Something You Should Know - Why You Remember and Why You Forget & Unusual Origins of Great Inventions

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

When you go out to eat, the restaurant wants you to spend money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how they stay in business. Still, you should be aware that they don’t leave it to chance. One thing they do is engineer the menu to nudge you you spend. This episode begins by describing some “menu psychology” you should be aware of. https://www.delish.com/food/a46625028/restaurant-menu-design-you-pay-more/ Your memory works in strange ways. First of all, it forgets more than it remembers. Also, there is one particular time in your life you remember more than other times. There are also techniques to help you remember things better. Joining me to discuss all this and so much more about memory is Megan Sumeracki. She is an associate professor of psychology at Rhode Island College, a cognitive psychologist and memory expert, and author of the book The Psychology of Memory (https://amzn.to/4cCOAuK). Great inventions and scientific breakthroughs are often the result of unusual, accidental or unintentional journeys. These stories are often inspiring and fascinating to hear – whether it’s the invention of the telephone or super glue, penicillin, the pacemaker or anything else. Here, to share some of those stories and explain why they are important for all of us to understand is Tim James. He is a science teacher, YouTuber and blogger and author of the book Accidental: The Greatest (Unintentional) Science Breakthroughs and How They Changed The World (https://amzn.to/3L4XC8b). Taking your pet to the vet can be a traumatic experience for all involved. To make the process easier on you, the pet and the staff at the veterinarian’s office, listen as I offer some advice veterinarians want you to know. https://www.rd.com/list/50-things-your-vet-wont-tell-you/ 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 a restaurant menu can influence what you choose to order. Then the odd workings of your memory, including what you're likely to remember most. It's this time frame from our sort of late teens into our early 20s Odd workings of your memory, including what you are likely to remember most. It's this time frame from our sort of late teens into our early 20s. Many memories from that time frame are remembered better. And so it's pretty common for all of us to remember events from that time frame.

Also, what you need to know for the next time you take your pet to the vet, and origins and stories of breakthrough inventions like the telephone, penicillin, and superglue. During the Vietnam War, troops were given superglue because it's a temporary sort of bandage, you know, in the field when a soldier was wounded. Superglue ended up saving a huge number of lives during Vietnam conflict. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for listening today. There are plenty of podcasts you could be listening to, and I appreciate the loyalty and for you spreading the word about this podcast to people you know. First up today, I want to talk about restaurant menus. Because when you go out to eat, you may not be aware of it,

but restaurants use psychology on their menus to steer you in certain directions. For example, you'll notice that a lot of menus do not have photographs of their food on the menu. Some do, but most don't. And that's because unless the photos are really good photos, they can really turn people off. And if the food that comes out of the kitchen doesn't really look like the food in the photograph, that can create a sense of distrust between the customer and the restaurant. You'll notice often that expensive dishes are on the top of the menu. This is because people will see those first because they're at the top, and that will

make other less expensive items look like a good deal by comparison. You'll notice that on a lot of menus there are things like Aunt Betty's chicken pot pie or Grandma's old-fashioned whatever. This is very much intentional. According to menu engineers, people like the names of mothers, grandmothers, and other relatives on their menus, and research shows that customers are more likely to buy them. Unlike retail items in a store, you'll notice a lot of restaurants don't price items on the menu ending in 99 cents,

like $19.99 for the meatloaf. They're more often in whole dollars. This is because menu consultants say that prices that end in 99 cents on a menu tend to signify value, but don't tend to signify quality. The important point to all this is that restaurants use psychology on their menu, and you as a customer should be aware of it. And that is something you should know. Over the last several years, it seems there's been a lot of new research coming out about how your memory works, which is always so interesting because more and more it seems that memory isn't what we think it is.

And the more you understand how the memory does and doesn't work, the more you can use your memory to your advantage. Here to explain all this is Megan Sumeraki. She's an associate professor of psychology at Rhode Island College. She's a cognitive psychologist, memory expert, and author of the book, The Psychology of Memory. Hi, Megan. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Thanks for having me. So first, could you tell me what my memory is?

