ASM142 Quantum Computers, Past Lives, and Transgender Brains

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quantum computers past lives and transgender brains all that and more on this week's episode of ask science [Music] [Applause] though he may mike understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the space science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarth known online as science mike and i'm here to give you a passionate amateur's perspective on the questions people send into the show if you're wondering what this is about it's your first time you'll find out soon enough because we're about to get it started [Music] hello science mike uh i am daniel hamby and i had a question um about quantum computers i came across our article today by the wall street journal title is how google's quantum computer could change the world um i was just curious if you can maybe explain a little bit more about uh quantum computers and it says here in article that it uses quantum mechanics uh just i guess calculate complex problems and they talk about the multiverse in here and i was just thinking maybe you can kind of translate a little bit about what exactly quantum computers do uh thank you bye from the sound of that audio file uh i wonder if you maybe submitted the question on a quantum computer oh man i need a rim shot there that was really cheesy [Laughter] okay let's talk about quantum computers this is one of those rare questions on s science mic that i feel unselfconsciously qualified to answer uh before i was science mike i worked in advertising and before i worked in advertising uh i built my entire career on technology believe it or not my core competency the thing i'm best at in the entire world is dealing with computers and computer systems and and technology so um what got me into science and physics in the first place was trying to understand how microprocessors work if you keep digging down into computer science eventually what do you strike you strike physics if you're trying to learn the mechanical action of a computer or mathematics if you're trying to understand the abstractions or the axiomatic systems on which computers rely to do their work i you know i i still don't have a college degree but i have a long career uh doing real work in computer systems so i think i'm actually credentialed maybe for the first question ever in the history of this podcast i read that wall street journal piece i got to be honest it was hard for me to read they made fundamental mistakes about multiverse mechanics they made fundamental mistakes about quantum computing and even how traditional computers work i'm not going to take the time to dissect that because the article's behind a paywall and most people won't be able to see it anyway but i was disappointed in that article that an opportunity to provide clarity and instead they fudged the basics which honestly happens often in journalism when people cover science and technology those are specialized fields and many journalists simply don't have the background to parse through the information required but let's step back for a second and talk about what is a computer what in the world is a computer what makes a computer a computer well all of the computers we think of today are what we would call binary digital computers it means they do computations that happens digitally as opposed to analog so everything happens in a computer is divided into discrete signals or levels there's not continuous curves what does that mean well as you listen to me talking we could draw a sound wave that would look kind of like a sine wave with bumps and ridges that goes high and low and this continuous curve uh and now i want you to imagine that like minecraft if you ever played the game minecraft how the world is made of these blocks now let's make that same curve from me talking out of minecraft blocks and that makes it digital instead of analog or discrete okay and when we say a computer is binary digital that means computers only deal with two digits zero and one on or off absolutely everything that happens in a computer's systems are digital although i suppose technically the power supply is not but i mean within the actual computing system itself once it has a voltage coming in to supply the system everything's happening where we treat electricity as representing either a one or a zero now if you want to think about that in like a more accessible analogy think heads or tails right and a single piece of information in a computer is called a bit b-i-t a bit so a single piece of information either heads or tails one or zero is a bit which means you could represent a byte that's eight bits with quarters if you were to set eight quarters on your table some heads some tails that would represent a byte of computer memory and you could technically do everything a computer does with a sufficient number of coins that you flip over heads or tails you could do it would be much slower than a computer but you could absolutely do it it's called a turing machine this idea of turning all computations into a digital intermediary and then turning them back on the other side into something people can understand now if you don't understand binary if every digit can only be 0 or 1 i'm going to count to 1 000 for you in binary right now don't skip forward it won't take long so i'll start at zero so we go 0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000. so see what happens whenever you fill up a place um like the ones place it fills at once you have to increment over and add another place you have to have the tens column now you have to add the tens place and you count very quickly in binary but if we were to do direct decimal conversion a thousand in binary is eight in base 10 or decimal mathematics so computers are using very very