Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Evolution of Counting & Our Obsession With the Unexplained

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

Water is amazing. Drink it and it keeps you alive. But did you know that drinking water can also make you smarter? This episode begins by explaining why that is and you may find the answer quite surprising. https://becausewater.com/7-reasons-staying-hydrated-makes-smarter/  Anyone can count. It is one of the first things children learn to do. Yet figuring out how to count took a long time and involved a lot of differing theories about math and numbers. Marcus du Sautoy is professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and author of the book How to Count to Infinity (https://amzn.to/3hCTgV6). He joins me to explain the fascinating history of counting, including why the invention of zero was so important and what infinity really is. People who use online dating usually have a photo as part of their profile. And that photo has a lot to do with how successful you will be in your search for love. Listen as I explain what makes a good profile photo – and what doesn’t and why you may want to change yours. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/online-dating-profile-picture-research/ Many people apparently believe in aliens, UFO’s, Big Foot and other conspiracy theories. Yet, the evidence for these things is usually pretty flimsy. Cultural historian Colin Dickey decided to explore why people cling to their beliefs despite the lack of proof or a logical explanation. Colin is author of the book The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained (https://amzn.to/32VmaLO). He joins me to share his unique insight into this phenomenon. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Get $100 off of your first month with Talkspace! To match with a licensed therapist today, go to https://Talkspace.com & make sure to use the code SYSK to get $100 off of your first month! Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! Redeem your rewards for cash in any amount, at any time, with Discover Card! Learn more at https://Discover.com/RedeemRewards 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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That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, how does drinking water make you smarter? I'll explain that. Then, creating numbers and learning how to count completely changed our world, as did the concept of infinity. You know, there is no biggest number. Actually, one of my favorite jokes is the mathematics teacher who asks the class, you know, what's the biggest number? And somebody puts up their

hand and says, a billion and one. And the teacher goes, well, what about a billion and two? And the student says, well, I was very close. Also today, if you have an online dating profile, you probably need to change your picture. And why do people believe in Bigfoot and aliens and conspiracy theories? Years ago, I used to pick fights with people on Facebook who would, you know, post conspiracy theories, and I would correct them by giving them the factual truth. And if you've ever done that, you find out that that actually rarely works. You know, what's driving people to cling to these ideas usually has very little to do with the facts.

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How many times in your life have you been told to drink more water? That you don't drink enough water? That water is essential to your physical health? Well, as it turns out, water can also make you smarter. In research, students who sipped water during a test performed better and received higher test scores. Why? It's believed to be for one or more of three reasons. Hydration improves brain function. We know that mental performance and alertness go down when a person is dehydrated.

So it stands to reason that increasing hydration will improve brain function. Number two, sipping water has long been suggested as a way to calm test anxiety. By offering a momentary distraction, it breaks the cycle of anxious thoughts, which leads to better test performance. And three, the placebo effect. Water has gotten a lot of good press lately, and if people believe water helps brain function, that expectation alone could be enough to

show an increase in test performance. And that is something you should know. When you were very young you learned to count. One, two, three, and off you went. And that skill that you mastered back then you now use every day, multiple times a day. Imagine though, imagine if we couldn't count. How would you keep track of anything? Well, it actually used to be pretty difficult. The ability to count has changed the world in many ways. Marcus de Sautoy is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford,

and he's author of the book, How to Count to Infinity. And he's here to talk about the fascinating history of counting and why it's so important to us. Hi, Marcus. Great to be with you. So begin by explaining a bit about the history of counting. I think it was one of the first things that the human species started to do. As soon as they had language, they were counting things. And I think in part, it was because we wanted to keep track of time. And the very first kind of examples of counting are bones that we discovered from about 40,000 years ago, which have little notches on the side of the bone.

And we think that probably what somebody was counting was maybe the passage of the moon or days. And by putting these notches on, they could keep track of time somehow. So counting really goes back a very long way. But I think that to see counting really done in a kind of uh intelligent way you're starting to look at the egyptians and the babylonians who are starting to use something more sophisticated than just notches on bones after all that's quite hard to keep track of whether is that 17 notches or 19 notches so So the Egyptians and the Babylonians are really the first culture to start to represent the idea of number by some interesting symbols. And were those early symbols somewhat similar to our 1, 2, 3, 4, or was it completely different?

