Learn about why rival sports fans experience the same game completely differently, and why there’s a secret room behind Mount Rusmore (and what’s inside it). Plus: take the world’s shortest IQ test. 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: Rival Sports Fans Experience the Same Game Completely Differently — https://curiosity.im/2S2CS3c There's a Secret Room Behind Mount Rushmore Meant for Future Civilizations — https://curiosity.im/2S0f2Fm The World's Shortest IQ Test is Only Three Questions — https://curiosity.im/2S2tqNf 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!
Learn about why rival sports fans experience the same game completely differently, and why there’s a secret room behind Mount Rusmore (and what’s inside it). Plus: take the world’s shortest IQ test.
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:
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/rival-sports-fans-experience-games-completely-differently-mount-rushmores-secret-room-and-worlds-shortest-iq-test
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Happy Thanksgiving. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about why rival sports fans experience the same game completely differently. We're also bringing back a couple of our favorite stories to help you celebrate the holiday. So we're going to get into the secrets of Mount Rushmore and give you the world's shortest IQ test.
CODY GOUGH: Let's gobble up some curiosity. If you're a fan of any sports franchise, then you've probably encountered fans of rival teams. And sometimes, it feels like you and that other team's fans are watching two completely different games.
Well, it turns out there's a psychological reason behind this, and a new study shows how deep it really goes. This is relevant research, whether you're rooting against a relative's favorite NFL team today or you're a diehard Cricket fan. Shout out to our listeners in lots of other countries.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Just because it's Thanksgiving in the States doesn't mean that nobody else is watching sports. There are other sports being played too.
CODY GOUGH: I can't think of a single other sport--
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: --anywhere. Well, before we get into the psychology of why rival team fans see games differently, here's an example of just how differently fans can see a game.
When England played Colombia in the 2018 World Cup, the European team was victorious, but a lot of people on both sides were not happy about it. More than 250,000 fans of Colombia signed a petition saying the referees had an obvious bias and tendency to award penalty kicks to England, which is what cost them the game.
Meanwhile, England fans were in an uproar because they said Colombia was playing a dirty game. So what happened? In a new study, psychologist Timothy Andrews rounded up fans of two professional football clubs in the English Premier League-- Manchester United and Chelsea. That's football in the non-American sense, also known as soccer here in the States.
For this study, fans of both teams watched the same highlight reel of the teams playing each other while their brains were scanned in an MRI machine. The MRI showed that the parts of their brains associated with visual perception matched up with each other pretty closely. But as you might have guessed, they felt very differently about it.
The frontal and subcortical regions of their brains were about as different as they could be. Those are associated with reward, identity, and movement control. The greatest difference was in the nucleus accumbens, which is central to the brain's reward system.
Fans of rival teams had a virtually opposite response in their nucleus accumbens, but fans of the same team matched up about as well as the visual areas matched up. It's an important lesson in how group dynamics and in-group bias form in the brain, even as we all see the same events play out in the real world.
So try not to get too upset if a relative gets overly excited on game day. After all, the holidays are a time for giving thanks and not throwing tantrums.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's Thanksgiving Day here in the States, so we wanted to do something, you know, American. So here's a story from a few months ago that'll help you feel patriotic while also giving you something fun to talk about over dessert.
CODY GOUGH: Favorite pie. Go.
ASHLEY HAMER: One of my aunts on my mom's side of the family makes this huckleberry pie, and she only ever brings one to this giant family party, and everybody has to have like a molecule-sized slice so it can all go around, but it is the best thing ever.
CODY GOUGH: What does a huckleberry taste like?
ASHLEY HAMER: Huckleberries look like tiny blueberries, and they're a little bit more tart than a blueberry.
CODY GOUGH: Look at that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Learned something new about pie.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep.
CODY GOUGH: Anyway.
ASHLEY HAMER: Every year, nearly 3 million people visit Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where the carved busts of four American presidents stand six stories tall. Maybe you've been there, maybe not. But did you know that Mount Rushmore was never actually finished? And that is the least of its secrets.
Today, we've got the scoop on a secret room that actually does exist behind Mount Rushmore. This is not a conspiracy theory.
CODY GOUGH: However, my belief that there are aliens living inside it is definitely a conspiracy theory. I don't really believe that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: Just, I know you were thinking I did.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well.
CODY GOUGH: Not this time.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right.
CODY GOUGH: All the aliens are in Nevada. Everybody knows that.
