Why People Misunderstand You (Even When You're Clear) & The Secret Life of Leaves

Ever send an email asking several questions, only to get a reply that answers just one of them? Or discover that someone completely missed your most important point? It turns out the way you write and organize an email can make a big difference in how people respond. Listen as I explain some simple techniques that can help you get better, more complete answers to your emails. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ You know exactly what you meant. So why did the other person hear something completely different? Misunderstandings happen constantly, even between people who know each other well. Innocent comments get interpreted as criticism, conversations turn into arguments, and people become convinced their version of events is the right one. Why does communication go wrong so easily? And what can you do to make sure people actually understand what you're trying to say? Dr. Yael Schonbrun, a clinical psychologist and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, joins me to explain the surprising science behind miscommunication. Drawing on decades of relationship research, she reveals why we so often misinterpret one another, why we stubbornly defend our own perceptions, and how to repair a conversation when things go wrong. She is author of Why Don’t You Understand Me?: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals. (https://link.amazon/B01SuP5Do). Leaves are everywhere. You've probably seen millions of them without giving them much thought. But those ordinary-looking leaves are actually performing some of the most extraordinary feats in nature. Powered by sunlight, they manufacture their own food, pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and release the oxygen that makes life on Earth possible. And here's something remarkable: There was a time when trees didn't even have leaves! So why did leaves evolve? How do they accomplish so much? And what would happen to our world without them? Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silverman joins me to reveal the fascinating hidden world of leaves and explain why these seemingly simple things are among nature's greatest inventions. He is author of nine books, including Nature's Magicians: How Leaves Conjure Up Our World (https://link.amazon/B06dPGc2Y). You might think the best way to impress people is to appear smart, capable, and completely on top of things. But being too perfect can actually make people like you less. Research suggests that a small, harmless mistake can sometimes make a competent person seem more appealing. So how does that work? And what's the surprisingly simple lesson you can use to make yourself more likable? Listen and find out. https://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/iphone/departments/psyc/psyc110/transcript09.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS MONARCH: Write your own money story with Monarch! Use promo code SYSK at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Monarch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get your 1st year of Monarch Core half off at just $50 AIRDOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com ⁠⁠⁠and use promo code SYSK to get up to $300 off ANY of their select AirDoctor models, plus you will get a 3-year warranty, absolutely FREE! with a 30-day money back guarantee. TREES. COM: Right now, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Trees.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% OFF their purchase when using the promo code SYSK at checkout. VINTED: Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing! With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the US on Vinted. QUINCE: Find your next Fall favorites at Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts! INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future? I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:32Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, a better way to write emails that gets you the reply you want. Then, why is it that people misunderstand each other all the time?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Misunderstanding is kind of baked into human relationships and for good purpose because misunderstandings are really an opportunity for growth and for deepening our own understanding of ourselves and for deepening our understandings of the other person and growing our relationship.

• 1:00Mike Carruthers?

  Also, a surprising technique that can make you much more likable. And leaves, you know, leaves on trees. They have an amazing story to tell.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  If we look at the evolutionary history of plants, for the first 50 million years, there were no leaves. There are plants, but they don't have leaves. So what happened 50 million years ago to trigger the evolution of leaves?

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:30Speaker 04

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• 2:56Mike Carruthers?

  Something You Should Know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. So this has become something of a pet peeve of mine, and I'm sure it's happened to you. It's when you send an email to somebody and you ask them two or three or four questions and you get an answer back, but they only answer one question. Well, how do you fix that? That's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. I'm Mike Carruthers and I'm glad you're here. So you send somebody an email, you ask a couple of questions, and you get a reply

• 3:39Mike Carruthers?

  that answers exactly one of those questions. And the reason that happens, it seems, has more to do with how you wrote the email than with the person reading it. Research on how people read online shows that we tend to scan rather than read every word. So when you bury several requests in a long paragraph, it's easy for someone to miss one or two questions. A simple solution is to number your questions and put each one on its own line and make it clear what you need. So instead of writing a long paragraph about scheduling a meeting, ask, number one, does Tuesday work? Number two, would 3:00 PM be okay?

• 4:24Mike Carruthers?

  Number three, should I send the invitation? And here's another useful trick. Put the most important question first. People often give the most attention to the beginning of a message. So if you want better answers, make your questions impossible to overlook. You may find that a little formatting will save a surprising amount of back and forth. And that is something you should know.