large values in binary and then converting them back into decimal numbers for us to understand now there's other intermediary intermediaries like hexadecimal but let's not worry about that for this answer what you need to understand is a normal computer does everything it does uh using ones and zeros and then converts those into things we understand like base 10 numbers or letters of the alphabet or pixels on a screen that draw graphics and pictures and facetime calls and all the things that we do on computers today all with ones and zeroes cycling billions of times per second which is believe me for a great beard like myself amazing that the phone in your pocket cycles its ones and zeros billions of times per second with an almost unimaginable number of bits involved now what is a quantum computer well quantum computers do computation in a fundamentally different way than a classical computer if a classical computer is based on manipulating bits quantum computers manipulate quantum bits or qubits q bits like with the letter q q u b i t s whereas a bit in a traditional computer will involve a set of transistors in a memory array or a microprocessor in silicon and a semiconductor quantum computers qubits can be an atom or a photon or an electron anything that we can put into superposition now this is this is pretty intense physics here in the quantum world the rules of physics are different than what we experience at the macro scale and so quantum phenomena can exhibit multiple states simultaneously they can be in multiple places at once prior to observation or particle interaction and that means a cubit and i i realize there's a lot of heads spinning right now it would take me 20 minutes to go fully into superposition i think i did on um the eska top not the eschatology the epistemology episodes of the liturgist podcast if you'd like to hear a longer rant on superposition but just imagine an atom uh or a photon or an electron can have spin right let's just imagine there's two spins up and down one and zero heads tails well an atom in superposition is going to be up and down at the same time one and zero at the same time heads and tails at the same time if your mind is blowing right now i want you to imagine a coin sitting on your desk is it heads or is it tails it's one or the other but if you take that coin and you put it on your thumb and you flip it into the air and it starts spinning in the air guess what it's not heads or tails it's both so now your coin is a cubit so just imagine in a quantum computer a cubit these kind of floating coins in the air all spinning so rapidly you can't see heads or tails all you see is this coin sphere and when it stops it could be heads or tails but we have no way of knowing right now because the coin or the qubit is in superposition gosh mike how is that useful at all well because superposition allows quantum phenomena to be in multiple states instead of having to do a long calculation to determine for example a prime number you can simply have a quantum computer surmise that value as its superposition collapses so it kind of simultaneously computes every possible probability and there are uh very specific quantum computers in the world today made by d-wave google's working on a more general purpose quantum computer and uh they can do some pretty remarkable things but they're all they're all very small there's not a lot of bits involved or if there's a lot of bits involved their application is limited and it means in theory quantum computers can do things that classical computers could not do like in the age of the universe no matter how big a computer no matter how much time you gave it it wouldn't be able to do this so for example quantum computers may be able to break all encryption codes by guessing the hidden factor factors in public key encryption they could calculate the fastest route between two points by considering every possible combination and in a quantum computer qubits create exponential growth because every additional qubit doubles the computing power of the system that's remarkable and nothing like a classical computer but here's the thing they're incredibly hard to build quantum computers google has got some pretty deep pockets and they're struggling to build a very small general purpose quantum computer ibm has struggled to do the same again a company called d-wave has had some success by building very limited in-use quantum computers but even if you built a quantum computer they're very hard to program because you have to be good at creating algorithms and computer code and also understand quantum physics because you can't really use superposition as the outcome of an algorithm your output needs to be ones and zeros so you need to craft your query to a quantum computer in such a way that can be expressed as what as ones and zeros equaling the number of qubits your system has okay so that's a that's a big deal um so we may need quantum computers with very many bits to do meaningful work even with that skill set if you know if you're a great programmer who understands particle physics and assuming we get the technology working today quantum computers are very prone to errors it takes a number theoretically if qubits to error correct a single qubit so you could imagine if we created a quantum computer with 300 qubits the vast majority of them would be assigned to error correcting leaving very few for useful work quantum computers still aren't good at most of what we use computers for today they're not good at playing 4k video on netflix they're not good at word processing it's funny as a writer i go straight to word processing they're not good at podcasting or music production the kinds of everyday tasks we use computers for we wouldn't really see any benefit to a quantum computer but quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that