Well, it's very interesting because the first examples are quite similar just to the notches, but our brain finds it quite difficult beyond about four or five things to distinguish four from five from six. And so you start to see examples of some sort of symbolic representation for a number like five. One of the interesting cultures where you see this is a Mayan culture where they use dots for numbers, but when they reach five dots, instead of doing five dots, they actually draw a line through the four dots they've already got. So it's a little bit like the prisoner in his cell marking off the days that he's still got left till he gets released and marks one, two, three, four, and

then puts a strike through five. So the Mayans, you see a similar idea where you have four dots and then a line represents five. The Babylonians are doing something quite similar. They're using cuneiform, again, lots of notches, but then a symbolic representation for when they have too many notches. But I think the Egyptians are quite interesting because they're using interesting little pictures to represent 10, 100. In fact, a million is represented by a little man on his knees with his hands in the air as if he's just win the lottery. So each different culture is coming up with a different way of representing number. And what about Roman numerals? I mean, they're sort of still around. We don't use them for very much, except I remember

learning about them in school and what they were or what some of the numbers were. But they strike me as being some early representations of numbers, but really they're just letters. Well, they are letters and they represent sort of the beginning of the name of those numbers. So, mile, a thousand, the M is representing a thousand. But there's a real fault when it comes to Roman numerals, because every time they get a larger number, a hundred, thousand,,000, they've got to write down more and more letters or come up with a different letter to represent that. So if they want to write down really big numbers, they're continually having to create new symbols to represent larger numbers. This is also true of the Egyptians. They just had to draw new little pictures every time the number went up by a factor of 10. And this is

why the Babylonians are so clever, because they realized that you could use something called the place number system, where actually you can use the same symbol, but it will represent different things. So we already have that with a number like 111. That's one, 1, 1, but those ones are representing different things. One unit, 110, 100. So this is a revolutionary moment in mathematics when the Babylonians realized you can have just a finite number of symbols, but still use those to count all the way to infinity if you wanted. Yeah. Well, that's pretty remarkable when you think about it, to come up with that. Like, hey, look, we just need these nine numbers and weth one, which is the zero. Now, the Babylonians, they would need a symbol to represent, for example, another interesting thing I should say with the Babylonians is that they weren't working in powers of 10, but actually powers of 60.

So they would have symbols all the way up to 59. And then they would tip over and do one zero to represent one lot of 60. And this is, of course, why we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. That goes all the way back to the ancient Babylonians. But they would need a symbol to represent perhaps no units. And so the idea of zero is starting to bubble up with the Babylonians because of the place number system. But what's fascinating is that the Babylonians never use zero in its own right to represent nothing, because numbers are meant to count something. And there's no point counting things if there's nothing there. And this is another revolutionary moment in counting, which happens in India in the 7th century AD, when the Indians suddenly realise, actually, we do want a symbol

for nothing. Nothing is important. And that really goes back to sort of Indian culture, where the idea of the void is very important in Indian philosophy. And so a symbol for the void, for nothing, was something that they could conceive of whilst perhaps the Europeans, for example, just didn't get for ages why you would need a number for nothing. If you're not counting anything, why do you need a symbol? As you were talking, I was just imagining, can you imagine trying to do math without a zero? I mean, it's impossible. Obviously, it wasn't impossible, but how hard would it be if you couldn't represent nothing? Well, exactly. It actually was really difficult to do calculations before we had a zero. If you're working in Roman numerals, I mean, listeners should try this. Write down two Roman numerals and try and multiply them together.

It becomes such a huge mess. And in fact, the role that zero plays in making calculations so much easier was one of the reasons these numbers just kind of caught on in Europe, because people realized if you use the symbol zero all the way up to nine with a place number system, in fact, you have power. You could keep track of calculations. You didn't have to give up the kind of power to those who had an abacus, for example, who could be tricky and trick you on the way to doing their calculations so this was a very powerful moment when suddenly uh it democratized counting in a way that it allowed everyone to keep track of what was happening with their numbers so at some point

