ASM082 Focus, Driving, and the End of the World

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focus driving and the end of the world all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and oh my gosh it's finally here the launch of my book finding god in the waves is tomorrow like it's tomorrow i can't believe it i'm blowing the intro i'm so messed up but i don't know let's get it started i'm a mess i'm just a total mess unlike last week i have power and air conditioning and i'm accustomed to those things but man it's here today that you're hearing this it's september 12th monday or at least that's when the episode comes out and tuesday the 13th my book launches and it seemed like it would never come i've finished the manuscript quite some time ago i've been working on it for years and now it seems like that day is approaching so fast i can't even appreciate it so i want to stop for a second before we even start the show and i want to thank the thousands of people who already bought this book sight unseen i i'm completely propelled to profound humility i was just thinking about that today like thousands of people have bought this book and they've never seen it they don't know anyone who's read it uh thank you a lot of things happening on the 13th the book comes out it'll be in bookstores everywhere if you want to find out which bookstores go to findinggontheways.com as well if you want to learn more about the book and what it's about this learning to understand god through the lens of science um we're throwing a party in tallahassee florida my church good samaritan 7 p.m eastern time if you're in tallahassee i'd love to see you there there's uh there's seats left so if you don't have a ticket that's fine just come on we should have room for you uh if you're not in tallahassee facebook.com mike.mcarg or just go to asksciencemike.com and click on the facebook button we're gonna live stream the party so uh have some music have a little bit of a reading from the book some question and answer and then i'll sign books uh for anyone who wants a signed book i can't believe that's going to be a thing that i do so that'll be september the 13th that week as well the liturgist gathering is happening in denver you know there's a great crowd i was worried this was going to be a really lightly attended event because ticket sales were slow and then they just picked up all of a sudden and so we've got a good crowd that's going to be with us in denver there are seats left if you'd like to join us for the liturgist gathering there'll be some book stuff but there'll also be a spiral dynamics garage liturgy and lots of deep nerdy intense conversation now chicago liturgist gathering has less than 20 tickets left so if you've been thinking about joining us in chicago stop thinking start getting your ticket or you won't get one that's just this one's going to sell out also in september i'm going to be down in naples for the gathering i'm going to be doing a new copernican event uh at eastern university which is right by philadelphia and i'll be at the y christian conference in chicago with nadia bultweber rachel evans and a cast of amazing people just some of the there's some people gonna meet for the first time in this event that i am thrilled about so if you're a white christian i'd love to see you there that's the september uh stops that are public there's other stops in september but you can't go to them now there's more stops on the tour i just booked a seattle stop uh we'll be announcing the new york date real soon so just go to findinggodonthewaves.com tour to learn all about that but it's here it's time my book is coming out uh i guess i'm an author now isn't that wild let's answer some science questions hi mike thanks for the interesting work here's the situation i found myself recently doing 90 on an interstate highway late at night i've been driving a lot for 40 years 90 may not be the fastest i've ever driven aside from the fairly obvious legal issues and how generally ill-advised it is to drive really fast there were impinging factors that impacted my decision and i did arrive at my destination without incident and that's the real question how in the world is it possible that a human being can make the hundreds of decisions a minute required to successfully navigate a highway at speed it feels like there's a combination of information processing physical reaction time judgment depth perception that happens fairly unconsciously and i'm not sure i understand how that's even possible and again i i've seen the stats on highway fatalities i am not recommending that anyone drive way too fast but there are highways in west texas with speed limits of 85 and on my little trip the other night i was running with the flow of traffic so 80 or 90 miles per hour is just not that unusual so i can walk at 3 miles per hour if i ever wanted to run i could do five or six i i am short and slow i could do a full gallop on a horse at 40 miles per hour or so but except in the last 100 years there's been no evolutionary advantage to being able to move at 80 or 90 or 100 miles per hour on land and since we got so fast so fast well there's been no time for any evolutionary advantage to manifest itself anyway so how do you explain it thanks mike this is easily one of my favorite questions we've had in a long time on ask science mike uh that we've gotten in such like philosophical existential territory um i think because you know there's a big repeat audience now and there's people