ASM209 Grounding, Friendship, and the Senses of Plants

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grounding friendship and the senses of plants all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] well hello friends and welcome to another episode of ask science mike this is a weekly program where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host i'm mike mccarg the internet calls me science mike and usually when i'm talking right now there's a background music and all kind of stuff but i'm i'm wondering if this year for a season i'm gonna try uh to do the intro without all of that uh production because i'd like to see if uh if i can be even more sincere and even more myself in our time together each week and i think maybe just talking to you without the music in the background makes that easier for me so i wonder if we could just try that together still love the theme song theme song as you heard is there um but i'd like to just drop right into talking together and we've got some really fascinating questions on the show this week that i can't wait to share with you uh before we do that though i'd like to talk to you about times in the near future when we could be together in a physical space and not just in the car or the subway or the gym or wherever you happen to be listening right now and what's really neat about these events is i could see your face and uh hear your voice did i say hear your face i can see your face and hear your voice and we can talk with each other so in january from the 20th to the 27th i'm going to be at the first presbyterian church in fort smith arkansas for something called a week with mike mccarg which is so much fun i've done it before i'll be at the sunday morning service and then i'll give a talk every night of the week that week so for those of you who are fort smith residents that's a great time if you just want to get a whole lot of time with science mike you can do that and if you're in the area it means you can come see me any night that works for you and i'll be there i'm gonna be uh uncovering and discussing some topics from my next book for the first time so uh that could be really exciting if you're anywhere near fort smith uh february the 9th and this is so exciting i'm going to be back in portland with my friends at cascade church and the event is called the goodness of every body exploring ableism and embodiment with stephanie tate and science mike i hope you remember stephanie from an earlier episode of this program one of the later episodes in 2019 uh stephanie is wonderful i so enjoyed talking with her and i got such great feedback on the episode that she and i thought gosh what if we just did an episode together and had this conversation in person with a lot of friends so tickets are on sale right now for that event the goodness of everybody for folks in portland and then finally april the 25th right before my next book comes out i'm going to be at first christian church in tyler texas so i'd love to see you at any of those as always those events are on my website at mikemccarg.com events or you can go to asksciencemike.com and click on the events tab and you'll get all those listings with times and dates and places to buy tickets if necessary and all that good stuff thank you so much friends for all you're doing we're seeing a lot more questions coming in for the show again it seems that mentioning on the program that you can ask questions helps people remember that's a thing uh if you'd like to have a question uh submitted to ask science mike and you can do so by going to asksciencemike.com and we really mean it we welcome all sincere questions you know a lot of the questions here on the show are are about uh you know simple curiosity which i celebrate things about science and but then people also uh ask questions they've they've been afraid or unable to ask people in their lives either now or in the past and i love making the space for those kinds of questions where i can offer a response not always an answer i don't have answers to every question but i do have a response to every question and that's what this show is about is that questions deserve responses at least sincere questions don't send sarcastic or cynical questions you may we probably won't select them for the show but sincere questions coming from a place of a genuine desire to grow and learn and share are what ask science mike is all about and with that i'd like to get us into our first question for this week hey mike my name is john and i'd like to hear your thoughts on what senses the plants have and how do they differ to our own human senses for example can a plant hear or respond to sound waves thanks so much if you're ever in melbourne australia these are on me john thank you for such a delightful unique and interesting question i'll start with the easy short response and that's yes absolutely plants have senses and comparing plants senses to our own is is is verging on impossible i don't know where i would begin to compare how plants experience the world with how we do because the architecture of our respective organisms and our our branches of the great tree of life uh are so so so different you know i've read a book i really enjoyed called other minds that showed me the ways in which some animal cognition is so alien and far into the human experience that the gap is almost unbridgeable and that gap is simply much much greater for plants of but let's talk about some of the ways that plants have senses and the way they experience the world and see if that might at least uh promote or provoke our imaginations into a sense of wonder and awe it certainly did for me as i contemplated this question flowers listen they hear that's for many plants the sensing part of the organism at least in terms of sound or hearing now obviously there's some big differences in how plants here versus people do people we have outer ears that channel pressure waves in the atmosphere to particular sensing organisms or excuse me sensing organs in our inner ear our eardrum