Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Now Julie.
Speaker 1: Normally we don't we don't do a lot of readings
Speaker 1: from the Bible on this podcast, but I've got a
Speaker 1: couple here I want to hit everyone with because of
Speaker 1: Ravens what we're talking about. Both of these are from
Speaker 1: the Book of Matthew, the New Testament and the first
Speaker 1: one Matthew eleven. At that time, Jesus explained, I give
Speaker 1: praise for you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, for
Speaker 1: although you have hidden these things from the wise and
Speaker 1: the learning, you have revealed them to the little ones.
Speaker 1: The little ones, little being the children. And then there's
Speaker 1: another one where he says, I tell you the truth.
Speaker 1: Unless you change and become like little children, you will
Speaker 1: never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And I think there's
Speaker 1: a little more there about needles and rich people. But
Speaker 1: needles and rich people, yeah, yeah, Like it's easier for
Speaker 1: a camel to go through the eyeban needle than for
Speaker 1: a rich man. And can all you know, lots of
Speaker 1: the you know, New testament wisdom that Jesus is spouting
Speaker 1: and in this book. But these two passages in particular
Speaker 1: interesting because they both talk about the this childhood nature,
Speaker 1: this there's something special about children that enables them to
Speaker 1: see the world as it really is, to to see
Speaker 1: through the grown up bs and and get at the
Speaker 1: truth of the matter. And it's something you see, I
Speaker 1: mean throughout the human history. I mean you see it
Speaker 1: a lot in fiction Chronicles of Narnia, Susan becomes too sophisticated, well,
Speaker 1: too grown up for Narnia, can't go there anymore. Puff
Speaker 1: the magic Dragon, as you remember a little Jackie Paper
Speaker 1: Paper reaches the point where you can't see Narnia the
Speaker 1: children and Stephen King's it you too. In order to
Speaker 1: defeat this evil clown shifting monster, you have to have
Speaker 1: this spirit of a child. Yeah. And my neighbor Totoro,
Speaker 1: the farest spirits, adorable as they are, he's got to
Speaker 1: be a child to see them. And and so then
Speaker 1: there's of course this longstanding thing like that. There's the
Speaker 1: whole kids say that darned as things right, where like
Speaker 1: Bill Cosby show, wasn't it it was? Yeah? And I
Speaker 1: think it was. It was an older show even before
Speaker 1: Cosby took it over, but he's the one most remembered
Speaker 1: for it. But the idea being that you bring a
Speaker 1: kid on and you just let them talk, and they're
Speaker 1: you're just gonna drop truth bombs on you because they
Speaker 1: don't know any better. Though, I found it interesting that
Speaker 1: Bill Cosby is also quoted as saying it's saying quote,
Speaker 1: a person with no children says, well, I just love children.
Speaker 1: And you say why, and they say, because the child
Speaker 1: is so truthful, and that's what I love about them.
Speaker 1: They tell the truth. And Cosby goes on to say,
Speaker 1: but that's a lie. I've got five of them and
Speaker 1: the only time they tell the truth is when they're
Speaker 1: having pain. Even that sometimes can be a lie, as
Speaker 1: I have discovered. Yeah, you're you're a mom. What's your
Speaker 1: take on the the innocence and the truth bombs of children?
Speaker 1: The truth bombs? Um, Well, I mean I think everything
Speaker 1: is is new to them, right, so immediately kids see
Speaker 1: things an entirely different way because they're piecing together context
Speaker 1: and being able to see things, um from an entirely
Speaker 1: new perspective, as we know, is a completely liberating thing.
Speaker 1: And there's a power to that, and we've talked about
Speaker 1: that before that as we age, we tend to let
Speaker 1: some of that uh slaw off of us, right, because
Speaker 1: we're so used to sort of establishing a pattern, going
Speaker 1: with that and then moving forward. But to paraphrase Picasso,
Speaker 1: he said he took his whole life to think like
Speaker 1: a child artistically to reach that place where he could
Speaker 1: once again delve into novel ideas or novel representations of
Speaker 1: the human experience. And in fact, I am looking at
Speaker 1: Picasso right now because in our podcast Booth. I don't
Speaker 1: know if we've ever mentioned this before. I don't think
Speaker 1: you have not in the podcast. Uh well, we have
Speaker 1: a couple of photos in the podcast Booth, and the
Speaker 1: one that I get to stare at is Picasso in
Speaker 1: his underwear. So I think about this idea a lot,
Speaker 1: so that I don't think about Picasso in his underwear
Speaker 1: with a bat for a while. But then then someone
Speaker 1: moved it. Yeah I did. I covered up his private
Speaker 1: parts in this one. They did. Um, But there is
Speaker 1: this I think he puts a you well that you
Speaker 1: know it takes a lot of effort to try to
Speaker 1: bust out of these constraints that we because we have
Speaker 1: to we placed in our lives, um, and to be
Speaker 1: able to think in a way that is completely mind
Speaker 1: blowing a new Yeah. I mean there is something about
Speaker 1: the creativity alone of a child. UM. I think I've
Speaker 1: mentioned this before. There's a in Atlanta. There's a there's
Speaker 1: an improv company called Dad's Garage and they do if
Speaker 1: you go at night, you've often get a lot of
Speaker 1: very blue material from these improv actors. They're getting up there.
Speaker 1: They're blooming dirty dirty. Yeah, they're doing free association and
Speaker 1: it's and all sorts of outlandish things are coming up
Speaker 1: that I couldn't even mention on the podcast, but they
Speaker 1: would all. They also do a show and I think
Speaker 1: they still do it called Uncle Grahampa's Hoodaily story Time.
Speaker 1: And in this show, it's the same improv actors, these
Speaker 1: same same guys and gals that are just really tearing
Speaker 1: it up at night with ranching material. But now they're
Speaker 1: in the a m and they have they're performing to
Speaker 1: an audience of mostly children, but they're also doing improv
Speaker 1: and they're getting tips from the audience, so they'll they'll
Speaker 1: ask the kids in the audience, Hey, what should the
Speaker 1: name of this princess be and what should the story
Speaker 1: that we tell be called? And uh, I've been to
Speaker 1: it a couple of times, and there it is always
Speaker 1: amazing because from these children, they're able to come up
Speaker 1: with the craziest ideas, like stuff that these these these
Speaker 1: experienced and highly creative improv actors would never be able
Speaker 1: to pull out. Like like I remember one when when
Speaker 1: they asked what should the princess be called, the little
Speaker 1: girl said that the princess name should be quote Batman
Speaker 1: the Girl, which is incredible. You know, it's like that
Speaker 1: kind of like strange, free association that you're just not
Speaker 1: going to get from an adult. Well, yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: seeing this Ted talk and uh, I'll show this up
Speaker 1: on Facebook or in a post. I don't remember the
Speaker 1: name of the Ted talk right now, but they were
Speaker 1: starting they were talking about accessing again this this childish thinking,
Speaker 1: and they were talking about um an arts program in
Speaker 1: which the kids were making different kinds of clay models,
Speaker 1: and one of the kids came up with Bacon Boy
Speaker 1: and it is so I've got to throw up an
Speaker 1: image of this. It is awesome, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: a superpower figure. And again, these are not things that
Speaker 1: we as adults go around thinking like I'm going to
Speaker 1: sculpture Bacon Boy today and really start to think about
Speaker 1: this mythology of this character. But that's what kids do.
