Something You Should Know - The Real Reasons People Drink Alcohol & How You Acquire Knowledge

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Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, the real health benefits of simply laughing. Then drinking alcohol. It's not really good for you, so why do so many people drink? Why can't we just say that the central motivation people have for drinking beer and wine and other types of alcoholic beverages is intoxication? We clearly have a strong drive to get intoxicated, and it arguably gave rise to civilization.

Starting point is 00:00:59 Also, why do some people faint after donating blood, and how do you prevent it? And what's the best way to learn something new so it really sticks? I think an important facet of learning that should be acknowledged is, you know, learning is not always fun and just doing little bits of practice every day to get over that initial hurdle can be quite beneficial. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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,

Starting point is 00:01:46 and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. 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. Who doesn't like to laugh? Everybody likes to laugh, and it appears that laughter rivals exercise when it comes to health benefits. Here are some things researchers uncovered about laughter.

Starting point is 00:02:30 In a study at Loma Linda University, laughter raised the level of a disease-fighting substance in the body by 14%. At UCLA, it was discovered that students could endure having their hands submerged in ice water 40% longer while watching comedies. A cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center measured subjects' blood flow as they watched the movie There's Something About Mary and concluded that laughter increases circulation about as much as a treadmill session. Two researchers at John Hopkins Medical School divided 98 students in a biostatistics class into two groups. Each took the same 57-item exam, but one group's test had funny instructions. The students who got those funny instructions scored significantly higher on the exam. Why does humor help us think?

Starting point is 00:03:26 No one really knows, but scientists believe that amusement and laughter stimulate the brain's reward center, which improves our mental function. And that is something you should know. The relationship human beings have had with alcohol goes back for centuries, and there's no question that alcohol has caused a lot of misery and heartache for many people over the ages. Nevertheless, the story and the science behind why people drink is fascinating, and certainly worth exploring and understanding, given how pervasive it is all over the planet. Whether it's cocktails with friends, beer with the guys, wine with dinner, alcohol is

Starting point is 00:04:10 part of our culture. And in fact, civilization as we know it might not even exist if it weren't for alcohol. Here to help us understand all this is Edward Slingerland. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and he's author of a book called Drunk, How We Slipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Hey, Edward, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So I would imagine that human beings have been drinking ever since they first figured out how to make alcohol. People have been drinking certainly for as long

Starting point is 00:04:47 as we've been doing anything in an organized fashion. By about probably 20,000 years ago, we were consciously making alcoholic beverages. And in fact, the standard story is that we, alcohol is a byproduct of agriculture. So we started growing crops, and then eventually we noticed that our grain fermented if we left it sitting around. But the way it's actually looking is that we started making beer and wine first.

Starting point is 00:05:14 So we have direct evidence of beer making as far back as 13,000 years ago, and that's way before agriculture started. So it looks like actually it's the desire to make better and more beer that gave rise to agriculture and therefore gave rise to civilization rather than the other way around. I remember having a conversation about this with someone. And I think it's a really important point that people, you know, talk about alcohol, like, you know, the smell and the taste and how this one tastes different than that one. But basically, people are drinking for the buzz. People drink for the buzz, primarily, right? Yeah, the central motivation people have for drinking beer and wine and other types of alcoholic beverages is intoxication. We clearly have a

Starting point is 00:06:05 strong drive to get intoxicated and it arguably gave rise to civilization. And it's what keeps this taste for intoxication. It has stayed in our gene pool. It hasn't been eliminated by evolution, either genetic evolution or cultural evolution. And that suggests that there are some really important benefits to wanting to get intoxicated at least from time to time. And what are those benefits? One is enhanced creativity. So there's an ancient idea that artists and poets have always been associated with wine and other intoxicants. One of the things alcohol does is down-regulate your prefrontal cortex. So this is the PFC. This is the part of your brain that's in charge of keeping you

Starting point is 00:06:51 focused on task and delaying gratification and controlling emotions and not getting distracted, which is all very good. The problem with that is certain creativity tasks require you to be open and allow connections to happen. And so the PFC is good for getting to work on time. It's not good for creative insights. And so one of the things alcohol does is temporarily turn the PFC down a couple notches. And this seems to allow different parts of your brain to communicate to each other in ways that they wouldn't normally communicate. It allows your unconscious to communicate to your conscious brain in a way that it normally doesn't. So there's good empirical evidence that getting to about creativity seems to peak at about 0.08 BAC, so this is about two drinks in. So this ancient

