Something You Should Know - What Makes a Family Happy & What We Can Learn from the Dead

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

While celebrities can sometimes pull it off, it can be almost impossible for regular folks to get a table at a busy restaurant without a reservation. This episode begins by offering some advice that can help. It may not always work, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Source: Frank Luntz author of Words That Work (https://amzn.to/37Ay5A8) You probably know someone whose family seems genuinely happy. And then there are families that seem less happy and have lots of conflict. What do happy families do to create that sense of happiness? That’s what Bruce Feiler is here to reveal. Bruce is author of the book, The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Tell Your Family History, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More (https://amzn.to/3xH113T). He has some simple yet powerful ways to help any family get along and be happy. If you believe movies and televisions shows about crime, it seems an autopsy can reveal a wealth of information to help solve a murder. Is that true in real life? Does forensic science really allow the dead to speak from beyond the grave and reveal clues about how a person died? Forensic anthropologist Sue Black has some firsthand knowledge to share on the topic. Sue is author of the book, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes (https://amzn.to/3lWzyJg) . She joins me to sort out truth from fiction and she reveals some of the fascinating advances in forensic science. Could people with big heads really be smarter? After all there is more room for a bigger brain. Well, it turns out - they are! Listen as I reveal how we know this to be true and how having a larger than normal head is beneficial now and when you get older. https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/actually-people-with-larger-heads-really-do-tend-to-be-smarter-but-not-for-reason-you-might-think.html 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, how do you get a table at a busy restaurant when you don't have a reservation? Then what do happy families do to be so happy? Lots of things, including... They make positive memories, whether it's game night or hiking or cooking or traveling. Find time, make those positive memories so that when the conflict comes, and it will come, you are addressing it from a position of strength.

Also, are people with big heads smarter than people with small heads? And a renowned forensic scientist who spent her career uncovering clues from the dead to solve crimes. I've spent my life with the dead, and the dead do not scare me. I have never, ever been spooked by the dead. The living terrify the living daylights out of me because you can't predict the living. But the dead are very well behaved. 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, 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 carothers hi there welcome to something you should know have you ever tried to book a table at a restaurant for like a friday or saturday night at the last minute, or Mother's Day, and they're all booked. There's nothing available. People do it all the time. They try to do it all

the time, and they resort to some pretty interesting tactics to try to get that table, like pretending to be a restaurant critic or using a celebrity's name. Those tricks typically don't work. Of course, if a restaurant is really booked, well, it's really booked. But here is a suggestion to improve your odds of getting that table from Dr. Frank Luntz, author of the book Words That Work. If you politely explain that this is a special date or it's an important meeting with the boss, and you go into some detail about how significant this is, they're much more likely to give you a table. The psychology here is that people want to engage in other people's lives.

And when you reveal a little bit about yourself, you've created a relationship where they're now invested in helping you. Of course, if it's possible to go in person and talk to the owner or maitre d', that can really help too. It doesn't always work, but it's better than getting upset that there is no table, because getting upset, that never works. And that is something you should know. There is no doubt that family life has changed over the last several decades.

Families have changed. Yet one thing about families remains the same. And that is that within every family is the desire to be happy, to get along, to work together, to be a cohesive unit. That's what Bruce Feiler wanted. He wanted a happy family, and he set out to discover what makes happy families happy. Bruce is a journalist and writer, and the results of his quest are his book, The Secrets of Happy Families. Hi, Bruce. Thanks for coming out to talk about this. I know a lot of people are anxious to hear what you have to say.

