Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Fix a Broken Heart & A Journey Through Numbers

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Everyone is different but when I need to solve a problem or think of something creative, I often lie down, close my eyes and think. And it turns out that is good advice for everyone. I start this episode with some interesting research that reveals why lying down is a good position to think in. https://lifehacker.com/need-a-creative-boost-try-lying-down-5982463 Ever have your heart broken? I think we all have at some point. Psychologist Guy Winch, author of the book How to Fix a Broken Heart (https://amzn.to/2UD20it) joins me to explain why a broken heart feels so horrible, how it is different than other forms of grief and why we need to take it more seriously. A broken heart can have negative long-lasting effects and Guy explains how to minimize those effects so you can move on with your life. What if there was no zero? In the world of numbers, zero is a relatively new addition. And it is the only number that hasn’t changed over time. It is and always has been a circle. Alex Bellos, author of the book Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (https://amzn.to/2MT3G4V) explains some of the fascination facts about numbers like: Why a minute has 60 seconds and an hour has 60 minutes; why a number for nothing (zero) was so revolutionary; why elevator buttons never use negative numbers to indicate floors below ground – and so much more. (Alex is also author of Puzzle Ninja and Soccer School . How can it be that 40% of food in the United States is wasted and thrown away? Many people use coupons and search for bargains at the supermarket and yet so much of that food never gets eaten. Listen as we explore the problem and what we can do. https://www.agweek.com/lifestyle/3937264-save-money-fish-heads-and-potato-scraps PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really enjoy The Jordan Harbinger Show and we think you will as well! There’s just SO much here. Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations, OR search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.  Over the last 6 years, donations made at Walgreens in support of Red Nose Day have helped positively impact over 25 million kids. You can join in helping to change the lives of kids facing poverty. To help Walgreens support even more kids, donate today at checkout or at https://Walgreens.com/RedNoseDay. https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! 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, if you need to solve a problem, lie down first. I'll explain why. Then, everyone has had their heart broken, and the effects can be more devastating than you think. If you're heartbroken and your heart is ripped out of your gut and all you can do is be in bed and cry for a day, there's no medical organization, psychological organization that

feels that that is actually something that merits its own category or its own consideration and it's remarkable that that's the case. Plus we have a real food problem. Too much of it is thrown away. And the fascinating world of math and numbers. For example, our number system is base 10, but... The very first system, the system used by the Sumerians 6,000, 7,000 years ago, was base 60.

Okay, base 60 kind of seems crazy, but that's why we have, to this day, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. 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, welcome. So a couple of feet away from where I'm sitting in my studio, I have a couch. And I use that couch frequently, not because I'm sitting in my studio, I have a couch and I use that couch frequently, not because I'm lazy, because often what I do is when I'm trying to come up with things to say, to introduce a segment, to introduce a guest, I often go over to the couch, lie down, close my eyes, and things pop into my head. And that is part of my creative process.

And as it turns out, I'm on to something. It seems that the next time you're struggling to find a solution or to come up with a creative idea, lying down is a good way to do it. In an Australian National University study, participants were asked to solve problems. Specifically, what they were asked to do is solve anagrams. And when the volunteers were lying down, they solved the problem 10 times faster than when

they were standing up. The theory is that when you lie down, it slows down the brain's production of chemicals, which can actually help you think more creatively and make connections between unrelated concepts. And that is something you should know. I imagine that just about everyone listening has had their heart broken by someone at some point in their life. And if that has happened to you, you know how devastating and crushing that can be. Yet we often don't take it seriously. We toss out phrases like, oh, he just had his heart broken, as if it's nothing. Is it nothing?