Starting point is 00:07:41 idea that creativity and alcohol go together finds some modern support in scientific evidence. And so what are the other benefits? Oh, and before we go any further, because people are probably listening going, what is that noise in the background? That's traffic noise of downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Edward lives downtown in Vancouver, and that's as quiet as we can make it. But he lives in and amongst the traffic. So Edward, go ahead. What are the other benefits? Another important benefit is what I call chemical disarmament. So the reason we shake hands is that potentially hostile people who are meeting and trying to come to an agreement want to show each other that they're not carrying a weapon in their dominant hand. In the same way, when treaties are

Starting point is 00:08:30 being signed or contracts being negotiated, people sit down and drink together. And essentially, what's going on, it's very much like shaking hands. If you sit down and have a few drinks with me, you are taking your prefrontal cortex out of your brain and putting it on the table and saying, I'm cognitively disarmed. So things that I'm less able to lie because I don't have cognitive control anymore. The PFC is very important for lying because you need to keep track of what you're doing. You need to suppress the truth. You need to have good working memory to remember what you're lying about. That's all much harder to do when your PFC is downregulated. We're actually better at detecting lies when we're a little bit drunk, because we're not,

Starting point is 00:09:14 when we're consciously trying to figure out if someone's lying, we're actually worse at it than if we just relax and take in a bunch of information. And then alcohol, another effect of alcohol is it's boosting feel-good hormones. So it's boosting endorphins, it's boosting serotonin, and this makes us feel better about ourselves. We feel wittier and more attractive, and we think other people are wittier and more attractive, and this helps people bond. So there's, I review some empirical evidence that it, you know, again, this is an old folk idea in vino veritas, right? The idea that in wine there's truth. This idea of alcohol as a truth serum and it's in a way to really get a good sense of someone is an ancient idea. And there's good empirical evidence that that's true. It actually does help people bond and trust one another more. Despite the benefits that people experience when

Starting point is 00:10:07 they drink alcohol, the fact is alcohol doesn't work for everyone. Some people can't stop drinking. Other people turn nasty when they drink. There are a lot of problems with alcohol. Yeah, so the mean drunk phenomenon is really more of a problem of just mean people. So alcohol, there is this kind of myth that alcohol can make you angry or make you mean. It doesn't really do that. It disinhibits you. So it removes your ability to suppress what's there. And so if you're a mean or angry person, it will allow you to express those traits. So that's a potential downside of alcohol is, you know, again, inhibition is important. So that's alcohol is basically just taking the playground monitor away.

Starting point is 00:11:00 And that means some bad things can happen, especially if you start to get to high levels of inebriation. The bigger danger with alcohol is addiction. It's probably the case that up to 15% of the human population is genetically prone to alcoholism. So there's a really high heritability to alcoholism. And people who are prone to alcoholism, it's very difficult for them to drink safely, to use alcohol in a moderate way. Alcohol is incredibly addictive. It's up there with heroin and cocaine in terms of how addictive it is. Why has the taste for it stayed in our gene pool, considering how many people in our population are vulnerable to misusing alcohol?

Starting point is 00:11:43 And it's got to, again, it has to be the case that these benefits overall outweigh the risks. But it's also the case that cultures have traditionally had ways to help individuals who are potentially problem drinkers drink more responsibly. So we have typically, you always drink socially. In traditional societies, you never drink alone. And in fact, you very rarely have private access to alcohol. So if you're going to drink, it's going to be a communal situation where it's ritually mandated how much you're allowed to drink, or you can only drink when people make toasts. That helps a lot. Traditionally, we've also only

Starting point is 00:12:20 had access to beers and wines. And in the past, they were traditionally pretty weak. So beers were coming in at like 3% ABV and fruit wines maybe could get up to 9%. What's changed, what's made the calculus a little bit different in the modern world is distillation. So we now have access to distilled liquors, which are just wildly more powerful than anything we dealt with in our evolutionary history. And this is relatively recent. People don't realize this, but we didn't have widespread access to distilled spirits in the West, in Europe, until the late 1600s, 1700s, which in a story that starts 10 million years ago, it's basically yesterday. So that's another problem is people can get dangerously drunk very quickly when they have access to distilled liquors.