and the systems associated with it transform those changes in pressure in atmospheric waves into nerve signals and those nerve signals travel to our brain where they are processed now of course with some complexity it's not just our brains they're involved in our auditory processing our polyvagal nervous system is involved as well but let's not complicate the matter for now let's just say that human nerve signals from the ear go to the brain where they're processed by neurons into sound and they provoke thoughts and feelings and experiences in humans and that's pretty similar to other animals especially mammals how they hear and how they experience things plants here too but not with ear drums and not with nerves and not with neurons but how do we know that plants can hear well we have found that uh flowers seem to somehow hear the buzz of bees that pass by and when they hear that bees are close by they produce sweeter nectar they they spend more of their energy reserves to put more sugar and nectar to try to entice the bees to come and visit because of course bees play a critical role in plant reproduction and that means that you know the flowers are the the ear now uh for a plant we can replicate that in laboratory settings and we can create b like sounds and find that we can get plants to kind of produce sweeter nectar on demand isn't that wild isn't that wild so both field recordings of bees and low frequency simulations are enough to change this mix of nectar in just a couple of minutes it happens quite fast so we think of plants as being very slow in responding to their environment but at least when it comes to hearing bees they can actually make really rapid changes interesting so plants absolutely here but what other senses do we have well we understand that it seems that plants have a sense of uh touch uh through an understanding probably a vibration uh in addition to hearing bees they can also sometimes hear predators crawling on them and then they can change their chemical composition to be less tasty or less nutritious to different pests and then one thing i learned somewhat distressingly is i love the smell of fresh cut grass it smells different than grass does usually and that's because you're smelling a chemical distress call that plants use to signal that they are under attack and if you imagine being a grass my goodness what is a significant strike a lawn mower blade isn't and to systematically cut such a large patch of grass at once so we have these plants signaling they are in distress plants can't move so plants don't have the option to flee when they're in distress so they've learned to cooperate together and communicate what's happening to them as a favor to their neighbor hoping that their neighbor will do the same if it's good for one plant it's probably good for all of them and so if instead of lawnmower blades it was insects then you know the grass can change their growth patterns and the thickness of their cell walls and all sorts of things to try to be less tasty [Music] some evidence out of the university of missouri columbia found that plants could even understand respond to chewing sounds by caterpillars they can hear the noise and then begin to respond this can be done through pheromones this can be done through chemical signals in the soil so the plant experiences it and then shares its experience with others so we even understand that plants have many of the similar genes for responding to light that animals do and we know that in some primitive way plants can see they know when it's light or when it's dark or which direction the light is coming from and in fact can grow to do that they do all sorts of complex behaviors based on their sensory information and being stuck in a rooted state as plants grow they can reach out for things for support how do they do that isn't that remarkable um plants can change direction to maximize the amount of sunlight light that falls on their leaves and not just temperature but the length of the days impact when plants drop their leaves so they're aware of how much light there is in a day in fact it seems that plants even have some form of memory because if you think about a venus fly trap you have to touch not one but two of the triggering hairs uh in a venous fly traps um i don't know what you call it leaf i suppose which means it has to remember if one has been hit and experiments that memory lasts about 20 seconds so plants can feel they can communicate they can hear in some way they can see so does that mean plants think and that's where things get interesting we know that plants have no neurons but they do have neurotransmitters and that some of the neuroactive chemicals we use in our medications can actually affect plants if we expose them to it because they have for example dopamine receptors and some of their cells isn't that remarkable um it doesn't appear that plants they don't have brains and it doesn't appear they build the same complexity in their model or or or that they don't seem to form their experiences into a narrative certainly but on some level plants are aware of what is happening and respond to changes in the environment and so i would personally say that at a very basic or rudimentary level plants are conscious although i wouldn't say they have cognition or they think i would say that do plants feel pain gosh i don't even know if scientists could answer that now some say yes some say no and philosophers are equally divided it turns out that to survive on this planet requires remarkable sophistication and what i've been learning the last few years is animals that i've always thought as primitive like plants and microbial life are actually remarkably sophisticated and that in many ways they live out their lives in ways that are not dissimilar from my own they want safety they want to survive and they take actions to get those things so yes plants can hear and have senses and yes those senses are wildly different from our own i wouldn't go so far as to say that eating plants is unethical but i would