Something You Should Know - Quirks of Human and Artificial Intelligence & The Good and Bad Ways Sounds Affect You

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why your smartphone hates winter and what you can do about it. Then the fascinating story of human intelligence and why we got to be smarter than other animals. Language is an unbelievable innovation and language alone can explain so much of what makes humans superior to other animals. First and foremost, language enables us to learn from the imagination of others. Also, something to keep in mind when you take

Starting point is 00:01:01 all the holiday family photos this year and noises, the sounds that surround you, you probably take them for granted, but you shouldn't. When we really pay attention to sound, it has the potential to hugely enrich our lives in ways that often we don't appreciate. Our brains are able to absorb astonishing amounts of information through sound, astonishingly subtleties in sound that we often underestimate. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful

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Starting point is 00:02:03 And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, when you think about your smartphone and all the things that your phone does, it truly is amazing. But one thing your smartphone does not do well is stand up to cold weather. Phones and cold weather just don't get along. Low temperatures can drain your phone's battery life and cause your phone to completely shut down. See, most smartphones use lithium-ion batteries,

Starting point is 00:02:41 and a chemical reaction within the battery sends charged particles through the phone circuitry. That's what powers the phone. Cold temperatures slow down the reaction. Charged particles encounter more resistance, and as these charged particles get stuck, the battery life plummets. Scientists don't entirely understand the balance of chemicals required to keep your phone alive, which is why sometimes it can seem like your phone's battery indicator lies to you. When exposed to cold air, your phone might say it has 50% battery life one minute and be completely dead the next minute.

Starting point is 00:03:19 Cold weather can also affect other parts of your phone. The LCD screen can go glitchy and blurry. Onboard sensors can lose accuracy because they're calibrated to work within a specific temperature range. So be careful, be cautious about leaving your phone in the car overnight when it's cold or leaving it anywhere where it's cold. Because before you know it, it could be dead. And that is something you should know. We are pretty smart, we human beings.

Starting point is 00:03:52 You might say we are the smartest species on the planet. So how did we get so smart? Where does human intelligence come from and how has it changed and evolved? And could it be that our intelligence is really not well adapted to the way we live our lives today? I think when the discussion you're about to hear is over, you'll have a somewhat different view of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. My guest is Max Bennett. He is the co-founder and CEO of Albi, a startup company that is in the AI business. He's published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Starting point is 00:04:34 He's author of a book called A Brief History of Intelligence. Hi, Max. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So first explain from your perspective, what is human intelligence as it compares to any other kind of intelligence, you know, dog intelligence or cockroach intelligence or, you know, what is it? So what's really interesting when we compare human intelligence to other animal intelligence is how little of a difference there is in fact. So if you roll the clock all the way back to Aristotle thousands of years ago, it has been historically assumed that humans uniquely wield features of intelligence that we deem to be really what makes people smart when it comes to reasoning, when it comes to logic. And what's been interesting to observe

Starting point is 00:05:25 is the more we've explored animal intelligence, in other words, studying animals on their own ability to reason, the surprisingly fragile edifice of human uniqueness has been whittled away. And it's actually very hard to find a uniquely human ability other than perhaps language. There is some good evidence that language is in fact unique, but any other human trait that you might mention, we find perhaps in smaller quantities, but still present in other animals. So when we think about our ability to imagine the future, we actually surprisingly, as of the last few decades have pretty hard to argue evidence that other mammals regularly imagine the future when we think about episodic memory the ability to invoke a past event and ponder about the past we can go into the brain of a rat and observe it

Starting point is 00:06:17 doing exactly the same thing when we think about our ability to engage in what's called metacognition so the ability to think about our own to engage in what's called metacognition, so the ability to think about our own thinking and the thinking of others, over the last few decades, we now have very strong evidence that other primates do exactly the same thing when they're engaging with each other, building social relationships, trying to infer and understand what others might want. And as we build AI systems, what's so fascinating is we are making the same mistake that Aristotle made. We're really focusing on the features of intelligence that seem uniquely human,

Starting point is 00:06:52 such as language. And the more we start building these systems, we're realizing that what's missing is actually these more primitive components of intelligence that evolved a long time ago. But even if other animals can do some of these things a little bit, I mean, if an animal can look into the future and think about its future, but it can't like plan a vacation and make plane reservations. I mean, yeah, it can sort of do that look into the future thing, but not like we can. Well, there is, and even Darwin sort of mentioned this and pondered this which is there is a difference between um are we unique in abilities in kind or in degree so it's clearly the