who are very familiar with science and want to go deeper and man half the questions i feel completely unqualified to weigh in on uh whereas this this question is like my original vision for the program like what is an interesting everyday application of the sciences which is not to say this is an easy or simple question it's not it's a fascinating question um but it lets us talk about important themes in science without having to kind of go through so much existential angst first so i love all the questions i'm always just going to answer the questions you want me to answer but i just wanted to take a moment and really thank you for this question specifically especially because my brain's kind of uh uh distracted with this book thing so uh you your question raised some interesting points humans aren't very fast we're just not fast animals uh but before the technological revolution we started domesticating animals and so you mentioned horseback is a more natural thing but kind of in terms of evolutionary history uh intentionally domesticating other animals and using them for locomotion is is really weird it's not a common thing in the animal kingdom so even the 40 miles an hour we can achieve horseback is strange of course running horseback what you have another brain a horse's brain is perfectly adapted to the type of running that it does and humans basically make requests navigational requests to horses but they don't micromanage their locomotion so that that one's relatively easy but then you mentioned 90 miles an hour and i would say what about what about the 450 miles an hour 550 miles an hour that a pilot has to accommodate in a jet airliner what about multiples of the speed of sound what about 25 000 miles an hour which is required for a spacecraft to make it to the moon or just the simple 17000 500 or 600 miles per hour required for the international space station to orbit the earth how on earth can humans make decisions at that speed well the answer is simple we can't we're terrible at it evolution has not equipped us to deal with decisions at those velocities just look at highway fatalities which you mentioned people run their cars into other cars and the environment all the time evolution did not shape us to take thousands of pounds of metal at dozens of miles per hour and navigate successfully so how do we do it we do what humans do best most carnivores have a profound ability to adapt to their environment and humans kick that up a notch and we adapt the environment to ourselves it's too cold we build an enclosure and we heat that enclosure with fire or now electricity if it's too dry we irrigate if it's too wet then we can actually pump water out raise foundations uh build buildings on stilts all kinds of crazy things that adapt the environment to us our natural our native environment would be you know a tropical a plain-like environment but we make the whole world that way our cities are dwellings and this totally applies to driving the higher the speed limit of a road the fewer intersections the broader the lanes the more distance in between opposing lanes of traffic and the more distance there is to things from the side of the road so when you're on the interstate every few miles at most cars can merge on in those high speed limit areas there's nothing on the road shoulder and there's a big generous median gap so that if you don't pay attention and fall inward you don't hit oncoming traffic or you don't do that easily we've engineered the environment so that driving at 90 feels much slower and here's here's kind of how you can visualize that think about going 90 miles an hour on a forest road how fast the trees go by now imagine it on a bicycle your car keeps the wind out of your face it protects you from the elements and the road is designed to minimize interactions with cross traffic whereas the forest is not 90 40 in the forest is terrifying but you can fall asleep at the wheel at 90 on the highway because we have adapted the environment to suit ourselves which is the same way airplanes work we use air traffic control so that planes don't enter into close enough proximity that humans have to make 500 mile an hour decisions it's the same thing we do a space travel space junk is becoming an issue for that reason it's not possible for a human to make evasive actions or maneuvers in response to speed differentials and you know tens of thousands of miles per hour so that's the answer evolution has not equipped us to deal with speed but to force speed to deal with us basically through highway engineering automotive safety air traffic control and other mitigating mechanisms [Music] okay our next question came in via email and it reads how do we work to increase our ability to focus i know from some reading on the topic that technology and especially the internet have rewired our brains to be more efficient in jumping from topic to topic increasing the breadth of our knowledge at the expense of focusing for long periods of time in my own life i see this manifested in an ability to focus while reading despite enjoying the reading and that's inability i don't know if i read ability or inability but he said manifested in an inability to focus what are some practical steps we can take to remedy this lack of focus in our daily lives it's a great question it's a fantastic question i'm not sure what research you're talking about that shows our brains are more efficient in jumping from topic to topic the research i've seen uh labels that is context