Something You Should Know - How Your Memory Works (and Sometimes Doesn’t) & Why We Actually Need Viruses

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

You know when you get part of a song stuck in your head? It can be hard to get rid of. As with most things, this has been studied and I begin the episode today with some ways that will help you get that song out of your head. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/21/heres-how-get-song-out-your-head/99264896/ We all like to think we have good memories but the human memory is flawed in many ways. Some things we don’t remember at all, other things we don’t remember well and most memories get distorted over time. So how does the human memory work and why does it sometimes fail us? To help unravel the mystery is Lisa Genova. She is a neuroscientist, writer and speaker who has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Today, PBS NewsHour, and she is author of the book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting (https://amzn.to/3ccv2B7). After all we have been through in the last year with Covid-19 you might find it odd to hear that we actually need viruses. But it is true according to Frank Ryan. Frank is virologist, physician, and pioneering evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield as well as the author of the book, Virusphere: From Common Colds to Ebola Epidemics – Why We Need the Viruses That Plague Us (https://amzn.to/3cYYQQJ). Listen as he explains what viruses are, what they do and why they are sometimes so deadly. If you hate spending lots of money to print documents - change the font! Some fonts use a lot more ink than others. Listen as I explain which font is most economical and other ways to save on printing costs. https://itstillworks.com/common-type-fonts-7402806.htm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! If you care about the security of your online activity, IPVanish VPN is a quick and easy way to start protecting yourself. Get started with this limited time offer and save 50% off monthly & annual subscriptions, visit https://IPVanish.com/SYSK. Get key nutrients–without the B.S. Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit https://ritual.com/SOMETHING to start your Ritual today!  Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to https://babbel.com and use promo code: SOMETHING With Grove, making the switch to natural products has never been easier! Go to https://grove.co/SOMETHING and choose a free gift with your 1st order of $30 or more! M1 Is the finance Super App, where you can invest, borrow, save and spend all in one place! Visit https://m1finance.com/something to sign up and get $30 to invest! Let NetSuite show you how they'll benefit your business with a FREE Product Tour at https://netsuite.com/SYSK https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! If the signals are on, the train is on its way. And you...just need to remember one thing...Stop. Trains can’t! Paid for by NHTSA  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, the next time you get a song stuck in your head, I'll tell you the best way to get rid of it. Then, how your memory works and doesn't work and why it's so often inaccurate. So yeah, our memories for what happened are not accurate or reliable.

They're quite fickle. You know, when you're so sure of a memory for what happened and you're arguing with your spouse because he thinks something else happened, you're probably both wrong. Then, did you know that when you print documents, some fonts use a lot more ink than others? And you might be sick of hearing about viruses, but actually, for the most part, they're a good thing. I would not like to live in a world in which there were no viruses. Not only that, but I'm going to explain a little bit later how if we were living in a world without viruses, you and I wouldn't exist. 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 hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show

one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi. Ever get a song stuck in your head? Ever get that song stuck in your head? I've actually had that song get stuck in my head, that little musical intro there. Those things are called earworms, and it seems that the more you try to get it out of your head, the more it keeps playing over and over again. Well, here is some well-researched advice for getting rid of those songs that keep playing over and over and over. This is from a study from 2016. The first piece of advice is to chew gum. Gum chewing reduces the number of involuntary musical thoughts and affects the music-hearing experience, and it interferes with a person's ability to recall words

from their short-term memory, so it made it more difficult for that song to stick. Listen to the actual song. See, I would think that would make it worse, but it turns out it actually helps it go away. Listen to a different song, or go talk to someone. Often, I guess these earworms get stuck in your head when you're alone, but if you engage with others or go pay attention to another song,

it fades away. Do a puzzle. I guess that's just distraction, but it seems to help. Or just let it go. Don't try to get rid of it. Don't try to get it out of your head. Just move on and eventually it goes away. The study found that classic rock songs were the most common earworm-inducing songs,

and at the top of the list were songs by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Queen, Kylie Minogue, and Journey. And that is something you should know. Why do you remember some things forever and other things you quickly forget? Why do you sometimes recall events differently than someone else who was right there at the same time? Why do you remember odd little things from years ago but can't remember where you put your keys 10 minutes ago? And is your memory finite? Can it only hold so many memories? These are all some pretty good questions that are about to be tackled by Lisa Genova. Lisa is a neuroscientist, writer, and speaker who has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, The Today Show, PBS NewsHour, and she's author of a book called