Starting point is 00:07:32 case that uh there are lots of features of intelligence that we are different in degree in other words we are capable of imagining the future probably much further into the future and further into the past our imaginations are probably much further into the future and further into the past, our imaginations are probably much richer than those of other animals. In other words, it's a difference in degree. But in kind, in other words, are we uniquely able to imagine the future at all? That seems not to be the case. So I think it's fair to sit on the laurels of human superiority in the context that our brains are definitely bigger. But I don't think there's many features of intelligence that are unique in kind.

Starting point is 00:08:11 But why is that? Why are we top of the food chain? What makes human intelligence as unique or not unique as it is, but as you say, we've've taken it further how come what what what what happened along the way that we we got way ahead in the race language is an unbelievable innovation and language alone can explain so much of what makes humans superior to other animals so first and foremost language enables us to learn from the imagination of others so if you look at a primate another non-human primate like an ape and an ape has many sources of learnings it can learn from its own trial and error so trying different things and seeing what succeeds and fails this is an ability we have in ai systems an ability you see in a fish

Starting point is 00:09:03 a fish will learn through trial and error a chimpanzee can also learn from its own imagination so it can pause and plan possible actions and then decide based on what works in its own imagined outcome it can also learn by observing others so we know uh for a fact that uh chimpanzees can learn tool use by observing others and imitating the behaviors they have. But non-human animals cannot learn from others' imaginations. So if me and you were trying to plan a hunt in the African savannah 300,000 years ago, we could pause and plan together. I could say, hey, let's actually travel north and let's pause and then we'll split up and then you go left, I go right, and then I'm going to surprise the antelopes and they're going to run in your direction and then you're going to trap them. That type of planning is

Starting point is 00:09:55 totally impossible without language. It allows us to report on the outcomes of our own imaginations. And so that enables humans to cooperate at an unparalleled scale. The other thing that is really unique about language is it enables culture. So we can pass down knowledge through many, many generations. And that allows us to accumulate complex information over long periods of time. Edison could not have invented the light bulb, if not for all of the amazing innovations that came prior that gave him those building blocks. And that accumulation of more complex knowledge is only possible with language passing down information. But you do see animals seemingly coordinated, like when the pack of lions surrounds the antelope i mean it

Starting point is 00:10:47 looks like there's a plan in place or something there's lots of animals that coordinate with each other but there's not evidence that what they're doing is imagining a plan and then reporting it to the other parties and then together they align on what they're going to do. A good example of this is if you look at how mice hoard, right? So before winter, mice will regularly find a bunch of nuts and they'll hoard them for the winter. And so people have posed the question, is this in fact them planning and realizing, oh, I'm going to be really hungry this winter. And so what I need to do is actually stock up. And so what they actually did is they took mice and all they did, they put them a mouse that has never experienced starvation through winter, never even experienced winter at all because it's been grown in a lab. And they

Starting point is 00:11:37 just lowered the temperature a little bit while they were living in a lab. And immediately they started hoarding nuts. And so what does that demonstrate? It demonstrates that there's a genetically hard-coded instinct to hoard food in the presence of dropping temperatures. So that ability to quote-unquote plan is not them imagining future hunger, it's actually an evolutionary instinct that enables them to survive winters. So that's instinct, but is that also intelligence? I mean, that is a pretty smart thing to do with winter coming to store food. So it's instinct, but that planning seems really smart. Other non-human animals definitely plan.

Starting point is 00:12:19 So, for example, even if you just watch a squirrel run across tree branches, I mean, although that doesn't seem like an incredible intellectual feat, we have utterly failed despite billions of dollars of research to get a robot to do anything like that. You cannot have a robot with the motor dexterity to look across a bunch of tree branches and figure out how to run across it without falling down. And so that is an intra-brain set of planning. The squirrel is real-time deciding where it's going to place its paws and which path to go down so it doesn't run into a dead end. So that form of planning does happen, but that's not the ability to share the results of one's own plan with another brain, which is what language enables us to do. We're talking about human intelligence, and we'll be talking about

Starting point is 00:13:10 artificial intelligence shortly. My guest is Max Bennett. He is author of the book, A Brief History of Intelligence. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world.