Thank you very much for inviting me. So briefly explain the process you went through. How did you discover the secrets of happy families? The core question I was asking was what can I learn from other people who have happy families to make my family happier? So what I did is I went out and I sought people who were experts in their fields. Okay. I talked to designers in Silicon Valley. I talked to coaches. I talked to bankers about money. I talked to negotiation experts on how to reduce conflict. The idea was there is a ton of wisdom out there that's just sort of been siloed off and busy parents don't have time to get at it. So my goal was to go out there,

collect this wisdom and bring it back for busy families who want this knowledge, but don't live their lives in a way that they can seek it out. They want it. They're desperate for it. So the idea, let's bring it all in one place. Maybe in order to discuss what makes happy families happy, we first have to understand what is causing unhappy families to be unhappy. Where are some of the big problem areas? What are the two most difficult times in every family? It's the hour after everybody wakes up in the morning and the hour before everybody goes to sleep at night, right? These are sort of the two nuclear winters of family life. Okay. Well, what do we know about groups? So I go out to Silicon Valley and I talk to people who understand group dynamics, and they are using a technique called Agile, okay? And what Agile is, is it used

to be that the boss would dictate things for companies like go and solve this problem, teams would come back 18 months later and 97% of projects would be over budget, late and irrelevant. So they came up with a system of talking much more frequently, having daily setups, standups, and then having kind of weekly meetings. And so this technique has kind of swept offices in the last 10 years, and a lot of families have begun to adopt this. And so I went and saw a bunch of families who use this kind of system, and we introduced into our family a family meeting structure where once a week we get together and we ask three questions, right? What's working well in your family? What's not working well in your family? And what will we agree to work on in the week ahead?

And so what the family meeting structure allows you to do is talk in real time about the problems you're facing right now and agree to focus as a family on how to solve those problems. And you experiment. And because you're meeting next week at that experiment, that solution doesn't work to sibling rivalry or scheduling or getting out the door in the morning or doing your homework, well, you can try something again. And the essence of it is you get the children to participate in picking the rewards and punishments so they, in effect, their voice is heard much more effectively in solving the problems that affect them directly. Oftentimes, though, when you get kids, teenagers around a table, a family meeting, and you ask them, how are things going?

What can we do to improve? How are you doing? You hear things like, I'm fine. Everything's good. No problem. Okay. How do you get them to open up? Well, that's the brilliance of this family meeting structure. Because if your kid comes home from school and you say, what'd you do today? The kid will say, as you just said, fine. What'd you do at Susie's house? Nothing. What the family meeting structure is, is a safe environment where everybody is in effect and equal sitting around

the table sharing ideas. And if we're talking about, say, you know, how are we going to get packed and take this trip, which is a problem that my family faces right now, what are we going to do to reduce the screaming in the morning? You say to everybody at the table, we'd love to hear your opinion. We'd love to include your voice. If you choose not to speak, well, we're going to decide a new system and your voice is going to be left out. And so we have one of my daughters, you know, doesn't like the family meeting and will complain. But when we come and we say, we're about to make a decision about how much screen time you're going to be allowed this fall, she knows if she doesn't join the conversation, her voice isn't going to

be heard. Usually she's the one who speaks the most. So what are some of the other things that happy families do to stay happy and to work together better? So there's basically three things that high functioning families have in common. Okay. Number one, they adapt all the time. And that's what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about trying to, in real time, adjust the way the family functions to adjust to the realities that are constantly in flux.

Well, the second thing that high families have in common is that they talk a lot. And not just difficult conversations, as important as those are, but they talk about what it means to be a family. So if you just pull the lens back, if you were adapting all the time, then that means that you're changing all the time. You need to balance that off. Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, says that all well-run organizations have two things, okay? They stimulate change, but they also preserve the core. So let's talk about that for a second. Like, what can you do to preserve the core? So one thing that Jim advised me when I was talking to him was that all well-run organizations

have a mission statement. And he invited us to go through this process at home. And when I first heard this, I thought this was a little corny, frankly. But then he said to me, do your children know what values are most important to you? And I realized, you know, I might wish that they did, but they'd have to kind of guess it. So we went through this process of creating a family mission statement, which I outline in my book, and it was incredibly valuable. So we got everybody together. We kind of had a, you know, kind of a pajama party. It was sort of our version of a corporate retreat.

