Something You Should Know - Weird Factors That Distort Your Thinking & How Animals Perceive the World

Starting point is 00:00:00 Metro Links and Cross Links are 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. Today on Something You Should Know, why if you're holding a grudge, you really need to let it go. Then, some interesting ways your thinking gets distorted, which can lead to some bad outcomes. For example, there's this thing called the primacy effect, which is what people learn early on,

Starting point is 00:00:48 they will hold on to despite evidence to the contrary. And so this is probably the biggest, baddest cognitive property that we have. Also how allergy medicines can make you fat and the world animals live in is so different than ours because of how they sense and perceive the world. For example, catfish, they sense their world through taste and they don't have a tongue. Their whole body is their tongue. All the flanks of their body are covered in taste buds. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Starting point is 00:02:41 is like drinking poison yourself and hoping it makes the other person sick. I always like that. The resentment you feel by holding a grudge can do some real damage to you emotionally and physically. Not only does it interfere with your present pleasure and keep you focused on the pains of the past, it could also destroy a salvageable relationship. The physical pain can include a tight chest, tense muscles, upset stomach, headaches, and poor sleep. Letting go of a grudge isn't always easy, but it may be worth the effort. You might just try speaking up and let the other person know what they did that

Starting point is 00:03:25 bothers you and try to offer a solution. And if an apology from the other person is in order, you'll probably get one. And then you'll feel a whole lot better. And that is something you should know. Fractions distort your thinking. Now, marketers know this and use this. Perhaps the simplest example is gas prices. They're always expressed as a number and then nine-tenths of a cent to help make you think that it's actually costing less than it does. That's just one example.

Starting point is 00:04:03 It does seem that the brain doesn't really grasp fractions very well without some considerable effort, and that can cause some trouble for all of us, according to my guest, James Zimring. He's professor of experimental pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and author of the book, Partial Truths, How Fractions Distort Our Thinking. Hey, James, welcome. Hi there. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:04:32 So I think a good way to explain this rather than trying to explain the concept, just give an example of how fractions distort our thinking. A comical example is that in the 1980s, A&W fast food chain took on a gargantuan task, which was they were trying to unseat the Big Mac as the king of the burgers in America, which had been dominant since 1971. So they put together what they thought would be a much better burger. And by blinded tests, it tasted better, it was cheaper, and it was more meat. So they thought, wow, this is really going to do the trick. And when they released it on the market, it did not sell well at all. They had to pull it eventually. And when they did a market analysis

Starting point is 00:05:17 after the fact, what they discovered was that many people thought a third pound was less than a quarter pound because three is less than four. Well, what seems weird to me about that is anybody who took arithmetic in grade school learned that a quarter of a pound is less than a third of a pound. A quarter of a cup is less than a third of a cup. I guess people just reflexively think four is more than three. So what could A&W have done to avoid the confusion? Well, that's a good question that I'm probably not qualified to answer. I guess they could have said the bigger burger, you know, or just explicitly stated that as a fact. Yeah, right. There's an obvious solution.

Starting point is 00:06:06 They could have said 30% of a pound instead of 25% of a pound. But in this case, which is funny, A&W wasn't trying to deceive people. Actually, just the opposite. It's when people are trying to deceive us that it probably becomes much more problematic. For example, and maybe this is intentional or not, if you look at mutual funds when they're first released for us to invest money in, if we have money to invest, that's a pretty serious thing. And mutual funds, people don't usually invest in them unless there's some track record of how they did, because who's the manager? What are they charging? How do they do in the stock market? Well, companies that release mutual funds often, not always, do something that's called pre-incubating their funds. So they'll kind of have their funds running without public investment for a couple of years. And the ones that do really well, then they make available

Starting point is 00:07:01 to the public. The ones that do really poorly, you never hear about. They never release them. They destroy them. Now, on the surface, that seems almost like good consumer advocacy. Why would you release to the public a product that you had not yet tested? But what is really going on here, at least to some extent, is that imagine if none of the funds, their strategy mattered. If none of the funds had the ability to really outperform the market average, but just by chance some would and some wouldn't. They're only showing you then the ones that just happen to do well.