Because I know what it is, but I don't really know what it is. Yeah. Yeah. This is an interesting question, right? Because we all think we know what it is, but then trying to provide a formal definition often trips us up. Memory is actually much more broad than most people think. The definition that I like is using the past in service of the present or future. And so this definition allows us to think about the memories that probably pop into our heads first when we think about the concept of memory. For me, it's my daughter's birth, include things like knowing what an elephant is, knowing how to ride a bike or type or any of those types of procedures. like unconsciously, but sort of still the past serving us in the present, being able to navigate an area that we haven't been to for a very long time.

And maybe we don't even remember having been there, but somehow we're able to navigate it better than if we had been dropped there and never had been before. That's called implicit memory. And that's one example of implicit memory. So there's a lot of different concepts that really encapsulate this larger umbrella of the term memory. And so we have all those different, seemingly different types of memories, but is it all working in the same place and working the same way? Or are we using the term memory to talk about a lot of very different things that sort of fall under the umbrella of memory? Oh, gosh, I think the answer is a little bit of both. So our memories are not perfect. And that's true across the board, whether we're talking about procedural memories, like riding a bike or, you bike or remembering concepts or events.

Our memories are not perfect. They also tend to be susceptible to suggestion, but that piece of it tends to work more for events than, say, concepts. So it would be hard for somebody to convince me that an elephant isn't what I think it is, but I can integrate new aspects or features of what an elephant is into my understanding of elephant. We are much more susceptible to being told or the suggestion that certain events happen differently. And every time we retrieve events, we actually kind of change a little bit. And so false memories are prevalent.

But so I think when we're talking about long-term memory, we're talking about kind of one system that has a lot of different pieces or components, so to speak. But we also have our shorter term stores like Working Memory, which is the system that allows us to have this conversation, the system that allows me to have at least a rough idea of what the question was and what I've said already. So you mentioned, and I wanted to dive into this, long-term and short-term memory. We hear those terms a lot. I don't know if those are actually two very different things or how it works, but there is that issue of grandma can remember everything about her wedding day, but she can't remember what happened five minutes ago. How is that possible? What's going on there? Oh, gosh, that's such an interesting question. So five minutes ago is part of long-term memory. We actually, when we talk about long versus short-term memory,

I think there's a misconception that short-term means like basically everything today and long-term is longer than that. Short-term memory or working memory is the more kind of modern cognitive concept that we use. It's really, really short. It's what we're holding on to in the moment. So the amount of things that you can sort of hold on to in your mind right now as I'm speaking, that's all part of this short-term working memory concept. What happened five minutes ago or even just a couple of minutes ago, once you let go of that out of your working memory, so say I could quiz you on some of the things that were mentioned during the introduction.

It would be kind of a useless quiz, but we could ask people, oh, do you remember my name? Do you remember details that were shared? And if you could think back to a couple of minutes ago and recall some of the information from the intro of this episode, you're actually using your long-term memory to do that because you stopped thinking about it for a little while and now you're retrieving and thinking about it again. And so five minutes ago really is grandma forgetting something from long-term memory. But of course, there's a big difference between five minutes ago and remembering components from our wedding or something that was many, many years ago, potentially decades ago. We do forget over time, but it seems as though the memories that we create,

what cognitive psychologists would call the reminiscence bump, it's this timeframe from our sort of late teens into our early 20s, roughly speaking. The memories, many memories from that timeframe are remembered better than the things that are more recent. So 10 years out from my wedding, I'll remember my wedding pretty well. 20 years out from my wedding, I'll remember my wedding pretty well, but I won't remember something that was 10 years, right? So like the 10 years in between, it's hard without a piece of paper to draw things out. But essentially just those things from our late teens, early 20s, and kind of that timeframe tend to be, for whatever reason, better remembered. And so it's pretty common for all of us to remember events from that time frame. But it also seems that remembering your wedding and remembering what happened five minutes ago,

one of the big differences is probably nothing much happened five minutes ago and your wedding was such a big emotional deal. Yeah, yeah, quite possibly. And we do it does seem it seems like we favor memories that are that occur with great emotion, although we tend to think that we're more accurate than we are. So that's one of the tricky things, too. We think we remember our wedding, but there's probably some details that we're misremembering. But who's, you know, how would we know that that's not correct? So it's entirely possible that these vivid memories that we have from these emotional events aren't as accurate as we think. But you're right. Something that, you know, nothing really happened five minutes ago. So, of course, I don't really remember it. What I ate for breakfast, who cares? But it's entirely possible that we're not

