How Many Words Do You ACTUALLY Know?

Most people use just a fraction of the words they understand. But how big is your vocabulary, really? When a listener builds a tool that claims to measure it, Hannah and Michael put themselves to the test. If you'd like to try for yourself, follow the link and tell us what score you get in the comments: https://vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app/ Along the way they uncover forgotten words, obscure linguistic curiosities, and a surprising question hiding beneath the quiz itself: what does it mean to know a word? After the break, they tackle your questions and answer a nuclear pizza problem, explain why humans can grow such remarkably long hair, and ask whether everyone has a voice inside their head. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science 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 + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata 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.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:03Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens. Today is an episode of Field Notes, where we have discovered something made by you.

• 0:10Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:11Michael Stevens?

  And not just all of you, but one of you, named Jake. I don't know the last name.

• 0:15Hannah Fry?

  I don't know the last name either.

• 0:16Michael Stevens?

  Didn't provide it.

• 0:17Hannah Fry?

  But what I will say is Jake is an absolute legend.

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, maybe Jake wants to be a little bit anonymous, but his website should not be anonymous.

• 0:25Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely not.

• 0:26Michael Stevens?

  Inspired by a discussion we had on a previous episode about how many words does a person know? And how many words are there to know? He looked into it and made a website that tests how many words you know. It estimates the size of your vocabulary.

• 0:40Hannah Fry?

  Certainly does. That's what we're going to get into today.

• 0:49Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:52Michael Stevens?

  Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.

• 1:13Hannah Fry?

  But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.

• 1:23Michael Stevens?

  It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 1:42Hannah Fry?

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

• 1:54Speaker 02

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• 2:38Speaker 02

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• 3:37Speaker 03

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• 3:59Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so the website is called Vocabowl, which looks like vocab bowl, like Super Bowl.

• 4:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Michael Stevens?

  It's a little bit competitive.

• 4:07Hannah Fry?

  Vocable.

• 4:08Michael Stevens?

  It's vocable. It's very fun. And you and I have both done it. We don't know each other's scores.

• 4:13Hannah Fry?

  Nope.

• 4:14Michael Stevens?

  Basically, you just go through and you're shown words, and then you have a multiple choice challenge. Which of these four is the definition of this word? And you go on like that for, what, like 100 words?

• 4:24Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, 100 words.

• 4:25Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Hannah Fry?

  Because there's how many, in total, 170,000 or so words that you could potentially know that are considered part of the English language?

• 4:34Michael Stevens?

  Yes, yes. I think Jake quotes the OED as saying there's something like 171,476?

• 4:42Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's precise.

• 4:44Michael Stevens?

  I wrote it down. Words in current use, what the OED considers current use, but...

• 4:51Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, though.

• 4:51Michael Stevens?

  What?

• 4:52Hannah Fry?

  If that number is so precise, can we not just make one up and then add one to it?

• 4:56Michael Stevens?

  We would have to get it into common use.

• 4:58Hannah Fry?

  Is coolth in there?

• 5:00Michael Stevens?

  Coolth? Coolth is not there yet.

• 5:02Hannah Fry?

  Hey!

• 5:02Michael Stevens?

  And I haven't confirmed this, but I'm gonna just guess.

• 5:04Hannah Fry?

  Let's make coolth a thing.

• 5:05Michael Stevens?

  Coolth. We need some more coolth. We don't need more coolth in here. It's cool in this room.

• 5:09Hannah Fry?

  It's extremely coolth. There's a lot of coolth in here.

• 5:11Michael Stevens?

  But the OED also estimates that most people only know between 15,000 and 35,000 words.

• 5:18Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 5:18Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 5:19Hannah Fry?

  We should say, actually, if you want to do this test, you should probably do it now, because we're gonna be saying some of the words.

• 5:23Michael Stevens?

  That would be really fun. If you're in your car, it's okay. We're not gonna spoil anything. Oh, we might, because you might learn.

• 5:29Hannah Fry?

  Hmm, what the words are gonna be.

• 5:31Michael Stevens?

  See, I don't want people to have to stop. But if you can...

• 5:35Hannah Fry?

  Go do your score.

• 5:36Michael Stevens?

  Pause, go take the little test.

• 5:39Hannah Fry?

  If you can't, just put your fingers in your ears.

• 5:43Michael Stevens?

  Take them off the steering wheel, over your ears. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, how should we do this? Should we share our scores? I want to share the ones I got wrong, because they're cool words.

• 5:53Hannah Fry?

  My experience of this was you start off, and he's got it, so you do the core basics first. And I was doing those, and I was like, hey, check me out.

• 6:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's very easy at first. I didn't know it would get harder. I was like, I know every word. Oh, my gosh. But no, it goes from core basics to intermediate, advanced, expert, and then grandmaster.

• 6:17Michael Stevens?

  And can I just say, once you get to the grand master words, the advantage goes to the kind of nerd who has read a lot of those books with titles like The Scrum tubulus person's guide to perplexa flibby words, right? And I am a person who owns like five books like that.

• 6:37Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 6:38Michael Stevens?

  So it paid off a little bit.

• 6:40Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Michael Stevens?

  But let's see. So who's gonna go first?

• 6:43Hannah Fry?

  I think you've won. I'll be honest with you. I think you've won. From between us two, I think you've won because you're an English Lit major, right?

• 6:48Michael Stevens?

  That's true.

• 6:49Hannah Fry?

  I could barely write a sentence until I was 25, you know? I'm okay. I'm okay.

• 6:57Michael Stevens?

  Do you think we should have more animosity between us? Would that make the show more interesting?

• 7:00Hannah Fry?

  I think it might. People, you know.

• 7:02Michael Stevens?

  We just dug at each other all the time?

• 7:03Hannah Fry?

  When we first joined, they were like, the producers were like, it is when you disagree, that's when, that's when the real magic happens. And I think that we're looking at Alistair and Rory and thought we should mirror that. So maybe we should. Maybe we should lay into each other a bit more.

• 7:16Michael Stevens?

  We could try, but it's always hard because so often with, with math and science, it's not like, no, the square root of four is two and a half. Like, what are we, how are we gonna disagree? We can disagree on interpretations and which facts to weigh in which way. But I think we're similar in a lot of ways too.

• 7:34Hannah Fry?

  It's true. Also bluntly, I just quite like you. So I, you know, I don't think it would be, I might, I might tease you in jest. Just rib you around the edges a little here and there.

• 7:45Michael Stevens?

  No, it's fun.

• 7:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Michael Stevens?

  I like you too. However, let's compare our vocab.

• 7:51Hannah Fry?

  Okay, deal.

• 7:52Michael Stevens?

  According to Jake's vocab owl.

• 7:54Hannah Fry?

  Vocab owl. Okay. What are we saying? Do you want the number I got correct out of?

• 7:59Michael Stevens?

  No, I want the estimated number of words you know.

• 8:02Hannah Fry?

  Okay. Uh, 73,400.

• 8:07Hannah Fry?