And we made a list and asked my kids a series of questions like, what do you like best about our family, right? When you're away from the family, what do you miss the most? When your friends come over, what is it that they, that you like to, you know, show them about our family? And we sort of made a list and we came up with ultimately a list of 10 things that are important to us. You know, we are travelers, not tourists, because we like to travel. Like we, my wife, like I don't like dilemmas. I like solutions, right? So these series of statements that encapsulated us. And one of them for us was

we help others to fly. So it's not like we dance Kumbaya around this thing that's now framed in our kitchen and bow down to it every morning, but it's a reminder when things go wrong, like let's go back, let's remember the bedrock values that we have. I imagine that in families with children, it's pretty common for the romance between the parents

to fade into the background because so much focus is put on parenting and on what the kids need. And so how do happy families deal with that? Because, you know, often the advice is, well, you need to make sure that you have a date night every week and that that will help keep the spark alive. What do you think? Like I'm big into like, forget date night. Like it's oversold because if you just go around the corner and sit across from each other

and in your favorite restaurant and talk about the kids, it's not going to actually kindle the relationship. In some ways, you're much better off. The research shows that like, what is it that keeps a longstanding relationship going? It's actually rekindling the feelings you have when you first met each other, which has to do with newness and discovery. So if you actually go on an adventure where you take a class, right, or go to a new part

of town or explore in some way, or even do a project around the house where you are side by side trying to discover something, that will do a much better job of rejuvenating you than just going to dinner and a movie. So that's kind of one practical thing on the kind of romance side, if you will. In addition to the suggestion about date night, which you've pointed out may not be as effective as people think it is, is often the suggestion that family dinners together are very important. And yet, you know, I find with two boys that it's hard to have family dinner together because there's soccer practice, there's hockey practice, there's, you know, things after school that it just, it's very hard for everybody

to sit down and have dinner together. Yeah. I'm really glad you asked this question. So first of all, nothing has been more studied than family dinner. And here's what we know. There's only 10 minutes in a family dinner. It's actually productive family time. Like the rest of it is take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. And that's fine. That's important. Frankly, as the manners person in my family, that's very important. But the key is that the togetherness part of it is only 10 minutes. So if you can have family dinner, great. It's incredibly effective for a hundred reasons. But Americans rank 32 out of 33 countries in the UN study of families that are able to have family

dinner. The key is focus on that 10 minutes. If you can do it at family dinner time, perfect. Do it at dinner. If not, time shifted. Do it after everyone comes home from a sports practice. Have a bedtime snack at eight o'clock and get everybody together. I talked to a chef. He's always working at dinner. Family breakfast is the most important to him. So the key is how you spend that together time. That's what's most important, not doing it at dinner. Is that the goal, 10 minutes a day? I think for a busy parent,

if you set yourself that you will spend 10 minutes one-on-one with each of your children, however many children that that may be, and 10 minutes with everybody together. That's an incredibly powerful, productive, easy, doable, small win that you can have in your family. Absolutely. And the thing is, when you're one-on-one with a child, let the child dictate what they're interested in. Okay. Like you mentioned, you know, sports practice or baseball practice. Okay. Well, maybe you don't like sports. Let your child lead that 10 minutes of conversation. Maybe your child is into, I don't know, TikTok, or maybe your child is into ballet, as my children are.

Let that 10 minutes, let them determine the agenda and let them be the leader, if you will, of the conversation that's incredibly productive to connect with them and gives them confidence as a leader. I'm speaking with Bruce Feiler. He's author of the book, The Secrets of Happy Families. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. He's author of the book, The Secrets of Happy Families. 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.

Metrolinks and Crosslinks 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. So Bruce, a very common concern for parents is technology, that kids are spending so much time with technology. And if they're spending time with technology, they're not doing a million other things they could be doing. And that's a big concern. So I would say a few things that I have seen work in other families and that I would

really kind of say are the bedrock of how we manage tech now that I have teenagers would be, number one, tech as a bedtime. So that we know if you keep technology, if the kids keep their phones in their rooms, they will do it longer, stay up later, you know, homework will be less focused and families will function less effectively. So in our family, there is no tech before eight in the morning and there is no tech after 8 PM. Point number two is I believe that we should stop talking about technology as a screen, like measuring it in screen time. And we should begin to think about technology as a place. Okay. You would not send your kids to a new neighborhood or a new part of town without