Starting point is 00:07:40 They're only showing you the top of the fraction and and they're selling you kind of a false product. Now, how would we know if that was true? If that was true, then pre-incubated funds, as soon as they were released to the public, would stop performing well, or as well as they had. And that is the case, that once pre-incubated funds that really outperformed the market are released, they usually hit the market average. That may or may not be intentional, but that's a rather serious manifestation of how subtle fractional differentiations can have huge effects on people's livelihoods. Well, I sort of get what you're saying, but that is a little difficult to get your head around because it does seem that basically they're just testing out their

Starting point is 00:08:25 strategy ahead of time before they release it to the public. What's maybe an easier to understand example of how this works? So let's consider for a minute self-help books or books that are going to show you how to become rich, you know, and they'll often have a title of something like the five habits of self-made millionaires. And the implication is if you find the things that self-made millionaires do, and then you do those things, you're more likely to become a millionaire. Well, I can promise you that self-made millionaires have the following habits. They eat, they breathe, they sleep, they yawn. Obviously, you're not going to become a millionaire by doing those things. But the point I'm trying to make is, it's not what do self-made millionaires do,

Starting point is 00:09:15 it's what do self-made millionaires do that other people don't do. And that second part, that's the bottom of the fraction, It's seldom, if ever, contained in these seminars and books that you might buy. Ask that question. Go to a self-help seminar, and they'll say, well, these are the habits that highly disruptive startup companies do. And if you ask the question, okay, that's interesting, but of the companies that fail, of the companies that aren't disruptive, that don't do well, do they have the same properties or not? And you usually won't get an answer. So by just presenting part of what has the form of a fraction, you can distort the message you're making. Now, remember, nothing that's coming out of your mouth is untrue here. None of the numbers you're giving are incorrect.

Starting point is 00:10:03 You're just presenting part of what has an underlying fractional form, and that can be very deceptive. Yeah, I think that is so true. You have to be so on guard about what people say and then the evidence they use to support what they say because on the surface, it might look right, but if you dig deeper, you go, wait, no, wait, no, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What's another example of that?

Starting point is 00:10:30 If you talk about claims that are made about products having some benefit to you, crystals having curative properties, it's not a question of whether somebody tried medicinal crystals and got better. Some people will try medicinal crystals and they will get better. And that is evidence that they might work. The question is, do people who use medicinal crystals get better at a more frequently or at a higher rate than people would have just gotten better on their own, right? So until you juxtapose with and without this thing, you can't tell. All you can tell is that you're kind of cherry picking an association. And again, this isn't necessarily some sinister plan to manipulate people because we do it to ourselves all the time.

Starting point is 00:11:17 It's called the availability heuristic, where we replace what comes to mind easily for what we think is most likely or most probable. But again, it's also a way that people can purposely manipulate us if they want to. You talk about, and I remember when this was a story about the Dungeons and Dragons and teenagers killing themselves and all that. Can you tell that story? Yeah. So in 1979, there was a gentleman, a young man named James Dallas Egbert. He went by the name Dallas. He was a child prodigy, brilliant kid. And he was at Michigan State University. And he was fairly troubled. And one of the things that he did was play Dungeons and Dragons. Now at that time, D&D was a relatively new game. It was confusing to parents, right? There's this game, but there's

Starting point is 00:12:11 no board. People sit around and they role play. It has demonic tones to it. And there was just a lot of confusion about it. And Dallas, as he went by, disappeared from Michigan State University. He left a note, which seemed like a suicide note, disappeared from Michigan State University. He left a note, which seemed like a suicide note, but they weren't sure. And they launched an investigation to find him. And one of the detectives who was looking for him came up with the theory that he had killed himself in the steam tunnels under the Michigan State as part of a Dungeons and Dragons game that got out of control. Well, they searched the steam tunnels.

