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You might credit the legendary Scottish male virility of past time to single malt whiskey, or the sometimes brutal weather, or the fact that haggis is the national dish, but a Dutch researcher is proposing another answer:

Chuck Burton / AP

"Men wearing a kilt experience a strong sense of freedom and masculinity," says a researcher. Here Tim Propst, of Lincoln County, N.C., throws a hammer during the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in Linville, N.C. in July 2012.

It was the kilts.

Kilts, worn as they were meant to be worn, without underwear, lets our laddies swing freely in the breeze, creating, according to researcher Erwin Kompanje, the “ideal physiological scrotal environment.” Exposed to the bracing Highland coolness, testicles will make robust sperm.

The modern man’s “scrotal environment” is pretty confined these days, what with underwear and pants that hold our testicles close to the body and its 98.6-degree heat, Kompanje, a senior researcher in the department of intensive care at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, told NBCNews.com. But as he pointed out in a paper published online in the Scottish Medical Journal, “adequate spermatogenesis requires a temperature about 3 degrees [Celsius] lower than normal body temperature.” (That would translate to about 93 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the normal body temperature of 98.6 Farenheit.)

Testicular temperature is regulated by the cremaster muscle – the muscle that covers the testicles -- that raises and lowers the scrotum in response to heat and cold. “The cremaster reflex only works, and has any sense, when the scrotum is hanging free,” Kompanje said. “In tight trousers it cannot work. In a naked man, or a man wearing a kilt, it can and will.”

Kompanje stresses that he’s only proposing a hypothesis based partly on his own fascination with things Scottish – he sometimes wears a kilt for special ceremonial occasions – and anecdotal evidence that kilt-wearing is good for sperm, and scientific evidence that sperm production wilts under high scrotal temperatures.

“I searched the scientific literature, and I found nothing on the subject,” he said. “Then I searched on sperm quality and found many scientific papers related to high scrotal temperature and tight clothing. So as 1+1=2, I formed the hypothesis that wearing a skirt-like garment (as a kilt) without underwear would help to improve sperm quality.”

There’s been a lot of debate in science about whether modern western men have poorer sperm quality and fewer sperm overall than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Environmental toxins, stress, smoking, diet, have all been implicated in the decline.

Temperature is often blamed, too, which is why doctors advise men not to put laptop computers on their laps. When doctors in Germany experimented with a “nocturnal scrotal cooling” device – crotch air conditioning – in men with fertility problems, they found “a significant increase in sperm concentration and total sperm count…after 8 weeks” according to a 2005 journal article.

So Kompanje may well be correct when he proposes kilt wearing as a possible solution to dropping sperm quality.

This raises the question, however, of whether a man wearing a kilt will get any opportunities to send his swimmers into the pool.  

Kompanje isn’t worried. “I found literature, and I have experienced this myself, that women like to see a man wearing a kilt. It can be very masculine and sexy.”    

“Wearing a kilt has strong psychological benefits,” he writes in his journal article. “A kilt will get you noticed no matter where you are. Research indicates that men wearing a kilt experience a strong sense of freedom and masculinity…The kilt gives a man a sensuous awareness of his own body and how it will be seen by others.”

Kompanje acknowledges there’s no proof testicles will be happier under kilts, so he proposes a controlled trial with regular scrotum temperature taking and sperm quality monitoring of some men wearing pants and others wearing kilts. One incentive to volunteer might be what Kompanje argues is the “positive attention from sexual admirers” associated with kilts.

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young Ph.D., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com), now on sale.

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You're on a stage, lights hot and glaring, watching the large audience you’ll soon be addressing file in. How is your body reacting?

You’re most likely jittery, your heart pounding through your rib cage and your breath quickening. Your legs may very well be able to run a marathon at this moment. And—oh great—your mouth just became super dry.

These reactions are not exactly conducive to standing in place and addressing a crowd, right? You’re not alone. Fear of public speaking, or glossophobia, is estimated to affect 75 percent of adults.

But such reactions, as it turns out, are the body’s natural way of helping us cope with stressful situations. According to a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, rethinking the way we perceive stress may actually improve our physical and mental performance.

In the study, 73 adults, half of whom met the diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder, underwent the Trier Social Stress Test. Designed to induce stress in a socially-evaluative situation, the test gives participants three minutes to prepare a five-minute speech about their strengths and weaknesses to two judges. Immediately following the speech, subjects must count backwards by sevens beginning with the number 996.