  Don't look at me like that. What was yours?

• 8:09Michael Stevens?

  72,250. Wow.

• 8:14Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 8:15Michael Stevens?

  Okay, congratulations.

• 8:16Hannah Fry?

  Congratulations to you.

• 8:18Michael Stevens?

  Well, that's a lot of words.

• 8:19Hannah Fry?

  I felt.

• 8:20Michael Stevens?

  You, so you know a thousand more words than me approximately.

• 8:23Hannah Fry?

  What are they? Who knows?

• 8:24Michael Stevens?

  Probably British ones like chim chim chery and, and.

• 8:30Hannah Fry?

  Jiminy cricket.

• 8:31Michael Stevens?

  I don't know them. I know Jiminy Cricket. I like that. I say that when I'm upset. Jiminy, I say Jiminy Christmas.

• 8:38Hannah Fry?

  I got 10 words wrong.

• 8:40Michael Stevens?

  I got nine wrong.

• 8:41Hannah Fry?

  Oh, but maybe we've got them wrong in different parts.

• 8:43Michael Stevens?

  I think that's what it is because the way the website estimates your vocabulary is by saying, okay, in the English language, there are this many words that are of intermediate difficulty or intermittently known. And if you only know two thirds of them, then you only know two thirds of those words.

• 9:02Hannah Fry?

  Of the wider corpus.

• 9:03Michael Stevens?

  So I missed more from lower down the chain.

• 9:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, you must have done.

• 9:07Michael Stevens?

  And fewer up at the top, but there's fewer to know at the top. So you have a larger vocabulary than me.

• 9:14Hannah Fry?

  Even though.

• 9:15Michael Stevens?

  But I think maybe I'm lopsided.

• 9:16Hannah Fry?

  I think, I think you've been reading too many of the scrumdiddlyumptious.

• 9:20Michael Stevens?

  Yes, and not enough of the.

• 9:21Hannah Fry?

  Gobbledegook wordy books.

• 9:22Michael Stevens?

  Dick and Jane.

• 9:24Hannah Fry?

  Jack and Jill went up the hill.

• 9:25Michael Stevens?

  Jack and Jill went up, went up the what? I don't know that one, but, uh, borberigmus, I know that one.

• 9:32Hannah Fry?

  What words did you get wrong? Can I, can I tell you the first word I got wrong?

• 9:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Hannah Fry?

  I was annoyed about this, actually.

• 9:37Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 9:38Hannah Fry?

  It was the word zenith.

• 9:40Michael Stevens?

  Oh, meaning like the top?

• 9:42Hannah Fry?

  I thought it meant top, but apparently it means strongest point.

• 9:46Michael Stevens?

  Oh, well, strongest and top can be related, but you know, it, it kind of depends on the options that you're given.

• 9:54Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. It's the pinnacle of something. Uh, I thought it was the highest point, but it mean, apparently it means like the, the peak of something.

• 10:04Michael Stevens?

  Which option did you choose?

• 10:06Hannah Fry?

  Um.

• 10:08Michael Stevens?

  There wouldn't have been highest and strongest.

• 10:10Hannah Fry?

  No, I think I sort of mucked up a little bit.

• 10:12Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, okay. Well, that's fair. I mean, that'll happen. Like, I don't think any of the ones I got wrong were unfair. I'm a little bit embarrassed about one.

• 10:20Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 10:21Michael Stevens?

  But I got, the first one I got wrong was zephyr.

• 10:24Hannah Fry?

  Zephyr?

• 10:25Michael Stevens?

  Now, I knew that zephyr was a kind of wind, but I was given two options. It's either a violent storm wind or a soft, gentle breeze.

• 10:33Hannah Fry?

  But then they get quite crazy once you get towards the end.

• 10:36Michael Stevens?

  They do get crazy because then this next one, I think I should have known laconic.

• 10:41Hannah Fry?

  Laconic.

• 10:42Michael Stevens?

  Laconic. I said, oh, that means being lazy and slow, but no, it means using very few words.

• 10:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Michael Stevens?

  Did you know that?

• 10:49Hannah Fry?

  I think I did know that one.

• 10:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I bet you did. Laconic is a great one.

• 10:52Hannah Fry?

  It is a good word.

• 10:53Michael Stevens?

  Like, oh, the way she describes things is so laconic. No wasted words, just. Okay. Should I go through what I've missed or should we trade?

• 11:02Hannah Fry?

  I don't have a full list of them. I'll be honest with you. I found the test quite painful. I don't like getting things wrong.

• 11:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, well, me neither. Actually, no, I did like getting them wrong. I mean, look at me. I've written them all down. And I've put them into sentences and I'm like, I'm not gonna get these wrong again. So I'll share my list then.

• 11:19Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, go on.

• 11:19Michael Stevens?

  Okay, lugubrious.

• 11:21Hannah Fry?

  Lugubrious.

• 11:22Michael Stevens?

  I got that one wrong. Now, I've heard the word before. I decided that it means looking or sounding happier gay. But it means looking or sounding sad and dismal.

• 11:33Hannah Fry?

  I think I got that one wrong as well, you know?

• 11:35Michael Stevens?

  Oh, really?

• 11:35Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 11:36Michael Stevens?

  Lugubrious. So that's a sad way to be. Ah, his lugubrious pose.

• 11:42Hannah Fry?

  You can really tell in the way that you're saying it. When you say lugubrious.

• 11:47Michael Stevens?

  All the children with their lugubrious play. But no, lugubrious play would be very sad.

• 11:54Hannah Fry?

  It would, yeah.

• 11:56Michael Stevens?

  Okay, unctuous. I got that one wrong.

• 11:59Hannah Fry?

  Well, can I just tell you, this one, I also got this one wrong, but I actually got this one wrong particularly because I was sitting next to producer Lauren, who was like, oh, it means delicious. Apparently not.

• 12:13Michael Stevens?

  It means excessively or irritatingly flattering. That is cool. I would not have guessed that. I guessed that it meant dry and rough and rude. Unctuous. Oh, this drink is unctuous. But no, to be unctuous means to be like, like a salesperson is unctuous. They're like, oh, you have such great tastes and oh, this is, you know what's good and you're, it's just, oh, stop being so flattering.

• 12:38Hannah Fry?

  I was a bit unctuous earlier when I told you I liked you.

• 12:41Michael Stevens?

  You said it, not me.

• 12:44Hannah Fry?

  And now we all understand it.

• 12:46Michael Stevens?

  This one is the one that I wish I'd not missed. Innervate.

• 12:50Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 12:51Michael Stevens?

  Innervate. It does not mean to cause someone to be filled with energy. It means the opposite. It means to cause someone to feel drained of energy. That's a tricky one.

• 13:02Hannah Fry?

  That is a tricky one. I think quite a lot of these, actually, you know. When you see the word, you roughly know what it's to do with. But as to whether it's in the positive direction or the negative direction is is actually quite a difficult thing to remember.

• 13:17Michael Stevens?