Speaker 1: And um, if you have ever taken a walk with
Speaker 1: a toddler anywhere from two to when they started to
Speaker 1: get preschool four five years of age, you know there
Speaker 1: is no linear path. That this is going to take
Speaker 1: a long time because everything is going to be picked
Speaker 1: up and inspected and stories where will begin to just
Speaker 1: organically arise from their experience with with their environments. And
Speaker 1: we have talked about this before, but I thought it
Speaker 1: would be good for us to mention that this is
Speaker 1: this idea that when we are adults, we have a
Speaker 1: focus that is that's pretty laser focused, this flashlight focus
Speaker 1: that kids starting as infants grow into that flashlight focus,
Speaker 1: but they begin at the lantern of light experience where everything,
Speaker 1: uh is it has light cast upon it and they're
Speaker 1: considering everything in their world. Yeah. Like, one thing that
Speaker 1: comes to mind when I think about this is the
Speaker 1: the Alan Rogue Grulay novel Jealousy, where the entire book
Speaker 1: and this is not going to really sell it well
Speaker 1: from most people, but the entire book is this guy
Speaker 1: staring at a wall or occasionally staring at its has
Speaker 1: banana plantation and trying to figure out whether his wife
Speaker 1: is having an affair with another band of plantation owner.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of it is him staring at
Speaker 1: at a sneer on the wall where he killed a
Speaker 1: centipede and just obsessing and obsessing, obsessing. It's that laser focus,
Speaker 1: you know, and that he's getting nothing done the whole
Speaker 1: novel because he's just obsessed with one thing. And I
Speaker 1: feel in his adults that we often do that it's
Speaker 1: not an actual smash centipede on the wall. Then it's
Speaker 1: something like, you know, some you know guy starts losing
Speaker 1: his hair, and then that's the thing they come back
Speaker 1: to over and over again. Oh my goodness, what's happening
Speaker 1: to me? Am I I'm getting older. I'm dying. You know,
Speaker 1: we end up obsessing over something, or we get obsessed
Speaker 1: with with one particular material thing or another, or or
Speaker 1: we attached our ego to a sports team or something.
Speaker 1: Whereas how many how many child children do you know
Speaker 1: who are rabid sports fanatics, who are rabbid fans of
Speaker 1: a particular team, you know, how many reliduced fundamentalist children
Speaker 1: do you know? How many neurotic children do you know
Speaker 1: where they're obsessed with? Uh, I don't know if their
Speaker 1: weight gain. Yeah, that's just not really something that you
Speaker 1: you commonly see until they get a little bit older, right,
Speaker 1: they get into grade school. The thing about this, and
Speaker 1: psychologist Alison Gothnick has talked about this, is that when
Speaker 1: you're an adult, you have, uh, you know, certain neural
Speaker 1: connections that have been pruned away because you don't use
Speaker 1: them anymore. And so if you are that character in
Speaker 1: the book who is staring at the wall, well, you're
Speaker 1: gonna be squirting a lot of neuro transmitters on that
Speaker 1: part of the brain to really keep it activated in focus.
Speaker 1: But if you are an infant, your entire brain is
Speaker 1: just steeped in neuro transmitters. It's marinating in it. And
Speaker 1: this is what she says results in this information rich world,
Speaker 1: this lantern vision, trying to take every single thing in. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She mentions in her in her writing that in the
Speaker 1: past it's been difficult for us to try and study
Speaker 1: exactly what's going on in the in the minds of
Speaker 1: young children, and certainly in the minds of of unlanguaged
Speaker 1: children and infants, and and even if you can get
Speaker 1: them to talk, it's going to be a stream of
Speaker 1: consciousness mumbo jumbo about I think her example is birthday
Speaker 1: parties and horses, obviously for for girls and for for
Speaker 1: little boys. Birthday parties. Uh, fire trucks and boogers. You know,
Speaker 1: it's I mean to go across gender, across gender, fire trucks,
Speaker 1: but yeah, um so. So I found that interesting because
Speaker 1: a lot of her studies is about getting beyond that
Speaker 1: and really finding ways to not only look at what
Speaker 1: children and infants are saying, well certainly not infants so much,
Speaker 1: but what beyond what children are say, and also look
Speaker 1: at their actions and how they're interacting with the world
Speaker 1: around them. And what she gets out a lot is
Speaker 1: the idea of this plasticity, which we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: the ability of our mind to change, the ability of
Speaker 1: ourselves to to to roll with the punches, because when
Speaker 1: you were a a zero to three year old, you
Speaker 1: have to really be able to roll with the punches.
Speaker 1: And so even in even in a very comfy environment,
Speaker 1: if you grow up in a very civilized environment, a
Speaker 1: very safe environment, there's still a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of trauma around you when you're that alert to the world,
Speaker 1: and certainly in in less advantageous environments, you've gotta be
Speaker 1: really hardy to survive. Yeah, she alson. Gopnik actually has
Speaker 1: this great quote about what it's like to be an infant,
Speaker 1: and she said, and this is the kind of more
Speaker 1: romanticized version of it, as opposed to just you know,
Speaker 1: having to deal with all the noise and the different stimuli.
Speaker 1: She says, it's like being in love and perish for
Speaker 1: the first time after you've had three double espressos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there is this idea you are being bombarded by
Speaker 1: all the different elements out there. She also mentions the
Speaker 1: study of Eastern European orphans who were adopted by parents
Speaker 1: in the UK and about how in in in most
Speaker 1: of the case it's not all but in most of
Speaker 1: those cases, and these were kids that were they're growing
Speaker 1: up in like extreme um situations of you know, they're
Speaker 1: just not exposed to enough sensory information, enough personal interaction.
