Something You Should Know - Don’t Eat Less, Eat Better & The Magic of Mystery - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 17, 2024

Look around and you will likely see someone doing something on their cellphone. For many of us, cellphones are a necessity and a constant companion. What about your relationship with your cellphone? This episode begins with a look at how Americans use their cellphone, how often they check it, and how they feel if they don’t have it. You can then compare and see how you fit in with everyone else. https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/ Why are some people overweight? The assumption is that they simply eat too much food and the way to lose weight is to simply eat less. But what if the real answer is not to eat less but to eat BETTER. There is some compelling science to support that, and it is what Mark Schatzker is here to discuss. He is a writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale University and author of the book The End Of Craving : Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well (https://amzn.to/3QPFS1l) People like mysteries. It seems to be human nature that we want to figure out how a magic trick is done or figure how whodunnit in a murder mystery. Think of all the movies, TV shows, books and podcasts that revolve around a mystery - and we want to solve it. Here to explain why mysteries are so appealing and how we can all use mystery to our advantage is Jonah Lehrer. He is a writer journalist and author of the book Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution (https://amzn.to/3QvN6aZ). When you go grocery shopping on a hot summer day, you’ve probably worried about food melting or getting too hot and spoiling in the car on the way home. Is it safe to run another errand or two while the groceries are in the car or is that flirting with danger? Listen and I’ll explain how long the experts say you have to get the food home and into the fridge https://www.budget101.com/frugal-living/598158-how-long-can-groceries-stay-in-a-car/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, how many times do you check your cell phone every day? I'll tell you how you compare with everyone else. Then, how your brain controls what you eat, how much you eat, and how much you weigh. Because not only does the brain not want you to be too skinny, it also doesn't want you to be too fat.

Since the 1950s, scientists have been doing overfeeding studies. They put people in a room and they feed them an incredible amount of food, and what they find is that eating too much is almost as miserable as starving. Also, how long is it safe to leave groceries in a hot car in the summer? And how mystery makes things interesting. Mysteries in stories, magic, even mysteries in sports. We're essentially drawn to sports because they contain some mystery. You know, we think of sports as like this pure meritocracy, this pure test of talent, that the better team will always win. But it turns out if the better team always wins, that's pretty boring.

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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know have you ever thought that maybe your relationship with your phone is a little over the top. You just spend too much time on it. You see other people on their phones all the time. But have you ever wondered, like, maybe you're doing this worse than they are?

I found this article on Reviews.org that looks at how obsessed we are with our phones. And first of all, this will tell you a lot. On average, Americans check their phone 344 times per day. That's once every four minutes. And here are some other statistics about people and their phones. 74% of Americans feel uneasy leaving the house without their phones. 71% of Americans say they check their phone within the first 10 minutes of waking up.

53% say they have never gone longer than 24 hours without their cell phone. 47% consider themselves addicted to their phones. 35% use or look at their phones while driving, even though you're not supposed to. 70% of Americans check their phones within five minutes of receiving a notification. 64% use their phone on the toilet. 61% of people have texted someone in the same room as they were in.

48% of people say they feel a sense of panic or anxiety when their cell phone battery goes below 20%. 45% say their phone is their most valuable possession. And 43% of people use or look at their phone

while on a date. And that is something you should know. Of course you know that there is an obesity problem in this country. Generally, people are eating too much and too much of the wrong thing and consequently, as a population, we are overweight. There's all kinds of diets and all kinds of advice on how to lose weight, yet despite all that advice, it doesn't really seem to be helping. The problem persists. So what if the solution wasn't all about trying to eat less,

but trying to eat better? I want you to listen to my next guest because he has a different take on the problem of people being overweight and some fascinating science to support what he has to say. His solution, I think, is right on the money. Meet Mark Schatzker. He is an award-winning writer, and he's the writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale. He's author of a book called The End of Craving, Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well. Hi, Mark. How are you?

Thank you for having me. So you come at this problem of overweight and weight loss from a very different angle. So explain it. Well, what I'm particularly interested in is why so many of us have such a dysfunctional relationship with food. We're supposed to eat food to survive, to thrive, to exist. And food has become a kind of slow-acting poison. And it's certainly the picture is really very much unlike what most people think. And how is that? What is it most people think and why are they wrong?

