ASM099 Questions, Questions, and More Questions

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questions questions and more questions it's a mega episode of ask sciencemike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever i'm just getting back into the swing of the show after getting home from tour and going straight into the holidays and this week man it's going to be a big one so what do you say let's get it started so this week's show is different a normal studio episode of ask science mike is four or five questions where i aim for answers that are five to seven minutes long that's a normal ask science mic show and then sometimes we have these crazy long episodes that are in front of a live audience that are honestly my favorite shows to do i like talking to you all in person but those have a downside i don't get to fact check my answers before i run them on the show and i don't get to provide any additional resources for the questions so this week we're going to meet in the middle of those two ideas this is the 99th episode of ask science mike our next show will be the 100th episode and as i thought about how special 100 episodes is um i couldn't have gotten there if some people hadn't decided that this show means enough to them that they wanted to throw me a few bucks a month so there's a pretty good crowd a couple hundred people who give between one and and significantly more dollars a month to keep this show going which i am so thankful for it doesn't just to provide for the equipment that we have to buy to do the live programs or replace when equipment breaks it also provides a significant portion of my living expenses because believe it or not ask science mike takes a lot of my time to do so i thought it'd be really fun this week to do a show where all the questions came from patrons on patreon now i put out the call intentionally with not a lot of notice thinking that would get me fewer questions but we have 37 questions for this show that's a lot even for a live program so i'm going to give an answer as long as needed for the question whether it's five seconds or five minutes uh so we'll see how this goes i'm really looking forward to it though because there are some really fantastic questions because in addition to being generous all my patrons are brilliant so uh before we get into questions a couple of really quick announcements one tour is kicking back up uh we're wrapping up the tour for finding god in the waves in the first couple of months of 2017. so these will be all the remaining tour stops on the finding god and the waves tour which by the way if you're new to the program and a lot of people are the numbers have gone up again in the fall and winter i wrote a book called finding god in the ways which is about my journey from baptist upbringing into atheism and then into a mystical christian faith based on cosmology and neuroscience it's a really strange story but it's a pretty good read so it's available in bookstores everywhere and but if you want to get it in person or have me sign it or come to an ask science mic live again there are some more tour stops coming up so january 21st i'll be in grand haven michigan doing an ask science mic live uh january 23rd i'll be part of a webinar series called writing for your life and i'll be teaching a class on podcasting you can get tickets online uh i'll be at vinings lake church in mableton georgia on january 29th sharing my story in a talk called finding god in the waves in both of their church services uh february 1st if you work for google i'll be giving a talk at google just check your internal messaging systems for more information there february 2nd i'll be at the century club of california in san francisco california february 5th and 6th and basically a whole week i'll be in fort smith arkansas doing a bunch of cool events including a talk about racism and race i talk about the science of story sharing my story and the sunday morning service we'll do an ass science mic live one night so check that out uh as well then in february 15th i'll be at northwest nazarene university uh giving a talk february 19th we'll do an ass science mike live in chapel hill north carolina there are more events in march and beyond on the website just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on events to get links to tickets or more information for all of those events i'd love to see you in person i make a point at every event of setting aside the time to meet anyone who wants to meet me to talk to anyone who wants to talk to me it's my favorite part of what i do also on the book front i'm still running the finding god in the waves giveaway so if you'd like a chance to win an autographed personalized copy of finding god in the waves just go to finding on the ways.com slash giveaway i'm giving away one book every week basically for as long as i feel like it and people keep entering so lots of stuff to keep up with and well let's start answering some questions uh so brandon on patreon asks how could lucifer have fallen from heaven if heaven was perfect hard when sorry but totally curious about your input on this so brandon i don't know how familiar you are with my work i assume you're at least fairly familiar because you support the show on patreon but answering questions about specifics and logistics and how things work between satan and god or lucifer and god are tough for me because i generally don't think that there is a single being lucifer even in the bible you know revelation is one of the books that helps people post text these kind of multiple distinct characters into a single entity uh you know i think that the serpent in the garden and the the guy that places the bet with god and job and all these different characters aren't meant to be the same entity but because we were talk about the fall of lucifer specifically in revelation and it alludes to satan and the devil in different names this kind of became a single figure in the christian tradition which wasn't necessarily true in the jewish tradition that preceded it and and of course continues to exist alongside it i think all of them including multiple or single entities based on lucifer or the tempter or the accuser whatever language you want to use are based on an ancient understanding of the spirit world and today make much more sense as allegories for the human experience the way we experience suffering the way we experience a darkness within ourselves that we recognize in others and sometimes see in our environment so i wouldn't consider lucifer falling from heaven as a literal story that happened but an attempt by people to describe how the world came to be as it is the nature and character of god all those things it's an attempt to answer questions now that puts me far outside any popular notions of lucifer in any major christian tradition or denomination so what most theologians in most traditions would ascribe to lucifer's fall would be free will the notion that lucifer has the capacity to choose which god gave to all created beings or at least created beings like angels and humans and uh that's a catholic idea that's an evangelical idea that's a very very common idea in the church that the perfection of heaven is only perfect if you have the opt out ability i don't know maybe it's clever to me it's uh you're thinking too hard in the wrong way about texts that are meant to help us try to understand the world and understand ourselves okay so josh on patreon says you've talked a lot about how when speaking with someone you have differences with it's best to try to avoid activating their amygdala my question is how can you avoid this in yourself i sense at times that my defenses get up and i lose the ability to speak rationally and with clarity well first of all i don't always do that successfully i do get angry sometimes on twitter very often uh because of something our president-elect did also frankly i found that my ability to respond instead of react my ability to be calm and diffuse anger has diminished since i fell off a motorcycle and had a closed head injury so a lot some things about me have suddenly changed since that accident and my temper and my patience is one of them that said the techniques i use then and am using now to try to be a patient person who is not unnecessarily anger is a combination of mindfulness an ongoing awareness and attention and focus on my thoughts and feelings and physical sensations and then i use something called biofeedback to counteract my emotions when needed so if i start to get angry when you get angry you get hot you get tense you your breathing picks up so i intentionally breathe slowly i intentionally relax and uh i listen to my thoughts when my thoughts get revved up and seem angry i say whoa let's examine that for a moment it just kind of brings me back down but on that note i've seen people use what i talk about in keeping the amygdala unaroused in yourself and others in a conversation of differences of opinion and they use that insight to dismiss all anger as invalid or divisive and that's not where i'm going anger is not inherently bad and expressing anger sometimes is part of healthy human behavior remember if you're a christian jesus did get angry jesus was sometimes sarcastic and snarky in the bible so anger has been scientifically demonstrated in fact to have a defensive benefit against oppressors or attackers it's just not very useful for persuasion if you're having a discussion with someone it's best to avoid the amygdala but if someone is actively hurting you or ignoring the way you are being hurt anger can get their attention and it is not healthy to repress anger it's only healthy to process and disperse anger okay so um how i do that is mindfulness biofeedback and trying to understand the other person's perspective but i understand that requires me basically some privilege it's very difficult to have that same dynamic with someone who's actively oppressing or harming you and i take my relative position of gender and racial and economic privilege to give me the platform to listen patiently to ideas that would be personal to someone else even if i find them offensive i try to think about how i might have shared ideas similar at some point i try to think of the motivations and and encounters that may have led to the belief in this person and allow them to express it honor their right to feel as they feel but then provide stories and perspectives and information that may help them see the world through other people's eyes dev on patreon says awesome given your axiomatic view of god what experiences lead you to believe he is loving is there anything in neuroscience beyond it being good for you first of all my axiomatic view probably wouldn't assign the gender pronoun he to god thank god the father is an image of our creator but my axiom is not masculine at all but in order to experience a loving god how do i do that mysticism the mystical encounters i've had with god describe a loving god and the mystical encounters others have had with god seem to create a consistent theme throughout church history throughout the bible throughout all scripture that god is love that god is loving and so i lean into that primarily of course that is based on neuroscience as you based in your question that god is loving is not a fact claim it's not a scientific fact claim it's a way of experiencing life as a gift and not a burden or not chance and it's it's volitional it's intentional it's an embrace of a gift that's a part of salvation for me uh sean from patreon says how fast are we on planet earth spinning through space how fast are we as we spin orbiting through space around the sun why don't we feel this movement i know i learned this in high school but given your love for cosmology i'd love to hear your answer thanks okay pretty simple stuff here the equator is moving about a thousand miles per hour relative to the center of the earth that's because it has to travel a pretty significant distance to get all the way around itself and back to the same point in 24 hours a day that slows down as you move away from the equator and toward the poles but you know the united states is still moving at a pretty good clip now the orbital speed of the earth relative to the sun is about 66 000 miles per hour again it has to complete an orbital cycle in 365 and a quarter days roughly so it's got to book it because space is huge now i'm going to go a little past your answer or your question and tell you that the orbital speed of the sun and the other stars in its relative neighborhood in the milky way galaxy is traveling about 483 000 miles per hour relative to the center of the galaxy that is booking but it's nowhere near as fast as the milky way galaxy is moving relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation which is about 1.3 million miles per hour why do i keep saying speed and relative to something because of relativity there is no absolute velocity you have to compare the speed of two objects against each other the only constant of course being the speed of light at roughly 186 000 miles per hour now why don't we feel this incredible velocity i mean if you've ever bungee jumped or have you ever rolled the window down in your car and just you know felt 50 mile an hour wind gosh why don't we feel moving 1.3 million miles per hour we only feel acceleration or deceleration because of how space time operates um that's due to relative reference frames we only feel a change in velocity not velocity or speed itself okay now then why do we feel it if you're going a steady 55 miles an hour on a motorcycle the friction from the wind gives you a sensation of movement but you're not actually experiencing a shift in your body fluids or anything that will make you feel a sensation of speed unless you are accelerating or decelerating that's just how physics works uh brian green's book the fabric of the cosmos goes really deep into how all that works and i could do a whole show on it it's fascinating but not enough time when we have 37 questions gosh i don't know how to pronounce this um janae i guess janae on patreon said how have you come to understand which parts of scripture are fable or myth versus historical i've come a long way in realizing the scriptures are not infallible but written by men and women within the context of their historical community but i still become confused about this question for example if the story of adam and noah are myths how are they included in the lineage of jesus in the new testament well you've alluded a little bit to my answer by mentioning that people wrote the bible i read the bible as a library of books written by people about god over a period of about 1500 years starting about 3 500 years ago i do not read the bible as a modernist or a modern