SGU Episode 1038

This episode needs: proofreading, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 1038
May 31st 2025
"Exploring the intricate structure and function of the human brain and nervous system."
SGU 1037                      SGU 1039
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and avoid being wrong, and biased, and prejudiced, and clueless; those are the people we need, and need to be."
Matt Dillahunty
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voice-over: 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 Thursday, May 29^th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Good evening everyone.

S: And we have two guest rogues this week, George Hrab.

G: Hi.

S: And Andrea Jones-Roy.

AJR: Hey, everyone.

B: Andrea.

E: Woo-hoo. Double our fun tonight.

B: What a crew. What a crew.

S: Jay and Cara are both traveling. They're both away this week, so they're unable to record.

E: I hope they're having a nice time wherever they are.

G: They're recovering from NOTACON, traveling, yeah, big quotes around that. They're just recovering from the massive time we had at NOTACON. We couldn't handle it.

S: NOTACON was awesome this year.

E: Oh, my God.

S: I have to say.

B: So, like, essentially perfect, right?

AJR: Essentially perfect.

B: Essentially perfect.

S: Well, that's all that we have to say, essentially. I mean, it was just-

AJR: Full on. It's a perfect-

S: Everything we planned came off pretty much without a hitch. Now, I just qualified it with pretty much. But-

B: There you go.

S: We're just being knee-jerk skeptical.

AJR: That's right.

S: I don't want to say absolutely. No, it was great. Like, nothing failed. Everything came off as we planned, which is always wonderful. You plan something and it works exactly as you plan. Everyone had a great time. The vibe was awesome.

AJR: It was really fun.

G: Yes.

AJR: The skeletons were skeletoning.

S: Yeah, the skeletons were-

E: Bob.

B: I was so obsessed getting those ready.

AJR: No, it was a lot of fun. And I hope everyone who attended had a good time. Everyone I talked to seemed like they were. But, yeah, it was just super fun.

B: If they didn't, they're damn good liars because everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.

G: And it's like if you attended, now you are able to- You're ready for the apocalypse. You can design your own skeletons. You can speak Mandarin. You can do a shepherd tone. And you can know what birds are on your porch.

AJR: That's right.

E: Serious.

G: Oh, and play a didgeridoo.

AJR: And host a poker night.

G: And host a poker night. What else do you want from-

S: And play jazz.

G: And play jazz.

E: And play jazz. Know about- Yeah, well. Yes.

S: Learn all those things.

G: All those things. Done. Finished. Ready to go out into the world and do those seven, nine things.

S: Ni hao.

AJR: Very good.

S: Did I say something? I remember that word. I don't know what it means.

AJR: You almost said hello.

S: Okay.

AJR: You said kind of hello.

S: Okay. How do you say it for real?

AJR: Ni hao.

S: Oh, ni hao.

E: Ni hao.

AJR: Ni hao.

G: You just shamed your ancestors there, Steve.

S: All right.

B: I mainly just remembered ma.

AJR: Ma.

E: Ma.

S: Ma. Or ma.

AJR: That's right. Yeah, we did work on tones. People really came a long way in their tones progress. So, I congratulate the group. Well done. We all- Do you remember the phrase that you learned? The very helpful phrase?

B: Oh, God, no.

AJR: Okay. That was one of the first phrases we learned in my Chinese textbook. Kai ge kai fung chir ho. Which means after the implementation of the open door policy. That was one of the first phrases we learned in my Chinese textbook. Not exaggerating, it proceeded, take me to the hospital and where is the restroom? We learned-

B: Wow.

E: Take me to the hospital.

AJR: Yeah. Tell me about the open door policy and what it did for the Chinese economy. I would love to.

E: Oh, boy. Wow.

AJR: Oh, boy.

E: That was fun.

B: That's nuts.

S: It was fun. That was the first time I was nervous getting on stage. That I could remember.

AJR: Really?

S: Definitely in the last 20 years.

E: Nervous?

AJR: What were you nervous for?

B: The drumming.

S: What do you think?

AJR: Oh, the drumming.

S: Doing a solo.

AJR: Oh, you were great.

S: Because that's the only thing that I could have totally flamed out on. Right? I mean, nothing else. The thing is, most of the bits that we do, you can't really fail, because whatever happens, we could make fun. You know what I mean?

AJR: Right. Right.

E: It builds in safety net.

AJR: Challenge accepted, but yes.

S: Yes. But during a drum solo, there's nowhere to hide.

AJR: Right.

S: If you flame out, it just looks terrible.

AJR: Right.

S: There's no way to recover from it.

AJR: Right.

G: So for those that don't know, Steve learned the Ringo drum solo from the song The End, which is the last song on Abbey Road, and he nailed it.

AJR: He nailed it. It's a beautiful song. It's an awesome solo, and Steve learned it.

G: I was skeptical. I got to say Steve, because I didn't hear it. I gave you the tune like five months ago, and I heard nothing from you. Like nothing. No response. And I saw you maybe like six weeks ago, and you're like, yeah, I'm going to get to it. And I thought, there's no way this guy's going to do it. Like there's no way. We'll have to cover somehow. And we rehearsed it, and you effing did your homework. And like I said to you that night, like you were more prepared than most musicians I work with. So-

S: It's nice of you to say that.

G: You should feel really good.

AJR: That's awesome.

G: You should feel really good.

E: And George-

G: It's true. It's true.

AJR: But it was also so fun because so George did an amazing job leading the sing along for two hours of playing thousand instruments like guitar and you were doing the tambourine with your feet and you were singing. And then different members of the organizing committee all went up and did different things. And then Steve was at the very end, and the drums had been on stage covered up. And I don't know if the audience knew that it was a drum set or what, but it was super fun because it was like, all right, this is the end. This is the last song. And then, whoosh, the cloth comes off, and Steve is on stage behind the drum. It was awesome. Just like the suspense, and the way it was done, and the surprise, and the reveal. Super good.

S: It came off as planned.

B: Yeah. Absolutely. And then George was like, oh, what the hell? Then we went to the bar, and he sang for another, how many hours, George?

AJR: Three hours? Five hours?

G: Five.

AJR: Five hours?

E: Five hours.

G: Till two. Till 2.25. I was like, all right, one more.

AJR: I'm amazed you can speak right now.

G: Oh, no. I had a good phone voice for like three days after that. It was great. Good podcasting voice.

B: Phone voice?

G: Yeah. That's when you, like, when you, anybody you owe money to, you just call them after that and be like, I'll get you the money when I get it to you. Because it's just like, you've got that nice basso profundo. Yeah.

AJR: But it was super fun.

G: I loved it, though. People were singing along. They were throwing out requests. And like, I had them in my folder so I could sing stuff, and that, to me, there's nothing better. There's nothing better. Put me in a corner, and I'll play. I'll play for hours.

AJR: It's amazing.

G: I was so happy to do it.

AJR: You even sang, I believe, in French and also in Ukrainian. Is that right?

G: I did. I did. Yes. Yeah. Because we had our Canadian friends there. And it was like, what French songs do you have, George? I'm like, uh, I got this one.

AJR: They were highly offended, and rightly so, when I said, well, why don't we just do the French national anthem? And they're like, no. Wrong country.

G: They poured syrup all over you. I was like, nope.

S: You know any songs in Mandarin?

AJR: I do. I have one karaoke song that's a pretty standard one, and it's Doi Mien Doi Niu Hai Kan Gua Lai, which means, girl over there, look over here. George, we'll learn it for next time. It's extremely fun.

G: Oh, Mandarin karaoke. Come on. That's 20 minutes right there.

AJR: Yeah.

S: Mandarin karaoke.

AJR: Yeah, we should do joint SG universities, actually. That's a fun idea.

E: Ooh, that's an interesting thought.

S: We can maybe think about that for next time.

E: That's an interesting thought.

AJR: Yeah.

G: Like adjunct faculty.

E: A combination. You pair up, and we deliver a talk about something and hand it off to each other at certain points. That has merit.

AJR: Right. Right. And I don't know if it would be something that we already have in common, or if, for example, it would be Evan, you teaching me a board game, and then I'm also teaching something at the same time. Do you know what I mean? Or is it something that you and I both know?

E: Yeah. We have different appearances or guises.

S: What I like about that bit is that it's always fun to learn something surprising, right? Something that you never would have gone out of your way specifically to learn.

E: That's the point.

S: Yeah, but it's kind of like just a celebration of knowledge itself. It's like here's just something interesting. You may not even care about it. It doesn't matter. Here you go, and it's a lot of fun.

G: Learning for learning's sake is really good and valuable, and it's like it's never a bad idea to learn something.

E: Fits a NOTACON theme perfectly, actually.

G: Yeah. You never regret. It's like you never regret doing the dishes. You never regret exercising, and you never regret learning something, even if you don't use it.

AJR: George, I have one correction for you, which is that a friend of mine who lost their house in the fires in L.A. She's fine. Her family's fine. Did post a video about how she regretted doing the dishes right before her house burned down.

G: Oh, jeez.

AJR: Because she was like, what a waste of energy that was. So that's one dishes-related regret.

G: Okay. So if there's a once-in-a-century fire, yes.

AJR: No, but that's the thing. I think one of the promises of the internet was and is any information you want at your fingertips. But I just keep reading about the things I'm already interested in, whereas if someone posted a video about birding, I would probably scroll by just because it's not something that has occurred to me as something to think about. But watching Steve talk about it, because I like watching Steve and we're all there at NOTACON, I really got a great appreciation for why people get so excited about birding. And to the point where I've seen some other birds and been like, I wonder what kind of bird that is. And someone else had like a bird app, like I'm noticing new things. And yeah, it's just, there's so much information I could learn that on my own, I tend to just stick with what I already am interested in. That this like totally different, you know, how am I going to make my skeleton cooler? Like that just is not something I would ever search for on YouTube, but I'm so thrilled to know it now, you know?

S: Yeah, but so you bring up a good point about the internet, that the internet has caused an unforeseen consequence. Prior to that, a lot of the information we got was pushed to us. And now we are pulling all of our information, right? So we are only getting the information we are going to get for ourselves, rather than just being exposed to stuff because it's on the air, because it's on the TV, because it's on the radio, whatever. So it's all curated and so isolating, you know what I mean? And that's, I think, what's destroying the world today, that we are all in these little bubbles of information, of confirmation bias. Like the internet is a confirmation bias machine.

AJR: Literally, the algorithms are tuned to be like, did you watch 10 videos on birding? I'm going to give you 10 billion more. Did you watch 10 videos on why the earth is flat? Here are 10 trillion more. I recently found I was using my boyfriend's laptop, and so I ended up on his YouTube. And his recommendations were way more interesting than my video recommendations, just because they were different. And so now I'm watching all this cool stuff that I didn't know about. So borrow a friend's algorithm for a bit, at least.

S: Even Netflix. Like I'm over at Bob's place or whatever. I go on their Netflix. Like, you have all different shows on here than I do.

AJR: Yeah.

B: Have you ever seen Moms? My mom was addicted to essentially South Korean soap operas. I don't know why, but she's been watching them for years. Her Netflix is all South Korean dramas. And oh my God, it's kind of funny to look at it and think of what I see on my home Netflix.

AJR: I do wish there was a way to like, and maybe there is, and it probably depends on the platform, but to like reset your algorithm, or be like, tell me what the generic is, or stop tailoring.

S: Or anonymize it.

AJR: Yeah. Or like turn up a knob that's like, randomize the stuff that I'm going to get. So I'm not just getting things that are trained for me.

B: Yeah. They should have categories. It's just random stuff. Unrelated.

E: Yeah. That's very easy to do with YouTube. Just log off as yourself and just go into YouTube raw and you'll get whatever. If you want a real randomization, there you go.

AJR: There you go.

G: That's why I always loved that show. I think it was called How Things Work.

B: Yes.

E: Oh gosh. I could watch that.

G: It's like thimbles, and then shovels, and then air conditioners, and then cars, and then the space shuttle, and then guitars. It's like, this is variety.

B: I love it.

G: And each one is fascinating. Like, how do they get the little thing in the whistle? How do they do that? Like, and here they go, they show you how they get the little thing in the whistle. And then they'll show you, yeah, like rocket fuel. And I always loved the randomness of that.

AJR: If it's a show, the show I'm thinking of, there was one that was like, how to dig a really good hole. The physics of making sure, like, if you want to go deep, you have to have the angles right, and it depends on the surface. And it was just like, yeah, great. Like, you know, if I ever have to bury a body, now I know.

S: Yeah, that's one of those things everyone does at some point, but nobody really knows how to do it.

AJR: Yeah.

S: But we all think we do.

