ASM030 Dreams, God’s Gender, and the Vacuum of Space

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dreams, god's gender and the vacuum of space all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Applause]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life

i recently had the chance to sit down with matt carter of the break it down podcast and talk about music and the brain and interstellar travel and just lots of really nerdy stuff that you guys would be into so i'll have a link to that on asksignspike.com if you'd like to check it out

otherwise let's answer some questions and get it started

## The Vacuum of Space

“hi science mike i'm jess and i'm from perth western australia um i don't really understand the concept of a vacuum so a space vacuum not just a vacuum that you kind of walk around the house with um so in space how can they just be nothing i don't understand that concept at all um it stumps me all the time when i think about astronauts having to wear pressurized suits so they can they can be protected from nothing essentially um so basically my question hypothetically if i was an astronaut and i was to take off my headgear and um expose my head to the nothing vacuum um if i was to open my mouth and swallow some of the vacuum or what i kind of perceived to just be air what would happen um would my insides be sucked from the inside out because the pressure or is it simply just like swallowing some air um thanks for everything that you've done in this wonderful show i'm looking forward to your answer”

thank you

it's interesting you mention a vacuum as in a noun on the surface of the earth in relation to the vacuum of space which is another noun but not an object

and interestingly enough a vacuum the object in your house uses a verb vacuum to create a vacuum

it's really wild english is weird

uh so basically the vacuum of space is nothing like the atmosphere on earth

you can't see the air not really not at short distances although over long distances during the day you certainly see our air's tendency to scatter blue light

that's why the sky looks blue even though it is in fact colorless

but you can't see air but you can experience the ramifications of air

you can feel a breeze you can see it scatter light you see those things

the vacuum of space is different

it is a nearly perfect vacuum

it's space without anything in it - no gas pressure at all

you might have a stray atom or molecule every now and then

but basically in proper space there's no atmosphere there's no air

now when you have such a perfect vacuum weird things happen

little virtual particles and anti-particles can appear out of nowhere exist for a second then collide with each other and annihilate

so the vacuum of space is not perfectly empty but it's close

that being said you know as a vacuum nothing that's more of a philosophical question because a vacuum is something

it's a vacuum it's an absence of matter

but for example the vacuum in our solar system is full of electromagnetic radiation from the sun and even small particles from the solar wind and likely pulsing with dark matter for example so not all that empty just effectively empty from the human reference frame now if you were to take off your helmet in space from your space suit that would be a really terrible idea it's a really common intuitive thing for people to imagine things like gulping the vacuum of space or putting it into a jar that's exactly the opposite of what would happen you exist and in a state of pressurization the the gases and fluids inside your body are in a state of equilibrium with the atmospheric pressure outside of your body and so if you were to take off your helmet in a spacesuit the first thing that would happen is all of the atmosphere all of the pressure in that spacesuit would quickly fly out it would actually propel you the opposite direction of where your helmet came off because you would be ejecting matter into space and that's how propulsion works so you'd get a little bit of thrust out of that and that would be the end of good things that happened if you were holding your breath your lungs all the air sacs in your lungs would rupture almost immediately as they over pressurized if you were smart and and blew absolutely all the air out of your lungs that you could you might survive in space a little longer with a little less damage but not much you see basically your body's a balloon your skin's a flexible membrane and if if you take a balloon on on the surface of the earth and you let it go and you let it fly higher and higher into the air it starts to swell because there's more pressure in the balloon than outside the balloon and your human body would do the same thing you would immediately begin to swell a lot and and some people assume in fact that in terms of surface area you would you balloon out to about twice your normal size that would be a bad scene the other thing that would happen is our atmosphere does a great job of filtering out uh the harmful parts of sunlight the earth's magnetosphere helps us as well and you would find that in moments any part of your body exposed to the sun would have severe burns it would only take a moment of looking toward the sun to do permanent and irreparable damage to your eyes you would slowly suffocate because there'd be no gases for you to breathe and probably uh worst of all is you'd get something similar to the bins because you'd have these bubbles forming your bloodstream your blood would not boil as many websites will tell you that's not scientifically accurate but you would get bubbles of of gas in your blood vessels and that would cause the bends and decompression sickness also kind of rough you'd have a lot of trouble maintaining any blood pressure whatsoever because as your body stretched out your blood vessels will also correspondingly get larger and there would not be enough volume of blood for your heart to maintain blood pressure and of course you'd be directly exposed to the sun's worst radiation and even if you survived you'd have horrible cell damage and dna damage depending on how long you were exposed and even after you recovered from the side effects of the swelling and you know possible damage to your lungs you'd still have dna damage and your risk of developing cancers in life would be dramatically elevated space is not a hospitable environment for human beings we are uniquely suited to the surface of one surface in the entire solar system as far as we can tell so far in the entire universe we are earthlings so the vacuum of space isn't nothing it's it's an absence of gas and atmosphere although it does have energy it does have quantum effects and probably even has a significant amount of dark matter that being said it's useless to you and nothing you could capture or gulp or interact with it would simply slowly take everything from you first your gases and then very slowly your thermal energy my advice is to keep your helmet on