person and to discern what may be a historical fact claim what may have actually happened in history or what may be more mythical or allegorical in scripture i use the same techniques and methods you would use for any ancient literature what do historians and anthropologists and scholars have to say about the text now we'll talk about this a little more because there's a ton of bible questions this week but at the risk of repeating myself later remember every book of the bible was written by a specific author or authors to a specific audience with a specific agenda okay so stories were told for collective identity and to teach morals there was no such thing as a dry portrayal of history that was meant to be an objective perspective that's an invention of modernism and post-enlightenment thinking so the story of moses was not just to show where the people of israel came from but to tell the story of who they are and and why they're all together it was to unify 12 tribes and two kingdoms it was to respond to exile and being conquered that story was incredibly powerful to those people so when jesus was speaking to jewish people of course he would reference adam and moses and noah because those were the stories of his people and remember what you read jesus as saying was written down by one of his followers or one of his followers followers or one of his followers followers followers and when they wrote down his teachings what did they have a specific agenda for a specific audience so those lineages are included as a theological claim of christ's divinity their acclaim to him being the messiah which many people in the culture most people in their culture was skeptical of so more about that when we have more bible questions later tai on patreon asks since vr is such a big deal right now when do you think we will be able to experience a virtual setting that is indistinguishable from reality or is that even a possibility in terms of virtual human representation do you think the uncanny valley will ever truly be bridged a couple of notes for people who aren't nerds vr stands for virtual reality it's a pretty well known topic in a popular culture but it's the idea of using computers and stereoscopic displays to make a digital world seem real the uncanny valley is what happens when in robotics or animation or any time you try to approximate the human form you make something that looks very very real but not quite real enough to be completely convincing and it's creepy like a living mannequin it just seems off so if you make a robot that looks exactly like a person but it stares too much or its mannerisms are wrong or its pace of speech is wrong we're incredibly sensitive to variations in human appearance and behavior but sorry i don't have enough time to explain concepts and questions this is going to be a long show in terms of is it possible to completely make a virtual setting indistinguishable from reality that's tough to say the industry's moving really fast you know right now audio is really close to indistinguishable from actual reality visuals are moving really fast if we can up the resolution of the displays in head mounted displays from their current kind of hd to more like a 4k display per eye you're going to get close in resolution to where your eyes can't see pixels anymore graphics cards are are are not struggling as much as uh normal computer processors are to get faster each year so visuals are moving really fast too and frankly there's a lot of promising tactile technologies i've seen systems that use ultrasonic sound to simulate touch i've seen gloves that have resistance in it and can simulate textures as well as resistance i think the problem mainly for making a convincing reality is more like smell and taste and locomotion how do you make things smell like things smell and taste things like things like how things taste and frankly how do you simulate walking two miles in a ten by ten room i don't think we're close to solving those problems uh now i will say i do a lot of vr i've got two vr systems uh the other day i spent i was waiting on a friend of mine to maybe join me in vr uh i basically have two friends that do vr uh both have been on the liturgist podcast michael gunger's one and jacob marshall is the other and uh i was hoping one of them would come hang out with me online so i stayed in my vr headset for like six hours and i had a i had a blast because i'm a nerd and i like doing things that aren't possible in the real world like casting spells or flying or uh you know making experiments that defy gravity and it the longer you spin the more your brain really treats the environment as real and the more kind of disorienting it is to come back out of vr i can also tell you one way to make vr convincing is to drink two glasses of red wine before you put on your headset and then it's super real uh but in all seriousness uh the uncanny valley is bridgeable at least in terms of visuals and animation rogue one had a young princess leia in it how'd they do that digital technology that was animation and i don't know if they quite bridged the uncanny valley but it was close and if we use real actors as the backing animation and we use real voices and pre-recorded sequences i think you can cross the uncanny valley i don't know that we're close to creating non-player characters or virtual entities that can behave realistically enough to bridge the uncanny valley because then you're talking about advanced ai and i don't think anyone can say how close we are to an ai that can convince you even in virtual reality that it's a real person [Music] aaron on patreon asked maybe the nerdiest question this week i just read a brief history of time and learned stephen hawking is now trying to disprove the big bang i think it was over my head so maybe i read wrong i love when theologians like rob bell and richard ward talk about the singularity and how much it sounds like god do you think hawking is right and there was no big bang if so does that change any of your views on god and faith first of all i know and follow rob and richard i did not know that they talked about the singularity so i'm gonna have to hear their talks about that and see if they're as good as my talks on the singularity i mean i wish i was kidding but i'm really impressed with my singularity theology uh so i would love to hear rob and richard have to say as well um so big bang stephen hawking let's be really careful with our language the big bang theory of cosmology is not one idea but a collection of ideas that describe how our universe came to be as it is today and uh stephen hawking is not trying to refute the entirety of the big bang theory but instead to address shortcomings in the model so hawking's more recent work doesn't resist or correct cosmic inflation the age of the universe as we know it today or even when and how matter and stars and galaxies and planets and all that stuff form hawking's revised theories hold on to all those things including cosmic inflation which is a big deal what hawking is wrestling with is the singularity and that's a great thing because singularity is what physicists say when they mean no one has a clue yeah what the f is this right so um and if the universe began with a singularity the universe as we know it isn't a universe at all because it's not all that exists because if the laws of physics just stop at singularity or change radically in a way that we can't project from this position then the universe has to have some external mechanism in order to begin something that happens pre-singularity to cause cosmic inflation and uh hawking doesn't like that so hawking's follow-up work proposes that space-time is finite but boundless now this is a big deal what does finite but boundless mean it means it's uh something limited in volume but that has no edges think about the earth the earth's surface is finite there's not an infinite amount of land and sea on planet earth but there are no edges you can go east and west as long as you want and never hit the end of the earth although you will eventually get back to where you started if we were to think kind of temporally what stephen's talking about is if you were to head north toward the north pole you can walk to the north pole and just keep walking you can walk past the north pole at which point you were going south but you never hit an edge and so hawking's kind of attempt which has not been verified but is incredibly clever is a multi-dimensional model of a finite boundless space-time where instead of the universe emerging from an infinitely dense point our universe emerges from a perfectly typical point of space-time that sounds complex i get it it's a big deal because if that's the case there is no singularity the laws of physics state the laws of physics then how do you explain cosmic inflation in the universe as we see it well it's proposing that somehow in physics thanks to the behavior of a finite boundless space-time at some point the universe basically borrowed energy from gravity to make matter and in doing so gravity was dramatically weakened and you had cosmic inflation as well as now an arrangement of matter and this is an attempt not to refute the big bang but to take the singularity out of the big bang theory and replace it with a better or more complete understanding of physics that can describe everything we know about the universe and possibly in the process help unify gravity in the quantum realm and relativity with the standard model of physics if you have no idea what i'm talking about you just have to do a lot of reading uh i've heard it said once if you can't explain a theory to a six year old you don't really understand it and by that metric i do not understand stephen hawking's revised theories of big bang cosmology okay our next question came from eric on patreon notice the theme this week all questions from patreon hi mike you've spoken about the importance of forgiving others as a process of healing from the wrongs committed against us but in the lord's prayer we also ask god to forgive us my question is is there any neuroscience behind feeling forgiven for our own misdeeds are we able to forgive ourselves if we don't feel forgiven either by god or by other people i can't really nail that down specifically in neuroscience that's a really specific case and i try to avoid over generalizing neuroscience findings which people do all the time which i've been guilty of you know i was really careful in finding on the waves to not over generalize the science uh and frankly to try to include non-neuroscience based science to also describe my beliefs in social sciences and psychology and anthropology but even then you know i had a couple of uh people accuse me of over generalizing the science and finding god and the waves so i'm not going to over generalize what i understand about the neuroscience of forgiveness in terms of forgiving self versus others and and what the mitigating factors may be frankly i don't think you can answer that with neuroscience today it's too specific a question and our ability to image the brain to limited if we include psychology it becomes a more answerable question and when we combine neuroscience with psychology and maybe even lean a little heavier on psychology than neuroscience we find that for many people it's actually harder to forgive yourself than to forgive others now part of this comes down to the difference between guilt and shame uh guilt being negative feelings about something you've done and shame being negative feelings about your identity and both of those are really tough to shake because they can affect your social standing if something about you is deemed undesirable by your tribe right or wrong that has a cost to you as a social mammal also if you've done something wrong and someone finds out and you're exposed depending on how severe the transgression you could also have a really serious hit to your social standing humans are obsessed with social standing for good reason we can't survive alone very well in the wild so our brains hold on to those things about ourselves we believe might not be desirable and obsesses about them and our brains hold on to and hoard things we think that we have done wrong so psychology tells us there's a few tips a few strategies to help forgive yourself to accept the forgiveness of others number one you have to accept that what you've done is done and that you did it it cannot be undone so you accept the the the finality of the action but you also make steps at restitution or reparation to try to undo the harms you've done or it you know starts with an apology corrective action depending on the severity of what you've done make steps to do your best to correct it the other thing you have to do is give yourself grace and this is something happens over and over and over and over sometimes i say stupid things to people and i'm relatively careful with my speech but i still step on my toes sometimes step on other people's toes however that colloquism goes i couldn't tell you but i can think right now three or four times in the last five years i've just said something awful on accident and i feel guilty i can think of one instance i said something awful on purpose i feel really bad about that but i've i did it i approve of it now or not i did it i can actually feel my pulse increase slightly thinking about those moments so i accept that i did those things and there's nothing i can do to change it i remind myself that with all those people i apologized and took what positive action i could to alleviate any suffering i may have caused and i say there's nothing more i can do it doesn't make me a bad person it makes me human and every time i think about those things i have to go through that same system and you think about them less and less often and um god you're already forgiven by god i believe that i can't prove it's not an empirical idea but if forgiveness is possible from god i think you've already been forgiven so you're not waiting on god's forgiveness you are waiting on yourself to accept god's forgiveness that's the most evangelical thing i've said in weeks [Music] okay andrew on patreon says what would it take to convince you of things like angels demons satan etc if you think anything could maybe seeing something so unexplainable firsthand like a work of the spirit such as a healing or a demon-possessed person thanks mike well andrew a healing a truly miraculous unscientifically or scientifically verified healing couldn't that be the work of god without angels [Laughter] like anything beautiful and full of light if god is everywhere if god is all-powerful things i don't i don't necessarily i mean i think god might be everywhere and god might be all-powerful but i don't think god in that case may have what we