guidance. You need to set very clear rules about one social media app is one that we did very effectively when our kids were adolescents, or I want the ability to look over your texts, or you need to, in a way, hold their hand. You know, we talk about with adolescents what they call scaffolding, right? You build a scaffolding and then slowly as your children get older, you take the scaffolding down. You need to scaffold access to the internet and kind of dole it out in smaller bits as your children gain more confidence and you gain more trust with them. And then I say a last thing about tech, work with your children to understand

that anything that they post on social media is accessible, not just to their friends, which is what they're thinking, but to adults, you know, and to grandparents and to teachers and to prospective employers and later to prospective college admission offices. I interviewed somebody who is a specialist in this, and she was saying that her teenager posted on it, oh, happy birthday. Remember that time when we shoplifted? And this person who's an expert in this had to go explain to her adolescent daughter, you realize that the pastor at the church is also seeing that. So we talk in my family about what I call the grand grandmother rule, like don't post anything that you wouldn't want your

grandmother to see. One problem I think is universal in families is money. There are always money problems in every family. So what about that? The big money problem is very simple. 80% of people, eight, zero, leave home, go to college, or wherever they go in their adult lives, having never spoken to their parents about money, where it comes from, how it's made, how it's lost, how it's spent, what debt is. Parent children simply don't know. Why do they not know? Because parents are uncomfortable talking about it. And here's the key thing. Any conversation around money is a conversation about values, including no conversation. Because when you don't talk to your children about it, that means they're learning it from Hollywood. They're learning it from magazines. They're

learning it from irresponsible friends. They're not learning it at all. So if you're saying that you're uncomfortable talking about money, they're going to be uncomfortable talking about money. And I went to see one of the wealthiest bank, Warren Buffett's private banker. And I told him the story that we were doing allowance with our children and that we, you know, we were dividing it up between share and spend and save and give away. And, but we were telling our kids how to do it. And he's like, well, don't do that. Let them do it themselves. I'm like, no, no, no. We want to encourage these values. I'm like, don't do it. Let them make their mistakes. And I'm like,

what if they drive into a ditch? And he told me maybe my single favorite line in studying families, which is it's much better to drive into a ditch with a $6 allowance and a $60,000 a year salary or a $6 million inheritance. And I just love that. The point is when the stakes are small, talk to your children about these important decisions and give them the freedom to make mistakes when the mistakes don't matter a lot. That applies to money. That applies to sex. That applies to competition. That applies to homework.

That applies to the first job. Almost everything. Allow your kids the freedom to make mistakes when they're young and the stakes are low and then talk to them about what they've learned from that experience so that they don't make the same mistakes going forward. You said earlier that often the two biggest trouble spots in the day for families are the first hour after getting up and the last hour before going to bed. So what's the approach? What does your research say the best way to approach those times is? The single most valuable way to think about that time is as

a joint family time. Is it something that you can manage together? And so when our kids were very young, we started making these morning checklists where it's the children's responsibility to make a list of all the things that they do and then to make check marks one by one when they do them. So what you're trying to do is give your children autonomy over their actions. This is something we used to do in the family meeting. We would make the checklist for the week. Okay, you have to get dressed. You have to make your bed. But this is just the way that we do it. Okay, someone's got to make the bed. I'm busy. So you just have to make your own bed. That may take a long time. And the parents may have to accept that the child may not do such a good job. But the key is to go back to what I said at the family meeting time is to let the

children pick the rewards and the punishment. So we say that this is going to happen. Okay. If you do make your bed every day this week, you get to pick the reward. Okay. Maybe that's ice cream. Maybe that's an extra half an hour of screen time. Maybe that's, we get to, you get to pick the family game. Okay. And the, the, there's going to be a punishment because that's just the way it's going to be the consequences. If you prefer that term as my wife does, you get to pick that. And if you don't pick it, we're going to pick it and you may not like it. So I think that what the, the complainer and trust me, I have a complainer in my house. They're going to see is we've got to have a set of rules.

