ASM160 Parenting, Bubble Wrap, and the Perfect Diet

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parenting bubble wrap and the perfect diet all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life i'm mike mccarg your host the internet calls me science mike and uh well i'm not a scientist i'm just a guy who likes to study things and enjoys explaining them and i answer questions honestly and without judgment and that's how this program works we do it every week and it's a lot of fun and for now let's get it started are you one of the eight to 12 percent of people who skip the announcements every week on ask science mike if so i have an announcement for you don't skip the announcements this week i've got some really cool stuff coming up uh and it comes after the events loop so listen to the events please and then you might hear a couple of announcements that you really care about although i don't know why you wouldn't care about my events they're amazing uh august 25th hello saint andrew methodist church in highlands ranch that's the suburb of denver so denver folks love to see you saturday august 25th i'll lead a centering prayer meditation and the next morning i will be giving a message in both of their morning services so also the allergist gathering is on in london october 5th and october 6th tickets are actually selling pretty well on that one so if you're thinking about joining us in london don't wait till the last minute we may sell out on that one which would be really amazing can men a retreat by the liturgist which is a treat about repairing masculinity and learning to be people who are connected and real relationships and and part of solutions to social problems uh that's going to be october 12th through 14th and that is sold out we do occasionally have someone ask for a refund though so uh you should sign up for our email list to be notified uh if tickets become available or we announce other retreats but honestly people re-buy the tickets faster than we can announce that someone asked for a refund so uh just if you want to go to to ken min october 12th through 14th in the la area uh just keep checking on the website uh and seeing if tickets are available uh october 17th in placentia california i'm doing an ask science mike live and believe me i love doing ask science mike live and then sleeping in my own bed so that's a good one for people in the los angeles and orange county area uh october 26th and 27th i'm going to be at evolving faith that's an event put on by rachel held evans and sarah bessie it includes a truly unbelievable lineup of speakers i'm excited to go that as an attendee i'm doing a conference on centering prayer november 3rd and 4th at first congregational united church of christ in greeley colorado so you can check that out and that's what is in the near future in terms of events fall is really really really really busy for me in addition to those events i'm doing a lot of private events so plenty of chances to see me and if you've thought about bringing me to your college or your conference or your church whatever whatever organization might be interested in my interesting take on the intersection of science and faith go ahead and send in a booking request because uh winter like the first couple months of 2019 and spring are already pretty packed and i've already got falls events lined up for next fall fall 2019. sometimes i am available for last minute bookings but it's generally better if you can put me six months to a year out yay by the way how amazing is that except for summer when no one brings me to speak and if they do no one shows up i don't know what it is about summer and my people but you are not into my events during the summer although you do listen to the podcast so thank you for that so anyway more information on that go to asksciencemike.com and click on the events tab and you can see my events another thing and i mentioned this for the first time on the last episode i've started a thing in l.a called church together it's very simple you go sign up for a special email address this is not signing up for my main email list this is just a special email list and basically some sundays in la i'll email out the week before and say what church i'm going to not speaking at going to and this is because i know some of you you don't know what you think about god you don't know what you think about christianity but you just would like to maybe go to church sometimes and you don't like to go by yourself so i thought we could just go sit together and have lunch afterwards and uh this um it's a little more popular than i thought it was gonna be several hundred people have signed up for church together so far knowing l.a a tiny fraction of them will actually show up though there's still a chance i could announce a church and no one shows up believe me la is a special place so if you're interested in that just go to mikemcarg.com church together and if you can't spell my name it's m-c-h-a-r-g-u-e an easy way to remember that is mch argue like the word argue like let's argue about where to go to lunch and then you can spell my name mike mccarthy.com church together and sign up and i expect in the next couple of weeks i'll announce the first church that we will visit together and that a church must be affirming of all gender identities and sexual orientations uh or it will not be a church that we visit uh and it has to ordain people of all gender identities and sexual orientations obviously including women so two two things i've got going on the third thing this is incredibly cool uh when i went up to toronto i went to an amazing conference up there with a lineup of speakers that i really enjoyed