Today you’ll learn about the science behind near-death-experiences, why some music is made for summer, and how the lionfish is invading southern Brazil.
Today you’ll learn about the science behind near-death-experiences, why some music is made for summer, and how the lionfish is invading southern Brazil.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/hallucinations-music-and-invasions
Death Hallucinations
Music and Weather
Lionfish Invasion
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[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about the science behind near-death-experiences, why some music is made for summer, and how the lionfish is invading southern Brazil.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: We’ve all heard the stories. A person wakes up from surgery and says that they saw a blinding white light and started floating toward it. Maybe they felt the presence of relatives they’ve lost. And when they wake up, the surgeons tell them that their heart stopped for a couple minutes. They were, essentially, dead.
NATE: Right. Near death experiences. I’ve heard a million stories. People say they levitate off the operating table, or that they can see their own bodies down below themselves.
CALLI: Exactly. It’s definitely the stuff of science fiction. But an incredible new study is suggesting it might actually be real.
NATE: Hang on…Are you saying they’ve actually proven that when we die, we go somewhere?
CALLI: Okay, no. Not quite. The researchers observed activity in the brains of people whose hearts weren’t beating.
NATE: Ahhh…so what’s happening is that their brains are still actually functioning even though they aren’t technically alive?
CALLI: Yeah! It’s crazy, right? The study is super surprising because scientists have always assumed that once the heart stops pumping, the brain stops receiving oxygen and can’t possibly still be active.
NATE: Okay…so if the brain isn’t active, then how do you explain near-death-experience stories?
CALLI: Yep. Now they know. The brain actually IS active, despite lacking oxygen.
NATE: So…how did they figure this out?
CALLI: That is a great question. Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan found something really weird when she was studying dying rats about a decade ago. Even though their hearts had stopped, she found activity in their brains - namely, something called gamma waves.
NATE: That sounds super sci-fi.
CALLI: Oh, totally. They are the fastest oscillations in the brain, and scientists associate them with conscious perceptions, lucid dreams, and hallucinations.
NATE: Aha.
CALLI: So you see where this is going? So she wondered if this could also be happening to the dying human brain. She and her team monitored four different patients whose families had made the difficult decision to remove them from life support. She observed their neural activity with EEG sensors and found complex gamma waves in two of the four people when they went into cardiac arrest. What’s even more interesting is that the waves happened in a part of the brain associated with conscious processing.
NATE: So they were thinking?
CALLI: Or dreaming. Or hallucinating. We can’t really know, obviously. But what we do know is that the waves happened in a dying brain.
NATE: We’ve covered a lot of studies in the past, and one thing that I can’t help but notice about this one is…it’s a really small sample size.
CALLI: Yep. Borjigin is the first to acknowledge that. Any study that only looks at four people will have a hard time proving its thesis. Especially when the gamma waves were not observed in half of the test subjects.
NATE: So…what kind of assumptions can they make from this tiny study?
CALLI: Well…some assumptions are just going to need more research. Like…why is this happening? What causes the dying brain to produce these gamma waves? Is it different for different people? Why do they happen to some people and not others? Is there any evolutionary advantage to this?
NATE: That’s a lot of questions.
CALLI: It is. But there’s one thing they know for sure: in two of these patients, the gamma waves existed. It actually happened. And if it can happen to those two, it can happen to others.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Right around the end of May every year - maybe early June - pop radio stations start sounding a little different, don’t they?
CALLI: I mean yeah! You’ve got the big beats, the high energy anthems. It’s happy. It’s fun. I love my summer music!
NATE: Well…believe it or not, researchers at the University of Oxford have conducted a new study that suggests weather might play a huge role in what we listen to - and might even determine the success of a song.
CALLI: I mean yeah, but you don’t need a study to prove that my summer soundtrack is absolute fire!
NATE: I’m sure it is. But this study is kinda crazy. They used machine learning to analyze over 23,000 songs from the weekly top charts in the UK over the past 70 years…
CALLI: Okay, that is quite the playlist.
NATE: Right? The first thing they found is something you would probably expect - those energetic, dance-y, exuberant tracks that make you happy are highly associated with warm, sunny weather. What’s more - those same songs are negatively associated with the cold, rainy, bleakness of winter. In other words, summer hits just aren’t so popular in the winter.
CALLI: I mean… they don’t call them summer hits for nothing!
NATE: Well, here’s the kicker: they also found that hyper popular songs - the ones that made it to the top 10 - were extremely associated with weather, while less popular songs had no relationship to weather at all.
CALLI: What do they mean when they say a song is associated with weather?
NATE: Think of it this way: a bright, sunny day tends to make us cheer up. Not always, but if someone asks you to describe ‘happy weather,’ you’d probably describe blue skies and sunshine and birds chirping…
CALLI: I mean for me, thunder storms are my happy weather but I understand for most people it’s going to be summer.
NATE: Yeah. Summer. And if someone asks you to describe ‘happy music…’
CALLI: …you’d probably describe summer music. So the music is associated with the weather. Got it.