B: I'll tell you this.

G: It's like poetry.

B: Don't dig a grave unless you really, really have to, because that is hard. I was digging a grave for my haunted mansion in the graveyard.

G: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B: First off, six feet, well, okay, that's my story.

E: That's what you told the judge, you know.

B: I mean, first off, six feet deep, forget it. You're not going. I went just a few feet. It's so much dirt. It takes so much time. I appreciate grave diggers so much more now.

E: Well, especially here in Connecticut, you don't know what you're digging into. You go down a foot, and bam, there's a ledge. You're done.

B: Oh, yeah. Rocks are always in the way.

S: All right, well, we got some interesting news items that we're going to push to you tonight.

AJR: That's right.

E: Yes. Here's your push.

Quickie with Steve: AMOC Time (13:10)

• Observational constraints imply limited future Atlantic meridional overturning circulation weakening 

S: I'm going to start with a quickie, which I am calling a muck time.

E: Ah, very clever.

S: Very clever. This is the AMOC. You guys remember what that stands for?

E: AMOC.

S: Yeah.

E: Oh, out of context. Hint.

B: Anti-multilingual or out of no idea.

S: Not even close. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

B: Yes, I used to know that.

S: That is basically the water circulation in the Atlantic, right?

E: Oh, sure.

S: You have warm, salty water traveling northward along the surface. Then it sinks down and becomes cold water that travels deep back south down to Europe. It's responsible for a lot of the current climate that we have, for example. One of the tipping points or fears of global warming is that the AMOC will collapse, right? It'll stop or will weaken significantly and that this will disrupt climates around the world, right? It'll exacerbate climate change. There's actually quite a bit of variability in how the models predict across different climate models. How they predict how much weakening will happen. And so we talked about this several times on the show. There's a quick update. I just wanted to give the quick update. So there was a recent study which basically found that the differences among these various models all have to do with the starting point. With how they model where the AMOC is today. And the variability there is essentially a couple of things. One is how deep does it go, right? You know, how much overturning is there? So they determine these. But how deep does the cold water go? And the other thing that differs is the temperature gradients. Basically the meridional, which is, you know, the north to south temperature radiance. So what they found was they just used a new equation to try to narrow the uncertainty in modeling where the AMOC is today. And if you apply that to the climate models, it significantly narrows the variability. So it turns out that with this new way of looking at it, the weakening of the AMOC by 2100 is only going to be moderate, right? So the most severe scenarios are ruled out by this new model, basically. Which is good. So it's not going to be as bad as the worst models showed. But it's still going to be severe enough to cause some temperature changes. And it still might eventually get severe, just not by 2100. So this is, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty. This is where the uncertainty comes in in climate modeling, right? Even though we know global warming is happening. We know broad brushstroke what's going to happen. We don't know exactly when and exactly how severe because a lot of these models are very dependent on minute changes in our current information about things like what's the temperature gradient in the Atlantic Ocean, things like that.

G: Is there a fear that this is going to be seen as like, so we're fine. So don't worry about it.

AJR: Yeah, I was just thinking that.

S: Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, you know, certainly the deniers will jump on this and go, see, they were over calling it all along. It's actually not that. And I remember this happened before too. This exact thing happened before in like 20 years ago when a study came out that said that reduced the variability in how much warming there's going to be. Right? So the most extreme came down, but the most mild came up. It narrowed. It didn't change the mean, whatever, like the middle of the distribution. But it was reported in the climate denying media, if you will, that they talked only about, oh, the warming is not going to be as bad as it said it was going to be. It's not going to be six degrees. It's only going to be up to four degrees. Yeah, but it's also not going to be only one degree. It went from like one to six to three to four. So I could see somebody doing the same thing. It's not going to be as bad as they said it was going to be. It's like, yeah, but it's still going to be that. It's still going to happen. It's still going to be moderate. The variability was decreased, which does, you know, chop off the most extreme end. Doesn't mean we don't have to worry about it. But yeah, I'm sure someone will say that.

News Items

Night Vision Infrared Contact Lenses (17:44)

• These Infrared Night-Vision Contacts Let You See Through Your Eyelids 

S: All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with the news items with these infrared contact lenses. How does that work?

E: Oh, cool.

B: Yeah, this obviously caught my attention, especially after my talk at NOTACON about that color Olo. This is definitely not as cool. So, oh, well. But, you know, it's still interesting.

S: By the way, Bob, somebody sent us an email. I don't know how he missed us. We were talking about fake Olo.

B: Yeah.

S: And we didn't think of Folo.

B: Yeah, OK. Not bad. Not bad.

S: We missed that one. All right.

B: Not a major one that we just missed but OK. Not bad. All right. So for this one, scientists have created special contact lenses that allow people to see infrared light even if your eyes are closed. So, yeah, interesting. But what are the details? What are the details? Devils in the details. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China. I won't read the name of the study because it's just a lot of gobbledygook words. Well, no, I'll read it because that's a stupid thing to say, Bob.

E: Andrea can read it for you.

B: The name of it is Near-Infrared Spatiotemporal Color Vision in Humans Enabled by Upconversion Contact Lenses. So what does that mean? Let's talk about infrared light, though, because it's just interesting and kind of integral to this whole thing. Infrared light was discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1800. I did not really know this, but it was the first time we discovered a type of light beyond visible light, first time that that had happened. Now, his technique was really interesting. He used thermometers to see how hot each of the colors of a rainbow were. That's when you separate the color in a prism, right? Shine white light through a prism, and it spreads the light into all the colors of the rainbow. So he put a thermometer by each one, and the colors generally got hotter as you went along. From violet to red, each color had a higher temperature. But after the red part of the rainbow, though, there was obviously no color there, right, because you don't see anything after red. But the thermometer that he put there, I don't know why he put it there, but it was a good move. That thermometer was the hottest. That actually was hotter than the hottest color. And so he correctly hypothesized that there must be another type of invisible light there. We can't see it, but the light's got to be there. Something's got to be there because it was making the thermometer reach temperatures higher than any other color temperature before that in the spectrum. So interesting. All right, so infrared light, it's one of the parts of the glorious electromagnetic spectrum that I love so much. From long to short wavelengths, radio, microwave, infrared, visible, UV, X-ray, gamma ray. Now we don't see infrared light because its wavelengths are essentially too long for our retinous photoreceptors. So we don't see it. We can sort of sense infrared, though, sort of, I say, because we can feel heat, and heat is related to infrared radiation. But they aren't the same thing. And since this is a common misconception, I'm going to spend two sentences on this. So I'll clarify briefly. Any object with a temperature emits infrared radiation. Infrared radiation can transfer heat, but heat itself is energy transferred due to temperature differences, which can also happen in many other ways through conduction, convection, and not just infrared radiation. All right, look it up if you want more details. Okay, so let's get to the real hero of this research that I'm discussing today, and that's the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles in this study were made from rare earth ions like yttrium. That's how you pronounce it, right, Steve? Y-T-T-R-I-U-M. That came up at NOTACON, actually.

E: I learned that there, yeah.

B: Yttrium or yttrium. So that has the ability to absorb the shortest infrared light called near-infrared light and emit it as visible light, right? So it absorbs near-infrared and emits it into something we can see in visible light. They call these particles up-conversion nanoparticles because it's essentially converting infrared to visible. For the mice research that they did before the people research, the human research, these nanoparticles were not only embedded into the special contacts, as you may have already surmised, but they were also injected directly into the little retinas for some of the tests. So now speaking of the testing, how did they determine that the mice can see infrared light or not? I mean you can't just ask it, yeah, are you seeing this? What do you think?

E: They hooked their brains up to an imager.

AJR: Or they just flashed some infrared light somewhere and see if the mice look in that direction?

B: Kind of, yeah. You guys are kind of right around it. That was good. One of the ways was to have – they have dark crevices. Now you know mice love dark crevices, but one of the dark crevices were illuminated by infrared and the other one was just a dark crevice. So when they had the ions, the nanoparticles, they avoided the dark crevices that had infrared light on them. And when they didn't have the augmentation, if you will, it was just a random selection of a dark crevice, whether it was truly dark or also infrared dark. So that was one way. The other way they looked at pupil restriction was another way that you could tell that the eye is actually detecting light and restricting itself in reaction to it. And they also even looked at the neural activity in the brain, so the visual processing center. So they definitely confirmed that these critters were seeing this upconverted infrared light. For human testing, they wisely decided to just use the contacts and not do any of the injections into the people's retinas because I think they would probably get no volunteers at all for that. That sounds so nasty. The results of the human testing were interesting. But I have to say though, before I go into the details, do not expect these contacts to give infrared vision like the alien had in the Predator movies or even – right?

S: Come on.

B: Or like we've probably all seen those special infrared cameras and the images from them. It's nothing. These people were not seeing anything like that, just throwing that out there. Body heat is associated with longer infrared wavelengths, not the shorter near-infrared wavelengths that these nanoparticles were optimized for. So you're not going to see Arnold Schwarzenegger's infrared light with these contacts. But now that I've lowered your expectations, the human subjects were able to see flashes of infrared light created from LEDs. That's what they saw. Oh, wait. Andrea, I need your help.

AJR: Okay.

B: T-I-A-N and then X-U-E is the last name. X-U-E.

AJR: Tianshui.

B: Okay. So what she said, a neuroscientist…

E: Good dodge, Bob.

B: I'm not even going to try. A neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology, the senior author of the study said, it's totally clear-cut. Without the contact lenses, the subject cannot see anything. But when they put them on, they can clearly see the flickering of the infrared light. We also found that when the subject closes their eyes, they're even better able to receive the flickering information because the near-infrared light penetrates the eyelid more effectively than visible light, so there's less interference from the visible light. So that's how they could see the light even better with their eyes closed. I'm just trying to imagine that sensation, seeing a flash of light that is essentially infrared light that's been upconverted. But you're seeing a flash of light, and then you close your eye, and it gets even better and brighter. It's like, wow, what the hell.

G: This will be good for relationships. It's like, no, honey, I'm not sleeping. I'm totally listening to you. I got the lenses in.

AJR: I just want to see your infrared feelings.

B: Imagine. You can close your eyes, and you could read things potentially, but not with these contact lenses, though. The researchers even created trichromatic lenses with three different layers to distinguish between different wavelengths of infrared. So one wavelength of infrared was converted to red. Another one was converted. A longer one was converted to green, and a longer one than that was created to blue or vice versa. And they were basically able to create these different colors of infrared. Not really infrared. Specifically, it's upconverted, right? All right. So what's the future for this tech? Say it again, Andrea. XUE.

AJR: XUE.

B: XUE. Said in a statement, in the future, by working together with material scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity. So some predictions were floating around about what this could be used for. Some predict that doctors could use this tech for something specific like near-infrared fluorescence surgery, where they use infrared fluorescence to detect and remove cancerous lesions without having to use bulky equipment. That's the key there. I mean, we have equipment to look at it, but you don't need it if you're using these contacts. So that's something, I guess. Of course, there are some critics who don't think that the lenses will prove very useful. Glenn Jeffrey is a neuroscientist at University College London. He specializes in eye health. He said, I cannot think of any application that would not be fundamentally simpler with infrared goggles. Evolution has avoided this for a good reason. I don't disagree at all with that. Maybe you're surprised. I think powered infrared goggle-type technology will always, I think, be far better than what an unpowered contact could ever do on your eye. Even the bulkiest, most expensive infrared goggles, I think, will eventually get down to something much cheaper and much more manageable, like, say, sunglasses. That's always the goal with this type of technology, something that you can just slip on and you don't need bulky goggles. VR goggles, that's the holy grail for VR, right? It's not these bulky goggles that you have to strap onto your head, but just simple sunglasses that could provide that. I mean, we're heading there. Who knows when we'll ever get there? So it's similar with this. Bulkier, even slightly bulkier technology will always be much better than what these contacts can do. Still, though, this contact technology could eventually reach a point where it's at least helpful in various situations. When I described earlier, that light when you close your eyes, infrared does go through your eyelids. It can go through haze and fog. So maybe just slipping on these contacts at some point, maybe when you're driving, I don't know, it can actually help you cut through the haze or the fog in some scenarios. I don't know. I think it might not come to much because, like I said, they will always be very pale technological examples of what these heavier goggles will be able to do. But it's still interesting, and who knows, farther in the future, what we could do with this, potentially extend our natural vision deeper into the infrared and even into the ultraviolet. Who knows? But it's still interesting to learn about anyway.

G: Selfishly, the first thing I thought of was an infrared teleprompter. So you're on stage, and you have the lenses in, and the back wall of the venue has your lyrics on it. It's just massive, so you can just look up and it doesn't look like you're reading lyrics. That's the first thing I thought of. How cool would that be?

