SGU Episode 390

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SGU Episode 390
5th January 2013
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 389                      SGU 391
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
M: Massimo Pigliucci
Quote of the Week
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend things which are there.
Richard Feynman
Links
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Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 2, 2013, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: I have come to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

J: Evan, can you say that again, but do it twice as corny.

(laughter)

R: Yeah, no.

B: Impossible!

R: You're no Rowdy Roddy Piper.

E: Right? They Live. That movie. Gosh. Is that one of the worst movies ever?

B and R: Worst?

R: It's one of the best movies ever, are you kidding?

B: Oh, god, I love it.

J: It's a cult classic. I mean, yeah, it didn't hold up as good as I would have liked, but it's still

B: Oh, what doesn't hold up?

J: Whatever. It's still great. It's still good.

R: It's awesome.

B: The best bare-knuckled brawl I think in any movie.

E: I'm sorry. Look, I get campy and I get, you know, yes, I get the brawl scene. It was rated like one of the best brawl scenes in movie history and so forth. Rowdy Roddy Piper, John Carpenter directed it and all that. I'm sorry. That movie had so many flaws to it. I mean if we were ever to do a review of that movie, oh man, we could do a whole episode on that.

S: Maybe we should.

E: Maybe we should.

R: Yeah. I will defend that movie with my life.

(laughter)

E: All right. I'm gonna be your Gene Siskel to your Roger Ebert or vice versa, or whatever.

R: Oh, boy.

J: Steve, I'm getting a feeling like in the back of my head. I feel like I'm predicting that we're gonna do a show on predictions.

S: I know, I think you're right, Jay.

B: Damn, you're good.

E: One of these days.

S: It's a high probability hit.

This Day in Skepticism (1:43)

• January 5, 1940: FM radio first commercial broadcast

S: But first, Rebecca's gonna tell us about January 5th.

R: Happy birthday, FM radio!

J: Awesome!

E: To all the kids out there.

J: What does the "F" in FM stand for?

R: Frequency.

B: Frequency modulation.

J: Thank you.

R: Yes, sort of. You could probably pick any number of dates for the birthdate of FM radio, but on January 5, 1940, the first network program was broadcast on FM radio. It was called "Colonel Harrison Featherbottom and the Fart Man's Morning Zoo Hour."

(laughter)

E: What? No, it wasn't.

B: No way. I don't believe it.

J: I love it!

E: . . . skeptic.

R: Okay, that's not what it was called. But it was a 60-minute show that was, it was designed to showcase several different types of audio and vocals and stuff that would eventually be broadcast. The show traveled from a station in Yonkers, New York that was operated by one C.R. Runyon, to a transmitter in Alpine, New Jersey operated by Major Edwin Armstrong of Columbia University, who was heading up the effort; and then onto Meriden, Connecticut; Paxton, Massachusetts; and then finally Mount Washington, where it was transmitted by telelphone wire to Boston and then back to Yonkers. By all reports the FM broadcasts were found to have no apparent loss of quality. So, it was given the thumbs up. The first FM stations that had regular scheduling, programming, appeared later that year. FM.

J: That's cool.

S: Yeah. So, Jay, frequency modulation, that's how the information is encoded in the carrier wave, by modulating the frequency of a signal. As opposed to AM, which is amplitude modulation, they modify the amplitude of the signal.

E: Thank you, Dr. Marconi.

S: Right. And the FM band simply refers to, the FM has nothing to do with any frequency range itself, any band, but that's just the band that's assigned in various countries to transmit FM signals over. So in the U.S. and most places it's 87.5 to 108.0 megahertz.

News Items

Psychic Predictions for 2012 (3:51)

• The Rogues review prediction for last year and make some new ones for 2013

This section is in the middle of being transcribed by banjopine (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed.

Cosmic Rays and Dementia (32:27)

• Houston, we have another problem: Study shows space travel is harmful to the brain

Who's That Noisy? (38:07)

• Whale Makes Human Sounds
• Answer to last week: Glass Harp playing Fur Elise

Interview with Massimo Pigliucci (42:33)

S: We are joined now by Massimo Pigliucci. Massimo, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide!

M: Thank you, it's a pleasure as usual.

