Something You Should Know - How to Learn Anything So It Sticks & Peculiarities of the Human Brain

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

You just might want to take your car keys to bed with you at night. Why? This episode begins with an interesting explanation – and it all has to do with your personal safety. http://worldofwonder.net/lifehack-put-car-keys-beside-bed-night/  How do you best learn something new? Probably not the way you think. There are actually proven ways to engage the brain so material really sticks. Joining me to explain what these methods are and how they work is Ulrich Boser. Ulrich has studied the science of learning. He is founder and CEO of The Learning Agency as well as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also author of the book Learn Better (https://amzn.to/30P03Wh) The human brain is a bit quirky. Some of those quirks are good but others can cause you a lot of stress and drive you crazy. Neuroscientist Dr. Dean Burnett has researched the oddities in the human brain and joins me to explain what they are, why they are important and how to best deal with them when they get in the way. Dean is a tutor and lecturer based at Cardiff University’s Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences and he is author of the book Idiot Brain: What Your Head is Really Up To (https://amzn.to/3ab7Dxp) Lobster is often the most expensive thing on the menu at any seafood restaurant. Why? Listen as I explain how getting the lobster from the seas to your plate is no small feat – and an expensive at that. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/why-lobster-so-expensive-worth-price PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! Cancel unnecessary subscriptions with Rocket Money today. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/something . Seriously, it could save you HUNDREDS of dollars per year! Redeem your rewards for cash in any amount, at any time, with Discover Card! Learn more at https://Discover.com/RedeemRewards Download Best Fiends for FREE from the App Store or Google play.. Plus, earn even more with $5 worth of in-game rewards when you reach level 5! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, a better place to keep your car keys when you're home asleep in your bed. Then, effective ways to learn anything better and easier and make it stick. Brain dumps are another really effective tool.

So if you read an article, rather than re-read it, just do a brain dump. Start writing down all the things that you learned. It's about 50% more effective than simply re-reading that article. Also, ever wonder why lobster is often the most expensive thing on the menu? And quirks of the human brain. Some quirks make life easy. Others make us crazy.

One of the things I've often really quite liked about the brain is that the brain just reacts really badly to uncertainty of any sort. Like the brain really does not like not knowing what's going to happen, not knowing how things are going to pan out. And that's actually a really big source of stress. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

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

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And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I got an email the other day of someone who took a road trip this summer and binge listened to episodes of Something You Should Know and wrote to tell me how much they enjoyed it. And if you're a relatively new listener, I invite you to dig back into our archives. Depending on what platform you listen on, you know, there's 300 plus episodes available. And most of the things we talk about on this podcast are pretty evergreen. And if you haven't heard them, I invite you to go back and give a listen. First up today, where do you keep your keys when you go to bed at night?

Well, you might want to keep them right on your nightstand. Why? Because if someone breaks in or you hear something outside that sounds like trouble, you can use your car security remote on your keychain to trigger the alarm in your car. Essentially, your car is an alarm system. If you hear someone, triggering that alarm will likely cause the bad guys to run away. It's also a good idea to keep your keys in your hand when you walk to your car for exactly the same reason, especially at night. If trouble happens, you can set off your alarm in your car, which causes everyone around to stop and look. And bad guys don't like when everyone turns around and looks. And that is something you should know. In your lifetime, you have to learn a lot.

We have to learn things all the time, in school, at work, with your hobbies and interests. There are skills and knowledge that you have to absorb. And I'm sure it is your experience, as it is mine, that some people learn better than others. I know that I learn some things better than other things. And a lot of what we learn, we forget if we don't use it very much. So when it comes to learning, what's the best way to learn? Are there shortcuts that can help you master something quicker and better? Here to discuss this is Ulrich Boeser, who has really studied the science of learning.

