How Words Shape Your Body

Does your native language physically sculpt your face? And could a swarm of bees be trained to run computer code? Two of your questions answer in this Field Notes with Professor Hannah Fry and YouTube's Michael Stevens, plus Michael’s object of the week is a visualization of the Holocene Calendar. By simply adding ten thousand years to our current year, it transforms our perception of history from a brief modern blip into an unbroken, monumental narrative of human progress. Check out the calendar here ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking ⁠here⁠.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Michael Stevens?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens and this is Field Notes. It is an exploration, expedition diary where Hannah and I share cool thoughts, objects, and discoveries with each other and from you.

• 0:14Hannah Fry?

  Every week, one of us is gonna bring in something to share the other. A bit like, uh, it's a bit like The Rest Is Science's version of show and tell.

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and together, we're building up a strange and spectacular library of our favorite items from the world of science.

• 0:25Hannah Fry?

  We also, by the way, would like to add in your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, anything you want to send us in a mailbag. So send them in to us and, um, look, we'll dust off a shelf, a metaphorical shelf.

• 0:38Michael Stevens?

  So later on, I am going to be showing off a book and also a scarf that cannot be cut in half.

• 0:46Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 0:46Michael Stevens?

  But first, we're gonna go to your questions.

• 0:49Hannah Fry?

  I mean, frankly, what are you doing cutting scarves in half? Anyway, respect your wardrobe, Michael. Okay, uh, our first discovery, though, doesn't come from Michael. It's, uh, it comes from, it comes from you guys.

• 1:02Michael Stevens?

  Here's, here's one from Brian. Okay, "Bees, like honeybees, can be trained to recognize simple shapes, colors, odors, and landmarks, and follow instructions, and perform calculations based on a given input. So can we train bees to simulate a universal Turing machine?" I've also formatted this question as a limerick. Okay, you see why I wanted to read this one. "I'm curious about bits in bees. I implore you to answer me, please. If meadows of flowers replace computational powers, will Google start making me sneeze?"

• 1:38Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 1:39Michael Stevens?

  Thank you, Brian.

• 1:40Hannah Fry?

  Brian, my goodness me, way to wet both of our appetites simultaneously. A limerick for Michael and universal Turing machines for me. Thank you very much. Okay, I think I've got, I did some research for this. I think I've got a sort of answer, um, because it is an amazing, amazing question. Because Brian's right that bees have actually this phenomenal capacity. There's this one experiment in 2019. This is in Australia where researchers demonstrated that bees can be taught how to add and subtract.

• 2:12Speaker 02

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• 2:54Speaker 02

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• 3:35Speaker 02

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• 3:43Speaker 03

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• 4:20Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 4:23Hannah Fry?

  The word cancer comes from the Greek kakinos, meaning crab. And Hippocrates used that word because tumors can spread out like crab's legs.

• 4:32Michael Stevens?

  For a long time, cancer was poorly understood. And so I think because of that, it was almost scarier and people didn't even say its name. But what science has done since is replace uncertainty with understanding.

• 4:45Hannah Fry?

  But that understanding isn't instant because cancer isn't just one disease. It's hundreds of different diseases, each behaving differently, depending on where it is and its genes. And that complexity is why progress in cancer research can feel like it's slow. But step by step, research is saving and improving lives.

• 5:05Michael Stevens?

  And that's why Cancer Research UK, the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, supports work across more than 200 types of cancer, from the tiny changes inside cells that start the disease to better ways to spot it earlier and treat it more precisely.

• 5:22Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 5:39Hannah Fry?

  So it wasn't a swarm computer, right? It was using sugar water and this Y-shaped maze. Okay, so what you do is a bee flies into the entrance of this maze and it sees a picture with a certain number of shapes on it, right? So let's say it's got three squares on it. And then the researchers trained the bees that a particular color would correspond to addition and another color would correspond to subtraction. Okay, so if the shapes were yellow, the bees had to subtract one. And if the shapes were blue, they had to add one. Okay? So what happens is the bee goes in, it sees, let's say, three blue squares, right?

• 6:24Hannah Fry?

  Um, if it flies deeper into the maze and then it sees this fork on the road and one path has two squares and the other path has four.

• 6:32Michael Stevens?

  Go to the two.

• 6:32Hannah Fry?

  But blue is addition, so it has to go.

• 6:34Michael Stevens?

  Oh, shoot, okay, man, all right, I wouldn't be a very good bee. So he goes to the four. Got it. This is really sophisticated math.

• 6:42Hannah Fry?

  Isn't it?

• 6:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Hannah Fry?

  I know, isn't it? Um, but yeah, it manages to do it. Does it every single time, kind of repeatedly? Once it's trained, it does it every single time, repeatedly and reliably. And then if the the original squares are yellow, which means minus, then it will go to the two and it will get the sugar water, right? It's amazing that these bees can can sort of, first of all, count up four shapes, notice the difference between four and three or four and two, but also have an instruction based on color as to which gate to go into.

• 7:13Michael Stevens?

  Right. I mean, they're they're recognizing amounts for sure.

• 7:18Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:18Michael Stevens?

  And and they're understanding what to do and what to look for next, based on what they're finding. I don't think that they're necessarily like definitely doing math.

