On this special episode of the Curiosity Podcast, we celebrate the end of our show's first year with a look back at some of the stories you never got to hear. You'll hear stories and lessons from past guests that we didn't get to share the first time around! Plus, hosts Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer let their hair down and give you an inside look at how the show is produced. It's a refreshing (and very entertaining) look back at 2017 and forward towards the future of the Curiosity Podcast! Among other surprising facts and stories you'll hear, this episode features: Bryan Davis, founder and owner of Lost Spirits Distillery, telling a fascinating story about the international alcohol industry (with a hilarious history lesson on the side). Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation dropping some knowledge about how your sense of smell is linked to your memory and more. Handwriting analyst Dale Roberts swapping stories with Cody about the surprising world of hand modeling. Dr. Sam Sternberg, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing expert, discussing classical music and finding some surprising things in common with both Cody and Ashley. Some behind-the-scenes fun that could change the way you think about the Curiosity Podcast. Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
On this special episode of the Curiosity Podcast, we celebrate the end of our show's first year with a look back at some of the stories you never got to hear. You'll hear stories and lessons from past guests that we didn't get to share the first time around! Plus, hosts Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer let their hair down and give you an inside look at how the show is produced. It's a refreshing (and very entertaining) look back at 2017 and forward towards the future of the Curiosity Podcast!
Among other surprising facts and stories you'll hear, this episode features:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/learn-a-little-about-a-lot-from-curiosity-podcast-favorites
ASHLEY HAMER: Every day, we explore what we don't know.
CODY GOUGH: Every day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Every day, every week.
CODY GOUGH: That's too much exploring.
ASHLEY HAMER: Too many. Every hour.
CODY GOUGH: Newest time to explore every day.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, I'm Cody Gough, and welcome to a special edition of the Curiosity Podcast. Today, we're going to learn a few new things like we always do. But we're going to have a lot of fun while doing it. Look, we've learned a lot on this podcast, but as you probably know, as a producer and editor, I have to pick and choose what I put into every episode of the show. And sometimes that means leaving stuff on the cutting room floor, as they say in ShowBiz. Well, fortunately for you, I'm kind of a digital hoarder, so I keep a copy of everything in case I need it later.
And to celebrate our first successful year of podcasting, I'd like to wrap up 2017 with some of the best stuff you haven't heard on the Curiosity Podcast. So that little intro with Ashley was pretty fun, right? You would not believe what goes on when we're scripting, and recording, and editing every episode. That could probably be a show by itself, although I'm not really sure how much you would exactly learn from that.
So sometimes we learn stuff together. And I'd like to give you a little inside look at one of our recording sessions, where we did just that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Some countries are working to combat this problem, but change has been pretty slow.
CODY GOUGH: You say combat kind of weird.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know. "Comm-bat."
CODY GOUGH: You have to decide ahead of time. "Come-bat" or "comm-bat."
ASHLEY HAMER: To "come-bat," that's what it is. OK.
CODY GOUGH: Would it be "come-bat"?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think "comm-bat" is a noun and "come-bat" is a verb.
CODY GOUGH: Oh.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right? I don't know. I just made that up. I think that's how it is, but I don't know that for sure.
CODY GOUGH: How to pronounce combat as a verb? How to pronounce-- oh, here we go. All right, hold on, hold on. That is a verb.
SPEAKER 1: "Come-bat."
CODY GOUGH: Oh, so that is a verb.
SPEAKER 2: Combative.
CODY GOUGH: That's an adjective.
SPEAKER 3: "Com-bat."
CODY GOUGH: "Com-bat." is a noun. So yeah, it would be "com-bat."
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, "com-bat."
CODY GOUGH: Wow. We've some new word today.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know. Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Some countries are working to combat this problem, but change has been pretty slow.
CODY GOUGH: OK, enough about us, the hosts. Let's hear it from some guests. First, is Bryan Davis. Bryan is the founder and owner of Lost Spirits Distillery, and we talked to him about how he taught himself chemistry and figured out how to chemically age rum and whiskey 20 years in just six days. This was a super fascinating conversation. I highly recommend checking it out.
But before he opened Lost Spirits here in the US, here's his story about what happened when he moved to Spain and started brewing absinthe in the early 2000s, which you're about to hear on this podcast for the first time.
BRYAN DAVIS: What happened actually. So in reality, we were lucky sort of. So the absinthe had become legal in Europe 10 years prior. And there were a couple of big beverage industry guys who we know now, but at the time, we didn't. These guys had challenged the Tax and Trade Bureau, which is the US regulatory division that governs distilleries and alcohol, as well as firearms and other stuff.
And they had a hold back room proceeding, which are not public with the Tax and Trade Bureau to challenge the idea that absinthe was illegal. Because technically, the formula wasn't. It was an old, old law written before they had really refined the law to the way we have today. And so they had said absinthe was illegal, but they hadn't ever defined absinthe.
CODY GOUGH: Was this during the Prohibition or prior?
