Learn about why icing an injury may not help it heal; the neurons that make old fears return; and how one of Einstein’s greatest regrets turned out to be useful after all. 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: Icing an Injury Doesn't Help It Heal — https://curiosity.im/2UrNPjW Scientists Discovered the Neurons that Make Old Fears Return — https://curiosity.im/2UyCLBk One of Einstein's Greatest Regrets Has Turned Out To Be Useful After All — https://curiosity.im/2GojM4L If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom 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 why icing an injury may not help it heal; the neurons that make old fears return; and how one of Einstein’s greatest regrets turned out to be useful after all.
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:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
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/einsteins-greatest-regret-why-icing-an-injury-may-not-help-it-heal-and-extinction-memories
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 why icing an injury may not help it heal; the neurons that make old fears return; and how one of Einstein’s greatest regrets turned out to be useful after all.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Icing an Injury Doesn't Help It Heal — https://curiosity.im/2UrNPjW (Ashley)
If you’ve ever used an ice pack to help heal an injury, then listen up: recent research says that icing an injury may actually do more harm than help. And that’s coming from the guy who popularized icing as a practice in the first place. [CODY: So you’re saying this guy has decided to… CHILL OUT / ad lib]
ASHLEY: Treating muscle injuries with ice is a pretty recent idea. It came from a book called “The Sports Medicnie Book” that was released by Dr. Gabe Mirkin in 1978. And it laid out a thing called the RICE method: rest, ice, compression, elevation. The book was a bestseller and RICE became the gold standard of care, especially for muscle injuries. That’s why you can buy an ice pack in basically any store these days. Everyone from little league players to Olympic athletes have used ice to recover from intense workouts. The medical reason behind all this is that cooling is anti-inflammatory. Cold temperatures divert blood flow from injured muscles, which sends it rushing back towards the vital organs — and that minimizes swelling and supposedly speeds recovery. Ice also numbs the area around an injury and temporarily reduces pain, much like an anesthetic would. But in a recent blog post, Dr. Mirkin himself basically retracted his endorsement of the “i” in the RICE method. He argues that research has never fully backed the idea that ice accelerates healing. It might reduce swelling, but that's a cosmetic benefit, not a therapeutic one — and elevation, another component of the RICE method, reduces swelling, too. What's more, ice might hinder healing in the long-term. In one 2013 study, for instance, icing slowed recovery after an intensive sequence of elbow extensions. Dr. Mirkin now argues that while swelling is unpleasant to look at, it's also inflammation, which part of the human immune system's natural response to injury. He wrote, quote, "Anything that reduces your immune response will also delay muscle healing," unquote. You’d think scientists would have figured this out by now, but research looking into the practice of icing has been patchy at best. That 2013 study I mentioned only had a sample size of 11. Part of the issue is that it’s hard to execute a blind study of icing. When you ice an injury, you’re automatically prone to the placebo effect, which could lead you to feel better just by believing your injury has been treated. But look: it’s still POSSIBLE that ice has more health benefits than drawbacks, under certain conditions. Still, the next time you feel like reaching for an ice pack, you could replace the RICE method with the METH method: that stands for movement, elevation, traction (like, with a giant rubber band), and heat. Or, you could just wait it out. Your body is pretty good at taking care of itself. [CODY: At least you can say you were here to witness the end of an ice age]
Scientists Discovered the Neurons that Make Old Fears Return — https://curiosity.im/2UyCLBk (Republish) (Cody)
Scientists have discovered the neurons that make old fears return. And the finding could lead to changes in how doctors prescribe certain therapies to treat anxiety, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder. As reported by Futurity, researchers have identified neurons called “extinction neurons.” When they’re active, they suppress fearful memories, and when they’re inactive, the allow those fearful memories to return. And these extinction neurons are why sometimes memories we thought we’d put behind us can creep up on us at inconvenient times, in a form of relapse called spontaneous recovery. The big surprise in this discovery came from the fact that the brain cells that suppress fear memories are actually in the hippocampus. Usually, scientists associate fear with the amygdala, which is the brain’s main emotion center. The hippocampus is responsible for lots of parts of memory and spatial navigation, and it seems like it also plays a role in contextualizing fear — for example, by tying a fearful memory to the physical place where it happened. And that’s why this discovery is so important: it could help explain why one of the leading ways to treat fear-based disorders can sometimes stop working. I’m talking about exposure therapy, which is all about forming new memories of safety to try to override a memory of fear. For example, if you get bit by a spider and you develop a fear of spiders, an exposure therapy session might have a harmless spider crawl on you, so you replace that traumatic spider encounter with a safe one. Those safe memories you end up with with are called extinction memories. The thing is, those memories don’t ERASE the original fear memory; extinction just makes a new memory that competes with the original fear. This research shows that the hippocampus generates traces of both fear and extinction memories, and then competition within the hippocampus itself is what determines whether the fear is suppressed or not. The bottom line is that this new knowledge could help researchers re-evaluate when and how often they use exposure therapy, and it may help them explore new ideas for drug development as well.
