ASM137 It's a Patron Show (Part 5)

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

number five is alive it's part five and the final part of the patron special on ask science mike [Applause] [Music] science faith so here we are at the last part of my patron special which was meant to be something i did over the thanksgiving break and then life got in the way so instead of doing five shows in five days i've done five shows in like 14 days still more than normal but strange and erratic which is almost becoming the hallmark of this program but here we go this is it we've got five more questions for this fifth part and then next week it's back to normal with studio editions of ask science mike got some really great plans for essence mike where to take it in the future i've been talking about that with my patrons on patreon and if you'd like to join into those discussions and help keep this show happening just go to uh sciencemike.com and click on the patreon icon and you can join patreon and help decide where we go next also we're reaching kind of the end of 2017 and 2018 is coming up and my speaking calendar is getting really really crowded already so if you're thinking about bringing me to uh an event in 2018 if that's at a church or a college or a conference or whatever your daughter's birthday party whatever it might be uh now is the time to start booking uh me for 2018 or i won't be able to come so i'd i'd love to come see you in your community uh meeting people in person is my favorite thing about this program so just go to sciencemic.com and then click on the speaking tab and that will take you where you can get information about bringing me in and with that let's answer these last five questions [Music] first question is from matt harris and matt asks another one to add to the vast array what's the cause of misophonia and what can a person do about it to personalize it why does the sound of other people eating actually make me angry what's that about i can't understand or i can't stand the sound of my wife flossing her teeth either sometimes the sound of my eating irritates me matt i don't know a lot about the cause of misophonia off the top of my head i do know that there have been some treatments that involve basically therapy in conjunction with white noise and that can help reduce your sensitivity to sounds like that i do know there's a vaguely similar disorder called sensory processing syndrome i believe that has to do with some people like feeling that you know seams and fabric are intolerable or feeling almost pain-like sensation in conjunction with sounds and that has to do with the brain's pain centers becoming active with sensory information that's not actually painful so i wonder if perhaps in misophonia there's something similar only involving the emotional centers of the brain but that is complete conjecture on my part um if it's really bugging you yeah i would i would look for a mental health professional who specializes in misophonia or similar conditions and see if maybe some of that white noise therapy and dissociation could help you find some relief [Music] andy says we speak briefly about the science of the green flash at sunset i've watched many a sunset and have never seen it is it a rare phenomenon or is it subtle enough that it's easily missed thanks uh yeah andy a lot of people think this is a myth it is not a myth the easiest way to see it is to be on a mountain or a tall building as you look at a sunset or to be on like a boat or the beach at sunset looking out over water somewhere the horizon is clear and if you look i mean immediately as the sun disappears over the horizon you can in fact sometimes see that green flash it is real i've never seen one personally i've seen photographs and i've talked to you know scientists who know what they're talking about who attest that it's a real phenomenon and what happens is as you know the sunset is red because our atmosphere readily scatters blue light and as the sun moves down from the top overhead down toward the horizons the light you're seeing is passing through more atmosphere and so more blue light is getting scattered which is no big deal and also doesn't cause green uh but also our atmosphere acts kind of like a prism so it will separate different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and visual light and so green if you if you think of a prism projecting a rainbow on a table that's what's happening only most of the light is getting filtered out except for the red and the green and the green is completely drowned out by the red until that moment when the sun goes over the horizon and then you get like a little echo sun a tiny little green rim of sun that's been bent by the atmosphere to a different degree than the red light so that's a totally real thing relatively difficult to see especially because if you look at the sun too early you can damage your eyes or temporarily cause enough you know uh partial blindness to not be able to see the green effect so it's a matter of timing a clear atmosphere and a clear view of the horizon the beach is probably your best bet if there's no beach nearby a tall building or mountain are your next best ways to see that famous green flash [Music] patrick klein asks hopefully a softball science question is there really any difference in how left-handed people or right-handed people from a neurological psychological behavioral perspective think or act i'm a lefty and i think people try to oversell our uniqueness by how different we are i.e lefties are more creative better at problem solving great leaders etc but i don't think it's actually true help us out here mike uh let's see patrick i think i answered this uh somewhere in the history of ask science mike if you give me a second i'm gonna look in my show notes archive my script archive actually and see yep look at that question uh one on episode 33 was the science of handedness um and it looks like the science of handedness is not entirely known we have some theories if you think about uh humans we're bilaterally symmetric we have two mirrored halves but the symmetry isn't perfect our heart's a little tilted our stomach is on its side and the two hemispheres of the brain are not strictly identical and sometimes our brains uh are kind of flipped some people's dominant consciousness is in their right temporal lobe excuse me the right prefrontal cortex instead they're left some people's language centers in the right temporal lobe instead of left sometimes people's brain functions entirely inverted from everyone else we also know that some genetic conditions can flip the symmetry of our organs where the hearts on the right side of the body for example um and we're not the only uh animals who show tendencies towards handedness both polar bears and chimpanzees have shown tendencies have shown not tendencies have shown actual handedness but in their populations is about 50 50 compared to 90 10 in homo sapiens one study showed that the amount of mutation between two copies of a particular gene correlated with left-handedness uh it's a gene that is in fact related to body symmetry but on its own it doesn't predict handedness so we think that probably has a larger genetic component that we don't know enough about the genome to tease out yet um but it makes perfect sense in our brain that's kind of put it upside down where our left hemisphere controls the right side of the body etc that handedness is is uh switching is a pretty normal thing we see it a lot in mammals and we think the reason uh there's so much difference in handedness rates in humans versus other species is the development of language and that high association with the left temporal lobe made it i don't know possibly more likely for right-handed people to reproduce over time