B: I love it. I love it.

S: I agree, George. I thought of not that specific application, but the idea of – from what I understand, Bob, the main limiting factor here is that it's only seeing one specific frequency, right? I mean it's not like seeing the infrared spectrum. It's just responding.

B: Maybe I didn't stress it enough. It's near infrared. It's near infrared light, so that's the –

S: It's a very narrow frequency range.

B: It's narrow. I mean the infrared band is quite broad. Some examples that I saw online, it seemed wider than even visible. So there's near infrared. There's mid-infrared. There's far infrared. This is only for near infrared.

S: For now, basically, you can see a laser in the correct frequency range.

B: Yep. It's an LED. They're super bright. That's why – the sensitivity isn't great. You need super bright.

S: You can see it. As George said, you can see it, and somebody without the contact lenses can't see it.

B: Right, right.

S: And so that could have applications like for spies or –

AJR: I was just thinking that.

E: And it's not so intense that it does damage?

S: Because you're not shining the laser in your eyes. You're seeing the laser shown on the wall or something.

E: Right. You're just – okay.

AJR: I mean the most exciting is the pitchers in baseball and the catcher no longer have to do those hand signs. You just have lasers to indicate to each other. That's obviously why they developed this technology.

E: The other team also wears the contacts and steals the signs.

AJR: Well, yeah.

B: Well, you could tag people like in a crowd. Let's say you're security, right? And you have an infrared pointer and you have the lenses in. You could like, oh, that guy is being trouble. So you tag him from a distance and every security person sees that guy being illuminated or whatever. Or for teachers or for safety things or – yeah.

S: And the tech may have applications that have nothing to do with vision.

B: That's always a classic. Yeah.

S: Just the idea that you can up-convert the frequency of the light maybe for video technology or sensing technology or whatever but not for wearing over your eyes.

B: Yeah. There's plenty of technology now that we had no idea that – Steve, we talked about it many times. You can't predict how people are going to use the technology. Right.

G: The question is now, when do we see the first fake contact lens product claiming to use this tech?

AJR: To protect you against 5G waves.

G: Yeah, it will be like a week or two, right? Like, yeah, based on this article. Now they have – you can see into the infrared.

S: The classic example, of course, of a technology that – because oftentimes technology is developed for a purpose but then it doesn't really serve that purpose well. It serves another purpose, was the microwave which was developed as a cooking tool which nobody uses it for but it turned out to be an awesome heating tool. We just don't cook with it but we do heat with it.

B: That's true. That's true. It's a great heater.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Trees Respond to Solar Eclipse (31:38)

• https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241786 

S: All right, George. You're going to tell us about trees communicating to each other during a solar eclipse. What is this about?

G: Okay. So this is one of these stories that kind of hits everything for me that I want a story to hit. First off, it feels kind of wooey. It feels like this could be not true. I love things that feel like they're not true or feel like they're wooey and then the more you examine them, they actually might be true and then there's like a paradigm shift for that as cliched as that phrase is. That's the one thing. The second thing is as a Rush fan, one of my favorite songs is The Trees. Evan will understand, of course.

E: I agree.

G: The first song is basically the trees talking to each other and that's kind of where we're going with this story. And fighting with each other. And fighting with each other, right. And the third thing is this involves an eclipse and we had such a lovely time in Texas with our eclipse adventures. So it's like this just hits all the – this just hits everything I want a story to hit. So we all – you know about the sort of mycelium that is under mushrooms that kind of communicates with – over vast distances. Well, this is sort of a similar thing that some scientists in Italy were trying to see if trees could sort of communicate with each other especially during an eclipse. So they wanted to measure the bioelectrical impulses of trees that took these spruce trees, spruces during this eclipse. Now, from the information that they've gathered, they're saying – and this is the Prezi. They're saying that like not only are the trees responding to the eclipse but some of the trees actually anticipated and were synchronized together to anticipate the eclipse which is crazy. Which is crazy. So there's two professors here. Professor Alessandro Ciollerio of the Italian Institute of Technology or the IIT and the Professor Monica Gagliano from the Australia Southern Cross University. So like legit places of study. Charged molecules travel through cells and through the cells of organisms and they transmit electrical signals as they go. And they're calling sort of that transmission an electron. And again, it feels kind of wooey because we're starting to get into like terms that sort of sound sciencey but might not be. So, yeah, my skeptical meters were kind of pinned throughout this. They wanted to monitor what these spruces potentially were communicating to each other. So they grabbed three trees. They grabbed two trees that were 70 years old and one tree that was 20 years old. They attached five pairs of electrodes all over on the branches, on the trunks, on the roots that were exposed all over the place. And they mostly measured bioelectrical potentials or the difference in voltage across cell membranes. OK. So they were measuring these things with these sensors. And they said that the electrical activity of all three became significantly more synchronized during the eclipse. Before the eclipse as well as after the eclipse, but around 60 minutes of the entire thing. This was at a microscopic level. These sort of synchronizations were occurring, they said, inside the water and lymph molecules of the tree. OK. One factor that sort of came out was they said the two older trees, the ones that were 70, had an earlier response to the upcoming eclipse than the younger tree, which implied there might be like a sort of, quote-unquote, learning that's happening with these trees. It may mean they learned to anticipate or develop mechanisms unlike the younger trees or the younger tree that hadn't quite developed it. And the wooiness kind of just keeps going. So they detected biological waves traveling between the trees. And not just the trees. They also had monitors on stumps. And the stumps had similar responses, too. There was a lower level, but they had a similar thing where they were kind of lining up together. And after analyzing the data, their computer models reinforced their supposed test results, i.e., the eclipse not only influenced the biological response, but the activity was correlated between the trees. This may mean that a cohesive organism-like reaction exists at a forest level. All right. So there's other studies that have been done sort of to try to reveal the interconnectivity of ecosystems, like I said, the mycelium of mushrooms and things like that. And this might be along that same sort of level. They think that if this is real, that this kind of activity could help the trees' resilience and biodiversity and overall function, in that it can anticipate and warn, quote-unquote, each other of stuff that's happening in the environment. It reinforces this idea that we need to preserve old growth forests because those older trees are smarter, quote-unquote. It seems wacky, and it seems pretty wooey, and I'm sure you're going to tear me apart. So I'm going to stretch and have at it.

S: It's an interesting study because it is one of those studies where I want to be fair to it. I don't want to have a knee-jerk reaction. I want to try to dig in and say, all right, do I believe this or not? My ultimate conclusion for several reasons is that I think this is probably bullshit. And at the very least, I would be surprised if this replicates. And until it does replicate pretty reliably, I would not hang my hat on this. So a few things. At one point, they have a whole section of the paper where they try to explain what the phenomenon that's happening, like how are these trees communicating with each other. And they invoke quantum field theory, which is a huge red flag.

B: Really?

E: They do, don't they? QFT, right there.

S: At a macroscopic level, I just think they have no idea what they're talking about. The other thing is a red flag for me is when a paper is trying to describe a phenomenon, and their mathematical statistical analysis is incredibly complicated. And they're pulling this little bit of signal out of something by doing all this fancy footwork. It's like, how hard did you have to work to find a signal in this noise? You know what I mean? Could you really predict like this is the thing that was going to show an effect? But also just the premise is silly, in my opinion, that the trees are communicating to each other and they know several hours ahead of time that an eclipse is coming. On average, an eclipse will hit the same spot on the earth every 400 years. There's just no way trees can adapt to that. It makes no sense. At the very least, at the very most rather, you could say, well, maybe they're responding to the gravitational, you know, the tidal forces of the new moon, you know. It has nothing to do with the eclipse per se. It's just that whenever the moon gets close to the sun or, you know, whatever, that they can sense somehow.

E: You don't need eclipses to measure that.

S: But I think trees are too small to really detect significantly, detect those kind of tidal forces. They would be really small, tiny at that scale. And who cares? Why would they care? Going on, I don't know that they really can. It's three trees.

G: That's another thing. It's like such a small sample.

S: Such a small sample. How do they really know that they're synchronizing versus just all responding to the same environment?

G: Synchronous, yeah.

S: Right? And the older trees, I mean, there's so many things that could be different about them other than their knowledge and experience. Like they're probably bigger. They're probably taller.

G: Right, right.

S: So there's so many questions that this raises. Their story that they're telling is almost certainly not true. I don't know if they detected something real or not. If they did, it probably has nothing to do with what they're claiming it does.

G: Right, right.

S: And you would need to do lots of controls and gather lots of data to see if there's anything even real in there. I think they're just diving into the noise and just making up a lot of bullshit is my guess.

G: But it's such a good Rush song though.

S: I agree.

G: It's such a great song. I was like, ugh. So yeah.

S: But you've got to dive in pretty deep though to really start to pick it apart. And the reporting on it is pretty much entirely gullible.

B: Steve, how did they invoke quantum field theory?

S: Right? They're trying to say, again, they get more complicated than they have to be. This is the thing. I love jargon. Right? I love science jargon. And I always have this question. When there's science jargon, I'm having a hard time parsing. Is that because I'm just way too out of my depth or because it's total bullshit? And sometimes you can tell and sometimes it's hard to tell or you can't tell. In this case, I think it could be both. Like they're talking about stuff that could definitely go over my head. But it seems like they're also just slinging a lot of bullshit.

G: Yeah. At one point they say, the bioelectrical signals include entropy, diversity, expressiveness, complexity, and fractal measures.

S: Yeah.

G: Which feels a little bit like a word.

S: They're just throwing out a lot of shit.

G: Yeah, a lot of shit. Action potentials, ion channel activities, and electrical potentials across membranes. Where it's like, oh. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

AJR: It is very tricky, Steve. You make such a good point. And I run into this a lot with sort of data-related things where the temptation is to conclude, well, they did so much math and so many fancy statistics that it's much more precise and accurate and powerful. When very often I appreciate what you said. It's like kind of the rule of thumb is like, of course, sometimes you have to do things that are complicated. But a lot of times if it seems unnecessarily complicated, there's a really forced result in here somewhere.

S: Right, right, right. And part of this, for me, is informed by me reading neurobabble, right? So there are like neurological chiropractors or whatever, people who are pretending to be neurologists who aren't, and are slinging the neurological jargon. And I can tell completely that it's utter nonsense.

E: Of course.

S: And it's just complete nonsense. But you get the vibe of how they're using the jargon, how they're using the terminology. They're being way more complicated. There's no elegance at all.

E: It's the hallmark of pseudoscience.

S: Yeah. You can't sort of boil it down to some kind of coherent concept, and then you build out the sort of complexity from there. It's just all like, it's like a big distraction. You know what I mean? So I get the same kind of vibe off of this, that these are biologists who are dabbling in physics they don't understand, but they think that they do. Or they think if they throw out enough math and physics, quantum terms, that it will make it seem science-y. But I'm not buying it for a second.

AJR: What is the incentive to produce this sort of paper? Is it academic clout, and it's another publication, and so on? Because, you know, normally this is like, seems like it's politically motivated, or they're selling something. But I can't place my finger on why they would write this.

S: I don't know. Who knows? I mean, speculations. There's always the generic motivation of getting another paper published.

AJR: Yeah.

E: Sure.

S: Plowing new ground, right? You're exploring new areas. It sounds like they have a bit of an ideology that this is aligning with, to be honest with you.

AJR: Right.

G: Yeah, they were pushing this kind of the value of old growth forests and that kind of ecological angle, which is a good angle, but you can't reinforce that with quantum BS.

S: With quantum.

AJR: Maybe you can't, George.

G: Yeah. That's true. Sorry.

AJR: I will say as someone who only eats plants. I mean, I don't eat a lot of trees, but any time I hear about plants communicating with each other, I sort of freak out. So I'm very relieved that we don't think this is true.

S: But having said that, trees do communicate with each other. That's established.

AJR: Wow. I'm back to eating plastic.

S: So I think they're building on that.

B: Don't listen, Andrea.

S: It is through the mycelium network. They're communicating chemically, right? And they're exchanging nutrients, and it's kind of like a failsafe. Like if one tree's doing better, it'll help its friends out, and then it's a reciprocity kind of thing. This is a different, completely different phenomenon of synchronization of their electron with quantum field theory. This is a completely different phenomenon, but they're sort of building on the basic idea that trees communicate with each other, which is true. Right? So I guess that makes it sound more plausible because of that. But anyway, it is interesting. And again, who knows? Maybe they're onto something, but we would need to see some massive replication before I think anyone's going to take this seriously.

AJR: What if we look at the trees through Bob's contact lenses?

