Science Friday - Virtual Disease, Daydreaming, Geoengineering. March 12 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Learning From World Of Warcraft’s Virtual Pandemic The widespread infection of roughly four million virtual characters all started with a giant snake demon. In 2005, the massively multiplayer online video game World Of Warcraft introduced a special event raid, where groups of players could team up to fight a giant snake demon named Hakkar the Soulflayer. Hakkar would cast a spell called “Corrupted Blood” on players, which would slowly whittle down their health. The effect of the spell was only supposed to last inside the raid arena—when players returned to the main world of the game, the spell would dissipate. But thanks to a software glitch, that wasn’t the case if the player had a pet companion. When the pets returned to the main world, they started infecting players and non-playable characters with the Corrupted Blood spell. If the player wasn’t powerful enough to heal themselves, they would die and erupt in a fountain of blood before turning into a skeleton. What followed was a virtual pandemic that startlingly resembled today’s COVID-19 pandemic, from the spread, human behavior, and cultural response. Blizzard, the developer of the game, wanted players to social distance. Some players listened, others flouted the rules, traveling freely and spreading the disease with them. Conspiracy theories formed about how the virus was engineered by Blizzard on purpose, and others placed blame on players with pets as the cause of the outbreak, mirroring the racist anti-Asian attacks and rhetoric surrounding COVID-19 today.  Coincidentally, two epidemiologists, Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, were there to witness the World Of Warcraft outbreak unfold. They studied and used the incident to model human behavior in response to a pandemic. Their findings were published in The Lancet in 2007. Many of their observations came to pass in 2020 when COVID-19 appeared.  SciFri producer Daniel Peterschmidt sat down with Eric Molinsky, host of the podcast Imaginary Worlds, who reported this story for his show. He talks about the epidemiologists who studied the outbreak and how it prepared them for public responses to COVID-19. Why Is Daydreaming Difficult For Grownups? Children have a natural talent for imagination. Even in moments of boredom, their imagination can take them away into daydreams that help pass the time in a flash. But for many adults, falling into a daydream is hard, especially when our minds are filled with worries about tomorrow’s obligations, finances, and a global pandemic.  Turns out those who feel this way are not alone. New research shows that adults report getting to a daydreaming state is harder than experiencing their unguided thoughts. Adults often require a prompt to think about something pleasant, and tend to ruminate on unpleasant things.  Daydreaming can be an antidote to boredom, and researcher Erin Westgate of the University of Florida says that’s important. Her previous research shows that boredom can cause sadistic behavior in people. Westgate joins guest host John Dankosky and Manoush Zomorodi, host of the TED Radio Hour and author of the book “Bored and Brilliant,” who argues leaning into boredom can unlock our most creative selves. Can We Geoengineer Our Way Out Of A Natural Disaster? Humans have always altered their landscapes—from simple agriculture used to cultivate specific crops to huge projects like damming rivers to change the flow of entire ecosystems. And many of these human interventions have unintended consequences and have led to major environmental disasters. In her book Under A White Sky: The Nature Of The Future, author Elizabeth Kolbert talks to scientists and people working on geoengineering projects and technology to mitigate and avert damage caused by humans in the natural world like climate change. The projects range from electrifying rivers to turning CO2 emissions into rocks. Kolbert discusses if we can solve these natural problems with the tools that created the problems in the first place, and at what cost? 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 John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. When the pandemic hit last year, people reacted in different ways, from complete denial to volunteering to help others. Some people flouted the rules while others didn't leave the house, and some even used it as an excuse to hurl racist insults and physically assault other people. These actions may have seemed unpredictable, but a group of epidemiologists was not surprised. They'd seen this all play out in another pandemic in 2005, one that happened online in a video game called World of Warcraft. Players there became infected with the virus due to a glitch in the software. Sci-Fri producer Daniel Peter Schmidt is here to talk more about that.

Hey, Daniel. Hey, John. So briefly, what is World of Warcraft for those who don't know? Yeah, it's one of the biggest online multiplayer games of all time. It's been around since 2004. and basically you're playing in this huge medieval fantasy environment with millions of other people across the world. You can play as an orc, mage, warrior, that kind of thing, so kind of D&D stuff. And you can explore the world and fight monsters and go on quests with other people.

I've heard about it, never played myself, but that sounds pretty cool. So how did this all start with the epidemic in the game? Yeah, so in 2005, Blizzard, the company who makes World of Warcraft, they created a new challenge. And basically it was you go to this one area, you battle a big villain, which is called a boss, this big snake demon thing that would cast a spell on you that gave you a kind of infection. And this infection was called corrupted blood. And the spell basically just slowly sapped your health away while you were fighting it. It would obviously affect you in battle.

But once you defeated the boss, you could go out into the main world and you're basically not infected anymore. So individual players could get infected while battling the boss. But then how did it spread to other players? Great question. So there was a bug in the software where if you had a pet with you, you can have these like companion pets. Your pet would also get infected. And when you left the area and went back to the main world, your pet continued to carry the corrupted blood infection. And it would spread it to other players and other characters in the game.