we literally can't compute any other ways and would be very useful not only in the sciences but creating new forms of encryption and high-speed communication assuming of course that we can get them to work [Music] i've got three events happening in february and i'd love to see you at one if you're nearby february the 7th i'll be at orange california for an ask science mic live event february 10th i'll be in cincinnati ohio also doing ask science mike live and february the 23rd i'll be part of the revive 2018 conference in san diego california to learn more about these events and how you can be a part of them go to asksciencemike.com and click on the events tab in the menu [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads thanks for all you do my question today is about young children who seem to have memories of past lives my niece once gave me a detailed account of how she used to be an old man living a town away who drove an old truck i've read accounts of other children who had such specific memories their families were able to verify the stories they were told for instance one little boy insisted he was a pilot who died in a plane crash and gave the name of his buddy who was on the plane with him which was verified through research i don't believe in reincarnation by any means but this has made me curious is there any explanation for this phenomenon well thank you for your question uh it was very very popular with my patrons on patreon when they pick the questions for this program this was by far the most popular question i went through and actually found the um particular story you're talking about you know i've got an abc news article and another article that kind of dig into the the situation and what was happening and basically as you describe a child named james uh claimed to be a fighter pilot seemed to know a lot about airplanes seemed to have specific details uh regarding the pilot's life that you know the parents reached out and and verified and there's other stories like that of children seemingly with uncanny knowledge of the lives of other people and then their parents or someone in their life kind of gets into it and does some research and finds amazing things okay i am deeply skeptical about these stories deeply deeply skeptical number one even if children are having exceptional or uncanny knowledge about other people's lives um i don't know why we automatically jump to they are the reincarnation of another soul as the most likely explanation that that's a that's a an understandable quirk of human psychology but what i find consistently when i when i dig into these stories is a lack of rigor in the investigative techniques used by parents and so-called experts as they learn about these past lives from children so for example james the child who remember being a fighter pilot they consulted an expert who counsels children about past lives specifically and i have a very difficult time believing that consciously or unconsciously this expert didn't lead james into how they interpreted these quote unquote memories through their questioning so when we when we're asking people information in a clinical setting this is something that requires training because it's so easy to accidentally lead people into answers when you ask them questions so i think first of all a big component here is people accidentally leading children in their questions selective memory so when you see mentalists and other people who psychics who seem to have great knowledge they're very good at asking branching questions and keeping most of the things they say are actually wrong but people only remember the successes because the timing seems uncanny and a good psychic or mentalist will kind of seem like they're tuning in but you know i mean if we're talking about fighter pilots uh if i said you know i was a fighter pilot named jimmy and i had a friend named tom well how many james and thomases have been pilots and may have known each other in the history of u.s aviation well probably a large number so that's not actually an uncanny situation i think what's going on here is we are accidentally ascribing low probability to things which are very common and parents and experts air quote experts are accidentally leading children and maybe even accidentally embellishing stories you know when people believe something when that becomes meaningful to them we're narrative consciousness species and we tend to remember things in a way that reinforces the story that animates our lives so if you have a child this child has a bright and vivid imagination and we come to believe that this child might be exceptional because they have an old soul trapped inside of them or that's embodiment of an older person then not through deceit don't hear me wrong i'm not saying these people are lying but they are um they're humans living a story and they are they're they're adding some spice to the soup i think that's the most likely explanation for the phenomenon barring serious double-blind scientific inquiry that has a more controlled test environment and allows us to better establish if there's really anything going on here so in the absence of evidence i'm going to have an absence of belief in um a world war ii fighter pilot living as a small child today have you ever tried to meditate and like it just didn't work you couldn't make it happen you've heard me talk about meditation you've heard people talk about the benefits of meditation and you were interested and then you tried it and nothing happened what about this are you into the enneagram and it seems like everybody's talking about the endogram every time i turn my head someone else is talking about the enneagram have you ever thought about how the enneagram might influence deconstruction doubt or spiritual formation well we are making