What are the limits of the human body, and how can we fully utilize them? Alex Hutchinson, award-winning journalist and author of "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance," explains why humans are nearly always capable of pushing just a little bit harder — and how you can eke out just a little bit more effort even when you think your body's tank is empty. Additional resources from Alex Hutchinson: AlexHutchinson.net Alex Hutchinson on Twitter @sweatscience "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance" "Big Ideas: 100 Modern Inventions That Have Transformed Our World (Popular Mechanics)" Other studies and materials discussed: What the Marshmallow Test Really Teaches About Self-Control | The Atlantic Gatorade: The Idea That Launched An Industry | University of Florida OCL Stroop Test | Open Cognition Lab Fatigue of Cognitive Control in the Stroop-Task Extra credit: Blemish: The truth about blackheads | Scientific American Everything you need to know about blackheads | Medical News Today Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
What are the limits of the human body, and how can we fully utilize them? Alex Hutchinson, award-winning journalist and author of "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance," explains why humans are nearly always capable of pushing just a little bit harder — and how you can eke out just a little bit more effort even when you think your body's tank is empty.
Additional resources from Alex Hutchinson:
Other studies and materials discussed:
Extra credit:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-limits-of-the-human-body-may-be-more-mental-than-physical
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious, what's stopping the human body from giving 100%?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: What it feels like is that it's your body stopping your body. Like, when you push to your max, it feels like you go to the point where either your legs or your heart or your lungs won't let you go any further.
But what the research seems to suggest is that in the vast majority of cases, it's actually your brain holding you back, preventing you from hitting those limits for your own good. In ways that we're not entirely sure how it works, but we're pretty sure that limits that feel physical are almost always actually mediated by the brain.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi. I'm Cody Gough with the brainpoweredcuriosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer. Today we're going to talk about the limits of the human body.
CODY GOUGH: Every week we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity Podcast.
CODY GOUGH: What if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we're capable of?
ASHLEY HAMER: Alex Hutchinson is the author of the new book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. And he has some answers.
CODY GOUGH: He's an award-winning journalist who wrote that endurance is quote, "The struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop."
ASHLEY HAMER: And he says that we're always capable of pushing a little farther. Today, we'll learn how.
CODY GOUGH: The book is called Endure. But let's talk about what's the definition of endurance in this context. What are you actually talking about and trying to get at in this book?
ALEX HUTCHINSONS: Yeah, and that was a question that I had to wrestle with, kind of. I probably should have wrestled this at the beginning of writing the book, but it sort of I kept wrestling with it as I went through the book, and my definition kept getting broader and broader.
From the sort of start of thinking, well, endurance is how fast can I run, to realizing that it's much broader in athletic pursuits, to realizing the similarities between running a marathon and studying for an exam. They're not just metaphorical that actually when you get into it. What the research suggest is that these are kind of actually the same things on a brain level.
And so I ended up with this really broad definition of endurance, which is that it's the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. And so that, as I said, it encompasses the endurance sports. But I think it's, actually, it's a metaphor for life, almost. Endurance is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.
One of the things I was like, well, OK, what's the bottom end of endurance? When does it stop being endurance and start being a sprint? And you're like, well, OK, if you look at Usain Bolt, when he runs the 200 meters, he starts out slower than when he runs the 100 meters because he's pacing himself. And there's fatigue.
Even in the hundreds meters, they reach their top speed at like 60 meters, and then they all start to slow down. And Usain Bolt slows down a little less than everyone else. He has better endurance at that level. So anything that lasts, that has palpable duration where you have the chance to quit but you choose not to, I think that encompasses endurance.
And like you said, it's not just physical, it's mental. And, in fact, one of the sort of underlying themes that came out of the research I was looking at is that physical endurance is mental endurance. Like, if you want to run a marathon, about 20 miles, it's not that your legs can't go any faster, they can.
If a lion jumps out from behind the trees in Central Park and starts chasing you, you'll find that you still can sprint. What determines how well you do in a marathon is how well you're able to keep pushing yourself mentally to be as close as possible to your limits.
And that's kind of the same thing. It's a cognitive trait called response inhibition, being able to-- it's kind of like the marshmallow test that's quite famous. Can you convince yourself not to eat one marshmallow so that in 10 minutes you'll be given two marshmallows.
ASHLEY HAMER: You've probably heard about the marshmallow test, but who doesn't need a refresher now and then? It refers to a series of experiments performed by the psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University.
Mischel and his team would offer children a reward, like a small marshmallow, and give them a choice. They could eat the treat immediately or they could wait for 20 minutes and then get two treats. Some chose option A, some chose option B.
