The old adage goes that if you have a hard decision to make, you should just “sleep on it”. But perhaps a better strategy might be to drink half a dozen cups of water and wait for the pressure to build on your bladder. Then you might be able to make the best decision, according to research that was recognized with this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine, an award given out last night by the Annals of Improbable Research as a whimsical counterpart to the true Nobel Prize (which will be announced on Monday).

In a study published in April in Psychological Science, a Dutch team reported that people who really had to pee were more likely to choose a larger but delayed monetary reward compared to those participants with empty bladders who opted more for smaller, short-term pay-offs. “A physiological form of control — bladder control — can also facilitate behavioral control,” Miriam Tuk, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, said in her award speech last night at the Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This suggests that neurological control signals are task unspecific, which has important implications for impulse control.”

But in conflicting research that also shared the prize, a team from the US and Australia found that the people in serious pain from the need to urinate had worsened memory and attention spans. “These impairments were the same actually as staying awake for 24 hours or if you reach the legal limit for driving” from alcohol, said Peter Snyder, a neurologist at Brown University Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, who reported the findings in January in the journal Neurourology and Urodynamics. “Also, these deficits magically go away as soon as you run to the bathroom.”

Other winners included a team that showed that red-footed tortoises do not display contagious yawning, scientists who built an aerosol wasabi fire alarm and a researcher who described why people sigh — a new discipline he dubbed “sigh-cology”. The hands-down crowd favorite of the night was Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, who won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for showing that the problem of cars illegally parked in bike lanes can be solved by running them over with tanks.

You can read about all the prize winners on the Improbable Research website, or watch last night’s ceremony below.

Image: Hans Bernhard / Wikimedia Commons