ASM032 Déjà Vu, Coconut Oil, and the Science of the Sorting Hat

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deja vu coconut oil and the science of the sorting hat all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life very soon i'm going to be in new york city with forefront church and tickets are on sale now you can go to forefront forefrontchurchnyc.com fcq to get tickets i'd love to see you there tons of other events coming up as well but for now we're going to do a podcast let's get it started hey science mike what does science suggest about the phenomenon of deja vu i have a wild but true personal story about deja vu in july 2007 a friend and i were visiting cincinnati ohio that night i had a weird dream about a cousin of mine getting shot and killed the following morning i shared details of my dream with my friend while we drove on the interstate fast forward a few months to september i got a phone call one day about my cousin getting ambushed by an intruder and then was shot in the head and killed i had forgotten about my dream until i went to his funeral and then it hit me everything about the scene was familiar it clicked it was a scene from the dream i had in july a dream that i had detailed to a friend when i went back and contacted that friend and updated her about my cousin's passing i asked her if she remembered my dream from july her eyes popped and she confirmed what i already knew this was a very bizarre and personal case of deja vu since then i've shared my story with numerous people but no one can offer any confident insight science mike was i supposed to use my dream to tell my cousin to be on edge about possible intruders or is there some sort of folding of time and space or other dimension that intertwines our dreams with a future reality i would love your insight to this topic thanks a lot science mike around sixty percent of people report experiencing deja vu at least once in their life now deja vu is the uncanny feeling that you are experiencing something again that even though this is a new situation you feel like it's happened before that is distinct from what you're describing which seems to be more like premonition the idea that you had four knowledge of an event and then saw it repeated it's a subtle distinction but an important one and we'll talk a little bit about both just to give you a comprehensive science answer here we don't fully understand how memory works in the brain we understand that certain parts of the brain are more responsible for memory recollection your prefrontal cortex and your hippocampus are going to work together for conscious recollection different parts of the brain are evolved involved in the feeling of familiarity and memory theories that we hold today say that our memory involves those mechanisms working in concert both ability to recall events and to find things familiar and many researchers theorize that deja vu is a situation in which the parts of the brain responsible for recollection and the parts of the brain that are responsible for familiarity get out of sync some trigger makes the brain feel like what's happening now is familiar even though you don't have specific recollection since that's a very rare brain state it feels uncanny and difficult to process now there is some experimental support to uh this idea and they've done some research on people that have chronic and constant deja vu i'm talking about people who couldn't read the newspaper or television because they felt like they'd read it before or can't buy groceries because they feel like they've just bought these groceries i'm talking about chronic deja vu and those patients had damage in their frontal and temporal regions of the brain and so this probably caused for some reason their familiarity circuits to be on almost all the time causing a persistent sensation of deja vu and this is different than dreaming about something that happens later now many people look at dreams as a temporal indicator something that transcends time and space that when we sleep unbound by the limits of conscious thought which is to some degree true by the way if you go back and listen to the episode i've talked about dreaming uh that you are able to get information from immaterial realms that you couldn't get while awake i suppose that's possible but there's not any scientific evidence to support that idea what we would assume in science is that you are having a confirmation bias essentially you're proof texting you had a dream and then the circumstances those dreams came real which i understand especially giving the severity of what you're talking about feels like something very akin to personal responsibility i'm not going to minimize the way you feel about that i'm just going to tell you what science would say about it lots of people have dreams that involve the deaths of loved ones or friends or family our dreams tend to have elements and then that we think about a lot especially things related to fear and insecurity because the parts of the brain in and around the amygdala are very active when we dream so our fears tend to come to life in dreams that's why it's so common for death to occur in dreams so you could imagine that every night a significant portion of the american population has a dream involving someone's death in fact you can imagine a significant portion of the global population every night has a dream that involves the death of a loved one and how often do those dreams come true it's relatively rare that's shockingly rare really and so you had a dream that came true millions of people maybe even billions of people have