Instant Genius - What we got wrong about pandas and teenagers

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

Scientists Lucy Cooke and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s books have been shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. They tell us the unexpected truth about animals and the secret life of the teenage brain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Breeding pandas in captivity is all but useless because the pandas cannot be released into the wild. Those that have been released have not fared well. Most have died.

It's a useless and expensive exercise. What we really need to be doing is just protecting their habitat properly and leaving them alone to lead out their surprisingly sexy, secret lives. You're listening to the Science Focused Podcasts. from the BBC Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Focus magazine. Since it was first awarded in 1988, the Royal Society Science Book Prize has celebrated outstanding books that bring the latest scientific findings out of the lab and into the hands of the general public. This year's shortlist is no exception,

with six brilliant books on topics ranging from precision engineering to fighting cancer. The winner will be announced on the 1st of October, and you can read articles by the shortlisted authors on sciencefocus.com. But in this week's podcast, we speak to two of the scientists up for the prestigious award. Later in the episode, you'll be hearing from the brilliant Sarah Jane Blakemore, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, about why our brains make being a teenager so tough.

But first up, we'll hear from Lucy Cook, who tells online editor Alexander McNamara why we've got pandas all wrong and what we could all learn from the sloth. So my book, The Unexpected Truth About Animals, is really a, it's a history of natural history through the prism of our mistakes rather than our successes. I wanted to write a book that explored

the myths and mistakes and misconceptions that we have made about animals over the centuries from Aristotle to Disney. And so these sort of myths and mistakes, there's been a lot of them over the course of history then? Absolutely, yes. I mean, more than a lot of them, more than a book's worth.

You start the book off by saying, how can Sloss exist when they're such losers? And that seems like a pretty good place to start, as it were, because obviously when most people, I say most people, like people such as myself think of Sloth, they seem very lazy, they seem very letharical and just, you know, not really up to much. I assume you start to off the book

that I'm completely wrong about this. I'm afraid you are terribly, terribly, terribly wrong. But in your defense, you will not be the first person that thought that. The first person that described a sloth that I could find in the history books was a Spanish knight in the, I think it was the 14th or 15th century, who described it as the stupidest animal that could be seen on the planet. So ever since then, people have thought of sloths as being somehow sort of evolutionary losers that have escaped the rigors of natural selection and have somehow managed to hang about the planet. But we humans have a habit of viewing the animal kingdom

through the prism of our own rather narrow existence and judging animals by our own standards. And the sloth is one of those animals. It was saddled with a name that speaks of sin and everybody thinks that because it's lazy, it's redundant. And that name has given it a very negative image. In actual fact, being lazy is an incredibly successful strategy for the sloth. Sloths are one of the tropical jungles most profuse mammals.

There was a survey that was done in a Panamanian rainforest that found that a quarter of the mammalian biomass was made up of sloths. So they are, you know, they're incredibly successful creatures. And they're successful because they are essentially energy-saving icons. They are lazy and they conserve a lot of. sorry, they're lazy and they don't waste energy like we do, for instance. So that's, you know, that that idea that they are, you know, that they are losers is completely incorrect.

So what I'm thinking in the jungle is that you see pictures of mammals, like monkeys, which are very sort of springy and jumping around from place to place. How have sloths managed to be so lazy and, you know, take up a quarter of the whole mammalian mass of the jungle? jungle? Well, basically, sloths have evolved to digest the undigestable, and that is tropical leaves. So leaves don't want to be eaten any more than anything wants to be eaten. So they're loaded full of toxins. The sloth's secret weapon against this is a huge belly that can digest these toxins, which it does so very, very slowly. If it did so any faster, it would poison itself. And the leaves and

themselves provide very little energy. So Sloss have evolved to spend as little energy as possible, to conserve energy as best they can. And one of the most obvious ways that they do this is by having inverted their existence. So they are the world's only inverted quadruped. They are a quadruped, you know, a four-legged mammal, but they are upside down pretty much, well, a lot of the time. and they actually they can they can sleep, eat, even give birth upside down. And the reason why they hang from the trees is that it requires 50% of the muscle mass that an upright existence requires. So even if you're just sort of relaxing in a chair, your body's working quite hard to hold

yourself upright. If you're dangling from a branch, the only muscles that are actually working are the ones that are gripping hold of the branch itself. So sloths have pretty much done away with the muscles like our triceps that sort of stiffen and protract the limbs. And they just have the muscles like biceps that pull them along. Now, this is brilliant because it means that they have less muscle mass and therefore they burn less energy.