BRYAN DAVIS: No, it was prior. It was at the time at which they had a lot of mental health cases in France tied to the absinthe boom. And so they had made it illegal here out of fears that you would have a big spike in mental health cases. It turned out that had to do with a food coloring that was being added to it, but that's a whole other story.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS] Sure.
ASHLEY HAMER: That food coloring was copper. While properly prepared absinthe gets its green hue from chlorophyll, shady producers would boost the color in low quality batches by adding copper salts. You're probably most familiar with copper being a brownish orange color, but if you've ever seen a rusty copper pipe, you know that it turns green when oxidized. One symptom of copper poisoning, central nervous system excitation, meaning agitation, confusion, twitching, and convulsions. Sounds like absinthe madness if I've ever heard it.
BRYAN DAVIS: To tell you a long story short, these two guys had challenged successfully the idea that you could have an illegal word, which is what you'd basically ended up with because the formula had been made legal in the 1980s through other different definitions of how much of different compounds were allowed to be in products and such. And so technically, the formula was already legal. It was the word that was illegal.
CODY GOUGH: This is insane to me.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's a very strange how-did-you-get-here thing.
CODY GOUGH: It's like the FDA classifies pizza as a vegetable.
[LAUGHTER]
That weird stuff where you're like, how is this a thing?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, I mean, it was really going to be a digression from hell. But what happened was I think it was 1912 when the US ban it. And they just said absinthe is illegal. It's like a three-sentence law. The idea was that everyone knows what absinthe is. You'll know it when you see it, right?
And so they didn't define it. They just said absinthe is illegal, so you can't import it, you can't sell it, you can't do anything. And so then in the 1980s, they had been challenged on foods known as the toxic compound in wormwood. That's the thing that's actually regulated in absinthe.
In the 1980s, they had been challenged on the topic of Thujone-free products. And the argument was that they couldn't tell if a product had less than 10 parts per million of Thujone in it because the analytical tools in the 1980s were only good enough to get to 10 parts per million of resolution on the chemistry. And so they effectively defined Thujone-free in products made from plants that contain Thujone, the neurotoxin in it, that anything less than 10 parts per million would technically count as 0. And actually, real historical absinthe was below 10 parts per million under most circumstances.
And so technically speaking, the formula was already legal because of that ruling from the 1980s, but you still have this law that said absinthe is illegal.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so it's really strange when you get to-- it's like having a law that says t-shirts are illegal and then having a formula that describes a t-shirt and says it's OK to sell it. Just don't call it a T-shirt.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS] Right?
CODY GOUGH: That's so strange.
BRYAN DAVIS: So you ended up with effectively an illegal word.
CODY GOUGH: And someone repealed, decided to repeal this?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, these guys saw a business opportunity. The Moulin Rouge movie had just come out. Absinthe was a thing people were familiar with suddenly. And there was this idea that, hey, you could probably sell a lot of this stuff if you could get it legal again. And they started going through the law and going through how they had arrived at this strange place and going, this is crazy.
And so they challenged TTB on it. They had a series of hearings. And TTB ultimately ruled that they would allow it. But as they often do with these rulings, they don't publish the results of the ruling for months and months and months. So these guys left the room going, they know it's about to be legal and no one else does.
And so these two guys set up two companies in Europe and started manufacturing absinthe, and started promoting it, and marketing it to Americans through the internet with the idea that you could buy it in a brown paper bag that would be marked as olive oil and get shipped to you. And if customs caught it, they'll send you a replacement.
And so this becomes a whole marketing endeavor. And because we're their target consumers at the time, because I was the guy who'd been making absinthe in my kitchen forever, I'm getting bombarded with all of their marketing messages. And so Joanne and I thought, let's go do this, too. So we basically copied what they were doing without realizing that we were copying very seasoned professional beverage industry executives.
And so right when we should have gone bankrupt, the US goes and legalizes absinthe. We start selling it in the United States. We end up number four in the US market. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Unbelievable. My jaw is hanging open right now.
BRYAN DAVIS: It was a crazy journey. It was a lot of fun. And mostly because we were just-- so you'll catch this theme the more you talk to me, but naivete is really, really, really important.
CODY GOUGH: Important for you to have?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. It's really important that you're naive, because if you don't know what's supposed to be impossible, then you'll still try it, right? And the whole reason we ended up number four in the US market is because we were incredibly naive. We ended up getting distribution in Las Vegas, which is a market that's normally closed, sealed, and locked down in the beverage industry.
And it's what's called a pay-for-play market. You can't get access to the consumers there. But we didn't understand any of this, so we just went and broke all the rules somehow and survived through doing it, and basically, did this systematically in lots of different things. We didn't have any etiquette in the business world. We didn't understand that it's not appropriate to get 20 of your friends to go to your competitor's lecture and drop stink bombs wearing ski masks.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Shocking.
[LAUGHTER]
BRYAN DAVIS: It was incredibly fun.
CODY GOUGH: So you're now living in Spain, you're the number four absinthe distributor in the US. You're set, right?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, you'd think, except that everybody got sick of absinthe about six months after that.
CODY GOUGH: Uh-oh.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS] And so the whole market collapsed. So the entire absinthe market collapses. We sold the distillery off to some local guys in Spain at a loss. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Oh, no.
