Something You Should Know - How to Learn Anything Better and Faster & The Mosquito: Humans' Worst Enemy

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Starting point is 00:00:18 That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, it seems the way you smell can make you appear thinner. I'll explain that. Then, if you want to learn anything, you have to understand the good and bad ways to learn. A lot of people, when they are learning something, will tend to cram it.

Starting point is 00:00:49 They will try to learn it in a short period of time. And we just know from countless studies that this is actually the worst thing you can do if you want to remember things long term. That if you want to actually remember things long term, you want to space it out. Also, why faking a smile may be worse than no smile at all. And what's the deadliest creature mankind has ever known? There's probably one not far from you right now. It's the mosquito. The mosquito is responsible for the deaths of half of every human being that's ever lived across our planet. So it's in the ballpark of, you know, 52 billion

Starting point is 00:01:23 people out of the 108 billion that have existed. All this today on Something You Should Know. This segment is sponsored by Dell Technologies Small Business Virtual Podference, starting May the 10th. Whether you're still working remotely or back together again, let Dell Technologies help safeguard your business with modern devices and Windows 11 Pro. 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. And we dive right in today talking about your sense of smell.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Of your five senses, the sense of smell is unique. It's not talked about a lot. For example, you may not know that everyone has their own unique odor, except for children of multiple births. Twins and triplets all smell alike. Women have a better sense of smell than men. Smell falls off dramatically for men after their mid-50s, and for women it doesn't happen until their mid-60s.

Starting point is 00:02:39 In a recent study, men thought women wearing a citrus floral scent were 12 pounds lighter. Green apple and cucumber scents create the impression of a larger space, while the scent of roasted meat creates the impression of closer quarters. Recall can be enhanced if learning is done in the presence of an odor, and then that same odor is present at the time of recollection. This is why some teachers burn chocolate-scented candles in their classroom and then again on mandatory national tests like the SATs. And your sense of taste is about 75% smell. And that is something you should know. Everything you know, you had to learn.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Some things you learn quickly. Other things take time. Some things you learn to remember. Sometimes not. We all do our best as we go through life to learn things, but how often have you ever thought about how you learn things? What does it mean to learn something? What's the best route to get there? How can you be a better learner? Scott Young is a successful writer who decided to take a hard and careful look at how human beings learn, and he's author of a book called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. Hey, Scott, welcome to Something You Should Know. Oh, it's great to be here. So there is different kinds of learning, right?

Starting point is 00:04:14 You can learn to ride a bike or play the trumpet, which is different than learning about history and mathematics. Well, if we're talking about scientific definitions, I think learning, if we were to look up a textbook, would probably say something about changes in the brain that adapt our behavior based on experience. So that's pretty broad and includes a lot of things that maybe we don't even think of as learning. For instance, you know, our habits are in a sense a kind of learning. It's a changed behavior in response to things. And so learning is really quite broad. And that's what I'm talking about, that it's really goes well beyond that sort of narrow definition of studying for school. And so we think we know how to learn, right? I

Starting point is 00:04:56 mean, most people don't stop and think, well, what's the best way to learn this? We just try to learn stuff. So there's actually a lot of really good research that shows, well, not that people are absolutely terrible at learning. Obviously, if we were terrible at learning, we wouldn't be very successful as a species, but that there are lots of little traps that we can fall into. So one of my favorite ones has to do with what is known as retrieval. And basically, there's a lot of studies on this. But one of my favorites is they took students and put them into different groups and asked them to use different methods to study.

Starting point is 00:05:30 One of them they asked to do repeated review, meaning that you just look over the text over and over again. And the others they asked to do free recall, which means that you close the book and you try to write down on a piece of paper everything that you can remember. And immediately after they did this, they asked them how well did they think they'd learned the information. And the reviewers were the people who thought they had learned it best. They said, yep, I've got this. Whereas the free recall people, they thought, oh man, this is really hard. I'm not actually getting this. But when they tested them, it was actually the opposite, that those who did free recall perform better. So the idea of learning is full of these little traps where you can think you're learning something really well. You're thinking you're doing what works best for your memory, and it's actually something different.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Is to learn to remember, is that what learning is? When people say you need to learn this, what does that mean? You must memorize it, you must understand it. What does it mean to learn it? analogy, a lot of people think memory is just, okay, if I say, you know, what is the capital of France, and you think Paris, and you're able to just sort of spit out that answer, that that is essentially what memory is. But memory is also a lot of other things. It's things like when you're riding a bicycle, for instance, you're doing that because you have memory stored in your head about how to move your muscles in order to control the bicycle. And so there's lots of different