• 4:53Mike Carruthers?

  The frustrating thing about communication is that you can say something perfectly innocent and someone else hears something completely different. A simple comment sounds like criticism. A harmless question feels like an accusation. You remember a conversation one way and the other person remembers it another way, and suddenly you're having an argument neither of you intended. How can two people hear the exact same words and come away with completely different meanings? And more importantly, what can we do about it? As it turns out, there's some fascinating science behind why we misunderstand each other, even the people we know and love best.

• 5:36Mike Carruthers?

  And understanding that science can make us much better communicators. Here to explain is Yael Schonbrun. She is a practicing clinical psychologist and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. And she's author of the book, Why Don't You Understand Me? The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals. Hi, Yael. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor.

• 6:08Mike Carruthers?

  So people miscommunicate all the time. It happens so frequently. So can you point to a reason why? Is there a general reason why miscommunication is so common?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  In essence, we have an overconfidence glitch in our brains where our perception, and social scientists call this naive realism, we experience our perception as objectively accurate. And so what is notable is that the gap between our confidence and our accuracy is not something that we are able to detect in our own experience, even as we acutely notice when we feel that the other person is not understanding us as we wish to be understood, either the meaning of the words that we're conveying or who we are. And cognitive science really reveals some of the reasons why. And a lot of them are neurological, some of them are physiological, some of them have

• 7:06Speaker 02

  to do with the way that language is far more ambiguous than we think it is, and also the self-protective nature of the stories that we tell.

• 7:16Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this all sounds pretty hopeless. So... But it would seem that in almost every conversation, there's so much going on. There's what I'm saying, there's what you're hearing, there's the factual part of what I'm saying, but there's other meanings. There seems to be so much going on that there are plenty of places where the communication just falls apart.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's lossiness to our communication. So I'm experiencing all sorts of things as you and I are talking, and you're capturing my words and my tone and you're paying attention, but there's no way for you to access all of the background, right? My own history, what's going on internally, how I'm feeling physically. So there is lossiness that's happening between us, but because you're paying really good attention, you're engaged, I generally feel understood. And at times, if I say something and you don't get it, it's often pretty easy to correct you, to correct somebody within a conversation. But the trouble comes when we get really overconfident and so much so that we stop

• 8:26Speaker 02

  updating how we're understanding somebody's words or who they are. And that often happens in close relationships, and it also happens inside of conflicts.

• 8:35Mike Carruthers?

  I love that word, lossiness. I've never heard it. Is it a real word or did you make it up?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I did not make it up, but I don't also know if it's a real word. I read it in an article that was a study of understanding.

• 8:49Mike Carruthers?

  But it's so great. It's such a great...

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:51Mike Carruthers?

  It explains it in one word that would normally take a sentence to explain what it means. I love that word. So, and I would imagine, it just popped in my head, when two people talk and there is this lossiness between them, if you bring in a third person to observe, they're likely to see something entirely different than each of those other two people, correct?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  That's right. And you know, that is really the power of therapy is you have somebody who isn't getting emotionally activated by what's happening within the conversation that can say, huh, you look like you feel that you understand what the other person is saying, but they do not look like they feel understood. What's happening? And then as a therapist, you can encourage the two people to take a step back and get curious about what is getting lost between them? What is the meaning of the message that's getting distorted in the method of communication?

• 9:48Mike Carruthers?

  Is it typically the case, well, what is getting lost? Is every conversation so unique that you can't answer that question? Or you see patterns that what's getting lost in these conversations is typically A, B, C, D, et cetera?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  It really does depend. Sometimes it's straight up information. You know, one person, the joke is, you know, that you can have two people having a conversation about, you know, did you pick up the blueberries on the way home? And one person says, I asked you to do it and you said yes. And the other person says, you never asked me to do it. And if you both, if you put them both through the lie detector test, they both pass, partly because lie detector tests aren't actually valid, but partly because we, when we're not paying attention, we don't perceive, right? The information might be there, but we're not processing it. So sometimes it's just that we lose actual content. More often, in really sticky misunderstandings, it's that we lose positive regard.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So I'm interpreting the information correctly, right? There's an accurate understanding and a perception of the content of what's happening, but I'm assigning malevolent intent or ignorance, and that's not going to feel good to you. And you're not going to agree with that understanding, even if we can agree on the basic facts.