Remember, The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. Hey, Lisa. Hi, Michael. Thank you for having me. So what is your memory? It's not like you can look at a brain and say, oh, there's the memory part of the brain. So what is the memory? There is no memory bank. Memory isn't stored in a place. It's not like files in a file cabinet. So if you think about something you remember, the first day on the beach with your friends

and family and your kids are playing soccer, the sunset is beautiful. Lady Gaga is playing on the portable radio. You've got oysters and s'mores and wine and beer. So Lady Gaga has nothing to do with oysters and wine and a sunset. But because I experienced all those things and paid attention to them, those different neurons, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, all of those are located in very different areas of my brain. All of those things become connected and then activation of any one aspect can trigger the full expression of all of the other connected parts. That's a memory. And when I remember, what is it I'm remembering?

Am I remembering my memory or am I really remembering the event? In other words, is my stored memory not necessarily reality? And doesn't it change over time? And that's what I keep remembering. And that's why, like when I go back to the house I grew up in, it doesn't look anything like I remember it, even though I think I remember it. So there's different kinds of memory, and some of them are more accurate and reliable than others. So you're talking about, so there's memory for stuff and information, sort of the Wikipedia of your brain. And that really is pretty faithful over time. So, you know, if I memorized six times six in the third grade, like I'm not going to remember it

as being 47 today. I'm going to always remember that that's 36. That's not going to change. But my memory for stuff that happened, that is highly likely to change over time. And it begins with a distortion because our brains are not video cameras recording a constant stream of every sight and sound we're exposed to. We can only capture to begin with what we pay attention to, right? So if you think about, you know, your childhood, so say Christmas morning, you are going to remember something different than your little brother and something even different from what the parents notice. So what your memory of what happened isn't sort of, you know, the universal truth. It's just the slice

of reality that captured your interest to begin with. Then over time, it can change because every time you reminisce, think about, write down, talk about a memory for something that happened, you have an opportunity to edit it and you will store the edited version over and you'll rewrite over the original version. So if I talk about that Christmas morning and my brother adds a piece of information, oh, you remember Aunt Susie and Uncle Bill came over. You had forgotten about that and didn't include it in your original memory, but now you do remember that they came. And so you add that to your memory. If it's for something like September 11th, 2001, your memory can get distorted because you've watched the news. You've listened to so many reports and read so many reports about it. You've listened to other people talk about it. You can incorporate that information into your memory and that gets stored over the original. So our memories for what happened are very fanciful and not accurate. Well, I think everybody, I know I've had memories. I have memories of things that have happened.

But I know that my memory has changed over time. And yet, even though the memory is probably a little different than I remembered it five years ago, I don't think of it as any less accurate. I think my memory today is just as accurate as it was before, and yet it's different. This has happened many times. There are folks who answered a questionnaire right after the space shuttle Challenger exploded about where they were, who they were with, you know, how they heard about the news, how they felt about it. And then were re-interviewed two and a half years later and gave very different answers from what they gave immediately after the explosion. And then when they were shown their own handwriting that took place two and a half years ago, describing who they were with and what they were doing,

they were dumbstruck and couldn't explain it and stuck to their memory today versus their own handwriting two years ago. So memory for what happened is a funny thing. It does seem sometimes that memories disappear, that they're gone forever. And yet there are those memories that might seem like they're gone forever, but then some trigger will bring them back. Like they're in there. It just needs something to pull them out. And this gets back to what you said about visiting a childhood home, right? So, you know, if I live in New York City and I'm, you know, in Manhattan and I say I grew up in rural Vermont and you asked me to describe, you know, my childhood neighborhood or something about my childhood home, I might

not come up with much sitting in, you know, amidst all the skyscrapers in the busy city. But if you take me in the car and drive me to that neighborhood in Vermont, and all of a sudden I'm surrounded by the context and the cues that are associated with those memories, those become triggers that once activated can then trigger the activation of all of the other neurons connected to it. So, oh, there's the weeping willow and there's Mrs. Daly's house and, you know, Mikey and Joey lived right next door. And so the memories come flooding back

when you're in the context of memories that were seemingly long forgotten or not accessible. Yeah, that happened to me. I walked in after several years of having not been in my high school. I walked into my high school, and it was like I had never left. And all these memories of people and places and events and things that I haven't thought of forever came flooding back, and it's as if it had just happened, and it was the strangest thing. And that's happened a couple of times to me.

