The Rest Is Science - How Words Shape Your Body

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Does your native language physically sculpt your face? And could a swarm of bees be trained to run computer code? Two of your questions answer in this Field Notes with Professor Hannah Fry and YouTube's Michael Stevens, plus Michael’s object of the week is a visualization of the Holocene Calendar. By simply adding ten thousand years to our current year, it transforms our perception of history from a brief modern blip into an unbroken, monumental narrative of human progress. Check out the calendar here ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking ⁠here⁠.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Rest is Science. I am Michael Stevens, and this is Field Notes. It is an exploration, expedition diary where Hannah and I share cool thoughts, objects and discoveries with each other, and from you. Every week, one of us is going to bring in something to show the other. It's a bit like the rest of sciences version of show and tell. Yeah, and together we're building up a strange and spectacular library of our favorite items from the world of science. We also, by the way, would like to add in your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, anything you want to send us in a mailbag. So send them into us and look, we'll dust off a shelf, a metaphorical shelf.

So later on, I am going to be showing off a book and also a scarf that cannot be cut in half. Oh. But first, we're going to go to your questions. I mean, frankly, what are you doing cutting scarves in half? Anyway, respect your wardrobe, Michael. Okay. Our first discovery, though, doesn't come from Michael. It's it comes from you guys.

Here's one from Brian. Okay, bees, like honeybees, can be trained to recognize simple shapes, colors, odors, and landmarks, and follow instructions and perform calculations based on a given input. So, can we train bees to simulate a universal tearing machine? I've also formatted this question as a limerick. Okay, you can see why I wanted to read this one. I'm curious about bits and bees. I implore you to answer me, please. If meadows of flowers replace computational powers,

will Google start making me sneeze? Okay. Thank you, Brian. Brian, my goodness me. Way to wet both of our appetite simultaneously. A limerick for Michael and universal chewing machines for me. Thank you very much. Okay, I think I've got, I did some research for this.

I think I've got a sort of answer. because it is an amazing, amazing question. Because Brian's right that bees have actually this phenomenal capacity. There's this one experiment in 2019, this is in Australia, where researchers demonstrated that bees can be taught how to add and subtract. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why their system lets you take payments. Track sales, handle inventory, manage staff, send invoices,

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I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. The word cancer comes from the Greek carcinos, meaning crab.

And Hippocrates use that word because tumors can spread out like crab's legs. For a long time, cancer was poorly understood. And so I think because of that, it was almost scarier and people didn't even say its name. But what science has done since is replace uncertainty with understanding. But that understanding is an instant because cancer isn't just one disease. It's hundreds of different diseases, each behaving differently depending on where it is and its genes. And that complexity is why progress in cancer research can feel like it's slow. But step by step, research is saving and improving lives.

Now, that's why Cancer Research UK, the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, supports work across more than 200 types of cancer, from the tiny changes inside cells that start the disease to better ways to spot it earlier and treat it more precisely. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, Visit canterresearchuk.org slash the rest is science. So it wasn't a swarm computer, right? It was using sugar water and this and this Y-shaped maze. Okay, so what you do is a bee flies into the entrance of this maze

and it sees a picture with a certain number of shapes on it, right? So let's say it's got three squares on it. And then the researchers trained the bees that a particular colour would correlate. to addition and another color would correspond to subtraction. Okay, so if the shapes were yellow, the bees had to subtract one. And if the shapes were blue, they had to add one. Okay. So what happens is the bee goes in.

It sees, let's say, three blue squares, right? If it flies deeper into the maze and then it sees this fork on the road, and one path has two squares and the other path has four. Go to the two. But blue is addition. So it has to go. Oh, shoot. Okay. Man, all right. I wouldn't be a very good beat. So he goes to the four. Got it. This is really sophisticated math. Isn't it? Yeah. I know. Isn't it? But yeah, it manages to do it. Does it every single time kind of repeat? Once it's trained, it does it every single time repeatedly and reliably. And then if the original squares are yellow, which means minus, then it will go to the two and it will get the sugar water. Right. It's amazing that these bees can sort of, first of all, count up four shapes. notice the difference between four and three or four and two, but also have an instruction based on color as to which gate to go into.

