Learn how much your work suffers when you’re sleep deprived; the scientific reason why some places feel like they’re haunted by ghosts; and how to get the most benefits from being surrounded by nature. 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: Here's How Much Your Work Suffers When You're Sleep Deprived Got a Ghost Problem? It Might Just Be Infrasound For the Biggest Benefit From Being in Nature, Get Wild 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 how much your work suffers when you’re sleep deprived; the scientific reason why some places feel like they’re haunted by ghosts; and how to get the most benefits from being surrounded by nature.
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-science-of-hauntings-sleep-deprivation-effects-and-maximizing-benefits-from-nature
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 how much your work suffers when you're sleep-deprived, the scientific reason why some places feel like they're haunted, and how to get the most benefits from being surrounded by nature.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. According to a new study, sleep deprivation could make you incompetent on the job. It might sound kind of obvious, sure, but how incompetent is another question altogether.
ASHLEY HAMER: I feel like sleep is a big theme on this podcast.
CODY GOUGH: Do you think that's because of me? Because of how much of it I do?
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, I think everyone does a lot of it.
CODY GOUGH: Yes. That's true. That's true. Everybody does a lot of it. Well, here's why this study matters. What you think of as busy work or standard procedure can have huge implications. Remember the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl? How about the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which poured 11 million gallons of oil into waters near Alaska. Both of those were reportedly caused by sleep-deprived people making procedural mistakes.
So this study really drives home the idea that while work-life balance is pretty important, sleep-life balance is a big deal too. This study had 234 college age participants go through a made up protocol called Unravel. That's an acronym for the different stuff they did in the protocol, like the letter U stood for whether a letter on a screen was underlined or italicized.
Participants cycled through a bunch of unravel procedures at night with more of the next morning. In between the two stretches of testing, only half the participants were allowed to sleep, and the other half were kept awake overnight in the lab. The sleep-deprived group did much worse on the next day's testing, making more errors, to the point where 15% of them failed the morning tests entirely. And that's compared to just 1% of well-rested participants who failed.
You don't have to work in a power plant or pilot an oil tanker for this to matter though. Surgeons, for example, have to follow lots of procedures when they're sleep-deprived, especially during the internship phase of their career. No matter what you do for a living, this study makes it clear that a lack of sleep could mean you're a disaster waiting to happen. So try to play it safe, and get at least seven hours of sleep a night, which is what the CDC recommends for adults aged 18 to 60.
ASHLEY HAMER: There's a scientific reason why some people get the feeling their house is haunted. You know, you're down in a basement, and you can just feel this presence around you. It turns out the terror is real, but it's probably not a ghost. It's something even more terrifying than that.
CODY GOUGH: The Star Wars Holiday Special?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. It's not the Star Wars Holiday Special.
CODY GOUGH: Have you seen that?
ASHLEY HAMER: I actually haven't. Do you have it? Do you have access to it? Is it online?
CODY GOUGH: I have access to it. And it is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, the feeling of being haunted is not the Star Wars Christmas special. But it could be an expensive problem with the plumbing.
CODY GOUGH: That's also pretty bad I guess.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Or your ventilation system. And we know this because of a, quote unquote, ghost story from the 1980s. That's when IT lecturer Vic Tandy was working at a company that made medical equipment. There was one laboratory at the office that had a certain reputation. People just felt like they were being watched in there. And every once in a while, somebody would say they actually saw something in the room with them.
Vic figured the stories were all just silly until they happened to him. One night, he was working in the lab when he began to feel it. He broke out in a cold sweat. And then, just on the edge of his vision, he saw a dark shape that looked like a human figure, but it disappeared when he looked directly at it. Creepy, right?
Well, the next day, Vic noticed that a piece of equipment he'd brought into the lab was vibrating. And he calculated that it was responding to a vibration in the air of about 19 Hertz. A sound at that frequency would be classified as infrasound, meaning it's just below the range of human hearing.
He then pinpointed the source of the sound to an industrial fan. And as soon as the fan was flipped off, the ominous presence disappeared. Nobody ever saw the shape again either, probably because the low vibrations were causing the eyeballs to buzz in their sockets. See, the human ear starts to pick up sounds around 20 Hertz. But you can feel sounds lower than that, like If you stand next to a subwoofer at a concert.
