Something You Should Know - How to Get People to Tell You the Truth & How Noise Affect Your Health and Happiness

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

How accurate is Wikipedia? If you go to one of their articles, how likely is it to be accurate and objective. This episode begins with some surprising facts about Wikipedia and its accuracy. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/wikipedia-explained-what-is-it-trustworthy-how-work-wikimedia-2030-a8213446.html People lie. In fact everyone lies. Many times those lies are small and inconsequential – other times they are a very big deal. Pamela Myers is one of the leading experts on lies and deception and she joins me to take us on a journey into how deception works, how to identify it and how to get people to tell the truth. Pamela Myers is author of the book Liespotting (https://amzn.to/2K8Bj2b) and you can her her TED talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_6vDLq64gE. If a store posts a sign that says “You Break It You Buy It” can they actually enforce that? Accidents happen – so how can you be forced to pay for something just because it slipped or because you happened to walk by it when it fell and broke? Listen and find out what the law says. https://blogs.findlaw.com/common_law/2012/01/if-you-break-it-must-you-buy-it.html The world is getting a lot louder. And all that noise is taking a toll on you – even if you don’t really notice it. Listen to some fascinating insight on what noise does to you physically and psychologically from Mathias Basner. He is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on how noise affects sleep and health.  This Week’s Sponsors -Bitsbox. Get $25 off any Bitsbox subscription of $50 or more by going to https://campaign.bitsbox.com/something enter promo code SOMETHING at checkout. -Simplisafe. For free shipping and a 60-day free trial go to www.Simplisafe.com/something -Article Furniture. For $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more go to https://www.article.com/sysk -Capterra. To find the best software for your business for free go to www.Capterra.com/something –Airbnb. To learn more about being an Airbnb host visit www.Airbnb.com/host Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, is Wikipedia really a reliable source of information? We'll explore that. Then, everyone lies. So how do you get someone to stop lying and tell you the truth? The best way to get to the truth is to have incredible rapport and to be enormously warm towards somebody, be truly curious, do not judge

them, assume they have a reason for doing what they may have done, because everyone has a reason they did something and it's usually pretty interesting. Also today, if a store has a sign that says you break it, you bought it, do you really have to buy it? And the world is getting louder and all that loud noise is taking a real toll on you. Whenever you come home from a concert or a bar and you have that ringing in your ears, at that point you basically know that you have done damage to your auditory system, and that damage, as we know now, is likely permanent. All this today on Something You Should Know.

People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to something you should know. If you have school-aged children, as I do, maybe this has happened to you as it has happened to me, or they come home and they have a paper to write or a project to do, and somewhere in the instructions from the teacher is, but you can't use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a good source to use for this particular paper or project. And I've always thought, well, why is that? Is it because Wikipedia is so inaccurate or so unreliable that it's not a good source?

Or is it because Wikipedia is so good, it's so accurate, that if you use Wikipedia, well, there's your paper, there's your project, all done. So I did a little research, and it turns out that Wikipedia is pretty accurate. They have software that can detect what are called acts of article vandalism, which is where people go in and deliberately mess up or try to delete content from an article. Errors like that are fixed anywhere from between a few minutes to several hours. There have been several studies made to confirm the accuracy of Wikipedia, and overall, it gets very high marks. There are over 73,000 active Wikipedia editors,

and there are over 1.8 edits done per second on Wikipedia performed by those editors who are all over the world. Currently, the English version of Wikipedia includes 5,967,980 articles or so, and it averages 589 new articles per day. 500 million people use Wikipedia in a month, viewing 18 billion total monthly page views. And that is something you should know. People lie. Everybody lies. Sometimes we do it to spare someone's feelings or to avoid a confrontation.

Sometimes we lie to purposely deceive someone. There are all kinds of lies, many relatively harmless and many not. But wouldn't it be good to know when someone is telling you a really big, juicy lie? Pamela Myers is someone who understands lying a lot. She's a leading expert on deception and she has a great TED talk online about lying. She's also author of a book called Lie Spotting. Hi Pamela, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much, I'm happy to be here. So since everybody lies and everybody knows that everybody else lies, why? Why do we lie?