And they would slowly die. So this was basically a computer virus that was acting like a real virus. Right. And this sparked the interest of some epidemiologists who happened to be playing. the game at the time. And I talked to Eric Molinsky about this. He's the host of a podcast called Imaginary Worlds, which is a show about how we create these worlds and why we suspend our disbelief. And he reported a story about this outbreak and how studying virtual epidemics can teach us how to deal with real ones. And I started by asking Eric how the virus started to spread in the world.

And he told me that in a virtual world, it spreads very easily and very quickly. In the real medieval world, you know, a place. plague would travel about as fast as a horse. But, you know, in this magical medieval world, you can teleport back to cities. And a lot of these cities have what we call NPCs, non-playing characters. So it could be like a shopkeeper or a guard or, you know, just sort of townsfolk in the background. But they all got infected with this thing. So they were walking around infecting everybody else asymptomatically, which is also a very weird thing, which is not supposed to happen. And so that's another way that the disease spread really quickly. And like did you have to be like really close to

them to like actually get it like how it works with COVID? Yeah. Yeah, you definitely need to be close to get to get to them. And also, you know, the longer you play in the game, the more sort of health and wealth you build up. So you could almost be like the NPCs where you feel it's the equivalent of you have a cough, you know, when people get COVID and they say, oh, it wasn't that bad. It was just like a mild flu. Or maybe somebody has access to, you know, very, very high end. medicine. You know, it's different from sort of the lower level players, the people that just didn't have the time to invest that much into their characters and build up all that health. And those people were just getting wiped out like crazy. And you would really get sick. I mean, you would just

like a fountain of blood would come out of you. It wasn't like you just sort of like turn into a skeleton and disappeared. Yeah, that is pretty graphic. So this caught the attention of some epidemiologists Nina Pfefferman, who at the time was at Princeton and Eric Lofgren. So they were, were gamers also. They were like also in World of Warcraft at the time. Yeah. What was fascinating to them was not exactly the way that the virus spread in the game as much as the way people reacted to it. Because as epidemiologists, they would often do, you know, models to try to figure out, well, how are people going to behave? And economists have talked about this lately too, that for so long their mathematical models would assume that in any situation, people would behave what they would consider to be

rationally. And so with World of Warcraft, here's a virtual environment where most of these characters are being controlled by real people, which meant that they could study the behavior in real time as to how people reacted in the situation like this. And it was really fascinating to them because they were reacting in ways that no mathematical model would have predicted. Yeah, can you describe those reactions and just some of the amazing similarities to how that epidemic mirrored our real-life pandemic now? Sure. So as I mentioned before, the sort of subset of players who were inadvertently responsible for spreading the disease were hunters who their, you know, their digital pets got infected. So there was a lot of sort of scapegoating against these, you know,

hunters. And I mean, it's a much, much more serious situation than real world. But there's a lot of anti-Asian racism that, you know, immediately started when COVID-19 came to the U.S. And is still going on today. There were fake cures being spread about. And just a ton of misinformation and conspiracy theories. People thought the company Blizzard had created it on purpose or maybe there was some disgruntled employee who had created it. It was very hard to get correct information in a sea of misinformation. Another thing that was really interesting was that there were people that were good Samaritans. People with very high health points, you know, people who had a lot of health and wanted to help use their, you know, go into infected areas and use magical spells to cure people.

But very often they overestimated how healthy their characters were and then they would get infected. And then, you know, this is a subject you've talked about before on the show, Griefers. You know, in this case, you know, it's people that basically have very trollish behavior online. And there are people that would actually go up and try to infect other people, which, you know, doesn't happen very often. You very rarely hear stories about that. But actually, Blizzard wanted people to do social distancing. But, you know, in a video game where the whole point is that you get to interact with other people through their avatars, social distancing is not a fun way to play the game. And there were just a lot of people that simply didn't care.

people are flooding the rules, people were being jerks. And then other people who are taking it very seriously were upset and we're just saying, you know, you're ruining the game for us. This is not a joke for us. And that kind of conflict in terms of, you know, how seriously do you take it? How much do you follow the rules? That, you know, had a lot of interesting parallels as well. How long did the epidemic last in World of Warcraft and how many players got infected? It lasts for about a week, which obviously compared to what we've been through doesn't sound like much. But so at the time, World of Warcraft had about six and a half million players around the world. And over half of them, about four million were affected by the virus.

So it was huge. I mean, you had to just kind of like, you know, escape to a virtual mountaintop and let your character just sit there for the whole week. If you, you know, go to your virtual cabin in the woods if you wanted to avoid this thing, or just not log on, which obviously for game company is disastrous. Right. It was like, oh boy, time to go to the top of them out and do nothing. My favorite game. Exactly.