BRYAN DAVIS: And we came home and went, OK. Well, that was fun. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Now what?
BRYAN DAVIS: Now what are we going to do?
CODY GOUGH: Well, now what turned into Bryan Davis founding Lost Spirits Distillery, so it all worked out in the end. And later in our conversation, Bryan talked to me about a label he was designing for one of his products, and it had a pretty hilarious back story. Here it is.
Earlier, you were telling me an interesting story about a ship in the--
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, yeah. It's on a label I just got done designing for one of the new products that's not out yet. It's called the HMS Royal George. It was built in the 1700s. And at the time it was built, it was the largest ship of the line that had ever been constructed. So it was this huge giant towering mega ship that held hundreds cannons on it.
And the story of the ship-- I mean, it fought the whole bunch of wars, it sank a bunch of ships, especially French ones. The story of the ship, its end is the hilarious part, where they were essentially loading rum on. They were doing a long journey to Grenada, third to Gibraltar, to try to retake Gibraltar. And so they were loading up rum stores to be able to make that long of a journey with 1,500 sailors on board, or 1,100 sailors, or whatever it was on board.
So they were loading all the rum casks on, and they had loaded them all on the port side of the ship. And they were doing maintenance on the starboard side of the ship. And so they had moved the starboard cannons to the center line of the ship. And all of the extra rum that they had loaded onto the port side of the ship was enough to tip the whole thing over, and then ultimately sink it. So it was the largest and most glorious ship of its day. It wasn't sank in battle, but was sunk by the rum.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Incredible.
BRYAN DAVIS: So the second chapter of the story is the court martial after the sinking of the ship was inaccurate in its recordkeeping. And so 75 years later, they still had to keep getting boats to go around it when they were coming into port, because the shipwreck was huge. And so the Royal Engineers wanted to blow it up and clear the debris so that the ships didn't have to worry about it anymore.
And so they read all the court martial documents from 75 years prior and concluded that the ship was sunk differently than it was actually sunk. The court martial documents read that it was sunk by the wood just getting old and decrepit.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, no.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so they dropped a bunch of depth charges onto the boat without realizing that there were still a whole bunch of sealed barrels in the bottom of the whole of the ship full of high alcohol flammable rum, and also a bunch of sealed barrels of gunpowder. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: You're right. Oh, no.
BRYAN DAVIS: Because they were loading up to go to war and try to take Gibraltar. And so they dropped all their depth charges onto the ship, ignited them, and then detonated all of the rum and the gunpowder and the whole of the ship, which ultimately created an explosion big enough to shatter windows two miles away in Portsmouth. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Oh, my gosh. Did anybody die?
BRYAN DAVIS: Oops. I couldn't really find anything on that. I mean, I'm guessing probably not, because the Royal Engineers had probably all gotten very far out of the way, because they were planning to blow it up anyway.
CODY GOUGH: Right.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so after they dropped all the charges, they probably were planning to not be standing right next to it when they detonated it.
CODY GOUGH: Sure. But two miles away, that's--
BRYAN DAVIS: I mean, it probably broke a lot of windows.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS] Maybe made a couple people deaf.
CODY GOUGH: Wow, adventures in rum. I'm looking forward to seeing that on some label of one of your products in the future.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: And there's no word on whether that label has made it to the market yet, but you can always see the latest from Bryan and his team at lostspirits.net or follow him on Instagram at Lost Spirits Distillery. There's some really cool photos there.
We interviewed Bryan Davis somewhat recently. So let's go further back in time. How about all the way back? If you're a long-time Curiosity podcast listener, then you'll remember our very first episode featuring Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation. He talked about some of his leading research in the field of smell.
And you're not going to believe this, but that podcast only used about half of our conversation. He knew so much about smell. It was awesome. If you liked that episode, then you'll love learning more about smell in this part of our conversation that you've never heard before. Here it is.
ALAN HIRSCH: So while there are other components that we perceive as flavor, it's really smell that's impacting upon it. And let me give you an example of how strong our cognitive ability is to overcome how things actually taste. If you take a glass of grape crush, and you take a glass of orange crush, and you take it, and if you taste it, and you hold your nose, they'll taste the same.
Now I'm going to tell you this. Take an orange crush and put inside it ginger ale, and you tell people this is orange crush and they drink it, they'll say, oh, it's orange. You take the same ginger ale and tell them, this is grape crush, they'll say, yeah, this tastes like grapes. So our cognitive abilities, we can actually overcome what things truly taste like to make us perceive that they taste what we expect them to. It's something called the expectation effect.
CODY GOUGH: Interesting. So if I close my eyes and eat something gross, I'm going to think it tastes good, if somebody tells me it's something good?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, that's right. As a matter of fact, there are all sorts of different aspects that can the buds. For instance, one of the things we looked at in the past was we looked at wine tasters to see how they would perceive wine. And what we did is we took identical wines, and we put them in different bottles, and we poured them for the wine tasters. And all these professional wine tasters said, oh, yeah, this one has this bouquet and that bouquet, and they all described in different ways all of the identical wine.
