Something You Should Know - The Neuroscience of You & Making Sense of the Weather - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Don’t you hate it when you hear or think of a familiar song but can’t recall the title? This episode begins with a clever trick that will help identify any song and all it takes is a smartphone. https://lifehacker.com/how-to-identify-any-song-just-by-singing-it-1849039953 Why are you different from me and everyone else? What makes you the person you are? That’s what Chantel Prat has investigated and is here to discuss. Chantel is professor at the University of Washington and author of the book The Neuroscience of You (https://amzn.to/3OJDyHL). She joins me to discuss what makes us all individuals and why we are constantly changing who we are. Extreme weather is fascinating to watch on television – but horrible to live through. And lately we have seen a lot of extreme weather – fires in the west, flooding in the southeast, tornadoes in the Midwest and more. Why is this happening and how does weather work? Here to explain the fascinating world of weather is Matthew Cappucci. He is an on-air meteorologist at FOX5DC in Washington D.C. and author of the book Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd (https://amzn.to/3vvSceW). Whenever you are in a situation where you are feeling upset, anxious or nervous, there is a simple strategy you can employ that can help reduce those stressful feelings in about 1 minute. Listen as I explain how to do it - in fact it is something you already know how to do. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture-council/articles/humming-for-self-care-tool-for-leaders-toolboxes-1234956725/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, a great way to identify a song that you know you know, but can't think of the title. Then, what makes you, you? And why are you different than me? We have to turn to the brain, which is this organ whose job is to form every thought, feeling, and behavior that you identify with. So what is it about brains that differ? And spoiler alert, it's not just wiring that make each

of us individuals. Also, if you can hum, you can relieve stress in about a minute. And how weather works, from extreme weather to the speed of a raindrop. With most raindrops, they're falling at about 14, 15 miles per hour. If it's a snowflake, it falls at about two or three miles per hour. If it's a hailstone, I mean, heck, those things can come down at 100, 120 miles per hour. My windshield is a testament to that, or I guess my lack of windshield. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Melissa & Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving

and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa & Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend. The skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. 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 to Something You Should Know. Maybe you already knew this, but I've asked a couple of people and they didn't know it. But you know when you have a song stuck in your head or maybe you hear it in the background at a store or something and you know you know it, but you can't remember the name of it, and it's driving you crazy.

Well, it turns out that the Google app on your smartphone can help you identify the song if you just sing or hum or whistle some of it. It'll tell you the name of the song, or it'll give you some possible titles to choose from based on what you sang or whistled or hummed. And according to Lifehacker.com, the app works surprisingly well. All you do is open the regular Google app on your phone and then in the search bar, tap the microphone and then ask, what's this song?

Or tap where it says, search a song, and start humming, whistling, or singing, and see what it says. And that is something you should know. I think we can all pretty much agree that no two people are alike. We're all individuals with lots of differences. But what is it that makes us so different? Why are you the way you are and I'm the way I am? It's an interesting question and it's one that Chantel Pratt seems to know a bit about. Chantel is professor at the University of Washington with appointments in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and she's author of a book called The Neuroscience of You, How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours. Hi Chantel, welcome.

Hi, nice to be here. So explain what you mean by the neuroscience of you. The neuroscience of you is the science behind what we all know intuitively, and that is that our brains make us ourselves. So anytime you hear or say in a casual conversation, I'm not wired that way, you're expressing either an explicit type of knowledge based on something you learned or just an intuitive understanding that something about our biology and our experiences gets laid down in our brains and it affects the way we behave. What you're saying then is that that kind of makes you who you are,

or it's at least part of why you're different than I am. Exactly. We have to turn to the brain, which is this organ in the body whose job is to form every thought, feeling, and behavior that you identify with as you. So what is it about brains that differ? And spoiler alert, it's not just wiring that make each of us individuals. But it would seem if you took, hypothetically speaking, your brain and my brain and put them next to each other, they probably look pretty similar. I mean, so how are they different or are they different to the naked eye? And if they're not, maybe that's not even important. But they clearly look the same, but they're not the same.

