Science Friday - Nerve Agents, Straws, Soccer Flops, Happiness. July 13, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

Four months ago, an ex-Russian spy and his daughter were hospitalized in the U.K. They came into contact with a substance known as Novichok—a nerve agent developed by Soviet scientists during the Cold War. And recently, two U.K. citizens were hospitalized. One died after apparent exposure to Novichok. Russia has so far denied any involvement in the attacks. The nuclear arms race wasn’t the only focus for the U.S. and Soviets during the Cold War. The proliferation of chemical weapons—nerve and blister agents like mustard gas—was also high on their priorities. The first nerve agent was the result of 1930’s German chemists’ experiments to develop new insecticides. The substance was toxic to insects but also, at certain doses, to animals and humans as well. Luckily, a brush with a nerve agent isn’t always fatal. Dr. Rick Sachleben joins Ira to discuss how nerve agents interact with our body chemistry and what can make a difference between life and death for someone who’s come into contact with the deadly substance. This week, coffee giant Starbucks announced that it was phasing out the use of plastic straws in its stores, instead using what some are calling “adult sippy cup” lids. Other restaurants have also made the move to scale back use of the ubiquitous plastic drinking straw, while some municipalities have considered total straw bans. New York Magazine food business reporter Clint Rainey joins Ira to talk about some of the alternatives companies are considering to plastic straws, from compostable paper straws to pasta tubes to reusable metal straws, and about the challenges restaurants need to address—from durability, to price, to usability by people with disabilities. In late April, FIFA announced that they would be adding four more referees to each soccer match. These refs won’t be running alongside players. Instead, they’ll be in a control room watching the match closely on computer monitors. The video assistant referees will be scanning instant replay for the typical fouls like hand balls and offside goals—but they will also be monitoring soccer dives. Soccer players are notorious for dives, or faking injuries. If players can successfully convince a referee they are temporarily injured, their team can get rewarded with a free kick, a yellow card for the opposing team, or the coveted penalty kick. If they get caught faking it, referees don’t really punish them. But there is a strategy to these flops. One study showed that players flopped when they were closer to referees and twice as much when the score was tied. Vox reporter Umair Irfan joins Ira to discuss some of the science, strategies, and behavior economics behind these soccer dives. What really makes a person happy? What is “the good life”?  Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos spends her research hours studying primate and canine cognition for clues to how humans think and learn. She also teaches Yale University’s most popular course (also available free online), “PSYC 157: Psychology and the Good Life.” She joins Ira to discuss her work and the psychology of happiness.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, we're going to be talking about psychology and happiness. But first, almost four months ago, an ex-Russian spy and his daughter were hospitalized in the U.K. After coming into contact with a substance known as Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Soviet scientists during the 1970s and 80s. And just recently, two more people, this time U.K. citizens have been hospitalized. one has died after apparent exposure to Novichok. Russia has so far denied any involvement in the attacks. British police report they have found the source of the latest nerve agent poisoning,

a small bottle in the home of the hospitalized victim. Police are still trying to find where the bottle came from. Luckily, though, the good news is a brush with a nerve agent is not always fatal. Surviving an encounter with one has a lot to do with basic chemistry, which we're going to be talking about now the chemistry of poisoning agents. Let me introduce my guest. Rick Sackleben is a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, Ira. So one of our listeners actually asked me this question last week and wanted to know, and I said, you know, that's a great question. Let's find out about it. So I'm going to ask you, how do these nerve agents work? Okay. Well, I'll regress just a little bit and describe that the, nervous system, how the nervous system works, and nerve cells send their messages by releasing

chemicals called neurotransmitters. There's neurotransmitters when they're released to go across to the receptor cell and cause a signal there, and then whatever happens after that happens. Now, one of the neurotransmitters is called acetylcholine, or ceacoline, and it's actually used in a lot of different nerve pathways, but one of them is to control most. muscle, so with a muscle firing. So when you want to send a signal to a muscle to fire, it goes down through a nerve system, and acetylcholine is released, and it goes across, and then the nerve, I mean, the muscle fires. It contracts. The problem is with that is now the muscles contracted, and as long as acetalcoline is still around, it's going to stay

contracted, and you're going to get paralysis. So, to get rid of that acetycholine so that the muscle can relax, the body has an enzyme called acetocolon esterase or ac e. And that's actually where these nerve agents work. When you get exposed to the nerve agent, it goes in and it interacts, it binds to this ACE enzyme and actually chemically binds to it and prevents it from breaking down acetycholine, and therefore the muscles can't relax, and you get paralysis. Now, there's a lot of other effects in the body as well, but that's the primary one.

So there are many different classes of nerve agents, Novichik, which I just mentioned being one of them, are they all more or less the same, or is this a particularly deadly one? Well, my understanding, I'm not an expert on the different agents, So this particular one I only know from the same reports that everybody else has access to. But presumably it was developed to be a particularly powerful one. There's a lot of agents that act in this way.