  That's right. The words, the words that that obviously go in one direction or another, they're more common. It's these weird ones like innervate. Innervate, you would think it means like, oh, yeah, you know, that speech really innervated the crowd.

• 13:30Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Michael Stevens?

  But that would be a bad thing for the speech to do because heat innervates you.

• 13:36Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm. Makes you more sluggish.

• 13:37Michael Stevens?

  It feels wrong.

• 13:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Michael Stevens?

  I I guess, did you get noisome right?

• 13:42Hannah Fry?

  I don't know.

• 13:44Michael Stevens?

  Cause noisome is a sad, do you know what noisome means?

• 13:47Hannah Fry?

  Not now, not now that you're asking me without multiple choice and the privacy of my own room to make mistakes.

• 13:51Michael Stevens?

  It sounds like noisome might mean like noisy.

• 13:55Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 13:56Michael Stevens?

  But it actually means stinky, bad smell. But it's got the word noise in it.

• 14:04Michael Stevens?

  Anyway, I was really proud that I knew that one. Okay, then what about this one? Zinzi, zinzi, zinnic.

• 14:13Hannah Fry?

  I don't think I got that one.

• 14:14Michael Stevens?

  You don't think you got, I get you, you would remember because this was a ridiculous one. Zinzi, zinzi, zinnic.

• 14:20Hannah Fry?

  Did you get the hippo ba ba ba ba ba ba ba phobia?

• 14:24Michael Stevens?

  If I did, I got it right.

• 14:26Hannah Fry?

  The the one about the fear of lo- of long words?

• 14:29Michael Stevens?

  Sesquipedalian also means really long words. Meh, ha, ha, ha, ha. But then, yeah, like hip, hippo ba ba ba phobia. I don't know the word off the top of my head, but I think when I saw it, I'm like, it's gotta be one of those.

• 14:42Hannah Fry?

  It's a hilariously long word. What's the word for when something describes what it is? So like, the the word describing fear of long words is in itself an extremely long word.

• 14:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I think that would be uh, autological.

• 14:58Hannah Fry?

  Autological, yeah.

• 14:59Michael Stevens?

  The word describes itself.

• 15:01Hannah Fry?

  Thing is, I think there's also quite a big difference between seeing these words and being able to. Take a good stab at what their definition is.

• 15:11Michael Stevens?

  That's a skill in and of itself.

• 15:13Hannah Fry?

  And then the opposite, which is to be able to conjure these words from the depths of your mind and use them correctly in a sentence.

• 15:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, and there's a certain point where it's impressive that you can use them, but you still shouldn't because it just makes everyone feel lost and confused. Like, if I started talking about, ah, yes, but as we all know, that requires math in the zinzy, zinzy, zinick variety, whatever, that's an old, archaic way of saying the eighth power of a number.

• 15:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 15:46Michael Stevens?

  Before superscripts were used, it's the German spelling of the medieval Italian word senso, meaning squared, zinzik. And so, to the power of two, to the power of two, to the power of two is to the power of the eighth. That's why zinzy, zinzy, zinick meant to the eighth power.

• 16:05Hannah Fry?

  And yes, if you start using that word when you're describing to the eighth power, people are gonna think you're a bit of a zinzy, zinzy.

• 16:11Michael Stevens?

  No, you aren't, you aren't even describing things better or more richly, just archaically.

• 16:17Hannah Fry?

  Do you know, one of my favorite things to do in the world is to just pick general words, completely innocuous words.

• 16:25Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 16:25Hannah Fry?

  And use them as insults for children.

• 16:28Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 16:29Hannah Fry?

  So, for example, you absolute bing, you know?

• 16:33Michael Stevens?

  You absolute bean?

• 16:34Hannah Fry?

  Bing.

• 16:34Michael Stevens?

  Bing.

• 16:35Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Michael Stevens?

  Ah, okay, this is like an automotopia.

• 16:37Hannah Fry?

  You know, or like, stop being a plinky, you know?

• 16:41Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 16:41Hannah Fry?

  This kind of thing, but just like, almost say them with the venom that you might deliver us well with.

• 16:47Michael Stevens?

  Sure, I thought you meant words that were really common, like, you absolute table.

• 16:51Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I mean, you can do that a bit as well.

• 16:53Michael Stevens?

  Plinky and bing are kind of, they're kind of cute.

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  They're kind of cuter. Or, you know, banana is like the standard one, right? Can you stop being a banana?

• 17:00Michael Stevens?

  Hannah banana, of course.

• 17:02Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 17:02Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Hannah Fry?

  You absurd chair leg.

• 17:06Michael Stevens?

  You absolute democracy.

• 17:10Michael Stevens?

  I use nerd a lot as an insult because I am such a nerd. I just think that it's fair.

• 17:18Hannah Fry?

  I think it's fair.

• 17:19Michael Stevens?

  I'll be like, yo, what up nerds?

• 17:21Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Michael Stevens?

  But like, actually, I'm the one here who's like, well, actually, on page 712 of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says this.

• 17:27Hannah Fry?

  You can't see steam?

• 17:30Michael Stevens?

  Uh, that's not steam that you're visibly seeing. The, uh, you know, like the fog that comes off of dry ice?

• 17:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Michael Stevens?

  I'm always the first to say, that's actually water. That's not carbon dioxide. The cold gas is causing water vapor in the air to condense into a cloud. So the white stuff that you see off of dry ice, that's water.

• 17:51Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I think you're allowed to call other people.

• 17:54Michael Stevens?

  Okay, there's three more that I got wrong. We're gonna just cover these quickly.

• 17:56Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 17:56Michael Stevens?

  Pogana trophy.

• 17:58Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 17:58Michael Stevens?

  That is not a trophy hunting sport. That is the growing of a beard.

• 18:02Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 18:03Michael Stevens?

  I got that one wrong. Yclept.

• 18:06Hannah Fry?

  Yes, I think I've got that one wrong as well.

• 18:07Michael Stevens?

  That, but see, that's literally an archaic word. It's a way of saying called or by the name of. Oh, yes, the lady Yclept Jessica. Come on. If someone said that, I would, I would not go, dang, you are so good of a communicator. I'd be like, what does Yclept mean?

• 18:24Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Michael Stevens?

  Finally, Eucalygon. Eucalygon means a neighbor whose house is on fire.

• 18:32Hannah Fry?

  Oh, yeah, I got that one wrong as well. You know what? Actually, there's a lot of overlap in the ones that we got wrong.

• 18:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Hannah Fry?

  I think maybe I got an extra one or two wrong, like Zenith in the early. But hang on, this doesn't make sense.

• 18:44Michael Stevens?

  You must have got one of these right.

• 18:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, one of the late ones, right.

• 18:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Michael Stevens?

  For example, I don't know why you don't remember this, but the Zenzie Zenzie Zenic. Maybe you just guessed right?

• 18:56Hannah Fry?

  I actually did this test 15 minutes ago, so it really is extraordinary that I can't remember.

