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If you study or work at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê, the sight of dusty old boxes stacked up in the corner of a cupboard is a regular one.

However, one intrepid academic bravely delved into the boxes and made an intriguing discovery, so much so it is the subject of a Radio 4 programme, to be broadcast at 11am on 6 January 2006.

When Senior Lecturer Mr Richard Rawles (Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Psychology) opened the boxes, he discovered 6,000 postcards, all dating from 1953. On the back of each card was text that seemed to be answers to a questionnaire about left and right- handedness, but the cards had lain undisturbed for more than 50 years.

In the programme, Professor Chris McManus (Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Psychology), a leading expert in laterality, describes how he and his colleagues traced the postcards' origins to an early BBC television science programme presented by a young Dr Jacob Bronowski, and how the cards are an early example of viewer participation, now a common practice in the age of digital television.

Professor McManus also describes how he and two undergraduate students, James Moore (Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) and Matthew Freegard (Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê Psychology), put the answers through a computer-driven analysis to find out what they can tell us now about the people and the time they lived in.

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