Yeah, because a memory consists of all of the sensory and emotional elements, right? So when you're not in the presence of those cues, your brain isn't being activated specifically. If you go back to high school, there are the lockers, the color of the lockers, the smell of the hallway, the stairwell, all of those visual, the olfactory, the touch, all of it can start to stimulate your brain. And then it's not just the sights and sounds and smells. It then activates all the things that are connected to it. So there's, oh, there's the memory of the girlfriend from senior year whose locker was two lockers down from yours. And you never even would have thought of that had you not been physically in that space. So is the brain, when it forgets all these things, but they're still there because they can come flooding back with the right triggers, is that some kind of

evolutionary efficiency that the brain is doing to make room for other things? And if we need those, we can pull them up. But the brain is working in some sort of efficient fashion so that new things can come in. Yeah, this is a little bit of a misconception, too. So there's, you know, people will say, oh, you're only using 10% of your brain. And, oh, I need to forget things so I can make room for others. No, I mean, we have over a hundred trillion connections available to us in our brain. And so there's not a limit capacity. So, I mean, there's a Japanese engineer who at

the age of 69 memorized over a hundred thousand digits of pi. And so here we have someone who's at an age that we would associate with being elderly and having maybe a diminished memory and sort of a long-lived life that's fairly full of stuff in the brain, and yet he has room for 100,000 digits of pi. We always have room to remember more. So it's not that we need to be efficient and sort of tuck some things away or not, or get rid of a certain number of memories so we can create new ones. Memories aren't, don't feel available to us if we're not using them or searching for them. They're memories for how to do things. Culture calls it muscle memory. It's also called implicit memory. But so the memories for how to do things. Culture calls it muscle memory. It's also called implicit memory. But so the memories for how to do things, right? So how to brush your teeth,

how to ride a bike, how to type on your computer. These become sort of unconscious automatic pilot, we know how to do them things. And we can not do them for years. So for example, I was a skier when I was younger, and then I didn't ski for over 10 years. I was busy having kids and moved far away from mountains. And then when I got back up on skis, I had a moment where I thought, do I remember how to do this? And so my brain hadn't used remember how to ski in over a decade. But as soon as I got on those skis, my brain knew exactly what to do. So muscle memory has integrity over time. It doesn't matter how many years you go. That's where the saying, it's just like riding a bike. It's in there. You don't have to get rid of it to make room for other memories. Yeah. But that's a misnomer, right? I mean,

the memory is in your brain. It's not in your muscle. Thank you. Yes, that is a misnomer. Right. So the choreography to the chicken dance, you know, it seems like your muscles know what to do, but they only know what to do because your brain is sending neurons to motor neurons to your muscles, telling them what to do. So yes, this is why it's called a muscle memory, but it's a memory that lives in your brain for sure. We're talking about memory, if my memory is correct. And my guest is Lisa Genova.

She's a neuroscientist and speaker and author of the book, Remember, The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride.

Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. 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 Lisa, you mentioned things like 9-11 and when the Challenger exploded, and those are those kind of memories where everybody remembers where they were when those big traumatic events happened.

Those seem like they're very special, very unique kind of memories. This is true. And they feel vividly remembered and richly detailed. And we feel confident in the accuracy of them even years later. And while you will remember all of these things, like I remember where I was when I heard that Princess Diana died, you know, 9-11 for sure. The details around it, even though they're confidently held, are very often not accurate. And, you know, this is okay for the most part. It gets interesting when we think about eyewitness testimony, which relies on the memory for what happened. But all of these,

they're called flashbulb memories, which is a little bit of a misnomer because it's not a photograph of what happened. But again, folks who are interviewed after all of these, so flashbulb memories are for highly emotional, shocking events that do feel personal to you. So like I have a flashbulb memory of where I was and what was going on after the Boston Marathon bombing. But maybe if you're from, you know, if you're from Paris, France, you might have heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, and it's certainly shocking, but you might not have a flashbulb memory of it because Boston might not be personal for you. And I'm from Boston.

