ASM136 It's a Patron Show (Part 4)

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this is the show that never ends it's part four of the patron special he's got answers [Music] [Applause] welcome to ask science mike the daily weekly irregularly scheduled podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life today while huddled hiding from high winds fire and a possible mandatory fire evacuation so if you hear something howling in the background that's not my stomach it's just the breeze uh and let's get this patron show over with by getting it [Applause] started paul asks where does your logo come from mike okay well if you've seen my logo it's a rocket ship and i really like space that's it i just really like space i like the idea of uh there's also a denotion of velocity in my little circle rocket logo so that the rocket's taking us somewhere a friend of mine designed it and i absolutely love it kevin asks i've heard that cell phones and routers near you while you sleep can cause everything from interrupted sleep patterns to cancer is there any validity to any of this at all yes but not what you think uh internet routers have flashing blinking lights and uh flashing blinking lights are bad for the quality of your sleep the same thing looking at your phone while in bed uh basically trains your your body and your mind and your brain to be active in bed instead of falling asleep and looking into a phone is kind of like looking into a flashlight at night and makes your brain feel wide awake neither your wi-fi router nor your phone will give you cancer because although they do emit electromagnetic radiation that radiation is non-ionizing and therefore not dangerous to living tissues [Music] holly asks what goes on in a sex addict's brain particularly if they are in denial that their view of sexuality is unhealthy it is confusing to me how an otherwise loving compassionate person can justify overstepping sexual boundaries over and over again especially when they see how it is further traumatizing their partner uh holly i'd start by saying that uh sexual addiction is a clinical diagnosis um and so even if someone has some unhealthy or even compulsive sexual behaviors that does not necessarily mean they are a sex addict unless they have been diagnosed so by a qualified mental health professional of course there are many reasons someone on a spectrum of sexual addiction or compulsion or straight up immorality may overstep the boundaries of a relationship and unfortunately we can't control other people's actions so if you're in a relationship with someone and i'm not saying you are i just mean hypothetically if you're if someone's in a relationship with someone who practices frequent sexual infidelity it's probably a sign that that relationship should not continue if sexual fidelity is important to you it is important to me it is also important to my wife and my wife and i have absolute sexual fidelity to one another uh as a sign of mutual love and honor and respect um and if your partner just literally can't do that they either need to seek treatment and then show some willingness to to respect their partner like that or they just don't need to be in any sort of monogamous relationship where they're going to continually re-traumatize their partner now in situations of specific addiction uh brain scans have shown us um that there becomes basically a um a very um short-circuited pathway in the brain i can't think of a better metaphor than that that almost bypasses the parts of the brain responsible for agency uh in from that stimulus to the more powerful emotional centers of the brain so we can we believe see addiction in certain types of brain imaging today and it is a serious problem for people who suffer from any sort of addiction the degree to which their willpower you know isn't significantly doesn't have a significant capacity to will to influence the behavior that is manifested by their addiction um but if you're addicted to something and you care for other people you can still seek treatment and be open to treatment options and even if someone is open to treatment options and they have a legitimate addiction the behavior may continue or they may seem better for a while and then they can have a pretty serious relapse and the only person who can decide if that's okay with them or not is the person's partner [Music] justin says what do you make of martyrs if all belief systems can lead to the divine then are any of them worth dying for oh justin that is a fantastic question i've never contemplated before this moment um i don't know that like a particular religious understanding of god is worth dying for but i think that um our religious beliefs can be worth dying for that are inspired by that specific god so if for example you believed that um let's go with something very obvious killing children is wrong and you lived in a society where people killed children frequently just you know school-aged kids and you refuse to do so on religious grounds and they say well if you're not going to kill children we're going to kill you and you are martyred i certainly think that is worthwhile not only because you have not been complicit in perpetuating harm but also your resistance to a violent system may inspire others in a way that eliminates the system altogether so as usual when you ask me a difficult philosophic question a shortcut to pragmatism and so i would say any form of martyrdom that leads towards justice i can totally get behind [Music] nathan asks how or where are we of when we are engaging in virtue signaling both liberal and conservative i've had some conversations with some typically older family and friends about things like systemic injustice which go well and are respectful but eventually we get to a point where the other person bails out on me usually with a comment that's an admittance of some bias that they denied at the beginning of the conversation it can be frustrating like i'm wasting my time trying to assume good intentions on their part and the lack of information and data are our disconnect it feels frustrating trying to navigate i'm sure i do the same thing in the other direction how can we do a sort of reality check at the