Learn about how we know that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. We’ll also talk to social psychologist and author Devon Price about how laziness might actually benefit us.
Learn about how we know that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. We’ll also talk to social psychologist and author Devon Price about how laziness might actually benefit us.
The Epic Tale of the 5th Mass Extinction (Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary) by Natalia Reagan
Additional resources from Dr. Devon Price:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/laziness-isnt-what-you-think-w-dr-devon-price
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you learn about how we know that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.
ASHLEY HAMER: Then we'll talk to Social Psychologist and Author Devon Price about how laziness might actually benefit us.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know what many scientists currently think kill the dinosaurs. And no, it wasn't smoking. They say it was a giant asteroid, and they've got the evidence to prove it. That's thanks to a father-son scientist team that made an accidental discovery back in the 1970s.
The seen, it's 66 million years ago. The end of the Cretaceous period, it's hot. Sticky hot. The Earth is teeming with dinosaurs including T. rexs, velociraptors, and assorted sauropods. And then it came. An asteroid the size of Mount Everest struck Earth. The 100 million megaton blast destroyed 75% of all life. But not all at once, the initial impact would have killed the animals in the immediate vicinity. But it also would have triggered a series of devastating events, including tsunamis, earthquakes, and underwater volcanic eruptions.
Not to mention the debris, which likely rose high into Earth's atmosphere and darkened the skies for months, maybe longer. The lack of sunlight would have killed many plant species, which would have led to the deaths of the animals that ate those plants and the animals that ate those animals. The old trophic cascade of extinction.
But how did scientists come up with the idea that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Enter Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father-son scientist duo. Luis was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and Walter was an Earth and planetary scientist. While working on a geological expedition in Italy, they accidentally discovered a thin layer of a heat resistant mineral called iridium. Iridium is one of the rarest elements found on Earth but it's common in asteroids. Hmm.
And this iridium was dated to around 66 million years ago, right around the time the dinosaurs died. Then the duo check sites in Denmark and New Zealand and found iridium in the exact same layer. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? Smelling that fifth extinction that I'm stepping in? Hmm. So sweet it is. They published their findings in 1980 and the Alvarez hypothesis was born.
One question remained, though. Where did the asteroid land? That question got its answer in 1991 when the Chicxulub impact crater was discovered off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The crater's age and size match the Alvarez hypothesis. Voila. Since then, the theory has gotten even more solid. That same iridium layer turned out to contain bits of quartz. That's a sign of a high impact explosion. And soot-- a sign of fires triggered by the impact.
Just like putting together the skeleton of Sue the T. rex, here's looking at you, kid, scientists from multiple fields worked together to fill in the puzzle of one of the biggest mysteries humans have ever encountered. What killed the dinosaurs? Now, if we can only figure out how to bring them back.
ASHLEY HAMER: I have a bad habit. And maybe you do too. I know that self care is important, that you should take time to relax and that you should be kind to yourself. I know these things. And if a friend seems stressed or burnt out, I'll be the first to remind them. But for me, oh, well, obviously, these things don't apply to me. I should be able to handle the pressure.
And when I can't, I know that it's because deep down, I'm lazy. If you're in the same boat, today's guest is going to be a breath of fresh air. Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist and Professor at Loyola University in Chicago. They're also the author of the upcoming book, Laziness Does Not Exist, which makes the case for why what we think of as laziness really comes from the pressure to do too much.
In fact, as Devon explains, feelings of laziness may really be the body's way of telling us that something is wrong. Here's Devon.
DEVON PRICE: When we feel unfocused, when we are having trouble getting something done, when we just feel like we just can't live anymore, those are often signs from our brain and our body that we need a break. Our body is very good at self-regulation as much as we try to punish ourselves into ignoring those things.
So in much the same way that if someone goes without sleep for too long, they start getting micro sleeps while they're driving. We have a cognitive way of ensuring that we get breaks even when we don't want them. In the creativity psych research, there's this very common concept of the incubation period, which is just the idea that to have a creative idea to solve a complex problem, if you want to have a moment of insight, basically, of any kind, you need time, not thinking about the problem.
You need time staring off in space, going on a walk. This is why a lot of creative moments come to people in the shower. It's like the "mad men" quote that I mentioned in the book. You want to think very deeply about the problem, and then forget it for a while. And then there's also a lot of research looking at administrative assistants in office workers that shows that cyber loafing is necessary for switching tasks.
Cyber loafing is just like checking Facebook, online shopping, goofing around online for a few minutes while you're at work. And employers hate that and they see it as time theft. But all the research suggests that it's a way of coming up for air mentally and it's pretty inevitable. And that when people are switching from one really draining thing like writing email to editing a spreadsheet, you need a little moment of cyber loafing to relax your brain and mentally gearshift.
So our impulse to do things that look quote unquote, "lazy" are actually really helpful for our mental health and often really helpful for our productivity as well.
ASHLEY HAMER: I feel like we all know that self-care is important and that we shouldn't ask too much of ourselves, especially, during the pandemic and yet we don't apply that to ourselves. We just apply that to everybody else. What's up with that double standard that we give ourselves?
DEVON PRICE: I think we all hold ourselves to standards higher than other people because we-- I think it's partially an attempt to kind of assert control, right? People want to think that they have a unique amount of control over themselves, especially, in of an American individualistic culture. We don't like to think of ourselves as victims of circumstance.