Right. I mean, they're recognizing amounts for sure. And they're understanding what to do and what to look for next based on what they're finding. I don't think that they're necessarily, like, definitely doing math. Agree. But still, the fact that they're able to look at four squares and be like, okay, I know that three of them is less, is pretty amazing because bees are not known for their brains. No, although, I mean, you know about the waggle dance, right? Well, yeah.

So this is a way that bees communicate the presence of pollen to each other. So a bee will go into a hive having found a source of pollen and will basically wiggle their bum for a particular amount of time in a particular direction to essentially keep. communicate to the other bees, the direction perpendicular to the sun, I think it is, that they have to travel in order to find this pollen. And they tested this, by the way, that, you know, initially people were like, oh, they're just, you know, they're just doing a little weird dance. And then people are like, maybe they're communicating it, but are they communicating it relative to where the bee is, or is it relative to the hive? They weren't sure. They got one bee, the one who's sort of communicating the dance. And they put little,

a little eye patch on her so that she couldn't see where she was relative to the sun. And then for the rest of the bees, they put in a big bright light to sort of mimic the sun. And they managed essentially to make it so that she accidentally

communicated the wrong directions and all of these bees went off to some pollen that wasn't there. Wow. So that is also pretty impressive. Their brains are good, but their brains have very few neurons. compared to other critters on this planet. So it's incredible what you can do with so few brain cells.

Totally. So going back to this question and this idea of whether you can build a B computer, right, whether you can build a universal Turing machine. I should just say for anyone who hasn't come across this phrase of a universal Turing machine, this is one of many of Turing's really great insights. So this is way before computers are invented. And Turing comes up with this idea for a theoretical concept. computer. It's like an imaginary computer. And it has this tape of infinite length and it's divided

into these little squares. And what the computer does is it reads a square, follows a rule to either change what's there or keep it the same as it was. And then it can move left and right, right? And the idea is that given enough time and infinite tape, then this imaginary computer can solve any mathematical problem. So I don't know. I personally think that chewing machines are, they're a bit abstract. So I have an example of how you could do addition with a chewing machine, like a really, really simple example. Yeah, let's try this and then we'll see how bees could be coming ball. Yeah. Okay. So you could have it where I could take you and give you an eye mask with just like a tiny little slit in it so that you can only see what's immediately in front of it.

you. So you can be the rule machine, all right? And I can give you a very clear rule about what to do. But in front of you, I'm going to lay out a series of plates. This is my infinite tape, right? And each plate is either going to have a penny on it or it's not. And that's it. And you're sitting at this chair and you can see only one plate at a time. Right. I've got you like a blinkers. That's all you're allowed to see. Okay. Now, I'm going to set it up so that you can do addition of three plus two without you ever needing to understand what addition is, what your task is, or the output of what you're achieving. Okay.

And you'll do this by just giving me a rule to follow. Exactly. Okay. So I'm going to set it up so that I have in this long line of plates, they're all empty, apart from three and then a space and then two. And that's it. Okay. They're coming up to you now, right?

They're sort of on this train. They're sort of coming up to you. And your job is, if you see a penny, you just move the plate to the right. Okay. If you look down, see a penny, move the plate to the right. Go to the next one. See a penny, move the plate to the right. So you do that.

You're at the beginning of the run and you do that three times. Okay. All the three pennies are to your right. Now, when you see an empty plate, the rule is you have to put a penny on it. Move the plate to the right and then switch to the next rule. Okay. Okay. So now there's four pennies, four plates with pennies to your right. And you're on the next rule, which is if you see a penny, you keep moving right. But when you finally hit an empty plate at the end of the line, you go back one plate to the left, take that penny away and stop. So, okay. So in this example, we wind up with five pennies in a row. To my right, which is three plus two. Exactly. You without ever knowing that you're doing addition, without ever understanding.

anything that you're doing, you have managed to just successfully complete an additive task. I feel like bees could easily follow rules that simple. They could follow rules, but what bees can't do, so bees could read the penny, they could move things to the right, or they could move through a system. Yeah. But what they can't do is right. They can't add the penny. So for a universal