He is founder and CEO of the Learning Agency. He's a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and he's the author of the book, Learn Better. Hey, Ulrich, so what is learning? What does it mean to learn? At a high level, what we want to do when we learn something is to change the way that we think about it to change our practice. So if you haven't created some sort of change, you haven't learned. And that's why

taking more active forms of learning, like talking to yourself, there are a number of reasons why talking to yourself is beneficial, even if it's a little weird. But one of the reasons that it's beneficial is that it slows you down and makes that learning just a little bit more active, right? You avoid that experience that I think we've all had where you've read an article and halfway through, you're like thinking about, you know, how the warriors are going to do next year, right? You're not really paying attention. And so taking more active steps can really improve your learning because it keeps you a little bit more engaged. So in addition to talking to yourself, what kind of active steps can you do

so that you're not just reading and then realizing halfway through that you had, you just paid no attention to what you read? Brain dumps are another really effective tool. So if you read an article and you did pay attention, rather than reread it, put the article away and then just do a brain dump. Start writing down all the things that you learned. If the article is about COVID or politics or golf games, just write down everything that you learned. It's about 50% more effective than simply rereading that article because you're, one, pulling these things out of memory. Two, when you have to write it down, you have to kind of make some connections, right? You're not just writing down all the facts. You're trying to put it in some more coherent way. The problem with this approach is that it's a little bit more difficult. I had this experience recently, Mike, where I was practicing for a talk. And so I went

into a room and I had my notes in front of me and I just read the notes. I really depended on the notes. And I just like basically slapped myself on the forehead and was like, wow, you know, I wrote this whole book arguing for more effective forms of learning, whether it's brain dumps or talking to yourself. But then I change environments and I'm using this more, less effective kind of passive way of learning. And so if you're practicing for a speech, you're much better off once you have a basic sense of the talk, just putting the notes away, going into an empty room and forcing yourself just to give that talk because it's again, a more active way of learning. Don't you wonder why nobody teaches that in junior high school or high school? Like, okay,

since I want you to learn this, here's how I want you to go about learning it rather than I need you to learn chapter seven and we'll see you tomorrow for a quiz. This is why I'm here. This is what I feel like. I get really excited about my life's purpose. It's like, no, we should be teaching this. I think the problem sometimes is that, you know, it's a little annoying to be pedantic. Recently, well, not recently, maybe it was a year or two ago, I got a note from my daughter's teacher who asked, you know, what my daughter's learning style was. And I had this moment of like, do I be the annoying parent who sends, you know, research citations in the response, or do I just let it go? The bigger takeaway here though, is that this learning

process, figuring out how to learn can really make us more effective at just about anything. And it's an incredibly powerful tool to have in your toolbox. Explain this idea that, because I think people believe that there are visual learners and auditory learners and you say no. So how do we know that's not true? Well, first we have to define what it means when people say that they have a certain learning style. And what people say when they have a learning style is they learn better visually or they learn better auditorily or they're kinesthetic learners, right? That they learn physically. And first, if you just start to think about it, it doesn't really make sense.

If you want to be a pro soccer player, just listening to soccer podcasts, as much as I love podcasts, is not going to get you to be an effective soccer player, right? Even if you are a auditory learner, you're going to just go out and play. So one thing is the domain, what you want to learn has a huge impact on whether or not you should learn visually or learn auditorily. The other thing, and you hear people often say that they're a visual learner, is that our visual cues are just incredibly powerful, right? If you look around in the room that you're in right now, even if you're in a radio room in your bedroom, your visual cues are much more powerful than auditory. Auditory is, of course, sequential. If I just start jumbling my words out of order,

it's going to be very hard to understand. So what I think people are saying when they talk about learning styles is really this idea that people are different. And I want to be totally clear, people are very different. They have different areas of interest. They have different areas of working memories. They have different motivations. But we don't really have a really robust language to talk about how people are different, especially when it comes to learning. So we resort to this other language that's just not true. And lots of research on this idea where they've told people, you know, tell us your learning style and we'll teach you how to be good at X or Y. And it doesn't work.

And so what does work? Besides what we've talked about, which are two things, active learning and having a learning process where you're setting goals and reflecting on your learning. Another really helpful thing is analogies. Analogies are this funny thing where it also makes us go back to high school and think about that English teacher who tried to push us to find an analogy or a metaphor. But at the end of the day, analogies are at the core of any type of thinking because we think in terms of categories. And so one way to improve your learning is to use analogies.

And people use analogies a lot, but they don't really think about them. You know, when you hear new business pitches, people are saying things like, oh, it's like Uber, but for haircuts or Uber, but for childcare, Uber, but for childcare is probably a bad idea, but these analogies are a really important way to learn. And so if you're trying to learn something new, engage in that compare and contrast, try and figure out what the deep idea is and how you can understand it more deeply rather than those surface details is in a really effective way to learn. That compare and contrast, incredibly powerful. What about aptitude?

