ASM114 Hypnosis, High-Roller Gals, and Humans Riding Dinosaurs

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hypnosis high roller gals and humans

writing dinosaurs

all that and more on this week's episode

of ask science

[Music]

[Applause]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarthy and on all over the internet as science mike and i am in the middle of a move i'm packing all my stuff into boxes and my house is in total chaos so hopefully that won't infect the show so let's see if we can get a good thing happening and get it started [Music] hey mike jonathan washington dc i was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine who is closely related to the founders of the creation evidence museum in glen rose texas they have a very famous at least in the creation evidence community famous fossil that was found in a nearby riverbed with a dinosaur footprint on top of a man's footprints and it's widely used to back up the history found in genesis i'm certainly an evolutionist and view archaeology that way i'm wondering if if you could explain to us how a modern evolutionist might look at that fossil and interpret it you know 25 30 years later since they found it since we of course don't particularly believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on this planet looking forward to hearing your thoughts thanks for all you do you know uh most of the questions that come into this show i know how i'm going to answer them like as soon as i hear them that's how i do the live episodes because i just i read and try to remember as much as i can regarding you know how science works today and our understanding of the world but i will admit that i have never heard of this human foot fossil interspersed over or among fossilized dinosaur footprints a quick google verified yes there's a lot of people in the creation science community who are very excited about this artifact who use it to support a young earth narrative about creation although strangely enough answers in genesis is not one of those organizations they actually question the legitimacy of this fine so not to spoil the answers but i think on this case answers in genesis and i are in total agreement 2017 y'all okay so what i usually do when i answer a question i know what i'm gonna say is my time in research is spent like fact checking to make sure i don't like misquote figures sometimes today i even check pronunciations of words i don't uh say because the most common feedback i get on episodes is not about the content of what i say but how i pronounce things which is hilarious in this case like i had no idea just nothing um and i was really skeptical the only thing i knew is i was skeptical of the finding for really obvious reasons humans and dinosaurs are separated by millions of years in terms of who inhabited this planet when uh dinosaurs have been gone a long long time and we've only been around a couple hundred thousand years it turns out these paluxy river tracks are quite famous they've been around for a long time decades and decades and creationists have been using them to support the young earth narrative they're in texas and uh dating methods do tell us that the tracks are in fact genuinely ancient so dinosaur tracks appearing in this fossil bed are legitimate and there are these human shaped uh tracks or almost look like footprints in this fossil bed and so at a quick glance you go oh my gosh like these are people walking among the dinosaurs and if you you stick to your initial impression of the fossil shape and then you date the fossils and you find that they date to a similar region in time that these these these human foot shaped fossils weren't added later then you could say oh wow humans and dinosaurs walk together but there's there's a couple of things uh that should maybe give us pause one is that these tracks are 15 to 20 inches in length 15 to 20 inches in length according to my very basic research shack's foot is on the small end of that range he has a 16 inch shoe our shoes are typically a little longer than our actual foot so we would assume that shaq's foot you know somewhere between 14 and a half and 15 and a half inches which means he'd be a small person if these are human tracks i mean if if shaquille o'neal say has a 15 inch foot my gosh what would a person with a 20 inch foot look like so is it is it that not only humans walked among the dinosaurs but giants first glance that would be a hypothesis you could hold further scrutiny uh really gets rid of the idea that massive humans shared a river valley with the dinosaurs way back in 1989 and i i'm i'll link you in the show notes this week on sciencemic.com to the 1989 new york times article covering this researchers cracked this they figured it out when they found that these tracks were actually created by bipedal dinosaurs dinosaurs that walk on two legs and a combination of their gait shifting towards their heels and pressing more lightly with their toes and some erosion means effectively that the toe impressions of these dinosaur footprints were erased and what was left looks kind of remotely like a human track obviously no human toe impressions uh maybe they were wearing shoes in the creationist theory but yeah there's no this is not evidence that um humans and dinosaurs were around at the same time and and frankly my sincere apologies to creationists who listen to the program and i mean sincere apologies but what you typically see with creationists young earth creationists who try to support that narrative using science is they grasp at straws they take fringe cases and they ignore the larger body of scientific evidence that places uh the earth at 4.54 billion years old uh that is really really really really really really outrageously well supported science a large comprehensive body of knowledge supporting that age so at first i got to thank you for a really fun question kind of a curveball i did have to look up and find findings because