It's such a great question because there's a lot packed into the same or different. And when it comes to brains, a little tiny difference can have huge implications. So think about the fact that our DNA, the DNA that builds our brains and a chimpanzee brain are 95% overlapping. Chimpanzees are fantastic, intelligent, complicated social creatures, but they still spend the majority of their day in the wild gathering food and grooming one another to promote social bonds while we communicate in this shared symbolic language that allows me to talk with your listeners about what I know, that 5% makes a huge difference. So how much of who I am is under my control? How much of, because you've used the phrase a couple times, you know, the average person, is there an average person? And how much of what I do say,

think is really my doing and saying and thinking or my brain, I'm pre-wired that way. When we consider the idea of normal and abnormal, just like left and right-handed, only it has a lot bigger consequences, we tend to think of it as a dichotomy. We tend to think of normal as a point and abnormal as a different point. But the truth is that you cannot define something as abnormal or atypical without understanding the way people vary in the normal range. So when I say on average, what I really mean is that these are studies that have done by taking a lot of different people and creating a blurred template that can be applied to everyone, but doesn't fit everyone exactly well.

So it's kind of like one size fits all clothes don't fit anybody well. A one size fits all view of neuroscience can be applied and you can make inferences about individuals, but it doesn't explain a lot of the variability. So that's one. What does it mean to be normal? Number two, how much of what makes you you is under your control? It depends on whether you're talking about free will, which myself and most neuroscientists think that your perception of control is actually that part of your brain that's interpreting why you're doing what you're doing, which means that essentially, not to mince words, it means that control is an illusion and that your brain, in fact, is largely driven by unconscious or implicit knowledge. And that this part of your

brain that I like to call, I like to think of it like a horse and a rider, this conscious part of your brain that can guide you to behave differently. It can guide you to behave flexibly. It can control the kinds of things you pay attention to and the behaviors that you execute. But it's important, really, really important to understand that if I say your brain makes you this way, or your brain makes you behave this way, it neither means that you were born that way, nor that this thing cannot change. In fact, one of the things that makes brains so hard to understand is that they are changing on a millisecond by millisecond basis. Every new piece of information that you take in, every new experience that you have changes your wiring. It changes your

connections. And by virtue, it changes the way you will behave. So whether the interpreter in your brain notices this and starts telling you a different story about why you're doing what you're doing or not is a really interesting question. But know that just because your brain makes you this way does not mean that you cannot gain new knowledge or gain new experiences that will change your behavior or your brain, because your brain is changing in every second, every millisecond. Well, often during the day, you have, you know, competing things going on in your brain. You want to do that, but you know, you should do that. And what's going on there? And who typically wins the battle? So the vast majority of behaving animals on the planet survive with this implicit

knowledge by learning what kinds of contexts and what kind of behaviors move you toward good things and away from bad things. It's a very basic system that works for the vast majority of behaving animals on the planet. And it guides us quite a lot. And we have this incredible power to learn not only from touching the stove to see how hot it is, but to follow instructions. Language allows us to tell each other, hey, I know this thing. And if you hold this thing in mind, you can behave in a different way. You can skip the whole touching the stove thing altogether if you're a trusting individual. And we can program our brains on the fly to behave according to instructions.