Let's talk about dieting. The diet industry is worth billions of dollars and most people believe in dieting and they don't believe in themselves. And that's because of the fact that dieting works and yet does not work. So here are the details. Dieting works, but only for about six to eight months. So people go on a diet, the pounds really do melt away. They fit into their old jeans and people stop on the street and they say, you look great. And everything's going wonderfully. And then around six to eight months, the pounds start to creep back on. They start to get tired and they blame themselves. They say the diet was working. I failed. And that is not what happened. What happened is that the brain intervened. The brain said, I know you're losing weight. I don't want you to lose weight. I want you to gain it back. And that's what happened. The brain controls our body weight. So this idea that we can, you know,

read a book and follow five simple steps and the pounds will just melt away forever, just simply isn't true because the brain is incredibly intelligent and powerful. But here's where it gets really interesting because not only does the brain not want you to be too skinny, it also doesn't want you to be too fat. Since the 1950s, scientists have been doing overfeeding studies. They put people in a room and they feed them an incredible amount of food. And what they find is that eating too much over a long period of time is almost as miserable as starving. People hate it. They had to do the first one in a prison because they couldn't get ordinary college students. But then when these overfeeding studies come to an end, the subjects snap back to their old weight, just like dieters snap back to their old weight. So the discussion

we should be having is, wow, how is it that the brain controls our weight? We've been avoiding it, and that's secretly been controlling us the entire time. Well, it would seem then, based on what you just said, that your weight's your weight, and no matter what you do, you're going to come back to it. And this is what a lot of people say. I'm someone who's weighed roughly the same amount my entire adult life. Even people who are overweight, who weigh more than they like to, tend to stick to a certain weight. So the big question we need to ask is, what's changed? Up until about 50 years ago, most of us stuck to a pretty healthy weight. You know, if you look at,

I love to look at photos of old concerts, like old summer concerts, or people at the beach, or even people just shopping in a supermarket. And you look back from the 1960s and 70s, and it's just remarkable how thin everybody was. And then something has changed to make the brain say, I want you to eat more food. And so what was that? What changed? What we have to understand to answer that question is that the brain is obsessed with measuring. What we experience as taste and flavor isn't this sort of frivolous sensation of, oh, isn't

it fun to eat? This is information that your brain is taking in about the nutritional quality of its food. And the reason the brain does this is because back in our evolutionary past, you know, we didn't have time to sit there and metabolize a meal for 40 minutes before deciding, you know, should I have a bit more? Should I get up and go do something else? So the brain is getting an early read on what it's eating. Well, that's information. And up until, you know, the revolution in food processing technology, the signals that the brain got from food were really reliable. If something tasted sweet, it carried energy. If it tasted

really sweet, it had more energy. If something tasted rich and fatty, well, it was packing a lot of energy. But because we misunderstood the fatty, well, it was packing a lot of energy. But because we misunderstood the brain, because we thought the brain was fundamentally stupid, a kind of stone age ogre that was just intent on stuffing itself, we came up with all these technologies, artificial sweeteners, but an even bigger family of additives are called fat replacers. And these are technologies that create the illusion of calories. So when you eat that food, you think, oh, this tastes great. It's sweet. It's fatty. It's rich. But what arrives in the gut is just a dribbling of calories. Well, the brain measures

what comes in the mouth, but also what's in the gut, how that energy is metabolized. And it goes, hold on a second. I thought I was getting calories. I didn't get calories. This is something that has never happened in the history of our species up until a handful of decades ago. And so the question we then ask is, how does the brain react when it didn't get what it thought it was going to get? So I would imagine the brain responds by trying to get more of what it didn't get because it was expecting more, so it tries to get more. Yes, exactly. Psychologists call this

uncertainty. A fancier term for it is reward prediction error. Basically, the brain said, I thought I was going to get something good. I didn't get it. So how does the brain react? By wanting more. One of the things I hear, because I've been interviewing people for this podcast, doctors and other credentialed experts on nutrition. And one thing I often hear is that it's an education problem, that people need to understand what good nutrition is and how to eat better. And I've just never bought that because I think people do understand what good nutrition is and that they should eat better. And, you know, they may not be experts on it, but there's a sense of

what good nutrition is. People just don't necessarily follow that advice, but it's not an education problem. I totally agree with you. We think that deciding what to eat is like deciding to turn your car left or turn it right. And it's really not that way. These impulses, these drives come from deep within us. And there are many, many very well-educated people who understand a great deal about nutrition who nevertheless struggle with this. I think one of the deepest insights to understand the nature of this problem comes from neuroscience, comes from brain imaging. And the typical idea that people have about overeating and obesity, they think it's an overindulgence in pleasure. They think that, you know, if you take a trim person and someone struggling with obesity, that the person with obesity just wallows in pleasure,