I want to log back in and see if my character is still staring at the sky. So the virus is spreading in the game. There's like unchecked spread. People are traveling all over the place. And eventually things like stop mirroring reality, as I understand it. Because unlike reality, World of Warcraft has an all-powerful game developer named Blizzard, right? Yeah. I mean, this is the thing where, you know, you wish you were living in a virtual world.

They took control of the whole thing. They first, they tried to put in a bunch of patches to stop the virus, and that wasn't working. And eventually, they had to just reboot the whole system. Oh. So one of the things I thought was really fascinating about your episode is that the epidemiologists really anticipated this wave of non-compliant behavior that popped up with our current pandemic. I'm going to play this clip from your podcast, Imaginary Worlds, of epidemiologist Eric Lofgren talking about that. And I think one of the things that we're seeing in parallel is that a lot of people don't take infection seriously if it is not personally a risk for them.

So you see a lot of people talking about coronavirus and they're like, well, I'm young, I'm healthy. The mortality rate isn't that high for me. So why should I care? And I think in the corrupted blood case, there was a lot of that similar thing where, you know, okay, this is bad if you're high level, but it's not all that big a deal. But like the server is being destroyed by this epidemic. The economy has been crippled. Everybody, can we cooperate for a little bit and get rid of this? Is, I think, sort of the important parallel there.

Yeah. It's just incredibly important that epidemiologists are not taken by surprise. To some extent, I mean, obviously they're surprising things about it. it was not a complete shock to them. And I think because this kind of began to lay the groundwork for epidemiologists to understand that people are not going to react like mathematical models. And it's an important part of their messaging as well to the public, is to anticipate that this is going to happen and, again, not be surprised by it. Yeah, we've had quite a few epidemiologists on the show over the past year.

and it's almost like they have to be kind of part medical scientists, part social scientist, it seems like. Yeah, they're really inseparable. And again, I've noticed, you know, economists over the years have been talking about this as well, that too often that they base things off of these sort of mathematical ideas of what people will do and people are obviously a lot more complicated. And it's ironic that what seems like kind of virtual people, you know, even though they're controlled by real people, is kind of what made them realize that. Yeah. Do you know, know what the reaction was like to this paper when it came out and if it and if the paper had any impact in the scientific community especially when COVID started. I can say it was huge. I mean the paper

when the paper came out it was huge. Eric Lofgren and Nina Feferman gave a lot of talks. It was generally very very well received paper. People were pretty fascinated by it and it's and it had a really fun element to it in terms of a video game that I imagine a lot of epidemiologist papers don't you know don't have. So what did you take away from the story after you finished working on it? Well, the thing that I really thought about a lot was what counts as human contact to some extent? You know, it's so interesting to watch these people interact virtually through this, you know, in this virtual world. Because we've all been doing that over the last year. In a way, we've all become more like players in a video game, you know, where we have, you know, even when you're on Zoom, I mean, you're sort of constantly watching yourself on Zoom.

And it's like there is kind of an avatar version of me that's interacting in this virtual world. And I just, I feel like in a way, the whole world has become more like the world of Warcraft over the last year. And I really began to see that coming when I worked on this episode. And so it's kind of played out exactly the way I thought. Eric, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Eric Molinsky is the host of the podcast Imaginary Worlds. You can download it wherever you get your podcasts.

For Science Friday, I'm Daniel Peter Schmidt. Daniel, that's a great story about what we can learn from these virtual worlds. We've got to take a short break here. And when we come back, don't zone out on us here. We're going to talk about daydreaming and why it's so hard to do for adults. Oh, hi, this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Sorry, I was just daydreaming a bit there.

You know, you ever do that just daydream for a few minutes in the middle of the day? I did that a lot as a kid. Usually it was about baseball or Star Wars or playing in a rock band. Now, you may have done the same thing growing up, and let's face it, as kids, we didn't have quite as many responsibilities, so we had the time to just let our minds wander. But I got to say, it's a lot harder these days. I mean, when I have a free moment, my mind usually wanders to COVID or politics or climate change, or what I have to do tomorrow.

But that's not really daydreaming. it. And let's face it, when I have a free moment, I'm probably just going to look at my phone. As it turns out, it's not just me. Research shows that adults are really bad at daydreaming. Here to convince us that we should lean back into thinking for fun is my guest, Dr. Aaron Westgate, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Dr. Westgate, nice to have you back on the show. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So I want to start by asking, is there a scientific definition of what a daydream is?

Oh, you know, that's a giant can of worms there. You know, when we use terms like daydreaming, of course, like we all have their sort of private intuitions of what it means. And even in like the scientific community, we've gotten into a lot of, you know, a little bit of, you know, what do you mean by daydreaming? What do I mean? And so we actually use the term thinking for pleasure, which is a little bit more precise. And we usually talk about it as being defined as intentional thinking for pleasure. So really sitting down and intentionally trying to have these positive pleasant thoughts by herself or what we colloquially might call daydreaming. So a list of things I'm doing tomorrow isn't a daydream, but imagining a possible future for myself might be.

