We explore how online learning affects the body, how mood affects alcohol cravings in both men and women, and how dogs have evolved to manipulate us!
We explore how online learning affects the body, how mood affects alcohol cravings in both men and women, and how dogs have evolved to manipulate us!
Online Learning
Alcohol Cravings
Manipulative Dogs
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/online-learning-alcohol-cravings-manipulative-dogs
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, we are gonna learn about how online learning affects the body, how mood affects alcohol cravings in both men and women, and how dogs have evolved to manipulate us!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: So, as we both know, during the pandemic students had the difficult task of doing school online.
NATE: Yeah, I imagine that was incredibly stressful in a different way than maybe the stress that we experienced while in school.
CALLI: Totally. And since the pandemic started, a lot of studies have detailed how people emotionally react to online learning… but I found a study that explains how the BODY deals with it.
NATE: Whoa, that’s an interesting premise. I can’t imagine that learning alone could be good for us, but I don’t exactly miss having my teacher watch me do math equations.
CALLI: Well, your teacher staring at you might have actually made your brain work harder. Studies have long shown that moderate stress is beneficial for learning, but it turns out that because online classes stress your body out LESS, you focus less on the topic at hand.
NATE: Wow! How does that even work?
CALLI: So, the researchers measured a number of physiological parameters in a case study of students: one group completed an anatomy course online, the other group completed it in person. And even though the courses were equally demanding intellectually, the data showed that the online group was a lot less anxious.
NATE: I’m not following. Less stress should be good though, right?
CALLI: Well, physiological stress shows itself through increased levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, as well as an increased heart rate. Stress affects how well we learn, how well our memory processes things, AND how well we pay attention to something. Even though we think of stress as this bad thing, pressure is what makes us actually LEARN things.
NATE: It’s like that old saying about how diamonds are formed from the worst amount of pressure.
CALLI: Boom. And most of the studies on the difference between in-person and online teaching have been done via questionnaire with subjective questions like “how motivated did you feel?” or “how stressed were you?” These researchers wanted to figure out the physiological effect because it’s a much more OBJECTIVE reading on the difference.
NATE: Alright, so give me the details. How did they measure this exactly?
CALLI: Researchers started by analyzing the heart rates and cortisol levels in 82 students. Like I said before, half were online and half were in person. Every day, the researchers measured the students’ heart rate with special sensors for 120 minutes, and took saliva samples at the start, middle, and end of every class. The online students had the same measurements done, but did it themselves by following step-by-step instructions.
NATE: And so this is when they discovered the physiological differences between in-person and online students?
CALLI: Exactly, and the online students showed lower cortisol levels at the end of the study. They also showed lower “sympathetic activity,” the body’s “fight or flight” instinct, and an increase in parasympathetic activity, which is the OPPOSITE of sympathetic activity. It’s more commonly known as “rest and digest,” so it’s basically our bodies becoming complacent and believing that we’ll be able to handle anything that comes our way.
NATE: I don’t see anything wrong with being a “rest and digest” guy, Calli.
CALLI: Sure, it’s not bad to do that all of the time, but when your body is primarily “resting and digesting” instead of fighting a stressor, you don‘t build any kind of strength. In this case, it’s your brain that gets weak!
NATE: I definitely don’t want a weak brain, but I imagine that students who choose to do online classes must like it better?
CALLI: Well, online students might think that, but the study says otherwise. After looking at cortisol levels and heart rates, the team also used more standard subjective questionnaires to supplement the more objective data they found, including questions like “how enjoyable was the course you just took?” For those taking part in the in-person classes, this survey showed increased activity in the sympathetic nervous system that is in charge of enjoyment in our bodies, meaning that the in-person students had positive feelings about the course. Guess what happened with the online group.
NATE: Were they EVEN HAPPIER?
CALLI: Ha, no. That correlation didn’t exist at all for the online students. So, long story short: learning is way harder online than it is in-person.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, we did that story on psilocybin as an effective potential treatment for alcoholism recently, and today I’ve got another story about researchers learning more about the causes of the disease and how we can better fight it.
CALLI: Ooh, what did we learn this time?
NATE: Researchers found that shifts in our mood affect alcohol craving in opposite ways for men and women. Knowing how dangerous drinking habits form can help us treat alcohol issues, and perhaps even prevent them.
CALLI: Why did researchers start looking into mood when it comes to alcoholism?
NATE: Well, there were already a few different theories around mood and alcohol. Some think that alcohol use is tied to good emotions, people use it to enhance a good mood, but others say it's often used for negative emotions, people use it to deal with stress. The fear with this is that drinking can become a reinforcing cycle, you feel down, you drink, that makes you feel more down, you drink more and develop problematic habits.
CALLI: Is mood the only aspect of craving though? What about walking past a bar or something?
NATE: Sure, researchers think that mood interacts with attention bias. This is a subconscious thought process. Heavy drinkers are really attune to alcohol-related things like bars or cans of beer, things that remind them of drinking, and this bias, combined with emotion, can create intense in-the-moment cravings. Researchers were particularly curious how these varied by biological sex.
CALLI: So how did they do the study?
NATE: They studied 69 college students between the ages of 18 and 29. Two thirds of the students were women, and none of them had any mood or anxiety condition. These students carried tablets with them for around two weeks and would do assessments that covered what their mood was like, and how much they wanted alcohol.
CALLI: 69 students over the course of two weeks, how many responses did they get?
