The Skeptics Guide #1109 - Oct 10 2026

AI Update; News Items: 2026 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry, Reading Fiction; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Sleep and Consciousness; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 8th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:18Jay Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  And Jane Novella.

• 0:22Bob Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  So, guys, I know I told Jay and Bob this already, but Cara, you're gonna love this. So, the other night, right after we went to bed, my wife and I heard like a full pack of coyotes in our backyard.

• 0:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  There was probably, I estimate, like eight to 12. It was a big.

• 0:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It was a lot. They were all. And it wasn't that. So, we, every now and then, we hear the howling in the woods, but this was not howling. This was more like whooping. You know what I mean? Like, this was, I think they were hunting.

• 0:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  They were, they were all so growling.

• 0:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh.

• 0:53Jay Novella?

  Could have been a party.

• 0:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Could have been a party. Could have been a fight. Could have been an orgy. You never know.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  So, it was scary, actually. I mean, the sound itself was scary, but, and that was like at 10 o'clock at night. So, now I'm getting concerned about letting my dog out at night.

• 1:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, what if you actually auditorily witnessed dogicide or caticide?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Something. They were attacking, maybe even a deer. The deer come to eat the apples under my apple tree.

• 1:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  But I looked. I didn't see any carcasses anywhere. But anyways, and I have to be worried about letting my dog out after dark.

• 1:24Jay Novella?

  Is there a deterrent for them? You know, what could you do?

• 1:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so, okay, so, welcome to the life of an Angelino. Like, that is, there are many A discussion forums dedicated to keeping your pets from becoming coyote snacks. There are outfits that people have developed that are covered in spikes for their dogs. I would not recommend that. I have no idea how well that works. Definitely, you should just monitor. Like, don't let your dog out without watching, especially at night, and have some sort of deterrent handy, like a jar full of coins or something that's very, very loud and scary, handy, so that if you do detect that they've come close, that you can scare them away.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Make a lot of noise.

• 2:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but also, like, you don't have a teeny tiny dog. I'm not saying that, like, your dog's not gonna become a snack, but I think it's less likely, the larger the dog.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's pretty scary himself. He's a medium-sized dog. So, I'm hoping, but yeah, but a full pack, they might get a little bit more aggressive.

• 2:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they totally could. I mean, but it's not uncommon here in LA for people's, you know, little Chihuahuas or house cats to become, you know, dinner.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, the encounters with these, these larger predators is definitely increasing in the last 10, 20 years. Bob recently saw a bobcat. I've seen coyotes in daytime in my property, black bears, foxes, seeing a ton more foxes than I have in previous years.

• 2:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Gosh, they're beautiful.

• 2:55Jay Novella?

  I see all of it, Steve.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:57Jay Novella?

  I mean, I haven't laid eyes on coyotes, but I hear them all the time, and they're always like doing some weird thing in the woods. You know, it just sounds like they're, they're doing something and it's serious, you know?

• 3:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Of cour-, yeah, they definitely have. I think for me out here in a very urban environment, it's, it's coyotes, and then it's like the, the typical raccoons, possums, and, you know, squirrels and things like that. So, things that get into your trash, things that cause big messes, but aren't necessarily dangerous, other than the, the coyotes. But again, you know, I don't think that these are animals that we should fear. I think the problem isn't, ooh, they're coming in and they're causing all this havoc. The problem is, we are increasingly invading where they live.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's part of the reason, is that there's, there's fewer wild places for them to be. So, they're, you know, we're encroaching on them, so they're encroaching on us, basically. And there's also, there's a lot more small game out there.

• 3:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah.

• 3:52Jay Novella?

  Peaceful coexistence. What's that from?

• 3:55Bob Novella?

  Star Trek: Next Gen.

• 3:57Cara Santa Maria?

  With habitat loss also comes the loss of their, you know, prey animals. And so, not only are some of these animals food insecure, and that's why they're looking for more food, sometimes it's just a function of efficiency. Like, a bear is gonna eat out of the garbage because it's just easier.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing, like, the, like, the coyote population in Connecticut is not increasing. It is stable, but sightings have dramatically increased because of resource overlap. You know, we're just basically sharing the same area. And because of that, they're habituating to humans.

• 4:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is bad.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Which is bad.

• 4:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we've, we've gotta remember, you know, through our very anthropocentric lens, that, oh, my dog is at risk. Yes, while that is true, we kill way more of them.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Than they harm us. They are at much greater risk of coming into human-populated areas than vice versa. They become roadkill. They, you know, it's, it's so sad when you see a larger predator dead on the side of the highway.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, so I'll keep you updated on my nature encounters.

• 5:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yay. You gotta get camera traps in your backyard.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:08Cara Santa Maria?

  You would love it. It would become like a huge pastime.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I had one for my bird feeder. That was fun.

• 5:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, cool. Yeah, that's very cool.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  So, Cara.

• 5:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  You were telling me that you've, you know, we've just talked about AI in the past, and you have not really engaged a lot with the current AI tools.

• 5:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  But that's, that's changed recently.

• 5:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It has changed, and it's changed in one very specific area, which is that my electronic medical record at the hospital where I work, we are very lucky that we have a lot of innovative divisions within our hospital. We're, you know, a research institution as well. And there is a brilliant AI tool that was developed within my home institution that we have access to, which has changed the game for me in terms of the amount of hours that I spend charting. And this is all very new to me. Like, over the past, I'd say, week, I've, I've implemented it in a, in a real way. And, oh my gosh, I was catching up on charts every weekend.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Every weekend. And now I am able, within one hour of my last patient of the week, to close my computer and not do a bunch of clerical work, which is, I mean, A, the hospital's probably happy about that, because they were paying me my rate as a psychologist to do documentation, like, sometimes more than, you know, patient care. But it's kind of scary how good these tools are.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've been using them similarly, like, to help organize data, to do tasks that are just tedium.

• 6:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  So, for the last few years, and they're getting crazy good.

• 6:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Crazy good.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Last iterations. I was having a conversation with somebody who's, who's said, oh, LLMs are basically just really good autocomplete. So, I'm like, yeah, maybe that was a reasonable view five years ago. That really is just talking about the pre-trained, basic models, but now the, like, the, the trained applications are way more complex than that. That does not cover it, what they're doing.

• 7:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, as an example, so there are multiple tools that I have, and of course, the patients have to opt in to the use of these tools. So, if a patient doesn't want to opt in to the AI actually, like, listening to the session and scribing it, then what I can do is I can basically just use a scribe feature for my handwritten notes, right? That, that the AI's not listening at all. It's not, you know, present during the session. But I can go through my handwritten notes, and I can scribe them. It will transcribe that. And not only does it make a note in the template that I identified in my voice really well, it is pulling interventions. Like, it's reading the process of what I'm

• 8:09Cara Santa Maria?

  doing as a practitioner, as a psychologist, out of the content. So, it's not just saying, patient reported this, patient reported that. It's literally saying, cognitive restructuring was utilized to, you know, engender a sense of control, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I noticed last week it was adding phrases like, delivered in LGBTQI-affirming, you know, context, or trauma-informed approaches to. It, it's able to read between the lines, which is phenomenal. And of course, now all I have to do is look at the new note that's kind of pre-written for me based on what we did, and go through it, line by line. I

• 8:54Cara Santa Maria?

  have wildcards in places where I do not want the AI to make that determination. I'm making the determination. So, those are wildcards that say, we can't sign this until it's ready. And then I just make sure that, you know, everything is accurate, everything is what we did, and then I can sign my note. The other cool thing that it can do is it can read the chart. So, it can say that something is in conflict with, you know, previously reported chart finding. It can say, you know, patient's understanding of their oncologic course is X, whereas the chart revealed Y. These are hugely important things. A lot of my patients are nearing end of life. We have advanced directive and goals of care discussions, and it can read the chart and say, you know, no advanced directive is on

• 9:38Cara Santa Maria?

  file, or patient has not had a goals of care discussion within the last six months. I mean, these things are so helpful.

• 9:45Bob Novella?

  And you guys, Steve and Cara, you guys are probably using, what, is it based off of, like, say, for example, ChatGPT 5.6?

• 9:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, here's the thing, like, program that I use, I have no idea what the underlying architecture is, but it was developed in an incubator at my hospital by a psychiatrist.

• 10:03Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Slash computer scientist. So, it's mental health-focused. It's built into the EMR. It's fully HIPAA compliant, and it was developed for us, by us.

• 10:12Bob Novella?

  That's cool. So, super specialized. That's great. Stephen, you're, you're probably still using ChatGPT 5 something, right? 5.6? I mean, that's what you've used in the past. So, you're not even using. You know, Astra, the latest one.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  No, I'm using Sol still.

• 10:25Bob Novella?

  Sol. Yeah, as impressed as you are, Six isn't even, you know, you haven't, we haven't even started using it yet because it's, whatever reason, it's expensive or not available yet, but.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, it's obviously they just keep getting more powerful. But just to clarify, the, the LLMs don't actually understand anything. And that still makes them always brittle in interesting ways. They, they will still display behavior that shows they don't really understand what's going on. But they do map meaning, they do map the meaning of words, meaning that they statistically can map that meaning based upon the context and the surrounding words, et cetera.

• 11:05Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Which creates a really powerful illusion that it understands what the words mean.

• 11:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, and like a perfect example, and this is actually a very simple example, is if I'm engaging with a patient who is gender non-conforming and talking about dating later in life and using terms like non-monogamy, or pan, or queer, or, you know, whatever, it's going to hear those different triggers and say, okay, this is LGBTQI-affirming because it's utilizing the appropriate language parameters. But one thing that I noticed that it does really well is compare things that the patient says to the patient's record and then to the record of our clinical experiences. So it can build on that information.

• 11:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It can track passive suicidality over the course of several weeks and months. And it can determine, you know, these are some red flags to watch out for. It's also really good for me, generally speaking, when we write our notes, it's up to us what we put in our notes. And we're trying to balance the, what's best for the patient, and that's always my number one priority, what's best for the patient, what is the most clinically relevant for insurers, for reimbursement, but also that whole cover your ass perspective, which I'm, to be honest, really bad at, and the LLM is really good at it. So it's really good about flagging safety concerns and then clarifying what they are to keep an eye on them session to session, which, you know, intuitively, I'm doing that

• 12:35Cara Santa Maria?

  in the background, but I'm not always perfectly documenting every single word or every, you know, that like, you know, it's usually, it's kind of boilerplate, patient denied, active, suicide, you know, intent, means, whatever. And so it's really, really nice to have not just kind of the, the help, but also to know that there's a little bit of protection in there. And I've found so far, I haven't seen any hallucinations yet, but I am watching for them. But one thing it does, regardless of how many times I tell it not to in the template creator, is it will sometimes take sections and put them at other places because I think it's making connections and going, well, this is more relevant over here. And I'm like, no, it needs to always be in the same place. What are you doing?