say the fact that all life seems to have some level of awareness and that all life relies on consuming other life to survive means that we should be mindful and aware of our actions in the world and how it impacts all forms of life um plants seem to be able to respond to damage in a way that seems remarkably similar to other organisms expressing pain and the way that we move through the world not only in how we eat but how we utilize natural resources i think should reflect our awareness as a deeply thinking species that all life has experiences and because we have the power to consider the impact of our actions we also have a responsibility to move through the world in a way that minimizes our lived experiences causing suffering or difficult experiences for the other life on this planet [Music] april 28 2020 is such a big day for me because my next book is coming out it's called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass and uh i just am delighted with that book i started writing a book that was about my journey to growth and healing at a time i thought that journey was just about wrapped up and then things started to happen i started to have health challenges i lost a dear friend my daughter was diagnosed with eating disorder i was diagnosed with autism and i started to have panic and anxiety attacks and i realized that this journey of growth that i was on was not over at all and that not only affected my life that affected the book that i was trying to write and so this book that started out as a mainly cognitive psychology and philosophical look at why our feelings and behaviors are so often different from what we would wish them to be became a firsthand account of a really difficult season of growth my friends i am just so proud of this book because i think it's going to do a good job helping inspire people on growth of journey and transformation of their own it's a first-hand look at my process of moving into trauma therapy to deal with wounds that i had buried for a long time and even as someone who's very focused on self-improvement and personal growth there was still more digging to do and so this book goes into compelling ideas in the world of psychology and neurobiology and even behavioral economics not to make us smarter but to invite you into a sense of self-understanding that leads to a sense of self-acceptance and the reason that's important to me is not just because i want you to like you and to have a more positive life experience as a result but when we learn to like and accept ourselves it also makes it easier for us to live in community with others in a way that doesn't hurt ourselves or other people so the book is called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass and comes out april 28th and why am i telling you now well one you could pre-order the book and you could get it the very first week and because you're a listener of ask science mike i know you really care about my life and my work and the fact is pre-orders and the the sales of the first week are the most helpful for me personally they help build a lot of excitement around the book and ultimately get more people to read it but the other thing i want you to know is that we're putting together a book tour and because we're putting together a book tour in a way that supports my physical and mental health by the way i am not re-entering old patterns of self-exploitation that put me in the hospital but we're we're gonna have more opportunities to get me in more different kinds of rooms next year than maybe ever before we're gonna do big rooms with fancy lights and we're gonna do churches and we're gonna do corporate campuses and we're going to do conferences but we're also going to do small rooms and living rooms and so no matter what kind of a venue you have access to there's an opportunity that that venue could be a part of this wonderful book tour that is going to be about self-acceptance and affirmation and growth so if you're interested in that you could just go to mikemcarg.com speaking or you can use the book mike button up in the menu if you can't spell mike mccarthy just go to ask sciencemike.com and it links right to it and i'd just love to see you in 2020 as i get the word out about this book i think friends that this book of everything i've done in my life this is what i'm most proud of when i've had people read early copies of the book the feedback i've gotten is resounding and immediate there's something in these pages that really impacts people so you can check it out it's available everywhere bookstores are sold for pre-order bookstores are sold i don't think there's anywhere that bookstores are sold it's available in all stores that sell books in person and online and you can pre-order it and if you'd be interested in being part of the book tour uh it's still not too late to submit your venue or your church or your company for consideration on my website thanks so much [Music] okay our next question is an email question and it reads within the christian community it seems very rare to find men and women who are encouraged to develop friendships that echo the biblical command of becoming community treating each other as brothers and sisters in christ as a happily married woman whose best friend is a man and not the one i'm married to i receive so much good intended christian advice warnings to be careful that our friendship is a slippery slope and that we're not honoring to our marriages you seem to have a deep friendship with hillary mcbride and i'm curious on your take i hate that culture seems to reinforce that the only into a cross gender friendship is sex how do we pursue deep meaningful friendships with both genders in the pursuit of biblical family still maintaining honoring marriages while fighting the impression that there's only one way that this can end thank you for your question i bet as i read that a lot of people related i bet some people felt seen and known and i bet some people felt triggered so before i respond to your question i wonder if i could respond