• 7:28Hannah Fry?

  Agree.

• 7:29Michael Stevens?

  But still, the fact that they're able to look at four squares and be like, okay, I know that three of them is less, is pretty amazing because bees are not known for their brains.

• 7:41Hannah Fry?

  No, although, I mean, you know about the waggle dance, right?

• 7:44Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah.

• 7:46Hannah Fry?

  So this is this is a way that bees communicate the presence of pollen to each other. So um, a bee will go into a hive, having found a source of pollen, and will basically wiggle their bum for a particular amount of time in a particular direction to essentially communicate to the other bees the direction perpendicular to the sun, I think it is, that they have to that they have to travel in order to to find this pollen. Um, and they tested this, by the way, that, you know, initially people were like, oh, they're just, you know, they're just doing a little weird dance. And then people like, maybe they're communicating it, but are they communicating it relative to where the bee is? Or is it relative to the hive? They weren't sure. They got one bee, the one who

• 8:29Hannah Fry?

  was sort of communicating the dance, and they um. Put little, a little like eye patch on her so that she couldn't, she couldn't see where she was relative to the sun.

• 8:40Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Hannah Fry?

  And then for the rest of the bees, they put in a big, bright light to sort of mimic the sun.

• 8:45Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 8:45Hannah Fry?

  Um, and they managed essentially to make it so that she accidentally communicated the wrong directions. And all of these bees went off to, to uh, some, some, some pollen that wasn't there.

• 8:57Michael Stevens?

  Wow. So that is also pretty impressive. I, I, their brains are good, but their brains have very few neurons compared to other critters on this planet. So it's incredible what you can do with so few brain cells.

• 9:10Hannah Fry?

  Totally. So going back to this question and this idea of whether you can build a bee computer, right? Whether you can build a universal Turing machine. I should just say for anyone who hasn't come across this phrase of a universal Turing machine. This is one of many of Turing's really great insights. So this is way before computers are invented. And Turing comes up with this idea for a theoretical computer. It's like an imaginary computer. And it has this tape of, of infinite length and it's divided into these little squares. And what the computer does, it reads a square, follows a rule to either change what's there or, or, or keep it the same as it was. And then it can move left and right, right?

• 9:51Hannah Fry?

  And, and the idea is that given enough time and infinite tape, then this imaginary computer can solve any mathematical problem. So I don't know. I personally think that Turing machines are, um, they're a bit abstract. So I have an example of how you could do addition with a Turing machine, like a really, really simple example.

• 10:14Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, let's, let's try this and then we'll see how bees could be.

• 10:18Hannah Fry?

  How bees could do it.

• 10:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Hannah Fry?

  Okay. So you could have it where um, I could take you and give you an eye mask with just like a tiny little slit in it. So that you can only see what's immediately in front of you.

• 10:30Michael Stevens?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:31Hannah Fry?

  So you could be the rule machine. All right? And I can give you a very clear rule about what to do. But in front of you, I'm going to lay out a series of plates. This is my infinite tape, right? And each plate is either going to have a penny on it or it's not. And that's it. And you're sitting at this chair and you can see only one plate at a time. All right. I've given you like, and blinkers. That's all you're allowed to see. Okay, now I'm gonna set it up so that you can do addition of three plus two without you ever needing to understand what addition is, what your task is, or the output of what you're achieving.

• 11:07Michael Stevens?

  Okay, and you'll do this by just giving me a rule to follow?

• 11:10Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, okay. So I'm gonna set it up so that I have, um, in this long line of, of plates, they're all empty, apart from three, and then a space, and then two, and that's it. Okay, they're, they're, they're coming up to you now, right? They're sort of on this, on this train, they're sort of coming up to you. And your job is, if you see a, a penny, you just move the plate to the right. Okay, if you look down, see a penny, move the plate to the right. Go to the next one, see a penny, move the plate to the right. So you do that, you're at the beginning of the run, and you do that three times. Okay, all the three pennies are to your right. Now, when you see an empty plate, the rule is you have to put a penny on it.

• 11:50Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 11:50Hannah Fry?

  Uh, move the plate to the right, and then switch to the next rule. Okay?

• 11:56Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 11:56Hannah Fry?

  So now there's four pennies, uh, four plates of pennies to your right. And you're on the next rule, which is, if you see a penny, you keep moving right. But when you finally hit an empty plate at the end of the line, you go back one plate to the left, take that penny away, and stop.

• 12:12Michael Stevens?

  So, okay, so in this example, we wind up with five pennies.

• 12:17Hannah Fry?

  In a row.

• 12:18Michael Stevens?

  To my right, which is three plus two.

• 12:20Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, you without ever knowing that you're doing addition, without ever understanding anything that you're doing, you have managed to just successfully complete an additive task.

• 12:32Michael Stevens?

  I feel like bees could easily follow rules that simple.

• 12:36Hannah Fry?

  They could follow rules, but what bees can't do, so bees could read the penny, they could move things to the right, or they could move through a, a system.

• 12:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Hannah Fry?