Are some people just wired better to do something? And that's why, you know, great athletes are great athletes and great composers are great composers because they have something that other people don't have. Or could anybody get there if they really wanted to? So one question is, you know, nature or nurture? Is it all about biology or is it all about the environment in which you grow up in? People love this debate and there are really loud voices of people who say, hey, it's all about nature. It's

all about nurture. I think when you look at the research, it turns out that it's complicated. And that when you look at people who are like great composers, right, whether it's Mozart or someone else, it turns out that his father had this incredibly powerful impact on him and trained him really early. And I think this mix is really important that it's both nature and nurture. The other thing that I would say is that the bell curve is really powerful. And what the bell curve says is that about 90% of us are pretty much the same. And so when we think about, hey, can you get better at Excel pivot tables or these things where people get really frustrated very easily.

Most of us are the same. And so we can reach that same level of heights. Yes, every once in a while, there is a LeBron James who can have a particularly unusual set of skills. But most of us are the same. And it's a matter of practice. It's a matter of these environments, all these other things that really can make a powerful difference when it comes to expertise and success. We're talking about learning and how to learn anything better.

My guest is Ulrich Boeser. He's author of the book, Learn Better. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a 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 Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. So Ulrich, I've always thought that interest level plays a huge part in this, because like you say, we could all get good at, you know, Excel tables and whatnot. But if you're not interested in it, where's the motivation? And if you're not motivated to do it, you're not going to do it. So you're not going to get good at. Right. And then the other thing about interest is that the more you know about something, finding out that next little fact, and you're like, oh, that's kind of cool, but I don't follow golf very much. And so, you know, if I find out a new detail that might be really of notable to a golf expert, I'm just going to shrug my shoulders. So that interest in motivation, which is, again, that we can get at home or we can get from where we grow up, really important.

And it's also something that will propel us for the rest of our lives. But if you one day went and played golf and you hadn't before and found out you really liked the game and you liked playing it, then all of a sudden your interest might increase and then you might get even better at it. I think that's totally true. So once you get started, you gain more interest, especially after you get after that little moment of beginner angst and fear. The thing that always surprises me about interest is that people who are interested in something have a really hard time understanding that other people aren't interested in it. And that the best way to bring people into something that you're excited about. So let's say you're excited about, well, here, let me give a different example. When I see and hear about college professors teaching about statistics, they course, love statistics, don't get why other people don't love statistics. And then they're like, well, if I just sprinkle a little

baseball on this, and then it's baseball meets statistics. But not everyone's interested in baseball either. And what the research shows on this is that if you can bring people in on their own vector, if you can bring people in on their own interests, it's far more effective. And so there's been these wonderful studies where they want to teach people statistics and they just say to them, write an essay about how you think you'll use this statistics later. Inevitably, some people might talk about gambling. Some people might talk about baseball, but some people might aspire to be nurses and say, hey, you know, I just really care about, as is relevant today, epidemics. And allowing people to find their own areas of interest, I think, is really important. And when you look at really charming political leaders, you know, we can go either way on Bill Clinton as a political leader.

But when you see him being his like charming way, a lot of it was like trying to figure out what people are interested in and then leverage that instead of just thinking, oh, if I mentioned the Kardashians, this will make this dry topic like Excel pivot tables a lot more exciting. Well, it might, but why not? Depends on your audience. So one of the things that's always kind of fascinated me about this is that we go through this process of going to school and learning all these different things. And everybody struggles, I think, with something. You know, some people are good at history and some people are good at math. But we make people take subjects that they're not interested in, that they'll likely never use, that, you know, you've got to take a class in English,

so you take, you know, in the 19th century poetry and you don't... We make people learn things that they have no interest in and that they will never ever use in their life. Why not let them learn things that excite them, that get them interested in the morning? All of us have this experience, right? When you reflect back onto what we learned, we are like, why did I possibly spend so much time on these little details? I think on one side, I totally agree. And at some point, we just, especially with younger students, just have to let them go with their passions.

But I'm going to offer a little bit of a defense about that thin spread of knowledge, because oftentimes when you hear people talking about learning today, they're like, facts don't matter anymore, that everything is on the internet. You can look at it on Wikipedia. We don't need these basic things to know about what date the civil war began or these really what appears to be mundane facts. And what it turns out, and this is really important to this idea of learning, is that content, just knowing something, is really important to know new things. And let me give you an example.

