99% Invisible - 401- The Natural Experiment

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running experiments have been interrupted. But there are some researchers for whom the shutdowns have provided a unique opportunity—a whole new data set, a chance to gather new information, or to look at information in a new way. And so, this week, we’re bringing you stories very different academic fields, about researchers who are using this bizarre, tragic moment to learn something new about the world. The Natural Experiment

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Summer is normally cruise ship season in Southeast Alaska. Every year around this time, these floating behemoths filled with tourists sail up the inside passage, stopping at little coastal port towns like Sitka and Ketchikan. One of the popular destinations along the route is Glacier Bay. It's this spectacular bay full of glaciers and the name and icebergs and sea otters and lots and lots of humpback whales. The National Park Service regulates how many cruise ships can come in and out of the

bay and how close they can get to the whales. But still, the humpbacks that are there in the summer have to live alongside roaring boat engines. What we know is that animals change their behavior when the ocean gets noisy. Michelle Forne is an acoustic ecologist at Cornell. Every summer she travels to Glacier Bay to drop a hydrophone in the water, listening in on what the whales are saying, and study how it's being affected by ship noise. This year, Michelle was preparing for her annual trip to Alaska when the COVID-19 shutdowns were announced.

So, Friday, the 13th was the last day that we were allowed to be in the lab at work before we had to start sheltering in place. And what that also meant for my perspective was that my summer field season was canceled, that the trip to Alaska that I was meant to take to go and do work with these animals wasn't going to happen. The lab at Cornell would also need to close, and so all the scientists gathered together

for a final in-person meeting to try to plan out how everyone was going to keep their research going from home. And Michelle mentioned that the summer cruise season would probably not even happen this year in Alaska, at which point another person at the meeting broke in with a question. And one of my colleagues and friends looked at me and she asked me, you know, are you listening? In other words, even if she couldn't go to see the whales in person, what she's still planning on listening to them? And I realized I wasn't.

And all of a sudden, my personal sentimental brain turned off and my biologist brain turned back on and an immediate flurry to get hydrophones in the water ensued. In that moment, Michelle realized that although her research trip had been canceled, the coronavirus shutdown had created an incredible opportunity. For the first time in decades, the ocean would be quiet for an entire summer.

And so what that means for somebody like me as researcher is that we have the opportunity to listen to undisturbed behavior for the first time. Usually Michelle relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try to understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. I get excited when we have six or seven hours of silence in the ocean. I built an entire dissertation around the fact

that Glacier Bay is one of the few areas in the world where you can predictably have moments of silence. And now what we have is months of silence. So this is unheard of. Right after that final meeting at the lab, Michelle started calling people in Alaska who could help her out. I had to call my best friend because all of my gear lives in her garage and could she blow up some booze for me and tie some line for me. And if I could put a hydrophone in the mail would she be willing to attach it to a shackle and then pass it off to someone else to put

it on an anchor who would then get it onto a boat and drop it in the ocean. Eventually with the help of lots of people in Alaska they got hydrophones into the water. Michelle is now set to record an entire summer of whale sounds, in strangely quiet seas. This is the first time in human history that we've been able to listen to truly quiet behavior. Which is something that the researchers could have never engineered on their own. Michelle's hypothesis is that the complexity of interactions between whales will go up.

So if you think about having a conversation in a really loud room, let's say you're at a bar and you're trying to talk to someone. You're going to talk louder and you're going to talk higher and you're going to use pretty simple words to make sure that you're understood. But if you're sitting at home having a cup of tea on your couch and there's no music playing and it's quiet and you're talking to someone who's beloved to you, the nature of the conversation can get really nuanced. So that's one of the things that we'd like to find out with these humpbacks is when they're not struggling to

be heard, does the complexity of what they say increase? Are they willing and able to have more nuanced acoustic interactions that perhaps they can't have when it's noisy? But whatever happens, Michelle is just excited to dig into the data. We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity. In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled. Labs have shut down and long-running experiments have been interrupted, but there are some researchers like Michelle,

for whom the shutdowns have provided a unique opportunity. A whole new dataset, a chance to gather new information, or look at information in a new way. In science, the term natural experiment refers to an experiment that happens outside of the lab, and outside of the control of the experimenter. With the pandemic the world outside the lab has changed dramatically and it has affected all kinds of systems that can be measured for the first time in the modern era. So this week our producers

have brought us stories from very different fields about researchers who are using this tragic and bizarre moment to learn something new about the world. First up is producer Emmett Fitzgerald. Jalantara is a city in northern India, in the state of Punjab, and like all Indian cities Jalantara has been in lockdown with everybody inside their homes. But a couple of weeks ago, there was this bright sunny day

and the residents of the city went out onto their roofs. And what they saw was this amazing view of the snow-capped Himalayas, which are about 100 miles away. And this view was celebrated like all over Indian social media. There are tons of pictures of these mountains on Instagram and TikTok videos of people zooming in on the horizon. So why was this such a big deal? Well because many people were seeing these mountains for the very first time.

People who had lived in Gelandar all their lives had suddenly woken up to this vista of snow-capped mountains across the horizon. A view that they said that they had never seen before. This is Rago Karnad, and he wrote about this phenomenon for the New Yorker. And he says that because of air pollution, the mountains have been completely obscured. Locals, I think, the last time these mountains had been visible was about 30 years ago. But because of the shutdown and the lack of pollution from cars and industry, the skies were clear in a way that had seemed impossible before.

That was the kind of scope of the transformation that had made the unimaginable real. And so was this phenomenon unique to Jolanda? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a particularly dramatic and poetic example, but really in cities all across India, the sky is blue and you can see the stars at night, the air feels clean in a way that it just hasn't in a really long time. And you know, air pollution is a huge problem in India. Of the 20 cities in the world, but the worst air pollution, 14 of them are Indian cities.