when i kind of saw the impression i was like oh gosh that is a weird thing so i can see how someone would arrive at that conclusion but that's the point of science to test our conclusions with further research and further knowledge and that's where intelligent design and young earth creationism deviate from from from science in science we challenge our assumptions and in intelligent design and young earth creation we start with a conclusion and then look for evidence to support it and that is not science [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike one of the biggest arguments used by creationists against the theory of evolution is that radiometric dating is not accurate and relies on a large number of assumptions is this correct are there any problems with the theory of evolution about which the creationists are actually right thanks for everything you do okay so i intentionally put this question right against the dinosaur footbed question when they both made it uh through voting on uh patreon with my patrons this week and i just thought they bookended well so now we'll talk a little bit about how we date fossils and date rocks and why that science is generally reliable so here's one really common problem in science communication and education journalists and the public tend to over generalize scientific findings and methods to fit their assumptions and their hopes and their dreams and their fears and radiometric dating is a great absolutely great example of this it's so often cited by people on the internet debating our origins but really poorly understood by people on both sides of the debate because it's not an immediately obvious methodology for uh testing dates it is some somewhat complicated and requires additional knowledge to do successfully and it's not just like a category of thing right so as a category that is valid radiometric dating works by measuring the ratio between radioactive elements and the elements their decay produces okay so a really common example would be potassium which is radioactive means its nucleus is not stable that's what radioactivity is it means it will shed neutrons and in doing so uh can decay into argon a completely different element and that's also a form of radiometric dating we do we'll talk about more of that later in this answer but the whole idea about radioactivity is it's super predictable it's really really predictable elements that are radioactive have a half-life in other words that in this period of time half the element will be gone okay it doesn't mean it's halfway to being gone because you know that the half-life still matters so it's kind of asymptotic and eventually it will be completely gone but it takes it's not double the half-life or anything like that and that means we can use basically any radioactive element to do radiometric dating now the length of the half-life and the availability of the material affect its suitability so one really you know different elements answer different questions i don't want to say that right here's an example let's talk about carbon 14 which when you hear the term carbon dating which is a type of radiometric dating carbon dating is great for dating tissues and fossils it's fantastic if you find preserved tissue from a frozen neanderthal or a woolly mammoth or something like that you can date that tissue and it'll do a good job if you find fossils it'll do a great job if they contain organic matter and they are less than 50 000 years old because the half-life of carbon 14 is just over 5 000 years and so once you get past 50 000 years all the carbon 14 has broken down into carbon 12 and you don't know if it was 51 000 years ago that this you know fossil or artifact was formed or seven billion years ago there's carbon 14 can't answer that question anymore and so many people hear that they go ah carbon dating only works for 50 000 years so how do scientists talk about rocks older than that you can't do carbon dating on anything older than 50 000 years which is true but you can still do radiometric dating you use a different element for your radiometric test potassium has an incredibly long half-life incredibly long so it's useful for dating older rocks and i mean determining the date of obviously not engaging in a social romantic relationship that was an accidental dad joke okay so uh potassium breaking down argon can answer much longer periods of time than carbon 14. but but it doesn't work sometimes for for example for some organic fossils and this is why not all rocks can be radiometric dated at all igneous rocks date really easily using radiometric dating metamorphic rocks will generally date to the date of their metamorphosis not the original rock formation and sedentary rocks really don't date at all using radiometric dating unless again they have organic components like a fossil and they're younger than 50 000 years old okay so you see these limitations different types of radiometric dating answer questions for different types of rocks over different time periods so we have one that that answers questions really well if you're talking about a fossil with organic material that's younger than 50 000 years we have another form of radiometric dating using potassium that works really well with igneous rocks or metamorphic rocks dating the date of their metamorphosis but doesn't work with sedentary rocks at all so how do we date everything else geologists don't only use radiometric dating to determine the date of rocks they will use this kind of absolute radiometric dating to identify the ages of different layers of the earth's crust or dig sites or artifacts and then use comparison and a number of techniques to apply approximate ranges to those things they can't use absolute dating for and absolutely that makes a large number of assumptions but the same thing is true of the techniques we use to make semiconductors optics or really any other systematic body of knowledge that science produces the idea