Some of them are uses pesticides quite broadly. They happen to have more, they're more effective against the ACE enzyme in insects than in people. Every animal, every species has a, the enzymes a little different. and some are more this way, some are more that way. And there's another thing, and that's the blood-brain barrier. In order to get to the nerves, these chemicals have to pass the blood-brain barrier. So if you build one that does that very efficiently, it's going to be more powerful. So you just tweak the chemistry until you get the properties you want,

which is maybe very strong against insects but not against people or very strong against people. So, yeah. Are there antidotes for these beverages? Yeah, there are, actually. There are a couple different ways of treating this. One is to use a chemical, which will bind to the acetycholine receptor, but not cause a signal. So if you put a chemical in there, and one of them is atropine, it goes in, and it binds to that receptor, so it kicks the acetycholine out. So the muscle cell relaxes. The problem is, that's poisonous too, too much of it, because now the muscles are relaxed and they won't contract.

So you have to have a balance there with that type. There's another one, and it's pretty interesting. It goes in and it actually interacts with that ACE enzyme, and it goes in and it actually cuts loose the piece of the nerve agent that was attached to the enzyme. And when it goes in and it takes that piece off again, then the enzymes active and you restore the function of the enzymes. So you can break down the Cetocin. So both of them work.

The first one that blocks the receptor, it's pretty fast. So when you give that to a person, it pretty quickly works, but you have to be really careful because it can give them too much. The other one takes time because it has to get there. It has to reactivate these enzymes. So it's slower. But I think in most cases of a severe poisoning, The treatment would probably involve a little bit of both, and over time they would change.

And you would have to get to the victim in time, before the damages, too much damage is done. That's right. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, and it seems like, you know, the idea here as in other kinds of poisonings or other diseases is to work on the symptoms, right? See if you can keep them alive enough so that the body might help out in fighting back? Sure. Well, that's what the receptor blockers, that's what they do. They really treat that symptom. The ones that reactivate the ACE, they are actually fixing the enzyme. They're putting it back. But a lot of damage has been done. You know, so you might be able to. The first thing they're going to do is they see that you have these symptoms, and breathing is difficulty breathing, and, you know, you may have irregular heartbeat, things like that. They're going to treat those symptoms first right off the back. They mean even before anything else. Now, they'll hit you with atropine if they know that you've got a chemical agent exposure, but they wouldn't know that if they just found somebody down on the street, you know,

wondering like it has happened in the British cases. So they really have to figure out what the problem is, but they can treat you with, you know, just the kind of standard medical treatments that keep you alive. And then they start the chemical treatments once they realize, hey, we have a nerve agent poisoning here. Yeah. I understand that the nerve agents go way back to World War II origins or as far back as a German insecticide. Yes. Yeah. So the first, the class of, the most common class of nerve agents, there were the first reports on this class of chemicals having certain effects was probably in the 1800s.

But then in the 30s, a group at a German chemical company were aware of these reports. And so they started studying this class of chemicals to see whether that could be useful for anything. And they found certain chemicals that were very effective against insects, against the ACE enzyme in insects. And so these were developed as – as insecticides. But the problem is they also found out that they were toxic to mammals, not as toxic as they are to insects, but certainly they are toxic to mammals.

And the military finds these things out, and they're starting to ask questions about what can we do with this stuff. So, you know, that's pretty much, you know, throughout history. Technology advances through various drivers, and the military applications are always one of them. Are they still around as insecticides? Yes, absolutely. In fact, I was checking on this before I came in, and it looks like probably half of the insecticides used in the world today are the organophosphates, which are in this class. And the largest other one is the carbamates, which are also in this class. So these ACE inhibitors or binders are really one of the major pathways for insecticides to act. I'm scared. Well, the interesting thing is that we've worked for over, you know, decades and decades to come up with pesticides that are, insecticides that are safer to use

that are less toxic to people and more toxic to the targeted insects that we want to hit. I know, but you say half of them are still, half of these organophosphates are still around. Oh, yeah, they're still used in half the insecticides. They're used all the time. They're extremely valuable, yeah, sure. I mean, Malifion is one of the most important insecticides we have for fighting flies for disease-carrying insects. So ticks, flies.

But you just have to be careful how you use it. It's like a lot of things, you know, used properly. And the other thing is the insecticides are designed to break down quickly in the environment. The nerve agents that are designed for warfare-type uses are actually designed not to break down readily because you want them to stick around. So the insecticide, you want to spray them out there, the bugs get hit by it, they die, and then it goes away, and it's not there anymore. and with the nerve agents, you want to spray it around,

and then anybody who happens to be walking through the grass gets it on their skin and absorbs it, and, you know, that's it. What determines whether someone will die after an exposure to an herb agent? Probably, I guess, from pharmaceutical background, two things. One is dosage, how much do they get exposed to, and then two is their personal sensitivity, because we're all a little different, you know. So pretty much that's it.

how much you get exposed to and your personal sensitivity. Some people are going to be more sensitive and some people less sensitive. And that will also vary with the agent a little bit. What about Novichok, do you know? No idea. No. No. No.