ASHLEY HAMER: The most famous example of how even wine experts can be fooled by their senses comes from a 2001 dissertation by Frederic Brochet, which was published in the journal Brain and Language. Brochet recruited 54 students of oenology, the science of wine, and asked them to describe the flavor of two glasses of wine, one white and one red. The students described the white with words like honey, lemon, and floral; and the red with words like raspberry, cedar, and cherry.
A week later, he invited the students back to do the same thing, except this time both wines were the same white wine as the week before. He just dyed one with tasteless red food coloring. Even so, the students described each wine just as they had the red and white earlier. People commonly take this result to mean that wine tasting is just a load of BS. If experts can't tell the difference between a red and a white, why should we trust their judgments on finer details?
My best friend is a wine educator, and she understandably hates this study. Beside the point that these were wine science students who weren't trained in actually tasting wine, her main defense actually has a lot in common with what Alan has to say. Tasting a wine is a complete experience, one that uses all the senses, not just taste and smell, but sight, too. She says making wine experts judge a wine purely on taste is like making literature scholars guess a book based on a single sentence.
Sure, if it's, call me Ishmael, you'll know right away. But if it's, she sat, just because they can't name the book doesn't mean they're not experts.
ALAN HIRSCH: So our perception of how things smell and how they taste is strongly influenced by how they look. Let me give you an example. Another good example, sometimes in St. Patrick's Day, they dye the beer green, which it never really tasted exactly the way beer should taste when it's green. So how the color of the food will impact upon how you perceive it tastes, if it tastes good or bad.
CODY GOUGH: But what if I like green eggs and ham?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, that's right. Actually, at Universal Studios in Florida, they have a little restaurant of green eggs and ham. It tastes like eggs. But you're exactly right. So there's an expectation effect of how things should taste. Ketchup in its blue color or green color doesn't do very well as opposed to red ketchup.
CODY GOUGH: And that's why if you reach for a drink, and you think it's apple juice, and instead it's orange juice or something like that, and you drink it even if you love apple juice or orange juice or you love them both equally, if it's not what you're expecting, you're not going to love it.
ALAN HIRSCH: Exactly. So expectation effect has a strong influence on everything we do, both in the smell world, in the taste world, and in other sensory phenomena. So what happens is, is that there are many different factors all coming together that impact upon our perception of smell and our perception of taste.
In reality, everyone has a different ability to smell. Men have a worse ability to smell than women do. As you get older, your sense of smell drops down about half of those over the age of 65. And 3/4 of those over the age of 80 have a reduced ability to smell. Different ethnic groups have different abilities to smell. Korean-Americans are better than Whites who are better than Black who are better than Japanese who have the worst ability to smell.
CODY GOUGH: Is that genetic?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, part of it may be genetic, part of it may have to do with the number of cigarettes they smoke. It may have to do with the number of infections they get. There's a lot of different influences that impact upon it. Clearly, there's a strong genetic influence. We know that identical twins tend to have very similar abilities to smell. But again, they've also been exposed to the same in-utero environment and it's the same environment.
So there are many aspects that can impact upon one's ability to smell, and you can also do things to help train yourself to have better sense of smell. One of the things we know is that there are millions of people in the United States who have trouble smelling. And the number one cause of smell loss that we see over here at the Smell and Taste Treatment Research Foundation is from head trauma from motor vehicle accidents.
So I always encourage people to always wear your seat belt because it's much easier to prevent smell loss and actually treat it once it happened.
CODY GOUGH: Why is that the head trauma?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, part of it is because the olfactory nerve is one of the few, and the actually only nerve, in the brain to actually leave the skull and come out to the periphery. And it goes out from the skull through a paper thin bone at the top of the nose, the cribriform foam plate, and goes to the top of the nose. And so when you have head trauma and your brain sloshes around in your skull as it moves back and forth, the little paper thin bone either breaks or the little nerves rip as it goes through the bone, and you lose your sense of smell.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK, this is wild. You know how Alan said the olfactory nerve is the only one to leave the skull? That's because it has a direct connection to your brain smell center known as the olfactory bulb. While other senses are routed through the brain's command center, the thalamus, your sense of smell takes a straight shot to where it needs to go.
What's more? The smell-centric olfactory bulb is directly connected to the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, and the amygdala, which does emotional processing. That's why a smell can trigger such vivid powerful memories. It's directly connected to your memory center.
CODY GOUGH: And there's no way to reattach that like you can with other nerves?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, you can't surgically reattach it. However, there are different things you can do to help improve one's sense of smell after a head trauma. And there's not only the different medications that sometimes can improve depending upon how much of the nerves are still left, but you can also do things something called sniff therapy. And sniff therapy is where you sniff an odor repetitively through the day. And after a few months, you begin to be able to smell the smells, where in the past, you never were able to.
CODY GOUGH: How does that work? How does that work scientifically?