NATE: But there are some songs that just aren’t associated with weather at all. You don’t hear them and think about winter or summer or falling leaves or snow or anything having to do with what’s going on outside. And these songs just aren’t as popular.
CALLI: Okay, so what’s up with that?
NATE: That’s a great question. And the authors of the study go out of their way to say that their findings show a correlation - not a causation.
CALLI: So summer weather doesn’t CAUSE summer music to be popular. It’s just that summer music is CORRELATED with summer?
NATE: Something like that. But they do say that it’s possible that when the weather is sunny and warm, it makes us feel happy and light, and could push us toward the more upbeat music.
CALLI: Okay, that makes sense. I mean, you don’t go to the beach and blast out heartbreaking country tunes.
NATE: Well you could…but you’d probably get some funny looks.
CALLI: Ooh, okay, wait, wait…so if upbeat songs are associated with summer, does that mean sad songs are associated with winter?
NATE: Nope.
CALLI: Weird.
NATE: Super weird. We can just get sad at any time of the year, I guess.
CALLI: Okay but keep the sad stuff off my playlist in July, ok?
NATE: Got it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Have you ever heard of a lionfish?
NATE: Uhh yeah, actually! They’re really pretty with these brown-white stripes and fins that kind of radiate out like feathers…
CALLI: Well before you get too excited, I should let you know that they are attacking Brazil right now.
NATE: Attacking seems like a weird choice of words.
CALLI: I mean, okay, let me rephrase; They could end up killing off reefs and putting a huge dent in Brazil’s famous aquatic biodiversity.
NATE: Okay, but they’re really cool to look at!
CALLI: Well, yeah in an aquarium they’re great, but once they get into our coastal waters…it’s havoc. We’ve talked about invasive species before and the lionfish is one of those species.
NATE: Okay. So if they’re invasive…where are they invading from?
CALLI: That is a great question. The lionfish comes from the Indian and Pacific oceans. Sometime in the 1980s, folks started spotting them off the coast of Florida.
NATE: Ah…hitting up the beach for spring break, I take it?
CALLI: No, not exactly. It’s unclear exactly how they got to Florida, but it’s possible that a few of them were released from home aquariums.
NATE: And how is that enough to cause such a catastrophe?
CALLI: A few different reasons. The first is that when a new species enters a new biome, none of the other species know what to do with it. And that means that it has no natural predators.
NATE: Nothing eats the Lionfish…
CALLI: Right. At least nothing outside of its natural habitat. And that leads to the second problem: the lionfish is a prolific reproducer. They reproduce all year long and a female can actually disperse up to 2 million eggs every single year. And with nothing eating them…
NATE: …that’s a lot of lionfish.
CALLI: It sure could be. So you have this rapidly reproducing fish without any predators, and…it is hungry. It is very hungry.
NATE: Without any predators, doesn’t that make the lionfish a top predator, itself?
CALLI: Yep.
NATE: So all the little creatures that survived for thousands of years with their usual predators now have to deal with this one, too?
CALLI: Exactly. And it’s bad enough that the lionfish is depleting populations of other types of fish, but the fish it’s eating are the algae-eaters - the ones that clean up the coral reefs. Without those fish, plankton starts to grow out of control and can strangle the reef.
NATE: It’s throwing the whole habitat out of balance.
CALLI: Just completely out of whack. And to make matters worse, it’s eating all the fish that other predators like grouper and snapper eat - and those predators are already under strain from overfishing.
NATE: But how did it make it all the way to Southern Brazil?
CALLI: It wasn’t easy. Northward-flowing ocean currents coming up from South America really slowed their progress, but not even ocean currents could stop them. The first lionfish were spotted off the coast of northern Brazil in 2020, during the pandemic. Scientists were pretty much homebound during that time, and funding for research was hard to come by, so when they finally made it back out to examine the spread, they expected to find more lionfish, but they were still surprised by how quickly they spread. In a matter of months, lionfish had been spotted moving down the coast.
NATE: So how do we stop them?
CALLI: To be honest, there’s no stopping them once they’re in the water. But there are local efforts that can work to lessen the damage they cause. Fisheries and SCUBA teams have been authorized to kill any lionfish they come across, but because they reproduce so rapidly, they’re just about impossible to eradicate. Eventually, they’ll just become a part of the habitat. But there’s no telling the damage they’ll do in the meantime. The good news is that humans CAN eat lionfish but you just need to be careful because their sharp spines are venomous and can sting you. Cooking deactivates the toxins in the fish though so get ready to fry up some lionfish tacos!
NATE: And keep your fish in your aquarium!
CALLI: You ain’t lion.Sorry, had to.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Researchers were surprised to find brain activity called gamma waves in people who were taken off of life support, and whose hearts had stopped beating. The waves provide evidence that fabled near-death-experiences might actually have a biological cause.
NATE: A massive study of the British pop charts over the last 70 years used machine learning to find a correlation between the success of happy, upbeat music and warm, sunny weather.
CALLI: Scientists have discovered the lionfish moving toward southern Brazil faster than they thought possible. This invasive species threatens the health of coral reefs and destabilize the Brazilian aquatic ecosystem.