Learn about whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, a mysterious, ancient city called Cahokia that’s, weirdly, just outside St. Louis, and how AI might be able to catch heart disease with a selfie.
Learn about whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, a mysterious, ancient city called Cahokia that’s, weirdly, just outside St. Louis, and how AI might be able to catch heart disease with a selfie.
Is It Better to Be a Big Fish in a Small Pond or a Small Fish in a Big Pond? By Kelsey Donk
Cahokia Was the Mysterious, Massive Ancient City in ... St. Louis? By Reuben Westmaas
AI Might Be Able to Catch Heart Disease with a Selfie by Kelsey Donk
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/can-a-selfie-screen-you-for-heart-disease
ASHLEY 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 whether it's better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, a mysterious ancient city that's weirdly just outside of St. Louis, and how AI might be able to catch heart disease with a selfie.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Whether you're accepted to a prestigious university, win a spot on a competitive sports team, or get a promotion at work, it's always a good feeling to level up. But then comes the realization, you're no longer the big fish in a small pond.
Suddenly, you're the smallest fish in a big pond. And you go from feeling confident in your abilities to feeling like you'll never be enough. Weird, right? Your skills didn't change, so what's with the drop in self esteem? If this feels familiar, a new study might bring some comfort.
It found that how we see ourselves depends on our rank in a group, not how our group compares to the rest of society. In the study, researchers asked college students to take a verbal reasoning test. The researchers told them that the same test had been taken by other students at their university and by other students at a bunch of other universities. Then the manipulation began.
Some students were told that they scored better than 65% of their classmates and their university scored better than 35% of the other schools. Basically, they were told they were a big fish in a small pond. In the three other conditions, students were told that they were a little fish in a big pond, a huge fish in a tiny pond, or a tiny fish in a huge pond.
After that, participants had to rate how they thought they did on the test. Unsurprisingly, the big fish in small ponds felt better about their performance than small fish in big ponds. But in the other two groups, that effect was magnified.
People who were told they were far above average in a far below average group, that is a huge fish in the tiny pond, rated themselves even better than the big fish in a small pond. And the tiny fish in a huge pond rated themselves the worst of everyone.
The bottom line, people focus on the group they're in and compare themselves to the members of that group. People don't tend to compare themselves to the overall population. That's just one more way we misjudge our abilities. Remember that the next time you compare yourself to others.
NATALIA REAGAN: I like that story. It reminds me of high school cliques.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally. It reminds me of auditioning at music schools.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, gosh.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's so tempting to go to the school where the professor is like yes, you're amazing, we don't have that many of you here versus the giant school, where they couldn't care less whether I lived or died.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. Split the difference. When you think of ancient cities, St Louis, Missouri probably doesn't come to mind. But that's exactly where you'll find Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement North of Mexico.
At its peak, this massive metropolis exceeded contemporary London's population. It had a developed trade network and a sophisticated understanding of astronomy. So why was it abandoned by 1350, hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans?
Researchers have been exploring the site for answers. Despite its location in Southern Illinois, the people who built the city were part of the Mississippian culture. This ancient society populated the Mississippi River Valley, stretching from the Great Lakes to what is now the southeastern United States.
And in the center of it all was the city of Cahokia, named by the Europeans after the Cahokia people who dwelled there at the time, even though they actively deny that they had any connection to the city. Unfortunately, most of the Mississippian culture had faded by then, so a lot of what we know about them is from oral tradition and archeological discoveries.
By the 12th century, Cahokia had swelled to a population as large as 30,000. For comparison, London, at the time, was hovering around 18,000. Residents dwelled around a central plaza at the base of Cahokia's most prominent feature, Monks Mound.
It's the largest man-made earthen mound in North America, rising 100 feet, or 30 meters, from the ground. A speaker at the top of the mound could likely be heard throughout the entire Grand Plaza, which was about the size of New York's Grand Central Station.
There are more than 100 other mounds that played a variety of roles. Some featured community buildings and their upper terraces, while others contain the bodies of human sacrifice victims. So if Cahokia was so huge and influential, why was it all but abandoned by the time Europeans arrived?
There are frustratingly few clear answers. Scholars disagree whether it was disease, environmental factors, or cultural conflicts that led to its demise. What they can tell us is that societies of this time were not unsophisticated or isolated tribes that many think of, and that basically, we have a real lost city of Atlantis, because the lost city of Atlantis is not real, smack in the middle of the American Midwest.
ASHLEY HAMER: Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might be able to catch heart disease with a selfie. You heard that right. You might be able to send a few selfies to a computer algorithm and find out if you're at risk for possible heart disease.
This is the first time researchers have been able to show that AI could be used to detect heart disease, specifically, coronary artery disease, where a buildup of plaque in the arteries blocks blood flow to the heart. And while it still needs to be tested in larger groups of people from different ethnic backgrounds, researchers imagine a future where people take selfies and send them into an app before going to the doctor's office.
That would be so much cheaper and simpler than having tons of people go to the doctor for heart disease screenings. But what does the algorithm look for exactly?