Starting point is 00:12:45 They searched all around. The newspapers had headlines stating as a matter of fact that that was why he disappeared. Even 60 Minutes got involved in a segment with Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons. And it turns out that Dallas ran away because he was so troubled and wound up. They found him about a month later in Morgan City, Louisiana, you know, 1100 miles away or so in an apartment where he was just kind of being despondent. And eventually he called the detectives. They didn't find him. He said, please come get me. And they they took him back to his parents. And this caused the light to shine on Dungeons and Dragons. And over the next five years or so, there were 28 cases of murder or suicide by adolescents who were playing D&D. And the idea entered people's heads that this is a dangerous game and it's causing kids

Starting point is 00:13:33 to kill themselves. And to be fair, that was a very appropriate concern. You have 28 suicides associated with this game. It's something that needs to be investigated. But when they investigated it, they found that at that time, there were already 3 million people playing Dungeons and Dragons across the country, basically 3 million adolescents, because that's where it was most popular. Now, the suicide rate at that time was 120 for every million adolescents, which is basically 360 suicides a year you would expect

Starting point is 00:14:06 without any outside influence. And so when you say, wow, there were 28 suicides playing Dungeons and Dragons, that seems like a really dangerous game. But when you consider that there were 28 suicides out of 3 million people playing, and the rate of suicide should have been 360 out of 3 million anyway. If anything, the game had a protective effect instead of a damaging effect. And so this is what happens, again, if you look just at the numerator of the fraction and not the denominator. And this continues to play forward with these horrible, tragic mass shootings that we've had by adolescents in recent decades and the claims that, well, they're playing violent video games or they're listening to certain types of music. They are.

Starting point is 00:14:48 This is true. But that's not the question. The question is, are kids that carry out horrible acts exposed to these things more frequently than your average kid? Is there any association? Well, I want to dig a little deeper into this Dungeons and Dragons thing in just a moment. First, my guest is James Zimmering, and he is author of the book Partial Truths, How Fractions Distort Our Thinking.

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Starting point is 00:16:23 And let's just blame that and and then you know we can get on with our lives like it just it just seems right even though there's no evidence to support it it really does seem like right because it catches our attention it's what comes to mind you know um people who want to go swimming in the ocean, especially in my generation, often at times say to themselves, I'm not sure I want to go in the ocean. I think I might get eaten by a shark. And the whole series of Jaws movies came out when I was a kid. And every time someone gets eaten by a shark, it's all over the news and it's all over the papers and we see it and it's available to our mind. And now the truth is a lot more people die in the ocean drowning from currents or rip

Starting point is 00:17:10 tides than ever get eaten by sharks, many more. But I don't remember Hollywood ever making a movie called Riptide. And I don't remember the news saying, unless it's a celebrity that drowned, oh, yep, another person drowned in a riptide today. And so what becomes available to our mind as the most likely thing is whatever was sensationalized or caught our attention. But it causes us to make really bad choices all the time when we're trying to assess risk. Driving your car is hands down more dangerous than flying by every analysis. But not many people are afraid of

Starting point is 00:17:46 driving. A lot of people are afraid of flying, in part because you're not in control and it's unfamiliar perhaps, but also because when plane crashes go down, it's such a big deal. And Hollywood has made horror films about it and all this kind of stuff. So don't get me wrong. This thing, the availability heuristicistic is very advantageous to us in many cases, right? I mean, a lot of times you see dangerous things and you know, hmm, I shouldn't be doing that. But the problem is, is they distort the real probabilities out there once you begin to investigate and they do lead us to make quite bad choices.