Because we're human and life is complicated and it's hard to navigate a world where we'd be completely honest. So I'm not actually that concerned about what we call low-stakes lies, white lies, like, honey, you don't look fat in that, which we all say to someone most mornings, or, oh, I just fished that email out of my spam filter. We navigate the world with a lot of white lies really for social dignity. And my bigger concern is really about high stakes lies, who to vote for, who to hire, who to marry, what house to buy, what car to buy, what company to buy. Decisions that might really punctuate the course of our life can be plagued by deception. And so I like to focus more, even though we are all liars a little bit, I like to focus more on helping people navigate situations where they

really could be taken advantage of. Over the course of time, I have interviewed a lot of people on this and related topics. And one of the things that almost everyone or everyone says, and I don't know if you say this, is you can't tell too much about one behavior. That it's a pattern more than it is, he put his finger on his ear, so he's a liar. It's more of a pattern compared to a baseline. Well, you know, Mike, I go even further than that. I mean, I feel so strongly that we have to consider this almost like the weather and not decisive. So, for example, when we do training,

we do two- and three-day workshops, and we train people all over the world. We work with government, industry, all kinds of organizations. We teach them to spot clusters of deception, whether it's on the verbal or the nonverbal side. And we will say, if you don't have a cluster, two or three indicators on the verbal side, two or three indicators on the nonverbal side, you have nothing to go on. But we also go further and we say, you know what? Even if you've got those clusters, all that really is is a red flag to tell you where to dig

deeper and find facts to confirm it. So we're real sticklers on facts. We never go just on deception detection. We always back up with deep research. Since we know that we all lie, since people lie to each other all the time, why do we need to pull the covers off this? Why do we need to pull the covers off this? Why do we need to dig into this? If you lie to me and I find out you lie and it upsets me enough that I don't want to hang out with you anymore, well, that's it. So why do we need to dig deep into this? Well, so for two reasons. One, life is rarely like that. It's rarely like, are you lying or aren't you? Red light, green light.

It's usually the messy middle that we're after. Like what really happened when a particular company lost 30% of their assets in one quarter? Or what really happened when someone shifted jobs and you're now hiring them? What really happened when you're on a first date with someone who, I don't know, they were on that online service for a while, then they were off and now they're back on. You don't necessarily just want to know if they're lying. You want to get to the truth. You want to understand the nuances and the subtleties of what's going on. And so when we train people on detecting deception, what we tell them is, you know what? Knowing someone lied, you're right.

If they've lied about something significant, weed the garden and move on and just say you're a big liar and I'm not going to have you in my life. But for the most part, the people that we work with and the people that are in our lives can be somewhat deceptive and it's subtle. And we train people as well on getting to the truth. So help me get to the truth. What am I looking for? And when do I even put my radar up? So, I mean, we'll talk about how to put your radar up in a minute, but let me just say that if you're trying to, and we call this eliciting information, if you're trying to get to the truth, the first thing you want to do is turn off your television. Because it is nothing like the TV show Law and Order, where you're hovering over somebody, sweating and yelling at them, where were you on Sunday, September 23rd? It doesn't work that way at all. The best way to get to the truth is to have incredible rapport and to be enormously warm towards somebody, charming towards them, be truly curious,

do not judge them, assume they have a reason for doing what they may have done, and keep that curiosity hat on because everyone has a reason they did something and it's usually pretty interesting. So the first thing you want to do is get your mindset in the right place. Second thing you want to do is start with very open-ended questions. If you're going to ask somebody about something really delicate that happened, and we oftentimes in our fraud investigation business, we call that the main event. You know, if somebody didn't show up at home, or a car went missing, or you think someone cheated on you or that main event. You're not going to ask about that for a long time.

First, you're going to start open-ended, almost like a funnel, and then you're going to narrow it down piece by piece while you have increased your rapport with somebody. And when you really feel like you've got a flow going with them and you've asked them a lot of questions and they're starting to talk and they feel like they can trust you, then you can start to ask those harder questions about the facts that are going to be a little bit more difficult for them to come forth with. So can you run us through an example of that? You've described it well, but now can we put some words to that and see what that sounds like? Sure.

So let's say you're going on a date with someone and you suspect that they're divorced, but they never told you. And they present themselves as single and you're trying to get to the truth on that. You're not going to say, hey, tell me your relationship history. You're going to say, so hey, how was your summer last summer? What were you up to? Who were you hanging out with? What kind of people do you like? You're going to sort of dance around it, get them talking, have a sense of what they're like, and ask them.