But I suspect from everything that they've said about this agent, the exposure must have been fairly low because it's pretty nasty stuff. And I know that some of the more common ones that have been, and these have all been outlawed. I mean, nobody's supposed to have any of these anywhere. You know, there's some very, very limited specific laboratories that are allowed to have these basically for diagnostic-type purposes. But they're not supposed to be out there. We agreed in 97, I think, to get rid of them all. And most everybody's claim to have done so.

How do you get rid of a nerve age? There's a couple ways. one way is to give me one way because I haven't that much time okay one way is to chemically react it so the most common way is you mix it with something that it'll react with and lie is one of the things that reacts with you have to be careful doing it though

because you don't want to handle the stuff no I can't and you want to make sure you you destroy all of it because if there's a little bit left it can still be hazardous so it's a challenge doctor thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today oh it's my pleasure you're very

welcome Dr. Rick Sockleven is a retired chemist and a member of the American Chemical Society. When we come back, we're going to talk about, oh, Starbucks and coffee and stirs and straws and things like that. So what are they doing to do away with all those straws? And everybody's jumping in on that. We'll talk about it after this break. I'm Ira Flato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This week, Coffee Giant Starbucks said it would start phasing out plastic straws in its stores. moving instead to sort of an adult sippy cup lid by 2020. And they are not alone because other restaurants and at least one airline American are also moving away from the ubiquitous plastic straw, something spurred by environmental concerns,

other times by government regulations. But what's next for your beverage if you don't have the straw? Joining me now is Clint Rainey. He writes about the food industry for New York Magazine. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on. What's the reasoning behind these shifts away from straws? Just too many cluttering up the environment?

Basically, yeah, right? The number that you always see cited is 500 million straws in America thrown out each day. There's a little bit of dispute about sort of the provenance of that stat. Apparently, there has never been an official study done into the number of straws that we throw out. But, you know, people agree it's probably more or less correct. So we're throwing away over 100 billion of them a year. It's enough to circle the earth a couple of times. And those, they're not recycled easily.

The straw is able to sort of, I guess literally fall through the cracks, if you want to talk about that way, when they're going through the recycling machinery. And there's so many of them because they're so cheap to make. Exactly. So is finding an alternative very hard to the straw? How hard is that? I think that there's certainly a lot of options out there already, but, Right, the one that's going to make a viable claim as the new straw moving forward, I'm not really sure.

Certainly paper is the material that a lot of people are gravitating towards. Cost-wise, it can be similar. This company, Ardvark, is sort of like the industry leader in paper straw manufacturing right now, and it claims its straws cost one penny more than the plastic ones, I mean, it can add up, but they also claim if you hand them out on request instead of just giving them out by default to customers that you might even make some money on the tradeoff. And that seems to be one of the keys. It's not going to take a lot of replacement to make a big difference, is it? Right, right.

And it's sort of a, you know, it's a culturally ingrained habit that we have when we are given a cold beverage, especially we think, where's the straw? but if you just make yourself, which is something I started doing after I wrote this thing, drink cold drinks without a straw, it's just fine. You know, you're not exactly losing anything. Are people coming up with you, you brought some examples of straw alternatives? I did.

I did. So I guess I'll start with the most ridiculous one in my opinion, which I can just sort of fall out here. There you go. If this looks like a piece of Bucatini pasta to you, that's because that is exactly what that is. A long piece of tubular pasta. Yeah, it's like about an 8-inch long piece of pasta, and this comes from a restaurant and private beach in Malibu called the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe.

The owner sent me some in the mail that he didn't package very well, so this is actually half the number I was sent. The others came in a bunch of pieces. But the, yeah, so they... They give that out to their customers? They switched over entirely, right. Yeah, he said they were going through about 100 million plastic straws a year. One place. Yeah, one place.

And they decided to look into what the alternatives were. He had this like Yahoo moment where he remembered going to Italy and seeing these giant pieces of pasta. And these are sourced from Italy. And they use them. I mean, it's sort of a gimmicky thing, too. They can claim to be the beach restaurant that serves you your margarita with a giant piece of pasta sticking out of it. He says they last four hours thereabouts in liquid, and I put that to the test. It does last about four hours.

Then it melts away until like a pretty gross-looking wet pasta noodle. What else do you have? So I have just your standard, I brought just kind of your standard paper straw as well. That's an old thing. I remember those. I'm old enough to remember paper straw. These actually go back to 1888. Most people...