  But what they can't do is, is right. They can't add the penny. So for a universal turing machine, um, what you need to be able to do is you've got to be able to put a symbol down, move away and then come back to it later as though it's a stored variable. Now, I should just say, to like, close this loop on the universal turing machine thing. The reason why this idea was so profound, that example of pennies, I mean, whatever, it's a really simplified example. But the key point about this is that after turing, someone came along called John von Neumann. And he was like, okay, I see this, because the idea about a universal turing machine

• 13:27Hannah Fry?

  is that if you have enough time, it can compute anything that is computable, anything. So John von Neumann saw this and was like, I think there's a way to make this actually happen. So he built this architecture and that is the basis of all modern computers, right? Like, this is the origins of everything that we built our entire modern world on. This stupid example of the pennies, like, honestly, at the heart of it, this stuff is so absurdly simple.

• 13:59Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Hannah Fry?

  It's just when you build up and build it up. And this is the thing about how people say computers don't know what they're doing, that don't understand what they're manipulating. Because they're the same as you with the eye mask on and the pennies, right? You're just like performing this task.

• 14:12Michael Stevens?

  I don't know that I'm adding pennies. I'm just following some rules.

• 14:16Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, exactly. So this is the thing, right? I think that bees um could not be a universal turing machine. Right? Because they can't, they can't write, they can't place down the pennies. However, that doesn't mean that there are no biological objects that could be. Because there was in twenty eleven, a, a team of researchers, this is from Japanese university and um and English university. So Cobe University and the University of West of England, right? And they decided they wanted to build a functioning computer logic gate using animals, right? No animals were harmed or hurt in the process of this experiment.

• 14:57Hannah Fry?

  So they worked out, or they noticed, I guess, that there's this species called the soldier crab. And the soldier crab, most crabs, you know, obviously scuttle sideways, then kind of hang around alone. Soldier crabs, they they live in these lagoons and they move in like really tightly packed swarms. And when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they don't sort of fight and they don't scatter. They actually act a bit like soft billiard balls. They sort of combine and then they move together in this giant swarm. So scientists worked out that you could basically build an AND gate, a NOT gate and an OR gate, right? Which is one of the the rules that we were describing about computers.

• 15:42Hannah Fry?

  Um, this sort of von Neumann architecture and so on. It's it's based on this idea of like you get two bursts of electrical current that come through. And it's like two inputs, it's like like either both together and AND gate. Either one of them, the OR gate or or NOT gate. So they built these mazes, these Y shaped mazes or these X shaped mazes. And then sent crabs through these mazes. And they combined in the the ways that you wanted from the from these logic gates. So in theory, I mean, they demonstrated that it worked with like one logic gate. In theory, then, um, you could, you could build a crab computer. A crab pewter, if you will.

• 16:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, so you set you set up the groups with your question. You let them go, they just do their crab thing, combining into groups or not. And then out at the other end of the maze is your output, which is your answer. And not a single crab, none of them, none of those crabs knew what they were doing. So, I mean, this raises the question of like, is that what life on Earth is? Maybe the original, you know, bacterial mats were placed here in a specific position by aliens. And they're like, look, give it five, six billion years. We'll come back and we'll get our answer. And we are all, with our own psychologies, we're just following the rules the aliens knew would happen. And we're doing their homework for them.

• 17:03Hannah Fry?

  I mean, this is this is like a massive philosophical question of the ages. I guess this giant debate that's going on about whether human brains are approximate Turing machines or not. Because the the implication of that is that are we actually computing everything? Is there something going on in our brains where it's just computation? And this feeling of consciousness, this feeling of being is a direct result of computation? Or is there something else going on? Like, is this experience of being in this room, talking to you, you know, feeling the light on my face? Is that just computation? And at the the the base level of computation, this the the the neurons have no idea what they're doing?

• 17:47Hannah Fry?

  Or is there something extra, something sort of magical on top? I should tell you that um I worked it out, but of course, if if a byte um requires eight logic gates, right? Um, a logic gate, by the way, required about eighty crabs in this experiment.

• 18:02Michael Stevens?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:02Hannah Fry?

  So if you.

• 18:03Michael Stevens?

  Oh, that's good to know.

• 18:04Hannah Fry?

  If you were gonna do like a one gigabyte iPhone update, um, you'd require six hundred and forty billion crabs?

• 18:12Michael Stevens?

  That's less than I expected. I thought the number would be some number name that no one ever says.

• 18:18Hannah Fry?

  I mean.

• 18:19Michael Stevens?

  It's in the billions.

• 18:21Hannah Fry?

  For for one gigabyte.

• 18:23Michael Stevens?

  For one gigabyte. I mean, gosh, a gigabyte is a lot. Like, maybe this is coming from a guy who's old enough that I remember, you know, getting a a memory drive that had a hundred megabytes on it and being like, whoa.

• 18:35Hannah Fry?

  It's the future.

• 18:36Michael Stevens?

  So many MP3s. Yeah.

• 18:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, this is true. This is true. But hey, who knows, right? Let's say in theory, you've got these billions and trillions and squillions of crabs. And then you put them in this setup and let them kind of compute stuff. Would the collective end up having consciousness as an emergent property? I mean, who knows?

• 18:59Michael Stevens?