perfectly accurate when we think about those really big and important events as well. What about the difference in people that some people seem to have, God, Bob's got a great memory, but Susie doesn't remember much. And like, are there individual differences or are they just not using it correctly or are they using it differently? Or really is one person just better at memory than somebody else? Yeah, so absolutely. We can have individual differences in our memory abilities. We can also have individual differences in our ability to monitor our own memory. So Susie might think she has a horrible memory and Bob might think he's

great and they could potentially have the same skills. They might be different, but there are some people that are confidently wrong and some people that are underconfident. And that mixes in with the general abilities of individuals in terms of memory as well. And so it becomes kind of tricky to know if someone says, oh, I have a terrible memory. Terrible memory is in some ways kind of what one would expect. There are a lot of different things that we forget and ways to forget, and those are functional. Forgetting is important. And so sometimes we think we have a terrible memory, but really our memories are just working the way they're supposed to. But there are definitely individual differences. Not everybody's the same height, not everybody has the same eye color, and not everybody has the same memory skills.

We're talking about human memory, how it works and how to make it work better. My guest is Megan Sumeraki. She is a cognitive psychologist and author of the book, The Psychology of Memory. Whether in the game or in life, the right coverage can make all the difference. Securian Canada gives you that coverage. For more than 65 years, Securian Canada has been helping Canadians build secure tomorrows. Their insurance solutions are designed to help protect you and your loved ones financially, giving you the peace of mind to focus on what truly matters. Find their products through banks, credit unions, and associations, or visit SecurianCanada.ca. Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. Mama, look at me. Vroom, vroom. I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the

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Visit Intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. So, Megan, you said a few minutes ago that forgetting is important. Why is forgetting important? Yeah. So, you know, misplacing your keys, not knowing where you parked the car. These things tend to lead us to say, oh, I can't remember anything or to be really frustrated. And I think in general, we focus on the times we forget and not so much on the times we remember. You're not going to give yourself a party every time you remember where you parked your car, but you sure remember the time that you can't figure out where it was and you were late as a result, right? And so

it's frustrating, but at the same time, you don't need to or want to remember everywhere you've ever parked your car or everywhere you've ever put your keys. We shouldn't and don't want to be want to remember everywhere you've ever parked your car or everywhere you've ever put your keys. We shouldn't and don't want to be able to hold on to every single detail. And that's not the point of memory. Memory is not designed to remember every single detail. It's designed to serve us in the future. And of course, it would be good to remember where you put important things like your keys or the car. But every once in a while, there is going to be an error. You're going to make a mistake. And that is just sort of the nature of our systems and that we want to forget things so that we can make kind of room, so to speak, for newer things. I remember hearing someone say, and it sort of made sense to me,

and I want you to comment on it, is one of the reasons that memories distort over time is that when you recall an event, you're not necessarily recalling the event. You're recalling the last time you remembered the event. And the more times you remember it, the more likely things are to go haywire in your memory about that event. Yeah, that's correct. So every time we retrieve information, whether it's something that we learned at some point or an event that occurred, it's not benign. It's not just an assessment of what is in our memory. Rather, it is activating those memories and using retrieval cues to sort of activate the features related to the memory. And when you do

that, the memory can be strengthened but also modified. This is great news for trying to learn new things in school or at one's job or whenever, because when you retrieve information, you strengthen it. This is very good news. But when it comes to trying to remember events exactly as they occurred, especially when there's no way to give yourself feedback and to correct misconceptions, or at least it doesn't make sense to do so. Every time you remember something about your wedding, you don't think, oh, I better go watch the wedding video to make sure I got everything correct. You don't give yourself feedback like that. And maybe there isn't even a wedding video to watch, right? So when you retrieve the

information, little pieces can insert themselves and they become integrated into that memory. And we have a difficult time distinguishing between the event that actually happened and the way it was maybe imagined later or something that was suggestive that was sort of integrated into the memory or altered the memory in some way. And so over time, the more you retrieve it, the stronger it gets, but also the more distorted it can become. We have like these weird random memories that aren't particularly special. They weren't special moments in time necessarily, but they're just like, I remember this thing when I was three and I had this coat and it had this thing and it's