But it's hard. I love this quote from Maya Angelou that says, do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. I love it and it inspires me to do better. But at the same time, I know that's hard and I know why it's hard. Because until something becomes habitual, until you've practiced it enough that your brain moves you in this direction, your brain agrees that this is the way to move toward good things and away from bad things, you've got to actively be holding that piece of information in mind and using it to

guide your behaviors. So I think when we feel pulled, when we feel like we're two different people, or when we feel like, why did I behave in a way that is inconsistent with the way I think I want to behave? We need to consider that we're not the same. If you believe that your brain makes you you, we're not the same person at every moment in time. Your brain is in a different state and your brain made a different choice. It wanted something different at that point in time. But there are some things that I am seemingly wired to do at every point in time. But there are some things that I am seemingly wired to do at every point in time. Like I don't struggle with not killing somebody at any point in time. That's just who I

am. I don't do that. And I'll never do that. Right. I totally agree. And I think that it's not hard work for your brain to not kill somebody. This is for the vast majority of us, that is a very hardwired no. That's something we move away from. We move away from harm, harming ourselves, harming others. But it's interesting to think that like on the flip side, so how hard you will work for something is related to your brain's value system. And value is in and of itself a really interesting word. But at the basic level, how good your brain estimates some choice to be is related to how much dopamine, how much of a feel-good reward chemical you'll get in your brain. And that dopamine signal drives us toward things that are very basic, like food and water.

But it also drives us toward things like compliments or jokes or experiences or knowledge. The brain finds knowledge rewarding. So when you feel curious, that's your brain saying, go toward this piece of knowledge. It's going to be good. That's different for everybody, right? Like we know that people have different levels of epistemic curiosity or wanting to know facts, and that these different levels of curiosity also relate to how much dopamine their brain releases when they're put in front of a trivia question or a video with a magic trick that asks,

and you ask them, how much do you want to know how this works? We're discussing what makes you who you are. And my guest is Chantel Pratt. She is a neuroscientist and author of the book, The Neuroscience of You. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats.

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Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. 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. So Chantel, one of the things I think is interesting and that I have thought about is I have a sense of who I am. And there are people who know me or think they know me, but I have always suspected that the person they think I am is not who I think I am. And probably the person they think they are is not who I think they are. That is such an interesting insight. So I should tell you that my husband is also a neuroscientist and that this is a conversation that we've had.

And the question is, we know that there are places where those things don't align. But the question is, who is actually correct? So on the one hand, it seems obvious to say you're correct because you have access to all. And what I mean is you're correct about yourself because you have access to all of these things that are going on in the inside, right? You have access to your emotions and the state, your goals and the state that drives you to behave in a certain way.

When another person is trying to understand you, they have only observable behaviors. Are your fists clenched and your eyebrows, you know, raised or lowered when you say the thing you say? They have only observable cues. And the better they know you, the more of these observable cues they have, the better of a model they've created of you, right? So the more observations you have of a person, the better of a model they've created of you, right? So the more observations you have of a person, the better you can predict how they'll behave in a new situation, the more you feel like you understand this person. But here's where I think this gets interesting because first, we don't actually have conscious awareness of many of the things that drive our behaviors,

right? Like I was saying, these automatic processes are just driving you through the world. And the part of your brain that is conscious is telling you a story about why you did what you did, but it is just an interpretation. So the person who is watching you behave is making an inference about your behaviors, but they don't have a dichotomy. They haven't divided it up into these are the behaviors that you know you're doing, you know why you're doing what you're doing, and these are the behaviors that are automatic. They're just watching your pattern of behaving and characterizing you, whereas your brain is telling you a story and that story allows you to conveniently interpret things that line up with your vision of self, right? So it's very clear that

your sense of yourself will probably be different in important ways than others who know you well. And the interesting question is, are both of those views equally valid? And I think yes. You were talking a little while ago about curiosity. And so here's my question is, I'm interested in podcasting, you're interested in neuroscience, something pulled us in the direction we went. I went this way, you went that way. And I imagine it has to do with curiosity, that I saw something and followed it, and you saw something and followed it. Is that fair? When we feel curious, the feeling of curiosity, like, hmm, I wonder what, blah, blah, blah, or I wonder what the answer to this question is. The feeling of curiosity arises because your brain has decided that a piece

of information is valuable. It actually releases feel-good dopamine in front of the question, telling you, oh, move here. This is a reward, just like ice cream, the same kind of signaling in your brain. And what's really cool about that, it's very convenient, is that when dopamine is released in the brain, it increases plasticity, which means it sets you up for learning. If a brain feels curious and dopamine is released and you give it information, it is more likely to remember that information than if you give it that same information when it's not in a state of curiosity, when it's not in a state of wonder. So the brain says, hey, this is going to be really valuable.

