 Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are here to talk about all the science, well not all of it, but the things that we wanna talk about this week related to science. And we're so glad that you're here to join us. This is the couple of seconds before the show where I remind you that this is the live streamed version of the show. There's no editing. It's just gonna happen as it happens. And now is the time to click the likes and the thumbs up buttons and to share and tell everyone that we're live, because that's very important. Tell everyone, because then if we tell enough people and there's enough people supporting the show, we could talk about all of the science. We would have then the time and resources to do that. I think it would, all of the science would take all of the time. We could talk about all of it. There's so many variables involved here. But yes, share, please. This is not edited, this is live. And we appreciate you being here with us right now. Are we ready to start the show? G-E-O-S-T-O-N? Let's do it, yeah. Let's do this thing we call a show. Oh, I have a thing here. I'll put it up there. And okay, we're gonna start the show in three, two, this is twist. This week in science, episode number 949 recorded on Wednesday, October 25th. Do roosters even know themselves? I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with faces, pigeons, and pigs. But first. Duh, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We are about a week away from the Celtic Festival of Samhain, a celebration welcoming the harvest at the end of summer. Usually held around November 1st, marking the transition from summer to winter. Fall had apparently yet to be invented. During Samhain, or however you pronounce it, and other people either gonna say, that's not how you say it, but that's how I say it. People dressed in costumes and lit bonfires to ward off ghosts. They believed, or participated in a tradition, that the souls of the dead returned to their homes on that day. We know it today as Halloween, or all hollows eve, in part thanks to Christianity, which created all saints day. And a long tradition of borrowing from pagan traditions in order to create new ones. A rebranding that may have been helpful when locals under church rule still followed old traditions. While the air this time of year is just right for the most superstitious of holidays, you need not be superstitious to believe in ghosts. We are often visited by ghosts from the past here on the show. Scientists who test their ideas against the universe long after they have passed. Creatures of enormous size, leaving footprints in our imaginations, entire branches of humanity that once walked the earth and ties us with their stories. And tonight, a girl, long dead, will show her face for the first time in centuries. Here at TWIS, we would like to wish you all a happy TWIS-o-ween in the coming week. And hope that any ghosts visiting your home don't stay longer than another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want them every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want science to be. Hail to Justin and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. It's not yet Halloween. It's not yet Samhain. But, you know, things are scary out there. So eat candy. Be happy. Find things to celebrate, like pumpkins. Yeah, whatever. Whatever fills your gourd. Yeah, I don't think I've carved a pumpkin. But it must have been at least a year now. Good thing Halloween came around and it reminded us of those fun things that we should be doing all throughout the year. You can carve a pumpkin whenever you want, but this is the official time to do this. And it is now the official time for us to be talking about the science news, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, so we have a great show ahead full of all sorts of stories. I have stories about language lessons, pig priorities, rooster recognition, lago leveling up, and lots of brains. Well, I always have brains, but anyway. What do you have, Justin? I've got the face of an ancient mummy. The fuzzy banging of blueberries, spooky policing, and an old trope dies once again. Go! Do we like tropes dying? Is that what we like? Yeah, sometimes they're overdue. This is the one that used to go, that men hunt women gather, and now it's been updated again on the show. I feel like we've done this a few times. But this is another look at men hunt and gather while women hunt and gather. Every able-bodied person is going to help us all survive. So let's talk about it. It comes to be winter, and women are just like, we're done working. Yeah, there's not a lot of gathering to do right here at this time of year. We're just going to chill out. Cook a soup over the fire. Whatever. As we jump into the show here tonight, we would like to remind all of you that there are consequences. No, there's no consequences. It got my attention. Yeah! Subscribe to This Week in Science if you're not already subscribed on our YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook channels where we stream live every Wednesday night around 8 p.m. Pacific time. We're on a lot of podcast platforms out there. Make sure you're telling your friends about it. And if you just look for This Week in Science or visit twist.org, our website. You'll be able to find all the show notes and other ways to, you know, find us, subscribe to us, etc. But now is time for this science. Yes? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. All right. So I am going to start us out with a story from one of my favorite astrophysics experiments out there. LIGO. The Laser Inferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. And there's, there's a couple of them, right? Yes. There are a couple here in the United States at different locations. There's another detector in Europe called Virgo. So it's the LIGO Virgo group. And then there's an additional observatory that is elsewhere. So all of these laser interferometers, they have lasers that are in tubes. And the lasers. Giant tube with lasers. Yeah. The laser is supposed to go straight. And the laser goes straight and it bounces against a mirror. And that's, they know, okay. They've been able to get rid of a lot of the Newtonian noise around these lasers. So the rumbling of trucks, right? So if there's something, because you have multiple observatories in different places around the planet, they can look at all the data and go, okay, that was just a truck. That's just local noise. They can get rid of those, that noise. But it allows them to triangulate what they're doing. These detectors are ridiculous in their resolution. They, gravitational waves come through. And if you can imagine them passing through Earth, they, like a wave with water, it kind of stretches and squeezes space time as it comes through. And so everything in its path is like stretched and squeezed. And these observatories are looking at this stretching and squeezing on a scale 10,000 trillion times smaller than a human hair. Tiny, tiny, tiny measurements. And what they have been limited by so far is quantum physics. They are really good so far at the Newtonian scale of things. But they were like, all right, there's a lot of noise at the quantum level. We can't get rid of it. And if we could get rid of it, maybe, just maybe, we could have even finer detection, higher frequencies, or of different amplitude waves. Maybe we could sense very sensitive measurement beyond what they've already done. So instead of a three-mile-long tube of lasers, they've got a microchip on a quantum computer that's going to do everything. Nope, it's still the mile-long or whatever tube of lasers. We're still in the tube of lasers. But now it's just getting weird. Seriously, if Feynman were here right now, he would say, if anyone tries to explain this to you, they don't really know what they're talking about because they don't really know what they're talking about. They're taking the quantum limit of what we know of as spacetime, where at that plonk scale in vacuum space, so we've got a laser in a vacuum space, there's still particles that are popping into and out of existence. And that's making noise. And that noise is bumping the laser because those quantum particles are like little popcorns that are in the laser. And it's noisy. And it changes the way that the laser can record the gravitational waves. So now they are treating these quantum particles that are popping into and out of existence like balloon animals. They are squeezing them. It is a quantum technology. They're reporting it in Physical Review X. It's advanced in what they're doing. And seriously, this technology is called squeezing, in which they are able to use the general relativity. So they squeeze the particles, so they're able to either make the laser beam more accurate in terms of frequency or make it more accurate in terms of the power, the amplitude that it has. They can't do both at the same time. When they squeeze it, when they squeeze these particles, the squeezing of the particles makes these lower-energy particles that bump the laser and impact the way the laser, the laser's frequency is moving. And so when they do that and try and make a more accurate frequency, it actually makes a noisier, louder, rumbly laser signal because they can't take advantage or fix the amplitude. So it gets rumbly. But then when they squeeze it in terms of the amplitude, they're able to get a very, very nice signal, and so we get lower, smaller signals but with higher amplitude. So it makes more fine-tune now some of these signals from gravitational waves, gravitational waves that maybe have been further in the past, that maybe were even smaller. It's a very interesting way that they are moving through this technology to be able to squeeze photons to create higher sensitivity so that they can sense more collisions, collisions from further in the past to be able to actually understand a bit more about when and where things were forming and smashing into each other throughout the history of our universe. Can you help me feel like there's also an experiment that's being missed? Okay, we're detecting this quantum noise in the background. This noise tuned out however we can. These silly