Speaker 1: They're starved for all of this. But they're so but
Speaker 1: the child is so resilient zero to three that most
Speaker 1: of them were able to just really bounce back without
Speaker 1: any kind of significant problems. And she says that this
Speaker 1: is because of this different consciousness that kids have that
Speaker 1: they grow out of again into the more flashlight focus.
Speaker 1: But she's saying, and this is this is kind of
Speaker 1: looping it back on how you can try to retain
Speaker 1: a bit of this for yourself as as an adult.
Speaker 1: She's saying that the creative people are able to hold
Speaker 1: onto this different consciousness to be able to inhabit this
Speaker 1: mind space where you can transfer your consciousness from flashlight
Speaker 1: to lantern and began to take more things in all
Speaker 1: while being a reasonably um responsible adult. Of course, one
Speaker 1: thing that comes to mind here, and so we're comparing
Speaker 1: adult artists with young children, one thing that instantly comes
Speaker 1: to mind here is children running around in the yard naked,
Speaker 1: and then artists inevitably running around in the yard naked,
Speaker 1: or like our friend Picasso here in the diaper um
Speaker 1: because it does kind of his head where it does
Speaker 1: look like a diaper, Because art, like childhood, is kind
Speaker 1: of a judgment free zone. And as it turns out,
Speaker 1: that plays into this mind of a child, this creativity
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, and in fact, in kids and teenagers
Speaker 1: frontal lobes the seat of judgment. Right, these are the
Speaker 1: last pieces to be fully connected to the brain, okay,
Speaker 1: or be fully connected to parts of the brain that
Speaker 1: deal with judgment, inhibition, self awareness, cause and effect, acknowledgement, um,
Speaker 1: all the things that are sort of the bane of
Speaker 1: our existence with with teenagers that we normally look at us. Ah, man,
Speaker 1: they just they're crazy there, you know, look at their hair.
Speaker 1: What are they think? Yeah, yeah, they're just there's not
Speaker 1: a lick of sense. And that kid um, that actually
Speaker 1: can be a real boon two kids because they lack
Speaker 1: again this idea of this inner judgmental voice that can
Speaker 1: sometimes stop us in our tracks when we're trying to
Speaker 1: do something novel um. So again, trying to silence that
Speaker 1: part of the brain is really important. And we have
Speaker 1: talked about this before, but surgeon and jazz musician Charles
Speaker 1: Limb wanted to look at this a little more carefully
Speaker 1: to say, how how are musicians so adept at just
Speaker 1: getting in there and improvising? What makes them able to
Speaker 1: do that? And it turns out that musicians are really
Speaker 1: good at turning off the part of the brain again
Speaker 1: this uh dorsal lateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions, dimming
Speaker 1: that and instead bringing online the medial prefrontal cortex, which
Speaker 1: else them to express themselves better. And so the frontal
Speaker 1: lobes they dim a bit because they're like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what, I don't need you right now. I really
Speaker 1: need to kind of flex this part of my muscle.
Speaker 1: So he saw that in all these m r I
Speaker 1: scans of these musicians, which really pointed to this idea
Speaker 1: that certain things are play. In fact, neuroscientists, Rex Jung
Speaker 1: also talks about how highly creative people usually have less
Speaker 1: white matter integrity and less brain tissue in the frontal lobes. Okay,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that they're you know, less intelligent or
Speaker 1: that they lack something. It just means that the frontal
Speaker 1: lobes again the seat of judgment, Uh, it's not nearly
Speaker 1: as taxed with neural connections, these glial cells, white cells,
Speaker 1: and therefore those people are a bit more unencumbered when
Speaker 1: it comes to creating something new. All right, we are
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: we are going to talk about the importance of play
Speaker 1: in this idea of uncertainty in our lives. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. We're discussing again the minds of children. Uh,
Speaker 1: this old idea that children see the world as it
Speaker 1: really is, or they see it in in a unique way.
Speaker 1: And if we as adults can simply recapture some of
Speaker 1: that childhood essence, and I mean not in a drain
Speaker 1: essence from a child's skull in a like a skexy way,
Speaker 1: but in an actual let us let's change the way
Speaker 1: we perceive the world and how we interact with it too,
Speaker 1: to improve our creative output. And and when I say creative,
Speaker 1: I'm not just talking about finger painting on the wall.
Speaker 1: But as we'll discussed here, actual scientific achievement as well
Speaker 1: falls under this category. Yeah, really engaging critical thinking skill.
Speaker 1: According to neuroscientists, Bolatto and he has that great Ted
Speaker 1: dot com talk, He says that uncertainty for adults is
Speaker 1: really problematic. And this is particularly true in the context
Speaker 1: of evolution, where uncertainty, you know, not knowing if there's
Speaker 1: a saber tooth tiger in the weeds over there or
Speaker 1: if it's just the wind rustling through through the leaves,
Speaker 1: could result in death. For us, we need to be
Speaker 1: certain about certain elements of life Yeah. That's the thing
Speaker 1: about uncertainty is that, for the most part, most of
Speaker 1: us tend to want to get away from uncertainty because
Speaker 1: uncertainty brings potential disaster. Uncertainty as you're walking down the
Speaker 1: street means maybe I'll get run over by a car,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll get mugged. Maybe again the saber through tiger
Speaker 1: will jump out at me. But it's out of that
Speaker 1: uncertainty that so many amazing creative ideas arise. And the
Speaker 1: way that we combat uncertainty, of course, is to sort
Speaker 1: of apply a script to the world, to cling to
Speaker 1: certain world views that that bring order out of chaos.
Speaker 1: So look at any particular world view and it may
Speaker 1: and generally it's about positioning yourself, your group at the center,
Speaker 1: creating a barrier between this group and outside groups. I
Speaker 1: we think like this, They think like that. These are
Speaker 1: the rules of the environment in which I live. These
Speaker 1: are the people who don't abide by those rules. These
Speaker 1: are the rules that apply to me. We we steadily organized,
Speaker 1: We build a little fort of ideas in which we
Speaker 1: feel safe against the chaos of the world. And that's
Speaker 1: that's certainty that we're talking about. That really helps us
Speaker 1: to predict how things will come out. But he's saying
Speaker 1: that for children, uncertainty is a game, and it is
Speaker 1: a necessary game because if you look at animals and humans,
Speaker 1: all species play in some way. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: this before, um in terms of the amount of time
Speaker 1: it takes for a creature to mature. We've talked about
Speaker 1: the New Caledonian crow, which has a relatively long childhood
Speaker 1: as as a bird, and then we've talked about the say,
Speaker 1: just you know, your run of the Milk chicken, and
Speaker 1: the consensus there was that the New Caldonian crow really
Speaker 1: needed that time to mature because it's pretty sophisticated in
Speaker 1: terms of its tool use and where's the chicken so
Speaker 1: much doesn't need a lot of time to play to
Speaker 1: to have a long childhood. And as we said, one
Speaker 1: ended up in in a pot. The other one, the
Speaker 1: New Caldonian Crow, ended up on the cover of Nature
Speaker 1: magazine because it does have these very sophisticated tool using abilities.