Before beginning the test, half of the participants were randomly assigned to read information regarding the evolutionary advantages of the body’s stress response. Specifically, they were informed that “the increase in arousal [they] may feel during stress is not harmful,” and that they should “reinterpret [their] bodily signals during the upcoming public speaking task as beneficial.” They also read summaries of three psychological studies that evaluated the benefits of stress.

The other half of the participants did not undergo this “anxiety preparation” task.

Purposely, the judges provided negative, non-verbal feedback throughout the speeches by head-shaking, stone-faced expressions, and tapping annoyingly on their clipboards. If the participant made a mistake, the judge instructed them to start over.

Before, during, and after the stress test, cardiovascular measures of heart rate and blood pressure were assessed in all participants.

Participants who did not undergo anxiety preparation showed a much greater cardiovascular stress response. The group that went into the stress test informed about the benefits of stress, on the other hand, reported feeling that they had more resources to cope with public speaking.

Jeremy Jamieson, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at University of Rochester, says that his work “shares the underlying concept that if you can alter cognitive factors, you can alter downstream outcomes.”

“Feelings of arousal, like sweaty palms or a racing heart that are typically construed negatively can instead be viewed as tools to help cope with acute stress,” he says.

Interestingly, despite greater fear of public speaking, individuals with social anxiety disorder did not show more physiological arousal than their non-anxious peers.

The authors conclude that our experiences of short-term stress are shaped by how we interpret our body. “Viewing one’s biological responses as beneficial will increased the ratio of perceived resources versus task demands,” says Jamieson. “Our reappraisal instructions focus on educating individuals that stress is an adaptive response.”

So the next time you feel the jitters of public speaking overtaking you, remind yourself that the human body is designed to help us cope with this stress, despite our trembling legs and dry mouths.

Above all, be grateful—this ability likely evolved when our ancestors had to outrun predators, not give speeches!

Jordan Gaines is a science writer and neuroscience grad student at Penn State College of Medicine. You can check out her blog, Gaines on Brains, and follow her at @GainesOnBrains.

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As a neurologist, Dr. Sam Berkovic sees many patients who frequently faint. These people say they feel weak in the knees after experiencing something unpleasant, perhaps seeing blood or being dehydrated. He began suspecting that fainting, also known as vasovagal syncope, runs in families.

And he appears to be on to something. A study by Berkovic, published today in the journal Neurology, finds that fainting may be genetic, and for some families only one gene causes it.

On average, about a third of the world’s population are frequent fainters. ”(I)t’s usually trivial, not a serious health issue,” says Berkovic, a laureate professor in the department of medicine at Austin Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

People who suffer from vasovagal syncope faint after encountering a trigger, which can be something like seeing blood, being dehydrated, feeling stress, or experiencing pain. While losing consciousness feels scary, vasovagal syncope is normally harmless. But Berkovic believes that understanding why people swoon might mean researchers can someday prevent them, saving fainters from accidents—and embarrassment.

To determine genetic underpinnings, Berkovic and his colleagues recruited 44 families with members who shared a history of fainting. Six of these families had a large number of fainters, bolstering the researchers’ belief that fainting was genetic. One family had 14 members who experienced vasovagal syncope and another had 30 individuals from three different generations.   

The researchers gathered DNA samples and also asked the family members to answer questionnaires about their general health, the onset of fainting, and what triggers their swoons. After analyzing the DNA, the researchers found that six of the 44 families showed strong evidence of a genetic link. And, the family of 30 fainters all shared a strong linkage to one chromosome, 15q26. These results show that a vasovagal syncope is genetic.  

While discovering a genetic link for fainting wasn’t a surprise, Berkovic admits he was amazed to learn that the triggers differed among family members. If a mother faints at the sight of blood, for example, her son might swoon when dehydrated. Berkovic says we don’t fully understand how triggers work, but this paper suggests it doesn’t seem to be controlled by genetics.

He hopes that future research will shed light on what controls the triggers, allowing for a better understanding of vasovagal syncope. Some people’s aversion to blood, for example, is so severe they refuse blood tests because they fear fainting. By understanding the triggers, researchers might be able to treat them.

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Are you reading this post instead of doing your damn taxes already? You are, aren't you? 