particle things that are popping in and out like you're saying and not of existence or what have you. You can't control that. But what if that is actually an interesting thing to look at and observe and record? We're trying to tune out. What might actually be an interesting experiment to actually see what's going on? What's all this popping in and out all about? What if we could actually just monitor that and find out what's going on there? That's not really an explained thing. No, right? The particle distance and particles popping into another existence. This quantum realm of the Heisenberg principle and it's complicated and it's fascinating and it's amazing that researchers have been able to squeeze light in such a way that they... You've got an interesting ad up there. Oh, great! Wonderful advertisements for other videos at the end of that one that I was showing. That was a video from Caltech that I just was sharing with everyone. The researchers though are saying at some point if you do more squeezing you're not going to gain much. We need to prepare for what was to come next in our ability to detect gravitational waves. Yeah, so they're reducing noise across the frequency range but it has to be very specific. So they can either reduce the noise in the frequency or in the amplitude but they can't do both at the same time because of the quantum wave particle reality of light and particles. Anyway, one of the researchers, a team member, Rana Adekari, a professor at Caltech says, we've known now for a while how to write down the equations to make this work but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction. And it kind of have to agree. I think we're stepping into a place that's very advanced and the minute level of precision that they are achieving is pretty amazing. Going from Newtonian physics getting rid of the rumble of trucks to the quantum realm. Quantum light creates a problem but it also gives us... You brought up trucks a few times. I think one of the first gravity waves that LEGO detected turned out to be truck traffic. There was a certain time when the trucks were rumbling by and that's when they would say, every morning around five in the morning we get this gravity wave. It's also when the trucks leave the nearby factory. Oh, what a coincidence. I love one of the history of this whole idea of squeezing light. It got kicked off experimental demonstrations in 1986 by researchers at Caltech and this H. Jeff Kimball compared squeezed light to a cucumber. The certainty of the light measurements are pushed into only one direction or feature turning quantum cabbages into quantum cucumbers. Yeah. Can we just have physicists stop making analogies and metaphors? Yeah, no, we just need good ones and so if you're not an expert making analogies then someone should be able to stop you. I'm sorry. It's like my complaint about all the administrators at NASA. You don't, if you aren't Carl Sagan or a poet of some sort, stop, you don't sound like you want to. You're not conveying... Or Feynman who answers the question well, no, I'm not going to tell you because I'd have to tell you everything and that's going to take a really long time. So instead I'm going to talk about rubber bands. I'm going to talk about, I've got a rubber band and I'm just going to manipulate this with the camera a little bit and that's going to be your explanation. That's what you're going to have to live with which is fine, but it's like it's kind of like if you had a cabbage and it became a cucumber, stop. Now you've gone too far. Or if I took a balloon and I decided that I wanted to turn it into a balloon dog, suddenly I hate knowing. So LIGO is working on this squeezing technology it hopefully will be applied to Virgo very soon and then the two of them will be doing runs through the end of 2024 that will potentially bring us even more neutron star destruction and black hole collisions and all sorts of interesting stuff. So we'll keep waiting for all that news. But in the meantime, yeah, quantum balloon animals. Well the exciting thing is first of all that it's now detecting anything this is the longest time it just wasn't and then Michael started detecting stuff like right away. Yeah, but we weren't like we know it was gravity waves like we have no idea what they were really detecting or if it was noise and the thing but it's sort of like the guys who discovered the background radiation of the universe microwave background radiation kept trying to clean their their observatory kept thinking it was like pigeon poop building up in there or something it was just noise and then somebody made a call they called somebody I was like hey what do you think this is like well there is a team looking for a signal in that frequency in space that's been theorized did you just find it? Yeah, let's go Jack. Yeah, it looks like it. We thought it was pigeon poop in there. Can't clean the universe. But it's kind of like I'd be really excited if we get to the point where LIGO is through like you say all these collisions and things in the universe being able to create sort of a map like an echolocation of gravity events throughout the universe it'd be really interesting to see how this develops and see what pictures that we can get of things that may not be visible. Right, so this plus J-wist plus Hubble like so looking at it looking at there's Gaia, there's all these maps that are taking like different efforts to look at our universe put them all together and what are we going to see? Yeah. And because part of the tricky part is where we look is limited. Where we look out into our just our galaxy is very limited in the little pinpoints where we decide to point a telescope and just way, way, way, way, way in but the gravity waves I would assume don't care which way we're looking, they're just waving through left and right up in that whatever however whichever you want to call the direction and so that's I think the best possibility of getting a little bit more of a 3D map of all of the galaxy around us. Absolutely. And then looking outside of our galaxy I don't think that I don't know if gravity waves are propagating in each space. Outside, no, not outside outside the galaxy. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The gravitational waves, these are definitely out from all over the place. So we can catch another galaxy's gravity wave this far away? I don't know, I don't know how long you can catch a wave in each space. I don't know, are you a quantum surfer, man? So we look out and then we also look inward and we look back in time. So tell me your story Justin. This is a this is my story. Teenage Inca girl died more than 500 years ago near the summit of Ampado volcano in Peru an elevation of nearly 4 miles big mountain big volcano in elevation nearly 4 miles the cold climate preserved her remains well enough to be discovered in 1995 with her internal organs hair, blood, skin contents of her stomach all frozen. So it's like Otzi or the Iceman Yeah, very much so very much so, not as old not as old as Otzi, he's oh gosh, 5000, 6000 years old something like that, she's only 500 but yeah, great Icemummy if you will. So this Icemummy are known as the Inca Icemaiden or sometimes the Lady of Ampado or simply Juanita because of course she should be given a Spanish name seeing as how the Spanish destroyed civilization she was born into but some many years after she died so they hadn't actually arrived but how better to preserve her memory to give her a name based on a civilization she had never encountered who also one better way to the Victor go the spoils one better way to to maybe honor her maybe facial reconstruction to perhaps put a face to the forensic features produced was a team of Polish and Peruvian scientists worked with a Swedish sculptor specializing in facial reconstructions Nielsen Swedish archaeologist and sculptor specializes in 3D facial reconstruction of ancient humans spent about 400 hours modeling the space and they used of course the skull and body scans they went deeper they've used DNA trait studies some nilogical characteristics they took into account age this ice maiden is thought to be 1314 15 year old range somewhere in there young very young the reconstruction of is of particular interest to me because this Incan girl and I have something in common we share the same mother what how is that possible you might wonder how is it possible to have the same mother is a 500 year old Incan girl and the answer of course is time travel Justin that's how that works the other one is genetics we both have the A2 maternal haplogroup that is only passed down from mothers to their children interesting she's an A2 haplogroup maternal haplogroup so am I which means somewhere in the traveling backwards in time through the unbroken line of mothers one of those mothers that we have in common share one of those we have a mother who is the same mother fascinating isn't that fun how far back though so I have I have tried to do the family tree genealogy thing I haven't gotten back even 500 years and this is probably 20,000 plus years of Justin maybe much longer than that this is South America so it's maybe more in the 30,000 plus range A2 is better I don't know but my genealogy skills are not good enough however the genetic genealogy is there and that says mothers all the way back unbroken chain me and this girl fascinating at some point back in time but still this is unbroken mother to daughter mother to daughter mother it ends at me I mean I have it but I can't pass it on I can't pass it on to you so it ends at just the male and this is mitochondrial DNA yes yeah so anyway they did a reconstruction and for the listening audience the podcast listening audience we're going to look at a picture the Incan isomating facial reconstruction and do one more see that are you turning your face now Justin is attempting to share his profile I think they did a pretty good job on the nose I think I think that's been well definitely can see that well preserved it's beautiful the reconstruction she was beautiful she had to put all of these traits together the ideas of the genetics and what traits that would give her and the bones the skull everything to produce this kind of a