Learn how deliberate practice makes perfect, what the New England Vampire Panic is, and how baby tortoises are attracted to faces from birth
Learn how deliberate practice makes perfect, what the New England Vampire Panic is, and how baby tortoises are attracted to faces from birth.
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Practice Won't Make Perfect, But Deliberate Practice Might by Ashley Hamer
After the Salem Witch Trials, There Was the New England Vampire Panic by Reuben Westmaas
Baby tortoises are attracted to faces from birth, which means faces have been important for a long time by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/baby-tortoises-love-faces-and-thats-a-big-deal-for-science
ASLEY HAMER: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about how deliberate practice makes perfect, the tragic story of the New England vampire panic, and how baby tortoises love faces and what that means for us.
ASLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
As many teachers have said, practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. In other words, hours spent at the piano or in the batting cages aren't worth much unless you're smart about it. Your practice doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be deliberate.
That's the lesson from performance expert K. Anders Ericsson, whose research into deliberate practice can help kids, and adults, for that matter, get more out of their practice sessions. Ericsson's 1993 study was the basis for the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become world class in any field. It was made popular in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. But by focusing on the hours, Ericsson says Gladwell missed the point. It's not about the quantity of practice, but the quality.
So what is deliberate practice? And how do you do it? You could say that the difference between practice and deliberate practice comes down to your comfort level. Regular practice is fun. You do what you enjoy for a handful of hours a week and hopefully get good at it. Deliberate practice requires spending lots of time outside of your comfort zone, working at the things you're lousy at and accepting criticism from someone smarter than you.
Take, for example, a child learning to play guitar. In the traditional practice model, she could sit in her room learning the chords she needs to play her favorite songs and eventually, start a band. The deliberate practice model is more effective but admittedly less pleasant. In this model, she starts taking private lessons from an experienced teacher. That teacher assesses her ability and gives her regular personalized feedback on what needs improvement, which she uses every day to practice her weakest skills.
Eventually, she begins performing, first with the help of her teacher and then on her own, all the while doing her own self-assessment to figure out what areas could use more practice. Of course, it's important not to push kids too far. But eventually, Ericsson says that they'll learn that working hard on something they love reaps benefits. And even if they don't become the next Eddie Van Halen, rest in peace, they've developed a skill that's even more useful, deliberate practice.
NATALIA REAGAN: Mwa-ha-ha-ha, it's Thursday. You know what that means? It's time to satisfy that Cody Fix. And since it's Halloween week, we wanted to give you an especially ghoulish story, so here is a tale about the New England vampire panic. Despite the title, I promise it doesn't suck.
CODY GOUGH: Around Halloween, a lot of people think about the Salem witch trials, but what about the New England vampire panic? That's the thing that happened in the 1800s, and it involved a whole lot of grave digging. We will tell the tragic story of one family to illustrate how this all came about. And it centers around the Brown family in the late 1800s.
They all fell prey to tuberculosis, which was often called consumption in those days. It's a wasting disease that could take years to kill its victims. George Brown's wife and granddaughter both died of the disease in the early 1880s. And his daughter, Mercy Lena Brown, died from a decade later in 1892. At that time, George's son, Edwin, had been trying to recover from the disease for years. After all that bad luck, George was desperate for a way to cure his family's misfortune. He'd already lost a bunch of family members, and he wanted to save Edwin.
His neighbors convinced him that there might be something supernatural leeching their strength. This was centuries after the Salem witch trials but that didn't stop a group of New Englanders from searching for monsters in the area. So on March 17, 1892, a group of local men dug up three deceased members of the Brown family. They were searching for signs that one of them was rising from their graves. And Mercy Lena Brown, who had been buried only a few months ago in the cold New England weather, was almost perfectly preserved.
Now, the village doctor explained the body was preserved thanks to weather conditions and she clearly had symptoms of tuberculosis. But the people of Exeter, Rhode Island did not care. They removed her heart and liver, burned her hearts to ashes, and fed those ashes to her brother Edwin. Tragically, Edwin died less than two months later.
This family sad story all took place after Dr. Robert Koch figured out the causes of tuberculosis in 1882. And before that, supernatural explanations for the disease were even more common. The silver lining of this ghost story is that most of the victims of this persecution had probably already passed away before the crowds rose up against them. A bit less violent than the Salem witch trials, but haunting nonetheless.
NATALIA REAGAN: If you've spent much time around babies then you already know they have a thing for faces, especially silly ones. And it's not just human babies, all kinds of social animals from chicks to monkeys display the same preference. But a surprising new study found that it's not just social animals either. Baby tortoises did the same thing.
The researchers behind the study cared for eggs from five different species of tortoise. When the eggs hatched, the researchers were careful to keep the hatchlings from seeing any faces at all-- human, tortoise, or otherwise. The tortoises probably didn't mind because they evolved to go it alone. Baby tortoises don't receive any care from their parents in the wild.
To gauge their preference for faces, each tortoise was placed in a box that was divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant featured a pattern made of blobs. One of the blob patterns was designed to look like a face. The researchers watched to see what pattern the little dudes preferred as indicated by which quadrant they went into first. As it turned out they tended to prefer the patterns that look like faces. In one of the experiments, the tortoises preferred the face 74% of the time.