Starting point is 00:13:22 You said, or maybe it was in the book, but I think you said earlier in this conversation that civilization might not be here without alcohol. So if I heard you correctly, can you explain that? Well, it relates to this idea that I talked about earlier of the so-called beer before bread hypothesis. So civilization depends on agriculture. And if it's the case that it's our desire to get intoxicated that caused us to start domesticating plants, there's just a literal direct connection between intoxication and civilization, the desire to get intoxicated created civilization. The kind of broader sense in which I think that's true is that intoxication is a tool, chemical intoxicants are a tool that cultures use to get past cooperation dilemmas, to allow us to innovate in a much more efficient way. And so it's been, I think, there are a lot

Starting point is 00:14:12 of these tools. So alcohol is not, intoxicants aren't the only one. We have religion, for instance. I think religion is another cultural tool. This is earlier research I did worked on the evolutionary study of religion and how it helped large scale societies get off the ground. So we have several tools in our toolkit, but a really crucial one is chemical intoxicants. And the fact that when, for instance, alcohol is removed, so there are places where they don't have alcohol, you find them using other chemical intoxicants that have very similar effects. So the fact that when you take alcohol out of the equation, something else fills its spot suggests that it's performing a really crucial function.

Starting point is 00:14:54 I'm speaking with Edward Slingerland, and we're talking about why people drink. Edward is a professor of philosophy, and he is author of the book Drunk, How We Slipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. 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, Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Starting point is 00:15:30 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

Starting point is 00:16:18 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

Starting point is 00:17:08 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, Edward, what about the hangover? Is that serving a function of you went too far and so behave yourself? Or is that just a byproduct of you drank too much and that's the beginning and end of the story? Yeah, I think it's just really just a physiological byproduct

Starting point is 00:17:40 of how alcohol affects the body. But again, it could be a function of the modern world. So you're much more likely to have a hangover if you've been drinking distilled liquors. If you spend an evening drinking two to 3% beer, which is what most people did traditionally, you're not going to have hangovers. You're going to wake up and be pretty fine. What about the health effects though? I mean, despite the sometime advice that you hear that a glass of wine a day is good for you, there are some serious health effects if you drink, right? Yeah, the health effects are terrible. So it's, again, this is part of the evolutionary

Starting point is 00:18:20 puzzle is alcohol is bad for us physiologically. And I talk about the study that came out, very widely publicized study from the Lancet Medical Journal. It was a massive review of the literature on the physiological effects of alcohol. And the conclusion of that article was the safe level of drinking for all individuals is zero. So if you're looking at alcohol purely from a medical perspective, there's nothing good about it. Any kind of whatever benefits to kind of helping with your lipid levels is far outweighed by cirrhosis of the liver, cancer risk, all the other bad things it does to you. So again, and part of the problem with our society is that we look at alcohol through this medicalized lens. We're looking at it only in terms of its physiological impact.

Starting point is 00:19:11 And if that's the case, we should stop drinking alcohol. It's bad for us. But I'm arguing that once we consider the broader picture of the positive effects it has socially and in terms of individual creativity, individual happiness in terms of stress reduction, relaxation of the ego. It's good for us to take a little break from being in cognitive control all the time. When you consider all those benefits, those outweigh, arguably outweigh the obvious negative effects physiologically of alcohol consumption. Over the last several years, there's been a lot of awareness made and pressure put on people not to go out and drink and drive. And has that awareness, how does that play into the mix here? So it's true. And that's the other thing that's made alcohol much more dangerous

Starting point is 00:20:00 is that we have access to motorized vehicles now. So traditionally, you know, if you were out getting drunk and you were walking home or you're riding a horse home, it was not a problem. The horse could find its way home. But having operating heavy machinery and drinking alcohol is a really bad combination. So there has been an increased awareness about the challenges of combining social drinking with driving. And I think people are much more reasonable and careful about that now, which is a good thing. But I'm not sure it overall decreases alcohol consumption instead of just pushing it to different places. I've always wondered why we have all these different kinds of liquor. If the core goal is to just get intoxicated, it really shouldn't make too much difference how you get there. But, you know, we have tequila or we have vodka and we have scotch and some people hate scotch and some people hate tequila. And maybe it has to do with where you are and what material is available to make the