sculpting is really amazing I think it's incredible to you know we do have statues from ancient Rome ancient Greece we have paintings we have other art but whenever we can put a face on it hits so much more strongly our nervous system is wired for faces suddenly it's a person it's not a skull this was a young human being who was sacrificed in a ritual for whatever reason hopefully the rains came after someone is asking somebody is asking is it wax I understand it's silicon and some other constructs so it's I think it's designed more like a Hollywood prop than a Madame Trusso's wax museum kind of thing she has beautiful olive skin dark brown eyes they've given the she has given her an expression of looking out into the world yeah I don't know it's funny it's supposed to be a sort of pensive look or something it kind of looks to me like like if somebody said so are you excited about getting sacrificed to the rain gods and she's like yeah that's great great culturally it may have been an honor for her at that point in time yeah and she's dressed like nobility she's wearing she's got like a silver clasp on really fancy clothes and just fine textiles and there's little figures of gold and silver but it might just be for that day you know for that moment but it doesn't matter that was that was an important cultural moment there were witches but yeah but I don't know the stowed upon the people who were sacrificed yes yeah but you know and first of all it's even if that is what happened you know I part of my part of I have two trains at that one is like I don't think anybody really really volunteers for these sorts of things everybody around you saying it's a great idea doesn't mean that you think so the other thing is because you're not part of that culture you have no idea what it was like to be part of that culture I have no idea and it could have been a great great honor that was very exciting you have no idea but I also have a really strong resistance to the interpretation of sacrifice human sacrifice in South America because of where it all that information filtered through how it historically was filtered we don't well it was how historically initially a lot of it was nonsense and built up by conquistadors trying to justify their brutal tactics in the Americas two people back home who were starting to hear reports and going what are you doing to these people but we have to because they're not civilized when in fact they were very civilized and that justification has been going on through a filter of trope and everything else whereas sometimes graveyards of people of all different ages and what have you have been interpreted as mass sacrifice because they found a lot of dead people buried and so they were mass sacrificed when in fact when the actual forensic research comes in these people all died at different times at different ages this looks like a cemetery this is what you would expect but with the filter that's on now I'm not saying there wasn't human sacrifice that took place apparently there was a lot but I don't know if I believe it because the sources of a lot of this information filtered through time and well I won't get into the other reason but there still seems to be some level of desire to justify the actions of the past in a lot of this as well as biases of past research but anyway fun to see my distant cousin sister mother friend portrayed this way I think it's very exciting it's always fun when we can start putting these pieces together to put these two historical figures and actually bring it into a realm of understanding that our brains can handle moving forward in stories let's talk about AI and how it's teaching us about language a bit artificial intelligence yes I know this is machine learning and these two studies that I've been looking at this week are working with neural nets and neural networks of neuronal like artificial constructs so they're fake brains they're computer brains but not brains but they're set up in a way that is meant to be learning and acting like the way that a brain's a network of neurons does and in in this work these researchers there's a couple of different studies so one a group of researchers was looking at neural networks and how they learned they compared and this is published October 25th in Nature these researchers were creating an artificial intelligence system that was based in neural network type paradigm and it learned language better than chat GPT so in the end they created a system that was able to train on words and concepts and learn in the way that people's brains would learn so they tested people in the first study on fake words there were nonsense words but they gave them meaning so they called them primitive words DAX WHIFF LUG it's like learning another language these words represented concepts like skipping or jumping and then they had function words BLICKET KIKI and FEP now I want to know why KIKI is always used in these studies but anyway and then they had various rules for combining the functions with the primitives and they could have sequences like DAX KIKI KIKI KIKI or WHIFF FEP which would be like jump three times backwards or whatever they trained the people also with the words related to colors and so a red circle was DAX, blue was LUG and the people got a combination of these primitive words and function words and with patterns of circles and so people would be shown something like DAX FEP and it had three red circles or LUG FEP with three blue circles and so it indicated how they were supposed to interpret what was going on and so there wasn't any actual training of like this is what this means, the participants had to figure out what this stuff meant and so it was really testing it just says DAX, DAX, DAX, DAX, DAX, DAX over and over and over again I don't know but they had to apply the rules that were abstract to give the rules the right combinations of the primitive words and the function words and they had to select the right color a number of circles and put things so basically they had to understand nonsense and make sense out of nonsense and so they tested it with people so when people did the sense making out of the non-sensing they were right about 80% of the time on average and then when they trained their algorithm on the same kind of data there was about the same chat GPT struggled with the task failing between 42 and 86% of the time yeah and so the researchers are interested in this because it's like a proof of principle that training and repetition can help scale up and can generalize across big data sets but it also could potentially help us figure out how to get rid of hallucination in these algorithms we use like chat GPT so that we don't have as many inaccurate outputs and then the second study which follows right on the tail of this one the researchers were looking at the neural network and comparing it with how people learn language symbols and concepts and in training their neural network they saw aspects of how they needed to train the computer network to get it to learn certain concepts like a cat or a dog versus the more abstract concepts like beauty happiness emotions and whatever and so you can look at a brain and see populations of nerve cells that light up in response to a picture of a dog or when asking a question related to how pretty something is and language models really don't have that that level of communication and meaningfulness and so in this study that was published in progress in neurobiology just this last week the researchers were pretty much able to separate different aspects of words, concepts abstract concepts symbols and like we've talked about on the show many many times the idea that if you learn a language growing up it makes your brain kind of think about things in a different way so you process information in a different way and in the development of these machine learned neural networks they saw different neural networks becoming active with different situations and they were reproduces this study actually produced computer evidence AI evidence of this concept that yes when you think or you learn about the world around you in a particular language it impacts the neural network that is created the nerves that are connected in your brain to create the representation of a concept symbols etc and then the way that those are connected influence the way that you interact with the world and the way you think about the world and the way that you have abstract thought I wonder what Felix is going to be like then Felix he's 18 19 months now almost he's he's now asking what everything is called but he will ask his mother and then he'll turn and ask me he's figured out two different languages both have different words for everything and so he will ask both of us like what's this and then he'll turn to me what's this after getting mother's answer right and this is I think a fantastic question which is those of us who are raised speaking only one language what does that do for the how does it limit or constrain our thinking versus being able to think in multiple languages there have been conversations where people switch from one way of thinking to another depending on which language they are using and how they're communicating if the brain is is segmenting it's hard drive a little bit as opposed to actually actually connecting those things but that's not something that's been shown or proven but it's just interesting to see as they train a machine learning neural network that there are these similarities and they've been able to show that it does seem to support the idea of language you learn influence the structure of your brain and that influences the way that you're able to think abstractly tell me about oh this is not going to be a fun study is it oh it's spooky spooky okay researchers using anonymized smartphone data from nearly 10,000 phones in the possession of police officers in 21 large US cities okay researchers this researcher is from Indiana University but they were all over the United States for this study they find officers on patrol spend more time in what demographic of societies neighborhoods they spend more time patrolling non-white neighborhoods so that's great that means the focus of these police