Turing machine what you need to be able to do is you've got to be able to put a symbol down move away and then come back to it later as though it's a stored variable. Now I should just say to close this loop on the universal Turing machine thing the reason why this idea was so profound

that example of pennies, I mean whatever it's a really simplified example but the key point about this is that after Turing someone came along called John von Neumann and he was like like, okay, I see this. Because the idea about a universal chewing machine is that if you have enough time, it can compute anything that is computable, anything. So John von Neumann saw this and was like, I think there's a way to make this actually happen. So he built this architecture, and that

is the basis of all modern computers, right? Like, this is the origins of everything that we built our entire modern world on, this stupid example of the pennies. Like, honestly, at the heart of it, this stuff is so absurdly simple. Yeah. It's just when you build up and build it up and build it up. And this is the thing about how people say computers don't know what they're doing, that don't understand what they're manipulating, because they're the same as you with the eye mask on and the pennies, right? You're just like performing this task. I don't know that I'm adding pennies. I'm just following some rules. Exactly. Exactly. So this is the thing, right? I think that bees could not be a universal chewing machine, right, because they can't write, they can't

place down the pennies. However, that doesn't mean that there are no biological objects that could be because there was, in 2011, a team of researchers, this is from Japanese University and an English university, so Kobe University and the University of West of England, right? And they decided they wanted to build a functioning computer logic gate using animals, right? No animals were harmed or hurt in the process of this experiment. So they worked out, or they noticed, I guess, that there's this species called the soldier crab. And the soldier crab, most crabs, you know, obviously scuttle sideways, then kind of hang around

alone. Soldier crabs, they live in these lagoons and they move in like really tightly packed swarms and when two swarms of soldier crabs collide they don't sort of fight and they don't scatter they actually act

a bit like soft billiard balls they sort of combine and then they move together in this giant swarm so scientists worked out that you could basically build an and gate

and not gate and an or gate right which is one of the rules that we were describing about computers this sort of an unknown architecture

and so on it's based on this idea of like you get two bursts of electrical current that come through and it's like two inputs it's like like either both together and and gate either one of them the all gate or not gay so they built these mazes these y-shaped mazes or these x-shaped mazes and then sent crabs through these mazes and they combined in the ways that you wanted from these logic gates so in theory i mean they demonstrated that it worked with like one logic gate in theory then you could build a crab computer a crab pewter if you will yeah so you set you set up the groups with your question you let them go they just do their crab thing combining into groups or not

and then out at the other end of the maze is your output which is your answer and not a single crab none of them none of those crabs knew what they were doing so i mean this raises the question of like is that what life on earth is? Maybe the original, you know, bacterial mats were placed here in a specific position by aliens and they're like, look, give it five, six billion years. We'll come back and we'll get our answer. And we are all with our own psychologists. We're just following the rules the aliens knew would happen and we're doing their homework for them.

I mean, this is like a massive philosophical question of the ages. There's this giant debate that's going on about where the human brains are approximate maturing machines or not because the implication of that is that are we actually computing everything? Is there something going on on our brains where it's just computation and this feeling of consciousness, this feeling of being is a direct result of computation? Or is there something else going on? Like is this experience of being in this room, talking to you, you know, feeling the light on my face? Is that just computation and the base level of computation, the neurons have no idea what they're doing? Or is there something extra, something sort of magical on top?

I should tell you that I worked out. But of course, if a byte requires eight logic gates, right? A logic gate, by the way, required about 80 crabs in this experiment. Oh, okay. Oh, that's good to know. If you were going to do like a one gigabyte iPhone update, you'd require 640 billion crafts? That's less than I expected.

I thought the number would be some number name that no one ever says. It's in the billions. For one gigabyte. For one gigabyte. I mean, gosh, a gigabyte is a lot. Maybe this is coming from a guy who's old enough that I remember, you know, getting a memory drive that had 100 megabytes on it and being like, whoa. It's the future.

So many MP3s. Yeah. Yeah, this is true. This is true. But hey, who knows, right? Let's say in theory, you've got these billions and trillions and squillions of crabs and then you put them in this set up and let them kind of compute stuff. Would the collective end up having consciousness as an emergent property?

I mean, who knows? Well, I mean, this is a topic for a future episode because I've been thinking a lot about it. Up until a week ago, I was very much like, Yes, it must emerge somehow. You get a big enough complex thing and it's going to start thinking, you know what? I'm feeling this and I'm doing this. I exist. I have a self.