a course about meditation and of course about the enneagram with the liturgists i'm really excited about it we've completed the meditation course it came out way better than i thought it ever could i think it's going to be very useful for people trying to start or deepen a meditation practice this weekend i'll be shooting with michael gunger and an enneagram expert a video about using the enneagram to navigate deconstruction and spiritual formation we're trying to help people go deeper into topics they tell us they care about than we can on a podcast and also trying to avoid people having to travel to come to an event so we're going to put an event in your home actually too one on meditation and one on the enneagram if that sounds interesting to you you can pre-order these two classes as a bogo buy one get one free by going to shop.theliturgis.com just click on the video bundle and you can get both those videos at a really remarkably low price well they're not just videos the video courses it's going to be 8 to 12 videos diving deep into that topic and that will include an online q a with the hosts of that myself and my good friend michael gunger if that sounds interesting go to shop.theliturgist.com hey science mike um lexi savoy here uh i love your show and um all that you do um i have a was recently listening to episode 126 um uh in that episode you talked some about suicide and um i had a follow-up question for that um i grew up in in the mountain west where the suicide rates are higher than in any other place in the country um oftentimes it's called the suicide corridor and i feel that the conversation there instead of focusing on ways and what we can do to help those that are suffering is instead become blaming with the non-religious uh blaming the religious people and um claiming that um christian conservatives uh especially and other religious um people are the cause of the high suicide rates i was wondering what the data showed and if there was any correlation between being religious and your risk of suicide i was also wondering if there was any data to show why the mountain west has a higher rate of suicide than anywhere else in the country and what are some of the things that we can do to maybe move the conversation forward so that we can instead of arguing about uh the causes we can instead try to fix the problem and what would be some of the ways that we can maybe help those that are suffering from suicide this is something that personally affects my life i had a cousin that many years ago committed suicide herself and i also have a few relatives that have attempted to commit suicide or pondered it and i just would like to know if you have any strategies or ways that maybe we can try to reach out better and and more towards these people to bring them in anyways love what you're doing thanks suicide is an incredibly complicated and nuanced topic and it is often sensationalized and over generalized in the media and frankly also in the sciences so for example if we look in aggregate if we just if we just look at all religious people as a group then you could say religion has been shown to improve mental health and reduce suicide risks and that would be a valid claim to make if you were to investigate why it's probably due to social connections and social support and a sense of belonging when you are a religious person in community with like-minded religious people you fit in and your brain loves that but if we if we dig deeper one study found that religious involvement in east asia actually increased suicide risks why because the overall culture is not terribly religious and so to be religious actually reduces social connections and social support so in latin america being religious is far more beneficial than it is in north america because latin america is more deeply religious than north america is so you have a high benefit from religiosity and mental health in latin america you have a detriment in east asia and then north america you have a modest benefit so it seems that in terms of mental health and suicide prevention being about as religious as your community is most helpful which i think to social scientists and psychologists would be not surprising at all that's just no surprise now if we talk about the the mountain west and the suicide corridor that you referenced data suggests that the combination of low population density and high rates of gun ownership could be what's driving higher suicide rates in the mountain west we theorize we surmise that sparse populations could aggravate depression and also by necessity reduce social support people living in sparse in rural areas no fewer people it's easier to become estranged when you have few social connections even though the south is deeply religious and in many ways similar politically to the mountain west uh it is it is actually more population dense even in rural areas than the mountain west which is some of the has some of the lowest population densities in the country possibly the world i don't know i'd have to i'd have to i'd have to dig through but it's there's there's a lot of miles square miles and not that many people easy access to guns absolutely i don't want to get into the second amendment fight here although i'm definitely for gun control but gun access means when you attempt suicide you're very likely to be successful it also means you know other suicide attempts often require more preparation but you can you can get into a very dark place you can grab a gun and you can kill yourself which is why people who own guns are very likely to die from the gun they own either by their own hand or someone else's interestingly enough at researching this question the suicide epidemic quote unquote that we're having today is actually a return to the suicide rates we saw in the 70s and 80s before suicide