Later the researchers followed up with the children and found that the ones who had waited generally fared better than the ones who didn't. Even 30 years later, their ability to resist temptation was linked with higher SAT scores and a lower body mass index.
That makes sense. If you can delay the gratification of watching TV and study instead, you'll get better grades. If you can delay the gratification of eating junk food before dinner, you'll be healthier overall. And if you're running a marathon and you can delay the gratification of resting your weary legs for four, three, two more miles, you'll have a more successful race.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: These are not-- like I said, they're not metaphorical similarities. It is the same cognitive traits that define your endurance in all these different contexts.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, athletes have to be very intelligent about their own bodies. And I also think of fighters, like boxing and UFC, where you can see matches where the pacing is the thing that determines how well or how poorly a particular fight goes.
The people give Floyd Money Mayweather a lot of crap because his bouts, some might argue, are kind of boring because they're kind of slow paced. But he's really good at pacing himself, and he was undefeated when he retired, so that's not bad. Did you look at a lot of athletes in that category too?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: It's funny when you're looking at the science of this stuff you end up being sort of captive to what scientists study in labs. And there's certain things that are easier to study. Like, a lot of studies get done on exercise bikes, stationary bikes because you could measure exactly how much power an athlete is putting out.
And so it's much harder to study these things like boxing or even like field sports, like soccer or football, it's harder to get good research there. But the little research that's out there really backs up the idea that, first of all, that the mental component is really crucial.
But also that endurance-- like a lot of sports we think of as sprint sports, but if you look at the physiology of repeated sprints, if you sprint once, it's all relying on your anaerobic energy. If you sprint twice, it's maybe 50/50.
If you sprint three times-- if you do like 10 second sprints three times within a couple of minutes, all of a sudden your majority-- you're using a majority of aerobic energy, which means you're relying on your endurance.
And so if you look at a soccer game, for example, endurance is a crucial determinant of who's going to win the game. And the same is true even for things like football and hockey. You look at fourth quarter performance, why was Gatorade such a game changer in the 1960s?
It's because traditionally football players who weren't thinking about their performance over the course of the full game, about how well they're going to be enduring by the time they got to the fourth quarter. Performance was going way down. And once some teams started to really pay attention to these stuff and make sure their performance was-- they were fueling themselves for the fourth quarter, for example, then they were able to get a huge advantage.
ASHLEY HAMER: Trivia time, do you know why Gatorade is called Gatorade? The name wasn't dreamed up in some marketing office. The gator in Gatorade comes from the mascot of the University of Florida, where the sports drink was invented. It's a fascinating story.
In 1965, a University of Florida football coach asked a university kidney specialist named Robert Cade why his players were losing so much weight during games yet didn't seem to urinate at all.
Cade was intrigued, and soon recruited the freshman football team for an experiment. Fluid samples he collected from the players mid practice showed that they suffered from low blood sugar, low blood volume, and electrolyte imbalances.
The fix Cade came up with? He mixed water to treat the dehydration with salt, to replace the salt they were losing in sweat, and just enough sugar to keep their blood sugar up but not upset their stomachs.
The first batch tasted so bad that none of the scientists could stand it, but it got better after Cade's wife suggested they add lemon juice. Immediately players started performing better. That freshman team even gave the B team a run for their money.
At the beginning of the 1966 season, before Gatorade was in regular use, two dozen players went to the hospital with heat related illnesses in the first two days. Soon, they kept the sidelines stocked with the stuff. And over the next five years, they only saw one hospital admission. And that player didn't drink any Gatorade. They began marketing the drink a year later, and the rest is history.
CODY GOUGH: Now, your background is as a runner, and quite an accomplished runner. You're a very fast runner. You're a fast guy.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: A formerly fast runner, as I get older. But it's a state of mind, right? It's not about the times, it's that I like to push my limits and see what I can run.
CODY GOUGH: That kind of feeds into your origin story, I guess, about why you started writing this book. You started writing the book almost 10 years ago, right? So what kicked it off? What was the big motivation to get into this? And what's your background a little bit, just so the listener can kind of understand where you're coming from.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, when I say 2009, that's actually-- the origins go back a lot farther than that. I actually started out as a physicist. I did my PhD in physics, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the NSA's quantum computing group until my late 20s. And so I was doing science, and then decided to become a science journalist.
And my other passion was running. I competed for the Canadian National Team as a track runner and a cross-country runner, and also in road running and mountain running. So pretty much any surface, I was willing to race on it.
So when I became a journalist in my late 20s, I had these two elements that I was both interested in and strong in, which was science and endurance sports. And so I sort of fell into reporting on the science of endurance. So not so much who's winning the game or who's winning the race, but why and how.
