Learn about how men and women remember pain differently; how to measure how mindful you are; and a theory about alien life and the laws of physics. 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: Men and Women Remember Pain Differently — https://curiosity.im/2MqWYm7 How Mindful Are You? Measure It with the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale — https://curiosity.im/2MudX74 Alien Life Might Be so Advanced That It's Indistinguishable From the Laws of Physics — https://curiosity.im/2MujSch If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom 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 how men and women remember pain differently; how to measure how mindful you are; and a theory about alien life and the laws of physics.
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:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
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/measure-your-mindfulness-male-vs-female-pain-and-why-the-laws-of-physics-may-be-aliens
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 how men and women remember pain differently; how to measure how mindful you are; and a theory about alien life and the laws of physics.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.
Men and Women Remember Pain Differently — https://curiosity.im/2MqWYm7 (Republished) (Ashley)
According to new research, men and women may remember pain differently. As reported by Futurity, this has pretty big implications, because researchers are starting to think the memory of earlier pain seems to be one of the driving forces in chronic pain. This study out of McGill University backs that up, and the findings could help scientists find future treatments for chronic pain. And the discovery they made was a total surprise to researchers. They were actually doing an experiment to look at pain hypersensitivity in mice, and they ended up finding differences in stress levels between the male and female mice. The researchers decided to extend the experiment to humans to see if the results would be similar, and they found the same difference between human men and women that they’d found in male and female mice. Here’s what went down. First, the researchers needed to make participants feel pain. So they did that, by doing stuff like applying heat to part of their forearm, or having them do arm exercises while hooked into a tightly inflated blood pressure cuff. The human participants rated the pain on a hundred-point scale, and for the tests with the mice, the researchers recorded how quickly the mice moved away from the heat source. These are the metrics they used to measure how much pain each individual felt. For the next step, the researchers needed to look at the role of memory. So the next day, the researchers performed the same tests, in the same room as the day before. On that second day, when the test happened in the same room, men rated the heat pain higher than they did the day before — and higher than the women did. And the male mice reacted the same way: when they were put in the same room with the same test, they moved away more quickly than the mice that were put into a new and neutral environment. The researchers think the males were anticipating the pain, and that caused greater pain sensitivity. And they knew this was true with the mice, because when they injected the brains of the male mice with a drug that blocks memory, those mice showed zero signs of remembering that pain. This finding is big because, like I mentioned before, it’s new evidence that suggests chronic pain is a problem based on how well you remember it. The study’s authors said, quote, “If remembered pain is a driving force for chronic pain and we understand how pain is remembered, we may be able help some sufferers by treating the mechanisms behind the memories directly,” unquote. Not the most relaxing study in the world you could take part in, but you know what they say: no pain, no gain.
How Mindful Are You? Measure It with the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale — https://curiosity.im/2MudX74 (Cody)
Mindfulness has been all the rage in the past few years. I mean, look at yoga and meditation. Pretty popular these days. And depending on the practice, sometimes mindfulness is a major focus of those particular activities. Mindfulness is kinda hard to measure though, right? I mean it’s not like you can track it the way you can see how heavy the weights you’re lifting are, or the way you can use a stopwatch to see how much faster you’re running. So today I’ll tell you a little bit about mindfulness, AND give you a way to actually measure it. [Ashley, do you practice mindfulness when you’re running? [ad lib]
CODY: For some background, mindfulness is sustained moment-to-moment awareness of and attention to ongoing events and experiences. You might’ve heard it referred to as “being in the moment.” So for example, tell me if this experience sounds familiar. You’re eating breakfast on a Saturday morning while thinking about something that happened at work that week. Then you look down and see you've finished your food without realizing it. That’s NOT mindfulness. A mindful version of that experience might involve you paying attention to the flavors and the aromas and the textures of the food you're eating, or maintaining an ongoing awareness of the gradual feeling of fullness in your stomach. You can do pretty much anything in a mindful way, like listening carefully to what your friend is telling you in a conversation instead of thinking about what you'll say next, or taking in the sights and sounds of your commute while you’re driving instead of planning what you'll make for dinner. That kind of thing. Research has linked mindfulness with benefits for people's focus, stress levels, memory, and even relationships. But some experts say mindfulness is a state, while others say it’s a trait. Kirk Warren Brown and Richard M. Ryan from the University of Rochester say you really can BE a “mindful person,” so in 2003, they came up with the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale. It’s a questionnaire you can take in our full write-up on this on curiosity-dot-com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS, and it’ll help you figure out if your mindfulness could use some work. Give it a shot and let us know if mindfulness has made a big impact on your life!
Alien Life Might Be so Advanced That It's Indistinguishable From the Laws of Physics — https://curiosity.im/2MujSch (Ashley)
In 2016, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University posed an interesting thought experiment about alien life. Caleb Scharf said that maybe, just maybe… aliens are so advanced that we can't tell them apart from the laws of physics. Trust me: this isn't just some far-out psychedelic rambling. It’s an idea that science writers have had for a while. [ad lib / So let’s get into it / something about Cody believing in aliens]
ASHLEY: Remember Arthur C. Clarke, the British science-fiction writer who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey? He once wrote, quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” unquote. I mean, if you went back in time and gave a caveman an iPad, then yeah, that’s gonna look pretty much like magic. Scharf took this idea to the next level when he said that maybe the whole of everything ever that exists anywhere is itself alien intelligence. He wrote, quote, "Presumably life doesn't have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world," unquote. This has to be one of the wildest possible solution to the Fermi paradox, that strange contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations? Scharf’s explanation isn’t just about aliens, though. It could explain the cosmic phenomena that’s most mysterious to us. Think about it: dark matter makes up 27 percent of the universe, and dark energy makes up roughly 68 percent of it — but we’ve never seen EITHER. Scharf says it wouldn't be outlandish to think that technologically advanced life is stored there. Now, none of these ideas are peer-reviewed or even testable with today’s technology. It’s just one man brainstorming the boundaries of theoretical possibility. But we thought it was worth sharing. And Scharf signs off with a mind-bender: quote, "Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn't just external. Perhaps it's already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence. In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations,” unquote.
ASHLEY: Today’s ad-free episode was brought to you by our Patrons. Special thanks to Julian Gomez, Jordan Sanford, Jairus Durnett, MannyBlaaze, Anthony Highland, and Mary for your support on Patreon. We really appreciate it!
CODY: To learn more about how you can support Curiosity Daily, AND how to get access to our feature-length Patreon-exclusive episodes, please visit patreon-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com, all spelled out.
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!
Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!