Starting point is 00:21:05 alcohol but is there any sense that you know what one kind of alcohol does anything different than another or is it all just intoxication driven it's all just ethanol the active ingredient of all these different substances is ethanol and that's it it's not different in tequila or vodka or any or beer or wine it's just that in distilled liquors it's much more concentrated ethanol so i think it the variation you see has probably a lot to do with different materials people have to work with um but in terms of the why you'd want to have this much variation, I mean, just go to the next time you're in the grocery store, any big grocery store, go look at the variety of Doritos you could get. There's like 20 types of Doritos or, you know, the number of different types of tortilla chips. People like variety.

Starting point is 00:22:01 So there's variety in alcohol for the same reason there's variety in anything. People like variety. So there's variety in alcohol for the same reason there's variety in anything. People like variety. But there does seem to be different effects of different alcohol in the sense that people often describe that gin gives them a worse hangover than vodka. That whenever I have a margarita, the tequila, I think it's the tequila. I have stranger dreams at night from the tequila. So could it be something, is it just me imagining this? But there does seem to be some truth. In fact, I can't remember the name of the brand of vodka, but one of the selling points when it came out was that it didn't give you a hangover, that they must have manipulated something.

Starting point is 00:22:48 So there's something else besides the ethanol doing something else. It's not having a psychopharmacological effect, but the other parts, components of alcohol can do all sorts of things in terms of giving you headaches or giving you an allergic reaction. So for instance, there's a gin made in the San Francisco Bay Area that I love. It's delicious. It always gives me just this brutal headache within about 15 minutes of drinking it. And it's got to be the case that one of the, you know, they use about 20 different botanicals when they're making this gin. I must be allergic to one of those botanicals. So there are other things in alcohols. The other thing is with regard to hangovers, sugar content is a big

Starting point is 00:23:34 cause of hangover. So if you're drinking an alcohol that has a lot of sugar in it, like rum, or I think tequila has quite a bit of sugar in it, you're more likely to have a hangover than if you're drinking something like vodka, which tends to not have very high sugar content. So yeah, there's all sorts of botanicals and other things and alcohols. And that's what gives them all their different, great, wonderful, diverse tastes. But if you're allergic to some of these substances or they contain a lot of sugar and that's going to give you a worse hangover, you could have different reactions.

Starting point is 00:24:07 There are a lot of things people say about alcohol that I'm not sure if they're true. For example, a lot of people say that red wine gives them a headache and it's because of the tannins in the wine. Is that true? The red wine thing is certainly true. Red wine has a lot of tannins. And when red wine, you're extracting a lot more of the grape because you're leaving it on the skins. And so you're getting all sorts of other compounds with the ethanol, which is what you're shooting for.

Starting point is 00:24:39 So there's good evidence that red wine can affect people really negatively. My partner actually can't drink red wine. affect people really negatively. My partner actually can't drink red wine. She can drink as much white wine as she wants. She has more than half a glass of red wine. It triggers migraines. So people really do have different effects, and different wines are going to contain different substances in them. So that is not a myth. The red wine versus white wine difference has got some evidence behind it. Is there's that, that, that is not a myth. The red wine versus white wine difference is, is got some evidence behind it. Is there anything else finally here in the science about alcohol that we haven't talked about that, that you think people really should understand?

Starting point is 00:25:16 Beware of distilled liquors. You know, what we, what we really evolved to deal with is weak beers and wines. And so even though distilled liquors are the same substance, it's just ethanol in the same way wine and beer are just ethanol. Keep in mind that when you're drinking these things, it's such a powerful combination that you should really, I think people should really view distilled liquors as a different type of drug. But as you say, alcohol is alcohol. So whether it's 10 beers or the equivalent shots of tequila, you're still getting the same amount of alcohol. Sure. But the 10 beers takes you a really long time to drink.