And I started to come across some research on the brain's role in endurance. And this was maybe sort of 2006 or so, 2007. And it really clicked right away my own experiences as a runner had left me with this real curiosity about what defines your limits.
So the story is, in brief, I wanted to run a subfour minute 100 meters race, which is a little bit shorter than it was, it's like a 418 mile, or something like that. And so in high school I had run 402 and thought it was-- I'm going to run subfour, no problem.
But I got stuck at a real plateau for about four years. I was running the same times, 401, 402. So that gave me a real sense that I was approaching actual physical limits, my outer limits.
I'm sure someday if I got it perfectly I'd run 359, but I figured that was the extent of what my body was capable of. And then I had this bizarre experience in a really small race in a town called Sherbrooke where the timekeeper was calling-- as it turns out he was calling the wrong splits.
So I went through the first lap, he called out 27 seconds for 200 meters, and I needed to run 32 seconds. And that's actually a huge, huge difference. And so I had this intellectual sense of, oh my God, I am screwed, I have gone out too fast. This is going to hurt. But then this perceptual sense of, but actually feel pretty relaxed.
And so after a couple of laps, this guy had basically convinced me that I was running this amazing race, and I stopped listening to the splits and just kind of put my head down and sprinted for the tape. And I ended up running 352, so like a nine second personal best.
And basically because this guy had inadvertently tricked me-- I don't know if he started his watch late or-- it was in the French part of Canada, maybe he was having trouble translating the splits or something-- that was my transformation moment.
And then the really bizarre thing is that I never transformed back, I never struggled to break four minutes again. And in my next race I ran 349, and the one after that I ran 344. And all of a sudden I was qualifying for the Canadian Olympic trials over the course of just three races.
So all of which is to say that I was left with this feeling that I had thought I knew what physical limits were, and then I had this transformation where I realized that actually I had way more potential in me physically that was just being held back. I mean, the only explanation is that my brain was holding me back, instead of my body.
And so I was kind of fertile ground for discovering that, oh, actually scientists have been trying to understand how this stuff works. That after a century, 20th century was all about understanding the body as a machine, understanding VO2 max and lactate threshold, and thinking that we can calculate the limits of human performance.
But now in the last decade or two, there's been a whole bunch of research trying to say, OK, how does the brain dictate our limits? And so it was kind of a way to the races from that point.
And I thought it was going to be a fairly simple book, a couple of years reporting on this latest research. But the more I dug into it, the more complexity and the more sort of fascinating findings there were.
And at a certain point, I just had to say, OK, this is an ongoing area of science where people are still making new discoveries. I'm going to write the book because I don't want to be in 15 years still saying, oh man, there's another new study, I still can't write the book. So it's kind of a snapshot of where the science is right now.
CODY GOUGH: Is there one particular specific snag you ran into that really was the fly in the ointment that you just couldn't quite get past? That science hadn't quite honed in on? Or was it just the fact that the brain has a really, really complicated structure?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, we're just getting into the-- there's been a kind of revolution in brain science where using various techniques, things like functional MRI scans you can look inside the brain and see which areas are active when you're thinking about certain things.
It's been really challenging to image the brain during exercise, whether using-- and there's other ways of brain imaging. But all of them demand that you hold absolutely still and preferably don't move. And so people have been trying to get around that.
There's a group in Brazil that has built a brain scanner where you're lying in this huge cylindrical magnet to image your brain, and your head is clamped to keep it absolutely still. And then your legs are pedaling on a sort of bicycle pedal, which is attached to a drive shaft that goes like 15 feet through the wall of the MRI chamber into another room where it spins a riderless bike.
Because you can't have the bike in the magnet room, otherwise, because it's so magnetic, the bike would just get slammed into the magnet. So they're trying to use like-- and this is like a Jerry rigged kind of Rube Goldberg device to try and look inside the brain during exercise and see what really happens at exhaustion. But these initiatives are totally in their infancy.
And it's not like, if I wait another six months, we're going to know what the brain is doing during exercise. It's going to be a sort of multi-years, probably a decade or more to try and start to tease out what's happening.
So in a sense we're on the cusp of some interesting new research. But as you said, even if we can look inside the brain and see what's happening at exhaustion, the brain's complicated. So just knowing that area B lights up doesn't necessarily tell you that much.
So the stage we're at right now is more of a black box stage where we can manipulate it-- without really knowing what exactly is going on inside the brain, we can manipulate the brain using things like electric brain stimulation or even things like subliminal images.
We can alter people's endurance by flashing smiling faces or frowning faces on a screen in front of them. They don't even know that those faces are there, but it can alter their endurance. So that can give us some insight about how the brain is processing the effort of endurance even if we don't know which neurons are firing.