dreams that don't come true and when things happen that are exceptional human consciousness really remembers that so even if you had other dreams where people in your life died you would have difficulty recalling those if they didn't come true but when a dream does come true that's something that people remember and talk about this is the root of mythology and of lore and even of urban myths so i'm going to tell you in all honesty i don't think you bear any responsibility for failing to send a warning to your cousin about their death i think you had a normal dream related to fear and anxiety and unfortunately there was a coincidence and that dream ended up reflecting future events but i would not harbor guilt i would not beat yourself up about not delivering a message if we all told our loved ones every time we had a dream about them that that harm or death was coming their way it would happen thousands and thousands of times per day and eventually we would ignore those warnings the same way we avoid you know pop-ups on our computer that come up all the time and tell us we have a virus because familiarity in humans well those are things we tend to ignore so in terms of the science of premonition in dreams it's related to fear and anxiety in terms of uh scientific evidence supporting that premonition is a thing i have looked before i looked again for your question and i couldn't find any credible research that backs up the idea that humans have the ability to ascertain facts about the future through premonition there's just not the science there to support anything like that in the psychic realm a lot of people believe it a lot of people are into it i'm not denying that i'm just saying that science doesn't necessarily validate it either way you have done nothing wrong so i hope you can offer yourself grace in those circumstances [Music] our next question came from kevin on facebook and it reads hi mike i've had a question that's been on my mind for years and i think it's right up your alley the question is this if darwinian evolution is true then things like gluttony lust violence pride self-interest etc pretty much any of our big ticket sins are historically biologically advantageous and helpful for our survival insofar as they keep us alive strong and passing on our genes in a dog-eat-dog world spreading your seed around to as many women as possible is good lust eating as much as you can to stay alive is good gluttony bashing in the brains of weaker creatures who may pose a threat to you is good pride violence selfishness and yet on this side of consciousness jesus tells us to do away with these things tells us that none of these things are as helpful to us and that they will be the death of our souls if we indulge in them i guess that's not as much of a question as it is an observation but it's always plagued me i'm a philosophy guy more than a science guy i can understand the scientific arguments for evolution but for me evolution changes the christian heritage by taking the things we call sin and showing how they were not only not sinful but the fuel for the engine of evolution and everything we see today how do you reconcile these opposing world views how do you stay intellectually honest and call helpful instincts and appetites grievous sins at the same time i've asked this to a number of people on different sides of the evolution discussion and they look at me like i'm the first person to ever notice this discrepancy or bring it up i can't be but i'm surprised more people don't talk about it in these sorts of discussions please let me know if you have answered anything like this in the past or we'll be talking about it in the future i'm a new listener but just binge listen to most of the liturgist stuff love that you are getting us to thank god bless man thank you kevin well kevin first of all there's an old idea about evolution that it represents survival of the fittest and people interpret the fittest to be the biggest the strongest and the most brutal and that is not how evolution works evolution rewards the genes that produce organisms that are the most adapted to present circumstances that means there's no goal of evolution we're not getting better and better over time we are continually and dynamically through our genetic changes through selection pressures on gene mutation responding to and adapting to a changing environment so there are absolutely evolutionary routes to many of the things that we call sin we're sexually reproducing organisms without sex we don't copy our genes our genes cease to exist obviously evolution strongly favors against organisms like that sex of course appears to be an adaptation that helps multi-celled organisms compete with the much faster generational rate of microbial life so of course we are primed to enjoy sex and to have sex frequently that's part of of humanity's evolutionary heritage we're a relatively sexually active type of ape gluttony in a calorie scarce environment gluttony is great it's not that simple we found that there are two basic genetic templates for metabolism and food response there are naturally heavier more binge eating people and naturally thinner more sparingly eating people and it turns out a population is more likely to survive if it includes both sets of individuals because in times of plentiful calories thin people tend to be healthier and to live longer but in times of food scarcity the opposite is true the people who eat beyond the capacity of their bellies and tend to carry extra weight live longer and we've even seen epigenetic expression so it's not as simple as evolution rewards gluttony