switching and talks about the kind of cognitive penalty that imposes on our brains and you can imagine that to some degree practicing context switching from distractions from notifications of the internet we do get better at contact switching but as that continues we actually get worse at context switching than we were originally and basically cognitively speaking the kind of distraction we live with now is bad for us not and not just when we're driving we're not good at cognitive multitasking now we are talented multitaskers as a species uh you can you know think about other things while gathering food you could do that you can be alert to danger while you know doing kind of gather activities but when we acts of focus more of a hunter mentality that require lots of cognitive detention then then we're not very good at multitasking and the technology hasn't improved that it's called a dopamine loop smartphone notifications facebook email texting clicking on internet ads or distractions all these things create a craving loop a dopamine loop in our brains that encourages us to be distracted and unfocused and can ultimately increase the amount of context switching that we have and uh man it wrecks your productivity it wrecks your focus it wrecks the quality of your thinking studies have shown that even if your phone buzzes and you don't look at it you don't pick it up you keep working whatever you're working on your attention your memory formation and your productivity still drop for a significant period of time before recovering this is a real i don't want to call addiction but cycle of compulsion that people get stuck in and then if you do check your phone research is really clear you almost never stop with the notification you go into a cycle of compulsive behavior related to social media checking email checking you try to clear all your inboxes how long will that take maybe five minutes 20 minutes the whole time the task you are working on is out of mind and not being done and then maybe five minutes go by and your phone goes hey pay attention to me again there are absolutely things you can do to counteract this influence notifications are a big deal i use do not disturb on my phone my phones on do not disturb right now and so is my computer i do that when i record ask science mike i do it when i'm a guest on podcasts i do it when i'm writing i do it when i'm recording i do it when i'm spending quality time with my family my phone's on do not disturb a lot and my phone also does a schedule do not disturb where it puts itself into do not disturb in the evening and stays that way until the morning and i also turn off notifications for as many apps as possible i don't get notified of facebook activity twitter activity email none of those things notify me instead i have scheduled times in my day when i look at email when i look at social media when i follow up on all those notifications in a structured way my email is not open all day that kind of distraction is terrible for you now if you're in an environment especially professional environment that requires regular email correspondence schedule your work in 20 to 30 minute blocks of time where your email is closed and then switch and check email for whatever time of period is appropriate and then return to work and that kind of context switching can actually be beneficial to productivity for me my emails close all morning i give the morning to my creative time and then in the afternoon i start corresponding with people but i'm an author podcaster and am lucky that way but the trick comes down to scheduling making intentional choices to context switch instead of allowing notifications and therefore a dopamine cycle to dictate your behavior this is also true for multitasking we're not good multitaskers if i try to write an article at the same time i work on uh one of the talks i'm giving or a podcast all the quality of those is reduced so i keep scratch pads available so when thoughts come up unrelated to the task i'm working on just for a second i can get it out of my brain and then my brain doesn't have to worry about it i commit my task to a task management system in my case a to-do system called the todoist so that i don't worry about what's next and worry about forgetting things and can focus on the task at hand and then i quit all applications unrelated to what i'm working on like i said my email's not open now safari is not open right now the only thing open is my notes and this recording program gives me focus so that i give you my best attention and communicate the most efficient way possible when i'm absorbing information if i'm reading something on the internet that's important that's part of my daily information regimen safari is the only thing open if i'm reading longer form content newspapers magazines books i tend to do that in physical media or the kindle because the dedicated nature of those objects discourage my brain to context switch and if you would do that as well you would train your brain over time to be more focused and to be you'll get back that ability to focus as you read so really timely question a vital question and if you're a kindle reader i might recommend switching back to books for a while um because that will create significant differences in the way that you're processing that information it'll be very tactile be very visual it'll be object oriented instead of symbolically oriented which it would be with a kindle and that will help you keep your brain in the right frame