would call temporal volition um yeah why couldn't god just do it why does god need an angel and as you know i've said before i think demons and satan raise troubling questions about god if such things exist and are allowed to run amok with reality demon-possessed people that can easily be described by psychological disorders i haven't seen any documentation that satisfies me of a genuine demon possession any seen a couple of thoughtful essays that are interesting it's too too far short of a standard of evidence so what would i need to believe in angel's needs by the way i had a terrible multi-hour nightmare last night of incredible vivid clarity and narrative consistency which i think anyone but me would describe as being threatened by a demon and i think i've been working out this week and my body hurts [Laughter] you know if i told you this this multi-hour multi-part nightmare it would terrify you i mean it was truly truly horrifying and i rarely have bad dreams it was incredibly vivid really clear narrative a consistent character that visited me repeatedly across multiple dreams and delivered specific terrifying messages um oh man it was rough does not make me believe in demons now if if you know my mom or pastor betsy or someone listens to this they may pray over me and and uh try to convince me um i told jenny uh part of the the story this morning and she's like maybe you're a prophet uh spoiler alert everyone i am not a prophet so um yeah i just had a bad night uh what would i need to believe in demons or angels i would need to see a consistent measurable effect on material reality that is documented and peer-reviewed that has no other plausible explanation just seeing something alone well heck i woke up in my bedroom this morning and clearly and vividly saw a figure standing next to my bed but i also meditate a lot and people who meditate a lot tend to have those kinds of sensory overrides more often than other people um what's more reasonable that uh i had really vivid dreams because of my you know frequent practice of mindfulness and meditation or that an extra dimensional spiritual being with nefarious intent appeared in my bedroom this morning which is which is more probable or plausible i just think a quirk of my brain makes more sense so seeing it with my eyes is not enough that could be a hallucination or if multiple people saw it david copperfield makes stuff disappear all the time i very clearly saw harry potter and ron weasley and hermione granger standing in hogwarts in universal studios florida that's not because they were there it's because it was a very convincing illusion so yeah it's got to be some measurable effect on reality that's documented and recorded and peer reviewed and then i will make an empirical claim that demons and angels exist now don't hear me wrong if angels and demons are an intrinsic part of your spiritual experience or your understanding of god i am not dismissing your beliefs any more than i'm dismissing my own belief that god is love i am merely saying both of those ideas lack empirical merit and therefore it is very difficult for me to convince you what i believe is factual or you to convince me that what you believe is factual we're both talking about spiritual things which are neurologically not rational and basis oh man i'm going to get emails on that one thanks for setting me up andrew [Music] okay bill says how do our brains construct meaning outside of the denotion of words we are able to consistently find meaning and poetry in musical lyrics which seems to represent more than the sum of their denotive parts yeah great question we are a animal that uses language but we haven't always used language anatomically modern humans have existed much longer than language so how do we find meaning without language well one model of consciousness i like and thinks describes the human experience very well is that the brain is kind of a storytelling machine that your consciousness itself is a narrative that's being generated by all your brain's subsystems and sure senses play a huge part of this story especially the setting but your internal experiences like thoughts and feelings are woven into this narrative right so when we read a novel we don't just read a description of settings and dialogue and actions we also get a picture of how people are thinking and feeling because we need those things to have a story that resonates with us it's very difficult to tell a story that's not evocative of an inner monologue or dialogue that doesn't include very strong emotional components and have people pay attention or enjoy it now poetry and music are incredibly evocative in the inner landscape if you think about it in terms of setting an action poetry and music are really boring what happens at a concert people stand on stage and bounce around a little bit and move their arms or fingers that's not exciting but what's exciting is the way the music these pressure waves of sound evoke an emotional response so that's part of how we derive meaning from things we call beauty this can be visual in nature as well what is linguistic about a sunrise or a sunset what is linguistic about a flower in a field these are all things that get woven into our narrative that make us think of great things and bad things in the distance in between them so poetry and music cause us to review and even rewrite our own story uh which is all part of a narrative we call consciousness [Music] chris on patreon says just science or trickery look up unbendable arm i used to practice aikido and i remember participating in exercises that highlighted feats of strength through the so-called power of chi and it typically looked like one or more individuals applying force to a recipient slash defender who was able to resist with seemingly little effort one comparison to such effortless strength was of newborns and their unbendable little grasp i understand an explanation of how adrenaline could produce extraordinary strength in an individual during a fight or flight survival event but is there evidence for increased strength in individuals who are in a more relaxed brain state and if so what is the pathopsychology well this is a really fascinating question that i enjoyed researching uh so the first thing i did was watch like a dozen unbendable arm videos on youtube from multiple angles and pretty quickly i came up with a theory uh which i i was able to see a couple of people uh corroborate but they weren't any more experts than i am so i'm not going to put them in the show notes basically uh if you if you see this you have one person kind of standing there and someone stands facing them and the person with the unbendable arm puts their arm palm up on the shoulder of the other person right so just picture that for a second people facing each other and i just kind of put my arm palm up on your shoulder and then you reach out with your hands and put both hands by my elbow and pull down and if you imagine someone with two arms trying to pull down on your elbow which is a point of leverage it would be incredibly hard to resist by pushing against that and in these videos you can see people will try to resist that they can't and they they do a pose and a bit of mental work to make their arm unbendable and then you see the challenger isn't able to bend their arm well immediately i noticed that mechanically when the arm was bendable people were using their tricep primarily to try to push up yeah because the bicep would would curl in yeah the tricep will keep your arm extended so they're trying to use their triceps alone to push up against parallel to the pressure that the opponent is pulling down with and of course two arms two biceps are stronger than one tricep they lose every time when the arm is unbendable they're not just using their triceps when the arm is unbendable i notice they engage their shoulder muscles and instead of just simply pushing up against the hand they push through their fingertips toward the other person's shoulder now what does that do one it engages more muscles and two it makes the person trying to bend the arm share the load if i push through my fingers and you try to bend my elbows as you pull down you'll actually press into your own shoulder which will create kind of a feedback loop you've also got to remember humans are pretty suggestible so simply me saying my arm is unbendable it's going to cause you to kind of unconsciously possibly reinforce that action now what do i mean the same thing happens with infants infants don't have super human grips they do have very strong grips that seem surprising for their size and it seems like hard to get a newborns if they grab your finger it's hard to get them to let go but it's because you're not going to use your full muscular strength on a newborn's hand you would break their finger bones and everyone understands intuitively that humans frown on breaking baby fingers right we all understand you don't break babies fingers so you're careful with newborns so i think that's part of it so you know um the very act of calling an unbendable arm uh you first set a scenario where as i pull down the arm pulls relatively easily then i'm told the arm is unbendable and when i pull something feels different i feel pressure on my shoulder that could unconsciously change it it not only puts the arm in a more rigid posture it also causes the other person to change their technique possibly undermining their ability to pull now in terms of being mentally relaxed and getting stronger with focus-based exercise and martial arts i think that's plausible and i think it's because the primary factor would be your you have dramatically increased neuromuscular coordination when you repetitively practice any motion this is why at first when you work out the movements are really difficult it's not a simple matter of strength it's also a matter of having to use a lot of thought a lot of conscious effort to make emotion but the more you make it the more naturally it occurs the more efficient the interaction between your brain and your muscles by the way this is also where the fabled old man strength comes from many studies have shown that older men can more selectively engage more muscle fibers and frankly get more energy out of a single muscle cell than younger men all the way up to age 55 your ability to engage your muscles improves all the way to 55 so you're able to be stronger with less effort and i suspect that's another factor at play so it's not like one thing i think you've got a psychological component and you've got techniques and then you have repetition which is a huge part of martial arts training that's the best answer i could come up with today okay chuck on patreon how can i learn to speed read when i hear about people who can read whole books and the time it takes me to read a couple of chapters it seems like a freaky super power think back to my last answer repetition is a huge part of this i have never practiced speed reading intentionally but i read really fast and i think it's just because i read a lot i read as much or more than anyone i know i read all the time most of my free time and a significant part of my work day is spent reading now tim ferriss which i'll put a link in the show notes this week swears by a method to read much faster i haven't tried it i only researched it today and i wasn't able to validate his methodology via any peer-reviewed studies but a lot of his commenters swear by it it's too complicated to describe on the air so just go to ask sciencemac.com click on the four hour work week link to speed reading and accelerated learning [Music] okay so we're 53 minutes in and it looks like we're like about halfway done with these questions so here's uh what i'm going to warn you there's a lot more coming i was going to split this show up into a few episodes but then episode 100 is just like a continuation of episode 99 it feels anticlimactic so one option for you this week is to just hit pause and listen more tomorrow and just you know it's probably gonna be in you know after editing an hour and 45 minute program or somewhere in that neighborhood uh so you can just you just hit pause and listen to as much a day as you want to finish the episode before the next show comes out and or you can listen one marathon session i just wanted to warn you we're at 53 minutes and this episode is not close to over the fun continues with this question from billy on patreon who asks when thinking about policy decisions what are some good ways to balance the importance of liberty and safety in our society these two ideals can often come at a trade-off to one another billy i think you slipped the most difficulty per word into a question in the history of ask science mike i actually called my friend michael who co-host allergist podcast with me to tell him your question as typical of science mic listeners this is the most fundamental question in human governance and society so i don't have like a a succinct answer for this i could give my opinion maybe in an hour-long show uh this is this is a topic reasonable people can deeply disagree on so i'll tell you my opinion is to err on the side of liberty here's why when you sacrifice liberty in order to be more safe you give power to the people who provide that safety and in doing so you make it where it's very dangerous if people in power are corrupt which does what it diminishes your safety i don't actually think safety is possible without liberty but liberty necessitates limited safety i don't think absolute human safety is possible or desirable again i'm not saying you know when you sacrifice your liberty you necessarily make corruption more common corruption can be common in high liberty societies but it is not as dangerous because what your liberty helps you fight against other people's power over you in terms of how we do that practically i think when we are making means to keep people more safe it's important to focus on transparency accountability and measure effectiveness things that aren't working need to be dropped like a bad habit we need to adapt and iterate quickly when we're trying to be safe i think the tsa is a perfect example of how to do this poorly right the tsa is not very good at keeping weapons or substances off of planes but extremely effective at slowing down air travel and invading our privacy some experts call the tsa security theater on the other hand reinforced cockpit doors are a phenomenal innovation to make us more safe while sacrificing very little liberty what liberty have we lost we can't go visit the pilot little kids can't get airplane wings in the cockpit anymore that's a very small cost to keep airplanes in the sky what's another innovation after 9 11 hijacking a plane in america would be difficult now if passengers think they're