Starting point is 00:26:01 So if you're drinking a weaker beer, there's a built-in pacing mechanism, right? You can't, there's only so much you can fit in your stomach and you're going to sip it at a certain pace. It's just with distilled liquors, if you're good about it, if you say, look, tonight I'm going to drink X amount of ethanol content, and I'm going to have that either in whatever, five beers or two vodkas. That's one thing. But that's not usually how people drink. People just order another round. And so you just got to be conscious that when you're dealing with distilled liquors, it's much easier to go past the sweet spot of pleasant inebriation and into dangerous territory. Well, I like your approach and the tone of this conversation because often

Starting point is 00:26:45 discussions about alcohol are either that, you know, alcohol is evil and nothing but evil, or they're, you know, light and flippant and isn't it funny, but you're more middle-of-the-road approach. I mean, it isn't all evil, it isn't all good, it is what it is, and it's a big part of our culture, and it's interesting to understand why that is. Edward Slingerland has been my guest. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the name of the book is Drunk, How We Slip, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Edward. All right. Thanks a lot. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan,

Starting point is 00:27:34 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. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:28:12 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 Lister 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. Pretty much from the time you're born till the time you die, you're learning things. You're always learning things.

Starting point is 00:28:50 And some things you just seem to absorb. Some things come very easily to you. And some things that you try to learn are very difficult to grasp. Since we're constantly learning, getting an understanding of how we learn is important, and as you're about to find out, really interesting. Barbara Oakley is a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan,

Starting point is 00:29:14 and she's author of a book called Learn Like a Pro, Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything. Hi, Barbara. Welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, Mike. So when people learn things or when people have trouble learning things, what generally is the reason people have trouble? I've always sensed that, you know, it's a lot easier to learn something if you're actually interested in it, which is why so many school subjects are hard because people don't aren't kids aren't interested in the subject makes it a lot harder. I imagine that's one thing. But what else? What makes it hard to learn? Well, one thing that makes it hard is simply not realizing how

Starting point is 00:29:57 hard learning can be. We often just want learning to be really easy. And one company, Course Hero, did a study and they tried to determine learners' biggest challenge. And what they found was their biggest challenge was that learning is really, really hard. And the issue is real learning involves creating links between neurons in long-term memory. And what we often do is we look at something, and for example, a list of vocabulary words in a foreign language, and we look at that and we go, oh, hey, it's right in front of me. I've got it in mind. But it's only in your working memory.

Starting point is 00:30:45 You haven't created those sets of links in long-term memory that can help you actually remember that list of vocabulary words. So what does that mean? It means that you look at the words on the page. They seem really easy, like you should remember them. But if you don't actually do the work to practice with them, repeatedly test yourself, try to retrieve those words from your own memory, you actually won't learn them. That's a really interesting and important point, I guess, because not all learning is difficult in the sense that we all have aptitudes and interests that, so some things are fairly easy to learn, and maybe we then think, well, then everything should be fairly easy. I pick this up pretty quick. Why is this so hard? There are two types of learning. If you look at learning from an evolutionary perspective,

Starting point is 00:31:46 there's the easy stuff, or what I call the easy stuff. There's actually a technical term for it, which is biologically primary cognitive processing. And that really means things like learning to recognize a person's face, or learning your native language, these are actually easy things to learn. Our brains are wired to learn these kinds of things. And we don't need to do anything special. It just automatically, we see someone, we recognize their face face we may not remember their name but we'll recognize their face again or we can very easily pick up our native language like a sponge but then there's more difficult material that's biologically secondary cognitive processes and these involve things like learning to read learning to to write, learning advanced, learning mathematics.

Starting point is 00:32:46 These are things that our brain is not really wired to do very well. And it's harder for us. Right. And when it gets hard, some people quit, walk away, and other people dive in and learn it. So what's the difference between those two types of people? I mean, learning is a lot like riding a bicycle. Who in their right mind would ever want to learn to ride a bicycle if all you ever see is those first few days of falling off the bike and getting bruised and maybe even breaking a bone or something. But we learn to ride the bicycle because we can see other people doing really cool stuff with it. And it's really fun. So you have to get through an initial hurdle where it's like the learning to ride a bike stage.