Exactly. So if you sit down and you're imagining what you need to do in the future, we'd call that planning. Or if you, not that I ever do this, but you know, if you're walking down the street and you're overcome by like worries about what you need to do, we might call that mind wandering. And mind wandering can be a form of daydreaming, but it's. It doesn't have to be, you know, it can be very unpleasant and immersive at times as well. So let's talk about your research. What exactly did you find when you tried to get adults to daydream? And how exactly did you do this? Yeah.

So a few years ago, we had this great idea. We thought at the time that, you know, everyone has these busy lives. If we just gave everyone a few moments to daydream, that this would be fantastic. You know, it'd be relaxing and people would enjoy it. So we started bringing people into the lab and we'd put them in this room. We'd take away all their belongings and say, you know, for the next. next five to 20 minutes, we just want you to sit here and entertain yourself with your thoughts. You can think about whatever you want, but, you know, we want you to try to have a good time.

And we got the data in, and people did not enjoy this. You know, on a one to nine scale from one is like not at all enjoyable to nine is extremely enjoyable. They gave it like a five, which I always say, you know, if you wanted to go to a movie and you saw it had like a 50% rotten tomato rating, like you wouldn't be impressed by this, right? Like a five out of nine is like pretty nice. great. So we're like, well, you know, well, but compared to what? What does that mean? And so we started sort of testing alternatives. Like, would you rather think for pleasure like we've asked you to do? Or would you rather read a book or do something else by yourself? And of course, people are like, yeah, I'd rather do,

I'd rather do something fun than think something fun. And so we thought like, well, you know, how far can this go? What if it was something that wasn't so fun? Would people even give themselves, say, an electric shock rather than simply sit and be a lot? along with their own thoughts. And so we actually ran the study. We brought people into the lab. We took away all their belongings. We said, you know, we want you to experience this shock once, just that you know what it's like and narrate it. And here's some other sort of experiences you can have. And later in the so-called second part of the study, we said, okay, now we want you to just sit here and entertain yourself with your thoughts. You can think whatever you want. But by the way, you're still connected

to that electric shock device. If you want, I don't know why you would, but if you want, you can press it And it will shock you again. And so we left them in the room, you know, for, we said 10 to 20 minutes. It was about 12 minutes. And afternoons, we found that 67% of the men and about 25% of the women in this study who had told us earlier that they would pay money to not be shocked again, that they found the shock unpleasant, actually went ahead and shocked themselves during this supposedly fun daydreaming time. So hold it. Were they just, were they bored? Is that what this is all about?

I think so. I don't think it's that, you know, it's not something as like existential as like being alone with our thoughts is like torture. It's just, it's kind of boring. And, you know, when people are bored, we know they do all kinds of interesting things. And if you're in this bored room, your thoughts aren't super entertaining. And there's this button. You know the button will shock yourself. But I think there's a real allure to pressing that button when we're bored. So, I mean, do you think that there's benefit in trying to avoid boredom? Yeah. I think of boredom is really.

being this signal that what's going on isn't working for you right now, that it's this signal that you're not meaningfully engaged in the world. And you need to do something to try to restore a sense of meaning or restore a sense of attention and making sure you're actually paying attention to what's going on. And people sort of look around for that and ways to do that. And hopefully they find good ways. But if the only option is a button that shocks yourself, at least some people we'll press that button. Okay, well, Aaron, I knew that we were going to be talking about boredom. So I thought, who could we bring into the conversation that comes to mind immediately when I think about something boring?

And it's my friend, Manusia Zomerooti. She's host of the TED Radio Hour on NPR. She's the author of a book, Bored and Brilliant, how spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self. She's been a guest and a host here on Science Friday. Manus, it's great to have you back. John, you flatterer. He's telling me, when you think of being bored, you think of me. It's great to be here again.

Well, look, you studied boredom just about as much as anyone. First of all, what do you think about what Aaron's been saying about people being so bored that they'll shock themselves? Yes, I am not surprised by that at all. I think this is, it's so interesting to me because one of the things that I came into when I was writing a book about boredom was the use of the word bored, you know, which immediately has these awful connotations. And as you said, Erin, the word daydreaming has more of a positive sort of spin on it. So my goal with the experiments that I did that I wrote about in my book is to say to people, you know, when you feel bored, don't immediately turn to your gadgets, which is what we all usually do, anything to avoid being bored, right? Sit with that feeling of being bored. Sit with that uncomfortable feeling of being bored.

