Something You Should Know - How to Read A Person's Behavior & The Science of Extremes

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

It’s weird sometimes how you meet someone and hear their name is Lucy, for example and think – “Yeah, she kinda looks like a Lucy.” Is that really a thing – do people look like their name? Listen as I reveal some fascinating research on this. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121 Tells. They are those little behaviors people have that give them away. You hear about tells in poker, but you can learn to read someone’s tells in everyday life according to my guest Peter Collett. Peter is a social psychologist who has taught at Oxford University and is widely acknowledged as an international expert on communication. He has been called a “grand master of the secret code of fleeting gestures, signs and expressions that give us all away.” He is author of the book, How To Tell What People Are Thinking From the Bedroom to the Boardroom (https://amzn.to/3WVytDM). Listen as he offers some very practical advice on how to read people based on their behavior.  This is a fun topic – EXTREMES! The biggest, the brightest, the stickiest, the loudest, the quietest. We are going to discuss the extremes in many categories with my guest David Darling. He is a science writer, astronomer and author of about 50 books –including Ka-boom!: The Science of Extremes (https://amzn.to/3X5gTgJ). If you have ever wondered what the most poisonous thing or what’s the brightest light on earth, or the slowest thing that actually moves – this will be a fascinating conversation to listen to.  How could it be that a birthday cake will taste better if you sing “Happy Birthday” first? Listen as I explain how this phenomenon and how it works in other areas of life as well. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/to-savor-the-flavor-perform-a-short-ritual-first.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, ever meet someone named Susie and she kind of looks like a Susie? Why is that? Then a person's gestures or movements can tell you a lot about them if you know how to read them. Like their feet. The direction in which people's feet are pointing is also highly informative.

If you're chatting to somebody new, it's always a good idea to look at their feet. Ideally, if you extend the lines out from their toes, you should be enclosed within those two lines. Also, why saying grace can make a meal taste better. And extremes in our world. The loudest, the stickiest, the biggest, and the brightest. The brightest light on earth is actually in Las Vegas, and it shoots up in the sky from one of the resorts there. In fact, it's so bright that it attracts all the wildlife

from miles around, bats and the insects and that type of thing. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. 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. 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.

Hey, hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So here's a question for you. Have you ever met someone and thought, you know, they kind of look like their name, you know, like he kind of looks like a Ken, or she looks like a Jennifer, or he looks like a Jeff. Well, there might be something to this. According to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

both children and adults can tell the names of adults by looking at pictures of them at a rate better than mere chance. But they could not tell the names of children by looking at pictures of them at a rate better than mere chance. But they could not tell the names of children by looking at pictures of them at a rate better than chance. So how can this be? Well, according to researchers who conducted this,

as people mature, they may alter their appearance over time to conform to cultural expectations associated with their name, without even knowing they're doing it. In other words, if your name is Susie, over time, you start to look like a Susie. As further evidence of this, when they used artificial intelligence to age photos of children to make them look like adults, people were not able to tell their names. The study gets a bit complicated, and there's a link to it in the show notes if you want

to read more, but it does seem that people tend to look like their names over time. And that is something you should know. You know what a tell is, right? You hear about tells in poker. People have these little behaviors and movements like how they hold their cards or how they look at their cards

or how they place their bets. If you know how to read them, you can tell if the other player is bluffing or if he or she has a good or bad hand. But tells work in everyday life as well. There are common tells that if you know how to read them can give you insight into what other people are really thinking.

That's according to my guest, Peter Collette. Peter is a social psychologist who has taught at Oxford University and is widely acknowledged to be a world expert on communication. He has been called a grandmaster of the secret code of fleeting gestures, signs, and expressions that give us all away. He's author of a book called How to Tell What People Are Thinking, From the Bedroom to the Boardroom. Hi, Peter. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you very much. So until I saw your book, I mean, I'd never associated tells with anything other than playing cards, that I thought that's kind of what