going to die anyway they're much more likely to resist a hijacker right both of those things measurably increase our safety with very little cost to liberty so i think that's generally the approach to be pragmatic on a case-by-case basis and measure carefully the benefits versus the cost and personal liberty [Music] kyle on patreon asks i've been listening to ask science mike in the liturgist podcast for about a year the deconstruction of my christianity has connected me to a new kind of faith that feels vastly different from the kind i always felt just outside of growing up i feel like i don't have to fake it anymore awesome kyle this question continues that being said your rejection of substitutional atonement makes so much sense but it's so deeply ingrained in me that it's incredibly uncomfortable to leave it can you please go into detail about what the ether eastern orthodox view of salvation is and why you're more on board with that well first of all there's not just the eastern orthodox view there's tons of ideas about the role of the cross in salvation also called sateriology in church history substitutionary atonement theory is pretty recent historically christus victor the idea that christ's death signals a victory over death is older even older than that is ransom theory that the death of christ paid a ransom to the devil to free mankind chris victor's is pretty neat ransom atonement theory places like a really oddly powerful position for the devil in the universe and frankly undermines some key ideas about god being a powerful entity at all it's a strange belief to me uh why do i like eastern orthodox the idea that salvation is an invitation to be healed from sickness which is a very eastern orthodox view of salvation it preserves the value of christ the incarnation and jesus himself without making god a monster right if god can't help but send us to hell because as created beings you were created sinful just because of something adam and eve did that you weren't culpable to so now you sin and if you don't make the correct declaration of allegiance and acceptance of a sacrifice you spend eternity in hell that god terrifies me i can't even pretend that that idea of salvation doesn't trouble me that i don't find it frankly abusive now i could go on at length about it but instead i'm going to plug my book because i have a chapter on jesus that includes deep views on salvation in finding god in the waves and i know based on the length of that audiobook chapter that if i were to give the entire preamble it's about 20 minutes and there's not enough time in this episode so finding onthewaves.com you can get more information about that and if you don't have a copy and you can't afford a copy i understand mini public libraries now carry finding on the ways because enough of you bought the book and requested it at your library [Music] steven asks hey mike i have recently read the book the myth of persecution by candida moses a fantastic read that i highly recommend one of the overarching ideas is that come from the text is the idea of the persecuted church was highly exaggerated and in many cases made up i wanted to ask you why there is such a strong voice claiming proudly that the church is persecuted also how does this both hurt and might possibly benefit both individuals and the church as a whole one i don't know i haven't read that book so i don't know if it's talking about the contemporary church or the historical church or what um in america the church is not persecuted the church does legitimately no the church does feel persecuted i'm not going to say legitimately but the church feels persecuted because it is in fact losing privilege and position in society the american church is less powerful and less influential than it used to be people don't defer to religious ideas now the american church did flex its muscle in the electoral college this year but it doesn't have many more chances to do that the demographic headwinds are against the church in america now across the world church persecution does exist there are nations on earth today where christians are persecuted where they are not allowed to assemble or worship freely that is persecution the fact that gay men can get married is not persecution you see the difference just because gay men can get married doesn't mean christians are not allowed to worship freely or assemble it doesn't mean their religion is outlawed it simply means men who are attracted to each other can get married but if you're the church and you're used to your ideas about marriage being normative in government losing that feels like persecution because you had it and you lost it but what you really had was an overreach in society that allowed you to prescribe your personal religious beliefs onto other people via legal mechanisms and we should lose that that should go away prayer in schools should go away and by that i mean an official praying over the intercom however this is a perfect example prayer in schools is perfectly legal any student may pray when they wish and how they wish why religious freedom i mean can you imagine if in alabama an imam gave morning prayers in school would people be for prayer in school then no right so that's that's where the persecution complex comes from now uh in terms of hurt uh it makes it makes other people uncomfortable with your faith if they're forced to live under your ideals whereas it help people band together if they have a sense of shared identity and they think they're being persecuted if it's us against the world you band together tightly and you become more resistant to outside messages psychologically and sociologically so that's one of the reasons that very very conservative very very counter-cultural communities tend to grow and tend to not have many defections because it makes them sticky psychologically amy asks i am in the middle of a messy breakup with evangelicalism and i'm finding the hardest part is how to deal with the bible i am tracking with the idea that the bible is a library of stories about how people have understood god but how then do we take literally anything about jesus also when i try to read the bible now especially the new testament i still read it as a rule book do you have any strategies on reading the bible especially when certain passages or verses are triggers of past church abuse or are misleading finally when you have been taught that being a christian is about being sexually pure not cussing and being good how do you choose what parts of the bible's new testament commands are relevant and what are cultural uh really great question amy i have been there first of all if there are certain passages that trigger you of past abuse grieve that abuse take the time you need to forgive those who abused you and i don't mean that in a forced forgiveness way they don't mean you have to forgive them to be loved by god or be a good christian i mean kick them out of your head you are giving them free rent that's what i mean by forgive them they don't deserve your emotional energy you've been traumatized give yourself the room to heal that may include avoiding those parts of the bible or the entire bible i stopped reading the bible as an atheist and when i came back to faith the bible made me skeptical and i did not read it for a long time i didn't read the bible again until rob bell talked me through it a little bit and introduced me to the work of a man named peter enz and pete ends open the bible for me again more than anybody else those pedence so um what do we understand uh what did i learn from rob and peter that was so comforting the bible as you mentioned is a collection a library of books about that people wrote about god that's my paraphrase of their teachings i got a whole chapter in my book with my thoughts on those teachings of course peter ends literally wrote writes books on the bible and how to read it better and they're fantastic but remember every book in the bible has what a specific author with a specific agenda for a specific audience a specific author with a specific agenda for a specific audience every chapter every verse and every word has to be placed in a historic and cultural context and in some cases in most cases we don't have a complete historical cultural understanding of things that happened 2 000 or 3 500 years ago so we admit we're never going to fully understand author intent now which parts of the bible were addressed to people living in 2017 in the west none of it there is not a word in the bible that was directly addressed to you or to people today so how do we know which new testament commandments are to us that's easy none of them [Laughter] i can't wait to read the email i mean it's amazing people keep listening to the show when i say stuff like this but i'm just telling you how i understand the bible and how i learned to love it again i think that's why people keep listening a bunch of people are just like gosh science mike why do you say stuff like that because i just i gotta be honest y'all i got to be honest but that said that none of the bible's new testament commands were intended for us does not mean the bible is irrelevant it doesn't mean the bible isn't useful and in fact it doesn't mean the bible is not authoritative i think the bible is incredibly relevant the bible is about how the rich people tend to ignore the poor and how that frustrates god endlessly the bible is about how empires tend to ignore the effects of their oppression on the oppressed and how that drives god crazy the bible is about how people wonder where god is in times like these that's relevant is the bible useful are books where people rail against injustice useful are books where people weep when they've been hurt and say god where are you useful are books where people in times of joy sing praises to god useful today of course they are and what about the authority of the bible the church assembled the bible did you know that the church was the editorial committee that selected which stories and which letters in which documents became the scripture who started the church jesus the founder of the christian faith who oddly was not a christian but peter paul that crew followers of jesus at his command assembled people assembled a church and that church made the bible so the bible is our most direct line to the words and teachings of jesus the bible helps us understand what jesus was even talking about because jesus was jewish jesus was not a white guy jesus didn't have an american vibe jesus didn't speak english jesus was a first century jew living in palestine under roman rule and it is the stories in the torah and the writings and the prophets that we call the new testament that help us understand what in the holy heck jesus was talking about the church submits to the bible but that process isn't simple it's beautiful how the reformation and evangelicalism made god personal and gave believers the confidence they could study the bible i think that's a great thing the problem is they told people studying the bible was easy and not an academic art a science an interpretation of ancient text you can't just pick up the bible and read it and expect to understand it the way the author intended it that's why we need the church that's why we need good bible scholars that's why we need good commentaries because i don't know about you but i don't speak hebrew or greek i don't know about you but i don't have a comprehensive knowledge of the cultural norms or context or even the allegories and colloquialisms that these authors were using to make points which means i can horribly misunderstand things and once all the interpretation has happened we have to work together to figure out what in the heck all this stuff means to us today as people who want to follow god my friends my exiled followers of jesus who don't feel comfortable in churches we got to fix this somehow because this is a faith that happens when we all come together i believe that's why you like this podcast i believe that's why you listen to the liturgists podcast too it's not because i have a great voice and i'm clever it's not because michael is clever and makes great production value in compositions it's because this podcast helps you gather with others in a collective story called christianity and if you don't feel comfortable at any church folks it's time for us to take the churches back but not to tear them down because without the church the church which assembled the bible the bible will never make sense i study the bible every day every day but the bible comes to life when i talk about it with others now i'm lucky i get to talk to pete ends in perfe person right i'm lucky you know if i want to talk to tom wright i can uh rob bell will return my phone calls but you know the most fascinating discussions i've had about the scripture once i learned to quit reading it the wrong way have happened with local pastors with bible scholars at universities and with people who devoted decades to studying and contextualizing the bible but not in an academic context the bible and the church those are the two ways we as people today can know and follow the teachings of christ [Music] okay brian on patreon asks if jesus wouldn't have come when he did but instead came to earth now anywhere in the world and given our current level of scientific understanding how would his teachings and activities differ from the jesus we know well if my theology is right if jesus came today he would still be the incarnate of christ the christ the firstborn of all creation the part of the godhead the trinity which invites all of creation into reconciliation with god by what pursuing god's peace and drawing the kingdom of heaven near so what does that look like today the kingdom of heaven was meant to contrast kingdoms of that historical context it does not mean god wears a crown it doesn't mean there's a court this is an image that people in that era would find evocative so jesus would probably talk about modern systems of government and the way they fail and how different the kingdom of heaven is he might talk about uh connection we talk about connection a lot because we're internet people i'm stealing just stealing from rob bell right now um and i think jesus would talk about a lot about a better type of connection that's not broadband [Laughter] i think he'd talk about freeing the oppressed and culturally meaningful context honestly and i don't want to make your head explode i think jesus would be all in on black lives matter i do that doesn't mean jesus doesn't think all lives matter uh but jesus didn't spend a lot of time advocating for the romans did he no the romans were fine they were wealthy and powerful jesus talked a lot about the poor and the oppressed the widow the samaritan right oh the samaritan i think