kind of a flash. Where did that come? Well, I know where it came from. It probably happened. But why am I still remembering that? So we do tend to remember things from late teens, early 20s, although it sounds like you're maybe talking about younger. It's also entirely possible that there's a picture and you've seen the picture or you've been told the story or it is just some weird thing that you that was special to you at the time. And you thought about it and you recalled it. Maybe you told the story a few times when you were younger and retrieving it has has helped you remember. So when you say that, I have a memory of I had this windbreaker, like a little jacket when I was maybe around four years old. And I called it my firecracker jacket because it was from the late 80s, early 90s. It was very colorful and all these different patches of color. But also when I was about that age, I got hit with a bottle rocket. We were camping and some kids were doing bottle rockets out over the lake before the professional fireworks and they thought it would be fun. They were probably like 12 or 13 to shoot the bottle rocket up over the crowd. They slipped it did singe a hole in that jacket. And so I remember that jacket.

And I remember it, you know, calling it that firecracker jacket. But I can imagine this event happening in my head, but I know I don't have a true memory for it. I know the story and I remember the story and then I remember that jacket. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, when you said what you said, when I was thinking about that memory I have of that coat, there was a picture. There is a picture. And that's what, and that must be it. But here's another weird thing about my memory. I can remember every phone number I've ever had since I was five years old. And I don't know why. I have no idea. But I could spot them all off to you if you wanted to hear them. There's no point to it. I never use it. I don't know whose number it is now,

but I know all my phone numbers from the time I was five. Yeah. I mean, we use those a lot. We used to give them out a lot. I wonder if kids now would know. Maybe not. But I mean, I remember my childhood phone number as well. And some of my friends from high school, I remember their childhood phone numbers, but I couldn't tell you their cell phones now. Right. Nobody uses them now. Yeah. One of the things that people always are concerned about is as they get older, it does seem that memory can fail more often. And is that just normal part of aging or is that a red flag that there's something wrong? Yeah, so it's absolutely a normal part of aging, depending on what skill we're talking about,

what cognitive skill. Those memory skills can peak in your mid-20s. Not all of them. Vocabulary tends to actually increase over time. So when you're in your older years, you know, 60s, 70s, your vocabulary might actually be better than it was earlier on. But speed of processing in particular and certain types of memory tend to decrease slowly, but they do decrease after roughly the mid-20s. And so, you know, having trouble accessing a word, remembering where things were, what you need to do, absolutely will decline. And it doesn't mean that there's something wrong. I also think we tend to just notice it more. It's entirely possible that, you know, when I was 27 and finishing up my PhD, that if I forgot something, I would think, oh, weird, I forgot that. Whereas now I'm like, oh, man, now that I'm in my late 30s, I'm forgetting things because I'm past my cognitive peak. It's possible that that's part of it. But it is a real but slight decline. And it really isn't something to worry about unless it starts happening frequently enough

that you become concerned. It's never a bad idea to mention it to a healthcare provider. So are there any proven ways either generally to keep your memory sharp or if there's something you specifically want to remember that we know really works or is everybody too different for that to be the case? No, we do have some strategies that tend to work very well.

When we retrieve information, we call this retrieval practice, it does strengthen our memories. And so if there's something that we need to remember, retrieving it frequently, bringing it to mind makes it so that we're going to remember it better. And it also makes us more able to apply it. So we become more flexible with that information. And so retrieving works pretty well across the board. And those effect sizes tend to be quite large. I study that in the context of students in education, but it works in a lot of other domains, including with

older adults who are trying to remember things as well. And then spaced practice is another one that tends to work really well. And the two go together. So you don't necessarily want to retrieve something 10 times in a row, all right in a row. But if you're trying to remember something and you can space out the times that you retrieve it, so maybe I'm going to retrieve it again in a little bit, and then I'm going to try to retrieve it again tomorrow and the next day and so on. That is a way to really improve remembering, but also flexible use of information and being able to apply it in other situations. This is weird. I forgot what I was going to ask.