CODY GOUGH: The stationary stuck with your head in the same place, that sounds like a nightmare to me.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, well, one of the cool-- there's a cool study at UC San Diego where they're trying to understand how elite endurance athletes respond to adversity. And so they end up-- there's a similar thing.
They're in this-- they're lying absolutely motionless in this very claustrophobic magnet tube, cylindrical magnet. They're looking through a mirror at a computer screen so that they can perform these cognitive tests while they're lying there. And they're breathing through a mask, and every once in a while the flow of oxygen into the mask is reduced. So it's effectively like they're kind of breathing through a straw.
And so it's like how do they respond to this sudden adversity when they're in this magnet and doing this cognitive test. And the interesting thing is the elite performers-- and whether they do it with like Navy SEALs, but also with elite endurance athletes, they actually get better at the cognitive tasks when their breathing is interfered with.
Because it's a stressful situation, and they've got their responses honed so that they can go into like top performance mode under stress. Whereas everybody else, first of all, yeah, their cognitive performance goes way down when they're stressed out by the fact that they can't breathe.
But also, like you said, it's pretty freaky to be in that situation in the first place, and then to not be able to breathe properly. And so some of the normal controls have had to sort of panic and have to be removed from the brain scanner. So it's a kind of a interesting way of seeing who's ready to deal with adversity in a tough situation.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I'm not going to volunteer for that study anytime soon. But it does lead to the question, how do these high performance endurance athletes, how do these top performers train themselves to be able to endure like this?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, that's the million dollar question, right? And if we can bottle this answer, then we'll never have to work again. But there's a lot of different roads to a similar goal of elite performance, but there are some commonalities that you find when you study elite athletes. And they're able to interpret discomfort in a way that is almost-- I mean, you could say it's a mindful way of interpreting discomfort, that is it's non-judgmental.
So if you go for a run and you start to feel your legs are starting to hurt, and you're panting, you're breathing, if you're a new runner, if you're just starting, that's very disconcerting. And that discomfort feels like, it's sort of like you're about to die. And you back off as a result because it's a little bit scary.
So for well-trained athletes, for the best athletes, they've learned to interpret pain essentially as information. They've removed the emotional aspect of it, that oh my God, something is going wrong. They're so familiar with discomfort that it's just another signal, that's like being warm or feeling your hand is wet, or something like that.
It's like, yes, my legs are hurting, that means I can't continue indefinitely, but it doesn't mean I have to stop. It just means-- it's just information. And interestingly, what they found is that you can inject a spinal nerve back into people's spine so that they don't feel any pain in their legs at all, but they can still make their legs move.
And you think that's like the dream come true that, hey, I can pedal a bike as hard as I want and I won't feel any discomfort. But, in fact, what happens is people aren't able to pace themselves without that pain. So the pain is actually a really important signal as long as you're not overreacting to it.
And that's the key for the elite performers is they're able to have this familiarity with pain and with discomfort. And to just treat it as information instead of-- stripped of all emotional content. So that's one characteristic of elite endurance athletes.
ASHLEY HAMER: I must break in and tell you about the grueling experiments scientists have done to find out how elite athletes approach pain. In 1981, a psychologist named Karel Gijsbers put elite swimmers in blood pressure cuffs that cut off circulation to their arms. Then had them clench and unclench their fists once per second and count how many it took before it was too painful to continue.
For research presented in 2015, Samuel Mark Maurer had people hold one hand in a bucket of ice water until the pain was unbearable, then made them ride a stationary bike to exhaustion. That's actually a standard protocol used in pain research.
And, of course, there's the study Hutchinson mentioned where University of Wisconsin researchers injected cyclists' spines with fentanyl to block all of their pain signals. Then had them ride five kilometers as fast as they could on a stationary bike. And they rode hard. By the time they were done, none of them could get off of the bikes by themselves, much less walk.
But throughout these studies researchers have found two things. One, that pain is important information for an athlete. And two, elite competitors can tolerate a lot more pain than the rest of us. As the researcher from that blood pressure cuff study wrote, quote, "It is reported that pain can be strangely satisfying to the motivated athlete."
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Another thing that turns out to be really important is that-- and this sounds sort of touchy feeling, and it wasn't where I thought I would end up when I started researching this book. But the words you say to yourself, your internal monologue is really important. And whether you have negative self-talk or positive self-talk, that influences how you perceive the effort you're putting out.
So the big kind of message that emerges from this research is that when you reach your limits, it's not that your legs can't go any farther or can't go any faster or that you can't breathe any harder or that your heart can't beat any faster. it's that your brain is interpreting those signals and deciding that you shouldn't move your legs harder or make your heart beat faster.
And so it's this interpretation that's really important. And what that means is if you're out there telling yourself, this is so terrible, there's no way I'm going to make it. This is so bad. Then that can subtly influence the way your brain interprets those signals.