[Music]

## Dreams

our next question comes from the email inbox and it reads, “how do dreams and nightmares work what are they why do they happen do they serve any purpose other than to confuse us when we wake up?”

well interestingly enough we understand more about dreams today than we ever have in human history because for the first time in the life of this species we can actually watch brains in action using physics there are several different technologies today that let us look at the activity in a human brain while the person is still alive and given the immense complexity around human brains that's helpful now admittedly the resolution of our instruments today is very limited i often tell people in terms of brain science we have a a similar technology level as galileo when he first started to look at the planets through a telescope but it's still new insight it's still new information i suspect some of it will be clarified or even found wrong in time but some of the old ideas we have about dreams face uh some pretty serious scrutiny in the light of modern brain science the first thing you'd have to understand about a dreaming brain is it's a fundamentally different state than a wake full conscious brain when you're awake your neocortex the outermost part of the brain is generally running the show even in times of crisis your analytical facilities are are taking note checking facts and in general exercising your agency when you're asleep your prefrontal cortex is is pretty much offline as well as your orbito frontal cortex which is you know kind of the part of your brain that assesses risk and also checks the facts about reality measures what your senses are saying and tests them against a rubric of what you understand to be reasonable about the world likewise way back in the visual cortex the parts of your your visual cortex that analyze visual imagery uh are active while the the other parts that actually deal with signals from the eye are off so you are analyzing something visual it's just not coming from your eyes and this actually explains dreams pretty well as you sleep your brain has these routines that help you strengthen memories that are important disregard memories that are less important and even clear out waste materials and toxins from your neurochemistry and you can certainly imagine that things that you think about or worried about or afraid of or want very badly end up showing up with greater strength in dream states but without your brain's executive function trying to create a cohesive narrative as it happens now your amygdala and other parts of the brain associated with very strong emotions and especially fear are very active during sleep and so dreams typically have an unreal quality as well as an intensely emotional quality simply based on the parts of the brain that are active during sleep so dreams absolutely serve a purpose they're part of our brain's housekeeping routine it's kind of like watching someone clean your house they might pick up things that you don't usually pick up in order to dust them they might go into areas that you don't usually go in to make sure that things are tidy the experience of a house being cleaned is different than the experience of a house being lived in so the things you care about most the things you think about most tend to show up in your dreams especially things that you're afraid of and some of the sensations we associate with dreams are actually side effects of the ways that our body adapts to sleep many people uh report feeling paralyzed in dreams or they can't move i've even had dreams where i'm laying on the side of a roadway and i can't i can't move as traffic whizzes by my head and that's a signal from the lower brain to the higher brain that for some reason it's aware that it can't move right now which is true you can't move while you sleep now this to me calls into question some of the symbolic imagery we associate with dreams where different objects are always associated with different ideas in psychology i don't know that there's much significance to that but it doesn't mean dreams aren't meaningful they let us know on some level the things our brain is spending time on spending energy on and connections neurological connections and memory that the brain is trying to maintain and because of that you may figure out something about your relationships something about your goals desires and fears as you sleep and your brain does basic housekeeping