That happens all the time too, it's normal Well I remember now, but how embarrassing that I forget what I was going to ask a memory expert We're out of time, but I'll save my question for next time I've been speaking with Megan Sumeraki She's an associate professor of psychology at Rhode Island College A cognitive psychologist and memory expert and author of the book The Psychology of Memory. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. And thank you, Megan, for coming on and being a guest. Thanks so much, Mike. It's been really fun talking with you.

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When you think about great inventions, you may think it's a very deliberate process. You know, scientists in lab coats being very thoughtful and going step-by-step to create some new magnificent thing that revolutionizes the world. Is that how it really works? Yeah, usually never. New products and new technologies often have a much more interesting and sometimes odd route to success. Sometimes they're the result of an accident or some weird eureka moment or some other series of unexpected events that lead to a new invention. As you're about to hear from my guest, Tim James.

He is a science teacher, YouTuber, blogger, Instagrammer, and author of the book, Accidental, the greatest unintentional science breakthroughs and how they change the world. Hi, Tim. Welcome. Glad to have you on Something You Should Know. Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me on. So explain why you tackled this, this journey of inventions. The reason I wanted to do it was because of what you just said, eureka moments are often some of the stories in science which are most interesting. So people sort of think of science as being sort of boffins in laboratories laboring

away over something until they finally hit the right answer. And a lot of the time, great scientific discoveries and inventions are the result of happenstance, misfortune, and bad luck. And it's often not the right person in the right place at the right time, it's the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I think there's something encouraging and reassuring about that, that accidents have often saved our skin as a species, you know, and it's sort of, it's cool to remind people it's fine to screw up because a huge number of important discoveries were made as the result of an accident. Which fortunately makes for a far more interesting story and a more interesting podcast episode. And let's start, because this I found fascinating.

When people think of the invention of the telephone, they think of the technology that gets my voice from here to over to somebody else's house, and we can talk to each other. But part of that whole technology was the invention of the microphone and the speaker of the telephone, which is the forefather of all microphones and speakers. Precisely, yeah. I mean, the technology that people are using to listen to this podcast and the technology we're using to record it.

So speakers and microphones are really the same device, but in reverse. So one converts vibrations in the air into electrical signals and one converts electrical signals into vibrations. And they owe their existence to a complete accident. So Alexander Graham Bell was not originally an engineer or an electrician. He was actually a speech therapist and a linguist. And he was really interested in how people make the sounds that they make with their voice, right? He was interested in how do we create vowel sounds. And his father sent him a book by a German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, doing some experiments. And one of the experiments Helmholtz was doing was passing

electrical current through tuning forks to make them vibrate and by setting up a series of these tuning forks and passing current through them he could create vibrations in the air. Now Alexander Graham Bell read this book or at least he tried to because the problem was the book was in German and he didn't really speak fluent German so he mist mistranslated it, and he misinterpreted one of the diagrams, and he thought what Helmholtz had done was find a way to record sound, transmit it electrically, and play it back. So he started building a device that he thought was recreating Helmholtz's invention, not realising he was actually inventing it completely from scratch.

So because he thought, someone else has already done this, I'm just rebuilding Helmholtz's invention, he didn't realise he was inventing the telephone in the process, and in fact, going against the conventional wisdom of the time, because people thought you couldn't do that, they thought there's no way of sending sound down an electrical wire. There's too much information. So he ended up doing something impossible as far as people knew, because he didn't realize it was impossible. He thought it's already been done. So a complete invention, the result of mistranslating a book in German. And here we are, everyone's using phones. We're talking to each other on microphones. People are listening on speakers because he couldn't read German very well. Something everybody, I think, uses and I've always been interested in is super glue because glue's been around forever.

