Learn what scientists say was the most influential film of all time; the special way riding a bike is stored in your memory; and the truth behind mistletoe, a Christmas tradition that’s actually a poisonous parasite. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Scientists Have Determined the Most Influential Film of All Time Riding a Bike Is Stored In Your Memory In a Special, Permanent Way Mistletoe Is a Poisonous Parasite ... of Love? Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. 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.
Learn what scientists say was the most influential film of all time; the special way riding a bike is stored in your memory; and the truth behind mistletoe, a Christmas tradition that’s actually a poisonous parasite.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. 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-most-influential-film-ever-your-memory-on-riding-a-bike-and-mistletoes-poisonous-roots
CODY GOUGH: Hi. 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 what scientists say was the most influential film of all time, the special way riding a bike is stored in your memory, and the truth behind a Christmas tradition that's actually a poisonous parasite.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. In a new study, scientists have determined the most influential film of all time. Any guesses?
ASHLEY HAMER: You know what it definitely isn't? Santa with Muscles.
CODY GOUGH: Santa with Muscles?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That was a Hulk Hogan movie back in the '90s that my brother and I rented. He loved it. It was a dark time in babysitting history.
CODY GOUGH: How do you know about a Hulk Hogan movie that I don't?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know. My brother really liked Hulk Hogan growing up.
CODY GOUGH: This is a strange inversion. Did you at least watch Suburban Commando?
ASHLEY HAMER: Probably. I watched a lot of Hulk Hogan when I was little. So I think I probably did see that.
CODY GOUGH: Suburban Commando is Hulk Hogan and Christopher Lloyd.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, wow.
CODY GOUGH: It's great.
ASHLEY HAMER: I would tell you that I'm going to check it out, but I'm not going to check it out for you.
CODY GOUGH: That's fair. Well, for this study, the authors say you can measure a movie's level of influence by how often other movies reference it. So for instance, in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, there's a Star Wars reference in the scene where a parking valet and his buddy go for a joyride in Cameron's dad's Ferrari. This could be used as evidence that Star Wars was influential.
References like this one get tracked on IMDb or the Internet Movie Database. Users generate some of IMDb's contents. And one of the things they do, conveniently, is tag references between movies. For this study, researchers scraped data from more than 5 million movies on IMDb, and they mapped out the networks of references. And movies got higher influenced scores the more they had been referenced by other films, and more those films had been referenced by other films.
By the way, the researchers argue that their definition of influence is better than other rankings that are already out there. They say films are both commodities and pieces of art. And a lot of the time rankings treat them as one or the other. Critics rate them on their artistic value, while box office numbers treat them like a pure product.
Overall, the researchers gave a score to 47,000 films that had been tagged as referencing or being referenced in other films. They skewed toward Western culture since IMDb has way more info on English-language movies. Oh, and they didn't just cover movies. They also listed the most influential directors and performers.
You can read the full list of results in our write up on curiosity.com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But I'll tell you the most influential director was George Cukor. He directed a lot of comedy films and literary adaptations in the '30s and '40s, including Little Women, The Philadelphia Story, and A Double Life. He also won an Academy Award for Best Director for My Fair Lady in 1964, and he had a long career, working all the way into the '80s.
The second most influential director was Victor Fleming, who directed Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in the same year, believe it or not, followed by the incomparable Alfred Hitchcock. The top performer was Samuel L Jackson followed by Clint Eastwood and then Tom Cruise.
ASHLEY HAMER: Can you believe that, Samuel L Jackson is above Clint Eastwood? Like, that's influential.
CODY GOUGH: That's pretty solid. And for the movies, let's do a countdown. Number five, 2001, A Space Odyssey; number four, King Kong from 1933; number three, Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock classic; number two was Star Wars, believe it or not; and according to this study, number one The Wizard of Oz. Guess there really is no place like home.
ASHLEY HAMER: When there's a skill you learned a long time ago that you're a little out of practice, people always say the same thing about it, don't worry. It's just like riding a bike. You know what they mean. Sure, you might be a little rusty, but you'll get right back into it, no problem. But did you ever wonder why that is? In other words, why is riding a bike like riding a bike? We have the answer.
CODY GOUGH: And I can barely ride a bike. So I would say this can also apply to driving a car, for instance. I haven't owned a car in 10 years. But when I get behind the wheel, it's not like I don't know how to drive a car.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, you could see if cars are like that in someone else's car, Cody, because I'm not going to let you drive my car to find out.
CODY GOUGH: I see what you did there. Safe, safe and smart.
ASHLEY HAMER: Being safe. So the answer to the question, why riding a bike is like riding a bike, comes from a 2009 study from the University of Aberdeen. The study looked at all kinds of motor skills and memories, including not only riding a bike, but also skiing, swimming, breaststroke, eating with chopsticks, and performing yo-yo tricks.