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Starting point is 00:14:17 So Max, along with human intelligence, humans, you know, okay, so we're really smart and we can do all these cool things. But alongside of that, the human brain's full of problems. You know, people get addicted to stuff. There's, you know, there's crime, there's people that do bad things, there's all this horrible stuff. Are they related or they just, these two things just go side by side and they don't really touch each other? Yeah, that's a really great question. So as much as we like to think about the human brain as some pinnacle of intellectual perfection, it clearly contains a whole suite of baggage. And a lot of our flaws come from this sort of baggage. So for example, in early mammals is when we evolved the ability, most evidence suggests,

Starting point is 00:15:04 we evolved the ability to imagine futures suggests, we evolve the ability to imagine futures and imagine pasts. So what we do is we engage in this process of simulation. And this is how we reason about the world. So when a squirrel is deciding how to run down a set of tree branches, it is mentally imagining its actions before it takes them. And that's a system that mammals use to plan in the world. But that set of reasons also, reasoning also comes with problems that lead to things like bias. So for example, a very famous behavioral economics question leads to a bias called the representative heuristic. So imagine I ask you the following question. Mike is meek and wears glasses. Is he more likely to

Starting point is 00:15:46 be a librarian or a construction worker? Almost everyone answers librarian, but that's actually not statistically correct because there are vastly more construction workers than there are librarians. So even if 95% of librarians are meek and wear glasses and 5% of construction workers are meek and wear glasses, and five percent of construction workers are meek and wear glasses, there's actually going to be more meek construction workers. And this is a source of bias all over the place in human reasoning. But it all comes from the fact that we reason by simulation. The way we answer that question is you imagine a librarian, you imagine a construction worker, and you compare the features I described to each of those individuals. And you say, well, it sounds like Mike being meek and wearing glasses is more

Starting point is 00:16:31 like the librarian. And so that type of reasoning by simulating is begotten from our early mammalian intellectual faculties, but leads to plenty of mistakes. These mistakes weren't particularly relevant when they evolved, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago. But now in the modern world, that type of reasoning also leads to problems. Well, I've heard the argument too, that a lot of the problems that people have today, addiction, mental health, that these are problems of a modern world because most of human history, people were too busy trying to survive to worry about being addicted or worrying about their anxiety. They're just trying to stay alive. And now that we have freedom from worrying about staying alive, all these other problems creep in. Yes. There's two places where that's definitely the case.

Starting point is 00:17:26 One is brains did not evolve the way that we like to model brains in economics or even popular culture. So in economics and popular culture, we like to think about humans as these agents with a happiness score. And the more good things we give these humans, the more their happiness score will go up. But that's not how brains evolve. Brains evolve to habituate to whatever situation they're in. They always will re-baseline themselves. And so what the problem with one of the problems with modern society is we keep trying to satiate something that is by definition insatiable. And so we see this even in fish. Fish have a reinforcement learning machine very similar to the way that we experience reinforcement and reward. And fish will get addicted to cocaine and caffeine and alcohol just as much and even gambling.

Starting point is 00:18:23 You can get a fish to get addicted to gambling the same way we do. What? Yep. You can have a, yes, you can have a fish. It's called variable ratio reinforcement, where if you have a fish push a lever and a random set of times, you release food. This is something you also see in mice and in humans. It's effectively a lotto machine. You can get a fish and a human to get addicted to pulling these lotto machines, even though the expected return is negative. And that there's a little bit of nuance into why that's the case. But that is based on the way reinforcement learning has to work in brains. We get an additional dose of excitement from surprise. And you need that in order to explore the world. But that can be exploited to get people to become addicted to pulling

Starting point is 00:19:11 effectively lotto levers. And so fish will do that. Mice will do that. Humans do that in casinos all the time. And so yes, that is exploited in the modern world constantly. In the natural world, those types of situations don't come up that often. So you don't end up stuck gambling and addicted to the sort of surprise that we see in our social media feeds and casinos, et cetera. The other way this manifests is in primate life. So primates are uniquely sort of status-seeking if you observe uh you know the social life of a chimpanzee there's very rigid hierarchies um there's a lot of politics they almost live in this like middle school like life um but all of that's grounded also in the need to survive so they don't spend

