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.
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/the-time-pi-was-almost-legally-changed-to-3-2
ASHLEY HAMER: Season's greetings. We're wrapping up the year with a look back at your favorite episodes of 2020.
NATALIA REAGAN: Enjoy this Curiosity Daily classic and stay subscribed for brand new episodes starting January 1.
CODY GOUGH: See you in 2021. Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: 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 that time pi was once almost legally changed to 3.2.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: 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.
SP: Hey Cody and Ashley. This is SP from Better Podcasting and I was just listening to your episode as I'm driving to work here, and I have a question for you. So on a recent episode of Better Podcasting, we ran into an article on Medium that was written by Steve Russo with the title, "I tried Listening to Podcast at 3x and Broke My Brain."
It was a pretty well researched article. One of the things in the article mention that as audio speeds up. Your emotional understanding goes down. So you're not as emotional affected. And I was wondering if you guys knew of any science that would confirm that. Keep up the great work, guys.
ASHLEY HAMER: You're in luck, SP. Well, 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. So a person's speech rate is one aspect of something called emotional prosody. That's all the nonverbal stuff that helps speech convey emotion.
Like if I say, I lost my keys. That sends a very different message about my emotional state than, I lost my keys. 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 raise 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 vise 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. What do you think of this, Cody? Because you're a longtime radio guy and podcaster.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It's interesting. I think, definitely, more research is required because the other thing is, we don't just speak in small clips in a vacuum, right? If I listen to a three-hour podcast at a certain speed, I'm going to pick up on variations in that person's speed and register in the context of it being sped up. Do you know what I mean?
So if everything's twice as fast, they're still going to be the sad stuff is still going to be a little slower and the more excited stuff is still going to be a little faster in the context of that three-hour chunk where everything is in a different register. So it's hard, I think, to isolate.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, yeah. Just because you're in the context of that recording, you're still living in the world that's going at one times the speed.
CODY GOUGH: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right? And there are still things happening around you. It's not like the whole world speeds up. So you're still relatively faster than everything else.
CODY GOUGH: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: So I don't know. We can't say definitively. Nobody's looked at this.
CODY GOUGH: Right. But the emotional prosody thing makes sense.
ASHLEY HAMER: But I'm going to come at this as a musician and say that the tempo of a song has a huge amount of influence on its emotional impact. I mean, you can tell that from any cover of a pop song when people will take like-- I've heard girls just want to have fun as like a slow acoustic cover. I mean, it's hilarious for one thing. But it also has a completely different emotional tone. And it's not just because it's acoustic, it's because it's slow.
Like slowing things down gives them more dramatic weight. And I can't imagine that that effect is not there when you change the speed of a podcast.
CODY GOUGH: Well, I hope that answers clear as mud, SP. If you have a question, you can leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208 and you may hear your voice on a future episode.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thanks for your question, SP.
CODY GOUGH: When it comes to rice, most of us assume brown rice is healthier, even though white rice is tastier. Well, if you think that, then I've got some good news. It turns out that the health benefits of brown and white rice are pretty much dead even. So first of 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.
I just like that name. The germ. 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? Well, not so fast. Whole grains like brown rice also contains 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 the white rice goes through removes a lot of its phytic acid content so its nutrients are easier for your body 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 race 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 dietitian and not a daily science podcast. But otherwise, just eat whichever kind you like.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm going to stick with my short grain brown rice.
CODY GOUGH: I bet you are.
ASHLEY HAMER: I love it so much. This episode is being released one day before March 14. Here in the US, that's written down as 3/14. So it's unofficially known as Pi Day in honor of pi's first two digits, 3.14. The value of pi is-- always has been and always will be 3.141592653, you get the picture.
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. It all starts with a man named Edward Goodwin. He 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 his finding into law in Indiana. Specifically, Goodwin believed that 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 of pi, modern mathematicians know that 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 he proposed for this 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 and 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. But the bill was finally 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 3.141535897932384626433832795028841971693993751, OK. I'm done.
CODY GOUGH: You know it's only a 10-minute podcast, right? Like we really don't have all weekend.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, you know, you can google it.
CODY GOUGH: Before we recap what we learned today, here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: 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 experienced by dads to be, why laughter might really be the best medicine, and more. OK. So now, let's recap what we learned today.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we don't know what the exact effects of speeding up or slowing down speech are in terms of how they affect our emotions, but emotional prosody tells us that as our emotions change, our speech changes. So the way that we process that is going to require more research. You also, in your research, flagged an article about this that mentions that when you change the speed of a podcast, it also changes the pitch and that's totally incorrect.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. I think that was a neuroscientist who didn't know a lot about audio saying that, in the article I was reading.
CODY GOUGH: Right. So for example, I'm going to say this sentence just like this right now. And now, I'm going to replay back that sentence slowed down. I'm going to say this sentence just like this right now. And I'm going to replay that sentence sped up. I'm going to say this sentence just like this right now. And you can hear the pitch is the same. It's just that it's been slowed or stretched.
You can do that with editing software these days. It's not that hard. And most podcast players that I've experienced don't make you sound like a chipmunk or whatever and super high-pitched if you speed up the sound.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we learned that the health benefits of white rice and brown rice are pretty much dead even, which kind of makes me feel as much as I like brown rice, I feel like I've been wasting my life because white rice is good too. And maybe I'll order it more at restaurants. But I'm not going to pack it in my lunch.
CODY GOUGH: All I know is I'm not eating either with Chinese food unless I also have a Mountain Dew.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, that's the thing. So yeah, that's the thing with Cody. Cody has many strange food tendencies.
CODY GOUGH: I have many strange food tendencies.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody and I have very different food tendencies and Cody will not eat Chinese food unless he has a Mountain Dew. It's very important to him.
CODY GOUGH: I mean, I will, but I will go to lengths to secure a Mountain Dew. I don't know what it is. It's one of those things. I wasn't saying we were in movie theaters for a long time. When many local movie theaters switch to Coke products, I straight up stopped buying concessions altogether. Because like, that was my thing. Go to the movie theater. Box of ResNets, Mountain Dew, call it a day.
You can't eat ResNets with Sprite. It just doesn't do it for me. And yes, I know Mello Yello is a thing but come on now. Really, I have strong feelings about things. Let's move on.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm fascinated by your strong feelings about food and drink.
CODY GOUGH: Very weird. Very weird. But not quite as weird as Edward Goodwin, who tried to legally change the definition of pie to 3.2 in Indiana in 1897. Fortunately, you can't legislate mathematical laws.
ASHLEY HAMER: You want me to say pi again?
CODY GOUGH: Nope.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right.
CODY GOUGH: Got to go. Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Steffi Drucker and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Have a great weekend and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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