stations around the world around the United States is to give extra protection to minority neighborhoods that's good to know that's great anyway spooky but true and sad and a really pathetic racist sort of way because researcher on policing has focused in the past on documenting actions such as stops and arrests but patrols and presents according to Kate Christensen assistant professor of marketing at the Indiana University School of Business says has not really been looked at is thoroughly police have a great deal of discretion police departments have discretion in deciding where law enforcement is provided within cities and she says here that where police officers are located matters because it affects where crimes are deterred and what the public knows about crimes as they happen police presence can influence when and where crime is officially recorded and so that's sort of true I think but also only sort of because police present isn't how crime is reported usually it's usually reported by people who call the police and say hey there's a crime thing happening yeah there's a thing happening you should be over where this is police rarely see a crime in progress by just being nearby or present unless you count traffic stops in which case they only happen if there are due to police presence it has to be police presence for the traffic stop so that part does influence where and when it is recorded if it is initiated by police officers such as traffic stops tickets, rests that they initiate from some sort of intervention into people going about daily lives so the article is smartphone data reveal neighborhood level racial disparities in police presence it's in the review of economics and statistics which is edited at the Harvard Kennedy School few police departments actually collect this data themselves so this was kind of a unique ability to get this anonymized data that has GPS tracking that allows them to tell where officers spend their time when they are patrolling in their cars and even outside of their cars it revealed strong correlations between racial and ethnic composition of a neighborhood and police presence which again if the role of the police is to protect and serve the community then great that means police departments across the US have placed greater importance on protecting people of color than other neighborhoods if on the other hand the role of policing is to increase funds of the city budget of which they are often the largest expense and therefore the greatest beneficiaries of such increases in funding then it could be seen as intentionally targeting non-white communities as they are often underrepresented in local government and more vulnerable to exploitation researchers right our findings suggest that disparities in exposure to police are associated with both structural socio-economic disparities and discretionary decision making by police commanders and officers when they combine police presence data with geocoded arrest data available for six of the cities New York, Los Angeles Chicago, Dallas, Austin Washington DC recognize those are all cities within the United States yes they found higher arrest rates of black residents were connected to more officer time spent in black neighborhoods the level of disparity persists after controlling for density socio-economic crime driven demand for policing you know there was the number of calls for help right could explain you know about 33% of the presence the extra presence in these communities could be explained in some place you know of more calls coming in from some areas but then they got the other 60 to 70% which had no explanation other than target so this is a quote here from this neighborhood level disparity persists after controlling for density socio-economic and crime demand for policing and maybe lower in cities with more black police supervisors but not officers patterns of police presence statistically explain 57% of the higher arrest rate in more black neighborhoods crime data suggests a reasonable explanation for the increased police presence in about a third of locations those don't match it's that other 60 to 70% that is not and that's a big deal because again I like find out if you don't if you live in America find out from your city look this up find out what your police budget is I think it will astound you in a lot of cities it's 50 or over 50% of the city's budget is going to policing not the potholes not the schools not to renovating the downtown area and all of this if people are spending the police are spending time in these particular neighborhoods we have to also look at historic redlining of neighborhoods we have to look at the history of why there are certain neighborhoods that are made up of minorities versus you know being more diverse there is history that impacted everything that we are seeing today and it's not this is an ongoing issue but this is an additional piece of data showing the disparity that is obvious yeah it makes it look like targeting and you know the thing is the thing is if you were if this wasn't showing greater police presence in black and also Hispanic communities about the same level of increased policing compared to not white neighborhoods not Hispanic white neighborhoods I guess they're crazy algae there you know if it was like we're you know policing is such a good thing that the people in charge of the community somehow allowing it to be yeah it's a little bit obvious what the role of policing is here it's not positive so what does that tell you though if police if police patrolling and police presence is not a positive influence on a community what are we spending half of the city budget on what are we doing right right also I have a story about what we're spending our money on in terms of our meat researchers publishing in livestock science this last week their paper is willingness to pay for reduced carbon footprint and other sustainability concerns relating to pork production a comparison of consumers in China, Denmark, Germany and the UK so the researchers they looked at how people felt about animal welfare about what would make them more willing to pay more money for pork products so we're talking about climate a lot recently and so that's where these researchers were coming from which is pigs and pig agriculture the raising of pigs is a huge climate impact but you can reduce it a little bit by shoving more pigs into smaller areas you can have pigs produce more pigs faster and there's a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide that is released from these efforts so the researchers were asking people in China Denmark the UK what what would they be willing to consider in terms of what they would pay for their pork products and surprise, surprise people really don't care about their pigs with respect to climate change they want happy pigs in China they wanted healthy pigs they want pigs that are not going to have a disease that's going to make everybody sick but the western countries were more interested in happy pigs so people would spend more money and in the study they said about 20% more money to buy happy pig products the problem is according to the researchers 20% of the cost from current prices of pig products to increase to some future price is not enough 20% more in the cost of producing a pig the end cost for the consumer is not going to be enough to give that pig enough room enough time enough nice food to really make it happy the amount of money that people want to pay to have happy pigs and eat the happy pig products is less than what is necessary to buy the happy pig products so it's interesting the researchers conclude in many countries morality among piglets is sky high I don't think he meant among piglets because I don't think we're talking about like piglet morality here but there are far too many sows that cannot withstand the production pressure as a consequence of there already being pushed so hard so instead of increasing production pressure yet further in the name of climate protection we should on the contrary set higher minimum requirements for pig welfare and hopefully get them through at the EU level as well in Denmark and at EU level no regulations have been added since the late 90s so it's time for something to be done about animal welfare so Denmark's number one export aside from maybe Lego is pork products you cannot buy good bacon in Denmark no Denmark has the worst worst bacon Danish bacon in Denmark because they apparently export all of the good bacon goes to the UK the UK is eating all our bacon over here a little bit for it there you get this it's okay bacon but it's not like oh there's a thick cut of bacon that you would hope for when you bought that bacon you looked in that package and you said oh look I can see that this one has some pork in it it's not all fat anyway anyway Ariel in the chat room on YouTube is saying I think they would be happier if we didn't eat them probably true so here's an argument though this is an argument when you're talking from the animal perspective this is something an argument I've always had with my oldest daughter at a very young age she decided she didn't want to eat cows anymore which is great that's fine be a vegetarian however there's other animals not just cows but my point though is that if we don't eat them they wouldn't exist with all the animals that have gone extinct there's a reason that there's billions of pigs billions of cows and chickens it's because without us eating them they have a domestic ecosystem that they're existing in but they're existing in much greater numbers than a lot of other animals because of it so there's no and they're having a massive impact on the climate and we talk all the time about how one of the things that people can do to impact climate change is to not just get rid of their air conditioner or refrigerator or freezer but just stop eating meat so this comes down to if people are really really concerned about animal welfare if they would rather pay more for a happier pig then what we should be investing in are not the big big pig farms the big things where there's massive numbers of animals that are really having incredible impacts on climate because the amount of excrement and