The difficult thing about this is that if you turn a sloth the right way up and prop it on the ground, gravity removes its dignity and it just sprawls on the ground. And they just literally, they look like they've been an animal that's been in, you know, some sort of terrible roadkill accident because they're completely flat. They cannot hold themselves up. And of course, this is one of the reasons why the early explorers thought so poorly of sloths, because they would have been brought, local indigenous people would have brought them examples of the local flora and fauna. They wouldn't have seen the animal in the context of its environment. And that's the, very key point of my book is that when you're seeking to understand animals, context is king.

So we cannot look at them and judge them on our terms. You have to understand the context of that animal's life in order to understand how it exists. So is that one of the reasons why we have so many misconceptions about animals because we're trying to sort of anthropomorphize the way how we try and understand them? Precisely, yes. So Why do we have so many misconceptions about animals? Because of that, because we have just like this terrible habit of anthropomorphising. We cannot. I think we must be an incredibly insecure species because we're constantly looking for our reflection in the animal kingdom.

You know, and this was, you know, we're better at it now than we used to be. But I mean, my book is full of lots of examples from times past, which are, you know, often pretty fine. especially from the beastries, which were the first sort of animal encyclopedias. And these were written in medieval times and were hugely popular. One, the physiologists that they were all based upon was the second most popular book to the Bible in the Middle Ages. So it was hugely copied and spread it all around the world. And it described animals, but it didn't seek to describe animals, They weren't looking for animal truths.

What they were looking for was moral lessons that we could teach human beings that were hidden in animal behavior. And this sort of habit of moralizing about animals. So animals were sort of good or bad. So the elephant was incredibly wise and lived forever, and lived for hundreds of years and was monogamous and was so adverse to promiscuity

that it would kill any promiscuous animal it came across. Well, of course, male and female elephants are hugely promiscuous in reality. So it bears absolutely no relation to the truth. But interestingly, what was fascinating to me when I was researching this book and these sort of preconceptions that still stick today about certain animals, that a lot of them date all the way back to the beestries. So some of these myths have been incredibly enduring. So what is it that?

These myths, why did they come up with these particular moral traits for some animals? Because they wanted to teach, they wanted to teach people lessons. So the people that wrote the beestries were religious types. They were, you know, religious scribes. And so the point of the beastries was to teach moral lessons to people, not to educate them about animal behaviour. But they were presented as if they were encyclopedias about animals. and so the fact, the fiction was blended with a sprinkling of fact,

but all of it was presented as if it was fact. And so that's sort of us, the scientific backing that we had for animals for a long time, even though there was no science involved in it at all. Absolutely. I mean, science started off brilliantly with Aristotle, who was the sort of grandfather of zoology, and he was a brilliant scientist, although, you know, of course he did get things wrong as well. And then around about the fourth,

century, natural history was hijacked by religion and the fall of the Christian, the fall of the Roman Empire of Christianity and the rise of Christianity. And that was the rise of the beastry. And then, really, they continued with spreading their muddled nonsense up until really the age of enlightenment. It was the sort of 17th, 18th century that scientists started, you know, looking into these myths and trying to sort of, you know, be more scientific. And the forerunner of all of this, really, was this chap who's one of my scientific heroes. He's called Sir Thomas Brown. And he was essentially a 17th century mythbuster. And he wrote this book called, he wrote this book that looked to dispel what he referred to as vulgar eras, which were these

entrenched untruths that they were propagated by the likes of the beasteries and busy clogging up the emergence of natural sciences as a credible science. And so for instance, he actually tested a lot of the myths that were presented in the beestries. So for instance, there was the idea that dead kingfishers were made great weather veins. Also, he got his hands on some dead kingfishers and he suspended them from the ceiling by silk thread and found that, no, they don't make great weather veins, they actually, they move uselessly in opposite directions. You know, so he, and so he sort of investigated all these things,

and he was really a sort of a forerunner of the scientific process. You know, once again, going back to Aristotle and observing animals, and then coming up with theories and then testing those theories. So my book really sort of charts that sort of, that, sort of, that, passage of science all the way through to the present day and the kind of mistakes that we've made along the way. It sounds like some of the ideas that they had about animals were just made up at random or completely picked out of the hat.