they don't know when to say no. So let's take the example of a milkshake. They think you give that milkshake to a trim person, they take a sip and they say, oh, well, that's nice. And you give it to the person with obesity and they go, oh my God, that's incredible. That's just the best thing ever. That in fact is not what we see. We see the opposite. The trim people enjoy the milkshake. The people with obesity have a blunted pleasure response. They're enjoying it less. Where we see the difference is what they call the cue for that milkshake, when they see it. A trim person sees the milkshake, they think, oh, that looks nice.

I might like to have a milkshake. A person with obesity says, I've got to have that milkshake. There could be nothing better in the world than that milkshake. So they're in this kind of dystopian, vicious circle where they have a craving for food that is never actually satisfied by the pleasure that food delivers. So how do you solve that? There is no easy answer. And I think part of the problem is everybody wants some one or two simple things they can do that's going to make this problem go away.

And it doesn't work that way. But I think one of the most important things they can do that's going to make this problem go away. And it doesn't work that way. But I think one of the most important things we can do is have an understanding about how the brain's pleasure systems work. I visited a lab in Germany, a professor named Anya Hilbert, who does what's called hedonic therapy. And she took me through what she does with her patients. She gave me two potato chips. I opened the bag. She said, I want you to listen to the pop that the bag makes and smell those potato chips. And she said, you can even rub them together, but you can't eat them. She said I could nibble them, and I did. And I was absolutely overwhelmed by craving.

I mean, there was nothing I wanted more in the world at that moment than those potato chips. And then she said, throw them in the garbage, which was like painful. Like, what? Are you telling me I can't eat them? And then I brought two fresh potato chips and did it again. And this was such a lesson in the power that certain foods have. This wasn't a pleasure response. This was a craving thing. I just really wanted to eat these potato chips.

Well, then she did something else. She pulled out a square of dark chocolate covering a biscuit center. She said, now I want you to eat this. She said, you can close your eyes. And I tucked it into a little corner of my mouth. And it very slowly started to melt. And this was a very different response because instead of being hopped up and jacked up and wanting, I was on a journey and this chocolate just took me places. I let it slowly melt my mouth, my mind filled with this sensation of chocolatiness. And then I bit

into this crunchy biscuit core and it was crunchy and it was fantastic. And I swallowed it. And it had this lingering finish like wine lovers talk about. And that is what psychologists or neuroscientists would call liking or pleasure impact. So what is so interesting about this woman, Anya Hilbert, is that she has patients with binge eating disorder who are tormented by crushing cravings for food. And she says, in those moments, I want you to eat one of these very fine chocolates. And what she's found is that this experience of fine food can actually extinguish these cravings for calories. And in fact, it's not so ridiculous when you think about it, because we know food cultures,

I'd like to point to Italy, Japan's also a good example, where people eat excellent food, and they're in fact much trimmer than we are. Northern Italians eat one of the greatest diets in the world and they are trim. So I think the solution lies in eating food that truly pleasures us, not food that sucks us into this cycle of craving. I'm speaking with Mark Schatzker and we're talking about food and diet and weight loss and how all these things are connected. Mark is an award-winning writer, and he is author of the book The End of Craving, Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking,

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giving you the peace of mind to focus on what truly matters. Find their products through banks, credit unions and associations. Or visit SecurianCanada.ca. Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. So, Mark, when it comes to foods that people crave, does it tend to be all the same foods? It seems like, you know, potato chips and those kind of things are the things that people will crave.

I think, you know, to some degree, there's certain universals, fast food, potato chips. You know, I don't eat a lot of fast food, but when I'm stuck in an airport and I'm always amazed, like, wow, I just downed 1200 calories in three and a half minutes. I think we all know that there's certain foods that make us kind of literally stuff our faces. And there are certain foods, I like to think of great tomatoes or great fruit or a great steak, a glass of red wine, that make us eat more slowly and contemplatively. These are foods that you'd want to share with people. So I think we all have the ability to drop our own list of foods we know that we get into trouble with and foods that take us to a better place. But then people will say,

but you know, here's my list of foods that I crave sometimes, and I can't imagine living life without them. Yeah, and it's true. It's not easy. The only thing I can say is it gets easier with time. I used to be someone who drank a fair amount of soft drinks, and I stopped. And at first it's difficult, and then you get to a point where you actually taste it and you think, I can't believe I drank that bubbly syrup. In the discussion of diet and weight loss, sugar always comes up and sugar is often the demon, the bad guy in this. Do you think that's justified? You know, I think that's a difficult answer. You know, like we have a sweet receptor on our tongue.