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, it's incredible. If you think about it for a second, imagine if you're color blind and you can't see green or red, you can't tell the difference, imagine if by watching all day long green and red, green and red, green and red, at the end of a few months, you could see green and red, well, we know that doesn't happen in the visual sphere. But in the olfactory sphere, it actually does because the nerves keep regenerating. And as it regenerates, new receptor sites are formed, and you can actually cause yourself to improve your sense of smell by repetitively smelling the same smell.
I guess it was discovered initially when somebody was in a laboratory, they were working with this horrible smelling smell that's industry known, [INAUDIBLE], and it smelled horrible. And the lab workers can smell it, one of them can smell it. And after a few months, you begin to say, oh, what's this horrible smell? Being repetitively exposed to it day in and day out, you begin to develop receptors for it, and you can actually smell it. So there's a strong plasticity in the olfactory sphere, stronger than any other senses.
CODY GOUGH: Are we all learning things together? I really hope. So let's take a quick break from learning really practical scientific stuff and learn something super random. We've got a story that handwriting expert Dale Roberts shared when he appeared on the Curiosity podcast. It was a little off topic from the overall podcast subject, but we ended up exchanging a couple of stories that left me feeling just a little bit jealous.
I've been here with Dale Roberts' graphologist or grapho-analyst. Those are cool titles. Take your pick. What do you prefer?
DALE ROBERTS: I usually go by grapho-analyst because graphologist sounds a little, I don't know, a little hokey--
CODY GOUGH: Hologist. Yeah, I could see the analyst part being really cool. Yeah. And you've done so much more besides handwriting analysis. You've been an actor before. You've done lots of performances. Have you done anything recently?
DALE ROBERTS: No, I've been in the financial services industry for about 40 years, but I spent 12 years as a commercial actor. I was actually a hand model for a long time. So if you ever saw things like the Bacos Bacon Bits, where a hand comes in from the side of the screen and shook the Bacos on the salad, that was probably me.
CODY GOUGH: Bacos. I remember Bacos.
DALE ROBERTS: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's awesome. I had one hand modeling audition actually once. And they were taking pictures of my hand. I'm looking closely at my hand for the first time in a while, and I thought, I've got a pretty good looking hand. I might have a shot at this.
DALE ROBERTS: Actually, you do.
CODY GOUGH: Thank you. Right? So then what they hand me?
DALE ROBERTS: What's that?
CODY GOUGH: They hand me a standard size iPhone.
DALE ROBERTS: Ah.
CODY GOUGH: Now I'm 6'4", and I've got a big hand. I actually can reach extremely large span on a keyboard. So actually, some of my piano player friends really hate me because they're like, oh, I wish we had hands as big as yours. And they handed me that iPhone the second. It was in my hand, I said, this is a joke, right?
I mean, I knew right then I was like, I should just walk out because it just looked like a little-- it was rough. It was rough.
DALE ROBERTS: Yep, they wanted a smaller hand.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, that was my--
DALE ROBERTS: Because the phone look bigger.
CODY GOUGH: It looks like small. If it had been an iPhone Plus, probably it would have looked all right. But, oh, well. My hand modeling career never took off.
Speaking of acting in the arts-- OK, it's a very loose transition, but bear with me. You might remember that time we talked to a CRISPR gene editing expert Dr. Sam Sternberg about basically the future of the human race. Dr. Sternberg is a busy guy and is opening up his own lab at Columbia University and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. That's another awesome podcast I would recommend checking out.
Now on our show, he mentioned that he plays a little piano, and he was actually going to play a few gigs with a Michael Jackson cover band. And I was pretty shocked to find out from there that he has something in common with both me and Ashley. I love--
SAM STERNBERG: Are you a piano player?
CODY GOUGH: No. I grew up with taking lessons and I dabbled in college. My original major was actually saxophone.
SAM STERNBERG: I play saxophone, too.
CODY GOUGH: What? What don't you play?
SAM STERNBERG: I didn't apply for that, but I grew up playing classical sax. Classical or jazz?
CODY GOUGH: Well, both, but I love classical saxophone.
SAM STERNBERG: I played in a classical saxophone quartet in college. That was probably one of the funnest musical things I've done.
CODY GOUGH: Me, too. Oh my god. What did you play? Alto?
SAM STERNBERG: Alto. I played alto, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's awesome.
SAM STERNBERG: Actually, three years ago, I had a Selmer Series II, and it got stolen out of my car.
CODY GOUGH: No.
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah, so now I have a crummy tenor student model that I played in this funk band. And I'm like, I miss that Selmer. And it was one of the Saturdays in Berkeley. I was parked for an hour and a half right on campus. I thought it's safe enough for that long, and someone knocked my window out and stole the sax.
CODY GOUGH: Oh my god. That's the model I have, Selmer Series II.
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's the model I have, too. This is too weird. For those of you who aren't huge saxophone nerbs. Nerbs? [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: I don't know if any of our listeners are nerbs.
ASHLEY HAMER: For those of you who aren't huge saxophone nerds, the French Selmer brand is like-- OK, well, I'm bad with cars, but it's like a Corvette of saxophones. That is to say the only thing more sought after than a new one is a vintage one. A vintage Selmer Mark 6 is the holy grail of horns. They are very good instruments.