So while you will remember these events always, the details of actually what happened morph over time. And we've seen this over and over again in all the studies that interview folks immediately after the event and then interview them again a year, two years later. And most of the details are off. People don't remember it accurately. Knowing what I now know about memory and what I hope to share with you all is that when you're so sure of a memory for what happened and you're arguing with your spouse because he thinks something else happened, you're probably both wrong. Well, it doesn't say much for eyewitness testimony, does it? No, it doesn't. And, you know, there are many psychologists out there who've written a lot about this. One in particular named Elizabeth Loftus, who is really trying to educate the

court system, the judicial system, that there are a lot of life sentences and death sentences that have relied exclusively on eyewitness testimony. And since then, DNA evidence has shown that these folks are innocent. So it's really, it's very scary to rely on it. Our memories for what happened are very vulnerable to suggestion. So, for example, if I were to show you a video of a car crash, and then after the video, I ask you, how fast were the cars going when they collided? Say you say 30 miles an hour. If I had instead asked you how fast were the cars going when they smashed, you'd say something faster. You'd say they were going 40 miles an hour. So just the substitution of a single verb can change your memory for what you believe you saw happened is there any way to prevent that in in other words are knowing what you know are there ways to cement memories and keep them real or this is just how

the human brain works yeah unfortunately this is how our human brains work like even when we write something down we narrow the experience of what we, the memory of what we actually experienced, right? Because we can only, we only capture so much. Like if I, you know, in this conversation with you right now, if I were to then write, you know, Dear Diary today, I had a conversation with Michael Carruthers and I talked about what we talked about. I wrote, if I wrote down what we talked about, I wrote, if I wrote down what we talked about, I certainly wouldn't include all of it. And so when I go to revisit my diary and read what, what we talked about, I'm really going to reinforce and therefore only remember what I've

written down. And I will forget any elements that I forgot to write down. So yeah, our memories for what happened are not accurate or reliable. They're quite fickle. Our memories for the stuff we learn are way more stable and reliable. The memories for how to do things are really reliable. Our memories for what we want to do later, which is called your perspective memory, is probably the worst of them all. And again, this is part of the price of playing poker here for being human. It our memories for what we want to do later. This is like your brains to do list are all it's awful. We weren't designed to do this. So like it planning to like, oh, I need to

remember to call my mom or take out the trash or or I need to remember to take my heart medication. If you don't have a cue that triggers that recall when you're supposed to remember it, or if you haven't written it down and have some sort of text alert on your phone, or you're not in the routine of looking at your calendar, you are very likely to forget what you plan to do later. What about those people who can never remember where they put their keys or where they put their glasses and their phones? They're always using the find your phone thing because they can't remember where they left their phone. And people worry that

that's a memory problem. Most of what we can't find. So there's the, oh, I can't remember where I put my phone. I can't find my glasses. Where did I park my car? 99% of the time, this is not a memory problem. This is a symptom of distraction. You haven't paid attention to where you put those things in the first place. And the very first necessary step in creating any memory is attention. There is a perception though, and the experience that many people report, that as you get older, your memory isn't as sharp as it used to be. Yes? Yeah. So processing speeds do slow down. You know, 25-year-olds experience several tip of the tongues a week, that experience where you're like, oh, what's the name of that actor? Oh my God, I know, I know it. I can't get it. That will increase as you age because the processing speeds of your neurons slows down. And

so they're chugging a little slower to get to where they're trying to go. But it's the same phenomenon. You're not, you know, your brain isn't decaying. You're not experiencing dementia or a disease. This is not a reason for diagnosis. So it's frustrating, but it's not a cause for panic or shame or diagnosis. It's, you know, again, this is the price of playing poker. Stress can make us fuzzy too. Chronic stress is really bad for our memory. And I think that, you know, in the last year in particular, a lot of folks have been, you know, sort of drowning in chronic stress. So chronic stress is really bad for being able to form memories of new things, retrieving memories of stuff you already know, and will increase your risk of Alzheimer's in the future. And I think

older folks notice it more. So if you're 25, and you can't remember the name of the movie that your friend recommended, you don't immediately then jump to, oh my God, I'm losing my memory. I'm going to get Alzheimer's. And you're 25, you're immortal. You just, and you don't hesitate to look it up on your phone because you've been tethered to a device practically since birth. But if you're 55 and you can't remember the name of the movie, a lot of us start to panic and immediately jump to, oh my God, I'm losing my mind. So some of it's just that psychological leap. But there are times when people report, especially older people, things like they left the oven on, or they can't remember how to spell a very common word. And it's not that they can't do it. It's not that a speed problem, a processing problem, they just don't remember.

