The Skeptics Guide #1038 - May 31 2025

Quickie with Steve: Global Warming and Ocean Currents; News Items: Infrared Contact Lenses, Trees Respond to Solar Eclipse, Affective Polarization, The Brain's Motor Switchboard, New Dwarf Planet Candidate; Discussion: The Effect of Science Fiction; Your Questions and E-mails: HHS Cancels Vaccine Contract; Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, May 29th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  And we have two guest rogues this week. George Robb.

• 0:56Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  And Andrea Jones Roy.

• 1:00Speaker 06

  Hey, everyone.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Andrew.

• 1:02Bob Novella?

  Double our fun tonight. What a crew.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Jane and Kara are both traveling. They're both away this week, so they're unable to record.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  I hope they're having a nice time where.

• 1:11Speaker 05

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

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Nauticon was awesome this year, I have to say.

• 1:22Bob Novella?

  So like essentially perfect, right?

• 1:24Speaker 06

  Essentially perfect.

• 1:26Bob Novella?

  Essentially.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I don't even know that we have to say essentially. I mean, it was just.

• 1:29Speaker 06

  Hold on.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Everything we planned came off pretty much without a hitch. Now I just qualified it, we're pretty much, but.

• 1:38Bob Novella?

  There you go.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Just being knee jerk skeptical. I don't want to say absolutely. No, it was great. Like, nothing failed. Everything came off as we planned, which is always wonderful. You plan something and it works.

• 1:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Exactly as you plan.

• 1:51Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Everyone had a great time. The vibe was awesome.

• 1:56Speaker 06

  Very fun. The skeletons were skeletoning.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Yep, the skeleton.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01Bob Novella?

  I was so obsessed getting those ready.

• 2:03Speaker 06

  No, it was a lot of fun and I hope everyone who attended had a good time. It seemed, everyone I talked to seemed like they were, but yeah, it was just super fun.

• 2:11Bob Novella?

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

• 2:15Speaker 05

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

• 2:25Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  Serious. Oh, and play a didgeridoo.

• 2:28Speaker 06

  And host a poker night.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  And host of Poconut. What else do you want from?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  And play jazz.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  And?

• 2:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Can I play jazz? No about, yeah, well.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  You could learn all those things.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  All those things done, finished, ready to go out into the world and do those seven, nine things.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Ni hao.

• 2:45Speaker 06

  Very good.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Did I say something that's just, I remember that word?

• 2:50Speaker 06

  You, you almost said hello.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:52Speaker 06

  You said, you said kinda hello.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  How do you say it for real?

• 2:57Speaker 06

  Ni hao.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Oh, ni hao.

• 2:59Speaker 06

  Ni hao.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  You just shamed your ancestors there, Steve.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  All right.

• 3:02Bob Novella?

  I mainly just remembered ma.

• 3:04Speaker 06

  Ma.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Ma.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Or ma or ma.

• 3:07Speaker 06

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

• 3:17Bob Novella?

  Oh, God, no.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 3:21Speaker 06

  Gaigei kai fang zhi hou, which means after the implementation of the open door policy. It was one of the first phrases we learned in my Chinese textbook, not exaggerating. It proceeded, take me to the hospital and where is the restroom? We learned.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Take me to the hospital.

• 3:37Speaker 06

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

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. Wow. It was fun.

• 3:45Bob Novella?

  That's nuts.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  It was fun.

• 3:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it was.

• 3:47Speaker 02

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

• 3:51Speaker 06

  Really?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Definitely in the last 20 years.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  What, what were you nervous for?

• 3:55Bob Novella?

  The drumming.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 3:56Speaker 06

  Oh, the drumming?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Drum solo.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  Oh, you were great.

• 3:59Speaker 02

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

• 4:08Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, golden safety net.

• 4:10Speaker 06

  Challenge accepted, but yes.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yes, but during a drum solo, there's nowhere to hide.

• 4:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  If you flame out, it just looks terrible. There's no way to recover from it.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 4:20Speaker 05

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

• 4:29Speaker 06

  He nailed it. It's a beautiful song. It's an awesome solo and Steve.

• 4:32Speaker 05

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

• 5:01Bob Novella?

  That's nice of you to say.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  You should feel really good. You should feel really good.

• 5:06Bob Novella?

  George.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  It's true. It's true.

• 5:07Speaker 06

  But it was also so fun because, so George did an amazing job leading the sing along for two hours of playing

• 5:14Bob Novella?

  Oh my god.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  A thousand instruments like guitar and you were doing the tambourine with your feet and you were singing.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  And then different members of, of the organizing committee all went up and did different things. And then Steve was at the very end. And the drums had been on stage covered up. And I don't know if the audience knew that it was a, a drum set or, or what, but it was super fun because it was like, all right, this is the end. This is the last song. And then whoosh, the cloth comes off and like Steve is on stage behind the drum. It was awesome. Just like the suspense and the way it was done and the surprise and the reveal. Super good.

• 5:45Bob Novella?

  It ca- it came off as planned.

• 5:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:47Bob Novella?

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

• 5:52Speaker 06

  Three hours? Five hours?

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Five.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  Five hours?

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Till two, till two, till two twenty-five. I was like, all right, one more.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  I'm amazed you can speak right now.

• 6:02Speaker 05

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

• 6:08Bob Novella?

  Phone voice?

• 6:09Speaker 05

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

• 6:21Speaker 06

  But it was super fun.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  I loved it though. People were singing along. They were, they were throwing out requests and like I, I had them in my, in my folder. So I could sing stuff and that to me, there's nothing better. There's nothing better. Put me in a corner and I'll play. I'll play first hours. I'm so happy to do it. It was great.

• 6:37Speaker 06

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

• 6:41Speaker 05

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

• 6:50Speaker 06

  They were highly offended, and rightly so, when I said, "Well, why don't we just do the French National Anthem?" And I go, "No, wrong country."

• 6:58Speaker 05

  Big quart syrup all over you. Yeah, I was like, "Nope."

• 7:01Speaker 02

  You know any songs in Mandarin?

• 7:02Speaker 06

  I do. I know I have one sort karaoke song that's a pretty standard one, and it's uh, "Doi mi en de nu hai kangwa lai," which means, "Girl over there, look over here." George, we'll learn it for next time. It's extremely fun.

• 7:18Speaker 05

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

• 7:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 06

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

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Ooh, that's an interesting thought.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  We could maybe think about that for next time.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  That's an interesting thought.

• 7:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like adjunct faculty.

• 7:35Speaker 04

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

• 7:45Speaker 06

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

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It can take on several different, uh, uh, appearances or... Guys.

• 8:03Speaker 02

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

• 8:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  And it is, yeah, but it's kind of like just a celebration of knowledge itself.

• 8:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  It's like, here's just something interesting. You don't, you may not even care about it. It doesn't matter. Here you go. And it's, it's, it's a lot of fun.

• 8:23Speaker 05

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

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Fits the noticon theme perfectly, actually.

• 8:31Speaker 05

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

• 8:38Speaker 06

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

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Oh, jeez.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  Because she did, she was like, "What a waste of energy that was." So that's one dishes-related regret. But other...

• 8:57Speaker 05

  So if there, if there's a once in a century fire, yes, that's the...

• 9:02Speaker 06

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

• 9:46Speaker 06

  cooler? Like that just is not something I would ever search for on YouTube, but I'm so thrilled to know it now, you know?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but so you bring up a good point about the internet, that the internet has caused unforeseen consequence. Prior to that, a lot of the information we got was pushed to us.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  And now we are pulling all of our information.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Right? So we are only getting the information we are going to get for ourselves, rather than just being exposed to stuff because it's on the air, because it's on the TV, because it's on the radio, whatever. So it's all curated and, and so isolating, you know what I mean? And that's, I think, what's destroying the world today, that we are all in these little bubbles of information of confirmation bias. Like the internet is a confirmation bias machine.

• 10:36Speaker 06

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

• 11:03Speaker 02

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

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:11Bob Novella?

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

• 11:31Speaker 06

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

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Anonymize it?

• 11:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, or or like turn up a knob that's like, randomize the stuff that I'm gonna get. So I'm not just getting things that are trained for me.

• 11:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they should have categories that just just just random stuff unrelated.

• 11:55Speaker 04

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

• 12:04Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 12:05Speaker 05

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

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Yes, oh gosh, I could watch that.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like thimbles and then shovels and then air conditioners and then cars and then the space shuttle and then guitars. It's like, this is variety. They're like, and each one is fascinating. Like, how do they get the little thing in the whistle? How do they do that? Like, and here they go, they show you how they get the little thing in the whistle. And then they'll show you, yeah, like rocket fuel. And I always loved the randomness of that.

• 12:32Speaker 06

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

• 12:47Speaker 02

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

• 12:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  But we all think we do.

• 12:53Bob Novella?

  Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you this.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  It's like poetry.

• 12:55Bob Novella?

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

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:07Bob Novella?

  First off.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Haunted mansion.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:10Bob Novella?

  Six feet. Well, okay, that's my story.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  I told the judge, you know?

• 13:12Bob Novella?

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

• 13:25Speaker 04

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

• 13:30Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, rocks are always in your, you know, always in the way.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  All right, well, we got some interesting news items that we're gonna push to you tonight. That's right.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Yes, here's your push.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I'm gonna start with a quickie, which I am calling a muck time.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Ah, very clever.

• 13:46Speaker 02

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

• 13:51Speaker 04

  A.M.O.C.

• 13:52Bob Novella?

  O.C.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Oh, out of context, um, hint.

• 13:58Bob Novella?

  Anti multilingual, or out of no idea.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Not even close. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

• 14:09Bob Novella?