and i met a person named chris davies who is a queer clergy person and chris has this incredible thing that are queer clergy trading cards so this is not an ad this is just something i'm into you can learn about this by going to queerclergytradingcards.org or you can find them on amazon and you can order these little packets this is the sound they make of trading cards and every trading card is a different queer person who is clergy in a local church these aren't uh platform building people these aren't like touring speakers these are people who uh work with one congregation and i just love them so much so my goal is to collect all of the queer clergy trading cards because what happens when people say when i get asked to go to an event i'll say well i'll say this is a conference do you have people of color and queer people speaking and they'll say well you know yeah we've got people of color speaking but we don't know any queer clergy which might be true they may they may not uh but if you get these trading cards then you immediately know at least 12 because you get 12 cards in a pack although there can be duplicates so let's say statistically very likely you'll get at least nine or ten queer clergy folks into your awareness so here's what i want to do i'm gonna give away some of these packs i ordered several on amazon i ordered four um i'll order more all you have to do is go sign up for my email list you go to my website asksciencemike.com or mikemcart.com at some point it'll pop up and ask you to join my email list at which point you are entered to win a set of these queer clergy trading cards and of course you don't have to win to get these you can order your own by going to queerclergytradingcards.org and then what i'm going to tell you is every time i do an event i'm going to bring some of these cards with me so if you show up and you've got your queer clergy trading cards and there's someone you're looking for and i've got that person i will trade any of my cards for any of your cards to help you complete your set okay even if it's one i don't have a duplicate of i'm just gonna bring the cards available for trading uh and i'd just love to start a science mic and the litter just queer clergy trading card ring i don't think anything fits the intersection of my progressive spirituality and innate nerdiness better than these trading cards i just absolutely love them every queer clergy person you get who they are you get their pronouns you get their superpower their kryptonite and their walkout song oh it's so wonderful i just can't stand it uh so for example here we have the reverend dr j johnson so he this is his card his superpower is queer liturgical mysticism his kryptonite is bad spelling and grammar and his walkout song is like a prayer by madonna and of course it's got a picture in this case with a dog as well which is a nice wonderful bonus so if you're not as into queer clergy trading cards as i am uh i'm sorry for whatever emotional blockage you have that prevents you from enjoying life but i would highly encourage you to get into this uh trading card hobby with me let's make this the next magic of the gathering you can do so by visiting queerclergytradingcards.org [Music] you know i should have mentioned this right up top sorry this is a special edition of last night's mike it's a it's a patron only edition all the questions this week came from patrons and uh if you're not a patron that might seem super not fair and i get it there is a little bit of favor happening here in exchange for money although honestly it takes one dollar a month to become a patron uh but these are the people that keep me going like i don't mean emotionally although that's a part of it i mean paying rent and eating so um at the end of the summer it's always tight there's less events over the summer i don't make much money basically patron income is like all of my income during the summer months and uh i just am so overwhelmed by gratitude for that that i wanted to do a show here at the end of summer devoted to the people who made sure that i ate all summer and i'm just so thankful for them so every question this week came from a patron i will periodically do patron-only shows so of course to be a part of that you could become a patron you can learn how ask sciencemike.com okay really this this this whole episode is a love letter to the patrons and our first patron with a question is mark and he says as kids my brother and i were delighted every sunday morning when our father would pick up donuts for us before church the donuts always came in a paper sack and when we had finished eating them dad would put the sack in his mouth blow it full of air and pop it with his hand as loudly as he could we loved it to this day i enjoying that if there's a small paper sack around it's the same with bubble wrap popping all the bubbles could almost be described as cathartic i don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy popping at least a few kids and adults alike i'm hesitant to confidently state that this enjoyment is universal but in general why do we humans find popping things like bubble wrap and paper bags so satisfying uh well mark i love this question because i've never had it ever or any variation of it questions like that are rare at this point in the science mic career arc so thank you for originality big bonus points for you unfortunately i think your question is conflating separate phenomena i think there are different things at play between uh popping a paper bag and making it go boom and why we love to pop bubble wrap let's start with popping a bag humans love to be startled or at least often it can be fun to be startled sometimes