Haben Sie heute Morgen gefrühstückt? That's German for, have you eaten breakfast this morning? Now, you can pull your phone out of your pocket and look up each of those words, but unless you have them memorized, unless you have them top of mind, it's very hard to speak German. And it turns out to be true about chemistry or history that unless you have some basic knowledge, it's hard to become an expert or it's hard to even learn something new without some of that background knowledge. So I think it is important to give

people a broad amount of information so that they can figure out where they want to be interested, so they can read the newspaper and figure out some basic details and interest themselves. But too often schools are too focused on these real facts and just pushing details for the sake of the details without keeping in mind this broader thing, which is motivation and what's. And I can't speak a lick of it because, well, I don't know exactly why, but my guess is that teaching it in a class at a school two hours a week is a horrible way to learn French. And the real way to learn French is to go to France and speak it and immerse yourself in it. And taking French class seemed like

a big waste of time to me. I'd say two things. One, let's be clear about the best way to learn. It is to go to France. It is to have a tutor. Those things are really expensive. They're hard to scale, giving everyone a tutor, giving everyone a chance to go to France really hard. So we're stuck often with classrooms and no doubt we can make them better. The other thing that I'll say, and I find this really interesting, not sure if you do, but we also know why you can't speak French now. And the fact is, is that we all forget and we all forget at a regular rate. And not only that, this is built into our brains. And the reason is that our brain is built to forget things. And it does it so that you can remember where you put your cell phone and lost it

today, not where you lost it last week. And the difference is pulling things from memory. Another way to think about this is that you've never forgotten everything. If I were to come to you and I knew, and I hope I don't, your high school locker number, more than chance would suggest you would remember that. Maybe you've had this experience remembering the telephone number of a grammar school friend. What your brain does, it's a little bit like your attic. If you never bring down those holiday ornaments, it just goes further, further in the back, gaining more and more dust. But if you want to remember something, it's pulling it out of that memory attic. And that if you were to go to France today, much more than someone who never took any French, like myself, it would take some time, but eventually those words would creep

out of the attic and you'd get better a lot faster than, say, someone like me who was stuck learning Latin, which I also can't remember. Yeah, well, Latin, really? Yeah. I didn't know they taught that anymore. I mean, it's hard to go somewhere and speak that. That's true. You at least have the advantage that when you go to Paris, a couple of words like merci will come rolling off of your tongue fairly quickly. so much and anybody who's a parent and tried to help their child as I've done with my fourth grader and my high schooler, help them with their homework, you don't remember almost anything. But

it sounds like what you're saying is that that's not the test. That's not the test you should be using as to whether or not you should have learned something. But if that's not the test, what is it? Then why are we learning it? So what I would say is you learn some of these facts and you simply forgot them, but that if you sat down and, you know, watch a couple of YouTube videos, listen to a couple of podcasts about math or science or whatever the details are that your fourth grader and high schooler are learning, a lot of it would come back to you. The issue is that you just haven't used it. So it goes back into the deep recesses of your brain.

You know, there was always this debate, I remember, of, you know, should we allow kids to use calculators? Because if they use calculators, they won't have the skill of adding, subtracting, dividing numbers. And then the argument is, well, but they won't need the skill because the calculator. Who doesn't have a calculator? But is there something inherently good about knowing how to divide and add and subtract? Or is the argument that everybody has a calculator is good enough? The best single predictor of what you're able to learn is what you already know. And this goes back to this

motivation issue that we talked about earlier. Just having some knowledge about something really allows you to learn more about it. So this idea that no one needs to learn any addition and subtraction anymore because they have a calculator or a cell phone is, I think, really short sighted because you need these numbers just to engage in higher order math. But at the same time, it's really easy, especially when we think about tests in school, it's just easy to test these very rote bits of information as opposed to richer information that we really want people to know. So if we think about the study of war, you could just get really interested in knowing all the facts. And that's interesting, helpful, but really what we want to know about are analogies. We want to know about patterns. And so you're far more, you're going to gain a lot more about thinking about, you know, what is the role of speed in war? And then,

you know, we can start thinking about, oh, you know, the Germans used speed to win World War II. In other areas, like World War I, it was much more slower. How does that role of speed play in other wars? Why is it important? When is it important? Those types of compare and contrast, thinking about analogies are much richer ways to really understand a topic, whether it's math or bit vague, frankly, that this whole idea of, you know, you need to learn something, study this so you can really learn it. So what does that mean? And what's the best way to do that? And you've really helped clarify that. Ulrich Boeser has been my guest. He is founder and CEO of The Learning Agency, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and he's author of the book, Learn Better. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.