S: And Massimo is the chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUNY-Lehman College, the editor in chief of the journal Philosophy & Theory in Biology. He's the host of a podcast called Rationally Speaking and also one of the authors on the blog by the same name. The author of several books, including the book that we will be discussing this evening: Answers for Aristotle. But his greatest claim to skeptical and scientific fame, was that he was the first ever guest on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

(laughter)

M: That's exactly right.

E: As if he needed anything else.

S: That's right. I was just- That's just the cherry on the top, Massimo.

(laughter)

S: Massimo, I talk about you a lot actually, in skeptical circles because like you're the one, in my opinion, like the one real philosopher that we have in the skeptical movement. I'm not saying you're the only philosopher, but you're the one who's active. Who's trying to keep the rest of us philosophically honest, if you will.

M: (laughter)

S: And that, that's essentially what your recent book, Answer for Aristotle, is about. So, tell us about it.

M: Yeah, in some sense. It is aimed at the general public, so it's not a technical book. But it is about the relationship between philosophy and science which I think that is something that certainly members of the skeptic movement should be aware of, or a little more sort of cognisant of. But the basic idea of the book is really that this is essentially a self-help book for people who don't believe in self-help books. The basic approach is that, look, when we're dealing with the big questions in life, you know: morality, or relationships, or you know, general views of the world and whatever, where do we get our best hints, our best information about that? I don't think we get them from religion. Common sense is helpful, but up to a certain point. So, it seems to me that the best combination of answers, or at least approaches to those kinds of questions, come from the two most effective traditions of thought in the Western -- possibly the world -- history, which are of course science, as far as factual questions are concerned and philosophy, as far as how to reflect on the implications of those factual answers we get from science. So that's what the book is about, it's how to combine science and philosophy in what I sort of jokingly call Sci-Phi -- actually, people pronounce it Sci-Fi, but it should be Sci-Phi, because the second part is P-H-I for philosophy.

S: Sci-Phi?

M: Yeah, that's right. (laughter) But I think that Sci-Fi was more, I don't know, the publicist thought it was more, sounded better than Sci-Phi.

(laughter)

E: Right.

S: Right. Well, then why didn't the Sci-Fi Channel change it's name to Sci-Phi?

M: Yeah, that's a good question!

(laughter)

B: That really pissed me of when they did that.

M: Agreed.

S: So, science gives us the facts, as it were, and philosophy tells us how to think about those facts. Is that a fair summary?

M: Well, yeah, it's, of course as you know that's a little simple version of the whole thing. In reality there is no sharp distinction between science and philosophy. There are many areas of overlap, the most obvious one perhaps is philosophy of science, or, and in fact also epistemology. I mean, there are areas of philosophy that are directly relevant to science and there also areas of science that are definitely relevant to philosophy, I mean, one cannot do these days any serious philosophy of mind, for instance, unless one is well read in, you know, neurobiology and current science. So, there's quite a bit more overlap than the simple distinction between science and philosophy. But it is true that, you know, historically speaking and strictly in modern, in the modern (GARBLED), the true disciplines have evolved unto quite different directions and yes, broadly speaking, science deals with the best factual information we can get about the world, and philosophy deals with reflecting, you know, methods of reflecting about what that, that information tells us.

S: Yeah, so they're complementary intellectual disciplines-

M: Right.

S: -if you will. And, I think what's, I know you've made this point a lot, and I know in your blog as well, and also in our prior discussions that, scientists who think they can answer all questions, with just science, have to first realise, that when doing science they are also practicing philosophy, cause there has to be a philosophical underpinning of science itself.

M: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the best summaries of that position was actually due to Dan Dennett. As you know, several years ago he wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which is one of the most influential books, in, in sort of many peoples understanding of evolution and implication of Darwinism and so on and so forth. But in that book, as much as that book is, of course, very much science friendly, and does take on-board, you know, evolutionary biology in particular, Dennett points out that there is no such a thing as philosophy-free science, there is only science that takes on-board the philosophy without examining it. No, now, the question is now that scientist shouldn't necessary do philosophy, in fact I would discourage scientists from doing philosophy. Just in the same way in which I would discourage philosophers from doing science. Those are sufficiently separate activities, as I said, that requires different skills, and also, by the way, they have developed huge technical literature of their own so it's really difficult to do both in a reasonable way. But, what I do suggest is that both scientists, as academics, and sort of general public at large, would be better of by respecting each others territory and what comes out of the other field, and also being a little bit acquainted with what comes out of the other field.