to people's responses to your question this show is a very uh mixed space in terms of faith experiences we have people who uh identify as pretty much any branch of institutional christianity that you can imagine evangelical people mainline people charismatic people catholic people uh if it's a branch of the christian tree people who are mormon then they are listening to the show we have people who identify with other faith transitions people who are a jewish or muslim or buddhist who listen to this program we have people who aren't sure what they believe at all that's a huge block of the audience actually and then we also have agnostic people and atheists that listen to this program and for those folks there's two at least two ways to respond some people heard you say things like brothers and sisters in christ biblical family and terms like that and they said finally science mike show is starting to sound christian and other people heard it and go went oh no we please don't take me to that place that hurt me so much and my friends i just want you to know that however you respond to these terms around relationships that are associated with modern christianity you are welcome and safe on this podcast okay i care about your feelings and i care about your life experiences and so as i i respond to this question i want to make sure that i've named that that everybody's belief systems belong and everybody's belief systems are okay now in the past i would have used a lot of similar language here brothers and sisters in christ biblical family because of theological changes i don't relate to those terms the same way that i once did so to you dear asker dear seeker i want you to know that i relate to your question even though i might not use some of the same terms in the same way anymore for example i don't i don't know what it means to honor a marriage anymore or what a biblical family is i've deconstructed all that stuff and haven't figured out how to put it back together but i think my answer is going to surprise a lot of people here my response to your question i think that taboos in faith communities are often based on a more fundamental wisdom that is true and is wise here's a fact there's a lot of infidelity in relationships in romantic relationships and sexual relationships a lot of people cheat and when people have infidelity in relationship in a way that is violating consent and boundaries people get hurt the spouse or partner being cheated on gets hurt the person who is in the process of engaging in infidelity often gets hurt and the person who this spouse is cheating with often gets hurt and sometimes people who are engaged in a you know a relationship of this kind they're both in committed relationships with someone else so the first thing i would say to anyone listening is it is best to communicate it's best to communicate if you're dissatisfied in a committed relationship and you find that you're finding satisfaction somewhere else in a way that your heart is moving you face a choice you can reinvest and try to work through your existing relationship and that's an ethical choice or you can seek to exit that committed relationship do some self-work and then engage in new relationships and that's an ethical choice but i think infidelity though i understand it and sympathize with it and empathize with it is ultimately not a healthy expression of relationship but the good meaning christian advice here that you've received is a sometimes hurtful and sometimes unhealthy way of people expressing their anxiety about how secure relationships are and how common cheating is i'd also like to say that people of many different gender identities and sexual orientations listen to this program and when we talk about things like uh cross-gender friendship if you're trans or bisexual or polysexual or pansexual some of those rubrics just don't apply to you right i hear so often that the best thing in friendship when we try to be more progressive is to have close friendships with people of gender identities to whom we're not attracted but if you're bisexual or pansexual that just isn't helpful at all you are attracted to many or all expressions of gender identity and so then your whole experience is erased and set aside so i wanted to name that that i believe that good advice and good strategies for relational help would support and include people of all gender identities and all sexualities and people of all gender identities and all sexualities engage in cheating or infidelity why gosh there's so many reasons i could think of there's no way i could do a comprehensive answer on the show so i'll just i'll just go with some ones that come to mind if that's okay first people have different expressions of codependency and they might be in a codependent relationship with their spouse and they might be in a cycle of self-numbing and self-erasure that makes it difficult for them to communicate their needs and their partner might be in the same cycle and so they both proceed out of a sense and a need to help the other an obligation to the other that frankly gets reinforced in many religious traditions and makes them unable to communicate their needs or take responsibility for meeting their own needs and that sense of you know dissatisfaction or unfulfillment from unmet needs leads for people to search to have their needs met outside of their relationship now let me be clear the expectation that one person can meet all your emotional needs is highly misguided and sets people up for failure that expectation that when you marry someone they are your everything i believe sets relationships up to fail no one person can or should be your everything i think healthy relationships involve people going in eyes open and communicating with each other what needs they want to be addressing and and dealing with in their significant relationship and then what needs are okay to address in friendship and i think that every couple should have that conversation excuse me should have that conversation once and on an ongoing basis that