Speaker 1: So when you look at children and you get uncertainty,
Speaker 1: it really is necessary for kids to throw away the
Speaker 1: rules and to begin to like a scientist, approach their
Speaker 1: environments and play with that environment. Yeah, it's easy to
Speaker 1: look at children and play and and just sort of
Speaker 1: discredited to say, oh, that's just children wasting time instead
Speaker 1: of doing chores, which they should be doing, or to
Speaker 1: look at it in terms of all right, well that's
Speaker 1: a that's a boy and he's playing with tools and
Speaker 1: beating stuff with hammers. He's just he's just kind of
Speaker 1: practicing for his life. Or oh, there's a little girl
Speaker 1: and she's playing with the baby doll. Well, that's just
Speaker 1: her rehearsing. That's a little there's a kitten fighting another kitten.
Speaker 1: They're just rehearsing for their their lives. It's aggressive hunters,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot more going on speci Typically, as
Speaker 1: a bow Latto points out, play be it whatever the
Speaker 1: kittens doing, what the child is doing, or what an
Speaker 1: adult artists or scientists is engaging in, boils down to
Speaker 1: five different things. First, celebrating uncertainty. It's not you're not
Speaker 1: entering the environment and saying saying, oh, there there might
Speaker 1: be something I'm unsure of outside of this fort of ideas.
Speaker 1: It's about venturing outside of that fort of ideas and
Speaker 1: seeing the world anew uh. It's about being acceptable to change,
Speaker 1: engaging in this in this world, beyond the fortress of ideas,
Speaker 1: and realizing that what you see may change you, It
Speaker 1: may change how you assemble your fortress of ideas when
Speaker 1: you return to it. You have to be open to possibility,
Speaker 1: open to the possibility that you're gonna change, open to
Speaker 1: the possibility that your preconceived notions are going to fail.
Speaker 1: You need to be cooperative, certainly if you're venturing outside
Speaker 1: of that fortress of ideas with other individuals, and finally,
Speaker 1: intrinsically motivated, you're doing it because you want to You
Speaker 1: want to see beyond this fortress of ideas that you've
Speaker 1: used to understand the world previously. Now, as um, you
Speaker 1: have probably witnessed before with kids that the rules can
Speaker 1: change pretty quick, right, They can throw them out or
Speaker 1: sometimes just completely change them. One second the floor's lava,
Speaker 1: then it's then it's a never ending pit, and then
Speaker 1: it's okay to walk on, which is great, right because
Speaker 1: it kind of gets very good narrative consistency. No, nobody
Speaker 1: gives them a certain amount of flexibility. And you have
Speaker 1: mentioned like giving a girl a baby doll and giving
Speaker 1: a boy tools. Um, really, you give a kid a
Speaker 1: stick and they are going to turn it into something
Speaker 1: in which Tory, Yeah, to interrogate the world around them.
Speaker 1: And I see this again and again with my daughter
Speaker 1: making Pulley systems out of you know, um buckets, because
Speaker 1: the buckets are full of Pixie destin she needs to
Speaker 1: skewer some pirate or something. Um. But I think it's
Speaker 1: really interestinging that Lotto looked at this play, this uncertainty,
Speaker 1: and then he sought out a group of children ages
Speaker 1: eight to ten because he wanted to know could they
Speaker 1: approach an experiment or could they create their own experiment?
Speaker 1: And could we actually get something on the other end
Speaker 1: that we could use. Because again he's saying that those
Speaker 1: those five circumstances that you talked about, this openness, this
Speaker 1: um intrinsically motivated cooperation, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: He's saying that this is really the play of a scientist.
Speaker 1: This is what scientists do. Yeah. I mean again, it's
Speaker 1: easier to make the initial comparison to creative work because
Speaker 1: like I think, if like, if I'm writing a story
Speaker 1: or something, I'm entering it with an uncertain mind. I
Speaker 1: don't know where characters are gonna end up, or what's
Speaker 1: going to happen in maybe one rule or two that
Speaker 1: you're trying to stay too, and those rules may they
Speaker 1: break by the time I finish it. I mean, I
Speaker 1: can't think of the number of times that I've I've
Speaker 1: started writing a story and when I end up getting
Speaker 1: is entirely different because I've because you've got to be
Speaker 1: open to it to change. And then, certainly in science,
Speaker 1: when you start looking at these these five things from
Speaker 1: a scientist per spective, imagine if a scientist goes out
Speaker 1: to figure out why something in the world works the
Speaker 1: way it does, or something in the outer cosmos works
Speaker 1: the way it does. You're going to go in there
Speaker 1: with some preconceived notions, but you have to be able
Speaker 1: to to dispel them and ignore them. It need be
Speaker 1: for commisically and you have to celebrate uncertainty, it be
Speaker 1: acceptable to change, open to possibility, cooperative, and intrinsically motivated. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of wanted to see if these codes could
Speaker 1: see themselves differently through the process of being a scientist,
Speaker 1: because again, when you say let's let's do some science,
Speaker 1: that's pretty weighted because people approach it and thinking that
Speaker 1: science is something that is separate from them as opposed
Speaker 1: to well, it's actually science really plays to our strengths
Speaker 1: as human beings. Yeah, this this comes into sort of
Speaker 1: the puff the magic dragon thing again. There's kind of
Speaker 1: this false idea that when you're a child, it's all
Speaker 1: interacting with imaginary creatures and engaging in this creativity. But
Speaker 1: then you learn to be a grown up and you
Speaker 1: learn science, and then you put all that crap behind you.
Speaker 1: But as as we're discussing here, being a scientist is
Speaker 1: as much about embracing that spirit of childhood as it
Speaker 1: is about growing up and becoming more mature. So a
Speaker 1: lot of worked with twenty five children in conjunction with
Speaker 1: their headmaster, again ages eight to ten, and they studied
Speaker 1: black wotton bees to see if these bees, again this
Speaker 1: is something that kids came up with, could solve problems
Speaker 1: in a similar way that humans do. And the kids
Speaker 1: asked the questions and they actually devised the experiments. Um.
