Learn about how to cope with “anticipatory grief” you’re probably feeling during the coronavirus pandemic; the controversy around Oculudentavis khaungraae, which may be the smallest dinosaur ever discovered; and how researchers discovered that music and speech are encoded in separate brain hemispheres.
Learn about how to cope with “anticipatory grief” you’re probably feeling during the coronavirus pandemic; the controversy around Oculudentavis khaungraae, which may be the smallest dinosaur ever discovered; and how researchers discovered that music and speech are encoded in separate brain hemispheres.
When you mourn something before you've lost it, that's anticipatory grief by Kelsey Donk
Scientists claim to have discovered the smallest known dinosaur of the Mesosoic by Cameron Duke
Scientists found how music and speech are encoded in separate brain hemispheres by Andrea Michelson
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/anticipatory-grief-during-a-pandemic-the-smallest-dinosaur-ever-maybe-and-how-your-brain-processes-music-and-speech-differently
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 how to cope with a type of grief you’re probably feeling during the coronavirus pandemic; the controversy around what might be the smallest dinosaur ever discovered; and how researchers discovered that music and speech are encoded in separate brain hemispheres.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
An ongoing global pandemic has us all feeling a lot of things right now, and one of those feelings is grief. Most of us are familiar with the kind of grief we feel after we lose someone or something we care about, but today I want to talk about “anticipatory grief.” It’s something you’re probably already feeling, and there are a few strategies experts suggest you can use to cope with it. Fair warning that this story gets a little dark, but psychology isn’t always pretty. And we think this could help you deal with these strange times we’re all in right now. So let’s dive in.
David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief, and in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, he explains what it means to grieve something before it happens. Anticipatory grief is the uncomfortable feeling we get when we’re not really sure what the future holds. It might involve a longing for the past — like, maybe a past where you got to visit family whenever you wanted, or maybe a past that involved crowded coffee shops. And that longing comes with a fear that those things won’t return. Sound familiar?
Anticipatory grief usually orients itself around death. It’s what we feel when we suddenly remember that some day, a parent or spouse will die; or, that feeling we get when we learn that a friend has gotten a scary medical diagnosis. But this kind of grief can also look more broad or vague, and that’s what a lot of us are collectively experiencing right now — the feeling that the future holds something terrible.
Grief like this is confusing because we know something bad is happening, but we can’t predict how bad it will be, and we don’t know when it will hit someone close to us. It’s a lot! But Dr. Kessler says a few things can help with anticipatory grief.
First of all, try your best to find balance in your imagined futures. It’s okay if you find yourself imagining a worst-case scenario where you or your loved ones might die. But you should also try to imagine that they might get a little sick and then be okay. It’s imporant that you try to keep the best- and worst-case scenarios in balance.
Next, try to remember that other people are also feeling pain and anxiety right now. They might snap at you or be distant or break promises. That’s their grief talking. You may want to cut them some slack.
But most importantly, name your feelings — say “I’m feeling sad right now,” or “I have a lot of anxiety today.” Kessler says that when you name your feelings and experiences, it’s easier to feel them and let the move through you. Fighting them doesn’t really help. Kessler promises that if we let ourselves feel our feelings, we won’t be overrun by them. Instead, they’ll keep moving and we’ll be on to the next feeling in no time.
If anticipatory grief is what you’re feeling right now, name it, feel it, and keep moving.
Scientists say they’ve discovered the smallest known dinosaur of the Mesozoic. But that claim comes with a bit of controversy. Are you ready for some paleontology drama? Because I’m ready to talk about some paleontology drama.
This all centers on the newly described Oculudentavis khaungraae [OCK-yoo-low-den-TAH-viss KONG-ray], which lived about 99 million years ago. The only fossil we have of it is its skull, which is half the length of an aspirin tablet. The researchers say it’s from a small, flying dinosaur — in other words, a bird — and it was no bigger than our smallest modern hummingbirds. Estimates put its weight at no more than two grams. That’s about as much as a single playing card.
That tiny size isn’t the strangest thing about Oculudentavis. It also had more than a hundred razor-sharp teeth, which researchers say that is the most teeth of any known dinosaur. The teeth are fused with the skull, which is even stranger for a dino. They extend far back enough in the mouth to sit underneath the eyes, which suggests it could open its mouth super wide.
Speaking of its eyes, that’s just one more of this pipsqueak dino’s strange features. Its teeth suggest that it was a predator, probably of insects. But a predator typically has eyes that face forward, on the front of its head, and Oculudentavis had bulging eyes on the sides of its head. That’s a trait more common of herbivores.
But with all these oddities, there’s a catch: some other scientists dispute these conclusions. They say that while these features are strange for a dinosaur, they’re pretty normal for a lizard. Lizards have lots of sharp, fused teeth and eyes on the sides of their heads. There are also a lot of lizards with skulls smaller than this one. Plus, one feature that’s a calling card of archosaurs — the group that includes birds and crocodilians — is a couple of holes in their skulls in front of their eyes called antorbital fenestrae [fen-EST-ray]. And Oculudentavis doesn’t have any.
And that’s not the only controversy surrounding this tiny skull. The amber specimen came from Myanmar, where miners face unsafe working conditions, and where the military has displaced thousands of indigenous people in an effort to take over the mines. The amber is often smuggled into China, where the high prices paid by private buyers may be both stifling scientific discovery and fueling that military conflict.
Whatever species this specimen ends up being, its story is much larger than its tiny skull. This fossil trapped in amber shows us how science isn’t always clear-cut — it’s a messy process that faces all the same challenges as any human endeavor.
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A recent study found out why processing speech and processing music happen on opposite sides of your brain. Which is a big deal, since that’s been a scientific mystery for decades.
You might have heard the myth that your left brain is more logical, while your right brain is more creative. That’s not backed up by scientific evidence, but it is true that each side of your brain deals with slightly different cognitive tasks. For decades, scientists have known that each brain hemisphere responds to speech and music differently, but they haven’t really known why. What difference is the brain picking out to differentiate between speech and song?
To find out, a team of researchers at McGill University’s neurological institute enlisted the help of the school of music. They got a capella recordings of a soprano singing a sentence. Something like this.
[Unprocessed sound clip]
Then, they added some effects to distort the sound, based on spectral and temporal dynamics. Spectral changes have to do with frequency, and temporal features relate to time. The result is a bunch of warped, somewhat creepy-sounding recordings. Like, here’s what the recording with spectral modulation sounds like.
[Spectral modulation]
And here’s what the temporal modulation sounds like.
[Temporal modulation]
You can take the whole test online — there’s a link in today’s show notes. But if you’re anything like the participants, one of those made it easier for you to understand the words that were said, and one made it easier to hear the notes that were being sung. When spectral information was distorted, participants had trouble picking out the melody. When temporal information was altered, the words were harder to parse.
The cool part is that these two types of information are actually processed on different sides of your brain. By scanning people’s brains as they tried to distinguish the sounds, researchers could see that they processed speech in their left auditory cortex while they processed melodies in their right auditory cortex. This means that each hemisphere of the brain responds to a different type of acoustic stimulus, with spectral information encoded on the right side and temporal information on the left. Spectral information is most important for picking out musical features, while temporal information is most important for understanding speech.
That discovery helped these scientists solve the decades-old mystery of why we process speech and music on different sides of the brain. Now that’s music to my ears!
A: Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Cameron Duke, and Andrea Michelson, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: 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!