• 19:00Michael Stevens?

  I did this like three weeks ago. So maybe the deal is that, like, so many new words have been invented since then.

• 19:07Hannah Fry?

  That's possibly what it is.

• 19:08Michael Stevens?

  Changed the curve. So Eucalygon, that is another, like, ridiculous. It's a character from the Iliad whose house was burned at this one point. Came an eponym for some reason, like in literature, authors have written things like, ah, but who is this eucalagon? Meaning who is this neighbor of mine that is suffering? And I that has, I've never needed to use that word.

• 19:32Hannah Fry?

  No, fair, absolutely fair. Just looking at this, these stats that he has here on the website. Actually, the number of words in each category increases as you go up the difficulties of the category. So core basics, in terms of the frequency of words that that people use in the English language, there are only actually around 3,000 core basic words. 7,000 intermediate words, 10,000 advanced words. And then it's 25,000 expert words, he describes it, and then 40,000 obscure words.

• 20:08Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 20:08Hannah Fry?

  So the words, so the harder they get, the more obscure they get. Not only are they harder, used less commonly and so on, but also there's way more of them.

• 20:18Michael Stevens?

  There are way more of them. Do you have your actual final results page open?

• 20:22Hannah Fry?

  I do.

• 20:22Michael Stevens?

  Because we could compare, I wrote down how many I got right in each category.

• 20:27Hannah Fry?

  Okay, go for it.

• 20:27Michael Stevens?

  I was 20 for 20 in core basics, 20 for 20 in intermediate.

• 20:31Hannah Fry?

  I got 19.

• 20:32Michael Stevens?

  Oh, interesting. I was 18 for 20 with advanced.

• 20:35Hannah Fry?

  17.

• 20:36Michael Stevens?

  I was 17 for 20 in expert.

• 20:38Hannah Fry?

  17.

• 20:38Michael Stevens?

  And I was 16 for 20 in grand master.

• 20:41Hannah Fry?

  17, baby.

• 20:42Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so because you knew one more grand master word than me, which might have been the zinzi, zinzi, zenic, that's my guess.

• 20:49Hannah Fry?

  It could be.

• 20:50Michael Stevens?

  That meant the algorithm estimated you to know 1,000 more words.

• 20:55Michael Stevens?

  Not that I'm gonna be stuck on this for the rest of my life, but that might be what happened.

• 20:59Hannah Fry?

  I think that's probably what happened.

• 21:01Michael Stevens?

  Uh, but anyway, Jake, thank you for creating that.

• 21:03Hannah Fry?

  Thank you.

• 21:04Michael Stevens?

  And please, everyone out there, go check it out, there'll be a link in the description.

• 21:07Hannah Fry?

  I think there's also something quite positive in that, that if you want to find, to, to, to learn a new language, I mean, the idea of learning 70,000 words, 170,000 words feels extremely intimidating. But actually, you can get really quite far with just 3,000 words. I mean, that's nothing.

• 21:22Michael Stevens?

  That's right, that's right, with just the grammar and 3,000 words.

• 21:24Hannah Fry?

  Like learn 10 words a day, you can do it in a year.

• 21:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Hannah Fry?

  I mean, you won't know how to put them together, but.

• 21:30Michael Stevens?

  Go try this out vocab owl and let us know in the comments what you got. And we're all going to compare and we're all going to support and love each other.

• 21:38Hannah Fry?

  It's a bit obnoxious of you.

• 21:39Michael Stevens?

  I just don't want people to get all judgmental and think that they're better than each other. Okay, this is not about the value of you as a person. It's about, it's about having fun.

• 21:50Hannah Fry?

  It's about the value of this podcast.

• 21:52Michael Stevens?

  It's about the value of this podcast. Yeah, at the bottom of the page, it doesn't even say the name. That's why I don't know Jake's full name.

• 21:58Hannah Fry?

  I know.

• 21:59Michael Stevens?

  It's not like made by Jake, whatever. It's just inspired by the rest is science with Professor Hannah Frye and not Professor Michael Stevens. That part isn't there, the not professor. But whenever I see those together, I'm always like, oh, I don't get to have a thing in front of my name. By Professor Hannah Frye and Mr. Michael Stevens. Anyway, coming up after the break, we're going to answer some of your questions.

• 22:22Hannah Fry?

  We certainly are.

• 22:30Hannah Fry?

  This segment is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Now, most cancer stories begin at the moment of diagnosis, but today we're going to start much earlier before cancer has even had a chance to begin.

• 22:41Michael Stevens?

  You can think of it like a biological time machine. If you go back far enough, understand what's starting to change, you can help save lives and spare people from ever facing diagnosis, treatment and what follows.

• 22:52Hannah Fry?

  And that is what Cancer Research UK scientists are exploring. How the ecosystem inside of us has changed over time and what that could reveal about a cancer's earliest roots. So today we are asking, what if the key to preventing cancer is by decoding what is already inside of us? Here's a fact that you may already be aware of, Michael. You are more microbe than human. The average human adult has about 30 trillion human cells, but about 38 trillion tiny bugs inside of them. Most of them are in the gut microbiome. This biome, it's not just digesting your dinner. It can influence your immunity, it can influence your mood, it can influence how you think.

• 23:35Hannah Fry?

  In general, you have these sort of good bugs in inverted commas that help you to protect against toxins and that. Train the immune system to behave. And then you have some bad bugs that produce toxins that that damage your your cells, your bowel cells and and potentially can help tumors to grow. And normally, in a healthy adult, you you would have the good bugs out competing the bad bugs for for resources and space. But as you get older, our microbiome can end up changing and the number of good bugs declines over time and so can't crowd out those bad bugs. And some of the chemicals that were once beneficial to us would end up start behaving a little bit differently.

• 24:11Michael Stevens?

  Now, we call them bugs. And what are they? I mean, they're they're little microorganisms, bacteria. They have completely different DNA than us. They are not us, and yet they outnumber the cells you and I are made out of. If you wanted to count every single bacteria in your body, one every second, it would take you a million years.

• 24:32Hannah Fry?

  Whoa.

• 24:33Michael Stevens?

  A lot of these bacteria are good, but harmful shifts in your gut microbiome can create the ideal environment for bowel cancer to develop and grow. But Cancer Research UK scientists are now screening a library of around 1,500 approved drugs to see if any of them help stop the shift from helpful to harmful bacteria. But here's a question. So we know about the link between age and bowel cancer, but why is it becoming more common in young adults?

• 25:01Hannah Fry?

  OK, well, to try and answer that question, Cancer Research UK scientists are tapping into one of the world's oldest bowel cancer archives because hidden beneath this hospital, there is tens of thousands of bowel cancer samples that have been collected all the way back to the 1950s, right? And what Cancer Research UK scientists have been doing has been hunting for essentially genomic scars, right? Little bits of DNA damage inside of the tumors. Because different causes of cancer can end up leaving different scars in the DNA. And you can now use whole genome sequencing to map all of the DNA of all of those tumors.