So it doesn't change what your heart rate is, it doesn't change what your lactate levels in your legs are, but it does change how your brain interprets those signals. As opposed to if you can learn to say, I've trained for this, I'm ready for this, I can do this.
It's totally subtle change. But it can change the interpretation, how your brain interprets the bodily signals, and that in turn changes your sense of effort. And if the effort feels easier, then you're able to go farther or go faster.
Now all of this is like the icing on the cake. Like, if you just take 100 random people off the street, what's going to dictate who's going to finish best in a marathon? It's going to be their physical characteristics. Who's got the strongest heart and the most efficient muscles, and so on.
But once you start comparing people who are similar, like, the people in an Olympic marathon, then they all have those physical traits, and these mental stuff becomes more important. And from my perspective, what's interesting is that if you take it-- if you're thinking about it personally, if I run a 5k tomorrow and then I run a 5k again next month, my physical traits are going to be very, very, very similar.
There's not going to be a big change between me now and me a month from now. But I'm not going to run exactly the same time. And those differences come down to my mental outlook and how well I'm able to push myself on a given day. So from a personal perspective, for each individual, the challenge of pushing your endurance, I think, becomes predominantly a mental challenge.
CODY GOUGH: That internal monologue, how much is that influenced by two different motivators? First the intrinsic motivators of wanting to beat your own time by that getting near the finish line and knowing you've just got to shave off five seconds, maybe getting to that home stretch.
And how much of that is motivated by the other people around you? How can you change your internal thought process when you're in the last leg of a race, and there's six people right with you?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, those are great questions. So to the first part about competition and beating your own times, there's some great studies using deception where basically they take people, they put them in a lab, have them do let's say a 5k time trial on a bike or a 10k time trial on a bike.
And then they record that performance digitally, and they use it to create a virtual reality avatar for you to race against. So you're racing against your own best performance. And the thing is you know you can beat yourself, you know that I can stay with that guy there because that guy is me. And so sure enough, if you race against yourself, you beat yourself.
But what they can do is they can secretly speed up the avatar without telling you. So if they speed up the avatar by 1%, you're still going to beat the avatar because you're so confident your internal monologue is, I know I can beat that guy, that guy's me. So you beat him even though he's actually going 1% faster.
They speed it up by 2%, the elastic starts to stretch a little bit. So you won't necessarily beat your avatar, but on average maybe you'll go 1.7% faster if the avatar speed it up by 2%. So you get more out of yourself, even if you're not quite able to beat this sort of mysteriously fast version of you.
But if they speed up the avatar by 5%, then it actually goes in the opposite direction. It's so demoralizing because you're like, man, what is wrong with me? Why can I not stay with my own best performance? And you end up kind of giving up, and the self-talk turns negative, and you end up going slower than you would normally.
So it kind of gives you a sense of if you have reason to believe that, yes, you can do something, then that translates into some positive belief. And so you'll be more likely to be able to actually go out and do that.
Now, other people play a role too. There's actually some really amazing research done with the Oxford rowing team where they quantified the increase in pain tolerance. So if you do exercise, you get a surge of brain chemicals, things like endorphins, and that allows you to-- it increases your pain tolerance. It allows you to tolerate discomfort. You won't feel pain as much.
But what they found is they took these rowers from the Oxford rowing team, and they had them do a workout on a stationary rowing machine. And they said, sure enough, their pain tolerance increased.
But when they did the exact same workout on a stationary rowing machine in the same room as their teammates who were also on stationary rowing machines, their pain tolerance increased like twice as much. So the exact same physical workout has different effects, depending on your perception of what's going on, including the presence of other people.
And in this case, it was particularly teammates. So this idea of people with whom you have a shared goal, that makes a big difference. But crowds-- may be to a slightly lesser extent, crowds can also play a big role in generating that surge of brain chemicals, and encouraging you and holding you accountable.
So all these stuff is really personal, right? Like, for some people a big crowd can be the absolute most motivating thing in the world. For others maybe if they have more sort of performance anxiety, that can actually slice or cut the other way if you start worrying about the possibility of failure.
And it comes down to controlling your internal monologue so that the presence of a big crowd, for example, so that it spurs you on rather than causes you to sort of doubt yourself and do worse. And that's something I guess it's important to say that this is something that people work at, that people deliberately, systematically try and improve.
You can't just wake up tomorrow morning and say, I'm going to stop saying negative things to myself. I'm going to say positive things to myself. Because these are really deeply worn grooves. So it's something where, first of all, you have to become aware what is it that I say to myself when the buck is on the line? What are the things I'm telling myself?