Speaker 1: According to Biology Letters, which published the paper, the children's
Speaker 1: findings show that bees are able to alter their foraging
Speaker 1: behavior based on previously learned colors and pattern cues and
Speaker 1: a complex scene consisting of a local pattern within a
Speaker 1: larger global pattern. This is pretty sophisticated for an insect
Speaker 1: um and then in Biology letters that says, as there
Speaker 1: has been little testing of bees learning color patterns at
Speaker 1: small and large scales, the results contribute considerably to our
Speaker 1: understanding of insect behavior. The kids managed to not only
Speaker 1: published a paper, which we'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about how they did that, but to to get a
Speaker 1: novel understanding of an insect. And what I love about
Speaker 1: this is that the paper actually begins with once upon
Speaker 1: a Time, which largely written in kids speak, but the
Speaker 1: methodology that they came up with, the observations, the hypothesis,
Speaker 1: all of this is so solid that they, you know,
Speaker 1: the people who actually ended up reviewing this and writing
Speaker 1: a commentary on this could not deny that they had
Speaker 1: found something that was very valuable. Well, it reminds me
Speaker 1: of your daughter's interaction with the trial bide and how
Speaker 1: she granted she gave it, that she give it a name,
Speaker 1: called it Gonk, but then also created the story about
Speaker 1: how it was going down to the water and eating plants,
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly. So it wasn't living in a
Speaker 1: fairy castle or anything. It was. She wasn't creating a
Speaker 1: a plausible story for that creature based on her knowledge
Speaker 1: of the world well and more importantly of her observations
Speaker 1: of the world, then she had a context for it,
Speaker 1: and she of course subscribed emotions to it and all
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. But yeah, I mean, do you
Speaker 1: just give kids a couple of things and they will
Speaker 1: run with us? And UH and began to see the
Speaker 1: logic inherent in there. I wanted to also point out
Speaker 1: that the paper that they came up with actually had
Speaker 1: hand drawn figures and tables in it as well. And
Speaker 1: if you check out that TED talk um by a
Speaker 1: lot of you'll also see a presentation by Amy O'Toole, who,
Speaker 1: at the time of a twelve year old student who
Speaker 1: helped run one of the science experiments that it was
Speaker 1: inspired by Bolto science approach and UH. At the age
Speaker 1: of ten, she became one of the youngest people ever
Speaker 1: to publish a peer of viewed science paper, and she
Speaker 1: was also at the time the youngest person to give
Speaker 1: a TED talk or to help give a TED talk.
Speaker 1: Since you get the second half, but that was really
Speaker 1: motivating as well, because then it comes down to the
Speaker 1: idea that when you got these kids in the room,
Speaker 1: you got him thinking about science they were already asking
Speaker 1: questions that were significant to science. Yeah, I mean this
Speaker 1: is pretty life changing for a lot of those kids,
Speaker 1: because again a lot of wanted to see how they
Speaker 1: would see themselves after going through a scientific process and
Speaker 1: you know, help them to gell this idea that science
Speaker 1: is again a part of them and not apart, not
Speaker 1: some sort of It's not something you learn, it's something
Speaker 1: you are from the earliest. If anything is we grow
Speaker 1: older more many of us we forget science rather than
Speaker 1: have to learn it. Well, it just seems like something
Speaker 1: that we look through the window at, right. But Loto
Speaker 1: said this, and I thought it was really interesting. He said,
Speaker 1: the point is what science does for us. We normally
Speaker 1: walk through life responding, but if we ever want to
Speaker 1: do anything different, we have to step into uncertainty. That's
Speaker 1: what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step
Speaker 1: into uncertainty through the process of play. Yeah. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of a quote badly enough by Timothy Leary who
Speaker 1: talked about before he gets his childlike was childlike. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he was, you know, he was very free
Speaker 1: thinking dude. Um for some of the other faults aside,
Speaker 1: but he has this great quote where he says to
Speaker 1: think for yourself, you must question an authority and learn
Speaker 1: how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open mindedness,
Speaker 1: chaotic confused vulnerability to inform yourself tune in. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: of course the thing is, you know, you need to
Speaker 1: remind mrr Larry that ultimately don't need any pharmaceutical help
Speaker 1: to achieve that. In I mean, all you have to
Speaker 1: do is either be a child or try and think
Speaker 1: like a child, and you can achieve that that level
Speaker 1: of of chaotic, confused vulnerability. Well, here's the thing about
Speaker 1: Larry is that he was a trained scientist, and so
Speaker 1: he had a background in the best ways to go
Speaker 1: about thinking critically but also thinking in a way that
Speaker 1: could really open up the mind. And when I think
Speaker 1: about ways in which you can look at probabilities and
Speaker 1: try to predict the future in a new way or
Speaker 1: an interesting way, I think about Bayesian modeling. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: this is UH something that is named after the Reverend
Speaker 1: Reverend Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth century mathematician, and according to
Speaker 1: Alice and Gopnik, studies show that kids at least unconsciously
Speaker 1: are Asian UH masters themselves. Now here's the thing about
Speaker 1: Beiesian logic is you can really get into the weeds
Speaker 1: trying to understand what it is. Essentially, Baisian probability theory
Speaker 1: is a branch of mathematical theory that allows one to
Speaker 1: model uncertainty about the world and about the outcomes of
Speaker 1: various aspects of that world by combining common sense knowledge
Speaker 1: with observational evidence. Okay, it sounds very mechanical and straightforar
Speaker 1: this because it is. It's actually figures into some of
Speaker 1: our AI constructs that we're working on today. It's a
Speaker 1: central part of trying to figure out how an intelligent
Speaker 1: creature thinks. Yeah, it was actually going to mention that
Speaker 1: Bayesian modeling actually came online in I think the early nineties,
Speaker 1: around the same time that psychologists were beginning to look
Speaker 1: at kids and wondering if this Baisian modeling was inherent
Speaker 1: to them. And it's funny because AI, artificial intelligence and
Speaker 1: kids really go hand in hand because people who are
Speaker 1: interested in AI are interested in looking at kids as
Speaker 1: the root model. In other words, if we're going to
Speaker 1: build a computer that can think like us, act like us,