that conversation is never over as people grow and people change and people go on journeys of transformation and health you should have ongoing conversations about what needs are being met what needs both partners desire remain exclusive to their relationship and what needs are filled by larger community i have found that my relationship with ginny is healthier when we are part of a vibrant and some more supportive community of people right i think that's very important so codependency plays a big role i think in why people have these fears about infidelity i think sexual addiction plays a role some people uh are addicted to thrilling sexual activity in a way that is coming from a place of psychological damage or trauma and that makes them at risk for infidelity they might have had a parental figure who didn't or neither parental figure adapted or excuse me demonstrated or modeled healthy relationship strategies so they never had a template to form those things on people have relationship addictions too some people only feel really alive in those initial stages of friendship and romantic relationship and they're always seeking out new people to get that thrill and that buzz and then they find themselves dissatisfied and bored with long-time partners and long-time friends because they have a relationship addiction i think toxic masculinity and feminine identity that's been co-opted by the patriarchy play a big role if you're a woman and you've been told that your job is to serve and to sexually satisfy your partner uh gross who wants to be involved in that if your value in the home is to keep the kitchen clean and the bed warm well gosh no one would be satisfied with that and it's sick twin toxic masculinity when men expect women to be subservient and submissive and are dissatisfied when they are not and also when men are afraid to share their feelings their sadness their fear their hopes their dreams for fear they won't look strong it makes us unable to communicate our needs as men and women and people of all gender identities in relationship i've noticed however sometimes that some of the best communication i've seen in relationships has happened between queer people gay people lesbian people trans people because they've had to write their own script in relationship they can't just buy some mega best-selling book off the shelf that tells them here's how to have a happy marriage they have to work it out in conversation with another person it doesn't matter what your friends think or what people at church think about your relationship with your best friend it matters what you think it matters what and it does matter what your spouse thinks and the trouble will come when communication breaks down between parties i believe that poor communication is the key in relational dysfunction that can play a role in making friendships with people and genders we're attracted to unsafe because if we're not communicating with our partner our romantic and or sexual partner our needs and they communicating to them to us and then we working through together ways our needs can be met then our psychology will almost inevitably start to seek out those needs in other places because gosh we are social beings most people thrive and benefit from being in relationship that includes people who are asexual or aromantic everyone benefits from relationship and for those of us who have sexual needs and sexual desire who don't identify as asexual well i won't dig we could do a whole thing on asexuality um for people who for whom sexual expression is an important part of their relationship uh we're talking about very deep drives deep desires and and for people uh for whom a romantic connection is a significant part of relationship those are deep hell drives the desire to be touched to be known to be connected with and then we bring into that the complex and often maladaptive relationships people in our society have with sexuality it seems to me so often we're offered a puritanical script and a promiscuous script as a reaction to the puritanical one and both hurt a lot of people one says that sex is shameful and one says that some of the difficulty you might have with sexual interaction is just your problem and your hang up and i don't believe that either things are true for most of my life i've been very prone to something called sexual anorexia because of sexual trauma in my past arousal is complicated for me so when i become aroused i typically become withdrawn i often have to dissociate in order to engage in sexual intimacy and that's been a difficult pattern in my marriage and my relationship so i guess the first thing i would say about me and hillary is that hillary and i can have a healthy relationship because jenny and i do jenny and i have faced such difficulties together i lost my faith and communicated that we went through some big uh changes in our community as a result we've moved across the country we've had challenges in parenting with our children we're each on our own journeys of growth and transformation to undo things we learned in the past and in that process we've maintained communication with one another and so even in times when we have felt things are difficult or dissatisfying we've been able to share that with each other and strategize and brainstorm together ways to make our our marriage more palatable for us both and because of that we've succeeded at that we have good times and bad times but we have more good times than bad times and even in our bad times i never feel alone in my marriage i always know that jenny is with me and she knows that i'm with her because we share that with each other and having seen hillary and her husband kevin together i know that they have a similar dynamic hillary and kevin openly communicate with one another and they work hard at maintaining open communication with each other and working on their relationship together and so because i've done a lot of work and i mean a lot of work confronting toxic masculinity and processing and dealing with my codependent