Aaron gave them the option to shock themselves. But what I said was, and maybe if you think of boredom as sort of a gateway to mind wandering, to what so-called positive constructive daydreaming, this idea of, and I'm sure Erin can speak more to this, activating the default mode in our minds where we do all kinds of imagining and creative thinking and problem solving and autobiographical planning. And my hypothesis was that if you tell people, yes, you know, when you enter boredom, things can go bad, but things can also go good if they understood why that could happen in their brains, that they would be more inclined to indulge in it and to unlock sort of this productive, creative, wonderful part of just staring into space. What's so interesting about that, though, Manusche's is the idea that there's a connotation around daydreaming that doesn't necessarily lead itself to, being thought of as productive, right? People think you're daydreaming. You're just lazing about, your mind's just wandering. You're not actually being productive, but you essentially say this is very productive time. Yeah. Like when I did the research into what happens, I had no idea that one of the things we do when we daydream is essentially time travel. We do something called autobiographical

planning, which is that we look back at our past. We take note of the highs and lows. We tell ourselves a story, how we got to be sitting right here in this moment, and then we cast forward into the future and literally imagine, you know, what could my life be and then work backwards to try and set the steps to reach those goals. So it's really, really important mental work that you cannot do if you are checking Twitter or, in my case, playing a particular game called Two Dots. Aaron, I'd love for you to comment on that. What are your thoughts? No, I really love that. idea that, you know, something I say a lot is boredom isn't good or bad. It's a signal. And it's what we do with that signal that's important. There's a lot of research that connects boredom to a lot of these

really fantastic outcomes. So, you know, creativity and mind wandering. And there's some really cool work that Jonathan Schuler and colleagues have done where they find that some of these sort of like epiphany moments in creative problem solving, they don't come when you're sitting at your desk and working on it. They come in the shower. Or they come in these moments when you're kind of doing something else. And this thought just sort of pops into your head. So sort of that classic eureka-a-a-ha moment in the bath, right? But we also have a lot of work showing that boredom can also lead to all these really negative, terrible outcomes. So like the electric shock studies that I told you about, my colleague Stefan Fautiker, has work showing that when you induce boredom in the lab, it can also lead people to behave in sadistic ways.

So grinding up bugs for fun or taking money away from other participants in this stuff. Like, you don't get the money. You're just being a jerk. And so, you know, we have all this literature suggesting boredom sometimes leads to these good outcomes and it sometimes leads to these bad outcomes. And I think, going back to what Manus said, it really depends on how people choose to react to boredom in the moment and what options they have available to them. So, Erin, can I ask you a question? Yes. One of the things that younger people told me, which I found so surprising, was they reported, you know, after they put away their gadgets and they tried to be more bored, essentially. They said to me, this is the weirdest,

most uncomfortable feeling. I have never experienced it before. And I was like, wait a minute, what? You've never been bored? And they're like, well, yeah, I just look at my phone. So I don't need to feel this way. And I don't like it. Does that surprise you? Are you, like, thinking that maybe some of the people that you had in your study had never been bored before, that they'd never even had this daydreaming sensation? So I think that a lot of people have been bored, but I get this a lot actually when I ask people. Like, you know, I study boredom and they say, oh, I'm never bored. And I'm like, really, really, really. And usually what I find is something like that flicker that leads people to pick up the phone, that's boredom, right? Like it's sort of a, I always talk about boredom is like,

it develops over time and it starts with this little flicker that if you act on it, you can make it go away. And, you know, we know from the, emotion literature and coping that, you know, there are lots of positive ways to cope with big emotions and negative emotions. And there are some not so great ways to cope with it. And the not great ways to cope usually involve suppressing the feelings instead of dealing with the feelings. So, you know, if boredom, part of what it's doing is saying, like, hey, what you're doing right now, it's not really super meaningful. Picking up your phone to sort of combat that and make that go away, it doesn't solve the lack of meaning that produced it. Manus, I should say,

your book was published back in 2017. Do you think that the world of boredom has changed somehow? Because I can't imagine that the book that you wrote in 2021 about this topic would be the same, because it's been a year. Honestly, I've been astounded at how, in some ways, prescient the book was. And I say that because that's what people are telling me, that they're like, I didn't get why I needed your book until this year. that I think for some people, the ones who were privileged enough to be stuck at home and not working on the front lines, there was a lot of boredom. There was a lot of bread baking. There was a lot of Instagramming of our bread baking, right? And there was a lot of people who were like, I feel trapped and uncomfortable in part because I have so much time to think.

And so my book, in addition to explaining sort of the neuroscience of what happens with boredom and exploring the linguistic use of the word, I also have these exercises where, it's a challenge. It's very specific and discreet. Try this. Lean into boredom now that you understand how you can sort of get to this positive daydreaming side and see if it helps. And, you know, part of it is just observing yourself under, you know, running sort of behavioral experiments on yourself in captivity. That's kind of one of my things that I love to do. It sounds a little statistic, but it can be wonderful as well. And so to have people saying like, you know, understanding it, knowing that you've tried it, knowing that thousands of other people, people have tried it because it was based on an experiment we did in 2015 with 20,000 people. I think that gave them permission to kind of relax into the boredom, into the daydreaming, and to hopefully embrace it in some ways and to see some of the positive effects that we've been discussing. I'm John Dinkowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Dr. Aaron Westgate, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville and Manusse Somerodi, the host of the TED Radio Hour.

on NPR and author of the book, Bored and Brilliant. She's based in New York, and we're talking about boredom and we're talking about daydreaming. Yeah, Aaron, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this, on how this specific year of COVID has maybe changed the way either you or people you study think about daydreaming and time being bored. You know, that's such an interesting question. We've started to collect some data on this. And one of the things that it struck me is how variable people's experiences have been. I work from home most of the time.