of reference for the task at hand hey science white my name is sheldon i'm from small town ohio and first of all i want to say i like what you're doing with this show and i enjoy listening to it i just recently started listening and haven't listened to all the episodes yet but the ones that i have i've enjoyed i am from a faith tradition that is probably considerably more conservative than your southern baptist upbringing so i would disagree quite a bit with some of the things that you say but nevertheless i do enjoy the show and i think you're doing important work my question has to do with the end of the world as we know it does cosmology or science in general have anything to say about the length of time that our universe will exist obviously the christian perspective is that everything ends on when jesus comes back and on judgment day obviously there's no scientific evidence for that so does cosmology or science have anything to say about the endgame of the universe or even if it will end or possibly how it could end and kind of along with that does science have anything to say about the value of humans in a cosmological perspective thanks for considering my question well sheldon thanks for listening and for sending in a question your question what got the most votes on patreon this week so it was the most popular question from the people who pick every week's content and don't worry about disagreeing with me i disagree with me all the time and uh this show is not about everybody agreeing it's about conversations better conversations getting things out in the open the first thing i'd like to say is as i understand it even in christianity there's not a single eschatology or understanding of how the world will end or when that will happen you reference my southern baptist upbringing even there there were multiple views pre-millennials post-millennialist millennials on uh eschatology and those aren't a comprehensive look at all eschatologies merely conservative evangelical eschatology so there's already in the church a lot of different ideas and that's important to remember because in science there are also a lot of different competing ideas about how the universe will end now i would say most fate of the universe models would say the universe will at least last for billions of years the shortest i found uh is five billion years other than one that says possibly any moment without warning and then some would say trillion years some would say the universe is eternal and a few would even say that time is probably only a temporary feature of the universe and the universe is already timeless in both its beginning and end state uh although those words are pretty fuzzy in a timeless universe the the idea here is different cosmologies make different predictions and we're too fundamentally ignorant about different variables and values in the universe to know which system is most correct there's a reason we call dark matter and dark energy dark uh that denotes our ignorance and the fact that the kinds of uh energy types that we can sample well mainly electromagnetic energy don't interact with those phenomena and we have a hard time studying them it's very difficult now one of the fundamental questions that relate to how the universe will end is the shape of the universe is the universe closed open or flat geometrically which is a hard idea to contemplate in a three-dimensional spatial universe it's easier if you imagine that the universe is flat or two-dimensional if that was the case then an open universe if you imagine a sheet of paper lying on a desk that the ends lifted up away from the table that would be an open universe a closed universe they would lean down and if you follow them far enough come back together like a sphere a flat universe would be like an infinite sheet of paper it's perfectly flat only we're talking about three dimensional space here so it's pretty mind blowing scientists today overwhelmingly accept a flat universe because of different measurements we've taken in space that lead us to have a high degree of confidence that the universe is flat but that's not a closed topic in cosmology it's just today the flat universe has a significant lead over an open universe and a closed universe is probably the most minority position in the sciences today if i'm wrong i'm sure a cosmologist or two will set me straight this week now this depending on primarily whether the mini world's hypothesis of quantum mechanics is true or not and then basically on the behavior of dark energy leads to a few possible ends to the universe one is called the heat death of the universe wikipedia calls it the big freeze which is a term i don't hear a lot but i hear the heat death of the universe a whole lot and that's basically that thermodynamics is going to do what it does and evenly distribute matter and temperature throughout the entire universe no more stars no more galaxies no more planets ultimately no more elements just evenly dispersed particles that could potentially create another big bang because you would have enough stability that quantum fluctuations would again play a role which leads to a related idea which is the big bounce and the big balance is basically that the universe goes through cycles of big bangs because big bangs originally reached a state of stability enough that they produce a new big bang if you imagine the compression associated with the original state of our universe it is very uniform much like an entropic heat death only very compressed