But now we have not just – it's not just glue. It's super glue. And what is super glue? How is it different from glue and why is it yeah yeah so super glue was also discovered completely by accident a scientist called harry cuva was actually he was trying to make a plastic um the aim was to make a transparent gun sight so you know the barrel of the gun and then you've you know the sight that allows you to sort of position your aim he was trying to make a transparent one and so he was trying to make a transparent plastic and he completely failed and ended up making this substance that was

ludicrously sticky just unpleasantly so and he kind of dismissed it and thought well this is this is useless this is this is failed plastic. And he gave it to his assistant and said, you just see what you can do with this. And the assistant came back to him in two weeks and said, oh, I've been having great fun. I've been having a fantastic time. Well, why? What have you been doing? Sticking everything to everything else. And because he'd warned him, this stuff is really sticky. The guy realized, actually, this is the most powerful glue anyone has ever created. And it's a failed plastic. And the wonderful sort of coda to the story is that Harry Coover was eventually approached by the US military and asked, could this super glue stuff be used as a temporary surgical device. And in fact, during the Vietnam War, troops were given superglue because it's a temporary

sort of bandage, you know, in the field when a soldier was wounded. You could put superglue between the flesh and seal it as a temporary sort of, you know, holdover measure. So this failed plastic that he thought, well, this is the most useless thing, because his mind was thinking plastic, plastic, plastic, what's this gloop I've got? And then his assistant pointed out, no, this is really useful. This failed plastic is a super glue, and it sticks almost everything to everything else. And this ended up saving a huge number of lives during the Vietnam conflict.

Well, and whereas you can buy super glue in the hardware store, in the pharmacy, you can buy liquid band-aids, which is the same thing, right? Yeah, very much so, very much so. And it sticks skin to skin together really, really well. And the way it works is super glue because obviously the first question you ask is well how come it doesn't stick to the inside of the the tube right so super glue is actually activated by water it's activated by moisture you've got a bunch of molecules inside the glue that are kind of rolling around next to each other and when they come into contact with water it triggers a chemical reaction which causes all of the molecules to link up and they bond together

and they form these kind of long chains and one end of the chain is sort of attached to one surface and the other end of the chain is tangled up in the other surface so any surface that contains a lot of moisture which of course your course, your skin does, will immediately become bonded. But because the inside of the tube is dry, it doesn't stick to the metal inside the tube. And how is that different than glue? So there's all sorts of different ways things can be sticky. So another sort of great example of an adhesive property that was also stumbled upon by accident was Post-its. So Post-it notes was the other way around. So super glue was someone was trying to make a plastic, accidentally made a glue.

The inventor of Post-its was trying to make a glue and ended up discovering a glue that really wasn't very sticky at all it hardly stuck to anything and lo and behold he thought well what's the point of a glue that doesn't stick to anything and his his friend um started using it for a bookmark in his hymnal sheets he was sort of singing in his church choir and hymn paper is rather slippery. So he used this kind of like very lightly sticky paper to sort of use as a bookmark to find his place in his hymnal, and then realized, huh, this failed superglue, actually having something that's very slightly tacky, has a wonderful use of its own, and thus we have post-its.

So post-its was a failed glue, and superglue was a failed plastic. Pacemakers. Now that seems like an invention that was like a deliberate, we need a solution to this problem. People have this heart problem and we're going to create a solution for it and call it a pacemaker. And that's not anything like what happened. Oh no, that one is absolutely great. This is another example of how an accident has actually saved lives, you know, in the same way superglue. So this time, an electrical engineer, Wilson Greatbatch, he was building a circuit in his shed, in wrong component and it's it's not clear whether he just wasn't looking right or was just a bit tired but he picked up the wrong component put into the circuit and the circuit didn't conduct electricity nicely what it did was it started

pulsing the electricity and it started making what he he called a squeak effect which is just a wonderful made-up word a sque squeak. So he put the wrong component in his circuit, and it started going, just sort of spitting electrical current around itself. And he realized, this is potentially really useful because I've created a circuit that will deliver a short, sharp electrical shock at a particular time interval. And he thought, well, this could really help people. Because up until then, the only way to help people with heart problems was there was a huge device with really complicated circuitry

that they had to lug around with them. And it was also external. So they had to have something sewn inside their flesh, inside their heart, and have an external thing that magnetized through the skin of their chest to it. And then you had to carry this lunchbox-sized battery around because that was how complicated the circuitry had to be. And then Wilson Greatbatch completely by accident discovered this tiny circuit, the size of a fingernail that would deliver these electrical pulses and he thought this could be used for people's hearts and he um so he his first the first thing he did actually