Not me, but the strong. Exactly. This was created by a guy named Marvin Stone. He was an inventor who was tired of getting little pieces of literal straw. That's what was used at the time in his mint juleps. And so he fashioned this machine that could swirl paper with some glue and then some waxing outside into a cylindrical structure that you can drink out of. and the company I mentioned earlier, Ardvarc, is the sort of modern-day version, modern-day company that he started back at the end of the 19th century. I also brought a metal one.

A metal straw, yes. Yeah, I mean, these have been around for a long time, too. This is actually my own straw. I was given it as part of a Christmas gift, I don't know, probably two or three years ago. But the plus side to this is that it's always reusable. The plastic and the pasta have a very limited shelf life, but the metal can be reused into perpetuity. The downsides are that they are very expensive

and that they require a very cumbersome cleaning process. They have a brush that you have to run through the center of them, especially if they're being used at a restaurant that goes through a lot of straws. The staff isn't going to appreciate that job, probably. So, yeah, so those are, the pasta one's a little bit of an outlier, but the metal and paper are the two big kind of like alternatives that places are turning to. You need a giant auto claim for them. That's how you clean it.

One issue, you know, would have been raised by people, it has been people with disabilities. Many of these alternatives are not good options. They need a straw, right? That's true. Do you think restaurant is going to say no more plastic straws? Are they keep some behind the counter just to give out to the people who really need them? That from the people I spoke with, that is the system that they seem to be gravitating towards right now.

Unus grow hospitality group, which is where that paper straw that I held up a second ago actually came from, it came from Gramercy Tavern. They have a similar system where they're holding on to a couple that can be used. you know, on request. And the metal ones are particularly bad if you, you know, if you have some sort of tremor or something like that, that would be a bad thing to be forced to have to use. So, yeah, I think moving forward, I think Starbucks said this too

when it made its announcement about the giant sipecup was that it would just continue to offer a very, very tiny number of them since the number of people who would be requiring one is certainly not going to be large. Are there drinks that are leaders in straw innovation? There are. Obviously, milkshakes and things like that are an area where you have to have a straw. You can't do what I said earlier and just refuse to stick one in it. And this sort of came out earlier this year that within sort of the boba tea industry, there are a lot of, they've had to, there are a place where you can't, you know, you have the straw because the tapioca ball at the bottom is going to be, if you just sit, drank all of the liquid directly from the cup. Stuff on bubble-teeting.

Yeah, it would be pointless at the end. So, yeah, they have been looking at ways to, I think it doesn't help the fact that their straw is an enormous plastic, you know, historically plastic straw, that if you're looking at the biggest offenders in the, like, straw world, then theirs are going to come up on the radar first because they're giant and long and thick and whatever.

So, yeah, they've been sort of at the forefront of rethinking how, to find a plastic alternative for their drinks. But, you know, necessity is the mother of innovation. Maybe, who knows, people will come up with stuff we haven't even thought about. That's true. You know, maybe some kind of innovative straw that people say, whoa, why did I think of that? You know, that sort of thing, because now there's an incentive to do that.

There is, there is. I mean, Starbucks, I'm going to say one thing about theirs really quickly, which I also brought here. Oh, that's the new Starbucks. Yeah, and the thing about it is, it is extremely. simple looking. It is. And they basically had someone work on an engineer working on this since 2016, and she basically took the hot lid cup and made the whole larger in it. It's an incredibly simple alternative. It's almost

like a beer can top. It is. Like if you pop the top, exactly. And stuck that lid on it, it would look like a beer can top with that kind of opening it. Exactly, exactly. This one, interesting, side note, is still a polymer. It's, I mean, it's the exact same plastic that a straw is made of. It's just, they're going to argue easier to recycle than those tiny little straws. But from a per, like a square inch argument or something, I'm sure that one of these lids is as much plastic as was being used before by the straws that they were hanging out. Just make it biodegradable. And then we've got a new thing here.

That is the next thing that they will get pressure to do, I'm sure. Clint, thank you very much for taking time to be able to say. Great stuff. Clint Rainey writes about the food industry for New York Magazine. The final match of this year's World Cup happens on Sunday. Are you team Croatia or are you team France? Whichever team you're rooting for, you may have noticed some dives or flops from the players. Flopping, if you're not aware of this, flopping is faking an injury.

It's very theatrical to get the attention of the ref who will take notice. and give the opposing offender a penalty. That, of course, is the idea. Well, FIFA, the ruling football body, has noticed this, too, and is taking action to try to stop the flop. Soccer players are notorious for dives, but there is a strategy to these flops. And joining me to discuss some of the science

and strategies behind these soccer dives is Vox reporter Umer Erfahn. He joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. So tell us about this. You wrote an article about the science and research behind flopping. Why were you interested in this? Well, I play soccer myself, and I was trying to get some skeptical friends to watch with me.

