Learn about how speed listening to podcasts affects our emotions; the health differences between white and brown rice; and the time pi was once almost legally changed to 3.2.
Learn about how speed listening to podcasts (or "podfasting") affects our emotions; the health differences between white and brown rice; and the time pi was once almost legally changed to 3.2.
Speed listening’s effects on emotion by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from S.P.)
The health differences between white and brown rice are dead even by Steffie Drucker
Pi Was Once Almost Legally Changed to 3.2 by Ashley Hamer: https://curiosity.com/topics/happy-pi-day-how-pi-was-almost-legally-changed-to-32-curiosity
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/speed-listenings-effects-on-emotion-surprising-differences-between-white-and-brown-rice-and-pi-almost-legally-changed-to-3-2
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, we’ll answer a listener question about how speed listening affects our emotions. You’ll also learn about the health differences between white and brown rice; and the time pi was once almost legally changed to 3.2.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We got a listener question on our new studio line! We’ll remind you what our phone number is later in this episode, but for now, here’s the question:
[AUDIO CLIP]
You’re in luck, SP! While nobody’s done an actual study on how speeding up narrative audio affects a listener’s emotions, there is a good amount of research that can give us a peek into what might be happening there. A person’s speech rate is one aspect of something called emotional prosody [PRAH-suh-dee]. That’s all the non-verbal stuff that helps speech convey emotion: like, if I say “I lost my keys” [angry], that sends a very different message about my emotional state than “I lost my keys” [sobbing]. Scientists have measured how speech rate changes with emotion, and they can pretty reliably pick out which basic emotion someone’s feeling based only on how fast they’re talking. Generally, fear is linked with the highest speaking rates, followed by joy, then anger. People speak slowest when they’re feeling disgust and sadness.
Scientists have also looked at this from the listener’s end. For a study published in 2018, German researchers first had a bunch of people read happy and sad poems out loud, in German. When they analyzed the audio, they found that the readers generally raised the pitch of their voices and sped up their speech when reading the happy poems, and lowered their pitch and speech rate on the sad poems. Then, they had non-German-speaking participants listen to these same poems, but sometimes the happy poems were read in a sad way and vice versa. Sure enough, when the listeners couldn’t understand the emotional meaning of the words, they judged the poem’s emotion on the way the words were spoken. Read a sad poem in a high, fast voice, and it sounds less sad — at least if you can’t understand it.
You can see how this might extend to podcasts. If you’re listening to a dramatic, heart-wrenching story at two times the speed, you might just interpret it as less depressing than if you listened to it at its original speed. It’s not that your emotional understanding is reduced; it’s that you’re sensing a completely different set of emotions than were intended. [ALL THE AD LIB] Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
When it comes to rice, most of us assume brown rice is healthier even though white rice is tastier. If that’s you, I’ve got good news: it turns out that the health benefits of brown and white rice are pretty much dead even.
First of all, all rice actually starts out as brown rice. Brown rice is a whole grain made up of three parts: the bran, which is a fiber-rich outer layer; the endosperm, which is the carb- and protein-packed middle layer; and the germ, the nutrient-filled core. White rice is processed to remove the bran and the germ, leaving just the white endosperm.
Because brown rice contains more fiber, thanks to the bran, it can help manage your weight and blood sugar, lower cholesterol, and reduce the risk of diabetes and heart disease. The fact that brown rice still has the germ also means it has more nutrients like manganese, selenium, and magnesium, which do everything from supporting your immune system to aiding in bone and muscle development.
Sounds like no contest, right? Not so fast.
Whole grains like brown rice also contain something called phytic acid, which binds to some important minerals like calcium and iron and keeps your body from absorbing those minerals. The milling process that white rice goes through removes a lot of its phytic acid content, so its nutrients are easier to absorb. There’s also the fact that a lot of white rice is enriched, meaning the nutrients lost in the milling process are just added right back in. One especially important nutrient that enriched white rice has more of is folate. Folate helps your body make DNA and produce new cells, and a one-cup serving of white rice gives you half of your daily intake. Not too shabby.
Rice also contains arsenic, which is a heavy metal that can be dangerous if too much builds up in your body. Brown rice tends to have more of it than white rice does. But don’t worry too much: the FDA says that as long as you have a variety of grains in your diet, eating rice of any kind isn’t a big risk.
So at the end of the day, it’s basically a wash. If you’ve got concerns about your diet, it’s never a bad idea to consult a registered dietician. But otherwise, just eat whichever kind you like!
The day after this episode is being released, the date is March 14. Here in the US, that’s written down as three-fourteen, so it’s unofficially known as “Pi Day,” in honor of Pi’s first few digits: three-point-one-four.
The value of pi is, always has been, and always will be 3.141592653... ad infinitum. But that didn't stop someone from trying to change that. So in honor of our favorite mathematical constant, let’s talk about the time Pi was once almost legally changed to 3.2.
Edward Goodwin was either a clever prankster or an amateur mathematician who truly believed he had made a breakthrough. Either way, in 1897, he believed he had found a new and correct value of pi. Not only that, he tried to put this finding into law. In Indiana.
Specifically, Goodwin believed he had successfully "squared the circle," which is a problem that’s plagued mathematicians as far back as the ancient Greeks. Squaring the circle means to draw a square with the same area as a circle. But because the area of a circle contains the irrational number pi, modern mathematicians know it can't be done: the length of the sides of the square would end up being some infinite decimal just like pi, and that's just impossible. Well, impossible if you define pi as an irrational number. But Goodwin believed it was possible because pi was rational. After all, he believed it was actually 3.2.
The bill is full of jargon, but according to a respected mathematician at the time, it gave multiple numbers for the "true" value of pi — sometimes it was 4, other times it was 3.2.
Believe it or not, the bill got surprisingly far. The first committee didn't know what to do with it, so they sent it to the Committee on Education, who inexplicably recommended it to the House, where it somehow passed with no resistance.
However, the bill was stopped when it reached the Senate — not because they recognized it was wrong, but because they recognized that you can't legislate mathematical laws. The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter will always be pi and pi will always be [read until you run out of breath] 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664 ... well, you get the picture.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about why extreme temperatures mess with your batteries;
How a machine learning algorithm discovered a new antibiotic for the first time;
Hormonal changes that are experienced by dads-to-be;
Why laughter might really be the best medicine;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!