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah, classical sax quartets are awesome. That was so fun. I really want to do that again, honestly.
CODY GOUGH: Have you seen a sax quartet perform anytime recently?
SAM STERNBERG: I've only seen once. Actually, the teacher we had played in a quartet in New York, I forget what their name was, but my dad gave me a saxophone quartet album, like CD, when I was growing up, and I really loved it. And actually NPR, they have a lot. I don't know if you listen to NPR at all, but they always have their little musical interludes. And they often have a sax quartet playing them. I don't know why, but I think that sound of four saxophones is just beautiful.
ASHLEY HAMER: The music Dr. Sternberg is talking about is the theme to NPR'S All Things Considered, and it's performed by the Washington Saxophone Quartet. That version of the theme has aired daily for the last 20 years.
CODY GOUGH: I have lived in Chicago 10 years, and I have been glued to the Chicago Symphonies, whatever they're doing. And I used to work at WFMT, the classical radio station in town, and 10 years, I have never seen a saxophone quartet performance. It's just not a thing you can see easily.
SAM STERNBERG: Well, that's funny because I actually used to work in the music department for the program that organizes chamber groups and chamber group recitals. And then I was no longer working there, but I was playing in the sax quartet. And we auditioned to be in this chamber music concert, and I had to convince my old boss that a saxophone quartet is chamber music, because you don't hear it ever really.
But I mean, there's some awesome French literature--
CODY GOUGH: Oh my god. Yeah.
SAM STERNBERG: --for sax quartets, and it's beautiful.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it's amazing. My saxophone professor also played a lot of really 20th century stuff.
SAM STERNBERG: So did you go to college for sax?
CODY GOUGH: Well, I went to Drake University, so Liberal Arts College. And I was going to double major in just general music, and sax was my instrument, and radio TV production. And after failing theory twice--
SAM STERNBERG: Redirection.
CODY GOUGH: --I decided, do I need to spend an extra semester getting a general music degree when I'm not? Because I was never music performance major level. I was never great, but I could fake it. Did you ever played-- so you did play jazz on the sax a bit, right?
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah. I played in jazz band growing up, but I learned reading sheet music. And I feel like that always-- I mean, I played in a funk band for four years with another sax player. He learned how to play maybe 18 or 20. He was a terrible sight reader. It took him so long to learn licks and particularly tough rhythms.
But that guy could solo like a beast. Because he'd learned playing by just listening to what sounds awesome.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
SAM STERNBERG: And I was the exact opposite. I could sight read any chart easily. But when I saw it wasn't that fun to listen to because I can't get my mind outside of this framework of reading off the page. So yeah, I played jazz. I can play sheet music, no problem, but I'm not probably a great jazz saxophonist in terms of improvising.
CODY GOUGH: I'm totally 100% there with you. I always thought it was funny.
SAM STERNBERG: I wish we could go back. I'm actually curious what one would do if one wants to relearn how you think about music. But same thing on piano, I mean, I feel pretty locked into the way I think about music, and I can't unlearn that.
CODY GOUGH: I played one good improvised solo ever, one time. And I don't remember the piece, but I listened to the recording of it, and there was a really good trumpet solo. And I transcribed it just by ear. So I locked myself in a practice room, just hit repeat, and I just learned it by ear or whatever.
And then when I played in the performance-- I mean, I used a lot of what I learned, but I was able to play with a little bit and alter it. So I think that was always my best.
SAM STERNBERG: When you're memorizing licks and then you just pull from the licks that you do. I mean, you listen to famous sax solos, and you hear licks that you've heard elsewhere, I mean, I think it's not all just made up from scratch. I don't think I'll ever listen enough and practice enough. I never practiced improvising. I just played like whatever stupid snot as I was working on.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, of course. They're not stupid. They're great.
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah, they're great.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I love the cords. So Ashley Hamer, when I first started here, I asked her about her background and stuff. And she was like, oh, I play saxophone. It's like, oh, me, too. Yeah. Where do you play? She went to graduate school at University of North Texas.
So when I found that out, I mean they've got one of the best-- that's where my saxophone professor studied, and they've got one of the best programs. So I immediately was freaking out. I was like, oh my god. You're so good. And she plays in a funk band and a couple cover bands around town.
I don't know if she does the Michael Jackson stuff, but that's just really cool.
SAM STERNBERG: That's really funny and cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, stop it, you guys.
CODY GOUGH: So I love that we have the saxophone thing. I feel like you can always pick it back up.
SAM STERNBERG: Yeah, I mean, the question is when I'm going to have time for.
CODY GOUGH: The next few months.
SAM STERNBERG: Well, next few months, yeah. I'd love to do stuff in New York, and everyone's like, oh, dude, you're in New York. There's music all over the place. But--
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
SAM STERNBERG: I do love music. I'd be much happier if I'm doing something on the side.
CODY GOUGH: Now I can't actually find a recording of that one ever decent jazz band solo I played, but don't be too disappointed. You're really not missing much. You can listen to Ashley's much better band Fuzzz with three Zs, that's F-U-Z-Z-Z on Spotify, believe it or not.