And this is, of course, the common complaint that soccer players dive. They look like whims. They waste so much time. And I thought it was actually something to look into a little bit further. It's a part of the strategy in the game. And I was kind of curious as to why you see this in soccer, especially the really bad play acting and not so much in other sports. And that's kind of what's my interest here. Has there been an increase in this year's World Cup? I don't think it's been quantified just yet.

I mean, I think we're still waiting for the dust to settle and some of us are still going to the tape to see what actually was a real injury versus, you know, a fake. Yeah. Flopping has even gone viral. There's a Namar challenge named after the Brazilian player who is the famous flopper. That's right. But the other side of that is Namar is also. the most fouled player in this year's World Cup. And so the question is, you know, is he flopping to draw attention to the, the fouls that he's receiving as a way to sort of mitigate that effect? Or is he just doing this to, you know, unfairly gain an advantage?

What do you think? I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. Yeah, if you're getting fouled and the referee is not calling it, you really want to try to get the referee's attention. And that may mean playing up something that was minor in order to keep his eye on something that was major. But, you know, the Mexican team was very upset that he burned so much of the clock in their game against them. And so some people consider that to be unsporting and also against the spirit of the game. Now, flopping seems random, but you say there is a strategy. One

study looked at when and where players take dives, and what did the researchers find? So the researchers found that players are more than twice as likely to take a dive when the score is tied rather than when they're ahead or behind. So it means that players are actually kind of paying attention to the score, and they're actually making more of a conscious decision on where and when to take dives. And similarly, when they looked at the location of the field where they were taking dives, the closer they were to the opponent's goal, that is, you know, when they were on offense and within striking range,

that's when they were more and more likely to actually, you know, hit the ground and screened in pain. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Amira Plato talking about flopping this, soccer weekend finals coming up. You know, but you watch how theatrical some of these players. They're rolling on the ground. They're diving. Faking an injury can be risky, right?

I mean, isn't there some sort of risk-reward option that's going on in their mind? Yeah, exactly. And the researchers that were looking at this, they were approaching this in the context of deception as we see it in the animal kingdom. So there's like a bird that's found in North America known as the kill deer that fakes of injury to its wing in order to lure predators. away from its nest. And the obvious cost is that, you know, the more you bait yourself to a predator, the more likely you are to be struck. In soccer, though, there's almost no downside to flopping.

It's very rarely called out as a foul. And if the ref does, if the call doesn't go your way, you just get back up and start playing again. So there's very little disincentive and there's a very strong payoff. And that's kind of why you see it more often in soccer. But FIFA is doing something, right? Trying to stop the dives? That's right. They introduced the video. assistant referee this year for the first time in the tournament. And they have actually overturned a dive, including one of Namar's, to after going to the tape and realizing that, you know, this was not a real injury. And certainly this is something that is going to start to have an effect. And I think we'll have to wait until we till after the tournament to try to see if it did actually

change behavior. Are you going to be looking for something in the finals at all in the match, what we should expect to see in terms of dives? Yeah. I mean, I think you can look at, you know, later in the game, if the score is tied, if you see a player go down on offense, very likely that's going to be a dive. And that's kind of like where the optimal time for diving is because that may give you the chance to take a penalty kick, which can, in fact, win the game for you.

So that's where you'll likely see it if it does happen. Well, the penalty kick seems like luck, but there was research at, that the team that goes first has an advantage, right? Yeah, there's also a lot of strategizing going on with penalty kicks. Soccer being such a slow scoring game, every single point has such value. So, yeah, it shows there are, there's research that shows that there's a first mover advantage to people, to the teams that shoot first.

But in this year's tournament, all four teams that shot first have lost the shootouts. So it doesn't necessarily hold in all instances. But if you are to trying to strategize, your goal would be to shoot. shoot first, and counterintuitively, one of your best bets might be just to aim straight down the middle rather than trying to aim for either the right or the left side of the goal. You know, I was looking and thinking about this and reminding myself, hey, you know, soccer or football is not the only place you see people being theatrical about penalties. All you have to do is watch an NBA game, right?

And basketball players are doing this stuff all the time. Yeah, and even hockey players, and you see NFL players do it as well. The issue is that in basketball, a foul or a flop will get you one, two, or maybe three points on the line, which won't really change the total outcome of the game. But in soccer, if you take a dive in the penalty box and you get a penalty kick, that's going to win the game for you right there and then. So the incentives are much stronger in soccer than they are in other sports. And, you know, when you say taking a dive, it really is.

Taking a dive. That's an old term for cheating or giving up early. Yeah, I mean, you could perhaps see that in boxing matches. Right, exactly. You took a dive. Okay, this is quite interesting. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure.