You really can't exaggerate it. India is the global hotspot for air pollution, 14 of them are Indian cities. You really can't exaggerate it. India is the global hotspot for air pollution, and that's happened. We've sort of taken that place from China over the last 20 years. And one of the cities with the worst air quality is the capital city, Delhi. Karnat has lived there for a lot of his adult life.

And he told me that a part of his morning routine would be to check a website that maps the air quality index throughout the city. And just for context, when AQI is over 300, it's considered hazardous to your health. But Cronon said that he would sometimes see readings of 999. And the reason it was that figure, 999, was not because that was the correct reading. It's because that's where the monitors maxed out. Even if you're a writer, it feels like language is failing you. You kind of describe it to yourself, you say, oh God, this is a nightmare. This is a sci-fi movie. This is like the apocalypse.

And none of that helps you comprehend the fact that there's small, visible inside your home. That's incredible. Not seeing a mountain is one thing, but this is just a gigantic public health tragedy. Totally. I think air pollution is really one of the most underappreciated public health problems that we have. The WHO says that 4.6 million people die each year from causes related to air pollution. And that's happening all over the world, but it really is most dire in India.

The World Health Organization had an estimate from 2016 that 100,000 Indian children below the age of five had died that year from exposure to a particular kind of particulates in air pollution. And the figures make it quite abundantly clear that Indians are dying and being made sick in really vast numbers, numbers that are almost sort of too large to process. And you know, for years, it's felt so large, like such a large problem that it's almost unsolvable. And that's what makes this moment so extraordinary, which is that we've reached this solution. We've fixed this problem without intending to.

That is incredible. I mean, it really does like create this strange, sober lining to an international tragedy. Yeah, and I think people are reluctant to use language like that because it's obviously such a terrible situation, but there's one group of people for whom this shutdown really has been a gift, and that's air pollution researchers. Researchers like Sarath Guti-Kwenda. I'm Shalath Guti-Kwenda. I'm the director and the founder of Urban Emissions. Urban Emissions is an independent research group and we do research on evolution.

And the scientists that Urban Emissions are always looking to understand the baseline, air quality, like what would a clean air scenario even look like. And usually they use holidays when people are stuck inside or rainy days to do this But those don't last very long when it rains it's clean for one day and then the never-ending next day the build-up starts happening But what we are seeing here is sustained for a sustained period of time. We are seeing low numbers So good t kunda says that the shutdown feels like the entire country is basically running a giant experiment for him.

The phrase that I've been using is forced experiment. It's a forced experiment that shows you what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero. And when you do that, turns out the air is pretty clean, which might seem obvious, but the air pollution problem has been so intractable in India, and here is this concrete example showing that it's possible to clean up the air. So, if you have an example of a sustained period, we're saying, when we can maintain

this level of emissions, and this is the kind of a quality we're saying, we can maintain this level of emissions and this is the kind of equality we're going to experience. And, you know, having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those are really chemistry, looking at particular pollutants like ozone, for example, and sort of tracking it. But they're also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this air pollution is coming from.

Because there's actually a lot of confusion about this in India, and a big question people have is like, is the pollution generated inside the city by things like cars and trash burning and dirty cook stoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources? From things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All those sources are contributing to the problem,

but the uncertainty about who to blame has allowed cities to basically throw up their hands and say, this isn't a problem that we can solve. Right, so the uncertainty allows the people in power to just do essentially just pass the buck and not deal with it at all. Yeah, exactly. And so that's been one of the goals of Guti Kunda's research. Because certain sources of pollution have been completely turned off while others have carried on, Guti Kunda is able to isolate the different sources of emissions.

And calculate, you and calculate how much of the pollution that a city is experiencing is generated inside of the city itself. And it turns out, it's a lot. We can easily see a lot chunk of it actually coming from the local sources. City like Delhi, we find that the easily 70% of the pollution is actually locally generated. So just so I understand, normally, a city like Delhi would sort of blame the pollution on outside forces, saying this is coming from power plants outside the city, or this is coming from agricultural burning, and the reality is Delhi is responsible for a lot of Delhi's pollution problem.

Absolutely. Now, a lot of this research is just confirming what the scientists at Urban Emissions had really been seeing in their models before. But Raghav Karnad says that, you know, because that analysis was based on more hypothetical modeling, policymakers were finding it much easier to reject and ignore. Now, they have data that confirms exactly what their models have been demonstrating, which is that cities can do much more to fix their own problem and to clean up their own house. And the biggest thing that a city like Delhi could do to clean up its own house is really to take on traffic.

Right, which can be a pretty hard problem solve unless you're willing to take pretty drastic measures and change the nature of a city. Yeah, and Daley has tried to do something about cars in the past. For example, they have tried one of those odds and evens policies where people with an odd last digit on their license plate can drive on some days and then even last digits can drive on the others. But it hasn't always been easy to convince people that policies like that are worth it. So that's why the specificity and the credibility of this data is so important. You really need to be able to back up your policy plans and the policy plans

need to be very comprehensive and they need to be very convincing because a lot of people maybe put out of work or are severely inconvenienced by the kind of changes that we need to we need to see. But you know cities have cleaned up their air before it's possible Beijing for example used to have the worst air quality in the world but then that became something of an embarrassment when they were chosen to host the Olympics in 2008. Right, right, you can't have that. It's like a huffing and puffing the most toxic hair in the world. Like for days and days on end, yeah. Right, right. And so they put in, you know, all these really intense restrictions to clean up the air in time for the games. The Olympics took a place, and when they were done done all those restrictions were lifted and very quickly the air went back to being as bad as it had been before but but

now people were unhappy about it. What had seemed impossible to ask for had proven to be possible to deliver which was blue skies and clean air and to not live in the most polluted city in the world, which was what Beijing was. So now there was a public outcry. And the city responded to that public outcry. Beijing tightened emission standards on trucks, subsidized electric cars, they regulated traffic in congested areas and built a giant bike share program. They closed coal fire power plants and encouraged residents to stop burning coal inside their homes.