• 25:41Hannah Fry?

  And then by comparing the different scars in the DNA in these tumors from the 1950s all the way through to now. Scientists can investigate what are the environmental factors, right? Because essentially you can see in your DNA that the sum of everything your body experiences over a lifetime, right? Your lifestyle, your diet, your pollution, your stress, and then how it ends up affecting your biology. And if those bad bug scars become more common over the decades, then that's a really strong clue that targeting these bad bugs specifically could help to prevent bowel cancer in younger people. So by using the past to protect our future,

• 26:22Hannah Fry?

  we can help to stop these harmful shifts before they even start.

• 26:27Michael Stevens?

  And that's how Cancer Research UK is creating a future where fewer people hear the words "you have cancer." In the past 50 years, their work has helped double cancer survival in the UK and saved and improved millions of lives around the world.

• 26:42Hannah Fry?

  And in the golden age of cancer research, we are finally unlocking the secrets of time to stop cancer before it can even begin.

• 26:49Michael Stevens?

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

• 27:01Speaker 04

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• 27:31Speaker 05

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• 28:07Hannah Fry?

  Okay, we're back with a question from Andreas from Sweden, who says, "I recently listened to your episodes about microwaves and fridges, and I've heard that if you stand at the right distance from a nuclear blast, you get a perfectly microwave pizza. Is that really possible, or is it just nonsense?"

• 28:22Michael Stevens?

  Okay, I want to imagine that when I was listening to this, I was thinking of it very literally. And it's like, if you stand just far enough away, you get a perfectly frozen pizza. Like, it just falls out of the sky.

• 28:34Hannah Fry?

  There you go.

• 28:35Michael Stevens?

  A perfectly cooked pizza. You have to be holding the pizza to begin with, I think is what he means. And then it becomes cooked because of the blast.

• 28:41Hannah Fry?

  Right, exactly.

• 28:42Michael Stevens?

  Is that true?

• 28:43Hannah Fry?

  Uh, no. Is the short answer.

• 28:46Michael Stevens?

  Shoot.

• 28:46Hannah Fry?

  But the slightly longer answer is no, but in an interesting way, I think. Okay, so the thing is, is that you get almost no microwaves from a nuclear detonation.

• 28:58Michael Stevens?

  Oh, bummer. I would have assumed it'd be a lot.

• 29:01Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Michael Stevens?

  A lot of everything, every kind.

• 29:02Hannah Fry?

  All across the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 29:04Michael Stevens?

  But no?

• 29:05Hannah Fry?

  But what it is, is you get 5% that's gamma rays, neutrons, the sort of initial nuclear radiation. 35%, this is from the nuclear detonation. 35% is thermal radiation, so infrared, visible light, UV, the kind of great blast.

• 29:19Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 29:20Hannah Fry?

  50% is kinetic energy in the shock wave.

• 29:23Michael Stevens?

  Oh, so half of it is just a pressure wave through matter, through the air, through...

• 29:26Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 29:27Hannah Fry?

  And then 10% is residual radiation, the kind of fallout. And, I mean, there's not that much microwaves in that list, right? So it's almost all this flash of infrared and visible light. But also, flash is kind of the operative word there because it's not lasting long enough, you know? You're not, it's not sort of like, you put your frozen pizza in the microwave, if that's how you're cooking them.

• 29:52Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah, right. No, I wouldn't do it that way.

• 29:54Hannah Fry?

  No, me neither, but fine.

• 29:55Michael Stevens?

  Who asked this question? I've got a lot of suspicions.

• 29:58Hannah Fry?

  Someone from Sweden.

• 30:00Michael Stevens?

  Oh, it all makes sense now. But yeah, I was right. You're not gonna, you could put your pizza in the microwave and shoot microwaves at it for minutes and minutes.

• 30:09Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 30:09Michael Stevens?

  A nuclear blast is gonna ionize for years, but it's gonna blast for a second.

• 30:16Hannah Fry?

  Few seconds, exactly, maximum. It's like, it's, but it doesn't cook in the same way. It won't cook in the same way. It's like, it's more like you're standing next to the sun for a second.

• 30:25Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 30:27Hannah Fry?

  It's sort of the difference between warming yourself by the fire and warming yourself in the fire.

• 30:31Michael Stevens?

  Ah, big difference.

• 30:32Hannah Fry?

  The sort of the fundamental difference of what's going on here. Also, I mean, the other thing is that the heat that is coming through isn't gonna distinguish between the pizza and, you know, your face.

• 30:41Michael Stevens?

  Ah, true, because I was just about to say, look, you could thaw the pizza.

• 30:45Hannah Fry?

  You could thaw the pizza.

• 30:46Michael Stevens?

  If you stood next to enough sequential atomic bomb explosions. Just a blast of heat, another blast of heat, another blast of heat. Eventually, it'll be room temperature.

• 30:56Hannah Fry?

  I would say overall, an inefficient way to do it.

• 30:58Michael Stevens?

  Don't do it.

• 30:59Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, because you're, you're getting cooked too.

• 31:01Hannah Fry?

  You are getting cooked too. Yeah, and if you'll, if you survive that bit, then the blast will come through immediately afterwards and knock you off your feet. So, so yeah, I'd go with no, generally.

• 31:12Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 31:12Hannah Fry?

  Overall. Okay, next question. This one is for you. This is from Mark. Sat in a bar in Portugal and there's a lively discussion on why humans need their haircut, but monkeys and apes don't.

• 31:25Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, this is one that I've, I've asked a lot and we, we don't know the answer. The question is, why are humans like the only primate that just kind of keeps growing hair? Only at a one, one top place, by the way. Now, would you call them orangutans or orangutans or orang? Okay, so orangutans have pretty long hair.

• 31:49Hannah Fry?

  They do.

• 31:51Michael Stevens?

  Chimpanzees don't. Humans, the theory goes, lost most of our hair because we needed to be able to sweat. We walk and move and especially run in ways that our tree dwelling ancestors didn't. And so it was, it was really helpful to have less fur and more open skin so that we could cool down through, through sweating. But we needed protection on our heads because of ultraviolet light from the sun.

• 32:21Michael Stevens?

  But then, for some reason, we not only kept fur hair on our heads, we also started growing it much longer. Like, the growing phase of each of our hair follicles on our heads is really long. It can be years. But for a pubic hair, it's like weeks.

• 32:39Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Michael Stevens?

  For an eyelash hair, it's weeks, but like not many.

• 32:44Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, like six weeks, max.

• 32:45Michael Stevens?

  And that's, and that's why the hairs are as long as they are. It's not that the body knows to stop growing after a certain length on my eyelash versus my head. Well, my head, it doesn't know what to do. But, but the point is that they, they fall out eventually and new ones grow in, and they only grow for a certain amount of time. But why it would be that humans would have longer hair than a lot of other primates is up to just guesses. It could have been sexual selection. It could have been that human populations around the world just liked it. They just thought it was pretty, and they chose partners who were able to grow longer hair. It could have been a sign maybe of health to them. We don't know. It could be about thermoregulation, though it doesn't quite make sense.