methane emissions and other aspects of how they impact the environment we should be really passing and this is going to take voters passing or voting for politicians and others who pass regulations that expect animal welfare to be top of the line that make it so that you can't have more than a certain number of pigs per square meter that once you start doing that it's going to cost more people are going to have to make choices it's going to affect their wallets and their bottom line they might not be happy but maybe they will choose to eat pork products more less often and that's going to reduce demand which will then continue the cycle which will support the farms that are doing it right and the regulations and also climate change goals and sustainability but it's not going to happen as long as we allow just whatever to happen to these animals that happens on these big farms anyway I'm thinking more sustainable and do you know the future and all this stuff I mean there's other places we could start however however make it so that there's certain regulations on ranching cows on chickens on pigs like all of our feedstocks not just oh my gosh it's protein and no no like make it like European gas prices stuff's expensive like pay for it make it like a bottle of water you don't want to buy it at a music festival like make it so that people are hitting the wallet and they are like okay maybe I'll choose differently and that's going to impact everything but we're not doing that we're just you can have whatever you want however much you want of it we're going to make it as cheap as possible you get to get to get to get get get get get get and I think that's the right approach I just think that the sustainability model does have to be part of that and so hopefully with science we can find a sustainable way to continue to get get get get everybody eats meaning everybody eats a nutritious meal and you know part of the part of the problem then too is like well if we if we have everything too processed then we're going to have like disease from the process the meats and the things and stuff so you also want it to be we know there are nutritious ways to eat that do not involve meat at every meal and it's just this crazy idea that we've come up with I grew up thinking that salmon was this special thing that you only got every once in like this like amazing like somebody oh my god somebody can pay for salmon oh my gosh oh my family was different it was not waiting to pay for salmon we oh somebody caught a salmon alright we're eating salmon yeah exactly a fish and fork but yeah I mean it's a similar kind of thing the buying of it or the work to get it like this is it's a different it's a different cultural reality than what we have right now but anyway I'm going to think positively right we're going to move forward thank you everyone for listening to the show right now I'm so glad that you're here with us I hope you have your own opinions about all the things that we are discussing we look for opinions and curiosity and we hope that you're growing curiosity tell your friends about twists so they can be opinionated and curious too and head over to twist.org click on the Zazzle link to find twist products we've got lots of merchandise that helps to support the show also click on that Patreon link and you can become a patron of the show where you help support us in an ongoing fashion ten dollars and more per month just ten dollars a month really yeah it's less than Netflix these days when you come every single week well thank you by name at the end of the show there's all sorts of other goodies but we really need your support and we thank you for your support so those of you who are already supporting us thank you so much and if you're looking for a free way to support us hit the like and subscribe button on the YouTube channel and then the algorithm will find that sucker with the money who will work it over to support us well whatever Patreon the person who's got the extra cash to support science media and have that be a thing that exists those people alright let's come back it's now time for Dr. Kiki's Bird House Bird House I like it Dr. Kiki's Bird House that's fantastic it took us 20 years to figure out Dr. Kiki's Bird House that should have been but it's now a thing so number one birds aren't real what? no you know I thought they got proven to be real and there's a guy with the TED talk and he's got his whole memification thing birds aren't real trying to show how misinformation spreads and you know prove conspiracy theory thinking and mindsets and blah blah blah anyway a group of researchers looked at pigeons because you know pigeons are smart don't you think of pigeons as being so intelligent? not really no I don't but they're survivors they're scrappy they're the best generalists yes they survive researchers at Ohio State University looked at pigeons and how they could take a bunch of like in the AI nonsense to sense language study earlier they gave them a bunch of lines of wits and angles and rings and sectioned rings and all and they had rules to it that the pigeons had to kind of figure out and peck at a button to get food so it was like oh peck the right thing and to get food and so the pigeons they started doing great so the pigeons as they improved through trial and error they went from about 55% accuracy to 95% accuracy and then they gave them they can learn pigeons can learn with nothing that's like this is what is the thing you should learn it's just information just them no instructions in bird language so yes no bird tutor telling them what to do and then in a more difficult scenario they improved from 55% to 68% there's a little bit of a limit to what they could do in terms of the complexity of all this information but the the researchers say that the pigeons were using what's called associative learning so they were able to link their size of a line or I think this is what I get my treat for it's the Pavlov's bell association so you eventually you ring a bell and dogs salivate even though there's no food you've created an association between these things and so we normally think of associative learning as really primitive and rigid and we think of it like it's used in basic neurophysiology we've got a plizia these snails that retract themselves into the shell at a shock and so they learn to avoid areas and do think associative learning is a very basic neural pattern and basic form of learning but the researchers were like these birds with this visual categorization and all that they're doing this is more complex than what we expected the birds to be able to do how do the birds do these things oh my gosh well what they have found is that these birds are actually you know very brighter than you expect them to be essentially and that they're able to put together these associations in a very seamless way and in the way that they're able to put these associations together it's actually teaching the researchers about how artificial intelligence works because they were as good at solving these problems as basic machine learning algorithms I don't know if that means the pigeons are really smart or machine learning is just really basic yeah and so this is the part of the study that I think is very fascinating is that when they tested humans on this whole thing humans tried to come up with rules and they could not do the task as well as the pigeons or the machine learning algorithms over thank you humans got frustrated they wanted to like make a rule and make it work and that didn't work so well so pigeons are probably robots no that's not what it is yeah humans have a more complex layer of learning that is involved and it's just interesting with these results to see that the associative learning is not just as basic and rigid as people may think it to be and that it can impact much higher order complex systems like visual learning and that these systems are used very capably by higher level organisms like pigeons they're not the smartest birds they're still better at this task than humans maybe we just haven't given them the credit they deserve for intelligence maybe they're much smarter than we just give you know I mean it's bias but you just don't look like a smart bird yeah but the researchers say pigeons don't try to make rules they just use this brute force way of trial and error and associative learning and in some specific types of tasks that helps them better than humans anyway pigeons maybe not so dim-witted as we think also maybe they're robots but you didn't hear me say that here and then roosters when you think of a rooster you think of that bird dude who's strutting around the house protecting his hens he's gonna fight off any other challengers this could be aggressive he's gonna rooster crow if there's any predators around to warn his hens to make sure that nobody is getting eaten that rooster is gonna be in charge of stuff but does that rooster really know who he is does he have self-awareness like a person like a dog like a dolphin I have I have a unique somewhat perspective on this because yes you lived in the country very recently was living on a farm just a few years back and most roosters are just running around doing like roostery chicken just looking like a big chicken wandering around looking for something to pack I had this one he used to walk up to me he got like one eye looking and one eye looked and I was eating peanuts one day not there on the farm eating peanuts shucking him he ate it all of a sudden this rooster would come around a lot but he didn't like yeah but I would like talk to him about stuff and he seemed like he listened he seemed like he was really paying attention when I was talking to him and I could call him and he would come over and you know see if I had peanuts or sunflower seeds or something to throw and then I'd get annoyed like okay okay okay I'm working here you know take off and you wander away I'm like but it was I wasn't like all of the roosters on the farm just that one none of the chickens but this one rooster was like the smartest rooster and like the most like okay you're not in the mood to hang out today I'll go wander off or like hey come over what are you doing what's up there's