• 13:18Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  It's being too helpful.

• 13:20Bob Novella?

  Have you identified any other downsides?

• 13:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It doesn't know how to center my titles, which is so annoying. I don't know why. It doesn't know how to center my titles and it's struggling with my dot phrases. People in healthcare will know what that means. And that's okay, because those are things where I just put in wild cards and I do them later. But so far, no. If I'm being honest, it's taking a task that would usually take between, depending on the complexity, five to 90 minutes, you know, on a really complex intake. And it's moving it down to about three to eight minutes of work.

• 13:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is a massive, that means that in the time from closing my telehealth session with one patient, in that five to 10 a minute break I have before the next patient, I can often finish their note and go to the bathroom before I see my next patient, which is so good for my mental health.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Obviously, we're aware and we talk about all of the risks and downsides and dangers of AI and the things like energy use, all that stuff, of course. But I've also been reading a lot about this exact type of thing, that rather than just making these sort of all-purpose, general apps based on AI, or ones that are, that are more toys than anything else, developing specific AI-powered apps for specific tasks that remove drudgery, right, from our everyday life, to help you do things more consistently, you know, better, good for, you know, quality control, standard control, and also just to remove that drudgery.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  That's exactly what they should be focusing on, is developing these specific apps like this, not just, here's a tool that you could use to screw around with and give us all your money, you know what I mean?

• 15:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and this is why I think, you know, you've probably heard, well, it's, it's multifaceted, but you've heard some, a lot of pushback from me, and I will continue to push back when it comes to exactly what you mentioned, AI for AI's sake, not thinking about the tool before you use it. But just like we have to have the lights on in the hospital, just like we have to use, you know, a lot of resources in order to do the job. I'm very anti-single-use plastic, but that does not mean that I think we should be taking plastic out of our medical devices in the hospital. It saves lives. It's incredibly important. So for me, it's always about a risk benefit analysis. It's about improving patient care, reducing burden on healthcare providers so that they're

• 15:55Cara Santa Maria?

  less burnt out and they're more capable of being present with their patients, but also ensuring that as an institution, you're paying providers for their time appropriately. Like, my hourly rate is high enough that it makes no sense for them to be paying me for so much admin and so much clerical work.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm getting paid as a psychologist, as a practitioner. And if I'm doing, if I'm spending half of my time charting, and, you know, every physician out there understands this, it's, it's a bad use of time.

• 16:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel bad that this came around the way that it did, Steve, kind of right as you were retired.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  I was always at the cutting edge, though, in terms of using medical informatics, like using the tools available. I was fine, I was extremely efficient.

• 16:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, sure. And I'll say, I was pretty efficient, too, in terms of, you know, I was using these, like, very specific templates that I developed. I was trying to reduce it, but, but it's kind of like the eclipse conversations we've had before, and I know you know this, but kind of like, okay, yeah, so you've seen a partial eclipse, but until you see a total, you really don't understand. Like, this, it's changing the game for me. I keep emailing the developer and I'm like, oh my God, thank you.

• 17:09Bob Novella?

  And just to, to make this a little bit more relatable to Halloween enthusiasts?

• 17:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, of course.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  It's always an issue, you have to make sure that, that we're incorporating the Halloween enthusiasts.

• 17:20Bob Novella?

  Especially in October, it's like, duh. But I was, I had, I created an animated zombie from a base skeleton. I, I put latex and cotton on it all over the entire body. And then I did some extra painting in the recesses, darker colors, right? And it just did not look good, it did not pop, and I was not happy with it. And I was going through a previous interaction with ChatGPT on just some ideas, painting techniques for, for such a thing. And it gave me a great technique that I had, that I just hadn't considered for this specific application. And I, and I did the technique and my God, Jay, you saw the before and after, it just pops so much better with this technique and.

• 18:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and Bob, while it's not, you know, my job to judge, it's not my job to tell anybody how best to do their job, how best to engage with their livelihood, or, you know, their art or their hobby. I do think that this maps back specifically to the conversations that we had in the past about the ethics and the values around using AI. It's, it's here to stay, let's be honest. We're not going to be able to, you know, get through unless we're sort of ending, nearing end of life now. We're probably not going to be able to get through this world without utilizing it. And it's running in the background in places we don't even know we're using it.

• 18:40Cara Santa Maria?

  But I still feel very strongly about the ethic that differentiates between AI to reduce drudgery, AI to reduce busy work, AI to improve the vocational experience for workers, and AI to replace creative endeavors. Like, you're using it as a tool so that your creative endeavors can be better. You're not saying, hey, AI, just do all of this, you know?

• 19:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, of course.

• 19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Write me songs, make me paintings.

• 19:09Bob Novella?

  That would be so unrewarding.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  On top of that, these are skills, you know, like, of course, some people are born with talents, but you know, if we don't exercise our brain, if we don't exercise our creativity and our, you know, our critical thinking skills and all, all these different ways that we use our brain, then you lose it, it, it won't be there.

• 19:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why I think it's, it's important to automate certain things, and it's also important to learn certain skills and continue to practice them, which is why, at least at the hospital, I don't think this is a hospital-wide policy, but I've been talking to the few other psychologists that work there about how we're really grateful that the software we use has a training version for our student practitioners, because we don't want them to only use these AI tools. They need to learn how to do a full intake manually. They need to learn how to write that note manually, they need that skill. You can't know that it's doing it correctly until you know how to do it without it. Otherwise, you don't have the critical eye to go through and be like, that's a hallucination,

• 20:14Cara Santa Maria?

  that's not appropriate, that doesn't map back to what we actually did. So we can give them limited versions of the tools to help with their spelling and to do what you said, Steve, like, kind of basic autocomplete stuff, but we want to know that you can write. Before we know that you can use the tools to help you write.

• 20:33Jay Novella?

  You know, there, I don't think Exactly. The solution here is going to be, don't use artificial intelligence because it's, it's so pervasive and it's going to affect everything, you know, it's unpredictably going to affect almost everything that we do and interact with and everything. So what can we do, you know, like there are jobs that people that haven't even, you know, been created yet that young people are going to be moving into when, when, you know, they come of age to start looking for employment that are very likely going to have to do with AI or managing AI or in some way, you know, working directly with it. So I think because of the weight of that reality, because there isn't going to be a global boycott, it's just never going to happen.

• 21:18Jay Novella?

  And we could pretend, yeah, like, let's all like pretend or whatever. I think what we have to do is be actively involved in what companies we choose to do business with.

• 21:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, what policies exist to, to protect us. It's kind of like, it's not, don't use it.

• 21:32Jay Novella?

  Use it well.

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't use it frivolously. Yeah, exactly. Use it well and use it mindfully from, we're finally in a place where we're thinking about this stuff before use. It's not the industrial revolution anymore. We know the outcomes. We know the potential harms.

• 21:47Jay Novella?

  You've seen this movie.

• 21:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, let's mitigate them in advance.

• 21:50Jay Novella?

  Again, I think a huge component here, Kara, and this goes for every single person on the planet that lives in a country that they can vote in, that we have to vote the right people in to make sure that they're aware of this and that they're going to do something about it. Because right now, there's not much happening, if anything, that's worth even talking about.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Don't worry about it, Jay, they're going to self-regulate. I was reassured about that.

• 22:13Jay Novella?

  Basically, is they get two, you know, just over two more years to do whatever the hell they want and then the hammer's going to fall.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And then we'll see.

• 22:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Have you guys seen the AI doc on Netflix?

• 22:24Jay Novella?

  Nope. No.

• 22:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I would, I would recommend it. It's really interesting that they interview a lot of people who are in this space. It's, it starts off very doom and gloom.

• 22:32Jay Novella?

  Oh, I did see that. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the, the guy who, you know, he's whatever, they're going to have a baby and he's like.

• 22:36Jay Novella?

  It was pretty balanced.

• 22:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I thought it was good and it introduced a lot of interesting conversations. It's a very good kind of like primer if you don't understand the landscape of AI right now.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a good starting point. All right, let's move on. So guys, it's Nobel Prize time of year again. These things always seem to come around so quickly. I'm going to start us off with the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which goes to three people, Carl Dezeroth, Peter Hegeman and George Nagel, for their work in optogenetics.

• 23:12Jay Novella?

  Oh, I haven't heard that in a while.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  We've talked about it on the show.

• 23:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  You know, we talked about studies using optogenetics, right? But now we're talking about just the technology itself. I have noticed, maybe, I don't know if it's a trend or just recently, there's been a few Nobel Prizes given to developing technology that helps research itself. You know what I mean? Like not a discovery about the universe, but developing a technique that has incredible downstream effects because it actually gives us a new way of studying the world. Okay.

• 23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or in the case of the one I'm going to introduce soon, it does both.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It does both. So this, well, yeah, this was, this was a basic science finding that then got translated into a really powerful research tool. And the story is fascinating. And it starts with Peter Hegeman, who had one of those, huh, that's interesting moments.

• 24:01Jay Novella?

  Eureka.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  More powerful than eureka, just like, that doesn't, that doesn't fit. There's something wrong there. Let me find out what's going on. So he was working with an algae and it has a little eye spot, right? And these algae are able to move toward light. And you could see this, like in a, you can have them in a Petri dish, they're, they're green and you could see the green color migrate towards any light signal. And he wanted to find out how their vision worked. So he attached electrodes to the eye spot and he found that the time from the light stimulation to the electrical signal was really short. It was fast.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  It was impossibly fast, right? So our eyes take between 100 and 200 milliseconds to turn a light signal into an electrical impulse. How long do you think this algae took, half that?

• 24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  You said our eyes do it in how many milliseconds?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  100 to 200 milliseconds.

• 25:03Jay Novella?

  10 milliseconds, Steve.

• 25:05Cara Santa Maria?

  50.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Try a half of one millisecond.

• 25:08Jay Novella?

  How nice.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's, like, that was his question, it's like, that's stupid fast. How is that possible?

• 25:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also like not something I would expect in that setting, in that organism.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Well, it, yeah, it kind of all makes sense to the end, I'll tell you why. So first, let me back up a little bit. So our, our eyes, vertebrate eyes, right? Vertebrate eyes use a process called phototransduction in order to convert a photon of light, you know, light energy into neurological signals. And phototransduction includes a number of different steps. It's like seven or eight steps depending on how you break it down. It's a cascade. So first, you know, you guys know about the opsins, right? You have rodopsin and rhodopsin, opsin in the cones, rhodopsin in the rods. They, the light causes a conformational change, which in retinol, which activates the opsin, which activates G protein transducin, which causes an alpha subunit to exchange GDP to GTP,

• 26:02Speaker 01

  which then activates phosphodiesterase 6, which hydrolyzes CGMP, lowering the set of plasmic levels. This causes CGMP gated sodium, calcium channels to close. And that's what causes the signal. So that's a complicated cascade of events.