Starting point is 00:19:58 all of their time obsessing about status and how they relate to each other, they also are bound together by the need to find food and survive predators, et cetera. But if you take chimpanzees and you remove all of the concern for actual survival, they spend more and more of their time obsessing about status and status seeking and the interpersonal politics. And so at least in the developed world, where a lot of us are not, there's plenty of places in the world where this is not the case, but at least in the developed world where there's not concern for survival, what we do is we replace all of that time, it's our natural primate instinct with status seeking political types of things. And that is not a source of happiness, right? So

Starting point is 00:20:45 scrolling on social media feed, comparing yourself to other people all day is what we will default to in the absence of needing to do things to survive as a group. But that obviously is not a source of happiness. And that also derives from the evolutionary history of early primates. So you work in the field of artificial intelligence, and can you explain basically what that is? We hear a lot about, you know, chat GBT, and it can paint pictures and write songs and play chess and do all these things. What is it doing, and how is it related to human intelligence? Is it like human intelligence, or is it something else? The biggest innovation recently has been in language models. And so chat GPT, which is the sort of famous language model

Starting point is 00:21:33 by open AI is founded on a massive neural network. So just a web of artificial neurons that does one simple thing. It takes the text that you give it and tries to predict the next word, all it's doing. And so when you give it a prompt and you ask it to do something under the hood, all that's happening is it's trying to predict the next word and answering your question. And what has been surprising to lots of people in the world of AI is instead of gifting these systems what we know to exist in human and animal brains such as the ability to simulate futures a model of the world the ability to reason about other minds all these things that we know are missing in this web of neuron that does nothing but predict the next word without giving it any of that. If we just scale

Starting point is 00:22:29 it up, if we just say, well, you know what, instead of solving these hard problems of doing things the way brains do them, what if we just give it like a ridiculous amount of data? What if we have this neural network read like the entire internet does that give it so much information that it actually starts being able to do a decent job and what's been surprising to everyone is the answer to that is clearly yes so chat gbt doesn't pause to think about what it's going to say to you it doesn't have a model of how the world actually works and yet by reading pretty much the entire internet and pretty much every book ever written, it does a decent job answering these really complicated questions. And so this actually begets a really big question, which is, how do we measure how smart these systems are when we know

Starting point is 00:23:17 it's not doing what we would think would be necessary, but it's almost good at tricking us into thinking that it is doing that? On what grounds do we trust these systems and how much do we want to give them control of things? So what do you see as the worry, the concern about artificial intelligence? Where can it go wrong? There is a risk that these very powerful AI systems just become dangerous technology and misunderstands what we're trying to get it to do. And this is where primate intelligence is really important. So the famous philosopher Nick Bostrom, who wrote the book Superintelligence, has an allegory that he

Starting point is 00:23:56 calls the paperclip problem. And in his allegory, he says, let's imagine a world where we have a superintelligent AI that runs a paperclip factory. And we give it a very simple request. We say, hey, can you just maximize production of paperclips? And fast forward a year, this AI has converted all of Earth into paperclips, eliminating human civilization. And what happens? This AI was not Hal. It wasn't trying to hurt anyone.

Starting point is 00:24:25 It just misunderstood the request we gave it. And this comes back to a problem of language that us humans don't realize, but it's happening all the time. When we talk to each other, the information we're giving to each other in our words is a very small fraction of the information that's actually being transmitted between our brains. And the reason is we are constantly trying to infer what the other person meant by what they said. So if I were running a factory and you came to me and said, Hey, Max, please maximize the production of paperclips. What I'm first going to do is take that language request. And then I'm going to try and simulate your mind and try and understand what are your preferences, what outcome

Starting point is 00:25:04 would actually make you happy. And then I'm going to start doing things with your preferences in mind. And I'm constantly going to be comparing my actions against would this be what Mike actually wants. And this is something primates do. And this is completely missing from AI systems today. And so I think that is a danger where the more control we give to these AI systems, the more crucial it is that we ensure they really understand what we mean by what we say. Otherwise, they risk doing actions that are not intentionally nefarious, but do lead to bad consequences. Well, this has been very helpful to me to understand human intelligence and to get a better handle on artificial intelligence.