Right. So that can be a cause for concern. But again, before people panic, understanding how memory works and how it is supported and facilitated, and that if those things aren't present, maybe that's the reason you're foggy today. So if you know, we require seven to nine hours of sleep a night for your brain to clear away metabolic debris that accumulated during the business of being awake the night the day before. And it consolidates the memories, the stuff that you learned that day before and the stuff that you experienced gets laid down and locked into a lasting memory while you sleep. And so if you're sleep deprived, you will essentially wake up the next day with a little bit of amnesia and an inability to learn new things and remember new things that day.

So you'll be compromised the next day if you're not getting enough sleep. So you can check in with yourself. Is that going on? Am I overly stressed? You know, have I been sedentary for too long? If you don't, exercising is probably the best thing you can do for your memory. You know, people are looking for the pill, the supplement, the magic bullet. It's exercise is really the best thing we know of. So are you distracted? Again, you can't remember what you don't pay attention to. So if you're cooking on the stove and you've got young kids running around and there's some crisis and they're crying and they're screaming and they're fighting or the phone

rings or if you're distracted, maybe that's why you left the oven on. If none of those things are happening and you're and you're worried, I definitely recommend a conversation with your doctor. I mean, I think people are so afraid of anything that's going on from the neck up. And they they keep quiet about it. And they don't talk to the doctors about what's going on. And, and I'd like to see that change. You know, we're not afraid of talking about our heart health, right? So we'll get our blood pressure taken and check for cholesterol and we'll count the number of steps and we're all, you know, sort of in on having an influence over our heart health. I'd love to see folks be unafraid of having a conversation with their doctor about their brain health and cognitive health. Well, it's interesting to listen to you because as amazing as the human memory is and the things it can do, it sure has a lot of deficiencies.

Memory is a bit of a dunce. It's going to forget to call your mother. It's going to forget most of your life because most of our life is actually spent doing routine stuff and we don't remember routine stuff, but that's okay. It doesn't matter that I don't remember the details of every morning shower or what I ate for breakfast three weeks ago. I think our brains are really good at remembering what's meaningful and what matters. And I think understanding how memory works and why it forgets can relieve us of some of the unnecessary stress that we're putting on ourselves when we forget stuff that's normal for our human brains to forget. You know, it's kind of sad, really. I always like to think that my memory's pretty sharp. I think most people like to think their memory's pretty good.

But after listening to you, it's pretty clear our memories suck. But I guess all of our memories suck, so at least the playing field's pretty level. Lisa Genova's been my guest. She's a neuroscientist, a speaker, and writer. And the name of her book is Remember, The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Lisa. Awesome. Thank you so much. Stay safe. Be well. 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 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 countdowndown wherever you get your podcasts. 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 podcast spotify or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes every monday t, Thursday, and Friday. In the last year or so, I know I, and I suspect you, have had it up to here with the coronavirus.

I think we can all agree that viruses are bad news. So you might be interested in hearing that viruses actually play an important role in the world, according to Frank Ryan. Frank is a virologist, physician, and pioneering evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and he is author of the book Virus Fear, From Common Colds to Ebola Epidemics, why we need the viruses that plague us. Hi Frank, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you very much, Mike. I'm glad to be here. So I have to say, my gut reaction is, you know, we really don't need viruses.

They make people sick, they kill a lot of people, and as we have all witnessed, can disrupt everybody on an entire planet, to which you would say, what? I would not like to live in a world in which there were no viruses. Not only that, but I'm going to explain a little bit later how if we were living in a world without viruses, you and I wouldn't exist. So explain that, because I think my perception of viruses is they're nothing but destructive. They cause nothing but harm to whatever they come in contact

with. So where's the good? About 20 years ago, marine biologists began to explore the true nature of what's going on in all the oceans of the world. Now, you go for a bathe in the ocean, and you look down at water that looks crystal clear. That water is not empty. That water is absolutely teeming with bacteria. If those bacteria, and they replicate at an extraordinary rate, if those bacteria were allowed to just continue to replicate like that, the oceans would be a toxic, steaming mess of bacteria.

You wouldn't dream of putting a foot in them. And, of course, they'd be very unhealthy for all of the creatures that live in the oceans. What they discovered is there's an extraordinary symbiotic relationship between those massive number, billions and billions of bacteria in the oceans, and far more numerous viruses called bacteriophage viruses, phage viruses. The viruses have a true symbiotic relationship with this bacteria, and the virus will sometimes enter the bacteria, infect it if you want to call it that, relationship with this bacteria, and that the virus will sometimes enter the bacteria, infect it, if you want to call it that,

but inside the bacteria, the virus goes into a sort of dormant stage and doesn't do anything. Then at some stage, there'll be some signal or other that signals it, the viruses replicate inside the bacteria on a colossal scale. When they do that, the bacteria then ruptures.