I mean, one of my favorite questions to ask somebody is to say, what's the pettiest thing? Like, I ask my husband this a lot at the end of the weekend. What's the pettiest thing that bothered you at the end of the weekend? What's the pettiest thing that bothered you about the relationship that you just told me you were in? And when you say that, when you say, what's the pettiest thing that bothered you about your past relationships, for example, in an open-ended way, they're going to tell you something not so petty because you're signaling to them, hey, I'm not going to judge you.

You can tell me anything. So oftentimes we minimize what could be actually something significant that someone's going to tell you as a way to get them to feel comfortable and come forth. Or oftentimes we say things like, hey, is there anything else you want to tell me about that? And oftentimes people will. They will come forth with very important information. Or you can say, hey, how do you feel about that? At very, very open. We never say, for example, why? You know, why did you do that?

Because when you ask the question why, you instantly put somebody on the defensive. We'll say, huh, what made you move to another city? Now, maybe you think that person moved to another city because they were getting divorced and they didn't tell you in that particular example. You're not going to say, hey, did you get divorced? Is that why you left? You're going to say, huh, what made you change cities? That's really interesting. And you just stay curious and you stay in that mindset of help me understand.

I'm on the same side as you. And oftentimes they will come forth. The minute you signal you're on the other side, you need to know why. You want to get the goods. You're going to lose their trust, and they're not going to feel like they have any reason or any incentive to cooperate or to give you information that you may really need. Well, that divorce thing is a good example of,

if you suspect somebody's divorced and they're not telling you, you're probably right. You obviously have some other information where you got that. You must have a sense of that. And so maybe you don't need to ask this person. You could find that out elsewhere and then just move on. Exactly. I mean, we call that, I mean, technically, in the lie detection business, we call that profiling. You know, before you even go into an interview with somebody, and of course you wouldn't do this on a date necessarily, but everybody does kind of Google stalk people. But in a more formal environment, when we profile somebody, we look at everything in their background. We think through what we call their

blame pattern. So when they're upset, do they blame the spouse? Do they blame the company? Do they blame the economy? Do they blame the president? Like, who do they tend to externalize toward? And then as we profile them, when we then go in to ask them questions, we then use what we think might be going on inside their internal monologue to try to get them to talk. We'll say, oh, everyone hates the boss. Everyone knows the boss is on the take. We'll say things like that just to get them to look up and kind of start to tell us what might be going on inside their interior world. That's the best way to get to the truth is to think through who the person is across the table from you, to be very, very prepared, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, to be curious,

and to think about what is the story they may tell themselves about why they did something that may not be too savory, or about why they made decisions they made that they may not want to come forth with, and really not to morally judge. We always say, pursue facts, not people. And when you're doing all this, when you're asking all these open-ended questions and being curious, what is it you're looking for? What's the aha moment? Because it would seem that a person who is lying is going to continue to try to perpetuate the lie. So what am I, as a questioner, looking for to determine that? Well, first of all, if someone's lying, they are not necessarily going to try to perpetuate the lie. Many people just

want to unburden themselves. It's enormously hard on cognition to perpetuate a lie. We call this cognitive load. You know, when you're trying to think what to say, act composed, appear spontaneous, that's a lot of processing power. And that's a lot of guilt that people carry around. So oftentimes, if they feel they can burden themselves, they will. So sometimes you can just offer somebody that off-ramp and they will take it. Now, if you're trying to figure out if someone's lying and trying to observe and look for those verbal and nonverbal indicators of deceit, oftentimes what we do is we do raise the cognitive load subtly in the questions that we ask, because what we're looking for when you raise the cognitive load and you make it a little bit harder for them to answer the question just a bit, you can see these verbal and nonverbal

indicators start to leak out. And they look like what? Well, on the verbal side, like let's say you're looking at the words and not the body language, and you're asking somebody some questions. First of all, somebody may stall for time. They may do what we call questioning the question, just to stall for time. They'll repeat the question over and over again. Or sometimes we hear like distancing language, like Bill Clinton famously said, I did not denied it and they went public. But, I mean, in Scott Peterson's case, he said he was looking for his lost wife, who it turns out he had killed. And in Susan Smith's case, she was looking for her kids, who she had also killed. Oftentimes, somebody will use the wrong tense unconsciously.