12 years later, Beijing is nowhere on the list of the worst polluted cities in the world. I don't even believe that it's in the top 100. So the example of the Beijing Olympics doesn't just demonstrate that it is possible to improve there, but it also demonstrates that people once they've experienced that it's doable, will want that and can be moved to demand that. Do you have hope that something similar could happen in India? As with a lot of things right now, I hope is not negotiable, but it's never felt more possible that

Indian cities could be livable, sane and even healthy. And so we've just got a hope that everyone can be brought around to realizing the necessity of this collective action, just the way everyone has been brought around to realizing that with coronavirus. I mean, do you think it's interesting that, you know, we've seen people make the decision that, you know, COVID-19 is a threat to public health that is so severe that we need to take these extremely severe actions. Like, what is it about that that's different than air pollution?

You know, like, if it about that that's different than air pollution? You know, like if the numbers show that air pollution is also a public health crisis, like what about a virus is easier to sort of wrap your head around as a public health problem than air pollution? I think that's a fascinating question and I think that it's something well worth investigating what it was that made us capable of this really inspiring robust collective sacrifice that made us capable of this determination to transform our lives and escape this crisis just with the coronavirus. When in fact our cities have been in a state of crisis for a long time. They have been practically unlivable and frankly unbearable for a long time, and it

never moved us to anything like this kind of collective effort. I mean, as a society, we just process different types of risks so differently. I mean, if we were just looking at the raw numbers of deaths, we would never get into a car again. Right. And just to be clear, the point, I don't think is that we're overreacting to COVID-19. It's that we're underreacting to all

these other public health threats. In part, I would say I would argue because many of them have disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially air pollution. If you have money and you live in a city like Delhi, you can take an Uber from your air condition department to your air condition office job. But there are millions of people who can't afford to do that,

who ride their bike or walk to get around, shop and open air markets, those people are just breathing the air all the time. I mean, it's so it's also just like an environmental justice issue. Yeah, yeah, it's a huge environmental justice issue. And for my mind, just like the best example of a underappreciated public health threat. Yeah, I think that probably climate change is also another pretty good example of that too. Totally, totally. I've been thinking about climate change is also another pretty good example of that too. Totally.

I've been thinking about climate change a lot lately. I'm always thinking about climate change, but particularly now, in part because, like coronavirus, it's a problem that just demands collective global action. And Raghunkaran, that's the thing about climate change a lot to these days. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to make India sound special, but when it comes to climate change, we are in the front line because there are really parts of the country in the interior where the increased heat is making life unlivable.

If there's any country that should be confronting climate change as an emergency that we take on on a war footing as an emergency that makes anything possible and any measures acceptable, then this is that country. And just like the other crises, as you've mentioned, it's just never seemed justified. It's never seemed, it's never seemed justified to do something like this, not even for climate change. That is so remarkable. Yeah, and I guess like with climate change and with air pollution and with all this, I think this story in India really raises for me just kind of this question of like,

what are we going back to when we come out of all this and like, are we, are we, we don't want to talk about silver linings when so much bad is happening, but is are there things we can learn from the ways in which the world has been, has been changed by this moment, even in the weird ways in which it's been changed for the better? Totally. I don't think it diminishes the moment to treat the moment as having lessons for us in the future.

I mean, I think that it would be, you know, a double tragedy if we went through this and learned nothing. So let's just take advantage of what we've learned about pandemics, about air pollution, about everything, and try to make the world better. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's all we can do. So we're now moving on to the next natural experiment which is presented by our producer Joe Rosenberg. Hey Joe. Hey there.

So it's time to your report. What kind of scientific study is on the precipice of advancement as an unexpected result of COVID-19? I'm so glad you asked because for the past few days I have been delving into the very latest research being done at the very cutting edge of an exciting highly specialized scientific field, boredom studies. Boredom studies. I mean, I guess everything is a thing, but I didn't know that was a thing.

It is a thing, although even the boredom study experts themselves seem to be surprised that it is a thing and that they study it. No one, I think, has a little kid ever says, like, you know what I really want to do when I grow up? I want to study boredom. So it's certainly, it was totally unplanned. This is Erin Westgate. She's an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Florida.

And one of her specialties is boredom. And Erin says one good reason to study boredom is that for starters, most people don't have the first clue about how boredom works, including apparently their own. One of the fun things about being a boredom researcher is like when I meet someone,

the conversation usually goes like this. Hi, I'm Erin. I know what do you study? I study boredom and they go, oh, I never get bored. And that always takes me back. I'm like, because I want to be like, yes, you do. It's so funny is I was thinking the exact same thing. I never get bored. Oh, you never get bored?

Oh, yeah. That's what it is. Well, you see, this is where Erin would prove you wrong, because this is her specialty. She gets this kind of evil genius thrill out of bringing unsuspecting people into the lab and figuring out ways to bore them to death. People hate my studies. They're so bad.

Like, it's like they come up with these deep briefings at the end. We say, how was it? And they just look at me and they're like, that was the most boring thing I've ever done. And inside I'm like, yes, yes, I'm so glad. So what is the most boring thing she has them do? I'm paradoxically, I'm pretty interested in how boring she can make someone's life. Yeah, and that's the thing is I think, you know,

you say you don't get bored, but the truth is, like you have been presented like with boring tasks in life that you have have no choice but to concentrate on. So maybe just a video of a sidewalk, literally one foot above the sidewalk, point it down. And because you don't know it's a boredom study, you expect something to happen, but nothing happens. Or it will be something like, you're going to play this air traffic control game where

you get to direct all this trafficking, you have to make sure all the planes land safely and this is out works and people are like, oh, okay, again, but then they make it really easy, they make it like stultifiably easy. And in fact, Aaron is so good at inducing boredom that her whole career started when she accidentally born some people while studying something slightly different. So what was that study and how did it lead her to focus on boredom? So a little more than five years ago, Aaron was running this study where they were trying to find out how much people enjoy being left alone with their own thoughts. And so what they did is they gathered a bunch of participants in a lab and first exposed them to a quick electric shock.