What is a broken heart? What can you learn from it? And what's the best way to get over one? Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist in New York, and he's author of a couple of really interesting books, including How to Fix a Broken Heart. Hi, Guy. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. So anyone who's had a broken heart knows what it is, but from a more clinical perspective,

is a broken heart a real thing? Oh, it's very much a real thing. A broken heart is a form of grief. It's a form of unsanctioned, disenfranchised grief in that it's not one that we tend to take very seriously, although we should. But it's a form of loss. It's a form of grief, and it impacts people as much as other forms of grief do. Well, it is interesting that everyone gets their heart broken, it seems. I don't know if there's any statistics on it, but it seems to be a pretty common experience. And yet, when you talk about it in a more clinical, medical way, we give it another name. It's depression or sadness or something.

But heartbreak is not a medical diagnosis. And that's interesting, right? Because our medical diagnoses, I mean, they're really arbitrary in a way, right? It's like what at the moment we consider to be problematic and we keep updating these things as we know more. But if you think about the result of heartbreak, it can render people really non-functional. It can be as severe in its initial impact as the most severe of clinical

depressions. And yet, while those are things you can completely consider, you know, legit and the mental health disorder and coverable by insurance and all of that, if you're heartbroken and you're literally, your heart is ripped out of your gut and all you can do is be in bed and cry for a day, there's no organization that feels, no company, no medical organization, psychological organization that feels that that is actually something that merits its own category or its own consideration. And it's remarkable that that's the case. How do you define a broken heart?

I define a broken heart by anything that really causes a shock response of loss and grief and massive, massive yearning that comes with it. The thing about heartbreak that makes it complicated is that we yearn for the person who broke our heart in intense, intense ways. Our brain chemistry, our brain functions really get altered in that moment and reflect a huge systematic physical and psychological change that's happening in us in those moments. And so it's not just the grief and the loss, but it's the intense, intense yearning that comes with it. Isn't it interesting how, and it's probably happened to lots, if not most people, where there's someone in their life who, not necessarily take for granted, but, you know,

they're not madly passionate about until they're told that person doesn't want to be in their life anymore, and then that person becomes amazingly attractive. And that's really about the fact that a lot of us walk around without really being fully appreciative of the things and the people we have in our lives until they're actually taken away. And it's always a reminder to me to practice some kind of regular gratitude about those things and the people that you have that make your life good. But it's also true that we tend to value things once they're gone, often more than we do once we have them or once they're harder to get.

So when something is hard to get because it's gone or it seems like it might be, we suddenly get much more motivated to pay attention to it, and that's just part of our psychology. Yeah, it seems to be human nature, and perhaps it serves some sort of evolutionary purpose, but it does compound the problem of when you feel sad that someone's broken your heart, it amplifies it to such an extent that it's really often debilitating. That is the case. The other thing that happens, though, and in part why it's so debilitating, is the way our mind responds when our heart is broken is our mind's job is to keep us from harm, right? Its job is to, evolutionary-wise, was to, if something we did is very painful or very

damaging, let's make sure we don't do that again. And so when we experience heartbreak and it's very painful, our mind's job is to say, oh, if that's painful, I'll make sure you won't forget how painful it is so you won't make the mistake again. But our job is to actually indeed forget and move on so we can make the mistake again, quote unquote, and find love. And then therefore, our mind is working to keep the pain as sharp as possible, as present as possible, to keep the person as fresh in our thoughts, to give them as much stage time in our brains as it possibly can, while our purpose is completely the opposite. And unless we realize that our mind is working at cross-purposes to what our actual needs are, we keep going down

the wrong rabbit holes and we'll keep responding to what our gut is telling us to do, even though it'll be absolutely the wrong and harmful thing to do in terms of our ability to recover. So what's the best thing to do? Where do you make the break and say, okay, I know my mind wants me to dwell on this. What do I do instead that breaks away from that? So first of all, you have to be aware, I think, and this is true of all emotional injuries, including heartbreak, you have to be aware that your mind is not going to serve you. And you have to know that when you, you know, your eyes fly open at three in the morning, and you're remembering, oh, my ex's cousin's wedding was last night, maybe I'll go and scour that cousin's Instagram because the other guy blocked

me, you know, and you find some good excuse to spend three hours or four hours, you know, stalking somebody on social media. And it seems like a great reason at the time, only you need to be able to catch it and go, no, no, no, no, that's just me trying to, you know, get more of a taste of what that relationship felt like when I had it. And we do that because the way our brain works, it responds to heartbreak the way a heroin addict's brain responds to withdrawal. We just become intensely, intensely needy of that fix, of having some kind of taste of what that felt like. And if you can't have the actual person, we can have the methadone of the memories of them or seeing them in an image, except that's really bad for us. We need to get off the heroin quote, unquote, and we need to be able to re-engage and rebuild our lives.