• 26:17Jay Novella?

  I don't even know what you just said, so yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  I know, you don't, don't worry about it. It's just, these are all like, all those little reactions. That's why it takes 100 to 200 milliseconds for that cascade to happen. However, there's, there's a reason for that. There's a reason for this complicated cascade that takes time. What do you think it is?

• 26:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Evolution?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Well, there's, it evolves.

• 26:38Jay Novella?

  Is our brain mass like large and it has to, it has to move from one part of your brain to the next? And that takes time?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's the subsequent conduction of the signal. This is just the creation of the signal in the first place. So what was the selective pressure? What was the selective pressure? That favored this complex cascade? The answer is because it amplifies the signal.

• 26:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I see. So instead of having like light spots and that happens really, really quickly, yes, you have this really complex mechanism, but now all of a sudden we can like see detail.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Our rods can respond, and cones can respond to a single photon of light.

• 27:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we can see detail, we can see color, we can see clarity.

• 27:18Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yes, but, but yeah, but I mean, just physiologically because of this cascade. All right, now let's get back to the algae. The algae has a light spot and it's not seeing stuff, right? It's just like saying, there's light over there.

• 27:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And I need to make food.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they have, they don't have the selective pressure for this complex cascade of amplification. So the selective pressures there favored just doing it simply and quickly.

• 27:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, I see.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  All they have to do is detect the light. So what Hegeman theorized was, all right, it's so fast, it must be a single protein, right? This, like, there isn't even two things happening. There's just one thing happening. There's the light hitting a protein and that protein is then sending the signal. So this was happening in the early 1990s. And so he wanted to see if he could find that protein in this algae. The algae is clemidamonus. And he, fortunately, a team in Japan had already mapped the genome of this algae. So he wrote to them, got the, the genome, was, you know, all, list of all the genes,

• 28:29Speaker 01

  and found two proteins that had the properties he was looking for, which he named channel, channel rhodopsin 1 and channel rhodopsin 2. And the channel rhodopsin 2 had the more robust reaction to light and that was the one that would respond in 0.2 milliseconds. So he put that gene into human and hamster kidney cells and found that they became light sensitive. They incorporated the gene, made the protein, the protein made this, those cells light sensitive. So basically what's happening is the light hits this protein, the protein is an ion channel

• 29:10Speaker 01

  and that causes the ion channel to open up to conduct sodium and calcium and create a signal. So just one, one change, one conformational change in response to being hit with, with the light, very fast. So Hegeman actually, at this stage, when he was, once he had the, the candidate genes, he needed, he needed help to. Isolate them, create the protein and study them. So that's when he contacted George Nagel. Nagel was the protein guy. He Nagel, uh, he, so he sent the code to Nagel. Nagel injected the genes into separate batches of frog eggs, which then began to express the protein. So now you have the proteins and he was able to study them and find the ones that had the properties he needed.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  And then they, they incorporated them into human and the hamster kidney cells. So Hegeman and Nagel isolated the proteins, channel, the channelrhodopsin 1 and 2, and discovered their properties. All right. Then the third guy, Deserovs enters the picture here. He is a physician and a neuroscientist studying mental illness like schizophrenia. And he initially, he was trying to understand mental illness like schizophrenia neuro anatomically, right? What parts of the brain are different in people with schizophrenia versus not schizophrenia? But he realized that that was only going to take you so far. And he needed a functional map. He needed to look at circuits and neurons and see what they were doing. If he was going to really understand these illnesses.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  So he was looking for a method that he could use to activate brain neurons, even a single brain neuron on demand. Right? So if you could, if you could poke a neuron and make it active, then you could ask the question, what is that neuron doing? So he heard about the work of Hegeman and Nagel, asked them for the DNA for channelrhodopsin 2, which they provided. And then he started incorporating that gene into rat neurons in a Petri dish to see if they would incorporate the protein, if it wouldn't screw with their functioning. Cause you never know, like you're introducing a new protein. But it turns out they were fine. It didn't adversely affect them at all.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  And he essentially made the neurons light sensitive. And so what that means is you could activate the neuron by shining a light on it. Right? And that they would create a signal that would actually propagate to other neurons. So then they, but you had to develop this into something that you could use in the lab. Right? So they ultimately found different proteins that responded to different wavelengths, but they basically had now a set of proteins that would respond to different wavelengths of light. And they introduced a very tiny fiber optic cable into the brains of living rats and mice. Right? And they incorporated, they genetically modified these mice

• 32:03Speaker 01

  so that, um, specific populations of neurons in their brain had these light sensitive proteins incorporated into them. So now that means you have a living mouse brain. Right? Where you can turn on a specific population of neurons on demand. And so they, they first studied, um, they found the neurons that allowed mice to control their whiskers. And they found another group of neurons that would cause them to wake up. So you could basically flip a switch, the light goes on, the mouse wakes up because it's activating the wake up neurons, right? In the, the brain. So you could say, okay, those neurons are involved with activating the brain and causing it to, to wake up.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  That's basically it. So now we have a method of selectively on demand, activating neurons in living brains so that we can ask, what do those neurons do? And we could see what they do because we could turn them on, on demand, just by literally flipping a light switch. That's optogenetics. Very, very cool. And this is essentially transformative for functional neuroscience, which is why they're getting the Nobel Prize. Right? Cause now we could, this is, and we're really just at the beginning of this. It's already, you know, exploding this field, but, but this is.

• 33:28Bob Novella?

  Been around for years. This isn't new. I mean, I've read about optogenetics for over, for over a decade.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:33Bob Novella?

  The downside though, is it's obviously fairly invasive, right?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that big a deal. Cause you put this tiny little fiber optic into the brain.

• 33:42Bob Novella?

  That's all.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  It doesn't, well, I mean, for, you know, this, that's not that big a deal for doing neuroscience on mice. Let me just say that, you know? It's actually.

• 33:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I hear you, but for people.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Fairly, but it was not meant for people. I mean, but it's.

• 33:57Bob Novella?

  Not yet.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  That's a good question is could we make a version of this that is safe enough to do in people? I mean, certainly you could do it in primates. I mean, we, and we do therapeutically, we do more invasive stuff on people's brains. And sometimes, uh, like, but the thing is, I don't know that there's a clinical application. Maybe there is. There are some invasive techniques that use like implanting electrodes, for example, in certain populations of brain cells. Right? That's more invasive than this or just as invasive. There are times when we do that for therapeutic purposes, but it, but we say, hey, since we're doing this anyway, you mind if we do some research on you?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And patients are usually happy to do that, actually. Right? That makes sense. You're already doing the invasive thing for a therapeutic reason. So then you could do the research. The question is, is it ethical to do it just for the research? And certainly you could, it is ethical or allowable in animals as long as, you know, they're treated properly, but it's, it becomes more difficult for humans. So either we need to make a like semi invasive version of it that people can do ethically, or develop this into a therapeutic intervention. That's an interesting idea. For example, stopping seizures, you know, or, you know, you're activating inhibitory neurons that will stop a seizure. I know there's research into developing chips that will do that. Maybe optogenetics can do that. Right? That could be life changing.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  There are some people who basically are just constantly having seizures, you know? And they don't respond to medication. But if we could activate the neurons in their brain that would inhibit the seizure, the cells that are having a seizure, that could be an effective intervention. Anyway, it's, it's a powerful tool and it spawns a lot of discussion about what can we do with it? You know?

• 35:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Or I also like that the story highlights how collaborative modern scientific research is.

• 35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like that's like time and time again with these Nobel prizes. It's the, and I think the Nobel committee or whoever is in charge of their press is like amazing. Cause they're so good about saying this built upon this, which built upon that.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Right. Like there's no one person or one team that could do this kind of stuff. This is like multiple people, multiple, and there are people who aren't even recognized with the Nobel. Like they, they got the genome from a Japanese team and whatever. Like this kind of, this international collaboration is so critical to modern science. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Monarch.

• 36:33Cara Santa Maria?

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• 37:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Kara, you know, you, the thing that it does as well is it can help you set goals. And if you want to like do a big purchase, it can help you map out like, you know, allocating money for that, just to see if you're on track. It, it really does work with you to help you get to your goals.

• 37:22Bob Novella?

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• 37:37Speaker 01

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Bob, tell us about the Nobel Prize in Physics.

• 37:42Bob Novella?

  Sure. The Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Sciences has given the Nobel Prize in Physics to particle physicist Francis Housen. In the academy's words, for divisive, oh boy, not divisive. That doesn't work. For, for decisive contributions to the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.

• 38:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, this is right up your alley, Bob.

• 38:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a lot of this is like, yep, yep, yep. Cool, cool. But it, but I do love diving into a topic that I'm quite familiar with and discovering new angles, new, you know, new things to discuss, just, just new ways to discuss things that I've mentioned multiple times is always interesting. So Francis Housen, born in Belgium, professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison, United States. Let's see, Mark Pierce, who's, who's the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said Francis Housen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument. His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy. And yeah, Francis and other people have said that, um, even though he is the only.

• 38:55Bob Novella?

  He's a single, the single winner of this prize, first time since I think in the 90s, like maybe perhaps 1993. But he and others have said that he, you know, he's, he's the front man, but you know, there's so many people all over the world that are critical to this achievement. So I'm glad when they, when they point that out explicitly. So this ultimately comes down to neutrinos, which we've discussed many times, and I just love talking about they're chargeless, almost massless elementary particles. They almost never interact with other forms of matter. They're famous for that. Each second, about 65 billion solar neutrinos pass through your little fingernail. The source, though,

• 39:37Bob Novella?

  of the, of the neutrinos are critical for this Nobel Prize. Solar neutrinos are, are probably the biggest source for the neutrinos that are flying through the earth. And these neutrinos are the byproducts of fusion. There's also neutrinos from the early universe. There's radioactive decay inside the earth that's also causing these geo neutrinos. And I did not know this, bananas emit 1 million neutrinos a day approximately. That is awesome. We, you know, we know that bananas, you know, are low key radioactive, but I did not know that they emit neutrinos. How off, how awesome is that? The thing, though, is that all of

• 40:20Bob Novella?

  these neutrinos that I've mentioned are low energy. They're not as mysterious as other neutrinos. We know, you know, how they're created. We know a lot about them, but there are other types of neutrinos that are more mysterious. These are the, the high energy neutrinos that hit the earth from outside of our solar system. And they have, they often can have hundreds or thousands of times more energy, many, many times more than what we've ever been able, or probably ever will be able to achieve in powerful particle accelerators on the earth. So their origins are much more mysterious. And this is where Francis Housen and the Nobel Prize in Physics comes in. He first presented this vision of capturing

• 41:01Bob Novella?

  these, these high energy neutrinos at the South Pole in the late 1980s. So it's been a while, and it took until 2011 for the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory to be up and, and running. But my question to you guys is, why the South Pole? Why do you think this is a great idea? And why would you even consider doing this in the South Pole? Now, remember, you've got, you've got these, these sensors, you know, in the ice, very deep, many, you know, many, many hundreds and hundreds of meters deep. Why? Can you think of a reason why the, the South Pole would be a good idea?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  That's where you can get the deepest ice?