uh jesus would be all for immigrants i think jesus would love our friends from mexico including those living in the united states why because they are put down by the powerful and really consistent in the teachings of jesus that's not okay with god i don't mean to get political there i really don't i'm making an honest attempt to answer the question and i just feel like jesus was not okay with oppression or injustice i think the gospels are crystal clear on that point so i think i think jesus would talk to us about how to build ooh got southern how to build god's peace in the world through connection and by fighting oppression next question comes from christopher who asks hi mike i recently started listening to the ask science mike and the liturgies podcast last year and i'm completely enamored with your work but i haven't yet listened to even half of your nearly 100 episodes so i don't know if you've answered this question already my profuse apologies if you have here goes what version of the bible does a person of both faith and reason read raised as a non-denominational fundamentalist christian the church i grew up in typically opted for the niv with much parallel comparison of the scriptures however several years ago i read that the niv was more of a transliteration rather than an accurate translation i've also discovered that there's an entire science devoted to the translation of the scriptures can you break that science down for us wow also if a person just wanted a solid translation for day-to-day reading and study which would you recommend i've heard that the nrsv and more specifically the nrsv oxford annotated edition is the version used in most mainline seminaries i've also heard criticism leveled at it because not everyone who sat on the translation committee was a christian from my perspective that may actually be a good thing for those of us who read scripture through a more critical lens anyway i'd love your take on all this i'm deeply grateful for the work you do you make faith and the world a less lonely place thank you and then the little heart text thing a really kind message really tough question for a lightning round show but we're an hour and 20 minutes in so i haven't exactly been blazing through the answers um the science of translation is or of tran of uh translating the bible is uh yeah it's just it's the same way we translate any ancient book and yeah it's tough you're going to have a methodology and that you can't perfectly translate one language to another even in a contemporary context now when you start to divide the document from culture by time say a couple of millennia then precise translations get really tough that means there is no perfect version of the bible and you can level reasonable critique of any of the translation methods any of them this is a big deal um i know some friends who are educated scholars who don't use bible translations when they need to work a piece of scrap scripture they translate it themselves must be nice so let's start with there's no perfect version of the bible if you're looking for the perfect version of the bible there isn't one um of course not all bible translators and scholars are christians that's i mean that's a non-starter um obviously some of the best scholars in the world on translating hebrew or or what they're jewish and if you if you want to you know get rid of all that expertise good luck with the old testament now in terms of transliterations versus translations and then translations can be more figurative or more literal you're making an editorial decision frankly a transliteration that's well informed by historical context can be more accurate than a more you know word for word literal translation if you do word for word uh the grammar's gonna be wrong anyway you're gonna have to make some decisions about word or word order and it's it's a it's a judgment call about what that uh what particular arrangement of words and what specific words that are synonyms may most accurately convey the original meaning and in some cases a completely different phrase might actually convey the original meaning better so this is complex heady stuff there's a reason people spend their entire career on it now in terms of translations personally i like the nrsv for study i actually have one of those annotated oxford study bibles that's nrsv [Music] i can't remember what translation the the new bibliotheca bible is in but i like it a lot it's got kind of a king james vibe uh but with just the these and vowels taken out um and so it still kind of reads poetic which i think especially you gotta remember like in the new testament time the old testament would have sounded kind of like the king james bible sounds to us today because it's a more ancient version of the language not to mention in the first uh first century a lot of people spoke arabic or greek instead of hebrew including jews especially to ask bridges so i do like the nrsv for easy readability i enjoy the contemporary english version which is like so simple to read i like to get down a little king james sometimes if i'm doing kind of a uh alexio divina day in the psalms something's meant to be kind of formal or or high speech then i enjoy the king james i love to get down with the old testament with the orthodox jewish bible i can i can muster through just enough hebrew to piece it together um and i do enjoy that uh but there's no like perfect translation so nrs nrsv is fine the world's not going to end if you read the niv or even the king james you just understand i'm reading a translation of the text and not the text itself [Music] uh jacob on patreon says has the sensation of awe or wonder been studied in neuroscience it's one of my favorite spiritual feelings with becoming more contemplative in adopting a meditative practice this year i think the frequency of this feeling has increased are there ways to increase a sense of genuine ah more often number one no one knows exactly for sure where all comes from in the brain jacob that's a bit of a mystery now as i did some searching and literature who did i discover has done research none other than andrew newberg my favorite neuroscientist and he found in his brain imaging studies which are admittedly small in sample size as tends to happen with brain imaging studies all seems to occur primarily in the autonomic nervous system but in a very particular state of activation where both sides of the autonomic nervous systems are active at once you see normally when the autonomic autonomic nervous system is active controlling either arousal or our flight or fight response one side or the other is active but since when you're have someone in awe both seem to be active at once very interesting but that's not very precise there's very limited data very little studies in terms of uh why you seek ah ah seems to have a a disproportionately uh pronounced effect and changing our behaviors and beliefs um and uh one great example that's something called the overview effect when people leave the earth's atmosphere on a spaceship and look back at the earth they have something consistently called the overview effect where they have an overwhelming sense of awe followed by kind of an existential vertigo vertigo when they realize oh my gosh that's it i had a taste of that effect when i read the pale blue dot for the first time uh now how can you encourage uh yourself to experience ah more often you're right meditation does seem to contribute in a particular type of prayer or meditation that causes you to expand your views seems to help so if you start with yourself and go to your family and your friends and your neighbors in your neighborhood to your community to your city to your state to the nation to the world and keep moving your focus out as you pray that particular tight focus to broad focus seems to in studies cause people to experience senses of all i've certainly experienced that myself but it's not universal but that's one type of meditation you can try to help increase uh how often you feel a sense of awe and of course i've found looking through a telescope to be very effective [Music] ryan asks mike from the beginning to the end of puberty i was mostly attracted to other boys after puberty almost instantly my attractions went back to girls again with zero attraction to boys what can you tell us about how attractions develop and change during puberty number one human attraction is complex very complex and not fully understood by science that's important we have so much debate about gender and orientation that people tend to overstate our comprehensive understanding of attraction and now i've talked about on some after dark episodes you can go back and look about how attraction works it is complex it's a number of related factors and because of that orientation or who we're attracted to can actually be quite fluid now intuitively that feels wrong to me i've always ever since i realized that another human could be attractive i've always been attracted to girls and that has just persisted throughout my life so you know it this was a particularly difficult idea for me to wrestle with when i first started to study same-sex attraction following frankly my loss of god was my lack of personal experience that said you know same-sex uh encounters prior to puberty we understand are relatively common that's a primate thing we also understand that uh young boys can have secondary sex characteristics that are similar to girls right so one of the ways your brains and your body systems determines male or female for reproduction purposes is secondary sex characteristics the pitch of the voice the height the build the size of the feet the hairiness of face arms chest and legs uh prepubescent boys and secondary sex characteristics much more resemble girls than adult men says your brain is beginning to formulate systems of attraction it's possible for false signals but i question to even use the word false because they're not false for gay men that ends up being the path orientation takes in the individual and of course let's remember there are bisexual people who are attracted to both genders equally or unequally we don't fully understand that i will tell you a huge part is humans um we do have an impulse and a drive to seek genital stimulation and certain types of visual stimuli and how those processes are reinforced or or punished plays a huge role in our development [Music] so you could imagine that probably everybody in their formative years would experience some same-sex attraction they wouldn't have a label for that but our culturalization begins to encourage a particular interpretation of those impulses of those desires and that's how you get completely straight people like me we we fall easily into a prescribed social role some people for complex reasons don't fall in so easily or that falling in takes more time and by the way talk about orientation fluid again some people kind of feel kind of attraction early prepubescent early adolescence they find they're also attracted to women they get married children they genuinely love their spouses they seem mostly settled and later in life uh that orientation begins to to to go back um orientation and attraction are complicated and i think society uh should expect that i think our social system should be built to accommodate it now some might say does that encourage that i don't know it doesn't for me but gosh i know so many people who had great marriages um and we're good friends but one member of the marriage got married because of social pressure and not because of attraction and the end result was a lot of pain and i just think it would be better if we learned to help people discover precisely how their orientation works and live into that earlier in life i think there'd be less collateral damage that's why i'm affirming of lgbtqia orientations and relationships i think people should have relationships on the terms that are healthiest for them and create flourishing and that it's better for the world and more accurately reflects the love of god little tirade for free there ryan thanks for the question and uh yeah don't worry about it if you were attracted to boys and art now that's great be attracted to girls if you're still attracted to boys that's okay too uh we demonize the wrong stuff here i think i think sexual infidelity is betraying covenants as violating consent like so if you've agreed to be with someone and you cheat on them i think that's sexual infidelity um if you force someone to have sex with you i think i think that's sexual impurity um you know i think i think that's just frankly these days kind of obvious so wherever you are be there be happy about it and the science is still unfolding so do what i do follow the journals they're a lot of fun levi asks you often talk about hacking our brains or counteracting our evolutional tendencies when a species can influence or at least is aware of its own evolution are we still talking about evolution in other words are we as humans transcending evolution when we name it and manipulate it fascinating question levi remember evolution means change are human beings still changing absolutely so the question is really about natural selection right because we know evolution is happening does natural selection still apply to humans yes absolutely natural selection still applies to humans we still have germs antibiotics have had a good run but bacteria are starting to adapt we may find in the relatively near future that we are still competing with bacteria on this planet now we're really good at uh breaking systemic equilibrium as a species which we'll talk more about in a couple questions what we're really talking about is artificial selection or domestication here we domesticate animals by manipulating the environment and controlling their breeding and we're doing that with ourselves i think you can make a great argument that humans are domesticating themselves so artificial selection can happen alongside natural selection just because we've artificially selected cows doesn't make them immune to predation or disease but it does increase their survival in the right context the same is true of all the plants that we've selectively bred to get corn and bananas and all the produce and vegetables that we eat those plants have all been shaped by millennia of human selective breeding or artificial selection that does not eliminate natural selection they can both coexist okay quincy hands asks you talk about how much reading you do and that you have done a lot of work at learning how to commit things to long-term memory my question is do you work solely from memory or do you have a note-taking slash highlighting system that you use or have created for your work apps first of all i have really good recall i i if you've