I can make the rules and impose them on you, which is what 95% of families do, but it's not what the most effective families do. Then they just impose it on the children. If you bring them into the process, you are increasing the chances that they will want to get involved. And if a complaining child, and I say I have one, watches the other child keep picking the rewards and punishment, over time, they're going to realize that they're losing out and they're going to find a way, while still complaining, to make sure that their voice is heard. Often in conversations about families and making them better, it's all about fixing what's wrong, the problems in families and how to change those. But I would imagine that happy families make some effort in being happy and in focusing more also on the positive and making things happy. They make positive memories. So whatever it is that your family likes, whether it's game night

or hiking or cooking or traveling, find time, make those positive memories so that when the conflict comes, and it will come, you are addressing it from a position of strength. So adapt all the time, talk a lot, go out and play. That is what high functioning families do. But the most important thing they do is that they try. They just don't give up. And they say, we're going to accumulate small wins. We're going to make small changes and we're going to make small changes, and we're going to try to make our family happier, and in the process, make everybody in the family happier. Well, you know what I really like about this is that you discovered all these secrets of happy families, and then, I don't want to say you used your own family as guinea pigs, but really you test drove these ideas to make sure they worked and they indeed worked. Bruce Feiler has been my guest. He is author of the book, The Secret of Happy Families.

And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Bruce. My pleasure. Thank you so much for reaching out. Keep in touch. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking. Melissa and 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. called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever watched one of the CSI shows or Law & Order where they're able to examine the body of a murder victim and get all kinds of information that helps them track down the killer? So is that just TV fiction or what? When somebody dies, especially if it's under mysterious circumstances, is there really a lot the victim can tell the police beyond the grave? And if so, what? Well, here to take us all on a trip into the real and fascinating world of forensic science is Sue Black.

She's a forensic anthropologist, pro-vice chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University. She's also a member of the House of Lords in Great Britain and the author of a couple of books, including All That Remains, a renowned forensic scientist on death, mortality, and solving crimes. Hi, Sue. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much, indeed. It's such a pleasure. So when you watch those shows, particularly when you watch those kind of shows, does it seem real to you? Is that recreating real science on television or what? You know, it's a mix.

I think that there are some parts of it that are fairly realistic, but there are some parts, we've got to be honest, it's for entertainment. And some of the work we do is just mind-numbingly boring and it doesn't make good television. So it's a mix of both, good and bad. When you say our work, explain what you do or did. So I'm a forensic anthropologist. It's the identification of the human or what remains of the human for medical legal purposes. So we're expert witnesses to the court. And a forensic pathologist will tell you the manner of death or the cause of death.

The anthropologist will hopefully tell you who that person was when they were alive. And the skeleton, so what is my skeleton? I mean, I've seen the skeleton in the corner of the classroom, but what is that thing? What is it doing for me? It's pretty much like the coat hangers in your wardrobe, is it's there to hang everything else off it. So that muscles, ligaments, tendons, it helps to give them a structure and something to hold on to so that they can move. But what it also does is it provides a cage that protects some of your delicate organs.

So whether it's in your chest region, whether it's in your pelvic region or inside your skull, there's some really, really delicate soft tissue in there that we need to protect from the rest of the world. And the third thing it does is it's a reservoir for some of the minerals that we need for all of our everyday biochemical activities. So whether it be calcium or phosphorus or any of the other minerals, it sits there as a little reservoir. And are the bones of my skeleton all the same or are the bones in my feet different, made of something different than the bones in my head or what? So they're all made of the same sort of material. They've all got the same composition, but when they form and how they form is different

so that your foot bones look a little bit like your hand bones, but they're different and they're sufficiently different that somebody with a necessary level of expertise can tell the difference between them. So we should be able to pick up a single bone and be able to tell you which bit of the hand it comes from and whether it comes from the right hand side or the left hand side and why it can't possibly be in your feet. And so what can you, besides that, what can you tell about a person by looking at their skeleton, especially if they're dead? Well, I guess that's kind of the only way you can look at their skeleton. No, you can actually look at them with medical imaging. So a number of

postmortems these days are done using CT scans so that we don't actually cut into the body anymore, especially if there's religious aspects to it that people don't want the desecration of the body. So we can sometimes just look at imaging. But what we're doing by and large when we look at the skeleton is determining who were you when you were alive. And when you look at imaging. But what we're doing by and large, when we look at the skeleton is determining who were you when you were alive. And when you look at who am I, then you know, whether you're male or female, you know, how old you are, you know, how tall you are, you know, what your populational origin was. You also know personal things about yourself, you know, when you've had a disease that might affect your bone, you know, when you fell and you broke it. You know when you're getting old and you can feel those

