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: THRIVE MARKET: Get an extra 25% off your first order along with a free 30-day trial 40% Of Your Life Is on Autopilot Want a Healthy Brain? Don't Skip Leg Day, Says a Groundbreaking Study The U.S. Government Released a Study on Warp Drive Want more? Check out "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" by John J. Ratey. The audiobook is free with a trial of Audible. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale. Learn more about these topics and more onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
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:
Want more? Check out "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" by John J. Ratey. The audiobook is free with a trial of Audible. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.
Learn more about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-to-form-new-habits-leg-day-helps-brain-health-and-a-government-study-on-warp-drive
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about a US-government study on warp drive, how to form new habits, and why you should never skip leg day if you want a healthy brain.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, what's the last habit that you formed?
CODY GOUGH: I did kind of form a habit recently, and I was making my bed.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's great. You make your bed every morning?
CODY GOUGH: Most mornings. If my wife isn't going into work that day because she doesn't always go into her office and I'm in a hurry, I'll kind of leave it and she'll handle a bit. Between the two of us, we have a very strong habit of at least one of us will make the bed during the day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hashtag goals. That makes your room look so much nicer. The vet tells me that I have to give my cat ear drops every single day. And it's really hard to do because she hates it.
And it's like I just have to ruin a perfectly good moment of me petting her by putting something awful in her ears, then she goes and runs away and hates me for like five minutes, and then she's fine again. But it's hard. So that's been a really hard habit for me to get into.
Anyway, [LAUGHS] a recent study actually showed that you probably have a lot more habits than you think. Actually, up to 40% of our daily activities come down to just habit. But if almost half of your life is just based on habit, then what makes it so hard to build a new one. Well, Curiosity found the answers. And it all comes down to engaging your habitual mind versus your intentional mind.
So let's start with where habits come from. You form habits through associative learning. So like when you learn something like how to ride a bike it activates the part of your brain where you find your working memory. And your brain needs repetition to stay engaged.
Your intentional mind cares about goals and outcomes, but your habitual mind runs on repeated cues. That's why if you're say, trying to lose weight, a weight loss program might leave your intentional mind feeling motivated, but it won't feed your habitual mind. You should do three things to feed your habitual mind.
So the first step is to derail existing habits. That means if you want to lose weight, you should get rid of unhealthy habit cues, like putting junk food out where you can see it and maybe instead put fruit where it's easier to get to. The second step is plain old repetition. It can take anywhere from 15 to 254 days to form a new habit, so get started.
And the final step is forming new, stable context cues. You brush your teeth, right? So start a flossing habit by flossing every time you brush your teeth since you do that anyway, or fill up a glass of water every time you go to the bathroom if you're trying to drink more water throughout the day. Baby steps.
CODY GOUGH: One thing you can do is when you get home, you can just put on your gym clothes, because that's a pretty easy habit to do.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: It's not an hour-long commitment. It's like a 5-minute thing. You just put on your gym clothes. And then at that point, well, you're already dressed for the gym.
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure. And some people actually, if you're going to do a morning workout, some people will go to sleep with their workout clothes on.
CODY GOUGH: That's such a good idea.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, my gosh, the look on your face.
CODY GOUGH: You just changed my life.
[LAUGHTER]
Wow. That's happening. Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Changing lives.
CODY GOUGH: I'd like to recommend one additional choice you can make with your intentional mind this week. And that's saving money on your groceries, thanks to our sponsor Thrive Market.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thrive market is an online retailer that sells thousands of healthy products from your favorite brands at wholesale prices. And you can get everything shipped straight to your door. Their mission is to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.
CODY GOUGH: For instance, I know a bunch of people who have been doing the Whole30 diet. And if you know that diet, you're not supposed to eat dairy. So since you can't use butter when you're cooking, a lot of people use ghee instead.
ASHLEY HAMER: Because ghee is butter with the milk removed, right?
CODY GOUGH: Right. I actually did Whole30 last year, and I got some ghee at my local grocery store, and it was like the most expensive thing I've ever seen. It was just like so much. Well, there are a bunch of different varieties of ghee on Thrive Market, and every one. I saw was at least 30% cheaper than the retail price, if not 50%.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can search for groceries and other products based on up to 90 different values, like gluten free, paleo, kosher, and other ones. And we're talking groceries from kitchen staples to snacks.