  Well, I mean, this is this is a topic for a future episode because I've been thinking a lot about it. Up until a week ago, I was very much like, yes, it must emerge somehow. Uh, you get you get a big enough complex thing and it's gonna start. It's gonna start thinking, you know what? I'm feeling this and I'm doing this. I exist, I have a self. And I'm starting to not believe that so much now. I'm starting to wonder if. Experiences, phenomenons, like feelings, are just part of the universe, like electromagnetism and gravity. Yeah.

• 19:37Hannah Fry?

  Wait, are we talking about panpsychism here?

• 19:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, we are.

• 19:40Hannah Fry?

  Okay, all right, we're, okay, okay. Stop what you're doing, everyone. We need to do an episode of panpsychism.

• 19:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I don't feel like I'm ready yet for it, but I'm just feeling like, uh, when you really lay down what I believe and what I think we, we know well, there's only a few conclusions and it makes, it just seems a lot more elegant. But doesn't mean it's true.

• 20:03Hannah Fry?

  I should tell you, I've switched, I've switched, by the way, and probably actually also definitely within the last month, I've switched. I think I used to think that consciousness wasn't an emergent property of complexity or intelligence, if you will, um, but that it was a, a property that came from, from evolution. Uh, and now I think I might change my mind.

• 20:28Michael Stevens?

  Uh, yeah, I just, I've, I've worked really hard for years on, consciousness clearly came about through evolution. Why, how is it fit? But the problem is, I don't, I just don't think that it's fit. I don't believe that a phenomenal zombie version of us would be any different.

• 20:49Hannah Fry?

  Brian, look what you've done.

• 20:51Michael Stevens?

  Whether agriculture, um, helps feed you or it helps feed you and makes you feel good, doesn't change whether you do it or not.

• 21:00Hannah Fry?

  All right, we're gonna park this one because there is, there is, I, I, I'm conscious that we've already gone through. Chewing machines, the evolution of consciousness, uh, this sort of infinite hard drives. And Brian just wanted to do a cute limerick.

• 21:14Michael Stevens?

  I know, Hannah, I, I was really shocked by where this went. I'm like, oh, she's gonna tell us a story about bees and then, you know, we'll move on to another question. Instead, you're like, why do I exist?

• 21:27Hannah Fry?

  Should we go on to another question?

• 21:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 21:30Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here's what I've noticed, Michael. We originally were like, oh, we'll just do half an episode a week on questions. We'll just quickly bam bam bam bam bam, quick fire. Turns out, all these questions that people are asking us, they're like episodes in themselves.

• 21:42Michael Stevens?

  We don't get questions like, hey, how long could a rabbit live? You know, we, we don't get Googleable questions.

• 21:51Hannah Fry?

  Okay, this is from Gavolokotas. Do languages and also accents shape facial features through the muscles they make us use? And therefore give us subtle but unique characteristics?

• 22:03Michael Stevens?

  I love this question because we don't totally know. And yet it feels like it could be true. And yet many people believe that it's completely ridiculous. That the language you speak changes the way your face looks? Now, on the surface of it, sure, right? Like, I'm using my lips and my cheeks and my tongue and, and, and my jaw to make noises. And so if I'm speaking one language or another my whole life, isn't that gonna change the musculature of my skull? Now, here's some things that I found. First of all, it is pretty easy to get a computer to guess what language someone is speaking just by looking at their face. Even just their cheeks and eyes.

• 22:46Michael Stevens?

  You can easily tell if a language is tonal or not by how people are moving their facial muscles. There's also an interesting little fact about this language called Kho. Kho was a, a Tu language from South Africa. And there was a linguist named Anthony Trail who learned it. And he learned this language and he spoke it for a long time. And he developed a bump on his larynx. Because of the sounds in this language, I don't know how this comes about. But biologically, it did cause a growth on the larynx. And all the adult speakers of the language Kho have this bump. The children don't because they haven't spoken the language long enough to have developed the bump.

• 23:29Michael Stevens?

  But this South African, uh, white guy, Anthony Trail, I don't actually know the color of his skin. But the point is that he was not a native who, who, who learned Kho as his first language. He developed this bump as well.

• 23:42Hannah Fry?

  What does Kho sound like, do you know?

• 23:44Michael Stevens?

  I don't know. I love how it's spelled, though. Exclamation point, capital X, O with a mark above it that's diagonal, and then O with a tilde above it.

• 23:56Michael Stevens?

  Co.

• 23:57Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 23:58Michael Stevens?

  It's a language that might actually have the largest number of phonemes of any language in the world, where a phoneme are the perceptually like different speech sounds in a language.

• 24:09Hannah Fry?

  Wow. Oh, it's one with lots of clicks, click consonants.

• 24:12Michael Stevens?

  It's got the clicks, it's got.

• 24:14Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 24:15Michael Stevens?

  And, and here's the thing that I also found, there are a lot of phonemes, like language sounds, that are very common, like the mm, the sound of the letter M, or the sounds of the vowel A, I, those are, we see those a lot, but there are some that we don't see as often, and they seem to potentially correlate with certain lifestyles. So there are some sounds called labiodental sounds, and it is what it sounds like. It's the lips and the teeth. So the V, V, V sound, and the F, F, F sound, where I've got my lower lip hitting my teeth. There's a theory out there that those sounds didn't emerge in

• 24:58Michael Stevens?

  human languages until we were eating soft enough foods. And it is true that if you look at cultures around the world, tribal cultures especially, that like eat like un-milled grains, their teeth are, are more flat in the front. And I'm not sure how this works, I'm not an orthodontist, but they don't have their front teeth ahead of their bottom teeth, making the labiodental noises, the Vs and the Fs harder to do, or just not more natural.