It's called lysis. And all of the structural entities, the proteins and inorganic compounds and everything else from the bacteria are released into the ocean. This is actually the basis of the oceanic food chain. Something else happened about 10 years ago. And again, most of the work on this

was done by American scientists, American biologists. People began to think, well, if the oceans are absolutely full of bacteria and viruses, what about land? And they actually started to look in soil. You know, they found exactly the same thing. Soil is full of bacteria in vast, vast numbers. I mean, it's meaningless to say 10 to the 28 viruses.

We couldn't imagine what that means. The numbers are absolutely vast. The numbers of viruses in the oceans and in soil outnumber all of the other life forms on Earth, including all of the bacteria, by a factor of 10 to 100-fold. So if viruses disappeared overnight, what would happen to our oceans? What would happen to our soil? A, they'd become horrible, stinking messes of bacteria,

but also the fertility of the soils and the kind of, not the fertility, but various other aspects of the ocean, the food chains of the oceans, and the kind of, not the fertility, but various other aspects of the ocean, the food chains of the oceans would cease. It would be a world in which we couldn't possibly carry on and live. How many viruses would you guess are on the Earth? Well, this is it. They said in the oceans there were 10 to the 28. Think of 10 times 10, 100, 10 to the 100,000

and go up to 28. It's a meaningless term. It's so massive, you just can't a computer might deal with it, but yours and my brain couldn't possibly deal with that. We can't think of numbers like that. People talk foolishly like it's

more than all of the stars in the sky and all this. It's just meaningless. I don't believe anyone can count them. And are they all related? No. No, the world of biology, there's numerous different kinds of viruses, many, many different kinds of viruses. People say, well, how can viruses do the host good?

Well, I'm going to talk to you about three relationships that will explain that. I think you'll be surprised because you'll be acquainted with all three of them. Now, the first thing is the classical example of the Australian rabbits. Australia was suffering a plague of rabbits. They didn't know what to do about them. They were gobbling up all the grasslands. Huge, huge numbers. They knew that a virus of the Brazilian wood rabbit was lethal to the European rabbit. The Australian rabbits were European because they were taken over

from Europe in the late 19th century as a food. Now, instead of bringing the Brazilian wood rabbit over to Australia, all they brought was its virus, and its virus was the myxoma virus. The myxoma virus is non-lethal to the Brazilian wood rabbit, but when they injected them into about 30 or so Australian rabbits, released them out into the wild, wet season comes along, biting insects. That's how myxoma is transmitted. Within three months, 99.8% of the rabbits in Australia were dead. 99.8%. What would have happened if the Brazilian wood rabbit had come with its virus?

The Brazilian wood rabbit would now colonize Australia. The virus would have made the way for its host. 0.2% of the Australian rabbits weren't killed, but they were sickly as a result of the virus. They had no rivals in their territory now. They begin to multiply. Today, Australia is once more full of rabbits, but the rabbits have a partner, and the partner is the myxoma virus. Now, if we look at the koala in Australia, we'll see an entirely different pattern. The Australian koalas are currently suffering from what, in effect, AIDS, koala AIDS. They're infected by a retrovirus.

The retrovirus is causing all of the sort of illnesses we saw in human AIDS, you know, the lymphomas and tumors and all these horrible illnesses that we saw in humans with AIDS. But it isn't killing all of them. It's culling them. In time, the only koalas who will be left will be those who are resistant to the action of the virus. The culling is creating a new virus-host relationship. We now got a koala that will be able to live with it.

And then it will do strange things. We'll come to it in a minute. It may completely change the evolution of the koala. In Britain at the moment, we've got something in between. We've got the American red squirrel was brought into Britain about a century ago. It's carrying a virus.

It's called a squirrelpox virus. It's lethal to the native British red squirrel. If it's allowed to continue without interference, there won't be any red squirrels left, and the gray squirrel and its symbiont will occupy the territory. You're seeing exactly the same thing, aggressive symbiosis between virus and host. The virus is contributing to its host.

