ASM196 Aphantasia, Carbon Offsets and E-Readers

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aphantasia carbon offsets and e-readers 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 well anything at all i'm your host mike mccarrick better known as science mike and i believe that every sincere question deserves the space for an honest genuine answer this is a space where we reward curiosity and learn and grow together so what do you say let's do one let's get it started you may remember back in may that i was in the hospital for heart disease specifically pericarditis and some associated uh diseases and i was advised to take some rest and i did i was on medical rest for a couple of weeks and then i returned to work uh pretty quickly and uh looks like i may have overdone it a little bit i've been having some chest pains again having some elevated heart rate and so right now i'm in a period where i'm i'm looking at what a more sustained period of rest would look like or changing my patterns around work there's nothing to announce yet it's just something i'm figuring out but it has already had an impact on some of you because we had to cancel uh the last four stops of the tabs and wafers tour which was sad because ticket sales were actually quite good on those stops so i know a lot of you were looking forward uh to being together so i am so sorry that uh i had to cancel those events i'm not sure what touring is going to look like for me in the future uh but for at least for a while i can't do this kind of back-to-back events that i was doing and i've actually kind of canceled most of what is on my events calendar at least for a little while there's a couple things left actually only two events uh remaining for this year 2019 uh the first of which is going to be october 19th i'm still going to the christian christian transhumanist conference in nashville tennessee i am really looking forward to that some folks biologists will be there some folks that actually have experience with transhumanism and gene therapy will be there in addition to myself so i think that will be really fun and exciting october 19th in nashville and then i have something that i i am just wildly excited about and that's going to be the 200th episode of ask science mike i don't know if you all remember this but you started this podcast ask science mike was not my idea some of you listeners of the liturgist podcast came up with the idea on twitter and i ran with it under your suggestion and then it you know became a pretty popular uh podcast and uh then with a lot of the attention i gave the liturgists it got neglected for a while and then lately we've been back on our streak of getting episodes out regularly again and and the downloads are up up again higher than they've ever been it's very exciting but i've had a grief with the growth of this podcast when i first started doing science mic events and when i first started doing ask science mic events they were small a normal room would be 50 or 75 people and i have to be honest those were my favorite science mic events because we all got to know each other everybody who had a question got to ask one there's plenty of time for me to meet everybody without it dr you know sometimes today when i do meet and greet they can last three or four hours i've got to make some careful choices about that with my heart health but i i like doing ass science mike with you you know right now i'm standing in my studio at home and i have to like stand up uh i've got a stand-up desk and i raise it in order to have to sound exciting on the program otherwise i get kind of sleepy kind of tired and i sound like it on the podcast i so love doing this work but what i love most about doing this work is doing this work with you so i was brainstorming with caitlin who is the producer of this show and brent who's my manager and we were wondering like what would it look like to do an old school small ask science mic we'd need a place to do it and there's some challenges finding a place to do our science mike lots of churches love to host me but a lot of you are nervous in churches and i don't want to make you know give you anxiety about where it is but if i partner with clubs and bars and theaters well then we have to get companies involved that drive the ticket price up really high um that was one thing that disappointed me with tabs and wafers was we were trying to build an event with economical tickets and then we realized by the time all these fees got locked in you know the tickets were 50 bucks which is just a lot for one evening i get it money's tight money's tight for me too so we have found an amazing space uh in highland park in los angeles that is uh really affordable for us to rent and we are going to do a tiny ask science mic together for episode 200 on november the 9th i mean tiny tickets are very very limited where there's not many spots for this we do have free tickets available so if you're on lower restricted income you can get free tickets if you are on uh not restricted incomes tickets only 25 bucks and if you want to sponsor free tickets so that i can have more of those both now and potentially in the future you can buy a sponsor ticket if you can't make it but you want to help somebody else attend so that events on november 9th and as i record this that event has already sold out i told my patrons about it and sent an email to my email list and all the tickets got uh bought immediately uh i think there are two free tickets left so we're gonna look at the venue see if we can move things around and add a few more seats so that by the time you hear this hopefully there are some seats what i would tell you though is if the event is sold out when you go to the website keep checking because people's plans change and i'm i you know i i try to be really easy about letting people uh cancel and get refunds on events we probably won't lock that until you know two days before the event or something so even if it says sold out realize that you can go back and you might find tickets available you know when we've done small events before like ken with the litter