It's a nasty little electricity put around your ankle, so I always say it kind of participants in a lab and first exposed them to a quick electric shock. It's a nasty little electronic put around your ankle, so I always say it kind of feels like a cat like biting your ankle, you know, like if a cat dives out and attacks you. And not surprisingly, most participants said they did not like being shocked, but then she says they told the same participants

to just sit in this room, no magazines, no phone, and just enjoy being along with their thoughts for a little while. Oh, and by the way, that little button that electricarder still hooked up if you want, I don't know what you'd want to, but if you want, you can press the button and it will still deliver an electric shock. And then we simply left them in the room by themselves for, it was actually 15 minutes and waited to see what they would do. And apparently one quarter of the women, and I'm sad to report two thirds of the men, chose to shock themselves and most people shock themselves multiple times.

Oh, that is incredible. There was one man, it was a man who shocked himself. Oh, I forget, and I was well over a hundred times. Can I just say, though, that that guy then, that guy, he was definitely not bored. Oh no, he was having the time of his life. He was like, this like exactly what I always needed. But apparently a lot of the participants who shopped themselves were not like that guy. When asked why they did it they were just like like a board and it was better than nothing.

It's like you're in a waiting room and there's a 10 year old magazine and like you're actually reading it for the first, you know like you never never read it otherwise, but in a really boring setting, you just go for it. Right. And then you can like, you can devolve from there, you're like done with the magazine now. You have like the candy wrapper, nutritional information. And then below that is the electrode strapped to your ankle that feels like a cat fighting you.

Like a might as well. Yeah. You know, which I find kind of sad, but Aaron, evil, genius, that she is, she just thought like fascinating. It was this magnificent, wonderful puzzle, and I got totally hooked, and I sort of switched gears and hardly started investigating what boredom is, why we experience it, and what happens when we do. So let's just start with that first question. That's what is boredom. One of the things that makes this hard for me to sort of picture what boredom studies are about is what is the scientific basis of boredom?

Is there actually a distinct emotion that you can pin down and measure? Or is it just a word that actually means a variety of things? Well, this is actually where things get really interesting because that is something we're still trying to figure out in some ways. Aaron says that in the last two decades, there has been a growing consensus that boredom is in fact a real emotion.

And just like other emotions, it's not intrinsically good or bad. Much like pain, it's a signal telling you something is a miss with your situation bad, much like pain, it's a signal telling you something is a miss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of what exactly is a miss, in other words, when it comes to Aaron's second question, why do we get bored?

That's where the scientific consensus ends. When you get down to the nitty gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you're gonna start finding a lot of disagreements. So there are folks, for instance, who prefer to define boredom, is just about attention. This is the attentional model, the idea of being that you get bored when you're stuck doing something that requires only a little attention. So the rest of your attentional capacities,

desperately looking for something else to do, in which case you just kind of check out and the task loses all meaning. There's other folks that are like no, no, no, no, no, you have it completely backwards. It's all about meaning. If you have trouble paying attention to something in your board, it's because that thing wasn't meaningful. And this is the meaning-based model. And the meaning-based model for an experience to not be boring, it just needs to seem somehow worthwhile. So you could do a challenging puzzle that requires the right amount of attention, but if you don't find it genuinely interesting, it's still boring.

Or conversely, you can do something repetitive and simple, but if you think it's saving lives, you work at bored. That's really interesting. I mean, I think I kind of see how both models work. I mean, it makes me wonder if they're entirely separate emotions or, I don't know, it just seems like it's really hard to tell how you would know which one is true. Yeah, exactly. And Aaron works with a model that tries to incorporate both, but this is where your original question is Bordam just a word actually comes back into into play. So for instance, in French, the word for boredom really alludes more to it's like what we would think of as its meaning components. In German, the word for boredom emphasizes the sense that time is slowing down.

Which is a classic symptom of attentional boredom. And in Japanese, there are in fact two different words for boredom that loosely map on to fact two different words for boredom that loosely map on to these two different meanings. And so, you know, is this one of those cases where the sort of the word actually affects the meaning, they become sort of self-fulfilling prophecies, where if you're French, you only get bored in a meaningful way. And if you're German, you get bored in these sort of attentional way. We don't know yet. And Aaron points out that even within English, there's this issue that the word boredom didn't even really exist before 1600.

And it's not clear to me how much boredom is something that is a problem of modernity. I think there's very, very limited data right now that speaks to this point at all. So it strikes me that figuring this out isn't just an intellectual exercise because, you know, our understanding of boredom must have some kind of public health implications, especially when you imagine, you know, like how we respond to being bored, like as a culture, like, do we have a problem with boredom to make people you know do bad things that's a good question because we know there is a correlation at least between people reporting being bored and things like depression anxiety substance abuse self-harm

but also pursuit of education and social connections and exercise. So this is one reason why Aaron's third and final big question is, what do we do once we're bored? And it turns out it's also the question which COVID-19 and the quarantine might actually help us answer. Yeah, I can see where this is heading. And there's a lot of people who are bored at home right now,

but lay it out for me. What is she gonna look look at. Okay so there's this big mystery right? How is boredom affecting us including one we're bored, do most of us start doing something healthy or something unhealthy and unfortunately for Aaron and other boredom researchers, the data on this is just all over the place. For instance, there's some work that finds that experimentally inducing boredom increases pro-social behavior. There's other work that finds that experimentally inducing boredom increases anti-social behavior. So which is it?

And Aaron says that the thing getting the way of good data and a clear answer on this is which activities people turn to when bored can be really hard to study in a lab setting. For the simple reason that when you can find people to a lab, you can't actually give them that many options of things to do. So you're in the boring group, you're not, you can shock yourself or not.