• 41:44Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, I guess the question I could say it, I could phrase it as why ice? Why not, why not the ocean? Other scientists have thought of putting this device in, in the ocean. And it's, the answer is fairly simple. It's that deep into the ice of the South Pole is free from, you know, lots of different types of interference, right? It's geologically stable. There's no earthquakes. The darkness, the darkness is constant at such depths. And it's, it's just much better than other areas that have been suggested, you know, like the ocean. Some, some people have said in the ocean would, would be good. But of course, that's, that's, that's much more problematic. And there's also, you know, fish swimming around that could, that could mess with it. So-

• 42:26Cara Santa Maria?

  And the ocean is moving all the time.

• 42:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's much more, it's more problematic. It would be a good medium to do this, but it, ice is just superior. But let me just go over then how this actually works. So you've got, you've got these, these sensors in the, in the ice, spread throughout the ice, and a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus. It's very rare, but it happens. And this creates a charged particle, a muon. And very importantly, this muon moves in the same direction, the same direction as the, as the neutrino was moving. And, and as it's moving in that direction, it emits a flash of special blue light called Cherenkov radiation. Look it up. Fascinating stuff. And then it's that light, that Cherenkov

• 43:13Bob Novella?

  radiation light that's tracked by the sensors in the clear glacial ice. From these data, the physicists can figure out the original neutrino's energy and direction of origin. Now, this is, this is really important because there's plenty of, there's plenty of particles coming in, you know, charged particles, protons, electrons, very, very powerful, coming from all different directions, and they're hitting the earth. What do you, what's the problem with these particles, though, do you think? These are charged particles. Why would that, why would that be a problem in terms of, you know, getting information from it?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Are they affected by the earth's magnetic field?

• 43:49Bob Novella?

  Because they're charged, they can be swayed by magnetic fields. So that means that a, that a very powerful charged proton would have this very circuitous route throughout the universe. So when you detect it coming from that direction, it's meaningless. It could be coming, it could have originated from any other point in the sky, essentially. And that's why these neutrinos are so special, because, because they are immune to basically everything. When you see them coming from this direction, that's pretty much where it was born. That's, so if you follow that path back, you can run into its source. So I loved in Sky and Telescope, they refer to these as ghosts in the ice, which was such

• 44:31Bob Novella?

  a great turn of phrase, especially in October. So since 2011, what's happened? You know, what, what's been going on with this? So there's, they've had dozens of these high energy neutrinos have been specifically detected, which basically proves this, this technique correct. They have been detecting them. The system is working very, very well. And they've even tracked, not a lot of them, but have tracked a few of them back to things like, for example, a blazar. We haven't talked about blazars very often, but it's essentially a black hole powered jet in a galaxy. And that jet is pointing right, basically right towards us. So we call that a blazar. There's also, they've, these high energy neutrinos have been, have been detected, potentially coming from what they call a tidal disruption

• 45:16Bob Novella?

  event, which is essentially where a supermassive black hole consumes a star and just rips it apart. Or they've also, they've also traced these back to star burst galaxies in the early universe. So they have been kind of connecting the dots between these high energy neutrinos and, and what's creating them. The milestone here, why is this a milestone? Why is this worthy of, of a Nobel Prize? In my mind, this relates to multi messenger astronomy. When you think of using astronomy to figure out what's out there, right? Looking at the sky, and you want to use astronomy to find out, you, you, the first thing you probably think of are big telescopes and detecting photons of light. But it's not

• 45:56Bob Novella?

  just photons of light anymore. They're also detecting particles from space, cosmic rays, right? And, and even most fascinating, and it's so influential, and we've talked about it many times, are gravitational waves. But now that we have this reliable way to detect high energy neutrinos, so multi messenger astronomy now has another reliable messenger that can be put into the mix. Because remember, when you're using multiple, multiple of these messengers together, like photons and gravitational waves, or cosmic rays and, and high energy neutrinos, when you're putting, you know, the more messengers you put together, it can reveal more about the universe, far much, far more than just any, what, any one

• 46:37Bob Novella?

  messenger can do. So this really helps contribute to multi messenger astronomy. And kudos to Francis Housen for winning his award.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Kara, finish us off with chemistry.

• 46:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagen and Kenzo Sawai for the discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. What? Jay, what does that mean?

• 47:02Bob Novella?

  I was just thinking about that.

• 47:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So first, we'll talk about Henri Kagen. He, he was born on December 15, 1930. So this man is 95 years old, about to be 96 years old. Yes, in France. And let's talk a little bit about his contribution. Actually, let's take a step back, even before we talk about his contribution. It's probably important to talk about the landscape and to define a few terms. Overall, so first and foremost, one of the most important things that we want to mention is the concept of chirality. Bob, do you have this one?

• 47:44Cara Santa Maria?

  What does it mean for something to be a chiral molecule or a chiral chemical?

• 47:49Bob Novella?

  It's like handedness, like left hand, right hand, you know, kind of images, reverse images of each other.

• 47:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And that's a perfect way to put it. A lot of molecules exist in two variants that are non-identical mirror images. So just like you can put your left hand on your right hand and they mirror each other, but you can't just copy your left hand to your right hand, or it would be on backward. That's how a lot of molecules in, basically in life, exist. So these are called homo chiral molecules, meaning same hand. Amino acids, for example, are both left and right-handed, but in the proteins of your cells, you only find the one-handedness.

• 48:37Cara Santa Maria?

  You're not going to see, um, which one is it?

• 48:41Bob Novella?

  They're all left-handed, correct?

• 48:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you. You're not going to see right-handed amino acids anywhere in the proteins of any living organisms. Now carbohydrates and sugars are all right-handed. Well, they're not all, but they're preferred. So we tend to see way more right-handed carbohydrates. Sometimes we'll see, especially when we're producing these things in the lab, we'll see mixtures that have either equal parts or varied concentrations of left and right-handed molecules. So let's talk about a couple of terms that I'm going to be using a lot so that we understand them. So first, chirality is that handedness of the biomolecule itself.

• 49:22Cara Santa Maria?

  We've got enantiomers, and enantiomers are the actual handedness. So an enantiomer is a left-handed molecule or a right-handed molecule. It's a molecule with a specific chirality. And then racemic mixtures are mixtures that have both. So they're not going to favor one enantiomer over the other. All right, because you're going to hear me say those words a lot, but I'll try and redefine what they are as we go through. So let's talk about the landscape at the very beginning of all of this. Well, some of this discovery goes back to the mid 19th century. Do you know who was first, like, given credit for discovering handedness of molecules?

• 50:06Bob Novella?

  No, who, yeah, who was it?

• 50:07Cara Santa Maria?

  He's another Nobel laureate, Louis Pasteur.

• 50:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, really?

• 50:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So Louis Pasteur was looking at tartaric acid, which is a molecule, I guess that's important in like wine making, I think. And this organic molecule, people had realized that sometimes it bent polarized light to the right, but sometimes it didn't affect the light at all. And he was like, well, that's interesting. So he started growing crystals of tartaric acid and looking at them under the microscope. And he realized there were two variants and they were mirror images of each other. He divided them up, he dissolved them, he sent polarized light through them. And one bent light to the right and the other bent light to the left. But when he combined them, the light was unaffected. And he was like, whoa, something interesting is going on here.

• 50:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Eventually, we, you know, chemists discovered what was going on. They came to call these types of molecules chiral molecules. And they distinguish between their left enantiomer and their right enantiomer. But obviously, the story doesn't stop there. You know, he continued to do research with, you know, bacteria that's fermented by these different enantiomers. And he was able to see how it affected these different bacteria. And people started to ask questions about what's naturally occurring in our bodies and nature all around us. And they said, you know, wait a minute.

• 51:34Cara Santa Maria?

  If, like I mentioned before, amino acids are all, you know, left-handed and sugars are mostly right-handed, how did it get to be that way? Why are we seeing that nature is favoring certain enantiomers over others? And chemists have been grappling with that for a really, really long time. They even found out, you know, in the 1900s, the early 1900s, led by a German chemist named Willy Markwald, that chiral chemistry is not even unique to life. We see it in inorganic chemistry as well.

• 52:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And we also see that in different chemical reactions, there are certain catalysts that can be used, and he was one of the first to do those, that are chiral themselves. And so the catalyst, the chirality of that catalyst, once it binds to the enantiomer, actually produces larger percentages of a left-hand molecule, for example, or a right-hand molecule than the other. So here's a little bit of an important way to think about this. There was actually a physicist from the University of Bristol named Charles Frank. He's a theoretical physicist. And he developed a model for chemical reactions and said there are three conditions that

• 52:56Cara Santa Maria?

  have to be fulfilled. One, there are chiral catalysts that lead to asymmetric reactions. Check. That was shown and awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 and 2021. But then step two, or the other two conditions, the formation of one mirror image is somehow enhanced and the other one is dampened. So we see an unequal reaction for some reason. And the third condition, the chemical reaction forms the catalyst itself. There's an autocatalysis that happens where it becomes self-reinforcing, a feedback loop.

• 53:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And it results in a number of one of the enantiomers growing exponentially. So this was all theorized. Nobody had seen this. They had only seen that there are chiral catalysts and that there is an asymmetric reaction. They didn't know how and they didn't know that, you know, whether or not it was a runaway reaction. So cut to our two Nobel laureates. So we're going to start with Henri Hagen. So in the 90s, he had the chutzpah to challenge a long-held kind of universal truth that was taken for granted within the chemistry community. So a lot of people believed that asymmetric catalysis, which had been seen, was linear. It follows a linear law.

• 54:21Cara Santa Maria?

  If you want to synthesize, let's say, a right-handed product, you got to feed in pure right-handed catalysts and you're going to end up with a nice, pure, right-handed mix. Or you want to follow, you want to get a left-handed mix of enantiomers, you got to feed pure left-handed molecules in with that catalyst. And he was like, I don't think that's true. I'm going to break this down and I'm going to do some really interesting experiments. What happens if we put left and right-handed versions in together? Are we going to get some left-left, some right-right, and some left-right? I think we are. And people knew that if you did that, you would end up with left-lefts and right-rights.

• 55:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And they kind of saw that as canceling each other out. And they just sort of ignored the left-right group. But Henri Hagen suspected that this left-right group, what he called a heterochiral complex, might act differently than right-right and left-left enantiomers with their catalysts. And so he started doing a bunch of asymmetric reactions. He intentionally used catalysts that, you know, other researchers would have said were contaminated, you know, putting in the quote wrong enantiomer in there. And what they expected, other people, was that the purity of that catalyst against the purity of the final product would have been linear. But what he found is that there was a massive curve.