Thanks, Ulrich. Cool. Well, keep up the great work. I'm really thrilled that you guys are engaging on this. Thank you. 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? 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 listener 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. I'm certain you have wondered about why and how your brain works. Why sometimes are your memories very accurate and other times your memories are way off? How do other people affect the way you think? What is your personality? Where does it come from? These are things I think everybody thinks about or wonders about from time to time.

And Dr. Dean Burnett has explored and researched all of this. Dean is a neuroscientist working as a tutor and lecturer based at Cardiff University's Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences. He's also author of the book, Idiot Brain, What Your Head Is Really Up To. Hi, Dean. Hi, Michael. Thank you for having me. So start with just an example of what you mean by what your head is really up to. Well, travel sickness is my go-to example. It's a weird thing whereby just moving on something

makes you sick. What's happening there is that your senses are telling your brain different things. Your eyes are saying, we're fine, because we are in a stationary environment, especially if you're in a ship or an airplane where you can't see things going by, and your body's still, but your ears, the balance sensors are going all over the place because they respond to physics.

So they're saying you're moving. The brain is getting conflicting messages. And, you know, this is related to the fundamental parts of the brain, which are very, shall we say, you know, old school. And the only thing they can think of is that you're being poisoned. You're hallucinating. So they make you want to be sick. So cars and vehicles and ships make you feel sick because the brain doesn't know what's happening at a fundamental level. One of the things that the brain does or that we think

does well is it remembers the past, our past, that we have very fond, vivid memories, very horrible memories, but we assume that they're accurate. Yes, we assume that, but they're not completely inaccurate. It's just that it's more of a gist than hard, detailed specifics because the memory is very flexible. The more times you think about something and sort of tell a story about it and elaborate it, that'll be added to the original memory, and it'll change over time. Or you could have an emotional experience about something which will change a past memory.

So say if you met someone at a party and you just met them in passing, didn't think anything of it, that'll be a very neutral memory. You'll barely remember them. You see their face on the news five years later, they've been charged with being a serial killer, that becomes a very weird memory all of a sudden.

So your memory is very flexible and can be adapted and updated all the time, and it usually is. And a lot of that's to do with emotions and experiences, but it's not a hard and fast concrete guide to the past, no. What is something that the human brain isn't particularly good at or doesn't handle well? One of the things I've often really quite liked about the brain, which seems to apply to everyone, is that the brain just reacts, the human brain in particular, of course, I mean, it reacts really badly to uncertainty of any sort.

Like the brain really does not like not knowing what's going to happen, not knowing how things are going to pan out. And that's actually a really big source of stress in the modern world. And it's sort of got the point where the human brain it's it's like become a victim of its own success because When you hear it's a simpler creature like a primitive like rodent or so anything in the wild You think uncertainty is in like what's that noise? What's that shape? What's going on? Where can I am I gonna find food today?

These are genuine reasons to be stressful But they very sort of straightforward and they can trigger the threat parts of the brain which make you feel stress and anxiety and the fear response. But the human brain is so much more capable of understanding possibilities, like the possibility that you lose your job, the possibility that the economy will go downhill or the possibility of a natural disaster in 10 years' time. These are things which don't necessarily happen, which may never happen, but they can still stress us out because we don't know. And not knowing stuff causes us to be stressful. And it's become sort of a vicious cycle of not knowing and becoming upset about that. And then these are all things which may never happen, but we can still worry about them. And that's sort of a downside of having this much cognitive power in the human brain.

Well, and I've heard psychologists say that most of those things never do happen. It's this rumination, this ability to, what if this happens and what if this happens? Chances are they never will, but it doesn't make you feel any better. That's exactly the problem, yeah. Like these are, so much of modern life is stressful and people will say we have it better than we've ever had. You know, human existence is far more comfortable than any time in the past.

That's not to be, that's not in question. It's a case of, that's not how the brain works. It doesn't work in terms of, okay, so this could be worse. Objectively, there are things in the past were worse than now it's your life is your baseline and things getting worse are what causes you to be stressful and like you say we are just so prone to it we are anxious creatures and there's even the process of counterfactual thinking in that you can know that something didn't happen so like you can worry about you know crossing the road at a busy

junction or like missing your flight and you know you can cross the road and be fine or you catch a plane but you can still worry about the possibility that you didn't do that even though demonstrably you it didn't happen it can't happen now it's in the past and but we still worry about these things because when we think of what if what what if, what if I'd done that, we realize how close we came to disaster. And that still causes us stress. So, you know, we are a very nervous species by and large thanks to the way the brain is just constantly looking for things to worry about. It seems to be hardwired into our being. What's another thing the brain does that you find interesting?