Starting point is 00:18:21 Let's talk about how confirmation bias fits into all of this and maybe start off by explaining what confirmation bias is. So confirmation bias has several nuanced definitions, but in short, it is that once you believe something, as you have new experiences, you will filter those experiences based upon your belief such that you will notice or emphasize things that support your belief, and you will discount or ignore entirely things that refute your belief such that it's not really that seeing is believing, it's believing is seeing. And why do we do that? I mean, is that just human wiring? We're just built to do that? Yeah, we always have to consider anthropological, you know, cultural influences, but this seems to be everywhere. And it's really kind of,

Starting point is 00:19:19 you know, confusing when you think about why would a creature have this tendency that seems kind of odd or not terribly clever. And there are some advantages to having it to be sure, but the disadvantages are overwhelming. There was a wonderful study done where at a department of psychology at a university. So you always have to say, well, are psychology students representative of all of us? But we're always stuck with that when they do psychology studies. And they took two groups of students who had opposite beliefs on whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not, right? Which is a common debate. And they mixed them together. And then they presented a bunch of evidence to them based upon studies of this question. And then they separated them apart and talked to them. And what they found was

Starting point is 00:20:05 that people with opposite beliefs who saw the very same evidence presented, both sides increased the belief in what they had believed at the beginning. So the same evidence polarized the beliefs even further, which if you look at some of the struggles of our society today, you can kind of see this happening real time. And when they interviewed the people after the fact, they realized that what had happened was they all saw the same data, but the people who saw data that supported their belief rated that as high quality data and the data against their belief as poor quality data. And so they're stuck, all of us, in a certain belief construct based upon how we experience the world.

Starting point is 00:20:49 Well, that certainly seems problematic because it almost doesn't matter what the truth is. You believe what you believe, and even if you're wrong, and I show you evidence that you're wrong, you'll still believe it's true. So that doesn't seem like a good thing. Correct. Now there's this thing called the primacy effect, which is whatever you happen to believe first, then immediately attaches and even gives you evidence that persists if your original evidence is removed. So there was this great study

Starting point is 00:21:26 done by Bruner and Potter where they showed people pictures that were out of focus so that you could not discern what the picture was and ask people to guess what it was a picture of. And then they showed them a series of the same picture slowly coming into more and more focus. And people stuck with their original guesses as to what the picture was, even when it became so much in focus that it was obviously something else that people who had never made a guess could easily discern. So, you know, we talk about debates of what are in our primary education textbooks, what our children are exposed to when they're young. And we talk about it for a number of reasons, but this is a big part of that because what people learn early on, they will hold on to despite evidence to the contrary. And so this is probably the biggest, baddest cognitive

Starting point is 00:22:20 property. I'm going to call it a property because it's not always a defect that we have. And it explains a lot of what human society holds. But people do change their minds. And one thing I've noticed, and I think it frustrates people, they'll argue hoping to change the other person's mind. People, when they do change their mind, change their mind over time. It takes time. It isn't like, oh, God, now I see what an idiot I was. I'll believe you now. It really takes time to change your mind. It is going to take time and reflection.

Starting point is 00:22:59 One of the most interesting developments in education around these areas, at least most interesting to me that I've read recently, is the difference between justifying a position with reasons as opposed to mechanism. And what I mean by that is if you say to someone, give me 10 reasons why you believe this, they will usually give you 10 reasons and it will enforce their belief even more because look at all the reasons they have. But if you ask to say to someone, okay, the reasons you have to believe this, how exactly would that work? What is the mechanism by which your reasons justify your claim? Then usually their belief becomes a little bit less extreme it doesn't you know it doesn't go away but it forces them to think through the internal implications of their belief construct

Starting point is 00:23:51 as opposed to just you know repeating over and over again a matter that they hold as fact and so when you ask is there hopes here yes i think there. I think that when we engage reflective debate about mechanisms and justifications, people become much less polarized and can understand the nuances of an issue better. When we just pound, you should believe this for this reason, louder and louder and louder and with great repetition, things become pretty extreme. So how you ask the question, how you approach the problem can have a big effect. Well, not only is this conversation interesting, but it helps you think differently. I think it makes you a more critical thinker and only good can come from that. James Zimmering has been my guest. He is a professor of experimental pathology at the

Starting point is 00:24:43 University of Virginia School of Medicine and author of the book Partial Truths, How Fractions Distort Our Thinking. And there's a link to the book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, James. I'm grateful for your time and your help, and thanks for doing your podcast. 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,

Starting point is 00:25:12 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.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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

Starting point is 00:26:37 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.