And so when you say, what can people do? One of the things you need to do is you have to reformulate what your life is about now. You're not in that relationship anymore. You're no longer a we. So now you're an I again. So who is that I? Are you the same person you were before that relationship? Are there updates you need to do to your life, to your identity, to the people around you, to your hobbies, to everything? So we really have to pay attention. This is a rebuild of our lives, both on the external and the internal. And we actually have to focus on that rebuilding job. In that immediate aftermath, when your heart just gets crushed,

in the moments and minutes and days after you hear, I don't want to see you anymore, what's the best advice? Surround yourself by people who care about you. Get that emotional and social support at the beginning. But pretty much at the beginning, try and come up with a good understanding or the best one you have about why it ended and try to come to terms with the fact that it has. With all forms of grief, we tend to do the bargaining, right?

In our heads, even when someone dies, oh, but if only I had done this, maybe we would have caught it in time. And we always do that bargaining, the counterfactual thinking of what if. Try and get to the point and try working on that reality to absorb the reality of this is over, because that will help you move forward more quickly. And one test to wrestle with that and to deny that.

And every time the phone, you know, beeps with a message, we think, oh, maybe it's them and they changed their mind. Probably not. That very, very rarely happens. It's interesting, at least it's my observation, that people tend to take their own broken heart very seriously. It hurts so much. You can't possibly understand what I'm going through. But we look at other people's heartbreak through a lighter lens, particularly, I think, maybe with kids, teenagers, middle school kids who are perhaps coming out of a first romance and getting their heart broken, which hurts a lot. But we tend to minimize the impact. We tend to, I think, minimize it more for adults, because at least with teenagers, we think it goes with the

territory. Oh, they're just discovering what that feels like. Except when you discover what that feels like when you're a teenager, and then it happens to you in your 50s, it turns out, oh, it sucks just as badly. It's just as painful. And so we tend to be sufficiently unsympathetic and not compassionate enough at all ages. You know, in other words, somebody gets the flu and we can go, yeah, the flu happens. It's bad. It really is debilitating when you have it. It's not a laughing matter. It's a health risk. It's a health concern. People take all kinds of drastic steps when their heart is broken. Self-harm is one of them, but also desperate measures of, I'm going to sell my house and buy her a ring to prove my love.

She just dumped you. What are you doing? But that's the thought that you'll have. And so, you know, it's a big deal. I'm speaking with Guy Winch. He is a psychologist who practices in New York, and he's author of the book, How to Fix a Broken Heart. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. book, How to 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 Guy, when people get their heart broken, is everybody different in terms of how much time it takes to get over it? Everyone is different and the circumstances are often very different. Because if you're someone that hasn't dated in seven years, and then you had two months of dating

with this one person, and you thought, oh, finally, this is going to now happen to me, that's wonderful. And then that gets taken away, and you're facing another bleak period of like, I don't know when I'm going to meet the next person, because it took seven years to meet that one. That can be a huge impact from a two-month relationship, as opposed to somebody who's been a serial relationship person and another one ends and it's very, very difficult, but they will find someone else. They tend to. Those people are around them. They're in a circumstance by which they can meet people. So the circumstance matters almost as much as our individual personalities because truly people get heartbroken sometimes multiple times in their lives.

And it's not that one circumstance is exactly like the same and they experience them in the same way. It can come at a time and in a place and in a way that can be more or less damaging and more or less debilitating. And there's a lot of it depends when it comes to that, of how bad it is. Do you think that when people finally do move on, that the baggage of the broken heart has a tendency to creep into the next relationship? Yeah, that's often the case. Often, when people get divorced, for example, they go and look for the person that's not like my ex, and then they get very chagrined because then they join all these, you know, apps.