But as Sam and I were saying, saxophone quartet music is pretty hard to come by. So here's a sample of some pretty decent quality quartet music, if I do say so myself, from back when I played in the Drake University Saxophone Quartet. Although I can't remember which part I played. I think I was bari sax. Who knows?
Anyway, I'll be back in a minute after this excerpt from Movement II of the Quartet for Saxophones composed in 1964 by the French composer Alfred Desenclos.
[SAXOPHONE MUSIC]
Well, I know I'm relaxed, and I'm almost ready to wrap up our year interview. But I'm feeling a little nostalgic still. [SNIFFS] Is that coffee, that smell? Maybe the smell of coffee has something to do with it. I wonder.
Let's hear from Dr. Alan Hirsch one more time and see if he has anything to say about nostalgia. Spoiler alert, he does. And I'm glad I'm not taking any cold medicine right now, because apparently, I might have trouble picking up that caffeinated aroma if I was. Here's why.
I've never seen a pharmaceutical commercial that says "May result in reduced sense of smell." I've never seen that.
ALAN HIRSCH: But actually, many, many different medications we do sense of smell, whether it be the medications that are lipid lowering agents or the antihypertensive agents. But that doesn't mean not to use them. It means talk with your physician to make sure that if you are losing your sense of smell, maybe he or she could switch you to a different agent.
CODY GOUGH: Does this include allergy medications?
ALAN HIRSCH: Some allergy medicines can do that. As a matter of fact, for a while, we were finding there's an agent called in zinc, an agent called Zicam that was over the counter. And people would spray into their nose. And in theory, help them reduce the sense of getting colds, but also would knock out their sense of smell for a substantial number of people. So we saw a mini epidemic of that for a while some years ago when it first came out.
So there are all sorts of things that we can smell is so ignored. People don't recognize it. They don't bother testing for it. But it can impact on every single thing you do. One of the things, for instance, let me give you another good example. When people buy a new car, they love the way the leather smells, the new car smell.
Well, we did a study of almost 20,000 people looking at whether they prefer natural leather or artificial leather. Overwhelmingly, they prefer the smell of artificial leather. And so if you buy an American-made car today with natural leather seats, the odds are that it's been pre-impregnated with artificial leather smell because people actually prefer that more.
CODY GOUGH: How do you put an artificial leather smell in a space? They don't have candles that you can burn.
ALAN HIRSCH: No, you can impregnate actually into the leather itself. There's also the phenomena that we studied something called olfactory-evoked nostalgia, when you smell a smell and you have a vivid memory of your childhood. I'm not sure if that ever happened to you, where you smell a smell. What smell does it makes you call your childhood?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, boy. My childhood? Not so much childhood, but people I have known in the past will say there are very particular smells. I'll smell somebody's shampoo in the grocery store, and suddenly, I'm boom. I'm right there back to someone I used to know.
ALAN HIRSCH: Well, that's exactly right. This phenomena of olfactory-evoked nostalgia, we looked at 3,193 people from 45 states and 39 countries that were happened to be here in Chicago. We found that the number one odor that makes people nostalgic for the childhood is baked goods.
And after that, it depends upon where they grew up and when they grow up. So if they grew up from the East Coast, the smell of flowers made people nostalgic for their childhood. In the South, it's just smell of fresh air. In the Midwest, the smell of farm animals. And on the West Coast, it was smell of meat cooking or meat barbecuing.
It also depended upon from other countries. In Canada, in Quebec, it was tortiere. In Africa, it was the maize. And from the Scandinavian countries, it smelled herring. But we also found it depended upon, not only where you were born, but when you were born. So the older the person was, the more likely that natural smells made them nostalgic for their childhood: trees, hay, horses, pines, metals, that sort of thing. And the younger they were, the more likely artificial smells made them nostalgic for the childhood: Play-Doh, PEZ, Sweethearts, VapoRub, even jet fuel.
So we found this gradual decrement of nostalgia for nature and a gradual increment of nostalgia for man-made chemicals. It was also variable depending upon whether they had a happy or sad childhood. We found that about 14% of people said they had unhappy childhoods. And those who did have an unhappy childhood, it wasn't these natural smells or artificial smells, it was bad smells that made them nostalgic for their childhood. Oh, for smells or fecal smells.
And what that suggested to us is that smell has such a strong induction of memory. It can even overcome any attempts of suppression of those memories.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we should probably wrap up our 2017 year interview. But first, I've got to ask, Ashley, is there anything we missed?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, two things. First, I think everyone needs to go back and listen to Dr. Natalie Vanatta, the cybersecurity expert, and all-around great boss lady, military extraordinaire, and hear how many times she says the word awesome sauce. That was my favorite part of that episode.
CODY GOUGH: Hearing an instructor at West Point refer-- can we just use the phrase awesome sauce? Yeah, that was pretty solid.
ASHLEY HAMER: It really made my day.