or not evolution somehow has designed humans to deal with different amounts of food that exist across situations and circumstances we certainly have a genetic heritage of violence we are carnivores we are tribal and for a long time yes humans were successful if they could bash other humans over the head that's our lower brain those are the primitive parts of our circumstances when times are tough you bet they kept us alive it was that tendency towards aggression combined with methodical planning that allowed us to take the apex of the food chain on planet earth learning to throw sharp sticks at other animals made us the most feared thing on the earth's soil and then we found agriculture we found civilization and our brains became complex enough that we could begin to ponder ethics and morality we could imagine the way that other organisms felt and for the first time in evolutionary history an animal could contemplate the consequences of its actions and with that came a responsibility to live in a different way i think that's what the genesis story is telling us about we all know what it's like to hear a whisper from a serpent and that serpent is our evolutionary past those behaviors that so well kept us alive when we were small bands of hunter-gatherers today subvert the fabric of civilization and so the story of jesus calls us to our higher brain functions it's our higher brain that allows us to form large societies and maintain large elaborate social webs it's our higher brain that allows us to contemplate morality to experience compassion and empathy in a very real way the gospel calls us to our most evolved state using the parts of our brain most recently given to us by natural selection i don't find evolution and christianity to be opposing world views i find them to be two world views that do their best to describe reality and then often they do that in different ways of course the bible reflects understanding of science and history appropriate for the time in which it was written and yet it contains timeless truths for how humans can deal with the tension between their lower and higher brains how they can deal with that which we've historically called ascend nature and maybe today begin to call evolutionary heritage either way we're talking about an innate tendency towards selfishness that we know is ultimately not productive and ultimately does not lead to peace or fulfillment for human beings i think both science and the gospel call us to treat each other better than that hi science mike i am wondering what you think about coconut oil i've heard a lot of things from a lot of people claiming that it has healing properties it gives you amazing skin it helps with weight loss all sorts of things like that and i'm wondering if there's some good science behind that i've looked and there doesn't seem to be much really good science on many of those claims but i was wondering what you think of it and if we can trust any of it or not food science is tough biochemically life is complicated humans are really complicated as our other large bodied vertebrates we have so many different types of tissues and so many different chemical pathways that do different things our neurochemistry is immensely complex and so it's not always clear the correlation between different foods and behaviors and there is an ongoing search for these superfoods these things that will fix all kind of ales if we just tap into them i'm not aware of many scientifically validated superfoods i know fruits and vegetables are universally regarded as very healthy things for your body it's difficult to overstate the value of getting enough fluid in your diet especially water but let's talk about coconut oil first of all is coconut oil good for your skin absolutely almost all plant oils that aren't caustic or toxic are good for your skin they're moisturizing they generally have some degree of a minor antimicrobial complement so but they're not too harsh they're not like antibacterial soap they're going to wipe out all of the natural flora and fauna that belong on your skin so that's good coconut oil there's refined coconut oil which was used as a food additive a lot in the 70s and 80s it's bad stuff it's full of trans fat we know those are awful for you natural coconut oil is about 90 percent saturated fat um compared to butters 64 it's super fatty however about half of those fats are generally considered to be beneficial they can help lower the bad type of cholesterol hdl so you know it's okay if you want to replace some amount of the cooking oil you use with coconut oil that's probably an okay thing it's not a good diet additive you're just adding fats to your diet it's not something you should cook with exclusively for sure it's just too much fat believe me my my tongue hates that i'm saying that my my tongue is a big fan of fats but health-wise you know just too much fat is bad the the scientific community just hasn't found this superfood claim to be valid at all i've noticed that all of the medical doctors that tend to endorse coconut oil sell the stuff so they're pretty biased i went to pubmed and did a lot of a lot of searches i read way way way too many studies and i did not see a lot supporting coconut oil as some miracle cure-all it's fine for your skin um if you do coconut oil pulling which is a thing where people put it in their mouths to to clean their mouths that's fine just brush your teeth afterwards you don't want to leave oil in your mouth overnight um that's a bad idea i think i think your dentist will agree with me yeah i mean and then there's coconut water which people uh love