rates plummeted in the 1990s so there may be a factor where you know perceived economic trajectories impact people's propensity to commit suicide which means boy are we into material wealth so what does that tell us it tells us that the mountain west has some real headwinds in its pop population density and gun culture when you look at similar densities without gun ownership you lower the suicide rate and when you look at higher population density but similarly high uh rates of governorship like the south the rural south you see lower suicide rates so so it seems like the mountain corridor is kind of a man a worst-case scenario in the united states for suicide attempts and successful suicide attempts the university of florida has a criterion for suicide attempt and we talk about what we can do how we reach out to others i think it's important to understand the the emotional and cognitive effects that come together to cause someone to try and take their own life and there are three one i am a burden on others you believe that you're a burden on other people that's a third of what it takes to become suicidal two i don't belong that can be with family or with community this lack of a sense of belonging and three i don't fear death or self-harm now interestingly enough this is why many antidepressants actually increase suicide risks even if they successfully treat depression they can distance people from the feeling of fear of their own death so if they already feel like they're a burden on others and they feel like they don't belong with family or community then the antidepressant can help them not fear death anymore and then they attempt suicide so we should be very careful when we prescribe antidepressants in the medical community or they i'm not in the medical community uh doctors should be careful screening for these criteria if someone that feels like they're a burden on others and they don't belong that's gonna mean antidepressants put them in an elevated risk of suicide what does this mean for us non-medical professionals non-mental health counselors it means we need to know in ourselves and other people when people are drifting towards these three criteria and it means when we're having discussions and trying to support people who are going into a dark place we need to have concrete ways to tell people they're not a burden on others and that they do belong right this is one thing i try to do in my work and i didn't do it on purpose but i do get a really high number of emails from people saying that they were contemplating suicide they encountered my work or what what we do with the liturgists and then we're as not suicidal anymore and i think it comes down to that sense of belonging and i work all the time on this program letting people know they are not alone it's not just you no matter what you know category that perceived estrangement comes from whether that's spiritual deconstruction or or faith identity or faith transition whether that's race or gender or ability level or membership in the lgbtq community whatever point is making people feel like they don't belong i try to have my work be a pushback on that idea no you do belong no you are wanted one of my favorite things is at science mike live when people stand up in vulnerability and they say i i'm a burden on others and i don't belong and i usually start to cry and tell people you do belong and you're needed here and then the whole room starts clapping or cheering or crying you have no idea what that does to a person in a time of crisis to feel like they belong i mean i think about what did rob bell do for me in that room in 2012. more than anything else i stop and i said i don't believe any of this god [ \_\_ ] and he said boy we're glad you're here why is the literature such a big deal for me i met michael gunger and i realized i wasn't the only weirdo like me that i belonged so what we can do to combat the suicide epidemic in the united states is offer people a sense of genuine belonging [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads i'm curious about what is going on in the brain and body of a transgendered person does something about their brain body or hormones actually communicate to them that they are the opposite sex or somewhere else on the non-binary spectrum or does it communicate to them that something is just wrong like their brain messages don't match their assigned gender though i'm sympathetic from a cultural perspective i'm confused from a scientific perspective how can someone say i never felt like a girl or something similar after all the body you have is the only one you have ever had and how do you know what someone in another body feels like what is going on in the brain and or body that separates transgendered people from cisgendered people thanks for shedding light on this for me becky well becky uh excellent question i i think a lot of people share that obviously i am not trans and i would say we typically want to say transgender and not transgendered right when you add that past tense that ed on the on the end of transgender to make it transgendered it makes transgendered seem like something that happened to someone as opposed to being part of their identity and i've been told by members of the trans community that transgender is the preferred terminology so i can't answer experientially at all i have always comfortably identified as a man although i have absolutely struggled with the societal expectations of masculinity i don't care about football i don't care about sports i i am utterly disinterested in competition and domination and winning i am emotionally vulnerable and in my youth i was relentlessly mocked for not being quote manly enough so that is coming from a cisgender man what happens if that feeling of disidentity is deeper than behavior and why well let's look at