was he he tested it out on the the family dog unfortunately um but discovered i i've got something here that will save lives by keeping people's heart regular. And all the result of him putting his hand into the box and picking out the wrong component. Penicillin is, I think people have heard this story. It has something to do with mold and bread. And I don't, you know, I don't know. Yeah. So penicillin is, that's probably quite a famous accidental discovery and this is the result of

an untidy lab of sort of uh slobby slobby uh workmanship um so the scientist um in question this time was alexander fleming and he was he was working on a lab with you know various molds he was really interested in mold that was his his big thing. Everybody's got a hobby. And he was working with a particular mould and he left his lab in a complete state. He just left Petri dishes, there was a mold inside the Petri dish that was somehow isolated. And anything else that was trying to grow inside the Petri dish wasn't able to. Something inside the mold was killing the bacteria that were trying to kind of get a foothold. And he thought, this is really, really weird. And he discovered that this particular mold, which is penicillin, penicillin rubrum, I think is the name of it.

I could have that wrong, but I think it's penicillin rubrum, was producing a chemical that was killing bacteria that were trying to also grow in the Petri dish, right? So because he kind of left his lab in a complete state and left petri dishes with the lids off it allowed this mold from a laboratory downstairs in fact that someone else was working with to land on the petri dish and have a couple of weeks to grow now if he'd been a cleaner scientist he would have cleaned out the petri dish and never would have noticed this mold growing and we wouldn't have antibiotics today and antibiotics absolutely ubiquitous medicine again it's impossible to put a number on how many lives have been saved because of antibiotics and we owe it all to this guy

not tidying up his lab not cleaning it and leaving petri dishes with the lids off albert einstein's special theory of relativity, you say that was an accident. This was a eureka moment. So some discoveries is just the result of someone looking at something and some small inadvertent thing someone said or something small that they noticed. And in the case of special relativity, it was simply looking at a clock. Albert Einstein was standing in the town square and he looked up at the clock just to see what the time was. And anyone else would just be looking up at the clock and thinking, OK, that's what the time is. But he started thinking, I'm looking at that clock. But what if I was moving away from that clock?

The light from the clock surface would have to reach me. But what if I was moving away from the clock at the speed of light, if I was moving away from the clock at the speed of light, then the light reaching me would be telling me that it was the same time constantly because I couldn't get any updated information. If I was moving at the speed of light, the clock hands would appear frozen because the later beams of light wouldn't be able to reach me. So the faster I go go the slower the clock would appear to be and so it made him start thinking about how people perceive time and how time relates to different points in the universe and how two two different observers moving at different speeds relative to one another can disagree even on the nature of time and that sort of led him

to special relativity all the result of checking the time. There were thousands of people doing it all at the same time, but one of them happened to be Albert Einstein. And lastly, talk about the microwave, because that's something we all use every day and don't think much about how it got here, but how did it get here? Right, okay, so this is the result of a guy called Percy Spencer. And after the Second World War, Percy Spencer worked in radar. So he was a radar sort of engineer and technician.

And he was working with some sort of military sort of quality radars. And after the war, there's actually more than one version of the story. There's two different versions of the story. So in one version of the story, he was standing next to this sort of a microwave emitter. So a microwave is just a particular beam of light. And he was standing next to this microwave beam of light, and he felt himself, his leg, getting warmer. And he thought, that's a bit weird. There's another version of the story, which is a little bit more fun, in that he had a candy bar, a bar of chocolate in his pocket, and it started melting the closer he stood to the microwave emitter.

So there's, you know, whichever version is true, we don't know. There's these two different accounts. And he sort of thought, well, that's interesting. The microwave emitter is melting stuff. So he started experimenting with it, and he experimented with an egg. So you put an egg sort of inside, you know, a chamber with a microwave emitter is melting stuff. So we started experimenting with it and he experimented with an egg. So you put an egg sort of inside, you know, a chamber with a microwave emitter and the egg exploded. It exploded in the face of his assistant, I think, unfortunately. And then he tried it with popcorn and, you know, he put popcorn kernels in and it popped them and he sort of realised,

