When Professor Peter Hancock Puts on His Thinking Cap, He
Creates a Brainstorm Under His Bonnet An assistant professor of
safety science and human factors at the University of Southern
California, Hancock says that scientists have known that heating
a person's body one degree centigrade causes him to perform
faster. But at the same time this temperature rise causes him to
make more errors. Hancock's challenge, therefore, was to design
a cap that would turn a person into a "hothead" without causing
heat stress in the body. Apparently Hancock's head-dress works.
When he tested subjects for reaction time, visual-search
ability, time estimation and simple mathematics, people with the
hat on did 5 to 15 percent better than a control group not
wearing the hat. (Heating the head only½ degree centigrade
seemed to make people react faster, but their error rate also
went up.) The son of a school principal, Hancock was born in
Berkeley, near Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon.
He moved to the U.S. seven yea