especially the early dawn of anatomically modern humans i don't know how close that is to my answer from episode 33 so if that wasn't satisfying i'd probably go into more depth back in time ask science mike episode 33 question 1 the science of handedness daniel says i've been listening to pete ends and jared bias's podcast the bible from normal people and they talk about how people of jewish faith have a much easier time disagreeing on matters of scripture but still staying united as a community and faith in my own christian faith excuse me i have found that scripture interpretation and hermeneutics seem to be more often than not a point of divisiveness rather than a jumping off point for discussion my question is there anything neurologically psychologically or culturally that makes us desire for others to agree with us it's it's largely cultural um and that culture is relying on psychological mechanisms that themselves are neurological in origin kind of an intersection of culture and neurology as manifested by psychology we like to fit in we're social species and if our culture has told us that common belief is important in social value and social cohesion then disagreement is an incredible stressor and and and perceived by the brain is dangerous actually you see this in fundamentalist communities where the the brain responds to dissenting voices in a similar way as it does to physical threat so if you look at jewish culture especially a religious jewish culture as opposed to secular jewish culture it's it's built in it's a cultural norm to um debate or discuss topics you know rather voraciously and that's different from western american christianity especially fundamentalist christianity but all all christian churches are prone to this islam you know doesn't fare terribly better in its fundamentalist incarnations as well but that it is absolutely rooted in the way culture reinforces some psychological needs we have for social identity and social cohesion and those things come out from being social primates this is what happens when social apes learn to talk [Music] last question for the patron special comes from ed and he says you've spoken before about the evolutionary advantages of value and aesthetics when it comes to the opposite gender for example assuming the viability of potential mates breeding factors etc i wonder what i'm wondering is if there's a scientific consensus or studies to determine why we as humans value and seek out aesthetics that seem to provide no evolutionary utility why do we find sunsets or art or music so profoundly moving when there doesn't appear to be anything to gain from valuing them why would natural selection select four offspring that have this innate appreciation for the beautiful and to play devil's advocate for a moment or in this case god's i guess is there a point where the explanation that natural selection simply doesn't select against non-detrimental mutations becomes a cop-out thanks for your work mike it means a lot to know that there are other folks out there with similar stories as mine you've had a tremendous impact on my life over the past year keep it up i hate to give you a cop out but i don't think it's a cop out to say that evolution doesn't select against non-detrimental mutations benign mutations are totally fine in evolution's eye as long as you don't get out competed by more beneficial mutation [Music] think about a moth and its attraction to light that's a great survival trait except for fire and artificial lights at which point that tendency to appreciate light backfires we have the same appreciation for light and the same aversion to darkness and those are evolutionary advantageous longing for beautiful sunsets and natural spaces is good for a nomadic species of social ape when the current environments are not ideal enough humans are pretty likely to pack things up and try to find better ground and evolution rewards that i think that's where that beauty comes from music is incredibly powerful in social cohesion if you can imagine early humans some were musical others were not music was used to create cohesion to rehearse hunting to rehearse warfare so i can't get behind the idea that music's not evolutionary beneficial or evolutionarily beneficial so i think all these things come down to um for most of humanity's history things that we currently think of kind of benign were actually incredibly beneficial to us they helped us create culture and culture and language and large scale human populations have been an incredible boon to this species for a large mammal we're dominant the only organism i can think that's more dominant on this planet um it would be like bacteria maybe maybe ants i think ants are pretty credible although they don't handle cold environments as well as we do [Music] because they don't adapt to they can't adapt their environment the same way that we can um cockroaches do pretty well but what i mean is for for very large body mammals our ecological domination of this planet is simply unmatched and uh a lot of that comes down to our appreciation for beauty and music and culture and it makes perfect sense to me that evolution favors those things i am pretty shocked uh these patreon episodes have done really well download-wise uh basically an ass science mic land when i i've done patreon specials in the past they're like two hours long they're some of the most downloaded episodes uh i don't understand it i'd love your feedback i'd love for you to tell me what you like about these shows why so many people download them the live shows do really well as well that makes sense to me they're tons of fun but you know i'm really interested right now if you want to go to my website and uh if you go to about me i think there's a contact form at the bottom what do you like about ask science mike what do you wish as science mike did uh this next year i'm gonna work on the format of the program i'm gonna try some new things i'm gonna experiment and try to keep it fresh and i'm really interested in like what what role does this podcast play in your life and what what do you love what episodes do you like if you like the patron shows why do you like them if you like the live shows why do you like those if you like the normal studio shows which ones do you like more why tell me i'm going to read those messages and your thoughts will go into how this show happened next year honestly it's probably too late it's only december the 8th as i record this and i'll release it december the 8th so uh it's too early for a year and retrospective but um tens of thousands of people listen to this show every week every single week um in the first two months an episode is out they'll do a quarter million downloads pretty consistently that's crazy i mean it's really unbelievable how many people listen to this program um and i'd like to know what i could do to best um do whatever it is you've hired me to do by downloading this show is it is are you just entertaining your commute is there some community building happening here i want to know so once again go to asksciencemike.com and then click on the button that says about and then scroll down to the bottom of the page it says i'd love to hear from you you can fill out that form and that goes right to an email box of mine that i read nobody else reads that just me and i'd love to hear your thoughts on this program and what i can do if you'd like to keep it going of course again check us out on patreon rate the show on itunes maybe leave a review and listen thank you for an incredible year so far we'll have a couple more episodes this year i will take christmas week off because the downloads tend to go very near zero but we'll probably have two more episodes this year and then back on schedule in 2018. thanks everybody