just says sell out really fast but then people cancel and we add back four or five tickets at a time and so if you if you're trying to get in and it looks sold out don't worry you still might be able to get and you just might have to check on the website uh you know every every other day or so but i'm super excited about this like i think i'm more excited about this event than anything i've done in a long time because it's what i love the most i love to just sit with a few of you at a time and for us all to just create an experience together so if you're interested in uh the christian transhumanist conference in nashville on october 19th or the 200th episode of ask science mike being recorded live in los angeles on november the 9th just go to asksciencemike.com click on the menu and then there's a one a button that says events if you go to events you can learn more about those events and buy tickets right there i would absolutely love to see you [Music] okay our first question came in via email and it reads hi science mike long time lover of both this show and the liturgists i regularly listen in to ask science mike with my 11 year old daughter on our way to swim training and it always gets a good conversation going a couple of years ago i discovered that i have aphantasia meaning i have no mind's eye when i say i discovered what i mean is to say i discovered other people actually have a mind's eye and it's not just a metaphor for our imagination i find people often assume i have no imagination when i tell them about aphantasia which gets annoying because i'm quite good at creative writing so my question is what part of the brain controls the mind's eye and what other functions are triggered by this same part of the brain i'm wondering if like other neurological conditions afantasia impacts impairs or improves other brain functions thanks for all you do mike john doyle preston from the united kingdom well for folks listening who did not ask this question i think we'd probably want to start with uh you know what a fantasia is and that is a rare disorder and it is quite rare that prevents people from conjuring images in their minds they can't picture anything so if you say picture a sailboat you know what even as i say that i can see a sailboat this one is uh blue it's very small it's got a sail i'm guessing this would almost be like a dinghy with a sail that my mind has conjured in response to the word sailboat and for someone with a fantasia that just doesn't happen it's a little hard for people to imagine what that's like sounds almost like the opposite of like someone like temple grandin whose internal experience is almost entirely images for someone like me you know most of my cognition is definitely linguistic or something i'd probably label as as meta language but i can conjure images what i think is fascinating about this is although we all talk we speak out loud or communicate with sign language we use these symbols and structures in metaphor to communicate called language the way that's interpreted and processes in our brains actually has a remarkable diversity and um in terms of aphantasia i i tend to think of this as another way of thinking more than i think about it as a disorder precisely because it doesn't appear to offer any real impairment now let's be honest there is very little research out there on a fantasia in fact almost no research at all it's that rare is that poorly understood but in the studies that have been done with very small sample sizes of people who have a fantasia there's no association with cognitive impairment or any inability to solve problems even those that we would intuitively imagine involve visualizing things so for example if you ask someone with a fantasia if an evergreen tree or a field of grass is a darker shade of green for me to solve that i picture a tree and i picked her grass and i say the tree is darker but people with a fantasia answer that question just as effectively they just can't describe the mechanism by which they're able to answer the question they say they just know i could not find any research that indicates where in the brain this disorder originates or is associated with i did find a once one small study of a single patient with a brain injury who basically acquired afantasia through that injury and when they scanned this person's brain during problem solving uh the activity in their visual cortex was much lower than control groups of normal brains one thing that was interesting to me personally is there's a high association with afantasia with face blindness a condition that i myself suffer from but that doesn't necessarily tell us where or how this condition occurs in the brain so i i hate to do it but it's a swing and a miss i'm assuming you did a lot of googling first couldn't find a lot and thought maybe i would do better i actually even called a couple of um neurologists uh and a neuroscientist who are friends of mine to see if they had any leads and they were equally stumped uh so the best thing i could find about fantasia was an article in scientific america called when the mind's eye is blind and i'll have a link to that in the show notes on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] ask science mike wouldn't be possible without the support of generous sponsors the first of which are my friends on patreon the show is listener supported if you'd like to be a part of that and in doing so select the content that appears on the show every week just go to ask sciencemic.com and click on the patreon become a patreon button to learn how you can become a member donations as low as a dollar a month help this show continue and help me pay rent and have health insurance so do consider becoming a patron if you aren't already it's a very fun community by the way the patrons got first shot at tickets to ask science mike 200 which is why the event was almost full before i even sent out an email about it this show is also made possible by better help i've had such significant mental health challenges in the last year and i found therapy to be pivotal in my ability to not just continue to do this work