• 33:29Michael Stevens?

  Even the sexual selection guess doesn't really make sense, because there are populations where people grow much longer hair than others. And there are papers where researchers have said, well, it's, it's definitely sexual selection. It was up to us and our choices and how, who we mated with, and that's why. But those selections were different in different places.

• 33:49Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 33:49Michael Stevens?

  So in like the tropics, there was still a preference for longer hair, but there were other things that were more important. And so that's why you'll have shorter hair here and longer hair there. But yeah, it's amazing how little we know.

• 34:05Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it could also be that there is no reason, you know? Like, evolution doesn't have a trajectory. It doesn't have a direction that it's heading for. Sometimes you just get features that appear for, for no reason at all. There is no pressure on it one way or the other.

• 34:19Michael Stevens?

  That's right. So either it, it, it, it helped in some way, or it didn't help or hurt. And so it's just the way it is.

• 34:28Hannah Fry?

  Because I think the other thing that's worth saying is that Actually, the length of our hair is in part because we have the conditions in which to be able to take care of it, right? If you if you imagine instead of taking a a modern human and making them wild in inverted commas, where they're kind of like moving around, you know, sleeping in different conditions, it's probable that the hair would break before it got to its full length, you know? So it could it could also just be, there is no reason at all.

• 34:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Hannah Fry?

  But it wasn't getting in the way. I for one, I'm glad it is though, because.

• 35:03Michael Stevens?

  Look at that.

• 35:04Hannah Fry?

  It's my greatest feature.

• 35:05Michael Stevens?

  Hair care companies, sponsorship opportunity.

• 35:09Hannah Fry?

  Astonishing that they haven't already, frankly. I mean, look at this. I won the hair lottery.

• 35:14Michael Stevens?

  Look at this. Hello.

• 35:17Hannah Fry?

  Between us, we average half a good head of hair.

• 35:22Michael Stevens?

  Between us, it's like one good head of hair, because you've got like more than, I've got less than. I wouldn't consider myself negative.

• 35:31Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I mean, on average, each person gets half. I was sharing.

• 35:35Michael Stevens?

  Oh, you were sharing. Okay, okay, fair enough.

• 35:38Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I phrased it wrong, though. I appreciate it came across that way. Okay, all right. Last question. This one from Megan, who asks, why do we talk to ourselves?

• 35:49Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 35:50Hannah Fry?

  This is good. Okay, first off, you know, not everyone does.

• 35:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Hannah Fry?

  Some people do not have an internal voice.

• 35:57Michael Stevens?

  I don't know if I believe them.

• 35:59Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 35:59Michael Stevens?

  It's it's very hard to define and talk about things like this. They don't have an internal voice? What does that mean to them? Because what does it mean to have an internal voice? I, when I silently think, it doesn't feel like it's a talking.

• 36:19Hannah Fry?

  Do you feel like it's words?

• 36:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I guess words would be the best way to describe it. But they're not fully spoken.

• 36:28Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I think mine are.

• 36:29Michael Stevens?

  I I talk out loud to myself a lot. That helps me to to figure out what I'm thinking and feeling. But in my own head, like, let me just try. Give me something, give me like a something to.

• 36:42Hannah Fry?

  A difficult puzzle?

• 36:44Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Hannah Fry?

  Okay, the only puzzle that sprung to mind is the last one you told me. Hold on, let me let me get one, let me get one. Okay, I am an odd number. Take away a letter and I become even. What number am I?

• 36:56Michael Stevens?

  Eleven.

• 36:58Hannah Fry?

  I mean, that didn't involve very much.

• 37:00Michael Stevens?

  No, it didn't. But, but here's what I'll say. It still gave me some insight into what's going on. It's very visual.

• 37:07Hannah Fry?

  There's one other answer.

• 37:09Michael Stevens?

  Oh, there's another answer? Okay, so it's, I'm an odd number, take away a letter.

• 37:15Michael Stevens?

  Tune. No, stew. I, I, I don't know, what, what is it?

• 37:20Hannah Fry?

  Seven.

• 37:22Michael Stevens?

  Oh, shoot.

• 37:23Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Michael Stevens?

  Of course, seven.

• 37:25Hannah Fry?

  Okay, now tell me what happened in your mind.

• 37:26Michael Stevens?

  So what happened in my mind was very visual. It was more about images. On while, while you were looking for a riddle, I was thinking about, what did I eat typically for breakfast as a kid? And in my head, I wasn't thinking, well, usually I had this food. I just saw images of them.

• 37:42Hannah Fry?

  Interesting.

• 37:44Michael Stevens?

  What is it like in your head?

• 37:45Hannah Fry?

  Oh, she will not shut up. She is constantly chatting.

• 37:51Michael Stevens?

  And it's verbal?

• 37:52Hannah Fry?

  It's verbal.

• 37:53Michael Stevens?

  Huh.

• 37:53Hannah Fry?

  It's verbal. The people who don't have this instantly.

• 37:58Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 37:58Hannah Fry?

  Uh, people who have the inability to, to, to visualize images in their mind.

• 38:03Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I've heard about this.

• 38:04Hannah Fry?

  Um, there's a, a sort of standard spectrum that you see, which is you imagine an apple. Imagine a juicy red apple in your head. And some people will see essentially a photorealistic version of this apple.

• 38:15Michael Stevens?

  That's what I got, yeah.

• 38:16Hannah Fry?

  Is it? Oh, you lucky thing.

• 38:18Michael Stevens?

  Like, it, it's like I'm remembering a photo of an apple I saw once.

• 38:21Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 38:22Michael Stevens?

  Very, very, with a lot of detail. Even before you ask for the detail, it's there. Like, I'm noticing things that are there. I'm not looking for them and then confabulating them.

• 38:31Hannah Fry?

  Whereas for other people, myself included, it's much less like a fully formed picture. It's sort of like, there's maybe, uh, the, the, the feeling of the shape of an apple.

• 38:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I know what that's like too, though, because if you say, well, imagine an apple and a strawberry. I don't think too much about them.

• 38:50Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 38:51Michael Stevens?

  But if you really make me imagine an apple, I can get it all.

• 38:56Hannah Fry?

  Fully photorealistic.

• 38:57Michael Stevens?

  Fully photorealistic. Oh, it's red and green and it's very ripe, you know? But.

• 39:03Hannah Fry?

  I don't think I can quite get there.

• 39:05Michael Stevens?

  If you were to say, well, Michael, imagine you had eight apples and you needed to share them with two people. I don't see eight photorealistic apples. I probably see like a half, half image, half word kind of thing, and that's all I need.

• 39:17Hannah Fry?

  So now this is the slight difference, actually, because if you, there was one program that I did where they put me in an MRI scanner. And then asked me to do a number of mathematical calculations.

• 39:28Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 39:28Hannah Fry?