S: Infrared thing?

E: Ooh.

B: Oh.

E: Clever.

AJR: As a follow-up step.

S: They're all talking to each other in infrared. We're just not looking.

AJR: That's right.

S: All right. Andrea, you're up next.

Affective Polarization (45:04)

• A New Measure of Affective Polarization 

S: You're going to tell us about it. Now, tell me, is this real or is this not real? Affective polarization.

E: Oh, my gosh.

S: That sounds jargony to me.

AJR: Tell you what. You tell me at the end if you think it's real. So affective polarization. So the paper that I want to talk about today. So I'm always excited to come on this show, and I always have a lot of fun finding the news items for when I join the show. And this paper wins the prize. I literally, the minute I saw it, I said, we're doing this. Normally, I consider a bunch of different ones, and what do you think, and what should we do? And the minute I saw this, I gasped and jumped for joy. And so now we're talking about it. So get ready. The title of the paper is A New Measure of Affective Polarization. Drum solo here, right? It's affective polarization is bigger and better than you ever thought it was before. So a new measure of affective polarization. Affective polarization is one of my favorite concepts in political science, and new measures of anything are pretty much my favorite thing in data science. So first, my question for you all, do any of you know what affective polarization is, besides, as Steve says, jargony? And it is jargony. But it is a term that's been around for 10 years.

E: We can define each of the words, but in its context, I don't know.

S: Only once I read the paper does that mean.

AJR: Right. Yeah. So Steve knows. So Evan, let's break it down. Let's do affective. What does that mean?

E: Affective is having an effect on things. What changes? What makes things go the way they do?

S: See, it's a neuroscience term. That's why I would know it anyway.

AJR: Yeah. Steve, let's hear it.

S: That's a clue. It's emotions. Your affect is the emotions that you're displaying.

AJR: Yeah. So a way of understanding and measuring emotions in psychology and in political science, which stole it, is to say, what is someone's affect? You could have a positive affect or a negative affect, and then you can divide. If it's a negative affect, there might be anger or fear or anxiety or whatever. Right? So affect is an emotion and polarization. Evan?

E: Oh, yeah. How things basically gather as a result and become compartmentalized or lean, go in one direction versus another.

AJR: Right. And you can have the North and South Pole, and you can also have polarization in terms of political polarization, which is what political scientists think about a lot, which is to say that there's this idea out there that Americans, and frankly, a lot of countries, there are people who have ideologies way on one side of a political spectrum, and the rest of the population largely has ideas way on the other side of the political spectrum. So with apologies to listeners not in the United States, this is a U.S.-centric piece of research, but I do believe it applies outside of the United States. But so the idea of affective polarization is something that came into the mainstream political science, like I said, about 10 years ago. And it was a big step forward in understanding partisan polarization in the United States. And when we talk about polarization in the United States politically, what we tend to think about, myself included, is we tend to jump to ideological polarization. So if you see in the news or you see on social media, Americans are more polarized than ever. Political polarization is at an all-time high. Political polarization is bad for democracy. Whatever claim you see, normally when you hear political polarization, we tend to think of it as ideological polarization. So my views are super, super on the left, and other people's views are super, super on the right. Of course, politics is not just this particular, you know, there's many dimensions to politics, but we could simplify it to just this left-right for now. The challenge is that political scientists for literally decades could not find empirical evidence of ideological polarization. With the exception now of two issues, Americans mostly, on average, there are people on the extremes, but if you take any particular issue that comes up in the news, so guns, taxes, government spending, you know, whatever it is that we talk about when we talk about politics and what, you know, candidates are asked about in debates and blah, blah, blah, the vast majority of Americans are kind of in the middle. You know, we see this conversation every time that gun control comes up is that most Americans, yes, there's people on the far left of gun control and people on the far right, but most Americans want some set of common sense gun control, and we can kind of quibble about how far, but most Americans are fairly moderate. That's the case for all issues except for two. There's two issues in American politics where ideologically we are seeing a real split between the left and the right. Do you guys want to guess what those two issues are?

S: Abortion and guns.

AJR: Abortion, yes. Not guns. You get one more guess.

E: Economics.

S: No.

AJR: I was going to say close, but not really. Climate. So climate change.

B: Oh, yes.

AJR: Yeah. So abortion is one where we see the left and right really split. Climate, we see the left and right really split. But things like guns, things like government spending, things like even immigration and other issues, LGBTQ rights, you know, most Americans, the left is a little to the left and the right is a little to the right, but we really aren't that split. So political scientists were in this conundrum where they said, look, we feel polarized. Things seem awful. But wherever we look in the data, and that's true if you say, like, how strongly do you believe that you're a Democrat versus how strongly do you think you're a Republican? That wasn't really widening either. And it wasn't until some researchers 10 years ago said maybe the polarization issue is not our ideological differences, but it's our emotional differences. And from there, that really opened up a brand new area of research on what is now called affective polarization, where the big finding is it's not that Americans disagree on the policy issues so much. It's that we hate each other, which is kind of good news from a policy perspective. There's a lot of middle ground that we might like. We might come to a compromise. But it's bad news from an implementation and democratic processes and day-to-day life quality perspective where it's like we just hate the other side. And the big measure for that is something that is one of my favorite measures out there in the world. It's called a feeling thermometer. And the feeling thermometer says, hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Democrats? Hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Republicans? And then you say, hey, Republicans, what do you think about your fellow Republicans? Hey, Republicans, what do you think about Democrats? And the feeling thermometer was very, very warm. It's kind of a warmth bias is another way it's talked about, where Democrats and Republicans both thought of their own party as like a 75 degrees, like a warm day, you know, on a scale from 0 to 100, I guess this is pretty Fahrenheit. But the out party feelings was like a 17 and plummeting. Democrats hate Republicans and Republicans hate Democrats.

E: Sounds tribal.

AJR: Very tribal. And that's what brings us to today's paper, which said, hold on a second. And this is why I just love this, because I've been thinking about affective polarization forever. I was pretty satisfied with this 0 to 100 warmth bias scale. And then these two researchers, Nicholas Campos and Christopher Federico from the University of Minnesota, recently published a paper in the American Political Science Review, literally came out within the last few weeks. So that's breaking news in peer reviewed timing. That said we can be more specific than just how warm or cold we feel towards the other party. And exactly as you said, Evan, they divided into three categories. They said, we think that based on a bunch of research on psychology and in group, out group research and in group favoritism and the sense of belonging and all this stuff about tribalism, all this research, we think there's actually three elements to this affective polarization. It's deeper than just, ah, we don't like them. The three elements are othering. So othering means I think that there are fundamental differences between people in the other group from my own. Another one is aversion. I dislike and avoid people in the other group. And the third one is moralization, which is a perception that my own partisan identity reflects fundamental values and this idea that I am basing my views on morals and therefore the other group must not be. So there's a lot of overlap, right? If I'm othering, I think there's a fundamental difference between me and people in the party that I'm not in. Then I may avoid them and I may have some moral idea that I'm superior or they're not, but not necessarily. And so the paper details a long process over two years and many, many surveys where they distilled these three measures into nine total questions. This went from 45 questions of like, you know, if I'm at a party and there's someone from the outer, the other political group there, I'll leave the party. I would be uncomfortable if I found out that my best friend was a member of another political party, all these possible types of survey questions. They distilled it down to nine core questions. They did a ton of work to validate the measures, meaning if I think I'm measuring, you know, moralization, am I actually? If so, this is what it would look like. So you do a ton of work to make sure that you're actually picking up the things that you think you're picking up. And then they were able to actually evaluate this three, you know, kind of three part model of affective polarization against some of the research out there about, well, why do we care about polarization in the first place? Well, one reason we care about polarization in the first place is that we think that it might permit people to justify anti-democratic behavior or democratic backsliding. So a lot of the talk in the United States right now is about, gosh, we might be losing our, you know, democratic institutions and we might be seeing a greater tolerance for behaviors that undermine our democratic institutions. A working hypothesis was increased affective polarization, this hatred of the other side, is causing us to be tolerant of or justify doing things that are anti-democratic, like attacking the Capitol or tearing apart, you know, various, you know, bureaucracies or whatever it is, or changing voting rules or whatever it is. We might be becoming more tolerant of that because of affective polarization. But it turns out that if you divide affective polarization into these three questions, these three kind of subcategories, yeah, these three constructs, you end up with a much more nuanced picture where it's actually just the aversion piece. So if I have aversion to the other side, if I dislike the other side, as opposed to particularly think that my side happens to be morally right, or simply think of them as different but I don't necessarily dislike them, I just don't want to hang out with them, it's that dislike that makes us most tolerant of these non-democratic attitudes. So when we think of people, you know, turning away and kind of ignoring things that we think, gosh, you're not even trusting our own political institutions, it's largely to do with this aversion, this hatred of the other side, as opposed to being grounded in some moralistic view or even the othering. The moralistic view, if I think that my side is absolutely right and my beliefs are based in some kind of morality, then we see people actually much more likely to endorse democratic norms, even if it's being enforced by parties they disagree with. And the last thing I'll say is that all of this also maps to how strongly we feel associated with a political party, as well as our knowledge of national politics. So the people who are this high in aversion, like I just dislike and don't trust the other side, were more tolerant of anti-democratic policies and they showed stronger ideological identity. So I strongly identify as a member of this party or that party, but they had very low knowledge of actual national politics. Whereas different groups, so if you're high in moralization, I have a strong party ID but I'm also very knowledgeable. So there's all these different pieces. We've been trying to figure out why Americans on opposite sides of the aisle hate each other. And if you start breaking down, well, hate them how? Why do they hate each other? You actually get a clearer picture where it's this mix of knowledge versus tolerance for democratic backsliding and tolerance of things like violence that's really helping us, I think, break through and get to some kind of solution so we maybe stop hating each other so much. So maybe the aversion people are not a great place to start. But those of us who are more on the moralization or othering side, there's some real interventions where we could start to understand each other and make policy compromises that seemed unreachable till now. So I think this is just amazing. I'm curious if you guys think this is just political scientists coming up with new terms to delight each other or if you think there's actually value there.

G: The saddest thing is that this is always like when you ask someone what they think of another group, it's in the aggregate. It's this idea. It's like a – like when you break it down to individuals, like individuals will never label other individuals in that same way that you label a group.

AJR: Yes.

E: Sure. It's much more nuanced.

G: Yes. It's like because everyone has a gay friend. Everyone has a – like oh, yeah. But you might not like a particular group of people but even someone that identifies within that group and you know them personally, you're totally different about them because you know them personally and oh, that's Fred. Fred is different. That doesn't count.

AJR: George, you're absolutely right. I've actually for a different project been doing some research on what works to reduce antisemitism and a lot of the research is about this intergroup contact theory that says hey, if you get people from different groups to talk to each other, blah, blah, blah, they like see that they're all humans and we all have shared fates and we're all in it together and blah, blah, blah. And everyone was really excited that that was going to solve all our problems. Well, it turns out that it's very possible that what's happening is exactly what you described where I go to some event and I say hey, you know, I'm not changing my views about Jewish people. I'm changing my views about that guy.

G: Right. That Jewish person.

AJR: And unfortunately it does seem that some of these interventions that we thought were group level interventions are actually not. Another example that I think is – well, you tell me if it's depressing is if you ask Americans what do you think – what is your approval of Congress? It's very low on both sides of the aisle, right? Everyone thinks Congress is terrible. If you ask Americans what do you think of your Congress person and you name that person, they're pretty favorable relative to the overall aggregate. So it's like what's the problem here? It's like we're all mad at Congress but most people are kind of okay with their person in office. Not everyone.

G: It's the same thing with teachers. The American education system is like, oh, you don't like your kids' teachers. Oh no, my kids' teachers are great. They're phenomenal. But the whole system is just corrupt.

S: It's true about everything. It's true about doctors. Doctors are this. My doctor is awesome. But doctors in general –

G: Lawyers.

S: Lawyers, yeah. Like any group and –

G: Drummers are definitely –

S: Drummers are assholes.

G: The worst.

E: But this drummer is decent.

S: Yeah, except for you, George. You're the exception. I even had that. I was in a debate on homeopathy to an audience of homeopaths, right? So it was me and 300 homeopaths.

E: 300.

S: And a lot of people came up to me and said, oh, most skeptics are assholes but you're nice. Yeah. It was like you're the – And I'm like, no, I'm typical. They refused to believe that I wasn't the exception. They refused to believe it because they had their stereotype.

AJR: Right.

G: You can't believe it.

S: They're a cardboard villain that they had erected that was part of their identity and their worldview and I'm a piece of data that conflicts with that worldview. And so that's an exception to the rule, right? It's not the rule.