bones creaking one on the other. All of these telltale signs remain inside the skeleton. And it's like having a record that in many ways the forensic anthropologist is the stylus on that record that allows you to hear the tune that says this is who the person was. And we can decode and decipher what the bones are telling us. So tell me a story about somebody, some skeleton and what you found. So take, for example, let's start with a historical case, which is from around 1746. And I know in your part of the world and certainly up into Canada, you're very, very keen on a television programme that's called Outlander. And Outlander, which I've never watched, I believe, is based on a television programme where there is time travel, but it effectively links back into the 1745 rebellion in Scotland with Bonnie Prince Charlie. And one of the characters in there is a member of

the Fraser clan. And the head of the Fraser clan was somebody who was called Simon Fraser, or he was known as Lord Lovett. And he was also had the nickname of being the old fox because he was a bit wily and he was one of these people who decided whether he was going to be on the side of the crown or on the side of the rebels but he got caught on the wrong side and what happened to him as he was executed and he was beheaded and his clan wanted to take his body back up to Scotland but there was a lot of debate with the government whether they would allow it but there was certainly a coffin placed in the crypt of their family church that said it was him and we were asked to open that coffin and determine

whether in fact the clansman had managed to take the old fox's body back up to Scotland. Now he was about six feet tall, which was a very tall man for the time. And he was in his 80s when he died. So when we opened the coffin, what we did find, there were a few other things in there as well, I have to say, but we did find a body and there was no head. So that boded well for people who thought it was likely to be the old fox. But by the time we took the bones out and we laid them out, we could see very clearly that this wasn't a man. It was a woman and it was a woman who was somewhere between 25 and 30 years of age.

So just from the bones alone, we could dispel that myth that the clansman had managed to secrete his body back up over the border into Scotland. Of course, what we don't know is who that woman was. That's yet another story. But isn't that the wonderful thing about these sorts of theories? They just they spawn other adventures from there. Well, let me ask you, how do you get into this? Because it seems kind of gross. It seems like why would you want to go look at dead bodies and dig them up back at your life path and see the crossroads that you took. I adored my father and my father used to go out shooting. So I was always with my father

wherever he went and he'd bring home rabbits and he'd bring home pigeons and my mother would cook them. But my mother was squeamish. And so my father and I would sit on the back step and I'd help him skin rabbits and I'd help him, you know, pluck the feathers out of pigeons. And when I was a teenager, my job every Saturday was in a butcher shop. So it was a natural extension for me to go from the back door with my father, plucking pheasants into the butcher shop, where again, I was surrounded by muscle and bone and blood and guts. And when I went to university, I found anatomy as a subject. And in the dissecting room, you dissect the human from the top of the head to the bottom of the toe. And that just opened up a world for me that I felt

so comfortable. But it's only with hindsight, you can see where that comfort came from as you were growing up. So I've never ever been squeamish about anything like that. Well, I have. It just grosses me out completely. But I get it. I mean, you know, some people like that. So, but the science of what you do, the science of forensic science of looking at bodies and telling things.

Is it a growing science or pretty much it is what it is or what? It's a science that grows in leaps. And what I mean by that, if you looked at the science prior to the 1980s, I would say in forensic science, very little changed between the end of the Victorian period and the start of the 1980s. And what happened in the 1980s was that Alec Jeffries couldn't get his medical experiment to work. And it was the moment when he realised that the reason he couldn't get it to work was that our DNA was different. Up until then, we didn't use DNA in the forensic world. This is the 1980s. But that was a real step change. And where forensic anthropology might have been involved in all sorts of cases prior to the 1980s, post 1980s, so many of the cases

were being resolved through DNA, that we became more and more involved in niche cases, cases that were really challenging, where you haven't got DNA to compare, where you haven't got fingerprints. And you still need to get to the identity of the person, because if you're going to investigate a crime, you need to know who the person was because you want to try and build up the pattern of their behavior before they died. You want to speak to their family, their friends. But if you don't know who they are, those avenues of investigation are shut off for you. So finding out who the person was is absolutely critical to any investigation that's going to come beyond there. So if somebody dies and you don't know who they are, can you now do like a DNA test?