Another particular example I like is phobias, in that these are irrational fears of things which, by and large, aren't harmful. Arachnophobia is a pretty common example in that people are afraid of spiders when the spider is like a tiny fraction of the size of a human and poses them no actual danger. But it's an evolved tendency. Spiders in the wild were poisonous and so on. But phobias of anything like heights enclosed spaces or even something random like clowns or whatever it is now logically these things aren't dangerous so if we're exposed to them and nothing happens to us what should happen is the brain goes I was afraid of that then I encountered it interacted with it nothing bad happened therefore I will learn that they are

not dangerous and that's what people think should happen like it's like face your fears idea but that isn't what what happens because the brain's fear response is so ingrained and so powerful to this this source of the phobia that say if you're afraid of spiders you sit down on a table and a tiny little spider comes along it's a harmless situation but your brain goes spider hits the alert button so like your heart rate goes up you start freaking out you start hyperventilating your adrenaline goes to the roof you start screaming and gibbering you jump away and that's what the brain remembers it's sort of like right i encountered a spider i had this absolute meltdown so clearly spiders are dangerous that's logic that is and that's why phobia has become sort of self-sustaining and self-perpetuating and curing them is a really long drawn on gradual process

because you have to get someone used to something without setting off this highly ingrained but really unhelpful fear response so yeah the brain becomes its own worst enemy by constantly looking for threats it's kind of paradoxical in a way is there anything if you flip that around is there anything that like the brain because mostly we've been talking about the weird and somewhat destructive things the brain does. But what does the brain do that's just phenomenal? Oh, there's so many things. I mean, the concept of empathy in that you can see someone else and from the very subtle cues that they're given off, without even knowing, your brain is detecting all that and using a very sophisticated network of internal connections and mechanisms and nuclei in different parts of the brain. It's deciphering the emotional content of someone's physique or someone's bodily movements and all of that, that's knowing it.

And then it causes us in certain circumstances to feel that emotion too so emotions can be shared between two different people without it's not something we have to learn it's just something that happens to us it happens to us from a very young age even newborn babies show an ability to do this like they can recognize when someone else is distressed or they can recognize other babies cries from their own and you know we're talking newborns they haven't actually had a chance to learn anything yet so it's clearly ingrained but yeah they say it's almost like mind reading but it's not it's anything it's more impressive because if we read in our mind we'd just be looking at something and seeing what it says whereas it's all these subtle cues we're constantly putting out without realizing which betray our emotional state and other people can

pick these up and experience the motion themselves in order to share an empathic feeling. And it's something which we can't build devices or machines which can do that yet because it's just beyond our technology. So it's really quite – but it's ongoing. It's like a basic function of the brain, but it's also quite mind-blowing, I would say. One of the things I wonder about is the brain seemingly is like a sponge. It absorbs things from the environment that you live in and the people around you and that if you grew up somewhere else or if you lived in another part of the world, you might be a very different person because of your surroundings, both the physical surroundings and the people in your life.

Absolutely, yes. I mean, the social aspect of humans is, it can't be overstated, like you say. A lot of the data suggests that we are the most social species out of all species because although we like you say we have a tendency to be unpleasant to each other we are considering how many of us there are and how much time we spend together we are a lot better than pretty much every other species like our closest evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee they can handle groups of like maybe 30 plus very more than that they start getting really violent and angry and doing some serious damage to each other whereas whereas we don't.

We can have stadiums full of people just sat side by side watching the same thing. And that's fairly impressive for a species to do that. And there's even a lot of evidence suggesting that this is why we've evolved the way we have, because human tribes are so social and cooperative that they became too dominant in the wild. So the normal things which would shape your evolution didn't hold anymore like you don't need to avoid predators because the tribe takes care of that you don't need to find mates because the tribes all around you and finding food and so on so the things that drove our evolution were more social in nature making the most friends being the most sociable making maintaining the most relationships and all

of which requires more brain power than just brutal survival. So yeah, so much of our brain is dedicated to forming and maintaining and engaging with other people and relationships. And things like the striatum is a very social neuroscientific region which contains lots of areas which if you have a positive social interaction, you experience a genuine reward and just interaction alone is very rewarding and rejection is painful on a very real level because that's just how our brains work. We are incredibly social. When things go wrong, when there's mental illness or when something horrible happens that, you know, a person commits a terrible crime or what's going, is it just, is it, what is it?