early in this whole number counting thing somebody must have said, well, wait a minute, we're counting here. And as it turns out, we could count forever. There's no end to this. And that had to be a fairly profound moment when you realize that counting can go on forever. Absolutely. Because, you know, there is no biggest number. I mean, actually, one of my favorite jokes is the mathematics teacher who asked the class, you know, what's the biggest number? And somebody puts up their hand and says, a billion and one. And the teacher goes, well, what about a billion and two? And the student says, well, I was very close. But the point is that, of course, you can always add one more. And so these numbers, they don't run out because it's always a way to get another bigger number. So already the ancient Greeks are beginning to

worry about this and they can see that these numbers can go on forever. But does that really mean that infinity exists or there's just this sort of possibility of ever larger things. So already the ancient Greeks are getting very worried about the idea of whether infinity is a real thing or just some sort of idea. And right through to Galileo, Galileo's worrying about this. Many people think that infinity is somehow something to do with God, and therefore we humans shouldn't question whether infinity exists. Only God can know infinity. So it is a sort of been a very troubling thing for, you know, generations and generations. And so what is infinity?

I mean, is it just a concept that symbolizes that we can go on forever? It can't be an actual number because, as you just pointed out, you could always add one to it. So then there's infinity and then there's infinity in one. Well, I think that initially it is the idea of something that however much you counted, there's always one more left that you haven't counted. And therefore, if that keeps on happening, you should regard this thing as being infinite. But I think there was a real extraordinary breakthrough that happened at the end of the 19th century, where a mathematician realized that this wasn't just something that we couldn't conceive of, that actually there was a way to understand infinity, to realise that in some sense it is a number,

and not just one number, but many numbers. There are infinitely many different sorts of infinity. And for me, this is one of the most exciting moments in mathematics, where suddenly a mathematician, Georg Cantor, in Germany, the end of the 19th century, gives us the tools to count to infinity and beyond, as Buzz Lightyear said. We're talking about counting and making that rather mundane sounding subject come to life in a very interesting way is Marcus de Sautoy. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and author of the book, How to Count to Infinity.

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. 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, Marcus, you said earlier that the Babylonians used a number system that was base 60,

and that that is why we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. And that's worked out pretty well, but there's nothing else that's base 60. There's nothing else that's hung around from the Babylonians except the clock. It's very interesting because I think that one of the reasons the Babylonians were drawn to 60 is that it's a highly divisible number. So 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 30. So the high divisibility of this number makes it very adaptable for doing calculations. And in fact, 10 is a bit of a rubbish number because it's only divisible by two and five. And one of the reasons probably we were drawn to 10 is because if you look at

your hands, we have 10 fingers. So they were useful to count on. And I suspect if you go to the Simpsons, if you see that the characters in the Simpsons only have eight fingers, except for God, who has 10 fingers. So probably the Simpsons are probably counting base eight rather than base 10. So you see lots of different cultures choosing different bases. So the Babylonians are base 60, we're base 10, the Mayans were base 20. So they would count all the way up to 19 before they kicked into 1, 0 and 20. And what about computers? Well, they just work with two digits, a 0 and a 1 in something we call binary. So there are a lot of choices for how you represent numbers, and each one has its own different quality to it.

And so numbers, the numbers that we use to count, also have taken on other things. And I know you talk about lucky numbers. Where did somebody apply luck to numbers and unlucky numbers, like 13? How did those two concepts come together? That's very interesting, again, because it's very specific to different cultures. You know, certain numbers are close to names, so will not be used because they sound too much like death, for example. Thirteen. Why is that one unlucky? That one seems to be quite hard to trace the origins of why 13 particularly is unlucky. There seems to be perhaps related to the 13th disciple betraying Christ. There's also in Nordic mythology, the 13th member at dinner who has always been somehow unlucky. But seven, for example, why is seven often considered a lucky number? That again seems to relate perhaps to looking up into the night sky

because at the time that we could just observe things with our eye and not our telescopes, we saw that there were seven heavenly bodies in the sky. And that seems to be one reason why perhaps a seven has become a lucky number. But, for example, I was very struck when I was on a plane just recently. And my favourite number is the number 17. It's the number I play for on my football team. And I was very struck that there wasn't a row 17. And I tweeted this just before we took off.

