Are you normal?

They may give the appearance of being hard at work, but just what is the person at the desk next to you looking at on their computer? Last night's TV reviews? Social networking sites? eBay bids for antique chairs from the latter Georgian period?

One thing that you can be sure to predict is that....you can't predict what they're doing. Because in cyberspace, no one is normal.

That's what researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington, the United States, discovered in a giant study, this week's New Scientist reports.

Researcher Mark Meiss and his fellow researchers collected statistical data on hundreds of millions of online connections involving exchanges of emails, files or simple web browsing.

You might think there'd be some kind of pattern underlying our online actions - after all, we're a fairly predictable bunch, generally speaking. But it transpires we're all different when it comes to our behaviour through the virtual world.

Scientists found extreme variations in user behaviour - the number of people a user tended to interact with, for example. Results produced a scattered spread totally unlike the usual Bell curve, where most data points cluster around a central value with a few points at the tails of the curve.

So rest assured. You may not be normal - and that's completely normal. Online, that is. In the real world, reinventing yourself as a kickboxing avatar named Gina might lead people to think you're a bit strange.

Picture credit: American Library Association