Starting point is 00:07:03 types of memory. And there's lots of different ways that we remember things. And so this is, again, that the essence of learning is not just being able to spit out facts, but being able to perform in situations based on having experiences with them. Well, the concept of learning to ride a bike is interesting, because everyone knows the saying, oh, it's just like riding a bike, meaning once you know it, you always know it. But when I learn stuff to study for a history test, just because I know it now doesn't mean I'll know it a year from now. Why is that? So there seems to be a couple reasons behind this, but one of them that has been hypothesized is that there is actually a difference between what psychologists call declarative memory, which is the kind that you can actually put into words, and procedural memory, which is the kind of informally known as muscle memory or the sort of motor skills that you learn throughout your lifetime.

Starting point is 00:07:59 And it seems to be that procedural memory is more durable than declarative memory. And this can actually have interesting interactions. So in one example, often we will remember our PIN code by how our hand moves, even if you had to write down, let's say, well, maybe not the numbers, but if it was a longer password, I certainly remember it by how it feels on the keyboard and less by what the exact letters are. And that can be because you've got this muscle memory or this procedural memory of moving your fingers to type in your password

Starting point is 00:08:29 that is more durable than the ability to recall it explicitly. And it may be that they are based on slightly different memory systems and one of them just lasts longer than the other. What about people's ability to learn? Is it different or is it more in the skill and the approach that everybody can learn more or less the same if they do it correctly? Well, so it's both. There's definitely a lot of evidence that some people can learn better than others and some people can learn certain skills better than others. And I don't think that there's much use denying that. But

Starting point is 00:08:59 at the same time, there's also effective ways to learn things and ineffective ways to learn things. And so a lot of what I try to talk about is what are the effective ways to learn things. So I mentioned one of those principles already, which is retrieval, that if you get students and you just ask them what would they like to do when they study, so this is another experiment that was done, they will often, if they don't feel very confident, use that strategy of repeated review. So they'll continually review the same information. And if you force them, on the other hand, to say, okay, you're not allowed to do that, you have to do free recall, then they actually will score better on the test. So free recall is better for all people than repeated review. Some people will do better with both than with the others. So there are people who will learn faster than other people,

Starting point is 00:09:45 but definitely this difference in how they learn is also based on what kind of methods they're using. And what are those two methods you just mentioned? Well, so this is just one idea, but this is the contrast between what is called review and recall. So review is when, you know what you're talking about, when you have your notebook and you flip through it and you just sort of read it again and again and again, and this makes you more and more familiar with the information, but it doesn't necessarily help you remember it for a test. Whereas recall is when you close the book and you try to actually recall from memory what was in the notebook without looking at it. Right, and there's a big difference between the two, and yet you would think, well, maybe that one works just as well as the other, but not so.

Starting point is 00:10:31 Definitely. And again, it's one of these deceptive things because after you do the review, students will say, oh, I've learned the material quite well. And this is because we actually don't really know how much we've remembered. And so we use these proxy signals or these sort of little approximations to what we expect to have remembered. And in this case, it's how familiar does it feel? How when I read it again and again and again, it's feeling more and more familiar to me. But this is actually slightly different than the ability to recall it without looking at it on the page.

Starting point is 00:11:04 So in other words, you're practicing being able to recognize the right answer, but not necessarily to produce the right answer. And I mean, this is just one of many, many different examples of little ways we get misled in our studying and learning habits. What about when you're trying to learn something like playing an instrument or riding a bike, or it isn't what you're trying to think about and learn and remember. It's more about doing. Again, there's a lot of interesting little tidbits on that. So one of them that I find really interesting is that it has been known for a long time by psychologists that people have a difficulty transferring. So if you learn something in one context, say in the classroom, and then you try to apply it in another context, say real life,

Starting point is 00:11:50 we often fail at that. We often are not able to transfer those contexts. So one of the best things that you can do when you're learning is to try to practice the thing that you actually want to get good at. And a lot of people, when they are learning a new skill, like let's say speaking a language, for instance, they will just be working on a little app and they will be playing around with the app and they never actually practice having conversations or they decide they're going to wait until they get to the point where they're ready. And just like the people who are doing the review versus the recall, they will often take a lot longer to actually learn the information in a way that they can use it because they have difficulty transferring those skills. So take me through, I want to learn to play the violin.