This means I can make a few educated guesses about you: You are perhaps a) not very conscientious -- procrastinators are less likely to be organized, dutiful or self-disciplined. Or maybe you're b) impulsive or easily distracted. It could also easily be that you're c) a perfectionist and have put off your taxes because it seems so very complicated and you're afraid you'll do it all wrong. Or maybe you owe money on taxes this year, in which case, no one blames you for putting them off. 

Meanwhile, your smug friend informs you (smugly) that she finished hers in February. Why do some of us suck it up and file our taxes promptly, and others put it off?

An estimated 20 to 25 percent of adults are chronic procrastinators, says Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of the 2010 book "Still Procrastinating: The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done." (Procrastinators who intended to use Turbo Tax got a surprise last night when the site went through intermittent service outages.)

The number one reason we procrastinate is obvious: we put off things we consider "aversive," which is the academic's way of saying we put off things that sound boring or complicated or generally unpleasant. Things like taxes.

"Nobody likes them! They're complicated, they require you to dig up things and you can't remember where they are, you fear you're not doing it correctly. Or you may be paying money! I think it's pretty normal for someone not to go get right down on their taxes," assures Tim Pychyl, a psychologist who studies procrastination. Pychyl writes the procrastination blog Don't Delay for Psychology Today, and is the author of the 2010 book "The Procrastinator's Digest: A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle." 

Smug Friend, he says, may even have done her taxes early because she was putting off something else, a behavior psychologists refer to as structural procrastination. (As students, these kind of procrastinators might have organized a desk drawer instead of writing their term paper.) Maybe she had some truly terrible things on her to-do list in February, "so she did her taxes instead," suggests Pychyl. "It may not be the virtue (you) imagine it to be."

An early filer might also be what's called a defensive pessimist -- someone who imagines the worst possible situation and prepares as if it's bound to happen. A defensive pessimist envisions the last minute deadline panic and uses that anxiety to motivate himself or herself to do everything to avoid it. 

It's also possible that Smug Early Filing Friend is rightfully smug. "Some people are just wise enough to know that they're not going to feel more like doing it tomorrow. They recognize it for what it is, and they just get started," Pychyl says. One way to embrace this mindset next year, or for other projects you're likely to procrastinate on, is to just ask yourself, "What's the first thing I need to do?" Just a little bit of progress on step one will make you feel accomplished, which can be enough to fuel the next steps, says Pychyl.

"Just getting started is quite magical in its own way," he says. "Once we get started on an avoided task, we often scratch our heads and say, 'Why did I put this off?'" 

One last insight: We are really quite awful to our "future selves," according to a report Pychyl and a colleague just published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Our weird minds create a disconnect between our "current self" and our "future self" -- it's like we imagine the latter to be a separate person, unrelated to our actual, current self. (There's actually a great example of this on the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" where Ted and Marshall put off a complicated conversation by deciding they don't need to do it now; it's Future Ted and Future Marshall's problem. "Let's let those guys handle that," current Marshall says.) 

Pychyl says we could cut down on procrastination "if we could just start to imagine 'future self' as 'self.'" 

"If I can start to think of 'future self' a little bit more kindly, I can start getting more things done," he says. 

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One whiff of budding flowers and the pressure in your chest starts to build. Your nose feels twitchy, your eyes snap shut and a-a-a-a-c-hooo -- a sneeze rockets out at 75 to 100 miles per hour. And with a long, miserable allergy season ahead, that's going to be happening a lot.

We all know how a sneeze happens. What we don’t know is why our eyes automatically close when we do it.

School kids will tell you it’s prevent your eyes from popping out, an urban legend – at least for the most part. There has been at least one report of this actually happening.

Dr. Rachel Vreeman, co-author of Don’t Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health says she discovered an 1882 story in the New York Times about a woman whose eyeball popped out (known as eyeball subluxing) after sneezing.

According to the story, published on April 30, 1882, a woman “met with a singular accident day before yesterday. While riding on a street car, she was seized with a sudden fit of sneezing and burst one of her eyeballs, from which she has since been suffering the most intense pain.”

Vreeman says there is no modern medical evidence of eyeball subluxing from sneezing, although she admits it has happened to people who violently vomit. Usually, though, this only happens to people who suffer from eye muscle problems.

Interestingly, those same muscles provide a bit of ammunition to shoot down the eyeball-popping urban legend.

“There is no way that keeping your eyelids closed can prevent [your eyes from popping out],” says Dr. Robert Naclerio, a professor of surgery and section chief of otolaryngology at the University of Chicago Medicine. “It’s not like the muscles are strong enough.”