  Yes, I used to know that.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  So that is the, basically the water circulation in the Atlantic, right? You have warm salty water traveling northward along the surface. Then it sinks down and becomes cold water that travels deep back south down to Europe. So it's responsible for a lot of the current climate that we have, for example. And the, one of the tipping points or fears of global warming is that the A.M.O.C. will collapse, right? It'll stop, or will weaken significantly. And that this will disrupt climates around the world, right? It'll exacerbate climate change. There's actually quite a bit of variability in how the models predict, you know,

• 14:56Speaker 02

  across different climate models, how they predict how much weakening will happen. And so we talked about this several times on the show. There's a quick update, I just wanted to give the quick update. So there was a recent study which basically found that the differences among these various models all have to do with the starting point, with how they model where the A.M.O.C. is today. And the variability there is essentially a couple of things. One is how deep does it go, right? You know, how much overturning is there, is the term that they use. But how deep does the cold water go? And the other thing that is, that differs is the temperature gradients. Basically, the meridional.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Which is, you know, the north to south temperature radiance. So what they found was they just used a new equation to try to narrow the uncertainty in modeling where the AMOC is today. And if you apply that to the climate models, it significantly narrows the variability. So it turns out that with this new, new way of looking at it, the weakening of the AMOC by 2100 is only going to be moderate, right? So the, the most severe scenarios are ruled out by this new model, basically.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Uh, which is good. So it's not going to be as, as bad as the worst models showed, but it's still going to be a severe enough to cause some temperature changes and it still might eventually get severe, just not by 2100. So this is, you know, there's a lot of, this is where the uncertainty comes in in climate modeling, right? Even though we know global warming is happening, we know the broad brush stroke, what's going to happen? We don't know exactly when and exactly how severe because a lot of these models are depend, are very dependent on minute changes in our, you know, current information about things like what's the temperature gradient in the Atlantic Ocean, things like that.

• 17:00Speaker 05

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

• 17:03Speaker 06

  I was just thinking that.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I, you know, certainly the deniers will jump on this go, see, they were over calling it all along. It's actually not that. And I remember this happened before too. This exact thing happened before in like 20 years ago. When a study came out that said that reduced the variability in how much warming there's going to be. Right? So the most extreme came down, but the most mild came up. It narrowed, didn't change the mean, the mean, you know, like whatever, like the middle of the distribution. Right. And, but it was reported in the, in the, you know, the climate denying media, if you will, that the, they talked only about, oh, the warming is not going to be as bad as it said it was going to be.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Right? Like it's not going to be six degrees. It's only going to be up to four degrees. Yeah. But it's also not going to be only one degree. It's also. Right. It went from like one to six to three to four, you know? But now they're Not good. So I could see somebody doing the same thing. It's like, ah, see, it's not going to be as bad as they said it was going to be. It's like, yeah, but it's still going to be that. It's still going to happen. It's still going to be moderate. The variability was decreased, which does chop off the most extreme end. Doesn't mean we don't have to worry about it. But yeah, I'm sure someone will say that. All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with the news items with these infrared contact lenses. How does that work? Oh, cool.

• 18:22Bob Novella?

  Man. Yeah, this obviously caught my attention, especially after my talk, not a con about that color olo. Uh, this is definitely not as cool, so oh, well. But, you know, it's still interesting. Disturb, disturb.

• 18:35Speaker 02

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

• 18:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And we didn't think of Folo.

• 18:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, okay. Not bad, not bad. Yeah, we missed that one. All right. Not a major, not a no. Pre-dismissed, but okay, not bad. All right, so for this one, scientists have created special contact lenses that allow people to see infrared light, even if your eyes are closed. Uh, so yeah, interesting. Uh, but what are the details? What are the details? Devils in the details. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China. Uh, I won't read the name of the study because it's just a lot of gobbledygook words that, uh, well, no, I'll read it because that's

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Andrea can read it for you.

• 19:19Bob Novella?

  The name of it is near infrared spatio-temporal color vision in humans enabled by up-conversion contact lenses. So what does that mean? Let's talk about infrared light, though, because it's just interesting and it's kind of integral to this whole thing. Uh, infrared light was discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1800. I did not really know this, but it was the first time we discovered a type of light beyond visible light. First time, um, that, that that had happened. Now, he, his technique was really interesting. He used thermometers to see how hot each of the colors of a rainbow were. That's when you separate the color from in a prism, right? Shine white light through a prism and it spreads the light into all the colors of the rainbow. So he put a thermometer by each one and the, the colors generally got hotter as you went along.

• 20:02Bob Novella?

  Some from violet to red, each color had a higher temperature. But after the red part of the rainbow, though, there was obviously no color there, right? Because there's not, you don't see anything after red. But the thermometer that he put there, I don't know why he put it there, but it was a good move.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Good control.

• 20:16Bob Novella?

  That thermometer was the hottest. That actually was hotter than the hottest color. And so he correctly hypothesized that there must be another type of invisible light there. We can't see it, but the light's gotta be there. Something's gotta be there because it was making the thermometer reach temperatures higher than any other color temperature before that in the spectrum. So, interesting. All right, so infrared light, it's one of the parts of the glorious electromagnetic spectrum that I love so much. From long to short wavelengths, radio, microwave, infrared, visible, UV, X-ray, gamma ray. Now, we don't see infrared light because its wavelengths are essentially too long for our retina's photoreceptors. So, we don't see it.

• 20:57Bob Novella?

  We can sort of sense infrared, though, sort of, I say, because we can feel heat and heat is related to infrared radiation, but they aren't the same thing. And since this is a common misconception, I'm going to spend two sentences on this. So, I'll clarify briefly. Any object with a temperature emits infrared radiation. Infrared radiation can transfer heat, but heat itself is energy transferred due to temperature differences, which can also happen in many other ways through conduction, convection, and not just infrared radiation. All right, look it up if you want more details. Okay, so let's get to the real hero of this research that I'm discussing today, and that's the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles in this study were made from rare earth ions like yttrium. That's how you pronounce it, right, Steve? Y-T-T-R-I-U-M? That came up at Nauticon, actually.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  I learned that there, yeah.

• 21:43Bob Novella?

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

• 22:28Speaker 04

  They hooked their brains up to an imager.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  Or they just flash some infrared lights somewhere and see if the mice look in that direction?

• 22:35Bob Novella?

  Kind of, yeah, you guys are, yeah, you guys are kind of right around it. And that was good. One of the ways was to have, they have dark crevices. Now, you know, mice love dark crevices, but one of the dark crevices were illuminated by infrared, and the other one was just a dark crevice. So, when they had the ions, the nanoparticles, they avoided the dark crevices that had infrared light on them. And when they didn't have the augmentation, if you will, it was just a random selection of a dark crevice, whether it was truly dark or also infrared dark. So that was one way. The other way, they looked at pupil restriction, was another way that you could tell that the eye is actually detecting light and restricting itself in reaction to it.

• 23:19Bob Novella?

  And they also even looked at the neural activity in the brains of the visual processing centers. So they definitely confirmed that these critters were seeing this upconverted infrared light. For human testing, they wisely decided to just use the contacts and not do any of the injections into the people's retinas, because I think they would probably get no volunteers at all for that. That sounds so nasty. The results of the human testing were interesting, but I have to say, though, before I go into the details, do not expect these contacts to give infrared vision like the alien had in the Predator movies.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Oh, come on.

• 23:56Bob Novella?

  Or even, right? Come on, I'm shooting that down right now.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  You gotta flee with that.

• 24:01Bob Novella?

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

• 24:35Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 24:36Bob Novella?

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

• 24:39Speaker 06

  Tianxue.

• 24:40Bob Novella?

  Okay. So what she said, a neuroscientist.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Good dodge, Bob.

• 24:45Bob Novella?

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

• 25:30Speaker 05

  This'll be good for relationships. It's like, no, honey, I'm not sleeping. I'm totally listening to you.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  I got the lenses in.

• 25:37Speaker 06

  I just wanna see your infrared feelings.

• 25:40Bob Novella?

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

• 26:20Speaker 06

  Xue.

• 26:21Bob Novella?

  Xue. Said in the statement, "In the future, by working together with material scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity." So some predictions were floating around about what could, what this could be used for. Some, some predict that doctors could use this tech for something specific like near-infrared fluorescence surgery, where they, where they use infrared fluorescence. To detect and remove cancerous lesions without having to use bulky equipment. That's the key there. I mean, we have equipment to look at it, but you don't need it if you're using these contacts. So that's something, I guess. Of course, there are some critics who don't think that the lenses will prove very useful.

• 27:01Bob Novella?

  Glenn Jeffries, a neuroscientist at University College London, he specializes in eye health. He said, "I cannot think of any application that would not be fundamentally simpler with infrared goggles. Evolution has avoided this for a good reason." I don't disagree at all with that. Maybe you're surprised. I think powered, like infrared goggle type technology will always, I think, be far better than what an unpowered contacts could ever do on your eye. Even the bulkiest, most expensive infrared goggles, I think, will eventually get down to something that much cheaper and much more manageable, like, say, sunglasses, right? That's always the goal with this type of technology, something that you can just slip on and you don't need

• 27:46Bob Novella?

  the bulky goggles, like VR goggles, that's the holy grail for VR, right? It's not these bulky goggles that you have to strap onto your head, but just simple sunglasses that could provide that. I mean, we're heading there. Who knows when we'll ever get there? So it's similar with this. Bulkier, even slightly bulkier technology will always be much better than what these contacts can do. Still, though, this contact technology could eventually reach a point where it's at least helpful in various situations. Because when I described earlier, that light when you close your eyes, infrared does go through your eyelids. It can go through haze and fog. So maybe just slipping on these contacts at some point, like maybe when you're driving, I don't know.

• 28:30Bob Novella?

  It can actually help you cut through the haze or the fog in some scenarios. I don't know. I think it might not come to much, because like I said, there will always be very pale technological examples of what these heavier goggles will be able to do. But it's still interesting, and who knows, farther in the future, what we could do with this? Potentially extend our natural vision deeper into the infrared and even into the ultraviolet. Who knows? But it's still interesting to learn about anyway.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Selfishly, the first thing I thought of was like an infrared teleprompter. So like you're on stage and you have the lenses in and like the back wall of the venue has your lyrics on it. You know, like projected, just massive. So you can just look up and doesn't look like you're reading lyrics. Like, that's what the first thing I thought of. Like, how cool would that be?

• 29:17Bob Novella?

  No, I love it. I love it.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  No, I agree, George. I thought of that, not that specific application, but the idea of, so from what I understand, Bob, the main limiting factor here is that it's only seeing one specific frequency, right? I mean, it's not like seeing the infrared spectrum. It's just responding.

• 29:34Bob Novella?

  Well, it's near, I didn't, maybe I didn't stress it enough. It was near, it's near infrared. It's near infrared light. So that's the

• 29:39Speaker 02

  It's a very narrow frequency range.

• 29:41Bob Novella?

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

• 29:56Speaker 02

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

• 30:01Bob Novella?

  It's, yep. It's LED. They're super bright. That's why, you know, the sensitivity isn't great. You need super bright.

• 30:07Speaker 02

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

• 30:11Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  And so that could have implications, applications like for spies or

• 30:15Speaker 06

  I was just thinking that.