Starting point is 00:12:31 So how, I don't really, but let's say I want to learn to play the violin. So what's the best way to do that? Well, so the starting point I would say is to practice playing the violin. So this is, I know it sounds kind of obvious, but for a lot of people, they would maybe start with a book or they would start with, you know, well, I'm going to have to go through all of these theoretical exercises. So the first place would be to practice the violin. The next step is what I call drilling. And this is something that we're all familiar with, but it's often something that we don't understand why we're doing it. And so in this case, you want to break down what is the activity of playing the violin into components that you can practice and get good at separately.

Starting point is 00:13:10 So expert violin players do something which is called deliberate practice. And this is something where you are trying to work on the points that you find hardest, not just playing the same tunes that you feel most comfortable with over and over again. And so this often means that if you're working on an entire piece, you don't play the entire piece from start to finish, but you focus on the few little tricky elements that you were starting to mess up when you were actually playing it through. There's a concept I've heard over and over again, and this particularly applies to sports, that if you want to be a better tennis player, play with people better than you. Well, absolutely, because if we don't get that feedback that, you know, our skills are not

Starting point is 00:13:52 as good as they could be, then they tend to just stay where they are. So indeed, a lot of the research done by Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice shows these plateaus so that we get to a level where we feel comfortable playing games of tennis. And then we don't improve because our habits, our little kind of micro decisions that we make while we're playing the game are good enough, but they're maybe not the best thing for us to do. And this can lead to this situation where we don't get better because in order to get better, we actually have to get a little worse first. We have to practice on working on something. And so if you play with someone who's better than you, then your old habits are not going to be good enough and you're going to get pushed to go further. Whereas if you just play with people

Starting point is 00:14:31 where you're winning all the time, you're not going to have that same pressure to improve. So when you play someone who is better and you don't necessarily know how to play someone better because they're doing things you're not used to. They're running circles around you. How is it that people somehow raise their game without necessarily knowing how to raise their game just by playing someone better? Well, there's two things. Obviously, having a coach helps because they can tell you what you're doing wrong and what you're making mistakes with. But even just the idea of you learning on your own and getting feedback can be enormously valuable because very often what we're doing is we're making subtle little adjustments. And so if we get some kind of negative feedback, oh, I missed that shot, then you start trying

Starting point is 00:15:17 different things. You start, OK, well, maybe I will try to do this next time or I'll try to do that next time and I will try to adjust to it. And you can learn through this sort of approach, get better and find ways to compensate for those weaknesses. But again, like we were saying, if you're playing someone where you always get their shots and you're always able to return it, you're not going to get better at the same pace. We're talking about and learning about learning and we're learning about learning with Scott Young. He's author of the book Ultra Learning.

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Starting point is 00:16:35 Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So, Scott, let's talk about the idea of a coach or a tutor. I mean, in school anyway, usually you get a tutor when you're like falling behind. If you're the top of the class, you often don't have a tutor. But when you're the top athlete, you often do have a coach.

Starting point is 00:17:07 So what's the role there? Well, I think coaches can often see your performance separately from you. So you have your own sense of how you're performing, but you're always inside your own head. And in particular, they can offer another perspective on what you're doing. So I think a lot of that's sort of what you talked about. We tend to think of tutors and people who are helping you as something that's more remedial because you're not able to learn it on your own. But I think really people of all stripes would benefit from tutors and benefit from coaches because they can see what you're doing and say, hey, what if you tried it this way? Or hey, what if you did it that way? And that's true even if you are better than the coach that you're working with. Because even if you are better overall,

Starting point is 00:17:48 there may still be little things that you're doing which are tripping up your performance that you can work on and they might be able to spot those. So you don't have to be the best to be the coach. You just have to be able. Coaching is itself a whole other skill actually, isn't it? It isn't just playing the game well, it's learning how to coach well. Definitely. Just like being a teacher is not the same as being a performer as well. You have to learn how to see someone else's performance and figure out, okay, what are some ways that it can be improved?