Thank you. Umar Erfahn is a reporter with Vox talking about the soccer finals that are coming up on Sunday. We're going to take a break when we come back. If you're feeling stressed out, we're going to talk about psychology and the good life. Stay with us to talk about a course at Yale that has 1,200 students. signing up for it. Think of that. What a classroom. We'll be back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. When psychologist Laurie Santos posted her course at Yale, it was Psych 157, she expected perhaps a few hundred students to sign up. Instead, over a thousand,

1,200 wanted in. Dr. Santos studies primate cognition, looking for clues to how humans think and learn and behave, but she also teaches now the most popular class at Yale University, psychology and the good life, or as many students call it, the happiness class. And she's here in our New York studios, Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology, and head of the Silliman College at Yale. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. What do you do with all those kids, 1,200 kids? You try to stick them somewhere. That was the real challenge, is like what classroom is going

to fit everybody. And why did you come up with that idea? So it started being head of college at Silliman. So for folks that don't know, Yale is kind of like Hogwarts, where we have, you know, Gryffindor and Slyth and things. So I'm head of Silliman, which means I live with students on campus, and I hang out with them. You know, I eat with them in the dining hall, and I hang out with them in their coffee shop. And it was being interacting with students at that level that made me realize that students are much more unhappy that I think folks realize,

particularly at college levels. And so it got me to look at the national statistics, and you find that over 30 percent of college students report being two, depressed to function, over 50% say they feel overwhelming anxiety, over 80% feel overwhelmed by all they have to do. Like, this isn't the college of my youth. It's a really stressful place, and as a psychologist, this

was really frustrating because we know from the science of psychology all these things you can do to feel less stressed out and bump up your mood and so on. So I thought, you know, I'm a researcher. I can develop a course on these topics to teach students better ways to kind of behave and better strategies

they can use. You know, the fact that so many turned up, pointed out how right you are. Right about how stressed people, they wanted to go to the class to find happiness. Yeah, I think two things. One is that really there was a need on campus, but also that students, you know, they don't want platitudes. Like, they really wanted to know what the research said about what they could do to feel better.

So tell us in a very few words, what is happiness to your definition? Yeah, so we in the class use the social scientist's definition, which is a little clunky, but it's really about subjective well-being, which has two components. It's kind of what you think, like how satisfied are you with your life? If I just asked, you know, on a scale of one to five, how satisfied are you? That's this kind of cognitive component. But there's also more of a feeling component. Like, what does it feel like?

Do you have positive emotions most of the time? And that's kind of the affective side of happiness. And usually these things are measured in the way that social scientists measure things. There's lots of scales and so on. But really what is just trying to capture is like, how's your mood? Are you feeling like your life is going okay? And are you in a good mood a lot of the time? Does control of your own life, is that a big thing?

part of happiness? Yeah, I mean, what the research suggests is that having paths that you find meaningful, not just necessarily control, but feeling like you're doing things for a purpose, can be really powerful in terms of our mood. Do we go chasing the wrong things in life? I think the surprising amount of research suggests that, yes, that's the case. In fact, psychologists have a term for it, they call it miss wanting. That's a good one.

Wanting the wrong things. I think what we tend to believe is if you want, if you think about what will make you happy, people think, I have to change something. You know, I have to change my circumstances, get a new job, or get a higher salary, or move somewhere new. But what the research shows is that our circumstances matter incredibly little for how happy we are. Researchers try to estimate it, which is kind of tricky, like, you know, how much does your circumstances matter? But they say that they matter only about 10% for your happiness. And so much more of it is the way you frame things and what behaviors you engage in.

Because you hear people who don't have a lot of money saying, you know, I've got other things. They have higher priorities. I'm very happy. Yeah, and you also get people who've had, you know, terrible life circumstances. You know, get hit by a car and are paraplegic, and they say, well, that's taught me what's important in life. You know, I've never been happier since I stopped being able to walk. And it's shocking to our forecasts. Our minds don't think that that will be good for us.

But it actually fits with what the research tells us. How much is our concept of we haven't got enough time to do things important? This is another big one that researchers have been working on. researchers talk about this concept called time affluence, which is a foreign concept, particularly to my Yale students, because we're always in the opposite, which is time famine, which is like somebody's like, you know, do you want to grab a coffee? You're like, sure, like when. You're like, I don't know, never. Like, I don't know. We're constantly so scheduled that we don't even have these simple breaks for, you know, things that would make us happy, you know, having coffee with a friend. And so what the research suggests is that folks who prioritize their own time affluence are happier than folks that don't, even when that comes at a cost of, say, how much money you make. You know, if you'd give up salary time to have more free time, those folks tend to be happier on average. But are these students willing to do that?

Well, when I taught the course, I was really worried about that. You know, I was going to give them this lecture on time affluence. And it also felt really ironic, right? I was going to make them read a paper and come to class. So we did this funny thing where we had students come to class on this time affluence lecture day. And they got there and they were handed a flyer that said, today's lecture is on time affluence.