• 11:14Mike Carruthers?

  Do you ever take two people and sit them down and say, "Okay, we're doing an experiment here and I want you to talk and listen and so that this goes perfectly"? Like if people are really conscientious and really, really try, do you still get the lossiness or can people really concentrate and have a great discussion and everybody agrees that it all went well?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  You can arrive there. I think a better way to test that is can you repeat back what the other person said in a way that they would agree with the message as you're stating it? Because what often happens, especially if you've lost that positive regard, right? You have two people who have been fighting. They each feel like the other person has harmed them in some way and doesn't have their best interests at heart. So in that situation, if one person says, you know, "I feel really hurt when you characterize me in the way that you just did," the other person might say, "What you're saying is you think that I don't, I'm cruel in the way that I characterize you." And the first

• 12:29Speaker 02

  person might say, "No, that's not what I meant, right? You captured a lot of the words and some of the sentiment, but what I'm talking about is my hurt feeling." And so if you lose that sort of compassionate, positive regard, you actually can reflect back a message in a way that the person who said it isn't going to agree with. But in these exercises that you might do in therapy, and actually, there's an exercise that's called the report method, where you have people write down, word for word, what they heard the other person say. And people can do it. It's a hard exercise. But what's interesting is in research that looks at how successful people are at paraphrasing and validating,

• 13:11Speaker 02

  that's not the difference, that doesn't make the difference in a happy versus an unhappy, long-term partnership. The thing that makes a difference is that feeling of being understood. And it's not the reflection of the exact words. It's the underlying sentiment of, "Do I feel that the other person gets me, values me, and sort of sees me as I want to be seen?"

• 13:33Mike Carruthers?

  There is a difference, though, between "do you understand me?" and "do you agree with me?" And people get very frustrated when people don't agree with them, even though, "No, I get what you're saying. I just think you're wrong."

• 13:48Speaker 02

  That's right. And in fact, research has been done in which they look at high-quality listeners who agree and don't agree with the speaker. And when we are agreed with, we feel more listened to and understood. And when we are not agreed with, even when somebody is a very skilled listener, we don't feel as listened to. That said, I teach people that there is a difference between understanding and agreement. And if you can learn some of the ways of making that explicit, then it gives you a little bit more space to understand someone and remain connected in a positive way and still have your own point of view.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  So that might look like, "Okay, I think what I hear you saying is XYZ. I can see how you got there. It makes sense, right? You're not immoral. You're not bad. You're not stupid for thinking that. I can see how you arrived there. And would it be okay if I shared with you, I feel pretty differently and I'd love to share how I arrived at that different place?" So that's a lot of words, and you could do it more succinctly than I just did. But we do often conflate understanding and agreement, and there's a reason for that. And there are ways to distinguish between the two of them and give ourselves space to understand someone without needing to agree.

• 15:12Mike Carruthers?

  I want to explore with you the differences in how we communicate with people who we've just met or who we don't know very well versus how we communicate with people that we've been in a relationship for a while or someone we've known for a long time. And we'll do that when we come back in just a moment.

• 15:33Speaker 05

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• 16:01Speaker 06

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• 16:32Mike Carruthers?

  So we're talking about how we are prone to miscommunicate with other people. My guest is Dr. Yael Schoenbrun. She's author of the book, "Why Don't You Understand Me: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals." So, Yael, you mentioned something earlier about people in long-term relationships. There are people who know each other pretty well and have known each other for a long time. You kind of can anticipate what they're going to say and what they're going to think. And maybe you don't pay as much attention. Maybe you're a little lax in really engaging in the conversation,

• 17:13Mike Carruthers?

  and that that can lead to trouble, even though you know this person very well.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what happens in long-term relationships with understanding is that, in a sense, we do begin to understand one another more. We learn more about one another. We share a history. We can anticipate in some ways. The problem is not that we fail to understand one another better in long-term relationships. The problem is that our overconfidence sort of grows faster than our accuracy. And because what happens in close relationships is we start to really see the other person as being more like us, because in a sense it's true, our tendency, our intuition, our instinct to kind of pause and check, "Hmm, do I have this right?" evaporates. So with strangers, research has been done that, compared