right now as a sports drink and kind of a miracle food and some people have said that you can infuse it right into your bloodstream i read several blog posts about that it is uh more sterile than dirty water and so it's true that it has actually been used uh in battlefield situations but only because it was like less dirty than really dirty resources that were available it's not like an antiseptic so coconuts are delicious limited amounts of coconut oil oil are fine in your diet they do contain some beneficial saturated fats but they also contain just just a they're just packed with fat coconut is almost almost pure fat i'm actually wondering i've always heard that butter was the most calorically dense food that existed i'm wondering if coconut oil might actually be more calorically dense i need to look that up it could affect some of the jokes i tell about putting people in space but i would not treat this as a superfood i would not you know be careful to buy products that only have coconut oil as additives uh it's you know it's a tropical fruit it's fine it's good for you in limited doses like any other high fat food item thanks for the question [Music] our last question came in via email and it's a fun one dear science mike which part of the brain does the sorting hat use to determine a hogwarts house also which hogwarts house do you belong to also how does the test and divergent work thanks for your help these questions are tripping me up in my discussions with my reader friends even if you don't put this on your show i'd love an email to help explain it thanks sarah mack now i have to be fully honest here i cheated a little bit uh sarah mack is both a friend of mine and one of my favorite musicians she sings in the ceramic band you can check them out at sarahmacban.com they're amazing um and i could have just emailed back but i thought it was such a fun question we would put this on the show especially because it'll let us talk a little bit about personality typing and brain scans and all those sorts of things now if you're not familiar with the lore of harry potter number one god help you how could you not have read those books the school of hogwarts which teaches people magic has four houses gryffindor hufflepuff ravenclaw and slytherin and when you go to the school you wear a magical hat that figures out which house you belong in based on whatever trait is most dominant in you so if you are a ravenclaw uh you're known to be clever or to love learning uh if you're in slytherin you are ambitious if you're a hufflepuff you're very loyal and if you're in gryffindor you're brave of course that's harry potter's house he was primarily brave and we know from that movie that the sorting hat did allow people's choice to play a role at first it started to put harry and slytherin and you know harry didn't want slytherin and so the house put him into gryffindor which is interesting because regardless of our n8 traits we all have the ability to influence our behavior through our consciousness and our willpower and i like that the sorting hat respected that mainly because jk rowling's an amazing author now believe it or not i actually found a study where a psychologist or a team of psychologists did a scientific trial with a sorting hat of course the sorting hat is a mythical object but they use the sorting hat software on pottermore which is jk rowling's website and used the fans of jk rowling in those forums to basically have them take this sorting hat test figure out what house they were placed in and then figure out that lined up with psychological personality assessment tools and there were some interesting results they did find that people who were sorted into slytherin showed that they had some of the dark triad traits narcissism machiavellianism and psychopathy that's really amazing they also found um placement in ravenclaw to positively correlate between a need for cognition people who need things to make sense like to think things through they did not find that gryffindor was associated with extraversion and openness which they expected on the test they also did not find that hufflepuffs scored higher on a need to belong so when science tried to reproduce the sorting hat we only got about halfway there now if we look into the brain and how the brain functions we can actually screen for bravery today we've done some interesting research that i'll have linked on the show notes at asksciencemike.com where they took people who were afraid of snakes and not afraid of snakes and had them sit at the end of a conveyor belt they could press a button to advance the conveyor or retreat it and their goal was to get the object to the end of the conveyor and of course they put a snake on the conveyor belt and people who were brave part of their anterior cingulate cortex lit up and it allowed them to advance the snake even though their limbic system was afraid and this is a critical point we can image the brain today we can see it work as it works but we can only do this at a very limited resolution the only way we could identify this part of the brain was by applying some kind of stimulus and the other traits in harry potterism are increasingly distributed across the brain you do have a pretty distinct part of your brain that helps you be brave but ambition cleverness loyalty these are much more diffuse traits these are collections of neurological behaviors that incorporate huge portions of the brain and i'm not sure how a sorting hat would sort between those ideas now we can assume if it's using brain imagery the sorting hat must have a resolution that is dramatically higher