I said, bizarre, why does this plane not have a number 17 row? And when I landed, switched on my phone again, I had a lot of tweets from Italy saying, well, that was probably an old Alitalia plane, because in Italy, 17 is an incredibly unlucky number. Why? Well, if you write it in Roman numerals, it's XV11, which is an anagram of VIXI, which means I have lived, which means I am now dead. So 17 for an Italian is an incredibly unlucky number because it's associated with death. One of the really interesting things about numbers that I saw in one of your videos is the demonstration you did of where, so imagine a chessboard, a checkerboard, and in the upper left-hand corner, you put one grain of rice in the square in the upper left-hand corner, and then in the next square, you doubled it. You

put two, and then the next square, you doubled it, it and you put four and you doubled it every time and so by the time you get to the end which is 64 squares later you had a lot of rice the point about doubling is that if you look at those grains of rice on the the chessboard the first row looks very small i mean you've got barely enough rice uh in the first row looks very small. I mean, you've got barely enough rice in the first eight squares for a little piece of sushi. But the power of doubling is that it grows fast very quickly. And so by the end, I mean, there's a very famous story that the inventor of chess was offered any prize by the King of India and wanted these grains of rice to be put on the chessboard. And the King of India thought that that was a very small price to pay

for such a wonderful game. But then by the time they try and put all the rice on the chessboard, they realize that by the end, there's more grains of rice than ever been grown on the surface of the planet. planet will be needed to actually fill all 64 squares. What's the number? It's two to the power 64 minus one. The other interesting example about this that I found so interesting was why we don't have vampires on the earth is because of, potentially, because of this same mathematical principle. So explain that. and that human becomes a vampire. Then the next month, you've got two vampires that need to feed on humans. So every month, you've got vampires doubling. And it only takes about 33 months,

I think, for the whole of the planet to become vampires. So that shows the power of doubling, that if you double the number of vampires each month, you will wipe out the whole population of the planet within about 33 months. Well, that really does help explain the spread of this virus, because it does seem when you just kind of step back and look, well, how could this virus that started supposedly in this little town in China sweep the entire planet so quickly. And it's basically what you just said. Exactly. So it's exactly the same principle as the vampires. It's very quick that if you're giving the virus to, say, just two other people, we talk about this thing, the reproduction rate, the number of people that somebody with a virus is likely to give the virus to, very quickly you'll start to get this exponential growth.

And those early graphs that we saw didn't look terribly frightening. And it's just like the grains of rice on the first row of the chessboard. You've got 128 grains on the eighth square. That doesn't look terribly frightening. But very quickly, this escalates. And that's what we've been seeing with these graphs of the virus. As it begins to take hold and spreads, the exponential growth really quickly starts to take hold on the population. And that's why we needed to intervene to try and stop, in some some way this exponential growth of the virus spread. And we've been pretty unsuccessful at that. It seems as if that doubling or that exponential growth has a momentum that is very difficult to stop.

It is very difficult. And what you get after a while is the fact that the virus starts to be unable to find somebody who hasn't had the virus already. And this is something that people talk about herd immunity, that after a while, you know, it's like the vampires wandering around and only meeting vampires and can't find any humans left to bite. So sometimes this is what happens with a virus that you get enough people who've got it who actually means that it can't spread any further. The other way to intervene is with a vaccine where you then cause people to have immunity because they take the vaccine. And that's obviously a very powerful way that we've created to kind of stop the spread of viruses in this exponential way. Well, when you think about something like counting, I mean, it's just

so basic, so simple. We learn it when we're very, very young, but there's a lot to it. And it's interesting to hear kind of the whole history of it and why and how it's so important. Marcus de Sautoy has been my guest. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. And the name of his book is How to Count to Infinity. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Appreciate you being here, Marcus. Thanks. Great. I hope that was useful. 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. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial.

And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic,

check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of people believe in things that other people don't. Things like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, conspiracy theories. And for some of these things, there is some pretty strong evidence that they're not true, or that they don't exist, or at least there is a lack of evidence that they do, but still, people hold on to their beliefs for their own personal reasons. Why? Well, Colin Dickey decided to look into this. Colin is a cultural historian and author of the book, The Unidentified, Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.