• 18:02Speaker 02

  to with strangers, with somebody we're close to, we're far less likely to check, "Huh, is that right?" Whereas with a stranger, you might say, "Well, I don't really know you, but I'm going to guess that you like sweets and you don't like vegetables. But is that right? Or do you feel differently?" With our partner, we might say, "Well, I know you so well, and I've seen what you order at a restaurant. I'm not even going to bother to check." And often, that's fine. But the problem is that if you do have a miss, it can compound over time because we're not checking and we're just kind of operating and integrating that into the story that we tell about our partner. And corrective information doesn't get in because we're not receptive to it. We're so confident that

• 18:45Speaker 02

  we already know. And so in long-term partnerships, that what researchers call closeness communication bias, this idea that we know our partner so well that we don't need to check in the areas that we might have it wrong, prevents us from getting corrective updates that we might otherwise get in relationships where we don't know somebody very well.

• 19:06Mike Carruthers?

  So here's something that happens, I think, a lot. What's happened, it certainly happened to me, where people will say something. And in retrospect, when I look back, it wasn't intended as criticism, but I took it as criticism. And I bet that happens a lot. Yes?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I can relate to that, too. Sometimes I'll read an email and I'll think to myself, "Ooh, that was kind of biting." And only later do I realize that wasn't the intended message at all. So I do try, for my own practice, to wait 24 hours before I respond to non-urgent emails because, depending on my mood, I can read into it something that wasn't there. What's notable about that is some of the ways that our body shapes our understanding. And research, for instance, shows that, like, when we're hungry or when we're stressed out or when we're becoming sick or when we've had too many back-to-back Zoom meetings, we tend to interpret neutral social cues as being more threatening,

• 20:10Speaker 02

  more critical. And we don't notice how our bodies are writing that story. It just feels true, going back to that idea of naive realism. And so it would be interesting for you, Mike, to kind of wonder, when you're reading emails as being more critical, is there something happening physiologically? Are you tired? Have you had a difficult conversation that kind of primes you to interpret that email in a way that if you were feeling really good and really positive and high self-esteem for the day, that you might read it in a very different way? And that recognition, according to studies that have looked at this, of being more aware of how our body is feeling and how our body can write our

• 20:52Speaker 02

  social stories, can help us to distinguish, "Hey, you know, I'm reading this as critical, but it might be because I'm feeling really hungry. I haven't had a snack in a while."

• 21:02Mike Carruthers?

  And so what do you do when someone says something? And an email is a good example because you're less likely to write back and say, "Well, what did you mean by that?" Whereas in person, you might. But what do you do with something where you're kind of left not knowing? "Well, what did that mean? I don't know." It seems like this kind of unanswered, dangling thing that you're not sure what to do with.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that that's a huge reason why our brains do what they do. They write a story because it gives us something to act on, right? If we were aware of all that we did not know, we would often be in that position of asking that question that you just asked, Mike, which is, how do I proceed if I have no idea what they actually mean? I think that there's a few things you can do. One is just the more that we assume positive intent to offer people benefit of the doubt for being kind and intending well, the better off we are. But if you interpret criticism where there is none, it kind of leads you down a rabbit hole that is uncomfortable for everybody. So one thing that you can do is if it is ambiguous, assume the best.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  I have a mantra of a friend that is close to me who often sees the good in everybody. And I always think, what, W W E D, what would Erica do? So I think if you know somebody who has a tendency to see the best in others, to kind of use them as a model for how to interpret that situation. But the awareness that we often have less information than it sometimes feels like we have can give us that powerful opportunity to pause before we assume things that can send us in a negative direction in our relationships.

• 22:51Mike Carruthers?

  Is the goal in all of this to prevent it? Or we have to all agree that this is going to happen and here's how we deal with it after the fact?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I love that question. Yeah, no, misunderstanding is kind of baked into human relationships and for good purpose. There is a different way that other animals communicate, and ants being one example, where they communicate through chemical compounds. And there's no qualms about like what a certain smell odor means, right? It either means food found, enemy in the territory, new home location. And there's no ambiguity in that. And that's lovely. There's never any misunderstandings. However, there's not the flexibility, the creativity, and the kind of evolution and social bonding and forward movement that comes through human communication.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  And so part of what is baked into our interactions is misunderstanding and to great positive effect. But there's also this danger of interpersonal pain, of feeling misunderstood, of feeling that sense of a ruptured connection. But we don't need to be afraid of it because misunderstandings are really an opportunity for growth and for deepening our own understanding of ourselves and for deepening our understandings of the other person and growing our relationship. And in fact, we need the misunderstandings and we need the ruptures that happen in relationships because they lead to positive growth.