• 55:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's not like these left-right combinations just sat there. They actually slowed down the reaction rate. They slowed it down so much that you saw a significant difference between the left-right enantiomer and catalyst versus the left-left or right-right. The left-left and the right-right were quick. When you had left, right together, a mismatched enantiomer and catalyst, what you found was they were moving super, super slowly. They were getting trapped inside those pairs.

• 56:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And the other combinations, the other pairs were left to be uninhibited and to become homo chiral very, very quickly. So they started to kind of purify themselves. So he was like, okay, I see something nonlinear here. This asymmetry is probably caused by this nonlinear effect. He published this in 1986. People were super skeptical at first, but then there was a bunch of math and a whole lot of people who checked that math. And they were like, uh oh, I think he's really on to something. And that opened up a massive new field of research.

• 57:11Cara Santa Maria?

  So now we've got to cut to our second researcher here, Kenzo Soai, who was born in 1950 in Hiroshima, Japan. So Kenzo Soai, built upon Henri Kagan's work in the 80s and 90s. And he said, okay, I'm interested in the stereochemistry. We now know that chemical catalysts can display nonlinear effects. We know that a small amount of that chiral impurity doesn't necessarily ruin the reaction. We know that we can bypass it. So I want to know now how to understand what the molecular structure of that chemical catalyst is

• 57:56Cara Santa Maria?

  and compare it to the final product. He was really tapping into that third assumption that I mentioned. So to repeat that, it's that the chemical reaction will form the catalyst itself, this autocatalysis phenomenon, where it becomes self-reinforcing. So here's what he did. We already knew that autocatalysis worked. We already knew that self-replicating reactions were happening, but none of them were asymmetric. Nobody in all of chemistry had ever been able to do a chemical reaction that produced one enantiomer.

• 58:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So you put all the, you know, stuff in, you put the molecules in, you put the catalyst in, nobody was able to just get right-handed or just get left-handed molecules out of the reaction. But he was like, I think I can do this. I think I can do this. I'm theorizing that this is possible. And really what I'm theorizing is that a reaction can be designed where the product acts as its own catalyst. And so he said, okay, I'm going to test a whole bunch of combinations of molecules. And those molecules are going to need to be really sensitive. They're going to need to be able to pick up these tiny imbalances. And I think what's going to happen here is that the quote, wrong mirror image version is going to inhibit itself, allowing the dominant side to race ahead,

• 59:23Cara Santa Maria?

  very similar to that nonlinear curve that Kagan pointed to. And in 1995, Soai ran an experiment using five pyramidal alkanol. So he intentionally made the mixture with like a teeny tiny imbalance. There was a 2% excess of one-handedness within the entamment enantiomer over the other. When he started with that tiny imbalance as the reagents mix, the dominant-handedness molecule started to act as a catalyst. It made more and more copies of itself. The other one became suppressed. And by the end, that 2% head start at the beginning ended with an 87% dominance.

• 1:00:07Cara Santa Maria?

  This was a huge breakthrough. He was then able to repeat these reaction cycles and make that excess even smaller. It was a microscopic fraction of a percent. We're talking like a statistical fluctuation of just a few molecules. And when it was off by only that much, he could reliably make a 99.5% pure, single-handed product. Now, what does this tell us? He was able to do in the lab, something that maybe explains what?

• 1:00:38Jay Novella?

  Why there's such an asymmetry in the amino acids on Earth?

• 1:00:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Why is it that in all of the cells of like all living organisms, we only have left-handed amino acids? How did it get to be that way? Well, gosh, he may have uncovered that in this very elegant experiment, which a lot of people, well, let's see, the members of the Nobel Committee just this year referred to as, quote, "probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry." And so we still don't know if this experiment, you know, ultimately is the reason that we have the sort of pure chiral that we see throughout organic and even non-organic chemistry. But we do have at least an idea of how it could have happened.

• 1:01:26Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not just about that knowledge. It's not just about understanding how the world that we live in looks the way that it looks. It's also got massive practical applications. And here's a really big one: drugs. So a lot of drugs on the market are racemic, meaning that they're like a 50/50 mixture of right-handed and left-handed molecules. So ibuprofen is a good example of that. The problem is, in racemic drugs, sometimes the active, because usually it's the case that one-handedness is active and the other-handedness is not. So you're only getting an effect from 50% of that substance. But the other-handedness that's not active,

• 1:02:09Cara Santa Maria?

  giving you the effect that you want, may actually cause side effects. A really big example is thalidomide. In thalidomide, one enantiomer eased morning sickness, but the other caused, was a teratogen. It caused severe birth defects. And so more and more, we're seeing that pharmaceutical companies want enantiopure drugs, drugs that have a single enantiomer. And how do you get those? You have to use the chemical reactions that were developed by the research that was awarded this Nobel Prize. And the example that I go to over and over, and Steve, you know, you probably know about this as well. I know that you are a neurologist, not a psychiatrist,

• 1:02:54Cara Santa Maria?

  but of course you're trained in psychiatry. And they're probably famous. I know that there are probably migraine drugs and other neurology drugs like this too. But an example I often think about is citalopram, Celexa. So this is an antidepressant drug. And Celexa, which is the older version, is racemic. It's a one-to-one mixture of right-handed and left-handed molecules. So it is half as potent as its newer, right-handed version, escitalopram, which is Lexapro. And what's really great is that Lexapro has fewer side effects because it is enantiopure. Taking half of the drug gives you the same effect as citalopram.

• 1:03:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So the dosages are different. And it reduces a really dangerous possible outcome of the drug, which is QT interval prolongation. You know, some drugs actually elongate the QT interval of your heart rhythm, which can be very, very dangerous. But those are largely contributed to by the right-handed enantiomer. So it's really, really interesting that they were able to develop a new drug that has a cleaner profile due to the ability to get rid of the racemic, the one-to-one mixture, and have a purer-handedness of that drug. And we're seeing this across the board. Super interesting.

• 1:04:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's funny, when I first saw that, like, did we already have Nobel in chiral?

• 1:04:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we've had a bunch of Nobel Prizes about this. This is a big one.

• 1:04:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's really important. All right, thanks, Cara. All right, Jay, this is an interesting item. Tell us about the effects of reading fiction. The question is, can reading fiction actually make you better at understanding other people? Like, you know, real, in-person, social interactions, right?

• 1:04:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and you know, my gut, before I dove into this, when I, you know, when I first read that premise, I'm like, yeah, why not? You know, but the details here are pretty, you know, pretty fun and interesting. So, all right, you're reading a novel and you're not just there enjoying it. You're trying to figure out what the characters are thinking, what motivates them, what do they actually want from moment to moment? What are they going to do next? You're also worrying about the other characters and their impact on other characters, right? Is all this interaction happening? So, you know, what you're really doing is you're navigating an imaginary social situation. And, you know, if you, next time you read, try to pay a little bit of attention and see what your brain is doing. Like, because you always have the side thoughts

• 1:05:31Jay Novella?

  and things happening in the back of your mind as you're reading. So the question is, could that actually improve someone's ability to understand people out in the real world? Well, there is an existing and growing body of information from existing research. And this is suggesting that, you know, fiction could definitely benefit our language abilities, cognition. And they also said that they think it could improve people's capacity for empathy. So there was this recent review that was published in Current Opinion in Psychology. And they looked at all the existing evidence. It was Raymond Marr, Rebecca Dunk, and Lily Shoemaker. And they're from New York University in Canada. And they examined what happens when people read narrative fiction.

• 1:06:16Jay Novella?

  So we're talking about stories involving characters, relationships, emotions, different points of view. You know, like Lord of the Rings, right?

• 1:06:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I love it. All these things, like Lord of the Rings.

• 1:06:27Jay Novella?

  It has it all, though. Really, you know, from a fiction novel, it's got all that social interaction. There's tons of layers and it's all there. So one finding is that people who read more fiction tend to have stronger verbal abilities. They said that exposure to fiction appears to be a stronger predictor of language skills than exposure to nonfiction. Why? That's incredible. Like, really, it really, you know, there is a difference. And they actually kind of figured it out. They said that there are, like, novels expose us to unfamiliar vocabulary. Like, if you're reading the news, you're not going to hit that many new vocabulary words. But if you're reading a novel, you know, from one author to the next, there's variability, of course. But you're going to be hit with words that you probably don't know.

• 1:07:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and sophisticated. Nonfiction, by the way, if you're like a science communicator and you're working for an organization, you may be running what you write through a program that actually flags if any of the words you use are over a fifth or a seventh grade level.

• 1:07:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Intentionally to make it more broadly readable.

• 1:07:31Jay Novella?

  Right. And to to continue, so you're going to encounter different writing styles. And there's going to be a complexity to the language that we don't encounter in everyday conversation. And also, you know, like if an author is being very descriptive about something and using metaphors and similes and things like that, it's going to give you, you know, a way of looking at things through a particular lens and probably one that you don't typically look at things through. And things actually get a little bit more interesting here. So the researchers have also been investigating whether reading fiction improves something called social cognition. And now this is our ability to understand other people's thoughts and their feelings and intentions. And one component of this is called theory of mind.

• 1:08:15Jay Novella?

  Steve, you've definitely talked about this before.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Jay Novella?

  It's our ability to recognize that other people, you know, they have beliefs, they have knowledge, they have perspectives that are probably and sometimes absolutely different from our own.

• 1:08:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why toddlers are jerks because they don't have it yet.

• 1:08:29Jay Novella?

  They're jerks?

• 1:08:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, toddlers are jerks. They don't have their mind yet. They don't, they really do not understand that they are inconveniencing you. Because they don't think that you're, they can't see that you have a point of view yet.

• 1:08:40Jay Novella?

  Kara, what about teenagers?

• 1:08:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Then they just don't care. That's the difference.

• 1:08:45Jay Novella?

  Yes, I got a little bit more anger towards the teenagers, I think, than the toddlers. So when you're reading fiction, you're constantly exercising these concepts. You're interpreting characters' behavior, you're anticipating their decisions, you're anticipating, you know, future events and what, you know, dangers or benefits that could potentially be happening or not happening. You're imagining situations from other perspectives. And in a sense, they said that fiction acts like a social simulator, really is a simulation of reality in a fun way, right? Because dragons, you know? But but does that practice actually translate into measurable improvements? And this is the important part.

• 1:09:28Jay Novella?

  So a large pre-registered meta-analysis, this was published back in 2024. They examined 70 different experiments and that investigated cognitive effects of reading fiction. And the researchers found a statistically significant overall benefit. And this was particularly for empathy and mentalizing, which is our ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Mentalizing, nice.

