Learn about an easy way to catch someone in a lie; a possible scientific explanation for why your vestibular system may be to blame for out-of-body experiences; and the healthiest way to prepare broccoli, according to science. 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: To Catch Someone in a Lie, Science Says Go Low-Tech — https://curiosity.im/2qr2Nt3 Out-of-Body Experiences May Be Explained by Inner Ear Damage — https://curiosity.im/2Bmxce3 This Is the Healthiest Way to Prepare Broccoli, According to Science — https://curiosity.im/32qCCAU 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 an easy way to catch someone in a lie; a possible scientific explanation for why your vestibular system may be to blame for out-of-body experiences; and the healthiest way to prepare broccoli, according to science.
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-tell-when-someones-lying-out-of-body-experiences-and-healthiest-way-to-cook-broccoli
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 an easy way to catch someone in a lie; a possible scientific explanation for what causes out-of-body experiences; and the healthiest way to prepare broccoli, according to science.
CODY: Let’s prepare some curiosity.
To Catch Someone in a Lie, Science Says Go Low-Tech — https://curiosity.im/2qr2Nt3 (from Wednesday 10/15) (Ashley)
For as long as humans could talk, we’ve been trying to figure out when others are lying. Wouldn’t it be great if people were like Pinnochio, and their noses got longer when they told a lie? These days, you'd think technology could solve this problem, but it hasn’t thus far. In fact, research suggest low-tech techniques might work better. The most promising technique involves, wait for it … asking questions and listening to the answers. Yes, science says that if you want to catch someone in a lie, the trick is to go low-tech.
So, what’s up with lie detectors, aka the polygraph? Well, lie detectors measure things like your heart and breathing rate, which increase when you’re anxious, with the idea being that lying makes you anxious. Problem is that many truthful people are anxious during interrogation, while good liars might not be anxious at all.
Another technology trick comes in the form of the Micro-Expressions Training Tool, or METT. That teaches people to detect liars by looking for tiny, fleeting "micro-expressions" that people supposedly make when they’re lying. This approach is already used in lots of settings including airport security. But that’s bad news, considering that a recent study showed that when it came to spotting liars, participants trained on METT did slightly worse than randomly guessing. Yikes.
The low-tech question-answer method I mentioned earlier involves a lot more work. It’s based on the idea that telling a lie is simply harder mental work than telling the truth. Ask any writer: making up a story takes more effort than simply transcribing something that happened.
That means that if you add more cognitive challenges to the task, like asking people to tell their story in reverse, liars will struggle, which’ll make it easier for observers to tell they are lying.
An even more basic approach that helps is to just ask more questions, especially unexpecte ones, which makes it a challenge for a liar to come up with something that's not in their prepared story on the spot. Sounds a lot like good old-fashioned investigators’ methods, right? Well, it is. Just make sure you ask the right questions and really listen to the answers.
Out-of-Body Experiences May Be Explained by Inner Ear Damage — https://curiosity.im/2Bmxce3 (Cody)
If you’ve ever had an out-of-body experience, then you might be surprised to learn what caused it. Because it’s a pretty weird reason: as in, according to a study from 2017, out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, may be explained by inner ear amage. Wait, what? Lemme back up. You might describe an OBE as the sensation of floating above your own body and getting a bird's eye view of your surroundings. And a 2017 study published in Cortex suggests you can actually blame this on your inner-ear — or, more specifically, your vestibular system. That’s made up of canals in your inner ear that track your balance and your location in space; it's the same system that makes you dizzy and gets you carsick. This study looked at more than 200 patients who’d reported dizziness, and 14 percent of them said they’d have OBEs. That means they were almost three times more likely to have an OBE than the study’s control group of healthy people. And that difference suggested to researchers that the vestibular system might play a role in OBEs. Here’s how it might work: your inner ear works to give your brain an idea of where you're existing in a space, right? Okay, so are you in a small room? Huge room? Are you moving? Your brain always has a bird's eye understanding of your space, but you experience the world through the perspective of your eyes. But then something glitches in how your brain is receiving sensory information, so your bird's eye view takes over as a default. And get this: in 2002, a neuroscientist actually demonstrated that you can induce an OBE by electrically stimulating the part of the brain that integrates vestibular and visual information. Pretty compelling, right? The authors of the 2017 study found a few other factors that might contribute to having an OBE; for one, those dizziness patients were more likely to have OBEs if they also had anxiety and depression. And people who have other perceptual anomalies — like feeling the mysterious sensation of a body part changing shape — are more likely to report OBEs. Me, personally, I’m not gonna rule out a more spiritual answer to the mystery of having an out-of-body experience. But if you’ve been searching for a scientific answer to explain one that you’ve had, then hopefully this research has helped you find a few possibilities.
This Is the Healthiest Way to Prepare Broccoli, According to Science — https://curiosity.im/32qCCAU (from Friday 10/25) (Ashley)
Get ready to learn about the healthiest way to prepare broccoli, according to science. This is important because we all know we have to eat our veggies to stay healthy. But some methods of preparing food destroy the good stuff. Which is why science has found the healthiest way to prepare broccoli to boost its benefits to the max, and it involves very little extra effort. Bring it on, broccoli.
By the way, there’s a reason why broccoli’s spent a long time in the spotlight as a poster child for healthy foods. It’s been found to slash blood sugar in type 2 diabetics, fight cancer, and more. That’s thanks to an antioxidant called in broccoli called sulforaphane.
Unfortunately, sulforaphane turns out to be pretty tricky to get at in raw broccoli, because it exists in the form of glucosinolates. Those need an enzyme called myrosinase to break it down. How do you get myrosinase working? Just by damaging the broccoli. Unfortunately, preparation methods like boiling and microwaving don't count. They seriously REDUCE the levels of glucosinolates in broccoli, so you actually end up with less sulforaphane.
For a study published in January 2018, Chinese researchers dove into ways of cooking broccoli that could possibly maintain its cancer-fighting goodness. They started by examining a common method in China: stir-frying. Then the researchers tried a few different methods and compared the results. Ready for the best recipe? here it is: first, chop up the broccoli into tiny pieces, then let it sit for 90 minutes. THEN, lightly stir-fry it. When the researchers did this, the broccoli that was chopped and left out for the enzymes to do their thing had 2.8 times as much sulforaphane content as the broccoli that was stir-fried right away. Although this method increases your meal prep time, it also increases your broccoli's nutritional power. Is it worth it? That's up to you.
CODY: And now, let’s recap what we learned today. Today we learned that if you want to catch someone in a lie, science says to go low-tech. Just ask them more questions, and really listen to the answers.
ASHLEY: And that out-of-body experiences may be caused by inner ear damage, because your vestibular system is what tracks where your body is in space.
CODY: And that the healthiest way to prepare broccoli is to chop it up into tiny pieces, let it sit for 90 minues, and then lightly stir-fry it.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Linda Lombardi and Joanie Faletto, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY: Scripts today by Sonja Hodgen / Sonja Margaret Ann Hodgen and Cody Gough. Today’s podcast 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!