And the first person the app is going to suggest is their ex. Because they're still consistent in their taste. And that happens so many times that somebody gets divorced and the next person that the app recommends is, you should try this woman. Well, I just divorced her. But we often want to go and do better than or differently than, but it depends. If there's a gap between those events, we might not,

and sometimes when the heart is broken, we want to go and find the clone of the person who broke a heart and give it another try with that clone, so we'll actually go and look for the exact same kind of person, at least often physically or with certain attributes or career paths. And that can equally be folly, because whenever you're going for a specific thing, you're actually going to sign up for something maybe when you shouldn't and pass on things that you should not pass on. So it just limits our thinking and our options

in an unnecessary way. It seems to happen, and perhaps one of the reasons a broken heart is so painful is because it seems to happen out of the blue. I don't want to see you anymore. I think we should see other people. I've met someone else or something. And it's like, where did that come from? One thing to keep in mind is this. When people break up, when people say, OK, I'm out, whether it's in a relationship, a short-term one, certainly if it's in a long-term one or a marriage, they have been thinking about that way before they verbalized it.

They have been going through a psychological exit process or distancing emotionally process for a long time before they'll actually vocalize it. That's very, very standard. And so when you hear it for the first time, as the person who's heartbroken, you think, but just last week we were on vacation and they seemed happy. How can that possibly be? And the answer is, yeah, they're not going to tell you they're thinking of leaving. They will go through the motions of regular life until they're ready to tell you whenever that is. And very often they'll think, you know, let's get through the vacation and not ruin that. And then I'll tell them.

But what happens to the person whose heart is broken is like, well, something must have changed in the last four days. What was it? But nothing has. It's been changing in the past four months. You know, so you hear it after it's been pretty well processed on behalf of the other person. They are at a very different point than you in getting ready to leave this relationship. They are ready by the time they're starting to talk about it or getting ready. And so that has been going on for a long time. You have to understand that you haven't been privy to that process, and you might have feelings about that, but that you are being brought into the loop at a much later stage.

I guess the eternally optimist advice for this is that you will get over it, because people pretty much do get over it, don't they? Most, some don't, though. I mean, in other words, you really have to do some work to get over it. And I keep talking about a recovery process. It is a recovery process. When you have a severe physical injury, you might get over it, but you're probably going to need some physical therapy, some constant attention. This is true of heartbreak. This is true of any emotional injury, but certainly of heartbreak as well. You have to manage that

recovery, not be on autopilot and just wait for it to happen. And to manage it means to limit the damaging things that can really interfere with your ability to recover, like stalking your ex on social media, say, or spending hours going through the great memories that you had together when you're trying to get over a person. And no, you can't be friends with them, not right away. And for the vast majority of people, if you wait long enough, once you're over them, you won't necessarily can't be friends with them, not right away. And for the vast majority of people, if you wait long enough, once you're over them, you won't necessarily want to be friends with them. But taking over means that you have to repair your life. There are going to be empty

things in your apartment where their possessions used to be, and your weekends are going to look different because you don't have a partner with whom you spend them now and your social life is going to be different and who you text during the day to say how your workday is going is going to have to be someone else. And the idea is you need to find substitutions and ways to fill these voids and ways to reformulate your life and your sense of who you are and what you're about. And that's an active process. And time does some of that. But slowly and not well, you have to contribute. So time helps, but you have to make it, make that recovery go more quickly and more efficiently and more comprehensively by the actions you take and the ones you avoid taking.