beginning of these kinds of talks so we know our biases and those of others nathan i suppose you could study uh well-known cognitive and psychological biases and understand they're basically universal and it's just it's just a question of what you're biased toward and that's going to be primarily a function of social identity changing people's minds and especially their worldviews is incredibly difficult and takes a long time uh your it's unrealistic to think that you can have a single conversation with someone and significantly alter the way they see the world um i think justice work in interpersonal relationships involves slow seemingly invisible progress um and also more than one person so you're just hoping to add you know maybe one more grain of sand to a scale that will eventually tip in that direction hopefully i don't think that everyone can sit down disclose their biases i don't think people know their own biases well enough i try to know mine sometimes i'm blindsided um and that's just that's just this crazy species of ours that's just who we are and um just try to be present with people and really try to listen to them and um and then and then just be honest about where you are and why and uh also information and data are fine they're nowhere near as powerful as stories if you can figure a way to get a toe hold into a person's value system uh using a story they're much more likely to listen and much more likely to be slowly changed by the information you present via a compelling narrative [Music] cliff asks how are specific genes and their functions isolated and identified within a larger strand of dna how are traits traced back to a specific location within the genome wow cliff a swing for the fences that i think i'd need 25 minutes to scratch the surface of that one there's no one way genes are isolated um in this age of the human genome project we if at least sequenced the entire human genome that doesn't mean we understand it and uh once we have a string of data in the form of a gene sequence figuring out what it does um takes a long time there's this one is called gene prediction try to predict what genes will do and sometimes it's done with computers that are um looking for like commonly known sequences or genetic words that we understand in larger uh phrases and that helps us understand what they may do and then we can also use a more evidence-based approach where we compare dna sequences with different rna sequences and see how they engage in the larger cell or we can compare the genomes of two individuals and uh even across species sometimes and see there by comparing contrasting what genes may do and finally we can actually alter genes in organisms to see what they do in that organism which obviously is deeply troubling for human testing um but it's this is this is a massive field of science that is not simple um but yeah basically it's detective work it's detective work with uh billions of tiny clues um you know it's i'm deeply unsatisfied with my answer this question cliff [Laughter] um traced back to a specific location within the genome is not as difficult now that we can sequence large portions of the genome and that we have a map for the entire human genome but this specific function that's that's what researchers do in genetic work today that's their whole job [Music] amanda says hey science mike my grandpa was visiting italy recently and told me he visited the body of a saint in a church who had died centuries ago but whose body has not decayed what are your thoughts on this do you think this is a real phenomenon and if so what's going on here thanks uh i'm i've seen some reports of religious generated lack of decomposition it usually comes down to excellent embalming or excellent environmental factors for preservation [Music] decomposition is a chemical process that is your body's bacteria turns on you when you're not alive anymore and certain populations explode and and your bacteria starts to break down your tissues if you stop that process and you make the tissues inhospitable inhospitable to bacteria a body can last for a long time i mean if you put a body in space for example uh i would imagine that it could be around for hundreds of millions or billions of years because it would be dry and it would be cold and it would be inhospitable to bacteria so if you get if you get a cadaver or corpse dry and cool they can last quite a long time without any apparent signs of advanced decomposition and i would imagine that's what's going on with this saint that your grandfather saw april says i didn't see my question i thought i submitted it but now i'm thinking i didn't hit post sorry if it comes up twice it did not so don't worry about that april i read a study that followed biggest loser contestants and i would love you to break it down in science mic fashion it seems for these contestants profound weight loss damaged their metabolisms even years later and they were at a greater metabolic disadvantage after shedding pounds than they were to start with i understand humans have to fight to lose weight because our bodies try to hold on to fat but these findings seem to show that their bodies kept fighting for those pounds back years later and so to maintain weight loss they would have to work harder and harder over time yuck if that's true then should obese people avoid losing significant amounts of weight or do you feel like this is an isolated study without enough data is it that we just have a predetermined weight that we're genetically predisposed to and our bodies fight to stay at or just how anyone's body could fight back to get back to where it was after getting thin losing weight thanks mike um losing weight rapidly is not healthy and the biggest loser encourages this this really rapid weight loss um it is true that as you get uh bigger and heavier and more obese that you need less energy to maintain a pound of your body than someone who's thinner and your metabolism gets used to that and so when you lose weight and if i you know i weigh i'm actually losing weight right now but i got up to 250 pounds which is not as heavy as i've ever been but still pretty heavy i'm just under like 239 right now and um if i say i get