What the hell is he doing? Sighing, that’s what.

“Teigen has seen deep traces in both the history of psychology and especially in fields such as intuition and social cognition, ie how we experience, perceive and think in social situations. Yet it is the ironic Ig Nobel Prize that has made him most famous, at least for those who are not in the profession.”

Ig Nobel Prize winner Karl Teigen, of the University of Oslo, is one five scholars thus profiled—about their current activities—in the newspaper Khronos, under the headline “What the hell are you doing, really?”

This photo shows Teigen emerging through the sacred curtains at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2011, at the moment he was introduced as a winner.

He was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for psychology, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

That research is documented in the study “Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task,” Karl Halvor Teigen, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–57.