It's going to be really important or even just really interesting. And then you learn the fun fact and you remember it. If you think about how this would work in the wild, right? Like we find yourself in a new neighborhood or you take a wrong turn on a hike you're on in the wilderness and your brain has to decide, I'm somewhere where I don't have knowledge. This is unknown. I might find something really cool, but something in here might kill me or hurt me. So your brain, whenever you come to the unknown, your brain is assessing based on your whole life

of experiences, whether this is a seek and explore situation or a turn and run situation. And that's the idea of threat. And so if your brain evaluates this new situation as threatening, it will not make you feel curious. It will shut down curiosity, which means that then if somebody continues to give you information, it's the opposite of curiosity. You're not open to it. You're not plastic. You're not going to lay that information down. And I think we need to understand this when we're trying to communicate with somebody who believes differently than us and just trying to hammer we're right into their heads. It will have the opposite effect. If you're insisting, if you're putting someone in a state where you're like, I'm right and

you're wrong and you're insisting on something, it's not going to open them up to curiosity. Are there things about my brain, things that are like you, early on in this conversation, we talked about, you know, I'm not wired that way. Are we wired in certain ways that are relatively difficult to change? For example, some people are loners and some people are very social. If you're a loner, is it worth trying to be more social or you're probably wired that way? And if that's true, then are there other things that are probably wired that way? I personally would love for loners to just accept and love that they're loners. I feel like this world is full of too many ways to make yourself better and not just to understand and appreciate that if you are wired that way,

after hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate brain evolution, there's probably a pretty good reason that some people work like that. And introversion and extroversion is one example of this. We know that introverts and extroverts have different reward systems. They have different receptors that are sensitive to dopamine, that reward chemical, and that there is some portion of that that's genetic. And one of the things that I find really fascinating, and this explains so much if you reverse engineer it, is that extroverts, the brains of extroverts respond more strongly to unexpected rewards than the brains of introverts do. and I'm walking down the road and I find X, my brain is going to respond like it's vanilla ice cream, while an introvert's brain might respond like it's, I don't know, a granola bar. I'm thinking of something else that I think is good, but less good. And you have to remember that that

dopamine response creates plasticity, right? So when my brain finds X and it's like, oh my gosh, this is like vanilla ice cream. This is awesome. What happens is that it reinforces all of the activities that led me to that place, that led me to go out the door and choose the series of things I chose that led me to find whatever it was that I found. So extroversion is characterized by seeking stimulation from the outside. And it makes sense because an extrovert's brain is incredibly sensitive to unexpected surprises, positive surprises. So this is just one example of how different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, but how there are some pretty strong genetic components in the way that our brains are built and the way that our brains respond to dopamine that can drive a whole host of behaviors.

As we wrap this up, is there anything about how the brain works to make you who you are that you want people to know? Some juicy little nugget. Probably the juiciest thing in my mind about the brain is just to understand that there's no other brain on the planet exactly like yours. Everyone's brain really is a snowflake to avoid a cliche. But when you're trying to interact with someone else, the more similar their brain is to yours, the easier that is going to be. The easier it's going to be to reverse engineer their behavior and figure out why they do what

they do. So keep in mind that if you're standing in front of a person who you think is behaving in a totally ridiculous way, this probably means that they're wired differently and that this way of behaving is absolutely rational to their brain. So I think this has been really helpful in understanding, you know, what makes people different? Why do some people do this and other people do that? And it's more than just some people are like that. There's a lot going on here.

Chantel Pratt has been my guest. She's a neuroscientist and the name of her book is The Neuroscience of You. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Chantel. Thank you so much. This was really fun and very thought provoking. reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best.

Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. The weather is something you notice and are conscious of every day. There's a good chance you talk about the weather every day. You probably look at a weather forecast on TV or on your phone because the weather where you are will determine what you wear, where you go, if you go, how you feel. Weather is a big part of our lives, and in many ways, it fascinates us.

But probably not as much as it fascinates Matthew Capucci. He's an on-air meteorologist at Fox 5 DC in Washington. He publishes daily articles in the Washington Post, and he is author of the book, Looking Up, The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd. And he's here to talk weather, including a lot of things about the weather you probably never knew. Hi, Matthew. Welcome. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Well, the weather seems to be on a lot of people's minds because, as we see on the news,

there are a lot of extremes. We see in some parts of the country, high heat, fires, drought. In other parts of the country, there's flooding. We're seeing a lot of extremes. Yeah, definitely. We talk about precipitation extremes, whether it be drought or flooding, and people find it hard to believe that both are actually linked to climate change. And we think, how can two antithetical opposites be driven by the same cause? And what happens is that as the air temperatures warm, every degree Fahrenheit, the atmosphere warms, the air can hold about 4% more water. What that means is that where water vapor is available, i.e. in the Southeast, the Deep South, the Eastern Seaboard, where we have

the Gulf of Mexico nearby, you can hold a lot more water in the air and there's water that's available for that air to take in and you get heavier downpours, more extreme flood events. But over the West, the Pacific's really cool. You don't get as much water vapor in the air. And so for that reason, when you have the warmer temperatures, you just suck the water out of the ground. You dry out the landscape that reinforces drought, that causes temperatures to warm up even more. And so drought really becomes entrenched in the West thanks to climate change. So again, two sides of the same coin that are very much opposites. One of the things I wonder about is when we see extreme weather like we're seeing now, is it the worst it's ever been?

Or do these things go in cycles and we've been here before or what? One of the worst things the media can do is use a term ever. This is the worst drought ever. This is the hottest temperature ever because in reality, we only have about 150, if that, years of good observations from which we can reliably draw conclusions. So I try with my viewers and with my audience to focus not so much on the milestones, hey, the hottest temperature ever, the this, the that. I try to focus more on the trends.

Each year we're seeing an increase of blah, or we're seeing a tendency for blah to occur more frequently or in more intense spurts, because people are much more perceptive to changes than they are individual anecdotes. People can remember if conditions are changing versus one generation, two generations ago. So can you explain rain? Where does it come from? What is it? What makes it fall out of the sky? What is rain? That's a good question. I like getting back to the basics. Really, rain should come from any liquid out there. We could be drinking dinosaur urine, and this water could be in 100 million years in a wishing well somewhere over in the Vatican, just crazy stuff like that. And so rain really begins

with water in the ground. Any moisture either on the ground, in the ground, or perhaps in the oceans evaporates when you have temperatures warming. So once that evaporation occurs, you have water vapors, an invisible gas. You can't see it. You can't smell it. You only begin to see it when the air reaches what's called saturation. Now, the air has a capacity as to how much water it can hold. So once the air's capacity is overwhelmed, it says, hey, can't take any more water. Suddenly the water condenses. You have temperatures reaching the dew point.

You get a cloud to form, and that's exactly what happens. A fog bank just means you have too much water in the air. Some of it has to condense and get out of the air. Now, eventually, some of those droplets of cloud coalesce and form raindrops, and those fall down to the surface and precipitate. Ordinarily, with most raindrops, they're falling at about 14, 15 miles per hour. If it's a snowflake, it falls at about two or three miles per hour. If it's a hailstone, I mean, heck, those things can come down at 100, 120 miles per hour. My windshield is a testament to that, or I guess my lack of windshield three times is a testament to that. But yeah,