• 25:30Hannah Fry?

  Because if you run through the alphabet, actually, there are, you don't touch your lips very often at all. Hang on, let me just work it out. There's, I think there's in like three, three, possibly four letters where you actually touch your lips together, right?

• 25:43Michael Stevens?

  B, P.

• 25:45Hannah Fry?

  B, M, P, and W.

• 25:47Michael Stevens?

  The set, the sound of W is like your lips are just teasing each other. They're not totally touching. If I, if they touch, it's a, it's an M sound.

• 26:01Hannah Fry?

  I found that very surprising when I learned that fact, because I, I think you sort of imagine that your lips are together all the time during speech, but actually it's a really small.

• 26:12Hannah Fry?

  A fraction of the letters that you're using.

• 26:14Michael Stevens?

  Oh, man, there's even like a little riddle about this where it's like, what is different about these two sentences? And it's whether or not your lips touch during them. Anyway, I was really intrigued by this question and I was amazed that we, I wasn't amazed, but I was even more interested when I found that we are kind of dancing around trying to answer the question. Because I also feel like people, even in the mid 20th century, like in the 50s, their just faces looked different. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it because they were talking different their whole lives? What I mean is when I see an actual photo from like 1957 of people, I go, I believe it.

• 26:54Michael Stevens?

  But when a really great art designer and costume and makeup department recreates the 50s and they use the exact camera that would have been used back then, I still feel like I look at it and I'm like, I can tell that those people aren't really from the 50s. So I latched on to this question and the research I found by going, I think maybe the facial musculature could have been different because they, their accents, their dialects were a little bit different. The words and the vocabulary they use day to day was different. As it turns out, maybe not. A lot of like researchers who actually are in this field say most of those facial differences

• 27:35Michael Stevens?

  purely come from grooming, style and diet that changes over time. But this is something that I want to do a lot more research on because it's a whole thing. The idea that you put Timothy Chalamet in a, in a movie set in the past and that no one believes that he's from the past. Because why? They say he's got iPhone face. They say his face looks like a face that has seen an iPhone. And you can't put your finger on exactly why, but it does not look like it belongs 200 years in the past.

• 28:06Hannah Fry?

  iPhone face.

• 28:08Michael Stevens?

  And I kind of get it. And then you watch like Carl Malden in some older movie and you're like, that guy, that face doesn't exist anymore. That is a face from a generation or two ago. Now, I don't know what to make of all of these feelings and observations, but I think even language and what we say plays a role in it.

• 28:29Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. I think you're right that it's like, even if, well, the world needs to do a lot more research to really be able to tell for sure. But I think mechanistically, I think I can see why this might be the case. I sort of believe that there's a path that might cause this. I found your, I think I found your riddle, by the way. Is it this one? When you say the word touch, your lips don't touch. But when you say the word separate, they do?

• 28:57Michael Stevens?

  The way it works is that you play this game with people where they just say words or you say words and you say whether they touch or not. You'll say lemons touch, oranges don't touch. And the person tries to guess what the commonality is. Why do lemons touch? Is it because they're like acidic? And you're like, nope, that's not it. And they go, okay, what about, what about bananas? And you're like, bananas touch. And they go, okay, what about, what about doors? And you say doors don't touch. And they're trying to figure out the rule that separates the touching from the not touching. And it turns out to be whether or not your lips touch when you say the word. And it takes, like in some cases, hours for someone to figure it out. Usually they don't.

• 29:42Hannah Fry?

  Monkeys touch, but gorillas don't. That kind of thing.

• 29:45Michael Stevens?

  Yes, exactly. That's the game. It's a fun game to play with someone.

• 29:49Hannah Fry?

  Oh, this is gonna infuriate everybody who knows me over the course of the following week. Shall we go to a break and then on to your object?

• 29:58Michael Stevens?

  Let's go to a break and we'll come back and we'll look at some things I brought.

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• 31:46Michael Stevens?

  Okay, welcome back. During the break, I had another thought about the touching game. What I love about it is that psychologically, it's so... It's such a great demonstration of how little attention we pay to the physicality of... Word and speech production with our lips and tongue. Because people sit there going, apples touch, oranges don't. And they cannot figure out what touching means in that context. But if you know the rule, you're like, how do you not get it? It's so obvious. Then I started thinking, it wasn't even that long of a break, but I started thinking about touching and how when you touch yourself, it's, you could actually change which like hand is doing the touching and which is being touched.

• 32:31Michael Stevens?

  You can switch in your mind which one is touching and which one isn't.

• 32:35Hannah Fry?

  That game reminds me of, of a drinking game that I played once at university. My friend introduced it to everybody and by the end we all wanted to punch him because none of us could work it out. And it was that he would say a sentence and the rule was whether he started with an um. That was it.

• 32:55Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow. And I bet it took like all night.