We are born enjoying the taste of sugar. There's sugar in mother's milk. So I don't think it's something like cocaine or heroin that is bad by its nature. But there's no question that many people get into an extremely negative relationship with sugar. I think people talk about things like food addiction. I don't think it's a chemical addiction like cocaine, heroin, nicotine. I think it's a behavioral addiction. So I think when you get into that cycle of craving calories, because you've been messing around with your brain, sugar is one place it will go. So I this world of fast food and junk and everything else, and you want to lose weight, what's the prescription?

Well, what we've known for a long time, people, everyone comes to the same conclusion, you know, stop eating processed food, eat real food. That's true. But there's an important addition to that, which is to say, eat like an Italian or someone from Japan, which is to say, eat like an Italian or someone from Japan, which is to say, every moment of eating, you should take pride and great pleasure in the quality of what you're eating. Eating isn't doing community service. It's not this acidic act of denying yourself pleasure.

We should enjoy real food. When real food pleasures us, it's telling your brain that there's good stuff in here. What we need to step away from is all the fakery, the additives that fool the brain. Put it this simply, eat food that tastes like what it is, richly and robustly, and celebrate in that. Are you optimistic about this? Because I'm not especially. I see things going in both directions on the one hand i see some food getting ever more processed what process or food makers are doing now is they're actually mixing artificial sweeteners with sugar and a lot of research is saying that that's

especially bad that that really confuses the brain so i think we're making things worse than ever at the same time i do see you know i look at trends like craft beer, that might seem odd, like beer is not exactly a health food. But I look at that. And I think this is a situation where people are spending money to consume a beverage made from better ingredients because of the way it tastes. And if we could take that attitude to everything we eat, I think things would improve. So, you know, I think you go to some supermarkets and you see, you know, better options and, you know, or pastured pork or organic vegetables, heirloom tomatoes, buying local. So I see it going in both directions at

the same time. You know, I remember hearing some statistic, I don't know if it's true, but that more people watch cooking shows than actually cook. Yeah, it's I think one of the problems with watching people cook is you don't see the mistakes and cooking. You know, the funny thing, like you go to these dinner parties and people will cook a dish they've never cooked for a dinner party, which is like the biggest mistake you can make. You're probably not going to cook something really well the first time you try.

Maybe there's that beginner's luck thing that happens. I think one of the important things to teach people is you're probably going to goof up. The more you do it, the better you get. So I think a lot of people, they try it, they fail, they kind of beat themselves up and they never go back and do it again. And I think if they had more realistic expectations, that would help. You know, I think, and we've talked about it before on the podcast here, that we have to fundamentally change the way we look at food. We so often look at food as what's wrong with it. It's too fattening. It's too carby. Food is the enemy. We think there's something wrong with food and there's something wrong with

us. So we're always looking for these food hacks or somebody inv, like these food hacks, or somebody invents like a fake meat or a fake this, and we give them a standing ovation. And we think, you know, they've done it. It's so interesting, when you look at Italy, they never decided to fortify their flour. They've always thought the problem with food is that people don't have access to it. So they would, they would, they set up school lunch programs decades ago. They would try to give poor people access to better food. And I think that's the right way. Italians on the surface seem far less technologically, you know, they don't have these discussions about carbs

and the carbohydrate insulin model. They're eating great food. And it seems primitive. It seems far less scientifically informed, but their way clearly works better. They eat superbly delicious food and they are so much trimmer than we are. They're the trimmest people in the Western world. Since we know that diets don't work and what you're talking about is changing your diet to another diet, which is kind of like dieting. So how do you get people

to do it and have it stick? That's some of the work anya hilbert is doing i told you about about about sort of retraining people's palates to get them to have a fundamentally different relationship with food you know there's not good scientific research on that i wish there were but that tells me i think if you put yourself in a different food environment where there's you know you're surrounded by better food and a different approach to food you know not eating in your car not eating in front of TV. I think you can reshape the relationship the brain has with food. Well, as I said before, I mean, it just seems like we have to change the conversation. We talk so much about food being bad and we have to avoid this food because of all the problems and

it's kind of discouraging. But if you think about the discussion we've had about food for decades, it's been about fat. It's been about carbs. We've always avoided the discussion of how food tastes. If anything, we think it's a danger. There's this like, if it tastes good, spit it out. I think that's the fundamental mistake we made.