What about the action of, obviously not the next day, but relatively soon to, you know, get back on the horse, get another mate? I have a guideline about that, which most people don't agree with or look at me sideways when I vocalize. But I say it almost not jokingly is that if you can get through your date without talking about your ex or bursting into tears, you might be ready. That's the test. Yeah, I mean, it's a low bar, but maybe a low bar is better, you know, because then, you know, and, and, you know, you can feel like your heart isn't in it. And certainly I wouldn't portray to the person who's on that date with you that, um, Oh, I'm ready to jump into a relationship right now. You don't have to say that or,

or otherwise, uh, you just don't touch it. But, but the idea is get that feel of, because there's nothing like going on a few dates to remind you that, yes, this is going to be the path forward. And even if it's not necessarily an appetizing one, that to have that reality there to get a sense of, hey, there are other people there for me to meet, even if I'm not necessarily that open or that interested in going, you know, fully forward right now, to remember that that is out there, that that exists and to remember that you can be in that world and even present yourself decently and maybe even have a better time than you would sitting home and going over a pint of ice cream and binge watching whatever on Netflix. That might be a better thing for you to do. Now, if it makes you absolutely miserable, then don't.

Then wait a little bit longer. But most people say, I'm not ready when I think they're absolutely ready at that point. Oh, I'm going to be off dating for a year now. For what? For what purpose? Do you think you're going to be more confident in a year? No, you'll be more anxious and you'll be more demoralized because now you've really been out of it. And now you're really lonely, so you're more desperate. So it's not necessarily a great idea to, you know, wait until you feel absolutely amazing. Part of getting to the amazing is putting yourself back in that world. Yeah, I mean, I see that a lot where people after a breakup decide,

you know, I'm off the market, I have no interest in dating for a while. But as you say, to what end? What's the purpose of that? That's an anxiety response, right? That's a fear of I'm really worried about being rejected because I'm feeling so shaky, etc., etc. And I understand that. And it feels terrible to be rejected and go on a first date. But if you go on a first date knowing I am barely ready and I'm certainly not ready to jump into a relationship.

So even if this person ends up, you know, rejecting me, it's not as if that would have gone somewhere necessarily. But let me go and interact. And look, once in a while you do that and you meet somebody who's so amazing or you click so well with, people say to me, like, you know what? I had a really good time on that date. It's amazing. And I'm miserable again because I got home and I'm missing my ex. But that was actually a good time.

For an hour we talked and I was distracted and I didn't think about my ex and I thought, this is an interesting person. So, you know, for those experiences, it's worth it. Well, this is a subject that people don't talk about a whole lot or talk very deeply about, and yet it is a fairly universal experience to have your heart broken, and it is painful. Right, and the people around them have to understand that this person is going to be compromised emotionally for a while, i.e. they're going to be suffering for a while. And therefore, they need support, not judgment or certainly not ridicule, but they need support and understanding and compassion and encouragement to rebuild their lives.

And that compassion, I think, if we could all have more of it, for people who are heartbroken, that would do a lot of good. Well, as we discussed, it's a pretty universal experience. I don't know too many people who haven't had their heart broken, who aren't in the middle of a heartbreak, or who one day won't get their heart broken. So it's good to get some of the science behind the best ways to fix it. Guy Winch has been my guest. He's a licensed psychologist in New York. He's the author of a couple of books, including How to Fix a Broken Heart. There's a link to the book in the show notes. Thank you, Guy. Thank you so much for having me.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday,

where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life.

So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Every single day of your life, you use numbers and math multiple times. And yet many of us claim not to like math, that it's hard and not particularly useful in everyday grown-up life. Someone who would disagree with that is Alex Belos. Alex is a writer and broadcaster in the UK who writes a lot about math and numbers. He's written several books, including Alex's Adventures in Numberland. He also has some other projects,

including a book of handcrafted Japanese puzzles called Puzzle Ninja and a series of books called Soccer School, which teaches kids about the world through soccer. And he's here to take us on a fascinating journey through the world of numbers. Hi, Alex, welcome. Hi, it's great to be here. So do we know where numbers came from?

