Learn about the impact of maladaptive daydreaming, then learn about whether dogs can recognize our faces in photographs. Then, author Maryn McKenna will explain how antibiotics created modern agriculture and changed the way the world eats.
Learn about the impact of maladaptive daydreaming, then learn about whether dogs can recognize our faces in photographs. Then, author Maryn McKenna will explain how antibiotics created modern agriculture and changed the way the world eats.
People with 'maladaptive daydreaming' spend up to 4 hours a day lost in their imaginations by Kelsey Donk
Dogs can recognize our faces in photographs by Grant Currin
Additional resources from acclaimed journalist Maryn McKenna:
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CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about the impact of maladaptive daydreaming; whether dogs can recognize our faces in photographs. Then, author Maryn McKenna will explain how antibiotics created modern agriculture and changed the way the world eats.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Everybody daydreams from time to time. But if you find yourself lost in fantasies for hours every day to the detriment of your real life, that could be what psychologists call “maladaptive dreaming.” It’s a psychiatric condition people have been paying more attention to lately, so we figured now might be a good time to talk about it.
Scientific research on maladaptive dreaming has been pretty limited: it’s shown up in a few research papers, but it hasn’t landed in the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — which is the bible of mental health diagnosis. Over the last few years, though, a number of internet communities have popped up to provide support and understanding for people who identify with the condition. And now, researchers are starting to come around to the idea that maladaptive daydreaming could be worthy of study.
Daydreaming for hours at a time might not sound so bad, and it’s true that people who experience maladaptive daydreaming say they like their daydreams while they’re happening. The daydreams are really vivid and intense, and sometimes pleasurable. But then there’s the maladaptive part. Maladaptive daydreaming can also have a negative impact on personal relationships, emotional health, and daily lives.
In one case study, a 25-year-old Polish man began daydreaming as a child. He would deal with painful life events by fantasizing that the events didn’t happen. By the time he was an adult, even a simple activity like reading the news could trigger these daydreams, where he’d invent elaborate and exciting stories about being a multimillionaire who fixes the world’s problems. He’d start daydreaming in the morning and before he knew it, the sun had gone down. Understandably, he felt like life was passing him by.
He’s not alone. A 2018 study had 77 people with maladaptive daydreaming keep daily diaries of their symptoms. They reported daydreaming for an average of four hours a day. The fallout was real: they reported feeling higher anxiety, dissociation, and negative emotions on days when they spent the most time daydreaming. The researchers found that many of the participants experienced more obsessive-compulsive symptoms the day before a really intense bout of daydreaming. That suggests the two conditions could be related, and that serotonin-modifying drugs that work on OCD could help with maladaptive daydreaming, too.
I hope this primer helped you understand maladaptive daydreaming a little better. Good mental health means keeping a careful balance of fantasy and reality. Daydreaming can be a nice vacation from real life, but unfortunately, every vacation has to end sometime.
Your dog can definitely recognize you in person, but can they spot you in a picture? That’s what Italian researchers set out to discover in a recent study. Here’s what happened.
Each of the dogs was brought into a room and given a few minutes to sniff around the new space. Then the pooch watched as its owner and a stranger put on white jumpsuits and blue shoe covers. Then the dog was led out of the room, and the two humans took their places behind a large white panel affixed with two small curtains, each hiding that human’s photograph.
A little while later, a researcher walked the dog back into the room and had it sit facing the panel. The researcher lifted the curtains so the dog could see the photographs. Next, the researcher opened two small doors, which revealed the legs and feet of the people standing behind the panel. Because they were both wearing jumpsuits and shoe covers, they were pretty much identical.
Finally, each dog was given 30 seconds to consider the photos and approach one of the people standing behind them. If they approached their owner’s side, it was safe to assume they recognized their owner from the photograph.
The team ran this experiment with three conditions, each of which tested 20 dogs. The “optimal” condition used a well-lit photo of their owner facing forward and smiling. The “suboptimal” condition used an unevenly lit photo of their owner looking off to the side with a neutral expression. Finally, the control group didn’t use any photo at all. That was to make sure the dogs weren’t recognizing their owners’ legs and feet. It turns out they weren’t — the dogs in the control condition did no better than chance.
But what about the two other conditions? Dogs that were presented with a well-lit photo did remarkably well. Fifteen went to their owner and only five went to the stranger. The dogs with the unevenly lit photos didn’t do quite as well — they did better than the control condition, but not good enough for the result to reach statistical significance. So if you want your dog to recognize your picture, think more “professional headshot” and less “bathroom selfie.”
In the end, the researchers concluded that dogs can, in fact, recognize human faces in photos. Maybe next time, you can get Fido to pick your profile picture.
Antibiotics kill bacteria. We take them when we’re sick. But farmers give antibiotics to animals…even when they’re not sick. So what’s up with that? Today with the story is Maryn McKenna, author of the book “Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats.” We interviewed Maryn during a live podcast at the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the AAAS — Annual Meeting in Seattle in February. Which seems like about a million years ago, and is probably the last large gathering Ashley or I will be able to say we attended in 2020. Maryn told us all about antibiotic use in agriculture, including this story of why we started doing it in the first place.
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This misuse of antibiotics in animals is bad, because the antibiotics we use in agriculture are the same antibiotics we use in human medicine. And as bacteria in livestock develop resistance to those antibiotics, they won’t be able to help us if the same bacteria make us sick. Maryn also told us that antibiotic-resistant bacteria from animals can contaminate lots of foods, including leafy greens — so even if you’re vegan, you have reason to be concerned. Fortunately, Maryn told us that this long story of antibiotic misuse in the food system is, quote, “beginning to be a story of solutions.” Which means food producers and policymakers are on the case. You can WATCH Maryn explain in our full uncut interview, which you can find on our YouTube channel right now! You can find a link to that in today’s show notes, or just visit youtube-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com, all spelled out.
CODY: Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!