E: You're an outlier.

S: You're an outlier. It does not challenge the rule. So you're absolutely right. This is where critical – That's why the missing element is critical thinking.

AJR: Yes. Yes.

S: Having the awareness, the metacognition to know that this is what we do and you have to break out of that pattern because you're right. People – and I've read this in many contexts as well and people of different political stripes get together and talk to each other. They realize, oh, you're not a three-headed monster. You're an actual human being who believes things that most normal human beings believe. But when you're thinking of like Democrats or Republicans or whatever in the aggregate, just read the comments to any political article online, right?

AJR: No, it's horrible.

S: They talk about the other side as like this cartoon villain. Nobody fits that. Nobody believes what you think the other side believes. Nobody is that way.

AJR: Well, the other challenge is that if you hypothetically go out and say, hey – which I have done is say, hey, I've spoken to people from the other side and I've read about a lot of the work happening on the other side and most people are actually pretty moderate and for example supportive of some level of gun control. We just don't hear about those people because they're not the ones shouting into the algorithms and being amplified. When you say that, the people in my own party get upset and accuse me of being sympathizers of the other side. It's a lose-lose.

S: You're a combinationist.

AJR: Yeah.

E: Apologist.

S: Apologist. Yeah, whatever.

AJR: Exactly. Exactly. And so it's just so – I mean, I think this sort of work is really interesting and we're not there yet, but it's just – I find it so frustrating because we could, from a policy perspective, actually make headway on a lot of things that a lot of people care about, but we just can't because we cannot be seen interacting with someone from the other side. And we tend to – there's other research out there that shows that most Democrats – well, let me do it the other way. Most Republicans think something like 30% of Democrats in the U.S. are LGBTQ, when the real number is like 6% or something tiny, right?

G: Six, ten, yeah.

B: Oh, wow.

AJR: And Democrats tend to think of Republicans as either these ultra-wealthy, out-of-touch or like totally uneducated – just all these stereotypes and really –

E: Yeah, gun-toting hillbillies.

AJR: The modal person for both parties is a white Christian and it's like we just mostly have a lot in common. We just don't hear from those other sides and so –

G: I wonder what countries have the greatest sort of whitest middle in terms of agreement and why that is.

AJR: I thought you said the whitest middle. I was like Norway.

G: Like the extremes on either side are minimal, below 5% or whatever it may be and like what is it about those particular environs or the country or the culture or media or the way media is consumed or the way people – maybe there's a homogenization. Like what is it – is our diversity causing this on some level?

S: I think it's –

G: Because it doesn't seem like that way because it's not.

S: I think it's – It's basically two things. In my opinion, although this is obviously a good question to research, one is what we were talking about before about the insulation of the internet. We're in little information ecosystems. The other one is the media. I mean especially –

E: They want conflict.

S: They want conflict. Absolutely. You watch the –

E: They stoke it.

S: Watch the media from the other side, whatever side you were on and you're shocked. You're shocked about what they're saying about you. It's ridiculous. It's like the degree to which they demonize the other side, the straw man is just absolutely unbelievable. So of course people think this is what they're being told over and over and over again that the other side believes all this ridiculously stupid things. They're trying to – I mean I've heard people on both sides say the other side wants to destroy America.

AJR: Right. They are an active threat to America. I've heard that too. I mean and that's the tricky thing and that's what's so hard for me is because I'll watch the other side and hear them say things that I just – are cartoonish.

S: Cartoonish.

AJR: Characterizations of things that no one actually – no one wants all your kids to be trans or whatever, right?

S: Whatever. Nobody wants completely open borders or people who just freely flow over the borders.

AJR: Right. Or like –

S: Pick your issue.

AJR: Abortions in a 7-Eleven or whatever it is. But what I need to do a better job of is remind myself that a lot of what I am probably hearing about the other side is also that level of caricature. Maybe not quite that level but near that level.

G: It's the hardest thing, man. It's like you've got to – whenever you agree with something, that's when you've got to be most diligent.

AJR: Right.

G: It's the hardest thing.

B: Good point.

G: Oh, that makes me feel good. Oh, is that – okay. Trees are talking to each other.

AJR: Right. That's why I had to be really diligent about your piece, George, because I was like I really want this to be wrong. So I'm sure that I'm not just finding –

G: The other direction too. Yeah.

AJR: No. I mean the media piece is such a mess and part of the problem with studying media is – more jargon – is the endogeneity of it, which is to say that, you know, am I more – partisan people tend to watch partisan media. But am I seeking out partisan media because I'm partisan or am I partisan because I've watched partisan media? And like disentangling that is extremely difficult whether you're consuming it on TV or online. A lot of the most partisan people in terms of ideological extremes seem to spend the least amount of time online, which is where we think that a lot of this stuff happens. That said, they spend time on Facebook as opposed to other algorithms, so maybe there's something there. But I did see a very interesting study a couple of weeks ago where I don't know how they got people to agree with this, but they got a whole bunch of Americans who routinely watch Fox News to watch CNN for a month. I don't know how they enforced this. I don't know how they verified that this was happening. But they did seem to report some ideological moderation in those 30 people who were forced to watch CNN.

E: That would be an expected result.

AJR: Yeah. I would be curious-

S: They pry their eyes open and strap their heads in.

AJR: Yeah. Put in context that just played.

S: Diddy well with her, brother.

AJR: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it would happen the other side. Like, would I become, not to overly talk about my own views, but like, what if I were forced to watch news that, exclusively news that I disagreed with for a month? Like, what would that do to me? I like to think it wouldn't change me, but I don't know.

G: Well, get back to us.

AJR: I will. Yeah, yeah. I'll come back in a month and talk about how the earth is flat.

S: Yeah.

AJR: Yeah.

The Brain’s Motor Switchboard (1:08:14)

• Dynamic basal ganglia output signals license and suppress forelimb movements 

S: I'm going to ask you guys to indulge me in a little bit of neurological jargon now.

E: You got it.

S: Yeah, this is a cool item. I'm going to try to explain this to you as simply as I can. Are you guys familiar with the basal ganglia?

G: Slow down. Slow down.

S: All right.

E: Yes, it's a spice.

G: What the hell?

AJR: I like it with a little turmeric in it.

E: I do as well.

G: That's what you use to think about pasta.

S: What do you think? If I just throw the term out there, basal ganglia, does that mean anything to you?

AJR: It's the base of your brain.

E: It's like insect brain or something.

AJR: It's like the brain stem or something.

E: It's like very small part of a piece of a brain.

S: Not quite. It's above the brain stem. It's part of the brain. It's above the brain stem.

AJR: It's like an old fear.

S: No.

AJR: Okay.

S: No, movement. Very quickly, there's three systems in the brain that influence voluntary movement. You have what we call the pyramidal system, the primary motor cortex. You have the motor cortex, which then sends signals down the cortical spinal tracts to your muscles. That's the direct motor control of your muscles. It's literally two neurons. These are the longest neurons in your body.

E: How long are they?

S: One goes from the brain to your spinal cord. The other goes from the spinal cord to your muscle. That's it. It's a two-neuron system. That's sort of the direct muscle control. That's modified by two other systems. It's modified by the cerebellar system, which allows you to coordinate different muscles together. That's where your muscle memory is. If you do any kind of coordinated movement, rhythm over time, right, George, when you're playing the drums, it's all happening in your cerebellum. Then there's also the basal ganglia. What does that do? How does that modify movement? That's a very interesting question. We've been modifying our models of what the basal ganglia actually does. One way to think about it, and this is probably how I explain it to students, is that part of what it does is modulate the gain of the connection between the premotor and the motor cortex. Basically, your desire to move and the amount that you actually move. Does that make sense? You know what gain is? Gain is just the connection between input and output. That's why on old stereos, some engineer decided to call the volume knob the gain. That's literally what it is.

E: Is that where it comes from?

S: Yes. It's the input versus the speaker output.

B: Kind of annoying.

G: You don't overshoot the pen when you're trying to grab it.

S: Exactly. Although, overshooting is more to do with the cerebellum. It gets complicated. Parkinson's disease, that's a disease of the basal ganglia. Their gain is turned way down. At the end stage, they move very little. They even get frozen. They can't move at all. There's something called Huntington's Chrea, for example, which is the opposite disease. It's a lesion in a different part of the basal ganglia where the gain is turned way up. They're constantly moving and wriggling. They can't stay still. That's a simple way to think about it. It's way more complicated than that. The question is, how does the basal ganglia do that? The traditional model is that it primarily works through inhibition, which is how most of the nervous system controls itself. The nervous system, especially the brain, is constantly inhibiting the pathways and conduction that it doesn't want. There's tonic inhibition, meaning baseline, always-on inhibition, basically throughout the nervous system. That's just how it functions. The basal ganglia works primarily through inhibiting unwanted movements. That inhibition could be turned up or turned down. Now we get to the new study, because we have all kinds of new fancy tools that we could use to study how the brain is working. This was looking at the circuitry in the basal ganglia, a specific part of the basal ganglia, the substantia nigra pars reticulata, which is not the part that's affected in Parkinson's disease, by the way. That's the substantia nigra pars compacta, which is right next door. In any case, they were looking at this to see how is it functioning during voluntary movement. What they found was it isn't just inhibition. It's not just inhibiting unwanted movements. It's also potentiating wanted movements. It's actually acting like a very complicated switchboard that is selecting specifically which motor neurons are going to be firing, which ones to enhance and which ones to suppress. It had a very dynamic firing rate. It actually has a much greater level of control than we previously thought over controlling voluntary movement. When you make a precise movement, you have to activate a bunch of motor units in a precise timing and coordination and sequence. A lot of that is happening in the basal ganglia. It's essentially modifying your... When you think about, I want to reach over here and grab a can of Coke and drink it, you don't have to really think too hard about specifically what you're doing. Your conscious control is at a very high level. You're not thinking, I'm going to activate this muscle a little. You're not voluntarily controlling every little muscle fiber and muscle group in all of the different muscles that are required to do that action. You're just thinking, I just want to reach over there. Whereas that level of control must be subconscious. It's partly in the cerebellum and it's partly in the basal ganglia. It turns out that there's way more control happening in the basal ganglia than we previously thought. It's not just a general inhibition, not just a gain up and down. It's actually coordinating a lot of the movement itself.

E: You mean decade?

S: It's way more dynamic than we thought it was.

G: So like an athlete that's learned a skill over time or like if you learn how to type or something like that, does that mean that the gain from the basal ganglia increases over time and kind of takes over the involuntary? Because when you're really good at something, you don't think about it. Whether it's an instrument or pitching or golf or whatever.

S: Classically, that kind of making a learned movement subconscious is thought to be in the cerebellum. So like when you shoot a basketball 100 times, 1,000 times to the point where you don't think about it, that's because those muscle coordinations all happening at the subconscious and specifically cerebellar level. But now, more of it may be happening in the basal ganglia than we thought. Maybe a combination of the two things. But the next step would be a very interesting question, George, is how much does the basal ganglia learn? Is it just necessary to execute these finessed movements or is it actually learning how to do them as a learned movement?

E: Getting more efficient as it practices.

G: Taking over responsibility sort of.

S: We don't know that yet. So we know the cerebellum does that, but maybe since the basal ganglia is far more complicated than we thought, maybe it's doing some of that too.

E: Parallel, redundancy, all these things come into it?

S: It's not redundant. It's because if you miss any piece of it, you know it. There's a deficit associated with a fault in any of these subsystems.

B: Steve, is this potentially good news for any types of treatment?

S: Well, the more we understand things at this level, then yes. Especially since we are at the dawn really of the age of, not Aquarius, but of neuromodulation, right? We're using electrical and magnetic stimulation in order to affect how the brain functions.

B: I got high hopes for that.

S: And that has two basic limiting factors, right? One is just the hardware, right? Just the technology of interfacing with the brain. And the other is our knowledge at a very fine level of exactly how the brain is wired. And so every bit that we learn about that – so you could imagine like building a computer chip that does the same thing, you know, that the basal ganglia is doing or whatever. I'm just saying theoretically. We obviously don't have the technology to do that now. One of the early technologies of neuromodulation is deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease. We actually put wires in the basal ganglia to, for example, suppress the tremor of Parkinson's disease. So the basal ganglia is one of the first parts of the brain that was targeted by sticking a wire in it and using electrical stimulation to affect its function. So yeah, so this potentially has a lot of implications for neurological treatment, especially because of neuromodulation. But again, it's just cool to understand how complicated the brain is and how it functions.

G: Aren't you going to miss being able to talk about this when you retire? Because they take your brain card away and you can't talk about this, right? Is that how that works?