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## God’s Gender

another question from the email box reads hey science mike i've noticed that you seem to use exclusively male pronouns when referring to god is this an intentional thing or more of an old habit left over from your baptist days it's my understanding that most denominations of christianities would tend to agree that god the creator has no physical manifestation or body it's only more conservative groups that hold to a strict usage of male pronouns for various reasons traditions diminished views of women etc and more liberal groups seem to use mostly a gender-neutral way such as god's self rather than himself or herself god instead of he or she from my own readings of the bible i found some definite feminine vibes when used to describe god such as a mother bear and i personally have no problem whatsoever referring to god as she her and mother as well as he him and father i would be interested to know your view on the language we use to describe and it's important to our faith lives specifically concerning gender pronouns or terms thanks carly carly thank you for your question it's one i get a lot and uh i shouldn't be surprised i do tend to say he a lot related to god that is absolutely a habit i picked up in 30 years in the southern baptist convention and it's one that is relatively hard to shake off sometime last year with the liturgists we released a liturgy called god our mother and the point of that work was to introduce people to epiphanic theology apophatic meditation and the limitations we put on god through language i certainly don't think god is male i don't think god is female either but as a writer i have to be honest non-gender reflective pronouns they don't read as well and so i tend to use he or she to describe god simply because it sounds good to my ear in an ideal world i'd like to balance those about 50 50 but i end up balancing them more like 95 5. now i'll be honest my work a huge portion of it is devoted to helping people who are going through some form of existential crisis with god and overwhelmingly these folks come from conservative religious traditions overwhelmingly and i've found that when i refer to god as she it often shuts down a conversation before it can begin because my conception of god is simply too scary when i embrace a feminine pronoun so when i'm addressing conservatives my use of the pronoun he is intentional and uh definitive i would rather someone come along for the conversation uh then force an issue people aren't ready to contemplate or encounter i would say that it is probably statistically wildly more common for people to think of god in masculine imagery in america today simply based on the far greater footprint of conservative theology in america than progressive or liberal theology but i'm certainly comfortable with either and i do give a lot of thought to the potential discomfort i may cause people by using male pronouns for god so often it's i gotta be honest you know language is tough i try to speak intentionally and yet very very often the years of neuro-linguistic programming and conditioning i've encountered are just immediately apparent in my speech i am more likely to say iran than iran i'm more likely to say arab than arab and i'm more likely to say he for god instead of she even though the way i think about the world identifies more closely with the later pronunciations and images that i just use iran arab and she but it requires an intense amount of concentration for me to use those words and i think in general today we're in a state where we are necessarily questioning the way we refer to things looking at the merit of ideas and i think that's a beautiful process but i also think we are too quick to dismiss people who are working against a headwind of a lifetime of linguistic programming and we should in all times offer people grace especially when people are attempting to move forward and grow in life and do everything that they can to create a more peaceful society and eliminate human suffering and universally express the love of god it's a great question i would encourage you if you haven't heard it before to check out god our mother by the liturgists that's probably my favorite work that we've done and i'll make a good shot at referring to god my mother in future episodes thanks

## Why Some People Have Mystical Experiences

“hi science mike i wish more people would experience a revelation of god the way you did on the beach without some kind of experience like that it seems many people won't come to the conclusion that there is a good god who cares about them a belief with proven benefits i believe christianity is meant to teach and demonstrate this but as in your case receiving an indoctrination of this sort often does not sustain the belief more than a decade ago i had my own somewhat mystical experience which changed my life well at least at the very least it made me much more gracious with other people the experience involved being completely undone by a kind of revelation of a father god's complete affection acceptance and approval of me however this did occur in the context of my deep faith which since then has been partially deconstructed especially while i'm watching my adult children struggling with whether there really is a god even though of course in my mind i thought god had been demonstrated reasonably well to them i guess my question is why do you think you got the benefit of a mystical experience while so many don't do you think it has much to do with your open seeking nature or maybe god knew that you would be really helpful to many others kind of like the apostle paul anyway i'd appreciate your thoughts on this whether the neurology of mystical experiences can predict who will experience them or even why god would choose to reveal himself that way to some people sometimes thanks mike really appreciate all you do keep it up”