• 32:59Hannah Fry?

  Honestly, all night, all night. None of us noticed. It was honestly, it was infuriating. And I really noticed this actually, that with all of my years of training, of being, working on the BBC, I am so unbelievably sensitive to people starting sentences with so.

• 33:23Hannah Fry?

  But I think almost nobody else in the world notices it.

• 33:26Michael Stevens?

  I know what you're talking about because there's a game called You Can't Say Um. And I played it over Thanksgiving with my family. And also as like someone who presents a lot and writes scripts a lot, I'm very aware of what words I'm saying. And it was like trivially easily, easy for me to not say certain words. But like everyone else in my family like struggled so much to not say um or uh. And I just was like. Aren't you aware of it right before you say it? It's like, so I think these are all skills that you can learn. Just like, once you know that touching means lips touching, you immediately get it and you hear it all the time during the game.

• 34:04Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I still say like too much, but hey, that's my Essex background. All right, let's, um, let's see what you've got for me today, Michael.

• 34:11Michael Stevens?

  Okay, well, I got a couple of things. One, um, actually came from a viewer and I wanted to talk with you about it. So, um, a listener named Michael, Michael Rourke, who, who by the way, makes it clear that he's a Michael and not a Mike, just like me. I've never felt like a Mike. There's a guy I met, I'm not going to give too many details, but he calls me Mike and I'm like, you don't know my soul at all, dude. Okay.

• 34:36Hannah Fry?

  I feel the same whenever anyone accidentally calls me Han. There's something inside me that just locks in. Han, oh no.

• 34:44Michael Stevens?

  I'm sure you get a lot of Hannah banana.

• 34:46Hannah Fry?

  Not if I can help it.

• 34:48Michael Stevens?

  Not if you can, okay, maybe.

• 34:49Hannah Fry?

  It only happens once, Mike, okay?

• 34:51Michael Stevens?

  My daughter, my daughter calls you the Fry person.

• 34:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 34:56Michael Stevens?

  She's really stuck on the fact that your last name is Fry and that's who you are.

• 35:00Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I like her.

• 35:01Michael Stevens?

  So anyway, um, you know, we did an episode about, uh, time and about, uh, how the calendar and the, the numbering system for the years came about. Well, Michael Rourke emailed us a Holocene calendar that he put together himself. So the Holocene calendar starts with zero, not at the birth of Christ, but at the beginning of the Holocene era. Okay, so what that, what does that mean? Geologically, it means the end of what we call the Ice Age. Okay, when Earth started warming up again, suddenly there's, uh, I mean, we don't know a lot about what it was like back then, but this was a major turning point in human history, but also the history of Earth. So it's kind of perfect.

• 35:45Michael Stevens?

  It's like both geological and anthropological. Anyway, this happened, what, like 10,000 or a few more years ago? And if you, if you count that as zero, it makes it easier to talk about human history because you're not having to deal with. B C, A D, or you know, B C E and C E. And, and of course, our current system doesn't even have a year zero. So it's really hard to calculate ages and stuff that span that gap. And I personally, I've talked about this before. I, one of my biggest pet peeves is the way B C numbers work. And when people say things like, well, in the first millennium B C. My brain always goes first millennia B C means 1,000 B C. But it doesn't.

• 36:29Michael Stevens?

  It means everything before that because the first thousand years of B C mean as you go backwards from zero, the first thousand years you hit. So 200 B C, 12 B C, 900 B C. That's the first millennia B C. The second, the second millennia B C is the 1,000 B Cs. Oh, I hate it. Whereas the Holocene calendar allows you to just say.

• 36:52Hannah Fry?

  The year 8,041, whatever.

• 36:55Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. So like pottery was invented in the year 2,000. There you go. Uh, because zero is whatever 12,000 years ago. To convert the current year to the Holocene calendar, you just add 10,000. So right now it is the year 12,026.

• 37:12Hannah Fry?

  Hey, we missed the great 10,000 anniversary of pottery.

• 37:16Michael Stevens?

  I know we did. 26 years ago, pottery turned 10,000. And I forgot to get it anything. I was gonna get it this really cool clay pot and I thought, oh, shoot, that's you.

• 37:30Michael Stevens?

  But anyway, uh, Michael Rourke, um, let me read you. He, he sent this email in about how we mentioned the Holocene calendar in that video. And he thought, man, this perspective is so cool. He wanted to visualize it. And so he put together a website, we will, we'll link it here. Where you've got the entire Holocene era and notable events from it. Both from, uh, you know, a standpoint of politics, science, all these different events. And you can scroll through it and see how close together they are or how far apart they are. You can even change how many pixels there are between every year. So you can crunch everything together or spread it out. But I actually had a hard time finding anything like this because I would love to be able to say things like, well, yeah, you know, Jesus was crucified in the year 10,030.

• 38:16Michael Stevens?

  Like that, I just, it's just more clear. I'd love to be able to say things like, "The Mayflower landed in 11620." Now, that's a big number, I get it, but it's better for B.C. things.

• 38:28Hannah Fry?