Starting point is 00:18:18 And that's, again, slightly different from actually doing those things yourself. What do we know from the research about things that maybe people believe help them learn that don't or aren't very effective? Well, so we just talked about one right now, which is the idea of this review versus retrieval. So that's a really common one that people will tend to focus on review

Starting point is 00:18:41 instead of doing retrieval. Another one has to do with spacing. So this is another really useful result will tend to focus on review instead of doing retrieval. Another one has to do with spacing. So this is another really useful result from the psychological literature that a lot of people, when they are learning something, will tend to cram it. They will try to learn it in a short period of time. And we just know from countless studies that this is actually the worst thing you can do if you want to remember things long term, that if you want to actually remember things long term, you want to space it out. So you want to expose yourself to the information either by doing some kind of recall or by doing some kind of practice on multiple different

Starting point is 00:19:14 occasions, and that this is going to make it a lot more durable. So continuing our discussion of memory, if you are able to practice something just once, it's very easy to forget it. But if you practice it multiple times, spread out over a few days or weeks, it will store in your brain much, much longer. So cramming at the last minute doesn't work in the long term, but does it work for the test tomorrow? It can work for the very short term. So if you do do this kind of what's called mass practice, you can get over a very short term learning goal. But again, this is sort of a constant problem for students because they cram for this exam and then they forget everything. And then when they start the next class that

Starting point is 00:19:56 builds on it, they're already behind. So really what I recommend is that if you can develop some kind of spacing schedule, so if, okay, you're studying unit one and you're going to practice it again another three times in the semester and you have that in your calendar, you'll do a lot better than if you just try to review just the week before the exam because you will have built it into your long-term memory

Starting point is 00:20:18 and that's just a much more stable thing for going forward. What else? What else do you find that either people don't know about how to learn better or people think helps that doesn't? One of the ones that I thought was really interesting has to do with feedback because feedback is obviously very important for learning and in some skills it would be nearly impossible to learn without any kind of feedback if we're talking about you know learning a bicycle if you had no sense of whether you were setting up right on the bicycle, it would be almost impossible to learn. But interestingly, a lot of the studies that were done on feedback show that

Starting point is 00:20:53 feedback often has a negative effect. So in a meta-analysis, I believe that was done by Abraham Klusier and Angelo Denise, they found that something like 37% of the studies they looked at, feedback was actually negative. And this can sometimes be because feedback is a distraction, it's not actually helping, but it can also be because the information in the feedback doesn't help you improve. So we can all think about that time that a teacher told us that we were no good at something. And I mean, that was feedback too, but it didn't exactly motivate us. And so one thing that students often will focus on and teachers will focus on and coaches will focus on is praise.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And so if you praise someone and say, oh, you did a really good job, that's great. That often actually can have a negative impact as well. That if the information being given isn't relevant to the task, if it's just saying, you know, you're so smart, you're so great, then that can also have a demotivating effect and it can allow the person to not work as hard at improving. So what does work? What kind of feedback, if any, is better? So the best kind of feedback that you can get is what I call corrective feedback, which is where you not only are told what you're doing wrong, but how you can fix it. So this is the kind that often comes from coaching where they'll say, oh, you're doing your

Starting point is 00:22:03 tennis backhand like this, you should do it like that. And thus you can correct it. Now, the challenge is that for a lot of domains, we don't actually have corrective feedback, because that's helpful, but to recognize also when you can't have corrective feedback. So if you are running a business, for instance, and you release a product and your product absolutely flops, it's easy to say, okay, I'm going to talk to my customers and ask them what I should have done instead. And I mean, your customers can tell you whether or not they wanted to buy your product. So that is a kind of feedback, but they probably can't tell you what you need to do to fix your product to make it better unless it's something really obvious because they are not the product developers. They are just the customers. And so it's important to also distinguish what kind of feedback you can get so you don't

Starting point is 00:22:58 overreact to the feedback and start just implementing suggestions from people who don't actually know enough to give you the proper advice. What about learning with people, not from people, but, you know, I think of like the Beatles, you know, and I don't think they had a whole lot, if any, formal musical education. But boy, when they came together and worked together, something very magical happened that probably might not have happened if the situation was different. Yeah, so working in groups and I think especially picking environments where you can be exposed to people who can give you that kind of feedback is really important. So we all know that learning a language through immersion is much easier than learning it through a classroom,

Starting point is 00:23:43 for instance. If you're going to learn French and you live in France and you speak French every day, that learning with other people is going to be a lot easier and more effective than if you're just studying it from a textbook. But this is also true of a lot of skills that we don't normally think of as learning through immersion. So if you wanted to learn an academic skill, for instance, grad school very often functions as this kind of environment where you're surrounded by people who are also smart and also researching this topic and you're having conversations about it constantly. And you quickly pick up this sort of indirectly what do people think is important, what do they think matters, what are the different effects, what are the different sciences going on that would be actually quite difficult to just piece together if you were only reading journal articles. Similarly, if you want to be at the cutting edge in some kind of professional skill,