Starting point is 00:27:01 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. Just as we humans have our senses to help us navigate and perceive the world, other creatures have their senses, and they don't necessarily work the same as ours do. Some of them have senses that work a whole lot better than ours. And perhaps there are things we can learn from those creatures that can help us better understand how we function.

Starting point is 00:27:39 Jackie Higgins is a writer, producer, and director of films about animals, and she has a book out called Sentient, How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Hi, Jackie, welcome. Thanks for having me on, Mike. So to give people a sense of what we're talking about here, let's start by discussing the peacock mantis shrimp and their sense of sight and their sense of color.

Starting point is 00:28:07 Yes. So this creature has a dizzying array of color sensors in its eyeball. So when scientists looked at its eyeball, they found 12 different color sensors in their eyes. And to put things in perspective, we have three different color sensors. So we're known as trichromats. And from that, we see millions of colors, whereas they're dodecachromats. So scientists envisioned or imagined that these creatures could see a million times a million times a million, et cetera, et cetera, septillion. I mean, it's such a large number of colors with so many zeros on the end that we can't quite compute how many colors they see the thing with with our senses is that they circumscribe every waking moment so they're the most mundane we forget about them we take them

Starting point is 00:28:58 for granted there's this quote i use i go from aristotle to da vinci leonardo da vinci he had this amazing quote saying that the typical person looks without seeing and listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance. So the idea of looking at the shrimp and understanding what it might be able to see gives us some distance on ourselves for us to realize how extraordinary our color site is and that we do see millions of colors. We see millions of colors, but they're all shades of a couple. I mean, there's really only a handful of colors.

Starting point is 00:29:33 Does that shrimp actually see like a color that we couldn't even imagine? Well, that was the notion, yes. And then through that, I introduce a scientist who was searching for the first human tetrachromat. So, there is evidence to suggest that some women are walking around with four different types of color cones in their eyes. And so, they are able to see colors that most of us can't see. I suppose the one easy way of thinking about it is if you think of color blindness so there are some people who only have two different types of cone and they see red green you've heard of red green color blindness so they they cannot see colors that I know that I can see

Starting point is 00:30:18 so yes this shrimp the idea would be that this shrimp can see many more colors than we could imagine. So our sense of taste, and you talk about the Goliath catfish, how does this all come together? So catfish, basically, they sense their world through taste. And they don't have a tongue, as you and I understand a tongue. Their body, their whole body is their tongue. The flanks and the feelers of their little whiskers, their catfish whiskers, but all the flanks of their body are covered in taste buds. And so I chose the Goliath catfish because this fish is enormous, possibly more than a meter, many meters long, swims through soupy Amazonian waters where there isn't much light. And the taste buds on the outside of its skin enable it to track its prey.

Starting point is 00:31:12 So it sees the world through taste. But what's extraordinary, or I find kind of extraordinary, well, I understand it, but I love all these connections, is that the catfish, the taste buds that are on the outside of the catfish are incredibly similar to the taste buds on our tongue. Proof yet again of this deep evolutionary past we share with fish. All life or vertebrate life on this planet comes originally from fish and the Devonian seas when the first tetrapod crawled out the land millions of years ago. By studying these fish and these taste buds, we can better understand our sense of taste and how it works. And so let's talk about the sense of hearing and the great grey owl. I find this interesting. Can you talk about that? Yes. We all think of owls as having incredible eyesight, which they do. But the great grey owl does this rather wonderful thing.