• 30:16Speaker 04

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

• 30:18Speaker 02

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

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Right. You're just, okay.

• 30:24Speaker 06

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

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Until the other team's look, also wears the contacts and steals the signs.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Well, yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 05

  Well, you could, you could like tag, you could tag people like in a crowd. Like, let's say you're a security, right? And you have a, you have an infrared pointer, and you have the lenses in, you could like, oh, that guy is being trouble. So you, you tag him from a distance and every security person sees that guy being illuminated or whatever.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Hope you're getting the right person.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Or for teachers, or for like, you know, for safety things, or, yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And the tech may have applications that have nothing to do with

• 31:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  vision.

• 31:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. That's always a classic. Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 02

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

• 31:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's, there's plenty of tech, technology now that we'd had no idea that, you know, how, Steve, we talked about it many times. You can't predict how people are going to use the technology.

• 31:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  The question is now, when do we see the first fake contact lens product claiming to use this tech? You know. To protect you against five G waves. It'll be like a week or two, right? Like, yeah, based on this article, now they have that you could see into the infrared.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  The classic example, of course, of a technology that, because oftentimes, you know, technology is developed for a purpose, but then it doesn't really serve that purpose. Well, it serves another purpose, was the microwave, which was developed as a cooking tool, which nobody uses it for, but it turned out to be an awesome heating tool.

• 32:01Bob Novella?

  Rehearing.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  We just don't cook with it, but we do heat with it.

• 32:05Bob Novella?

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

• 32:07Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. All right, George, you're going to tell us about trees communicating to each other during a solar eclipse. What is this about?

• 32:15Speaker 05

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

• 32:47Bob Novella?

  Agree.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  And that song is basically that trees talking to each other. And that's kind of where we're going with the story.

• 32:52Bob Novella?

  And fighting with each other.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  And fighting with each other, right. And the third thing is, this involves an eclipse. And we had such a lovely time in Texas with our eclipse adventures. So it like, this just hits all the, this just hits everything I want a story to hit. So, we all, you know about the sort of mycelium that is under mushrooms that kind of communicates with, over vast distances? Well, this is sort of a similar thing that some scientists in Italy were trying to see if trees could sort of communicate with each other, especially during an eclipse.

• 33:28Speaker 05

  So they wanted to measure the bioelectrical impulses of trees. They took these spruce trees, spruces during this eclipse. Now, from the information that they've gathered, they're saying, and this is the crazy. They're saying that like, not only are the trees responding to the, to the eclipse, but some of the trees actually anticipated and were synchronized together to anticipate the eclipse, which is crazy, which is crazy. So there's, there's two professors here. Professor Alessandro Ciolerio of the Italian Institute of Technology, or the IIT, and the Professor Monica Gagliano from the Australia Southern Cross University. So like legit places of study.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  Charged molecules travel through cells and through the cells of organisms, and they transmit electrical signals as they go. And they're calling sort of that transmission an electron. And again, it feels kind of wooey because we're starting to get into like terms that sort of sound sciency, but might not be. So yeah, my skeptical meters were kind of pinned throughout this. They wanted to monitor what these spruces potentially were communicating to each other. So they grabbed three trees. They grabbed two trees that were 70 years old and one tree that was 20 years old. They attached five pairs of electrodes all over on the branches, on the trunks, on the, on the roots that were exposed all over the place.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  And they mostly measured bio, bioelectrical potentials, or the difference in voltage across cell membranes. Okay, so they were measuring these things with these, with these sensors. And they said that the electrical activity of all three became significantly more synchronized during the eclipse.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  Before the eclipse as well as after the eclipse, but around sixty minutes of the entire thing. This was at a microscopic level. These sort of synchronizations were occurring, they said, inside the water and lymph molecules of the tree. Okay. One factor that sort of came out was they said the two older trees, the ones that were seventy, had a, had an earlier response to the upcoming eclipse than the younger tree, which implied there might be like a sort of quote unquote, "learning" that's happening with these trees. It, it, it may mean they learn to anticipate, um, or develop mechanisms unlike the younger trees, or the younger tree that hadn't quite developed it. And, and the wooiness kind of just keeps going.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  So they detected bioelectrical waves traveling between the trees. Uh, and not just the trees, they also had, they also had monitors on stumps. And the stumps had similar responses too. Uh, there was at a lower level, but they had a similar thing where they were kind of, kind of lining up together. And, um, after analyzing the data, uh, their computer models reinforced their, their supposed test results, i.e. the eclipse not only influenced the biological response, but the activity was correlated between the trees. This may mean that a cohesive organism-like reaction exists at a forest level. All right.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  So it, it's, there's other studies that have been done, sort of to try to reveal the interconnectivity of ecosystems, like I said, the mycelium of mushrooms and things like that. And this might be along that same sort of level. They think that if this is real, that this activity, this, this kind of activity could help the tree's resilience and biodiversity and overall function, um, in that it can anticipate and warn, quote unquote, each other of stuff that's happening in the environment. It reinforces this idea that we need to preserve old growth forests because those old, older trees are smarter, quote unquote. Now, it seems wacky and it seems pretty wooey and I'm sure you're gonna tear me apart.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna stretch and have at it.

• 37:34Speaker 02

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

• 38:19Speaker 04

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

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, at a macroscopic level, I mean, they just, I just think they have no idea what they're talking about. The other thing is like, a red flag for me is when, you know, a paper is trying to describe a phenomenon and their like mathematical statistical analysis is incredibly complicated. And they're, they're pulling this little bit of signal out of something by doing all this fancy footwork. It's like, how hard did you have to work to make, to find a signal in this noise? You know what I mean? Like, could you really predict, like, this is the thing that was going to show an effect? But also just the premise is silly, in my opinion, that the trees are communicating to each other and they know several hours ahead of

• 39:04Speaker 02

  time that an eclipse is coming? On average, an eclipse will hit the same spot on the earth every 400 years.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  There's just no way trees can adapt to that. It makes no sense. At the very least, at the very most, rather, you could say, well, maybe they're responding to the gravitational, you know, the tidal forces of the, of the new moon, you know? It has nothing to do with the eclipse per se, it's just that whenever the moon gets close to the sun, or, you know, whatever, that there's, they can sense.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  You don't need eclipses to measure that.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  But I think trees are too small to really detect significantly, detect those kind of tidal forces. They would be really small, tiny at that scale. And who care? Why would they care? The other thing going on, how, I don't know that they really, again, it's three trees.

• 39:51Speaker 05

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

• 39:54Speaker 02

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

• 40:02Speaker 05

  Synchronos, yeah.

• 40:03Bob Novella?

  Right?

• 40:04Speaker 02

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

• 40:14Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 40:15Speaker 02

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

• 40:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 40:30Speaker 02

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

• 40:44Speaker 05

  It's such a good Rush song though.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  It's such a great song. And I was like, oh, so yeah, so.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  But you gotta, you gotta dive in pretty deep though, to really start to pick it apart. And the reporting on it is pretty much entirely gullible.

• 40:57Bob Novella?

  Steve, how did they invoke quantum field theory?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, that they're trying to say like, they, again, they, they get more complicated than they have to be. This is the thing, like I love jargon, right? I love science jargon.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  And I always have this question.

• 41:13Bob Novella?

  Even techno babble.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  When there's science jargon, I find a hard, having a hard time parsing. Is that because I'm just way too out of my depth or because it's total bullshit?

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And sometimes you can tell and sometimes it's hard to tell or you can't tell. In this case, I think it could be both. Like they're talking about stuff that could definitely go over my head. But it seems like they're also just slinging a lot of bullshit.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, they say, at one point they say, the bio, bioelectrical signals include entropy, diversity, expressiveness, complexity, and fractal measures.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  Which feels a little bit like a wordy.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  They're just throwing out a lot of shit.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Action potentials, ion channel activities, and electrical potentials across membranes where it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 06

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

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 06

  there's a really forced result

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  in here somewhere.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Right, right. And part of this, for me, is informed by me reading NeuroBabble, right? So, like, there are, like, neurological chiropractors, or whatever, people who, like, are pretending to be neurologists,

• 42:41Speaker 06

  Mmm.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  who aren't, and are slinging the neurological jargon, and I can tell completely that it's utter nonsense.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  And it's just complete nonsense. But you get the vibe, you know, of how they're using the jargon, how they're using the terminology. They're being way more complicated. There's no elegance at all. They can't-

• 43:00Speaker 04

  The hallmark of pseudoscience.

• 43:01Speaker 02

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

• 43:30Speaker 06

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

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. Who knows? I mean, speculation's-

• 43:48Speaker 06

  Attention.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  There's always the generic motivation of getting another paper published-

• 43:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 43:52Speaker 02

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

• 44:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:00Speaker 05

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

• 44:11Speaker 02

  With quantum-

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Maybe you can't, George. Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  That's true, sorry.

• 44:14Speaker 06

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

• 44:26Speaker 02

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

• 44:32Speaker 06

  Wow, back to eating plastic.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Don't listen, Andrew. It is through the mycelium network.

• 44:37Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  But they're communicating chemically, right? And they're exchanging nutrients. And it's kind of like a fails...

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Not neurons.

• 44:45Speaker 02

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

• 45:20Speaker 06

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

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Infrared thing, yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  As a follow-up study.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  They're all talking to each other in infrared, we're just not looking.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  All right. Andrew, you're up next. You're going to tell us about... Now tell me, is this real or is this not real? Affective polarization.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, here we go again. That sounds jargony to me.

• 45:42Speaker 06

  Tell you what, you tell me at the end if you think it's real. So affective polarization. So the paper that I want to talk about today... So I'm always excited to come on this show and I always have a lot of fun finding the news items for when I join the show. And this paper wins the prize for, I literally, the minute I saw it, I said, we're doing this. Like normally I consider a bunch of different ones and what do you think? And what should we do? And the minute I saw this, I gasped and jumped for joy. And so now we're talking about it. So the title... So get ready. The title of the paper is "A New Measure of Affective Polarization." Drum solo here, right? It's affective polarization is bigger and better than you ever thought it was before.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  So a new measure of affective polarization. Affective polarization is one of my favorite concepts in political science. And new measures of anything are pretty much my favorite thing in data science. So first, my question for you all. Do any of you know what affective polarization is? Besides, as Steve says, jargony. And it is jargony. But it is, it is a term that's been around for 10 years.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Define each of the words, but in its context, I don't know.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  All right.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  I read the paper, you said me.