  Some of them were just simple arithmetic and some of them were about the movement of surfaces. Some of them were about some calculus, basically, trying to, trying to solve these quite long, complicated equations. And over and over again, regardless of the, the problem that I was being given, the, the part of my brain that was lighting up was the visual cortex.

• 39:46Michael Stevens?

  Right, okay.

• 39:47Hannah Fry?

  So, and, and that I think matches, it's not like a photorealistic version of, of what I'm manipulating, but it's definitely like, the visual cortex is definitely doing a lot of work when it comes to mathematics, you're kind of manipulating things. But the people who are, who really struggle to create images in their minds, there's quite a big overlap with them and the ones who do not have an internal monologue whatsoever.

• 40:10Michael Stevens?

  Oh, is there?

• 40:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Michael Stevens?

  So to not have an internal monologue, these people are still aware of the thoughts that they're having and they're just normal.

• 40:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Michael Stevens?

  People from the outside, but they insist that, what, when they like debate something in their head, like, oh, should I, should I take a break from studying right now? What do they?

• 40:31Hannah Fry?

  It just doesn't appear in the form of words.

• 40:33Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 40:33Hannah Fry?

  I mean, I think, I, I mean, I'm not, I'm not one of these people, right? But, but yeah, they say.

• 40:38Michael Stevens?

  It appears in your head in the form of words?

• 40:40Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Michael Stevens?

  For me, if I'm like, ah, should I take a break? I imagine what I could be doing during the break. I imagine the benefits I get from not taking a break as like experiences, like I feel them and I'm weighing them. I definitely aren't. The word break doesn't enter into it.

• 40:58Hannah Fry?

  Right. Oh, no.

• 40:59Michael Stevens?

  Until I take another step back, if I want to talk out loud about what I'm trying to decide, then it becomes very verbal.

• 41:05Hannah Fry?

  I think we should do a whole episode on this, you know, at some point, because I think it's really, really fascinating, all of the different ways that you can test, because it's incredibly difficult. I mean, this is like the hard problem of consciousness, right? It's like understanding the experience from somebody else's perspective. And, and how difficult it is to describe your own internal world, your own internal monologue.

• 41:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, because I don't even know if I'm describing it the way I should be. It's hard, and I don't know if I should trust other people's descriptions of it. You know, I've, I've always loved this hard problem of consciousness. What is it like to be someone else's mind? I just read a Greg Egan story where this couple wants to get closer. They just feel like they, they don't know why they got married, like they don't really. So they decide, well, maybe we need to be closer. And through all these various steps, they eventually, they, they realize that they cannot swap minds, because as soon as they swap minds or bodies, they just learn what it's like to be in the other person's body, but not what it's like for them, for their conscious awareness, right? So this, this doctor has an idea.

• 42:07Michael Stevens?

  What if I take both of your memories and pool them together? So you have each other's memories. And then I'll knock you unconscious and I will put your brains into exactly the same physical, mechanical shape. Your awareness is still there, and then when I snap my fingers, you won't be each other, but you will both be for a moment, the same third person. And this makes them so close that they get divorced, because they realize that not knowing the other person is exciting. And now that they're so close, they're like, this, I don't, I, I don't care for you anymore. You may as well not be there, because I already have myself.

• 42:42Hannah Fry?

  That's such a great idea.

• 42:43Michael Stevens?

  It's kind of cute.

• 42:44Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I like that a lot. In terms of why we all do this, by the way, in terms of why we have this voice, or where this voice comes from, if you, and experiments have been done on this, where you look at three, four-year-old children, at that point, all of the voices are external for them. They are, they're narrating everything they're doing. They're like, I'm going to put this block here, and then I'm going to do this here, and then. They're chattering all the time continually. And the idea is that essentially you just stop doing it out loud. It's the same voice that's going on, but you just do it in your head instead of doing it, doing it particularly out loud. But speaking out loud, by the way, I mean, so many people do this. It's way more, I mean, people do it in private because it's associated with

• 43:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Hannah Fry?

  with something, you know, with something that people who've lost their minds.

• 43:25Michael Stevens?

  I know, I know.

• 43:26Hannah Fry?

  But, but people do it all the time. Like you, it's really difficult to find people who don't do this ever at all. And it's good, it's kind of good. It improves your performance on, on particular tasks. There's one of my favorite studies on this is from, from 2012, where they were asking people to find particular items in a supermarket. And those that were told to say the item's name out loud were much faster at finding it than others.

• 43:51Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 43:51Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Michael Stevens?

  That makes me feel better because I talk out loud all the time. Even in the grocery store, I know that I can't, so I'll like mouth it. And if you look at me, I'm going.

• 44:02Michael Stevens?

  And I'm always afraid that someone's gonna like record me in public and be like, he's losing his mind.

• 44:07Hannah Fry?

  You're optimizing.

• 44:08Michael Stevens?

  I'm the old man muttering around the store, being like, under my breath going, well, would those be in the, the, uh, the Thai food section or the potato chip section? I just want prawn crackers, come on.

• 44:19Hannah Fry?

  See, I am doing that, but I'm doing it in my head.

• 44:21Michael Stevens?

  But it's all in your head.

• 44:22Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Michael Stevens?

  I think that I never gave it up as a kid.

• 44:24Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 44:25Michael Stevens?

  I never internalized it, so I have to externalize it.

• 44:28Hannah Fry?

  In order to form the words.

• 44:29Michael Stevens?

  But I'm always doing little shows and stuff too. Like when I'm alone in my hotel room, I'll be like, ah, now when this, I'll, I'll literally talk out loud. I'll be like, you know, I think that the warmer, it's like I'm on the podcast even when no one's listening. The, the warmer soda has, has stronger flavors, but it's not as refreshing. And I think it's because of this.

• 44:47Hannah Fry?

  Do you really?

• 44:48Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Hannah Fry?

  On your own?

• 44:49Michael Stevens?

  And that's, I think is why I'm such a, like a loner. Cause I know that I can't do that around other people.

• 44:55Hannah Fry?

  I like that so much.

• 44:56Michael Stevens?

  I work in my office by myself and I'm just sitting there basically performing a whole thing, externalizing every single thought I have out loud with words.

• 45:05Hannah Fry?

  Can you do it in front of your wife?

• 45:07Michael Stevens?

  No, but I, I'm, I'm terrified that she'll walk in on me and I'll be doing this and she'll be like,

• 45:13Hannah Fry?

  This is adorable.

• 45:14Michael Stevens?

  Dude, you are not on camera, but I'm like this when I'm all alone.

• 45:20Hannah Fry?

  So you on camera is the most authentic version of you.

• 45:23Michael Stevens?

  It's the most authen, the least authentic is this version.

• 45:27Hannah Fry?

  Wow, that must feel quite suffocating then, where you need to continually talk in order to feel like yourself.

• 45:37Michael Stevens?

  To process and think things, yes. So I find myself especially.

• 45:39Hannah Fry?

  But you can't do it in your head.

• 45:40Michael Stevens?