And if they're counterproductive, what are some alternatives that I could use? And then you have to practice in training or in various contexts saying those things to yourself, saying you've trained for this, you're ready for this so that it becomes second nature.
So that when you are in a high stress situation, again, whether it's an exam or a race or whatever the case may be, the positive self-talk is coming automatically rather than you having to stop and say, what am I supposed to say to myself? Because in the high stress situation you don't really have time or the opportunity to control it, it has to be second nature.
CODY GOUGH: It's kind of similar almost to our conscience. That the little voice in your head that says, hey, what you're about to do is really stupid or destructive. And maybe you shouldn't do it. And then you can either ignore that voice and do this really stupid thing despite knowing the consequences, or you can actually listen to it.
And it's almost like a mental exercise that way. Despite knowing better, some people are better at it than others. Just like how some are better able to, not ignore, but interpret the signals of their brain that are saying, hey, your legs are really tired. And understanding whether that means they're tired, you got to slow down or you're going to break something, or you're tired but you can keep pushing through this.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, I mean, you can almost conceptualize it as the old the good angel on one shoulder and the bad angel on the other shoulder whispering suggestions in your ear. And you have to decide which one you're going to listen to.
CODY GOUGH: Develop this ability I would refer to near the end of your book you get into brain endurance training. Talk to me a little bit about that, and how can people get better and do what you're talking about?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, there's some really fascinating research from a guy named Samuel Mark Maurer who works in Britain. His basic insight is this, if you want to make your body stronger, you do things that are physically fatiguing. So if you want to make your mind stronger, you should do things that are mentally fatiguing.
And he has some very specific-- it's not just like go and memorize the digits of pi or whatever, he has some very specific cognitive tasks that he has shown hurt your physical performance.
So if you spend 90 minutes sitting at a computer performing these with what are called response inhibition tasks where letters or numbers are flashing on the screen, and you have to press a certain button depending on which letter or number is up there. And it's sort of taxes-- it requires you to suppress your first instinct and maintain focus for a long time.
Those things hurt your performance. So he thinks, hey, if you do those things every day for an hour, say, your brain should gradually adapt, and you'll get better at displaying mental endurance. And he's done some pretty interesting pilot studies for the British military with some very, very promising results suggesting that this really does-- it's a way of enhancing your physical endurance while sitting in front of a computer.
Now, I actually had a chance to try this a couple of years ago when It was in the pilot testing stages. And I can say it was extremely boring and also very time consuming. It's like you would really, really have to be into getting that extra 1% performance to want to spend five hours a week staring at a computer screen like that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Samuel Mark Maurer's response inhibition tasks aren't available to the public quite yet. But he's working with an app developer to hopefully make that happen in the future. I say hopefully with some sarcasm. In the book Hutchinson quotes him as saying, quote, "People who have done these mental fatigue studies, it's not nice. It's really bad. They hate you at the end of the task." End quote.
There are a few other cognitive tasks that studies have shown to be mentally fatiguing, however. I don't think they've ever been used in endurance sports, so take this with a grain of salt, but you could give them a try.
One popular one is called the Stroop task where you're given a series of color words like red, green, or purple, that are printed in mismatching colors. So the word red might be printed in green, for example, or the word purple might be printed in orange. Your task is to name the color of the word instead of the word itself. It's really hard. We'll include a link to an online Stroop task in the show notes.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: One of the points Mark Maurer makes, the researcher, is that mental training doesn't have to be something you do in the lab in front of a computer. That it's a part of all the training you do. So it's like any time you go to the gym and spend an hour at the gym, you're training your body, but you're also training your mind. But there may be situations where you're getting a kind of extra mental boost.
And so one of the examples he gives is, hey, let's say you've had a really long or tough day at work, and you're mentally exhausted. You're not physically exhausted, you were sitting at a computer all day. But it was highly stressful and you're kind of mentally fried.
You know your workout is not going to be that great if you're mentally drained. But what he says is, hey, don't worry about the physical aspect of the workout, do the workout anyway and consider it a brain endurance session.
By working out when you're mentally tired instead of, say, rescheduling the workout, you're doing the equivalent of wearing a kind of weighted vest mentally, forcing yourself to get a little more than usual a lot of it.
And the same is true if let's say you're up half the night with a sick child, or something like that. There are situations where you know that your physical work is going to be compromised. But what he says is this is actually an opportunity to build your mental endurance.
So I find that a kind of encouraging message because the truth is life is full of situations where you are going to be a little bit mentally drained. And so it's kind of like making lemonade from lemons there. It's like it's not going to be a great physical workout, but maybe you're getting something mentally.