it's a very interesting process and it's constantly repeating every single day. And what is hail? Why does it sometimes seemingly, it's raining and now it's constantly repeating every single day. And what is hail? What is it? Why does it sometimes seemingly, it's raining and now it's hailing? Yeah, so contrary to popular belief, hail actually only forms from thunderstorms. It is not a cold season sort of thing because yeah, you get sleet in the winter time,

completely different thing. Hail is what happens when you have updrafts, very strong upward motion in thunderstorms that might carry liquid rain water to 30 40 50 60 000 feet now anytime you're in an airplane summertime winter time i don't care when if you fly high enough you get really cold air and so these thunderstorms grow so tall they reach this layer and suddenly all the liquid that is being carried up by these powerhouse a potent thunderstorm updrafts, cools, it freezes, it has to freeze onto something, so condensation nuclei, whether it be a bug,

a piece of dust, pollen, whatever, and it becomes ice. Now, with every time that little piece of ice, that fledgling hailstone gets tossed around inside the cloud, it can accrete a new layer and a new layer, and suddenly it grows larger and larger larger and if you ever slice a hail stone open you'll see these onion like layers now the hail stone can remain suspended so long as it isn't too heavy for the thunderstorm updrafts if you have a hundred mile an hour updraft air going straight up at a hundred miles per hour which is feasible in in severe and supercell thunderstorms you might get baseball sized hail if you want gargantuan hail we're talking six to eight inches across you might get baseball-sized hail. If you want gargantuan hail, we're talking six to eight inches across,

you might need 150 mile per hour updraft, which is why oftentimes the same storms that produce the biggest hail are the ones that are tornadic, that produce twisters, funnel clouds, all that stuff. These are usually the rotating supercells, but I've seen hail to about softball size before. My vehicle's all dented up.

I actually have a cage built around the truck to protect against that giant hail. But it is a very mystical thing to see the rain suddenly lift, the cloud bases lift, and suddenly you have these boulders of ice shattering on impact with the ground. And sleet is something else entirely, but I think people sort of get them confused. They do, yeah. So sleet and something else called grapple are things that form in the wintertime from clouds that might be producing snow, might be producing a mix.

Sleet is a form of wintery mix. What happens, you have essentially a raindrop that is falling out of the cloud, but it hits a cool layer before it hits the ground. So you have warm near the clouds, then a cool layer. So liquid precipitation freezes into a little pellet and that's what sleet is grapple is something completely different and most people don't even know what grapple is it looks

almost like dip and dots a little soft crunchy snow pellets and what happens for that you have a snowflake that begins to melt a little bit and it passes through a shallow layer of super cooled water droplets or tiny droplets of water that are liquid below 32 degrees. And suddenly all these little droplets accrete onto the edge of this snowflake and you get a crunchy snow pellet. So that's what grapple is. It looks like sleeves. It sounds a little bit differently. And if you're a meteorologist or someone who really pays attention to these things, you notice it. How often does, cause I've never even heard the word until you just said it. How often does grapple, how do you spell that?

G-R-A-U-P-E-L. And it's actually a pretty frequent occurrence in parts of the United States. I see it probably four or five, six times a winter out here. It's more just that, and I'll be honest, a lot of TV meteorologists and folks who see the media just don't bother reporting on it or talking about it or explaining it because it's easier to just call it all asleep. But my platform is all about education. And so if folks can learn something new, yeah, let's talk about grapple. What is one thing about weather that you think people

never really hear much about or don't really understand? One of the things that I find really interesting is that there's something called precipitation efficiency, which is really a figure that there's something called precipitation efficiency, which is really a figure that tells us how much of a raindrop evaporates before hitting the ground, because every raindrop is going to lose some of its mass on the way down. The highest precipitation efficiency comes in tropical storms and hurricanes because the entire moisture, the entire column of atmosphere is so moisture loaded that you don't get much dry air