been to an out and quincy i've seen you you've been to ask science mike live you know i don't use any notes or references for those events it's all off the top of my head from memory now that said i do use a few technologies to help me keep track of things when i start to assemble a book or a podcast or a writing i use an app called evernote for clipping things and taking notes and i use an app called mind node for mind mapping that's how i build my conversation trees for literature's podcast it's how i outline my books and chapters and books before i write them it lets me get my thoughts out of my short term working memory and into visualization and lately because i had a problem where i would read a study and forget to clip it for evernote uh or read a link that had a link to a study off facebook or twitter or something that was scientific in nature and then forget to clip it so i've installed a new app called atlas recall that remembers everything i look at anywhere on the computer and i'm really enjoying it so if i want to see everything every document every email every webpage that relates to vr i can type vr in this app and it is incredible shows me everything so evernote my node and uh if you're interested in a kind of testing a new technology atlas has been a lot of fun too josh asks evolution has obviously shaped humans in many ways but now that a lot of humanity doesn't have difficulty finding food shelter and can procreate pretty easily how are we currently affecting our own evolution as a species also how are we humans affecting the evolution of other species on earth one as i mentioned two questions ago we are totally affecting our own evolution via artificial selection and environmental manipulation and the outcome seems to be that we are self-domesticating something no animal has ever done that we're aware of kind of wild now the reason this is pretty similar to the last question but the second part of your question about how do we affect the evolution of other animals it's profound there may have never been an animal more profoundly affecting the evolution of other animals we are literally driving a mass extinction event we're driving an extinction event so animals that can't adapt to the way humans manipulate the environment are dying off in huge numbers and in ways that could eventually affect humanity because ecosystems are interconnected webs and cycles eventually we're going to mess up our own food chain if if we keep killing off animals at this rate but the the short answer yes absolutely we can and do affect the evolution of other species on earth damien asks there's still a lot of questions damien asks i work in a state psychiatric forensic hospital schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder are some of the most prevalent diagnoses our patients suffer from often one of the struggles of schizophrenia or like mental illnesses is the inability to have insight into one's illness called an acid i cannot say this even after googling it i ca i literally have a pronunciation right here and i can't do it a-n-o-s-o-g-n-o-s-i-a uh anastonia naustia sorry that's a real condition and serious but i cannot say it as this is a neurological disorder how does a therapist or caretaker help when it is neurologically impossible for them to have insight or acknowledge their disability this is so far out of my league it's ridiculous i have no business answering this question if you weren't a patron i would not put this question on the show because as i sat down and read some research and some literature and some best practices a very common theme appeared in regards to this condition it's one of the hardest things to treat in medicine and it's not curable by any known means so as is so common among listeners of ask science mike you get used to me answering science questions well so then you answer me on you send me unanswerable science questions and unanswerable questions in medical science all brain injury is really tough to treat we don't understand the brain that well and brain injuries are uniquely able to affect our thoughts and feelings and overall functioning and in this case the blindness is not psychological or cognitive or the inability to see one's own condition it's neurological and based on brain injury so cognitive therapy has been shown to be beneficial in treating but not curing the condition the trouble is people who can't see their condition don't want to be treated so the treatment has to be coercive coercive treatments are kind of handicapped from the get-go i've seen a couple of experts and researchers recommend uh positioning the treatment as something like job training or skill enhancement to the patient and that uh everybody needs to get better at their work right so we all go to classes and learn things uh so if the deficiency is is for example a patient who can't use one of their arms there's very limited use of one of their arms but is unaware of that treating it like job training can help get the patient's attention which helps the treatment that's tougher for what you talked about psychoaffective disorders uh schizophrenia people are unaware they have the condition uh that's it's tough and it's it's just beyond my ability to answer effectively uh you work in a forensic hospital i guarantee you know more about this than i do i guarantee i would absolutely take it to the bank that if i handed you the microphone you would be able to answer this question better than i am able to but i want to honor your question by giving you the best on answer i'm capable of which seems to be cognitive therapy is the way to go if you can get the patient to participate in the treatment [Music] patrick asks mike what are some good techniques and practices to integrate the head and the heart personally i'm very good at understanding the arguments for and against faith but belief doesn't resonate emotionally for me i have a hard time validating emotions internally as much as i validate intellectual thought help me feel feelings i love you now here's what's interesting patrick about your email uh you tell me you can't integrate your feelings and then you say that you love me which is not a cold analytical emotional kind of thing to say that's a very emotive thing to say so what's happened somehow you've been conditioned that rational thought is more important than emotions let me guess uh patrick you're white you're evangelical or post-evangelical you live in the south maybe one or all of those things maybe none of those things you're at least male our society says men aren't supposed to be emotional we're supposed to be rational uh you know many conservative traditions emphasize the importance of right thinking over our feelings minimize our feelings all these reinforcements tell us our feelings don't matter i get it i have been there man have i been there so how did i get through that one i recognized that my emotions are part of me my emotions aren't something my mind is observing they're not separate from me my emotions are part of me and they belong as part of me and i understand that my emotions actually have an important role to play in my life that my emotions can actually teach me things that my rational mind can't they can catch things that my rational mind misses evolution gave me emotions for a reason emotions help me understand others emotions help me understand when my life conditions are good or bad or some mixture so i learned to appreciate the importance of my emotions and then to positively reinforce myself when i experience them validate your emotional experiences and emotions work best not when studied but put into practice view great art read good books listen to good music eat a cheesecake like take a bite of cheesecake and just just enjoy that incredibly rich sensuous feeling that happens as you eat cheesecake it happens it's visceral literally visceral happens in the viscera watch sad movies and cry laugh laugh don't stop yourself laugh loud laugh absurdly if people make fun of how you laugh you're doing it right i love it when people tell me my laugh is ridiculous that means i'm really laughing like that was i i didn't just put that on when i just laughed right then sometimes i am so bemused or amused or delighted with something i said or how silly it is i just can't help but laugh and i let myself and i even validate the experience your emotions are part of who you are accept it and then nourish them judson asks i grew up in a family culture where international travel was discouraged or even mocked as unnecessary he must be american as i've come now to discover that leads to an isolation where one assumes her own story is the only right one and i want to be different i want to travel this past summer i spent a few days in mexico city and thoroughly enjoyed the experiences of a new culture new foods etc however after getting home i fell ill to a nasty case of traveler's diarrhea which lasted nearly two weeks it was really discouraging my question is twofold could you discuss the scientific causes of travelers diarrhea and is there some way to train my gut over time to be resistant to these causes so i can look forward to future traveling adventures okay scientifically traveler's diarrhea is almost always caused by contaminated food and water it's bacteria typically that belong in the human intestine that somehow gets into food and water and therefore into the stomach and the upper gi tract where they do not belong and they make people sick can you train your gut to be more resistant sure you can continually get exposed to that bacteria which is not healthy that's the thing it's not it's not actually a good thing to become more immune to that contamination that contamination is related to pretty significant public health costs in those cultures and you know that's not a good thing you don't want to get used to food contamination so what do you do instead i travel all the time i very rarely get traveler's diarrhea so here's how and i'm getting this from medicinenet.com which i'll have a link on the show notes one drink bottled beverages like bottled water that's usually safer in places you know there's potentially contaminated food and water tap water and dairy products should be avoided be sure that tea and coffee were made with boiled or bottled water alcoholic drinks are usually safe that's important but remember this if people put ice in alcoholic drinks that was made with local tap water now you have a contamination vector ice in general even in industrialized places is a common vector for foodborne illness you should brush your teeth with bottled water you should just be aware of any contact at all with tap water in areas with unsafe water supplies and that would include fruits and veggies that were washed in unsafe tap water when you eat vegetables and fruit uh try to get stuff with a peel that you can peel yourself and stay away from street vendors in areas known to carry foodborne illness that's the toughest one for me but i i'm pretty pretty devoted to not getting travelers diarrhea and then you want to when traveling abroad especially avoid consumption of undercooked meat or seafood a rare steak right uh uh you know raw fish raw oysters in areas known for contaminated food and water will make you sick so it's more to to adapt your travel practices than it is to adapt your gut and like i say i mean if you listen to the show you know i travel literally all the time that includes international travel and uh typically my tummy's okay because i'm cautious wash your hands a lot too that wasn't in the article but wash your hands frequently with soap because that you gotta actually use the soap to eliminate um the contamination in the in the tap so what i'll usually do is have a bottle i will wet my hands with tap water soak my hands and then rinse my hands with bottled water uh so i'm not trying to you know just pour bottled water all the time i typically shower in the local water and then then i'll wash my hands again right after the shower [Music] okay next question comes from joanna do you ever encounter the kids who bullied you so badly when you were a child have you spoken to them about the past or have any come to you asking for forgiveness do they know what you're doing now and how they are part of your story and the trauma they caused do you believe that they bullied you because they were dealing with issues themselves or do you think they were simply mean what are some techniques to forgive people who have hurt you even if they don't ask for forgiveness joanna reading my mail huh um do i ever encounter the kids who bullied me not often a couple of them have interviewed with me to get jobs before i was science mike i was a successful technologist and later advertiser and typically held management or executive positions and a couple times kids that beat me up needed a job and at least in one case i lied and said they were not qualified for a position that required almost no qualification that was petty of me have i spoken to them about the past or have any of them come asking for forgiveness not really no do they know what you're doing now and how they're part of my story i don't know i haven't talked to them uh and i don't know how i would handle it if they did want to talk to me honestly those are probably the deepest scars that i carry do you believe that they bullied you because they were dealing with issues themselves i think yeah everyone has issues themselves and i think everyone has the capacity to be mean we naturally try to form hierarchy as a species especially males [Music] that's not entirely culturalized it seems by biology culture can mitigate it or or amplify it but there is some natural tendency toward hierarchy in homo sapiens especially in the males of our species um so i don't know what are some techniques to forgive people i talked about forgiving yourself a little earlier forgiving others is very similar imagine why someone would have done it if you can if you can actually imagine their perspective that helps of course of course those boys made fun of me i was a fat kid who had a really active imagination and loved computers and making fun of me made them feel powerful and their friends laughed and it reinforced them and it made them feel secure in social hierarchy i can understand that and then in time i don't i yeah i don't wish them poorly you know there's a time when uh i would have loved to walk into a classroom and publicly commit suicide to make them feel guilty to make them feel pain i haven't i haven't felt that way in a couple of decades um [Music] i hope they are all doing well i hope they rarely think of me because i fear if they thought of me they might feel guilty and i wish them well they were kids kids are gonna be kids um and i don't resent them in some way i'm