Learn about how being a “Viking” was actually a career choice, not an ethnicity, why it’s easy to plant false memories, and how the pandemic has made birdsong more complex.
Learn about how being a “Viking” was actually a career choice, not an ethnicity, why it’s easy to plant false memories, and how the pandemic has made birdsong more complex.
"Viking" was a job description, not heredity by Grant Currin
It's Surprisingly Easy to Plant False Memories by Ashley Hamer
The Pandemic Has Made Birdsong More Complex by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/viking-was-a-job-description-not-heredity
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you'll learn how being a Viking was actually a career choice, not an ethnicity, why it's easy to plant false memories, and how the pandemic has given birds something complex to sing about.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's sing about some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: Ah, the Vikings. If the word brings up images of blond, burly Scandinavian men in horned helmets, maybe accompanied by their blond, burly wives and children in horned helmets, well, first off, the horned helmet thing is almost certainly a myth. Stop with the horned helmets, please. You're embarrassing yourself. But more importantly, new research has turned the rest of that image on its head, too. The real Vikings are nothing like their popular depiction.
Researchers have spent the last 10 years collecting samples of genetic material from Viking burial sites across Europe. They placed a special focus on Scandinavia but also collected samples from Viking burial sites as far as Italy and Ukraine. Most of the burials took place during the Viking Age, which lasted from 750 CE to 1050 CE. When all was said and done, the researchers managed to sequence 442 genomes. That DNA gives intimate insight into the lives of people who lived more than a millennium ago.
For instance, there's a site on a beach in Estonia where researchers uncovered four brothers who were buried shoulder to shoulder in a Viking-style ship. They also found a pair of cousins whose paths had separated them by an entire sea. One was buried in Oxford, in the UK, and the other was found in Denmark. But these stories of lives lost weren't the biggest takeaway from this massive genetic survey.
One huge surprise? Forget the blond stereotype. According to the DNA, Viking Age Scandinavians tended to have black hair. It looks like blond hair has grown more common among Scandinavians over the past millennium. Though Scandinavian wasn't a requirement, either. The other finding that might come as a surprise was that Viking wasn't really a matter of lineage. It was more of a job description. Archeologists and historians have been saying this for a while. But the new genetic data offers even more proof that so-called Viking heritage didn't necessarily have a genetic component.
For instance, there's a site on the Orkney Islands in the UK with Viking-style graves. Another group of Viking-style graves in Norway contain the remains of people whose DNA ties them to the Sami, an Indigenous people who live in the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and western Russia. Researchers still have a lot of questions about the Vikings, like when they reached the Americas and what role they played in creating the early Russian state. But whether the Vikings were a powerful race of burly warriors with blond hair is no question. It's a myth.
ASHLEY HAMER: This news is going to break my mother's heart. She's very proud of the fact that we have Viking heritage way back in our lineage.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, man. I'm sorry, Ashley's mom.
ASHLEY HAMER: But she's also blonde and blue-eyed. So it's just hard.
NATALIA REAGAN: You never know. Maybe some of her ancestors possibly had the career choice of Viking. You don't know.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. When you recall a memory, it can feel like you're a computer accessing stored data. The memory's there, safe and ready to be retrieved. But you're not a computer. And memories? They're way more malleable than they feel. In fact, it's surprisingly easy to plant false memories. There was actually a rash of them in the 1990s. That was the era when many therapists believed that traumatic experiences in a person's past could produce repressed memories, memories that could only be accessed through therapy.
But as patients began coming to terms with repressed memories of abuse and calling out their suspected abusers, some began realizing that the experiences in the memories were actually impossible, and they sued their therapists. At the same time, psychology researchers began speaking out against the idea of repressed memories. They said that there was no scientific evidence that they exist and that, in fact, the therapists were planting false memories in their patients.
Maybe the most prominent researcher in this fight was Stanford Professor Elizabeth Loftus. To show how easy it was to plant false memories, she and her team had participants read stories from their childhood. Two of the stories had been recounted by a relative, and one of the stories was totally fake. After reading, the participants were asked to write down how much they remembered about each event. Then they were asked to recount the events again in two follow-up interviews.
Nearly a third of participants claimed to remember the fake event directly after reading it, and a quarter continued to remember it in the follow-up interviews. That's weird, but what's more alarming is what happens when you ask someone to imagine an event that never happened, which is an exercise that's pretty common in clinical psychology. One study that asked volunteers to imagine a childhood event that never happened found that a quarter of them believed the event really did happen when they were asked about it two weeks later.
According to Loftus, false memories are most easily formed when three factors are present-- pressure to recall the memory, encouragement to imagine what might have happened, and opposition to questioning the truth of the memory. That's a reason criminal interrogations can lead to false confessions and why fake news can be so insidious. So how can you protect yourself and your memories? Well, question everything and be aware that your mind can be manipulated.
NATALIA REAGAN: This is terrifying.
ASHLEY HAMER: It really is.
NATALIA REAGAN: Just the idea that the 1990s, that was kind of, like, in-vogue sort of thing about repressed memories. And I went to therapy, I believe, in the 1990s. Yeah, that's wild.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I think repressed memories are pretty much no longer a thing in psychology research, but I wonder how much they're still out there in society, the idea that they could be possible.
NATALIA REAGAN: When COVID-19 forced hard shutdowns across the country this spring, traffic all but ceased, and city streets fell silent. If you started taking more notice of the birds chirping around your neighborhood during this time, it's not just thanks to a newfound appreciation for nature. New research shows that the extra peace and quiet is doing wonders for birdsong.