evaporating the raindrops. So the entire thing pretty much falls. Whereas with most thunderstorms might only get 40, 50, 60% precipitation efficiency, or only about like two thirds of that raindrop actually hitting the ground. So is that why sometimes it seems that the raindrops are bigger? Yeah, definitely. If you have bigger raindrops, you have what's called a cool rain process which can be a couple different things either you have great precipitation efficiency the rain is bigger and it's falling faster or perhaps you have a more moisture loaded column or sometimes and this is my favorite the big globules you get of rain can oftentimes be hail that has melted remember in la even it might be too warm for hail at the low levels, but once in a while you might get hail that falls way high up at, say, a mile, two miles in the atmosphere

that melts before hitting the ground, but that mass is still sort of intact as a big drop of rain, whereas other times you might have more what we call stratiform little rain. Since you're a pretty well-known meteorologist in Washington, D.C., what are the kinds of questions, interesting things people ask you about the weather? You'd be surprised by how many messages I get from viewers, listeners, followers who will say things like, oh my gosh, the moon and the sun are up at the same time today. I've never seen that. And I want to say to them, that's almost always the case. It's the case like 10, 11 days out of every month. But I think people just aren't as observant as they were

a generation, two generations ago. People look down at their phones all the time. Yet if they looked up, they'd be amazed by what they see. So things like that. Or one of my favorites is telling folks that when they're watching a meteor shower shooting star, those shooting stars, the debris that sparks those beautiful colors might only be the size of a grain of puffed rice, but it's moving along at 30, 40, 50 miles per second. And that's why it burns up in the atmosphere

and produces that streak of colors. And so when people start learning what makes these phenomena that they've either noticed or been curious about, it really unlocks this even greater reservoir of curiosity that I believe is sort of inherent to most people. I think it's an innate thing that we're curious about the things that we see all the time, but never really bothered to take the time to understand. One weather question that I don't think I've ever heard the answer to is is in a thunderstorm there's lightning there's electricity how did

where did that come from where does that electricity originate believe it or not that is one of the biggest mysteries we still kind of struggle to understand we know how thunderstorms get charged there's something called tribo electrification where essentially if you have liquid and ice rubbing against each other the ice will take on a positive charge and the rain will take on a negative charge the liquid will take on a negative charge and so the top of thunderstorms where it's really cold you have a lot more ice tend to be more positive whereas the middle the the innards of the storm are more negative that means the earth is relatively positive and you get a spark to jump in between the two but we don't

understand how this reservoir of charge builds up, how it becomes so incredibly strong that you get a lightning strike. Now, we can talk about something called the dielectric breakdown coefficient of aversion air. It's a big fancy word to say, basically, how much of an electric field do you have to have to get a spark to jump through thin air? And that turns out to be three megavolts per meter, which is an incredible amount of charge. It would be virtually impossible for that charge to build up without being dissipated just naturally however it turns out that as you have a tiny spark job even a half inch that heats the air around it which lowers the resistance which makes it easier for the rest of that channel to propagate which is why lightning oftentimes

jumps in 50 to 100 yard little jagged increments. And, you know, most lightning is only about a half inch thick. And at last, you might see 30, 40, what we call return strokes or pulses in the course of a second or two seconds. But yeah, people always find it surprising that it's only about a half inch to an inch thick. And how does lightning decide where to strike? It is very capricious. So one thing that we can't see, just because, well, you don't want to be that close to the lightning anyway, but one thing we can't really see unless we have good time-lapse and high sensitivity cameras, is what we call upward streamers. So essentially, when a lightning charge is coming down from a cloud,

it creates a bunch of little tiny channels that rise up out of the ground. It induces channels that rise up out of the ground. And we call those upward streamers. Eventually one upward streamer will meet with the downward leader somewhere in the middle, and that will be the channel that all the electricity flows through. But you might have 30, 40, 50 upward streamers. Picture a bunch of kids in class all raising their hands going, oh, pick me. Oh, pick me. The teacher can only pick one. That's kind of how the lightning is. The lightning, the charge going down from the clouds can only pick one upward streamer, but where they meet, that now creates this river for the current to flow through. And that is what allows these