• 24:17Mike Carruthers?

  You've talked about a lot of great ideas, and I'd probably have to go back and listen to this. I will go back and listen to this, which is the great thing about podcasts, is you can go back and listen again. But focus in on one thing, one big takeaway that people can grab on to here who maybe won't have a chance to go back and listen to all of this again, and the one thing with the biggest payoff.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  You know, one of the most powerful things that I really advocate for is this idea of positive regard that many people have heard of and that we've already talked about, which comes from the psychologist Carl Rogers. And that's the idea of seeing the good in people. And one way that we can do that is by complicating our stories that we tell, that when somebody has hurt us, the reflexive move that our minds make is to develop a villain story, a story of them as the bad guy. And by refusing to do that and by really dedicating ourselves to keeping a complicated picture of people, you know, that most of us have hurt others and are good people, and that even people who have done very bad things have goodness inside of them, that

• 25:25Speaker 02

  it gives us the potential to understand one another more deeply, to protect ourselves because we're open to new information, and also to bridge back relationships when ruptures have happened.

• 25:37Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I like your advice and especially the idea of giving people the benefit of the doubt. I mean, that could save an awful lot of conflict in conversation if you assume the best intentions from the other person. Yael Schonbrunn has been my guest. She is a practicing clinical psychologist and author of the book, Why Don't You Understand Me: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. And great, Yael, this was fun.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 27:16Mike Carruthers?

  Imagine a machine that runs entirely on sunlight, pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, makes its own food, releases oxygen, and helps keep the planet alive. Now imagine that machine is so common, you probably stepped on a few of them today. I'm talking about leaves. And without leaves, life on Earth as we know it would pretty much collapse. And that's just the beginning. Why do leaves come in so many different shapes? Why do they change color? How do they know when to fall off a tree? And how did something so simple looking become so essential to life on this planet?

• 27:57Mike Carruthers?

  It turns out, leaves are far more sophisticated and far more interesting than most of us ever imagined. Here to reveal their secrets is Jonathan Silverman. He's an evolutionary biologist and author of nine books, including Nature's Magicians: How Leaves Conjure Up Our World. Hi, Jonathan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Hi, Mike. Good to be here.

• 28:21Mike Carruthers?

  So explain why leaves are nature's magicians. Why are they so interesting to you?

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Because it occurred to me one day that if I were to say to you, I can raise an unlimited amount of water 100 meters, 100 yards into the air with nothing but the power of sunlight, completely silently, and that all the equipment I'm going to use is completely sustainable and renewable, would you like a ticket to this show? I like to think you'd say, yeah, I've never seen anything like that before. But in fact, you have because it's what plants are doing all the time. And there are so many other tricks that they do, and a lot of them are actually happening because of what leaves do. In fact, so huge amounts of water go through plants every day, more in fact than the rivers and streams on Earth.

• 29:12Mike Carruthers?

  I mean, that's a lot of water. So why so much water? And how do leaves have anything to do with bringing water up from the ground if the leaves are out on branches on the tree?

• 29:22Speaker 03

  That's a very good question. And we've known for about 100 years how it works. So you might imagine in a plant's stem or in a tree trunk, in the veins in leaves, you have these vessels, these tiny little tubes called xylem vessels. And they actually conduct water throughout the plant. And the motive force for that takes place on the surface of leaves. So on the surface of leaves, you look under a microscope, what you'll find is there are thousands of tiny holes called stomata. And each hole has a couple of cells either side called guard cells, and they regulate the size of the pore or the hole.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  And when it's open, you get this little gradient of water vapor, of humidity around the hole. There's always about 100% humidity inside a leaf. There's never as much as that outside. So you have a gradient from high humidity to low humidity. And this kind of sucks water out of those holes. And then if you multiply that by the thousands of stomata there on a leaf and the thousands, in fact, millions of leaves there are on, say, a tree, but it's all plants, then this produces enough suction to raise water from the roots right through the tree, or right through whatever plant it is, to the top. And then it kind of essentially evaporates from the leaf.