no reason that different roosters can't have different personalities and different ways of interacting with others this rooster was my buddy for a while and one day he wasn't there and I was I didn't even want to talk to the farmer but roosters are for eating and one day I was like I haven't seen a rooster and he's like yeah neither have I yeah I was like you didn't get the rooster I thought you got the rooster I didn't take that rooster oh no what happened maybe like coyotes got my buddy anyway back to sideline but great story who knows what happened to your rooster I don't know but in this particular study researchers were looking at roosters and their potential self awareness so these researchers were interested in the fact that roosters will call out to others their peers about threats about the possibility of predators other like a bird of prey coming around and so in this study similar to studies where they've looked for self awareness in other animals by marking one part of an animal or another they put a rooster in one of two sections of an indoor space and in the other section there was either nothing it was empty there was a mirror so they just saw their own reflection or there was another rooster and then rejected a hawk onto the ceiling of the room that the rooster was in and they looked at how these roosters responded how did these roosters respond with their threat calls there's something that's scary around here right now the researchers found that the roosters who had been marked with a cornstarch die prior to some of these mirror interactions the roosters called their alarm call to themselves no to the other rooster I would have thought I would have been the opposite no the roosters made more alarm calls when there was another real rooster chicken con-specific pier in the room with them they did not make as many calls to themselves in a mirror and we tend to think of birds as seeing themselves in a mirror and like attacking the image in the mirror not under you know oh not these roosters figured it out they got it so this is that's me how selfish of a rooster I would be because other roosters on the farm a competition if I saw a rooster that didn't look like me I'd be like I'm just gonna take a little walk underneath the shelter and just not say anything about the hawk because if it gets them you didn't see it and you get some that's more hens for me but if it looks like me it could be kin I gotta look out for kin not him but no it was the con-specific okay so that means they like recognized that it was them in the mirror or does that mean that they just couldn't tell what the mirror was maybe it is that they recognized themselves in the mirror one of the interesting aspects is the fourth condition in which they had a mirror and another rooster so they saw themselves but they also saw another rooster and those results were within the bounds of an empty room or just a mirror that they saw themselves so it's possible that by seeing themselves they only focused on themselves okay focused on the other rooster or like you were saying in the selfish I mean it's interesting in the selfish game kind of idea oh I see myself here this is me I see myself if I don't say anything another rooster but it's an interesting result so I think there's more that needs to be investigated here but it was a huge difference between any mirror condition in which they saw themselves and just another rooster well hang on so I think I see what's going on here so you got empty meaning there's nobody else to warn and not make myself obvious so no need to take any risks stay quiet you see the mirror they maybe don't even notice the hawk now you're just like hey who's that good looking rooster or you recognize yourself and you're like keep quiet and then in the conspecific oh hey there's my buddy the other rooster hey look out and then it's the he's there and the mirror and now you're still that rooster doesn't even notice the hawk just like what a good looking rooster so it's either that they're caught up in self-gazing it's either self-gazing like you're saying or it is that it's the selfishness again where it's like I see myself save that guy don't say anything don't warn anybody what if the thing he's telling the other rooster isn't hey look out what if he's just going run run and flap hey how high can you jump oh my goodness who knows the minds of roosters other than the roosters themselves alright tell me about blueberries are like summer fruit yeah so this is actually a story about sunflowers oh okay which are cultivated for seeds and oil but the stems of the sunflower are generally considered just to be a waste product there's kind of thrown away maybe turned into mulch or something like that but turns out the extracts from sunflower stems could be useful in combating one of the world's most pernicious produce problems the dreaded fuzzy blueberry mole that invasive fungus that creeps into blueberry baskets always hiding a few blueberries deep to keep your prospective customers and vigilant produce managers in the dark. The problem can lead to significant economic losses in food waste both for producers and consumers of blueberries according to the a paper in the journal agricultural and food chemistry compounds from sunflower crop waste can prevent rotting in blueberries they suggest the food industry could use these natural compounds to protect against post harvest diseases or inoculation from fungus. Sunflowers are particularly resistant to a lot of plant diseases they're a great crop because you don't have to do as much to protect them and they can grow in places where other crops might be more subjected to infestation researchers investigated whether the stems might contain chemical constituents responsible for this protective effect they also wanted to find out if these compounds which they did end up finding could be used to fend off fungal plant pathogens and other things and fruit as a way to avoid the toxicity and resistance associated with chemical fungicides although just because it comes from a plant doesn't mean it's not a chemical researchers isolated and identified the components in an extract focusing on deterpenoids which are known to have biological activity they found 17 of these deterpenoids including four previously unknown compounds most of the deterpenoids showed activity against gray mold the bane of blueberries for the compounds including two of the newly identified ones were effective at destroying the plasma membrane of the fungus causing it's cells to leak and preventing it from forming biofilms and another test researchers briefly wet blueberries with the stem extract then dried the fruits and injected them with mold spores over a period of six days the stem extract protected almost half the berries from mold growth so almost half doesn't really sound like it was super effective but in the wild blueberries aren't usually being injected with mold spores it's also an extreme a little extreme scientists conclude that sunflower stem extracts could be used as natural biocontrol agents to prevent post-harvest disease you can also shake around your you can shake around your blueberries before you buy them check for that mold, get them home and wash them in a little bit of baking soda and vinegar by the time I do all that I've eaten something else because I was hungry so I stacked on something else during this whole washing and powdering process and now I'm not even hungry so they go back into the fridge and then the thing I was eating I put that in the fridge and it pushes the blueberries to the back where they just rot yes, and that's gross no matter what you do, really the issue of food waste is a really big issue and if you can get more berries to consumers before they've gone bad and started molding that's going to be a benefit right, more people are going to eat them consume them and it just won't go to waste right? but who knew, sunflowers? sunflowers stems have got all this this antifungal compound built in but what if you just grew sunflowers and blueberries together, would that help? I don't know, because you have to like extract from the sunflowers well, so the thing is though but you kind of make a good point and this is the monoculture of agriculture is a thing that is part of the whole sustainability picture because maybe if you don't have an entire 40 acres of blueberries but have a bunch of it that is sunflower maybe not too close because sunflowers are kind of tall, whatever there is it, because the mold doesn't, it has to be growing somewhere else somewhere else also and if it can't grow on the sunflowers it means you might be able to protect your blueberry fields by surrounding them with a protective fence of sunflower could be that's another study yeah, next study alright let's go back into deep history we've had our blueberries and sunflowers which we love, but now it's time it's fall, it's time to fall back fall back? yeah, but like no no, it's fall back spring back no, you spring forward and you fall no, no but anyway, that's like a week a week and a half from now tell me about the history and the big destruction of a of a the old trope men hunt women gather and it's always been that way although often refuted by anthropology ancient societies there were no such luxuries of only doing one thing, everyone hunted everyone gathered it was everyone's job to survive the idea that women were not physically capable of hunting because of anatomy has never been from actual evidence of a lack of women hunting but from a whole lot of assumptions made by male professors who are likely not athletic hunters themselves so it's sort of weird that they would decide that according to research research by University of Delaware anthropology professor Sarah Lacey which was recently published and Scientific American I think there's also two papers in the general American anthropologist Lacey and colleague Kara Ackabach from the University of Notre Dame examined the division of labor according to sex in the Paleolithic era going from approximately they went back about two and a half million years to as recently as around 12,000 years looking at any evidence they could find in the anthropological record of division of