Speaker 1: make decisions, then we want it to be based on
Speaker 1: this root material. A k a. Kids. And you know,
Speaker 1: as we're moving forward to the future, we we inevitably
Speaker 1: come back to this idea of of robots solving problems,
Speaker 1: computers solving problems. We want to know the weather's doing
Speaker 1: in ten days through a computer model at it, right,
Speaker 1: And it's just gonna become more and more like that
Speaker 1: as we move forward. So it's it's fascinating to think
Speaker 1: that the ais that we're building today to solve the
Speaker 1: problems of tomorrow, children are already born with that, with
Speaker 1: those mechanics in their mind. If they get older and
Speaker 1: they become adults, it becomes clouded. So in a way,
Speaker 1: adult humans are having to build robots that think like
Speaker 1: children so they can solve the problems that they no
Speaker 1: longer can. And one of the reasons that can because
Speaker 1: of preconceived notions. And these again, these these fortresses of
Speaker 1: ideas that we build because whether you're looking at questions
Speaker 1: of I want who's gonna win the election, I wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder what choice I should make in my life
Speaker 1: regarding my employment, uh, any number of questions that may
Speaker 1: come up. We're we're handicapped against applying the Asian logic
Speaker 1: to them because we have these these world views in place,
Speaker 1: these preconceived notions, this fortress of ideas that we have
Speaker 1: to somehow navigate, and it could because of all those
Speaker 1: preconceived notions, they end up flowing the data. Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: And um, you know, kids can really be better problem
Speaker 1: solvers when it comes to Bayesian logic, because, as you say,
Speaker 1: there are certain things that as we get older, we
Speaker 1: have these priors, they get stronger and stronger, and they
Speaker 1: actually need to in some ways to help us survive
Speaker 1: our experience in the world. But we're already relying on
Speaker 1: that too heavily and less on new data, right, so
Speaker 1: we rely more on our past experiences, and these strong
Speaker 1: priors are really actually very comforting to us. But Bayesian
Speaker 1: inference inference, excuse me, it considers both uh, new evidence
Speaker 1: and prior probability of hypotheses, and this gives Baisian learning
Speaker 1: a character characteristic combination of stability and flexibility. So here's
Speaker 1: the key to it really working really well in science
Speaker 1: and with kids. In science. Uh, if if you have
Speaker 1: a really crappy hypothesis, you're gonna throw it out. Kids
Speaker 1: are going to do the same thing. They don't have
Speaker 1: emotional investments or really strong priors. So this allows them
Speaker 1: to go through the information much better. Okay, so how
Speaker 1: do we know that kids are better at some reasoning
Speaker 1: when it comes to to be Asian modeling, um than adults?
Speaker 1: Is it because they say the darniest things? It is
Speaker 1: Alson Gopnik again, who is pretty much the centerpiece for
Speaker 1: this podcast. She used something called a Blikic detector. This
Speaker 1: is a machine that lights up and plays music when
Speaker 1: certain objects which are controlled by the experiment or are
Speaker 1: placed on top of it, plays like a cube onto
Speaker 1: this little platform and lights up and it starts playing music. Right,
Speaker 1: you might have different shapes, you might have a star
Speaker 1: or a cube, or different colors, and so the idea
Speaker 1: is that you begin to understand the relationship of what
Speaker 1: makes the machine work. Well, what she did is she
Speaker 1: asked both adults and children separately in separate experiments, to
Speaker 1: try to figure out these objects and how they would
Speaker 1: make the machine work. I mean, essentially, she was saying,
Speaker 1: go make this machine work. Well, the kids were a
Speaker 1: lot better at it, because what what the adults did
Speaker 1: is they observed what the experiment or did with the
Speaker 1: blocks to make the machine work and there's a really
Speaker 1: strong priors, and so they were holding onto the this
Speaker 1: idea of what happened in the past, whereas the kids
Speaker 1: were able to take every single angle of the blocks
Speaker 1: the colors put together, you know, various points of data
Speaker 1: to figure out how to best make this blicket machine work.
Speaker 1: Another example of this is give an iPad to a
Speaker 1: child and your grandparents and see who figures it out
Speaker 1: for Yeah, and in some not to say that's a
Speaker 1: complete divide, because you're gonna have some older people that
Speaker 1: really dive with new technology and again are really able
Speaker 1: to pass that booket test. Like my wife's grandmother in
Speaker 1: her nineties use the Kindle all the time, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: Do you think kindles in the beginning like an early
Speaker 1: early adopter of that technology. Well, and see there's again
Speaker 1: there's this idea of holding on see this bit of
Speaker 1: your your childhood thinking or your childness, or this openness
Speaker 1: to new ideas and experiences and not saying up a
Speaker 1: machine for a bug, give me my old books, Just
Speaker 1: give me my paper, my paper, I just move with
Speaker 1: my finger. Yeah, yeah, you can do the same thing
Speaker 1: with kindle. Um, all right, So there's this idea. Another
Speaker 1: pcassa quote that everything you can imagine is real. Now
Speaker 1: I would say that I would add this, you just
Speaker 1: have to make it fit into that bay Asian model.
Speaker 1: So anything you dream of could be real as long
Speaker 1: as you can make it fit into the constructs of
Speaker 1: our physical world. And that's where Okem's razor comes in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all comes razor. Is this idea that basically the simplest
Speaker 1: answer is the one that is probably the most likely answer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Akams raisers. It's interesting because the term first appears around
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty, two centuries after the death of the guy's
Speaker 1: named after, who was a fourteenth century Franciscan friar by
Speaker 1: the name of William of Oakum. Uh. Really fascinating dude. Um.
Speaker 1: If you've ever read the Name of the rose By
Speaker 1: and Burn of Eco, the main character in that, who's
Speaker 1: a Sherlock Holmes styled monk named William of Baskerville. He's
Speaker 1: always talking about his friendship and camaraderie with Oakum's way
Speaker 1: of thinking, because despite being a Franciscan friar, he was
Speaker 1: you could you imagine, all right, what he's gonna be
Speaker 1: a really religious dude. He's gonna see the world through
Speaker 1: religious goggles and to a certain extent you, as we've
Speaker 1: discussed in a recent podcast on witchcraft, that's gonna be
Speaker 1: a part of the way you see the world. You
Speaker 1: just can't help with us the world you're born into.
Speaker 1: But Oakum was a realist, and what we call a nominalist.