Were there any that he found that were surprisingly accurate? I mean, there's lots of people of... I mean, Aristotle made some brilliant observations about animals in his writing. So, yes, there's... But that's not what I chose to do. I chose not to write about, you know, what we got right. I chose to write about what we got wrong.

And then to sort of, and then to look, basically, the examples that I've chosen, the 13 animals that I've chosen were chosen because of the diversity of different stories that they allowed me to tell, but also that in most cases, the truth is even more fantastic than the crazy theories that we had developed about them. And it was also incredibly surprising. often the opposite of what we think. Do you have a good example of one of those animals that you could give us a brief rundown of

to give us a flavour of what other animals we might find? I chose to write about 13, or as I like to think, of the unlucky 13, most misunderstood creatures. And you've got a whole range there. I start with the eel, which was a creature, which is incredibly commonplace and commonly found in the rivers of Europe and rivers of America,

but has tormented scientists, 2,000 years because of its extraordinary life cycle. So it goes through not one, not two, not three, but four metamorphoses. And it only, and it also undergoes this incredible migration from the Sargasso Sea, which is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Europe and then and then back again. and it only develops its sexual organs on its return journey to Sargas O.C. So for that reason, it absolutely tormented scientists because basically they would, from Aristotle onwards, Aristotle writes about it, but he thought that eels must produce by spontaneous generation, because however many he opened up, he could find no evidence.

of their testes or their ovaries. They simply weren't there. And in fact, centuries of scientists went searching for the testicles of the eel and could not find them, including amusingly, I thought, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud's first ever job as an academic was to try and find the testicles of the eel. He had a, there was a Polish professor who claimed to have found them. and Freud was given the job of following up on this

and he spent one whole summer slicing open hundreds of eels and lamenting in these wonderful letters to a friend how the eels are torturing him and he can't find any at all, any sign of their testicles. And one has to wonder how much the slicing open, you know, centric fish, how this sort of then went on to influence Sigma Freud's later work, because obviously he moved on to look for something a little less elusive, the seat of human desire rather than that of eels.

So, and it wasn't, it was, it wasn't until the, I think it was the 18th century that eventually, I know it must be in the 19th century. Anyway, it wasn't for a long time that people eventually, discovered the testicles of the eel. So something as commonplace as the eel has been such a mystery. And then I then go on to talk about other animals that we've either, you know, projected ourselves onto or have mistaken for different reasons. So for instance, there's the penguin.

So everybody thinks penguins are, you know, really cute and monogamous and great parents. And the documentary March of Penguins has a lot to do with this because it propagated this idea that the emperor penguins and your trudge across the ice flows with some kind of epic romance, which it isn't. Life in the Antarctic is extremely brutal. and these are birds with very tiny brains and they are flooded full of hormones and in actual fact penguins, Adelae penguins in particular, are prone to having or copulating with anything that moves

and quite a few things that don't move, like dead penguins, for instance. So it was sort of slightly unfortunate because the American Christian right wing after March of the Penguins came out, adopted the penguin as a paragon of Christian family values. They, of course, didn't realize that they're actually pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs. Yeah, there's definitely an image of penguins that has changed as we've come to understand them more. I guess there's a lot of

animals that, especially recently, we must be changing our opinions on. So I'm just looking at some of the other animals that are in the book. We've got things like the panda, which, and most people when they think of a panda as like a big, fluffy, cute-faced animal, which is terrible at breeding. But presumably there must be something more to that that you've discovered in your book? First of all, they're not rubbish at breeding. There are basically two pandas.

There are wild pandas, and then there are captive pandas, and they behave very, very differently. Captive panders are very hard to breed, Like many animals in captivity, it's very hard to get them to breed. You know, animals, you can't just, you know, you couldn't shove a pair of two humans together in a cage and expect them to get it on. And animals are no different.

They need the animal equivalent of, you know, a nice glass of wine and a bit of Barry White to get them in the mood. And in the case of the panda, it's generally scent-driven. And the female panda likes to choose between a number of males and the males will fight and she'll make possible. even with multiple males. Wild pandas are anything like they are their sort of sex-shy, captive doppelgangers. You know, a male panda was observed by George Sharler in the wild mating 40 times in an afternoon,