We evolved to eat real food and the experience of deliciousness isn't this primitive thing that's trying to make you fat and kill you. We did not evolve to want to eat ourselves to death. We changed the fundamental nature of food, which is its sensory aspects, how it tastes, the aromas, fake flavors, artificial sweeteners, fat replacers. And that, I think, has changed the brain's relationship to food. And that has, that has set within us this, this artificial hunger, this craving for food that we just can't satisfy. It also seems that, you know, the more technology gets involved in food, the worse things get. When you bite into a great peach or, you know,

it's summer right now, like a really good tomato. I mean, you feel that it is satisfying and nourishing in a way that fake food, it just doesn't have a chance. And yet we're so caught up in this idea that somehow technology is going to save us, that we're, you know, flawed by our nature and only, you know, the scientific adulteration of food can get us out of this mess, I think is the absolute wrong approach. Well, I like this idea, and I do think you're onto something here, that the problem of people being overweight and people being obese may not be solved by people eating less, but by people eating better. It's an interesting solution. Mark Schatzker has been my guest. He is an award-winning writer and writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale University.

The name of his book is The End of Craving, Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate the conversation. Thanks, Mark. Okay, thanks. Yeah, great interview. It's always a pleasure chatting. Mama, look at me. Vroom, vroom. I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the car, please, Mom?

Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with Intact Insurance. Mom, can we go to Nana's house tomorrow? I want to go to Jack's place today. I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit Intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply.

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Whether it's a book or TV show or movie or podcast, it seems we're drawn to mysteries in the arts and also mysteries in life. Trying to figure out who done it or what happens next or who wins in the end seems to create an itch that most of us like to scratch. So why is that? What is it about mystery that's so appealing? And how can you use mystery to your advantage? Here to discuss this is Jonah Lehrer. He's a writer, journalist, and author of the book,

Mystery, A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution. Hey Jonah, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. So just to define our terms here, I mean, there are a lot of different kinds of mysteries. So what are the kind of mysteries that you're interested in that we're talking about here, for instance? Those plot twists in a detective story, a magic trick that we just can't explain, an abstract painting that makes us feel something, but we can't describe why it makes us feel that way. Those are the mysteries I'm most interested in. If you look at Star Wars, those are movies

that lurch from one mystery box to the next. We meet the Jedi. Who are the Jedi? Who is Obi-Wan Kenobi? What is the Force? That the narrative is propelled by these series of questions. And that's what keeps us gripped to the plot, to the narrative, to the story. That's what keeps us paying attention. And so then I started thinking about it in terms of Sherlock Holmes and magic tricks and began to see mystery as this unifying factor that helped explain so much of pop culture, so much of the culture and content that I loved, and I think could also shed light on the human

brain and human nature and what makes us such curious creatures. I've always thought of mystery as kind of like a spectator sport. You know, the audience is not just watching passively. We're trying to figure it out along with, you know, whoever Sherlock Holmes is also trying to figure it out. But we're trying to figure out the mystery. So we're participating in the game, so to speak. There's a motive for doing that. Yeah. So I think the motive for mystery is the desire to figure out who the Jedi are, to learn who committed the crime in a Sherlock Holmes detective story. You know, if you look at narratives, they are most compelling when there's peak mystery,

when things are most uncertain, when we understand the least. So that is what we're drawn to. We are drawn to things that, and they have to be very carefully framed mystery. Obviously, if it's a complete, you know, if we're completely confused, there's nothing compelling about that. But in the hands of a great artist, in the hands of a great mystery writer, detective story writer, in the hands of a great television writer writing a procedural, and I got to spend time with the writing staff of Law & Order SVU and see how they crack these mysteries and made them

as compelling as possible, that is what holds our attention. That if something is very predictable, it's also very boring. And you can begin to understand why that is when you look at how the brain decides to allocate its attention. So there's a series of studies on a neurotransmitter called dopamine. It's a neurotransmitter if you know about it. It's often associated with hedonism and sex drugs and rock and roll. But in reality, dopamine is really about controlling our attention. It helps us determine what we should pay attention to. And so you can do these studies with rodents and primates where you track their dopamine release from dopamine neurons in the middle of