I certainly have been on, like, team boredom, this pandemic, I guess I would say. A lot of bread was baked in this house as well. But, you know, there's a lot of folks, too. And we look at this, you know, sort of this global data from like over 60,000 folks. There are many people who, you know, especially essential workers, folks in healthcare, who haven't been bored at all. And so I think really understanding this variability and embracing it to some extent. I really love minutiae point about sort of the self-experiments and the importance of, you know,

all of the data that we collect in psychology is really sort of about the average, like what typically works for a typical person. And I think it's really important for folks to do those experiments on themselves and say, like, well, does this work for me? And being able to adapt things like that to people's own circumstances, especially during the pandemic, when so many people are having some. such very different experiences. I think it's really, really valuable. You know, Erin, what you just said really speak to a lot of the stories that I heard from the people

who have followed the exercises in the book, which is that for some people, they have an epiphany and they decide, you know what, I haven't talked to my dad in 20 years. I'm going to do it because they've really thought about how they want to go about doing it. They've thought very carefully. For other people, it's simply like, oh, I'm happier when I sleep more and I pick up my guitar instead of being on Facebook. And so they decide to do that more. As much as the data, you know, is interesting. It's really very much the personal stories about how boredom, I think, is an extremely and daydreaming, a very personal experience that you treat yourself, you know? Lean into the boredom, lean into the daydreaming.

It's just for you. No one else. And, Aaron, do you have any thoughts about that? If people want to reframe some of this pent up boredom into positive daydreaming, do you have any tips for them? Yeah. So I always think of boredom as being an invitation. to fix something that's going wrong. And we know that you can make things less boring by making them more meaningful and making them a better fit. It's like Goldilocks. You don't want to do something

that's too hard or too easy. And you can apply that to thinking to make daydreaming more enjoyable and more accessible as well. So you want to pick topics that are meaningful to you. You know, imagining eating ice cream is kind of fun, but it's not deeply meaningful and satisfying. And you want to make it easy on yourself. Thinking is actually really, really hard. It involves a lot of cognitive effort. You have to be this playwright and the audience and the director and the actors of this whole mental performance. So anything you can do to make it easier by having topics in mind, by reminding yourself of what you want to think about, by picking moments where you don't have a lot else going on, where you can really focus is really key to making it easy, making it meaningful, and having a more enjoyable and less boring experience. Dr. Aaron Westgate is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Thank you so much for joining us on Science Friday. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. And Manusia Zomerodi is host of the TED Radio Hour on NPR, and she's author of the book, Bored and Brilliant. She's based in New York. Always good to talk with you, Manusch. You too, John. Thanks for having me back. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about how humans are really good at causing environmental problems and then trying to fix them by causing more problems. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Humans have always altered their landscapes from simple agriculture used to cultivate specific crops to huge projects like damming rivers to change the flow of

entire ecosystems. And of course, many of these human interventions have unintended consequences and have led to major environmental disasters. And there seems to be a human tendency to try to course correct with, well, more interventions to geoengineer our way out of these human-made, natural disasters like climate change. So can we solve these natural problems with the tools that created the problems in the first place? And at what cost? In her new book, my next guest talked to the scientists and people working on some of these big projects from genetically engineering cane toads to particles in the atmosphere to combat climate change. Elizabeth Colbert's new book is called Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future. She joins us from Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for being here. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Let's start with a big idea behind your book. When we try to tinker with the natural world, there are so many unintended consequences, and as you say, we don't necessarily have the best track record with some of our interventions. It almost seems like your book is written to remind us of this fact. Well, definitely, there's a cautionary tale aspect to it. Let's put it that way.

I want to read a passage from your book early on. It says, if there's to be an answer to the problem of control, it's going to be more control. Only now what's got to be managed is not a nature that exists or is imagined to exist apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself. Not so much the control of nature as the control of nature. First, you reverse a river, then you electrify it. Now, we're going to come back to the electrification of the river in a second, but I want to ask you, what does it mean for something to be natural today, do you think? Well, that's a really good question, and I discuss that conundrum in the book. We have developed actually this very interesting vocabulary around our complicated relationship with nature these days. And one phrase that is only really used in the academic literature, but I think describes, you know, potentially the whole world, is this idea of a coupled human and natural system. Everywhere we go, we are sort of,

entwined with nature at this point. There's really nowhere you can go where you don't find evidence of human activity. And that includes, you know, the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the ice sheets. I want to talk about some of these projects that you write about in the book. And you start on the Chicago River, a river that's been changed and rerouted, actually reversed. How's the Chicago River an example of some of these human-made interventions? Chicago grew up along the banks of the Chicago River, and at the time that the city was founded, it flowed east into Lake Michigan. And Chicago basically used the river as a way to get rid of its waste. That was its human waste, and also, as the stockyards grew up in the city, all of its animal waste.