scientists have been on a quest to understand why people understand and experience god so clearly and so directly while others don't even though religion and spirituality is a very common system on planet earth all cultures include some religious and spiritual element and belief in the afterlife and even belief in god is remarkably common in human societies not everyone has those moments where god seems real and present to them some interesting research i've seen is well first of all tanya lerman did some research where she evaluated people using something called the psychological absorption test and that generates a scale answer and she found that people who scored higher on this test which was designed to identify a predisposition towards a person's ability to be hypnotized actually did reflect an increased propensity to directly experience god when that person prayed regularly or did other frequent rigorous spiritual disciplines other researchers have looked to the genetic template of humanity and one scientist even claims to found something called a god gene although that name is a bit of an overplayed idea there's no one gene that is responsible for human religious recognition and response there is a variable propensity based on a genetic template for different people to produce different amounts of particular neurotransmitters that are associated with viewing the world in a more mystical way i heard one scientist say that to have a very high expression of the quote god gene unquote is basically to walk around on constantly a low-level dose of psychotrophic drugs so these different researchers have taught me that number one different people have a different natural propensity to experience what we call god and number two that the activities we do increase or decrease that propensity and so you could imagine we don't all have the same genetic potential to be a runner but if you have a naturally very fast runner who never exercises and who never practices running race against someone who is less genetically gifted but works very hard at training to run likely that second person is going to win the race unless the difference in the genetic potential is so vast that it can't be overcome it seems somehow humanity is wired that way we have differing genetic predispositions towards mystical experiences and religious belief that are reinforced or not by what we do when people tell me they long for their own moment on the beach i do offer them a few science-based suggestions on ways they could be more open to the experience one of course is having an open frame of mind having a seeking disposition praying or meditating for at least 30 minutes a day six days per week and immersing themselves in some form of spiritual community to reinforce belief in god or the supernatural through social identity all of those are things that will help now that said all i'm talking about is statistical propensities based on science if you change your lens for a moment and instead look at a god who uh we're assuming is active and intervening in reality in some way and made a choice to reveal you know this divine light to me i have no idea why i was chosen i don't have the foggiest notion i get this question almost every time i speak somewhere people submit it to the show all the time and i always afraid to answer this question because other than describing the science and the propensities i don't have any answer i don't know what impact i might have i know i needed that moment i know it was beautiful and i know it changed my life but my friend rob bell says that questions of blessing are just as difficult as questions of suffering and as i've i've thought about that idea there are two sides of the same coin in one case you ask why did i receive when another did not in the case of blessing and in a question of suffering you say why did they receive when i did not only this time they received something negative i don't have answers to those questions and i'm not sure that anybody does so the point of my work is not to definitively explain god or definitively explain even how i was able to encounter god but merely to share that i did so that anyone interested anyone seeking anyone searching and anyone hoping may find some peace and comfort some reflection of that beautiful moment of light that i experienced on the shore of the pacific ocean that night the more i think about it the more i'm not sure that why did it happen is even the best question for me i think a better question is what am i going to do with that moment and i've been compelled i've been pushed forward by a need to share that experience so that other people could find some measure of comfort who are looking for it that maybe the why doesn't matter maybe all that matters is the what the what do we do when god reaches down and touches us on the forehead and i hope i hope most of us that have had these sort of experiences turn around and try to reflect on and honor that moment by loving others well