• 1:09:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Now, of course, we have to throw out an important caveat here because we're skeptics. The overall effect was small. It was, it was small, but it was definitely there. It was, there was a measurable effect that is outside error bars. So reading a few chapters of Lord of the Rings isn't going, you know, it's not going to transform you into an expert on human behavior. Of course not. We're talking about, you know, modest improvements under experimental conditions that that could be measured.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you extrapolate that to a lifetime of being a fiction reader, I think. Again, that was my assumption that it would have a big, a big effect, not just a tiny effect. And I think it goes beyond even what you're saying. I think, you know, because narratives and storytelling is so powerful for humans. And it enables us to sort of be in the mind of other people. And good writers will deliberately challenge your assumptions that you make about characters and force you to think about them in a different way as a story evolves. And that is, think about how hugely helpful that is in everyday life. If you have been made to question your assumptions about

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  other people's motivations, or their backstory, or whatever, even in fiction, then that is something that's available to you when you're thinking about people in the real world.

• 1:11:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And also think about how hugely important it is if you read often and early in the developmental lifespan.

• 1:11:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're young, you're being exposed to this while you're still developing your value systems, your own sense of personal identity. It induces, or at least facilitates, I should say, it fosters a psychological flexibility that is really necessary to regulate your own emotions, to practice empathy throughout the lifespan. It's so, so important to read fiction when you're young.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  And something else that's come up, we've brought this up on this show every now and then, is, you know, how important are the stories that our culture tells?

• 1:11:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  And I've always thought that they're hugely important. Sometimes we get pushbacks, like, ah, it's just fiction. It's like, it's not just fiction. It is the stories that our culture tells ourselves and tells each other.

• 1:12:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, the reason we are the way we are.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yes. And I do, I think a lot of, like, my sense of morality has been affected, for example, by the heroic stories that you consume as a child, right? You model your moral thinking after people like Superman. You know what I mean? Who's like kind of a Boy Scout kind of figure. And I think, you know, like really cynical stories that glorify acting horribly have a negative effect on people's view of the way the world is.

• 1:12:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the overt part. I think the sort of under the radar part that I often will try to highlight is that when certain components within storytelling are normalized within a culture, they become essentialist in a lot of our minds. We assume that, well, that's just the way things are. But really, we have the power to change that. So, you know, when we think about the more pernicious aspects of our culture, supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy, all of these different, you know, the patriarchy, the water we swim in, that stuff is reinforced within storytelling in a way that we almost find intangible. And we internalize all of those different biases because of storytelling.

• 1:13:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So we definitely have the power to change those narrative opinions by broadening the types of authors that we read, by broadening the perspectives that they're writing from.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  And that's why I get upset over certain tropes, like the mad scientist trope.

• 1:13:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Oh, man, yep, they're baked in at this point. I know, it's like, it's, yeah, it's not just storytelling. That affects how people think about science and scientists and the way things work. We shouldn't just brush that off because it's quote unquote just fiction.

• 1:14:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's problematic, for sure.

• 1:14:04Jay Novella?

  A couple other quick points. First of all, like, reading fiction isn't the only thing that is associated with with better cognitive outcomes. You know, there's lots of different things that people can do. And you should, you know, do a little reading about this to find things that you might be interested in. But the social element here really piqued my interest about this whole thing because, you know, you're right, Steve, storytelling is just woven into human, the way our minds work, like, you know, it's, it's been with us from the very beginning and it serves a purpose. It's very meaningful to most people. You know, when you emotionally react to, to characters, you're reacting because we are emotional beings. And if it's done right, if it's done well, you mean, you could

• 1:14:48Jay Novella?

  feel lots of different things from, from reading fiction, even watching movies, right? But the point here is, I think in general, reading is really powerful, it's important, it does lots of different things. You know, it's a much healthier way to go to bed at night, like, get off your phones, don't scroll at night. Read, reading is, is better in every way. There's just no, hands down, it is the best way. If you need to do something to fall asleep, that's the thing you should be doing. And on top of that, you know, look, this was, um, these are observational studies. They don't demonstrate direct associations, right? It's not, not causation. But there were very interesting things in some of these studies that they looked at. You know, real quick, one of them was like, you know, they

• 1:15:32Jay Novella?

  found that, they found, they followed people for five decades. And they found that those who read more as teenagers tended to have more frequent social contact with friends and family later in life. And then another study, they, they followed 3,600 people. These were Americans over the age of 50. And they found that readers had approximately a 20% lower risk of dying during the following 12 years compared with non-readers. Now, again, this is not, you know, this isn't like-

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  It's a correlation, so there's so many confounding factors there.

• 1:16:02Jay Novella?

  They did adjust for several demographic and health factors. So I would say that one isn't completely teased out, but it's still interesting.

• 1:16:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and, and I think one point that's important to make here too, Jay, is that the, the first analysis, the first level of analysis that you just mentioned flies in the face of what I think a lot of people's preconceived notions actually are. I think a lot of people would assume that, you know, quote, bookish teenagers are going to be less socially engaged as they get older. But that's just not true. Just because somebody is reading a lot doesn't mean that they're a loner. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily against, you know, making friends and being social.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Jay. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Quince.

• 1:16:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so important to have in your closet pieces that you can go to over and over. They're tried and true, they always look great, and you can mix and match them. We often call that a capsule wardrobe. And I think the best place to have one of those is through Quince. They focus on high quality staples that are made with premium materials at a fraction of the cost of what the designer brands use. Like, for example, 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters that start at just $60 and beautiful leather items.

• 1:17:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Kara, I got, they call it the brushed cotton wool utility overshirt. And this is like a perfect fall thing to wear because it's a button down, but it's more like a jacket, but it's not fully a jacket, right? So it's kind of halfway in between. Super durable, I can wash the thing a million times. Like, I love it. I, I have one and I'm buying another one. So I can, you know, vary it up a little, right, Kara?

• 1:17:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Heck, yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:18:06Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. And Jay, you're going to do the next segment too. It's who's that noisy time? You want me to do two in a row, huh?

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, suck it up.

• 1:18:15Jay Novella?

  You got this, Jay. All right, this was from two weeks ago, but two weeks ago, I played this noisy.

• 1:18:31Jay Novella?

  So you guys have any clue? So there's clearly something spinning very fast, right?

• 1:18:37Bob Novella?

  It seems.

• 1:18:37Jay Novella?

  And then you listen to the whole sound. It sounds like there's like a bouncing noise after it. That's right. Are you hearing anything else in there?

• 1:18:46Bob Novella?

  Did they build, is this a Disney ride that went so fast it killed everybody that tested it? And then so they never released it?

• 1:18:52Jay Novella?

  It's like something spinning really fast and then releasing something that bounces.

• 1:18:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the body's hitting the ground, maybe.

• 1:18:59Jay Novella?

  Okay, so Peter Ritter emailed me and he said, hello fellow skeptics. A long time listener and first time, who's that noisier? It sounds like an arrow hitting a target. The fluttering sound is made by the fletches and thump is the arrow hitting the target. He says, unfortunately, it sounds like the archer missed the bullseye by a few centimeters on all three shots. That's funny. Anyway, yes, you are incorrect. But you did, you know, find some, some elements in there that I think, you know, you're using the right part of your brain because you made a good guess. Joe Vanden Enden.

• 1:19:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Vanden Enden.

• 1:19:35Jay Novella?

  Vanden Enden, Joe, I'm sorry. I know I pronounced it wrong. Anyway, he says, hey, Jay, great show this week. This sounds like one of those helicopter toys that you push up a spiral rod. The last clip sounds like it hitting the ceiling light fixture. Now, I've had these. I've had two different versions of these helicopter toys. So imagine you have a plastic helicopter. And one version of it is that there is a rod that has like, like, you know, what do you call it, like this, like a screw formation on it? And as you, as you push it down, it spins the helicopter blade. But then if you lift it up really fast off the rod, it spins the blade like crazy and the helicopter goes up. And it was a ton of fun when I was a kid. There's another one where you just pull a string or whatever, but same, same idea. Thanks for telling me something from my childhood that I really loved.

• 1:20:20Jay Novella?

  But you are incorrect. Another listener named Kyle Ledbetter said, hey, Jay, maybe I'm crazy, but this week's noisy sounds like some sort of railgun being used to shoot aluminum cans, like a series of subsequently firing magnets being used to accelerate a small projectile. I have never heard a railgun, but you are, you are incorrect, but I included your guess because I thought it was very provocative. And then we have a close guess. We're getting closer now. And this is the, the thing that I was hoping that you would hear in the noisy, Steve. This listener is named Annalise and Annalise says, hi, Jay, the noisy sounds like someone using a whip with a fast spin up and then a strike at a target.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  I didn't hear a whip crack in there. Was that a whip crack?

• 1:20:59Jay Novella?

  Let me, let me, when I play it again, you, you.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  All right, I'll listen for it.

• 1:21:03Jay Novella?

  I had two people guess really, you know, they were within like a minute of each other and they were the first two to guess. A lot of people got this right. I have Nicholas Andrew, who was the very first guesser. And he said, hi, Jay, this week's noisy sounds very much like multiple angles of the firing of a supersonic trebuchet built by engineer Tom Stanton on YouTube.

• 1:21:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Jay Novella?

  You are 100% correct on all, on all points. So this trebuchet, I'm not exactly sure how he spun it up. I think it was via an electric motor. So you hear like the spin up, then you will hear the crack, right? The, that breaking the sound barrier crack. And then you'll hear the aftereffect of whatever it's throwing, doing things, right? And the other guesser here was Alan Scott. Good job, guys. Let's listen to that again.

• 1:21:57Jay Novella?

  You hearing it?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  No, I don't, doesn't sound like a whip crack to me. I mean, now I hear what you're saying, but I wouldn't have tied that to it. I hear that the spit, the rapid spinning and then it's throwing something.

• 1:22:09Jay Novella?

  That clanking you're hearing though, I believe is the, the arm, you know, just, you know, doing the aftereffect of being spun up so fast and hitting something or whatever as it kind of slows itself down. Very cool noisy, very cool idea that this guy built. And thank you very much, Morgan, for sending that in. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This one was sent in by a listener named Andrew Horford. And I will give you a little clue here. I left other sounds in there as well to help you try to figure this one out.

• 1:22:58Jay Novella?

  I know what you're thinking. Don't even say it.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Don't even say it.

• 1:23:01Jay Novella?

  Don't even say it. Guys, if you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, right now we are starting to plan next year's events. And so we will be, you know, coming at you pretty soon with some dates about different things that we're going to be doing. We're also talking about the next Nauticon dates. We're also talking about doing it in, in maybe other countries or whatever. We have everything in play right now. If you're interested in having us come do some shows in your town, or, you know, if you think that you live in a good place for a Nauticon conference to happen, just email us at [email protected]. In the subject matter, just put in something like future shows or whatever and I'll, I'll see that.

• 1:23:46Jay Novella?

