Learn about how experiencing “flow” could help your mental health during quarantine; why airplane windows are round; and whether flies experience time more slowly than we do.
Learn about how experiencing “flow” could help your mental health during quarantine; why airplane windows are round; and whether flies experience time more slowly than we do.
Experiencing flow could buffer the mental-health effects of quarantine by Kelsey Donk
This Is the Important Reason All Airplane Windows Are Round by Joanie Faletto
Do flies experience time more slowly than we do? by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-flow-can-help-in-quarantine
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 how experiencing “flow” could help your mental health during quarantine; why airplane windows are round; and whether flies experience time more slowly than we do.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Quarantine is hard, but findings from a new study might make it easier for a lot of people. A survey of more than 5,000 people suggests that experiencing “flow” could protect against the rough mental-health effects of a long quarantine.
What is flow? Flow is the way psychologists describe the experience you get when you’re really absorbed in an engaging and pleasurable task — when you lose track of time or stop hearing people talk around you. That can come from any activity you enjoy, from playing music to cooking to doing extreme sports.
Flow is similar to mindfulness, which refers to a focus on the present moment and a nonjudgmental awareness of your current experience. Both involve focus on the present moment, but while mindfulness is about being aware of what’s going on in and around you, flow shuts all of that out. When you’re in a flow state, you only see what’s right in front of you.
Past research has shown that both flow and mindfulness could help people maintain their well-being in stressful situations. So when COVID hit last year, psychology researcher Kate Sweeny and her team wondered if flow could help people stay sane during quarantine.
In February of 2020, the researchers surveyed more than 5,000 people around Wuhan and other Chinese cities where the coronavirus was emerging. And they discovered three important things.
First, they confirmed that the longest quarantines were roughest on people’s well-being. People who had to quarantine longest felt more worry, more depressive symptoms, and more anxiety.
The second, brighter finding was that both flow and mindfulness were associated with better well-being, regardless of how long quarantine lasted.
Third was the best news of the study. It turns out that flow actually improved long quarantine experiences — but meditation didn’t. Some people who’d been in quarantine for a long time but also experienced a lot of flow had the same level of well-being as people who weren’t in quarantine!
It’s not like a flow state can make all of the stress of the coronavirus fade away. Even people who experienced a lot of flow felt worried and lonely. They just felt less worried and lonely than people who didn’t experience flow at all. The researchers think worries and loneliness might be particularly stubborn forms of stress. But the findings might justify picking up a hobby you love. Getting in the flow might just make quarantine a little easier in 2021.
Have you ever wondered why airplane windows are round? It’s easy to assume that it’s an aesthetic design choice, but that’s not quite the case. It turns out that if commercial plane windows were square like the ones in your house, the whole plane would disintegrate mid-flight. No one wants to deal with that on their way to Cancún.
And this isn’t hypothetical — square windows have led to flight disasters. It all goes back to the mid-twentieth century, when commercial airlines started flying their planes at higher altitudes. This plan saved money, because lower air density means less drag on the plane, and therefore less fuel. Flying in the upper atmosphere means a smoother ride, too.
To make planes suitable for flying at higher altitudes, airlines had to make some design changes. First, the plane cabin had to be pressurized so passengers could, well, breathe. Secondly, the plane had to be cylindrical in order to withstand the newly increased internal pressure. And voila! They’d made the perfect plane — or so you'd think. In the 1950s, three airplanes crashed when the fuselage was ripped to shreds because engineers overlooked one crucial design flaw: They used square windows.
Square windows are problematic for high-flying planes because of a difference between atmospheric and cabin pressure. This difference causes the cabin to expand very slightly, and that puts stress on the material — in this case, the window frames. That stress builds most at the sharp corners of a square window, and when the stress becomes too great, crack! But with an oval window, the stress flows more smoothly around the whole thing, and that avoids a potentially destructive buildup of stress.
Since we're on the topic of airplane windows, you may have noticed another quirk about them: They're often not aligned with the rows of seating. Don't blame the airplane manufacturers; this is solely up to the airline that purchases the plane. The manufacturers build the planes with row positioning, legroom, and window placement in mind, and pass their recommendations along to the airline. But they're rarely followed. Depending on the airline, different planes stack more rows together than others. Once the number of rows changes, the window alignment gets — yep — thrown right out the window.
Flies are almost impossible to swat. No matter how fast you move, the fly always seems to move faster. Why is their reaction time so fast? Well, get this: it’s because they might experience time more slowly than we do.
This all comes down to how vision works. Vision is not truly seamless. In fact, eyes work a bit like a flipbook: they perceive still images in rapid succession, and it’s up to our brains to stitch those images together to convince us that we are seeing fluid motion. The rate that our eyes take those still images is called our flicker fusion frequency. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we talked a bit about it in regard to birds of prey last January. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes!
Anyway, humans have a critical flicker fusion frequency, or CFF, of around 60 hertz. That means that a light has to flash faster than 60 times per second to make us see it as one continuous beam.
For a fly, that light has to flash about twice as fast on average for them to see it as a solid beam. That means that they see your fly swatter moving in slow motion, which gives them plenty of time to get out of the way.
And this isn’t limited to flies. Pretty much any animal smaller than us has a higher CFF. This includes birds, dogs, cats, squirrels, mice…you get the picture. That’s because CFF is limited by physiology. Small animals have higher metabolic rates and shorter optic nerves, so messages can travel more rapidly down those pathways.
CFF isn’t set in stone. One experiment recorded people’s CFF before and during a ride on an airplane making parabolic flights — think the Vomit Comet. At the top of the parabola, the passengers experience zero gravity conditions. The researchers found that in zero gravity, the participants’ CFF increased slightly — meaning the flashes had to be faster for them to see a continuous light beam. That was probably thanks to the reduced pressure on the nervous system allowing nerves to fire more quickly.
Unfortunately, our flicker fusion frequencies will never increase to the point that we can swat a fly in slow motion. For us, time will always… FLY BY.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Joanie Faletto, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. 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!