i'm grateful for them uh the fact that i was made fun of so much means i don't really worry about the approval of others i just do what i'm gonna do people can get it or not i record two hour podcasts uh and if no one listens that's okay i have really enjoyed recording this right that's a gift my bullies gave me so i acknowledge the ways in which trauma and loss help me grow and that lets me release hostility towards those people and forgive them and i think i have it doesn't mean i want to facetime them but it does mean that i have forgiven them you know what if any you uh [Music] former friends from gilchrist or raw reach out to me and be happy to talk anything you want to say i'm ready to listen and i just want you to know i don't hold any ill will toward you [Music] okay robert asks what specific ways do you find and keep up with research how do you know if a study has been adequately peer reviewed great question robert the subject of an upcoming liturgist podcast first of all i read a lot of books and i read the footnotes when i read the footnotes i often go look up the studies and research papers and publications cited in the footnotes of books and read those too why it gives me a more comprehensive understanding of the discipline of science that the author is discussing and that lets me kind of know how far from consensus a given idea may be it's really helpful the farther from consensus it is the more i need to see what others may have said about this paper or claim who are more qualified to address it for that purpose i use google academic so google has a special search engine that looks only in academic publications if i'm if i'm unsure about the quality of a given publication i call a scientist friend in that field and ask them is this publication reputable and then maybe if they have time i ask them their opinion on that topic or a recommendation for where to look next and that's pretty much my system that's pretty simple it you know you just keep studying science you stick with the really well understood well like people love to read about new sensational findings in science get the fundamentals first get a comprehensive understanding of the field those discoveries are being made in otherwise say well that's really interesting news that could turn out to be nothing right err on the side of caution and skepticism even with the sciences and you will be fine eric asks a friend recently explained a wonderful moment in her life as a god thing which got me thinking about my protestant upbringing and this idea that god has an entire plan and road map etched out for us am i to actually believe that everyone's life story is in part pre-designed by divine intervention how much power and or control does god have over our choices and life journey eric great question absolutely no one can answer for sure we do not know if the universe is entirely deterministic in nature or not many scientists would say that it is it that it is uh but quantum mechanics seems to have some spooky action it seems to have some probabilistic component that we haven't cracked and may in fact be truly probabilistic in nature if the universe is truly deterministic then all of our actions are probably predestined and if god created the universe then god predestined everything uh unless you're a compatibilist at which point determinism is the mechanism that produces will because god would be a temporal i'm not going to unpack that there's no time if you get it you get it here's what i think i think we are made in the image of god and that means we have the power to create god is a creative god and we have the power to create and because we have the ability to create we get to influence the act of creation creation is not done new things are happening all the time and we're given the freedom to co-create and co-invent a universe with god and uh the invitation is what are we going to create are we creating shalom or not we're creating beauty or destruction love or fear um and that's to me the gospel is an invitation to creating shalom along with christ i got really far from science there toward the end actually probably closer to the beginning but uh that's how i interpret my cosmology through my christology i'm so sorry to my skeptical friends when i do stuff like that but it's important to me and some of our friends who listen to this program nathan asks headaches for my entire adult life i have battled headaches that seem to come on out of nowhere some worse than others while i rarely get sick in the traditional sense i hate that for seemingly no reason my headaches from time to time maybe more bothersome than that is that many people i know have never experienced a headache in their life how can that be possible as i have had thousands thanks well nathan headaches are incredibly common but not everyone gets them often most people a vast majority of people have at least occasional headaches but there's not uh well first of all don't you're not alone one in six people in the u.s suffers from chronic headaches chronic meaning frequent to the point of impairing function [Music] now let's understand not all headaches are created equal and that can help us understand the variation in the amount of headaches people have there are primary headaches where the headache is the entire issue and has no underlying medical cause and then there are secondary headaches and secondary headaches have some underlying medical cause so if you have a fever and a headache that's a symptom of the fever if you have clogged sinuses or a sinus infection that is a secondary headache because there's an underlying medical condition that if addressed will eliminate the headache but among primary headaches there are three kinds one migraines if you have migraines you know what they are wow incredibly intense debilitating headaches there are tension headaches which are typically related to stress feel like a dull ache everywhere in the head and then there are cluster headaches now i've had migraines and i get cluster headaches and cluster headaches are where you have repeated headaches over a period of weeks that are usually centered on just one of your eyes and in my case cluster headaches can lead to migraine it's not a lot of fun now here's the thing about tension headaches we know the cause stress and tension we're learning a lot about the cause of migraines we don't really have a good theory today on where cluster headaches come from so your health factors that can contribute to secondary headaches can help explain why you have so many for example if you have sinus trouble and live in an area with you know a large amount of allergens in the air at different times in the year or all year if you have primary headaches if you have a lot of stress now we understand if you get migraines now i understand or if you get cluster headaches we don't understand how it happens but it's a condition we know happens frequently now some people get migraines and tension headaches and cluster headaches and have sinus problems and those unfortunate people have some kind of headache almost all the time and what's important why it's important to understand the different types of headache is to understand that there's subtly different treatment options for each if you can be more prescriptive with the time of treatment based on the type of headache you may successfully reduce the number of headaches you have for example i had cluster headaches and migraines but i was able to eliminate the migraines through working with a neurologist and that helped me cope with the cluster headaches to the point where i suddenly felt like i didn't have headaches that often at all of course then i fell off a motorcycle and then i had a lot of headaches for a while but that's what's going on that's why you have more headaches is because there's so many types of headaches [Music] we are almost to the end here folks uh one two three four five six seven more questions almost being a relative term remember you can pause at any time i'll be happy to talk again later kevin asks my grandfather died a few months ago i found out about it while i was at work which immediately sent me running to the stairwell so i could cry in private as i sat there sobbing with tears pouring down my face and trying to stop from completely losing it my brain began to analyze the situation i assumed this was a defense mechanism employed to help stop the pain of crying a side note yes kevin it is it's called intellectualization anyhow as i sat there remembering all of the amazing memories and trying to suppress the tears i began to wonder why this happens now i know why we grieve i understand why it hurts so much what i don't understand is why the specific physiological reactions occur and why they seem to help i noticed it more intently once i got home that night and was able to cry safely in my wife's arms for a while so why do we experience those specific reactions when we grieve when we grieve why tears why the uncontrollable sobbing and groaning why do our sinuses start to close up crying is terribly uncomfortable because of all the specific reactions yet after you finally let go and just allow all of that to happen you seem to feel better i noticed that the pain i was experiencing lessened quite a bit with each cry session so why have we evolved to use those specific reactions when we grieve great question kevin um and i have to admit i'm disappointed in myself i've actually researched the the runny nose thing and linked to tears and i found a a pretty interesting hypothesis uh for an article i was writing and i don't appear to have saved it in evernote and now i can't find it so that is lost to me right now what i can tell you is we don't know exactly why crying comforts us sometimes we do know that crying does not always comfort people this is important if you're suffering from depression and or anxiety those people can cry and experience no relief which is compounded by the fact that so many people report that crying feels cleansing or comforting so it deepens their depression so i want to mention that if you're a person that when you cry you don't feel better you may need to talk to a therapist because you could be suffering from depression or anxiety that are chronic or even bordering on clinical now here's why crying works it serves a social function our tears draw attention at a time we may need them we may be in physical or emotional pain physical pain there's something wrong with our bodies we need to lean on those around us emotional pain we may have experienced some loss or experience that again we need the support of those around us but crying isn't just social crying gets your attention when you cry you know something is wrong and you pay attention unless it's you know that kind of crying when something good happens that's different i tend to cry positively very often i've had to learn to let myself cry with grief or pain [Music] lee asks love the show it is save me from giving up on my faith here's something i've pondered during the christmas season can you explain how a virgin female can give birth to a male offspring if a female has xx chromosomes and there was no sharing of genetic material then how is that the offspring would possess x y chromosomes making it male where might the y come from furthermore can you speculate on the possibilities of human genes being combined with the genetic material of a super human being such as god or the holy spirit what might we be able to do with the genetic code of such a union if captured perhaps off some ancient relic just saying smiley face really fun question further than that how can a female who's a virgin give birth to anything other than a clone where would different a different x chromosome come from uh sexual reproduction requires the contribute the contribution of another set of genes and that doesn't happen in humans without fertilization just doesn't so guess what you can't explain anything about the virgin birth scientifically it has to be appealed to as a miracle that violates medical science and physics i do not accept the virgin birth on a scientific basis if you ask me scientifically i will tell you tell you that a virgin birth is impossible and although it would be a fun like comic book idea to explore what god's dna may look like we don't have any indication of the gospels that he that jesus carried non-human dna seemed to be fully human that's actually a claim of christian theology so i don't try to explain the virgin birth scientifically i accept it primarily or exclusively on mystical grounds and even then i i actually hold the virgin birth pretty loosely i see it primarily as a a way to claim divinity uh so it's not like a core claim of my faith the virgin birth not all the gospels mention it so it didn't wasn't of uh of uh important enough to write down for uh what two of the four gospel authors maybe it's one of the four and i can't remember off the top of my head either way you know i'm more of an empty tomb guy so ryan asks hi mike i know you've been you've answered a lot of questions on the bible in the past but i thought i'd put a spin on it like you i grew up in a fundamentalist baptist church and i believe that being under strong biblical teaching only via the king james version was one of the most essential aspects of my christian faith we also believed that any christian could study to show yourself approved in bible study and learn deep things of god via cross-referencing verses across the entire bible and reading jesus and new testament principles into old testament word pictures types names etc so my question is was reading in all these entire bible standing concepts and pictures just a form of confirmation bias largely yes in other words since we had these new testament presuppositions in mind before we went to the text were we already looking for them yes you were were our biases forcing the bible to say things it really wasn't no i'll come back to that or does the bible really have that much continuity across its many books and authors thanks as i kind of answered as the question was going yes you were forcing things onto the old testament but no you weren't necessarily forcing things onto the new testament the new testament authors many really were quoting and or alluding to old testament books some of that synthesis is intentional a claim to be a con a continuation of the faith of abraham and moses and therefore the god of abraham and moses that is an intentional feature of the new testament but i think make a really persuasive clean argument that that is not what the old testament authors intended i think that's a great thing i don't actually have a problem with people studying the bible systematically to learn things about god that span the ark of scripture that's why we think of