but to survive and thrive as a person but i'll be honest getting to therapy is really hard for me i have issues navigating traffic i have issues parking uh it turns out i've been diagnosed with narcolepsy so some of my issues with driving really makes sense in that light that's why i enjoy better help so much better help lets me connect with a counselor through my phone or my computer i can text them i can do real-time chat i can do a phone call i can even do a video call from the security and privacy of my own home which i find an indispensable way of getting the support that i need better help is staffed by licensed mental health professionals in the united states more than 3 000 but it's available worldwide they help us deal with stress anger management family issues they even have therapists who specializes in the emotional issues that lgbtq people face every day best of all in my mind is they offer things on a sliding scale so if you have a lower income their service is available at a significant discount for you better help is offering 10 off a first month subscription to listeners of ask science mike and to do that just go to betterhelp.com sciencemike or use the discount code sciencemic when you sign up for a description it's super easy when you go to that website they'll take you through a short questionnaire that will help get you matched with a counselor you love again that's betterhelp.com slash science mike and one of the longest running sponsors of ask science mike is kiwi co you parents listening check this out it's amazing kiwi co is all about inspiring children through science technology engineering arts and the math creating future scientists and designers and engineers and artists it's an amazing product every month your child will receive a kiwi crate in the mail that are seriously fun but centered around hands-on learning activities in science and art and math they are age graded with multiple tracks available depending on your child's interest and you can switch anytime kiwi co is absolutely remarkable i'm a subscriber myself i pay for kiwi co this is not something i get for free and if you would like to try it for free just go to kiwico.com science where your first month is completely free you get to try the product for no cost whatsoever and because you can cancel at any time that means you can literally get a crate cancel and have paid nothing so the worst case scenario is some entertainment for your child that gets them away from screens and facilitates hands-on learning that shows up in their grades and shows up in their confidence i especially love this for girls since we understand that around middle school girls become less interested in science and art excuse me science and math because of social pressures and this helps us bring girls into the future they are so needed in science and the arts but kiwico is fun and exciting for children of all genders so if you're interested just go to kiwico.com science to learn more and get your free kiwi crate hello science mike this is connie i'm from canada and i have a question for you about carbon offsets i love to travel with my family and i've been wondering lately if that's a luxury we can no longer afford in terms of uh the carbon emissions of travel of course there's less harmful forms of travel like taking a train that's going anyway but even that of course has a carbon footprint so when i've looked into buying carbon offsets to neutralize the impact of travel i've wondered if it's really legit can i trust that these companies are really doing the right thing with my money is it really helping does the math actually work out that the carbon pollution emitted from my travels is actually brought down to zero when i buy those carbon offsets so many questions and if the math does work out is there one is there one company or a handful that are better than others can i trust a few of them more than others i apologize for the wind noise or any other noises i'm currently walking my dog in this beautiful playground of a planet that we have that i love to explore and would want to keep exploring but i just wonder uh about the impact thanks for all you do thanks for the positive energy you put out into the world and uh i look forward to your answer thanks you know it's a complicated question i can't answer it definitively definitively so i'll say that up top i think that's just important to set expectations carbon offsets can be a green washing that's pr driven that's associated with unscrupulous actors in the economy it takes a lot of due diligence to vet carbon offset programs to make sure that they are effective because some early carbon offset programs and initiatives basically spent 20 or less of the funds they received on the carbon mitigating activities that were sold to the person or company who purchased that offset program so not a great start for carbon offsets and let's be real if you fly in an airplane with your family somewhere each each person's share of the carbon emissions on that flight are going to be you know thousands of pounds of carbon for that journey if it's of any significant length per person per person you know a cross-country flight for one person can put a comparable amount of carbon in the atmosphere as you sp as you generate driving your car for a year now on a per person basis flying is generally more effective than a single person uh driving a long distance in a car but as soon as you add two or three people with you cars become more efficient than airplanes again and of course trains you know wreck cars and carbon efficiency and buses are even more carbon efficient i've been trying to figure out if it's feasible or plausible for me to switch to primarily buses and trains when i travel for events i'm looking at these things too so what about carbon offsets the idea here is a carbon offset does something to neutralize carbon that would have been released into the atmosphere or captures and sequesters carbon already in the atmosphere the most popular form of of capturing and sequestering is planting trees uh the mitigation strategy which has become more popular recently