is the assumptions are constantly tested and they're overturned by new data if necessary that's not a weakness of science that is the strength of science to be flexible with those assumptions in the face of new data but sometimes we make working assumptions in the absence of data for example in particle physics the standard model of physics completely ignores the existence of gravity and we know that we know the model is incomplete but going with what we do know building a working model allows scientific work research and the formation of theories to continue we may one day find that the standard model is woefully incomplete it may be amended with something that is more inclusive and that may have implications for some of the techniques used in physics up to that point but that'll be a good thing that'll be a growth of human knowledge in the same way that the approximate aging of rocks using means other than radiometric dating are good for our knowledge of the earth and our knowledge of radiometric dating being appropriate in different circumstances helps our body of knowledge grow as well [Music] hi science mike love the show my question today is about hypnosis is hypnosis a real thing if so how does it work how is it used improperly or fraudulently and how can it actually be helpful thanks so much this question sounded so familiar to me you know i have almost no memory of what questions i've answered on the show i mean just almost none people meet me at events they say have you ever talked about blah blah blah blah on science mike and i'm like i don't know this is the 114th episode we've had at least four questions on every show except like the minis we did a couple times and many more than four on the live episodes so i really don't remember what questions that i've answered on the program but i was i felt strongly that i'd researched hypnosis before so i actually googled ask science mike hypnosis and discovered that i answered a question about hypnosis very similar in episode 24. and so even though this question got voted uh on by uh the patrons on patreon to make it on the show i wasn't gonna run it but then i thought you know well maybe something new has happened since then so i went back and listened to that part of that science mike 24 and then i did a little bit of research and i found out that between the time that i answered on eyesight 24 and now new research has come out so consider this an appendix to ask science fight 24's answer about hypnosis because now we've had a brain imaging study come out and that's really exciting because that wasn't available last time i answered the question but remember my usual caveats about brain imaging studies one brain imaging studies have small sample sizes in this case less than 60 people were involved in the research they are low resolution we can't image the brain in fine detail compared to how intricate the brain structure is and in brain imaging studies correlation and causation are very difficult to discern or tease apart so be careful not to over generalize the findings of the research that i'm about to share with you don't use this to make new conclusions about how either hypnosis or the brain operate okay there's the fine print now back in science mike 24 i talked about how the reality of hypnosis is really different from kind of the popular or even hollywood narrative of hypnosis you can't be hypnotized against your will through hypnosis you can't be made to do things that you don't want to do someone can't hypnotize you and then have you perform a you know an assassination or something and it's not a miracle cure for behavioral change you know the research when we studied the effects of hypnosis on smoking cessation for example aren't actually that encouraging uh at its its core hypnosis is a state of focus and relaxation that really does allow for some interesting and even wild experiences and psychological effects in my case i'm super easy to hypnotize um i can watch a youtube video of someone doing hypnosis and and just go just just go i don't know it's because i meditate a lot i'm not really sure what the effect is there i've never taken any of the the tests um in psychology that are supposed to be predictive of hypnosibility i don't know if that's a word or not i might have coined it but you know i watched one video that i'll include in the show notes on sciencemac.com this week that basically locked my eyes closed where i could not open them now doesn't that go against what i said a moment ago that you can't be hypnotized against your will and you can't be made to do anything you don't want to do no because i wanted to be hypnotized and i willingly went along with the suggestions that the hypnotist was offering okay so before i could really test it the the person kind of brought you back out of the hypnosis and let you open your eyes but i've later put myself back in that state or pause the video at the right point and you can just kind of de-suggest yourself easily enough so hypnosis is not magic now in terms of what is it useful for it is useful in therapeutic situations it is generally entertaining but and it has a measurable effect on our perception of physical pain so people suffering with chronic pain people in temporary pain hypnosis can provide pretty tremendous relief but to say that hypnosis is not super well understood by science it's a really safe sentence and it can be difficult to tease out and separate the science from the pseudoscience around hypnosis that's why i got so excited about this brain study so i'm going to read you a couple paragraphs from the press release from stanford where the research took place spiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis first they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate part of the brain's salience network in hypnosis you are so absorbed that you're not worrying about anything else spiegel explained secondly they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula he described this as a brain body connection that helps the brain process and control what's going on in the body finally spiegel's team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex this decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone's actions and their awareness of their actions spiegel said isn't that fascinating they effectively found that areas associated with body awareness and attention were more weakly associated during a state of hypnosis and it's a fascinating finding it's it's the first hypnosis brain imaging study i've found and of course more research is needed but this study did find a consistent difference in its sample size and it was it seems to be methodically rigorous there was a control group and uh anyway something a lot of times in brain imaging studies there's no control group which is a big problem in science but they found a consistent difference in this brain activity between people who were easily hypnotizable and people who were not and this starts to provide a scientific foundation for what hypnosis is but it just starts to be careful of overblown claims of hypnosis i would typically recommend that you if you're going to engage in a hypnotic practice uh in hypnotic therapy you work with a trained therapist and professional who is credentialed and uh that you you lower your expectations hypnosis isn't magic it's just a state of focus and concentration that is effectively trance-like keep your eye out i think there could be more brain imaging studies to come our last question came in via email and it reads hey science mike i'm a long time listener so first thanks for all you and the liturgists do for the world as a woman raised in the southern evangelical world trying to reconcile science my feminist beliefs and my relationship with god your work and story has been something that has kept me going over the past few years to my question i am a 20-something in professional school about to graduate the job i will go into will let me earn a six-figure salary i am also in a relationship with a man who makes considerably less than that i recently discovered the prospect of me earning more money than him was viewed as a negative or a problem to him to the point he is putting all his efforts into increasing his finances and in turn less efforts into our relationship he has the view that a situation of a woman making more than a man can never work long term the young feisty feminist side of me wants to yell and say that this is ridiculous it's the 21st century after all and it shouldn't matter who makes more money in a relationship i realize though that this is naive unfortunately so what does the data show about wives who make more than their husbands do they divorce more are they more unhappy couples is everything just fine how can a conversation be started with the males in our lives who we love but seem to have their egos bruised by this idea thanks aly well allie um thanks for your question i can't say that i love the question because of the underlying problem but it is one of those questions where i didn't know where research would take me because i haven't read about this particular topic in either my scientific research or my continuing work to learn more about feminism and patriarchy so my intuition told me the effects of the on the population uh would not be good that when we saw large studies if they existed that the results would be discouraging and although i know that some of my conservative friends don't like the term patriarchy does show up consistently in studies done across the social sciences and these kinds of social effects are incredibly powerful incredibly powerful as social animals so much of what we value so much of that which we don't question about ourselves comes from social conditioning social norms and social expectations and once i started to to dig it did not take long to find data and for once my intuition was right the data tells us that today about a third of women out earn their husbands in the united states and that's higher if you include relationships where the husband is unemployed this makes some sense women have higher college attendance and college graduation rates than in the united states today and their income is starting to track along with that now obviously this doesn't apply to the executive suite or to boardrooms yet where men's presence is much more common and their income is much higher but in the rank and file of the working world women are taking over quite successfully this is such a bummer for me to even read divorce rates really are higher in relationships where a wife makes more than her husband it's a pronounced effect interestingly enough we know that women do more housework than men in an average relationship but that gap actually grows when wives make more than their husbands they cook and clean more often than the average woman and some social scientists theorize that this is an attempt to soothe a threatened male ego women who make more are much more likely to be on anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications men in relationships and this is not just marriages where the woman makes more are five times more likely to cheat on their partner so we've got an elevated divorce rate we've got women overcompensating to attempt to assuage a male ego who are medicated possibly as a result of that and men who are still five times more likely to cheat on their partner folks this is why patriarchy is bad it's bad for women and it's bad for men too and and the thing that discourages me about answering your question is i'm not sure i know how to engage in this conversation well when i've tried to have one-on-one conversations with men that i know about women's rights the word [ \_\_ ] has been used um for some for some men the investment in a traditional understanding of masculinity is so deeply embedded that ideas about women's equality or certainly women earning more than men are