And I'm starting to not believe that so much now. I'm starting to wonder if experiences, phenomenons, like feelings are just part of the universe like electromagnetism and gravity. Yeah. Wait, are we talking about pan-psychism here? Yeah, we are. Okay, all right, we're doing. Okay, okay, stop what you're doing, everyone. We need to do an episode of Pan Psychism.

Yeah, I don't feel like I'm ready yet for it, but I'm just feeling like when you really lay down what I believe and what I think we know well, there's only a few conclusions, and it just seems a lot more elegant. It doesn't mean it's true. I should tell you, I've switched. I've switched, by the way,

and probably actually also, definitely within the last month, I've switched. I think I used to think that consciousness wasn't an emergent property of complexity or intelligence, if you will, but that it was a property that came from evolution. And now I think I might change my mind. Yeah, I just, I've worked really hard for years on consciousness, clearly came about through evolution. How is it fit? But the problem is I just don't think that it's fit. I don't believe that a phenomenal zombie version of us would be any different.

Brian, look what you've done. Whether agriculture helps feed you or it helps feed you and makes you feel good doesn't change whether you do it or not. All right, we're going to park this one because there is, I can't just that we've already gone through. cheering machines, the illusion of consciousness, sort of infinite hard drives. And Brian just wanted to do a cute limerick. I know. I was really shocked by where this went.

I'm like, oh, she's going to tell us a story about bees, and then, you know, we'll move on to another question. Instead, you're like, why do I exist? Should we go on to another question? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, here's what I've noticed, Michael. We originally were like, oh, we'll just do half an episode a week on,

Questions will just quickly, bam, bum, bam, bam, bam, bam, quick fire. Turns out all these questions that people are asking us, they're like episodes in themselves. We don't get questions like, hey, how long could a rabbit live? You know, we don't get Googlerable questions. Okay, this is from Gabolo Kotaas. Do languages and also accents shape facial features through the muscles they make us use and therefore give us subtle but unique characteristics? I love this question because we,

We don't totally know. And yet it feels like it could be true. And yet many people believe that it's completely ridiculous. That the language you speak changes the way your face looks. Now, on the surface of it, sure, right? Like I'm using my lips and my cheeks and my tongue and my jaw to make noises. And so if I'm speaking one language or another, my whole life, isn't that going to change the musculature of my skull?

Now, here's some things that I found. First of all, it is pretty easy to get a computer to guess what language someone is speaking just by looking at their face. Even just their cheeks and eyes, you can easily tell if a language is tonal or not by how people are moving their facial muscles. There's also an interesting little fact about this language called Co. Coe was a two language from South Africa. and there was a linguist name Anthony Trail who learned it. And he learned this language and he spoke it for a long time. And he developed a bump on his larynx.

Because of the sounds in this language, I don't know how this comes about. But biologically, it did cause a growth on the larynx. And all the adult speakers of the language co have this bump. The children don't because they haven't spoken the language long enough to have developed the bump. but this South African white guy, Anthony Trail, I don't actually know the color of his skin. But the point is that he was not a native who learned co as his first language.

He developed this bump as well. What does Coe sound like? Do you know? I don't know. I love how it's spelled, though. Exclamation point, capital X, O with a mark above it that's diagonal, and then O with a tilde above it.

Co. Oh. It's a language that might actually have the largest number of phonemes of any language in the world, where a phoneme are the perceptually, like, different speech sounds in a language. Wow. Oh, it's one with lots of cliques, click consonants. It's got the clicks. It's got...

And here's the thing that I also found. There are a lot of phonemes, like language sounds, that are very common, like the sound of the letter M, or the sounds of the vowel A, a, those are, we see those a lot but there are some that we don't see as often and they seem to

potentially correlate with certain lifestyles. So there are some sounds called labiodental sounds and it is what it sounds like it's the lips and the teeth. So the V-V-V-V-V-V sound

and the F-F sound where I've got my lower lip hitting my teeth. There's a theory out there that those Those sounds didn't emerge in human languages until we were eating soft enough foods. And it is true that if you look at cultures around the world, tribal cultures especially that eat like unmilled grains, their teeth are more flat in the front. And I'm not sure how this works.