Well, we've known for a while that certain facial features were linked to an increased risk of heart disease-- thinning or gray hair, wrinkles, a crease in the ear lobe, and cholesterol deposits under the skin and around the cornea. That stuff is pretty normal if you're, say, old enough to have voted for Eisenhower. But the real concern is when these features show up earlier than they should.
But even then, it's difficult for a human to use these signs to predict disease. So that's why this new AI tool could be such a game changer. The test of the algorithm took place in China, where researchers found nearly 6,000 patients to examine for heart disease risk.
They ran the algorithm on four photos of each patient, but they also interviewed the patients about their lifestyle and medical history. Then they had radiologists assess their actual levels of heart disease risk by looking at heart scans and measuring their blood vessels.
The algorithm was able to pretty accurately predict heart disease with the pictures alone. And it outperformed the existing methods doctors use to predict heart disease. But it also had some false alarms that said some people had heart disease who really didn't.
Researchers want to correct these false positives before scaling up the algorithm. Plus, like I said, it also needs to be tested on different types of people since almost all of the participants were Han Chinese and most of them were men.
Now the only question is, if you could send four selfies to the doctor and find out your risk of heart disease, would you? I think I would.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, I think I would too. Although, I don't know. I feel like-- I could see them doing the same thing for like emotional stuff too.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, AI can get pretty creepy. Like the kind of stuff that it can tell about you just from looking at your face, it's getting better and better.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. (ROBOTIC) You do not have heart disease. You have a broken heart. So let's recap what we learned today to wrap up, starting with-- we learned that people prefer to be a big fish in a small pond since they compare themselves to the people in their group rather than the population at large a lot of the times, which I think makes complete and utter sense.
We're very social creatures, humans. And so we want our group to like us. Obviously, we'd love the whole world, probably, to like us. But the people in our group are the ones that really matter.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, I remember back in high school when a beloved band director left to go get his PhD, and we all missed him. And I had his email address and so I emailed him once to tell him about how band was going. So I was a huge band nerd.
I said all these things about comparing my ability to the other people in band and he responded, don't compare yourself to the people around you. Compare yourself to Miles and Coltrane and the greats, which I think when I was in high school, I was like, oh, I'm never going to be good. But I think that was a great lesson. And probably a more mature lesson than I was ready for.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes. No, I think that's great because I think, oftentimes, we don't set our sights on higher goals or we think that high school was the glory days. And that, right there, you're setting the bar really low. Senior year was your glory days.
And I'm not trying to be hard on anybody, but my big thing is the best is yet to come, including your abilities. So I think that by comparing yourselves to a group can do a disservice to you. You can dream bigger, aim higher. Sometimes, just compare yourself to yourself.
ASHLEY HAMER: I was just about to say that. Absolutely. If you're better than you were yesterday, then you're on the right track. That's all it is. And we also learned that there was a big city outside of St. Louis, hundreds of years before Europeans set foot on North American soil.
And it was called Cahokia, which boasted a population of 30,000, which was more than London had at the time-- wild. And it has the largest earthen mound in North America. I have never been there. And I know you have a bunch, Natalia. I've already looked. It's a five hour drive from where I am. I need to do it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Road trip. Actually, every time I go to St. Louis, I always go to Cahokia Mounds. It's one of my favorite places to go even before I studied anthropology. I remember I dated someone from Collinsville, Illinois, which also has the largest ketchup bottle in the United States. It's a giant water tower. It's a ketchup bottle, but they have Cahokia Mounds.
And I remember climbing them and reading about the people that they were still trying to figure out who exactly these individuals were and what this community was and this town. And that got me really into archeology and anthropology.
But you can climb the mound. And the last time I did, it was preceding a lightning storm. So I was up there for maybe a few minutes and ran back down. But you can see the St. Louis Arch from there and the Mississippi River. And it's just a beautiful place to be, but it's fascinating.
And I think a lot of times we think of monumental architectures of being, of course, these pyramids, whether it's the Egyptian pyramids or Mayan, Tikal, all these different pyramids. But these are earthen mounds and they mean something. And I think it's good to visit. So I highly recommend.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think there are a lot of people in North America that don't even know they have these ancient structures right here in their continent. So cool.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes. And we learned that something is innocuous as a selfie can help detect something as serious as heart disease. From creases in the earlobe to cholesterol deposits under the skin, these little small physiological traits can alert you to a deeper meaning.
Although, AI can get it wrong so researchers are working to make sure it's more foolproof before sharing it with the public because you don't want to get some sort of report that ma'am, you've got three months to live. Oh, just kidding. Sorry, my bad.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or the opposite, where maybe if you have dark skin, this stuff doesn't show up as clearly, people just think, oh, no, you're not at risk at all. We don't even need to check you. I mean, you don't want that either.
NATALIA REAGAN: And that is a big problem. The lack of medical, either photographs, for dark skin to show what certain illnesses might look like or even like bug bites or things like that. So they're trying to change that right now because it's heavily racially biased, and things that we can do to make medicine a lot more inclusive.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely. Today's
NATALIA REAGAN: Stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Reuben Westmaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan, and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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