it was all about. But you say it applies in everyday life too. I do. I've requisitioned the term tell and I've used it throughout. And I think it's very informative and illustrative and it's illuminating because as you probably know, and a lot of your listeners will know, in order to play the game of poker with some effectiveness, it's absolutely crucial that you do two things. One, you make sure that other people don't know what the hell you're thinking or intend to do next. And at the same time, you also try to read what kind of cards they might be holding on the basis of their behaviour, what they say and do. Now, those two elements, in other words, keeping a poker face on the one hand and interpreting other people's behaviours, they are

not peculiar to poker. They are general. They apply to almost every walk of life, you know, from our love lives to our association with our friends and with our business partners and so on. In other words, I think it's fair to say that the notion of tell applies right across the board. So explain how that works. I mean, how do tells work in everyday life, in your everyday life? If you were to say to me, Peter, confess, what are your personal tells? What are your personal giveaways? I would have to say to you, there are two things that give me away I've noticed. Now, this is not to say for a moment that I'm in a position

to control these, by the way, but I am in a position to recognize when I've done them. Now, the one is what I call the eye wipe. In other words, if you place your index finger underneath your eye and drag it away from your nose towards your ear, that's the gesture i call the eye wipe and it's pretty common i mean prince charles did it right in the middle of his wedding ceremony with diana and i think that was a very important tell because it showed in that context that he was a troubled man now just coming to me if i may my eye wipe i seem seem to, as it were, share that particular signature tell with him. Other people have it too, but it's something that he has and that I also do fairly commonly. So I'm able to gauge, in other words, I'm able to, as it were,

read my own behavior. Not only my own behavior, but I can read the behavior of others simply on the basis of this very tiny little gesture. And what does that tell? What does that eye wipe tell about you? What it obviously tells me is that I'm experiencing something sad. Now, on occasions, I'll know that. I'll be watching a movie which distresses me and I find myself doing the eye wipe. But the more interesting version of that is when I don't even know that I'm sad and I find myself doing the eye wipe and then reflecting upon that, I suddenly realize that something has crossed my mind, which has saddened me.

It is all to do with sadness. Do you have other tells that you know about? The other little giveaway that I have is a tendency, for example, to touch my face when I'm talking to people whom I regard as being more powerful or important than me. Now, this is a fairly common tell. It's not, as it were, a signature tell, which is peculiar to very few people. Lots of people do it. And the reason they do it, well, there's a variety of reasons why they do it, but it's

something that I do and I've noticed myself doing it. And I now make a special point of trying to avoid doing it. Why? Because I think that even if they're not consciously acknowledging what I'm doing, other people, important people, as it were, may be able to read the fact that I'm deferring to them, that I'm aware of their position vis-a-vis me. Really? So you're saying that if you touch your face when you're talking to someone in a superior position, like your boss or something, that you're sending a signal that you're acknowledging that you're in an inferior position. And so you don't do that, or you try not to do that, because that's one of your tells. And do you think you can use these tells to tell if someone is lying to you? Well, let me put the question to you. How can you tell if somebody's lying from

their body language? I don't think I could articulate it, but I sometimes think I can spot it, but I don't know what it is I'm spotting. Okay. What about patterns of gaze? Yeah, I know. You mean like where they look? Yeah. Or how much they look at you. Yeah. Well, I would assume the less they look at me, the more likely they are lying. You share that opinion with the majority of people, that if people don't look at you, there's a higher probability that they're lying. The other conclusion that people draw is that if somebody is fidgeting, can't sit still, then they're probably lying too.

Both of these turn out to be incorrect for very good reasons. When somebody is lying to you, they unconsciously or consciously know that there's this assumption around about gaze patterns. If I don't look at this person, he or she is going to think I'm lying. So what they do is they overreact by looking at you more. When it comes to fidgeting, the reason why people fidget less, in fact, some liars become almost frozen in their demeanor. The reason for that is they're doing their utmost to ensure that they don't give you any information about their inner state at all. So those are the two ways in which people draw the wrong conclusions about the signals associated with lying. The interesting remark you've made

about, well, I get a gut feeling about it. Now, there's actually an interesting study where they contrasted people trying to detect if others had told them the truth or lied to them are on the basis of either gut feelings or analysis of the other person's behaviour. And what they've found is that when people are directed to actually look at the tells, they're much more accurate than when they go on the basis of their gut feelings. There's a whole lot of interesting things about lying, not least the fact that if you ask people how good they are at detecting liars, most people consider themselves to be above average.