is things like funding wind farms or energy efficient appliances for economically disadvantaged people i actually think you know that ladder option is a better way to go because when uh carbon offset programs plant trees those trees may or may not make it to maturity they may or may not be the right tree for that environment today and certainly may not be the right tree 30 years from now as the climate changes and if those trees die they release carbon back into the atmosphere right so you know no easy answers here so do they work do carbon offsets neutralize the carbon activity from travel no once carbon's in the atmosphere it's in the atmosphere that doesn't mean i'm against carbon offsets though because carbon offsets can really help lower emissions when you get something as simple as a carbon offset program that gave away led light bulbs and gave those to people who are using incandescent bulbs that will absolutely lower emissions and help people who can't afford to buy led light bulbs new stoves new water heaters new air conditioners subsidizing those things to get more of them in use is a way of restructuring our economy around lowering emissions in fact you know one study in frontiers in the ecology and the environment written by three folks from stanford looked at california's carbon offset program which allowed companies to buy offsets in the form of funding forest preservation that study said that in 2015 those offsets resulted in 4.7 million metric tons of reduced emissions uh that's great 4.7 million metric tons of carbon so basically companies funded forestry programs that otherwise would not have been funded uh so it prevented some forest from being logging logged and then in other cases allowed new forests to be protected and to recover and have significant planting uh that's great so i am all four carbon offsets as long as we don't think of them as like magically making our activity carbon neutral we still need to make lifestyle changes but when we're doing things that put out a lot of carbon that is a moment to think about ways we can fund things that are good for the climate and good for the planet and carbon offsets is one way of doing that i've got a couple of links uh in the show notes this week one is should you buy carbon offsets and the others carbon offsets really do help lower emissions that references uh that study in the state of california i'm not going to tell you which companies are best because there's a lot of companies coming and going and very few with an international profile so if i were to tell you you know a few companies that look good in canada by the time someone hears this episode a year from now in the archives that company might not be around and they might not be in canada so this is a place where people will have to do unfortunately their own homework and due diligence [Music] okay our next question came from email hi mike our children's school is looking to implement an electronic home reader that will mean reading from a screen or device instead of a real book while i understand that books are made from our planet's natural but renewable resources my partner and i feel that this is a real step backwards in teaching philosophy i like the world feel because i can't find any data to support this not from my google searching anyways is there any data to support the fact that reading a tangible real ink and paper type book is better than reading from a screen i'd be keen to hear your thoughts keep up the good work my podcast friend tim well tim it's a very thoughtful question you do point to an important issue at least in my mind around e-readers and that's people tend to think of books as bad for the environment because they're made of trees but from what i've read in the research i've done the consumption of paper especially if that paper is recycled doesn't increase our landfill usage very much while encouraging us to plant new trees which then sequester carbon and keeps lands set aside for forests since the paper industry needs trees so in an odd way books seem like they might be better for the environment than e-readers which are electronic devices and take a ton of energy to produce and a couple of back of the napkin estimates i've seen nothing rigorous it seems that it would take hundreds of ebooks to offset uh where you buy no books at all to offset the carbon required in manufacturing and distributing e-readers so to your point of natural resources books do come from renewable natural resources in terms of research there's not a lot of research that looks at e-readers versus paper books in my experience i read faster when i read an e-reader but i never know what book i read something in i just remember seeing it on my kindle or on my ipad and i have better source retention when i read from books because i get to engage my tactile memory at least that's my theory like you i don't have any data to back that up uh so i did find a few studies just a few that basically say there's not really any difference in comprehension between e-readers and traditional books some students read faster on ipads versus actual books in very very small samples they read faster but had equal comp uh comprehension scores uh it looks like children who have learning disabilities or uh dyslexia um actually perform worse when they read from a print book uh so an e-reader an ipod touch in this study actually helped those children read better these are all very small sample sizes the point is when we have done research we've seen very small advantages and disadvantages that are mixed between the two media there is no slam dunk on e-readers versus print books in learning so you can start thinking about other things you know i i watch my children develop um back pain from lugging these big backpacks around and maybe e-readers would help with that maybe but that would mean all the curriculum would have to be available on the e-reader uh so i'd love to give you some science to support i love books i love paper books so this is a case where my answer doesn't fit with what i would have wished my answer to be and again i also wanted to say there's