Speaker 1: Nominalism is the theory that there are no universal soul,
Speaker 1: essences and reality. He argued that only individuals exist rather
Speaker 1: than super individual universals, essences, and forms. So to break
Speaker 1: that down in a really sustinct way, I turned to
Speaker 1: Catholic Encyclopedia of all places. They have a really nice
Speaker 1: paragraph and we're just gonna read this. They say, exaggerated
Speaker 1: realism invents a world of reality, corresponding exactly to the
Speaker 1: attributes of the world of thought. Nominalism, on the contrary,
Speaker 1: models the concept on the external object, which it holds
Speaker 1: to be individual in particular. So it comes down to
Speaker 1: how are you gonna understand the world around you? Are
Speaker 1: you gonna start with the ideas about the world and
Speaker 1: work down to the world itself, or do you start
Speaker 1: with the world and work out from there? And so
Speaker 1: that's that's a large part of Lum's Razer. Right there
Speaker 1: is is looking at this idea, this possible theory for
Speaker 1: what's happening, and then asking yourself which hypothesis conforms to
Speaker 1: the world that we observe and not the world that
Speaker 1: we think exists. This is the basis of the scientific method,
Speaker 1: and so when we talk about science and scientists and play,
Speaker 1: this is really essentially we're talking about because in a way,
Speaker 1: this is a bit of a thought experiment, although with
Speaker 1: the thought experiment you're just trying to kind of throw
Speaker 1: everything out there. You're not really looking for for something
Speaker 1: that's going to stick. But it's the same idea that
Speaker 1: you you try to figure out every hypothesis you can
Speaker 1: and then you call out the ones that don't make
Speaker 1: any sense or at least probable. Um. Now, this is
Speaker 1: really an awesome game to play with kids because it
Speaker 1: fuels their imagination, but it also gives them the tools
Speaker 1: to sort through all the data that they have and
Speaker 1: find a line of logic. And it's a particularly a
Speaker 1: nice game to play when they're at that age where
Speaker 1: they're asking a bazilion questions about how the world works. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like why is that? Why is the sky blue? Well,
Speaker 1: because it has to do with reflectional well, why is
Speaker 1: that the case? Then? Why is that the case? And
Speaker 1: and you can either give up like the lady I
Speaker 1: observed at a zoo once when the child asked, Mommy,
Speaker 1: why does the commode dragon? Why does he look like that?
Speaker 1: And she just responded because that's just the way God
Speaker 1: made him, honey. Right there, there's a complete non answer,
Speaker 1: and not engaging with the child's curiosity about the world
Speaker 1: and instead saying, here's a big wall of the fortress
Speaker 1: of ideas, let me erect that in in the way
Speaker 1: of the horizon. Say I'm going to say that that
Speaker 1: parent probably had low blood sugar. So before you engage
Speaker 1: in augms phraser, make sure you eat something because you're
Speaker 1: gonna need that energy because kids will ask a million questions,
Speaker 1: as you say, and it can get a little bit like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, like after fifteen million questions. But you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: my daughter asked me a ton of questions every day
Speaker 1: about everything, and um, one of the things that I
Speaker 1: noticed was she's starting to enter into that territory where
Speaker 1: the unknown is frightening her. So she's really looking for answers,
Speaker 1: she's looking for comfort, Like the skeleton thing you mentioned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's she's very frightened of skeletons, even though we've talked
Speaker 1: about how they're inside our bodies. Um, you know, they
Speaker 1: help us to walk, so on and so forth, a
Speaker 1: very practical things. She said, I don't care. I just
Speaker 1: don't want to see them outside of the skin, which
Speaker 1: is a reasonable request. What are you know what you're
Speaker 1: gonna say to that. Um, But one of the things
Speaker 1: that drives her nuts, or has in the past, is
Speaker 1: that we'll she'll hear things on the roof of our house. Well,
Speaker 1: I know it's magnolia pods. There's just falling and they're
Speaker 1: huge and they're I mean, they do sound like someone's
Speaker 1: on the roof. Yeah, oh yeah, the squirrels. It's a
Speaker 1: racetrack actually on our house, particularly this time of year
Speaker 1: in the fall. But um, so if I hear allowed that,
Speaker 1: what I've done in the past is I've said, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, let's look out the window and see what's
Speaker 1: on the ground, and they will observe that there are
Speaker 1: magnolia pods all over the yard. So then I can
Speaker 1: ask my daughter, and I've done this before, which is, hey, okay,
Speaker 1: what else do you think could be causing that noise.
Speaker 1: So now we're entering into this idea of blackham threachers,
Speaker 1: where we're going to gather as many hypotheses as possible,
Speaker 1: and so she's come up with before you know, again,
Speaker 1: the skeleton is a skeleton. It's trying to come down
Speaker 1: the gym name get me um Or she has observed
Speaker 1: that there's construction in our neighborhood, and she said that
Speaker 1: it's a construction crane, and she thinks that it just
Speaker 1: came down the street and crashed into our roof. Okay,
Speaker 1: but she's already going from from least believable hypothesis to
Speaker 1: a slightly more believable hypothesis. Yeah, because actually, if you
Speaker 1: count the number of assumptions for all of the hypotheses,
Speaker 1: you will see that the Magnoli pod is one assumption
Speaker 1: it fell from the tree in Atlanta on the ground.
Speaker 1: But a skeleton, well, that is requires the assumption that
Speaker 1: even though it's dead, it doesn't have any flesh around
Speaker 1: it somehow alive, it somehow has a functioning brain. Those
Speaker 1: three it can scale a roof and show me down
Speaker 1: a chimney that's for maybe even five um and then
Speaker 1: it has some business with us. It's got some some
Speaker 1: reason for coming down the chimney and talking to us
Speaker 1: about that too. Is it makes me think, well, to
Speaker 1: make the skeleton down the chimney idea makes sense. You
Speaker 1: really need a working um understanding of necromancy, which is
Speaker 1: just say, you need a fortress of ideas that has
Speaker 1: been carefully constructed by adults to make the unlikely seem plausible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you need so, I say five assumptions there, but really,
Speaker 1: if you're going to detail, there's probably about a hundred
Speaker 1: different assumptions there. So then you get to the crane
Speaker 1: and now you have the crane down the street scenario
Speaker 1: that it can operate on its own. That's an assumption
Speaker 1: that it has somehow managed to make its way through
Speaker 1: four houses and and and and still has momentum that
Speaker 1: it has bumped into the roof, and that somehow, even
Speaker 1: though it's bunched in the roof, there's no damage done
Speaker 1: to our house. There's four assumptions. You're right, there's getting better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if if the if the walking skeleton necromance, the
Speaker 1: idea of that is like it's like a cathedral of
Speaker 1: ideas with flying buttresses and stuff. Whereas the claim moving
Speaker 1: on its own. That's more like a decent um cabin
Speaker 1: in the woods, kind of fortress of ideas, modestly constructed
Speaker 1: but still constructed. Nice. Nice. I like that, Yes, flying
Speaker 1: buttresses as opposed to like a modest cabin. So you
Speaker 1: present all those which I've done with my daughter before,
Speaker 1: and she'll just laugh and say the magnolia pod because
Speaker 1: then she's starting to understand that these are outrageous things.