Starting point is 00:25:46 You explained it well. I've been speaking with Max Bennett. He is author of a book called A Brief History of Intelligence. And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you being here, Max. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

Starting point is 00:26:03 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.

Starting point is 00:26:34 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

Starting point is 00:26:57 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. 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

Starting point is 00:27:32 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. The world is full of sound, and we often take it for granted. But if you suddenly lost your ability to hear all the sounds around you,

Starting point is 00:28:29 it would probably be pretty frightening. Sound fills in a lot of information about what's going on. Sound can be very pleasant and pleasurable, like music, a baby laughing, or the sound of waves crashing. Sound can serve as a warning that something is or about to go wrong. We rely on sound, the noises the world makes. And here to explain just how important a role sound plays in your life is Casper Henderson. He is a journalist who covers topics like energy, science, the environment,

Starting point is 00:29:03 and he's author of a book called A Book of Noises, Notes on the Oraculus. Hi, Casper. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. So what is it about sound and noises, what is it that fascinates you so much? Because as I mentioned, you know, a lot of times we take it for granted, we don't really

Starting point is 00:29:22 pay attention consciously to the sounds we're hearing, but you obviously do. So why is that? Well, I've always loved good noises. I've always loved music and the amazing sounds of nature. But I think more than that, when we really pay attention to sound, it has the potential to hugely enrich our lives in ways that often we don't appreciate. How so? How so? Once we start to really pay attention, the world becomes present to us in ways maybe that it wasn't before. Our brains are able to absorb astonishing amounts of information through sound.

Starting point is 00:30:01 And this can be a very enriching experience. Sound is actually processed very quickly in the brain and is astonishingly subtle. At least our brains are capable of detecting amazing subtleties in sound that we often underestimate. Well, as somebody who works in an audio medium, I'm tuned into sound and noises probably more than most. And I have a great appreciation for it, that we need sound. I mean, we need it to navigate the world. It's really important. It is absolutely foundational and is the source of enormous joy. Of course, it can be a source of horror and dismay when we have noise pollution or very very loud and unpleasant noises but mostly it's a source of enormous joy i think when we really feel

Starting point is 00:30:51 present very often for many people it's music but it could be it could be at a sporting event you know with uh with the crowd and everybody together making sounds together it's one of the ways in which we feel most present and alive and i think that's part of where I started when I got as interested as I am today in the topic, just how alive sound can make us feel. Being someone who works in audio and with sound, I have always had like favorite sounds. I mean, I could name five of them. And I have one here that I'll play. This is the sound of my son who's now 19. When he was an infant, I recorded him when he was having

Starting point is 00:31:35 just a laughing fit. And every time anyone has ever heard this that I've witnessed, can't not smile and maybe even laugh out loud. There's something about this sound. And so I wondered, does everybody you think have a favorite sound? Are people asked that? Does everybody have a sound that goes, yeah, I really love that sound? I think some people think about it quite a bit and i have asked people and often they have quite surprising answers um i have a few sounds that i like very much but of course it does change over time and so much is connected to our memory and our life story i'll give you an interesting example i was sharing quite recently um a sound that really like, and that is the liquid

Starting point is 00:32:26 inside a wine bottle or similar shape bottle makes just as it starts to come out, this kind of noise. And the person I shared it with said for her, no, that was what they call dysphonia. It's actually something she loathes, that sound. It sends shutters down her spine. So this shows that your life history and various other factors play a big role too. Well, it's interesting you say that. So not only do some people have favorite sounds, but some people have sounds that drive them nuts. I mean, my son is an example of this. He does not like the sound of people chewing, particularly something crunchy like nuts or crackers or something. I mean, it really, he leaves the room because it's so unpleasant for him.

Starting point is 00:33:10 Right. Yeah. Well, I sympathize with your son, I guess. I mean, there are times when, you know, the noises that people make really bother us. But mostly, you know, I think the world is so full of astonishing sonic variety and richness. And by and large, the more we look, the more there is to wonder at. I came up with this word, the oraculus, which is kind of a counterpart for the miraculous, which comes from the Latin to see, to see a marvel. But the oraculus are the wonders that we hear. And I think the world is full of them when we start to pay attention.