Of course, just because the eyelid muscles don’t have the strength to hold your eyes in, it doesn’t mean they’ll explode out during a violent sneeze.

Optometrist Bert Moritz of the Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wis., explains that six extra-ocular muscles firmly hold the eye in the socket, making it almost impossible for eyeball subluxing (what a relief!).

And though it may feel as if pressure builds in your entire face before you sneeze, it doesn’t increase in your eyes.

“The nasal passage, where the air comes through, is separated from the eye by some bones and membranes,” says Naclerio.

So why then do we clamp our eyes shut when we sneeze?

“This is an involuntary reflex,” explains Moritz. “When our brain sends this muscle message, one part of the message is to close our eyes. It’s similar to a deep tendon reflex.” 

A deep tendon reflex is what happens when a physician taps on your knee with that tiny hammer and your knee jerks. It’s simply an uncontrolled body response. Sneezing with your eyes open feels impossible without using your fingers to pry them open.

Which has certainly been done, by one of the guys on Mythbusters and countless others.

“It is certainly possible to keep your eyes open if you try while you are sneezing … but it requires working against the reflex,” says co-author Vreeman, assistant professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. “It’s a very strong response. The body puts as much force as it can muster into cleaning out its airways.”

Others have theorized that we shut our eyes when sneezing to shield our eyes from whatever we’ve expelled, says Moritz. Generally, when we sneeze we’re protecting ourselves from allergens and the reflex to shut our eyes might have developed as a further defense.     

"Some biologists think that when we expel our mucous and things [we close our eyes because] we don't want that stuff to get in our eyes," he says.

Related:

Allergy season will be even worse this year

Does the sun make you sneeze? It's not just you

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If you’re a college student thinking of cramming for finals, you might want to adopt a more restful strategy.

Scientists have shown that sleep plays a crucial role in memory. As the brain goes down for the night – or even for a nap – what’s been experienced during the day is carefully sorted through and then filed away in permanent storage for easy access later.

Building on that discovery, German researchers have shown in an intriguing experiment that the improvements in memory that we get during our slumbers be boosted even further if we’re exposed to a very specific kind of sound when we’re in deep sleep.

The researchers suspected that little clicking sounds played in synchrony with our brain’s natural oscillations during deep sleep might pump up the oscillations, thereby improving sleep – and also memory.

“Imagine the sleeping brain as a swing which oscillates slowly back and forth,” says study co-author Jan Born, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Tubingen. “The auditory stimulation acts as a gentle nudge of the swing at its highest point [to enhance] the down swinging direction.”

For the new study, Born and his colleagues asked 11 volunteers to memorize 120 word pairs. The words in each pair were related to one another to make them easier to remember, so, for example, “brain” might be paired with “consciousness” and “problem” with “solution.”

In the evening, the volunteers were tested. A researcher would say one of the words from the pair and the volunteer was to try to remember the other.

Then the volunteers were sent off to the sleep lab where their brain activity was monitored throughout the night.

In the first part of the experiment, clicking noises were played through headphones when volunteers reached deep – or slow wave – sleep. In the morning, they were again tested on how well they remembered the word pairs.

A week later the volunteers were again brought into the lab and the experiment was run exactly as it had been the first time, except that there were no clicking sounds during the night.

To see whether the sounds had improved memory, the researchers subtracted the scores from the evening tests (taken before sleep) from the scores from the morning tests.

In both parts of the experiment, morning scores were improved over evening ones. When there was no clicking during the night, people, on average, remembered 13 more word pairs in the morning than in the evening. But the biggest difference was when people were exposed to clicking during the night. They remembered 22 more word pairs in the morning than they had in tests the evening before. That’s almost double the improvements brought on by sleep alone.

So, will college students be rushing out to buy new-fangled headphones that click in the middle of the night?

Not just yet, Born says.

“The creation of head phones that automatically apply auditory stimuli following the stimulation protocol presented in our publication is possible, [but] not so easy,” he explains. “There is ongoing work on these applied frontiers and therefore the development of such devices in the long-term is not so far-fetched.”

One big hurdle to developing a memory enhancing device is that the clicking sound must be in rhythm with the brain’s oscillations. And that, currently, requires the sleeper to be hooked up to an EEG in a sleep lab so brain waves can be monitored.

In the meantime, specialists may want to use the new method to improve sleep quality in people who are restless during the night, Born says.