• 46:53Speaker 06

  Right, yeah, so Steve knows. So Evan, what do you, let's, let's break it down. Let's do affective. What does that mean?

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Well, affective is, you know, having an effect on things or, you know, what, what, what changes? What makes things go the way they go?

• 47:06Speaker 02

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

• 47:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, see, what, let's hear it.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  That's a clue. It's emotions. It's your affect is the emotions that you're displaying.

• 47:14Speaker 06

  Yep. So, so a way of understanding and measuring emotions in like psychology and in political science, which stole it, is to say, what is someone's affect? You can have a positive affect or a negative affect. And then you can divide if it's a negative affect, there might be anger or fear or anxiety or whatever, right? So affect is an emotion and polarization, Evan?

• 47:33Speaker 04

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

• 47:43Speaker 06

  Right. And you can have, you know, the North and South Pole. And you can also have polarization in terms of political polarization, which is what political scientists think about a lot, which is to say that there's this idea out there that Americans and frankly, a lot of countries, there are people who have ideologies way on one side of a political spectrum. And the rest of the population largely has ideas way on the other side of the political spectrum. So with apologies to listeners not in the United States, this is a US centric piece of research, but I do believe it applies outside of the United States. But so the idea of affective polarization is something that came into the mainstream in political science, like I said, about 10 years ago. And it was a big step forward in understanding partisan polarization in the United States.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  And when we talk about polarization in the United States politically, what we tend to think about, myself included, is we tend to jump to ideological polarization. So if you see in the news or you see on social media, Americans are more polarized than ever. Political polarization is at an all time high. Political polarization is bad for democracy. Whatever claim you see. Normally, when you hear political polarization, we tend to think of it as ideological polarization. So my views are super, super on the left, and other people's views are super, super on the right. Of course, politics is not just this particular, you know, there's many dimensions to politics, but we could simplify it to just this left-right for now. The challenge is that political scientists, for literally decades,

• 49:11Speaker 06

  could not find empirical evidence of ideological polarization. With the exception now of two issues, Americans, mostly, on average, there are people on the extremes. But if you take any particular issue that comes up in the news, so guns, taxes, government spending, you know, whatever it is that we talk about when we talk about politics and what, you know, candidates are asked about in debates and blah, blah, blah, the vast majority of Americans are kinda in the middle. You know, we see this conversation every time that gun control comes up, is that most Americans, yes, there's people on the far left of gun control and people on the far right, but most Americans want some set of common sense gun control, and we can kinda quibble about how far, but most Americans are fairly moderate.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  That's the case for all issues, except for two. There's two issues in American politics where ideologically, we are seeing a real split between the left and the right. Do you guys wanna guess what those two issues are?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Abortion and guns.

• 50:06Speaker 06

  Abortion, yes. Not guns. Uh, you get one more guess?

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Uh, economics.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:13Speaker 06

  I was gonna say close, but not really. Climate.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  No.

• 50:16Speaker 06

  So climate change.

• 50:17Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so abortion is one where we see the left and right really split. Climate, we see the left and right really split. But things like guns, things like government spending, things like even immigration and other issues, we LGBTQ rights, you know, most Americans, the left is a little to the left and the right is a little to the right, but we really aren't that split. So political scientists were in this conundrum where they said, "Look, we feel polarized. Things seem awful, but wherever we look in the data," and that's true if you say, like, "How strongly do you believe that you're a Democrat versus how strongly do you think you're a Republican?" That wasn't really widening either. And it wasn't until some researchers 10 years ago said, Maybe the polarization issue is not our ideological differences, but it's our emotional differences.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  And from there, that really opened up a brand-new area of research on what is now called affective polarization, where the big finding is it's not that Americans disagree on the policy issues so much, it's that we hate each other. Which is kind of good news from a policy perspective. There's a lot of middle ground where we might like each other. We might come to a compromise. But it's bad news from an implementation and democratic processes and day-to-day life quality perspective, where it's like, we just hate the other side. And the big measure for that is something that is one of my favorite measures out there in the world. It's called a feeling thermometer. And the feeling thermometer says, hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Democrats?

• 51:44Speaker 06

  Hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Republicans? And then you say, hey, Republicans, what do you think about your fellow Republicans? Hey, Republicans, what do you think about Democrats? And the feeling thermometer was very, very warm. It's kind of a warmth bias is another way it's talked about, where Democrats and Republicans both thought of their own party as like a 75 degrees, like a warm day, you know, on a scale from 0 to 100. I guess this is pretty Fahrenheit. But the out-party feelings was like a 17 and plummeting. Democrats hate Republicans, and Republicans hate Democrats.

• 52:14Bob Novella?

  Sounds tribal.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  Very tribal. And that's what brings us to today's paper, which said, hold on a second. And this is why I just love this, because I've been thinking about affective polarization forever. I was pretty satisfied with this 0 to 100 warmth bias scale. And then these two researchers, Nicholas Campos and Christopher Federico from the University of Minnesota, recently published a paper in the American Political Science Review, literally came out within the last few weeks, so that's breaking news in peer-reviewed timing, that said, "We can be more specific than just how warm or cold we feel towards the other party." And exactly as you said, Evan, they divided into three categories. They said, "We think that based on a bunch of research on psychology and in-group-out-group research, and in-group favoritism, and the sense of belonging,

• 52:58Speaker 06

  and all this stuff about tribalism, all this research, we think there's actually three elements to this affective polarization. It's deeper than just, eh, we don't like them." The three elements are othering. So, othering means I think that there are fundamental differences between people in the other group from my own. Another one is aversion. I dislike and avoid people in the other group. And the third one is moralization, which is a perception that my own partisan identity reflects fundamental values and this idea that I am basing my views on morals and therefore the other group must not be. So there's a lot of overlap, right?

• 53:42Speaker 06

  If I'm othering, I think there's a fundamental difference between me and people in the party that I'm not in, then I may avoid them and I may have some moral idea that I'm superior or they're not, but not necessarily. And so the paper details a long process, over two years and many, many surveys, where they distilled these three measures into nine total questions. This went from 45 questions of like, you know, if I'm at a party and there's someone from the other political group there, I'll leave the party. I would be uncomfortable if I found out that my best friend was a member of another political party. All these possible types of survey questions. They distilled it down to nine core questions. They did a ton of work to validate the measures, meaning if I think I'm measuring, you know, moralization, am I actually?

• 54:27Speaker 06

  If so, this is what it would look like. So you do a ton of work to make sure that you're actually picking up the things that you think you're picking up. And then they were able to actually evaluate this three, you know, kind of three-part model of affective polarization against some of the research out there about, well, why do we care about polarization in the first place? Well, one reason we care about polarization in the first place is that we think that it might permit people to justify anti-democratic behavior or democratic backsliding. So a lot of the talk in the United States right now is about, gosh, we might be losing our, you know, democratic institutions and we might be seeing a greater tolerance for behaviors that undermine our democratic institutions.

• 55:12Speaker 06

  A working hypothesis was increased affective polarization, this hatred of the other side, is causing us to be tolerant of or justify doing things that are anti-democratic, like attacking the Capitol or tearing apart, you know, various, you know, bureaucracies or whatever it is, or changing voting rules or whatever it is. We might be becoming more tolerant of that. Because of affective polarization. But it turns out that if you divide affective polarization into these three questions, these three, these three kind of subcategories. Approaches? Yeah, these three constructs, you end up with a much more nuanced picture where it's actually just the aversion piece.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  So if I have aversion to the other side, if I dislike the other side, as opposed to particularly think that my side happens to be morally right, or simply think of them as different, but I don't necessarily dislike them, I just don't want to hang out with them, it's that dislike that makes us most tolerant of these non-democratic attitudes. So when we think of people, you know, turning away and kind of ignoring things that we think, gosh, you're not even trusting our own political institutions, it's largely to do with this aversion, this hatred of the other side, as opposed to being grounded in some moralistic view, or even the othering. The moralistic view, if I think that my side is absolutely right and my beliefs are based

• 56:36Speaker 06

  in some kind of morality, then we see people actually much more likely to endorse democratic norms, even if it's being enforced by parties they disagree with. And the last thing I'll say is that all of this also maps to how strongly we feel associated with a political party, as well as our knowledge of national politics. So the people who are this high in aversion, like I just dislike and don't trust the other side, were more tolerant of anti-democratic policies, and they showed stronger ideological identity, so I strongly identify as a this member of, a member of this party or that party, but they had very low knowledge of actual national politics. Whereas different groups, so if you're high in moralization, I have a strong party ID, but I'm also very knowledgeable.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  So there's all these different pieces. We've been trying to figure out why Americans on opposite sides of the aisle hate each other, and if you start breaking down, well, hate them how? Why do you hate each other? You actually get a clearer picture where it's this mix of knowledge versus tolerance for democratic backsliding, and, you know, tolerance of things like violence, that's really helping us, I think, break through and get to some kind of solution, so we maybe stop hating each other so much. So maybe the aversion people are not a great place to start, but those of us who are more on the moralization or othering side, there's some real interventions where we could start to understand each other and make policy compromises that seemed unreachable till now. So I think this is just amazing.

• 58:03Speaker 06

  I'm curious if you guys think this is just political scientists coming up with new terms to delight each other, or if you think there's actually value there.

• 58:11Speaker 05

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

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Sure, it's much more nuanced with individuals. Yes, it's like, because, you know, everyone has, everyone has a gay friend, everyone has a, you know, like, oh, yeah, and so, but you, you might not like a particular group of people, but even someone that identifies within that group, and you know them personally, you're totally different about them, because you know them personally, and, oh, you know, that's Fred, Fred's different, that doesn't, that doesn't count.

• 58:52Speaker 06

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

• 59:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:28Speaker 06

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

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  It's the same thing with teachers. Like, you know, people hate the American education system. It's like, oh, you don't like your kids' teachers. Oh, no, my kids' teachers are great.

• 1:00:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  They're phenomenal. But no, but the whole system is just corrupt.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  It's true about everything. It's true about doctors. Doctors are this. My doctor's awesome, but doctors in general.

• 1:00:19Speaker 05

  Right, lawyers.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Lawyers, yeah. Like, any group.

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  Drummers are definitely.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Drummers are assholes.

• 1:00:26Speaker 05

  The worst.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  But this drummer's decent.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  300.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  And a lot of people came up to me and said, oh, you know, most skeptics are assholes, but you're nice.