Do we know the origins of those numbers that we use commonly every day? Well, what we can do, we can go back to the earliest civilization that we know that had symbols for numbers, and we can say, well, that's where numbers started. And that would be about 6,000, 7,000 years ago in Sumer, which is where Iraq is now. And they developed the first system for numbers which had symbols, and they also had different words for those numbers. So interestingly, the very first word that was ever used for the number one was the same as the word for man, and the very first word that was used for number two was the word for woman. No

one knows why this was the case, but that's what we know. Why do you suppose that some people love math, love numbers, and the whole concept of that, and others of us run the other way? I imagine it has to do with aptitude. I mean, if you're good at something, you're going to like it more than if you suck at something. But math and numbers seem to divide people between those people who like numbers and math and those people who don't. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone has their own personal story. And my personal story is that I was good at numbers. I enjoyed it.

And when at school, back when I was a kid, if you're good at something, you know, math was about getting something right or wrong. And I would get it right. And so I was told I was good, and so I liked it because it made me feel good. Obviously, there are lots of kids who don't get it right, and they don't like it because they're told right from the beginning that it is wrong, and it's one of the only subjects where there is a right and there is a wrong, and no one likes being told that they're wrong.

There's also the whole sort of social kind of cultural attitude towards math. You know, it's fine to say, oh, I'm terrible at Psalms. Oh, I couldn't possibly do that. I'm rubbish at math. It's almost a badge of honor people say that. Whereas people would never say, oh, I can't read that. I'm terrible at reading. Right. But there does seem to be a shift. It used to be that, you know, math and science, those were nerdy subjects that, you know, cool kids didn't get involved in. But now, I mean, you've got shows like The Big Bang Theory that celebrate math and science. You've got movies about Stephen Hawking and, you know, he was a rock star. I mean, there is a shift. Oh, absolutely. And also, who are the icons of the modern day? You know, Steve Jobs, like, world's biggest nerd. Stephen Hawking, another huge nerd hero. We have kind of nerd role models in a way that we didn't before.

And that can only be a good thing. One of the things you talk about that I think is really interesting is this whole concept of zero. The fact that we have a symbol that represents nothing and that that's a fairly recent concept in math. And yet imagine trying to do math of any sort and not having some sort of representative for nothing, for zero?

Zero has not been around since the beginning of numbers. It really hasn't at all. In fact, zero, it was invented, or invented, it kind of emerged in India about 1,500 years ago. Before then, there was no zero. So the first people to realize that you can actually have a, sort of describe something that's not there with India. And what I find most fascinating about why it began in India is that India already at that time had these spiritual ideas of nothingness, you know,. Nirvana, that's the idea of nothingness, that you need to kind of achieve nirvana. You need to get rid of all your worldly

desires and cravings and then just kind of just disappear. But having that nothing is something. The reason why we need zero is because it makes counting so much easier and makes arithmetic so much easier. The reason why we calculate, count, calculate, is that we have developed a positional way of describing numbers. We have one column for units, that's the position of the units column. We have one position for the tens, and one position for the hundreds, etc., etc. With a positional system,

you need a symbol when there's nothing in that position. And that's what the zero is. Well, just imagine, I mean, really stop and think about what if there was no zero, how hard life would be. I mean, it would be so difficult to figure out anything. Everything becomes so much more long-winded and complicated because you need to rephrase everything in such a way to avoid it. I mean, and the nature of zero or the properties of zero have so kind of infiltrated our daily lives because we have numbers everywhere and we take it for granted that zero is a number

that it's almost impossible to extract i mean one final thing i want to say about zero which is interesting and i only realized when i started looking into it is that all the so the numerals that we use for one to nine have changed a lot since they first emerged but zero has always been the circle always always. And I used to first think, well, maybe that's because it's like a hole with nothing there. But that's to misunderstand the origin of zero. The circle represents the sort of eternal, everlasting circle of life. It actually represents kind of infinity. So every time you see zero, every time you write it down,

you're actually thinking about nirvana. One of the things I think is so interesting is, whereas the world has a lot of different written and verbal languages, there's really only one number system. Everybody on the planet, more or less, uses our number system, and it is a base 10 number system. It's based on the number 10. That wasn't always the case. The very first system, the system used by the Sumerians 6,000, 7,000 years ago, was sexagesimal, was base 60. Okay, base 60, it kind of seems crazy, but the fact that it was base 60, that's why we have to this day 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. But it's a bit too complicated. So when the other people have come along, there have been lots of other different base systems around the world.

