Learn about GMOs with help from Dr. Patrick Cournoyer of the FDA. Plus: a trick for hearing someone in a noisy room. FDA's Feed Your Mind website: https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/agricultural-biotechnology To hear someone in a noisy room, look at their face by Grant Currin To better understand speech, focus on who is talking. (2021, October 26). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/932401 Fleming, J. T., Maddox, R. K., & Shinn-Cunningham, B. G. (2021). Spatial alignment between faces and voices improves selective attention to audio-visual speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 150(4), 3085–3100. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0006415 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about GMOs with help from Dr. Patrick Cournoyer of the FDA. Plus: a trick for hearing someone in a noisy room.
FDA's Feed Your Mind website: https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/agricultural-biotechnology
To hear someone in a noisy room, look at their face by Grant Currin
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/gmo-food-science-101-and-how-to-hear-someone-in-a-noisy-room
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about GMOs, with help from a special guest from the Food and Drug Administration; and a trick for hearing someone in a noisy room.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you see anything about GMOs on your food packaging, chances are it's some phrase like "non-GMO" or "GMO-free." Which might make you wonder — does that mean GMOs are bad? What even is a GMO, for that matter? Well today, we're laying out the basics of GMOS with an expert from the US Food and Drug Administration — also known as the FDA. Dr. Patrick Cournoyer [corn-why-ay] is a regulatory scientist at the FDA who works to ensure the safety of food from genetically modified plants. Patrick explained that GMO stands for genetically modified organism, and refers to plants or animals that have been modified through genetic engineering. We asked him why GMOs exist in the first place.
[CLIP 6:09]
I guess that means that food waste is only skin deep! Again, that was Dr. Patrick Cournoyer, a regulatory scientist at the FDA. Patrick will be back tomorrow to talk about the new GMO foods that he's most excited about. And in the meantime, you can learn more about GMOs at the FDA's Feed Your Mind website. You can find a link to that in today's show notes.
You’re in a noisy room. A friend is trying to telI you something, but it’s hard to make out what they’re saying. And if they’re wearing a mask? Forget about it. Is there a trick to understanding them? According to new research: yes! Look at their face! Looking in their direction actually boosts your brain’s ability to key in on their speech — even if you can’t see their mouth.
Researchers have known for a long time that when someone is talking, the people listening use the sound of their words and the sight of their lips, facial expression, and body language to figure out what they’re saying. That’s especially important when there’s other noise that might be distracting, like other conversations in a noisy restaurant. Reading lips is a big part of this story — especially for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. But innovative research conducted during the pandemic shows that simply looking in the direction of someone who’s talking makes it a lot easier to understand what they’re saying.
Researchers had volunteers listen to pairs of speakers who were talking over each other. The volunteers were told who to listen to and where to look on a screen. After they heard the mashed-up audio, the volunteers were asked to look at a list of words and identify which one their speaker had said.
Sounds easy, right? Well, that depends. Some participants saw videos of the speakers as they talked, others saw photos of the speakers, and some simply saw a white cross meant to focus their attention on either side of the screen. In some runs of the experiment, the audio they were listening to came from the same direction they were told to focus on. In others, it came from the opposite direction. The difference was only 30 degrees — slightly to the left or to the right.
But that small change of direction made a big difference. Participants found it a lot easier to understand speech when they were looking in the direction it came from. This wasn’t just lip reading. It appears that people’s brains find it much easier to focus on and understand speech when their eyes are looking in the direction the speech is coming from — even if they can’t see the speaker’s face. They found that this becomes more and more important as the background noise gets louder.
So the next time you’re struggling to understand what someone is saying, be sure you’re looking right at them — even if they’re wearing a mask. Your brain will thank you, and they probably will, too.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, we wanted to give you a heads up that if you follow Curiosity Daily, then you’ll be getting a BONUS podcast in your feed tomorrow! Early Friday morning we’ll be giving you a sneak preview of a new podcast from Discovery called Dogs 101. Now, if you listen to Curiosity Daily on a smart speaker or as part of a daily news briefing, then don’t worry, you WILL still hear a brand-new episode of Curiosity Daily as planned tomorrow. But if you open an app on your phone every day, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, then don’t be surprised when you see a full episode of Dogs 101 in addition to your daily dose of Curiosity. And we encourage you to check it out, because it’s pretty good stuff. But right now, let’s recap what we learned today!
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ASHLEY: The writer for today’s noisy room story was Grant Currin.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and lead audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!