“The most obvious application for our finding is in clinical settings, in order to enhance the slow oscillation sleep rhythm and thus improve slow wave sleep in certain forms of insomnia,” he explains. 

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Everyone seems to have a go-to hangover remedy. Some people swear a Prairie Oyster—raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, and a splash of hot sauce—makes the nausea and headache subside (or maybe the beverage is so disgusting people forget they’re hung over?). Others believe a greasy breakfast makes them feel OK again. Still some crack open a beer, believing that only the hair of the dog can help them. But are all these efforts useless? Is it even possible to get rid of a hangover?  

The only sure way to avoid a hangover is, of course, to abstain from drinking. But there are at least some science-backed ways to make the symptoms more bearable, says Alyson Mitchell, a professor and John Kinsella Chair in the department of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis. 

Every year U.S. companies lose an estimated $148 billion on hangovers, says Alyson Mitchell, but experts know little about them. Hangovers cost so much because so many people miss work and if they do show, they flub basic tasks because being hung over makes people a bit, well, stupid. That's just one example of why we need more research on hangovers, Mitchell argued during a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting. 

“The interesting thing about a hangover is that really it is a metabolic storm that is going on,” says Mitchell, a professor and John Kinsella Chair in the department of food science and technology at University of California, Davis. Hangovers involve a variety of systems, causing headaches, stomach discomfort, and immune responses like out-of-control inflammation. 

Mitchell notes that there a wealth of research on alcohol and alcoholism, but there is little research on hangovers (PubMed has more than 700,000 articles on alcohol and only 400 on hangovers). While she believes researchers might shy away from studying hangovers because finding a hangover cure might encourage excessive drinking, she thinks that examining hangovers can improve our understanding of how the immune systems, metabolisms, GI systems react to alcohol. 

“We really don’t know much about a hangover and it is an incredibly puzzling response—the symptoms only show up after all the alcohol is metabolized and gone from the body. And that in itself is amazing,” says Mitchell.  “The fact that something is the most toxic after it has been eliminated from the body [is unusual].” 

On to the “cures”: One way to avoid hangover symptoms is to drink water while you’re drinking alcohol. Alcohol works as a diuretic causing that achy head (so does caffeine; consuming alcohol and an energy drink will double that hangover). 

“You lose a lot of liquid through urination—four times as much water is lost as you take in,” Mitchell explains. “Ethanol is also a vasodilator and that [also] causes some of the headache issues.”  

People can also treat that icky hangover feeling by drinking fruit juice, which helps us hydrate and replace carbohydrates lost from drinking.  It’s also why eating toast or crackers sometimes makes us feel better.

Prior to drinking, people should eat a high fat meal, something that includes olive oil, meat, or dairy. The fat coats the stomach, meaning it takes the body longer to absorb the alcohol. The day after drinking, eating eggs helps replace cysteine, an amino acid, lost from alcohol consumption. Our bodies don’t easily replenish the amino acid and cysteine-rich eggs help restore it.  

”Hangovers are so common and prevalent in every society,” she says. “[Yet] I found it to be almost shocking that there is so little real research done on hangovers.” 

Related:

Eat asparagus, and more questionable ways to ease your hangover

Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?

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From time to time Dr. Oliver Sacks is haunted by musical symbols: notes, clefs, staffs and bar lines all fly by his eyes uninvited and in rapid succession. The celebrated neuroscientist can “see” the imaginary scores despite, or perhaps because of, his partial blindness.

As it turns out, Sacks is not alone. People from around the world have been writing him letters describing the music-oriented hallucinations that come unexpectedly and unbidden.  He’s described their experiences in a new report published in the journal Brain.

“When they happen you’re startled,” says Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University and author of the 2012 bestseller, “Hallucinations.”

“It’s different from imagination. When you imagine something, it’s yours because you have imagined it. But when this happens to you, you’re startled. You wonder, ‘Who ordered this up? Where did it come from?’”

More often than not, people who are visited by these hallucinations of musical notation have problems with their eyesight like Sacks, but the visions can come to people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or even just a fever, he says. While they often come to people who are musically oriented, they can also appear to those who can’t read a note.

Sacks describes the case of 75-year-old Ted R., who developed Parkinson’s in his early 60s. Despite the disease, Ted is still an active scholar and writer - and a gifted pianist who’s been having musical hallucinations for the last two years.

