Matt Simon, author of “Plight of the Living Dead,” discusses real-life zombification in nature. Plus, learn about the most annoying sounds ever, according to research, and why leaders who are too smart are actually less effective. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — plus learn about real-life zombification from “Plight of the Living Dead” author Matt Simon — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Leaders Who Are Too Smart Are Less Effective — https://curiosity.im/2D4hozP These Are the Most (and Least) Annoying Sounds Ever, According to a Study — https://curiosity.im/2D7Judq More from Matt Simon: Pick up “Plight of the Living Dead” on Amazon — https://amazon.com Matt’s official website — http://www.mattsimon.net/ Follow Matt on Twitter — https://twitter.com/mrmattsimon Reach Matt’s articles in WIRED — https://www.wired.com/author/matt-simon/ Check out Matt’s other book, “The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution's Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life's Biggest Problems” — https://amazon.com Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey 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! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Matt Simon, author of “Plight of the Living Dead,” discusses real-life zombification in nature. Plus, learn about the most annoying sounds ever, according to research, and why leaders who are too smart are actually less effective.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — plus learn about real-life zombification from “Plight of the Living Dead” author Matt Simon — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
More from Matt Simon:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
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!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/real-life-zombification-w-author-matt-simon-most-annoying-sounds-and-leaders-who-are-too-smart
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We're going to get smarter in just a few minutes with some help from a special guest. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about the most annoying sounds ever according to research and why leaders who are too smart are actually less effective.
CODY GOUGH: You'll also learn about the biology of real life zombification from Matt Simon, author of the new book, Plight of the Living Dead. Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. Researchers have identified some of the most and least annoying sounds ever. Hey, Ashley, you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?
ASHLEY HAMER: No, I don't, Cody.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, don't worry. I'm not going to do that. Listen, nails on a chalkboard may be the most cliched of the horrid noises out there. But apparently, it's not the most annoying, and neither is my voice. Good to know. In 2012, a group of neuroscientists from the UK and Germany tested which sounds upset the human brain the most.
The researchers put 16 people in an MRI machine and monitored what happened in their brains while they heard each of 74 different sounds. Then they asked these unlucky participants to rate which of the noises they found most annoying. File this under studies I am really glad I didn't participate in.
The most cringeworthy sounds according to this research do include nails on a chalkboard. But even more annoying than that? A ruler on a bottle, chalk on a chalkboard, a fork on a glass, and at most annoying, a knife on a bottle. This research is useful because it sheds new light on how two parts of the brain interact with each other. And it might help researchers look at treatments for emotional disorders, like tinnitus and migraine, where there seems to be a heightened sense of the unpleasant aspects of these sounds.
So in the brain, those annoying sounds didn't just trigger the auditory cortex, which processes sound. It also triggered the amygdala's activity. And it was directly proportional to how awful the sound was. This part of the brain deals with emotions. So it would make sense that more annoying sounds might activate this emotional zone.
The annoying sounds were also all between 2,000 and 5,000 Hertz, which is pretty high pitched. The jury is out on why this happens, although one evolutionary theory is that higher pitches resemble alarming noises, like the squeal of a chimpanzee. But whatever the reason, it was worthwhile research with some interesting results.
ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever had a boss that just didn't get it? Ever wished your boss was just, I don't know, smarter? Well, be careful what you wish for because according to research, smarter doesn't necessarily mean better. Have you ever had a boss who's like too smart? I don't think I have. Just going to say that right now.
Well, a couple of decades ago, psychologist Dean Simonton came up with a counterintuitive idea that smarter leaders are better, but only as long as they're not too smart. And in a recent study, he was able to test this idea. He and a pair of other researchers observed 379 leaders from 30 different countries in fields including retail, banking, and technology. The participants all took IQ tests, and they were each rated on their effectiveness by eight of their team members.
Now, IQ tests are not the most reliable metrics in the world, and how a person rates their boss is pretty subjective. So the data wasn't exactly airtight. But the results still showed a clear pattern. In general, the better the managers performed on their IQ tests, the more effective their employees ranked them.
But there was a clear cutoff point. Managers with an IQ of 120 or higher saw a sharp drop off in how they were seen by the people under them. There could be a few reasons for this. Maybe the plans that smarter leaders make are over their employees' heads. Maybe their strategies are so complicated that they're just too hard to put into action. Or maybe it just comes down to having a tough time relating to people. After all, it's hard to get inspired by somebody that you can't understand on a human level.