Hey, Colin. Hi, thanks for having me on. It does seem that we as humans are drawn to these unexplainable things, sort of in the way that we're compelled to slow down and look at a traffic accident. But why is that? Why are things like UFOs and Bigfoot? Why are these so interesting to so many people? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a pretty innate part of human culture. And I mean, we all kind of, you know, are fascinated with the unexplained or, you know, stuff that is just kind of just out of the reach of our human comprehension. And I think for some people that fascination takes the form maybe of religion and sort of contemplating the divine. I think for other

people, it takes the form of mainstream science, this idea that, you know, I mean, it's true, there's still a lot we don't really know about the universe or, you know, the oceans or, you know, the climate or stuff like that. But there seems to be this kind of about the universe or, you know, the oceans or, you know, the climate or stuff like that. But there seems to be this kind of third way, which, you know, is the idea of like the fringe, you know, the stuff that's kind of on the edge of what's acceptable for human culture. So I went in search of cryptids, which is the catch-all term for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and the Chupacabra and UFOs and aliens. And then, you know, the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, these kind of grouping of things that are, you know, the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria,

these kind of grouping of things that are, you know, kind of outside the bounds of science, even though they sometimes kind of mimic or borrow a little bit from scientific inquiry. And they remain compelling even long after many of them have been, you know, scientifically debunked one way or the other. So how is that? How can something be compelling when it's been proven to be untrue? Years ago, I used to pick fights with people on Facebook who would, you know, post conspiracy theories, and I would, you know, try and just correct them by giving them the factual truth. And, you know, if you've ever done that, you find out that that actually rarely works, you know, that that what's driving people to cling to these ideas usually has

very little to do with the facts and is usually operating on some much deeper kind of fundamental level. And there's a kind of primal belief that these stories meet for them. And so, you know, with this stuff, you know, as I looked back in the history and the kind of where these things came from and how they evolved over the past 150 years or so, I kept seeing that that wasn't just that they were kooky myths or conspiracy theories or whatever. I saw the ways in which a lot of them tapped into a kind of primal need we had for one way or another and provided a way of explaining the world in a way that was sort of comforting or enticing, and that this actually mattered more to people than whether or not the story was actually true or false. So how many people, and maybe you don't know the exact number, but generally speaking, how many people actually believe

that the Earth has been visited by aliens from another planet? It's a very large number. Over 20%, I believe, of Americans believe either that aliens have visited the earth in the past, maybe during, maybe a little bizarre or, you know, it's clearly fictitious or whatever. But it has a huge impact on our kind of cultural subconscious one way or the other. Well, and you point out that belief in a lot of these things has escalated in the last few years, right? Right. There's a study that comes out of Chapman University every year where they survey Americans on these beliefs and they do it every year. So you can watch these numbers sort of slowly climbing up over the past couple of years,

which I think, again, you know, when I look at these things, I think that they are doing more than just giving people, you know, a supernatural belief to cling to. What they seem to be doing is addressing certain needs that we have and maybe providing a little sense of comfort during increasingly chaotic and random times. And I think, you know, as our world seems to be more and more, you know, out of control by some measures, you know, and things are more and more chaotic and frenetic, particularly conspiracy theories, but also these kind of beliefs in cryptids or, you know, and things are more and more chaotic and frenetic, particularly conspiracy theories, but also these kind of beliefs in cryptids or, you know, the lost continent of Atlantis. These can be a way of kind of asserting some kind of order and sort of clinging to an idea that gives people a little bit of solace, I guess.

But it would seem to me that believing in aliens or believing in, you know, conspiracy theories, pick whichever one you want, is not comforting. To know that we've been, you know, invaded by creatures from another world doesn't make me feel better. It doesn't make me feel better. But there's a perverse way in which this works. In the late 70s and into the 80s, it's really the rise of this idea of alien abductions, right? You know, that people have been, you know, secretly abducted in the middle of the night and, you know, aliens have, you know, done things to their bodies in various ways and then drop them back off and wipe their memories so they have no idea of what's going on. And, yeah, that's a scary thought. That's scary to contemplate.