And in both of those cases, they used past tense because they knew that those subjects were dead. And so, you know, you pay attention. Did someone use inappropriate tense? Did they pepper their account with a little bit too much detail in order to appear authentic? Did they use what we call qualifying language? You know, to tell you the truth and all honesty, oh, let me think honestly. Well, to tell you, you know, when they pepper their account with all this kind of bolstering language and qualifying language, it can be associated with deception.

It's not proof of deception, but it can be associated with it. Right, because people will say those things when they haven't done anything wrong. They'll say, honestly, I don't know. Or, to tell you the truth, green's my favorite color. It doesn't mean I'm lying. It doesn't mean you're lying. Now, what we do know is that you want to get someone's baseline. Like if someone always says the words, tell you the truth, and they say that,

it doesn't mean anything because that's their norm. Or if someone's always tapping their foot and you ask them a hard question and they start tapping their foot, it doesn't mean anything. That's just their norm. So we do get a good, reliable reference point for measuring changes later, because when you do ask questions, what you're trying to figure out is which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive indicators. That's how you can figure it out.

I'm speaking with Pamela Myers. She is a leading expert on deception. She has a great TED Talk online about this, and she's author of a book called Lie Spotting. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

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Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall

behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Pamela, has it ever happened to you, or you know of any case, where all the indicators are somebody is lying, and they're just wrong? They're just, the person wasn't lying, even though all these red flags are going off? Yes. And that's why you have to be really careful, and you have to back it all up with facts,

and you have to throw people a bit with questions they weren't prepared for. Oftentimes you'll have someone who's very conditioned, goes like a conditioned witness. They're very conditioned to telling you the same story over and over again. They're extraordinarily rehearsed. They're slick. They're extroverted in some way. And you may have to really throw them off with a question they didn't expect in order to get them to give you an authentic response. And so we often do have people who are either too slick or people who throw off all kinds of indicators because they're anxious, or someone's dying in

their family, or they have indigestion, or they're medicated in some way. There are lots of reasons why someone could throw off, particularly on the nonverbal side, an image or a patina of being deceptive when in fact it has nothing to do with the conversation you're having. So you really have to catch yourself on those instances. People make mistakes all the time. Is it your experience that people who lie, lie a lot? Or everybody's going to lie sometimes. I mean, are there people who you can really categorize as just chronic liars? And how often do they show up? Or this is everybody.

We don't have science to know. I mean, there's a lot of science around who the super pathological liars are out there. We know that's a very small part of the population, and oftentimes you actually can detect them as well. For those of us that are in the middle, we know that the average liar can lie anywhere from 10 to 20 times in a day, and those lies can range from low to high stakes. And oftentimes they are for very valid motives. But we don't know exactly what the frequency is. There's no science particularly around that. But people do lie, you know, men and women lie for different reasons. Men lie more to protect their image. You know, they'll lie about how much money they made or what their job title was or,

you know, kind of how they look in other people's eyes. Women tend to lie more for avoiding punishment or making a good impression, protecting someone else from harm, omitting information, maintaining someone's privacy, getting out of an awkward social situation. So we lie with equal frequency, but for somewhat different reasons. And oftentimes I think it's incumbent on the person trying to get to the truth to have a fairly forgiving view of the person across the table from them to understand that lying is complicated. It's a big deal to accuse someone of being a liar. There's a very, very messy middle.

And the kernels of truth that oftentimes emerge in between what may sound like lies are often more interesting and more valuable than the fact that somebody fabricated along the way. So although I'm not a big apologist for those who lie, and I think we need to live in a more transparent and a more honest world, we also have to be realistic in viewing people as human beings who have complex impulses and complex reasons for why they do what they do. What are some of the things, or one of the things, or a couple of the things about this whole topic that particularly fascinates you, that surprised you in the researcher? Something about this whole thing that's like, wow. One of the things that I find very interesting, in the field of deception detection is undergoing rapid disruption. So, for example, while the polygraph used to be the tool of the day to surface technologically whether or not somebody was being deceptive,

