 I love the science and cooking course and in fact I'm a student in their course when I find the time to actually do the labs and homework and so on but Pia provided one example of the macaroni and cheese to demonstrate viscosity. Another really nice one is the molten chocolate cake example. Now with molten chocolate cake the center of the cake needs to be oozy so when you cut into it it just kind of the the middle is raw and the outside is cooked which is amazing that really great dessert but in order to get that effect you need to bake it exactly the right temperature and so what they do as one of the homework assignments is you create a single batch of batter for the cakes and you cook it at different temperatures and at different times and so you can see exactly the right temperature to be able to cook the cake to get that oozing center but what they're doing in their course is similar to what we're doing in ours we're trying to get people to apply the scientific method experimentation not just in the kitchen but everywhere in their lives and so a few of the examples that we have from science that we can apply to cooking is exactly as they are experimentation so if you have a recipe so if you have this cookie recipe for example to create the best shortbread and and you tweak a whole bunch of things at the same time so you just the recipe the amount of time that you whip the thing butter sugar or something and you get this amazing cookie in the end you won't know which of those things actually did it or which of those things were actually effective and you know if you're trying to figure out which of these things work like that you have to do it Michael and Pia did in their course you have to systematically formally adjust one thing temperature and see what happens as a result of doing that one thing so manipulating one variable variable at a time is really important another is careful notes and so we learned in episode 2 that memory doesn't work like a videotape and we're often really we misestimate how how well we're going to remember something when we learn it for the first time and so if you just jot down in in the recipe in the margins of the recipe that something is two tablespoons for example if you're not very specific that it's two tablespoons of vanilla say then you're not going to remember it a month down the road and so it's very important to be very specific about what you've done throughout another is telling other people about it once you create this amazing cookie and you've figured out what it was that you needed a tweak to get it there tell other people so don't just follow these recipes blindly and just pass them down from generation to generation or just keep them within your family tell other people because people don't do this very often people don't manipulate recipes to see what it is that's effective they just kind of blindly follow what other people have done before them yeah there's a great example of this is a great story of this a daughter and a mother in the kitchen and they're cooking a roast you know it's all prepared and ready to go and then the mother says oh make sure you cut off the ends of the roast before you put it on the baking tray and into the oven and the daughter says oh why do you do that the mother's like I think it it helps release the juices which improves the flavor and you know the daughter is not quite convinced and she says well come on what why why do you do that mother says this is the way I've always done it this is the way my mother your grandmother taught me and so the daughter gets on the phone to grandma and says look we're making a roast and I'm wondering why you have to cut the ends off the roast before you put it on the baking tray and into the oven and then grandma's like and then it dawns on her dear dear the reason I cut off the ends of the roast is because it was too big for my baking tray so this is just it's a simple story simple example but it gets at that idea of finding things out for yourself first hand you could of course you could blindly follow what people say and the authority of others you could be slaves to authority or alternatively you could you can go out and find out for yourself that's really important to find things out first hand there are a whole bunch of other sorts of cooking myths that propagate exactly like that I talked about searing meat before people have the idea that you need to cook a steak really cook it at a high temperature and only flip it once for example to get the outside nice and caramelized in the inside raw it captures the juices in more which is completely there's there's no evidence for that whatsoever in fact it's the opposite which is another one is cooking off the alcohol so if you add some wine to a bolognese or something the alcohol will burn off or something or that if you cook food in the microwave it gets rid of the nutrients or if you're cooking muscles and they don't open up after you've cooked them you have to throw those away I mean I've seen professional chefs actually propagate these myths but I don't think it's enough to say that people are silly or people are slaves to authority or that they're gullible or they'll believe anything because we've seen that that doesn't quite work so what we're trying to do is is is find out why we make these mistakes why do we rely on these these these beliefs and these myths and these mistakes and then how we can avoid them and do better that's right and this idea this is kind of a point we've returned that we're returning to now I think it was an episode to we're incredible pattern recognition machines so we provided a bunch of examples where we see structure we see signal we see things that aren't actually necessarily there if you if you look at a pattern of noise you see faces in the in the noise or in oak you know so you see the word paneling and you can kind of see faces looking at we do this all of the time and most of the time it's normally fine I mean it it's it's because we do that because we're so good at that at seeing faces that aren't actually there that we are so impressive in other domains for example I mean we've talked about the availability heuristic and we rely on the ease of processing to give us some indication about the size of a category with representativeness we rely on similarity and familiarity to be able to pigeonhole people in particular ways and most of the time it's fine most of the time that serves us extremely well but sometimes you know it's not great sometimes we do make mistakes as a result at least we need to figure out where those happen and why they happen exactly as you said yeah so this this idea of of seeing patterns and noise of being of misinterpreting random events is something that came up in my conversation with Tom Gillovich so why do we believe these strange things in the absence of data or evidence to the country yeah well there's a whole bunch of reasons there's not a single answer to this if there was a single answer to it we could easily teach that to people in school and then it would be gone but a whole bunch of things conspire to it one of them and most of them are sort of a side effect of this impressive intellectual machinery that we have in our heads part of its job is to identify patterns out there it's hard to get that job accomplished perfectly so people look out there for patterns and they're often going to see things that really aren't there if you go on the internet and type in you know illusions you'll see all sorts of them people spotting faces and clouds or faces in a cinnamon bun or what have you if you take for example grab a bag of M&M's port and a jar and you look at it and they're the different colors are randomly arranged they don't look random it just like oh there's a bunch of blue ones over there and a bunch of green ones over there we sort of see order where there isn't any so we can see things happening in three we organize things into certain clusters that are really the kind of clusters that you'd see by chance take for example the pretty common belief that things happen in threes you know natural disaster so if two of them have happened in close proximity people will sometimes tell you oh my god one of what the third one is going to be or homicides or a fatality on the part fatalities on the part of famous people if you look at all of those things they don't tend to cluster in threes at all and so why do people believe those kinds of things there's a belief in the sports world and something called the sports illustrated jinx you get your picture on the cover of sports illustrated oh that's a terrible thing your whatever success got you there is unlike is unlikely to continue that's a that's been shown to be false as well another belief in the so-called sophomore jinx you've been exceptional as a first-year performer or rookie and the thought is that if you've done really well your first year you're jinxing yourself or more common kinds of things you're at a grocery store you're the line you're in is really bogged down going nowhere there's someone in front of you with a million coupons sifting through them or can't get their change organized and the line right next to you is zipping through and you're tempted to go to that line why stay in a slow one when there's a faster line over there and many of us often think up wait a minute I know that if I do that that line is going to slow down and this one's going to speed up I don't know what principle of the universe would create that is a really nice demonstration of what we do as scientists so if you're looking at this one observation this little chunk of the world you can see whether it whether it's sufficiently weird whether it's sufficiently lumpy or fishy to be able to say that something systematic is happening something non-random is going on and so next we're going to talk about the role of chance and randomness and how we perceive