Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Turning Down the Radio When You're Lost

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

It’s a typical human reaction: When you’re driving and you realize that you’re lost, you turn down the radio. On its face it makes no sense – or does it? (It does.) Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, get this. The stuff you should know book that's coming out this fall, the incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. It has a cover now. It's been born. It's arrived. And we're showing it off on all of our social channels.

You can go over to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all those jams and check out our new cover now. Check it out. It's free. To check out. So go. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh.

There's Chuck. There's Jerry. This is short stuff. I'm Josh. Jerry's over there. There's Chuck. Let's go. Car radios.

Killers? I know. So I have to say this article was pretty great. It's a how stuff works article and it's, why do we turn down the radio when we're lost? And it was like, it's got that kind of classic how stuff works sheen where it's like, well, here's the simple answer, but let me find all this other stuff that has to do with this that makes it that much more interesting, you know? Yeah.

It's also kind of funny to look back to the 1930s and realize that their cell phone was the car radio and they were just as worried that it was going to kill people driving. Yes. Right? So like there's this question, like are we, every time we're worried about some new technologies, is it the same thing as when people before us worried about technology that proved to be totally safe or will we eventually hit some technology that were like, oh, actually no, this one doesn't qualify.

It's actually way worse than everything else. And will it be radios again? Maybe they'll have another shot at being dangerous. Who knows? That's right. Well, in the early thirties, they were so worried about it. Some states find people who put cars in their radios. Yeah.

And it wasn't until about eight years after 1930, nine years that they actually did some real studies, the Princeton Radio Research Project, that said, you know what, it's not a big deal to listen to a radio in your car if anyone cares what we think. Doesn't that sound like our current times where it's like, this is dangerous. This is dangerous. We should come up with some laws to protect ourselves against this. And then finally we're like, oh, let's actually study it and find out. Yeah, a little bit.

And then now it's actually fine. So the radios were deemed safe, right? They were deemed to not play a role in car accidents specifically. But the question is this, so at some point the Society of Automotive Engineers basically said, hey, we've got this figured out. As long as you're not distracted for more than 15 seconds while you're driving, you're going to be just fine. Which is crazy.

And that's just totally untrue, right? Of course, anyone knows that these days, that 15 seconds is like a death sentence basically in a car. But did they sign off on radios under that 15 second rule? I don't know. I think they have now whittled that down to two seconds because they realized that driving three football fields without paying attention is actually quite dangerous, no matter what somebody will listen to.

Right, exactly. So I guess a car drives at 55 miles an hour, drives about a football field every five seconds. So yeah, 15 seconds, you can get into a lot of trouble even at 55 miles an hour. Yeah, I mean, two seconds, that seems about right. Because even though you shouldn't be distracted at all, everyone is, I mean there are things going on that you can't help but be distracted by sometimes. Did you ever take any of those like insurance reductions slash DUI schools classes? You didn't do that?

I went to that, never for DUI or anything like that. But like you could get like a discount on your insurance if you were like a teenage driver and you went to take one of these safe driving classes, but inevitably the instructor would just start shelling out like stories about people doing stupid stuff while they're driving. Oh yeah. And one that always stuck with me was somebody eating cereal while they're driving. And for years, I thought that was the most bonkers thing. And then I finally saw it with my own two eyes, somebody else on the road eating cereal

while driving down the highway during a morning commute. And it is as bonkers as you would think. It wasn't any less bonkers seeing it. I guess because there's a liquid involved. And two hands. That makes it different than eating something else. Well, I can drive pretty well with my knees. How are you?

I don't know if I would eat clam chowder. Can you really? I can kind of, but then I'm also like, I can freak myself out and be like, this is really, really dangerous. Well, and my car now has one of those sort of driving assistance where you don't have to hold the steering wheel. And that is... You don't even need knees.

It's super freaky and makes me feel a little bit like unsafe. Right. Yeah, I have that too where it's like, you start to drift a little bit and then the car just goes, no, no, and like pushes you back into your lane. That one. It's a little creepy. It feels like your car's possessed. Yeah, basically.

Or it's like a little bossy for my taste. I mean, you don't have to use that stuff. You can turn that stuff off. I don't know if you can in the one I have, but maybe. So here's the thing. Radio driving is an actual thing, but radio's got signed off on. Now they realize that if you are driving down the road, just listening to the radio, not like fiddling with it or messing, you know, finding like the right track on your phone

or connecting your phone via Bluetooth to your media center or whatever in your car. But if you're just listening to music, it actually helps you focus more. So not only is the radio not in and of itself or listening to music, not in and of itself distracting, it actually helps you focus and probably drive better. So bearing all that in mind, Chuck, doesn't it make sense that it is the most bizarre thing you could possibly do when you're lost and you realize you're lost or you're really trying to concentrate on driving that you would turn the radio down. It doesn't make any sense if you think about it on its face.

What it does make is a great teaser for part two right after that. Man, you know me so well. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. Get stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look

for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology?

