Learn about how caregivers may experience “post-traumatic growth” from the pandemic; why the UK has one of the world’s most memorable postcode systems; and how researchers witnessed the birth and development of a completely new language.
Learn about how caregivers may experience “post-traumatic growth” from the pandemic; why the UK has one of the world’s most memorable postcode systems; and how researchers witnessed the birth and development of a completely new language: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua.
Survey suggests most caregivers have experienced "post-traumatic growth" from the pandemic by Kelsey Donk
Cognitive psychologists are why the UK has one of the most memorable postcode systems by Steffie Drucker
Researchers Have Witnessed the Birth and Development of a Completely New Language by Arika Okrent
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/post-traumatic-growth-is-a-pandemic-silver-lining
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 how caregivers may experience “post-traumatic growth” from the pandemic; how science helped the UK have one of the most memorable postcode systems in the world; and what researchers learned when they witnessed the birth and development of a completely new language.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Parents and other caregivers have had a hard time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But a new survey conducted during the first wave of infections is pointing to a silver lining in all that hardship. It suggests that caregivers have experienced what’s called post-traumatic growth.
Psychologists surveyed 385 British and Portuguese caregivers of children between the ages of six and 16 between the start of May and the end of June last year.
On the face of it, things didn’t look great for the caregivers, who were mostly mothers. Seventy percent were working exclusively from their homes, and nearly half had less income than before the pandemic. Almost all of their children were being homeschooled, so these caregivers were responsible for the children full-time while also trying to work. And to make matters worse, 20 percent of the respondents said a family member was sick or suspected to be infected with COVID.
Definitely a rough time to be a caregiver! But then, the researchers asked this question: Do you think there are any positives to come out of this pandemic and the social distancing restrictions? And a whopping 88 percent of the people said yes!
Almost half of the caregivers who answered yes said their family relationships had grown closer and more understanding. Twenty-two percent said they had more appreciation for life. Sixteen percent said they experienced spiritual growth, and 11 percent said they were able to embrace new possibilities and opportunities.
The people who saw the bright side of the pandemic didn’t feel any less anxiety than those who didn’t. But they did score significantly better on measures of well-being. The researchers call this an example of post-traumatic growth. That’s when people experience positive effects from stressful or traumatic events.
Researchers say that when people experience trauma, their sense of self is shaken and they have to rethink their worldview. Maybe a car crash makes them realize how precious their life is, or surviving a natural disaster makes them change their career and join the Red Cross. After a difficult period, those with post-traumatic growth experience positive change.
Researchers said the study gave them some hope for positive things that could be waiting for us on the other side of this pandemic. They also said it might be helpful to families who are still stuck at home in challenging circumstances. It’s okay to acknowledge that this is hard, but good things could come from it too!
The UK has one of the world’s most memorable postal codes. A 2016 survey by the UK’s postal service found that residents were more likely to remember their postcode than their home phone number. That’s by design — specifically, the design of a cognitive psychologist. Turns out that governments can do some pretty cool things by using science.
The UK’s postal service, aka the Royal Mail, went through a major makeover in the 1950s. There was a lot more mail after the Second World War, and the Royal Mail wanted to be able to use machines to sort it all automatically. So they called on cognitive psychologist Reuben Conrad to invent a system of postcodes to help them do that.
Conrad was given some parameters: the codes had to be memorable and easy to use, but they also had to accommodate millions of addresses. Scientists had already discovered that our short-term memory is only capable of holding between five and nine pieces of information at a time. Researchers also knew that codes that only contained numbers were harder to remember, so it had to be a mix.
The code Conrad designed has two parts: The first half of the code is known as the outward code, and it represents the post area and district. It starts with one or two letters of the area — like “OX” for Oxford — followed by one or two numbers for the district in that area. Next, the inward code represents the post sector and unit. This part gets the mail to a certain street within a postal district. Numbers represent the sector and letters stand in for the unit in that sector. Our brains remember things better in chunks, so a space between the two pieces breaks things up. So the postal code for Oxford University is, “OX1 – space! – 2JD.”
There are a few exceptions to this system. If you’re sending mail to a member of the military, the outward code starts with “BF” for British Forces. Start your outward code with “XX” if you’re returning an online purchase. And if you’re mailing something within the city of London, the districts correspond to their orientation from the city center, like north or southwest.
Conrad died last year at 103. But because of his invention, it’s safe to say he’ll be remembered by generations to come.
What if you were born unable to speak your parents’ language? That’s the challenge faced by children who are born deaf. And without a formal education in sign language, those kids are isolated from the rest of the world. That was the situation for deaf people in Nicaragua before 1980. But when the first school for the deaf was established, something amazing happened. The students created a completely new language together, and researchers were there to watch it happen.
This first school brought children together from all around Nicaragua, and many of these students were meeting other deaf people for the very first time. They were initially meant to be trained in spoken Spanish and lip-reading. But instead, the students brought the different gestures they had used to communicate with their families at home and created an improvised sort of sign-communication system with each other. The next generation of students turned this rudimentary system into a fully-fledged, grammatically complete sign language known as the "Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua.=," or Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Linguistic researchers began recording and studying the emerging language in 1986. They were able to document the birth of a language in real time.
New languages usually arise out of already-existing languages, like the way Latin turned into French and Spanish. Another way is when very different languages come into contact and people are forced to improvise. In those cases they form a "pidgin," or a sort of stopgap language. Sometimes that language becomes a full-fledged language with native speakers over time, as it did for Hawaiian Creole English or Jamaican Patois.
The Nicaraguan language shared some pidgin characteristics. When the next generation of younger students came to the school, they observed the communication system used by the older kids and started to use it in a more consistent way. For example, instead of pantomiming an action and pointing to people to show who did the action, they used a compact gesture that already showed the agent or recipient of the action. They were no longer "laying out a scene" as much as inflecting a verb.
Linguists found that the kids who came into the school at a young age, 5 or 6, were the engine of making the language rule-based and consistent. But it was more than that — without those early structures from the first generation of students, they wouldn’t have anything to work from.
Language creation needs the flexible minds of children, but it also needs the patterns that emerge from active interaction among members of a culture.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#Uniform_penny_postage → The footnote links to a Smithsonian page that can’t be found :( But if you Google it all the results say the same]
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Steffie Drucker, and Arika Okrent, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. It’s not a mystery where you can find us — unlike the mystery at SP4 7DE, of course… [it’s Stonehenge]
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!