Author Jen Sincero explains why it’s important to form and maintain habits. You’ll also learn about why phantom limb sensations are way more common than you think; and how the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is warping the Milky Way galaxy.
Author Jen Sincero explains why it’s important to form and maintain habits. You’ll also learn about why phantom limb sensations are way more common than you think; and how the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is warping the Milky Way galaxy.
Additional resources from author Jen Sincero
Phantom Limb Sensations Are Way More Common Than You Think by Ashley Hamer
The Milky Way once collided with the Large Magellanic Cloud by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/a-distant-galaxy-is-warping-the-milky-way
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why habits are important, with help from author Jen Sincero. You’ll also learn about why phantom limb sensations are way more common than you think; and a small galaxy that’s warping the Milky Way.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We talk a lot about how to break and build habits on this podcast. But have you ever stopped to wonder why habits are important in the first place? Today's guest has the answer. Jen Sincero is the author of the new book "Badass Habits: Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick." Yesterday, she told us how important beliefs and identity are to building new habits. Today, we're zooming out and asking: why should we build habits, anyway?
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Again, that was Jen Sincero, author of the new book "Badass Habits: Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick." You can find a link to pick it up in the show notes.
Have you heard of phantom limbs? I’m talking about the sensations that people with amputations sometimes get that make it feel like their lost limb is still there. Here's why they happen, and how they’re teaching scientists more about how the brain operates.
It might surprise you to know that phantom limbs are more common than you’d think. Ninety to 98 percent of people experience a vivid phantom immediately after amputation. Sometimes they even feel like the limb is experiencing intense pain or cramping. For a lot of people, the phantom limb disappears within a few weeks, but for some, it can hang around for decades.
There are a few things that make phantom limbs more or less likely to appear, and that gives scientists hints about how they work in the brain. For example, children are less likely to experience a phantom than adults. That suggests that phantoms might have something to do with a brain being less able to redraw its body map as it ages.
That “body map” is called the somatosensory cortex, which is a region of the brain's wrinkly outer layer. And it really is an almost literal map of the body, where individual areas correspond to individual body parts. When a body part disappears, the brain starts to redraw this map by giving more real estate to the neighboring features. So hand neurons might be slowly taken over by face neurons, for example. But things can get weird. Some amputees will feel sensations on their face as happening both on their face and on their phantom hand.
Phantom pain may come down to how motor commands work in the brain. When you move a limb, your brain creates two copies of the command: one tells the limb what to do, the other double-checks after the limb sends back the "movement accomplished!" message. It's possible that phantom cramping happens because the brain isn't receiving that feedback message, so it's trying harder and harder to create that movement.
That's why treatments using mirrors and virtual reality seem to hold promise; if you can convince your brain that the limb is there and moving, maybe you can keep its motor commands from going haywire. Researchers still aren't sure how effective these treatments are, though.
The brain is an adaptable organ, and scientists are gradually learning how to help it adapt to life without a limb. But in the end, every new discovery about phantom limbs tells us more about the brain as a whole.
This is going to sound like bad news, but don’t worry.
A small galaxy in the night sky is violently deforming the Milky Way galaxy — you know: the spiral disk of stars and planets that we call home. And the researchers who realized what’s happening say this is a pretty big deal; as in, the finding demands a new generation of models that describe the past, present, and future of our home galaxy.
The small galaxy causing this commotion is called the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. It’s visible in the night sky if you’re south of the equator. When researchers in Scotland built a super-complicated statistical model that calculated the speed of the Milky Way’s most far-flung stars, they concluded that the LMC is exerting a surprisingly strong pull on our galaxy.
It might sound strange that such a small galaxy could have such a big effect. And it is: their findings suggest that the LMC has something else going on. That something else is a massive halo of dark matter, which is a kind of matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light, but does exert a powerful gravitational pull. There’s so much dark matter surrounding the LMC that it’s currently pulling and twisting the Milky Way at a rate of about 20 miles or 32 kilometers per second!
That pull is sending our galaxy toward the constellation Pegasus. That’s odd, because it’s not where the LMC is. Pegasus is in the northern sky while the LMC itself is in the southern sky.
This flummoxed the researchers, too, until they realized that we aren’t being pulled toward where the LMC is now. We’re traveling to where it was at some point in the past. The researchers think it’s because the LMC is moving away from the Milky Way a lot faster than we’re moving toward it. It’s sort of like if a wedding crasher snatched the tablecloth from the cake display and kept on running: the cake would fall toward where the guy was when he snatched the cloth, even though he’d be long gone by then.
And if all that wasn’t enough for you, here’s one more huge finding from the study. The LMC probably passed through the Milky Way about 700 million years ago — right around the time that the so-called “Snowball Earth” was giving rise to the first complex animals. If they’d had eyes to see it, it might have been a spectacular show.
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!