You're in the boring group, you're not, you can eat a snack or not. And I don't know how useful that's going to be to us in understanding the effects of boredom in the real world, where we often have many multiple options available to us. And that question always hangs over you. Like, does this, does it matter? Who cares if you find an effect in the lab

if no one actually does it in the real world? So obviously, there's this incentive to do studies outside of the lab in the real world, but there's a problem with reality and it's the opposite of the problem with the lab, which is people don't get bored enough. You know, for better or worse, people are not that bored all the time in everyday life. I think the bestest of it suggests people are bored around 5% all the time in everyday life. I think the bestest of it suggests people are bored around 5% of the time, which isn't really that bad.

If you calculate it out, it's about 30 minutes a day, but 30 minutes a day of boredom is probably not all in one chunk, it's separated out across time. And this is because most people don't stay bored for very long thanks to the structure of their daily life. They go back to work or school, almost always very quickly something happens without them even having to think about it and they stop being bored. Right. So the upshot is that you can either get people really bored in a lab,

but not see how they'd actually realistically behave. Or you could study how people realistically behave to board them, but out in the real world, they're actually rarely bored for very long, so it's hard to catch them in the act, so to speak. Exactly. And this is where the coronavirus outbreak comes in, because thanks to the quarantine, people outside the lab in the real world are, at long last, more bored, more often than they've ever been before. And for better or worse, certainly for worse for the people experiencing it, but better for me and my graduate student and my other fellow

board and researchers around the world. Yeah, go ahead, be happy about it. Go for it. Yeah, we're kind of thrilled. I have not been bored. Other people's boredom has made very sure that I have not been bored. Other people's boredom has made very sure that I have not been bored these past few weeks. She's hours and hours of glorious boredom to study.

No, yeah, it's beautiful. And so one of Aaron's doctoral students named E. Jean Linn proposed doing this study. And to be clear, this does not actually fit the formal definition of a natural experiment. Right. So it's the boredom level isn't the only variable that's changed, like some of the out-of-house activities that people might turn to when their board are like off the table. Yeah, but on the plus side, it is potentially getting people bored in this kind of sustained way, where they have to make up their own minds about what to do if they hope to be unborn. And so Aaron's team is really curious to see what activities people choose. And one way they're doing that is they're having participants fill out this kind of daily survey of how they've been feeling and what they've been up to, in which they can choose

from this checklist of possible activities. And other researchers keep asking, oh, can you add this to the checklist? Can you add that to the checklist? Because there's so many questions, are people baking sourdough bread out of boredom? Are people buying games out of boredom? Are people, there's a whole set of question, are people hooking up and becoming lovers

with their roommates out of boredom? What's going on? What are people doing? And so they becoming lovers with their roommates out of boredom. Like what's going on? What are people doing? And so, you know, they're looking into all sorts of things. They're looking into whether there is a discrepancy between how people think they react to boredom versus how they actually react to boredom. And also, you know, is boredom followed

by maladaptive behaviors, including breaking the quarantine. But also, they can record something that by definition is almost impossible to record in the lab, which is novelty seeking. People trying things they've never tried before. And so just recently, I asked her to send me a list of some of these novel activities that people are trying. And it's just, in some ways, it's just very sweet. So spray painted a string of lights outside, tried a new hair color, tried making my own music, went

under my house to look for a dead rat, used my cats to help search for the rat. But also watch the church sermon with my family, something we don't do very often, helped my little brother set up a kite to find the front yard, talk to a new person, and then a few fun ones. I'm about to smoke weed. It's slim gyms for breakfast. That's pretty grim. Yeah, some of these are, you could classifies maladaptive behavior. That's so far. And actually, I think we can joke about this, like, oh, we're baking bread, oh, we're doing this little thing. And they might seem even like kind of banal to us.

But to Erin and her fellow researchers, these are like these precious stones. And precisely, these are the activities that they weren't able to study or record and lab. And now they're getting them. So we might not have the experimental control out in the world, but we have something that's just as valuable, which is reality. So they have all the boredom of the lab,

but all the novelty possibilities of the real world, that's a really kind of amazing experiment to have land at your feet. Yeah, and for Aaron, it really gets back to these core questions. What is boredom? And what should we do with it? I think the thing I always try to touch on is that boredom's not good or bad, except that we make it so that boredom is an important signal. It's healthy, it's adaptive. We would not get very far without it.

Boredom makes sure that we stay engaged in the world and it doesn't feel good, but that's okay. It just depends on how we react to it. Yeah, but in that way Bordam is like all things. Yeah, it's like everything else, but with its own unique mysteries, which in this weird, unexpected, accidental way, we just might get to learn a little bit more about. Well, it's super interesting. Well, thanks so much, Joe.

Thank you so much to Professor Aaron Westgate and her doctoral student, Yee-Jane Lynn, at the University of Florida for helping us investigate the great mystery that is boredom. To learn more about their research, you can visit Aaron's website at AaronWestgate.com, where you can also volunteer to participate in one of her ongoing COVID-19 studies. Whether you're bored or not, Erin wants to know. Now I'm talking with Delaney Hall or senior editor and who is currently trapped in her home in Santa Fe with two children, two small children. Yes, yes, I hope you cannot hear them screaming in the background. I actually sent everyone outside because working from your home, there's no sound isolation.

No, totally. There's no amount of foam padding that will protect you from little children. It's just the way it is. Yeah. So, how are you coping there with the children? Well, I've actually been spending a lot of time in a couple of different parenting-related Facebook groups where parents are commiserating with each other and sharing tips about how to get through this crazy time.

And I recently came across a post in one of those groups that got me thinking about this idea of the natural experiment. recently came across a post in one of those groups that got me thinking about this idea of the natural experiment. The post was about vaccination, which honestly is a subject that does not come up that often in this group. Yeah, I mean, that's always a hot button topic, and even if you have strong scientific based feeling about the subject, you just don't want to fight with strangers on the internet about it.