And if any of their relatives are in one of those, you know, ancestry or 23andMe or what, you can figure it out? So what we will do in the UK, and it's different around the rest of the world, but what we will do in the UK is we will take a DNA sample, we will run it through our national DNA database, and our DNA database only stores the DNA profile of individuals who have been convicted of a crime. So if this person has come to the attention of the police, they will be in the DNA database.

What will also happen is if they have had a relative who has committed a crime and who is on that DNA database, we will pick that up. But the police forces in the UK are only now starting to think about these genealogy sites and can we use them? But just because you can use something, there's the question that says, should you be using them? Because the people who submitted their DNA samples for their own personal reasons to explore their own ancestry, have they really given the permission for an investigative force to use it for different purposes? And I think that that's a real sort of moral and an ethical debate that's certainly going on in the UK at the moment. So when you watch TV and you see somebody on the table there and there's the doctor cutting them open and they're like pulling out their liver and weighing it and, oh,

they had roast beef last night. Is that what you really do? And what does that tell you? Yeah. So, I mean, it depends on just how fresh the body is. So if you're doing the post-mortem very soon after death, then yes, it is about opening the body. It's about looking for the pathologist for a cause of death. So they will look at liver, they will look at heart, they will look at lungs, they're trying to figure the skeletal structures. So we kind of stand back until the pathologist has done everything they need to do with the innards, if you like. And we will then start to look at the skeletal material to say, you know, how old was this individual? Or can we look at calculating their stature? How tall were they? Are there any pieces of evidence in the skeleton that tells you they've had disease in the past or that they've had previous surgery or that they've had fractures? Those kind of things that when we get to dental records and medical records, we've already accumulated that information. Because what we're trying to do in identification is match two sets of data, what we call anti-mortem data, which is the data we can find out about you as a named person, and the post-mortem data, which is the information that

we get from the dead body. And we're trying to see whether the two sets of data match or not. And if they do, are we prepared to release this body as the named, you know, John Smith or whoever it may be? Well, often you hear about, well, we identified this person through dental records. Well, that seems like that would be a very tedious. I mean, wouldn't you have to hold up one and the other and go, well, it kind of looks like that guy's teeth. I mean, how do you match dental records? So we have specialists called forensic odontologists and their whole remit is to study teeth. And teeth are really useful because they survive. So if you bury a body, if a body's caught in a fire or an explosion, the teeth are

really dense structures. So they do survive. But what we will do is we will chart the teeth. So we will look in the mouth and we'll say how many of these are real teeth? How many of them are crowns? How many of them have amalgam fillings? How many of them have got white fillings? Is there bridge work from the X-ray? Have they got impacted wisdom teeth? You will create this this map, if you like, of the inside of their mouth. But what we don't have in the UK is we don't have a national database of dental records. So we can't go and compare it with any sort of database. You have to get to a possible name for the individual that I think this is John Smith.

Then you can go to John Smith's dentist and recover their records. And the dentist will also have charted the work that's been done in their mouth. And then for us, it is literally comparing tooth by tooth to see where we have differences and where we have similarities. And if we have differences, can we account for them in that the dental records with the last time they were updated was five years ago, which means in that five years, they could have gone away and had other dental work done privately that may not have been linked back to, for us, a National Health Service dentist. I've also heard that, like often you'll see on a TV show that, you know, the time of death, but the time of death is pretty hard to determine

the longer time goes by. Yes? That's very true. But also the circumstances make it very difficult as well. So for example, when I was working in Sierra Leone, we knew that we had some soldiers who had been shot. We knew that they were lying on the surface and we knew that you will turn from a corpse to a skeleton inside seven days. If that was happening in Scotland, it could well take six months or a year before that body will be completely decomposed to skeletal. So the circumstances are really important to determine the rate of decomposition. So it's about heat, it's about humidity, it's about animal activity. It's also about where the body's found. So whether it's on a surface or it's been buried. And the deeper it's buried, the longer the body takes to decompose. But is it in an acid soil or is it in a sandy soil? And they will also