But the one which is the most sensible really is base 10. And that's not because there's anything arithmetically good about 10. It's because it's easiest for us to learn because we've got 10 fingers on both our hands, obviously five on one, five on the other. So when we start counting, 10 is an easy thing to count. So we've chosen 10 for anatomical reasons. Were we to have chosen the best base for counting reasons, for arithmetical reasons, for what is going to make math easier, counting easier, we would have chosen 12.

So we would count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, DEC, which is people who like to count like that, we would call DEC, which would be a single digit for what is 10. L, which is the word that we would use for 11. And then 12 would be 1, 0. So that's how a decimal system would work. We would have 12 digits rather than having 10 now. Why is that better?

So let's think about our multiplication tables. What are the multiplication tables that are the easiest ones to learn in base 10? Well, the 2 times table is dead easy. It's 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Also, the 5 times table is also dead easy. 5, 10, 15, 20. Why are 2 and 5 easy? Well, that's because 2 and 5 divide into 10. In other words,

the times tables that are easy are the ones that are divisors of the base. If we had base 12, 2 divides into 12, 3 divides into 12, 4 divides into 12, and 6 divides into 12, which means the 2 times table, the 3 times table, the four times table, and the six times table would be incredibly easy. Talk about randomness, because it's one of those mathematical ideas that I think people think they understand that perhaps they don't. The easiest way to show that people don't understand randomness is to ask them to imagine flipping a coin. You're going to flip a coin, but actually you don't have a coin. So just imagine it and tell me, is it heads or tails? And if you get someone to say 30 results of an imagined coin toss, and then you compare that with what you actually get a coin and you flip it and you'll have the real coin toss, the real coin toss is

random, you'll see that the one imagined by a human is very different. For example, it's very rare that if you're flicking in your head that you will have three heads or three tails in a row. Because you think, oh, well, I've done enough heads, heads, heads. Oh, I've done enough heads. I'll have a tails now. So in other words, you're thinking that there's a memory that you're sort of thinking, well, I've had too much of that. I've got to have one or the other now. But obviously, the coin that you're flipping has no memory. And it's more likely than not that in 30 coin flips, you'll get a row of either four heads or four tails. There are ways that humans misunderstand this to make kind of bad decisions. For example, well, probably the most obvious example is on the slot machines. You think this machine has not been paying out for a while.

It's due to pay out. Well, no, it's not due to pay out. The probability of it paying out at any one time is exactly the same. That's one of the reasons why they're so addictive, because you kind of think, well, it must remember that it hasn't paid out for a while. It's going to pay out. Didn't Steve Jobs have a problem with randomness back in the days of the iPod when he first, when you put it on shuffle? Can you tell that? Imagine a blank piece of paper, and let's say we're going to just randomly put dots there. If you were to randomly put dots on

this blank piece of paper, you wouldn't get a nice sort of grey shading of dots. You would get some clusters of dots and some bits of the white paper where there's nothing there. So randomness is not ordered like that. And when the iTunes or iPods first had their shuffle, if it was perfectly random, you'd expect there to be clusters. So you would expect it to play sometimes the same song several times in a row, because it's not remembering each time it plays that song. It's not remembering that it played it last time before. It's just as much chance it might play it each time. And people started to

complain. And they wrote in and they said, you know, whenever I put my iPod on, it plays just from my Led Zeppelin album and not from my Black Sabbath album. And that is perfectly predictable within randomness. And so Steve Jobs changed the shuffle to not really be random at all, but to be more of a selective going through your catalog or the songs that you've got on the list and not repeating them. And that is not random, because if it was random, you would end up getting clusters, you'd end up getting repeats. So people think that putting something on shuffle is random, but what you're really

getting is deliberate variety. Correct. Correct. You know, we don't really want mathematical randomness. We want variety. You talked earlier about zero and what a novel concept that was when it was first introduced, that you would have a symbol that stands for nothing. So I would imagine that negative numbers had to be even more perplexing to people. How could you actually have a negative number of something? And yet it turns out negative numbers or minus numbers are really important. So minus numbers are only a few hundred years old. They were in the same way that people thought, how can we have a number for zero? How can we have a number for something which is minus?