it's genuinely terrifying but in the context of feeling safe or secure or something like a thrill ride or a horror movie or yes assembling or family member jumping out and startling you can be a lot of fun because the jolt of adrenaline and the flight or fight response once we realize we're safe can actually just be fun and enjoyable now not everyone enjoys that some people are traumatized by it or frightened by it but many people enjoy being startled in safe circumstances so you had that which is a known and documented phenomenon with human behavior and you had in the context of really positive conditioning you had parental attention and affection as part of a routine you had your family socialization going on and so this this pop this bag pop which started being fun just because it was startling became associated with really positive memories and experiences and every time you blow up and pop that paper bag you're going on this mental neurological journey back to a time that was very safe and enjoyable at affirming right so that's kind of a very rich and wonderful nostalgia at play here with you popping a paper sack bubble wrap totally different thing one study has actually compared groups of grad students who got to pop two sheets of bubble wrap with a group that didn't get any bubble wrap and they actually found that the group that did the popping was calmer and more alert after they popped the bubble wrap so they were calmer than themselves pre bubble wrap popping and they were calmer than the control group the entire time so we think the act of popping bubble wrap probably serves as a particularly tactile and auditory engaging form of fidgeting think about shaking your leg or tapping your toe on the ground or any kind of nervous energy fidgeting can actually help us fight stress because it helps us relax our muscles and engage in self-soothing behaviors and so for whatever reason the the movement the repetition of bubble wrap the structure of going bubble to bubble the sound the auditory reinforcement we get from doing it helps us easily move into this act of self-soothing to a measurable benefit to our alertness and level of calmness so they both involve a very small explosive decompression for a very uh weak atmospheric vessel um that's what you're hearing is is is kind of this percussive action of um gas being forced out of a a closed container uh so you're hearing a small explosive decompression but why those things are enjoyable in this case i believe come from two completely unrelated effects [Music] our next question came from hannah and it reads it seems like many religious traditions have unhealthy beliefs like patriarchy or authoritarian leanings baked into them in your view does atheism secularism have similarly unhealthy beliefs baked in and if so what are they well this was a really tough question i want to start by like affirming the question because i don't hear a religious critique of secularism here i hear a preemptive yeah preemptive measure to avoid slipping into some form of institutional or collective toxicity from someone who might have experienced that in a religious context i could be wrong that's what i hear and in that vein i really honor the spirit of the question and i think any true skeptics would encourage people to be skeptic of themselves and skeptics movements otherwise it's not skepticism but a couple of things to note the first thing to note is atheism is not a thing it's not a movement it's not a belief system there's actually only one belief required in atheism and it's actually a lack of belief a lack of a belief in any god or gods and so there is no other assumptions baked into atheism at all there are no beliefs associated with atheism at all so for this have this question to make sense we've got to talk about secularists and humanists or maybe new atheists or anti-theists people are taking uh something more than a lack of belief in god in their view there's actually you can't form a world view with atheism alone it's impossible it's also hard to generalize a movement that is relatively small and extremely new historically in ancient times the patriarchal assumptions of religious faced was not really viewed as a problem so it's very difficult for me to say what future generations could view as a problem in secularism especially because there may be things that aren't in secularism now that will grow in the future but i wanna i wanna you know do my best to honestly engage the question uh and so i'm gonna go with some anecdotal observations of things i noticed when i was an atheist one i noticed that skepticism is often confused with a rhetoric that is primarily pedantic it's easy to to have a pedantic approach and response to something someone says and have that sound clever and insightful when really it's just pedantic some atheists can be prone to scientism they can actually take scientific insight beyond what science is meant to do and that's when you have scientism instead of something scientific although i kind of cringe at the word scientism because scientism is often co-opted by religious fundamentalists to discard real science like for example global anthropomorphic climate change is often called scientism when in fact that is actually good science atheists can discount the importance of emotion that's based on uh the brain activity required for a person of faith to become an atheist it requires a highly prefrontal oriented approach to evaluating reality and often because of the amount of emotional activation evolved in religious experiences some atheists become dismissive of feelings in general and over prioritize the power of logic and cerebral thinking uh some atheists can use a