Think Tank

Pop Hit

The search for legal ways to get high has led people to bake banana peels, grow marigolds and do unmentionable things to heads of lettuce. Now it has led to butyl nitrite, a chemical kin of amyl nitrite and, like amyl, nicknamed "poppers." (Amyl nitrite you may remember from the drug-sodden Sixties, when it was a popular drug of abuse but had to be obtained with a prescription.) Butyl nitrite is legal, easy to obtain and currently very à la mode in middle-class and professional circles.

As mind-altering chemicals go, poppers are not exactly subtle. They get their nickname from the sound the tiny, cloth-wrapped glass capsules make when they are crushed between the fingers of the user, releasing the volatile liquid. One sniff produces a sudden rush or kick that one space cowboy likened to being "strapped to the side of a rocket ship that's just blasted off." Translated into more precise terms, butyl nitrite dilates the blood vessels and causes your heartbeat to increase sharply for a minute or so. It also can produce world-class headaches and is definitely to be avoided if you have any sort of heart problems.

Since butyl nitrite is often sold in head shops, record stores and even pharmacies as "room deodorizer" or something other than a drug, the Food and Drug Administration has little interest in it, even when it is marketed as Rush and Bullet. But butyl nitrite does share something with other, less legal recreational drugs: big profits. The Wall Street Journal says that retail sales may reach $15,000,000 this year, and one seller told the paper he could foresee the day when even supermarkets would stock the drug: next, presumably, to the bananas and lettuce.

Managerial Machismo

So you're getting a woman boss? Chances are she may work out all right---if she acts enough like a man. Seems like a fairly obvious conclusion, but this one now has some research to back it up. Dr. Gary Powell of the University of Connecticut and D. Anthony Butterfield of the University of Massachusetts asked 685 college students to name the characteristics they considered most important in a boss. It turned out that the exhibition of so-called masculine or feminine personality traits is more important than the actual sex of the manager. Therefore, they report, a woman who exhibits lots of stereotypical "male" traits, such as competitiveness, self-reliance and decisiveness, will be judged a better boss than a man who is perceived to be yielding, shy or sympathetic---i.e., classically "feminine."

Also, unlike undergraduate coeds, women at the graduate level reveal more masculine than feminine personality traits. It's possible, says Powell, that all this may change with the development of a "non-sex-role-oriented view of managerial behavior," as more women move into top management. "What we need," Powell observes, "are more flexible managers, men and women, who are capable of exhibiting both kinds of behavior and dealing with all situations." Amen.

Psychic Spooks?

The perfect spy would be even more efficient than James Bond. He could go anywhere in secrecy and obtain any desired information without leaving a trace of his visit. Wondering if a psychic or a specialist in astral projection might fill the bill, the Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly been keeping a sharp eye on experiments conducted at the Stanford Research Institute in which a specialist in "remote viewing" (as the SRI folks prefer to call it) allegedly roamed the globe and peered into top-secret military bases without leaving the Menlo Park laboratories of the researchers.

According to writer John Wilhelm, author of The Search for Superman, a book on psychic research, Project Scanate, as the study is called, enlisted the aid of one Pat Price, a mild-mannered businessman with psychic powers, who described the location of a top-secret satellite eavesdropping station in Virginia, then proceeded to reel off the names of the personnel who worked inside, the labels on the file cabinets lining the walls and even the code names of top-secret papers on desktop folders. (The fly in the psychic ointment is that an attempt by Wilhelm to locate the station turned up nothing.) Later, Price "scanned" a Soviet installation halfway around the world, describing it in similar minute detail. Some agency people suspected that the information about the bases had been obtained through more conventional channels and leaked to Price by CIA insiders who wanted to make the experiments look good. Although Price has since died, the controversy over the validity of the experiments continues.

This set of experiments began just five years ago, but according to Wilhelm, it is just one small part of a quarter century of research by many branches of the U. S. intelligence community into the military uses of parapsychology, the much-debated field that includes telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. The possibility of harnessing this last power, the movement of objects by the mind without physical means, has even led to speculation that missiles could be disarmed or detonated by mental influence alone. What we have seen so far is probably just the tip of the psychic iceberg, but even that is more than a little chilling.

Blind Designers

Think of something that doesn't work. Something so poorly designed it would be funny if it weren't so costly. How about the Teton Dam? That was certainly a bust. Or take San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit, the new system whose trains skipped stations by remote control and opened their doors while they were still moving.

Our society is replete with technological breakthroughs that break down, and Eugene Ferguson, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, thinks he knows why. Engineers, he says, no longer form in their minds a visual image of what they are designing. Rather, they rely increasingly on computer-generated mathematical analyses that don't provide for the possibility of breakdowns and too often overlook the obvious.

"Thinking with pictures is an essential strand in the intellectual history of technological development," Ferguson notes in Science magazine. That technique has given us pyramids, rock ets, clocks, cathedrals, printing presses and even snowmobiles. But as machines become more complicated, courses in design, "one of the few remaining links to the complexities of the real world," are rapidly losing favor in engineering schools, and Ferguson sees no relief in sight from what he describes as "an increasing number of silly but costly errors."

You Are What You Eat

The scene was common enough: a criminal standing before a judge, waiting to hear his sentence. Probation, came the word from the bench, but---and now came the switch---only if you stay out of trouble, and stay off junk food.

This scene, which actually happened in a Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, courtroom, is evidence of a growing trend to link what we eat with how we act. In this case, a probation officer, Barbara Reed, had discovered that keeping probationers off foods loaded with preservatives and refined sugar seemed to lead to major beneficial changes in their behavior and appearance. She enlisted judicial support for an experiment with people on probation and found that those who stayed on the diet, which includes lots of vegetables, grains and high-protein foods, tended to stay out of jail.

Advocates of this new form of therapy are known as orthomolecular physicians (see October 1977's Playboy Pipeline, page 241); they argue that balanced, highly nutritious diets and megavitamin supplements are valid treatments for some forms of mental illness, learning disabilities and even criminal behavior. One common thread running through many of these ills seems to be hypoglycemia, a little-understood condition of low blood-sugar levels that, oddly enough, must be treated by removing sugar from the patient's diet. Hypoglycemia sometimes makes its sufferers irritable, cranky and even violent, and Reed found an unusually high incidence of this disorder among her probationers. Sugar and spice, it seems, do not make everybody nice.