to 200 pounds once i get to 200 pounds it'll take less calories to keep me at 200 pounds than someone who's never weighed 250 pounds my metabolism is actually slower it's not that i have to work harder and harder over time but it does mean i'll have to work hard period to maintain that weight harder than someone who has never been obese and that just has to do with how our metabolisms function [Music] it is also true that obesity is increasing and that scientists see a variety of factors at play and we don't know all of them but we know that even animals who eat a prescribed amount of calories per day in laboratory environments are also getting more obese and that that would somewhat mitigate the it's simply a matter of activity and calorie consumption that said no it isn't it is good for your health to decrease the amount of fat on your body a lot of body fat does put you at a risk of cardiovascular disease puts you at a risk of stroke and heart attack can put stress on your liver and other organs so if you if you if you are obese and i don't mean to be beautiful i think people of all shapes and sizes are beautiful but i think if your health is important to you then decreasing your body fat percentage is important i wouldn't obsess about a scale number i would just focus on being intentional about what you eat and on gradually increasing your daily amount of exercise because those things are going to make you feel good so i don't i don't go on a diet because i want to look great i think i look great already when i start to exercise and lose weight it's because i actually enjoy how i feel i have more energy my body aches less i actually get hungry a lot less i'm not i'm not terribly my appetite it's not really bad right now because i've really cut down on the processed grains and the uh processed flour and sugar and so my blood sugar sugar is more stable all those things are nice they're nice effects for my body and i enjoy them um and it may you know i it's i don't have a goal weight in mind um but i am writing down everything i eat in a food journal and uh tracking how much exercise i do and just like slowly i mean very slowly taking weight off of my body about a pound a week is is is what i'm kind of settling in at right now so that's probably a sustainable rate of weight loss as i lose weight i'll have to eat less and less um and i'll just focus on calorie dense foods so it's not hopeless but it is true that if you if you've been very heavy it is harder to stay lighter than someone else who's never been heavy based on how our metabolism functions [Music] mercy says several people asked about an aversion to cilantro on your twitter feed i am one of those people it tastes like dish soap to me one question if it might be psychosomatic the first time i was exposed to it was during one of my first jobs at a grocery store even the smell of it made me gag i had limited exposure to variety and food up to that point in my life and i did not know what it was and i didn't even know it existed so what about it is it a thing is it hereditary no one in my family and i have asked shares my aversion a strange thing has happened to me marcy as uh twitter my twitter profile has gained followers i've lost the ability to keep up with the mentions so i don't remember the cilantro situation um and i'm not familiar uh with any genetic markers for cilantro version um i'm cheating a little bit right now and actually googling um and the new york times thinks they have the answer let's see according to the new york times um i'm going to pause the recording and come right back okay so no one knows for sure uh someone claimed to note uh via genetic testing but that hasn't been peer reviewed or verified uh it does turn out some of the molecules in cilantro are similar to some of the molecules in soap and since taste and smell are subjective experiences if you don't if you have an experienced cilantro like in the context of a dish you enjoyed you don't have any emotional memory to shape the experience and so this uh scientist thinks it's possible that's what's happening is in the absence of an emotional connection or a palette that's been prepared for cilantro the brain just clues in on the similarity of to soap molecules and says oh you're eating soap so it's probably related to limited exposure to food variety and this doctor says in the new york times that he used to hate cilantro and start trying it in different dishes and now really enjoys it so it may be possible for you to defeat that aversion if that's something that is important to you [Music] matt says hi mike a question that i keep getting asked is along the lines of if evolution is true and at the atom story is an allegory of human origins what about the genealogies in the bible did they just make that stuff up that's a very modernist interpretation of ancient literature i don't think they made that stuff up but i do think biblical lineages are meant to be something other than a civil record a lot of times when you see genealogies in the bible they are meant to place people within the lineage of moses or abraham or king david they're a literary historic device and they're meant to let the reader know that the the claims about this person's life are significant this story matters precisely because it fits within the overall narrative of the leaders of the people of israel [Music] but to say they made it up that's a very modernist way of uh of approaching historical literature and that's what the bible is it's an ancient ancient document and it doesn't fit within the confines of modern history [Music] conrad says i just listened to russell brand under the skin podcast speak with controversial scientist rupert sheldrake what is your take on what he claims to be the dogmas of conventional science and do you think there is enough evidence to support a memory in nature or morphic resonance would really like your non-expert assessment of him as a scientist and the concepts that he promotes thanks for making science accessible to science noobs like me smiley face well that's a delightful uh thanks at the end conrad unfortunately i am not familiar with rupert sheldrake memory in nature or morphic resonance so i can't really