It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so if we're talking, what we're really talking about is multitasking. And it's pretty interesting how the human brain works. We've talked about the brain ad nauseam on the show, but just as a refresher, you've got the cerebrum.

If someone subscribes cerebral, that means they have pretty tight, higher cognitive functioning going on. Talking about emotion, talking about language. Sure. What's next? What about the cerebellum? That's right. Muscle movement, balance, stuff like that.

And then you got the dumb old brainstem, which just, you know, like if you want to breathe and blink your eyes and stuff like that and get messages between the spinal cord and the other two parts of the brain, then your brainstem is going to step up. So all of these parts of the brain are kind of working in conjunction to help you do things like drive or walk around or chew gum or whatever. All of them are going to play a role either by themselves or in conjunction, more likely in conjunction with the others. And the way that you do go through life, and not just you, Chuck, or you, dear listener,

but everybody, every human goes through life, taking in all of the information available to us through our senses, our five basic senses, right? Which is touch, hearing, smell, vision, taste, and then the sixth one, our morphic field sense. That's right. Seeing dead people. That's right. Exactly.

Or knowing when somebody's staring at the back of your head. Right. So when you get all of this information, your brain is processing it. It's encoding everything, and it's basically while it's encoding it because it's getting so much different stuff. And I know we've talked about this plenty of times before in past episodes, but I just still to this day find it fascinating. But the brain is basically saying, this is important.

This isn't important. This I can throw away, this I need to put more focus on. And apparently the brain is capable of carrying on at least two tasks virtually simultaneously. But one is considered more important than the other. So you've got your primary task and your secondary task. That's right. And switching back and forth between these, your brain is really good at it. It's called attention switching, but it is actually switching, and it does take time.

It doesn't take long, but it can add up. And if you think that people like to brag about their multitasking abilities, you're not really multitasking though. You think you are. But what you're really doing is just doing a lot of things more poorly than you would be doing. Right. Exactly.

Which is surprising because multitaskers are such like type A go-getters to begin with that you would think if you explain to them like, hey, you're actually doing way worse at each of these different things than you would be if you just did one at a time and completed each task, that they would take up that mantle. But I still suspect that they wouldn't. You know? Yeah. I mean, anything over two is a problem for the brain such that it's not like the brain's

like, all right, I'll do all three of these at once. But it's going to really, I'm going to struggle. Your brain literally says, no, sorry, that third thing is in line now behind these other two things and they're actually in line as well. Or the brain might even just toss that third one out. Maybe. Yeah. There's got to be a primary one.

There's got to be a secondary one. And maybe if it's in a good mood, your brain will take on the third one. But when it switches between these things, because that's the thing, if you have two things that you're doing and you can't do them actually in parallel, what that means then is that your brain has to switch between them, right? Because they kind of compete for one another, for your brain's resources with one another. And when it does that, all sorts of terrible things happen because it's not an instantaneous switch.

There's a very slight delay. And in that slight delay, you can lose attention, lose concentration. Our response time is eaten up. There's a whole bunch of things that kind of go south where if we were just focusing on one thing at that moment, we would be doing much better at it. And we're doing two things instead, and we're doing both things more poorly. That's right. Because if you're multitasking, your error rate increases by as much as 50%.

And like we said, you're not speeding up anyway. If you're multitasking, it's doubling the amount of time it would take to do each of those things if you were just doing those things. Right. So you think you're saving time and you're not? No. You just said it, Chuck, you're doubling the amount of time it actually takes. If something doesn't take less time, it doubles the amount of time, which is mind-boggling

ironically enough. Yeah. And you probably don't even realize this if you think you're a good multitasker. The small errors you make, and it could be dumb little things like you have to go back and retype a line of an email that you would have typed correctly the first time I had you been only doing that, or zoning out on someone and saying, I'm sorry, will you repeat that because I was doing something else. You're literally, your brain is not able to.

Right. Exactly. So it makes sense then that if you are suddenly, you're driving along and you suddenly realize you don't know the way, or maybe you're coming up on a street that you need to turn on and this is not a familiar area to you, and you really need to concentrate, you would turn down the radio to remove a distraction from your brain so that your brain can focus more clearly on finding this turn or taking in this other sensory information or making these decisions that it needs to make to get you where you're going, which makes a lot of sense

if you think about it. That's right. I'm not sure the science behind it, but I'm sure some people are a little more sincerely stimulated than others by different senses. And I'm one of those that sound can really get to me. If I have, I've got to turn that radio down if I'm lost or I'll go crazy, or the worst thing on planet earth to me is having two musics playing at once. Yeah, that's terrible.

Like if you have your volume on on your computer and you have a tab that's playing music and you open another tab and it starts playing, it's just utter chaos. Can't do it. Nope. I'm with you, Chuck. You got anything else about turning down the radio when you're lost? No. Do one thing at a time.

You'll get there quicker and it'll be better. There you go. So that means since Chuck summarized everything so beautifully that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.