S: I know you're joking, but the serious answer is this is the one thing I think I'm going to miss the most is teaching students, residents, fellows, sort of high-level neuroscience. But you'll probably be hearing more of it on the show.

G: You'll just have to teach us.

E: We just have to become your new students.

AJR: It's the Stephen Novella unlicensed neurological course.

G: The doctor is in.

E: No refunds.

AJR: Yeah, yeah.

G: Five cents.

E: Yeah, five cents.

S: Five cents.

New Dwarf Planet Candidate (1:18:44)

• Scientists discover new dwarf planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune: Meet 2017 OF201 

S: All right, Evan, tell us about this. You said this is a new dwarf planet, but the pedant in me says, you mean a new dwarf planet candidate.

E: Yeah, and I think they talk about that in actually the body of the article, but the headline kind of missed the term candidate, which is kind of important here. Yes, an absolute new candidate, new dwarf planet candidate in our solar system. Do you guys know when the first dwarf planet was discovered?

S: Yeah, like in the 1900s, right? I mean Eris. I mean Ceres. Ceres was discovered a long time ago.

E: 1801.

B: Whoa.

G: Oh, wow.

E: Way, way back when. And then what? Pluto was the next one, 130 years later.

G: That's visually? Like through a telescope?

S: Yeah.

G: Because there was no radiometry or anything. Yeah, wow.

E: Nope. That was it. And then it was in 2005 they have the third one, Eris. And then what in 2006 happened?

AJR: Changed everything.

E: It did change everything. The category called dwarf planet came into existence by the International Astronomical Union. And many people were, you know, upset with that. It's still debated to this day, I think.

AJR: I was upset until I learned that it was entirely an issue of measurement, my favorite thing in the world. And I said, oh, well, I get it. All right, I'm sold. Yeah.

E: There are, what, four criteria for dwarf planets? You guys know and you must know most of these.

S: I know all of them.

G: Sleepy. Dopey. Sneezy.

S: So the criteria to be a dwarf planet, you have to orbit the sun and not another body so you can't be a moon.

E: Correct.

S: You have to be large enough so that your gravity pulls you into a sphere.

E: Yes. Or a near sphere, yes.

S: But you do not clear out your own orbit.

E: Right.

S: If you did, you'd be a planet.

AJR: Oh.

E: Correct.

S: And there's a fourth one?

E: Well, you combine two into one. It was orbiting the sun and not being a moon.

S: And not being a moon. Okay.

G: What do you mean clear your own orbit?

S: So if there's a bunch of other stuff in your orbit and you haven't gravitationally cleared out your zone, then that makes you a dwarf planet. That was the thing that made Pluto.

G: Oh, it's flying with you. I got you.

E: That was what knocked Pluto out of the category.

S: That knocked Pluto out of the category. The reason why they did that was because they were concerned, for whatever reason, that they were going to be discovering dozens, if not score, of planets in the Kuiper Belt.

E: Right.

S: And they said, well, we can't have dozens or hundreds of planets. That doesn't feel right.

B: That'd be annoying.

S: So let's make them dwarf planets, and we'll just throw in this criteria to make it so that they don't meet the criteria for a planet, a full planet.

E: Right, right.

B: It's a man-made definition anyway.

AJR: I mean, it's all arbitrary.

S: It's all arbitrary anyway, yeah.

E: It sort of is. But with this particular new discovery, well, in 2017 is when the images were captured. But they were reanalyzed and now has come forward as part of a paper that appeared on the preprint server ARXIV. I don't even know if that's pronounceable or not.

AJR: Archive.

E: Archive, OK. Well, yeah, I guess I suppose that's what it would be. And yeah, they have – so it's designated 2017 OF201. So 2017 for the year that the images were captured. OF201, don't know why. It will – if it ever is officially declared to be a dwarf planet, it will receive a name, a proper name like the others. This one was discovered far beyond Neptune. I mean far beyond. It orbits the Sun every 25,000 years. That is out there. Yep. Yep. And this was all confirmed by, again, the IAUs. Oh, they have a specific department for this, the Minor Planet Center, which I did not know about before. And this was published on May 21st, so just recently. A team of scientists spotted it while poring through our archival data from the Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope based in Hawaii. The researchers tracked the object's motion across 19 sets of images spanning seven years. And, you know, you think about it. Something that is going around the sun every 25,000 years. And you've got, what, seven years' worth of photography for this thing. It's not really moving all that much. That is very, very minor. So to be able to kind of suss that out in itself is kind of incredible. All right. So, yeah, again, it's a candidate. They still have to do more to determine exactly if it fits all the criteria. But here's some interesting data they do have on the planet. The diameter of the planet, they approximate that it's 700 kilometers. And that would be roughly the size of Ceres.

S: A little bit smaller.

E: Haumea, a little bit smaller. Yeah, that is an elongated orbit with 25,000. And it's elliptical, like all planets are. When it's closest to the sun, it's 44.9 astronomical units away. But at its farthest distance, 1,630 astronomical units. So if you can envision that inside your head, that is quite a shape it makes. So it has not been direct. It says here its exact shape hasn't been directly observed. So they still need more on that. But its size suggests it's likely in hydrostatic equilibrium, nearly spherical, which would give it one of the criteria it needs to become a dwarf planet.

S: Interestingly, since you bring up that criterion, Haumea is oval-ish, right? It's actually like a flattened egg. So it's not a sphere.

E: No, it's not a sphere.

S: But it still counts.

E: Has it's on gravity.

S: Because it would be a sphere if it weren't spinning so fast.

E: Oh, there you go.

S: It's actually its theoretical shape not eliminating the factor of a rapid rotation.

E: What did we talk about?

S: If that's a factor.

E: Yeah, we talked about, was it another planet, an exoplanet or something that had a kind of a—

B: Scientific—

S: No, it was Haumea. It was— Yeah, we talked about it. I think in one of the private shows.

G: Yep.

S: Which haven't aired yet. Yeah, so yeah, we did talk about it.

E: So they're going to go back and they're going to look at some other potential candidates as well. And they said based on, I guess, this technique that they're using or the research data, Steve, there still could be maybe hundreds or thousands of these that are out there. So what— And I get the point was to make this classification so that we wouldn't have to have hundreds or thousands of these. But what if it turns out there really are hundreds or thousands of these?

S: I guess they're okay with hundreds of dwarf planets as long as they're not full planets.

E: Yeah, that makes sense.

B: Full-fledged planets, yeah.

AJR: The kids can only memorize up to nine full planets.

E: I remember that.

AJR: Exactly.

E: That was so deeply ingrained in our early—

AJR: Like fourth grade would be entirely dedicated to memorizing planets if we included all the dwarf planets.

S: Right.

E: And when they do achieve their names, they're named after mythological entities or beings, all having to do with fertility for the most part. And so we will have to see exactly where this one will get its name and which name they'll use.

S: Pluto and all of its moons are named after the underworld.

E: Yeah, it sort of—I know because it received its name prior to being a dwarf planet.

AJR: At least we let it keep its name. I mean there's some dignity in that.

E: It did. It was grandfathered in, I suppose, at that point.

S: Yeah, but this—2017, blah, blah, blah, may not get an actual name, may not be confirmed for decades.

E: Yeah, it could be a while.

S: It takes a long time. We have a bunch of other candidates we haven't confirmed fully yet because it just takes time to really confirm their orbit, their shape, whether they've gravitationally cleared out their zone or not. So it takes time.

AJR: Do we know what the candidate confirmation or candidate clearance rate is? What percentage of candidates end up being dwarf planets?

S: Well, it was—they had five at the beginning and there's only been those five. So they haven't cleared a single one yet after the—

AJR: Okay.

S: It's taking way longer than I thought it was.

AJR: I see. All right.

G: I'm shocked that A-R-X-I-V is pronounced archive and not—

E: Yeah.

G: Not A-R-14.

E: I didn't think of that. Exactly.

G: I thought it was A-R-14. I was like, okay, that's weird.

AJR: I know.

S: A-R-14?

AJR: It's a website where you put in working papers basically and I've just heard it called archive.

G: Yeah, that makes sense.

E: But the X is capitalized. The letter A is not. So you have a capitalization in the dead center of the word.

G: It's cool.

B: Kind of like a brand.

E: I suppose. Yeah.

AJR: Scientists being wacky.

Discussion Topic (1:27:55)

How has science fiction affected our expectations of technology and the future? None S: All right, guys. We have to know who's that noisy this week because Jay is away.

E: Hi Jay.

S: So George proposed a discussion topic, which I like. I want to talk about this. How has science fiction affected or distorted our expectations of technology and the future? George, since you brought this up, do you have a specific example in mind?

G: I've got a bunch of just – the ones that bother me the most and that I wonder what kind of a disservice is being done. Now, obviously, look, we all love Star Trek. We all love Star Wars. We all love science fiction. That's not a question. I think the question that I'm proposing or the discussion I want to talk about is how much expectation is gained or permitted or brought about because of these amazing stories and the ubiquity of certain kinds of science fiction tropes. The ones I wanted to talk about or at least wanted to propose are the ones that break rules of physics. So like a transporter. We will never have a transporter. It doesn't matter how great the knowledge of quantum will become. You will never have a transporter. We will never have a tractor beam. Like you will never have shields, like shields of some kind around a spaceship. Like we will never have that. We will never have subspace communication. Like I'm sorry.

B: Faster than light travel.

G: Right. I'm going to be getting into like warp drive and stuff like even that. The relativistic effect of just space travel of like high velocity travel affecting your age versus the age of loved ones that are on the planets and all that kind of stuff. Artificial gravity that's like not induced by some kind of circular motion. Replicators. Like we're never going to have a replicator. I'm sorry. Like you're not going to be able to make a steak appear on a plate. Like for as much as that would be amazing. And I wonder just how much –

B: Not quickly anyway.

G: Not quickly. Right. Yeah. You'd have to have the 3D.

E: Very rare.

G: And it's just – They're so ubiquitous, these tropes. And I wonder how much damage it does in terms of our expectations. Lightsaber. We'll never have a lightsaber. There's not enough energy to have a handheld lightsaber, let alone like a laser. Just to have a handheld laser, which you think would be like, oh, yeah. We'll totally have a phaser or a laser. It's like it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

S: So I agree. We actually talk about this in our book, The Skeptic Guide to the Future. We go over all of those and talk about their plausibility. And you hit a lot of the big ones. And I think just under the category of space travel, our image of space travel is completely distorted by science fiction.

B: Completely and utterly distorted.

S: In the near, medium, or even long-term future, it's not going to be anything like depicted in almost any science fiction except for the hardest of science fiction. And even then, they throw in a gimme or two just to make it work narratively. Right? But yeah. So space travel, it's all about our tolerance for acceleration. Right? There isn't any way to get around that. Artificial gravity, it hasn't been 100% ruled out by the physics that we currently have established. But we're getting damn close. Yeah. The door is only cracked open the smallest amount. It's probably not possible within the laws of physics to have that kind of artificial gravity. And as you say, shields, you can't just have an energy field like that.

G: Right.

E: Yeah, that would deflect weaponry and things like that. Right.

S: It's just not practical.

B: Directed energy and kinetic energy, it would be extremely limited, if anything, and not anything like that.

E: I mean, you can have magnetic fields.

S: Yeah.

E: It protects you from some things.

S: Yeah, but it's not going to be like blocking it, but not as they're depicted in science fiction, where it's like a little barrier made out of energy. And other things, too, like the design of spaceships are always wrong.

E: Oh, gosh. That is terrible.

S: You're always standing as if you're on a sailing ship. Right. You would be standing up in the direction of acceleration. And you wouldn't be at the top of the ship. You would be at the middle of the ship.

E: Of course.

S: Because the thing that I haven't seen, I've never seen even the hardest of science fiction programs address, is the radiation in space. Space is a very unforgiving environment for biological organisms.

E: Does the Expanse not deal with that?

S: They really don't. That's like the one hole. I've never even seen them. And they're constantly being exposed to space.

AJR: Constantly.

E: So they just ignore the problem?

S: They just ignore it. They just completely ignore the problem. Occasionally, I'll read in a book or something where they talk about shielding for the radiation or whatever. But especially when you're in a movie, they always just make things look cool. But they never really design them like you would have to. If you're going to be in space for a while, you've got to be in the center of the ship. You need massive shielding. Actually, you know the one science fiction TV show that talked about shielding?

B: Avenue 5?

S: It was Avenue 5, which is a comedy.

AJR: Really?

E: I don't even know what that is.

AJR: I remember that, yeah.