• 30:51Mike Carruthers?

  So in New England, for example, it's a very spectacular show where every year the leaves change color and they fall. But do all leaves fall every year, or do some leaves hang on for a long, long time?

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, some do hang on for a long time. So you mentioned pine needles before. They have hang around through the winter. And the reason they're able to do that is because the water loss from a needle is much less than the water loss from, say, an oak leaf or anything broad and flat. So the the problem in cold climates for for plants is that water is less available in the cold months. It might be frozen in the ground. And if they then carry on with their leaves, try to suck water up a plant when there's no water in the soil to be sucked, because it's all frozen, then you can get air bubbles in in the tubes through the plant, and that's a problem.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  So one solution, the common one in in in plants of New England you're talking about, is that they drop their leaves in autumn, in the fall. But those plants that are able to cut their water loss a different way, which pine trees can do, by losing less, by just having very economical, if you like, arrangements with their needles, they can cope with this this problem through the winter. And the longest-lived pine trees, which are these things that grow in the Sierra Nevada in California, the bristlecone pines, they're the longest-lived trees we know. And they can live, I think the oldest one is known to be about four and a half thousand years old.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And what's interesting is that their leaves are also old, not four and a half thousand years old, but they can live to forty five years, apparently. So if you compare that with an oak leaf that lives perhaps nine months, it's extraordinary. So the length of life of of of leaves varies a lot. And also what varies is whether they get rid of all the leaves at one go or just a little bit at a time, replacing them as they go.

• 32:56Mike Carruthers?

  When leaves in many, in northeastern climates, colder climates, when leaves turn colour? Why do they turn colour? And what determines what colour they turn?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's another one of these leaf mysteries. And we've got some ideas. The ideas, I think, that are currently accepted are that, first of all, not all leaves do this. And they don't all turn the same colour, of course, which is what makes the the forests of New England so beautiful in in in fall, because you get different colours. And the different colours are are different chemicals. So the principal one, the red, is something called anthocyanin. And this is the same chemical that makes roses red, apples red, and so on. And it's manufactured to protect the leaf as it's taking the biochemical mechanisms inside the leaf apart. So it's it's there for a purpose. It's not just there to be pretty.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  And then carotene is a yellow pigment, which, as the name suggests, is what makes carrots the colour they are. And these are protective chemicals that leaves use to protect themselves from the power of sunlight in the fall. And there's still quite a lot of sunlight around. And plants are getting ready to, you know, rest up for the winter. And what they do is they actually extract useful minerals and things from the leaves before they throw them away. So leaves are actually detached in a, air quotes, deliberate way. And they create a barrier, and there's leaf stalk, which essentially kills the leaf.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  But before they do that, they take out as much of the nitrogen and certain other minerals that will be useful and stored in the plant until it can make new leaves in the spring. And the colours are there to protect that process from, if you like, the bleaching of sunlight.

• 34:52Mike Carruthers?

  So one thing I've always wondered about, and this is going on in my kitchen right now. I have a potted plant. And and this happens, I'm sure, to everybody, where the plant is doing fine. But one day, one of the leaves starts to turn yellow and eventually falls off. The rest of the plant is fine. What happened to that leaf? Why did it sacrifice itself? Or what killed it? Or what made it go away?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Well, leaves are temporary. I mean, so they they all have a finite lifespan, which is shorter than the lifespan of the plant itself. And it's very difficult to give a general answer. I mean, various things could happen. It could be diseased. It could be that it's the oldest leaf on the plant and it's time to replace it. Leaves wear out. And, you know, a new leaf will be more efficient at producing, fixing carbon, taking carbon outside, and so on. And as as leaves age, they become leaky. So the plant may actually be, air quotes again, deliberately getting rid of that leaf. I mean, all plants do do that.

• 36:02Mike Carruthers?

  So when leaves fall off and they go to the ground outside off a tree, are they done? Or are they going to do something else now that they're not part of the tree?