hyper-individualized lens when looking at politics and social sciences that's common in a lot of groups that's also a very deconstructed white guy thing uh is the super super hyper individualized lens which is like a valid lens it just is not the only lens we are individuals who exist in a collective society so i think you really need individualized and collective lenses and use them interchangeably to evaluate every situation to get our sense of what's happening uh traditionally skeptical communities have been very white and very male although that is changing um but at first many skeptical communities because of the hyper-individualized lands were resistant to the notion that they were very white and very male but i'm having to really dig deep here uh studies generally show that atheists are very moral people they're good marriage partners and they're reliable parents so i don't see a lot of the same institutional baggage with free thought movements and skeptical movements as i see with religion but they're also very new right part of the reason religions have baggage they've been around so long they've been so attached to power and we know the power is a corrupting force on human psychology and secularists don't have a ton of power to be corrupted by they don't have widespread social influence or political power especially not in the united states so as good skeptics we can best uh prevent the kinds of unhealthy beliefs from infecting free thought movements by continuing to be skeptical of our own thoughts of the leaders of those movements and never taking any information for granted and always understanding we can be wrong [Music] our next question is from ricky and it reads there has to be an optimal human diet there is for every other animal on earth why is science so unclear on human diet or are we just ignoring the facts because of capitalism and our own desires man what a great question i get asked that question all the time it's so hard but i think i think that we can start getting at why this question is so hard right in the question we say there's an optimal human diet there has to be one because there is one for every other animal on earth but what do we mean by optimal diet do we mean animals in the wild tend to be healthier than humans i mean they have horrible mortality rates so so what is an optimal diet optimal for what in the view of natural selection the optimal diet is one that allows you to survive your childhood mate and then help your offspring do the same and natural selection is unconcerned with anything that happens after that so if you're a wild human living outside of civilization and agriculture the optimal diet is the one that gives you enough calories to deal with a very demanding life an optimal diet is that juicy juicy animal that you and your friends just killed which you gorge yourself on and that's that's relatively hard to get meat so most of the time you're foraging on grains which aren't like agriculture grains they're much harder to come by plant matter fruit we can find it it's mostly seeds by the way without our agricultural power reshaping at the artificial selection so the impulses we have to seek out fatty foods and salty foods and calorically rich foods were optimal because of caloric scarcity in the environment we developed in but natural selection won't start selecting against those things until it causes us to be unable to mate or survive childhood and as a species compared to wild animals we've done a great job surviving childhood and mating although affluent people make much less we you know we are not uh natural selection's unconcerned with heart disease that takes you out in your 40s 50s 60s or 70s there's no mechanism to weed that out um now so we have to assume we mean something different by optimal then what we mean by optimal i guess is that uh we're in good physical health that we have a high quality of life and that we have a long life or a high life expectancy maybe that's how we define an optimal diet and oddly enough americans are uniquely obsessed with the optimal human diet while also being uniquely and singularly unhealthy physically as a society and i think this notion that there is an optimal human diet is part of that i don't think there is an optimal human diet your diet can and in fact must vary based on your activity level based on your genetic factors your food sensitivities right and looking for these optimal nutrients and taking a nutrient based view of food leads us to be obsessed with the wrong things i've noticed all the time there's a good food and they're bad foods i've watched eggs be good foods and bad foods and good foods and bad foods for a while saturated fat was the enemy so we started using plant-based fats created trans fats figure out they were even worse and then we have these super foods right right now i can't turn my head in los angeles without someone telling me how great coconut milk or coconut butter or coconut oil is good or how great olive oil is good and that's fine those things are good but psychologically once we call them good foods we over consume them and coconut butter has just as much fat in it as dairy butter so if because it's good suddenly start using more coconut butter then you would have used dairy butter your diet is not getting more optimal your diet is getting less optimal so there's a lot of complexity here absolutely capitalism plays a role the need to sell foods that are processed that are patentable that are marketable there's not a lot of companies that are going to subsidize a buy broccoli campaign because there's so many broccoli companies right so it's much easier to sell cocoa crispies that's a you know we got a