And it was said that the river was so thick with filth. A chicken could walk across it without ever getting her feet wet. This was obviously, you know, revolting, but it was also a serious public health hazard because Chicago draws its drinking water from Lake Michigan. So around the turn of the 20th century, it was decided, you know, we can't, we, they were getting constant outbreaks of waterborne disease. So it was decided as a public health measure, something had to be done. And that something was an enormous construction project, perhaps the biggest of its day, which resulted in the construction of basically a canal that reverse the flow of the river. So now if you go to the

Chicago River, it no longer flows into Lake Michigan, rather it flows away from Lake Michigan. And away from Lake Michigan into a river system that ends up taking this waste essentially down to the Mississippi River all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. It was, you know, pretty much eliminated this public health problem. But in the process, it connected these two great drainage Basin. So the Great Lakes, drainage basin, and the Mississippi drainage basin, which previously there had been no way, no aquatic connection between the two. And this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except for the fact that in this other river system is a particularly nasty invasive species that's really hard to control and that people desperately don't want to get into Lake Michigan.

Just to say it would be a problem even without this particular invasive species that we're going to talk about, because both the Mississippi River system and the Great Lake system are both highly invaded systems. So there are species in both systems that the other one would prefer to keep out because they're wreaking havoc. But the species that I believe you're alluding to, which is actually a collection of species, is referred to collectively as Asian carp. It's actually four species of carp that were imported to the U.S. purposefully back in the 60s and 70s and have since basically taken over the Mississippi. river system. And people who live around the Great Lakes really, really don't want them in the

Great Lakes. And they've taken over the river system because they're very efficient at just eating, crowding out all the other species that are there. And they're there in part because we didn't want to put chemicals into the river. Hold it. How'd that happen? Yeah, it's one of those sad slash comic ironies of our time is that these fish were imported to, the U.S. at an effort, what's called biocontrol. So using one species to get rid of the problem that another species is causing us, you know, humans. It's always done from a human perspective. And so in this case, one of the species was brought in because it's a very efficient herbivore. It eats aquatic plants. And there are a lot of invasive weeds that people were trying to get rid of

from waterways. So this was said as well, instead of dumping herbicides in the water, we'll dump these fish in the water and they will get rid of our weeds. Another species was brought in because of the nutrient loading that occurs from, you know, sort of insufficiently treated sewage. This was the time of the Clean Water Act. Communities were under a lot of pressure to reduce this nutrient loading. And it was the idea was these fish who are very efficient filter feeders would help do that. They all got loose and basically swam their way all the way up to the very edge of Chicago. It's such a fascinating story because the original notion that we want to solve the problem of a filthy river that's filled with waste by this enormous project of rerouting it. And then eventually ends up causing all these other downstream effects.

You know, the other way of thinking about it, of course, Elizabeth, is we could just not dump so much stuff in the river. But that gets to this habit of mind. I mean, how people think about the problem that they're facing right now. And that's something that I think you grapple with quite a bit in this book. at the heart of the book is this question of how we deal with these problems, which are increasingly in scale. So we're starting with the Chicago River, which is a, let's call it a regional problem. And we get all the way up to, you know, climate change, which is a planet-wide problem. And how are we going to respond to that? You know, one of the interesting side stories here is,

is there, we could separate these two basins again. The Army Corps of Engineers has looked at it. It would be quite expensive to do at this point. But it would also be extremely inconvenient because Chicago has grown up now around this reverse river. So what might be the best thing to do ecologically rarely wins out, you know, when people are making those decisions. Some of the projects that you write about sound really like science fiction. And there's one that is, I think, scary to an awful lot of people. It gives you the title of this book. It tries to control the effects of the sun basically by almost simulating volcanic ash in the sky. Explain what exactly this project is trying to do. Well, what you're alluding to is this, I don't even know if it rises to the level of project at

this point. It's an idea. Let's put it this way, proposal called solar geoengineering or alternatively sometimes solar radiation management. And the idea here is that you know, we've dumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's warming the planet. That's climate change. So a subject, you know, you've spoken about many times. One of the challenges of dealing with climate change is that carbon dioxide is a very long-lived gas in the atmosphere. It just hangs around for a very long time. So, you know, even once we stop emitting CO2, which we're certainly not near doing at this point, we still are going to have this altered climate. If we decide we don't. like that climate for humanitarian reasons, for ecological reasons. It's very, very hard to do anything about that fast. And the only theoretical proposal on the table is this idea of, well, we will shoot something into the stratosphere, some chemical compound, sulfur dioxide, potentially, calcium carbonate potentially. It's even been proposed, diamond dust has even been proposed, that will reflect sunlight back to space and that will have a cooling effect. So in