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Well, that's that's a very good question. I I like to say that dead leaves make living soil. And it's it's one of those simple things that, you know, most of the carbon in land-based ecosystems, in terrestrial ecosystems, is not in wood. You know, you might, I'm looking outside my window and I can see trees and they're made of wood. And you think, oh, that's a lot of carbon. But there's more carbon in the soil than there is in vegetation. Why? Well, because the soil has been, if you like, growing, it's been accumulating carbon over centuries, possibly millennia. And good soils, the kind of soils that are fertile,

• 36:53Speaker 03

  are usually packed full of the decayed remains of plants. What would happen if plants didn't drop their leaves on a regular basis? Well, the soil would become impoverished. The recycling of minerals, those those things in the leaves that can't, the plant can't remove before it drops its leaves, wouldn't take place. The the physical structure of soil, which is so important to its fertility, its ability to hold water, its ability to feed earthworms, which then do their own things for soil structure, none of that would happen. So dead leaves really are

• 37:33Speaker 03

  almost more useful than living ones. Of course, living ones are required to make dead ones, if you like. But dead leaves are critical to the entire ecosystem.

• 37:44Mike Carruthers?

  When leaves are on a plant and there are other plants around, is there any communication going on between plants through their leaves?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Well, this has been a point of debate for a while now. Once upon a time, people were talking about talking trees. That turned out to be an unfortunate misunderstanding. But we have discovered things that plants can do which are quite remarkable and involve not so much communication as sensing. So one of the things plants can do is they can sense the chemicals given off by other plants when those plants are damaged. So when caterpillars, all caterpillars virtually eat nothing but leaves. A few of them eat some other things, but mostly they eat leaves. And there are a heck of a lot of different things that make caterpillars. So I've lost my thread suddenly.

• 38:37Mike Carruthers?

  Oh, I asked about communication and then you said, well, they're sensing.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Yes, right. So so what what plants can do through their, these pores in the leaf, through the stomata, is they can, they can sort of, they don't sniff the wind in the way we would with an intake of breath. They can't do that. But they do actually absorb gases. And if those gases include some of those things given off by other damaged plants, including damaged parts of the same plant, then there often is a biochemical reaction, a metabolic reaction, that increases the defences, the chemical defences, inside the leaf. Now, I don't think you should really call that communication.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  It's more like sensing what's going on around and adapting. It would be communication if trees were sending messages to and fro, to and fro, the way you and I are having a conversation now, and exchanging information and so on, in a sort of conversational way. And plants most certainly don't do that.

• 39:43Mike Carruthers?

  But is there any sense that trees together in a forest, for example? Like, you sometimes see a lot of pine trees together or a lot of maple trees together. They have any awareness of the other one? Is there any sense that, yes, there are other trees here? And then things happen because there's a group of them, rather than just single trees? Or each tree is its own island and it does its own thing?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  No, trees don't. First of all, they require each other for for reproduction. And they exchange genes. And that's a whole other subject we get into another time. But so that's the first connection. And

• 40:22Mike Carruthers?

  Well, wait a minute. Wait, wait, trees and plants have sex?

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely, they do. Yes, yes. Seeds are the product of sex.

• 40:33Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, well, I'd rather not get into that in another time. I'd rather hear about that right now.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Okay, sure.

• 40:40Mike Carruthers?

  Well, how does that work? How does?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  How does it work? Okay, so flowers, let's start with a flower. Okay. My favorite would be, for example, a hibiscus, but you could take any flower you like. On the outside, you've got the petals, the colored things, and they attract insects, if we're talking about insect pollinated flowers. And the insects visit to collect nectar, which is a sweet substance that plants secrete. So insects visit and they sort of burrow into the flower and to find the nectar, which is always hidden away down the bottom of the flower, to force the insects in. And in the process, they brush up against these things called anthers, which are pollen-producing organs.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  And those, pollen is basically a little cell with a sperm inside. Then they go away and they visit another flower and they brush up against a thing called the stigma, which is, in a hibiscus, is sticking out, and it's quite long. So the reason I chose hibiscus for this description is because if you look at a hibiscus flower, it's very obvious, it's just hanging out there. And the insects then, in the course of going back into the flower, to another flower, will brush up against the stigma, deposit some pollen, and the pollen then germinates and it produces a little tube. And the tube grows down the thing called the stile, which is like the stalk, into the ovary of the flower.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  So flowers have ovaries, plants have ovaries. And then the sperm goes down that tube and fertilizes the egg in the ovary of the flower. And from that, you get apples, pears, beans, you name it.