The researchers behind the new study have been studying white-crowned sparrows in and around San Francisco for decades. A few years ago, they discovered the birds had changed their tune in response to city noise. They compared recordings of modern sparrows to some from the 1970s and found that they were singing simpler songs at a higher volume. They were basically shouting to be heard above the noise, (LOUDLY) like how you'd turn up the volume to be heard at a loud bar.
[ASHLEY LAUGHS]
Sorry, everyone. Scientists long assumed that if things quieted down, birds would lower their volume by the same amount. But they didn't really have a way of testing that. They could only add sound to the birds' environments, not remove it. Then COVID-19 created the perfect research opportunity, or should I say pitch-perfect research opportunity.
During the lockdown, traffic in San Francisco reduced to levels similar to those in the mid 1950s. The team was shocked to learn that the birds were singing 30% softer than before and with the acoustical complexity of their 1970s ancestors. This has big benefits for the birds, which sing to communicate with rivals and attract mates.
Think back to that crowded bar. You can't have a deep conversation when you're fighting to be heard. Or think of the chance you hear at sporting events or protests. They have to be simple so others hear your message loud and clear from far away. Less noise from us means birds can be heard from twice as far away, so they are less likely to cross paths and fight with rivals. Lowering their voices also means they can sing more elaborate tunes, which impress the ladies. Silence has never sounded so sexy.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right. Well, let's recap the main things we learned today, starting with the fact that if you've been bragging to folks about your Viking DNA, Mom, you better stop, because a new study reveals that Viking was just kind of a job description, not heredity. Scientists also discovered that many Vikings had dark hair and came from a whole lot of places in the world.
NATALIA REAGAN: This is very true.
ASHLEY HAMER: I do think that my family has been traced back to Erik the Red, who was absolutely a Viking, but I don't know about the Viking DNA part.
NATALIA REAGAN: So Ashley's mom is not totally wrong. Yeah, we also know that there were a lot more women that took up the career as Viking. So these are things that we get wrong, and it's OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is.
NATALIA REAGAN: So there could be Ashley the Red.
ASHLEY HAMER: My descendants will have podcaster DNA, which will be great.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes. That was what I was thinking when I first read this, was like, imagine if they dug you and I up, Ashley, one day, and they found that they buried us with our grave goods. We have our mics. We have our Zoom mixers. And considering how everyone has a podcast these days, I could see how aliens could think, oh, my goodness, this was a race of podcasters.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, I love it.
NATALIA REAGAN: And our descendants can be like, oh, my goodness, I had podcaster DNA. Why do you think my voice sounds this way?
ASHLEY HAMER: As my ancestors used to say, today's episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
[BOTH LAUGHING]
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh my god, are kids are just going to have call to action. Oh, wow. OK, and we also discovered it's really easy, easier than we thought, to implant false memories. Ah, this was terrifying. In the 1990s, repressed memories were kind of all the rage, so some therapists were actually accused of implanting false memories in their patients.
And a Stanford scientist found that when fake childhood stories were told to participants of a study, some of the individuals actually began to falsely remember them. So some of the factors that make implanting false memories easier? Well, pressuring someone to remember, encouraging them to use their imagination to remember, and, lastly, opposition to question the truth of a memory. So what does this mean? Question everything.
ASHLEY HAMER: Just can't trust my memory. I guess take a lot of pictures, write a lot of things down, do everything you can to not just rely on your memory. Ugh.
NATALIA REAGAN: I don't know, Ashley. I have all my childhood journals. I was that Goth '90s girl-- wannabe Goth, because I was too blonde and happy to really be technically Goth. But I would write in my journal horribly sad poetry. And I read those journal entries now. I'm not 100% sure if that's how things accurately went down.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. That's true. Every story is told through your own biases.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Very hard.
NATALIA REAGAN: Very subjective. I don't know. I don't know what to trust anymore. If only we could just jump in a wormhole and go far, far away.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we also learned that while the pandemic has made life difficult for humans, it's given birds something to sing about. In San Francisco, researchers found that birds were now filling the silence left in the wake of COVID-19 with more complex songs. In fact, the complexity of their songs was similar to birds in the 1970s, so they were literally singing the songs of their ancestors, and maybe some Bob Dylan.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Who else was in the 1970s?
NATALIA REAGAN: The Grateful Dead.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
NATALIA REAGAN: They were around summer of '69. Some Joan Baez, some Joni Mitchell, some Van the Man. These birds are just literally singing songs of their great-great-great-grand-sparrow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. It's like when you leave a crowded bar, and then you have a deep conversation on the walk home or something because everything's quiet. I just love the idea of these birds being like, hey, I like you. And then now it's just like, my dearest, you are so beautiful.
[BOTH LAUGHING]
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes. I would like to take you on a nice date down to Fisherman's Wharf, scavenge some Ghiradelli chocolate. Yeah. No, this is actually a great sketch. We need to do this. This needs to happen.
ASHLEY HAMER: Perfect. Let's do it. And actually, scientists have been finding stuff like this in all sorts of species. The first time I heard about it was with whales. They were listening to whale song. Busy waterways affected their communication patterns in a very similar way that traffic affects birdsong. And when shipping traffic dropped in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, they measured a drop in stress hormones in the whales because it was quieter.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, that makes me so sad that we're stressing whales out.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know.
NATALIA REAGAN: They've got enough on their plate.
ASHLEY HAMER: They do. They've measured similar things right now with whales during the lockdowns because there aren't as many ships out there. So whales are having a better time.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. This is like a Xanax for whales. Just a bunch of stressed-out whales. Going to therapy.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Being told to remember repressed memories. Oh, it's all coming together.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Steffi Drucker, and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who is the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan, and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Be sure to pay attention to those birds singing, and join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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