So I think part of it is this kind of very individualistic and even just dating back to the Protestant work ethic and the Puritans. This idea that we are supposed to-- if we are good, virtuous people, we're supposed to have discipline, we're supposed to have control over ourselves. And if we really work hard enough, we'll be able to do better than most other people.
So that creates this really weird double-edged sword where you both think that you personally should be held to a higher standard than anyone else, and also it means you feel like crap about yourself all the time because you're never going to meet that standard. And you're giving a lot more leeway to other people.
So that's one of the funniest things that I've noticed in this book and talking about it to people. When I tell people the title, "laziness" does not exist, they never really say like, "Oh, but my husband is so lazy" or "oh, you know. This person that I know is so lazy." It's always, "Oh, sure. Other people have things going on that explain why they're burnt out, but I don't have a good enough excuse. I could do better."
And that's one of the things that's both the funniest and kind of the saddest about it. Is we give ourselves so little permission to be human and as flawed as anybody else. The whole message of this book is really, what are your values versus what are the shoulds that are being put on you by your employer, by your family, by society, by a culture that tells you that you constantly need to be doing impressive productive things.
And COVID has given people a chance to really reframe what their values are and really think about what they want their life to be. And so to the extent that you can right now look at that-- look at your life and see, what can I give myself permission to just not do anymore, who can I disappoint without two negative consequences, how can I take a responsibility off my shoulders, and how can I put that energy, instead, towards something that makes life actually feel worth living.
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, that was Dr. Devon Price. A social psychologist and professor at Loyola University of Chicago, School of Continuing and Professional Studies, and the author of the upcoming book, Laziness Does Not Exist. It's set to be released on January 5, 2021. You can find a link to pre-order the book in the show notes. Devon will be back tomorrow to explain how to avoid burnout in the workplace.
CODY GOUGH: All right. Let's see how good of a listener I was by recapping today's takeaways. Today, we learned that the dinosaurs were most likely taken out by a giant asteroid that hit off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and the story of how it was discovered is also pretty darn cool. It was first proposed by a father and son scientist team that discovered a layer of iridium around the globe that matched the 66 million-year extinction events. And all the chaos that came from the asteroid led to 3/4 of life dying on Earth.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, bonus fact on this asteroid impact story. When Natalia and I were looking into this, I found out that Luis Alvarez, in addition to being a Nobel Prize winning physicist and helping to discover the evidence that shows that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, he was also on the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb on Japan during World War II which is wild. And he spoke about it afterward, and he said he was shocked and sickened by what he saw.
But he kept working in high-energy physics and then he won the Nobel Prize. But yeah. Amazing scientists have mixed backgrounds, I would say. Everybody's human.
NATALIA REAGAN: No. I was shocked. I had no idea, honestly. But yeah. This is actually-- this story, I mean, of the dinosaurs going extinct has been a personal favorite forever. So fun to finally tell it and to get that extra little bit of information. Mind blown, go get a mop.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we also learned that laziness actually stems from our feeling that we must always be productive and that being lazy doesn't really exist. And they're giving our minds an opportunity to come up for air, a.k.a. cyber loafing, is actually good for us. And lets us just switch tasks more effectively. We also have a laziness double standard where we are harder on ourselves than we are to other people.
I'm glad that this came out because I played a lot of Hades while I was on paternity leave. Hades is a new video game that everyone is playing pretty much. So that was fun and sometimes, I'd kick myself and be like, wow, I haven't read a single book while on paternity leave. But you know what? When you sit down and you read like three words, and you can barely process what they mean because you're so tired, turns out that video games are a nice alternative to unwinding after a sleepless night or not enough naps.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah I think, especially, of all people, new parents should be kind to themselves. I think there is so much stress and sleeplessness and just new things you have to learn that, yeah, I don't think anyone would blame you for playing a few video games.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. And I definitely feel like there's this sort of glorification of being busy all the time too which is dangerous. I mean, it's almost like, if you're not busy, you're immediately, you know, pigeonholed as lazy or I think that's more of a self perception than what others would say given the double standard that Devon spoke about. But yeah, we just go easy on ourselves, you know? Like, cut ourselves some slack. It's been a year, you know?
ASHLEY HAMER: It has.
CODY GOUGH: Yes. I am on a crusade to end that whole. Always be busy, always be on thing on this podcast. We've done stories about how the most productive employees take the most vacation time but how working fewer hours ends up making people more productive. All this other stuff like you don't have to have the axe to the grinder all the time or you're not going to have an axe anymore.
ASHLEY HAMER: But something else that we do, Cody, that I've been thinking about a lot is that in all of those stories, we're still focusing on productivity.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
ASHLEY HAMER: And like, productivity is not the end all be all of humanity, right? Just enjoying life is good.
CODY GOUGH: That's true.
ASHLEY HAMER: And so maybe we shouldn't have such a focus on that too.
CODY GOUGH: We also do stories about like, I don't know. Trees and how looking at water is good for you and nature and gardening.
ASHLEY HAMER: No, you're right. You're right. We have a lot of stories. It's fine.
CODY GOUGH: Man. I did me some gardening on paternity leave too. I got to tell you. Planting soil and just like smelling it and just having your hands in it, if you can get your hands-- like if you're in an apartment, even just a little potted, anything. Just do it and be present. Like really think about and just really literally smell it and just breathe in that freshness, and it's something. There's chemicals there. I'm telling you. Humans, we were designed to do that stuff.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
NATALIA REAGAN: Absolutely. Today's first story was written, well, by me and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting by Natalia Reagan. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael and our producer is Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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