trademark on cocoa crispies we make it in a factory but broccoli is a more nutritious food item than cocoa crispies uh and i think to get toward an optimal diet we have to start moving away from being obsessed with nutrients and towards thinking about whole foods not the restaurant chain i mean entire food items the best summary i've seen of a reasonable approach to diet was by michael pollan when he said eat food not too much mostly plants now you'd hear eat food you'd say that's ridiculous of course i eat food no he means food food not i think he says edible food items what is food food grew from the ground food had a mom or a dad right he says you know avoid ingredients you can't pronounce don't eat things with more than five ingredients basically eat the things around the rim on the outside of the grocery store that are closer to the loading docks because they have to be constantly replaced with fresh stock because they expire what are those things vegetables fruits unprocessed meats right that just have been butchered fresh meats not frozen um although well i won't go down a rabbit hole fresh versus frozen in uh meat items eat actual food don't eat too much understand that your appetite developed in food scarce environments and so most of the time you need to stop eating before you feel full so that's practicing portion control and then mostly plants the majority of the food you eat as a human should be plant matter and that's it when i follow that approach by the way i lose tons of weight without counting calories without obsessing over nutrients and macronutrients my my blood panels come back better when i eat food not too much mostly plants i do great the problem is i like pizza more than food [Laughter] honestly like i've lost some some reasonable weight lately about a dozen pounds and we went to a pool party with some friends and they ordered pizza and i couldn't stop eating the pizza i ate so much pizza to the point that my friend i think charitably closed the pizza box so that i could not see it anymore maybe he didn't know but it felt to me like this great beautiful gesture of i got you buddy the salty goodness of pizza combined with the fattiness of the cheese it's irresistible to me i mean i understand what people talk about when they talk about addiction because a pizza and i'm not minimizing your experience with hard drugs here i'm saying i've known addicts and what they described with their alcoholism or their heroin addiction when they had that seems awfully similar to me and pizza and that's not good right it takes a huge effort to eat food not too much mostly plants for many of us but also we shouldn't demonize food items there's nothing wrong with pizza uh as an occasional thing i eat when i'm having fun with friends then pizza is just fine when pizza is a problem is when it's twice three times a week oh i don't know eight times a week then pizza is a problem right uh anyway if you want to know more check out michael pollan's books he's got a couple on that he's also got a great book out on psychedelics recently he's a good journalist who does due diligence when he researches the topic and he's done a great job with food as well [Music] okay our next question from melissa is short sweet and multi-layered and difficult the question is what does science have to say about how parenting changes people's personalities yikes first of all i don't know what you mean by the question uh do you mean how does becoming a parent change you or how did you change because of how your parents raised you those are very different questions and i think are both reasonable ways to read that question grammatically so i'm going to answer both because i love my patrons so much first question is how's becoming a parent change someone uh according to science you get more tired forever uh you get more unhappy you get poorer you have less disposable income you have less money saved for retirement you have fewer social relationships so parents go through a great thinning of their uh social web so those those are not great things uh but your child's smile lights up your brain with dopamine in a way a few other things are capable of you experience the release of oxytocin in greater amounts more frequently both moms and dads you have a house that in some ways becomes more affectionate children make us more tender you basically go through a great trial with great rewards and how we go through that individually depends on a lot of factors and it also impacts our parenting style which goes with how we would answer that question interpreted the other way how does being parented changed someone uh how do our parents shape us and the most helpful model i've seen here comes from research where you imagine two spectrums to measure parenting and the intersection of the two those two spectrums uh illustrate four distinct parenting styles the first spectrum is how demanding is a parent now i tend to be triggered by the word demanding uh so in this in this case think more like clearly sets expectations is demanding not demanding demanding although as you'll see it can be demanding demanding as well the other spectrum is how responsive is a parent so we're looking at two things how demanding how responsive now if we look at a parent who is highly demanding and highly responsive that parenting style is called the authoritative parenting style so authoritative parents they set very clear expectations about what they want to happen but they're also highly responsive to their children's needs so a highly responsive parent might see their child in conflict with another child they may walk over they may see that their child took a toy away from the other child