Learn about the complicated history of the NATO phonetic alphabet; why we eat three meals a day; and how you can use a technique called Functional Imagery Training to achieve your goals faster. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: The Complicated History of the Alfa, Bravo, Charlie Alphabet — https://curiosity.im/2KfUcAF A Technique Called FIT Can Help You Achieve Your Goals Faster — https://curiosity.im/2LAhsLF Additional resources discussed: Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them? | BBC News — https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692 Is there a biological reason to eat three meals a day? | HowStuffWorks — https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/biological-reason-to-eat-three-meals-day.htm Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about the complicated history of the NATO phonetic alphabet; why we eat three meals a day; and how you can use a technique called Functional Imagery Training to achieve your goals faster.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Additional resources discussed:
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/achieve-your-goals-faster-why-we-eat-3-meals-a-day-and-the-nato-phonetic-alphabet
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about the complicated history of the NATO phonetic alphabet; and, a technique to help you achieve your goals faster. We’ll also answer a listener question about why we eat three meals a day.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The Complicated History of the Alfa, Bravo, Charlie Alphabet — https://curiosity.im/2KfUcAF (Cody)
CODY: Alfa, Sierra, Hotel, Lima, Echo, Yankee. [ad lib]
If you’re like me, you probably pull random letters out of the air when you’re spelling your name on the phone. C, O, D-as-in-dog or D-as-in-Delta, Y. But for the servicemen and women who started using spelling alphabets back in the early 1900s, the difference between “M as in Madagascar” and “C as in Casablanca” was a life or death distinction. Imagine you're on the radio, trying to warn soldiers of a mustard gas attack. You'd want to make sure they heard "mustard," not "custard." So let’s talk about the NATO alphabet — and its complicated history. Just so we’re clear, there is one official version of the NATO alphabet, and it’s used all around the world. According to NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — the phonetic alphabet we use today became official in 1956. It's now the universal phonetic alphabet, and this is how it goes: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu. Before that, the phonetic alphabet went through a few practice runs. In 1927, the International Telegraph Union came up with a spelling alphabet for telegraph communications. Through the start of World War II, most commercial airlines used these ITU code words to communicate. That alphabet featured names of cities, so to spell 'Sam,' you'd say, "Santiago, Amsterdam, Madagascar." But this alphabet wasn’t standard everywhere in the English-speaking world. During World War I, the British Royal Navy used a spelling alphabet that began "Apples, Butter, Charlie" while infantrymen said "Ack, Beer, Charlie" instead. After the United States joined the war, the Allied Forces kinda mashed them together and came up with an alphabet called “Able, Baker.” But Spanish and French speakers had a hard time recognizing those words. So in 1951, the International Air Transport Association developed a spelling alphabet that more closely resembles the one we now use. By the way, lots of other spelling alphabets have existed, but these are the main English-speaking ones. As for the future of the NATO alphabet, some are starting to argue that we don’t really need it. Atlas Obscura’s Dan Nosowitz recently noted that nobody actually memorizes it, and that new technology makes voice quality clear, so we don’t even really need it as much. But he and the scientists he talked to don't have a good solution. It's hard to find words that speakers of all languages can pronounce and recognize, and it's even harder to convince people to memorize the order of 26 words and have them on the tip of the tongue. So it seems we're stuck with the hodge-podge we have. November, Bravo, Delta.
ASHLEY: We got a listener question from Likhit, who asks, “who came up with this three meals a day concept of breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” Great question!
These days, three meals a day is so ingrained in most of our routines that you might guess that it’s some sort of biological requirement. But in fact, for a lot of history, people only ate one meal a day. The ancient Romans, for instance, stuck to one big feast in the middle of the day, and monks in the Middle Ages were actually forbidden from eating before morning Mass, so they had their big meal long after sunrise, as well. Despite the fact it wasn’t a morning meal, when the term “breakfast” was first coined: the monks were breaking their overnight fast. There was another reason for the one-meal-a-day thing beyond tradition: before refrigeration and modern stoves, preparing food was a big ordeal. That’s probably why the first breakfasts as we know them became most common with 17th century aristocrats — they were the ones who could afford to send someone out for ingredients in the morning and keep the fire burning through the night.
But in the Industrial Revolution, the working classes got into the breakfast game for practical reasons: if you were going to work long hours in the factory, you had to have the fuel to sustain yourself. That was also when lunch became popular, for pretty much the same reason. In general, eating patterns were dictated by your working hours, so a light lunch became the midday meal and dinner was pushed to the evening after you clocked out for the day. By the late 18th century, most people in cities were eating three meals a day. These days, working hours are shifting even more thanks to the way so many jobs have gone remote, which might explain why fewer people are eating breakfast and the snack industry is booming. But you can still see echoes of our ancient meal habits on holidays and celebrations: here in the U.S., anyway, many people have Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner in the afternoon, with very little breakfast or lunch to speak of. When it’s time to celebrate, we’re all still ancient Romans in our hearts.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692
https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/biological-reason-to-eat-three-meals-day.htm
A Technique Called FIT Can Help You Achieve Your Goals Faster — https://curiosity.im/2LAhsLF (Cody)
When you set a goal but you don’t reach it, a lot of the time it’s not because you don't know how. If you’re like a lot of people, the real issue is a lack of motivation — and now researchers have found a new way to generate it using a therapy that you can try, too. It’s called Functional Imagery Training, or FIT, and a study from September 2018 backs up its positive effects.
FIT involves visualizing what it would be like to achieve your goals in deep, sensory detail.
But a FIT session often starts somewhere else entirely. Therapists might open by asking patients to deeply visualize a lemon. You can try it now. Imagine looking at a lemon, touching it, drinking its juice, and hey, since we’re imagining here, getting its juice squirted in your eyes.
I’m sorry I did that, but now I have to ask: did your eye sting a bit just now? Your imagination is intimately linked with your five senses, and that’s what makes visualizing a goal so powerful.
The study reported in the Journal of Obesity was designed to assess FIT's effectiveness as a weight-loss strategy. It involved 141 participants, who were randomly sorted into two groups. One group received FIT therapy; the other received Motivational Interviewing therapy, which is a more traditional treatment that urges people to articulate their goals but places less emphasis on visualization and sensory detail.
The results were clear: FIT was more effective. People in the FIT group lost roughly six times more weight than their counterparts who did Motivational Interviewing. Six times!
And as a bonus, The FIT group also kept losing weight after the study ended — compared to the other group who, on average, lost no additional weight.
Researchers are still trying to figure out why FIT worked so much better than Motivational Interviewing — and what other goals it can help people achieve. So far, the theory goes that part of FIT's strength is that it empowers patients to help themselves. You don't need a therapist to re-access the vision you come up with in a FIT session; you just need your imagination. So FIT, as the proverb goes, may be like teaching a person to fish, whereas MI is more like giving a person a fish. The power is in you — you just have to visualize it.
ASHLEY: Now let’s recap what we learned today! Today, we learned that it took a long time to come up with the NATO alphabet we use today.
CODY: And that [LISTENER QUESTION]
ASHLEY: And that if you visualize your goal in DEEP, sensory detail, you might come closer to achieving it!
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes! I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!