They found that a particular type of nerve cell, known as a molecular layer interneuron, acts as a gatekeeper that controls electrical signals leaving the cerebellum. Basically, when you learn a new motor skill, there's a cell that turns the signal from your cerebellum into a code that gets engraved in your memory. That means that your motor skills are encoded in a particular way that allows them to be easily accessed, even years later.
Your memories aren't all encoded the same way your motor skills are encoded, though. That's why not everything you've ever done will come back to you, like riding a bike. There are two different types of memory, procedural and declarative. Declarative memory can be called knowing what. And procedural memory is knowing how. You can't just say how to ride a bike. You need to actually do it to know how. So riding a bike sits in your procedural memory.
By the way, your declarative memory comes in a couple of different flavors called episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory is how you recall events from your own life. Semantic memory calls up factual information like the 16th US President or the capital of Iowa-- Abraham Lincoln in Des Moines, by the way. Thanks to the fun ways your brain works, you might remember how to ride your bike through Iowa, even if the last time you rode was Fourscore in seven years ago.
Today's episode is sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
CODY GOUGH: Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash, and people could get hurt or killed. But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.
ASHLEY HAMER: Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes.
CODY GOUGH: Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk-driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
ASHLEY HAMER: Many people are unaware that driving while high can be just as dangerous. In 2015, 42% of drivers killed in crashes tested positive for drugs. Not so harmless after all, is it?
CODY GOUGH: And get this. From 2007 to 2015, marijuana use among drivers killed in crashes doubled. The truth is driving while high is deadly.
ASHLEY HAMER: So stop kidding yourself. If you're impaired from alcohol or drugs, don't get behind the wheel.
CODY GOUGH: If you feel different, you drive different. Drive high, you'll get a DUI.
ASHLEY HAMER: Drive sober or get pulled over.
CODY GOUGH: We need to talk about mistletoe. You know the drill. You're standing there at a Christmas party. Your crush walks up to you, points up at the doorway arch you're standing in. You look up, and there's mistletoe. And then you must kiss that person and fell in love forever. OK, so maybe I've just been watching too many movies on the Hallmark Channel.
But this definitely is the time of year when people hang mistletoe for you to kiss under. Well, I've got a fun fact to kick-start your next mistletoe-fueled romance. That pretty green sprig of mistletoe is actually a poisonous parasite that survives by sucking the life essence from its host. How romantic?
ASHLEY HAMER: Would you like to know a behind-the-scenes fact about this article?
CODY GOUGH: Oh-oh.
ASHLEY HAMER: So this is a classic Curiosity article from a couple of years ago. And when I wrote it, I was single and bitter. So that is why it comes off as being written by someone who is single and bitter.
CODY GOUGH: That's hilarious. And now I can't wait to hear you explain it in perhaps a less bitter way, but we'll find out, I guess.
ASHLEY HAMER: We'll find out. So first off, the whole mistletoe tradition has kind of murky origins. According to history, English servants kicked off the custom of men stealing a kiss from women standing under the mistletoe, and then the trend spread to the higher classes. As part of some early traditions, you had to pluck a berry from the mistletoe with each kiss. No more berries, no more kisses.
Before that a lot of ancient cultures used mistletoe as a medicinal herb. The Greeks and Romans were known to prescribe it for everything from menstrual cramps to epilepsy. And the Celtic druids would use it to restore fertility. It's even being used today in cancer therapy. In Norse mythology, mistletoe was used on an arrow as a sort of Norse kryptonite to kill the invincible god Baldur.
Whether it came from the magic, the mythology, or the gross fact that the berries of some plants secrete a semen-like substance, by the 18th century, it had become a holiday decoration associated with kissing. But like I said, the plant itself is a poisonous parasite. Mistletoe grows on the branches of trees, where it survives by taking water and soil minerals the tree needs to, you know, live.
Of course, if the tree dies the mistletoe dies with it. So it's in the parasite's best interest to only take what it needs. There are more than 5,500 species of mistletoe throughout the world, and a lot of them are toxic, particularly those found in North America.
Still, it's not all bad. Birds are known to eat the berries. And two studies found that when scientists removed mistletoe from trees in an area, the bird population suffered. And hey, mistletoe stays green all winter long. So it's kind of magical in that way anyway right. Actually, it's because it leaches nutrients from the tree it's evaded. Merry Christmas!
CODY GOUGH: Wow. Savage.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's all for today. Next week on Curiosity Daily, we're going to bring you some of your favorite stories from the past year.
CODY GOUGH: Hundreds of listeners took our listener survey. And you told us what you loved learning about on this podcast. So please join us again next week on the award-winning Curiosity Daily when we review the most popular stories of the year to help you get smarter in just a few minutes every day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Happy holidays! I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Have a great weekend.
ASHLEY HAMER: And stay curious.
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