But the majority of people are no better than chance. In other words, people are about as good as throwing a dice when it comes to detecting other people's lies. What about using tells in romance and specifically like when you see somebody across the room or something, are there tells that give you an indication that that person is interested or not? And I've heard that, you know indication that that person is interested or not? And I've heard that, you know, men are particularly bad at this. First of all, men get it wrong, by and large.

But your initial question, how can you tell if somebody's got an interest in you, has a lot to do with gaze patterns. And one of the things that happens in a romantic encounter, when two people are, as it were, moving towards each other, one of the ways in which women and not men, one of the ways in which women indicate their interest in men is by providing what I call an approach tell. In other words, it's permission to make the next move. And as Darwin said, sex is always a matter of female choice. So what's the tell? The tell is a slightly prolonged look, possibly with the eyes slightly widened possibly over the shoulder which is a very sexy way of doing it possibly with the lips slightly parted but it's infinitesimally long longer than one of those mistaken glances one gets when somebody catches your eye and then

they break off but we're pretty sensitive to that. And that, as you've indicated, is often an indication, it's often a clue to the fact that the person has some residual preparatory interest in taking things further. And it goes both ways, that slightly elongated gaze, men to women and women to men? Yes, but with the proviso that when it comes to heterosexual interactions and courtship and flirtation, it's the women that call the shots. Men think they do, but in this regard, as so many others, they're completely mistaken. We're talking about tells, little body language things people do, what they are and how to read them. And my guest is Peter Collette. He is author of the book,

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And still get groceries. Shop now at PCExpress.ca. So, Peter, can you run down a couple of common tells and what they mean? And one that I see frequently, I guess, is, you know, when people say something, it's not really shocking, but you react as if it is. You know, you put your hand to your neck or your chest and you open your eyes and, oh my gosh, you know, this kind of fake shock. You see that a lot.'s very it's a quite a youthful gesture actually uh this shock horror uh as you've described it you know hands up eyebrows raised eyes opened jaw dropped you know there will be occasions when it's a genuine reaction to something that you've said or or you've seen somebody else say.

But equally, there will be times when it's a synthetic gesture designed to communicate something to you, and one that doesn't really reflect the potency of the signal itself. In other words, people aren't really that shocked. It's just that they want you to know that they're that shocked in order to, as it were, realign themselves with you.

Now, if they think, for example, that you want to tell them something that's horrifying, unexpected or whatever, and in the process of doing so, they react that way. It's a kind of kindness on their behalf. It's not as though they're doing it necessarily to draw attention to themselves. They're doing that because they are thinking to themselves, not acknowledging their own thought processes, by the way. They're thinking to themselves, oh my goodness, this is a story about something surprising. I better look surprised. Well, I think I've done that plenty of times.

We all do all the time. You do it with children a lot too, because you want them to see your reaction to what they said so they get what your reaction is. And that's a great way to do it, is to demonstrate it as well as say it. Yeah. Well, it is a kind of gestural conversation, isn't it? Something that operates in parallel with what we're saying. And that, I think, is probably fair. It's probably fair to say that that's true of almost everything we do when we're engaged

in a face-to-face conversation with somebody. You know, the two lines of interaction, there's not only what we're saying and how we're saying it, but at the same time, there's all the stuff to do with tells, you know, our comportment, our orientation towards the other person, how far or close we are to them, how we rearrange our limbs, what we do with our hands and face and the whole panoply. Everything is going on. Now, what's interesting, of course, is that people are reading that stuff, but that's not to say that they could unnecessarily articulate it. What about people's feet? I've heard that you can tell that it's a tell, that you can tell something about the person you're talking to if you look down at their feet

yeah the direction in which people's feet are pointing is also highly informative some years ago i was watching crufts the great dog competition which has been televised and i turned to my wife and said you see the judge there this was now in the final judgment and the judge was going to decide which of the dogs who had won their divisions was going to be top dog and i turned to her and i said you see the poodle on the right there that's the one he's going to choose and she fittingly said well what the hell do you know about dogs and i said no no it's not about the dogs watch the judge's foot his right foot is pointing right at that dog and lo and behold moments later that was the dog he selected as best in show is it fair to say that if you're talking to someone and their feet are pointing in a direction that isn't you that that says something and if they are pointing at you that also says something yes