Starting point is 00:33:39 But it's harder to get past that stage mentally because, you know, to where it gets fun and interesting. So you just kind of work through it, but it can get more exciting if for whatever reason, either your teachers or some motivation, either internally to yourself or externally from the world can help you kind of become motivated for this. And is there a way, and parents I think would love to know the answer to this, is there a way to generate that motivation in yourself or in your child or something where it doesn't seem to be there, to get them to do their work and to get into it without the struggle and the hassle that often happens? Everyone would love that magic bullet. And I think an important facet of learning that should be acknowledged is, you know, learning is not always fun. And just doing little bits of practice every day to get over that initial hurdle can be quite beneficial. I mean, nobody says we get a kind of a bad set of information from the educational system because they they say, well, you know, to make learning in science, technology, engineering, and math, we need more students in this.

Starting point is 00:35:09 So we're always just going to make it fun for students. Well, that's a little like saying we're going to get you all excited about playing the guitar and you appreciate playing the guitar when you start having some actual successes through practice. It's the tiny bit of building blocks of practice that actually lead eventually to a love of what, you know, you kind of get past that initial hurdle, and then you begin to fall in love with it. One of the things I think people struggle with, or at least I've struggled with, is in school, you know, people say, well, we have to learn this. And I never knew what that meant. Does that mean memorize it? Does that mean just know it off the top of your head? Does that mean know where to go look for it when you need to know it? What does learn it mean?

Starting point is 00:36:11 Oh, what a great question. I think one of the real challenges is that we will throw students 12 to 16 years of education at them, and we never, ever give them a course on how you learn effectively i mean this is just it's like you've got to be kidding me because we know so much about what learning actually means now and it's coming from not only cognitive psychology, but also from neuroscience. It's very clear that to really learn something, you need to be able to access it in long-term memory. So if you ever hear a cognitive psychologist or educator saying, well, you know, you could just always look it up. Don't bother to remember any of these things. That's true for

Starting point is 00:37:06 trivial factoids, but you could never learn to speak French if you had to go to Google Translate. You must build a structure of the key ideas called a schema in your own brain. But even when you learn something well, and this is one of the criticisms of learning things in school, is that we learn a lot of things that we don't ever really need to know or use later on in life. And if you don't use it, then why learn it? The challenge is we never know what we're going to need when we go out into the broader world. So when I was young, I was quite naive and I was like, I will never use math.

Starting point is 00:37:58 Don't even bother to teach me math because I'm never ever going to use it. Well, as it turns out, if you do, they've done controlled studies and people who don't even understand the math enough to understand mortgages and interest rates are far more likely to default on their mortgages. So it's almost like you have an exercise program and you have a general exercise program because you just never know what you're going to be doing out in real life and you don't want to pull a muscle or get a sprain or something because you're completely out of shape. You kind of want to be generally in good shape.

Starting point is 00:38:48 That's what an exercise program does. And continuing to learn new things and broaden your learning is actually a good thing for you to keep mentally flexible. So keeping yourself flexible and learning new things is just kind of what you need to do in a modern society such as ours that requires people with many different skill sets. Let's talk about note-taking. I mean, I remember in school, and I even go to like conferences and things, and I'll see people, there'll be a speaker, and there'll be people in the audience furiously taking down notes. And I've never thought of myself as a particularly

Starting point is 00:39:30 good note taker, because I'm always afraid that while I'm writing down what they said 10 seconds ago, I'm not listening closely enough to what they're saying right now, and maybe that's more important. What a perceptive comment. It turns out that people with high-capacity working memory that can hold a lot of information in their mind, they can often take notes and also be listening to the speaker and understanding everything. But those with lower-cap capacity working memory, like me, about the best you can do is really either focus on the speaker or focus on taking notes,

Starting point is 00:40:12 but you can't like follow along with the speaker when you're taking those notes. Incidentally, Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek was like us. He could not, he didn't have the mental capacity to follow along with the speaker if he was also taking notes. So note-taking is sometimes very important, but the bottom line is taking notes is not the same as getting those links of the important ideas into your own long-term memory. And research has actually shown that if you borrow somebody else's notes, like if you just sit there and you take in the information and then you borrow somebody else's notes to study from, you'll actually do as well, if not better on the exam. So because you're kind of