now with AI and biometrics and machine learning, facial recognition, we're seeing the entire field being disrupted by a more advanced form of technology. So I sit, for example, on the advisory board of a company called Converis, which is really, I think, the most advanced in this field. And what they're doing is they're using ocular measurements on a computer that someone looks through in a sort of eye tracker connect to a computer, and that machine, they call it eye detect, can detect with enormous accuracy whether or not someone's being deceptive, and it's not biased. You know, you don't have, for example, like you do oftentimes with a polygraph examiner, someone across the table on the fly just making up questions

who can change them according to, for example, the color of the skin of the person across the table from them. A computer doesn't know the color of someone's skin. They only know biometrics and measurements, and in this case, 75,000-some measurements that can be rapidly calculated in an algorithm. So I think this is really where the field of deception is going, and it is under rapid disruption now. And while the human side remains unbelievably fascinating, I think we are going to see a world where the human side of interrogation

and the human side of deception detection is going to blend in an almost seamless way with the machine learning side, and we're going to see a whole new form of probably truth emerge. I think there are a lot of people, and I put myself in this group, I guess, who believe that we're pretty good at telling when somebody's lying. I'm pretty good at spotting, I think I'm pretty good at spotting a liar. My mother was really good at spotting a liar. Are some people just better programmed to notice deception? Some people are much better than others. We know that people who are high self-monitors,

who have a better sense of the way they present themselves to the world, tend to also be better at detecting lies. There's also data that shows that we're only about 54% accurate unless we go through training, because if you think about it, it's not like tennis. You know, like when you hit a ball, the tennis, you know, you'd serve the ball, the tennis ball goes out. That's instant feedback. You can adjust your behavior immediately and the second ball will go in. With lying, evolutionarily, if you think about it, as a species,

we don't find out if someone lied sometimes ever or sometimes for many, many years later. So we don't find out if someone lied sometimes ever, or sometimes for many, many years later. So we don't have a view on someone's behavior and that instant feedback, that learning curve to go up the minute someone lies. So we think we're better than we are often. Sometimes there's some data that shows that the more confident you are in your deception detection ability, the worse you are at it. Is there any one thing that, because it's, and it sounds like there isn't not, but is there any one thing that if you're trying to tell if somebody's lying that, although maybe not foolproof, is a pretty good indicator that you can kind of do on the fly? If someone's words

and their body language and the message that they're conveying are not in sync, those three channels. They're sending you content, they're giving you words, and as well they're giving you body language. Oftentimes that can be the indicator that there's red flags all over the place and there's something being omitted or you don't have the whole story. If someone also kind of unconsciously lowers their voice, slumps into their chair, tries to kind of unconsciously get out as quickly as possible, shifts around. Those are pretty good indicators. That doesn't mean someone's necessarily lying. It can be a stress response. But when you start to see that kind of behavior where someone really kind of unconsciously just wants to get out of town,

that's a good indicator that you're probably on the right track of questioning. And what are some other indicators of deception? Indicators of deceit. I mean, somebody may, you know, on the verbal side, when you ask somebody a hard question, they may look down, slump, lower their voice. You may see grooming gestures like dusting lint off the shoulders, twirling their hair, postural changes, changes in vocal tone, a sense that they're trying to just leave in some way. And then on the verbal side, you may see somebody deflect. They may change the subject altogether. They may question the question.

They may give you a lot of qualifying knowledge, you know, to tell you the truth and all honesty. They may protest. They may say, oh, but that's a ridiculous question to ask. Oh, but I'm a religious person. I would never do that. They may protest the entire process of asking them questions. Or they may minimize,

oh, it was no big deal. We didn't really have layoffs. We only laid off 5,000 people. So when you see somebody minimizing, protesting, detouring, throwing up what we call that distancing language, lots of qualifying language,

lapsing into what I described as that kind of convincing behavior. Oftentimes it can be a signifier of deceit, not necessarily proof. You've got to be really careful, but it can be a signifier. Well, I can imagine people are very careful not to lie to you because they don't want to get caught. Pamela Myers has been my guest. She is one of the leading experts on deception. She has a great TED Talk online, and there's a link to the TED Talk in the show notes. And she's also author of the book, Liespotting,

and there's a link to that as well. Thanks, Pamela. Well, you're a fantastic question. That was super fun. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows.

In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? 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. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. The world is getting louder.