CODY GOUGH: It all goes back to the brain, right? Like, you can't win a race if your body is strong enough but your brain doesn't know how to pace yourself.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, for sure. And it's always tempting to say, oh, endurance-- everyone used to think the endurance was all about the body, and now we know it's all about the brain. And, of course, the truth is, and we've always known this, it requires both-- you have to be well trained physically and you have to be tough mentally to get the most out of yourself.
And I think, again, that's one of those halfway truths. It's like, is it nature or is it nurture? Well, you have to have both. And is it the mind or is it the body? You have to have both.
But I think maybe we haven't understood the role of the brain as much. We've intuitively known that, of course, the brain matters. But we're now starting to get a sense of how the brain makes these calculations to determine when it's going to try and shut you down, and when it will let you go, and how you can maybe get around some of the brain's natural caution.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I think it's very smart to not look at everything as an either/or scenario, and really look at everything in concert of how it works. I want to wrap up our conversation with the curiosity challenge. A little segment where I'll give you a break and ask you a trivia question about something I learned about on curiosity.com.
So for this question, the studies analyzing the expressions of Olympic medalists have found that, obviously, if you win a gold, silver, or bronze medal, some winners are happier than others. The question is, which medalists do you think is happiest? And which medalists do you think is least happiest?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: I think I'm going to do well on this one. The gold medal is happiest, the silver medal is the least happy. And the bronze medalist is second happiest presumably because they're just happy to have made it on the podium, whereas the silver medalists it's like, I could have got the gold.
CODY GOUGH: You are completely correct. And there's from a couple of different psychological studies, but it's chalked up to something called counterfactual thinking. And this is instead of thinking of your achievement objectively, you compare it to what might have been.
So for the silver medalist the counterfactual thought is probably that they could have won the gold if they had done just a little bit better. And for the bronze medalist it's the opposite. They almost didn't win a medal at all, so, yeah, it's great to be up there on the podium.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, and I think that's an important life lesson to try. And I don't know if this is good advice, but my thinking is always, well, that could have gone worse. So then I'm happy.
CODY GOUGH: I think it's good advice. I like it. And I believe you brought a question for me as well?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yes, yes. I'm shifting to a completely different field for you. When was the modern-- the completely recognizable, fully modern photocopier invented?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow, like the first Xerox machine kind of thing?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Exactly. With toner and electrostatic imaging. Basically the exact process that modern photocopiers and laser printers use.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, man, I mean my instinct is to say something like 1991. You're probably going to say 1730 or something totally insane.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: It doesn't use like goose feathers or anything like that. It's not like the ancient Romans had something similar. I'm talking about the actual real thing that was patented and led to the first Xerox machine.
CODY GOUGH: OK, I am going to say probably-- let's say like 84 or 85. And I'm very curious why you chose this particular question.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: This wasn't intended as like product placement. But like 10 years ago, I wrote a book on the greatest modern inventions, which led me to research the origin stories of hundreds of inventions. And this one stuck in my mind because it's almost the only one that was an individual, like, mad scientist working in his in-laws kitchen who invented the entire process.
Almost every invention you're like, well, this was one incremental improvement. But there were like 15 people who made incremental improvements that led to, say, the transistor or whatever. So there's always-- it's always like this collective process.
The photocopier was a guy named Chester Carlson. He came up with-- like there's multiple steps that are required to make a photocopier. Like the electrostatic imaging, the transfer of the toner, then the fixing of the toner for the printing. He came up with it all. He made the first photocopy in 1938.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: And then he went from company to company trying to interest them in developing, and nobody was interested. They're like, this is totally useless. And it wasn't until like, I think, it was 1960 or so that a company that later became Xerox actually ended up releasing the first one to the market. Even that 1960 is earlier than I realized. But 1938 was the first successful test photocopy.
CODY GOUGH: Wow, dude. Was he around to reap the benefits?
ALEX HUTCHINSON: That's a good question. I think he must have-- yeah, I'm going to say I hope so because I think it was a young guy. I think he was like in his 20s when he was doing this, so hopefully he went on to live a life of great opulence lying on a desert island surrounded by vast piles of money. But, yeah, he went through some tough times before they got there. It was a long, long road to hoe.
CODY GOUGH: Wow, well, I hope he eventually got what he deserved. Well, the book, again, is Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. It should be restated, again, this is a good book on running and endurance.
But it's also just great for training and understanding the brain, and how it influences all of the things that we do. I'd recommend it for really anybody because I ran cross-country in high school, but I am not an athlete. And I am no longer a runner, I'm sorry to say.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Well, we'll let that one pass. But maybe you'll be inspired after reading the book. But, yeah, I would say I hope it's just interesting. And my kind of guiding star-- and I'm not just pandering to the podcast here-- is that I wanted this to be a curiosity driven book.