I'm not an orthodontist. But they don't have their front teeth ahead of their bottom teeth. making the labiodental noises, the V's and the F's harder to do or just not more natural. Because if you run through the alphabet, actually, there are, you don't touch your lips very often at all. Hang on, let me just work it out. I think there's in like three possibly four letters where you actually touch your lips together, right? B, P. B, M, and W.

The sound of W is like your lips are just teasing each other. They're not totally touching Wua, what, ma, ma. If they touch, it's an M sound. Ma, ma, ma, wah, wah, wah, wah. I found that very surprising when I learned that fact because I think you sort of imagine that your lips are together all the time during speech,

but actually it's a really small fraction of the letters that you're using. Oh man, there's even like a little riddle about this where it's like what is different about these two sentences and it's whether or not your lips touch during them. Anyway, I was really intrigued by this question and I was amazed that we, I wasn't amazed, but I was even more interested when I found that we are kind of dancing around trying to answer the question because I also feel like people, even in the mid 20th century, like in the 50s, their just faces looked different. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it because they were talking different their whole lives? What I mean is when I see an actual photo from like 1957 of people, I go, I believe it.

But when a really great art designer and costume and makeup department recreates the 50s and they use the exact camera that would have been used back then, I still feel like I look at it and I'm like, I can tell that those people aren't really from the 50s. So I latched on to this question and the research I found by going, I think maybe the facial musculature could have been different. because their accents, their dialects were a little bit different. The words and the vocabulary they used day to day was different. As it turns out, maybe not. A lot of researchers who actually are in this field say most of those facial differences purely come from grooming, style, and diet. That changes over time.

But this is something that I want to do a lot more research on because it's a whole thing. The idea that you put Timothy Shalame in a movie set, in the past, and that no one believes that he's from the past. Because why? They say he's got iPhone face. They say his face looks like a face that has seen an iPhone. And you can't put your finger on exactly why, but it does not look like it belongs 200 years in the past.

iPhone face. And I kind of get it. And then you watch like Carl Malden in some older movie, and you're like, that guy, that face doesn't exist anymore. That is a face from a generation or two. ago. Now, I don't know what to make of all of these feelings and observations, but I think even language and what we say plays a role in it. I think you're right that it's like even if, well, the world needs to a lot more research to really be able to tell for sure, but I think mechanistically,

I think I can see why this might be the case. I sort of believe that there's a path that might cause this. I think I found your riddle, by the way. Is it this one? When you say the word touch, your lips don't touch. But when you say the word separate, they do. The way it works is that you play this game with people where they just say words or you say words and you say whether they touch or not. You'll say lemons touch, oranges don't touch. And the person tries to guess what the commonality is. Why do lemons touch? Is it because they're like acidic? And you're like, Nope, that's not it. And they go, okay, what about bananas?

And you're like, bananas touch. And they go, okay, what about, what about doors? And you say, doors don't touch. And they're trying to figure out the rule that separates the touching from the not touching. And it turns out to be whether or not your lips touch when you say the word. And it takes, like, in some cases hours for someone to figure it out. Usually they don't. Monkeys touch, but gorillas don't.

Yes, exactly. That's the game. It's a fun game to play with someone. Oh, this is going to infuri it everybody. Who knows me over the course of the following week? Should we go to a break and then onto your object? Let's go to a break and we'll come back and we'll look at some things I brought. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins.

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This episode is brought to you by Defender. With its 626 horsepower twin-turbo V8 engine, the Defender Octa is taking on the Dakar rally, the ultimate off-road challenge. Learn more at land rover.ca. Okay, welcome back. During the break, I had another thought about the touching game. What I love about it is that psychologically, it's so, it's such a great demonstration of how little attention we pay to the physicality of word and speech production with our lips and tongue.

Because people sit there going, apples touch, oranges don't. And they cannot figure out what touching means in that context. But if you know the rule, you're like, how do you not get it? It's so obvious. Then I started thinking, it wasn't even that long of a break, but I started thinking, it wasn't even that long of a break. But I started thinking about touching and how when you touch yourself, you can actually change which hand is doing the touching and which is being touched. You can switch in your mind which one is touching and which one isn't.