Starting point is 00:24:27 picking the right company or the right office to work for can also matter because if you're, again, surrounded by those people who are doing cutting edge work, like the Beatles, you're also going to naturally learn through watching other people and learn by kind of tacitly picking up the skills that they think matter. Great. Well, I think I've just learned more about how I learn than I've ever learned before. My guest has been Scott Young and his book is called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition and Accelerate Your Career. You will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Scott. Really interesting. Well, thank you so much, Mike.

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Starting point is 00:27:09 It is the mosquito. While we have, for the most part in this country, relegated the mosquito to the category of pest, over time and throughout the world, the mosquito has wreaked havoc and, in fact, has changed history in significant ways. Tim Weingard is a professor of history and political science at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, and he's author of the book The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. Hi, Tim. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Starting point is 00:27:40 So this summertime and springtime pest that we hear buzzing around our ears and occasionally bites us and it itches, what kind of horrible things has this creature done? The mosquito is responsible for the deaths of half of every human being that's ever lived across our planet. So it's in the ballpark of, you know, 52 billion people out of the 108 billion that have existed in these estimates, but across our human existence. And obviously the mosquito by itself, you know, untethered from a pathogen is harmless. And that's important to note is that the mosquito doesn't directly harm anybody. It's the pathogens and the diseases that she transmits that cause such devastation and death. Wait, you said that mosquitoes are responsible for half the deaths in world history?

Starting point is 00:28:35 There's numerous, you know, academic papers and articles that suggest that that's the estimate, that it's half of all human beings that have ever lived, which from a historical impact, that is astounding. Wow. That is astounding. And as you said, it's not the mosquito itself. It's the... And so why is it such an efficient killer and carrier of all these diseases? Well, the diseases don't harm the mosquito at all, but they use the mosquito for transport

Starting point is 00:29:06 and to continue the cyclical contagion of their own species. So for the malaria parasite, for example, it's an extremely sophisticated creature and its reproduction, it has numerous stages of reproduction, and some of the stages occur with inside the mosquito, and then other stages of malaria reproduction occur inside a host, whether that be, in this case, humans or other animals that have malaria strains. So the malaria parasite needs both the mosquito and essentially a zoological Noah's Ark of other animals' safe houses to continue its survival and its procreation, which is why it's so difficult to combat

Starting point is 00:29:52 and why it still persists as such a lethal, lethal disease to humans. It's just such a sophisticated creature, and it's not a virus. So vaccines in the traditional sense for viruses, like smallpox, for example, we eradicated smallpox from the face of the planet. The last case was in 1977. So it's not a virus. So traditional vaccines, it don't work. So when we say that mosquitoes have killed half the people that have ever lived on this planet, it's because they have been carrying and distributing malaria amongst the population primarily.

Starting point is 00:30:28 Right. Among other diseases. Now, yellow fever before it's a virus. So there's a vaccine developed in the 1930s. But prior to the vaccine of the virus class that the mosquito transmits, which includes Zika and West Nile and dengue and chikungunya. Yellow fever was also a prevalent killer, especially in the colonial tropics of the Americas. So the mosquito is indirectly responsible for these, you know, death statistics. But if you take away the mosquito, you don't have these pathogens being able to be transmitted to.

Starting point is 00:31:07 They use the mosquito as transport. So it's a symbiotic relationship for the pathogens, not necessarily for the mosquito, because it does no harm to the mosquito itself. And the mosquito bites animals and people because why? Only females bite. The female needs blood from humans or other animals to help grow and mature her eggs. It's very simple. She uses the protein to help grow and mature her eggs.

