Or, if you’re like me, the idea makes going vegan sound really, really good.

And now I just ran across this New York Times article on how literally thinking outside the box can boost creativity. Illustrating that there may just be some truth in truisms, even those as trite and overused as “thinking outside the box,” is research by Suntae Kim, a doctoral candidate and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor, at the University of Michigan; and Evan Polman, a visiting assistant professor of management and organizations at New York University. According to the Times, students facing creative challenges came up with 20 percent more creative solutions when sitting outside a literal box than inside one. And the old saw about weighing something on one hand and then the other before making a decision? Again, taken literally, in students who were asked to come up with new uses for a university complex who were “allowed to switch hands — in other words, to think about a problem on ‘one hand’ and then ‘on the other hand’ — we found a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of uses generated.”

So, if people literally let a cat out of a bag, do they become more loosely lipped?
If you get people who haven’t been on one for years to ride a bike, do they find it easier to remember other skills?
If you have people fall off a horse and then climb back on, do they become more resilient in other areas?
If you have people sit in glass houses and throw stones, do they become develop better self control?

So much to research, so little time!

And now a little postscript that also relates to creativity, though in a different way: This was some seriously smart PR work on the part of SoHoSoleil Locations, which according to its Web site is an “exclusive group of New York rental spaces for corporate meetings, events, photo, TV, and video shoots.” Someone there forwarded the link to the NYT article to me, and it is a terrific argument for using just the sort of space I saw when I looked them up. Nice!

Thanks to Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc., for pointing to this gem of an idea on the Meeting Solutions blog!

After feeling the inevitable full-bladder effect of mucho coffee during a long lecture, Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, did some research on that bodily discomfort and decisionmaking. The upshot? “You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says.

Do with this nugget what you will — I’m just the messenger.

“In 1981, Eli Hazum and his colleagues at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., reported a remarkable discovery. Analyzing samples of cow’s milk, they found traces of a chemical that looked very much like morphine. They put it to one chemical test after another. And, finally, they arrived at the conclusion that, in fact, it is morphine. There is not a lot of it and not every sample had detectable levels. But there is indeed some morphine in both cow’s milk and human milk.”

And from Care2: “Researchers also discovered the protein casein, which breaks into casomorphins when it is digested and also produces opiate effects. In cheese, casein is concentrated, and so is the level of casomorphins, so the pleasurable effect is greater. Neal Barnard, MD said, “Since cheese is processed to express out all the liquid, it’s an incredibly concentrated source of casomorphins—you might call it dairy crack.”

Just some food for thought as you work on the menu for your next event.

I agree with Josh over at Automaton that this likely will never be cheap and easy enough to become something you regularly could expect to see in future conference rooms, but it could save some staffers some backaches, and it would be pretty cool if you could link the robots to the Internet reservation system so the room could rearrange itself to be ready when you need it.

(Thanks to Alison for the pointer!)

David Walton, mitigating, said the hotel owner, Jan Hampton, was not on the premises at the time and would have ensured the task was carried out by specialist tree surgeons if she had been.

”They proceeded to cut the branch that the ladder was leaning against. It is an unusual accident. Laurel and Hardy do this sort of thing,” he said.