That game reminds me of a drinking game that I played once at university. My friend introduced it to everybody and by the end we all wanted to punch him because none of us could work it out. And it was that he would say a sentence and the rule was whether he started with an um. That was it. Oh, wow. And I bet it took like all night. Honestly, all night, all night. None of us noticed.

It was in, honestly, it was infuriating. And I really noticed this actually that with all of my years of training of being, I don't know, working on the BBC, I am so. unbelievably sensitive to people starting sentences with so. But I think almost nobody else in the world notices it. I know what you're talking about because there's a game called You Can't Say Um. And I played it over Thanksgiving with my family. And also as like someone who presents a lot and writes scripts a lot, I'm very aware of what words I'm saying.

And it was like trivially, easily, easy for me to not say certain words. but like everyone else in my family struggled so much to not say um or uh and I just was like aren't you aware of it right before you say it it's like so I think these are all skills that you can learn just like once you know that touching

means lips touching you immediately get it and you hear it all the time during the game yeah I still say like too much but hey that's my Essex background all right let's let's see what you got for me today Michael okay well I got a couple of things one actually came from a viewer, and I wanted to talk with you about it.

So a listener named Michael, Michael Rourke, who, by the way, makes it clear that he's a Michael and not a Mike, just like me. I've never felt like a Mike. There's a guy I met. I'm not going to give too many details, but he calls me Mike, and I'm like, you don't know my soul at all, dude.

Okay. I feel the same. Whenever anyone accidentally calls me Han, there's something inside me that just... Han. Han, oh no. I'm sure you get a lot of Hannah-Banana. Not if I can help it. Not if you can, okay. Maybe.

It only happens once, Mike. Okay. My daughter, my daughter calls you the Fry person. Yeah, I like that. She's really stuck on the fact that your last name is Fry, and that's who you are. Oh, I like her. So anyway, you know, we did an episode about time and about how the calendar and the numbering system for the years came about. Well, Michael Rourke emailed us.

a Holocene calendar that he put together himself. So the Holocene calendar starts with zero, not at the birth of Christ, but at the beginning of the Holocene era. Okay, so what does that mean? Geologically, it means the end of what we call the Ice Age. Okay, when Earth started warming up again, suddenly there's, I mean, we don't know a lot about what it was like back then.

But this was a major turning point in human history. history, but also the history of Earth. So it's kind of perfect. It's like both geological and anthropological. Anyway, this happened what like 10,000 or a few more years ago. And if you, if you count that as zero, it makes it easier to talk about human history because you're not having to deal with BC, AD, or, you know, BCE and C.E. And of course, our current system doesn't even have a year zero. So it's really hard to calculate ages and stuff that span that gap. And I personally, I've talked about this before, one of my biggest pet peeves is the way BC numbers work. And when people say things like, well, in the first millennium BC, my brain always goes, first millennia BC means 1,000 BC.

But it doesn't. It means everything before that because the first 1,000 years of BC mean as you go backwards from zero, the first 1,000 years you hit. So 200 BC, 12 BC, 900 BC. that's the first millennia BC. The second millennia BC is the 1,000 BCs. Oh, I hate it. Whereas the Holocene calendar allows you to just say... The year 8,000 and 40, whatever, yeah.

Exactly. So like pottery was invented in the year 2000. There you go. Because zero is whatever 12,000 years ago. To convert the current year to the Holocene calendar, you just add 10,000. So right now it is the year 12,000, 20,000. Hey, we missed the great 10,000 anniversary of pottery. I know, we did.

26 years ago, pottery turned 10,000. And I forgot to get it anything. I was going to get it this really cool clay pot. And I thought, oh, shoot, that's you. But anyway, Michael Rourke, let me read you. He sent this email in about how we mentioned the Holocene calendar in that video. And he thought, man, this perspective is so cool. He wanted to visualize it.

And so he put together a website. We'll link it here where you've got the entire Holocene era and notable events from it, both from a standpoint of politics, science, all these different events. And you can scroll through it and see how close together they are or how far apart they are. You can even change how many pixels there are between every year. So you can crunch everything together or spread it out. But I actually had a hard time finding anything like this because I would love to be able to say things like, well yeah you know Jesus was crucified in the year 10,030 like that I just it's just more clear

I'd love to be able to say things like the Mayflower landed in 11 620 now that's a big number I get it but it's better for BC things but also I think what this does is it just puts ourselves in a better perspective of our of our history and our ancestors I think it connects us to the past in it just a really different way because all of a sudden then, you know, I don't know, people going on about the Second World War and like political agreements after it and it was such a long time ago and whatever. And it's like when you put it on this scale, no, it really wasn't. I know.