tendencies and working on my communication style not only in my intimate relationship with jenny but the way i communicate with everyone because i've spent years learning and getting in touch with my sexuality and destigmatized and de-shaming my sexual desire all that was important work to lay groundwork for my friendship with hillary because when i've done that work i can feel great affection for hillary without confusing that affection for romantic attraction i can feel pleasure and happiness in my body if i were to touch hillary without channeling that directly into sexual arousal or an arousal response because i'm not afraid of my body and i'm not afraid of my sexuality i don't constantly obsess about where is this relationship going there is no inevitability in my life in my relationships that relationships move towards sex i am a person who chooses to be monogamous i enjoy monogamy i like having one partner who is the exclusive outlet for my sexual and romantic energies and for me that is wonderful and fulfilling and life-giving and it seems to be that for jenny that is also true but she and i have had open conversations about the structure of our relationship and why it is structured in that way and because i know where i stand with myself and because i know where i stand in my marriage that makes it so much easier for me to just be hillary's friend and i don't have a lot of baggage that i'm drawing in or bringing into that relationship hillary and i just get to be me and hillary we cry together we laugh together you're absolutely right that you've listening when you're listening that hillary and i have a deep friendship it is profoundly deep and i receive such joy and satisfaction and fulfillment in that relationship and i know that hillary does too and i'm careful and i'm careful with all people of all gender identities and all sexual orientations touch from me is consent based two people have to consent to a touch regardless of their relationship i ask for consent when i touch jenny when i touch my children i touch friends and family setting boundaries around ourselves is important and i also i do the work on my marriage i just do jenny and i are in process all the time i'm always thinking about our ratio of positives and negative interactions and intentionally trying to increase the number of positive interactions that we have i am also mindful of the amount of time that i spend with jenny i understand that part of the way human brains decide who they're attracted to is time and proximity so i just make sure i spend a lot of time in close proximity with my spouse because i made a choice that i'm going to have one sexual and romantic relationship with jenny i don't there's no magic bullet here it's the work of growing as people and self-knowledge and self-acceptance there's a time in my life where a relationship with hillary wouldn't have been a good idea not not as close as we are now i wouldn't have been able to understand it i would have gone taking that relationship to inappropriate places because i hadn't gotten in touch with my sexuality and i had such shame about my life and my process um and that's just not where i am today today i have close deep and intimate relationships with people of of all gender identities and all sexual orientations and i don't bring fear into that my friends and my friends and friendship can be very very intimate and wonderful and as i've learned to have intimate close friendships gosh you know what's happened my marriage has just gotten more wonderful as i've learned to communicate my needs not only with my spouse but with my friends as well i feel a deeper sense of satisfaction and fulfillment and that lets me show up in my marriage these things aren't compartmentalized they aren't in bubbles they're all connected we all have to face the difficult work of growing up and as we do whether we're 18 or 98 we have to unlearn a lot of things that we were taught by society and our family systems as children and i would just say that work is so valuable i'm in no place to judge or evaluate your relationship with your best friend or with your husband but you are and your opinion is the one that counts especially when you're mindful and aware over time of when your opinions might be misguided there's been times in my life where if someone tried to have a conversation with me about food i would have gotten very defensive but the fact was i didn't have a healthy relationship with food and i had to tell myself that i did in order to avoid a difficult process of healing and facing significant pain so i would say trust yourself and kind of hold yourself accountable sometimes when people express concern they're being busy bodies and speaking out of their own insecurity and disregard that stuff but sometimes when people express concern it is because they may see something that you don't and let me be clear oh my gosh i am not saying that is the case for you i have no idea from your email everything sounds on the up and up and healthy to me i'm saying cultivate self-knowledge and self-awareness and self-honesty and that will probably require trust-based safe relationships with other people just like marriage and just like intimate friendships [Music] hey mike james here if we ever make contact with alien life forms are they likely to be benevolent or are they likely to be like us interested to hear your thoughts on this thank you for all that you do gosh what a wonderful unanswerable question that one is ascribing likelihood of alien encounters is tough stuff because the way we assign probabilities and statistics is by quantifying things and comparing things to known models and there just aren't any known models for alien life we've never encountered any to our knowledge um and so that means trying to you know guess or assess uh what is up is it's just very difficult so i just wanted to name that whatever i say is extraordinarily likely to be wrong in the event that we ever encounter an alien species well let's think back to this very episode to the first question