S: It was actually really good. And they did it because the ship had a poop shield. All of the excrement of all the passengers was stored in the outer layer of the ship as a radiation shield. So they got a joke out of it.

B: That's hilarious.

S: But it was right. It was correct. Actually, that show, as silly as it was, made a lot of interesting correct choices. But then they also made some egregious, horrible gaffes as well scientifically.

G: But the question here is like does the inspiration of science fiction outweigh the practical disappointment or misinformation?

E: It raises our expectations too high.

G: What's the right equation or what's the right percentage to be like? Where should that live?

B: I wouldn't want to limit authors narratively just because of the potential bad influence it could have. It's far too restrictive.

G: Sure.

B: Right? I mean, would you restrict other types of narratives because of the bad effect it could have on future development of whatever? I don't know. It just seems like we've got to suck that one up and be like, yeah.

G: I just wonder what damage has been done. The people that have gone into most probably to a person, if you ask those that work at NASA or those that build rockets or those that become physicists or whatever, many, many, many of them will cite science fiction as being inspirational to them.

B: Sure.

S: Yeah. I think you have to tie it though because any proper nerd is going to like revel in discussing the tropes and why they're not scientifically accurate, et cetera.

B: Don't take that away from us.

S: But there are areas where, and I think we've mentioned this on the show, that not dealing with space travel is where the science tropes in media are an actual pragmatic problem. The big one is all of the CSI shows.

G: Yeah.

S: Because now juries expect there's going to be whiz-bang science attached to every case. If it's not there, they think, well, they don't really have a good case. They didn't show me DNA or blah, blah, blah.

B: It's too boring, you know?

G: The fingerprint database that's instantaneous.

S: Yeah. Exactly. You can't get DNA back in hours. I mean, I don't get it.

AJR: So George, your question reminds me of an area of research that this is going to be very underwhelming because I don't remember what the findings were. But there are people who study the historical impact or the impact of science fiction from the past on like, OK, science fiction from 1900 depicting 1950. Could we possibly trace some kind of influence to what actually happened in 1950 as a result of the way it was imagined 50 or 100 years prior to that? And I don't know what any of the findings are, but I remember being very excited to learn that there were people studying kind of the history of science fiction.

G: It can be certain. I mean, the flip phone was totally a Star Trek-inspired thing.

B: Sure.

G: So you have the fiction then inspiring the actual fact, which then curves in upon itself like an oberus or whatever.

AJR: It is a kind of like imagining of what's possible and kind of scoping out. And like Evan said, it's like we kind of get anchored to some. Like flying cars and for me, like the Jetsons, the kid that could walk on the ceiling. Like you just have these like ideas that like that's what the future looks like. A biodome, I think, is up there.

G: Yeah. Where meanwhile, like we're being pummeled now with AI and all the ramifications of what potentially could be happening with AI. And there's, relatively speaking, very little science fiction tropes about that, you know, the availability of AI, AI then replacing people and like the art and music being replaced by AI. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure there are stories that exist. I'm sure that exist. But there's no way there's more stories that exist than have lasers or phasers or shielding or, you know, or lightsabers or whatever. So it's this weird like what are we writing about and learning and worried about and being influenced by and talking about?

S: I think AI is going to destroy us in a completely different way than was imagined in science fiction. It's not going to become sentient. It doesn't have to become sentient. It doesn't have to destroy us. So I think this problem goes way beyond science fiction and technology. I think we have the same problem with all fiction. For example, I think, and this is my main beef with all medical dramas, is that they instill in people a pretty bad misunderstanding of how medicine works and clinical decision-making works. And people come in with expectations about like, well, I need a diagnosis. Like I need a Dr. House to make this bizarre diagnosis. And that will lead directly to me being cured. And until I get that diagnosis, nothing good can happen. It's not just a false hope. It's also shutting down other pathways of legitimate treatment and evaluation, et cetera. They're thinking in a very narrow narrative way that they see on TV. It's the same thing with lawyers and with courtrooms. Courtroom dramas are mostly bullshit, right? That's not how courtrooms actually function. There's no surprise witnesses or whatever in courtrooms. It can't happen.

AJR: I'm going to be my own lawyer now. And you're like, it somehow wins.

E: Perry Mason moment.

B: Can't handle the truth.

AJR: No, Steve, when I watched Dr. House, and when I was actually in real life diagnosed with lupus, I thought, it's never lupus, because that's what Dr. House always said. Never lupus. It's always something else. Like I denied my own diagnosis because of that show.

S: When in reality, it's always lupus.

AJR: It's always lupus.

S: Yeah. There's like running jokes. Like in neurology, I can tell you the ones. Like if somebody's presenting a weird case at Grand Rounds, like, oh, you'll never guess what this is. It's like one of three things. It's always like the same few things that are like the mystery diagnoses. And lupus is one of those in medicine, because it can do so many things.

AJR: Right.

Emails (1:39:07)

S: All right. We're going to do one quick email. This comes from Joshua from Tyler, Texas.

B: Joshua.

S: And he writes, hi, all. There's so much stupid or malevolence going on right now, it's hard to keep up. Here's the latest stupid. And then he links to an article, I'm sure you guys have heard about this, about Health and Human Services canceling a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine.

E: Can you get more short-sighted than that?

B: Didn't read it. What's the facts?

S: Here's the quickie on what's going on. So Moderna, as you may or may not know, was one of the companies that developed the COVID vaccine, one of the mRNA vaccines.

B: A lot of my shots were Moderna.

AJR: Same.

S: Yeah, me too. Yeah, I got a lot of the Moderna shots. And Moderna, you know, was able to develop the vaccine as quickly as it did, probably because there was government funding available, Operation Warp Speed, et cetera. So other companies also developed, like Pfizer, mRNA vaccines. And we talked about the fact that mRNA technology has been in development for like 30 years. And Moderna actually has been in existence for 10 years developing the technology before they came out with the vaccine. So now they're working on an mRNA-based vaccine against the bird flu, which is a strong candidate for the next pandemic.

E: That's the next one, right?

S: Not necessarily good, but it's a strong candidate. Like if there's one to worry about, that's the top of the list, right?

G: Get your sourdough ready.

B: My money's on that.

E: Here we go.

S: Stock up on toilet paper. Get your sourdough starter ready. So it's actually a good thing that we're developing a vaccine now. And the government had given Moderna a grant for like $700 million, something like that, to develop the vaccine. And the Trump administration, HHS, under Jackass, what's his name, RFK Jr., just decided they were going to up and cancel the whole thing. They just canceled the contract.

B: Sure, why not?

S: And they did it for the dumbest reasons possible. hey basically, it's all because of RFK Jr.'s conspiracy fear-mongering about mRNA technology and vaccines. They're saying this is too risky.

E: He doesn't understand it.

S: It's too risky. There are better ways to go. We're going to use this money to develop safer options. It's complete and utter nonsense. And what they're touting is basically 30-year-old technology instead of using mRNA technology. The big advantage, of course, with the mRNA technology is that it can be developed much faster.

AJR: And hasn't, I'm sure you guys have covered this a lot on the podcast, but hasn't mRNA, like we haven't used it for vaccines until recently, but hasn't it been around forever and ever? It's not like it's like that new.

S: Yeah, like 30 years.

AJR: Yeah.

S: Totally. And again, Moderna spent 10 years developing it as a therapeutic before they came out with the COVID vaccine, which was their first product. It's not like they just thought of it yesterday.

G: We'd rather spend that $700 million on pasteurized milk.

S: On vitamin A tablets, whatever.

G: It's more vitamin A.

S: It's malfeasance. It is malfeasance. And it's because we have a conspiracy theorist, pseudoscientist running healthcare at the federal level. They also, since we're talking about this, RFK Jr. bypassed the CDC and changed the recommendations for who gets the COVID vaccine, saying we're no longer going to recommend it for-

E: Pregnant women.

S: For pregnant women and healthy kids.

G: Consulted no one.

S: Consulted no one, bypassed the CDC, just decided himself, because he's a jackass, that that's what we're going to do.

E: There you go.

S: Yep, this is exactly what we were expecting to happen, and it's happening. It's as bad as anyone feared, probably even worse.

B: Yeah.

S: And we're just going to have to, every now and then, we're going to have to report on the latest crazy thing that RFK Jr. did.

E: Wow.

AJR: What do we do about this, right? Obviously, raise awareness and help people.

B: Yeah, not vote for assholes. How about that? Let's try that.

S: Now, Bob-

G: He's a legit guy.

AJR: That sounds like some affective pull.

S: Yeah, it was very polarizing.

B: Absolutely objective.

S: Not vote for people who are basing their policy on misinformation and conspiracy theories.

B: Right. That too, that too. I just gave you a shorthand of that sentence.

AJR: And just legitimizing that way of thinking, like the long-term damage of just saying, like, well, if we're going to have this kind of, I don't know, skepticism, not in this, the Skeptic's Guide kind of skepticism, but the cynical pseudoscience skepticism at the national-

S: Denialism.

AJR: Denialism, there we go. At the national level, it's like, think of how many young people are going to be trained to think that this is the way to think about the world.

G: But, like, they want to throw Fauci in- They, I know I'm using the-

AJR: Right.

G: But there are people that wanted to throw Fauci into prison because of his supposed connection with the COVID vaccine and its evils, supposed evils. Here's a guy who's, like, legitimately passing, not talking to people in the CDC and passing general kinds of stuff that's going to kill people. It's going to kill people. This could potentially kill millions of people.

G: Right.

S: If this delays a vaccine and the pandemic hits fast and we lose six months or a year, that could be millions of people. Absolutely.

B: Or more.

AJR: And there's no way the country would respond with the kind of care, and there's arguments to be made that it wasn't enough care in 2020, but there's no way the people in the United States are going to tolerate a kind of shutdown like we had in COVID. And so we're going to see even more deaths. Like, we won't have the vaccine, we won't have the social distancing, or whatever the- Like, I just don't see the public health measures of other kinds, non-vaccine interventions, being at all tolerated.

E: Unfortunately, the company is going to continue, though, with their work.

S: They said they're going to keep going forward. Why wouldn't they?

E: Right.

S: But losing, you know, $600, $700 million of funding obviously is going to have a massive impact.

E: Oh, it's going to have a massive effect. On their development. And on their development, and when it comes time that we need this thing, there's going to be people- It'll be expensive, and there'll be people who can't afford it. Yeah. Because they have to build this-

S: Or there won't be enough available.

E: They have to build this into their cost.

S: Terrible, terrible, terrible decision.

G: Any other emails there, Steve?

S: No, that's it.

E: What else you got?

AJR: Any good news?

E: Canceled the Department of Transportation yet?

S: I have good news. It is time for Science or Fiction.

G: Whee!

AJR: Everything you just said was fiction.

E: Yay!

S: Unfortunately, no.

E: It's like that episode, that season of Dallas where the whole thing was a dream.

AJR: Yeah.

E: Remember that?

S: Or the last season of Lost.

E: Oh, God. Spoiler alert.

AJR: I still haven't even finished Lost, and now I really- I mean, I had 20 years to do it, but-

G: Don't bother.

B: It's still a wonderful series.

AJR: I've seen all but the last two episodes, and people were so upset that I just can't bring myself to watch them, but I feel like I get it.

S: All right. Let's go on with Science or Fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:45:36)

Theme: Jargon Item #1: Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules. Item #2: Pseudorevertant hyphal morphogenesis – the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior. Item #3: Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.
Science	Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.
Science	Pseudorevertant hyphal morphogenesis – the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior.

Host	Result
Jay	win

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.
Cara	Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.
SPEAKER_06	Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.
Evan	Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.
Bob	Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. I kind of teased the theme a little bit earlier in the show. I've done this theme before. It's a favorite of mine. The theme is jargon.

AJR: Yay!

S: I'm going to give you three bits of scientific jargon and their definition, but of course one of them isn't real.

AJR: So good.

S: Okay?

E: Oh, this is where Steve gets to play pseudoscientist.

S: Here we go. Item number one, solatonic superfluorescence, localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high-temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules. Item number two, pseudo-reverent hyphal morphogenesis. Don't you love it? The ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation replicates the wild-type behavior. Item number three, indurated leucocratic amphibolite, a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Don't worry.

AJR: Whichever one is the fiction, the fact that you thought of it is incredible because all three of these words are wild.

S: So there we go. I got to give it to you in writing.

G: Yeah, thank you. We've been playing this. I've been playing this for, what, 12 years, 10 years, whatever. I always take little notes and I can always sort of basically encapsulate what each one is, and my page is blank. So thank you for providing the link there. Thank you. Holy Christmas. Really?

S: Okay. Two of these are real. Keep that in mind.

G: Yeah.