considered deeply emasculating or even associated with homosexuality this is ridiculous it's ridiculous on so many levels it's ridiculous based on the the inherent worth and dignity of women their their humanity from my faith their image bearing status creatures made in the image of god but it's also practically really dumb uh my eagle talent yeah i said eagletarian it's back my egalitarian approach to relationships has led to really wonderful female friendships in my life and frankly really good romantic relationships if if we men can let go of our insecurity and relate to women as equal partners it's better for us and for them i mean who wants the pressure of making all the decisions in the home alone i'll tell you honestly if ginny made more than me i'd be ecstatic i mean i i really i just i can't imagine the level of happiness i would have if ginny made more than i did it would probably change some of the way i do things on the show and with my events i would love for my income to not be so tied to this work i love doing i've never understood this idea oh my gosh my wife makes more than i do with it it affects me you know in very negative emotional ways but again this is societal structures and pressures now the good news is i think this is easier to do on a relationship-by-relationship basis right so if you love this person i assume he's not a total [ \_\_ ] a successful woman like you who has her stuff together who's moving through life is interested i assume he's not a dud which means he is interested in communication he's interested in ongoing communication and uh i would say can we talk about something that i'm concerned about and i love you and then just go over them with the data about what happens with more than men and you just say it concerns me that you're aggrieved by the the chance that i could make more money than you do based on these elevated risk for divorce rate and this elevated risk for infidelity and then psych central and i've got a link to this on sciencemike.com in this week's show notes has some really great tips for strategies uh for couples in this arrangement because this is historically unprecedented at least in the united states but generally across cultures across the world the norm has been for men to earn more so their tips are this remember your pioneers this is a new thing in society keep in mind that the workload and not the players is the problem so in other words stuff's got to get done it doesn't matter you know who's bringing in what percentage of our total income and in terms of the arrangements we make what matters is that problems get solved which means we're going to keep money out of the chore talk we're going to decide who does what based on their schedule availability i think it's appropriate if one member of the the relationship male or female works 80 hours a week hard labor and the other one works 45 hours a week office labor that the shorter hours less physical labor member of the couple would do more around the home but again this that should go either way uh if if if both of you are working six hours a week in office environments you should really easily evenly divide household chores in household maintenance by the way i am incredible at vacuuming and dusting i'm a machine man i can just i can just destroy it my wife is much better at uh simple home maintenance than i am so to some degree i do i do practice what i preach here ongoing communication is really important never stop talking about the dynamic keep it in the room talk about your financial decision making so what bills get paid by who all that stuff you need to discuss it explicitly not make assumptions and don't hesitate to get professional help if you think things aren't working either of you think that a neutral third party like a therapist can be a great resource and help preserve and protect your relationship so uh ali your your assumption is right there's reason to be worried when you earn more i don't think that's that's right i don't i think that's a bad feature of society but it does exist today and you're right to think of ways to mitigate it and open up clear communication with your husband about the insecurity caused in men thanks to patriarchy man i gotta tell you we are on a tare of episodes where i have loved the questions um so thank you for continuing to send in questions which by the way if you're new to the show this show doesn't exist unless you create it you've got to share with me your curiosity and i will spend as long as i need to to come up with the best answer i can to your question about science faith or life you go to ask sciencemike.com on my website you can send me an email or a voicemail for a question to go on this program of course those questions are filtered through and sorted by my good friend andrew gallucki golucky who's not just the pre-producer for a science mic but also an amazing musician in his own right i'd encourage you to go to andrewgolucki.com to find out about a little string of tour dates he's going to be doing in the near future if you if you go to an andrew show just say science mike sent me so thanks andrew for all the work that you do thank you to all the people on patreon who throw me one or two or five or ten bucks a month to keep the show going i really appreciate it i also appreciate how consistently every week you answer the poll questions and pick the questions that we talk about on the program if you'd like to join in that party just go to asksciencemike.com click on the patreon logo and you can learn more about our patreon party for patrons and polls i just made that up and i'm really impressed okay uh greg nordin thank you for producing outside mike you do amazing work of course jeff waterford wrote that theme song that's so catchy i don't know really good zone i'm kind of chaotic with the move but i feel like the show's going well if you agree let me know on itunes those ratings make a big difference thanks for listening everybody