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: This Beer Is Made With a Wine-Spoiling Yeast — And It's Delicious Teaching Yourself The History, Chemistry, And Business of Spirits [Full-Length Podcast] Scientists Used Hypnosis to Alter People's Memories The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire Measures How Well You Deal With Your Emotions Emotion Regulation Questionnaire [University of Central Florida] Want to learn more about how psychology can make you happier? Check out "Foundations of Positive Psychology" on Coursera, taught by professors at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center. Want to support our show? Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018 Learn more about these topics and more onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
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:
Want to learn more about how psychology can make you happier? Check out "Foundations of Positive Psychology" on Coursera, taught by professors at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center.
Want to support our show? Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018
Learn more about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/brettanomyces-removing-memories-with-hypnosis-and-the-emotion-regulation-questionnaire
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll learn how an ancient yeast is changing craft beers, why scientists use hypnosis to alter people's memories, and a way to measure how well you deal with your emotions.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, do you like craft beer?
CODY GOUGH: Everybody likes craft beer in Chicago. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure. What's your favorite style?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, I don't know.
ASHLEY HAMER: Really?
CODY GOUGH: I can never remember what hoppy even means.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: I'm really bad.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is like your thing with apples. You don't know what apples taste like. [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: No. I know I like Green Line and a couple Goose Island varieties.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right. Those are local to Chicago. That's nice.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Goose Island Green Line?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Green Line is a pale ale.
CODY GOUGH: But not an India pale ale.
ASHLEY HAMER: No, but it is a little hoppy. I don't really have a favorite, but there's some good ones. I think this Flemish red ale that comes in like a black bottle. Oh, that one's amazing. It tastes like balsamic vinegar but if balsamic vinegar was made into a beverage that tastes good.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: That's really intense.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: And specific.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] Right. Well, that's what it tastes like. So we know not everyone drinks alcohol, but there's actually a lot of science that goes into stuff like fermentation and brewing and all the other chemistry behind beer and wine and everything else in the liquor store. So that's why we wrote about Brettanomyces today. It's an ancient yeast that winemakers want nothing to do with, but beer makers do. But let's back up.
So small-batch craft beer is all the rage. But do you know how it's actually made? It's actually pretty simple. You start with a starch, usually a grain like barley. And then you add some hops, which is a flour, and boiling water. And later, you add yeast.
There are a lot of different starches and hops and yeasts, so that's why there are so many different craft beers out there. There are just so many possible combinations of ingredients. So take yeasts. Those use sugar from the starches as energy, and they leave behind important stuff like alcohol, carbon dioxide, and flavor. So yeast are pretty central to beer brewing and to winemaking, which brings us back to Brettanomyces.
It's kind of an intimidating yeast. There's a phrase I never thought I'd say. But seriously, Brettanomyces is unlike the carefully cultivated varieties that you'll usually find in regular beer. It's known as a wild yeast because it grows naturally on fruit skins and can be found floating around in wine and beermaking environments entirely by accident.
This yeast acts similarly to other yeast that you use to make beer, but it can either taste really good or wreak havoc on the final product. The problem is that it's a slowly fermenting yeast. That means it takes a while to start working, and it's hard to know when to stop letting it ferment. Flavors associated with Brettanomyces range from funky and a little tart to having aromas of stinky feet and sweaty horse blanket. That's a quote.
It's also hard to control. But if you're a brewer that's up for it, you can make some really creative beers with the stuff. You can find it most commonly in styles like lambic, geuze, saison, and Flemish red ale, which is the one I mentioned at the beginning. Just let us know whether it tastes perfectly tart or falls more into the smelly feet category, or maybe even your curiosity has limits.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. The science of this stuff is pretty thorough, and you can take it really far. And if you want to look in the show notes, I'll put a link to the full podcast interview we did with Brian Davis from Lost Spirits Distillery in California. He figured out a way to change the chemical properties of rum to age at 20 years in just six days using chemistry that he taught himself. And his story is really, really fantastic. Again, check the link in the show notes for that. But yeah, this alcohol thing, I guess--
ASHLEY HAMER: It's taken off.
CODY GOUGH: It's going to be big.
(TOGETHER) [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: Have you seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
ASHLEY HAMER: It was only my favorite movie in college.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I love that movie.
CODY GOUGH: I like it a lot. It's underrated in my personal life because I should watch it every couple of years, and I haven't.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's good.
CODY GOUGH: Well, the movie has Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as ex partners who have had each other erased from their memories so they don't have to relive their painful shared past. That's the plot if you haven't seen it. And scientists have used hypnosis to alter people's memories in a new study. It's a thing that is happening now kind of like in that movie, probably not as dramatic, but kind of like it. And this could be big news for people who have suffered from a serious trauma, like abuse or war.
Researchers in Moscow used hypnosis to alter memories of subjects. And according to their new study, that helped subjects experience less anxiety. So what do we mean when we say alter a memory though? Let's say, you've got a deep fear of public speaking. You remember this one time you went up to speak and something embarrassing happened. Maybe you froze up and forget your next line, or somebody threw a tomato at you or something.
The researchers would take that memory and make it positive. So instead of forgetting your lines, you get a new memory where you get a standing ovation at the end of your speech, and then your crush totally wanted to go on a date with you because you did such an awesome job. For this study, researchers did stuff like that in two different types of memory modification. One group of participants met with researchers every week for three weeks and modified a different memory every time. And another do the same thing but while under hypnosis.
There were also control groups, and we wrote about them and all the rest of the details of the study in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But the takeaway is the participants who had built new memories under hypnosis showed a huge reduction in anxiety even four months after the therapy sessions. They also had the most confusion with which was the real memory and which was the false one out of all the groups, which is kind of interesting. The most real thing about this study is that this could be the first step in finding a real-world cure for some anxiety disorders, and that is really cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, how well would you say you deal with your emotions?
CODY GOUGH: Depends on who you ask. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] Oh, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Usually pretty well, I think.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think I do too.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. We're always going to see ourselves in the best light, but I like to think that I have good emotional control. So today we're giving you a way to figure out how well you deal with your emotions. Take the emotion regulation questionnaire. It's on the University of Central Florida's website, and it focuses on two different ways of dealing with emotions known as reappraisal and suppression.
You might actually remember us talking about these topics when we were discussing how to get over a breakup. This is the same thing. So reappraisal is when you reframe a situation to change how it impacts you, like thinking of a performance review as a way to show off your accomplishments instead of being judged.
Suppression, on the other hand, happens once you've already felt a feeling. It's like when you go to a bar after a bad breakup to distract yourself from feeling heartbroken. You can read more in our full write-up, but check out the questionnaire to see where you fall. Take the questionnaire before you read the article if you can so you don't change your answers.
Of course, take the results with a grain of salt, just like with most online quizzes. But if you see you need some help with your emotion regulation, then that's a good thing. More information about yourself is always helpful.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. You can't work on a problem until you know it's there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely.
CODY GOUGH: You can read today's stories and a lot more on curiosity.com. And we have some very exciting news. You can now find Curiosity Daily on Spotify.
ASHLEY HAMER: Woohoo.
CODY GOUGH: Finally. Just open Spotify and search for Curiosity Daily. We're in there. You've been asking for a long time, and we finally got a hold of Spotify to deliver it. They're pretty busy over there, believe it or not. One more way to get smarter in just a few minutes. Please tell your friends.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.
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