the bible as a living book it has a massive scope combined with very self-rest referential content that encourages us to make new connections and therefore gain new insights about ourselves as we try to follow god i think that's a good thing as long as we don't then turn around and say that we're making claims on behalf of an old testament author and instead we're just honest this is something that i discovered through the scriptures that that were spoken to me i would even be fine with that language through the scriptures uh we just are humble about it deborah asks hi science mike i love your show and your book thanks so much for the work you do i am a parent of a teenaged girl who we were blessed to adopt from foster care as a teen being in a close empathetic relationship with someone who has experienced profound childhood trauma and neglect is an intense but rewarding experience by responding to her pain and behaviors that act out that pain with love and grace and without reacting to her behavior in a way that simply perpetuates that pain i am able to help her heal however it comes at a great cost i am a highly empathetic person and so i find i take on her pain so much that i physically ache at times it feels like i have the flu counseling and good self-care have helped but i still hold her pain in my body and it is wearing me down i have read some research about the relationship between empathy and inflammation it appears that there is some scientific basis for my sense that we can experience physical pain as a result of someone else's psychological pain and you're correct we absolutely can my question is what is going on in my body when i feel my daughter's trauma and what are the spiritual implications of the fact that empathy may hurt how can grace both heal and harm i believe that love is at its best sacrificial but i'm also mindful that when we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves the latter part of that edict requires that we also care for ourselves thank you so much uh debra first of all uh walk run don't walk to grab a copy of the body keeps the score which is a book about the relationship between bodily trauma or bodily pain and bodily condition and emotional trauma i won't attempt to summarize its contents in this book or in this answer it's book length and this is a podcast and uh but it's more centered on trauma and not empathy i would imagine the two are related but frankly you've asked a question i'm kind of in the middle of researching myself let's say hypothetically for a book that comes out written by me after finding out the waves uh so you're right in the middle you've asked me in the middle of a research project so i'm trying to get a better answer this question myself uh i think the mechanism is related to the same psychological responses we have to emotional trauma our brains because of empathy we mirror the trauma the other person is experiencing and yeah that can create a systemic inflammation in the body you know in inflammation one thing that happens is you can actually have red blood cells that escape your blood vessels and that's part of where tissue inflammation comes from and uh it's rough it's rough on the body why on earth would evolution encourage this well pain as a mechanism has been rewarded by natural selection because it forces us to act if if you break your ankle you stop running and avoid further injury right if you feel a sharp pain in your hand you stop doing what you're doing you look and you pull the thorn out of your hand and allow the body to heal and avoid further injury that's what pain does so physical pain in response to emotional trauma does what it says something's wrong stop stop doing this uh it forces us to act so maybe as a social species when we hurt when others are hurt we are more likely to act to respond or to move away and that's the choice you're making you have to continue to give yourself self-care and time to heal and recover so that you don't naturally and inevitably begin to distance yourself from the source of the pain you gotta take care of you to take care of others great question michael asks thank you for everything you've done i found your work before i had fully deconstructed and it has kept me from fully losing faith in a loving god in spite of experiences with church and religious people i'd love to hear about how to keep my own amygdala under control i feel like i am driven by fear and anxiety and it keeps me from being in good relationship with my wife and children i am often preparing for the worst case scenario and the negativity has taken its toll on my family you're talking about two distinct things the amygdala is fear and anger yeah but sometimes long-term anxiety and kind of a pessimism bias is happening more uh in the in the prefrontal cortex specifically like in the orbital frontal cortex uh and those are are a little bit distinct uh if it's a very intellectualized anxiety it's a little different than a more generalized anxiety centered in the limbic system uh you know i would recommend cognitive behavioral therapy and uh there's a book called uh cognitive behavior therapy second edition by beck get it on amazon um that'll help you understand and maybe do some treatment there's also a great thing called the anxiety and phobia workbook that helps people deal with anxiety and negativity those would be things you could put into practice i know why you've emailed you've sent me a question why do i send you to a book because they're both really good books i've read them they're on my bookshelf i consult them frequently when answering questions on this program but basically cognitive behavior therapy is a practice where you learn to watch and monitor your own thoughts and feelings and interrupt them so when you're being really negative you go hey that's really negative and i'm not a negative person it's that simple you do it over and over and in times modifying your thoughts causes your feelings to follow but also accept yourself you've gone through some changes this is traumatic um so understand that it's normal to feel weird maybe uh go see a therapist once a week and and let them guide you through the process of accepting the fact that it's okay to to feel down sometimes it's okay uh to struggle through fear and anxiety when how you see the world changes it's normal it's a normal thing there's nothing wrong with you i feel like i'm a broken record on the cognitive behavior therapy thing but it's a really powerful um psychological treatment model okay joe has a question and his question is hi science mike i have a question about what the ear can and cannot perceive or interpret in terms of sound fidelity i understand the sampling rate of any recorded medium be it mp3 or m4a or flack or wave or lossless or even higher resolution audio than that of cds from what i understand instead of giving us full natural sound a 128k mp3 pile mp3 file is giving us 128 000 little snapshots of the sound per second that our brain perceives as continuing sound so scientifically what can our ears perceive of different audio sampling rates can our brain even detect that there's missing information and or to what extent is the original sound sampled or not okay so we're getting into digital audio theory first i've got to correct some assumptions in the question there are sample rates which yes a sample rate is how often you take a slice of a wave form to digitize it cd audio is 44.1 000 samples per second the audio you hear associated with digital video and digital television is sampled at 48 000 samples per second now you can double those to get high resolution audio which would give you 88.2 000 cycles per second or 96 000 cycles per second if you double video and now there's a new super high resolution audio encoding sample rate of 192 000 samples per second uh boy when we have done blind trials train listeners and audio files can't tell the difference between a well produced mastered 44.1 sample rate file and uh you know 192. when you sample more often it lets you get higher frequencies that's the entire benefit another part of sampling is the bit depth how many bits per sample cds are 16 bit which is a lot but you can also do 24 bits which doesn't sound that much but it gives you exponentially more information to work with uh so recording at 24 bit and then outputting to 16 bit is really a great way to get an incredibly good sounding audio file the the 128k in an mp3 or an m4a or compressed audio file does not refer to the sample rate it refers to the bit rate meaning how much data is the algorithm allowed to use per second of audio basically how much information should i throw away as i make this file this is kind of funny uh if you get up to a high enough sample rate i think it's above 128 but not much above 128. you get to the point where trained experts on a good system can't tell the difference between an mp3 and cd audio or a high definition audio file so the the answer is we can't hear the differences but part of that's because we don't ever hear a digital audio file that digital file is converted to an analog signal by a digital to analog converter and then sent as an analog signal to an amplifier which then moves a speaker column that creates purely analog waveforms that are ear sample you could not directly hear a digital file if you wanted to your ears aren't set up to receive digital information how would we you know we'd have to what use a modem like right like that's uh then you'd have to demodulate that in your ear you can't do it your ear can only receive analog signals so the question is how much fidelity do we need to give a digital audio converter enough information to create sound that sounds indistinguishable from the original to the human ear and cd audio does it and a good mp3 does it as well but you know you can you can make a good argument that higher sample rates and certainly bit depth matter at the recording phase once you master and output the file you can get great sound that will fool the experts from an mp3 and i know people are going to refute me on the website and on twitter and i would just ask when you do so bring me a blind study that supports your conclusion and not an anecdote thank you uh becky has the last question on what may be the longest episode of ask science mike we've ever done we're clocking in right here at almost two and a half hours so here is the last question from becky my friend was telling me this the other day and i wanted to know what you think about it when i was a christian eight to ten years ago i would have a recurring dream in which i would feel a very dark spiritual presence and it was holding me down literally holding me down in bed many times it was a lucid experience and i would try to scream to wake up my wife to help me but nothing would come out nothing then finally some sort of weird maniacal sound would scream uh from forth and freak my wife out that's probably a muffled scream i guess is what you're describing she would wake me up and i would spend the next 30 minutes freaked the f out when i became an atheist the dreams stopped as i move forward in my reconstruction i've yet to buy into spiritual warfare i'm undecided about the nature of the spiritual woman honestly couldn't care less the dreams have yet to return my question is this how much of our spiritual belief system is in our brain and not in reality are we simply buying the mythology to such a great degree that would create a different reality than the others uh becky good question from your friend um first of all what your friends describe is sleep paralysis and uh sleep process when we get kind of stuck half between waking and sleeping where you have some conscious awareness of our environment but are still unable to move our bodies i'm a frequent sufferer of sleep paralysis so i know all about being awake and being unable to move uh luckily for me i am a lifelong observer of my own thoughts so i tend to not panic and uh i tend to work unintentionally making the same sound your friend would make on accident so in in my frozen state i scream as loud as i possibly can jenny jenny which usually comes out like right but then she knows when i'm making that sound i'm lying on the bed paralyzed but awake and she'll reach over and kind of uh shake me a little bit or touch my face and then snaps me right out of it and i say thank you and generally go back to sleep when you are very tired or very stressed you're more likely to experience sleep paralysis so if this person was leaving christianity and had some stress or anxiety related to their faith and becoming an atheist relieved that anxiety guess what the dreams would stop um now the question how much of our spiritual belief system is in our brains and not in reality our brains are in reality everything that happens in your brain is part of reality uh but it also is part of reality that's happening in your brain and the fundamental question at the heart of my work is how do we prove spiritual things happen beyond our brain and i have not been able to do that i can't prove any part of your spiritual experience happens beyond your brain i mean i can i can your liturgy your practice of faith happens in the world but your moments with god the only science that illuminates those moments is neuroscience when we look into your brain i can't prove that any and i mean any of our spiritual experience happen outside our brains that doesn't mean they're not valuable as you know in my axioms even if spirituality even if god is nothing beyond something we experience in our brains as we contemplate reality it's still useful and it's still beautiful but the power of my experiences with god lead me to what i would call an unjustified hope that there's more to god than a distant uncaring physics that we personify that god somehow reaches back when we reach out to god but i can't tell you that scientifically and i won't try and i respect anyone who says mike that seems really like a very silly thing to claim right i just admit it it is a silly thing to claim and it's beautiful and it's life-changing and billions of other people have similar experiences i don't know just don't try to prove what's happening or where with my faith and instead i just let myself be transformed by it god is love and therefore the best action we can take in the world is to personify love it's not a scientific fact claim but it does make a beautiful world thanks for listening everyone to my patrons who not only contribute to the show who not only pick the questions for every week's program but this week wrote questions themselves i say thank you the next time i talk to you it will be the 100th episode of ask science mike and wow what a journey it has been with you all and i can't wait to do the 200th episode with you see you next week