Yeah, exactly. But this post just went there, head on. And to paraphrase, it basically said, we're all terrified of this disease that's going around. And we're living in lockdown. And this is what life looks like without vaccines. This is how life used to be. And the post really struck me like I've been thinking a lot about it.

And what would aspect have you been thinking about? Well, the sentiment of the post represents my feelings. Like I cannot wait for a vaccine. But it also made me wonder about people who are anti-vaccination. Like how are they experiencing this moment as the pandemic unfolds? Are people's minds changing? And so I started looking around for a researcher who studies those issues and who would have some insight into how a pandemic might influence people's attitudes about vaccines.

You know, this is a generation defining experience. My dad's 95. He doesn't remember anything ever like this in his lifetime. This is Dr. Bernice Hausman, and she leads the Department of Humanities within the Penn State College of Medicine. So it's almost like two big an experience when you're in it to figure out how you're going to study it. So what Dr. Houseman studies is the history and meaning of anti-vaccination sentiment. She looks at what vaccine deceners actually believe and why. And more broadly, she's interested in medical controversies

that spill over into the public realm and become social controversies. This interface between science and society, right? You have to work with people, which means you're working with culture and tradition and ritual and history, not just with science. And if it were just science, then there wouldn't be a controversy, right? I mean, this is a situation where the scientific evidence shows that vaccines are really important,

like essential for public health, but that hasn't changed the fact that there are people skeptical about them. Right, and if you understand the history of where that skepticism comes from and why it's so durable and how it connects to these very big ideas about individual freedom and state power, all of that helps you understand why the phenomenon continues today, even in the middle of a global pandemic. So, Roman, do you wanna hear some really disgusting, early vaccination history? Absolutely. I thought you would.

Okay, so the earliest method of immunization, which dates back to the 10th century, was something called variolation, and it was used to protect people against smallpox. And the way it worked is that you would scrape a little pus out of a smallpox blister, and then scratch your arm and put the pus into the wound. Oh my god.

Yeah, or, or, alternately, you could also take a scab from the smallpox blister and then crush it up and suck it up your own nose. With either method, the idea was that hopefully a mild and protective infection would result. The idea that if they had a mild course of the disease, they would not be scarred and they would survive. It had a pretty significant mortality rate, but not as high as smallpox itself. And so after a while, variolation spread from China and India where it originated into the

West. And eventually the practice gave way to vaccination. In the late 1700s, an English physician named Edward Jenner made a vaccine for smallpox that was based on cowpox, a related animal infection. And amazingly, that's actually where the word vaccination comes from. It's based on the Latin word Vaca for cow. Okay, so a lot of people welcomed the many new vaccines that began to develop from that point forward, but there were also objections right from the start. Some of them based on the notion that you should not mess around with nature.

It's always dangerous to mess around with nature. People who do so are punished. There were anti-scientific arguments based on the notion of naturally becoming ill as was preferable to being vaccinated. There were perceptions of the dangers of vaccination. So all of the same concerns that we see today in contemporary vaccination descent, you can see them historically. And a big sticking point for a lot of people were vaccine mandates. People hated the idea of the state requiring them to vaccinate, which started happening pretty quickly.

Great Britain implemented compulsory vaccination in the mid-1800s, and people actually rioted. Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think people, when it comes to civil liberties, they're really thinking about their bodies. You know, it's the ultimate divide in line, you know, that that's only theirs. But you can see why they would be required,

because, you know, you mandate a vaccine, because it only works if a critical mass of people do it. Like, you have to get that herd immunity going. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it kind of presents this catch 22. If you didn't have the mandate, you probably wouldn't have the movement movement because the mandate is what forces people who don't want to vaccinate to vaccinate their children. So our mandate is the way to go. That is a really

interesting question because it feels like mandates are both very American and very un-American. In the sense that, you know, we really have a tradition of individual personal liberty in this country and the notion that the state cannot make you do certain things. And so, I don't think the mandates are going away, but I do think that we see the friction that they cause at the political level. So here in the U.S., vaccine to centers organized to challenge those mandates. And then eventually in 1905, there was a famous Supreme Court case, which you actually covered on Trump Conlogue a couple of weeks ago.

I know this one. This is Jacobson versus Massachusetts, which upheld the rights of states to enforce vaccination laws. And it basically said that, you know, sometimes public welfare is more important than individual freedom. Right. And even though the decision did allow for some exemptions, it was one of the things that really mobilized the anti-vaccination movement in the US. It provided fuel. And as time went on, Dr. Houseman said that two broad groups of vaccine dissenters began to emerge. The one group is a sort of more ideologically anti-vaccination group, right?

So this is the group that is against the science of vaccination. They may use their own scientific evidence. They're largely middle-class educated people who believe that vaccination is dangerous or wrong in some way. And then there's another group of people, often working class people who object to the government's intrusion on the family. So these are people who believe the government just should not be telling people what to do with their bodies, kind of like you were talking about earlier, that that is the realm of the individual,

that is the realm of the family. And it's worth pointing out that sometimes this was for a good reason. You know, working class people in general had a harder time getting out of vaccination. People with more money could just pay a fine and skip it. So working class people were often forced to do this thing that they objected to. What you tend to see in the United States at least is a mingling of arguments about freedom

and about individual rights with the notion of bodily danger. And this idea of bodily danger is really compelling to people. Dr. Hausmann made this point that was really interesting. She said that public support for vaccination is actually very fragile, meaning that even if the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks, all it takes for some people to abandon it is just a small number of bad outcomes. And so what are some examples of that? So something that you can see historically is the power of media that highlights a few

vivid worst case scenarios. So Dr. Hausmann traces the modern anti-vaccination movement to the 1970s. And that was when parents started to express concerns about the original pertussis vaccine, which caused high fevers and febrile seizures in some children. In the 1970s, there was an increasing belief that it could cause some neurological damage.