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## Closing

well there we go that's another episode of ask science mike thanks for another week of great questions thanks for another week of downloading the show uh i'd love to see you in person i updated my events page today at mikemcarg.com events with all the stuff i've got on the calendar at least most of it i added details to events that were just placeholders before for those of you that sent me emails and tweets asking for more information or asking for missing events thanks for the reminder i do uh forget some of the basic mechanics of this stuff sometimes so uh i do have some things coming up august 21st i'll be in orlando for the relevant podcast live event celebrating the 10th anniversary of that program then in september i'll be in new york at forefront church talking about sex drugs and violence through the lenses of science and faith that's a ticketed event and seating is limited and you'll probably if you're in new york you want to grab those tickets now before they sell out i'll be at my own church good samaritan united methodist church in september as well i'll also be hitting up the sandbox cooperative which is really cool that's an online event that you can all be a part of you can listen and stream online and even ask questions unless you happen to be in the rochester minnesota area at which point you can attend in person of course i'm very excited to tell you i'll be speaking at the storyline conference in chicago this year i'll also be in denver in october late october for the wildfire services at st andrews umc as well as a special event with uh me sharing and jennifer knapp doing some music so lots of great stuff coming up i think there's more events than that on the page 2016 is starting to book up as well i expect it to be a pretty busy year the book will come out next year and there'll be a book tour but also lots of events so if you've been thinking about having me come to your college or your conference or your church or whatever faith community you're a part of i'd love to just go to asksciencemike.com click on bookmike because 2016 is already starting to fill up and i'd like to see you before 2017. of course this show is powered by your questions so keep them coming most people go to ask sciencemike.com you can record a voice question submit it right there you can also type out a question if you want an anonymous question that's the place to do it just check the anonymous checkbox i won't reveal your name or identity on the show you can also use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube although pretty much nobody does that anymore most people just use the website and ask sciencemic is listener supported so you can help us create and maintain these conversations that are open and honest and safe and you know i've really been encouraged lately because so many people tell me that they disagree with some of the things i say you know theologically or about the mythology of scripture but they appreciate the fact that i don't pretend to know what i don't and that shows so much allows tension allows people to disagree i hope our shared affinity here is a desire for open conversations and uh d shaming christianity not necessarily landing on any particular belief system but the show is listener supported this is how i pay my bills and so if you'd like to throw me a dollar a month i'd really appreciate it you can give it any level of course you can change or cancel pledges at any time there's some perks for people who donate to the program although all my wonderful patrons say they don't care about the perks and of course if money's tight you can rate the show on itunes that's one of the best things you can do to help people discover the show or just tweet or post on facebook about an episode you enjoyed of course no matter what science mic will always be free to download that's not going to change hayley hyde helps us do our production work we're so thankful for her greg nordine does our production and sound design the show is totally not possible without greg and of course my gigantic monster of a friend jeb bodaford does our theme song he can compose music if you need it done you can find links to all of those folks as well as resources for every single question ever answered in the history of the show on ask sciencemic.com now one last thing before i go this week i was lucky enough to spend some time with don miller and bob goff at the malibu lodge that bob goff has up in british columbia and uh i met a couple of friends there their names are jill and kate they're singer songwriters and i got to hear them play in a kind of a small intimate setting and they have a song that just really really moved me and i thought you guys may enjoy as well so instead of closing out with my usual theme song i thought you guys might like to hear this song my love by jill and kate i'll have a link to it on itunes in the show notes and i'll see you guys next week i will never change my mind i will never change my mind about you i've been crazy about you yet i've been crazy about you since i've found you [Music] so you can fall right to pieces on the floor tonight you can't break down if you need to cry but i won't ever change my mind i will never change my mind about you so come on take a walk with me take my hand you can scream into the darkness and tell your plans you can cry all night till you understand my love [Music] cause i'll be here in the morning when [Music] i'm never gonna leave it i am never gonna leave you stranded [Music] life is never gonna go it'll never go like you planned it so you can run yourself down try to figure me out you can love me later if you hate me now but i am never gonna leave i am never gonna leave you stranded so come on take a walk with me take my hand you can scream into the darkness and tell me your plans you can cry all night till you understand my love cause i'll be here in the morning when the sun to find is it's always gonna be [Music] [Applause] [Music] cause i'll be here in the morning when the sun is [Music] shining [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music]