And I think I would be pretty freaked out if I felt that that had happened to me. But, you know, when you start to read the accounts of these people who claim that they've been abducted by aliens, what you see is that a lot of cases it starts with somebody just feeling off in some ways, you know, physically sick in ways that can't be diagnosed, maybe, you know, fatigued or tired in a way they, you know, physically sick in ways that can't be diagnosed, maybe, you know, fatigued or tired in a way they, you know, they can never really overcome, they can't get enough rest. And then somebody comes along and says, well, the reason that you feel this way is that you were abducted by aliens, and the aliens did something to you. And that's, that's what you're left with. Now,

that's still a scary thought. But for somebody who is dealing with something that they literally have no answers for, suddenly even something as far-fetched and even scary as alien abduction, it gives them an answer. It may be the wrong answer, but it's an answer. So that's a way in which something that seems like it might be actually scary can actually be a little comforting. And you see that again and again with these, the people who write on these forums, you know, these alien abduction forums, they talk about, you know, how badly they felt and then they figured out they had been abducted by aliens. And now they had kind of found a community and they found a sense of purpose. And now they could kind of go on these message boards and talk to other people with similar, you know, afflictions and fatigue, and they can all kind of, you know, be in a community together. And I do think that gives people a little comfort, and it sort of

makes sense to me. Is this whole belief in extraterrestrials or Bigfoot or whatever it is, is this a symptom of modern society? Or did people believe this stuff three, four, 500, 2000 years ago? You know, 500, 600 years ago, you imagine the world, you know, from the perspective of maybe somebody in Europe or North America, and you have this, you have this picture of the map where some places are very detailed. And, you know, the cities that you know, and recognize, and then at the edge of the map, there will be just blank blank space and maybe there'll be a picture of a you know a monster of some kind and it'll say something like you know here there be dragons right that that that there are these things at the edge of the map that we can't explain and that that these monsters actually define the edge of

the map in a sense and and that that's a sort of common kind of medieval conception of the world that, um, is being replaced in the, in the 18th and into the 19th century by a better understanding of, um, you know, of animal biology and, and taxonomy, you know, the, the Linnaean classification system, which, you know, the, the kingdom order phylum genus species, I always forget which order those go in, but you know what I'm talking about. Um, and, um, and, you know, kind of a better sense of what the globe looks like and a better documentation through, you know, colonialism or exploration or whatever that sort of the map is now kind of fully filled in. And those medieval monsters, either they've been proven to be, you know, false or figments of the imagination or they've been given names, you know. So the monstrous kraken of the sea becomes the the giant squid so the rise of cryptids of you know bigfoot and the loch ness monster happens around this time it happens when the world has been kind of filled

in and there are no more edges of the map and the monsters that used to define the edge of the map have all been dispelled and, you know, classified. And it's almost as though even knowing that that stuff was false and inaccurate, we need that kind of sense of some kind of frontier or some kind of edge. And on the other side of the edge is something, you know, mysterious and strange. And I think what I found in following the history of some of these things is that time and time again, people are looking for that thing kind of right on the edge of the borderlands, right on the other side of the margins, be it an alien or Bigfoot. So you said that 20% roughly of the American population believes that aliens have been to this planet. That means that 80% of people don't believe it. So how do the 20% reconcile or process the fact that they're way outnumbered

in their belief that 80% of people believe that what they believe isn't is not true or or maybe they just they just don't care i think it runs the gamut i think there there are a lot of people for whom it is a fun possibility but probably not something they take too seriously i mean people who you know maybe just decide to spend the weekend camping with their friends and think oh well why don't we put out a motion detector camera and maybe we'll get lucky maybe we'll'll see, you know, Sasquatch out there, you know, but don't, you know, devote their lives to it. I, I've, I found other people who take it very seriously. Um, and I don't know that they think the, think of the rest of us as nut balls, but I think they, they have found communion with like-minded people in a sense that they have a secret knowledge that doesn't belong to the rest of the world.

Let's talk about a couple of specifics. Like, you know, the one that really confuses me is Atlantis, because there isn't a whole lot of evidence, I don't think, that there is this continent that just disappeared and this civilization was lost. But boy, there are people who really believe it. Atlantis comes about, it starts with Plato, the Greek philosopher, but he kind of posits Atlantis more as a kind of philosophical exercise. You know, it's a sort of a supernatural place that he just sort of is using to make a point about philosophy and human civilization. And then it's more or less forgotten until the 1870s when this guy, Ignatius Donnelly, who is a failed businessman and a former congressperson, writes this book, Atlantis, where he posits that Plato was actually talking about a literal civilization

