I was once described in the UK magazine Private Eye as a "brown-noser". I couldn’t deny it. I’m Sri Lankan. I not only have a brown nose: I have a brown EVERYTHING.

A much more intriguing comment came from an article on the web which said I had a big head. Now this was worth pondering over. You see, in Western culture, "you’re a big-head" is an insult, while in Eastern culture, it’s a compliment.

So how big should one’s head be and what does it mean?

I decided to go and see Roger Ball, a world expert on head sizes. A few years ago, Roger, a designer, noticed that helmets and safety-hats did not fit Asian heads. And since Asians make up the majority of the world’s population, he knew this was important.

He measured thousands of heads, and discovered that Asian heads were a completely different shape to Western heads. (He limited his researches to humans, so space aliens such as Kim Jong-Il were excluded.)

Western heads are longer, front to back, and Chinese heads are wider, ear to ear. "And a hatmaker told me that Indian heads are ‘little European heads’," Roger told me.

As a Sri Lankan, that makes me not a big-head, but a small-head.

Talking to him solved a mystery that has puzzled me for years. Why do airlines hand out headphones which suggest they believe Asians listen to movie soundtracks through our jaws? (Memo to self: ask a scientist: do we?)

Roger has spent years measuring heads and has come up with data (see sizechina.com) that means we will all eventually be able to buy headgear that fits us.

But before you start to sneer at me for having a small head, please take note. "Size doesn’t matter; it’s how you use it," as my girlfriends all felt obliged to say in my pre-marital years.

I had dinner at a Malaysian food stall that night, and a woman told me about Alex, an African gray parrot who died a year ago at Brandeis University in the US. Alex had a brain the size of a peeled walnut, yet he had a vocabulary of 150 words and could do math. I was astonished. This is a higher level of intelligence than most of the Asian politicians I’ve interviewed over the years. AND he was too smart to ask for kickbacks, except for the occasional cashew nut.

This makes him way smarter than Illinois politician Rod Blagojevich, who kept on with his dodgy activities even though he knew he was being investigated. In his case, size did matter. The most notable thing about Blagojevich is his massive, helmet-like head of hair, which basically doubles the circumference of his head. Clearly, he is trying to cover up a tiny cranium.

I suspect his legal defense is going to be based on the fact that his hair has a life of its own, and set up a series of corrupt deals without his knowledge.

But the most astonishing fact I discovered studying head sizes was that Neanderthal men, who believed that the best way to handle women was to grab them and carry them back to their caves, had far larger heads than we have.

What did they know that we don’t?

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