ASHLEY HAMER: The man behind Mount Rushmore is the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the Idaho-born son of a Danish immigrant. He was quite the character. And you can read about some of his background in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
But one thing he firmly believed was that he had to do something special, so he wouldn't be forgotten. He once wrote quote, "Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls," unquote.
Construction on Mount Rushmore started in 1927, and 11 years later, he started working on a massive haul of records. It's just behind Abraham Lincoln's hairline-- never thought I'd say that phrase-- and he wanted to use the chamber to house all the information about the mountain and the United States that anyone would ever need, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, by the way.
Visitors would climb an 800-foot rock staircase and look up through an 18-foot tall doorway at a gold-plated eagle stretching 38 feet wide.
CODY GOUGH: Modest.
ASHLEY HAMER: The US government didn't exactly share his vision, so they asked him to focus on the faces instead. But three years after he started work on the room, Borglum passed away, leaving the room and the faces unfinished.
The Hall of Records is still there, but it's close to the public, so you'll have to be satisfied with photographic evidence. 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 works. That's why it's been used by the Marine Corps, the Navy, and business executives, among many others, to learn new languages quickly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Pimsleur is a convenient, hands-free way to learn. It's perfect for turning your downtime into a new skill. You can reach an intermediate level in just 30 days. I did this. That's because the Pimsleur method is based on groundbreaking research that combines language and memory.
CODY GOUGH: That includes Dr. Pimsleur's Graduated Recall principle. It's a scientifically-sequenced schedule built into every lesson that ensures your brain moves what you learn from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.
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, like a new language, a new perspective, and 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: Here's a classic quiz before we sign off. Enjoy.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're going to wrap up today with the world's shortest IQ test. It's called the Cognitive Reflection Test, and it was published in 2005 by psychologist Shane Frederick.
He said he picked these questions because they make it easy for people to quickly jump to conclusions instead of stopping to closely analyze the seemingly simple quiz items.
CODY GOUGH: So, basically, these are deceptively simple questions, but if you don't stop for a second to think about it, you might just breeze through it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. So just take your time. Read the questions.
CODY GOUGH: Or listen to them in this case.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or listen to them. So this is a classic one, the bat and ball problem. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? This one always gets me.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: I have heard it so many times, and I never remember the answer.
CODY GOUGH: One more time. A bat and a ball together costs $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The answer is?
ASHLEY HAMER: The ball costs $0.05. You probably guessed $0.10, didn't you? I know I did. No judgment. A ball that costs $0.05 plus a bat that costs $1.05 will set you back $1.10.
A Princeton study found that people who answered $0.10 were significantly less patient than those who got it correct.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, guilty as charged.
CODY GOUGH: Mm-hmm. That's OK. Question two. The widget-making machine problem. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
ASHLEY HAMER: If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
CODY GOUGH: This one throws me off all the time because it seems like a really complicated math problem, but it's really not. It would take 100 machines five minutes to make 100 widgets.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, I guessed right.
CODY GOUGH: So your gut might tell you the answer is 100 minutes, right? Five, five, five, 100, 100, 100. Well, no. From the question, we know that it takes five minutes from one machine to make one widget. So it would take five minutes for any number of machines to make any number of widgets.
ASHLEY HAMER: The third one. The size-double lily pad patch problem. There's a patch of lily pads in a lake. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
CODY GOUGH: Again, every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days to cover the whole lake, how long does it take for the patch to cover half the lake? And I love this question because I always get it right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Really?
CODY GOUGH: I don't know why.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, the answer? The lily pads would cover half the lake in 47 days. You might have guessed 24 days. It seems intuitive to cut the number of days in half because you're cutting the size of the lily pad patch in half.
But if the area of the lake covered in Lily pads doubles every day, it would only take one day for it to go from being half covered to fully covered. Take one day away from 48 days, and you're left with 47.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it's simple stuff, but it's deceptively simple stuff.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. It's tricky.
CODY GOUGH: Quiz your friends with it, and let us know how they do.
ASHLEY HAMER: On today's day of giving thanks, we want to say thank you for listening to our podcast and for leaving us five-star reviews and for telling your friends about our show and for supporting us on Patreon.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, basically, we are just immensely thankful. This podcast is our passion, and we wouldn't be able to do it without curious, engaged, generous listeners. So from us to you, thank you so much, and have a happy Thanksgiving. Or to those of you not celebrating that today, happy Thursday.
ASHLEY HAMER: And feel free to 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.