if you're chatting to somebody new uh if for example you are concerned about whether or not they find you attractive want to continue the conversation or whatever it's always a good idea to look at their feet ideally if you extend the lines out from their toes, you should be enclosed within those two lines. On occasion, what you'll find is that the foot is pointing at somebody else. And if you watch their eyes closely, you might find them steal a glance at that person. In other words, suggesting that they probably would prefer to be chatting to the person at whom their foot is pointing. Equally, if the foot is pointing

at the exit, the door, that likewise might provide clues to an intention to escape this little engagement that you've got with him presently. So there are these body language things that people do, you know, like folding your arms, right? the in the conventional wisdom is that you're putting up a barrier that you're closing up that you that that says something and and maybe it does but couldn't it also be you're just folding your arms and it has nothing to do with anything else yeah yeah now I think you're right there by the way I mean there are occasions when these actions are innocent, but there are also times when by crossing your arms, you are actually establishing a barrier signal against any intrusion by somebody else nearby. Folding arms in itself is a very interesting gesture, by the way. I mean, why don't you do so?

Okay. Okay. I'm folding my arms. right you're doing it yes looking looking down at your arms you will see that either your right or your left arm is on top as it were now which is it in your case right my my right arm is on top okay just like me now other words, did you know that to be the case? Absolutely not. You never knew that you were a right over left person. Now, switch it so that the left is over the right. It's a struggle. It requires quite a lot of thinking. Yeah, it does. It really does. Have you got yourself in complete knots at this stage no i know i've asked you to do that for two for two reasons one to illustrate the fact that a lot of our actions are completely unconscious and there are also a whole range of things we do where we are so ingrained in our habits that we can't actually do something that's quite

different. So do most people go right over left or is it 50-50 or what? I think it's fairly even. But the point I wanted to make really was that, you know, the power of habit is all-encompassing and we do things habitually, unthinkingly and without any conscious awareness of what we're doing this doesn't mean for a moment that other people aren't aware of what we're doing even if they don't even know that they've spotted what we're doing because a lot of our actions can as it were creep in under their radar and impact on them. So we have to be on our guard, as it were, against giving people information about our inner world, simply because they're quite capable of picking up our behavior and reaching a conclusion about

what kind of people we are, what kinds of thoughts and preferences we have, possibly even what we're likely to do next purely on the basis of our nonverbal behavior. Can you pick two or three common tells and explain what they mean so that I might use that in my life? Well, the handshake is a very interesting one. In our society, a lot of greetings, a high proportion of them are conducted via the handshake.

And it's designed as a kind of egalitarian exchange. We both, as it were, you and I, when we shake hands, we both do the same thing. So it's an expression of our equality in contrast to previous greetings, which involves a bowing or cursing, which were asymmetric, you know, where the subordinate, as it were, expressed their respect for the superior. And the handshake is designed to underline the fact that there's no difference between us. There are people, of course,

who cannot resist the opportunity to use the handshake to gain an advantage over other people. So if, for example, I would shake hands with you and I were to twist my, or I were to present my hand to you, palm down, you would be forced to greet me with your hand, palm up. I would, in the process, have gained the upper hand, both figuratively and literally. And even though you don't really recognize it, you would have felt slightly subordinated

by the practice. What I find so interesting about this is how all these tells, all these various body language things, these expressions, these gestures, we see people doing them all the time. We do them all the time. They're communicating something and somehow it doesn't register, but it really adds to the meaning. I've been speaking with Peter Collette. He is a social psychologist and author of the book, How to Tell What People Are Thinking from the Bedroom to the Boardroom. And if you'd like to read his book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on today, Peter.

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your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply. The world is full of extremes. The brightest, the biggest, the loudest, the stickiest.