I know. Exactly. If you have to talk about the 40s versus the 90s, it sounds like there are two different universes. But if you talk about events that happened in 11-945 and 11-990, it sounds like they're really the same. And that better fits the actual scale of human history. I love saying like, oh yeah, the Great Wall was constructed in the 9700s. And I don't have to use BC because I think saying BC makes it almost sound like in fictional times. Like it's a different world, but it's not. It's still the world that we are reacting to and living in in many ways. I mean, are we,

we're still in the Stone Age. Look how much concrete we use every year. Give me a break. Also, copper smelting, 4,500. That just makes way more sense to me. Yeah, in the 11-300's, Black Death Time, not good. But only a blip when you consider the history back to the beginning of the Holocene era. Yeah, and then in the 11500s, we've got Galileo. We've got Shakespeare. I think people might be annoyed if I use this more often,

but I really want to use it especially because, like I said, I've been doing a lot of research on how consciousness has changed over time. as potentially revealed through the literature humans have written. And I hate that there was obviously such a change in the first millennia BC and the second. And I'm having to talk about BC and thousands of years ago. And I want to be able to just say, look, let me give these all positive integers. And then it's easier. I tell you what this really does, just scrolling through it.

I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. And I'm so impressed that he coded this over his Christmas break as well. But what this really, really hammers home for me is just the sort of exponential acceleration of progress and technology. Because this thing, you know, nothing happens for such a long time. And then they start popping up, events start popping up pottery, copper smelting, you know, domestication of the horse, the sort of the Bronze Age, ancient Egypt and so on and so on and so on. And then they start picking up around the turn of when the Romans come to be. But then you get into the modern era.

And it is like, bam, bam, bam, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, I mean, absolutely constant. These extraordinary, extraordinary moments, civilization-changing moments happening, you know, literally all of the time. That's right. And it really makes me reflect on the difference between things happening and civilization-relevant things happening. Because of course, between the domestication of the dog and pottery, a lot of stuff happened. People lied to each other. They fell in love. They had children. They lost loved ones. But the stuff that makes it onto a timeline like this is the civilization technology-based stuff. It's pottery. It's the kings and the battles. It's the construction of stuff. It's the moon landing.

it's vaccines. And of course, as those become more relevant to what it means to be human, we're like, oh, there's so many now. But gosh, imagine if you lived at the beginning of the Holocene where nothing ever happened. There were no moon landings. There was no AI. There was no Super Bowl every year. But it's like, wow, that's a very biased way of thinking. Yeah, because you're missing the heartbeats of individual human lives. And of course, like writing only existed around like 3,000 BC. So there's a lot of prehistory here where the majority of humans lived that we just don't have records of. Writing has only been around since like 3,000 BC. We've only had written stuff for like 5,000 years. Yeah.

So to put this in the Holocene calendar, we're talking about writing didn't exist until the 7,000s. But humans had been around, living in settlements, participating in agriculture, had been happening for 7,000 years before they were like, Oh, dude, let's like write down, you know, how much oil you owe me. That's incredible. And from there, we see the emergence of history as we know it. That's what history is. It's written accounts. What about art?

Did art, like, the cave paintings, when were those? I mean, those were, that's all the way through this, right? All the way through this, there were some forms of art in paintings. Oh, yeah. I mean, art predates the Holocene. I mean, depending on how you define art. there's human-made artworks that seem to just exist

for their aesthetic value potentially long before the Ice Age even ended. I mean, humans were around like anatomically, behaviorally modern humans were around before the Ice Age ended. But as the Ice Age ended, it's pretty cool. I mean, so much of this is speculative,

but it was quick. Ice melted. Glaciers retreated really quickly. Like within 50 years, oceans rose to a point where it was like, okay, we've got to move our settlement. And that could have spawned agriculture. In fact, a lot of that rising sea level at that time could also explain ancient flood myths and where they came from, that they really were in oral traditions, that they were being shared as like, oh, you know, I've always heard that there was this flood. And that may have been true.