• 1:00:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  It was like, you're the, and I'm like, no, I'm typical. They refused to believe that I wasn't the exception. They refused to believe it because they had their stereotype.

• 1:00:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

  You can't believe it.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  You're an outlier.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Is, you know, having the awareness, the metacognition, to know that this is what we do. And you have to break out of that, of that pattern. Because you're right, when people, and I've read this in many contexts as well, and people of different political stripes get together and talk to each other, they realize, oh, you're not a three-headed monster.

• 1:01:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  You're an actual human being who believes things that most normal human beings believe. But, but when you're thinking of, like, Democrats or Republicans or whatever, in the aggregate. You know, just read the comments to any political article online, right?

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  Oh, it's horrible.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

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

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  You're an accommodationist.

• 1:02:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Apologist.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Apologist, yeah, whatever.

• 1:02:39Speaker 06

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

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  6, 10, yeah.

• 1:03:15Speaker 06

  And Democrats tend to think of Republicans as either these ultra-wealthy, out-of-touch, or like, totally uneducated, you know, just all these stereotypes. Yeah, gun-toting hillbillies. The modal person for both parties is a white Christian. And it's like, we just mostly have a lot in common, we just don't hear from those other sides. And so...

• 1:03:36Speaker 05

  I wonder what countries have the greatest, sort of, whitest middle in terms of agreement, and why that is?

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  I thought you said the whitest middle. I was like, Norway, yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 05

  If you know, like, the extremes on either side are minimal, you know, below 5% or whatever it may be. And like, what is it about those particular environs, or the country, or the culture, or media, or the way media's consumed, or the way people, maybe there's a homogenization, like, is our diversity... Causing this on some level.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  I think it's the media.

• 1:04:08Speaker 05

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

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  I think it's.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  Because it's just said.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically two things, in my opinion, although this is obviously a good question to research. One is what we were talking about before about the insulation of the internet. We're in little information ecosystems. And the other one is the media. I mean, you know, especially.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  They want conflict.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  They want conflict, absolutely. You watch.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  They stoke it.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Watch the media from the other side, whatever side you are on.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  And you're shocked.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Say, the other side wants to destroy America.

• 1:05:01Speaker 06

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

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Cartoonish.

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  Characterizations of things that no one actually, no one wants all your kids to be trans or whatever.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Whatever.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  That's, you know, no one's.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:21Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Like whatever, just pick your issue.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  Abortion's in a 7-Eleven or whatever it is. That's, but what I need to do a better job of is remind myself that a lot of what I am probably hearing about the other side is also.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:34Speaker 06

  That level of caricature, maybe not quite that level, but near that level and.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  It's the hardest thing, man. It's the, it's the, it's like you gotta, whenever you agree with something, that's when you gotta be most diligent.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  It's the hardest thing.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  Oh, that makes me feel good. Oh, is that, okay, trees are talking to each other?

• 1:05:49Speaker 06

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

• 1:05:57Speaker 05

  The other direction too, yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

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

• 1:06:43Speaker 06

  watch Fox News to watch CNN for a month. I don't know how they had forced this. I don't know how they verified that this was happening, but they did seem to report some ideological moderation in those 30 people who were forced to watch CNN.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  That would be an expected result.

• 1:06:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Like a clockwork orange, they pride their eyes open and strap their heads in.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. Put in context that just play.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Vidie well, little brother.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

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

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  Well, get back to us.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

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

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, let's take a quick break from the show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 1:07:32Bob Novella?

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• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, I'm gonna ask you guys to indulge me in a little bit of neurological jargon now.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a cool item. I'm gonna try to explain this to you, you know, as simply as I can. You guys familiar with the basal ganglia?

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  Slow down, slow down.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a, it's a, it's a spice.

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  What the hell?

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  I like it with a little turmeric.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  Mmm, I do as well.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  That's what you, that's what you use to think about pasta.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  So what do you, what do you think? What do you, if I just say, throw the term out there basal ganglia?

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  It's the base of your brain.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  It's a brain, but not a brain. It's like insect brain or something. It's like very small part of a brain.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  It's like an old like fear.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:09:29Speaker 06

  Sent, okay.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  No movement. It has to be movement. So very quickly, there's three systems in the brain that influence voluntary movement, right? You have the, what we call the periaminal system, the, the primary motor cortex. Um, this is just, you know, you have the motor cortex, which then sends signals down the, um, the cortical spinal tracts to your muscles, right? That's the direct motor control of your muscles. It's literally two neurons, right? These are the longest neurons in your body.

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  How long are they?

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  One, one goes from the brain to your spinal cord. The other goes from the spinal cord to your muscle. That's it. To the two neuron system. So that's sort of the direct muscle control, but that's modified by two other systems.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  No redundancy.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  It's modified by the cerebellar system, right? Which allows you to coordinate different muscles together, right? That's where your muscle memory is. And if you do any kind of coordinated movement, rhythm over time, right, George, when you're playing the drums, it's all happening in your cerebellum, right? But then there's also the basal ganglia. Well, what does that do? How does that modify movement? And that's a very interesting question. And we've been modifying our models of what the basal ganglia actually does. One way to think about it, and this is partly how I explain it to to students, is that part of what it does is modulate the gain of the connection

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  between the premotor and the motor cortex. So basically, you're desired to move and the amount that you actually move. Right? And does that make sense? You know what gain is? Gain is just like the connection between input and output. Right? That's why on old stereos, some engineer decided to call the volume knob the gain. Right? Because that's literally what it is. Yes. Yeah, it's the, you know, the input versus the speaker output. Kind of annoying.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  That's right. So like you don't you don't overshoot the pen when you're trying to grab it.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. Ah. Although overshooting is more to do with the cerebellum. It gets complicated. But it had think so you so Parkinson's Parkinson's disease, right? That's a disease of the basal ganglia. And they have their gain is turned way down. So at the end stage, they move very little. And they even get frozen. They can't move at all. But there's something called Huntington's chorea, for example, which is a the opposite disease. Right? It's a lesion in a different part of the basal ganglia where the gain is turned way up, way up. And they're constantly moving and wriggling and right. And they can't stay still. So that's a that's a simple way to think about it. It's way more complicated than that.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  But the question is, how does the basal ganglia do that? Now, the traditional model is that it primarily works through inhibition.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Which is how most of the nervous system is, controls itself, right? The nervous system, especially, you know, the brain is constantly inhibiting the pathways and conduction that it doesn't want. And there's tonic inhibition, meaning baseline, you know, always on to inhibition, basically throughout the nervous system. That's just how it functions. And so the basal ganglia works primarily through inhibiting unwanted movements. Right? And that inhibition could be turned up or turned down. So now we get to the new study, which is looking at, because we have all kinds of new fancy tools that we could use to, to study how the brain is working. And this was looking at the circuitry in the basal ganglia, a specific part of the basal

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  ganglia, the substantia nigra pars reticulata, um, which is not the part of the, that's affected in Parkinson's disease, by the way. That's the substantia nigra pars compacta, which is right next door. But in any case, so they, they were looking at this and to, to see like, how is it functioning during voluntary movement? And what they found was, it isn't just inhibition. It's not just inhibiting unwanted movements. It's also potentiating wanted movements. So it's actually acting like a very complicated switchboard that is selecting specifically which motor neurons are going to be firing,

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  like which ones to enhance and which ones to suppress. And the, it had a very dynamic firing rate. So it actually has a much greater level of control than we previously thought over controlling voluntary movement. When you make a precise movement, right? You have to activate a bunch of motor units in a precise timing and coordination and sequence. And a lot of that is happening in the basal ganglia. Right? So it's essentially modifying your, like, when you think about, I want to like, reach over here and grab a can of Coke and drink it, you know?

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  You don't have to really think too hard about specifically what you're doing, right? Your conscious control is at a very high level. And, right? You're not thinking, I'm going to activate this muscle a little, you know, I mean, you're not, you're not Right. voluntarily controlling. Yeah, every little muscle fiber and muscle group in all of the different muscles that are required to do that action. You're just thinking, I just want to reach over there. So where is that, that level of control must be subconscious, right? And so it's partly in the cerebellum and it's partly in the basal ganglia. And it turns out that there's way more control happening in the basal ganglia than we previously thought.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  It's not just a general inhibition, not just a gain up and down. It's actually coordinating a lot of the movement itself.

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  You mean decade?

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:29Speaker 05

  So, so like an athlete that's learned a skill over time, or like if you learn how to type or something like that. Does that mean that the, that the, the, the gain from the basal ganglia increases over time? And like kind of takes over the involuntary? Cause like when you're really good at something, you don't think about it.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  You know, whether it's an instrument or pitching or golf.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  So again, classically, that kind of, you know, making a learned movement subconscious is thought to be in the cerebellum.

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Right? So like when you shoot a basketball a hundred times, a thousand times, to the point where you don't think about it. That's because those muscle coordinations all happening at the subconscious and specifically cerebellar level. But now more of it may be happening in the basal ganglia than we thought. Maybe a combination of the two things. And, but we will, the next step would be, would be a very interesting question, George, is how much does the basal ganglia learn?

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Like, is it just, is it just, is it just necessary to execute these finessed movements? Or is it actually learning how to do them as a learned movement? We know the cerebellum.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  As it practices.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's exactly.

• 1:16:39Speaker 05

  Taking over responsibility sort of.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So is, we don't know that yet. So we know the cerebellum does that, but maybe, maybe since the basal ganglia is far more complicated than we thought. Maybe it's doing some of that too, who knows?

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  Parallel redundancy, all these things coming in?

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:00Speaker 05

  Plastic.

• 1:17:01Bob Novella?

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

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:25Bob Novella?

  I got high hopes for that.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  And that has two basic limiting factors, right? One is just the hardware, right? Just the technology of interfacing with the brain. And the other is our knowledge at a very fine level of exactly how the brain is wired. And so every bit that we learn about that, so you could imagine like building a computer chip that does the same thing, you know, that the basal ganglia is doing and, or whatever. I'm just saying theoretically, we can't, obviously don't have the technology to do that now. So, and we all, like, one of, one of the early technologies of neuromodulation is deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  We actually put wires in the basal ganglia to, for example, suppress the tremor of Parkinson's disease. So the basal ganglia is one of the first parts of the brain that was targeted by, you know, sticking a wire in it and using electrical stimulation to affect its function. So, yeah, so this potentially has a lot of implications for neurological treatment, especially because of neuromodulation. But again, it's just cool to understand, you know, how complicated the brain is and how it functions.