Starting point is 00:33:43 Are there sounds that are universally liked? And are there sounds that are universally disliked? That's a good question. I honestly don't know. I suspect, you know, I'm not an expert here. I don't know if there's been well-grounded research on this topic. But I would be surprised if, by and large, the overwhelming majority of people do not like um the sounds of a small child or baby laughing i think that's probably one of those most popular sounds there

Starting point is 00:34:11 is and uh i mean the other side very very loud sounds are necessarily uh shocking to us and indeed if they're loud enough they can cause significant physical damage. Even very, very loud sounds can actually kill a human being. What? So, yes. How can a loud sound kill someone? A very loud sound can create something like an embolism, so like an air bubble, and that could get into your heart and it can kill you. It can happen.

Starting point is 00:34:40 People have tried, have developed weapons specifically to maim and kill, which use sound. There are, you know, much cheaper and quicker ways, by and large, of killing people than these weapons. Certainly sound can be used to degrade somebody psychologically, to torture them. And sound is used in war in this way quite a bit. Let's talk about music. And clearly I understand there's lots of different kinds of music and not everybody likes all kinds of music. But it does seem that most people like some kind of music. There's something about music, the sound of music that does something for people.

Starting point is 00:35:20 There are people who don't like music or are indifferent to it. You know, just it just doesn't work for them. But yes, I think the great majority of us, most of the time, we love music, as long as it's coming when we want it. But then music, you know, it's this word we have in English in most Western European languages and in North America and other parts of the world. But there are parts of the world where, including large parts of Africa, where often people don't distinguish music from dance. The two come together. And so I think we need to keep that in mind, too. The sounds of nature. It does seem like there's something about the sound of nature that people like.

Starting point is 00:35:58 Here's a couple of things on that. One is if you kind of average all the sound in a natural environment, if you kind of take all of it and smoosh it together, you'll come up with something called pink noise, where the loudness diminishes in proportion as the pitch rises. So basically it gets quieter as it gets higher. And pink noise, it's not the same as white noise, which is actually pretty unpleasant to listen to. That's kind of hissing noise. But pink noise is very like what you'd get from a waterfall or waves crashing on a beach, which is for many people shown to be a very soothing sound. And of course, when it comes to the

Starting point is 00:36:38 sounds of the living world, when we're in a place where nature where animals and plants and other living things are thriving, then the noises are indicative of that. And I think we learn often quite early in our lives, depending how and where we grow up. But particularly if we grow up in a place with lots of non-human living forms, with lots of nature, we learn what is um what's a good healthy time uh where where the creatures are thriving and that's reassuring one sound that i think people cherish because it's often hard to find is the sound of silence that in in the modern world getting away from all the noise is nice i mean noise pollution depending on how you define it but you know unwanted noise has bad effects on on our psyche

Starting point is 00:37:34 on our bodies you know it can lead to increased stress and it's definitely bad for us so when we get away from these these unwanted noises that's generally a very good thing. Most people, people I've talked to and from research I've done, most people are not always comfortable with complete silence. We want maybe very gentle background sounds, maybe what we would call quiet. In the US, for example, there's, I think, a place in the Cascade National Park or National Forest where you can seldom hear the sounds of planes or other human actions and noises. And when it's totally silent, sometimes people are more aware of other things. There's a quite well-known case of Philip Glass, the composer, who went into one of these super silent rooms, an anechoic chamber, and he could hear a kind of buzzing and humming. He was probably listening to electrical signals in his own ears, maybe even his blood moving. And for some people, that's a little disquieting. But it does seem that new noises can puzzle us, scare us.

Starting point is 00:38:48 I mean, how many times have you heard something and gone, what the hell was that? Because you've never heard that noise before. Something happens outside, a car crash or something, that noise that you haven't heard or you seldom hear. New noises seem to be somewhat alarming. Sure. I mean, anything that's unfamiliar to us is going to get our attention. And, you know, fear may be one of the first reactions. You certainly will be on heightened alert. And if it's an unfamiliar sound, you know, I think we've all had that.

Starting point is 00:39:29 Or even if it's just a super unexpected sound, you know, it's a shock, of course. But that doesn't, you know, we can get to like unfamiliar sounds. You know, we, I don't know, I don't know about you, Mike, but I, one of the things I feel fortunate is, and I'm still discovering new kinds of music and new sounds in the world around me. And, you know, this I think is part of the adventure. So I prefer to see it as a glass half full. Yeah. But when you hear a sound that you're not familiar with, you try to equate it with one you are. It's like, well, that kind of sounds like that other thing. And we do that with our other senses, too. You know, it sort of tastes like chicken, but it's like we try to make sense of it based on what we already know.

