Learn about how lockdown is changing our perception of time; how the most devastating meteor on record may have never even landed; and why it’s a big deal that elephants can catch contagious yawning from humans.
Learn about how lockdown is changing our perception of time; how the most devastating meteor on record may have never even landed; and why it’s a big deal that elephants can catch contagious yawning from humans.
Why lockdown is changing our perception of time by Kelsey Donk
Maybe the most devastating meteor on record never even landed by Cameron Duke
Elephants can catch contagious yawning from humans by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/lockdown-is-changing-our-perception-of-time-a-devastating-meteor-that-never-landed-and-elephants-can-catch-yawns-from-humans
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why lockdown is changing our perception of time; how the most devastating meteor on record may have never even landed; and why it’s a big deal that elephants can catch contagious yawning from humans.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Did the past few days feel like months? Or did they go by in minutes? If you’re not an essential worker and you’re still locked down in quarantine, the answer might be… both. For some people in quarantine, time feels like it stretches out and also like it’s really compressed. Don’t worry, though — this is normal! Psychologists say that being on lockdown actually changes how we perceive time.
And it all comes down to how we measure time. Psychologists say we measure time in two ways: prospectively and retrospectively. Prospective time refers to how fast time is passing right now. Retrospective time is about the past — how fast did the last day, week, or decade go by?
With prospective time, your perception of the present moment depends on what’s grabbing your attention. If you’re immersed in activities, the hours may feel like they’ve flown by. If you don’t have much to do and you’re constantly checking the clock, you may feel like time is moving more slowly.
But with retrospective time, that’s reversed. That’s because you perceive time in the past via your memories — the more standout memories you have, the slower that time will seem to have passed. If you haven’t done a whole lot, you won’t have many event markers to measure what’s happened and when, so time will seem to speed up.
The thing is, you can feel both the slowing and the speeding up of time at once. Take, for instance, a weeklong vacation. Remember those? While you’re on the trip, time flies. Your attention is always on something new, so the present moment feels quick in prospective time. But afterward, when you show your vacation pictures to a friend, it feels like you were gone forever. You made so many new memories! That’s your brain using retrospective time.
But in lockdown, we’re either bored or swamped with the same tasks every day, so the present moment feels long. But when we look back, we don’t have any memories of what we did all day. The days blur together, and whole months pass in the blink of an eye.
So the next time you watch your Monday creep by, only to realize it’s already Friday? You can blame the weird ways your brain judges time.
One of the biggest explosions on record didn’t leave a crater, and new research might explain why.
Take a moment to travel back in time with me, to June 30th, 1908. A burst of light appeared in the twilight over the boreal [BORE-ee-yull] forest of remote Siberia. It soon took over the whole sky. A man who was sitting on his front porch at the time said his clothes began to feel like they were on fire. And just as his eyes were adjusting to the piercing light, the shockwave hit. It threw him almost two meters. He was lucky. He was also 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, from the epicenter of the explosion, which is now known as the Tunguska [more like “TIN” or “TEN,” not “TUN”] Event.
The Tunguska Event released more than 100 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. It leveled 80 million trees, and left a butterfly wing-shaped scar about the size of modern-day Jacksonville, Florida. It lit up the night sky from England to Japan. But there was no crater, and nothing to suggest what had actually caused the explosion.
112 years later, we still don’t have a definitive answer. Over the years, theories have ranged from a comet fragment to a meteorite impact to a freak volcanic eruption. But today, our best evidence suggests that the explosion was actually caused by a large iron asteroid.
In fact, a recent scientific paper says that asteroid never even hit the ground. The Russian researchers ran mathematical models of asteroids with different sizes and compositions, and only one matched the conditions of that fateful day in 1908. They say that the Tunguska Event was probably caused by an iron-heavy asteroid larger than an Olympic swimming pool. It likely entered the atmosphere at a shallow angle and cut a 3000-kilometer, or 1800-mile path through it, never dipping below an altitude of 11 kilometers or 7 miles. Finally, it flung itself back into a solar orbit, like skipping a stone on water. This could explain the shockwave and the missing crater. It may also explain one of the more captivating effects of the Tunguska event: the way the night sky glowed for several days across Europe. The asteroid would have entered the atmosphere somewhere over Europe, where friction would have peeled iron off of the rock atom by atom to leave a streak of reflective dust in the upper atmosphere.
If this asteroid had hit the earth’s surface, it would have likely been the most devastating explosion in recorded history. But it didn’t. I’d say that’s a close call.
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Yawning can be contagious, and scientists think the ability to “catch” a yawn is related to the fact that we’re complex social animals. Which is why this is so surprising: it turns out that elephants can catch yawns from humans. That could say something important about those big brains of theirs.
Lots of animals yawn, but believe it or not, yawning in elephants wasn’t documented until 2015. Elephants don’t yawn much — researchers had to record a lot of video to confirm that they even do it. Those researchers accumulated hundreds of hours of footage of elephants in and around their enclosures in South Africa’s Knysna [NYE-znah] Elephant Park, which is a facility for orphaned and rescued elephants. They discovered not only that elephants yawn like the rest of us, but also that yawns spread easily through the group.
Contagious yawning within a species is rare, but even MORE rare is a contagious yawn that jumps from one species to another. This is called interspecific yawning, and it’s only been documented in dogs and chimpanzees. Now, we can add elephants to the list. For that experiment, the team asked the handlers of that same group of South African elephants to do a bit of acting. During the elephants’ morning training time, the trainers faked yawns in front of the animals 10 times in a row. And wouldn’t you know it? Three of the seven elephants in the trial actually yawned in response to the trainer!
So why does this happen? Well, we know that contagious yawning tends to happen more in social animals with highly developed cognitive brains. But everything else about contagious yawning is still a mystery. While some researchers think that contagious yawning is a sign of empathy, others disagree. But as lead author Zoe Rossman told Curiosity Daily, the leading hypothesis comes down to the fact that yawning boosts brain arousal and awareness. It’s possible that contagious yawning is an adaptive trait that makes some aspects of group living easier — like, maybe it gives the herd an awareness boost to watch out for predators when they wake. No word on whether the trainers can catch a yawn from the elephants, though.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode 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!