Lots of extremes. And they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, except they are extreme. So someone has gathered many of these extremes together in one book, and so that we can talk about them. David Darling is a science writer, astronomer, and author of about 50 books, including Kaboom! The Science of Extremes. Hi David, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, it's nice to be here. So let's start with an extreme. What is the brightest thing on Earth? Well, the brightest light on Earth is actually in Las Vegas, and it shoots up in the sky from

one of the resorts there, and it's tremendously bright. In fact, it's so bright that it attracts all the wildlife from miles around. And you can see it from a great distance away. In fact, if you're in a plane, you can see it from tens of miles away. And that's really the brightest artificial light on Earth, except going into a laboratory, for example. And it attracts all kinds of wildlife, bats and all the insects and that type of thing. And it's tremendously hot. You can imagine the amount of energy that's required to fire this thing up there. Beyond that, you would have to go beyond the Earth, really, and into space, where, of course, we end up with a lot of these records because that's where the brightest, the biggest, the most distant things are. Well, obviously, I think of the sun as being pretty bright. But as suns go, as stars go, is the sun bright?

There are many, many stars out there. And all the stars that you can see in the night sky with the unaided eye are actually brighter than the sun see maybe a couple of thousand three thousand stars every single one of those stars is brighter than the sun some of them are thousands of times brighter tens of thousands of times brighter and in the most extreme cases of the biggest, most energetic stars, actually millions of times brighter than the sun. The stickiest is in your list of things you looked at. So I can't wait to hear what's the stickiest. Well, of course, a lot of insects are sticky. You see flies, for example, climbing up the side of walls and they just appear to be sticking there. They're not actually sticking there. There's no glue on the feet of flies or indeed any other animals. hairs, microscopy. You would have to look under a microscope to see them. And they use these tiny

hairs to grip onto any roughness in the surface. And it enables them to actually walk across the ceiling. It appears to be as if by magic. So that's a form of stickiness, if you like. And of course, the tongue of a chameleon that shoots out is also sticky as well. If you want to go beyond the stickiness in nature or apparent stickiness in nature, then you have to move on to chemicals that have been created in the laboratory. And there are some extraordinary, extraordinarily sticky glues. One of the strongest one was used to support a truck just by using tiny little pads where the glue was connected to the wheels of the truck and lifted this thing, which was several tons up in the air. It was quite remarkable, actually. When you see pictures of it, it just seems impossible. So you pick one you pick one that you liked that you when you came across in your research

um you found particularly fascinating or that other people tell you is fascinating well yeah i like the ones where humans are involved because you can kind of i mean there's a lot of things to do without a space and you know laboratory. There is actually an experiment, but it's a very simple one to explain. It's also the longest running experiment in the world. So now we're talking about slow records. And this thing is called the pitch drop experiment. And it's been running since 1927 in Australia, the University of Queensland. And this professor, back in the day, decided he wanted to see how fast pitch or tar, if you like, would drip. So he filled this funnel with the tar, you know, what you put down on roads, the sticky black stuff that hardly seems to move at all.

And when he put this into the funnel, let it settle for a long time, in fact, for three years, and kept it under rigidly constant conditions because, of course, it's going to depend on temperature and things like that. And then let it drip out. When I say let it drip out, since then, and we're talking about a century ago there's been nine drips from this thing so we're talking about slow record here the last drip was in 2014 10 years ago they actually have a live webcam pointing at this thing you can you can see it on on the internet and you can watch it you know so if you're patient and you're interested, you could watch this thing and maybe see the next drop fall because nobody ever seen a drop fall. The last time it was captured on camera, but nobody's actually seen this thing happen. I like things like that.

You know, there's just a little bit eccentric. What's the purpose of this? Well, very little. No, I think it was just a piece of eccentricity actually. It's certainly a talking point, but there's no real practical purpose to it at all. So you did an interesting comparison of computers. So tell that story. So I used to work for a company called Cray Research, which makes, made and makes

supercomputers and so now we're talking about 1980 ish and i worked for them when they produced their first computer the cray one which was the fastest computer in the world at the time it sold for about seven million dollars and i was interested in how fast the cray one was would be compared with an iPhone. Because we don't really think of iPhones as being computers, but that's what they are. They're supercomputers, in fact. So I compared the speed and the memory and the storage capacity of the Cray-1 with actually the iPhone 13, so it's not the latest model but the iphone 13 is 3 000 times