labor in the sexes when it came to hunting gather a view of all the current archaeological evidence and literature and found if anything at all to support the idea that roles were ever assigned specifically to each sex team looked at female physiology found that there's no reason women would not be physically capable of being hunters and there's also evidence of ancient injuries on fossil finds that provide evidence to support that they were involved in the hunt they found that men have an advantage over women in activities requiring speed and power such as sprinting, throwing some of that upper body strength lower body strength I guess that's both but women have an advantage over men in activities requiring endurance such as running long distances both sets of these activities were essential to hunting in ancient times in fact if you think about the advent where we think humanities hunting skills began it began with persistence hunting persistence hunting is long distance running after an animal that can't sweat properly and eventually overheats and just lies down so that you can stab it while it's gassing from the entire it up it's not like you have to arm wrestle the wilder beast you just have to run long distance after and according to what they're saying it's like actually women would have been much better at that portion of the hunting skills the team highlighted the role of that hormone estrogen more prominent in women than men the key component in conferring that advantage can increase fat metabolism which gives muscles longer lasting energy sources and can regulate muscle breakdown which prevents muscles from breaking down which then also like that's how you get the strong male muscles as they break down and then rebuild a little stronger each time so it's just different strategies scientists have traced estrogen receptors proteins that direct the hormone to the right place in the body back as far as 600 million years okay so when we take this is quoting Lacey when we take a deeper look at the anatomy of the modern in the modern physiology then actually look at the skeletal remains of ancient people there is no difference in trauma patterns between males and females because they're doing the same activities that is fascinating okay so the what they're saying trauma patterns so they're looking at the bones they're looking at how they've been impacted by work by the activities they're doing whether they've been injured or you know how they were injured and that's you would expect differences you live in a small society you have to be really really flexible everyone has to be able to pick up any role at any time it just seems like the obvious thing but people weren't taking it that way and part of this has to do with man the hunter this is a bedrock a collection of scholarly papers presented in 1966 in a book written in 1968 two male anthropologists made the case that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to the prehistoric diet contributing to growth of bigger brains and primates and the authors just assumed that all of the hunters were male yes no reference to anything this is just standard this is just how it's happened so many times so when and when men saw a weapon in a grave site they said that's a male if a female scholar looked at it and said if you look at the forensics and the pelvis and this that's actually a woman so female scholars have been publishing research that contradict man the hunter for decades and decades now and this is quoting Lacey women involved in that research so the research is less and the data is less well it also go ahead so the quote is there were women who were publishing about this in the 70s 80s and 90s but their work kept getting regulated to oh that's a feminist critique or a feminist approach hmm because what's the word is it misogyny is that the one or is that the word think that's a word in the field so this is before any of the you know genetics revolution or understanding of the roles of estrogen and also in the analysis of so even like even like stone tools the stone tools were attributed to men making the stone tools which you can tell by looking at a stone tool the gender of the person who napped it like what now maybe you can figure out like whether they were right handed or left handed maybe there's a napping pattern that you can set out something like that but yeah now I think this is fantastic this is this is this is two papers not just one this is awesome work trying to put together these stories and challenge the status quo in the field and you know like we said earlier in the show it's kind of able-bodied people who can do these things and you want to do this you can do this and you let's go do this okay who's going to help in the hunt who's going to help in the making the food who's going to do these things if you're working as a tribe everybody gets to do the things that's what helps everybody do better yo everybody's got a pigeon especially if it's you know well we either all go to work today or we don't eat yes like that's like the amazing thing like I'm surprised any animals survive for a long time because I feel like I would just get too lazy as an animal and be like ah I'm not going to hunt today and you take that day off hunting and now you didn't eat now you're like oh now I don't have the energy to hunt you can't run this fast I'm not as strong as I should be now I can't catch a wilder beast I'll try to eat something else but I gotta wash the blueberries and put powder on it I'll do that later and the next thing you know you've gone extinct oopsies I think really what we're looking at is all of humanity is the product of unlazy people who worked really hard I think that's a very apt statement speaking from the brain side of things researchers have been trying to figure out the role of the hippocampus in memory for ages and ages and ages and ages and trying to figure out okay at the hippocampus we know that it's involved in spatial navigation we know it's involved in memory formation or at least in like bringing memories in and then sending them out to wherever they're going to be stored and kind of part of that and so a group of researchers published in science this last week their work using optogenetics which is actually a really interesting use of this technology where they were able to use light to stimulate certain neurons in the hippocampus and turn off other neurons in the hippocampus during certain things the hippocampus is involved in associations between time place and action and it's also involved in the planning of future actions so predicting things is that the one that's got the one is that the part of the brain that has like dedicated neurons to direction as well because that would be like the time and place stuff but they're called place cells I always think that's so fascinating yes and it is fascinating we've got this little three dimensional kind of vector system every time you step into a new room your hippocampus is like simulating the real world so that the body can navigate it it's got a little simulator running up there a little model of everything it's like okay so now if you do this this is what should happen it's like doing all this calculating right but it's not just calculating whether you're in the corner of the room or whether you're navigating from one corner of the room to the other corner of the room it's also like paying attention to like okay I was in the room this morning and oh my god my cat threw up and I had to go clean it up and like it's putting together all this information related to your terrible morning like it remembers that episode and why this morning was a bad morning compared to other mornings when your cat was just nice and snuggled with you and so there is a hypothesis there have been two hypotheses that are involved in the hippocampus and how it works and there's an idea of like the coding so like a way that the neurons go turning on and off and connecting with other neurons in the system and researchers have been trying to figure out the association between all these things for a very very long time so how can you just like know that you're going from one place to another you're at your house or you want to go to your friend's house and you're gonna go that way or that you're gonna go to the neighborhood grocery store and buy apples because you like the apples and this grocery store more than the apples and the other your hippocampus is involved in that kind of stuff but maybe one day the route you take to the apple store not like the technology store but like the place where you buy the apples that you like to eat the roads closed because of construction and so you have to find a different route to your apples and your hippocampus is maybe involved like do you have an internal map is it like how is the brain working can the hippocampus like is the hippocampus involved in predicting a route that might work for you or multiple routes that might work alright so they stuck a bunch of electrodes into a rat's brain and they had rats go from place to place for rewards and they used optogenetics which could turn different neurons in the hippocampus on or off at different times to test what was going on and so they they would tweak the learning of the path from your house to the apple store so the rats would like start at the house and they'd end up at the apple store and they'd be like I like both these things how'd I get here I don't know what happened so there's like the sequence of events that gets you from one place to another and there's a sequence of cells that fire in the path as you go from one place to another and so by using optogenetics they could turn off the neurons to stop that sequential firing and then there's the other aspect that's more like milestones or new routes in different ways and so like um maybe like it's gonna go from this place to that place and like it's not the sequence that they messed up but it was like the overall code of going to get apples that was messed up so but then what you're talking about there is a landmark series of things so it's like I'm gonna walk this direction train station that means I'm going to turn left candy store oh that means I gotta keep going