What does a minus number mean? And actually, minus numbers confuse a lot of people. I think that's one reason why, for example, in lifts, when you see the numbers, the floors going up, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But when you go down, it never goes minus 1, minus 2, minus 3. Sometimes it does, but in the UK, very rarely, it will say basement or lower ground numbers coming down and then start going up again, but they're actually going further down, is really quite hard to understand. And understand the history of that. Even just over 100 years ago, there were mathematicians who were writing books that had no negative numbers in them because they thought the negative numbers, how can they exist? And then you follow on from that, you're thinking, well, there's a concept in math, which of the square root of minus one, like how can minus one have a square root? Because whenever you square anything, it becomes positive. And the square root of minus one is such an

amazing idea that without it, we wouldn't have modern physics, we wouldn't have kind of electronics. It's such a powerful idea. Quickly, something you talk about that's really interesting, everybody knows what dyslexia is and it causes people to have trouble with words, but there's a number version of that. There's people who have the same problem or more or less the same problem with numbers as people with dyslexia have with letters and words, and it's called dyscalculia. So talk about that. I think about 5% of the population have dyslexia. So everyone knows what dyslexia is. It's studied a lot. Dyscalculia is the number equivalent of that.

It's people who see numbers or see the symbol for numbers, and it just doesn't go in. There's some kind of blindness to it. They just don't get it. And it happens to affect apparently about the same, about 5% of the population. And it's a lot less well-researched. And if you do find numbers really, really difficult, they just sort of don't go in. You just don't quite grasp them. You feel blinded by them. It could be the case that you have dyscalculia. And dyscalculia is nothing about mathematical ability. You can have brilliant mathematicians who are a little bit discalculic when it comes to actual numbers. And if you do think you are discalculic, if you think

your children might be discalculic, if you look online, there are lots of things that can help you assess whether you are and give you strategies on how to cope with numbers in life. Well, as I used to say to my parents parents and as my son says to me about the math he learns in school, you know, this is never going to be helpful to me in real life. I'll never need to know this stuff. But in fact, numbers and math are integral parts of our lives

and it is important and in many ways really fascinating. Alex Bellows has been my guest. Alex has written several books including Alex's Adventures in Numberland. He's also got a book of handcrafted Japanese puzzles called Puzzle Ninja, and a series of books called Soccer School that teaches kids about the world using soccer. There's a link to Alex's book in the show notes. Thanks, Alex. I appreciate you joining me.

Wonderful. Great talking to you. It is interesting that so many of us go to the supermarket and we comparison shop. We look for bargains. We use coupons. We're very price conscious when we shop for food. And yet so much of that food ends up getting thrown away. In fact, it's estimated that a family of four could save about $1,500 a year by being more careful about the food they buy. That's over $100 a month. About 40% of the food America produces goes to waste. When you separate out households

from commercial entities like restaurants, it's about 20% of what we purchase at the supermarket that eventually finds its way into the trash. This is according to Dana Gunders, who's a senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council and author of the Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook. Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to waste food, it happens in little bits and pieces, according to Dana Gunders. We're so price conscious when we go shopping, but when we get the food home and eventually throw out, say, a quarter of the cheese we just bought, we don't realize that that's the same $1.50 we were trying so hard to save when we went shopping, and now it's just down the drain.

And it all starts with being more deliberate about what you buy. And that is something you should know. Join us, follow us. We're on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. If you like this episode of the podcast, why keep it to yourself? Tell a friend, send them the link, say, hey, listen to this podcast.

It's really good. And they'll think you're a genius. 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. 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.