Starting point is 00:32:09 From 30 metres away, it can hear a mouse or a vole underneath a mound of snow. So it's not seeing them. It's not sensing their heat. It's hearing them. And the way that it does this is it uses both its ears. So like we have stereoscopic vision using two eyes to get a sense of depth and position. These owls use stereoscopic hearing and they use these two ears to map their environment. This is an aspect of hearing that I was fascinated by, this idea that

Starting point is 00:32:39 sound creates a landscape around us. And it's something that we as humans use all the time. John Hull wrote a wonderful book called Notes on Blindness about his experience of losing his eyesight. And he talks about this idea of geographic sound. He has these wonderful, he's got an amazing turn of phrase. And he talks about thunder putting a roof over his head. Or when it rains, suddenly the contours of the world become apparent to him. He can grasp topography again. Things beyond what he can feel with his fingers, which is another way in which he could grasp topography, but he can hear the topography of a landscape in the distance that he can't see.

Starting point is 00:33:23 It's an aspect of sound that we don't necessarily notice. And I talk about echolocation and how we're all using echolocation to some degree. So when you say echolocation, I think of bats like sonar. Is that what you mean, echolocation? So echolocation, we always think of bats who send out ultrasonic peeps that then basically bounce off the surface and they then listen to the reflections of these ultrasonic sounds. And that enables them to map the topography of their world, map their landscape. I was walking down the corridor with a scientist talking about this idea that we use this sense of echolocation subliminally without really noticing it.

Starting point is 00:34:08 And I could hear our feet kind of hit the floor surface. And the scientist said to me, you probably noticed that we're about to run into a wall was coming up because of the reflections of the echoes that my feet were making, because we're attuned to using and hearing these kinds of sounds. You see, that's really interesting to me, because I know exactly what you mean about how sound guides us like it did you in the hallway there. And yet we never think about it we never consciously say oh well i can hear that the wall's coming up you just yes you just know it is and you you turn right you turn yeah absolutely and there are many of these senses that work like that our sense of body um our sense of proprioception this sense that if you close your eyes you i'm i hope mike you know where your body is to the point that you can take your finger with your eyes closed and touch your nose.

Starting point is 00:35:11 So this, again, is one of these senses. Without this sense, it's impossible to move. It's impossible to sit up and to walk. It's one of these senses that is so familiar and automatic that we just don't notice it. Often the way one notices these things is if you lose them. And I met an extraordinary man called Ian Waterman, who back in the 1970s contracted a nasty virus. And it completely interfered with the senses that enabled this sense to exist, the senses in his muscle, all the nerves back to his brain were

Starting point is 00:35:46 essentially cooked by this virus. They were wiped out. And so he had lost his sense of body. So when he came around from his feverish dreams in the hospital, he could not feel his body from the neck down. So it was as if when he first was grappling with this new way of being, he said he felt disembodied. So if he closed his eyes, it wasn't like his body had been anesthetized. You know, we still have a sense of our flesh and our presence if we're anesthetized. If you're going to the dentist and your gum's been anesthetized or your side of your cheek, you still feel these things. You still feel its presence. He felt nothing. It was like everything had disappeared. It's back to that Leonardo da Vinci quote, you know, we're using them all the time without

Starting point is 00:36:35 appreciating them. And some of them are working secretly beneath our conscious radar, which makes it even more difficult to appreciate them. Was he paralyzed or he just couldn't sense his body, but he could use his body? So he couldn't sense his body and he couldn't use his body because he couldn't control it, but he wasn't paralyzed. So he found his arms would be kind of off moving, but he didn't know that they were moving. I mean, he joked that one was kind of, you know, saying hello to a nurse in an inappropriate way, but he didn't know. He didn't know that that's what his arm was doing. He could only gather control and master his body again by allowing his sense of vision to step in for this lost sense of proprioception. So if he looked at his hand and knew where it was, then he could control it. And so Ian, more than any other person perhaps, had to break down every single motion. He had to