Starting point is 00:41:06 getting it twice, you really heard it when the when the professor was saying it. And then you can do retrieval practice, that is looking at the notes and trying to see if you can draw those key ideas out of your mind by looking away from the notes and seeing if you can remember what those key ideas actually were. So note-taking is a very interesting approach, but you have to just be careful. It's not the be-all and end-all. It's putting things on paper, but that's not necessarily putting it in your brain. But the great thing is online learning nowadays. You can watch someone, you can take notes, and when you don't understand somebody, you can stop them. It's so neglected that this is a really valuable, you know, enhancement to learning nowadays. My very favorite athlete of all times is Julius Yago. And he was from Kenya. He always wanted to throw the javelin.

Starting point is 00:42:14 Well, if you know anything about Kenya, you know that they're famous for their long distance runners. And in fact, they had no javelin throwing coaches in Kenya. So he couldn't afford to get a coach or, you know, go to another country. So he went to YouTube, started watching YouTube videos, and then he'd go out and practice on his own. Watch a video, practice, watch, practice. Do you know that 99% just by doing this, he won the world champion in throwing the javelin. So it's that mixture of really being able to focus, stop it when you need to, to understand something and take your notes and so forth. But then practice what you're learning. We're really moving into a great new world with what the online

Starting point is 00:43:05 learning community is being able to provide. You know, there are so many different ways now to learn something. You can listen to an audio, you can watch a video, you can read a book, you can read something online. Is there any indication that one is better than the other or strategies that improve how well you learn something depending on which method you're trying to use to learn it? That's an interesting question that I have not been asked before.

Starting point is 00:43:34 I do know there's a good study by a colleague of mine that shows that if you are listening to something, say an audio book versus reading that audio book, it's about the same as far as your understanding goes. Now there are, there's plenty of evidence that if you're watching a video that has good visuals in it, that you can learn more effectively and more quickly by watching a video because you can both see the imagery and hear the verbal explanation, and your working memory, which, again, is limited, can integrate both of those streams of information much more easily than if you were just, you know, reading something or

Starting point is 00:44:27 hearing something. So this is called multimedia theory. And this indeed is why so much online education or even in-person education by a teacher who's explaining, but also has good visuals. The bad thing is when you have, see, great online teaching can have really thoughtfully done visuals that arise piece by piece and build and scaffold the learner. So it's not just like a book where it's all big pictures thrown at you on a page. It unfolds as the teacher explains what's going on. The problem is that some individuals do not take advantage of this kind of economy of scale that massive open online learning can provide. So some local, say, university online learning is not going to be necessarily as good as some of the massive online courses just because it's not made with such great care. They don't have a lot of money. I mean, it takes a lot. I'm creating a new online course now called Uncommon Sense Teaching. And it's amazing. I mean that's a 10-second sequence.

Starting point is 00:46:06 But when you see it, you go, oh, that's what they mean. It's so obvious. Whereas if it was all thrown at once onto the screen, it would not be nearly as obvious. Well, it's interesting how there is so much that is known about how learning works and how to do it better. And so much of this, you know, I've never heard before, and I don't think most people are taught. So it's good to have you come on and explain it. Barbara Oakley's been my guest.

Starting point is 00:46:33 She's a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, and she's author of the book, Learn Like a Pro, Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Barbara. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Mike. It's been great. You know, we're all encouraged to donate blood. It truly does save lives. However, there is one possible side effect of donating blood, and that is fainting, which is the result of a drop in blood pressure. Unfortunately, when people faint, that experience is so unpleasant and embarrassing

Starting point is 00:47:13 that those people usually never give blood again. So the Red Cross did a little research and found that drinking a 16-ounce glass of water before you donate blood will almost always prevent fainting. The water increases activity in your sympathetic nervous system, which raises your blood pressure and gives you more energy. That compensates for the drop in blood pressure when you donate blood. It works so well that the Red Cross says it is seeing a spike in returning blood donors. So just be sure to have a glass of water the next time you give blood. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:47:52 If you like this podcast, I always appreciate if you would tell some people to give it a listen and see if they like it. And also, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Five-star reviews are most appreciated. 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

Starting point is 00:48:22 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 We'll be right back. To be continued... that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favoured children. The Heresies of Rudolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.

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