Learn about why you can’t suffocate by holding your breath; how being angry makes you more likely to believe misinformation; and that time scholars tried to kick Latin out of English, thanks to words like honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Learn about why you can’t suffocate by holding your breath; how being angry makes you more likely to believe misinformation; and that time scholars tried to kick Latin out of English, thanks to words like honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Why can't you suffocate by holding your breath? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Daniel in Beirut)
Being angry makes you more likely to believe misinformation by Kelsey Donk
16th-Century Scholars Once Tried to Kick Latin Out of English by Arika Okrent
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-cant-you-hold-your-breath-to-death
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, we’ll answer a listener question about why you can’t suffocate by holding your breath. Then, you’ll learn about how being angry affects the way you believe misinformation; and that time scholars tried to kick Latin out of English.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We got a listener question from Daniel in Beirut, who writes, “Why is it not possible for a human being to choke themselves to death by intentionally deciding not to breathe?” The answer is way more mysterious than you’d think!
Obviously, the human body is equipped with failsafes that make it really hard to kill ourselves on purpose. If you hold your breath for more than a minute or two, your brain will force you to inhale. Even if you could hold your breath long enough to pass out, once you were unconscious, you wouldn’t be able to consciously hold your breath anymore and you’d start breathing again.
But here’s the mystery. Your lungs should be able to hold enough oxygen to sustain you for four minutes, but most people can barely hold their breath for half that long without training. And sure, carbon dioxide builds up in your blood when you don’t breathe, but it doesn’t get to toxic levels quickly enough to explain that short time limit. In fact, studies show it has nothing to do with our blood: patients who have severed nerve connections to the sensors that measure oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood still can’t hold their breath until they pass out. Other studies have even shown that most people can hold their breath until their breaking point, exhale, and then do it again immediately. That wouldn’t be possible if it was a matter of oxygen or CO2.
While we don’t know exactly what triggers this “break point,” as scientists call it, our best explanation comes down to the diaphragm, that sheet of muscle that sits below your lungs and makes them pull in air each time it contracts. See, your brain is constantly sending rhythmic nerve impulses to your diaphragm that tell it to contract and relax. And those impulses don’t stop when you hold your breath. When study participants have had their diaphragms temporarily paralyzed, they’ve been able to hold their breaths for twice as long without any discomfort.
That suggests that holding your breath is just you overriding those nerve impulses to your diaphragm and keeping it contracted for as long as possible. Eventually, your diaphragm starts sending signals to your brain that it can’t hold on much longer, and your brain makes you take a breath. That may explain why some people can train themselves to hold their breath for so long: they’re training their diaphragms to hold out a little longer. This hypothesis still needs more research, but so far it’s the best one we’ve got. Thanks for your question, Daniel! If you have a question, send it in to curiosity at discovery dot com.
If you’re angry, it might be time to step away from the internet. Because a new study shows that being angry can make you more likely to believe misinformation. This study’s findings have somewhat unsettling implications for the pandemic, not to mention issues ranging from decisionmaking to eyewitness testimony.
For the study, 79 people watched a short film clip. After the clip, the participants did two difficult cognitive tasks and then had an interview with a researcher. For some participants, all of these activities were designed to keep their moods level; for others, they were perfectly tuned to make them angry. Like, during some interviews, the researcher would be polite and professional with the participants, but in other interviews, they were disorganized, dismissive, and insulting.
After the interview, all the participants completed a short quiz about the film they’d watched earlier. The researchers designed the quiz to have small bits of misinformation threaded throughout. So, for instance, one question asked “What do Daniel and Julia sit on during their conversation when Julia drops her purse?” But in the film, Julia never drops her purse at all.
After that, the participants in the anger group had to write about a time in their lives when something made them angry. When the writing was done, the participants took another test to see how much information they could remember about the film, and how much of the misinformation from the quiz they absorbed as fact.
As it turned out, the people who’d been angered absorbed more misinformation than people who hadn’t been. When they were angry, the participants were more likely to remember the misinformation from the quiz as actually being correct.
Maybe most troubling is the fact that both their confidence and decision speed increased with their anger. And the more confident they were, the less accurate their memories tended to be.
This isn’t just theoretical. Earlier this year, researchers in South Korea found that people who were angry about an election were also more likely to spread misinformation about COVID-19. The study suggested that in order to stem the spread of misinformation, public officials should work on managing the population’s anger and direct their desire to act in a positive direction.
The longest word in Shakespeare is "honorificabilitudinitatibus." It's an overly complicated, show offy way to say "the state of being able to achieve honor." Shakespeare didn’t coin it — it was already a well-known joke about how pompous Latin terms had invaded the English language. Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, English had become so infested with these types of words that some scholars actually tried to kick Latin out of English.
The Latin influence in English goes back hundreds of years before Shakespeare. After the Norman invasion of 1066, a wave of Latin-origin French words made their way into English. They were so well incorporated that we don’t notice their “foreignness” at all. Words like color, language, and peace all ultimately come from Latin. And since Latin was the language of the church and universities, fancier words from those domains also came from Latin: words like acolyte, mathematics, and academic. For the most part, Latin was used for high-minded pursuits, while English was the lowly language of everyday life.
Latin only gained its foothold on English with the advent of the printing press. This invention made it possible to spread ideas further using everyday language to bring culture to the masses. The problem was that English didn't have the vocabulary required for some more complex concepts, so publishers had to adopt some words from Latin. Words like describe, explain, and illustrate were introduced (to use another new coinage). But, while some words were created out of necessity, many were just to show off. I mean, words like suppeditation, meaning “supplies,” and illecebrous, meaning “enticing,” have not exactly stood the test of time.
It wasn't long before people started to push back against this trend. Scholars wanted English to be clear and straightforward without borrowing foreign words. So they invented their own purely English terms: words like “endsay” as a substitute for “conclusion” and “saywhat” as a substitute for “proposition”. Most of these never caught on (aside from the surprisingly enduring “naysay”), and Latin continued its English invasion.
Not only have many of those fancy Latin words been completely absorbed into English by now, they’ve been so thoroughly absorbed that they no longer seem fancy at all. These days, it sounds far less showoffy to say immediately than anon, or reluctant than loath. We’ll probably never be completely at ease with honorificabilitudinitatibus, but that won’t be because it comes from Latin.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about a global study of sourdough and what it means for the popular pandemic pastime of baking bread;
What researchers found when they sequenced the bizarre duck-billed platypus genome;
Why our microbiomes may have come from dirt;
How medical science answered a 300-year-old philosophy question;
And more!
CODY: You’ll also learn about how to understand statistics you see in the news, like “what does a 95% effective COVID vaccine actually mean?” with journalist and economist Tim Harford. So much to talk about, but for now, let’s recap what we learned today.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Kelsey Donk, and Arika Okrent, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday morning — or near enough as makes no matter — to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!