Starting point is 00:31:38 And when she bites, she immediately starts excreting the water from our blood to lessen the weight, obviously because she's taking a blood meal that's larger weight-wise than her own body. So it's actually quite an amazing feeding system and ritual. Does the mosquito have a purpose, a function? Would the world be fine without them or are they here for a reason other than to just Be mosquitoes and do what mosquitoes do That's a tricky question and and you know, we don't know 100% obviously they don't aerate the soil like other insects They don't ingest waste for example like other insects and the males world may only females bite But the males world essentially revolves around

Starting point is 00:32:26 nectar and sex. So the males get off easy in this species. But the males, because they drink nectar, they do pollinate plants and flowers. Now, not to the extent by comparison of bees, for example. And we all know what's happening to the bee population, and that's certainly a concern globally with the reduction of bees. So if you took away mosquitoes hypothetically, there would be certain plants and flowers that would suffer the consequences of that from not being pollinated by mosquitoes. And we don't think that they're an indispensable food source for other animals. Other animals, obviously, bats eat mosquitoes, or some fish eat their floating eggs and their larvae that float on the water. But we don't know at the end of the day. And to use the Star Wars

Starting point is 00:33:27 vernacular, there's a balance to the force. And if we disturb the balance to the force, we don't know what those consequences could be. There seems to have been a lot of effort in education, you know, remove standing water, so much effort towards getting rid of mosquitoes with limited results, why are they so hard to eradicate? Well, I think one is there's just so many of them. There's anywhere from 100 to 110 trillion mosquitoes that inhabit nearly every inch of the globe. I think like any other creature, including ourselves, and this is why I kind of frame the book as a war almost between humans and mosquitoes,

Starting point is 00:34:11 is that they want to survive and procreate. That's what they're hardwired to do, just as we are as an animal. So they're able to adapt fairly quickly to new surroundings or also the best weapons we can throw at them to circumvent essentially our weapons against mosquitoes. And that holds true for the malaria parasite as well. Whether it be, you know, the succession of drugs, new frontline drugs that come out, the malaria parasite adapts very quickly to circumvent these drugs and essentially shrug these drugs off, which makes it extremely difficult to tackle.

Starting point is 00:34:53 And the mosquito story that's the most poignant or that people can maybe identify with the most is DDT. And we all know that DDT has harmful effects to other animals, including humans, as Joni Mitchell sang in her song, Big Yellow Taxi, and Rachel Carson certainly made the world aware with her book, Silent Spring, in 1962. But as a mosquito killer, for its first decade of use, give or take, DDT was a remarkable mosquito killer, and it dramatically reduced the rates of mosquito-borne disease. But even before Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, it was very quickly understood that there was mosquito pockets across the world that were already resistant to DDT, and it no longer

Starting point is 00:35:39 worked anymore. So it's been a war since, you know, the dawn of humanity against our paramount killer. So what kind of progress is being made in the fight against malaria and its carrier, the mosquito? You know, science progresses, and we try to match the mosquito. And with CRISPR and the gene editing technology that has made the front page headline since it was unveiled in 2012, there is a hope there, and CRISPR research among other institutions, whether that be the World Health Organization or the CDC. So we are continually trying to develop better frontline weapons to deal with not just the mosquito, but also, more importantly, the diseases that the mosquito transmits.

Starting point is 00:36:27 Talk about some of the things the mosquitoes have done in history that people probably aren't aware of. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Surrounding Rome is something called the Pontine Marshes. Historically, the Pontine Marshes were a malarial hotbed and just teeming with malarious mosquitoes. So when Rome is consolidating itself and projecting its power, when outside invaders, Hannibal, the Carthaginians, and the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, none of them actually take or hold Rome for any extended period of time. It was just cut to shreds by the mosquitoes of the Pontine Marshes. So essentially, these marshes acted, the Malarious Marshes acted as a shield safeguarding Rome.

Starting point is 00:37:18 But eventually, the endemic malaria that's just pervasive across not just the Pontine Marshes in Rome, but other parts of Italy, starts to sap the strength economically, militarily of the Roman Empire. So it's kind of a double-edged, it's a Faustian pact, if you will. It's a double-edged sword, these Pontine Marshes. They both helped the Roman Empire at the beginning, but ultimately help in the collapse of the Roman Empire as well. The American Revolution was partly aided by malarious mosquitoes. So originally, the main strategy or British strategy was a northern strategy. But in the final few years of the war, General Clinton, he shifts the main grand strategy of the British from the northern colonies to the southern colonies where malaria reigns. And so these British soldiers coming from northern England, coming from Scotland, they weren't acclimated to American malaria or what in history they use the term seasoned to malaria.