And I've said that over and over, and I was saying that to my editor too. It's not just like a training manual. In fact, I really resisted the urge to try and turn everything into, here's how you can use this in your life.
Some of it is just like-- there's a chapter where I go into breath holding records and free diving. And it's like, I don't have any desire to hold my breath. But it's amazing to see what the limits of the human body are. So I hope it really tweaks the curiosity of people who are interested in the human body and its limits.
CODY GOUGH: Perfect way to end the Curiosity Podcast. Thanks, Alex Hutchinson for joining me. I really appreciate it.
ALEX HUTCHINSON: Thanks, Cody. This was fun.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Time to get up close and personal with the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Rosut Noemie who wants to know about blackheads, specifically what causes them and how you get rid of them.
If you have a question you'd like answered on a future episode, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com. The answer, after this.
CODY GOUGH: All right, so last week we talked about Instagram a little bit, and we're doing cool things with Instagram. And I have invited our social media manager at curiosity.com, Joni Fileto. And I'm curious what is going on with our Instagram account because I've heard some really cool things are happening.
JONI FILETO: Yeah. Well, besides having a very engaged super fun, super smart audience that's growing by the day, we have trivia questions and fun polls. It's entertaining, educational. The polls are interactive. We'll have a question or a fill in the blank, and we'll have two different options. So it's kind of a--
CODY GOUGH: How do they know the right answer?
JONI FILETO: Well, you got to swipe up and read the story, that's the way. Because they're all linked to articles on Curiosity, so you can read the whole, and learn new things.
CODY GOUGH: So if you can't get enough of the extra credit questions on the Curiosity Podcast, and you want to earn your own extra credit by reading curiosity.com every day, then the way to test your knowledge is on Instagram. And the handle is just Curiosity Dot Com spelled out.
JONI FILETO: It is @CuriosityDotCom spelled out.
CODY GOUGH: Thank you, Joni. You are a pro.
JONI FILETO: Thank you, Cody.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's clear up some misconceptions with the extra credit answer. Pursuit Noemi wanted to know what's up with blackheads. A blackhead is just a pore clogged with oil, that's it. The bit of the oil that's exposed to the air gets oxidized, which is why it turns black. It's the same reason apple slices turn brown. It's not trapped dirt or anything like that, as much as certain skin products might tell you so.
The scientific term for a blackhead is comedo, the plural is comedones. And when skin products say they're non-comedogenic, that means they don't cause blocked pores. Anyway, blackheads are most common during puberty, but they can appear at any age. That's one of the things they don't tell you when you're a teenager.
They're perfectly normal. But if you're worried about them, here's what you can do. Use gentle face washes or scrubs designed to reduce oil production since blackheads are caused by excess oil. But don't go overboard. Over drying your skin, scrubbing too hard, and squeezing and picking at your blackheads will just inflame your skin and make everything worse.
You can always go to a dermatologist if things are really bad. But, honestly, most of us will always have a few blackheads. Learning to live with them might be the best thing you can do for your skin.
CODY GOUGH: Well, was a pretty appropriately timed episode considering what's happening next week, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, the Boston Marathon is happening next week.
CODY GOUGH: And somebody we know is going to be running the Boston Marathon?
ASHLEY HAMER: It's me.
CODY GOUGH: It is you, you're a marathon runner. I don't know if our listeners know that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, they probably don't. This is going to be my second Boston Marathon. I think my ninth marathon overall.
CODY GOUGH: You're ninth?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: You're hardcore.
ASHLEY HAMER: I am. It's pretty great. I love it, and I didn't do any sports in high school. I came to this late in life.
CODY GOUGH: Why? Or you just not in-- well, you were in a band. You were a band geek.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yep.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, yeah, me too. I was a bit-- while we were both band geeks, I was a distance runner.
ASHLEY HAMER: You were just a cooler band geek.
CODY GOUGH: But, dude, I could not do a marathon, oh my God.
ASHLEY HAMER: You could, anyone could if you wanted to.
CODY GOUGH: Of course, but it's mind over matter, and my mind is telling me that I can't do a marathon. So that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. But good luck to everybody who is going to be running the Boston Marathon.
And if you know any friends who are running it or who are runners in general, I think this episode is particularly going to be of interest to them. And, of course, the book, which you can check out in-- we've got links in the show notes.
ASHLEY HAMER: The book is fantastic. I really recommend it.
CODY GOUGH: Now you picked it up and then told me about it, and that's why we called up Alex.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally.
CODY GOUGH: So next week we're going to talk about something completely different. And I don't even know how to tease it, so I'll just leave you in suspense until next week, I guess. So join us next week, it'll be a lot of fun. I'm Cody Gough. And I will, hopefully, talk to you then.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.