Starting point is 00:37:35 relearn how to master his body and relearn how to move. He had to break down the simple action of sitting up into the many different components, which, you know, you talk about things that happen automatically. It wasn't happening automatically for him. So he had to break it down and basically sew his body back together with his sense of sight. But if you touched him, would he feel it? No, he also is touch blind. He's not, and this is where touch, I think touch was one of the most interesting senses. Often when people say, what's the sense you'd least like to use? We often say vision, but touch. Touch is so

Starting point is 00:38:20 complicated. There are many different senses in our skin. And if you stroke his arm, he can't feel it, but he can feel hot and cold. That's because temperature sensors are different sensors within our skin to the ones that your body registers if you're being stroked or the sensors that you're using. He also can't feel the topography of the world. So you've got many different senses, for example, in your fingertips and in your skin that enable you to detect texture, shape, size. He's lost all of that. So there are certain dimensions of his touch that he has and very few temperature essentially, but everything else was wiped out alongside this muscular sense, this deeper sense of body, the sense of proprioception. I've never heard of that.

Starting point is 00:39:12 That is so strange. That is so- Well, he's completely, he's unique, almost. There's been a couple of other cases like him, but he's such a rarity, such a rarity. And the fact that he was able then to walk again and to master his body, I think makes him exceptional and unique. He's a properly amazing man. And so now that he can walk again and he figured out how to walk again, is it very deliberate where he has to watch himself walking or does he now do it automatically? No, every moment he has to watch himself. He talks about his daily marathon. If the lights go out and he's unable to see his body, he falls like a rag doll. He even, if he's watching fireworks and you know that momentary blackness you get after bright lights just gone off in front of your eyes, even that short loss of contact between his body, he staggers.

Starting point is 00:40:13 So when power cuts have happened in his house, he's been at the mercy of just he can't move. He can only move when he watches himself and he engages with that movement. So for him, a walk in the countryside is not enjoying the view, listening to the bird song. He has to really focus on what it is he's doing. And he might be able to continue the conversation at the same time, but not with the same level of concentration of focus that you and I could give it because it's such a mental feat just to walk. So talk about our sense of pleasure and pain because I don't think people really think of those things as senses, but you talk about the common vampire bat.

Starting point is 00:40:58 So talk about that. Yes. The vampire bat has these little sensors in its nose that enable it to detect the tiniest variations in temperature so that if it's landed on its prey's hide, it can detect where the vein is pulsing beneath the skin from the heat that emanates. So these little trip sensors are much the same as what is found in our skin. David Julius, who's this extraordinary scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine this year, is in the book and he studied the vampire bat and he also studies trip sensors in us. And these trip sensors in us give us a sliding scale of temperature and a sliding scale of, you know, sometimes boiling hot water will trigger pain, or incredibly cold things will also be painful. So sliding scale of temperature alongside a sliding

Starting point is 00:41:53 scale of pain. And the vampire bat on pleasure and pain, there were so many sensors within our skin that scientists are just beginning to understand, not simply the trip sensors, but this incredible sensor that they found in our skin a few decades ago, but they're only just beginning to kind of map out. And this is a sensor that fires if you lightly touch your skin, so with very little pressure, and then you move it at a speed between three and five centimeters a second so that's essentially a stroke and it will ping only if your um whatever is touching it is bodily temperature so the scientists have called it the caress sensor so we've just discovered a sensor in our skin that is

Starting point is 00:42:39 activated when we're stroked quickly because we're almost out of time here, but I wanted to talk about our sense of direction. Because again, I don't think people think of that as a sense. They think of it as really almost an ability, an innate ability. You're either good at your sense of direction or you're not, but it doesn't feel like a sense. And so we know that birds are able to sense the magnetic field. So they have this kind of compass sense that enables them to navigate. So they navigate by looking at the stars and they navigate by listening to infrasound and it bouncing off mountains. But when it's dark at night and there are no stars because it's cloudy,