Like Noah's Ark, for example. Noah's Ark, Gilgamesh. We see these flood myths all over the place. and they may have, when they were first written down, they may have been the results of a long, multi-millia game of telephone. It reminded me of this book. I wanted to leave you with some things from this book.

It's called If. And it's like, it's a great book for kids, actually, but it's good for everybody. A mind-bending new way at looking at big ideas and numbers. It's full of wonderful illustrations and visualizations of time and money and population. So like, here's the page. on life on earth and it breaks down life on earth into say like one hour okay if if the whole

story of life on earth was all condensed into just one hour when would things happen so let's let's just say let's just say that this it's compressed into the hour between uh noon and one okay so noon is when the very first life forms like one-celled organisms appear like bacteria and one o'clock is today, this very moment that I'm talking. Okay, so here's what happens. First life forms form within that first second. But it's not until 1251 that fish appear on Earth. The dinosaurs arrive at 1256, and they only exist for three minutes.

And then mammals appear at about 56 minutes and 25 seconds. The earliest birds appear at 1258, two minutes until today. And modern humans, the ones that we're related to that are biologically and anatomically modern, they show up at 1259 and 59.59 seconds. No! Two tenths of a second before right now. But hold on a second. That's still way before even the beginning of this calendar, right?

Yes. Yes, I know. Wow. It's nothing. And then here's something that's not related to time. Well, it's not related to history so much as it's related to your life. There's a page about if your life was a pizza. Here we go.

Okay, so if your life was a pizza, cut into 12 slices. Here's what all those slices could represent. Four of them would be the time that you spend in school or at work. Another four of them would be the time that you spend getting ready to and sleeping, getting ready to sleep and sleeping. So you spend four of your slices sleeping, four of them at work. That's already eight of the 12. One slice would be spent shopping, caring for others, and doing things around the home.

One slice would be spent traveling, whether it be to school on errands, on holidays. One slice would be the time that you spend preparing food and eating. And that final 12th slice would be the time that you spend on leave. leisure activities, whether that's recreation, exercise, games, surfing the internet. Wow. And that's your life as a pizza. There's a book by Oliver Burke, 4,000 weeks. It actually says the average human life is 4,000 weeks long.

Yep. And talks about how that should change your perspective of what you want to do with it, you know? I should check that out because I think about that a lot. I think about 4,000 weeks means that I only get in my life 4,000 Saturday. Yeah, yeah. And then it starts shrinking as you start to say, well, but how many, how many rainy Saturdays am I going to get? How many rainy Saturdays with my daughter am I going to get? And the number becomes magnificently small.

It really does. I think especially when you think about, let's say, if you have parents who are around, you know, and you've left home already, once you start counting, the number of times that you have left when you're going to get to spend really good time with them, really good quality time. Exactly as you said, it's vanishingly, terrifyingly small. I know. It's a good exercise though, you know. I think it's so easy to go through life, seeing the little bubble that you're in. But I think that stuff like this, like Michael has built, of understanding the context of your life, your human life, in the moment. much bigger picture of who we are and where we've come from, how it's so much bigger than you,

and then looking at things like your if book of understanding what you have for yourself in the context of what you have left. I think it's a really useful exercise to do. I know. It makes you think so many things like, gosh, if I spend a third of my life sleeping, which we all do, about a third of our life is spent sleeping, then I'm not 40. I'm 26. That's how much life experience I actually have. Are we counting the traveling time? I'm happy to keep the sleep bit. I just want to get rid of the traveling bit.

That was the bit that was the most painful. Yeah, right? I mean, but at the same time, traveling can be worth it. You know, if you're traveling with people or even traveling by yourself, then it gives you time to think through something. Maybe it's worth having a slice be just that. Not always. Depends what you do when you travel.

Well, okay, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that mind expanding. episode at Field Notes. Love doing Fields Notes episodes with you, Michael. Always, always fun. You can join us again next week. We're back on Tuesday with our usual episode and another podcast expedition on Thursday next week. If you've got any questions you'd like us to answer, make sure you send them into us. The Restis Science at goahunger.com. And you can join our newsletter at the rest is.com slash science. See you next week. See you next week. Thank you for spending some of your slice with us. Ha ha.