faster than a cray one supercomputer in its day 3 000 times the storage 750 times the the ram and yet the cray cost uh well it's eight million that's about 38 million dollars today the iphone maybe a thousand dollars two thousand times less absolutely extraordinary so that just shows how the records moved in the computing world and really it's unfair because we're comparing the craves is supercomputer with the thing you carry around in your pocket what you really have to compare it with is supercomputers today. And the fastest of those is the frontier computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is an exo-flop machine. In other words, it can conduct a million trillion operations a second. So there we're talking about record speed in computers, which obviously has a huge practical implication. Can you talk about extremes of acceleration,

specifically human acceleration? Again, I'm going to take you back in time to 1895, a park in Brooklyn, where they had the first vertical loop roller coaster. It was called a flip-flap railway. And it was quite a sensation. It had a vertical loop 25 feet high, which is quite small. And that was one of the problems with it it was small and the biggest problem was that it was perfectly round so you would have uh them coming in you'd have the passengers coming in uh to this loop they would then enter this vertical circle, loop around it and come out again. Now, the problem is going from a straight direction into a circle, they were subjected to a tremendous G-force. In fact, 12 Gs, far more than an astronaut would experience going into space or re-entering. And it unfortunately caused a lot of problems,

spinal injuries, serious neck injuries, because they didn't really know how to make roller coasters properly at the time. And now, of course, we know more about the physics of it. You don't do vertical circles. You do teardrop-shaped curves. So you come in on a gentler angle before you go into the circle so that was something they had to learn through experience of course when we started thinking about space flight we needed to see whether the human body could withstand high g forces so that's when you started putting astronauts and test subjects into centrifuges and, you know, seeing what the limits of human tolerance are. But to really go to the extreme of what humans are capable of withstanding in terms of acceleration, you have to look at the experiments of John Stapp, who was a surgeon who worked for the US Air Force.

And he subjected himself to extraordinary situations on a rocket sled. And on December 10th, 1954, he got on this rocket sled called Sonic Wind 1 and fired the rockets. And in five seconds time, he was traveling at 632 miles per hour, which is pretty fast than what an airliner would travel at cruising altitude. Not only that, but he then hit a water trough, which broke him from 632 miles per hour to zero in just over one second, to the equivalent of hitting a brick wall at 120 miles an hour. And he did survive it. Let's talk about loudest and quietest records for those. Yes, loudest. One of the loudest things that humans had built was actually an aircraft and not a jet aircraft. It was a propeller

aircraft, a plot plane. It's called the Thunder Screech. Well, that was its nickname anyway. And it was tremendously loud. You could hear it 25 miles away when it was just running on the ground with its propellers turning. And the reason for that is that propellers turned at supersonic speeds, and they produced a sound of about 200 decibels, which is pretty close to what you would get from a rocket taking off. It was tremendously loud, and it caused all kinds of problems.

The ground engineers were all suffering from nausea and this type of thing. But there are um natural sounds which are even greater than that and the one of them for example would be the explosion of krakatoa the island of krakatoa in 1883 which is reckoned to have made a sound of 310 decibels and could be heard 3000 miles away. Now I say 310 decibels, there's a physical limit to loudness actually,

a sound of 194 decibels. Beyond that is not really sound as we know it, it's a series of supersonic pulses. So there's really at that point, it stops being loudness. It turns into something else. And quietest? I would think silence is silence. So the quietest places are really places that are made specifically to be quiet,

which are called anechoic chambers. And these basically absorb all the sound that you can produce immediately. So you get no sound coming back to you whatsoever. And these places are actually very difficult to tolerate because we're so used to having even slight sounds slight sounds in the background it's it's it's not a natural situation to be in and so people can't tolerate this very long because you start to hear your own heartbeat breathing and even sounds made that you never normally hear but you know your own muscles creaking and things like this and it becomes becomes very, very disconcerting. And so they do have some of these anechoic chambers open to the public, but they limit how long people can spend in them because you start to hallucinate after a while and go crazy because it's a very, very, very, very unsettling experience. Well, where are these things and who made them and why?