S: Yeah, so just as, like in the skeptical movement in just, in general, we promote the idea that people should have a basic scientific literacy, not that they should be able to practice science as a layperson, but just be scientifically literate. By the same token, people should be philosophically literate as well, not to be able to engage at cutting-edge philosophical technical discussions, but to have some idea when philosophy is in play at least.

M: Correct. So for instance, a little bit of understanding of basic philosophy or science or epistemology for instance, would go quite a long way for skeptics, to have, to develop a better appreciation not just for the power of science, which is, you know, unquestionable within the community, or unquestioned within the community, but also for the limits of science, you know, there is a lot of stuff that science hasn't figured, maybe will never figure out, you know, there is a lot of, you know, science needs to be seen for what it is: a very powerful, but nonetheless human epistemic activity, based on certain methods, those methods have certain problems and limitations. The skeptic is supposed to be thinking rationally about broad range of issues and that ought to include, it seems to me, also the functioning of science itself.

S: Is there an area where you most frequently see science or skeptics go wrong when it comes to philosophy as it's relevant to what we do.

M: Oh, that's a great question. (laughter) I think there's more than one.

(laughter)

S: Give your top three-

J: Slow down, slow down, don't, don't kill us.

M: No no no no. It's- So, one of the, I think, the major areas that I've seen coming up, quite often in the last, especially the last two-three years, is actually the relationship- it's ethics. And what science can or cannot tell us about ethics. There seems to be a lot of confusion about, you know, ethical reasoning and what it is about, and are there moral truths and how do we discover moral truths and all that sort of stuff. And of course, the naïve position among some skeptic quarters is that well you know, either morality is all about- it's entirely a human invention, so it's essentially one step removed from moral relativism, which most of us don't wanna go to, or, then if it is about objective fact then those facts have to be of course matters that science can investigate and therefore we're gonna have, you know, you name it, evolutionary biology or neurobiology is gonna give us answers to moral questions. I think that the reality is a lot more complicated than that. I think that evolutionary biology tells us something very important about morality, that neurobiology tells us something very important about morality, but that neither one of those exhaust what, you know, the province essentially of moral (GARBLED) of ethics in general. So, let me give you a quick example: I think that evolutionary biology is absolutely necessary in order to understand where a sense of moral, right and wrong, comes from. I mean, we evolved it. We are social animals of a particular type and there is no magic behind it, it doesn't come from gods, it evolved over a period of time, the building blocks of a moral sense, a moral intuition if you will, or a moral instinct can be found in other primates and that makes perfect sense. I mean, it would be really bizarre if morality for some reason where the only thing that we cannot find any, sort of, gradual examples or partial examples in other species. So-

S: Yeah, birds have morality. I mean, birds punish each other for not-

M: Yeah.

S: -doing what the group is in the groups best interest. If one bird doesn't warn the others about a predator, then they won't get warned next time around. You know, so that's been-

J: Wow.

S: -demonstrated experimentally.

M: (GARBLED) Quibble a little bit about that, is, I wouldn't go as far as saying that they have morality as in, obviously, as we understand it from a human perspective, meaning they don't have the ability to reply.

E: Dear Duane.

M: But they do have an instinct, that correspond, that if you were to see those actions in a human being, you would say, "oh that's a moral action."

S: Well that, that's, but my point is what you were saying that there are evolutionary antecedents we could see the elements of morality in other species, obviously an elementary form, not in the reflective form that we have, but they have an instinctive notion of reciprocity which informs our ethical senses, right?

M: Exactly, right. From there to neurobiology or the current science in general of moral decision making that also tells you something interesting. It tells you for instance, not only which areas of the brain tend to be involved in moral thinking and that sort of stuff, which is interesting in and of itself, but it tells you something more deep about how we think about morality. For instance, let me give you one example: you probably, you guys probably now have heard a bit about, sort of the different versions of the trolley dilemma.

S: Yeah.

B: Yeah.