  But also, I think what this does is it just puts, puts ourselves in a better perspective of our, of our history and our ancestors. I think it connects us to the past in it just a really different way. Because all of a sudden then, you know, I don't know, people going on about the Second World War and like political agreements after it, and it was such a long time ago and whatever. And it's like, when you put it on this scale, no, it really wasn't.

• 38:54Michael Stevens?

  I know.

• 38:55Hannah Fry?

  It really, really wasn't.

• 38:56Michael Stevens?

  I know, exactly. If you, if you have to talk about the 40s versus the 90s, it sounds like they're two different universes. But if you talk about events that happened in 11945 and 11990, it sounds like they're really the same. And, and that better fits the actual scale of human history. I love saying like, "Oh yeah, the Great Wall was constructed in the 9700s." And, and I don't have to use B.C. Because I think, I think saying B.C. makes it almost sound like in fictional times. Like, it's a different world, but it's not. It's still the world that we are reacting to and living in in many ways. I mean, are we, we're still in the Stone Age. Look how much concrete we use every year. Give me a break.

• 39:40Hannah Fry?

  Also, copper smelting, 4,500. That's, just makes way more sense to me.

• 39:46Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yeah, and the 11300s, Black Death time, not good.

• 39:51Hannah Fry?

  But only a blip when you consider the history, the history back to the beginning of the Holocene era.

• 39:56Michael Stevens?

  And, yeah, and then in the 11500s, we've got Galileo. We've got Shakespeare. I, I, I think people might be annoyed if I use this more often, but I really want to use it especially because, like I said, I've been doing a lot of research on how consciousness has changed over time, as potentially revealed through the literature humans have written. And I hate that there was obviously such a change in the first millennia B.C. and the second. And I'm having to talk about B.C. and thousands of years ago, and I want to be able to just say, "Look, let me give these all positive integers." And then it's easier.

• 40:29Hannah Fry?

  I tell you what this really does, just scrolling through it, I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. And I'm so impressed that he coded this over his Christmas break as well. But what this really, really hammers home for me is just the sort of exponential acceleration of progress and technology. Because this thing, you know, nothing happens for such a long time. And then they start popping up, events start popping up, pottery, copper smelting, you know, domestication of, of the horse, the sort of, um, the Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, and so on, and so on, and so on. And then they start picking up around the turn of, uh, when the, the Romans come to be.

• 41:11Hannah Fry?

  But then you get into the modern era and it is like bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. I mean, absolutely constant, these extraordinary, extraordinary moments, civilization changing moments happening, you know, literally all of the time.

• 41:27Michael Stevens?

  That's right. And it, and it really makes me reflect on the difference between things happening and civilization relevant things happening. Because of course, between the domestication of the dog and pottery, a lot of stuff happened. People lied to each other, they fell in love, they had children, they lost loved ones. But the stuff that makes it onto a timeline like this is the civilization technology based stuff. It's pottery, it's the, the kings and the, the battles, it's the construction of stuff, it's the moon landing, it's vaccines. And of course, as those become more relevant to what it means to be human, we're like, oh, there's so many now.

• 42:10Michael Stevens?

  But gosh, imagine if you lived at the beginning of the Holocene, where nothing ever happened. There were no moon landings, there was no AI, there was no, uh, Super Bowl every year. But it's like, wow, that's a very biased way of thinking.

• 42:23Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, because you're missing the heartbeats of, of individual human lives.

• 42:27Michael Stevens?

  And of course, like, writing only existed around like, you know, three thousand B.C. So there's a lot of prehistory here where the majority of humans lived that we just don't have records of. Writing has only been around since like three thousand B.C. We've only had written stuff for like five thousand years. Yeah. So to to put this in the Holocene calendar, we're talking about like writing didn't exist until the 7000s. But humans had been around, living in settlements, participating in agriculture had been happening for 7,000 years before they were like, oh dude, let's like, write down, you know, how much oil you owe me.

• 43:05Hannah Fry?

  That's incredible.

• 43:07Michael Stevens?

  And from there, we see the emergence of of history as we know it. That's what history is. It's it's written accounts.

• 43:15Hannah Fry?

  What about art? Did art, like the cave paintings, when were those? I mean, those were, that's all the way through this, right? All the way through this, there were some forms of of art in paintings and.

• 43:27Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, art predates the Holocene. I mean,

• 43:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Michael Stevens?

  depending on how you define art, there's there's human made artworks that that seem to just exist for their aesthetic value, potentially, long before the Ice Age even ended. I mean, humans were around, like anatomically, behaviorally, modern humans were around before the Ice Age ended. But as the Ice Age ended, it's pretty cool. I mean, so much of this is speculative, but it was quick. Ice melted, glaciers retreated really quickly. Like, within 50 years, oceans rose to a point where it was like, okay, we've got to move our settlement. And that could have spawned agriculture. In fact, a lot of that rising sea level at that time could also explain ancient flood myths and

• 44:12Michael Stevens?

  where they came from, that they really were in oral traditions, that they were being shared as like, oh, you know, I've always heard that there was this flood. And that may have been true.

• 44:22Hannah Fry?

  Like Noah's Ark, for example?

• 44:24Michael Stevens?