  If you listen to the podcast and if you appreciate the work that we do, if you think that we're pushing back at the right things that are out there in our reality right now, that, that need to be pushed back on, please consider becoming a patron. You can help support the work that we do. Go to patreon.com/skepticsguy.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Jay. Got one email this week. This one comes from Paul from Mississauga, Canada. And Paul writes, I lay here at 3:00 AM, having just experienced something odd that perhaps has an explanation in the neurology of sleep and consciousness. I was asleep, I think dreaming, and I thought I had a good idea for work. And a part of my mind was saying, don't wake me up for this. It's going to be a stupid idea. I looked at the clock, I could tell the time, but I still couldn't really understand the idea. Ultimately, I woke up completely and yes, the idea was stupid. So the question that my fully awake mind has is, was this a moment of partial consciousness?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  And does sleep science explain why I couldn't understand this idea until I was fully awake? And was it really two parts of my brain separately thinking? What do you guys think about that?

• 1:24:59Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, clearly he had, he had the probably the, what I would think of as the, like the lowest level of a type of lucid dream where he had some sort of reality test testing because he was thinking of that this could be a dream. He had the wherewithal to at least dredge that idea up. But it's not, he's not, um, two parts, it's not two parts of the brain separately thinking. It's really, you know, the, what the, was it the frontal lobe, the executive function part of the brain that was kind of like, like offline in a, in a, in a sense where, so there is no reality testing. So I wouldn't collect, you know, characterize that as two parts of your brain separately thinking. You're just like, you're impaired, you're basically impaired and every, in a dream, everything goes because you, you don't do any reality checking.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think everything you said is correct. Whether or not this is like separate parts of your brain thinking by themselves depends on your perspective. Like that's not an unreasonable.

• 1:25:53Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Statement, actually. So when you are asleep, your prefrontal cortex, right? Your frontal lobes are way less active. Your limbic system, your visual cortex and the sort of creative parts of your brain, the temporal parietal lobe, those are very active. So the parts of your brain that are active and dreaming are basically emotions and imagination.

• 1:26:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so you're not just talking about sleep. You're talking about specific phases of sleep.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  This is specifically dreaming.

• 1:26:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  When you're like in deep stages of sleep, nothing is very active, right?

• 1:26:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. So you're talking about REM.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Being consciously awake and dreaming. Those are really the two states we're talking about. So dreaming is no frontal cortex or very little frontal cortex, high emotion, high visual and high creativity. So that kind of makes sense, right? That's what we experience when we're dreaming. And you're right, Bob, that prefrontal cortex is logic, critical thinking, self-awareness, planning, and also reality testing, right? You could sort of think about it that way. But if we back up a step and to try to make sense of all this, I think the best way to do that is to, is to realize that your consciousness is more like a committee than a single individual entity.

• 1:27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  It is different parts of your brain. Each part of your brain is able to contribute to consciousness by itself, right? The idea that there's one part of your brain that is conscious and the other parts of your brain are feeding information to it is not correct.

• 1:27:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we're not dolphins. We're not like hemispherically sleeping where like some of our brain is, is unconscious and some of our brain is actively conscious at the same time.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, well, it's not, not, you're right, but the frontal lobes do have a significant decrease in activity, not.

• 1:27:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, they're quieter regions. And that's, and that's at the regional level. There's also some variability during dreaming versus awake states in the actual network activity itself. Like, like there are connections that aren't used often when we're awake that are disinhibited when we're dreaming. And in some ways it mimics what the brain looks like under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. And that can also explain why when you're, let's say, tripping on acid or when you're asleep, things seem to make sense to you.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And then later, when you're sober again, you're like, that was the most terrible. But it, it seems so profound at the time.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  So if you think of your consciousness as all the different parts of your brain that contribute to consciousness, all sort of vying for, I mean, probably it's problematic to use the word attention, but, because there is, again, there's no, there's no Cartesian viewer, like there's no person inside your brain paying attention to what the brain is doing. The brain activity is your consciousness. Yeah, that was an old idea, but that's just not-

• 1:29:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Your soul is not in there with some switches and levers.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  It's not like inside out where there's somebody in there looking at a screen or something. It's not, that's not what's happening. And so we are experiencing the net effect of all of these little bits of consciousness all acting together and meshing together. But there are different states of consciousness that represent a subset of the parts of your brain acting, or different proportions or strengths of your brain acting. Now, and the one that we all experience is dreaming.

• 1:29:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's a good example.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  It's an altered state of consciousness because a different, you know, your different parts of your brain are functioning in different proportions.

• 1:29:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And again, being under the influence of drugs is altered-

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Drugs is another way. Sometimes you could remove like one specific piece of your, of the brain, like the sense that you're inside your own body, right? So you feel like you're floating or whatever. You're still conscious, just that that piece of your consciousness is not contributing to your overall consciousness. So you have some weird experience, right?

• 1:30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and, and this is also, Steve, right? Like, correct me if I'm wrong, why we have to make a distinction between being under total anesthesia and being asleep? Because you are not asleep when you are fully anesthetized.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:30:19Cara Santa Maria?

  You are-

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:30:21Cara Santa Maria?

  -unconscious. It's not that you have altered consciousness. There, you know, depending on the combination of drugs, but with total, total anesthesia, your body is not capable of keeping yourself alive the right way. And that's why an anesthesiologist is monitoring everything.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, your, your brain is not generating any consciousness at all.

• 1:30:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Not even enough to make sure that you don't choke on your own spit.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:30:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And, you know, that you breathe and all of that good stuff.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So it's interesting, you know, to think about consciousness in that way, that, yeah, you can change your consciousness by altering the different parts of your brain and how they're interacting with each other. You know, it's not just some parts not working as much. It's also some parts of your brain inhibit other parts of your brain. Or some parts of your brain can become more active. Have you guys ever had an emotional experience during a dream that was an order of magnitude more than anything you experienced during your waking life?

• 1:31:14Jay Novella?

  Hmm, I wouldn't say that much.

• 1:31:16Bob Novella?

  Well, I wouldn't go that far, but-

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  I have. I mean, I've had, like, I've been angry in a dream to a degree that I've never experienced in my waking life.

• 1:31:25Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, you and I talked about, and I don't, I don't want to out you on the air, but you and I talked about one of our stress dreams, Steve, that we sometimes have, which is that we like committed a horrific crime.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And then now we're responsible for either figuring out how to hide it or figuring out how to not get caught. And that type of paranoia and fear, I don't think I've ever experienced in my waking life.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. So, yeah, definitely more fear. I've had more fear during a dream than I've ever had in my waking life. More anger, I remember. More anxiety or paranoia. Absolutely. And the limbic system is more active.

• 1:32:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And there is one, one phenomenon that is, it's actually a well documented phenomenon that we do often experience in altered states of consciousness from certain types of psychedelic drugs that I think some people also experience in dreaming, which is, it's a sense of expansiveness and connectedness to other things, like a disembodied feeling, like you are part of a greater universe. And it's a, it can be deeply spiritual for a lot of people, but it's also a very common experience with altered consciousness.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Because there's a circuit in your brain that makes you feel as if you are separate from everything else.

• 1:32:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. So when you are fully conscious, that is active.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  That's active, right? We take it for granted, like our, our body ends at one point and the rest of the universe begins, but that is an active construction of your brain. And if that's missing, you feel one with the universe.

• 1:32:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Right? Which is kind of more of the default, which is interesting.

• 1:32:58Bob Novella?

  Wait, how was that the, how was that the default?

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Well, meaning that if you, if you-

• 1:33:02Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a disinhibition.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  You take that circuit away, like you have to actively construct that notion that we are a separate entity from everything else.

• 1:33:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:33:13Bob Novella?

  All right. You could also say being uncon- non-consciousness is also default, right? I mean-

• 1:33:20Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that you mean more in terms of inhibition.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And action. Yeah. Like, our brain is always inhibiting things. The active state of our brain is the default, just like firing all the time.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is the subject of the first report that I could remember giving in school, like in grade school, which was whales, which is one of my favorite animals when I was a kid.

• 1:34:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so the theme is whale?

• 1:34:08Bob Novella?

  I did that in sixth grade.

• 1:34:09Cara Santa Maria?

  The theme is not the subject of your report.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  No, well, the subject was whales.

• 1:34:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I was like, this is very, uh, subjective.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Okay. We'll see how much you guys know about whales. All right, here we go. Item number one, killer whales or orcas are actually dolphins, which are in fact whales, meaning that dolphins are whales and killer whales are dolphins. Okay. All right, number two, whales belong to the taxonomic group Archeodactyla, the even-toed ungulates, with their hooved limbs evolving into flippers. And item number three, it is estimated that humpback whale populations worldwide were about 150,000 individuals prior to hunting, and now their total population is estimated at about 5,000. Bob, go first.

• 1:34:56Bob Novella?

  Killer whales, basically whales and dolphins are closer than we think, if that's, if this is true. Killer whales are dolphins and dolphins are whales. Oh, man, uh, don't know about that one. That one's tricky. Um, let's look at the second one and see if that's, uh, Archeodactyla, even-toed. Even-toed? Um, hmm. Wow. I would, I would have absolutely guessed that they are not even-toed. All right, let's look at the third one here. Now, this, yeah, this one rubs me the wrong way. This, I can't imagine, first off, humpback whales were the 150,000 worldwide before-

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:33Bob Novella?

  Prior to hunting them. And now it's estimated at 5,000. I mean, I would think that, first off, 150,000 seems way too low. And then 5,000 seems way too low because, I mean, this has been basically, uh, you know, there are some countries that ignore it, but there's basically been a ban on such, on such hunting for, for decades. Uh, was, I know Japan famously, I think, kind of ignores that. And I'm sure probably a few other countries, but I would think that the numbers would have bounced back much better than, than what you're, seem to be, what you seem to be saying here. I can't decide between the even-toed ungulates or, or this humpback whale thing. Hmm. I'll just have to put my, is it put my dime down or my nickel down?

• 1:36:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Your nickel.

• 1:36:18Bob Novella?

  Dime, isn't it?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Nickel.

• 1:36:19Bob Novella?

  Nickel?

• 1:36:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Jay Novella?

  Well, it should be, it should be a dime with inflation now, right?

• 1:36:23Bob Novella?

  Right. No, you, so you dropped the dime on somebody, but you put down your nickel.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  You also turn on a dime.

• 1:36:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Got to get your coin-based metaphors correct.

• 1:36:32Bob Novella?

  Yes. All right. So I'm going to have to say that, um, all right, I think humpbacks are more numerous than 5,000.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:36:39Bob Novella?

  Fiction.

• 1:36:39Jay Novella?

  Okay, this, the first one here about orcas, that some people call them orcas, some people call them killer whales. I like to call them killer whales.

• 1:36:51Jay Novella?

  Thank you, Kara. You're always there for me when I need you most.