Starting point is 00:43:23 these birds use the magnetic field that surrounds the earth to navigate. And Joe Kirschvink at Caltech is convinced that humans are also able to use this magnetic field. Now, the mystery at the moment is figuring out where these senses are. And there's some extraordinary science being done. And there are two theories. One is the quantum compass, whereby quantum changes happen in these little cryptochromes in eyes, in the bird's eyes, for example, that enable them perhaps even to see that magnetic field. But Joe thinks that what is the sensor are these tiny magnetite crystals that basically swivel like the little needles of the compass that enable us to know where North is. So it's a really fascinating possibility that humans

Starting point is 00:44:12 might be able to have this sense of direction. And he's hoping, being funded by NASA, he's hoping to go out to Australia and study the indigenous tribes there who do have an exceptional sense of direction and to find out whether they are using somehow this magnetic field. Well, I always wondered why there's a difference between, what's the difference between people who really do have a good sense of direction and those who don't, because there are people that have a very good sense of direction. Sense of direction. Or maybe people, if this sense, if we are, he's done these experiments where he has in his basement at Caltech,

Starting point is 00:44:56 he's let people sit in a chair and he's removed all sensory information. So people are relaxed. Their eyes are closed. They're not hearing anything. They're not feeling things. And he's changed the magnetic field about their heads and looked for the brain, looked at the brain and found differences in brainwave patterns. So if we are sensing these changes, maybe these people that you talk about are just more tuned to that somehow. But it's an if.

Starting point is 00:45:25 It's an if. It would seem that our sense of balance is one of those senses that you don't really notice it unless you don't have it. And if you lost it and you couldn't stand up and balance yourself, that you would really notice that. But, I mean, imagine that. Imagine if you lost your sense of balance. So there was this wonderful quote from Brian Day, who studied how we walk, for example. And he talks of walking as one of the most daring balancing acts in the animal kingdom, which is wonderful. We're inherently unstable on two feet. And each time we lift our leg and step

Starting point is 00:46:03 forward, that's a kind of tip into the unknown. So yes, I use, so it is very much a sense and our body is adjusting according to what information is being sensed in terms of gravity. And we use our vision to balance ourselves. And we use that sense I talked earlier about proprioception, all of them key and all of them senses. Well, what's interesting about this discussion is it makes you realize that your world, what you perceive as your world, the colors, the tastes, the sights, the things that you see may be very different than another person, certainly other creatures. Even though we're all in the same world, the way we take it in is all unique. I've been talking with Jackie Higgins,

Starting point is 00:46:51 who is a writer, producer, and director of films about animals, and she is author of the book, Sentient, How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Jackie. The pleasure, Mike. And thank you very much for having me on. One way to deal with allergy symptoms

Starting point is 00:47:16 is to take antihistamines. But what you may not realize is that those types of medications can promote weight gain in a lot of people. There have been a couple of studies that have shown that people who took common allergy medications like Allegra or Zyrtec or Claritin showed a roughly 10% increase in body weight. Now, the connection between antihistamines and body weight is not new. Some older antihistamines have actually been prescribed in the past

Starting point is 00:47:48 to help underweight children increase their appetite so they would eat more and put on some pounds. But how it works exactly to cause weight gain, no one's really sure. But be aware that if you take these drugs to make allergy symptoms more manageable, your weight may suffer if you're not careful. And that is something you should know. If you found something useful

Starting point is 00:48:14 or interesting in this podcast, you know, like the fish whose whole body is covered in taste buds, come on, that was pretty interesting. Tell someone you know about something you should know so they can hear it too. 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.

Starting point is 00:48:38 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.

Starting point is 00:49:20 Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. for The Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for The Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - Weird Factors That Distort Your Thinking & How Animals Perceive the World

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