  Noah's Ark, Gilgamesh, we see these flood myths all over the place. And they may have, when they were first written down, they may have been the results of a long, multi millennia game of telephone. It reminded me of this book. I wanted to leave you with some things from this book. It's called IF. And it's like, it's a great book for kids, actually, but it's good for everybody. A mind bending new way at looking at big ideas and numbers. It's full of wonderful illustrations and visualizations of time and money and population.

• 44:57Michael Stevens?

  So like, here's the page on life on Earth. And it breaks down life on Earth into, say, like, one hour. Okay, if if the whole story of life on Earth. Was all condensed into just one hour. When would things happen? So let's, let's just say, let's just say that this it's compressed into the hour between noon and one. Okay, so noon is when the very first life forms, like one celled organisms appear, like bacteria. And one o'clock is today, this very moment that I'm talking. Okay, so here's what happens. First life forms form within that first second.

• 45:34Michael Stevens?

  But it's not until 12:51 that fish appear on earth. The dinosaurs arrive at 12:56.

• 45:46Michael Stevens?

  And they only exist for three minutes.

• 45:49Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 45:49Michael Stevens?

  And then mammals appear at about 56 minutes and 25 seconds. The earliest birds appear at 12:58. Two minutes until today. And modern humans, the ones that we're related to, that are like biologically and anatomically modern, they show up at 12:59 and 59.8 seconds.

• 46:14Hannah Fry?

  No!

• 46:14Michael Stevens?

  Two tenths of a second before right now.

• 46:17Hannah Fry?

  But hold on a second. That's still way before even the beginning of this calendar, right?

• 46:23Michael Stevens?

  Yes, yes, I know.

• 46:25Hannah Fry?

  Wow. It's nothing.

• 46:28Michael Stevens?

  And then here's something that's not related to time. Well, it's not related to, to, to history so much as it's related to your life. There's a page about if your life was a pizza.

• 46:39Michael Stevens?

  Here we go. Okay, so your, if your life was a pizza, cut into 12 slices. Here's what all those slices could represent. Four of them would be the time that you spend in school or at work. Another four of them would be the time that you spend getting ready to and sleeping. Getting ready to sleep and sleeping. So you spend four of your slices sleeping, four of them at work. That's already eight of the 12. One slice would be spent shopping, caring for others and doing things around the home. One slice would be spent traveling. Whether it be to school, on errands, on holidays. One slice would be the time that you spend preparing food and eating.

• 47:21Michael Stevens?

  And that final 12th slice would be the time that you spend on leisure activities, whether that's recreation, exercise, games, surfing the internet.

• 47:29Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 47:30Michael Stevens?

  And that's your life as a pizza.

• 47:32Hannah Fry?

  That, I mean, that really, there's a book by Oliver Burke, 4,000 Weeks. It essentially says the average human life is 4,000 weeks long.

• 47:39Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 47:40Hannah Fry?

  And talks about how that should change your perspective of what you want to do with it, you know?

• 47:46Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I should check that out because I think about that a lot. I think about 4,000 weeks means that I only get in my life 4,000 Saturdays.

• 47:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:55Michael Stevens?

  And then it starts shrinking as you start to say, well, but how many, how many rainy Saturdays am I going to get? How many rainy Saturdays with my daughter am I going to get? And the number becomes magnificently small.

• 48:12Hannah Fry?

  It really does. I think especially when you think about, let's say, if you have parents who are around, you know, and you've left home already, once you start counting the number of times that you have left, when you're going to get to spend really good time with them, really good quality time. Exactly as you said, it's vanishingly terrifyingly small.

• 48:37Michael Stevens?

  I know.

• 48:39Hannah Fry?

  It's a good exercise, though, you know? I think it's so easy to go through life, seeing the little bubble that you're in. But I think that stuff like this, like Michael has built, of understanding the context of your life, your human life, in the much bigger picture of who we are and where we've come from, how it's so much bigger than you. And then looking at things like your IF book of understanding what you have for yourself in the context of what you have left. I think it's a really useful exercise to do.

• 49:11Michael Stevens?

  I know. It makes you think so many things, like, gosh, if I spend a third of my life sleeping, which we all do, about a third of our life is spent sleeping, then I'm not 40. I'm 26.

• 49:25Michael Stevens?

  That's how much life experience I actually have.

• 49:27Hannah Fry?

  Are we counting the travelling time? I'm happy to keep the sleep bit. I just want to get rid of the travelling bit. That was the bit that was the most painful.

• 49:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right. I mean, but at the same time, travelling can be worth it. You know, if you're travelling with people or even travelling by yourself and it gives you time to think through something, maybe it's worth having a slice be just that. Not always, depends what you do when you travel.

• 49:50Hannah Fry?

  Well, OK, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that mind-expanding episode at Field Notes. Love doing Field Notes episodes with you, Michael. Always, always fun.

• 50:00Hannah Fry?

  You can join us again next week. We're back on Tuesday with our usual episodes and another podcast expedition on Thursday next week. If you've got any questions you'd like us to answer, make sure you send them in to us, [email protected].

• 50:14Michael Stevens?

  And you can join our newsletter at therestis.com/science.

• 50:19Hannah Fry?

  See you next week.

• 50:20Michael Stevens?

  See you next week. Thank you for spending some of your slice with us.

• 50:24Hannah Fry?

  Ha ha.