It's giving it the territory. But as you say, there are all these uncountable numbers of viruses. Why is it that occasionally one like the virus that we're facing now shows up and does such devastation when obviously most of them we barely notice? I think that's a very good question. And it goes back to that thing I was talking about, that aggressive symbiosis right at the beginning. All of the animals in nature, all those wild animals out there, have a cluster of different viruses that the virologists would use the term are co-evolving with them. Co-evolving means symbiotic with them. They all have them. Now, one of the animals that

has more virus, mammals, all the mammals particularly have co-evolving viruses. And when scientists have looked at them to see which one has the most, which perhaps has the viruses that might be dangerous to us. They discovered that it was bats, different species of bats. Bats are actually the most, have the most species within the family of all the mammals. There are lots of different kinds of bats, and they're all carrying viruses. If another mammal comes into close proximity to another mammal that's carrying viruses, there is a possibility that the virus will jump species from its normal host into the species that's coming into contact with them. And almost certainly the COVID has come from

humans coming into contact either with bats or possibly with a species that got into close contact with bats and then got into contact with humans. The original host of the coronaviruses are bats. I thought the prevailing wisdom was that it was created in a lab. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so, because the so-called spine of this coronavirus is absolutely nothing like the previous one. SARS and MERS, for example, don't have that spine. If a lab was working on viruses to try and fiddle and just change them very slightly, they'd obviously start with viruses that were known already,

and they'd use them. This virus, if they would have to create a complete virus from scratch to make this one, and I think that that's way beyond the ability of any laboratory to do so. I think the likelihood is that this has come either directly or indirectly from bats, and there are coronaviruses in bats that are very similar genomes to this one. So it's highly likely that that's the explanation. The other thing that's important in the explanation is, you know, people compare COVID to the great flu of 1918, your so-called Spanish flu. But the human population at the time of the Spanish flu was 1.8 billion. The human population

today is 7.8 billion. And that tells you, along with all the other scare stories we hear about global warming and all that, is that this huge increase in the global human population is forcing people to move out into areas that they wouldn't have moved into before. It's bringing more and more people into contact with feral sort of symbiosis between, particularly with mammals and viruses. And I think that the reason why viruses, for instance, Ebola came from chimpanzees in Africa. AIDS came from chimpanzees in Africa.

This one almost certainly came from chimpanzees in Africa. AIDS came from chimpanzees in Africa. This one almost certainly came from bats. Mars, SARS almost certainly came from bats. And I think it's another impact, really, of sort of human population burgeoning to levels that are difficult to support. And I think we're asking for trouble living in a world where there's such a pressure on humans that they're forced to move from food sources, space, and everything else into feral areas. And so this has increased the risk to us of these things emerging. So one of the things I've always wondered about viruses, but I guess you could ask the same question about cancer or anything else, is why do these things seek to destroy when ultimately they end up destroying themselves? Well, I don't think they seek to destroy. They don't think. I think the problem with viruses, there's only one force controlling viruses,

and that's evolutionary forces. Anybody who studies viruses and their genomes will realize they're the ultimate expression of evolutionary viruses because they're so simple in their structure that that's all that works with them. They respond to evolutionary forces. If, for example, you've got coronavirus spreading in a population, you'll have different groups spreading into different areas, different landscape areas within that population. And the virus is mutating at an extraordinary rate. So any subgroup of the virus that is better at infecting people, better at replicating itself, will dominate.

Natural selection will select the one that's best at doing it. It doesn't say that natural selection is a thinking thing that chooses the virus. All you're really saying is that the virus that does it best will dominate, and that's what happens. Once a virus like that starts to move, you've got the most absolute naked application of Darwinian natural selection in that the one that does it best dominates. And that's what's happening. That's what we're witnessing. And why does this virus, why does COVID become variant?

Why are there these other strains of it? What causes that? That's exactly what I've been talking about. When they say a variant of COVID, all it is is that the genome of the virus, when it replicates, it doesn't do it perfectly. It makes mistakes. We do, every human, every human, when they're born, gets a mixture of the DNA of the two parents. But actually, again, it isn't the perfect process replicating the DNA. A small number of little changes are called mutations. In other words, single-point mutations.