The first time the musical notations appeared, he’d been reading a book. He turned away from it for a few seconds, and when he glanced back at the pages in front of him, the text had been replaced by a musical score.

Ted wondered whether the score was actual music and has tried many times to either transcribe or to perform it, but so far has found that “the music is scarcely playable because it is highly ornamented,” Sacks writes.

But Ted perseveres. Having discovered that he can summon up the hallucinations by staring at a text on a printed page, he will put a newspaper on his music stand and wait for the notes to appear. Hampered by their complexity and the speed with which they disappear, he’s had little success and so far, no great symphony has arisen from the elusive illusions.  

Another letter writer, whom Sacks calls Arthur S., finds the hallucinations to be irksome rather than entertaining. Arthur is a surgeon and an amateur pianist who is losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. “He was quite annoyed, as they would appear on a letter he was trying to write or something he was trying to read,” Sacks says.

The hallucinations may offer scientists more than merely some entertaining stories about brain quirks. Sacks hopes they will teach us something about the networks that process musical scores. Researchers have already scanned the brains of people who hallucinate faces, Sacks says. “One finds that the part of the brain in the back of the right hemisphere that is normally responsible for recognizing faces, has taken on a life of its own,” he says.

Scanning people who suffer musical hallucinations might be even more interesting.

“A musical score is a complicated sort of thing,” he explains. “It might show us how many parts of the brain can be integrated together as they are in reading music – and also presumably in hallucinating about it.”

Sacks hopes his article will spark more research and prompt scientists to scan the brains of people in the midst of a musical hallucination. “One of my reasons for publishing this in ‘Brain’ is to say to my colleagues, ‘Hey guys, this is something interesting. Take it and run with it.’”

Related:

Head injury turns man into musical savant

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By Glenn McDonald, Discovery News

In the realm of baseball broadcasting, maybe the single most famous call in the history of the game happened on Oct. 3, 1951, when New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thompson hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," the home run capped a historic comeback by Giants over their longtime rivals and inspired the famous radio call by Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges:

"There's a long drive … it's gonna be, I believe … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

Baseball fans have long appreciated that announcers like Hodges in "the good old days" -- the era of the 1950s and before -- have a very specific style and cadence to their speech. It's a clipped, carefully enunciated manner of speaking that can also be heard in the films, TV shows and newsreels of the day.

But did everyone really talk like that in the 1950s? Or is that mannered speaking style we're familiar with really a pop cultural construct -- an artifact of the performance styles and broadcaster techniques of the time?

"That tinny, clipped tone of yesteryear is called Transatlantic speech," said Jay O'Berski, assistant professor of the Practice of Theater Studies with Duke University.

Transatlantic is a specific style of speaking, or dialect, that is still taught in acting schools and was part of the curriculum for performers and broadcasters in the early days of mass media. "It's an effort to neutralize regional dialects and consciousness of a particular class," O'Berski said.

That high-end, nasally quality, also associated with speech from previous eras, is a very real phenomenon, although it may have more to do with technology than performance technique.

"My understanding of the high-end, all-treble sound is that it's a holdover from radio and the first talkies when they had very little bass technology in receivers," O'Berski said. "You literally could not hear bass tones before stereo technology."

So what we think of in popular culture as "that 1950s" voice is partially the result of performance techniques and technology of the day. The artifacts we have from that era are, to a large degree, recordings of professional performers and broadcasters – film and TV actors, news readers and sports announcers.

But if you were to stop a random person on the street in 1955, in a random town in America, you'd get the full spectrum of regional dialects that continues to change and evolve to this day, says Dr. Robert Leonard, Director of the Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University in New York.

Proof of this is just a few clicks away in the age of YouTube and archived, digitized video, Leonard says. "It is quite possible to find 'man-in-the-street' interviews from 50 years ago. Unless these are staged, and it should be pretty obvious, you will be hearing the 'real' dialects of the times."

Sportswriter Jason Turbow, author of the 2010 book "The Baseball Codes," recently finished work on his latest project -- "Baseball Forever!," a compilation of game broadcasts from the Golden Age of radio. Turbow says recordings from that era can illustrate the range of speaking styles in the era -- often in a single exchange of dialogue up in the press box.

"The play-by-play guys are usually professional broadcasters, and you can hear the difference right away between them and the color (commentary) guys, who are often ex-ballplayers or managers," Turbow said. "It's the same as today, really."

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