and their sperm count is 100 times higher than that of a human, and they are not incapable of of reproducing. But, you know, we have, I think humans have this sort of inbuilt desire to be heroes and also to micromanage things. And so we've decided that they are useless because, again, like the penguin, they look cute. So they look like toddlers. So they look like they're helpless and they bumble around and they fall off climbing frames. And so they must be useless. They must need our help. Well, they don't. They absolutely don't need our help. All they need us to do is just leave them alone. That was Lucy Cook there, whose book The Unexpected Truth About Animals, is available now. Now we're on to teenagers. We've all been one, but somehow they universally

get a bad rap. We think of them as moody, inscrutable, and hypersensitive. But as Sarah Jane Blakemore explains, it's not their fault. It's their brains that are the culprit. Sarah's life's work has been dedicated to peering into the inner workings of the teenage brain, which she explores in her new book, Inventing Ourselves. Speaking to Alexander, she kicks things off by telling us what exactly is going on inside the teenager's mind. So the teenage brain is undergoing a huge amount of change. Interestingly, we never used to think that was the case.

So until about 20 years ago, neuroscientists assumed that the brain stops developing in childhood and nothing much changes after childhood. But we now know because of being able to scan the living human brain with MRI scanning, that in fact that's not true at all and that the human brain develops right throughout childhood and also throughout the teenage years and even into the 20s. So at what point do we start considering like from a child's brain to a teenager's brain? Well, I mean, it's not a sudden change. It's quite a steady change between childhood and the teenage years in terms of the brain structure.

It just continues developing. But very substantially, really huge changes go on during adolescence. And what sort of changes are they? Well, for example, the brain is made up of grey matter and white matter. And grey matter contains cell bodies like neuronal cell bodies and connections between neurons called synapses. And white matter contains the fibres that connect up different regions of the brain and allow different regions of the brain to communicate with each other.

And there are huge changes during adolescence. in terms of the amount of both grey matter and white matter. So we know that white matter increases during the teenage years. And the interesting consequence of that is that it probably means that the brain becomes faster during the teenage years because more white matter means that the brain is able to generate signals and transmit signals more quickly between neurons and between brain regions. And at the same time, there's a decrease in grey matter. And we think that that's partly because the brain is becoming more white and less grey.

So tissue is changing from grey matter to white matter. That's why the white matter increases and the grey matter decreases. But also, possibly because the number of colour. connections, synapses in the brain is decreasing during the teenage years. And the reason why that's important is because this process where by synapses are decreasing is called synaptic pruning. And it partly depends on the environment. Synapses that are being used in a particular environment are the synapses that will remain and grow stronger. And synapses that are not being used in a particular environment of the synapses that get pruned away. So in that way, during childhood and the

teenage years, the brain is being shaped by the environment that the child or the teenager is in. And that's, is that just purely like environmental of like external factors or is that like, you know, learning and education? Is that all feeding into what the brain, essentially the brain makeup is at the end? Well, we don't know, but we presume that all, environmental factors, whether it's, you know, yes, learning or education environment, your family environment, your social experiences, but also things like nutrition and exercise, and things like alcohol, all these external environmental experiences, in theory, can influence the way the brain develops. And that sort of will, does that, in some way we go to explain

some of the behaviour that we tend to associate with teenagers? Possibly, yeah. So we, when we think, about teenagers, we sort of stereotypically think of behaviours like increased risk-taking and self-consciousness being very embarrassed, particularly by your parents. We think things like peer influence being influenced by your friends, going along with your friends. And to a certain, you know, there are huge individual differences. So some teenagers show those behaviors, others don't. I think that's the first thing to say that it's not all teenagers. And of course, you know, lots of adults and younger children also take risks or influence by their friends,

not just teenagers, but it's true that there is an increase in those behaviours during the teenage years, and that's in humans as well as in non-human species of animals. And it's true also across different cultures and even across, you know, many centuries or even millennia of history. So there is something about adolescents that makes a just sort of unique period of development and behavioural change. And those behaviours that we associate with the teenage years, we used to put them down to changes in the level of hormones, sex hormones at puberty, and also social changes like going to a new school, going from a little primary school to big secondary school, for example. But we now know that in addition to hormones and social

effects, the brain is also undergoing a huge amount of change. And that development of the brain probably explains some of the teenage typical behaviours. So is there something that we can do to sort of, is there a sort of optimal way that that brain should develop? Or are there things that we could do that sort of positively will grow it or there are things we could do that will negatively influence the way how it's growing? Yeah, the science of brain development during adolescence is actually very new and we don't know the answer to those kinds of questions yet. So that is, you know, but one one question I often get asked by parents and teachers and even even teenagers themselves is what does digital technology, what does, you know, social media, mobile social media, mobile