Either way, the researchers say the takeaway shouldn't be that companies should stop promoting smarter people or hiring them as leaders. Instead, they should consider that the IQ ceiling might change depending on the field that they're working in. And even more importantly, they should think about how to overcome the barriers that come from that intelligence. If a super smart leader is having trouble bridging the gap, they might be able to handle the problem by relying on their charisma instead of their brains. Today's episode is sponsored by Pimsleur.
CODY GOUGH: Pimsleur is the conversational method for learning a new language. It was developed by Dr. Pimsleur, spelled P-i-m-s-l-e-u-r. And the Pimsleur method is scientifically proven to work for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: With Pimsleur, you learn by actually talking and training your ears to understand native speakers. It's perfect for turning your downtime into a new skill.
CODY GOUGH: In fact, 75% of Pimsleur customers learn a new language on the go.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can reach an intermediate level in just 30 days. I did this, Cody. I was playing a four-night a week show that involves a ton of driving. So every time I was driving to the show, I did these Pimsleur lessons. And by the end of it, I could walk by someone speaking Spanish and just know what they said. It wasn't like I had to think about it. It was amazing.
CODY GOUGH: Nice. It's no wonder the FBI, the State Department, Homeland Security, and many others have relied on Pimsleur to learn new languages quickly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Don't just take our word for it. Try the full course absolutely free for seven days, risk-free. You've got nothing to lose, but everything to gain. A new language, a new perspective, a better understanding of other cultures.
CODY GOUGH: You can sign up today at pimspeaks.com/curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's P-i-m-s-p-e-a-k-s dot com, slash, curiosity.
CODY GOUGH: Halloween might be over, but zombies are always a hot topic in popular culture. Well, Ashley and I had a chance to talk to a science writer about zombies in the real world. Here's what he told us about the biology of zombies. We're talking to Matt Simon, author of Plight of the Living Dead. It's about zombiism, like real life zombiism. How is this a thing, Matt?
MATT SIMON: It sounds fantastical, but it's very much a thing. We are used to zombies in pop culture. So The Walking Dead, things like that. The generally bitey, aggressive, human kind of stumbling around. That is the zombie that we know. But it turns out that in the natural world, there are many, many zombies that are far more creative than what we see in popular culture.
And this is consistent across worms, and fungi, and wasps. All kinds of different organisms have, over evolutionary time, figured out how to zombified their hosts in ways that are far more dastardly than you see on TV or movies. A lot of times, it is insects that are doing it to other insects. But yes, they are walking, crawling among us. Luckily, haven't really done much to the human brain. But that isn't to say that we are actually immune.
CODY GOUGH: So this hasn't happened in humans yet, or has it?
MATT SIMON: Yeah. So the one that we don't often think about more than it just being a virus, the rabies virus is in fact a manipulative parasite. You see behavioral changes in the host. So this is a virus that evolved for exploiting other mammals. Things like possums and raccoons. Those are the famous ones. But the virus can actually get inside our brains as well, and it actually causes the same kind of aggression and the characteristic foaming at the mouth.
So we share this mammalian biology. Our brains are weirdly enough largely the same as the raccoons. So it happens to us too. You can actually find videos online of humans in the throes of the rabies virus. It's a really terrible thing to watch because you know that they're probably not going to survive.
But one of the really interesting manipulations is that because the virus manifests in the saliva, it's that famous foaming at the mouth, it manipulates its host to not only not want to drink water, but to actually be afraid of water. And you can see in videos online of nurses trying to give water to humans infected with rabies. And the humans will actually recoil at just the sight of water.
And back when this evolved in other mammals, that was a manipulation on the virus's part to keep the host from drinking water and washing the virus out of its mouth. It's incredibly precise, but also nuanced in its own way. And it's something that has evolved over millions upon millions of years to really ruin the day of the host.
So you ask about the why. Why would this evolve in many different ways? And that's because species to species, it's a really, really good strategy. Yet it's working on that pure biology. And scientists are just starting to understand not only why this would evolve, and it's different from species to species, but how these parasites are releasing chemicals and acting on brain structures to very finely tune their manipulations of their hosts.
CODY GOUGH: You can follow Matt Simon on Twitter @mrmattsimon. And you can read his science articles in Wired magazine. We're working on pulling more clips from our full interview, which will be available on our Patreon page soon. In the meantime, check out his book, Plight of the Living Dead. We'll post a link to buy it in the show notes of today's episode.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.