because they wanted it an authoritative parent would say you had to give the toy back uh we we don't take toys from other people and explain why um and then respond to the child's questions and um respond to their own emotional response you know if the child is upset by the toy being taken then that's going to lead to a time of interaction and not just harsh correction right that's a highly demanding highly responsive parent which is called the authoritative parenting style and kids who have authoritative parents are more likely than other children to have good emotional self regulation they're going to be more likely to have high academic performance and they're going to be more likely to be socially accepted by other children they're also going to be more likely to associate effort with success that's an authoritative parent highly demanding and highly responsive their close cousin is the authoritarian parent who is also highly demanding but has low responsiveness so an authoritarian parent is going to set very high expectations but not offer emotional support or conversational guidance if you want to sum up the authoritarian style of parenting you could say spare the rod spoil the child right heavy emphasis on discipline no emphasis on warmth or vulnerability kids of authoritarian parents are very likely to have authoritarian personalities think donald j trump they often have lower academic performance than kids raised by authoritative parents they're often socially withdrawn they're often unhappy children with low self-esteem so authoritarian parenting measurably has bad impacts on children then there's a permissive parenting style and if you're a permissive parent you're have you're a low demanding low demands but highly responsive so that means there's not a lot of discipline or expectation setting but very responsive to children's requests or emotional needs permissive parents tend to let children say what they want to say stay out as late as they want to stay out buy whatever they can afford to buy the child they respond quickly to tantrums all those sorts of things i'm not casting judgment here i am explaining the intersection of low demanding highly responsive parenting what do we see among children with permissive parents they're more likely than baseline to be impulsive to struggle with academic achievement they are more likely to abuse drugs not use drugs but abuse drugs in adolescence and in adulthood than children uh just average children i guess uh then there is the rejecting neglecting style of parenting and this is low demand low responsiveness it means i don't set expectations i'm basically not involved with my child at all or very little as little as possible and children of of rejecting negative parents have extremely low academic performance extremely low social acceptance extremely low self-image they're often depressed they're often very risky in their sexual behaviors and they have the worst adult performance of any uh group of children worse than any of the other three now go back to that first question you get more tired you get more happy you get poorer i actually have a lot of empathy for why people become rejecting to get collecting parents if they're in extremely difficult circumstances or they had poor parenting themselves same thing i understand permissive parenting sometimes it's easier just to give in i think most of us parents find that on different days we represent all of these parenting styles and it's i guess it's the trend over time that determines which group you've fallen and therefore which group your children fall in uh but one thing the research has shown is that a child's sensitivity matters so some children are just less emotionally sensitive innately and those children are less impacted by their parents for good or for bad so if you have a child that's not very sensitive and you're an authoritative parent okay very small shift in their behavior because of that and the same way if you're rejecting neglecting a child with low sensitivity is not going to be as impaired more sensitive children are more impacted by their parents for good and for bad so sensitive children raised by authoritative excuse me authoritative parents have extremely high performance and self-acceptance top of the class so to speak sensitive children with rejecting neglecting are at the the very bottom so parenting is this interaction um one thing i've learned as a parent is the degree to which i am partnering with my children in raising them that i'm not like the boss that this is a project we're working on together uh and i strive to include them in that and to have honest discussions with them and that and that seems to work out pretty well of course my kids are 11 and 13. 10 years from now i might tell you all just how wrong i was but yeah parenting is a huge huge deal uh i'm gonna put links for every question this week but especially this one if you're a parent digging deeper into these four parenting styles and the corresponding research is something that i've found to be super helpful and it was fun to go through it again to answer this question [Music] well there we go another ask science mic in the books thanks to all my patrons for keeping me going thanks for submitting these questions thanks for voting on each other's questions thanks for running this whole show greg nordin man thanks for the editing andrew golucki thank you for pre-production jeb bodford thanks again for the theme song can't wait to see you in la this fall and for all of you are listening thank you for listening i hope to see you at some events and i hope to trade some queer clergy trading cards with you i'll talk to you all next week [Music]