Speaker 1: But we've been able to talk about really cool different
Speaker 1: ways that the world might work, which is the imagination
Speaker 1: in the creativity part. But now she has something to
Speaker 1: hold onto that is concrete, that is logical, that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she can imagine the flying buttresses and the crazy
Speaker 1: cathedral of ideas. I mean, everyone wants to be able
Speaker 1: to imagine something that that rich and and and just engaging,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like uh, like say Dante's Inferno.
Speaker 1: I love that that's the cathedral ideas that there ever
Speaker 1: was one. But when I actually think about how the
Speaker 1: world works, I choose to go with a far more
Speaker 1: modest construction of ideas um and certainly at times of
Speaker 1: the less the less building there on the horizon, the better,
Speaker 1: And you can actually see the world as it perhaps
Speaker 1: really is now. Gothnick says that these cathedral of ideas,
Speaker 1: this is really the evolutionary juice of our species. We
Speaker 1: have to have this imagine a because she said, you know,
Speaker 1: think about every single thing around you right now. Think
Speaker 1: about this microphone in front of us. This was once
Speaker 1: an idea in someone's head and it was part of
Speaker 1: their imagination, and they just used their available knowledge to
Speaker 1: create this thing. Uh, you know, given a couple of
Speaker 1: constructs of what is possible what is not possible. So
Speaker 1: you know, she's saying that if you are um, a
Speaker 1: human fifty thou years ago, this is incredibly important as well,
Speaker 1: because you're trying to imagine or predict really what the
Speaker 1: year is going to look for you. So you start
Speaker 1: to really pay attention to seasons when some animals might
Speaker 1: be migrating, right, and you start to sort of imagine
Speaker 1: yourself participating in this future self or this future part
Speaker 1: of yourself. So again, just all of this is ah
Speaker 1: I think, an evolutionary boon to us, this stability to imagine, create,
Speaker 1: play and essentially become scientists. All right, Well, on that note,
Speaker 1: let's call over the robot and get some listener mail here.
Speaker 1: The first one comes from a listener by the name
Speaker 1: of h. A. H A writes in and says, greetings
Speaker 1: Robert and Julie, regarding your mention of Bloody Mary in
Speaker 1: your recent podcast Light as a Feather Stiff as a Board.
Speaker 1: I've always, personally, i albeit humorously, believed that the Bloody
Speaker 1: Mary myth that she would appear of her name was
Speaker 1: spoken a certain number of times in front of a
Speaker 1: mirror was real, but that everybody that's tried it so
Speaker 1: far had just gotten the number of times one has
Speaker 1: to say her name to invoke her wrong. I believe
Speaker 1: the correct number is three hundred and thirty three. No,
Speaker 1: I've never tried it anyway. Thank you for the entertaining
Speaker 1: and informative podcast. We'll see there's a there's an interesting,
Speaker 1: uh cathedral of ideas that only not a cathedral. But
Speaker 1: let's say there's a modest cabin of ideas, and our
Speaker 1: listener here built a little extension. Well, yeah, what is
Speaker 1: half of if you double three three, what is that? Well,
Speaker 1: that would be six D sixty six. Yeah, so curious
Speaker 1: to know why it would be half of the devil's numbers,
Speaker 1: and that their math is wrong, that the actually needs
Speaker 1: to be doubled up or I don't know, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: Bloody Mary is going to match that number on the
Speaker 1: other side and then there then becomes complete. Well, it
Speaker 1: reminds me of pretty much every attempt to predict to
Speaker 1: the end of the world, be at the rapture or
Speaker 1: something else. Inevitably that comes a point where that where
Speaker 1: someone says, well, the math was wrong. We need to
Speaker 1: do the math a little more correctly to figure out
Speaker 1: exactly when the world's gonna end. So I'm sure if
Speaker 1: if someone were to count up to thirty three, uh,
Speaker 1: there would be a need to revise our predictions speaking
Speaker 1: of when is the next end of the world, Oh
Speaker 1: like now or something that the mind calendar. When what's
Speaker 1: happening right now outside the door? Oh yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: that was. I just thought there was a lot of traffic.
Speaker 1: We also heard from a listener by the name of Kristen.
Speaker 1: Kristen writes and says, hey, guys, in the Maps episodes,
Speaker 1: you talked about how humans are just wired to respond
Speaker 1: to vertical and horizontal and diagonals and mess things up.
Speaker 1: It triggered a memory for me three summers ago, I
Speaker 1: visited my friend in Colorado and we went to an
Speaker 1: old West type town. They had a mystery house there.
Speaker 1: You went inside. It started out with the hallway floor
Speaker 1: slanted at a slight angle, which was fine, and then
Speaker 1: it opened up into this huge room and the floor
Speaker 1: there was at a forty five degree angle. I guess
Speaker 1: my brain totally shut down because as soon as I
Speaker 1: stepped into the room, I just fell down into the
Speaker 1: wall and couldn't move or stop laughing. My friend's dad
Speaker 1: had to help me out because I could not move.
Speaker 1: L o l uh. It's my favorite memory. Thanks for
Speaker 1: the great podcast. That's because that draws us right into
Speaker 1: the episode we did on Haunted Houses to how if
Speaker 1: you screwed around with the shape of rooms and engage
Speaker 1: more of that diagonal construction, then it throws us off.
Speaker 1: It throws throws off our ability to predict what's going
Speaker 1: to happen, our understanding where we are in a space.
Speaker 1: That's right because we have many more neurons that are
Speaker 1: dedicated to the X Y access than the diagonal access.
Speaker 1: So it makes sense that our brain would like this
Speaker 1: very clean lines, and of course haunted houses like to
Speaker 1: play with that idea, so that's fascinating. Thanks for writing
Speaker 1: into us, Kristen and h A. We always love to
Speaker 1: hear from our our listeners and if you have anything
Speaker 1: to add on this podcast, let us know. And we
Speaker 1: know we have a lot of parents out there as
Speaker 1: their listeners, and then many more who have children in
Speaker 1: their lives, and many more still who are very talented artists,
Speaker 1: uh and creative people. We'd love to hear from you
Speaker 1: guys as well. How do how does the child inside
Speaker 1: you come out when you engage and creative act? Send
Speaker 1: us an example of what you do to We'd love
Speaker 1: to share it on Facebook and let us know how
Speaker 1: the young lauarvel human in your life, How they seem
Speaker 1: to see the world around you, What kind of questions
Speaker 1: are they asking, What unique inside are they bringing the
Speaker 1: table when they construct their own fortress of ideas. You
Speaker 1: can find us on Facebook, you can find us on tumbler.
Speaker 1: We are stuff to blow your mind on both of
Speaker 1: those and on Twitter we go by the handle blow
Speaker 1: the Mind and you can always drop us a line
Speaker 1: at Blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com.