their brain. And what you find is that you give them a reward, a squirt of apple juice, say, that their dopamine neurons will fire. But if you keep giving them that same reward, even if it's paired to like a cue, so a light goes off and they get a squirt of apple juice. Before long, the dopamine neurons will get bored by this sweet tasting treat because it's predictable. It's understandable. There's no mystery there. But if you reintroduce mystery, what neuroscientists call a prediction error, say you've trained this monkey to expect, you know, a bell, then a flash of light, and then a squirt of juice. And you introduce a mystery. So you give them a squirt of apple juice out of the blue, or you play the bell and the light, but don't give them a squirt of apple juice. You introduce a mystery there, some prediction errors,

and that is when their dopamine neurons get most excited. So at a very basic fundamental level, we are wired to respond to things we can't quite understand. And that makes evolutionary sense. If something's perfectly predictable, don't waste your attention on it. You already know what's going to happen. So that's why the brain is most sensitive to stories, narratives, magic tricks, poetry, to things we want to understand, but we just can't quite solve the pattern yet. So you said you spent time with the writers of Law & Order SVU. So what did you learn? Because I mean, every week they come up with a mystery basically of who did it. So how do they do that and make it interesting? So essentially when I got to spend time in the writer's room,

what you quickly discover is that they have to introduce all these feints in act one. So the obvious guy is never the guy who did it. And then essentially, they've got 42 minutes to tell a story. They don't want you to know who did it until it's minute 41. Otherwise, you're not going to watch. Otherwise, you're not going to come back after a commercial break. So it's all about engineering those twists and turns and surprises so that you'll keep coming back. Because as soon as you know who did it, you're done. You know, the whodunit is only interesting if you don't know who did it. So it was really about watching them create these surprises, engineer these surprises.

And the same is true of Sherlock Holmes. The same is true of all the great detective stories, that they're all designed to keep us guessing for as long as possible. And it is this form which is now more popular than ever. You go into a bookstore, there's a giant mystery section. But this genre itself is really only about 175 years old. Well, I know you talk about how Edgar Allan Poe really invented this genre, this mystery storytelling back in the 19th century. And was the first one to create this omniscient detective, this brilliant, rational, deductive guy who could connect the dots in a way no one else could and could solve crimes

that are seemingly impossible. And so we still have characters like that. You know, there's still something very compelling about that kind of character. But I think, at its core, it's a genre that depends on us not knowing the ending until we get there. And so why is this important to write books about and talk about? I mean, mystery is mystery and people have a sense of what it is and it's fun to read a book or go to a movie, but so what? Part of me just enjoys understanding kind of the science behind pop culture. Why is this kind of story so compelling? I think it sheds lights on who we are and how our minds work. But at a more practical level, I think there are tremendous implications.

One of the main implications I talk about is in terms of education. So I got to spend time at a wonderful charter school in Chicago called the Noble Academy, which is one of the highest performing schools in all of Illinois. And it's in a very poor area of Chicago. And their secret is to build a curriculum around interactive Chicago. And their secret is to build a curriculum around interactive mystery. Although their students are some of the highest performing students on standardized tests in the city of Chicago, they don't teach to the test. Instead, they give their students really difficult math problems, really difficult stories, and ask their students not to just find the answer, but to ask the right

question, to engage in conversation. So they use a method called the Harkness method, which began at fancy boarding schools in New England. But they want to introduce that same teaching style to students in every neighborhood all across the country. And it really is built around embracing mystery. It's built around the idea that if you stand up at the front of the classroom and tell kids to memorize the answer, that's really boring. Kids are drawn to the unknown. They are wired to be intensely curious. So the way to really compel them in the classroom, to keep them engaged, is to one, engage them in conversation, to make it not a chalk and talk, but to have everyone engaged, everyone asking questions, and to not give them answers, but to just give them hard material that demands questions.

And then they can find the answers together. But it's much more about a process of investigating mystery than it is about memorizing answers and regurgitating them on a test. So I think that's one practical consequence. I think there are also consequences for how we think about social media and digital engagement. You know, right now we've built these social media platforms that really take advantage of confirmation bias, which is the opposite of mystery. So if you believe X, we'll give you X plus one. We'll confirm what you already believe because that's an easy way to get clicks and minimal engagement. Giving people more of what they already believe or what

they already like is not the only way to engage people on a screen. If you look at the most successful kind of culture out there, whether it's Law and Order or Star Wars, that it also engages people with complexity, ambiguity, mystery, known unknowns. And I think we should experiment with that in social media as well. seem that once you figure it out, once you know whodunit, once you know and tie up the ends at the end, you would think people would lose interest. But, I mean, look at Harry Potter. I mean, people watch those movies and read those books over and over and over again. They already know whodunit, but there's still something about it that's very appealing. Essentially, there are two types of games. There are finite games like Monopoly or basketball.