• 1:18:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  You'll just have to teach us.

• 1:18:59Bob Novella?

  We just have to become your new students.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Speaker 06

  It's the Steven Novella Unlicensed Neurological Course.

• 1:19:06Speaker 05

  The doctor is in.

• 1:19:07Bob Novella?

  No refunds.

• 1:19:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 05

  Five cents.

• 1:19:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, five cents.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell us about this. So you said this is a new dwarf planet, but

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Well, that's what the headline said.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  The pedant in me says, you mean a new dwarf planet candidate?

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

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

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, uh, 1800s, right? I mean, Eris, I mean, uh, Ceres. Ceres was discovered a long time ago.

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  It was 1801.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

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

• 1:19:59Speaker 05

  That's visually, like, through a, through a telescope?

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  Because there was no radiometry or anything, or radio, yeah, wow.

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  Nope, that, that's, that was it. And then it was in 2005, they, they have the third one, um, Eris.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  And then what in 2006 happened? The, the category-

• 1:20:18Speaker 06

  Changed everything.

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

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

• 1:20:33Speaker 06

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

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

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

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  I know all of them.

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  Sleepy, dopey, sneezy.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  You have, so the criteria to be a dwarf planet?

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  You have to orbit the sun and not, and not another body, so you can't be a moon.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:21:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  Or a near-sphere, yes.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Uh, but you do not clear out your own orbit.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  If you did, you'd be a planet. Oh.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  And there's a fourth one?

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  Well, you, you combined two into one. It was orbiting the sun and not being.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  And not being a moon. Okay.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  And not being a moon. What do you mean clear your own orbit?

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  Oh, it's flying with you. I got you. That's what knocked Pluto out of the category.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:53Bob Novella?

  That'd be annoying.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:22:04Bob Novella?

  It's a manmade definition anyway.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it's all arbitrary. Yeah. It's all arbitrary anyway. Yeah.

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  It sort of is, but you know, with this particular new discovery, well, not, well, you know, it was in 2017 is when the images were captured, but they were reanalyzed. Um, and now has come forward as part of a paper that appeared on the pre-print server, ARX IV. I don't even know if that's pronounceable or not.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Archive.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Archive. Okay. Well, yeah, I guess I suppose that that's what it would be. And yeah, they have, uh, so it's designated 2017 OF 201. So 2017 for the year that the images were captured. OF 201. Don't know why. It will, you know, if it ever is officially declared to be a dwarf planet, it will receive a, a name, a proper name, uh, like the, like the others. This one was discovered, uh, far beyond Neptune. I mean, far beyond. It orbits the sun every 25,000 years. That is out there. Yep. Yep.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Uh, and this was all confirmed by, again, uh, the IAUs. Oh, they have a specific department for this. The Minor Planet Center, which I did not know about before. And this was published on May 21st. So just recently, a team of scientists spotted it while poring through archival data from the Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada, France, Hawaii Telescope based in Hawaii. The researchers tracked the object's motion across nineteen sets of images spanning seven years. And you know, you think about it, something that is going around the sun every twenty-five thousand years, that and you've got, what, seven years' worth of photography for this thing. It's not really moving all that much. That is very, very minor. So to

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  be able to kind of suss that out in itself is kind of incredible. All right. So yeah, again, it's a candidate. They still have to do more to determine exactly if it fits all the criteria. But here's some interesting data they do have on the planet. The diameter of the planet, they approximate that it's seven hundred kilometers. And that would be roughly the size of Ceres.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  A little bit smaller.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Or Haumea, a little bit smaller. Yeah, it's that is an elongated orbit with the twenty-five thousand. And it's elliptical, like all planets are. When it's closest to the sun, it's forty-four point nine astronomical units away. But at its farthest distance, one thousand six hundred thirty. Wow. Astronomical units. So if you can envision that inside your head, that's I cannot. That is quite a shape it makes. So it has not been direct, it says here, its exact shape hasn't been directly observed. Okay, so they still need more on that. But

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  its size suggests it's likely in hydrostatic equilibrium, nearly spherical, which would give it one of the criteria it needs to become a dwarf planet.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  No, it's not a sphere.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  But it still counts.

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  Its own gravity.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  So it's actually its theoretical shape not eliminating the factor of its rapid rotation.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  What did we talk about?

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  If that's a factor.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, what we talked about, was it another planet, an exoplanet or something that had a kind of a It's science fiction. There was a science fiction, yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  It was, yeah, we talked about it. I think in one of the private shows, which hasn't aired yet. So yeah, we did talk about it.

• 1:25:47Speaker 04

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

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 06

  Full fledged planets. The kids can only memorize, you know, up to nine.

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 06

  Full planets.

• 1:26:21Speaker 04

  Remember that?

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  That was so deeply ingrained in the, in our, in our early.

• 1:26:26Speaker 06

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

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

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

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Pluto is, and all of its moons are named after the underworld.

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's sort of, I know, because it received its name prior to being a dwarf planet. So.

• 1:27:01Speaker 06

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

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

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

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this, you know, the 2017, blah, blah, blah, may not get an actual name, may not be confirmed for decades.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could be a while.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  It takes a long time. They still have, you have a bunch of other candidates we haven't confirmed fully yet. Because it just takes time to really, you know, confirm their orbit, their shape, their, you know, whether they're, they've gravitationally cleared out their zone or not. So it takes time. Yep.

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

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

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:27:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:27:47Speaker 06

  I see. All right.

• 1:27:49Speaker 05

  I'm shocked that AR X I V is pronounced archive and not AR fourteen.

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  I didn't pick up that.

• 1:27:56Speaker 05

  I thought it was AR fourteen. I was like, okay, that's weird.

• 1:27:59Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  AR fourteen.

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  I think it's just, it's a website where you put in working papers, basically. And I've just heard it called archive.

• 1:28:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  But the X is capitalized. The letter A is not. So you have a capitalization in this dead center of the word. So. Kind of like a brain.

• 1:28:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just.

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I suppose, yeah.

• 1:28:17Speaker 06

  Scientists being wacky.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  All right, guys. We have no who's that noisy this week is Jay's away.

• 1:28:21Speaker 04

  Bye, Jay.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  So George proposed a discussion topic, which I like.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:28:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:29:21Speaker 05

  Like, like, you will never have shields, like, you know, shields of some kind around a spaceship. Like, we will never have that. We will never have subspace communication. Like, I'm sorry.

• 1:29:35Speaker 04

  Light travel.

• 1:29:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  Quickly, anyway.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  Not quickly, right, yeah, you'd have to have the 3D, yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  It would be very rare.

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  And it's just, eh, these, they're so ubiquitous, these, these tropes, and I wonder how much damage that does in terms of our expectations. Lightsaber, we'll never have a lightsaber. There's not enough energy to have a handheld lightsaber, let alone like a laser, just to have a handheld laser, which you think would be like, oh yeah, we'll totally have a phaser or a laser. It's like, eh, it's not gonna happen, it's not gonna happen.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  So, no, I agree, we actually talk about this in our book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Future, we go over all of those, and talk about their plausibility, and you, you hit a lot of the big ones. And I think just under the category of space travel, our image of space travel is completely distorted by science fiction.

• 1:30:58Bob Novella?

  Completely and utterly distorted.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be, not, in the near, medium, or even long-term future, it's not gonna be anything like depicted in almost any science fiction, except for the hardest of science fiction. And even then, they always, they throw in a gimme or two, just to make it work narratively, right? But yeah, so, space travel, it's all about our tolerance for acceleration, right? There isn't any way to get around that. Artificial gravity, it hasn't been 100% ruled out by the physics that we currently have established, but we're getting damn close. Yeah, it's, the pro, the, the, the door is only cracked open the smallest amount, so it's probably not possible within the laws of physics to have that kind

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  of artificial gravity. And as you say, shields, like, how, you can't just have like, just an energy field, you know, like that, you know?

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, that would deflect weaponry and things like, right.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  It's just not practical.

• 1:31:54Bob Novella?

  Like, directed energy and kinetic energy, you know, is like, it's, it would be extremely limited, if, if anything, and not anything like that.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  I mean, you can have magnetic fields, but it protects you from something.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  Oh gosh, that is terrible.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:31Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:46Speaker 05

  Does the expanse not deal with that?

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  So they just ignore the problem?

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  They just ignore it. They just completely ignore the problem. Occasionally I'll read in a book or something where they talk about shielding for the radiation or whatever. But especially when you're in a movie, they always just make things look cool. But they never like are really designed them like you would have to. If you're gonna be in space for a while, you gotta be in the center of the ship. You need massive shielding. Actually, you know, the one, the one science fiction TV show that talked about shielding? Avenue 5? Was the, was Avenue 5, which was a comedy. I don't even know. It was actually really good and they did it because the ship had a poop shield.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  They, all of the excrement of all the passengers was stored in the outer layer of the ship as a radiation shield. So it was, they got a joke out of it. That's hilarious. But, but it was right. It was, it was correct. You, actually that show, as silly as it was, made a lot of interesting, you know, correct choices. In terms, then they also made some egregious horrible gaffes as well scientifically, but.

• 1:34:02Speaker 05

  But the, but the question here is like, does the inspiration of science fiction outweigh the practical? Disappointment or misinformation. Like, I don't know.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Raises our expectations too high.

• 1:34:14Speaker 05

  Right, you know, what's the, what's the right equation? Or what's the right percentage to be like, where should, where should that live?

• 1:34:20Bob Novella?

  I wouldn't want to limit authors narratively just because of the potential bad influence it could have. That'd be too, far too restrictive.

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:34:27Bob Novella?

  Um, right? I mean, like, would you restrict other, other types of narratives? Um, because of the, you know, the, you know, the bad effect it could have on, on future development of whatever? I don't, I don't know. It just seems like.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I'm not proposing any kind of restriction.

• 1:34:40Bob Novella?

  And be like, yeah.

• 1:34:41Speaker 05

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

• 1:34:59Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:10Bob Novella?

  They don't take that away from us.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:41Bob Novella?

  It's too boring, you know?

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Speaker 05

  The fingerprint database that's instantaneous, yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. Or like, we can't have DNA back in hours? I mean, I don't get it.