Yeah, obviously there's a lot of different options there. Like if you think of in terms of mental health problems, the most common ones would be depression and anxiety. So depression is probably the go-to for all things mental health when it goes wrong. A lot of different theories of what's going on there with depression. The most common one was the monoamine hypothesis for a while, which is the one that says it's all to do with an imbalance or a deficiency in neurotransmitters. But more recent data suggests that that's a part of it, but that's actually a small component of the overall um or the overall big picture and current data suggests that it's parts of the brain depression is caused by parts of the brain becoming essentially worn out and

not sort of broken but like overtaxed by constant stimulation by stress and the stress chemicals is constantly hitting the part of the brain which is responsible for controlling mood and emotion and because the part the brain stem is a more fundamental part which regulates these stress chemicals but because modern life is so stressful they can often become confused and the system which stops them being produced is sort of sort of becomes short circuits and then we end up being constantly bombarded with stress chemicals and and this causes the responsive neurons to be overexcited and they become exhausted essentially and i think depression isn't necessarily you know sadness or low mood although it is that it's constant low mood it has to be there for at least two weeks or more i know so that's why that's the difference between generally being sad or having a low

mood and being genuinely clinically depressed is when you can't stop being depressed. And anxiety is sort of related. It's like when the amygdala part of the brain, which is responsible for fear and threat perception and emotion, the ability to shut that off becomes compromised for some reason. So you're constantly stressed, constantly heightened, constantly alert for dangers, even though there's nothing to be afraid of. But yeah, so there's so many different ways which the brain can and regularly does go wrong that there's no real way

to summarize that in a podcast. That's a whole, I mean, that's been like several hundred years of science and counting as they've tried to condense that into one understandable whole. But is it the case where at least sometimes it's not that the brain something goes wrong the the wiring from the

factory is wrong i think that that's where it comes down to the difference between psychiatric and neurological disorders i mean a neurological disorder is when something in the workings of the brain has gone like say wrong like parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, Huntington's disease, and other neurological epilepsy would be a neurological disorder. It's part of the brain of firing when they shouldn't be and causing a mess. So those are kind of the neurological head in, but they also have psychiatric or psychological problems with them because obviously that's going to cause problems with the way the brain is running. Whereas psychiatric or psychological disorders, however you want to define them, there's technically

nothing wrong with the brain. It's just being made to do the wrong thing if that's the way to discern it. I guess you could argue it's like some people hesitate to do this, but if you look at the brain as like a computer example, a neurological problem would be a hardware problem. Something's wrong with the processes. Something's wrong with the RAM. Whereas a psychiatric problem would be a software problem. There's a bad code or there's a virus or a bug in the system which is making it do bad things or unhelpful things. But if you've got a virus, you don't strip out the motherboard.

You try and fix it. You give it different instructions. And that's sort of where the distinction lies, as always. It's more complex than that. But that's a general good rule of thumb to look at when it comes to is the brain going wrong or not or is this being told to do unhelpful things. The comparison of the brain to a computer, is that a reasonable comparison?

A lot of neuroscientists don't like it because it does bring up a lot of assumptions which are unhelpful in terms of how the brain works. The brain is nowhere near as compartmentalized and organized as a computer. There's no memory bank. There's no files like, no files. But I'm personally okay with it because at present,

it's a useful analogy because it helps people explain what the brain is doing. But there's nothing else really like that in the wider world which people can relate to and understand in that, you know, a computer is a thing which manipulates information, which stores memory, which, you know which creates visual things. And the brain does all that, too. It does it in very different ways. But as a sort of gateway analogy, yeah, I think it's fine.

But if you start saying the brain is like a computer and therefore we should treat it like a computer, then you're going to run into problems because the brain doesn't really operate along those lines at all. I mean, there's lots of sci-fi about people uploading their minds onto computers and so on and so on. But that's way beyond anything we're capable of right now because electronic technology and neurology just don't work in the same way. They're fundamentally incompatible and there's a lot of work that needs to be done just to get them to be able to talk to each other in a useful way. Trevor Burrus So one more thing before we go, one more thing A lot of work needs to be done just to get them to be able to talk to each other in a useful way.