Starting point is 00:40:06 Absolutely. Also, one of the things that some new technologies are making available is just the range of sounds in the world that we, I think, often have not appreciated before. So, for example, the huge world of sound under the sea. There's this misconception, I think, dating back to maybe the 1950s and Jacques Cousteau, who talked about the silent sea. But in fact, the sea is full of sounds, full of noises, extraordinary things going on at every level. And new, cheap, robust, reliable microphones mounted on, say, subsea drones and other ways of hearing those sounds are making available ways of understanding what's going on in the sea that are just way beyond what people have ever thought of before.

Starting point is 00:40:51 So we've all heard, you know, scientists talk about, you know, the limitations of our vision, that there are probably things right in front of us that we can't perceive. And I also wonder if there are sounds that are not within human hearing that we hear and may affect us, but we're not even aware of it. This is a fascinating question. So human hearing, broadly speaking, a healthy young adult with good hearing will easily hear sounds from around 20 hertz. That's 20 cycles per second up to about 20 000 hertz that's from a very low sound like a like a very big pipe on a church organ up to something that's heading towards but not as not nearly as high as a dog whistle but heading in that direction

Starting point is 00:41:38 um unfortunately as we get older our hearing tends to deteriorate a little bit um but yeah there's huge amounts of sound outside these ranges. So you have the very low sounds from volcanoes and other earth systems. And then way above human hearing, of course, we have the sounds that many animals make. Birds tend to actually sing mostly in the range we hear, but bats and some other creatures emit very very high sounds or can detect them and use these very very high sounds in the case of bats for eco echolocation finding their way around bouncing a very high sound off an object and detecting the signal that comes back and they achieve amazing resolution just by using sound actually better than we can do with the human eye

Starting point is 00:42:23 and they're you know they're whizzing through space and screeching actually very loud, but it's so high we can't hear it. And they're discriminating differences in their environment that even the eye can't see at an equivalent distance, the human eye can't see. One of the things that I find interesting about, and I guess other creatures do this as well, is, you know, we don't hear sounds one at a time consecutively. We hear a lot of sounds all together and we're somehow able to pull them apart usually well enough to decipher what those sounds are, what someone is saying,

Starting point is 00:42:57 even though that truck is going by and really loud. We're able to pull apart sounds is that a human thing or every creature does that or what once you start to pay attention to and realize how able humans are in this area it is fascinating and delightful so in speech we're detecting very very rapid changes in sonic waveforms on a very very rapid scale even as i mentioned before that we can hear from up to 20 000 hertz that's 20 000 cycles a second the brain is processing you know incredibly rapid changes you know this is an astonishing feat and not surprisingly it actually takes quite a lot of our brain to do this it's an amazing area and, and I think it's really something we should celebrate and, of course, look after. Because the more we realize it, I think, the more we're likely to value it and protect our own hearing and also the wonderful sounds that the world makes. Is there much science to the idea that sound, particularly music, has any kind of healing effect on people? Or is that

Starting point is 00:44:07 more, wouldn't it be nice? No, well, in some areas, there's a lot of science. So something many of us are familiar with, I think, is the use of ultrasound. So perhaps many people may have seen a baby while it's still in the womb by the aid of ultrasound. And ultrasound can be used to look at many other things going on in the body to a great level of detail. There are many other applications. Just one of them is that the ultrasound can be used to ablate a cataract in the eye. There are other techniques, of course, but it is one of the ways that it can be basically the cataract using sound. When it to music i mean many cultures certainly um western cultures and muslim the muslim world and elsewhere in china and in shamanic traditions people have long associated

Starting point is 00:44:57 music with healing uh and there's a good reason for this. Music is demonstrated, depending on the kind of music and the circumstances, but music is demonstrated to have a beneficial effect on mood. It brings people together. We entrain, as it's called. We come together in time. I live in the UK, and the National Health Service here runs some quite large-scale trials on various things. And one that took place recently with good results and is going to be rolled out at a larger scale is using singing and music therapy for new mothers who have postpartum depression. The music can really help. It can do better in some cases than some of the drugs that people have been using or other therapies.