And to teach you about it, I'm going to give you some. You have no class today. And the only rule is that they couldn't use the time to study or, you know, prep for a midterm or something. They had to do something that increased their well-being. The amazing thing is that students completely lost it at this moment. You know, some students hugged me. One student burst into tears. This was, like, central midterm time on Yale's campus where everyone was really stressed.

And I gifted them an hour. Wow. And one student even said this was the first free hour she had all semester. Just sad. That is sad. 844-7-24-8-25 is our number. but you can also tweet us at Sifry, talking with Laurie Santos,

Professor of Psychology and the head of the Sullivan College at Yale University in New Haven. They were actually crying because they were so excited and relieved that you gave them an hour. To do nothing. To do nothing.

And I actually gave students a list of things to do because I thought it would be so forth. It was like, go to the art gallery, you know, take a break. You know, savor a bubble tea. Do you shake your hand at this? Say, how did this happen? Because you said when I was a student, we had none of these issues.

Yeah, I think partly student life is different, right? They're so focused on grades. They're so worried about what's going to happen in the future. They're just focused in this future-oriented way in a way that I kind of wasn't in the 90s. But I think it's not just college students. I think all of us face this to a certain extent. You know, I tell my friends about time affluence, and my professor friends joke like, man, I wish you could show up at my office and give me a flyer and tell me I had an hour off.

This isn't just college students who are facing this. That's a good point. That's a good point. Your research involves studying non-human primates animals such as Reese's McCax. Do they have insights into happiness that you learn to teach other people? I mean, the work on monkeys is a little bit different from happiness. But I think when you watch them, you realize they're doing a lot of the kinds of things that research on humans suggest would be good for humans to do to be happier.

So, for example, they have tons of time for social connection, something that their work in humans shows is really important for happiness. I think they stay in the present moment all the time, you know, in part because their minds can't think about the future. They're mindful. It's funny because the Buddhists talk about, you know, getting out of our monkey mind. That's our goal to be in the present moment. But I actually think the monkey mind is in the present moment all the time.

You know, they can't think about the future. They're not worried about what happened three weeks ago. Could it be because parts of their, you know, I'm thinking about the prefrontal cortex idea that it has not mature to like maybe you're 25. Could that have something to do with why there's all the stress and pressure and time feelings? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is that, but I think part of it is how these students are really spending their time. You know, they're spending much more time alone than we've ever seen in college days.

And that comes a little bit through things like technology, right? There's this myth of social connection on things like Instagram and so on. But the research kind of suggests that you need to be there in person having these social. social connections. That's what matters. Let's go to the phones because we have people who'd like to check with you from Boston. Michael in Boston. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I was wondering if a research indicated any basic or notable differences for people on the autistic spectrum, I find that social interaction is sort of basically painful and I find if I get what I want, I'm happy and until maybe it's taken away and I don't seem to have the regret that most people

seem to have. Good question. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think there are definitely individual differences and important differences that come, you know, from things like being on the spectrum and so on. But again, research suggests that our forecasts can be off, that even people who are incredibly introverted can benefit a little bit from having a bit more social interaction. And so I think that's the kind of major claim from the research is that these things we forecast, the things we think are going to make us happy, don't necessarily make us as happy as we think. One of the things I struggle with is not just the social connection part because I'm a Massachusetts native and don't like talking to people, even though the research suggests this. But another one comes from work suggesting that we'll feel better

if we do nice things for others. You know, there's this lore in our life that we want to treat ourselves, but it turns out that if we're having a bad day, you'd be much better off not treating yourself, but treating someone else. And this is something that I have to very explicitly make myself do. You know, I want to get a manicure myself or I want to get a nice latte. I don't want to gift somebody else a knife latte, but in fact, that would make me feel better. That's the argument I always use on Pitchweek on public radio because you will feel better if you gift at this public radio station. It's true. The science bears this out.

844-8255. You know, you say you see the difference between your generation and these kids. Has social media played a large role in this? I think it really has. I mean, it's tricky to nail down exactly what the causes are. But I think social media is this real opportunity cost on the kinds of things that make us happy.

So the list of things I give students are things like, social connection with real people in real life. The more you're on Facebook or Instagram, the less you actually talk to real people. A second thing that we find is that a really important thing for well-being is just sleep. And one of the things we know is that students who are on social media later at night are sleeping less and less. In fact, there's some terrifying statistics of how many 15-year-olds sleep with their phones. It's about 80% of 15-year-olds who have phones sleep with them in their bed. And so, you know, this is impacting our sleep.

It's impacting our social connection. It's definitely impacting our ability to stay in the present moment. And the first thing I do when I'm standing in line at the coffee shop, as soon as there's a moment of pause, is to take out my phone and, you know, pop on Twitter. And that's just breaking up how much we're paying attention to the real world. Do we need to teach kids' mindfulness? I think so.