it scientifically because i can't speak to it experientially and it seems like you're already making progress on how you view this socially and culturally the first thing we want to consider is that biological sex is incredibly complicated and deeply varied before we even introduce the sociological idea of gender our social conception of gender as a binary isn't reflective of the biological reality for all kinds of species vertebrates and invertebrates and that includes homo sapiens or humans in humans biological sex lies at the intersection of chromosomal combination genetic factors and environmental factors during fetal and later development it is never as simple as two x chromosomes is a girl and an x and y chromosome are a boy let's look at specifics in science and biology specifically talking about human beings some people are born with genitals that appear to be female due to an enzyme efficiency and then they hit puberty and these outwardly appearing female genitals grow into a penis and testicles and the child matures into a man these children are often dressed like girls all the way to puberty no one knows and then they have to have a gender transition non-surgical by the way but they have to transition their gender from female to male once they hit puberty their voice changes and they literally develop normal male primary and secondary sex characteristics people can be born with a vagina and a uterus but testicles instead of ovaries now someone who is born with ambiguous or mixed genitals is intersex not trans but at least one in 1 000 babies are and there's not just one state of intersex there's many different uh types or conditions uh to be an intersex person numerous it's not just one in the same way science is telling us there's not just one way one thing that makes someone trans i mentioned intersex people which are distinct and separate from trans people only because intersex people so well illustrate the way that our binary view of gender is a misconception of the biology so what happens if something more subtle than genital development or primary and secondary characteristics are at play then you have someone who's trans now research does support the idea that the brains of people who identify as trans have something special going on in terms of their brain structures we really do see a mix of their apparent gender and the gender they identify with their brains will show structural characteristics of male and female brains we could also see that in studies involving a hidden sensory information where we we make it impossible to uh know what the gender of a person for example who wore a t-shirt is uh oftentimes trans people will report attraction to the pheromone of the gender that they are attracted to kind of disintermediating the idea of preference here that we're showing an underlying biological reality now research into trans brains and trans behaviors is very new and very limited in scope and we absolutely need more research which is frankly true of all brain imaging studies we have very small sample sizes and very limited research scopes in all brain imaging studies but trans people and intersex people reveal that a spectrum is a far more biologically accurate way to describe gender than a binary but this raises an interesting question if gender really is a spectrum how come the vast majority of people feel comfortable in a binary of man or woman male or female boy or girl well if we look at the distribution of genetic chromosomal and primary and secondary sex characteristics guess what we see along the spectrum two bell curves two distributions where the the mass of individuals in a society comfortably fit at where all of what we consider their biological sex aligns with their identified gender and that's most people but if we look at these two bell curves the the tips of the bells overlap in the middle significantly there's a lot of people who don't comfortably identify as male or female or they comfortably identify as male or female but they appear to be male or female and there are some people whose characteristics and identification is ambiguous enough that they don't identify comfortably as either or perhaps they identify as both and culturally that seems strange and it seems difficult to process but biologically it's actually more accurate to the science than male and female so what do we do well i got to be honest even if the science didn't support gender fluidity i still would it's people's right to live their life as they choose and do with their bodies what they wish but the science supports the idea that these people are pushing back against social norms for a reason underlying biological reality and it's important to me to use the science and the ethics to fully support the humanity and dignity of trans people all over the world so i hope you becky and everyone listening understands yes there's a scientific component and we can use that science to offer insight to people who aren't yet affirming to understand why trans people are fearfully and wonderfully made and deserve complete and full equality in our society well there's another episode of ask science mike in the books i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon who make the show possible and if you'd like to keep ask science mike going would you consider giving me a dollar a month or five dollars a month it really makes a big difference and plus you get to pick the questions that come on the show every week if you're interested in learning how to do that just go to ask sciencemike.com click on the patreon icon i'd like to thank andrew golucky for his work in pre-production greg north dean for producing ask science mike and my best friend jeff bodaford for writing the ask science mike theme song thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week [Applause] [Music]