NATE: They had 4,010 measurements. They also had students do visual tasks that either included or did not include alcohol-related things to analyze their attention bias and see if seeing alcohol related items increased their cravings.
CALLI: So what did they find?
NATE: In men, the alcohol cravings, and attention to those alcohol related items, increased when they were in a good mood.
CALLI: So then that reinforces the idea that people are drinking to keep the good times going?
NATE: Right, but interestingly, in women, the response was opposite! Attention to alcohol related things, and increased cravings happened when they were in worse moods!
CALLI: So they reacted completely differently? Along biological sex lines? Why would that be?
NATE: Yes. Well some researchers think it might happen as the dopamine-related motivation system in our brains change over time. We start drinking because we like it, but then the pleasurable impact of drinking goes away, instead of liking the drink, you kind of just…want it. It's called the incentive sensitization theory.
CALLI: And women experience this more than men?
NATE: Well researchers aren’t sure this is exactly what is happening to cause the difference between men and women, but they do say it adds to some existing evidence that suggests women develop more addiction-like behaviors more quickly than men.
CALLI: So then where do we go from here? Is there something we can do?
NATE: Well researchers say they need to do more work, 91% of the participants were white, so we need to see if these results hold for a more diverse group. But they say in the meantime, it might be important to focus treatment around removing alcohol cues that feed into attention bias, and help drive the cravings.
CALLI: Well the more we know the better equipped we can be to help people. And I’m glad that, like we talked about before, there are new hopes for treatment.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: What if I told you that one of the single most manipulative creatures on the planet was a dog?
NATE: I’d say absolutely not, Calli. Dogs are pure, innocent, loyal creatures.
CALLI: Right… Except a new study that looks into the science of the infamous “puppy dog eyes” says otherwise.
NATE: Calli, please don’t ruin dogs for me.
CALLI: I won’t… entirely. Because it turns out the puppy dog eyes, with that cute little crinkled brow, isn’t something a dog is actively doing. Our dogs are descended from wolves, as hard as that can be to believe sometimes. Because of domestication the dogs of today have a higher number of fast facial muscles than wolves AND have facial features that are closer to humans.
NATE: Hold on. Are you saying that dogs have those cute faces… because of humans?
CALLI: That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s believed now that through a combination of breeding, human decision, and a good old case of “survival of the fittest,” most early dogs that DIDN’T have empathetic faces died out, as humans adopted dogs that looked trustworthy. To get a little more scientific: it’s believed that humans selected dogs with fast-twitch facial fibers in their mimetic muscles, so they could more accurately communicate with facial expressions.
NATE: Fascinating. But uh… remind me what mimetic muscles are?
CALLI: Mimetic muscles are the muscles all of us have in our faces that control facial expression. Whenever you’re happy, sad, angry, hungry, uncomfortable, and you show it on your face, you’re flexing your mimetic muscles. Fast-twitch fibers are what control those muscles so that we can create “readable” facial expressions. These fibers contract quickly but get fatigued even quicker. There are also slow-twitch fibers that contract slowly, but are resistant to fatigue. So for instance, if you're a marathon runner, many if not most of your lower limb muscles are dominated by slow-twitch fibers. But if you’re a sprinter, your lower limb muscles are dominated by fast-twitch fibers.
NATE: Wild. But what does this have to do with dogs?
CALLI: Right, so the research located a muscle in dogs called the levator anguli oculi medialis that helps dogs become more emotive in their faces. Wolves do not have this muscle and domesticated dogs do. So it’s believed that we bred this trait into modern dogs.
NATE: That’s interesting. How does that imply that a dog is in any way manipulating us, though? And why would we want them to?
CALLI: Well, again, the manipulation isn’t intentional. But it turns out that when a human and a dog gaze at each other, the brain activity between both is measured to reveal the same level of pleasure being emitted as when a human mother looks at her children. On top of that, both dog AND owner release a chemical compound called oxytocin into the bloodstream during a mutual eye gaze. And you know what oxytocin is? The same hormone released by a mother when she stares into the eyes of her infant.
NATE: I think I understand now. So we evolved dogs to be more empathetic, and therefore created the bond we have with our furry friends on a molecular level? And an unfortunate side effect of that is that dogs can sometimes exploit that to their advantage?
CALLI: Exactly. Much like a child will try to take advantage of their mother’s goodwill to, say, get an extra piece of candy before dinner, a dog will take advantage of their owner’s love to get extra food, pets, a better spot on the bed…or the whole bed…or that toy that you know the dog is just going to tear apart, but you buy it for her anyway because you love her so much you’d do anything for her.
NATE: Uh… yeah. That’s an oddly specific example, but totally.
CALLI: I just got a new puppy but I’m happy to be manipulated by her anyday.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: If it felt harder to learn from at-home schooling during the COVID-19 lockdown, you’re not alone, and science has got your back. A new study has found that not only are people less motivated to learn online, but there’s a physiological downside to at-home learning that inhibits your ability to absorb information.
NATE: Research has shown that women and men react differently to alcohol cravings as a result of their moods.
CALLI: We regret to inform all of you that if you’ve ever suspected your dog of manipulating you, science suggests you’re right. However, it turns out this isn’t the dog’s fault; through selective breeding and a growing generational love between humans and dogs, it turns out we’ve evolved dogs into BECOMING manipulators. It might sound like victim blaming, but science suggests this IS a self-inflicted wound on a societal scale!