pulses of light. And in each pulse of light you see with the lightning is charges flowing through that channel so you're a storm chaser of sorts and you know your books about storm chasing and and your adventures what's the point of that do you actually learn something when you chase storms or is it just so cool that you can't not do it or both it's a it's a little bit of both the atmosphere is a quintessential teacher. I see so many meteorologists who are on television or who are wherever, and they're doing tornado coverage, but they've never seen a tornado. Or they're talking about a hurricane, but they've never been in a hurricane. Or they're talking about what people are seeing, experiencing their locations without ever having experienced it themselves. And I think that's hypocritical

almost because I never want to be a distant meteorologist. When I'm doing tornado coverage, I can say to folks exactly what they're seeing. I know what the clouds look like. I know what the texture of the cloud is, the color, the everything, what the winds are doing, not just because I can read the radar adroitly, but because I've been there. I've done this so many times. I put myself in the path to experience these things. And since you do put yourself in the path of these things, like a tornado, like when you see a tornado, what is it that's so cool about it to you? I've seen a couple of cool things with tornadoes. Unfortunately, oftentimes after tornadoes, you can smell them. It's like the world's biggest lawnmower churning everything up. You sometimes find dead birds afterwards, which is pretty sad, but think about the powerful suction. The really cool thing is I've been on a couple of tornadoes where after the tornado, stuff will start falling from the sky. I'll look out and I'll have to turn my windshield wipers on because corn is falling from the sky. So cool stuff like that.

It always is painful when you see people's lives disrupted or impacted, but from a scientific standpoint, it's incredible what we get to see. One thing I've always thought was pretty cool about the weather is how different kinds of weather make you feel, you know, a rainy day can make you feel sad or, you know, a sunny day, you tend to feel happier that, you know, a snowy day has a different feel to it. A large part of that is actually the olfactory sense of the weather, which sounds a little bit apocryphal, but consider, for example, the smell of a thunderstorm is two things. One is called petrichor. It is that clean, fresh scent after, or even before rain where the rain goes down, it enters the pores of plants, the stomata,

and expels gas from the plant. So it smells very piney and very pleasant outside and very clean. That's that clean smell we smell. The other thing you're smelling with thunderstorms too is actually ozone. Lightning is so hot that it splits up O2 molecules and some recombine into O3. That is ozone, which we don't normally have near the surface. But when we do, you can smell it because it is something that we can smell three parts per billion. So like three teaspoons in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, our nose is so sensitive. And oftentimes, you get that ozony smell out ahead of the storm, which is remarkable. Or for example, when we talk about fall, there's a very distinct scent of autumn. And I've gone on air here in DC

and talked about why the air smelled a certain way. And I traced what we were smelling in the district area all the way to pine trees near the Hudson Bay. And so you're exactly right. There's an emotional connection to the weather. And, you know, it's partly visual, it's partly auditory, but it's largely olfactory too. Well, I have to say this conversation has taught me several things about the weather that I never knew before. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Matthew Capucci has been my guest. He is an on-air meteorologist at Fox 5 DC in Washington. And the name of his book is Looking Up, The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd.

And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Matthew. Appreciate it. Hey, thank you again so much. I really appreciate you guys having me on. The next time you have to deal with something stressful or unpleasant, consider humming before you do it. Humming can actually do wonders at relieving stress and activating those all-important alpha brainwaves. Just 60 seconds of humming will reduce levels of anxiety and leave you feeling more grounded and confident. You can hum anything you like, a favorite tune or a healing hum of just the letter M or N. To get the full advantage of your hum,

concentrate on the soothing vibrations you're creating and find a sweet spot that feels good on your vocal cords and sounds good to your ear. And that is something you should know. I'm sure your mother has told you many times that it's always polite to share. So I hope you'll be polite and share this podcast with someone you know, and that'll make your mother very happy. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love

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

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