CODY GOUGH: She was really great. That was our 18th episode on Fighting in the Fourth Dimension: The US Army on Cyber Warfare. And yeah, that was a pretty great one.
ASHLEY HAMER: But yeah, besides that, I think we should probably talk about the most popular episode we had this year.
CODY GOUGH: All right, so we should probably do that before we get into this week's extra credit question. The most popular episode with our listeners or at least the most downloaded this year was the one with Jonathan Pritchard, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. A mentalist, which is like a magician, except he reads minds instead of playing with cards, I think.
CODY GOUGH: Right, and you can find that episode on curiosity.com or on your favorite podcast app by searching for the episode title which was Communicate Like A Mind-Reader. Here's just a little snippet of that episode before we wrap up today's show.
JONATHAN PRITCHARD: Your brain is fallible, and you make assumptions all the time to make life easier. And it's those assumptions that get you in trouble. If we didn't have assumptions, if we didn't have shortcuts for a mind , we would be incapacitated. We would have to test, OK, is this step going to hold my weight? OK. Yes, I think so. All right, perfect.
Now I've got to test this next part of the sidewalk. Is this sidewalk going to hold my weight? You wouldn't get anything done. So to save time and resources, your brain just goes, well, the previous 50,000 steps on a sidewalk has worked for me, so I'm just going to assume that this next one will. And for the most part, it works out all right.
But occasionally, you step in wet cement because you weren't paying attention. It's just that once you understand that those hiccups in perception can happen, you're more likely to see them when they do.
CODY GOUGH: Is this also where biases come from against certain groups of people?
JONATHAN PRITCHARD: Yes, absolutely. Cognitive biases, assumptions, just the beliefs about how the world works is predicated on the experiences that you've had. But what's really weird is that most people believe that your sentences inform you about what's happening in the world, that they take in lots of information, and that your brain's like a sponge, and it just notices everything.
The problem is, what you are primed to see is what you pay attention to. Your senses are actually filter mechanisms to filter out stuff that is not important to you. So if it's not important, you're not really going to notice it. So then you only notice what you already think will be important. So then you only notice important things to you, so it skews your belief that only those things are happening.
It's like when you buy a new car, and suddenly, wow, that car is everywhere. They were out there already. It's just that your mind didn't know that you cared that much about it, so it didn't show you that information.
ASHLEY HAMER: There's actually a term for when that thing you just learned about pops up everywhere. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It happens for two reasons. First is selective attention. Like Jonathan said, your brain now cares about the new car you drive, and you unconsciously keep an eye out for it.
The second is confirmation bias. Every subsequent sighting of a car like yours assures you that there really are more of them than there were before. The phenomenon got its name in 1994 from a commenter in a news discussion board who heard the name of the German terrorist gang Baader-Meinhof twice in 24 hours.
Download the Curiosity app for Android or iOS to learn more.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's the last extra credit question of the year. Cody said I could do any question I wanted, and that means it's going to get real sciencey up in here. Here goes.
People use simplified images to represent a lot of complex scientific concepts, but they're not always that accurate. So which of these symbols is the most true to life? A, the classic monkey to man picture, you know that one with a monkey on one end and several other animals evolving to become a human on the other; B, the DNA double helix, that thing that looks like a twisted ladder; or C, the classic atom diagram with electrons orbiting a nucleus the way planets orbit the sun.
So once again, which of these symbols is the most true to life? A, the monkey to man picture; B, the DNA double helix; or C, the classic atom diagram. The answer, in a minute.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Wow, wasn't it great to remember all the good times we had on the Curiosity podcast? Wouldn't you like to have something to remind you of Curiosity all the time? I don't know, something with our logo on it, or some cool facts to share, or all of the above?
CODY GOUGH: You should probably check out our exclusive Curiosity merchandise to scratch that itch. We've got three different t-shirts, a cozy Curiosity hoodie, and even socks. Socks.
ASHLEY HAMER: My personal favorite, though, is our beautiful Fact-A-Day calendar. Every day it delivers a new fact you can share with your friends, and right now, it's 40% off.
CODY GOUGH: You can find all of our amazing merchandise on store.dftba.com. But why don't you just check the show notes and we'll post the link there? It's a little easier.
ASHLEY HAMER: Fact-A-Day calendar.
CODY GOUGH: Then you really can learn something new every day, just what you've always wanted, Ashley.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ASHLEY HAMER: Ready for your extra credit answer? Out of the monkey to man image, the DNA double helix, and the atom diagram, the most accurate image is the DNA double helix. Evolution looks more like a branching bush than a single lineage. And electrons form a cloud around the atomic nucleus rather than an orbit.
To learn more about this and lots of other cool stuff, check out curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: And you're right, that question did get incredibly sciency. You exceeded all expectations.
ASHLEY HAMER: Excellent.
CODY GOUGH: And with that, we'll be back in 2018 with brand new episodes, and we might even sound a little bit different. But don't worry, Ashley and I will still be here.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, we'll still be here. Until then, thanks for listening to the Curiosity podcast. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Happy holidays and happy new year!
ASHLEY HAMER: Happy new year!
[MUSIC PLAYING]