It's been getting louder for some time, and that's not really good news for you. Noise takes a toll on you, even though you often don't even realize it. It takes a physical toll and a psychological toll, and it does so in some very interesting ways, above and beyond potential hearing loss. To help you understand the role noise plays in your life and how to manage it is Matthias Basner. He's an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is an expert on how noise affects sleep and health. Welcome, Professor. Thanks for having me. So let's just start by explaining why I and everybody else should be concerned with noise. Most people are, I believe, aware that if you expose yourself

to noise levels that are too high, for example, you go to a concert or you're in a bar or in the workplace, for that matter, that that can be damaging to your hearing and that the consequence can be noise-induced hearing loss. So, you know, whenever you come home from a concert or a bar and you have that ringing in your ears, at that point, you basically know that you have done damage to your auditory system. And that damage, as we know now, is likely permanent. The problem with that is that, you know, the ringing will go away. And so we say you typically get what we call a temporary threshold shift. So your hearing may be impaired for a short while, but then everything will be back to normal.

So it's very hard to extrapolate that, what's going to happen to your auditory system in the long run, if you do that over and over again. And, you know, we as humans are particularly bad in basically associating what we do today to ourselves and what that may mean in the long run. And, you know, in the end, we will pay a price for that. So you said that if you go to a concert and you come out with your ears ringing, that you've done damage and it's likely permanent. But you also said that there's this threshold shift and then things go back to normal. So then it isn't permanent. So reconcile that for me. The thing is, you have done permanent damage to your hearing, but you don't notice it right away or there is like there's enough capacity you know in your system that it doesn't matter at the time but you've you've you've set

a first damage and then if you just keep accumulating these damages you know at a later age when your hearing is deteriorating anyway then you will notice but But I mean, just what's happening physiologically, they are like nerve cells in your inner ear. And basically, if you expose them to extreme noise levels, they are degenerating and they're basically just dying off. And that's nothing, you know, once they're dead, they won't regenerate. So obviously, if you start from a level where you have a lot of these, if you lose a few, you know, it doesn't matter at the time. But if you start from a level where you have a lot of these if you lose a few, it doesn't matter at the time but if you keep doing that and then if you add the agent used

degeneration of these cells anyway then you notice the problem and so noise damage is cumulative the more you do it, the worse it gets. Absolutely. But the effects of noise are not just related to hearing loss. They affect other things. There are psychological effects to being bombarded by noise all the time.

You know, we believe that what is behind many of these effects, and we're talking about, I mean, noise obviously affects communication. It may impair academic performance in school children. It definitely disturbs sleep. It very likely is a reason for an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease, like high blood pressure, higher incidence of heart attacks. And there's other disease outcomes that people have started looking at, like diabetes or obesity, that could be linked to noise exposure. And we believe that at the very beginning of this is basically a general stress response. So, you know, experiencing the noise at the time is interfering with an intended activity. It is annoying the person and the person feels stressed.

And that translates into physiological reactions of the body. The body is treating stress hormones like adrenaline, like cortisol that all have physiologic consequences. For example, the composition of our blood is changing, the structure of our blood vessels is changing, there's an inflammatory response, and all these consequences of this general stress response translate, if they're chronic and if the noise levels are relevant, they translate into manifest diseases. But this stress response does not only depend on the sound pressure level, but it depends on the circumstances.

And this is why my boilerplate example for this is a rock concert. If you're attending the rock concert and you're standing in the first row and it's like 100 decibels, it's not noise to these people because they actually like the band. They paid $100 for the ticket. And to them, it's like it's music in their ears, so to say. So they don't perceive it as noise.

In contrast to that, think about somebody who's living three blocks away from the concert hall trying to sleep, still perceiving the music from the concert hall, and although the noise levels are much lower, this is noise to that subject, because it's interfering with that intended activity of going to sleep, and it's stress in that situation. So although, you know, the sound pressure levels are much lower, in one situation it's perceived stressful, in the other one, it's not. So noise is in the eye or the ear of the beholder. But the person who lives near the train tracks, the person who lives near the airport,

doesn't time help to fix the problem? In other words, if you live near train tracks and you're hearing trains all the time and you have to sleep, at some point you get used to that so that you can sleep. And maybe even get to the point where you become so used to the sound of the train going by that you can't sleep without it. Yeah, so there is certainly what we call habituation. That is people who move into an area that is noisy and they haven't been exposed to noise,

there's certainly some degree of habituation. We actually were able to show this in our laboratory and field studies on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep. If you put people in the lab for the first night, you expose them to aircraft noise, they wake up with a much higher probability. And then you see across the study nights, they start to respond with a lower probability. And that is biologically very plausible because during sleep, our auditory system is extremely important during sleep because as you can imagine, when we are sleeping, we're unaware. We are basically unconscious. We are unaware of ourselves and our surroundings. So we are a very easy prey.