M: Two basic forms, as you likely know, are the one in which there is this trolley coming down the road and it's about to hit and kill five people and you have, you happen to have a very convenient located lever next to you, that if you pull you're gonna divert the trolley on a second track where it is gonna kill only one person. Question: would you do it or not? Answer: empirically speaking, most people would say yes. That's interestingly, by the way, cross-cultural, depending (GARBLED) how you present the dilemma, pretty much people will respond in the same way. Eighty or ninety percent of people say yes. Then you switch into a second situation where you don't have the lever, you're on top of a bridge, there's this really bulky, big guy in front of you and the only option you have is to push the guy of the bridge to save the five people. Question: would you do it? Most people answer no. Now, the interesting question there is why would people answer, most people answer, yes to one and no to the other since at least at one level of analysis the two situations are perfectly analogous: in both cases you have five people you're about to save and one person that you're about to kill. Now, turns out that neurobiology sheds some light on this and it's perhaps not surprising, but it's interesting the way it works. It turns out that if you do a brain-scan of, you know, with all the limitations of course of neural scanning and current technology, but if you do a neural scan of people, an FMRI of people, when they are involved in thinking about the two versions of the dilemma, in the first case, the lever case, people tend to involve the areas of the brain, like the frontal cortex, that are involved typically in sort of rational, deliberate decision making. On the other hand, when people are thinking in terms of the second version of the dilemma, the pushing guy of the bridge, a lot of the action switches to the amygdala, which of course is more connected to emotional reactions and fear and things like the sort. Now, that makes perfect sense, because basically the second version of the dilemma is much more personal. You're about to actually push somebody, as opposed to do something from a distance, like pulling a lever. So it makes perfect sense that people switch ways of thinking, they use different neural pathways essentially to think about this. That is very interesting and without the science we wouldn't find out why exactly people are doing that. The question however still remains, should you or should you not push the damn guy of the bridge?

S: Yeah.

M: Right.

J: I think an interesting way to look at it too are "what about the social ramifications." Like, you're gonna, you're actually breaking the law if you push the guy of the bridge, even though you're not gonna get arrested for not saving people's lives. Does that come into play? M: Uh, it does, it depend again, as I said earlier, there is a lot of different variants of the thought experiment, and yes, some of those do involve information about the, you know, consequences and if you, of course, were in moral philosophy (GARBLED) it's called a consequentialist (GARBLED), you will take those into account as well. But the basic version doesn't include those and it's one of the things comes out interestingly, for instance from the cognitive science literature, is that there is a small minority of people who do not change their mind, who both will push- uh, you know, pull the lever and push the guy of the bridge. Turns out that psychologically speaking those people corresponds to a somewhat sociopathic profile.

S: Mhmm.

M: Those are people that essentially do not engage with the amygdala, they don't engage the emotional reaction, they just think rationally about the whole thing. The reason I brought that up is because, so, now we have an evolutionary account of how we got morality to begin with, we have a neurobiological account of, we begin to have a neurobiological account of how we actually engage in that sort of thinking, and all of this is very interesting. The thing that we still need to deal with, however, is, okay, in interesting, complex, real-life situations, what we ought to do, and now I think is where the philosophy, the interesting philosophy, comes in, because of course there are hundreds of years of discussions among philosophers that have been able to frame moral dilemmas according to two or three major ways of thinking about it. One is the one that I mentioned a minute ago, the (GARBLED) consequentialist view. There is also the ontological thinking which is based on rules essentially and then there is vitalistic(?) thinking that is based on sort of character development, of what is the right thing to do in terms of what is the right person you wanna develop into. Anyway, those three frameworks help you think about the dilemma in a way that might lead you to reach a conclusion or consider a conclusion based on reason, so you go beyond your instinctual reaction, you go beyond what amygdala is telling you and you think about it and say "well, wait a minute, here's the situation, here's what the right thing to do is and here's why."

S: Then there are those people like Sam Harris, who I know you have engaged with at least on your blog, who argue that: if we had enough scientific information, that could answer moral questions for us, essentially. You've pretty much explained what's wrong with that answer, but how have you responded to Sam Harris' position.

M: Well, let me give you a simple analogy. Imagine instead of talking about moral decision making, were talking about mathematical abilities, right? So, how is it that people have developed, human beings have developed the ability to solve mathematical problems. Well, again, you got the same three sort of answers. From an evolutionary perspective it probably was useful at some point or another to start counting or to start thinking in terms of very simple abstract mathematical entities that helped our survival. That's of course speculation, we don't really have access to the relevant information, ecologically speaking, but it's very likely that something like that happened. Now, today you could put somebody that's, say, who's trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you can put him under an FMRI-scan and you can figure out how active different areas of the brain are, and so on and so forth. There is one thing however, that neither this scan, nor the evolutionary story can actually tell you and that is "is the guy getting the proof of the Theorem right?"