There was a paper that was published in Britain claiming that it actually did so. There is controversy about whether or not that paper is valid. And in the early 1980s, there was an influential TV news story called vaccine roulette that highlighted some of these concerns. It aired on a local NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. It aired on a local NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. It's a fact of life. All children must get four D.P.T. shots to go to school. Shots we are told will keep our children healthy.

Shots we are told will protect every child from a dread disease pertussis. It's hooping cough. But the D.P.T. shot can also damage to a devastating degree. The report caused a lot of controversy. In general, it emphasized the risks of the vaccine while minimizing the dangers of the actual disease. And some of its more serious claims have since been debunked by further research. The story gave a big platform for this group called dissatisfied parents together, which would go on to become the National Vaccine Information Center. And that's one of the biggest, quote-unquote,

vaccine safety organizations in the country. Many people would call them anti-vaxxers. Another example I'm thinking of in terms of like a single article that had outsized influence was the Andrew Wakefield, the completely fraudulent paper that linked the MMR vaccine to autism, which had no basis in anything, but it became this starting point. Yeah, that one came out in 1998, and it's been very damaging. As you said, there's no link between MMR and autism, but that association continues, and it still motivates some vaccine refusal.

So those are a couple of the big moments that get us to where we are today. Okay, so now that we're in this moment where an infectious disease affects our daily lives, like the coronavirus pandemic, what is Dr. Hausman seen in these different movements? So right now, she's just observing and formulating some questions that might be interesting to investigate. And to start with, she says that this is a really interesting time to be studying vaccination descent, because what we're experiencing is really unprecedented. This is the first big worldwide pandemic of the vaccine era. We haven't had one since we've had all these vaccines.

That's really the case, right? The last big pandemic like this was in 1918. So what Dr. Hausmann is doing is she's checking on these online hubs like the National Vaccine Information Center to see how they're messaging around the issue of the coronavirus. And among hardcore ideological anti-vaxxers,

there is a lot of fear. People are seeing the government enact these state home orders, requiring businesses to close. They see the heavy hand of government coming down and they are concerned about what might happen with respect to vaccines. And is this going to emboldened states to use these same powers to compel vaccine use?

There's a whole set of concerns around that. I feel like I've actually seen some of this manifesting in the protests against the state home orders. And they're pretty small, but they've been happening in the last couple of weeks. And if you watch the footage, you will see anti-vax signage, along with signs that talk about tyranny

and needing haircuts and stuff like that. It seems to be part of that same worldview. Yeah, it's in the mix at those protests. And it's just clear that the government orders have people quite worried. I came across this video that a pastor who is also anti-vaccination posted on Twitter recently. They will be sipping frosties in the lake of fire

before the government ever gets their greasy grimy hands on me and my family and forces us to take a stupid implant or a vaccination that we don't believe in. I have a first amendment right that allows me to reject it and say no. I have a second amendment right that protects my first one and I have a God-given right to tell you you have gone buck wild, the government is out of control, and Christians, you need to wake up. The sort of the mingling of fear about state power and anti-vaccination seems to be

kind of a natural mix. That's happening right now. Yeah, I mean, it is not the case that the pandemic is causing really hardcore anti-vaccination people to rethink their views as I perhaps naively thought it would. In fact, it seems to be creating this environment where some people are really doubling down. Right. I mean, so I can imagine that the anti-vaxx pastor whose whole identity is wrapped up in this, not budging. But is there maybe some people on the edges that might be just a little wary of vaccines that you wouldn't present it with a world in which a vaccine would greatly improve the quality of life all around the world.

I mean, are they moving at all? Dr. Hausman does think this experience will probably affect the views of people who are vaccine hesitants. So they don't have super strong beliefs about vaccine. They're not connected to these communities and movements of vaccine dissenters, but they are people who've picked up a sense of unease about vaccination. She thinks that those people, the hesitant people, might in fact come around to the idea that vaccination is a really good thing. And in fact, there's this technology that she's keeping an eye on. And this is more about the design of one of the potential coronavirus vaccines.

So as you know, there are teams of researchers all around the world looking for a vaccine. And one of them is being developed at the University of Pittsburgh. And one of the interesting things about their vaccine is it's not given through a shot. It's given as a patch. It's this little patch that looks like a translucent square. So how does that work? I can't even imagine it.

Yeah, so you place it on your skin kind of like a bandaid. And then over the course of a few days, it delivers the vaccine to your body through these tiny little needles. So there's a number of reasons why this is a really interesting technology. First of all, a lot of people don't like shots. Second of all, there are some arguments that the skin is actually a better tissue for a vaccine absorption than intramuscular injection. But then there's this other reason, which is more about the psychology of vaccines. Think about what it would mean if you went to the doctor's office and instead of giving

your child shots, they gave you like four patches and said, okay, over the next two weeks, you do them in this sequence and then you can see if there's an adverse reaction to one of them, you're sort of more in control as a parent and even if it's the same delivery of the same vaccines, that totally changes your relationship to the entire process. Well, that is really interesting. I remember when my kids were born, there was a movement among people who were like, you know, they were in favor of vaccination, but felt maybe the MMR was too much vaccination at once. And it wouldn't be great if they gave them one at a time, for example. And so this seems to like, this ability to give you control and to sort of

test and watch your child, because your child is not like every other child, it's just your child, and so they have a specific reaction to everything that you can watch for. I can see that why that would psychologically help people out who were having a problem. Yeah, and as a parent, I can understand the appeal, too. And I think Dr. Hausman is hoping that this might be the vaccine that actually gets developed and licensed because she wants to study that reaction. She wants to study how the mechanism of delivery

might change people's attitudes about the vaccine. Right. And what's interesting is that ultimately what she's seen in this moment displays a lot of the same dynamics we've seen over and over again in history, which is that even when there's overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are good for public health, and we're getting a very real illustration of that right now. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone just gets on board. And so like I guess in order to have effective public health measures, whether or not you agree or disagree, you just have to grapple with that.