impact on the speed of decomposition. What else are either myths about this or that people don't know or don't understand about how all of this, all the work you do works? I think our difficulty is with the jury and the jury is our members of public and the members of the public believe that they're quite forensically aware because they've seen it on television or they've read it in books or they've seen it in films. And the reality of what comes to them in the courtroom can be a bit of a shock. They think that every case will have DNA evidence. And of course, sometimes it doesn't. And they think that, you know, DNA results come back within 40 minutes, because that's the length of an episode. But in fact, a DNA sample may take several weeks to come back, and it may not be conclusive. So we have that disparity between fiction and reality that creeps into us in the courtroom

because of the forensic public think they have that forensic awareness. And do you think it skews the results? I'm not sure that it skews the results, but I think it skews the perception. They think we're cleverer than we really are. So, you know, when we get into court, there's a huge frisson of excitement because there's a forensic expert coming in. And by and large, I think they're often quite disappointed because we are scientists and as scientists, we will not go beyond, well, certainly in the UK, we're not permitted to go beyond our own level of

expertise. And we have to be very clear about what we can do and what we can't. And I think that really disappoints them. I'm sad that you're a disappointment to so many people. There you go. That's life for you. Based on all this work that you've done, all the dead people that you've seen, does it change or do you think it affects your view of life and spirituality or not? Is it just science? I had a wonderful grandmother from the west coast of Scotland and she always talked about death. And my grandmother always said that death walked alongside her

every step of her journey, and eventually their paths would cross. And she had this view that if death is going to walk beside you every day, you better get used to them and you better make a friend out of them. Her down-to-earth practicality has been incredibly important as an anchor for me in the job that I do. But I also had a really important piece of advice from a police officer when asked if I'm doing something really difficult, how you cope with it. And he always said to me, don't own the guilt. You didn't cause it. You couldn't stop it. You couldn't make it any better.

It's not yours to feel guilty about. And you're not there to investigate it. And you're not there to investigate it. And you're not there to find somebody innocent or guilty. You're just there to do your job. And I think that helped enormously. Because of all your work with the dead, have you ever had any kind of supernatural beyond the grave kind of experience? I've spent my life with the dead and the dead do not scare me. I have never, ever been spooked by the dead. The living terrify the living daylight side of me because you can't predict the living, but the dead are very well behaved. They don't do the kinds of things that you see in films

and on television. They really don't. But for most of us, it's that period of leading up to death that we fear. What does dying feel like? What does that moment of death feel like? But once you're dead, you're dead. And I don't believe from my perspective that there is something beyond there. And I was very fortunate to hold my father's hand when he took his last breaths in life. And I would never have left him whilst he was still breathing. But the moment he took his last breath, once he was dead, I had no trouble leaving my father's body, because it was just the shell that he'd left behind. My father was gone. And that was the point at which I knew my father was dead and was no longer. And he's never, ever come back to tell me otherwise.

Well, if he does, please let me know, because that could be another great conversation we could have. Sue Black has been my guest. She is a forensic anthropologist, a professor at Lancaster University, a member of the House of Lords in Great Britain. And the name of her book is All That Remains, a renowned forensic scientist on death, mortality and solving crimes. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Sue. Thanks for being here. It's such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Michael. Have you ever wondered if people with big heads have big brains?

Well, actually, they do. Young people with wide heads tend to have higher IQs. Scientists say that skull size is directly related to brain volume and mental ability. And there's more good news for big heads. People with bigger skulls have better memories in old age. Researchers tested people age 70 to 80 with an IQ and memory test, and the ones with the largest head circumference scored much better. They even showed less degeneration three years later and were at lower risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.

And that is something you should know. There's nothing more satisfying than reading a wonderfully well-thought-out five-star review from someone who clearly listens to this podcast and enjoys it. If you'd like to join them and do the same thing, please leave us a review. Five stars is appreciated on Apple Podcasts. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs?

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