I've got something that will cook things, right? So microwave light, when it's beamed at anything that has high water content or fat content, it makes the water and the fat molecules like go crazy, right? They start vibrating really fast. And thus we have the microwave oven. So the result of him standing a little bit too close to a military grade microwave emitter. And lo and behold, now we have stuff that we can cook mac and cheese in any sense as to like how long did somebody did it take for someone to figure out you know we could cook other things we could do i always wonder about the development process like how it gets from the beginning to where we

are now so it was it was fairly quick actually so from from the the different accounts of it it was pretty much sort of within the next few weeks right so he sort of felt this either his himself or the chocolate bar that started getting a little bit warm and he sort of you know sort of came back the next day and thought that's interesting and so tried it on different foodstuffs so for him it was pretty immediate it was it was pretty much you know right off the bat that he started experimenting with it and then over the next few years started you know refining it and patenting it and lo and behold so sometimes it's it's years and years later that someone realizesises, oh, wow, I could use that for something.

But sometimes it's pretty instantaneous. So, for example, shatterproof glass was a discovery. Someone had sort of coated a beaker, like a glass beaker, with a chemical and they dropped it on the ground and it didn't shatter completely. But it was actually a long time later that they were reading about a car crash and a windshield that had smashed and injured people that they thought hey that that thing i did months and months ago but with the microwave it was instant it was i could use this to cook so yeah it's really interesting sometimes people immediately and instantly figure out what they've got. And sometimes it's months later that someone thinks, oh, wow, I could use this. Or in the case of, you know, Superglue and Harry Hoover,

it's someone else, not Harry Hoover, sorry, Harry Coover, someone else that goes, that thing you thought was useless? No, that's going to save lives, mate. Well, they're fun stories to listen to, and there's probably countless other stories of inventions, things that happen through these kind of weird accidental, wait, I didn't know that. Look at how that works. Those kinds of stories that we'll never hear. It's yeah. And that's sort of what's wonderful about science because you never know

when the next great discovery is going to show up and you don't know what's going to lead to it. So you've just got to try everything, right? You've got to sort of do any experiment that comes in your head. You've got to try everything. You've got to follow every lead down. Anything that looks strange, you've just got to keep going. And most importantly, when you think something has gone wrong, try and learn from it. When something screws up, when you blow up half of the laboratory,

think afterwards, okay, what can I get from this? What can I learn? And i find that it's kind of uplifting actually i think it's kind of cool to remember that the greatest scientists screwed up sometimes and often that was what led to world changing discovery so i think it's it's important to remember everyone screws up it's what you then do with the screw up that really counts. Well, these are great stories, Tim. And in a way, they kind of give you hope, right? I mean, that the strangest things under the strangest circumstances can produce amazing results. And you just never know.

I've been speaking with Tim James, and the name of his book is Accidental, the Greatest Unintentional Science Breakthroughs and How They Changed the World. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Tim. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Taking your pet to the vet can be traumatic for both you and your pet. And here are some things that can help minimize the trauma, and these are things the veterinarian would really like you to know and follow.

First of all, leave your kids at home. Get a sitter. Most vets love kids at... get a sitter. Veterinarians see your children as really a liability. It's hard enough to keep the pets safe without having to worry about badly behaving children around sick animals. Lock your leash. Retractable leashes need to be locked on the shortest setting possible. Anything longer than that is a hazard to other pets and humans in your path. Having no leash is really not an option.

Put your cat in a carrier. Holding your cat in a carrier. Holding your cat on your lap or putting it on a harness and leash are really bad ideas because there are dogs in the waiting room that are likely to go after it. Silence your phone. It's rude to take or make calls while the vet is trying to examine your pet. And pay your bill. Pet owners often agree to hospitalization and other procedures and medications and then later change their mind and refuse to pay. And that's just not cool.

And that is something you should know. I'm sure you know the podcasting business is very competitive and we need every edge we can get. So I'd like to put you to work to help us grow our audience. And all you have to do is probably the best way to show your support for this podcast is to recommend it to a friend or a relative and the podcast platform that you're listening on Apple podcast, Spotify, whichever one has a share button that makes it really easy to share. People like to get podcast recommendations, and we would like it if you would do that recommending. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and

crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their 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, Laura O., who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes.

And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice

in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.