when we asked if plants have senses and we thought and contemplated if plants think and what their lived experience is like plants are an earth organism they're from this planet they have the same common ancestor that we do and plants are really different if we look inside the animal kingdom if we look at the octopus my gosh what an intelligent form of life with a completely dissimilar uh brain body architecture from us why why am i sharing this just on earth there's such a startling variety of life and differences in lived experience i just have to imagine anything alien is going to be truly alien bordering on incomprehensible to us and possibly we would border on incomprehensible to them there's a possibility that two forms of intelligence in this universe would fail to recognize each other as such what if the pace of cognition and communication is radically different what if there were intelligent beings whose lives were minutes long who are very small and we just thought they were some kind of strange bacteria or what about very large very slow beings whose words take hundreds of years to form we might think they were rocks you see what i mean there's a possibility that intelligent life would be wildly incomprehensible to us now there's a fantastic idea in science called the fermi paradox that i enjoy a great deal it's effectively this the universe is very very large and life even if it doesn't form often statistically given the size of the universe it should form more than once so where are the signs of other alien life out there why don't we just see a super highway of spacecraft through our solar system that's obvious with signs and markers and communication systems and that dilemma is called the fermi paradox and one possible solution to the fermi paradox is that life grows out of evolutionary systems and evolutionary systems inevitably produce a type of life that survives by eating other life that we would call predators and regardless of differences in physiology and survival strategies and climates ultimately if you are a predator cognition suits you the biggest brains tend to go to animals that eat other animals and therefore the most likely candidates to explore space would be other predators who would be aggressive and maybe the reason the sky is silent is because when species reach each other they annihilate each other or the more sophisticated of the species annihilates the other which is not a comforting thought if that's true we are on a tick tock timer waiting for one of these predatory species to notice our radio signals and make their way to the earth and let's be clear any life that can travel between the stars can harness energy on a level that humanity cannot imagine um and so there would be no war between us and such a species um so that's a possibility i i think you said do i think they'd be benevolent or like us i think maybe neither i think it's possible alien life will be incomprehensible to us if we encounter an intelligence i think statistically uh we're more likely to encounter primitive alien life than advanced alien life i think it's likely or at least possible that the universe is teeming with life but that that life is not often sophisticated enough to create radio waves or technology or civilizations i bet i bet there's all kinds of microbes all over the place maybe even in our solar system but i think intelligent life is probably much more rare just based on what i see in the sky i've included a link in the show notes on this one to a blog called wait but why and there's a very long but marvelous post there about the fermi paradox that i would imagine you would enjoy uh based on this question anyone else who's kind of fascinated by what aliens could be like and why we haven't heard from them yet uh would also enjoy this post again it's on the show notes on ask sciencemic.com okay our last question is an email question and it says hi mike as someone who goes barefoot as often as possible including outdoors in church and coffee shops that allow it i've often wondered what it would take to have some solid evidence to suggest the concept of grounding or earthing is a health benefit grounding according to one study i read refers to contact with the earth's surface electrons by walking barefoot outside or sitting working or sleeping indoors connected to conductive systems some of some of them patented that transfer the energy from the ground into the body i've read this study as a limited sample size and is potentially close to pseudoscience my commitment to bare feet is not rooted in this practice but it would be nice to know if the idea is at least grounded no pun intended in scientific thought or holds any merit at all here's a link to the study i mentioned thanks so much mitchell and for those of you listening i'll include a link to that study the one linked uh by mitchell in the show notes so that you can read it for yourself oh let's talk science literacy there's some there's some things that start to flag pseudoscience for me immediately to be clear before this question i was unfamiliar with grounding or earthing i'd never heard of it but as i started to evaluate some of the claims there were red flags number one was and you quoted transfer the energy from the ground to the body anytime you see the word energy used by itself that's a potential flag for pseudoscience scientists don't talk about energy now uh you know an economist might talk about energy meaning electrical energy or the energy we use to power economies and do significant work but scientists will never talk about just transferring energy they'll talk about electrical energy they'll talk about kinetic energy they'll talk about potential energy they won't just say energy in this nebulous term that is one of the markers of pseudoscience one of the ways that pseudoscience does its thing is through a lack of specificity so i went through and i read this entire paper that you linked and i do appreciate you for sharing it and i had immediate concerns um the the papers methodology is flawed the