There are games where there are winners and losers. And then there are infinite games, games where you play just for the sake of playing because the act of playing it is so enjoyable. And I think the greatest art, whether it's Hamlet or I would argue Harry Potter, you can return to again and again and again. My 11-year-old is, I think, on her ninth reading of the full Harry Potter canon, simply because every time you return to it, you discover something new. You realize that the answer you thought worked the last time is actually more complicated, that the character you thought you understood, whether it's Snape or Ophelia, has layers to them. And so you can keep returning to great art simply because there is no answer, there is no solution. That's what makes it so compelling.

Well, it sounds like you're saying that if you want people to pay attention, give them a mystery, give them something to figure out that that's kind of how our brains are wired. The psychological takeaway is if you want to hold someone's attention, don't give them the answer, give them a good question. I think at the most basic level, when you look at what motivates the human brain, these three pounds of jello inside our skulls, to stare at something, to notice something, to watch something for two hours, to read 400 pages or a thousand pages, it's the mystery. That's what holds our attention, not the answer to the question. So I think that's true if you're in marketing, the advertising that grabs our attention. It's not the prettiest, not the glossiest, not the most colorful. It's the

one that subverts our expectations. It makes us work a little bit harder. That gives us something in a new and unfamiliar way that feels a little mysterious. So it's true in marketing. It's true in television. It's true in movies. It's true in magic tricks. I got to spend time with some magicians and some people who devote, you know, one of their hobbies is solving seemingly impossible magic tricks. You know, what makes magic so compelling, of course, is the mystery. It's not a whodunit. It's a how the hell did he do it?

And that's what we find so compelling. So I think if you look at cross culture, it is if you want to hold someone's attention, give them a good question. But even with mysteries in books or movies or TV shows or whatever, even though we may not know whodunit, we do know some things because it has become pretty much standard operating procedure that the good guys usually win. The bad guys seldom win. The hero never gets killed. You can tell which characters are going to survive. Really, early on, they're kind of spoiler alerts built into the way books, movies, TV shows are made that we expect the good guy to win. On the one hand, yes, you know that Harry Potter

makes it, spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't had the pledge reading Harry Potter. But I think what makes those works is that there are layers to them. Of course, you know the broad strokes of the ending. And I would say that really applies to most summer blockbusters. I mean, you kind of know that the good guys in Star Wars aren't going to die. You know the bad guys aren't going to win when it comes to a Marvel movie. So we go in with an awareness that, you know, we kind of know how it's going to end. So what keeps us motivating is all the layers and wrinkles along the way. And I actually cite some research in the book by Nicholas Christenfeld and colleagues at UCSD showing that when it comes to good art, spoilers actually increase our pleasure. So we live in this age where we're incredibly anxious about spoilers.

You know, we never want to know how anything ends. But what he showed is that you give people various forms of good pop culture, that spoiling it in advance actually increases their pleasure. And one of his very interesting hypotheses, explanations was that it increases our pleasure because it frees us up to pay attention to all the other layers that we actually enjoy even more. So once you know that Harry Potter is going to defeat Voldemort in the end, again, spoiler alert, I guess I should put the spoiler alert before I tell you the answer, my apologies. But once you know how it ends, then you're free to enjoy all those nuances and subtleties that make Harry Potter such great fiction. So you can pay more attention to Snape and Harry as a teenager and Harry's interactions with Hermione and Ron and all

those other layers that really make the art so rich and worthwhile in the first place. I saw something in the notes. I can't remember what it said, but it had to do with you and your work. And it said, why is the baseball season 10 times longer than the football season? So how does that fit in this? I've been very interested in why certain sports are so popular and how the rules of sport evolve. So there's some really interesting academic research looking at essentially the unpredictability of various sports. And by unpredictability, what I mean is that what are the odds that the better team is going to win? So you can use advanced statistics to figure out which team is better and then say, how likely is it the better team is going to win

