Learn about why having too many choices stresses us out; how wormholes might cast a visible shadow; and the adorable Wug Test that measures how well children understand the rules of language. 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: Having Too Many Choices Stresses Us Out — Here's Why — https://curiosity.im/2lKjb5Y Wormholes Might Cast a Visible Shadow — https://curiosity.im/2mVYcx3 This Adorable Test Measures Children's Grasp of Language Rules — https://curiosity.im/2lxcpjR 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 having too many choices stresses us out; how wormholes might cast a visible shadow; and the adorable Wug Test that measures how well children understand the rules of language.
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:
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/how-to-deal-with-having-too-many-choices-wormhole-shadows-and-a-language-wug-test
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 having too many choices stresses us out; how wormholes might cast a visible shadow; and an adorable test that measures how well children understand the rules of language.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Having Too Many Choices Stresses Us Out — Here's Why — https://curiosity.im/2lKjb5Y (Republish) (Cody)
Having too many choices stresses us out. And new research shows why from a physiological point of view, there is definitely such a thing as too much choice. [ad lib]
As reported by The Conversation, research from July 2019 looked at what happens to our bodies when we’re making decisions. And the results are... a little concerning.
Plenty of previous research has shown that too much choice can lead to things like “decision paralysis” or dissatisfaction or just plain old regret. But it wasn’t clear what people were actually experiencing when they were in the middle of making decisions.
So a team of researchers from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York set out to discover whether people genuinely feel confident about their ability to make a good decision. And, if so, when does this experience turn from good to bad?
For their study, they asked participants to review online dating profiles. Some were asked to pick one profile from those options, some were allowed to pick a few options, and others just rated the profiles on a scale from 1 to 10. And while they did that, the researchers tracked the participants’ cardiovascular responses.
They found that when the participants chose from lots of options, they felt more invested in the decision, and their hearts beat harder and faster. But their arteries also constricted — which is a sign that they felt less confident about their decision.
This matters because if they happen often enough, even minor exposures to this kind of cardiac activity are believed to have long-term health consequences — like heart disease and hypertension. So literally, having too many choices could be bad for your physical health.
Which begs the question: how do we protect ourselves from choice overload? The study’s lead author Thomas Saltsman suggests putting decisions into perspective. Most of the day-to-day choices you make aren't gonna matter in the grand scheme of things.
It also helps to enter these situations with a few clear guidelines of what you want — and don't want. This narrows the possible choices, and also makes you more confident about your decision-making abilities. Removing the sheer weight of our choices can help us navigate a world overwhelmed by them.
Wormholes Might Cast a Visible Shadow — https://curiosity.im/2mVYcx3 (Ashley)
Like artificial gravity and anything quantum, wormholes are one of those cheap writing tools that seem to make any sci-fi plot point possible. However, they're also objects predicted by real scientific theories that real scientists are searching for. And now, according to a recent paper, it might be possible to find a wormhole based on the visible shadow that it casts.
A wormhole is a theoretical object that basically takes a singularity, like the one at the center of a black hole, and extends it to a second location. That creates a tube-shaped path between two points by wrinkling the fabric of spacetime as if you pinched together the two sides of a balloon.
Wormholes are different from black holes, but they're related. Some concepts of wormholes require a black hole at one end. Both black holes and wormholes have an intense gravitational pull that warps the fabric of spacetime and bends the path that light takes around them. But not all light — some unlucky light particles fall in, producing a dark void scientists call a shadow.
But here’s the thing: while black holes are confirmed to exist; the existence of wormholes is much less airtight. One glaring issue is that if they do exist, we don't know how to keep one from collapsing instantly; to solve that, scientists came up with a theoretical material with negative pressure called "exotic matter" to keep the tunnel open. Of course, we don't know what, if anything, exotic matter really is. But just because you don't know if something exists doesn't mean you can't go looking for it.
So just like black holes, wormholes should produce a shadow from the light that falls into them. And in fact, scientists have calculated the shape of a rotating wormhole's shadow! Chances of spotting any wormhole are slim, of course. To know the shape of the shadow requires knowing the geometry of the wormhole, and knowing the geometry of the wormhole requires knowing the nature of the exotic matter within it. And that, we're sad to say, is a long way off. But at least it might be possible!
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This Adorable Test Measures Children's Grasp of Language Rules — https://curiosity.im/2lxcpjR (Ashley)
When you turn a singular noun into a plural, you do it slightly differently each time. So, shell becomes shells but fish becomes fishes. Those are examples of what linguists call morphology, or word formation. The question is: How do people know to make these plurals differently? Did they just learn these words on their own, or did they learn the rules they follow? To answer this question, a linguist in the 1950s quizzed small children with a measure that's come to be known as the Wug Test.
For the study published in 1958, the linguist Jean Berko Gleason set out to understand how children think about morphology. She couldn't just ask kids to recite the plural forms of existing English words because there was no way to know whether they simply memorized the words themselves instead of understanding the rules for forming them.
Instead, she came up with nonsense words. An experimenter would show the child a card with a bird-like creature for example with text that read: "This is a WUG.” Then the researcher would add another creature and ask the child to complete a sentence that read “There are two ____."
The child would have never heard of a wug, but if they knew the rules of morphology, they could easily answer correctly: "There are two wugs," pronouncing the "s" like a "z."
Berko Gleason found that, unsurprisingly, children's grasp of morphological rules got better with age: But the participants, as a whole, were more successful on some questions than others. Turning "wug" into "wugs" seemed to be the easiest for them all — in fact, the percentage of children who got that right was the same as for turning the real word "glass" into "glasses." It wasn't quite as simple to pronounce a word like "kra" or "lun" as the plural "kras" or "luns" because, as Berko Gleason writes, you could end these words with an "s" or a "z" sound and still have a possible English word.
The results were enough for Berko Gleason to conclude that children really do possess what linguists call "productive morphological capabilities." In fact, they grasped the rules of language at a much earlier age than previously assumed. So there you have it: the young children around you aren’t just memorizing words — they’re learning the rules we use to communicate.
CODY: And now, let’s recap what we learned today. Today we learned that when you have too many options, your arteries literally constrict, which could lead to long-term health problems.
ASHLEY: We also learned that wormholes might cast visible shadows, because
CODY: And that
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!