than any brain scanning equipment we have today and then also that the sorting's hats map of brains and the possible distributions of gray matter configuration across the human population is orders of magnitude greater than what we see in the sciences today because we have to provide multiple stimuluses and scan the brain and the differences between these stimuluses give us insight the sorting hat just sits on a kid's head and does its thing now it may be more personality assessment driven it may be looking instead of at the actual brain looking more at cognition a little q a may help the sorting hat do its thing now that's actually very similar to what we see in the divergent series if you haven't read that i'm not going to spoil it but essentially in that ritual in that book young people are put into a test where their ability to discern what is real and not real is impaired medically and then they're given a set of stimulus they're they're given a scene that seems real and people judge how they react we would assume the people running that test are looking not only at how people respond in behavior but also at some brain data they're looking into a brain similar to how we do today it's relatively scientifically plausible uh if you wanted to create a dystopian society that you could use brain scans and even mind-altering drugs in order to learn about people of course luckily today that falls well outside of the realm of medical ethics we have really great safeguards on how you can do research and uh consent is a huge huge part of anything involving humans delightfully so scientifically if the sorting hat the brain scanner it's the best one in the world it's probably easier to call it magic uh divergent a little closer to science a little less far-fetched which is kind of scary isn't it it's a little weird that uh the beautiful magical world is more far-fetched than the dystopian one scientifically that's not where i was going with an answer oh man anyway uh i think it's easier to say that the sorting hat is magic well that does it for another episode of ask science mike uh as always i've got a few announcements for you here first of all last week we had the first ever episode of ask science mike live and one week later it's already the most downloaded episode of the show man that was a lot of fun i feel like a lot of you got to meet me for the first time you hear me every week and i'm sitting in my office alone i'm an extrovert my energy is just a lot better when there's people around so if you didn't get to listen to 31 go back and check it out and on that note i had so much fun and so much good feedback i've decided i'm gonna put together an ask science mic live tour i don't have the specifics it will probably be in 2016 but if you're interested in maybe helping me find a venue in your town to make sure i can come by i'm gonna figure out how we're gonna handle the costs and i'm probably gonna have to stick to the like the biggest download markets for the show just to make sure it's financially viable um but if you're interested at all and ask science mike coming to your town go to ask sciencemic.com and send me a note i'm going to start building a database of potential places to work through with my management company if you think that's a good idea actually not only send me a venue if you think it's a good idea to do an ass science mic tour hit me up on twitter at ask science mike other events coming up a forefront in new york city going to be talking about sex drugs and violence through the lenses of science and faith it's going to be an amazing event tickets are on sale now you can go to askclientsmike.com and click on events it'll take you to the website where you can buy a ticket don't miss it if you're in new york that's going to be a great event we're doing a peace weekend at my church in tallahassee good samaritan it's gonna be a friday night thing a saturday thing a sunday thing and i may even have some friends who are musicians coming into town monday we might do a little house show or even an event at the church so again go to sciencemite.com click events we've got belong the details are out about that tickets go on sale today by the time you hear the show tickets are already on sale so if you're in london or you can fly to london you want to go to the liturgist.com slash belong dash london or just go to liturgist.com and click in the upper right hand corner it'll tell you everything about the event and how you can get tickets for that i also want to let you know and this is very exciting unless i'm mistaken unless some something you know fell apart tomorrow tuesday a new episode of the liturgist podcast comes out and guess what we've already got more recorded we're going to be back on every other tuesday with the liturgist podcast now i need your questions to keep ask science mike going we have tons of great questions but i went through today and almost all my remaining rewarded questions are from dudes so i don't like having a dude only show i don't like the whole science technology engineering math is a male discipline thing so i would love to get more questions from women for the program guess what girls if you submit a question you have a better chance of getting on the show than the guys do i think it's only fair you can submit questions on ask sciencemike.com just scroll down to the bottom 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you can find links to greg to jeb to resources for every question asked in the history of this program all of that's on ask sciencemic.com thanks for listening everybody and i will see you next week