Starting point is 00:38:21 So he's zigzagging across the Carolinas trying to escape malaria. And his correspondence absolutely alludes to this. And he's ordered to hole up in Yorktown with his forces against his own better judgment by General Clinton, his superior. And the Americans and French lay siege to Yorktown. And in Cornwallis' correspondence, he clearly states that he surrenders because he only has 35%, 37% of his troops able to stand to post, with the vast remainder having either been killed or being incapacitated at the time by malaria. So in a way, the mosquito is a founding

Starting point is 00:39:07 mother of the United States. Is anyone making a dent in the problem? Is there any winning in the battle? We are seeing a reduction in malaria cases and malaria deaths in the last, you know, 10, 20 years, which is a very good thing. So we're seeing that the death rates consistently decrease from malaria, which is the paramount killer. But at the same time, what we're seeing is the emergence or reemergence of other mosquito-borne diseases. And they're not comparatively as prolific of killers as malaria. But, for example, we're seeing West Nile Zika. And dengue is making a big comeback, for example. And we even are seeing some sporadic and isolated domestic transference of dengue in the southern United States.

Starting point is 00:40:02 What is that? It's a virus. Breakbone fever is is that? It's a virus. Breakbone fever is the nickname. It's a virus, again, and it's essentially, call it a cousin of yellow fever, but far, far less lethal than yellow fever. But still, it's agonizing and excruciating pain in your joints and muscles and fever and rashes,

Starting point is 00:40:25 and it's not something, obviously, that you would want to contract. And it can lead to death. It's just not in the same class as killers of humans as malaria and yellow fever was. Is this a thing that governments and foundations are going to have to fix? Does, you know, spraying mosquitoes in my backyard help? I mean, what's the takeaway from all of this? Well, I think because mosquitoes are a universal concern, it requires a global or universal solution. And I think definitely, as I said, with various governmental organizations, national organizations, vast amount of research being funded and conducted all where we can CRISPR mosquitoes to alter their genome and DNA to make them harmless. thereby bringing down the disease itself, but not necessarily harming or extincting the mosquito species itself, and thereby essentially keeping the alignment to the balance of the forest, to which I alluded to earlier.

Starting point is 00:41:54 I remember hearing when there was a big mosquito problem, I guess it was in California, where they were trying to release sterile mosquitoes to mate with the other mosquitoes. Does that kind of effort help or is that more of a Band-Aid thing? Well, no, it would certainly help. And as I said, not all mosquito species transmit disease. That's the other avenue with the CRISPR research is you CRISPR mosquitoes and release them into the wild, and their offspring will be only male, infertile, or stillborn, and therefore you could potentially extinct that species of mosquito. What's the lifespan of a mosquito?

Starting point is 00:42:41 Oh, it varies depending on the species of mosquito. And because they're cold-blooded, they're temperature sensitive too. So it depends on the outside temperature. It depends on a lot of factors. But generally in more temperate zones, it's kind of a week or two. They can live longer. So not a long lifespan, but certainly long enough. Yeah, because in that week or two, they mature, mate, have babies, and here we go again. Right, and can have more than one birthing of eggs in that lifespan as well. So depending on the species, again, it depends on how many eggs they lay, but generally, you know, I'd say about 200 eggs in one birthing in a canoe of eggs floating on the water. So yeah, it's very temperature dependent, but also species dependent

Starting point is 00:43:33 as well. But generally, I would say about a week or two on average is how long they live. Well, it is strange to think that that little pest buzzing around your head at the picnic, its ancestors helped change human history, world history. It's mind-boggling. Tim Weingart has been my guest. He's a professor of history and political science at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, and he is author of the book, The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Tim. All right. Well, thank you very much. You've probably heard the advice that forcing yourself to smile will improve your mood.

Starting point is 00:44:19 It can help, but it has to be a real smile. Faking a smile can actually make matters worse. A study from Michigan State University found that customer service workers who fake a smile throughout their day actually wind up in a worse mood and may be withdrawn and less productive. The fake smile effect was stronger for women than men. Smiling can improve your mood, but you have to mean it. If you don't feel like smiling, instead try to conjure up pleasant or funny thoughts. Most of us do have the ability to trigger a genuine smile, and when we do, we tend to

Starting point is 00:44:58 experience a slight surge of feel-better endorphins. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast, I bet your friends would too. Please share it with them. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide

Starting point is 00:45:21 when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, 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. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions,

Starting point is 00:45:50 and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine,

Starting point is 00:46:15 erstwhile monk-turned-traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Rudolf Bantwine

Starting point is 00:46:32 wherever podcasts are available.

Something You Should Know - How to Learn Anything Better and Faster & The Mosquito: Humans' Worst Enemy

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