So one more thing before we go, one more thing that the brain does that's either amazingly great or amazingly horrible. Sleep is actually probably a very good one because it's one of those things everyone takes for granted. It's a fundamental process. We need to do it. But it's also scientifically very rich and very confusing. You think it's just a period of unconsciousness. The brain is shut off for a bit, the bare minimum of functioning. And it isn't.

Sleep is incredibly complex. The sleeping brain is often as active or more active than the waking brain. It's just that the body is shut down. Because sleep is when the brain does essentially all the maintenance it needs to do after a day of experience. And the body needs rest, but the brain is just chugging away. During REM sleep, that's when all the cellular debris, the waste of all the complex processes that take place in the brain, that's all cleared away better because things have stopped. And all our memories accumulated in the day are sort of sorted and organized and consolidated better and you know things become more attuned and the brain does rest as well but not all of it does so sleeping is actually a very very complex and important process but you know the theories to why we sleep are very many and varied

and it's an evolutionary interest in it. It's so important that things like hibernating animals, when you hibernate, you're actually more comatose than sleeping. But sleep is so important, hibernating animals need to wake up a bit in order to sleep. And that became quite confusing. I tried to work that one out. So, yeah, so even when the brain's seemingly not doing anything,

it's doing a great deal, and a lot of it's really impressive. Well, it must be because, I mean, think of how much time we spend sleeping. I mean, supposedly a third of our lives were out of it. So it must be doing something important. Yeah, yeah. So again, it's so important. Like animals have evolved ways to do it when it's really unhelpful. Like dolphins and migratory birds have unihemispheric sleep.

Like one half of the brain sleeps while the other half runs the body, and then they swap over so they don't sink and drown or just fall out of the sky while flapping. So clearly there is something deeply important about sleep, even when it's really unhelpful, we still have to do it. I wonder why we can't do that. Why can't we rest half our brain and then the other, and then we'd never have to go it. I wonder why we can't do that. Why can't we rest half our brain and then the other and then we'd never have to go to bed?

Well, that'll always be the dream, of course, but we do need a very powerful complex brain, so we need kind of both working in tandem to function. But we do, so we do do it to a certain extent. There's something called the first night effect whereby if you sleep somewhere new, the first night is never as restful as your own bedroom is.

Because there's a part of your brain which is still ticking away, modeling for threats when you're asleep, which knows that you're in a different environment. Like the space is all wrong. The sound, the acoustics are all wrong. And that stops you from ever becoming too fundamentally asleep. You don't relax too much, and that's why, even if it's like the best possible hotel or the most comfortable bed the planet has to offer, you still won't sleep as well on the first night as you will subsequent nights when you're a bit more used to it. So, yeah, there's always a part of your brain which is sort of watching out for things going

on, and sometimes it gets a little bit carried away. Well, it's always working, isn't it? Your brain's always doing something or trying to do something, and it's interesting to get some insight into exactly what it's doing. Dean Burnett's been my guest. He is a neuroscientist who is a tutor and lecturer based at Cardiff University's Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neuroscience, and he's author of the book Idiot Brain, What Your Head Is Really Up To.

There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes, and I appreciate you being here. Thank you, Dean. Thanks for having me. Much appreciated. If you go to a seafood restaurant and they have lobster, lobster is probably one of, if not the most expensive things on the menu. Well, why is lobster so expensive? According to the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, there are several reasons. Lobster farms are pretty much impossible.

Lobsters have to be caught in the wild, in the ocean, and they're not always easy to find. Then they have to be transported alive, and that's expensive. 83% of lobsters come from Maine, and most of the rest come from Massachusetts or Canada. But lobster wasn't always expensive. Native Americans once used them for fertilizer. Pilgrims and the colonists considered them a poor man's food. Lobster were so abundant that they would literally wash ashore in piles.

They initially gained their status during the Gilded Age in New York City and Boston and have remained that way ever since. Finally, there's another element in play. Every restaurant knows that when you add something expensive to a menu, it makes everything else look more appealing and reasonably priced.

So that's another incentive to keep the price of lobster high. And that is something you should know. If you have a friend who's the curious type and likes to learn new things, I'm sure they would enjoy this podcast. So share the link and tell a friend. 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

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, 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.

Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured,

hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was,

"'He's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type.'" With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.