just like not a ton of research into this topic i did uh find an article that summarized some of the sources that i checked i'll leave that in the show notes so you can look yours for yourself and and make your own decision on what might best suit your child's learning style [Music] high science of my kids from the central valley of california and i appreciate everything you do so thanks anyway i've had a brain injury for about six years now and the main thing that was affected is my muscle control so i talk really slowly so you could speed it up to 1.5 or if you're smoking something strong you can slow down to 0.5 and have a real creepy ride so my question is my faith changed a lot but after my brain injury i was a hardcore fundamentalist so was that because of the brain injury and change in neural pathways or because something happened to me that i really didn't expect and kinda came out of nowhere anyway thank you bye well zach thanks for your question as someone who uh speaks slowly as well and sometimes uh people leave comments in the reviews for ask science mike and the literature's podcast on itunes that basically say i love science mike why does he speak so slowly i appreciated the solidarity i have difficulty understanding people when they speak quickly and i just wanted you to know that the pace at which you asked your question actually really helped me follow along with your question i'd also say that i've read some research in a book called how conversation can change how words change your brain i think by my favorite neuroscientist andrew newberg that people who speak more slowly not only increase the comprehension of what they say in the minds of their listeners and increase the retention of what they said but also create a sense of trust and mutual respect by speaking more slowly so that all that is a very long-winded way of saying i enjoyed listening to your voice the premise of my first book finding god in the waves is that faith is something that happens in the brain that's what the whole book is about it tells my story sure it's my attempt to refactor and understand a lot of christian theology through science but the central premise of the book the waves in which god is found are the waves in our brains so absolutely your brain injury could have a direct impact on your faith the brain injury itself the mechanical changes in your brain and your brain's plastic response in order to recover from that injury can play a role but also the emotional recovery from a brain injury i fell off of a motorcycle in 2015 in the fall i guess we're coming up on four years now for me gosh yeah right at four years i think this month and i went through a terrible period of depression and anger and frustration it's been four years and i still don't have the verbal acuity i had before the injury i still get brain fog brain frogs as well i get brain fog i get confused and disoriented in a way that i didn't used to be in fact one of my uh medical caregivers and my neurologist believes that the reason that my symptoms from autism spectrum disorder increased to the point that i sought a diagnosis was because my brain injury lowered some of my cognitive capacity to mask the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder also it may be the reason i was recently diagnosed with narcolepsy is those symptoms have become more severe because of my brain injury before i fell off that motorcycle i was in the the afterglow of a mystical experience it lasted several years where i just felt like all was right with the world that i was close to god whoever the heck or whatever the heck god is um and i just had a profound love and patience for my fellow man my fellow humans sorry for gendering our species folks i try to do better than that and then i had a brain injury and i became short-tempered i became frustrated i became disillusioned in my faith some of that was probably the loss of neurons that created networks responsible for my belief and understanding of god and part of that was probably the grief that comes with realizing after a brain injury you never become the person you were before but instead are on the quest to discover who the new person you are will be and of course that new person will have a new take on faith a new understanding of who or what god is i would just as your friend and as someone who has also struggled with brain injury i would encourage you to just offer yourself tremendous patience and tremendous grace i would reframe your journey as discovering who the new you is and what your new faith may be and delight in the fact that changes in your brain are giving you the opportunity to change your worldview i don't want to say that in a way that erases any disability that you experience i know that the challenges of brain injury are real so what i'm telling you is as someone who has also experienced these things some ways of thinking that were helpful to me most of all i would like to encourage you that if anything i say feels wrong or feels counter to your experience to say all science mike is doing his best but he doesn't understand my situation that science mike and zach are two different people i hope that people in your life are patient with you as you undergo this multi-year process of recovery and growth and discovery and i want you to know that i am simply delighted to hear anything you'd like to share in the future about what you're learning about faith and life [Music] it takes a village to make ask science mike thank you greg nordine for producing and sound designing ass science mike thank caitlin's hermstad i guess thanks it sounds like i'm commanding everyone to thank caitlyn although you should i'd like to thank caitlyn hermstad for producing science mike and organizing it andrew golucky for pre-production and of course all the patrons on patreon for not only funding the show but also doing the work of deciding what questions go on the air i have such a joy and such a delight making this podcast with all of you i look forward to our time together every week and i can't wait to speak to you next week thanks for listening everybody [Applause]