so pretty wild in physics another idea is called the big rip and that's if uh the hubble constant is non-stable and that as dark energies pressure increases with the expansion of space it will increase so much that elementary particles would be ripped to pieces whatever that means by the incredibly rapid expansion of space-time propelled by dark energy the big crunch is an idea that eventually the momentum carried out by the big bang will uh reach a point where gravity no longer or the expansion of the universe no longer has enough energy to overcome the gravity of the matter in the universe and everything will collapse back towards a singularity which could also manifest itself in a big balance a cycle universe so those are kind of the major ideas in cosmology about the end of all things and they are billions to trillions of years away some theories say that eventually protons themselves will break down others don't and again some say that basically the universe exists in a false vacuum state and that any moment the higgs field could reconfigure itself in such a way that uh matter just sort of spontaneously comes apart which would be a very painless but uh anticlimactic way for the universe to end but science doesn't actually know with any degree of certainty how the universe will end that's why cosmologists care so much about gravity waves and care so much about a unified theory of physics that helps us reconcile the standard model of physics with relativity so that we can build a better model of how reality works we understand the version we have now is quite limited and i guess maybe the biggest difference between uh prominent american christianity and the sciences is science is very comfortable saying we don't know we're investigating that so that's not actually a weakness in the scientific process that's a feature this idea that we don't claim to know things we don't have explicit evidence for [Music] our last question came from kristin who is one of the patrons on patreon and so she gets a question automatically on the show and it is a doozy hi mike i've noticed that more and more of my peers are opting their school-aged children out of annual standardized test or completely pulling their children out of schools in order to home school i too have some concerns about the educational models that appear to be more about teaching to test and collecting data than about fostering curiosity and learning the critics of standardized testing state that forced high-stakes testing is not scientifically based and fails to follow the u.s government's own data on learning foster's test-driven education that is not meeting the individual intellectual needs of students presents a racial and economic bias detrimental to english language learners impoverished students and students of color violates fiscal fairness in funding schools supports complicity of corporate interests rather than democracy based on public concerns fosters coercion over cooperation with regards to federal funding or public ed promotes a culture of lying cheating and exploitation within the school community has used the achievement gap to foster a de facto segregation that has resulted in separate and unequal education for minorities as parents my husband and i don't pressure our kids regarding their standardized tests as we don't want them to base their value as students or learners on test scores but instead on their natural curiosities and efforts however it still pains us to see our son who has autism and is naturally curious and a voracious consumer of information grow more discouraged with his standardized test scores every year as he never scores over 50th percentile on the other hand our daughter scores in the 99th percentile every year and would lose her spot in the gifted program if she were to opt out of the test for the ethical reasons listed above as the program is solely based on standardized test scores and not on other grades talents portfolios or accomplishments in addition my closest friend is their school art teacher and even she has been pressured by the administration to find ways to collect hard data on her students performance in art class this sounds to me like a great way to kill a child's natural creativity and curiosity and i'm pleased that so far my friend the art teacher has refused to turn the children's artwork into data all that to ask are there data that support our society's data-driven educational system are the critics arguments valid are parents justified in their concerns that all this testing and data collection are robbing our children of curiosity creativity and genuine learning thank you for your work my kids and i have some fantastic discussions in the car thanks to your podcast my 11 year old daughter even decided to become a vegetarian after hearing a segment on climate change on one of the earlier episodes and i joined her there are not a lot of vegetarians in iowa farming communities but we feel great and cook meals together with gratitude kristin well kristen first of all this is one of those questions i was talking about that trouble me because it's really difficult to answer because you demonstrated in your question a tremendous amount of knowledge and research on the topic and uh this happens a lot on the show now people ask me to weigh in on topics where multiple perspectives contain good research and uh reasoning so everything in science is not always clear-cut but you've asked the question so i guess i have to interpret my understanding