S: "Is two plus two four?"

M: Yeah.

S: Well, Massimo. Thanks for joining us again on the show, it's always a pleasure, it always seems like it goes by faster and we're just scratching the surface. But for our listeners, Answers to Aristotle, just tell us about that title for a second, because that's interesting.

M: Aristotle is in fact the philosopher that is most widely quoted or referred to in the book and there is a reason for that. Aristotle was the first guy in the Western tradition, that really was doing exactly what a (GARBLED) the book is about. He was doing philosophy, he is known for establishing the foundations of logic for writing the first comprehensive book about ethics and so on and so forth. But he also was doing science, I mean, most people don't realise this but Aristotle was actually doing field biology of a way on the island of Lesbos, among other places. And he was trying to figure out, okay, was interested in, for instance, shells and he was there and he was collecting samples and looking at things. Now, he got a lot of stuff wrong (GARBLED) idea that we got answers for the questions that he asked that he certainly did not have access to. But he does embody the spirit of the book. He was the guy that figured out that "look, you need both factual questions and to ways reflect on the meaning of those questions," and that is sort of the science and philosophy combination in the broadest possible sense.

S: Well, thanks again Massimo!

J: Thanks Massimo.

B: Thank you.

M: It was a pleasure as usual.

Science or Fiction (1:01:19)

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction

S: Each week I come up with three science or news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of sceptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. Now before we get started this week, because this is the first Science or Fiction of 2013, I do have the stats, the full Science or Fiction stats, from last year.

E: Eurgh

S: These were sent to us by Cat, from sgutranscripts.org, so thanks Cat. So, here they are for 2012: Bob had played 47 games, lost 19, won 28 for a total of 59.6%.

B: Eurgh, damn.

S: Evan played 50, 25 and 25, exactly 50%.

E: Wow, I think wow, that's pretty good.

S: Jay also played 50, lost 26, won 24 so just shy of Even at 48%. I played 7, lost 3 and won 4 so am at 57.1%, just behind Bob and Rebecca played 44, lost 17, won 27 for a total of 61.4%.

E: Wow.

S: Just edged out Bob.

B: Nice.

S: Congratulations Rebecca.

R: Thank you.

B: Congratulations.

R: Thank you.

J: Overall we're way above average.

E: That was...

S: All doing better than random guessing.

B: Yeah but...

R: Hooray.

B: Rebecca and I did worse than last year though.

R: Yeah. I felt dumber this year.

E: Jay and I picked up the slack though.

B: How could I start off so well and then totally tank it?

S: Regression to the mean. Randomness.

J: Evan, our goal for this year, better than 50%.

E: You bet...

S: OK.

E: You bet buddy.

S: It's a brand new year though, guys. Are you all ready?

E: Clean slate.

S: We do have a theme for this week.

(laughter)

R: God damn it.

S: This theme... (laughter) this theme is dedicated to Jay. It's all about little babies.

(overlapping comments)

J: OK

S: Prepare Jay for his...

R: Because Jay's a giant baby?

S: Yeah, for his upcoming...

E: Oh, is that what you mean?

S: ... child to be born in a few weeks.

R: Oh my...

(overlapping comments)

S: Hope all goes well. OK...

E: So excited.

S: Here we are - item number one - a study finds that maternal use of anti-depressants during pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Item number two - a new study concludes that babies start learning language in the womb. And item number three - new research finds that for most babies it is better to leave them alone when they cry at night rather than comforting them. Jay, 'cos this is a theme in your honour, you get to go first.

J: The first one, about the study that says that mothers that took anti-depressants while they were pregnant - that's interesting that it increases SIDS. Now I do know that SIDS... SIDS is when the baby stops breathing and I thought that that had to do with temperature. OK, the second one about the babies learning language in the womb, I believe that one is correct. I think that they can hear their mothers' voices before they're born and they can identify their mother's voice and actually start to pick up language. So I think that one is science and the third one, the last one about... it's better to leave most babies and let them cry at night instead of comforting them - I'm not sure about that. Now this one, of course Steve's not going to answer questions but, a new born baby absolutely needs to be fed on a regular basis and one of those reasons why a baby cries is because it wants to be fed. It could be just hungry, which, you should feed a hungry baby. The whole crying baby thing, to me, you gotta go in, you gotta check on the baby and feed them. But for some reason I'm thinking here Steve that because you're gonna be leaving the baby alone in a room that this could be later maybe not a new born. I'm gonna say that because of how vague that third one is, I'm gonna say that the first one, the one about SIDS is the fake.