And the research suggests that these kinds of techniques, like meditating over time can have much bigger effects than we think and more quickly than we think. You don't need to be an extra meditator and spend 30,000 hours to get a big effect. It's got a Renee in Cleveland. Hi, Renee. Hi, Renee. Thank you so much for taking my call. It's a two-prong question. First, I was wondering if you've done any research to scale down to like high school and middle school or up to just the general population that's working. And then also as an educator, how do you give your students the ability to have more time to engage in this kind of behavior? So thank you for taking my call. Yeah, really great question. So on the.

kind of scaling upward side, we realize that so many people are interested in this stuff, that we've decided to make the content of the class available for free to anyone who wants to take it. So right now on corsera.org at Yale's site, you can take a shorter version of this class completely for free. And it's kind of caught on. Right now, we have over 130,000 learners, which is kind of incredible. But I really love that the caller brought up kind of bringing this downward to K through 12 students, because the kinds of patterns that we're seeing right now in college students, we see the same kinds of patterns in high school students, and that worries me. And it gets to her second question about, you know, what we can do to give kids more time affluence.

You know, one of the things I think we are seeing is that high school students are more stressed than ever, in part because they have way more homework and way more academic stress than ever. Is that right? I was just visiting an elite high school, and they gave me their stats on all their students, and one of the things buried in there, kind of two facts that were worrying for well-being. One is that these high school students report getting only four hours of sleep on

average, which research suggests is enough over time to induce psychosis and depression in these all these things. But at the same time, these stats reported that these students have four to five hours of homework on average a night per person. And I think, again, you know, with that much homework and then these hits on well-being and sleep, we can't be achieving our educational mission with this much work. And so my advice to teachers is to find some ways to scale back because we might be doing something that's really counterproductive, both for students learning and for their health. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking with Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. You know, my question about all of these things is you can bring a horse to water, but can you make it drink, right? Can you tell students things that they, you know, will actually listen to? It's certainly at that age. Yeah. Well, it's not just listening. It's like you can have the best of intentions, and it's still hard to change your

You know, this is why we're in July, and I'm sure half your listeners have forgot completely about their New Year's resolutions that they made, you know, just six months ago or so on. And that's why one of the things we tried to do with the course was to really harness the science on this. The class focused a lot on the science of behavior change. And the cool thing is that we've learned a lot about, say, how we form habits and the kinds of situations we can put into place to get people to achieve their behaviors. And we tried to build a lot of that into the course, not least of which is just sort of following up on all the research, suggesting that social support can help you. You know, inadvertently, the course ended up having a tremendous amount of social support just because one out of every four students at Yale was taking it. And so you could just kind of ask a student in the dining hall, you know, what's your gratitude list look like this week? Or, you know, did you exercise this week?

It really was a context where the situation was promoting some of this stuff. You threw it this semester? Do you think the course made any real difference in the student's lives? The sad, heartbreaking thing for my scientist hat is that because we thought it would be, you know, 40 students taking the class, I didn't put rigorous, you know, pre and post measures in to kind of do the science of this stuff. But we do have anecdotal reports and anecdotally students, students who did these practices, who actually did the hard work of the class, self-reported that their well-being went up a lot. You know, students who are sleeping more, exercising more, even doing things like listing their gratitude at night.

they self-reported, like, feeling a lot better. And having resilience for bad things. One student who is doing her gratitude letter said she got turned down for a bunch of summer internships would normally would have, you know, like put her through the ringer. But she said, you know, every night I realize I had all these things to be grateful for. You know, who cares about a few rejections? I think I have room for one more call. Let's go to Jean in Harrison, Michigan.

Hi, Jean. Hi, how are you? Quickly, please. Okay, yeah. I'm a sociologist and I teach at a local community college and I'm finding that we're getting a high rate of, like she said, a lot of students that are just so stressed, they disappear. A lot of students disappear during the middle of the semester and we never see them again. I may talk to them from time to time. So I'm wondering, with all the hierarchy that we have in our culture, we have a great social inequality right now and we also have people who have a lot of long-term depression and they're being treated even.

Are there coping techniques that you teach in this class that can help them kind of rewire their brain back, reset it back to where it needs to be? Yeah, I mean, in the course we preach a bunch of very simple habits from just simple healthy behaviors like sleeping seven day hours a night to exercise. And there's work suggesting that a half hour of exercise every day is equivalent to the antidepressant medication Zoloft. So it's surprisingly simple techniques that can have really big effects. Well, we've run out of time. but next time we'll have to have you on to talk more about your research. Excellent. Thanks so much.

This was fascinating. Maybe we've helped a few people. Thanks so much. On college campus or just general public. Laura Santos, professor of psychology and head of Silman College at Yale University. BJ Lehman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program, we're all over the place. You can subscribe to our podcasts. If you have a smart speaker, it'll play Science Friday whenever you want to.

And, of course, we're active on all social media. media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, anything new that comes up, you can be sure we will be there. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.