way research should work is you should have a hypothesis that is specific ideally there should also be a theory of a mechanism of action and then you test something specific looking for a specific outcome that you have determined in advance those are essential parts of doing good science and this paper um is let's say overly broad so instead of starting with a specific hypothesis and this specific set of tests they've just gone into all kinds of unrelated categories of factors to look at um and it's just kind of a mess and yes there are charts and graphs and data but it's not clear to me how that information was curated selected this is almost like a meta study a study of studies but it doesn't claim to be so it's like an amalgam of original research it's somewhere between a research publication and a white paper and those are just all things that concern me now you this is on nih.gov this is a place where real science gets published and that's what we have to understand like you can publish anything ideally in the scientific process peer review would uh and reproducibility studies would test a lot of these claims and they don't so just because this is on a site that often contains credible information does not mean that this study is credible in my mind uh this study is not credible um that's yeah yeah they'll use like really technical language in conjunction with a woo word and they do that often [Music] and if we you know here's what should have happened before paper got done um the the theory is flawed here can you get electrons transfer between the surface of the earth and a person oh absolutely you can yes of course we static electricity is an excellent example the flaw here and the grounding idea is that shoes are insulators when you walk around you are still grounded when you're wearing shoes how do i know if you build up a static charge right it makes your hair stand up and you've touched something that zaps if you do that thing where you shuffle your feet on the carpet humidity is low which you can do in some kinds of shoes by the way uh it's easier in socks but it can be done in shoes and you build up that static like charge guess what happens it goes away you don't stay static charged forever and if you don't do the discharge thing where you touch a conductor and then transfer a lot of energy at once the static charge will fade because you are grounded you're grounded all the time even when you're wearing shoes i used to work with electronics i used to work in electronics labs and you could sure as heck be electrocuted wearing shoes why because the electricity would fine ground through your body and through your shoes choose can be a conductor now they're not a great conductor they're not like copper wire but when you're wearing shoes you are in fact still electrically grounded that's a fact so uh based on the paper you've shared and i looked up a few others i don't find any credible research anything that's methodologically sound that indicates that there are health benefits to going barefoot because of grounding there can be health benefits to going barefoot when we wear shoes we can cause atrophy in the muscles of our feet we change the texture of our feet you know i can't walk across round gravel without pain and discomfort because my always shoed feet are so soft and your feet mitchell have undergone physiological changes that support you moving through the world the way that our ancestors did for a hundred thousand years which is shoeless you can walk on stones and probably feel at the most minor discomfort and guess what if we were to look at the muscles and bones of your feet in many ways yours are probably more healthy than mine and that's because you are barefoot not because you're grounded to the earth and getting electron transfer that it's just not there uh so um i'd encourage you to go shoeless as much as you want i've been trying to go shoeless more to help me deal with some chronic pain in my ankles and my heels in advice and counsel of my medical doctor but grounding i don't think is just potentially close to pseudoscience i'll go ahead and in my opinion say it is actual pseudoscience um uh the what's out there is overly broad and also tends to be the studies there are usually by people trying to sell something like these grounding systems for your bed which is another marker and warning sign that i see with pseudoscience is somebody stands to profit from the woo um you know i would say like wu profiteer in chief is gwyneth paltrow and she's talked about grounding a lot of the usual suspects dr oz etc have talked about grounding and those people um people like exciting new developments in science and they're slow and so if you lean into some pseudoscience that doesn't actually hurt people and you can sell a product you can also keep a tv show going so i understand the incentives that create that but uh i i think it's ultimately bad for society barefoot walking looks to have health benefits some health benefits a barefoot running is a mix can be beneficial can be detrimental grounding that's just not a thing you're i'm grounded right now i'm wearing shoes um electrons can absolutely move between my body and the surface of the earth um nearly as effectively as they can if i were barefoot so uh i'm calling it that one's pseudoscience [Music] it takes a village to make ask science mike i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon for making the show financially possible and for picking the questions every week if you'd like to join us on patreon you can do that just go to asksciencemike.com and click the patreon button to learn more it makes such a difference in the work i'd like to thank caitlin hermstad for producing ass science mike greg nordin for production and sound design brett cradle for management services um gosh i'd like to andrew golucky for pre-production jeff bodaford for writing and recording the theme song and all of you for listening thank you for joining me every week it is a delight talking with you i can't wait to speak with you again