• 1:35:49Speaker 06

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

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

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

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:36:28Speaker 05

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

• 1:36:35Speaker 06

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

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Where meanwhile, like we're being, we're being, you know, pummeled now with AI and all the ramifications of what potentially could be happening with AI. And there's relatively speaking, very little science fiction tropes about that, you know, the, the, the availability of AI, AI then replacing people and like the, you know, art and music being replaced by AI. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Speaker 05

  I'm sure there are stories exist. I'm sure that exists, but there's no way there's more stories that exist than have lasers or phasers.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Or shielding or, you know, or lightsabers or whatever. So it's this weird like, what, what are we writing about and learning and worried about and being influenced by and talking about?

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  I think AI is going to destroy us in a completely different day than way than was imagined. Yes. It's not going to become sentient. It doesn't have to become sentient in order to destroy us.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  That's so, and I think this problem goes way beyond science fiction and technology. It, I think we have the same problem with all fiction. For example, I think, and this is my main beef with all medical dramas is that they instill in people a pretty bad misunderstanding of how medicine works and clinical decision making works. And people come in with expectations about like, well, I need. A diagnosis, like I need a Dr. House to make this bizarre diagnosis and that will lead directly to me being cured. And until I get that diagnosis, nothing good can happen. It's not just a false hope, it's also shutting down other pathways of legitimate treatment

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  and evaluation, etc. They're thinking in a very narrow narrative way that they see on TV. It's the same thing with lawyers and with courtrooms. Courtroom dramas are mostly bullshit, right? They're not, it's not how courtrooms actually functioning. There's no surprise witnesses or whatever in courtrooms. It can't happen.

• 1:38:49Speaker 06

  I'm gonna be my own lawyer now and you're like, it somehow wins.

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  Perry Mason moment.

• 1:38:56Bob Novella?

  Can't handle the truth.

• 1:38:58Speaker 06

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

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  When in reality, it's always lupus. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's like there are certain, like, there's like running jokes, like in neurology, I could tell you the ones. Like if there's, somebody's presenting a weird case at grand rounds, like, oh, you'll never guess what this is. It's like one of three things. It's always like the same few things that are like the mystery diagnoses. And lupus is one of those in medicine, because it can do so many things.

• 1:39:36Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  All right, we're gonna do one quick email. This comes from Joshua from Tyler, Texas. And he writes, hi all, here's, there's so much stupid or malevolence going on right now, it's hard to keep up. Here's the latest stupid. And then he links to an article, I'm sure you guys have heard about this, about Health and Human Services cancelling a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine.

• 1:40:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I heard, I saw an article.

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  Can you get more short sighted than that?

• 1:40:06Bob Novella?

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

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:40:18Bob Novella?

  A lot of my shots were Moderna.

• 1:40:19Speaker 06

  Same.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too. Yeah, I got a lot of the Moderna shots. And Moderna, you know, was able to develop the vaccine as quickly as it did, partly because they got government, there was government funding available, Operation Warp Speed, et cetera. So other companies also developed, like Pfizer, you know, mRNA vaccines, and we talked about the fact that mRNA technology has been in development for like 30 years, and Moderna actually has been existence for 10 years, developing the technology before they came out with the vaccine. So now they're working on an mRNA-based vaccine against the bird flu, which is a strong candidate for the next pandemic. That's the next one, right? Not necessarily, but it's a strong candidate. Like, if there's one to worry about, that's the top of the list, right?

• 1:41:02Bob Novella?

  Get your sourdough ready. My money's on that.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  There we go. Stock up on toilet paper, get your sourdough starter ready. So it's actually a good thing that we're developing a vaccine now, and the government had given Moderna a grant for like $700 million, something like that, to develop the vaccine. And the Trump administration, HHS, under, you know, Jack, guess what's his name, RFK Jr., just decided they were gonna up and cancel the whole thing. They just canceled the contract. And they did it for the dumbest reasons possible. They basically, it's all because of RFK Jr.'s conspiracy fear mongering about mRNA technology and vaccines.

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  They're saying this isn't, this is too risky. It's something that's too risky, there are other, better ways to go, we're gonna use this money to develop safer options. It's complete and utter nonsense. And what they're touting is basically 30-year-old technology, instead of using mRNA technology. The big advantage, of course, for the mRNA technology is that it could be developed much faster.

• 1:42:11Speaker 06

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

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, like 30 years.

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  We'd rather spend that 700 million on unpasteurized milk.

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Boy, crazy. On vitamin A, whatever. Yeah, right.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  It's more vitamins.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, consulted no one.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Consulted no one, bypassed the CDC, just decided himself, because he's a jackass, that that's going to be, that that's what we're going to do. There you go. So, yep, this is, this is exactly what we were expecting to happen, and it's happening. It's as bad as anyone feared, probably even worse.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:31Speaker 06

  What do we do about this, right? Like, obviously raise awareness and help people.

• 1:43:36Bob Novella?

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

• 1:43:40Speaker 05

  There's some legit guy putting that.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  That sounds like some affective pulling.

• 1:43:43Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very polarizing.

• 1:43:46Bob Novella?

  Absolutely objective.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:53Bob Novella?

  Right. That too, that too. That's just a, I just gave you a shorthand of that sentence.

• 1:43:58Speaker 06

  And just legitimizing that way of thinking, like, the long-term damage of just saying, like, well, if we're going to have this kind of, I don't know, skepticism, not in this, the skeptics guide kind of skepticism, but the cynical pseudoscience skepticism at the national denialism, there we go, at the national level. It's like, think of how many young people are going to be trained to think that this is the way to think about the world, you know?

• 1:44:19Speaker 05

  But like, they want, they want to throw Fauci in, they, I know I'm using the proverb, but like, but, but there are, there are people that wanted to throw Fauci into prison because of his supposed connection with the COVID vaccine and its, its evils, supposed evils. Here's a guy who's like legitimately passing, not, not talking to people in the CDC and passing general kinds of stuff that's going to kill people. It's going to kill people.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  This could potentially kill millions of people.

• 1:44:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:45:00Speaker 05

  It's, it's just.

• 1:45:02Speaker 06

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

• 1:45:27Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, the company is going to continue, though, with their, with their

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  They said they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna keep going forward. Why wouldn't they?

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  But, but losing, you know, 600, 700 million dollars of funding obviously is going to have a massive impact.

• 1:45:42Speaker 04

  Oh, it's gonna have a massive effect. And, and on their development. And when it comes time that we need this thing, there's gonna be people, it'll be expensive and there'll be people who can't afford it.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  Because, because they have to build this, they have to build this into their cost.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, terrible, terrible, terrible decision. Any other emails there, Steve?

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  What else you got?

• 1:46:01Speaker 06

  Any good news?

• 1:46:02Speaker 04

  They canceled the Department of Transportation yet?

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  I have good news. It is time for science or fiction.

• 1:46:07Speaker 06

  Everything you just said was fiction. Yay!

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, no.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Or the last season of Lost. All right.

• 1:46:19Speaker 04

  Spoiler alert.

• 1:46:21Speaker 06

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

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Don't bother. It's still a wonderful series.

• 1:46:30Speaker 06

  I've seen all but the last two episodes. People were so upset that I just can't bring myself to watch them, but I feel like I did it.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:46:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:11Speaker 06

  Yay!

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna give you three bits of scientific jargon and their definition. But of course, one of them isn't real.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

  So good.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 1:47:25Speaker 05

  Oh, this is where Steve gets to play pseudoscientist.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  Here we go. Item number one: Solotonic superfluorescence. Localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high-temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Item number two: Pseudorevertent hyphomorphogenesis. Don't you love it? The ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior. And item number three: Indurated leucocratic amphibolite. A class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Don't worry.

• 1:48:15Speaker 06

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

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  So there we go. I gave it to you in writing.

• 1:48:21Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, thank you. I've been playing this, I've been playing this for, what, 12 years, 10 years, whatever? And like, I always take little notes, and I can always sort of basically encapsulate what each one is, and my page is blank. So thank you for, just thank you for providing the link there. Thank you. Holy Christmas, really?

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:46Speaker 06

  I was afraid you'd say that. All right. So the only one that I felt like I had a fighting chance at familiarity with was the one about the fungal strains undergoing branching growth. And the main reason that meant anything to me is because I've been watching The Last of Us, and I've seen a lot of CGI of fungal strains growing. And that made me think, well, that one must be real. And then I thought, well, that is a fiction show that I'm watching based on a video game, so maybe it's false. But I'm gonna stick with my initial instinct and say that the fungal strains, which is the pseudoreverent hyphomorphogenesis, I'm gonna say that's true. That's the science. And I'm also gonna say that the hydrated calcific minerals is the science, because minerals feel sciency to me.

• 1:49:31Speaker 06

  And so I'm gonna go with the solotonic superfluorescence as the fiction, largely because superfluorescence

• 1:49:41Speaker 06

  Sounds like a word I would have made up in like sixth grade if I was trying to like BS my way through a test I didn't study for. So the localized self-sustaining waves and nonlinear systems, I think is the fiction.

• 1:49:53Bob Novella?

  Okay, George.

• 1:49:54Speaker 05

  I'm gonna agree with Andrea's reasoning here. I was the solitonic felt a little little hat on a hat. It felt a little hat on a hat. So item one, solitonic, super fluorescence, localizing self self sustaining waves and nonlinear systems, this bursts of light thing. Yeah, I I I I'm gonna agree with you. I think that is that is indeed the fiction.

• 1:50:20Bob Novella?

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:50:22Speaker 04

  Does no one have a problem with pseudo revert?

• 1:50:26Bob Novella?

  Pseudo revert.

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

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

• 1:51:11Bob Novella?

  Lucocratic.

• 1:51:12Speaker 04

  Lucocratic.

• 1:51:14Bob Novella?

  Amphibolite.

• 1:51:15Speaker 04

  Amphibolite. Hmm. Gee whiz. I'm gonna let Bob go and then he'll come back to me. Oh, wait, no, that's not how this game works. Well, I'll tell you what, we have two very special guests this week, and you guys are awesome. I've been so happy to be working with you all these years on these various projects. And out of out of total respect for the both of you, I will join you.

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:51:39Speaker 04

  In saying the solitonic one is the fiction.

• 1:51:44Speaker 05

  Can I change my answer?

• 1:51:47Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. Okay.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  No pressure, Bob. No pressure. No pressure, Bob.

• 1:51:52Speaker 06

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

• 1:51:54Bob Novella?

  Oh, I'm totally out group.

• 1:51:58Speaker 06

  I am moralistically opposed to you.

• 1:52:00Bob Novella?