S: OK, Bob?

B: The babies start learning language in the womb, yeah that just makes sense. I would expect that the unborn baby can hear it's mother's voice. I remember reading a while back about how babies can recognise their mothers' voices soon after birth. It just makes sense that they would become accustomed to the language and be primed and ready to go right out of the gate so to speak so that makes sense to me. Leaving crying babies alone, yeah that was the conventional wisdom twelve, fourteen years ago when I had an infant in the house. After Ashley was born it was pretty much - a lot of people were saying that and it makes a lot of sense, you know the baby wakes up, there's some separation anxiety and if the parents come rushing in then the baby will get used to that and expect it all the time and if they can get used to waking up, being alone then going back to sleep, bam, perfect, that's what the baby will do. So that makes a lot of sense too so considering that two and three make so much sense to me, I just think that you could say that mothers who have had babies who died of SIDS, I just don't think you'd have a decent percentage of them that would be on anti-depressants. Yeah, I'm going to say the SIDS is fiction.

S: OK, Rebecca?

R: Ah, yeah. I don't know but the one about leaving babies alone when they cry at night - there's like a huge can of worms in the parenting blogs and forums - I feel like that's one of those things that...

E: You read those?

R: I have friends who are parents who get involved in the mommy blogs and stuff - yeah that's for the past thirty years or so that's been a huge thing - there's even a title for it like it's a parenting style that's specifically based on remaining fairly detached from your children in the hopes that they will learn to fend for themselves and everything that I've read, which admittedly is not a ton because I don't have a kid and I'm not planning to have one any time soon, but everything that I've read suggests that it's BS, that like Jay said, when the baby cries it's crying for a reason go pick it up. So I'm going to say that's the fiction.

S: And Evan?

E: Oh, everyone made very good cases for all of these. Bob, you, I think you hit on the SIDS one, anti-depressants during pregnancy associated with a greater risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Anti-depressants being more prescribed these days than they were way back when but there was still SIDS occurring way back when so I'm thinking that that one's the fiction. But Rebecca, you brought up a good point, good points about the crying. Rebecca I hate to leave you alone out there I'm going to go with what my first instinct way I'm going to say that the SIDS is the fiction.

S: OK so... I'm a little surprised that you guys all believe that a new study concludes that babies start learning language in the womb is science.

E: Spanish or French?

B: Why?

S: You guys all believe that one - I don't know, that one struck me as being a little out there but that one is science.

B: Why did you think that one was out there?

R: That was the most obvious one to me.

J: Steve I read that one and I was talking to my wife Courtney about it and she goes ah I don't know that sounds like BS to me.

S: Yeah.

J: Which I thought was funny 'cos now it's on our game here.

S: It just struck me as like really, really? Alright, but this is true a study does conclude this, I'm not sure how much I totally buy the conclusion and this is the first time a study has shown that newborns are not naive to the language of their mother. What the researcher did, this is Christine Moon, professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University, they studied infants that were just hours old and the research paradigm's interesting. They had them suck on a pacifier that was attached to a computer and when they sucked on the pacifier (laughter) - hang on - they sucked on the pacifier it would...

E: Ten thousand volts.

S: It would play a recording of vowels from either their mothers' native language or a foreign language.

B: Interesting.

S: And it would play for as long as they sucked and then when they stopped sucking it would stop and then when they started sucking again it would play a different vowel.

B: They sucked more.

S: So the question was would they listen more to the vowels...

B: Parent language.

S: From their parent language or their mothers' language specifically or from a foreign language and with the idea, and this was a paradigm used in other research, that they would listen longer to vowels that they were not familiar with.

B: Oh, interesting.

S: Because they were novel, the brain's like hey, this is new, I've got to pay attention to this, not oh this is something I've been hearing for months, you know? And in fact they found that the infants did listen longer, you know based upon their sucking on this pacifier, to vowel sounds from foreign languages than to their mothers' language.