You have to figure out how to reach people. Yeah, she said this super interesting thing towards the end of our conversation. You know, with science-based medicine is a tremendous advantage that we have in the modern world. The fact that they could sequence the genome of the coronavirus so quickly, the fact that they're talking about a vaccine within 18 months or two years is phenomenal, right?

All of that is based on advancements in medicine. But the experience of the pandemic, the social disruption that it has caused, the difficulties of discrimination and unequal treatment that the pandemic has uncovered. We already knew it, but now we know it even more. All of that is the realm of the social world, and all of that is much more difficult in some ways to handle.

So in other words, science is the easy part, you know, and people are hard. Coming up, experimenting with our city streets now that vehicular traffic is down and pedestrians are everywhere. After this. So our city of Oakland made its way into the national news recently for a policy initiative that I think our urbanist fans will probably appreciate that they banned cars. That's right. I mean, they banned cars on a lot of streets.

I mean, that's, it was really remarkable. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't all cars and it wasn't all streets, but the measure came in response to crowding concerns that they were seeing at local parks and around like merit downtown. You know, we're all cooped up in our houses in the streets of the one place where we can go for a walk or a run, but with everyone doing that, it's creating problems. People were sort of encountering each other on the sidewalk

and making a decision up ahead, having this little dance, who's going to walk out into the street, who's going to cross over to the other street. This is Ryan Russo, Director of the Oakland Department of Transportation. Someone going for a run, saying, okay, they don't want me to go down to the lake where I normally run. So I'll run in the neighborhood, but I don't want to breathe heavy on people on the sidewalk. So I'm going to do that in the street too. I don't know about you, Rowan, but I've been going on a lot of runs these days wearing a mask.

And I've just decided that the safest way is just to go right down the middle of the road. Most sidewalks are less than six feet across. So there's just not enough room to safely share one with another pedestrian. And so the city of Oakland decided with that in mind just to close a whole bunch of streets to cars to give people more room. Right. And it's like dozens of miles of streets, right? Yeah.

So the city already has this network of what they call bike boulevards. And that's about 74 miles total. It can already be low traffic volume, but connect you to things in the neighborhoods. They actually get you places. It's not just a cold assack. And what we are doing is selecting from those 74 miles, well, which ones should get soft closure treatments? Soft closures mean that they're basically throwing up a temporary roadblock in a five-mile per hour sign. The streets are still open to people who live there, delivery trucks and emergency vehicles,

but otherwise the street is for pedestrians and bicyclists and little kids on scooters and dads doing jump rope. I mean, what's interesting about this is that a lot of urbanists have wanted this for a long time, pandemic, or no pandemic. They just wanted to see the streets used for other purposes other than driving. Right. We've talked about this a lot on the show. I asked Ryan Russo whether this policy was part of a larger transportation vision that he had for the city.

What we're doing now is focused on helping Oakland at this moment, and that is number one. That said, we're learning. We can't help but learn from observing how that's going. And while we're taking quick action, we're not doing something that's particularly expensive or permanent. So if it's not working, it's quite easy to pick up the barricades with the sign strap to them and adjust what we're doing. Yeah. Is there any way that any chance that you know when this is all over some of the streets might stay slow streets? I mean, I think that with the work we're doing on Oakland Solosaries, we're focused on keeping people safe. Now, I do think it's a great experiment and as we hear from our communities,

like, hey, that was working or that wasn't, we're gonna have our ear to the ground for that and we'll respond accordingly. That sounds like a definite maybe. Yeah, I think we got a maybe. But I wanted to talk with an urbanist about this. And so I called up Allison Arieth. She's the editorial director

for the transportation think tank spur. And she said she's really encouraged by what's happening in Oakland. I think what this has shown is one, you can do these really fast. Just put up a bunch of cones and then you have a bike lane. Instead of having a hundred committee meetings over how horrible this is going to be and no one's going to use them and all the other evidence that people make, like just do it. And yeah, it will come to light that like, you know what, this street didn't make the most sense, but this one's really working and

the only way to do it is try and to just be able to like throw something on the ground is great. And she says that throughout history, moments of crisis have also been moments of experimentation inside cities, chances for cities to try things out, try to make themselves better, more livable. Right. I mean, it took Chicago burning to the ground to totally remake the grid of Chicago. And even more akin to what's happening now, Central Park in New York came about partially as a reaction to the cholera epidemics of the 19th century.

We need more space for people to be and exist. Yeah. And even more recently, just look at the last recession, which was obviously terrible for cities, but it also gave rise to all these tactical urbanism projects in cities like San Francisco. That's why we have all these parklets. And that's why we have the proxy shipping container project that used a lot that no one could afford to develop

and turned it into the great public space. That stuff has stayed around. Some cities around the world are already planning to use this crisis as a chance to remake themselves. Milan, just announced that they would use this summer to transform over 20 miles of streets into spaces for pedestrians and bicyclists. Allison has hoped that in Oakland and elsewhere in this country,

maybe some of these experiments in traffic reduction might stick. I think people are still figuring it out, but ultimately I think this is a huge indicator of how much more space we could give to the public. And, you know, I'm not going to say like, oh, there will be no cars in our post-COVID future, but hopefully people will understand, wow, it actually feels quite liberating to walk down the middle of the street. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, and Joe Rosenberg. Mixing tech production by Sriviusi, music by Sean Rial.

Katie Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the crew is Chris Barube, Sophia Klatsker, Vivian Leigh, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Ragu Karnad, whose piece in the New Yorker inspired our segment on air pollution in India. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is distributed in multiple locations around the East Bay, but in our heart will always be in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI-O-R. We're on Instagram and read it too. But you can learn more about all the research we talked about today atepi.org Radio Tepi from PRX you