Dr. Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches

Dr. Ivan Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, in this Discovery Channel video:

He explains it in more detail, in this TEDx Talk:

Dr. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, were awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for ornithology, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

REFERENCE: “Cure for a Headache,” Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February28, 1976, pp. 454-5.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19,1976, pp. 1347-8.

If you come to the Improbable Research show at the AAAS Annual Meeting, on February 14, 2015, in San Jose, California, you can see and hear and meet Dr. Schwab, and learn the latest on his work.

This video from the University of Southern California (USC) explains how USC researchers are following in the path laid out by Dr. Schwab, to better understand how the woodpecker insights might be applied to protecting the brains of human football players:

BONUS: Dr. Schwab also wrote the book Evolution’s Witness: How the Eye Evolved.