  I don't know what these are. I do know some of these words. No one knows what they are, Bob. Right. So I'm just throwing that out there. So this first one, solitonic supliferresence, I'm familiar with those words and they seem, stressed, underlined and in bold, they seem to be related to the definition. So to me, this one, the solitonic supliferresence, seems most genuine to me. So I'm gonna say that one is science. Pseudorevertent hyphomorphogenesis, to a lesser degree, seems to coincide with the definition, at least some of the words. Especially, I don't know what hyphal is in this context, but pseudorevertent and morphogenesis kind of flows with the definition as it's stated

• 1:52:44Bob Novella?

  here. It seems to go together in my mind. Now, these are like correlations. I just can't give anything definite, but it seems to make sense. The third one is the one that makes me say, what? Indurated, leukocrotic, and fibellite. I just don't know any of those words. So it's hard. I can't connect those wacky words. I can't connect that jargon with what follows in terms of the description. I can't make a connection. It may be very nicely connected, but I can't connect it because I can't get anything from those words. So this is probably, maybe it's the wrong approach. So I'll say for that reason, since the first two seem to flow for me, I'm gonna say the third one is fiction.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree on the second one. So we'll start there. Pseudorevertent hyphomorphogenesis, the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior. You guys all think that is sciency jargon, and that one is science. So you're all safe so far. Halfway there. So pseudorevertent, if there is a mutation, so the wild-type is what it sounds, that's the strain of a whatever, bacteria, plant, whatever, that exists in the wild. If there's a mutation that could change the

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  You know, the form of that thing. But you could, but you could also then have a back mutation, right? You undergo another mutation which reverts it to the wild type, a revert into mutation. But you can have a pseudo revert mutation, which is different than the original mutation, but it replicates the original phenotype. So it looks like the wild type, even though the second mutation was in a different place and sometimes even in a different gene. So that's what pseudo revert, it's a genetics term, right? Hyphol just means branching, hyphy, that's the branching growth, right? And morphogenesis is just changing form. So this is, I got this from a paper which was just published. You know, here it's camp independent signal pathways simulate hyphol morphogenesis in

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  Candida albicans. Albicans, Candida is a fungus. So yeah, so it's, they, they found a pseudo revert into mutation in the Candida albicans that simulates, that stimulates hyphol morphogenesis in, similar to the wild type. So yeah, so that one is science. Pseudo revertant hyphol morphogenesis. All right, let's go on to number three. Bob, you think this one is the fiction, everyone else thinks this one is science. Indurated leucocratic amphibolite, a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Now Bob, you think this one is the fiction, probably mainly it sounds because this is

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  a, is geology and you're not familiar with geological terms?

• 1:55:42Bob Novella?

  I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 1:55:43Speaker 04

  George is.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  George is a geologist.

• 1:55:46Speaker 04

  George has the advantage.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  Nine hundred plus episodes.

• 1:55:49Bob Novella?

  Right, no doubt.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Now, these are all legitimate geological terms. Indurated, what does indurated mean? As a generic, as a term? It's not, indurated is not specific to geology. In fact, that's a medical term that we use as well.

• 1:56:04Bob Novella?

  Embedded with, enmeshed?

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  Well, cemented hardened, just means hardened.

• 1:56:07Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  Like any mineral, any mineral that, yeah, that gets hardened or like cemented is indurated. Leucocratic, now leucos means what? Loose? Letting light through? Looseism? Light colored, right? Light colored, okay. So it's a hardened, light colored amphibolite. Amphibolite is a class of minerals.

• 1:56:28Speaker 04

  No way.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  And what does amphi mean? Amphi, like amphibious? Both.

• 1:56:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:56:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, like double or, or two-sided.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  Or specifically like what's an amphibian?

• 1:56:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, water and, and air.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Um, so this one is the fiction.

• 1:56:49Bob Novella?

  Good Bob.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  Oh, sniff it out, Bob.

• 1:56:52Bob Novella?

  I knew it sounded off.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:58Speaker 06

  Oh, so you're telling super fluorescence is real?

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  It will get there.

• 1:57:02Bob Novella?

  Sure, that's a, yeah, that's a real word. I've seen that one.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I figured that's why Bob went left.

• 1:57:05Bob Novella?

  And solotons too, yes.

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:08Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:57:09Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  All right, so amphib- so the big thing is that a- a- amphibolites or amphibol, they are silicate minerals, not calcific. They have nothing to do with underwater or volcanic eruptions or whatever. And I just combined that with endurated and loosocratic, I just looked up more geological terms to make it sound sciency-jargony.

• 1:57:30Bob Novella?

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

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:36Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  Now, solotonic supliferescence, but as Bob said, these are, this is real. This comes from a paper unconventional solotonic high-temperature supliferescence from perovskites. Perovskites is a type of crystal. It's what, it's currently the, the best candidate to replace or to be combined with silicon for solar panels. Yep. And for a lot of electronics as well. Uh, but in any case, yeah, the solotonic is these localized self-sustaining waves in a nonlinear systems. Now fluorescence, you know, that's when you, fluorescence is when you have molecules that, that when excited emit light, right? They glow.

• 1:58:16Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  They fluoresce. Usually doesn't happen at high temperatures because high temperature causes, it basically breaks the coherence. But if it's in a solotonic system, you can have high-temperature coherence, which creates these, these, uh, large groups of excited molecules that all burst together, causing super fluorescence.

• 1:58:39Bob Novella?

  Super fluorescence, yeah. Cool.

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  So that one is real.

• 1:58:42Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  That was tricky.

• 1:58:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, for once, go with my gut. It was actually helpful. Let it go, Bob. Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you sniffed it out.

• 1:58:49Bob Novella?

  You sniffed it out, Bob.

• 1:58:51Speaker 06

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

• 1:58:53Speaker 04

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

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  You would have gone with two, yeah.

• 1:58:58Speaker 06

  All right, well, might as well be wrong together, huh?

• 1:59:00Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:59:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  But I, I, real science jargon is like poetry. Cause I, you know, I really love.

• 1:59:08Speaker 04

  People hate poetry.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  It's precise. There's no money in poetry. It's efficient. It's just lovely. And just, if you understand the words, you understand the concepts. You know what I mean?

• 1:59:20Speaker 06

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

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  Lean into it. Lean into the jargon.

• 1:59:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:59:32Bob Novella?

  For high level communication, for high level communication between colleagues, that's the way it's gotta be.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  No, but even, even to the general public, just define, define, why do we have this term? Because it refers specifically to a concept. The concept is what you're teaching. And the words go with the concept. So you don't, and I feel like if you avoid jargon rather than explaining it, you actually, the idea becomes simplistic. Not just, and can, and imprecise, you know, sometimes.

• 2:00:00Bob Novella?

  From our point of view though, for science communication, and I, I encounter this for almost every news item I cover. It's like, you know, how much jargon do I throw in there? And how, and where is the point where people, people are gonna just get glazed over and it's gonna be counterproductive to my, to my goal.

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  You don't want gratuitous jargon. I agree. Don't want gratuitous jargon.

• 2:00:21Bob Novella?

  That's all I'm saying.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:31Bob Novella?

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

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  I also wouldn't avoid it just to avoid it. You know what I mean?

• 2:00:35Bob Novella?

  Right. But it's about, like everything else, it's a balance.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Bob Novella?

  I'm not gonna throw, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna throw five of these into one 10 minute news item. I'll throw a couple and try to focus on one or two, but not go too crazy with it. Otherwise you're gonna lose people and then it's like.

• 2:00:49Speaker 06

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

• 2:01:29Speaker 05

  I think I need to write like a Schoolhouse Rock for terms. Oh, my God, dude, that's it.

• 2:01:37Speaker 05

  Right, just like all different branches and stuff, yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 06

  You did miss an opportunity to have a little Skeptic's Guide Spelling Bee where you made us spell these terms.

• 2:01:45Speaker 02

  That I won't do, or pronounce them.

• 2:01:47Speaker 05

  Next, Nauticon, next Nauticon will do that.

• 2:01:49Speaker 06

  I would love a spelling, I've wanted to do a spelling bee.

• 2:01:52Speaker 05

  A spelling bee?

• 2:01:54Speaker 06

  Right, it's a good idea.

• 2:01:55Speaker 05

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  But the flip side is unnecessary jargon drives me crazy, you know, when it's not more precise, it's just dense, you're just inhibiting understanding, that drives me crazy, you know?

• 2:02:11Speaker 05

  It's very solarpatalupatus.

• 2:02:15Speaker 06

  And not even just.

• 2:02:16Speaker 05

  A syllabac.

• 2:02:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, not even just jargon, though, but it's just sort of like, it's the thing that we all did in 12th grade to make our three-page paper a five-page paper, which is you just find words with more syllables.

• 2:02:26Speaker 05

  Very, very, very important. And now we have ChatGPT for that.

• 2:02:30Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Which is wonderful. Oh, man, when I learned I could, I could, we had Macs, we had the very first Macs, we had a Mac lab in my high school, the very first Macintoshes in New Jersey in a school, and when I learned you could change the font size, oh, my God! An eight-page paper turns to a 10, it's like you go from like, you know, the 10 to 10.2 or 10.5, whole extra page, phenomenal.

• 2:02:56Speaker 05

  Awesome. Awful, awful, awful, awful.

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 2:03:01Speaker 04

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

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  Very nice.

• 2:03:21Speaker 06

  Matt.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  You know Matt, he was on the show before.

• 2:03:23Speaker 04

  Yes, yep, Matt's been on the show.

• 2:03:25Speaker 06

  That's a great quote.

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

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

• 2:03:35Speaker 04

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

• 2:03:42Speaker 06

  And prefer seeking truth over being right.

• 2:03:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, don't become too invested in your belief or your truth. Wherever the evidence lies.

• 2:03:53Speaker 06

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

• 2:03:56Speaker 04

  Yes, you're in perfect harmony.

• 2:03:59Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:04:01Bob Novella?

  Nice when that happens.

• 2:04:02Speaker 02

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

• 2:04:05Bob Novella?

  Thanks for having us. You guys are awesome.

• 2:04:07Speaker 04

  Always fun to hang out with you guys.

• 2:04:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:04:16Speaker 06

  Yes. Yes, agreed.

• 2:04:17Speaker 02

  And thank everyone for being on the show this week.

• 2:04:19Speaker 04

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:04:20Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

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

• 2:05:07Speaker 07

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 2:05:21Speaker 07

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 2:05:23Speaker 08

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.