Claudio Feliciani is a Swiss-Italian scientist whose main interest is the movement of crowds. He worked alongside 3 Japanese scientists on a study that examined why people bump into each other when some of them are looking at a smartphone. It won an Ig Nobel Prize, which honors research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. In a Japanophiles interview, Feliciani tells Peter Barakan how he ended up in Japan, and why he finds crowds so fascinating.

Cast of this episode