do to the development of the brain? Because, of course, this generation of teenagers is growing up just completely immersed in that kind of technology. And how does it affect the brain? Is it good or bad? And actually, you don't know the answer to that. There's just no information yet. There's no data on how using your mobile phone a lot affects your brain and whether it's damaging or not. but that kind of question is now being looked at in lots of different studies around the world

that are going to track the development of very large numbers of young people as they get older to look at how all sorts of aspects of the environment and environmental experiences and also your genetics affects the way your brain develops. It sounds like a really sort of really broad sort of level of study that's sort of trying to encompass everything that's happening around brain development. That's exactly right. There's a really exciting study called the ABCD study, the adolescent brain and cognitive development study happening in America. They are following 10,000 children who are currently age 9 to 10 over the next 10 years. and they are tracking them and testing them every year

and acquiring a whole load of measures like measures of hormones, measures of their genes, their genetics, brain measures, behavioral measures, and also things like measures about their environment, like how much they use their mobile phone and their mental health and looking at how all these different factors influence the way a young person develops. And do you think that it was without sort of thinking about it in a sort of parenting way, do you think this will sort of give us a good idea of what would be optimal for the positive and sort of strong development of teenagers' brains?

I think so. The study is going to be 10 years. It's going to take 10 years. So, you know, we're not talking next week. But by the end of that 10 years, I think we will have a very rich. and detailed data set and that will inform us

about the optimal environment for brain development. Is there a difference that you've seen between boys' brains and girls' brains or is it just they're completely the same?

Question about gender differences and I think it's because you know, boys and girls do seem quite different when you know them anecdotally teenage boys, teenage girls

they do seem like quite different types of people. But although we anecdotally think of girls and boys as really being quite different, actually most of the research on teenage brain development and teenage cognitive development doesn't really show much in the way of gender differences. And I think that that might be because partly because there's so much overlap between the genders. that to see a difference between them would require huge numbers of people in each study. And we just don't have those kinds of numbers.

You know, in our studies, we include maybe a few hundred young people, which is actually quite relatively large in the field. But to see gender differences, maybe we'd need to include, you know, several thousands, and that's just not really possible. But also, I think even though at a kind of crude level, in everyday life, yes, there are gender differences clearly, but actually when you test them at a much more fine-grained sensitive level with really carefully designed experimental tasks,

then maybe those gender differences just don't, are not robust. You know, they just don't come out on those kinds of tasks. But anyway, the jury's out because this is a new field and with larger scale studies, like the big adolescent brain and cognitive development study in the US, then they're the kind of studies that will show gender differences if there are any in brain development. With regards to learning and the capacity to learn, so obviously you are doing a lot of learning as a teenager and your brain is developing still, are there some things that the teenage brain is more capable of learning better than, say,

a child's brain or an adult's brain. Question. There's not a lot of evidence on that. We found that teenage, late teenagers in their late teenagers learn information like nonverbal reasoning. So their nonverbal reasoning are those sort of patterns where you have to see a pattern and fill in the missing,

the last, the missing kind of square. I don't know if I'm explaining that very well. But anyway, we find that, late adolescence, so young people aged about 16 to 18, are better at learning those kinds of puzzles than younger teenagers, which is actually quite surprising because most people, I think, have this idea that, you know, children are always better at learning things than teenagers because they've got, you know, very kind of plastic sponge-like brains.

But anyway, we found that that was not the case. actually that late teenagers, you know, older teenagers are better at learning, nonverbal reasoning. But actually, they're not better than adults. So it's not, in that case, it wasn't like teenagers were the best at learning. They were exactly the same as young adults. But there is some evidence from the Netherlands from a group of research in the Netherlands that teenagers are more creative than either children or adults. And they have more creative, sort of novel responses on creativity tasks,

which kind of makes sense, you know, that if you think back about your teenage years, this is a time where you're not only good at learning, but also very imaginative. And you have ideas that maybe decline a bit when you get older. That was Sarah Jane Blakemore there, whose book, Inventing Ourselves, the So secret life of the teenage brain is out now. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. The October issue of BBC Focus magazine is out this week. And inside, we discover how we could leave Earth for good

and build a new civilization in space. We also speak to a panel of leading female scientists about why there are so few women in science. We discover why Curry is so good for you and explore whether machine learning could help shed new light on the problem of male suicide. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several

digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

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