this game? And it turns out that certain sports are much more predictable or reliable than others. So football with its 16 game season is a pretty reliable sport. In football, the better team almost always wins. Baseball, much less reliable, much less predictable. In baseball, the better team is going to win most of the time. That's why they're the better team and have a better record. But there's a lot of randomness in baseball. And so the way baseball compensates for its inherent mystery, for that randomness of the game is to make the season 160 games. So over 160 games, the better team will have the better record. But if baseball were just 16 games or 18 games like the NFL season, you'd see a ton of randomness. You'd see some bad teams

make it into the playoffs or win the championship. So the way the baseball season compensates for its inherent mystery, for the randomness of each game, is to make the season really long. Now, I think at a higher level, what this teaches us is that we're essentially drawn to sports because they contain some mystery. We think of sports as like this pure meritocracy, this pure test of talent, that the better team will always win. But it turns out if the better team always wins, that's pretty boring. What sports have done is find ways to keep the teams relatively equal with salary caps and stuff. But they've also found ways to constrain talent so that the talent doesn't always win. You can see this when they're going to move the

three-point line in basketball because people have gotten too good at shooting three-pointers, or some people have. In baseball, this has been very clear, the way the game has evolved over time. So I tell the story of the season of 1893 when pitchers became too dominant. Pitchers had discovered breaking balls. They started throwing really fast fast and there were no hits. So the talent of pitchers had come to dominate the game. And not surprisingly, that made baseball very, very boring. It was on the verge of going out of business. The league was about to close. And so what did they do? They moved the pitching mound back. And that gave batters a little more time, a little more space to deal with breaking balls. It equaled the playing field and most importantly, constrained the talent of pitchers, introduced some more chance and mystery to the game.

And that's why baseball is still, to this day, America's game. Yeah, well, imagine how boring sports would be if the best team always won. Because a lot of times, you know, I think people like to root for the underdog. We like to see an upset. We like to see the lesser team win that there's something very gratifying about that. And I think that's also why a lot of people find college sports so compelling. College sports, you know, March Madness is all about the upset. You know, the reason that tournament is so addictive for so many people is not because the number one seeds always win. It's because they don't always win,

because there's always that Cinderella team who comes out of nowhere as a 14 seed who makes it to the final four. That is what's so marvelous and intoxicating about March Madness. What do you think is more satisfying when you're watching a mystery and you guess whodunit or you guess how it ends and you're wrong? Is that more satisfying than if you guess whodunit and you get confirmation that you were right? I don't know, which feels better? It's a really interesting question. I think if there's going to be a big surprise ending and we don't know who did it, I think for me what makes that satisfying is if the track was laid properly, to borrow the language of a Law & Order writer. So if there's going to be a big twist, and this is something that they struggled a lot with in

the writer's room, if you're going to have a big twist in minute 40 of a 42-minute show, you have to make sure people can go back to act one and say, aha, I see that. I could have guessed that. If I were Sherlock Holmes, I could have connected the dots in this manner. So I think that's the requirement of a big twist, that I think people love a big twist. We love talking about it. We love being surprised. We love the mystery of it, but it has to make sense as well. Well, that old saying that everyone loves a good mystery certainly seems to be true. And it's interesting to understand you know how important mystery is not just in fiction or you know in the arts movies and tv but also just in life mystery draws us and it's interesting to hear

about jonah lair has been my guest he is a writer and journalist and the name of his book is mystery a seduction a strategy a solution and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Great having you here. Thanks, Jonah. Thank you so much for the wonderful questions. I really appreciate it. Have you ever gone to the grocery store on a hot summer day and been tempted to maybe run another errand or two while the food's in the car, wondering if maybe it's going to spoil in the heat? Well, according to food safety experts, if the temperature in the car is over 90 degrees, which is easy to get to in the summer, food spoils after about an hour,

under 90 degrees, and you have a little longer. By the way, this rule also applies to food left out in the heat at a picnic or a barbecue. So you might want to make grocery shopping the last stop on your list of things to do and get the food home and safely stored in the freezer or fridge as soon as possible. Also, if you leave food such as milk out or in the car exposed to heat, even if it's under an hour, it might not spoil right away and it might not make you sick, but for foods like milk, it might expire more quickly if it doesn't get into the fridge right away. And that is something you should know. I hope you found this episode of the podcast interesting and maybe learned a thing or two. And if you did, please share it with

someone you know. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers

to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true?

Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate.

We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type.

With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.