and bring my own biases in a big way to the topic and that said i i really agree with you on a lot of points all points really most research has shown that standardized testing has racial and economic biases to it that it does encourage school funding discrimination it rewards affluent areas that it doesn't promote good learning all those things are true that doesn't mean measurement's fundamentally bad but measurement as an understanding of what a student needs to learn more in a subject is more helpful and we see that in more successful school systems especially in northern europe especially scandinavia where testing is used as a diagnostic not as a metric and certainly not an aggregate metric that way my kids go to public school my kids take standardized tests because i think socialization is a huge part of school as much as learning and i think that gives me the opportunity to talk to my children about why their worth shouldn't be based on the result of a standardized test but also how one day if they work for a corporation they'll be asked to do possibly silly menial things that aren't related to real success but if they say no they could lose their job so trying to inform my children to make their own decisions i mean ultimately the american school system is a weird hybrid model it was designed to create factory workers in industrialization take kids out of farms and put them into factories it did a good job at that that's not the society we live in anymore so we keep tacking on like modern business metrics and as you mentioned the economic needs of corporations that create testing systems and school supplies and learning curriculums and and tacking that on to a farm to factory educational model of course it's a disaster i guess that's part of how society works uh so it's a rough compromise i think we are reaching a make or break point in american education no one's happy with it so hopefully we're gonna get some fresh ideas and some fresh thinking and and reevaluate how we do funding and testing and and learn from societies that are doing a much better job educating their children the the metrics aren't encouraging in the american school system we're falling behind in you know competitive areas of science and technology and mathematics and engineering we're falling flat on our face in the arts really discouraging that kind of learning and failing to recognize the way in which uh i've heard the acronym steam that science technology engineering math and art all influence each other for the positive we've been failing at the basic aspects of a liberal arts education for a long time i understand when people homeschool there's kind of i've noticed there's a homeschool because schools aren't religious enough and then there's a home school because standardizing standardized testing seems reckless and i have empathy i get to both those movements really um i don't want my kids to go to a religious school but i can understand why that's important to other people but i keep my kids in public school so they can be parts of society but i make sure that we spend the time at home to talk about the things we disagree with in the school system and my kids understand that's an open dialogue but i have a lot of luxury we've oriented our choices so that jenny my wife gets to be mom full time she doesn't have other work and i'm an author so when i'm home i'm home and it means you know we don't get to buy very much very often um but we do have a lot of productive conversation time with our kids but even that's a luxury there's a lot of people who [Music] are just two parents working as hard as they can or one parent working as hard as they can to pay bills and having these kind of conversations to try to mitigate the challenges in our national education system are impossible uh so how do we change it um i don't know if homeschooling's effective or not period that's not a loaded statement i literally have no idea how effective that is in driving change but i do write a lot of letters to legislators and school boards one of my friends truby actually got an email back from our superintendent because she sent them research showing how detrimental homework is to learning and we have seen some teachers responding to that movement and giving less homework and focusing more on beneficial coursework so i think it changes one teacher one school district one state legislature at a time and the only way to make that happen is to be involved to be educated like you are and maybe send a very similarly worded letter to your legislature and ask your friends to do the same and if they don't listen vote for somebody else and let them know you're going to do that because you know our children's future really is up to us oh and by the way uh you've just inspired me to cut back on the amount of meat i eat yet again so thanks not only to you kristin but also to your 11 year old daughter well there we have it the last episode of ask science mike i'll ever do before my first book comes out from this point on every single ass science mic will be done by the author mike mccarg so thanks for coming along for this amazing ride andrew thanks for all your work andrew lucky on pre-production question selection greg nordine thank you for your working production and sound design and direction and chad bonifard thanks for that beautiful theme song thanks for listening everyone hope to see you as part of the book launch festivities tomorrow september 13th and other than that i look forward to talking