I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, it's not that important today. But these systems, of course, still work as they evolved. So the auditory system plays a critical role in that it has a watchman function and is actually monitoring our environment constantly for threats. And so, you know, if you put somebody in the laboratory that doesn't have aircraft noise at home and then you play back aircraft noise, that's a novel stimulus. And, you know, it makes sense that that subject wakes up with a very high probability, just making sure that this is not a real danger. This is also why the habituation makes sense, because it's always, whenever you wake up, you're basically wasting energy,

you're disrupting that sleep process that needs to be continuous, to be recuperative. So once you have woken up a couple of times to these types of noises, and you have established that this is no real danger, then it wouldn't make sense to keep waking up with that same probability. So we see habituation across nights in the laboratory. And then, you know, when we go to people in the field, like basically measure their sleep in their homes after they've been living, for example, at an airport or the railway for a number of years, we see that their reaction probabilities are much lower than what we observed in the people in the lab.

What about individual differences? I think of myself as somebody who really is irritated by noise. I don't like extraneous noise. I particularly don't like it when I'm trying to talk to and listen to somebody and I can't hear them because of all the noise. That drives me crazy. But other people seem to handle it much better than I do. So there are individual differences in how we perceive noise.

Well, there are huge individual differences in how we perceive noise. Well, there are huge individual differences in how people perceive noise, how they are affected by noise. Again, you know, we actually published a paper a couple of years ago specifically for sleep. Because if you expose people for a number of nights, there will be huge differences between the different people but people will react very consistently themselves um so and that that almost suggests that it's it's like uh some of that is is determined genetically but yeah there are there are huge differences uh we don't have a good explanation for uh you know what is contributing to these differences, what is explaining these differences. Is there anything we could do to make somebody who is very noise sensitive to make that subject less noise sensitive? One thing I want to say, though, is that this is against sleep, that we actually showed in our studies on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep,

that subjects who had said before they entered the study that they were, you know, strongly annoyed by noise, that they also woke up with a higher probability in our studies. So obviously, we don't know what is the hen and what is the egg. Are they, you know, were they more annoyed to begin with because they were light sleepers? Or are they actually waking up with a higher probability because they are so annoyed and kind of both make sense because our auditory system is not only evaluating sound pressure levels during sleep but it's also doing a content analysis there were studies as early as in the 1960s where researchers played back just

names while people were sleeping, and the subjects would wake up with a much higher probability when it was their own name, or the name of a loved one that was played back. So that tells you, you know, there's a content analysis going on, and the brain is making a decision, is this content, is it worth waking you know the the subject up or not what about when it when it comes to noise and whether or not it bothers you is how predictable the noise is and and maybe how much control you have over that noise does that have an influence does that mitigate how upset or concerned or cranky you get when the noise happens?

One example in the aircraft noise world is that at Frankfurt Airport, they introduced something like dedicated runway operations. So they would tell people up front, you know, on Thursday, November 22nd or whatever, we will not fly over your area. So people can, you know, plan if they want to do a barbecue outside, they can actually plan for that. And it gives them some control back over this noise situation. And that can be very helpful. What does the science say about white noise? Because I know a lot of people, my wife included, likes to play low-level white noise. She plays the thing of crashing waves. It's pretty constant. And she does that

because she's a pretty light sleeper, and any intermittent noise is likely going to wake her up. So that low level of constant noise masks the intermittent noise so she doesn't hear it. But what about the effects of the white noise can you pretty much get used to anything and that becomes okay right and you know that that is the idea behind these white noise machines that if you have like intermittent noise intruding into your bedroom a bedroom that you mask these intermittent noise events. And then, you know, it makes good sense. However, we actually looked into this and we're in the process of preparing a systematic

review of all of the studies that looked into white noise and how it, you know, promotes sleep or affects sleep. And I mean, first of all, there's not a lot of research out there. And the research that is out there is not very high quality. So I mean, my conclusion at this point would be, I could not tell you whether it works, whether it may be even harmful, it may work for some people. It may not work for others. I mean, obviously, we already talked about it a little bit. The auditory system also needs to wind down. And, you know, the best time for the auditory system to wind down is the night. So if you're introducing