S: All right, Andrea, why don't you go first?

AJR: I was afraid you'd say that. All right. So the only one that I felt like I had a fighting chance at familiarity with was the one about the fungal strains undergoing branching growth. And the main reason that meant anything to me is because I've been watching The Last of Us and I've seen a lot of CGI of fungal strains growing. And that made me think, well, that one must be real. And then I thought, well, that is a fiction show that I'm watching based on a video game, so maybe it's false. But I'm going to stick with my initial instinct and say that the fungal strains, which is the pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis, I'm going to say that's true. That's the science. And I'm also going to say that the hydrated calcific minerals is the science because minerals feel sciency to me. And so I'm going to go with the solitonic superfluorescence as the fiction, largely because superfluorescence sounds like a word I would have made up in like sixth grade if I was trying to like BS my way through a test I didn't study for. So the localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems, I think is the fiction.

S: Okay, George.

G: I'm going to agree with Andrea's reasoning here. The solitonic felt a little hat on a hat. It felt a little hat on a hat. So item one, solitonic superfluorescence, localizing self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems, this bursts of light thing. Yeah, I'm going to agree with you. I think that is indeed the fiction.

S: Okay, Evan.

E: Does no one have a problem with pseudo-revert?

S: Pseudo-revert.

E: Pseudo-revert. I mean, I'm trying to think of where else I'm seeing the prefix pseudo in this part of terminology. Pseudo, what else would there be? Pseudo, right? So I don't know about this one. It seems like that one sounds the most made up to me. It doesn't mean it is, but I just don't know where pseudo-prefix has come up before when talking about these weird kinds of terms. Whereas everything else, superfluorescence, that's not so crazy. What's the last one here? Indurated? Indurated? Lusocratic?

S: Lusocratic.

E: Lusocratic.

S: Amphibolite.

E: Amphibolite. Gee whiz. I'm going to let Bob go and then they'll come back to me. Steve. Oh wait, no, that's not how this game works. Well, I'll tell you what. We have two very special guests this week. You guys are awesome. I've been so happy to be working with you all these years on these various projects. And out of total respect for the both of you, I will join you in saying the solitonic one is the fiction.

G: Can I change my answer?

S: Okay, Bob.

B: Okay.

G: No pressure, Bob. No pressure. No pressure, Bob.

AJR: Yeah, you're either in the in-group or the out-group, Bob.

B: Oh, I'm totally out-group.

E: Oh, no.

AJR: I am moralistically opposed to you.

B: I don't know what these are. I do know some of these words.

E: No one knows what they are, Bob.

B: Right. So I'm just throwing that out there. So this first one, solitonic superfluorescence, I'm familiar with those words and they seem, stress underlined and in bold, they seem to be related to the definition. So to me, this one, the solitonic superfluorescence, seems most genuine to me. So I'm going to say that one is science. Pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis to a lesser degree seems to coincide with the definition, at least some of the words, especially, I don't know what hyphol is in this context, but pseudo-reverent morphogenesis kind of flows with the definition as it's stated here. It seems to go together in my mind. Now these are like correlations. I just can't give anything definite, but it seems to make sense. The third one is the one that makes me say, what? Indurated, leucocratic, amphibolite. I just don't know any of those words. So I can't connect those wacky words. I can't connect that jargon with what follows in terms of the description. I can't make a connection. It may be very nicely connected, but I can't connect it because I can't get anything from those words. So this is probably, maybe it's the wrong approach. So I'll say for that reason, since the first two seem to flow for me, I'm going to say the third one is fiction.

S: Okay. So you all agree on the second one. So we'll start there. Pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis, the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild type behavior. You guys all think that is science-y jargon, and that one is science. So you're all safe so far. So pseudo-reverent, if there is a mutation, so the wild type is what it sounds, that's the strain of a whatever, bacteria, plant, whatever, that exists in the wild. If there's a mutation, that could change the form of that thing. But you could also then have a back mutation, right? You want to go another mutation which reverts it to the wild type, a reverent mutation. But you can have a pseudo-reverent mutation which is different than the original mutation, but it replicates the original phenotype. So it looks like the wild type even though the second mutation was in a different place and sometimes even in a different gene. So that's what pseudo-reverent, it's a genetics term, right? Hyphal just means branching. Hyphae, that's the branching growth, right? And morphogenesis, just changing form. So I got this from a paper which was just published. Here it's camp-independent signal pathways simulate hyphal morphogenesis in candida albicans. Albicans, candida is a fungus. So yeah, they found a pseudo-reverent mutation in the candida albicans that stimulates hyphal morphogenesis similar to the wild type. So yeah, so that one is science. Pseudo-reverent hyphal morphogenesis. All right, let's go on to number three. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. Indurated leucocratic amphibolite, a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Now, Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Mainly it sounds because this is geology and you're not familiar with geological terms.

B: I'm sure, I'm sure.

E: George is.

S: George is a geologist.

E: George has an advantage.

AJR: 900 plus episodes.

E: Right, no doubt.

S: Now, these are all legitimate geological terms. Indurated, what does indurated mean? As in generic, just as a term. Indurated is not specific to geology. In fact, that's a medical term that we use as well. Cemented, hardened, just means hardened. Like any mineral that gets hardened or cemented is indurated. Leucocratic, now leuco means what?

AJR: Letting light through?

S: Light-colored, right? So it's a hardened, light-colored amphibolite. Amphibolite is a class of minerals.

E: No way.

S: And what does amphi mean? Amphibious?

AJR: Both. Yeah. Yeah, like double or two-sided.

S: Or specifically, what's an amphibian?

AJR/B: Water and air.

S: Right, right, right. So this one is the fiction. Congratulations.

B: I knew it sounded off.

S: I just took three geological terms, crashed them together and made up a fake definition for it.

AJR: So you're telling superfluorescence is real?

B: Sure. Yeah, that's a real word. I've seen that one.

S: Yeah, yeah. I figured that's why Bob would like it.

B: And solitons too, yes. All right.

S: Well. So the big thing is that amphibolites or amphibole, they are silicate minerals, not calcific. They have nothing to do with underwater volcanic eruptions or whatever. And I just combined that with indurated and leucocratic. I just looked up more geological terms to make it sound sciencey jargony.

B: I'm sure coming up with the definition was a lot harder.

S: Yeah, it had to sound realistic but be definitely wrong. Yeah.

B: Right.

S: Now, solitonic superfluorescence, as Bob said, this is real. This comes from a paper. Unconventional solitonic high temperature superfluorescence from perovskites. Perovskites is a type of crystal. It's currently the best candidate to replace or to be combined with silicon for solar panels. And for a lot of electronics as well. But in any case, yeah, the solitonic is these localized self-sustaining waves in a nonlinear systems. Now, fluorescence, you know, that's when you – fluorescence is when you have molecules that, when excited, emit light, right? They glow. Right. They fluoresce. Usually doesn't happen at high temperatures because high temperature causes – basically breaks the coherence. But if it's in a solitonic system, you can have high temperature coherence which creates these large groups of excited molecules that all burst together causing superfluorescence.

B: Superfluorescence. Yeah. Cool.

S: So that one is real.

AJR: Wow.

S: That was tricky.

B: Yeah. For once, go in my gut. It was actually helpful.

G: Way to go, Bob.

S: Yeah, you sniffed it out.

E: You sniffed it out, Bob.

AJR: Evan, we appreciate your loyalty but it was guided.

E: Well, I mean had I gone with what I wanted to, I would have also been wrong.

S: You would have gone with two, yeah.

AJR: We might as well be wrong together.

E: Yes. Yes.

S: But I – real science jargon is like poetry because I –

B: It is.

S: I really love the –

B: I love it.

E: And people hate poetry.

S: It's precise. It's unambiguous.

E: There's no money in poetry.

B: Right.

S: It's efficient. It's just lovely. If you understand the words, you understand the concepts. You know what I mean?

AJR: It's really nice to hear you say that, Steve, because so much of the science communication advice is to avoid jargon. I think as long as you're defining the terms and you're using it on purpose, not just to juggle things up.

S: I like to lean into it. Lean into the jargon.

AJR: Yeah, exactly.

B: For high-level communication between colleagues, that's the way it's got to be.

S: Even to the general public, just define.

AJR: Yeah, I agree.

S: Why do we have this term?

AJR: Right.

S: Because it refers specifically to a concept. The concept is what you're teaching and the words go with the concept. I feel like if you avoid jargon rather than explaining it, the idea becomes simplistic and imprecise sometimes.

B: From our point of view, though, for science communication, and I encounter this for almost every news item I cover, it's like, how much jargon do I throw in there and where is the point?

E: Where's the threshold?

B: People are going to just get glazed over and it's going to be counterproductive to my goal.

S: You don't want gratuitous jargon. I agree.

AJR: Right.

S: Don't want gratuitous jargon.

B: That's all I'm saying.

S: But selectively, including it and explaining it when it's conceptually helpful when done properly I think is good science communication.

B: No, I don't disagree with that at all.

S: I also would avoid it just to avoid it. You know what I mean?

AJR: Right.

B: Like everything else, it's a balance. I'm not going to throw five of these into one 10-minute news item. I'll throw a couple and try to focus on one or two but not go too crazy with it. Otherwise, you're going to lose people.

AJR: And it's sort of the ones that carry the most weight. If we're talking about the basal ganglia and something that it does, using the word basal ganglia is much more important. It's much more useful than the other part of the brain or whatever because it's such a key part of what the finding was. Yeah, I mean, jargon just to use it. If you can use a synonym and not lose any of the meaning, sure. Or talk about, oh, I did an analysis instead of talking about the specifics of the factor and factor analysis, the blah, blah, blah, because that's not really the point that we're making. But if it's like a piece of like affective polarization is a concept that means a lot and understanding that word means you can understand a ton more research that's also about that thing.

G: I think I need to write like a schoolhouse rock for these terms.

B: Oh, my God. That's it. You got to.

G: Just like all different branches and stuff.

AJR: You did miss an opportunity to have a little skeptics guide spelling bee where you made us spell these terms.

S: Or pronounce them.

G: Next NOTACON. Next NOTACON will do that.

AJR: I would love a spelling. I've wanted to do a spelling bee for a long time. Right? It's a good idea.

E: Well, that's interesting.

G: Wow. For everybody.

B: I'm there.

S: Unnecessary jargon drives me crazy. It's not more precise. It's just dense.

E: The confabulary.

S: You're inhibiting understanding. That drives me crazy.

G: It's very somatopatalupatous.

AJR: And not even just. Yeah. Like not even just jargon though. But it's just sort of like. It's the thing that we all did in 12th grade to make our three page paper a five page paper. Which is you just find words with more syllables.

G: Very, very, very important.

E: And now we have ChatGPT for that.

AJR: Exactly. Yeah.

E: Which is wonderful.

G: Oh man. When I learned. I could. We had Macs. We had the very first Macs. We had a Mac lab in my high school. The very first Macintoshes in New Jersey. In a school. And when I learned you could change the font size. Oh my God. And a page paper turns to a 10. It's like you go from like the 10 to 10.2 or 10.5. Whole extra page. Phenomenal.

B: Awesome.

G: Awful, awful, awful. Awful.

S: All right, Evan give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (2:02:29)

"The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and avoid being wrong, and biased, and prejudiced, and clueless; those are the people we need, and need to be."  – Matt Dillahunty, (description of author)

E: "The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and avoid being wrong and biased and prejudice and clueless; those are the people we need and need to be." Matt Dillahunty.

S: Very nice.

G: Matt.

S: You know Matt, he was on the show before.

E: Yes, yeah, Matt's been on the show.

AJR: That's a great quote.

S: Yeah, that's a good encapsulation of skeptical philosophy. Basically, it's a way of life. It's a way of trying to go through life. It's thinking about your own thinking.

E: Yeah, and we all fall short at times. We have to constantly practice this and remind ourselves all the time.

AJR: And prefer seeking truth over being right.

B: Yeah, don't become too investigated in your belief or your truth, wherever the evidence lies.

AJR: Luckily all the evidence lies with what I think, so that hasn't been a problem for me.

E: Yes, you're in perfect harmony.

AJR: That's right.

B: Nice when that happens.

S: Well, George and Andrea, it's been wonderful having you on the show.

E: You guys are awesome, always.

G: I appreciate it.

B: You guys are awesome.

AJR: Always fun to hang out with you guys.

S: I can't wait for our next NOTACON or whatever the next thing is that we do together. Hopefully something before then.

G: Yes.

AJR: Yes. Agreed.

S: And thank everyone for being on the show this week.

E: Thanks, Steve.

B: Sure, man.

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

[top]