• 1:36:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Was that Sling Blade?

• 1:36:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Bob Novella?

  Sling Blade, yes. Nice.

• 1:36:58Jay Novella?

  I call them orcas.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:37:00Jay Novella?

  Uh, okay. So I believe that the first one is, um, is correct. I will move on. Now it's a number two. Whales belong to the tax- taxonomic group. And then these are words I will not try to pronounce. That sounds legit. It's a hard thing to really, uh, you know, build a case against because I don't have all this memorized, but there is something in there that I'm remembering that I think makes this legitimate. And yeah, like I reacted the same way Bob did, like, okay, so there was prior to, you know, hunting whales, 150,000 individuals. These are humpback whales. And now it's down to 5,000, and I don't think the number is that low, not even close. That one's the fiction.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  All right. And Kara?

• 1:37:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, I think I'm going to go with the guys on this one. So quick and dirty, killer whales or orcas are cetaceans, dolphins are cetaceans, and whales are cetaceans.

• 1:37:54Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:37:54Cara Santa Maria?

  So if you're thinking of it that way, then that follows. If there's some sort of other, I mean, you, we can slice and dice them in lots of different ways. So at a certain point, like this wouldn't work in the reverse. Like whales are not dolphins and dolphins are not orcas, but orcas are dolphins and dolphins are whales, I think. So then, again, it's between Archeodactyla, the even-toed ungulates being their taxonomic group versus the humpback populations. I do think that they have declined, but I also think that they have, they haven't fully bounced back, but I think that they have probably, you know, their numbers have improved since, uh, global bans on whaling, as, as Bob mentioned. I'm pretty sure whales were land-dwelling first.

• 1:38:36Cara Santa Maria?

  They evolved on land, they had feet, and then they went into the ocean. I think their closest living relative is like the hippo or something like that. And so is a hippo an Archeodactyla? Maybe? Yeah. So I don't know. I'd say that one seems more reasonable. And I think I'm going to go with the guys on this. Those numbers feel low. Like, yes, 5,000 humpback whales, I mean, that's horrific if that is true. I hope it's not true. I hope the number has, uh, is significantly higher than that. The ocean is really big. Humpback whales are also really-

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  They're also really big.

• 1:39:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they are. But there, I don't think that they're all just like in one region of the ocean. I think that they are spread out, and I just think the carrying capacity is obviously much higher. And with these sort of environmental efforts at play, my hope is that the number is significantly higher than that. So, oh, I want that one to be the fiction.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Okay, so you all agree on number three, so we'll take these in order. We'll start with number one. Killer whales, or orcas, are actually dolphins, which are in fact whales. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Yeah, this is science. So yes, they are all cetaceans. Cetacean is sort of the parent group. But the question is, how does that break down? Right? And so, the first split of cetacean is what? There's two basic groups.

• 1:40:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I think there's the toothed and the untoothed.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Toothed and baleen.

• 1:40:03Bob Novella?

  Baleen and toothed.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yes, right. So you have the baleen whales and the toothed whales. Dolphins and porpoises are under the toothed whale group.

• 1:40:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  And killer whales are under the dolphin group, right? So, but it's funny, because you will read a lot of people who will say, look, killer whales aren't whales, they're dolphins. It's like, well, dolphins are whales.

• 1:40:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Dolphins are whales.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  So killer whales are whales. They're just not, they're toothed whales in the dolphin group. Okay. But you know, the original name of killer whales was whale killers, because they were, they were observed killing whales.

• 1:40:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, how interesting. And they didn't know they were whales yet.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  But it got flipped from whale killers to killer whales, the name.

• 1:40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  All right, let's go to number two. Whales belong to the taxonomic group Archeodactyla, the even-toed ungulates, with their hoofed limbs evolving into flippers. You guys all think this one is science. Surprised none of you keyed in on the hoofed limb bit. You think that whale flippers evolved from hooves?

• 1:41:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, I don't know, maybe.

• 1:41:06Bob Novella?

  No, I wouldn't have thought that.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Well, this one is science. This is science.

• 1:41:13Bob Novella?

  Yay, got it, guys. But, okay, give me details.

• 1:41:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Go, Bob.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the Archeodactyla are, you know, the even-toed ungulates, they include things like hippos, which are, Carrie, you are correct, the closest group to whales. So basically, within the Archeodactyla, one of the subgroups includes whales and hippos. So hippos are the closest to whales, and all the other Archeodactyla are really the next closest. They include things like giraffes and pigs and some deer.

• 1:41:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And aren't manatees related to elephant? It's so weird.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Manatees are related to elephants, yeah.

• 1:41:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, these like mammalian, these oceanic, what, marine mammals, that's what they're called.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Marine mammals.

• 1:41:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's bizarre, their evolutionary path.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  And, yeah, and so, early on, of course, the common ancestor of all whales, all cetaceans, was land-dwelling. And-

• 1:42:08Bob Novella?

  But even toad, Steve?

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, even toad ungulates. Yeah, they're the split hooves, you know, like deer, right? So deer, pigs, giraffes. Basically, when they're, they were living, they lived on the shore, like, near the water, and then they, evolutionarily speaking, fairly rapidly adapted to the water over, like, say, eight million years. All the major anatomical changes happened, and that included their limbs turning into flippers. The hooves basically just disappeared, evolutionarily.

• 1:42:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. They didn't need them.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the hooves are just keratinized nails, you know, they just, yeah, they just shrank away to nothing. The structure of the limbs, they, the fingers extended, they flattened out, they turned into flippers, basically. Now, Archeodactyla, sometimes they use the term, the new term, Cetoidactyla, because it now includes the whales. So you either have to do that, or just redefine Archeodactyla to include whales.

• 1:43:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Because by definition, the word itself is not inclusive.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  By definition, the cladistic model is, once you are a member of a group, you are always a member of that group. And, right, and a group includes all of the descendants, all of its descendants. So if you evolve from an Archeodactyla, then you are an Archeodactyla, no matter how different you evolve. So whales are Archeodactyla, right? Just like birds or dinosaurs. You don't stop being a dinosaur because you evolve into a bird. Okay, let's go to number three. It is estimated that humpback whale populations worldwide were about 150,000 individuals prior to hunting, and now their total population is estimated at about 5,000. This one is indeed the fiction you guys swept me this week. This is interesting, I could have gone either way with this. And it was a matter of if I thought you guys were going to be optimistic or pessimistic. I guess I thought you guys were going to be

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  pessimistic. But here's the thing, those approximate numbers are basically true about the Antarctic blue whale. Prior to hunting, the population of the Antarctic blue whale was about 225,000 individuals. And today, it's about 4,000.

• 1:44:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's so sad.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Even, so if I had used that one as a true fact, would you guys have bought it or not? That's the question. That was my dilemma.

• 1:44:19Bob Novella?

  Well, I don't know, you know, I don't know much about that specific whale, but the humpback, it didn't sit right with me.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  What's true for both whales, so the 150,000 is before hunting is true, the 5,000 was true in 1960, that was basically the nadir, the low point of the humpback whale population.

• 1:44:38Bob Novella?

  Good word, nadir.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  But then bands have allowed them to bounce back. Same is true of the blue whale. The question is, so, all right, and the humpback whale population, the latest estimate is 135,000 individuals. So it's basically bounced back to its pre-hunting population size. But blue whales are still at 4,000. So why have the humpback whales bounced back almost completely, within the, you know, standard deviation of the estimates, and blue whales have barely bounced back at all? They have come back from like 2,000 to now they're like 4,000, something like that. So they have increased, but they're still down there in the single digits of thousands. So why is that?

• 1:45:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, maybe their fitness is not as good. Maybe something happened to the actual environment that makes it harder for them to persist.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the short answer is we don't know. But we'd certainly like to find out why they're not, whereas the humpback whales have done great. I'm sure it's some environmental issue, their food source, or they're migrating, or they're, something, something is keeping them from thriving to the point where their, their numbers are increasing very slowly, whereas the humpbacks, you know, dramatically increased their populations back to basically the carrying capacity.

• 1:45:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, we also know that the oceans are warmer, they are more acidic, there are all these changes to them. It's not just that we stopped killing the animals en masse.

• 1:45:59Bob Novella?

  Steve, are you saying that the humpback whales like to hump?

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  That's probably part of it.

• 1:46:03Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:46:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Hump on their back.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  They're just, whatever, they have adapted better, and they're thriving in the modern world, whereas the Antarctic blue whales are struggling still. You know, they're slowly increasing, but they just are not bouncing back the way the humpback whales have, unfortunately.

• 1:46:21Bob Novella?

  I wonder how much they, what actually could be done to help them?

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Well, we have to find out what's, what's, the problem is first. They're still considered critically endangered, so we have stopped hunting them. That was a good first step. Let's not kill them.

• 1:46:35Bob Novella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  They need to figure out, like, what is the limiting factor now, the rate-limiting step? Is it food supply? Is it, you know, are they dying at a higher rate because of changing in the ocean itself? Is it interrupted migration? Are they not able to get to where they need to, to mate? So all kinds of things that could be going on. And these are huge creatures that travel and communicate over massive parts of the ocean, and eat, like a blue whale could eat four tons of food a day, you know?

• 1:47:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and there are hundreds of variables of how the ocean is different now than it used to be.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  There's lots of variables. Yeah, exactly. But the humpback whales are doing good, so at least we have that.

• 1:47:14Cara Santa Maria?

  That's good.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  That's a good job, everyone. Thank you.

• 1:47:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, if we ever need them to go back in time to save us for good.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, we don't need that. All right, Bob, give us a quote. That was a Star Trek reference, Carrie.

• 1:47:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  And they had to take a humpback whale from the past and bring it to the future to reestablish the population.

• 1:47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  And, yeah, but the humpback whales are doing fine. Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:47:33Bob Novella?

  "When kids look up to great scientists the way they do musicians, actors, and sports figures, civilization will jump to the next level." Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. I love Brian Greene. This quote really resonates with me. I look at the adoration and the lionization of stars and celebrities, and my God, if we really appreciated, you know, actual scientists and discovery, the world would be a very, I think it would be a better place. And I can't help but think of, in this case, the Sliders episode in this series from many years ago. The stars were basically going

• 1:48:16Bob Novella?

  from parallel Earth to parallel Earth. And in the season one, episode six, Eggheads episode, they went to an Earth where intellectuals and scientists, where they were celebrities, they were the celebrities, and they were loved worldwide. And I was just like, every now and then, I just imagine, imagine if, you know, if that were real, or I wonder if we'll ever, ever even come close to anything like that, but, ugh.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  But it also is, again, it's another way in which the stories that we tell ourselves and the priorities that we have do affect our society.

• 1:48:50Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. Also, Brian Greene would probably love to see that world. It would definitely benefit him as well.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:48:58Bob Novella?

  Of course.

• 1:49:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, man. Thanks, Steve.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

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