So when there's a sound you can feel but you can't hear, your body might be thrown into a panic. And this might come from evolution. After all, alligators, rhinos, tigers, and elephants can bellow infrasound frequencies loud enough to be heard for miles. And those animals aren't exactly ones you want to spend a lot of time with. The next time you get that uneasy feeling, you can blame evolution. And maybe think about getting your pipes fixed.
CODY GOUGH: Or call the Ghostbusters.
ASHLEY HAMER: [HUMS GHOSTBUSTERS THEME] Next story.
CODY GOUGH: We've covered research on how the feature has positive effects on your mental and physical health here at Curiosity. But here's something interesting. In a recent study, researchers found that the benefits are actually proportional to how naturey or wildernessy your setting is. For the biggest benefit from being in nature, you've got to get wild.
ASHLEY HAMER: Gee, Cody. When was the last time you were in nature?
CODY GOUGH: Thanks for asking, Ashley. I was just on an anniversary slash honeymoon trip to Belize.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yay.
CODY GOUGH: Last week. And we stayed on a little island, Caye Caulker. And I swear to you, my wife sat there reading a book for a while, and I just looked at the water.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: And I can't even describe the feeling. I just sat looking at the sea. And there's nothing to see. It's just clouds, and sky, and water. But I didn't want to read a book. I didn't want to listen to podcast. I didn't want to do anything but just like be there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: It was pretty intense.
ASHLEY HAMER: I feel so relaxed like just hearing that story. That sounds amazing.
CODY GOUGH: It was good. And it kind of goes with this study because we also have the lake here in Chicago. And I'll go to the lake sometimes and look out. And there's the lake there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. For people who aren't from Chicago, when I first moved here, I didn't realize that Lake Michigan is huge. You do not see the end. I guess if you were in a really tall building, and it was a super clear day, you might be able to see some sort of land. But most of the time, it's just blue. You just see water. It's like an ocean basically.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And it's nature. But it still just didn't have that same effect. And this study kind of bears that out. Researchers from Indiana University and Illinois State University compared the effects of three different levels of nature. There was a wilderness setting, an urban park, and an indoor exercise club.
They asked 105 participants to fill out a questionnaire about their stress levels and provide a saliva sample for testing. And then the team used the saliva sample to test for two telltale signs of stress. The stress hormone cortisol and an enzyme called alpha amylase that the body secretes when it's in fight or flight mode.
Well, regardless of where they went, all the participants reported a decrease in their daily stress and worries. But the ones who were in the park or wilderness area were the only ones to show increased levels of joy. And only the visitors to the wilderness area showed a significant decrease in their cortisol levels.
The takeaway is that the more remote and wild, the better. And this is good to since the city residents are at a higher risk for anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses than their rural counterparts. Research like this really shows us a good reason why we should preserve our wild spaces, even within cities.
And if you haven't gotten out of your local concrete jungle lately, then try to make it a priority to get into some nature, even if it's just outside the city limits. And if you need some ideas for where to get wild, then you should follow our travel-specific Instagram accounts, which you can find if you search for Curiosity Travel. Or find our username, all one word spelled out, @curiosity.comtravel. Did you get this a lot in the redwood forest near your home? Did you feel more like chill?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I feel chill when I go home for sure. The redwoods are very-- they create a peace in me that I don't get anywhere else.
CODY GOUGH: Oh.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: So if you want to go to California, go to the redwoods. If you want to go to Central America, you can go to Belize.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: The official language of Belize is English. There's another random fun fact. Lots of water there. Check it out. That's all for today, but here's a sneak peek at what you can learn about on curiosity.com this weekend.
ASHLEY HAMER: This weekend, you'll learn about how you can write a better list, whether you should exercise according to your body type, the stories behind mythical monsters that hail from across the United States, a quiz to see how much you know about dinosaurs, and more. Come hang out with us again Sunday on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. And learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Have a great weekend.
ASHLEY HAMER: And stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.