But why is this so surprising? Well, the reason scientists think some newborn animals are born with a preference for faces is that it helps them interact with their parents. That makes sense for humans, chicks, and monkeys because newborns and all those species get quite a bit of attention from their parents at the beginning of their lives. The same isn't true for tortoises, which are solitary reptiles that have been shown to ignore or avoid other tortoises early in life. Go away. Leave me be.
It will take a lot more data to really make sense of the finding, but the researchers have a few thoughts. This may be the first clue that infant face preference evolved for a reason other than jumpstarting the parent child relationship. Maybe an attraction towards faces is more about seeking out other living animals of any species, since they may lead to resources and other helpful clues about the environment. After all, a vulnerable baby tortoise needs all the information it can get in order to survive.
Either way, the researchers also say it's likely that the behavior evolved more than 300 million years ago in an ancestor common to mammals, birds, and reptiles. Evolutionarily speaking, we've loved faces for much longer than we thought,
ASLEY HAMER: All right, well let's do a quick recap of what we learned today.
NATALIA REAGAN: Well, we learned that practice is great and all. But if you're just practicing what you feel comfortable doing, you're not going to excel like you would if you get out of that comfort zone and deliberately practice. This is why I still remember the Katas I learned in the third grade.
ASLEY HAMER: Is that martial arts?
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes. Shorin-ryu is a hard-hitting, no holds barred martial art, emphasizing in bold, tactical ingenuity and street-proven techniques of self-defense.
ASLEY HAMER: Sounds like Cobra Kai.
NATALIA REAGAN: Kind of. And I remember there's a whole creed, and I remember the whole thing. My favorite is, I will forge my body in the fire of my will. I will be born again hard.
ASLEY HAMER: Wow.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I deliberately practice that martial art.
ASLEY HAMER: Nice.
NATALIA REAGAN: Up until I was a brown belt.
ASLEY HAMER: Yeah. I mean, this was huge in music school. Throughout my years of music training, it was always drilled into me that I have to do the things that are hard for me to do. I actually have a saxophone book, where my teacher actually made me-- we had this big freshman class, and he had us all open up our books and write down this quote from him and actually credit him with the quote. And it was, I must do the things I cannot do. And that's basically it. It's like you aren't going to get better at doing the things you can already do. You have to figure out how to do the things you can't. And that's basically all that deliberate practice is.
NATALIA REAGAN: It really is. I wish I had been better about that because I did play music as a child. But it was something that did not come easy to me. My brother flourished. My brother is a great musician. And maybe there's something to be said for somebody that has kind of a natural knack at playing an instrument, but it sounds to me like you worked really hard to get where you are. I'd love to see you play in person one day.
ASLEY HAMER: One day after COVID. I mean, it might just be my own identity and the way that I narrate my life, but I don't think that it has ever come naturally to me. I think every single bit of music has been just fighting tooth and nail to get there, which I think has its own value, right? Yeah, I don't think I'm a natural for sure.
NATALIA REAGAN: I think that's way more impressive honestly. You know what I mean? Like, I think that shows your tenacity.
ASLEY HAMER: Yeah. And we also learned that in the 1800s, when tuberculosis, a.k.a. consumption, was killing members of a New England family, that town's population went to some gruesome measures to make sure something supernatural wasn't at play. That included exhuming the dead and forcing the living relatives to eat the ashes of their dead sister's heart. This sounds so much like the zombie thing that we talked about yesterday.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, goodness.
ASLEY HAMER: There's some creepy stuff that happens around the world.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. That is a huge leap. Who came up with this? OK, guys, I got an idea, we got-- OK, we got we got to take out the heart and the liver. Let's burn it. And let's just feed it to the kid.
[LAUGHTER]
Look, what? I'm also impressed by the imagination really.
ASLEY HAMER: And lastly, we learned that baby tortoises show interest in faces, which is cool because, unlike mammal babies, they have no need to seek out mom, which means interest in faces must have an early evolutionary advantage. It's old.
NATALIA REAGAN: Part of me is wondering if maybe those poor tortoises are looking for mom, and they just never find her.
ASLEY HAMER: Oh.
NATALIA REAGAN: But I also am curious what did these blob faces look like. Did they look like human faces, tortoise faces?
ASLEY HAMER: I can tell you. I mean, they were literally dots. They were literally like two eyes and a mouth, the kind of thing you'd do if you were just drawing a face with dots. Like, an open mouth. It's like the emoji for surprise.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: That's funny because you look excited to be born, too. Oh, that's really cute. I do think this is interesting because if they think it evolved 300 million years ago, we're talking dinosaurs where like, seeking out faces. Hey, hey, hey, friend, are you a friend? Are you a friend? Will you eat me? Are you going to eat me? Don't eat me. I promise I'm nice.
ASLEY HAMER: Oh, I love it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Grant Curran, and Reuben Westmaaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonia Hodges. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan with additional editing by our producer, Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Be sure to say hi to the baby tortoises. And join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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