Well, they make them for carrying out all sorts of experiments, for example, on hi-fi equipment. There's all sorts of situations where you don't want any sound coming back at you. There is one at Bell Labs, for example. They're usually at major laboratories, quite a few in the US. There's some in Europe as well. And they're just used for carrying out scientific experiments.

Let's talk about largest. What's the largest thing that we have? So locally, the Sun is the largest thing. We can then move beyond the Sun out into the galaxy and we find other stars, some of which are immensely bigger than the sun. They can be a hundreds times, thousands of times bigger than the sun. But then what's bigger than that? Well, the whole collection of stars that we live in, which is the galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across, that takes means that it takes light 100,000 years to get from one side to another. Is there anything bigger than the galaxy?

Well, you get clusters of galaxies. We live in a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group, which has 30-odd galaxies in it. And that is 10, 15 million light years across. Surely that's the biggest thing there is. But no, you can get clusters of clusters of galaxies, which are called superclusters. And you can go beyond this to great walls of galaxies, which can be billions of light years across. The largest structure in the universe is about 10 billion light years across. The largest structure in the universe is about 10 billion

light years across. Is there anything bigger than that? Well, beyond that, you would have to go to the universe itself, which is about 90 billion light years across. You've got some weird extremes in here. And so talk about the one about reverberation. I live in Dundee on the East coast of Scotland and about 15, 20 minutes drive away from here is a little town called Cooper. And in that town, there is this silo. It's 200 feet high. It's a concrete silo and it used to be used for storing sugar beet. It's disused now. So it's empty. And in fact, it's not really open to the public because it's quite dangerous. But they do occasionally open it up. And for an interesting

reason, this silo, when you make a sound in it, for example, clap your hands, the sound takes over 30 seconds to die away. In other words, it's a tremendously reverberant space. It's one of the longest reverberation times of any human-made space. And they even hold concerts in there, very unusual concerts, I might add, because, of course, as soon as you make a sound, that sound is going to carry on for a long time. So you have to come up with a composition that works in that sort of environment. So that's very interesting to me, this whole idea of reverberation. There are bigger reverberation spaces, but this one happens to be nearby, so I have a particular fascination for it. Talk about poisons. What's the most poisonous thing?

Of course, in the past, poisons were used for getting rid of people you didn't like. There were obviously things like strychnine and arsenic and those sort of things. You could actually pay people, this is going back into sort of late medieval Renaissance Europe, to dispose of people you didn't want by getting some of these substances. But as time goes on, we found there are more and more poisonous things i can think of for example the poison arrow frog you can just touch a poison arrow frog and make the mistake of putting that into your mouth and that that can be lethal the puffer fish for example which is found off the coast coast of Japan and is considered a delicacy in Japan,

but it has to be cooked properly because if it isn't, again, it's deadly. So chefs that serve puffer fish have to have three years of training before they'll be allowed to prepare a meal of this for the public. If you want to go to the most poisonous things of all, you're talking about bacterial toxins, botulin and this sort of thing, which are so poisonous that they're deadly in microscopic amounts. So the botulin toxin is actually the most poisonous substance we know, and it takes a microscopic amount of it to kill a person. Well, this was kind of fun to take a bunch of relatively unrelated topics and put them under the umbrella of extremes so we could talk about them.

And we've been talking about them with David Darling. He is a science writer, astronomer, and author of the book Kaboom! The Science of Extremes. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, David. Thanks very much, Mike, for having me on your show. It's been great fun, and thank you. How could singing Happy Birthday make birthday cake taste better? Well, according to research from the University of Minnesota,

rituals like singing happy birthday trigger what psychologists call our intrinsic interest, and that heightens our feel-good senses, including taste and smell. This same intrinsic interest trick can also work with saying grace or a prayer before taking the first bite of a meal, or proposing a toast before savoring that first sip of something.

And that is something you should know. If you have on your to-do list maybe a little extra space, a little extra time, you might want to write this down, to tell two people, two people about this podcast, share the link, and tell them to listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. 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. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, To be continued... ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolf Bantwein, wherever podcasts are available.