and then turn right and then so you're picking out spots that you tell you that you're getting closer to your destination right and so they they manipulated these neurons and impacted the way that the sequencing either happened or the overall thing of like I gotta go get a reward how do I go get there oh my gosh um and so they either impacted the sequence or the predictive ability of how to like change a path and like take a different path to get to the store and so in doing this what they discovered is that there are two types of memory that are encoded differently with different types of coding so overall in the hippocampus there's like a doing this thing and going to this place I love Apple's memory and this is like I know there's an Apple store and I'm gonna go to the Apple store but then and I can I know how to get but then there's the other part which is there are multiple ways to get to that Apple store and there's different coding for those different prediction predictive paths and so the sequence and so there's like a bigger general coding and then a sequential coding and either of them can be messed up and it affects memory differently and so this implies that the hippocampus is like a it's like an interesting coding computer it has these different types of codes that work together to allow us to do the things that we do but when you have somebody who's has dementia or Alzheimer's where their memory is impacted in a very particular way that perhaps it's not the entire population of neurons that's being impacted maybe it is like some of the sequences and the way you only need to be missing wow because yeah and then suddenly the mapping system doesn't have its landmark or if it's missing just one left right in the sequence but doesn't have it doesn't have the because you don't I don't feel like I'm going in a sequential set of things but in a sequential there are things that you do that your brain notes in a very time coded manner and then when you go to bed it replays those things in the time like the neural network of your different communities of neurons that work together they fire together they wire together they fast forward through those events and that that makes it a memory it makes it something that's solid within your brain and when you disrupt that and whether it's through disrupted sleeping or whether it's through neuronal deficits neuronal degeneration that is going to impact the way that the memories are going to work but they also maybe these are targets maybe there are ways that we can work with them to treat these things anyway anyway I love the hippocampus is my favorite part of the brain my gosh I love it so much and then because we're on a visual communication medium right now it's kind of like a zoom call really stream yard it's pretty awesome but anyway there was some work published in imaging neuroscience this last week where researchers wanted to know whether or not there was a big difference between in-person interaction brains and zoom brains and even though previous studies have shown that there can be some synchronization of brains across these virtual media this study specifically they used what's called functional near infrared spectroscopy they were looking in the visual area of the brain the dorsoparietal regions for cross brain synchrony and also for face recognition in-person face recognition they also had EEG and they showed that zooming is not as real as real in-person connections that there is a yeah that the brain does not respond the same and the choreography of the neurons and how they interact it's not the same over zoom so even though we can talk we can interact and we can have a nice time the dynamic what the researcher says dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during zoom encounters online representations of faces at least with current technology do not have the same privileged access to social neural circuitry in the brain that's typical of the real thing interesting now now what I would be interested in finding out is if that's training with screens that's resulting in this experience with screens like watching television and so there's something on a screen and so you don't I'm curious like if somebody who's not in a culture or society that watches screens all the time you know like audiences used to jump in their seats in the simplest things in the old time movies well you still do jump scares are your real thing yeah absolutely it's a whole thing and there are people who are more some people are more emotionally I don't know empathic than others like you get into the life of a character in a show and you just have to know what's going to happen you know you get into the story and the character and all this stuff but TV also isn't interaction you're watching passively whether or not you are psychologically feeling like you are engaging you're not actually talking right now you and I are talking we're having a conversation right I think so but at the same time every time we've done a live show it's different yeah that's absolutely but then we're also not having any eye contact because when we're usually when we're doing a live show we're all staring at the audience looking out at the audience and talking for a good part of it and so that's a whole weird dynamic too it is so that's a different paradigm I don't think we could be used as an example having done two three thousand hours of this time on blinding I think our at least interactions here are probably much more fluid than somebody who's like just got the zoom uploaded on the computer and has to do a meeting for the first or a dozen time or whatever I'd love to know more about the numbers and the experience whether or not this is some random person I've never met before and I'm talking to them on zoom versus seeing them in person and they go very well that you're connecting with there's a eye contact is a big deal and Lon says I have decades of practice making eye contact with the camera that is something I'm terrible at by the way I can't look up there at the camera I know it probably looks weird I've tried to position it so that my eye line doesn't seem like I'm looking off somewhere else but for me to talk like this talking to Kiki feels bizarre it is bizarre it doesn't feel right at all I make eye contact with the screen eye that you have which makes it up here look like I'm not making eye contact with you which then you might feel like oh is he even making eye contact with me because I can't tell so I can see how these social cues can get all crunched up in the zoom platform environment but I think it's going to be a very interesting development forward you know as we are developing with the technology and more and more people especially since the pandemic more and more people are online doing things and whether they're going to just be zooming are we going to be doing VR where we're like just avatars I don't know what's going to be happening but how our brains react in these artificial systems versus in the real world is important as we address the future of mental health and loneliness which is a growing issue more and more people especially younger generations older life is loneliness people like I don't know maybe I'm a nihilist now but a lot of people are lonely and it's becoming more and more of an issue it's impacting mental health and if we're not able to address it appropriately if these digital platforms aren't able to help us feel connection with people then we need to figure things out and it's not just pills so come on where did all the people go then like why aren't people talking to other people they're lonely scared tired life is hard there's all sorts of reasons yeah well part of the problem with not being lonely is that if that's your priority then you just have to hang out with whoever's available and that's not necessarily because that can compound loneliness and I can make it worse there's a lot of people out there I would rather be alone talking to myself with than talking did I say that right no but that's okay yes actually I get what you just said but honestly though I do feel like that with our chat room and with everything I feel like we do have a connection with our audience and with people here we have a connection with each other but it is definitely our brains know that we're doing this over a computer over internet over thousands of I'm not even wearing pants why would I need to do that I'm a zoom call thing what are we using again live stream stream yard stream yard yes but I think we've come to the end of this episode and I hope that we have kept people company helped with the loneliness also helped distract people's brains from the rest of the news world that's out there right now John Ratnaswamy asked when I use the end of my finger to pick up a crumb does the crumb adhere to my finger because of electricity moisture, magic or something else all of the above yeah exactly I'm guessing on electricity but yeah could be yeah Vanderwall's forces we've also got it could we're like sweat we got oils and we have little fingerprints that like stretch out when something smushes up against it and you know all that stuff can counteract the power of gravity for just a little while hmm yeah so it's not magic I'm gonna say not magic not magic I think everybody's magical everybody's magical and they should absolutely use their powers for good yeah a magical unicorn okay are we done? we're done, right? thank you for listening everyone thank you for joining us for this show thank you for all of your attention love that all of you who have been here in the chat room have been here commenting and being a part of the conversation everyone chat rooms really YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Gord, thank you for being here Fada, thank you for your help on the social media and show descriptions can't do it without you Gord, Aranlor, others who help keep the chat rooms nice places for everyone to be thank you for keeping it civil Identity 4, thank you for recording the show and Rachel, thank you for editing and to all of our Patreon sponsors I say a huge thank you 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 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