comment on them i will say that when people are controversially in science they're either ahead of the field or off their rocker and the vast majority of the time it turns out they are off their rocker not ahead of science [Music] lori says i am walking slash running away from fundamentalism was in it for 30 years my husband is still in it we are in marriage counseling through marriage counseling i've determined i very much need personal therapy anything christian has become toxic to me and yet i know deeply that i am spiritual by nature i've heard you discuss therapy a lot so a few questions then what kind of therapist will help me with this uh lori any qualified therapist can help you uh go through issues of religious dogma or religious trauma i found it to be especially helpful if they are not especially religious themselves um so any licensed therapist could be a licensed counselor or social worker or a therapist proper can certainly help you talk through that and you said you've made an initial contact with a psychoanalyst great how long will it take it takes as long as it takes does gender matter gender matters as much as it matters to you i've had both male and female therapists and both were perfectly adequate and comfortable for me how does the process of talk therapy work in the brain and then you say i've been to counseling several times in the past with no real lasting change thanks mike your ministry has profoundly assisted me and others blessings lori therapy works as well as you let it work your therapist doesn't do the work you do so you just need a therapist that you're comfortable with who can guide you through the process of introspection and there's no one way talk therapy works in the brain uh when you're specifically talking about negative emotions fear trauma those sorts of things assuming the trauma is not overly intense and it re-traumatizes you exploring it talk therapy basically lets you experience a memory in a safe environment and therefore lessen the emotional energy associated with that memory and it worked quite well below a certain threshold of trauma above a certain threshold of trauma and talking talk therapy is not necessarily effective as explained by my friend hillary mcbride on several episodes of the literature's podcast today actually we released an episode of shame that you should probably really check out you'd enjoy um but yeah i mean it's up to you whether there's lasting change or not if you're with a therapist and it's not working just just try another one um i usually have to go see three or four people before i find a therapist i really want to work with long term that's just part of the process and therapists understand that if a therapist takes it personally that you know you're looking around to find a great fit then they're probably not a great therapist um so just try a few therapists when you find someone that is comfortable and ask questions and and helps you find insights about yourself then you've probably found a good partner for the introspective work that you do [Music] dev says hey science mike i hope i'm not too late with this question from what i understand of neuroscience repeated exposure to things like a song or another work of art increases the strength of neural connections in the way those things affect us so what are the ways we can use this to our advantage in everyday life to make ourselves more loving to further strengthen some of your neural connections i really appreciate your work you've given me a newfound love of science faith and life itself gosh thank you that's kind um there's a saying that neuroscientists have neurons that wire together nope that's wrong neurons that fire together wire together and that's what you're talking about when you're exposed to different stimuli different movements any sort of repetition you start creating pathways in your brain for that stimuli slash behavior slash whatever you're doing and if you want to make yourself have a more loving brain then practice empathy do a loving kindness meditation uh you know um read portions of scripture if you're a christian about compassion and about loving others and and and just focus on those things the things you kind of think about will gradually shape your perception of the world and gradually shape your behaviors i mean that's like the thrust of my faith and why i wrote finding god in the waves the way that i did was to explore okay if god impacts our brains how can we have that impact be as good as we can that's why i've got a chapter on prayer about how god affects the brain about what church does all those things are about me kind of unpacking that central question so if you don't yet have a copy of finding on the waves it's out on paperback amazon has it for less than 10 bucks and uh if you're if you're a prime member there's no shipping so like nine dollars and something cents you can have finding on the waves and that'll have a better answer than i can do on the podcast that fast [Music] okay and that'll do it for part four of the patron episode we've got a handful of questions left so i'll come back and do those tomorrow assuming i haven't evacuated my house um if i have maybe i'll record them somewhere else on my phone i don't know um i do want to let you know that uh if you're a listener of the liturgist podcast we're doing something new over there if you go to the liturgist.com let's go deeper early next year we're going to launch a couple of video courses one on the enneagram and deconstruction spiritual formation and the other one on meditation and we're doing that with a another company that's helping us produce those and uh we kind of wanted to see what people's response would be if people are interested in that kind of stuff from us and so from now until the end of the year if you pre-order those you get both of them uh together for the same price the price of one bogo whatever i'm not a big uh sale retail guy um but i'd love for you to check that out if you're interested the liturgist.com slash let's go deeper all lowercase all one word no dashes let's go deeper and uh you can learn more about our upcoming enneagram and meditation courses and hopefully i'll talk to you again tomorrow