with an archaeological record and a culture and civilization and art and all these things that we can find traces of and it becomes a it comes a big bestseller and people really gravitate to this idea and i think for me one of the things i find you know if i had to hazard a guess as to why it became so popular it it does strike me that it happens again in that time when um the map had been really filled in and so people wanted something, they want to believe in something that is, um, you know, out of reach for modernity. They want to believe in, in a place that will never be, you know, it'll never be colonized. There will never be flights

out of there. You'll never be able to go there on vacation. You'll never, uh, be sent there on business. It will just always be this place that is just outside in this other place. And that I think is a very alluring and tantalizing idea that kind of supersedes any, anybody's sense that, you know, you need to actually have historical proof before you can believe this thing. Are there any of these unexplained things that you find really interesting or that, that are unexplained and then get explained that they're figured out? Oh, that's what that really was. Okay, so you know, when we think of when we think of cryptids, when we think of, you know, Sasquatch and Yeti and stuff like that, it's usually like a footprint, or maybe it's a grainy

photograph, or maybe it's a eyewitness account from a sketchy guy or something like that. You know, there's usually not a lot of firsthand direct evidence. And I assumed that was kind of the case until I discovered the story of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. And the Gloucester Sea Serpent in the early 1800s shows up outside of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It's described as anywhere from 50 to 100 feet long with a body the diameter of like a beer barrel. So, you know, pretty big animal. And it wasn't just seen by one person. It wasn't just seen once. It was seen by dozens, if not hundreds of people over the course of like a week or two.

This thing hung out in the bay, visible from shore, visible from people who were out on boats. And a lot of people saw it. And a lot of people were able to describe it in the exact same way people would come out from Boston on the weekend to take a look at it, like Shamu at SeaWorld. It was like something you could just go and see. And I think it's really fascinating to me that the the gloucester sea serpent never gets the um the celebrity presence that that bigfoot or the yeti or the loch ness monster does when i think you know objectively you got to say you know well there's a lot more um you know sightings of this

uh you know regular predictable sightings of this creature than than some of the more famous ones and so what was it well so it's it's a fascinating story. So, you know, at the time, you know, everybody saw this thing. Everybody's like, okay, well, we definitely, you know, this is definitely a thing. We should figure out what it is. So a group of biologists and scientists from Boston get tasked to try and discover what this is. And they're, you know, they take a bunch of aff davids from, you know, eyewitnesses and they put together their theory. And then while they're working on it, this baby is found. This baby sea serpent specimen is found crawling around the beach somewhere. A local farmer manages to kill it and then delivers it to these scientists and says, look, I think

this is just the baby version of the sea serpent. And so they say, you know, it's a sort of oddly shaped, it sort of looks like a snake, but it has these sort of weird ridges that they've never seen before. And they think, okay, this is, this is just the, you know, it's the juvenile form of what we've seen. You know, it's only four feet long, but it would probably have grown to 50 feet if, you know, whatever, if it had matured. So they give it a, they give it a scientific classification. They, they slot it into, you know, the kind of, you know, taxonomical system and, um,

and kind of wipe their hands and say, great, we're done. We have discovered a new species. And that's the only, you know, that's the only specimen that's ever found. And then years later, another biologist, you know, takes a look at it because it's taxidermied and kept on display in a museum. And he takes a look at it and he says, you know, this is not a new species. This is an ordinary snake that has a very bad case of rickets and, you know, kind of debunks the idea that they had found a baby sea serpent and, you know, and is able to sort of demonstrate that it's just, you know, a disease snake with a lack of, you know, vitamin D. So, so that's the, that's sort

of the end of the story as far as most people are concerned. But in my mind, you know, while I'm like, yeah, okay, so that was that was a mistake to treat that, you know, ricket rickety snake as as a new species. It doesn't really answer the original question, which is, you know, what did all those people see through the course of that month of August? And I think we, we still don't really have an answer for that. Well, I've always believed a lot of this is because it's human nature to fill in the gaps. We don't like unfinished stories. So if we see lights in the sky, we think, well, maybe that could be creatures from another planet. If we see something fuzzy in the distance in the woods and it looks really big, well, maybe that's Bigfoot.

And that there is this tendency to want the whole story. And if you don't get the whole story, you fill in the whole story. But it does make for interesting beliefs and interesting ideas. Colin Dickey has been my guest. The name of his book is The Unidentified, Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Colin. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been great.

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for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, To be continued... God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.