R: But what if they found the mothers' language more soothing so wanted to listen to it longer?

B: Yeah.

S: As I said, this is, you've got to buy every link in this chain...

R: Yeah, dumb, it's dumb.

S: You know, to buy this. But the thing is any difference, any difference you can take that they're not naive and it was not that they're listening to sounds of their mother, just vowels from their mothers' language or a foreign language. So any difference would... means that they're getting something, you know, if you believe the difference itself, if the data itself is compelling. Definitely the kind of study that I'd like to see replicated and looked at from different angles but that was what this study concluded.

E: Great.

S: Let's go to number 1, a study finds that maternal use of anti-depressants during pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Rebecca thinks this one is science, the rest of you think this one is the fiction and this one is... the fiction.

(overlapping comments)

B: Yeah baby.

R: Not a good start.

B: One hundred, one hundred percent.

S: Ah so yeah, this is interesting. So first of all the news item that I was basing this on showed the opposite - the use of anti-depressants during pregnancy not linked with increased risk of still birth, infant death or other bad outcomes so that's very nice. And I did do a little research on, you know, 'cos I said let me just say the opposite and then I did some research just on SIDS and specifically what the literature shows is that depression in the mother is associated with increased risk of SIDS and in fact this leads to a recommendation that mothers be treated for their depression...

B: Interesting, woah.

S: In the hopes that it would decrease the risk of SIDS if anything because untreated depression is a risk factor that has been identified for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Now SIDS still remains a little mysterious, you know, it's not like we completely understand exactly what, you know, what is happening, we've identified lots of factors, you know, that increase or decrease the risk and it's thought that, you know, it is... that they essentially they stop breathing. And over the years I've read so many different things like, you know, it's good if they're in the room with the parents because maybe the higher CO2 content drives the infant's respiration more. There are some drugs that are associated with an increased risk of SIDS and those are more for breast feeding now, not anti-natal. So for breast feeding mothers, anti-depressants are still fine but you want to avoid anything that would be sedating so Valium-like drugs are not good, lithium was also another one that was identified, so drugs that could pass through to the infant through breast feeding and can cause sedation will increase the risk of SIDS. The bottom line is if you're breast feeding, your OB should know every medication that you're taking and you need to talk to them about is this something that would get passed through the breast milk to the infant and what risk or effects might it have. So don't just take... breast feeding is actually... you're still linked to the infant, you know, biologically. It's actually more metabolically demanding on the mother than being pregnant, breast feeding, you still need to take that very seriously. Alright, which means, new research finds that for most babies it is better to leave them alone when they cry at night rather than comfort them is science. Now, Rebecca, you're right in that this is a controversy and there's two sides, there's two schools of thought here. There's the... if you comfort them they'll feel reassured and more secure and if you leave them alone to cry they'll feel abandoned then the other side is what Bob articulated which is they, kids need to learn, babies need to learn how to sooth themselves, if you run to them every time you hear them cry you're re-enforcing the behaviour, the crying, and they're not going to learn how to sooth themselves and that is essentially what this latest round now in this controversy has shown. Researchers have found that babies need to learn how to sooth themselves back to sleep. This is also based partly on the notion that infants have a sleep cycle just like everyone else, just like adults, and that sleep cycle involves, you know, going into deeper stages of sleep and then coming into lighter sleep, kind of waking up and then drifting off back to sleep again, that's natural. If the child is fussy or is, you know, upset at all when it wakes up it might cry during that stage of its sleep but that's perfectly normal for it to be quote unquote awake, you know, at that time and what the researchers found is that for some babies, again not for everyone but for some, that they were better sleepers later on in life, meaning like eighteen months, you know, two years, if they were allowed to sooth themselves back to sleep and that those babies whose parents picked them up every time they cried, that they had delayed learning of self-soothing and had a worse sleep later on. So, good job guys.

R: Meuhh.

S: Of to an ironic start, given that Rebecca won last year and...

E: Watch, she'll sweep the table the rest of the year.

S: Yeah, it's, hey, it's an endurance test, you know?

R: Yeah, it's a marathon.

S: It's like one basket in basketball, doesn't mean that much.

B: It's a marathon but right now you're in last place.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:01)

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend things which are there.

Richard Feynman

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