• 42:26Mike Carruthers?

  Tell me something about leaves and plants that I probably don't know that you think is really fascinating.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  If we look at the evolutionary history of plants, so plants colonized the land, as far as we know, somewhere between a half a billion, that is to say, 500 million years ago and 450 million years ago. By about 440 million years, there are fossils of plants, but they don't have leaves. If you look at the evolutionary history, the fossils in the evolutionary record, in the paleontological record, from that period of about 450 million years ago to the present, for the first 50 million years, there were no leaves. There are plants, but they don't have leaves.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  They're just little spiky things, quite short, you know, a couple of feet tall, and they have stomata, they actually photosynthesize, they do all the things that we've been talking about, but they don't have leaves. And that is an extraordinary thing when you think of how important leaves are today. So what happened 50 million years ago to trigger the evolution of leaves?

• 43:43Mike Carruthers?

  Do we know the answer to that? Do you know the answer to that?

• 43:47Speaker 03

  What we think happened was that over those first 50 million years, what plants were doing was they were sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And I described before how much carbon is locked up in soils. So over those 50 million years, more and more carbon was being removed by plants from the atmosphere and squirreled away, sequestered is the word that people use, into the soil. And that was lowering the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it was becoming harder and harder for plants to get carbon dioxide out of the air because there was less of it. So what do you do?

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Well, a leaf would be a good idea because you can then, instead of having just a sort of like a tube, like a stem with stomata on it, you could have an entire plane, you could have an entire, think of it like a little, a hand, if you like, covered in stomata, and that could flap about in the air, and you get more. So leaves started to appear. So as soon as leaves start to appear, you get competition for light between trees. And when that happens, what's the best thing to do? Well, to grow a bit taller, so you can put your leaves over the top of your neighbors and not be shaded by them. And you can imagine what the neighbors are doing, they go, okay, I better grow a bit taller.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Again, I'm talking anthropomorphically, they're not actually deciding this, this is an evolutionary process. So that's what happened, as far as we know. And it was all kicked off by this decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the paleontological record, the fossil record, supports this. It shows not only the increase in the appearance of leaves, the increase in size of, the height of plants, but also the decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere. And it all kind of fits together really rather well. And what happened once leaves started to appear is there were six, at least six separate, okay, separate origins of leaves. So there were six sort of separate groups of plants that around the same time started

• 45:57Speaker 03

  to make leaves, indicating that something in the environment that, of all of them, that kind of made this of advantage.

• 46:05Mike Carruthers?

  When you think how we're surrounded by leaves, and most of us don't ever give them a second thought, and to think there was a time when there were plants and trees, but no leaves, and what happened to create that whole evolution, it's all really fascinating. Jonathan Silverman's been my guest. He's an evolutionary biologist and author of the book, Nature's Magicians: How Leaves Conjure Up Our World. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Jonathan, and explaining all this.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 46:43Mike Carruthers?

  We generally try to avoid making mistakes in front of other people because we're afraid it will make us look foolish or incompetent. But sometimes, a small mistake can actually make you more likable. Psychologists call this the pratfall effect. In a classic experiment, people listened to a recording of someone answering difficult trivia questions. In one version, the person performed brilliantly. In another version, the same brilliant person accidentally spilled coffee all over himself. Surprisingly, people liked the brilliant person more after the embarrassing accident.

• 47:25Mike Carruthers?

  The researchers believe the mistake made someone who seemed almost too perfect to appear more human and approachable. But here's the important catch. The effect worked differently for someone who didn't appear particularly competent to begin with. For that person, the mistake of spilling the coffee tended to make things worse. So the lesson isn't to deliberately make mistakes, it's that if you're generally good at what you do, a little imperfection may actually work in your favor. People don't necessarily want perfection, they want someone they can relate to. And that is something you should know.

• 48:06Mike Carruthers?

  One thing that can really help a podcast stay relevant and popular is reviews. Leaving a review on whatever platform you're listening on, Apple, Spotify, Castbox, if you leave a review, well, first of all, we read them and other people read them, it helps them to decide whether to listen or not. So if you have a moment, please, a five-star review would be greatly appreciated. I'm Mike Herthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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