Starting point is 00:45:44 So, yes, music really can heal people and it can really help them. cases than some of the drugs that people have been using or other or other therapies so yes music really can heal people and it can really help them talk about earworms you know those the well explain what they are and then why they're interesting an earworm is just a figure of speech an earworm is a piece of music usually or it could be it could be somebody's voice but very often this piece of music has kind of got stuck and it feels like it's just going round and round in your in your head it's not anything to be worried about it's nothing to do with hallucination it's not a not a sign of mental illness and it's super common it's reported that 95 percent of people maybe more occasionally have earworms some of us maybe suffer a little more than others.

Starting point is 00:46:26 I've had periods where I've had, you know, it just will not leave me alone. And sometimes more than one at a time, even very different bits of music. So they're very common. And it's probably, you know, music is many things. But one of the things it does is often it kind of trips reward circuits in our brain and maybe with an earworm what's happening is our brain is just kind of trying to give itself a little bit more reward maybe like when we eat too many potato chips it's just wanting more and more and it's kind of got stuck the cure usually um you know they will go away however long they go on

Starting point is 00:47:02 but usually if they won't go away in the short term, the cure is usually to just find something to do, engage yourself in a conversation or go for a run or go to work, whatever it is, do something else. And almost always, in fact, virtually always it will go away. I know one thing you write about is the golden record, which I think it really illustrates the importance and the power of sound and noise that, you know, if we ever came into contact with creatures from another planet, sound would help us explain who we are. And so talk about the golden record. So the Golden Record was an LP, a long-playing record, not made of vinyl, but of metal, coated in gold, mounted on two twin spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in, I think, 1977, sent on a trajectory to examine Neptune and Uranus,

Starting point is 00:48:02 but then to head on out of the solar system into interstellar space. Carl Sagan, who was working on the Voyager spacecraft, proposed these records to carry some of the sounds of Earth. And he and his team selected a number of tracks from all around the world. And these are engraved on or engraved on these golden records. I think they're just leaving our solar system or they've just recently left, heading out. The prospect or the likelihood of an alien civilization ever finding them is, I think, very, very close to zero.

Starting point is 00:48:40 But I think if we think of it as a work of art, it's a way of expressing what, at least in 1977, Carl Sagan and his people felt was some of the most precious music on earth. There are several tracks by J.S. Bach, but there's also Johnny B. Goode and many other famous pieces of music from the States and wonderful folk songs from different parts of the world. Well, being a podcaster and an audio guy, I guess I've always felt that hearing and sound and noise is often underrated, so it's fun to hear someone explain that, yeah, no, it's actually pretty important. I've been speaking with Caspar Henderson. He is a journalist and author of the book, A Book of Noises, Notes on the Oraculous. There's a link to that book in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Thanks for coming on, Casper. All right. All the best to you. And thanks so much again. I think I've mentioned, I'm sure I've mentioned this before on another episode, but it's something that comes up every year, and I've always remembered this advice and strongly recommend it to you. When you look back at all your holiday family photos, you will often notice something is missing. The grown-ups. We tend to focus most of our photo efforts around the holidays on the kids. You know, take a picture of Johnny and his new bicycle. And while that's perfectly natural, you really need to take pictures of aunts and uncles

Starting point is 00:50:09 and grandmas and grandpas, because in the years to come, when those kids are grown and those adults are not around anymore, your kids will wish you had taken more pictures of them. Also, particularly if you put the pictures in some kind of scrapbook, put a few words on the page next to each picture that identifies the people and the places and the feelings. I mean, how many times have you looked at an old holiday photo? Who's that next to grandpa? I don't know who that guy is. Well, this way you'll know, and it will help to jog your memory long after you've forgotten just how special the event was. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:50:50 Our audience continues to grow because listeners like you tell their friends about this podcast, and then they listen and they tell their friends. It's that whole word-of-mouth thing. It works, and we really appreciate it. So please, tell someone you know about this podcast. I'm Mike Hurbr brother's thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney?

Starting point is 00:51:11 Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed.

Starting point is 00:51:37 I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true?

Starting point is 00:51:54 Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

Starting point is 00:52:13 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,

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Something You Should Know - Quirks of Human and Artificial Intelligence & The Good and Bad Ways Sounds Affect You

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