theory, you could counteract the warming with cooling. But the worry here, of course, is that we could do something like this and assume that this is going to do something that could help us, but it could, as you write about so often in your book, it could go horribly wrong. Are they concerned about the possible consequences of an intervention like this? Well, yes, absolutely. Everyone is very concerned about that. And this gets us to the current state of the debate, which is just even should we allow the

first preliminary tests. As I say, this technology doesn't exist. It would require specialized aircraft with the capacity to spray, you know, many, many tons of some material in the stratosphere. We're quite a ways from developing that, although I think everyone thinks that that would not be that difficult. But the question is, should we even allow these first preliminary tests to go forward to see if this theory is viable? So this is maybe far. out in the future, you also write about some technologies that are already being used and that could maybe be scaled up a little bit, some of the carbon capture technologies that are out there. You know, we read about Elon Musk putting out this huge $100 million prize to find the best

new carbon capture technology. Before we get into some specifics, do you sense that this is the right way to find the solution, that we're going to find some technological marvel that's going to allow us to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere? Well, this is. really gets to the heart of, you know, the book in a lot of ways. We have already built in. If you look at, you know, the sort of fine print of a lot of these intergovernmental panel on climate change reports, which are sort of the basis for these big global agreements and about, you know, how we're going to keep average global temperatures from increasing more than two degrees C, which has sort of become this threshold, which we've agreed we do not want to cross, already.

built into a lot of those projections is this idea that we are going to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. That's one of the pools we're going to need, I guess I use that word, to achieve that goal. Now, we don't have those tools yet. So that is exactly this sort of habit of mind of say, well, let's assume, you know, that's going to work. One of the technologies that you saw firsthand is this idea of taking carbon dioxide and turning it essentially into rocks. One of the things I found most interesting and amusing about this concept was that the scientists that were working on this had a whole lot of ideas about how this would work, but didn't really have an idea of where the rocks were going to go. They were created by all of this. Maybe you could explain the technology briefly.

Eventually, and once again, eventually is a long time, you know, most of the CO2 that we are throwing up into the atmosphere would end up turning to stone to calcium carbonate through a, you know, complicated process that goes under the title sort of benign sounding, and it is very benign of chemical weathering. So that's the process over long periods of times, you know, hundreds, thousands, millions of years through which CO2 is removed from the air. And the question is, can we basically, you know, mimic that and speed it up a tremendous amount? So I actually took a trip to visit some of my emissions that I paid to have removed from the atmosphere by a machine, a machine that looked kind of like a giant air conditioner, and then it was being pumped deep underground into the volcanic rock beneath Iceland,

where it was reacting chemically with that rock to form calcium carbonate. So that is one method that potentially could be used to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere. The problem is that it requires energy, so that's, you know, an issue. And right now, it's quite expensive. The cost and the energy costs are both significant factors here. Climate change has been at the heart of so much of your work. It seems in some ways like a much bigger and much more complex problem, I suppose that that's an understatement, than some of the other problems that you write about in the book that humans are trying to solve. Do you sense, Elizabeth, that it is that way that climate change is of a different scale than anything else that humans have caused that we're now trying to fix? Well, I guess I would argue, and this is sort of at the center of the book, our efforts to grapple with the ecological damage, the biodiversity crisis, extinction crisis, whatever you want

to call it, if you're like ranking global disasters, I think that ranks pretty high up there as well. And both of these are, the extinction crisis is being caused by many, many human activities. Climate change is a big one. Climate change is being caused, you know, also by many human activities, all of which are, have the result of putting CO2 up into the air. So they're very intertwined crises and they're both, it's very, very difficult to put, as it were the genie back in the bottle in both cases. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday. from WNYC Studios. And we're talking with Elizabeth Colbert.

She's the author of the new book, Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future. Has your reporting for this book changed anything about the way you think about climate change and the way that we are dealing with it as humans? Well, I think that one of the very sobering things about writing the book is realizing that even were we to stop emitting CO2 once again,

which we absolutely need to do, in which everyone working on all of these technologies would tell you we absolutely need to do. We haven't solved the problem of climate change. We're simply no longer making the problem worse. So that's a pretty big and daunting fact that I think, unfortunately, we're going to have to grapple with. Are you more scared or less scared after looking at some of the work that people are doing to try to solve the problems? That's a really good question. You know, if it's possible to be both simultaneously, I guess,

I would say that's true. And, you know, one of the points I would make about the book and it genuinely reflects, you know, sort of my own ambivalence about a lot of these things is, you know, you can read about some of these technologies and you can say, yeah, that's great. I'm enthusiastic about that. You can read about them and say, you know, that's horrifying. That would be, you know, an even bigger disaster. And I think both are very legitimate reactions. That's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guest, Elizabeth Colbert, is author of the new book Under a White Sky. Elizabeth, thank you so much for the book and for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. If you missed any part of this program or I'd like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is now Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Voxpop app, we want to hear from COVID-19 long haulers, people who've had COVID symptoms over a long period of time. What questions do you have? have about your experience. That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps.

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