[NHTSA]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is paid for by NIT-suh.
CODY: It can be a little frustrating, especially if you’re in a hurry or running late, to find yourself at a railway crossing, waiting for a train. And if the signals are going and the train’s not even there yet, you can feel a bit tempted to try and sneak across the tracks. Well, don’t. Ever.
ASHLEY: Trains are often going a lot faster than you expect them to be. And they can’t stop. Even if the engineer hits the brakes right away, it can take a train over a mile to stop. By that time, what used to be your car is just a crushed hunk of metal and what used to be you…
CODY: ...well, better not to think about that. The point is, you can’t know how quickly the train will arrive. The train can’t stop even if it sees you. The result is disaster. If the signals are on, the train is on its way. And you... just need to remember one thing… Stop. Trains can’t.
One of Einstein's Greatest Regrets Has Turned Out To Be Useful After All — https://curiosity.im/2GojM4L (from Friday) (Ashley)
ASHLEY: Tell me if this situation sounds familiar: you’re playing a trivia game or you’re out with friends for trivia night at a bar. And you get a question, and the correct answer pops into your head right away… but then you second-guess yourself, and you change your answer, but that FIRST answer was the right one all along? Well don’t be too hard on yourself when you do that, because someone else who did that once goes by the name of Albert Einstein. And Einstein happened to change his answer when it came to something pretty important: as in, the general theory of relativity. You know — the breakthrough in our understanding of the universe that concluded that space and time are not absolute, but flexible, dependent on one another, and affected by the presence of matter. Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915, and that included what’s known as the Einstein field equations. They lay out the relationship between the curvature of spacetime and the amount of matter and energy moving nearby. When Einstein applied those equations to the entire universe, something was fishy: They predicted that the universe had to be either expanding or contracting. But at the time, Einstein and everybody else thought the universe was static and unchanging. So he figured his equations had to be wrong. To fix them, he added a lambda symbol, which is now known as the cosmological constant. It basically put a limit on how much the universe could change by balancing the push and pull of its competing forces. Like a Vegas casino, it stacked the odds in favor of the house. But the universe doesn't care about the odds. In 1929, Edwin Hubble published a study that showed that the universe was actually expanding. And that’s when Einstein was famously quoted as saying that adding the cosmological constant was his biggest blunder. Physicists these days still use Einstein’s cosmological constant to describe the energy density of empty space, or basically the force that’s making the universe expand. We still don't know what that force is, or why the universe's expansion is accelerating. But on our road to understanding those mysteries, the cosmological constant will be there to help — right where Einstein put it.
CODY: You can read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com! And if you want to support this podcast, you can sign up to make a one-time or monthly contribution on our Patreon page. Special thanks to some of our existing Patrons: Roger Wright, Julian Gomez, Dane Norris, Stay-FAN Crate, Luke Chapman, and Michaela Mays.
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!