another noise source into your bedroom, and, you know, some of these sound machines can be pretty loud. You're basically preventing your auditory system from doing that, right? Also, I mean, the white noise itself could be disrupting to your sleep. Again, there's so little research out there that I couldn't say right now if that's the truth or not, and if it applies to all people or not. But at least, you know, I myself at this point would not feel comfortable to give a boilerplate suggestion that, you know, yeah, people who have intermittent noise should do that or they shouldn't do that. I simply don't know at this time. Well, it is interesting, too, that there are reports of people who do sleep in noisy

environments and manage to get used to it and then they go out to the country and they can't sleep because it's too quiet. Yeah, we had these stories, too, when we were looking on the effects of railway noise in people's homes, and there was one subject who said, you know, typically there's a 5 a.m. train, and then one morning that train wasn't coming, and the subject woke up because, you know, something was different. Right. Yeah, it just tells you we are getting used to some degree to the noise exposure. It does not mean that the noise isn't harmful for us, though. Right.

I mean, whatever we perceive subjectively, it doesn't mean that at that point it's unproblematic, it doesn't matter anymore. It just means, you know, yes we've kind of gotten used to it. So let's flip things around a little bit here. So you've been talking about the negative effects of noise. Are there positive effects of subjecting yourself to silence? Is going in a room and just having it be quiet good for you in the opposite way that subjecting yourself to noise is bad for you? There may be research out there. I have to say I've done most of my research on the dark side of the force, so to say, like investigating what's happening if you're exposing yourself.

But you say in your TED Talk that your prescription, or one of them, is to find places and times when you can be surrounded by silence. Yeah, absolutely. But that's just the inverse of the findings that we have in the sense that exposing yourself to noise is a stress response. It's a chronic stress response. So trying to get out of that vicious cycle of continuously exposing yourself to the noise makes a lot of sense. And in the TED Talk, I give that example. And that is very much in line with what we just discussed, right? We are habituating.

We're kind of getting used to the noise exposure. It doesn't mean that it's good for us. So when I attended a noise conference a couple of years ago in Japan, it was in Nara, which is like this World Heritage Site. It's super quiet. And, you know, I was there. Everything was fine. I didn't really notice that it wasn't, you know much much less noisy I did notice though that that Tokyo I was in Tokyo for two days that that was much less noisy than the than the big cities I was used to from from Europe and the United States but regardless you know when I was there for a week and I came back and basically entered Los Angeles Airport and really this wall of sound

hit me and only then did I realize oh my god this is how loud this is right it's just the contrast between not being exposed for a long period of time time and then being re-exposed to something I had gotten used to and I believe that tells you how important it is to seek out these quiet places, especially on your weekends or if you're doing a vacation, trying to somewhat evade the everyday noise and trying to allow our physiologic systems to wind down somewhat. Well, it certainly seems that the world is getting louder and it makes you wonder, like, you know, how loud will things get?

Will they continue to get louder? And will we just continue to have to adjust to that and wonder, you know, what the effects of that are? Matthias Basner has been my guest. He is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on how noise affects sleep and health. Appreciate you being here. Thank you, Professor. Oh, great. Thank you so much.

Are you legally obligated to buy something that you break in a store? Not necessarily. Even if the store has a sign that says so. There's no statute on the books declaring that if you break it, you buy it, anywhere in the United States. When a store displays a sign with that rule, it's considered a unilateral contract. That's a contract proposed by one party,

but not necessarily agreed on by the other party. That would be you. If you've broken something while shopping, there are a few things you would need to consider before you would have to pay. First of all, the store can't hold you hostage and make you pay before you leave. It's a civil matter. They would have to sue you in court unless you want to voluntarily pay for what you broke. Did you act negligently? If you were juggling the fine china, well, a court might likely hold you liable for those damages. But if the store did not take reasonable steps to prevent breakage of something of value, you might be off the hook.

If you are found at fault for the breakage, you would most likely be responsible for the wholesale, not the retail, price of the item. And that is something you should know. We release three new episodes every week, and to make sure you don't miss a single one, subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's free, and then the episodes are delivered right to you. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

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