CODY GOUGH: Save money on your next grocery trip by going to thrivemarket.com/curiosity and get 25% off your first order plus a free 30-day trial. No code necessary. Discount apply to checkout.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thrive Market's prices are already up to 50% off. But on top of that, Curiosity podcast listeners can visit thrivemarket.com/curiosity to get 25% off their first order plus a free, 30-day trial. You can make saving money your next habit.
CODY GOUGH: All right, Ashley, do you ever skip leg day?
ASHLEY HAMER: Never.
CODY GOUGH: Me neither.
ASHLEY HAMER: Leg day is the best.
CODY GOUGH: I actually like leg day because it's so efficient-- squats and deadlifts and you're kind of out there, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean--
CODY GOUGH: I mean, you can go deeper. But are you getting a pretty thorough workout between two exercises?
ASHLEY HAMER: They are your biggest muscles. And you are burning the most calories with those huge muscles, and you're doing great things for your body.
CODY GOUGH: I like efficiency. Well, a groundbreaking new study from just last month has shown that leg exercise is critical to brain and nervous system health. We already knew that not using your legs can reduce bone and muscle mass, like in astronauts in low gravity or in bedridden patients.
But a team of researchers wanted to know if restricting leg mobility would affect the brain. They ran tests on some mice by immobilizing their legs for 28 days. And the result was a 70% reduction in the number of neural stem cells in their brains compared to the freely-moving control group. That's 70%. That's really big.
ASHLEY HAMER: That is big.
CODY GOUGH: And without those cells, neurogenesis doesn't happen, that means new cell development. Brain health also declines as dead cells are not replaced. So the takeaway is, don't skip leg day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Little caveat that it is an animal study. So that doesn't necessarily extend to humans, but there's a good chance that it does.
CODY GOUGH: Better safe than sorry.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, leg day's great.
CODY GOUGH: Also, you don't want to be a tank on stilts.
[LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: That's right. Hey, Cody, what do you know about warp drive?
CODY GOUGH: I know I've watched a lot of Star Trek and a lot of Star Trek The Next Generation and a lot of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, et cetera. I could go on. But I don't think that means I know anything about warp drive.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, all right. Well, the way that warp drive works is it makes you go faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. You can't actually go faster than the speed of light, that's against the laws of physics. But it lets you go faster than the speed of light by actually wrinkling the fabric of space time.
CODY GOUGH: That's a misconception that warp drive is just going really fast, but it's actually not.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's a very specific technology that we don't have yet. Well, the US Department of Defense has just declassified a 2010 study. And it's called-- are you ready? Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions. That's right.
The US government has been studying warp drive. Warp drive isn't a thing. But theoretically, we could use Einstein's principles to bend the dimensions of space and time.
Those are several dimensions that are bound together into spacetime-- one word-- and that can curve and bend in the presence of certain physical forces. Like how you can make the waistline of a dress smaller by bunching up the fabric, it might be possible to actually bunch up the fabric of the universe to shorten the distance between two points. Wormholes are one way we might do this.
So this 34-page report from the government lays out just how we might produce warp drive. It uses a bunch of established physics to get to its end goal. But basically, it would work by controlling dark energy. And we can't do that because we don't even know what it is yet. You can read about dark energy in our full ride of today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But let's just say that the paper falls into the realm of not going to happen anytime soon.
CODY GOUGH: Wah-wah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Physicist Sean Carroll told Business Insider, quote, "It's bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications which it doesn't," unquote. Brutal. He went on to say that the paper is full of real physics but not real physics we can really do anything with in the near future or maybe ever.
Oh, well, honestly, you need to read this paper. It goes from, hey, here's this thing that we don't really understand. But if we did understand it, then maybe we could do this other thing we don't really understand. But if we did understand that, then we could do this other thing. It's like, wow. There's really not a lot of solid evidence here.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. Worth checking out on our site for sure.
ASHLEY HAMER: For sure. Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.