A virus mutates far more than we do. Their control of their replication is much poorer than ours, so they make lots of mistakes. Whether it's COVID or just the common cold, why are they so hard to treat, kill, get rid of? Well, the difference between a virus and a bacterium is the bacterium has got its own internal metabolism, its own biochemistry, and so we can design drugs that damage the bacterial biochemistry, and that's how the antibiotics were discovered. Viruses use the biochemistry of the host, so it isn't as easy to get a drug that will stop it like an antibiotic. And, of course, the antibiotics don't have any effect on viruses. So only relatively recently have we found good. Maybe AIDS was a tremendous stimulus to find drugs that would stop the virus. But the sort of drugs we need to use to stop a virus are much

more complex, if you want, than the compounds we might use to stop a bacterium. And the reason why is you've got to get drugs that either jumble the virus genome or maybe a drug that could in some way prevent the virus latching onto the appropriate chemical on the surface of our cells. It's much more complex to make a drug that'll do that. The other thing we learned, of course, made as we did from tuberculosis, which is something I looked into in the past, is that only when we used, say, three drugs at the same time did we control it. And it's possible that from the point of view of drug therapy, what we might need with COVID, at least two or maybe more

drugs to be given to someone at the same time that might stop the virus. Our problem is we don't have the time. It's moving so fast that we don't have the time. Normally, you take decades to develop new drugs, and we don't have that time. So I think we're going to have to rely very heavily on vaccination. So we're seeing the cases, new cases of this virus dropping pretty rapidly, although I guess it seems like it's plateaued a bit, but it has fallen off pretty considerably. Will it go away? Well, I think that, again, I can't easily answer it because we've never experienced a COVID pandemic before. I know I keep saying this, but it's very important not to compare this to flu.

It's not flu. It's a completely different virus, a much more complicated virus than flu. It's like comparing a mouse to a camel or something. They're totally different. So we have to look at this virus in its own right. And so next year it won't come back like the flu does as a variation of what it was before? Not necessarily, because this isn't a seasonal virus. The flu virus likes the temperature in your nose

and your respiratory passages that's about three or four degrees below normal body temperature. In other words, in winter, in cold climates, when you're breathing cold air, that cools the nasal passages and the cells in the nasal passages, and the flu virus loves that. But this virus doesn't care. The temperature doesn't make any difference to it. You remember it came along in the summer.

It was killing people on a grand scale, initially and Spain right in the middle of the summer. This virus doesn't care seasonally. So it won't be seasonal factors that decide whether this keeps rotating round and round and round. I think it will be other factors. I think the key thing here really to me is vaccination because vaccination, you know, would create a barrier to the spread of the virus. You know, this herd immunity that people talk about. And we need to get herd immunity as fast as we can to stop it spreading. And touch wood, I hope that will stop it. Even if another coronavirus broke out, we'd now already have some resistance to coronaviruses from global vaccination, which would make it very difficult for another pandemic to arise.

If this had happened, if this virus had shown up a couple hundred years ago before modern medicine, would it have had the potential to wipe us out? I don't think so. One of the things that is very reassuring for me is that if the virus was allowed to just spread and we did nothing at all, it looks as if the mortality rate would be between 1% and 2%, which means that it certainly wouldn't wipe out the human species. There are viruses that are much worse than that. The worst virus in history was actually one everybody knows about. It's called smallpox. I've got a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm.

Smallpox in a virgin population, in other words, a population that had never experienced it before, was lethal in 70 to 90 percent of those it infected. COVID compared to that is a kitten. Well, I% of those it infected. COVID, compared to that, is a kitten. Well, I guess I get it now that we need viruses. There's just a few of them that we could really do without, but it's good to get a real understanding of what they are and what they do. Frank Ryan has been my guest. He is a virologist, physician, and evolutionary biologist.

His book is called Virus Fear, From Common Colds to Ebola Epidemics, Why We Need the Viruses That Plague Us. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Frank. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. Don't you just hate it when your computer printer runs out of ink or it tells you you're low on ink and then you've got to spend all that money for new ink cartridges? Well, here's some advice.

If your document setting uses the Arial font as the default for printed documents, which many do, you're wasting ink and therefore money. Century Gothic uses about 30% less ink when printed. And, of course, the smaller the font, the less ink and paper you'll use. There are some other tricks to saving cartridge ink. In your preferences, choose the draft option instead of normal or best. And if you use the print in grayscale option, you'll save big on those pricey color cartridges.

And that is something you should know. This is that point in the podcast where I ask you to tell someone you know about this podcast, and I wouldn't ask if it didn't mean a lot. So please, tell someone you know about this podcast, share the link with them, and let them hear it. And, well, then the two of you will have plenty of things to talk about. 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. as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.