  No, especially when I'm like traveling, visiting my wife's family and we're staying in their house and I never have a moment to myself. I'm like, I don't know what to do. I can't, I need to sit down and go, oh, why is Susan always saying that? I think it's because, I need to just do that.

• 45:58Hannah Fry?

  I do say that.

• 45:59Michael Stevens?

  To myself and it's embarrassing because it makes it look like I think that I've got an audience all the time.

• 46:04Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 46:05Michael Stevens?

  The first time I noticed this was weird is when I was on vacation with my family and they went down to the pool and I was gonna go join them. And I just started talking out loud about why there was this sealed for your hygiene seal on the toilet. And I was like, I, out loud, I just said, they do that so that people feel that the toilet is clean. And, and I realized that no one was listening. And that it wouldn't be an interesting thing to listen to. And yet, I was compelled to do it.

• 46:32Hannah Fry?

  See, see, I think I am having very, very, very similar conversations, but I'm just not doing them out loud.

• 46:39Michael Stevens?

  Well, good for you.

• 46:40Hannah Fry?

  Sometimes I'll be like narrating the, I mean, it's almost like there's two or more conversations going on simultaneously. So I might be like, oh, this hygiene thing, it's so that people blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the other person will come in and be like,

• 46:58Hannah Fry?

  either good job or you're an idiot. That's sort of, that goes on a lot.

• 47:04Michael Stevens?

  Oh, there's like a conversation.

• 47:06Hannah Fry?

  Oh, there's a conversation. And sometimes it can be, this is the one that I find the most disconcerting. I'm, I'm sure other people have this exact same experience. But I can be on stage and having, giving an entire talk, right? A full presentation, especially if I know something reasonably well. And I can be verbally delivering the words and there will be an entire conversation going on in my head about something different.

• 47:33Michael Stevens?

  Do you like this other voice?

• 47:34Hannah Fry?

  She's really annoying.

• 47:36Michael Stevens?

  Okay. But she's part of you and it like informs what you say out loud in this speech.

• 47:42Hannah Fry?

  She's called Colin.

• 47:44Michael Stevens?

  Where did this name Colin come from?

• 47:45Hannah Fry?

  She actually is called Colin. Well, maybe I'm giving away a bit too much of myself.

• 47:52Hannah Fry?

  Colin is the nasty part, you know?

• 47:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Hannah Fry?

  Cause I think it's just when, when, when Colin is just like, whoa, you're a bit much today, Colin. It feels very useful to externalize it.

• 48:03Michael Stevens?

  To externalize it, give it a name.

• 48:05Hannah Fry?

  I am definitely talking way too much.

• 48:07Michael Stevens?

  This reminds me of the Carl Jung thing about like, as soon as the unconscious becomes conscious, it loses its power. And I think this is also a thing for another episode, but uh, this is one of those silly reels from like the, I'm a Navy SEAL teaching you how to be a man. But there was one that I thought was actually really, really insightful. And it was that to disarm someone who's, who's got the upper hand, just mention how good they are. So like, if you're being interrogated,

• 48:39Michael Stevens?

  one way to disarm them and to kind of like make them second guess themselves is to actually say, you're really good at this interrogation. Like I can tell that you have been trained and have a lot of experience.

• 48:49Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 48:50Michael Stevens?

  Once it's spoken, now they have to live up to that. And he was like, if a guy comes up to you and shakes your hand like really firm, he's got power over you so long as you're going, oh gosh, okay, I uh, but if you go, wow, that was a really strong handshake. They say that that's what alpha men do. Then the guy's like, oh.

• 49:11Hannah Fry?

  Oh, now I need to be an alpha.

• 49:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And now it's out there and it's been named and it doesn't have power. It's not fate if it's been said.

• 49:19Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 49:20Michael Stevens?

  And I think about that a lot, beyond just the like strong handshake kind of a thing, but just in life. It's like, as soon as you name it and you've said it, it's just not scary anymore.

• 49:30Hannah Fry?

  No, it's just not scary anymore. You know, also though, speaking out loud, I mean, even just beyond naming the, the, the things that, that otherwise go unnamed, that there is also some evidence that um, it does. Help with emotional regulation, that there is something really positive about this. So there's one study where they were like looking at people who would mutter to themselves, you've got this Sarah, like you can do it Claire, you know, as they were doing a task.

• 49:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:57Hannah Fry?

  And they actually like it reduced their anxiety, it reduced their, their, their.

• 50:01Michael Stevens?

  Wow, yeah, you know, and I want to, I, I think that that's so true, but it can come in different flavors. All right. Like for someone like me, I don't think you got it, Michael. I externalize myself. This is very common, I think, like when I'm playing like basketball, you know, in the backyard, I'll be like, and look, look how well he does this. It's the announcer saying it. And then if it doesn't go in, I'm like, oh, we'll do that again. Now, look, Michael never misses. Right? It's like a third person describing how good I am.

• 50:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Michael Stevens?

  But it does make me better. So I don't know who asked this original question, but you got a full.

• 50:35Hannah Fry?

  You got a full, you, you basically got more of me and Michael there than, than I think either of us have ever given away on anything. But I think that ultimately, you know, the reason why I like talking about these kinds of things is because I think every single person is extremely weird. Every single person is extremely weird and we have been taught and sort of societally expected to hide our weirdnesses from each other. And I, I think let's not do that anymore.

• 51:02Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't help because it makes us think that other people like have just nothing weird about them, that they have no trouble waking up in the morning, that they love getting all their tasks done. And it's like, guys, it's called a task rather than having no name because it's terrible.

• 51:17Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:18Michael Stevens?

  We're all in the same boat.

• 51:19Hannah Fry?

  We're all in the same boat. You're weird, Michael. I'm weird and so are you, our listeners, and every one of you.

• 51:26Michael Stevens?

  So stay weird and please, yeah, reach out to us. Jake, who else?

• 51:31Hannah Fry?

  We had Megan as well.

• 51:32Michael Stevens?

  Megan. Guys, you are great role models for the rest of the audience. Send in your questions. The rest is science at goalhanger.com. Can't wait to hear from you.

• 51:42Hannah Fry?

  Or you can leave a comment under the video which you're watching now or the podcast which you have downloaded. We read all of them and we love your questions. So thank you. We'll see you next time.

• 51:53Michael Stevens?

  Bye bye.

• 52:10Speaker 06

  Here we are getting a statement from Number 10. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 52:18Speaker 07

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 52:26Speaker 07

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. A man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: Do you want to play, or not?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 52:51Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes. New from Goldhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 53:13Hannah Fry?

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy!

• 53:17Speaker 07

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 53:19Hannah Fry?

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 53:23Speaker 07

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two times friendly KIIs. Where Britain plays its strongest hand

• 53:30Speaker 02

  He's the best.

• 53:30Speaker 07

  Against its strongest foe.

• 53:33Michael Stevens?

  Don't do it, Duffy!

• 53:35Speaker 07

  Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.