Learn about how Arnold’s ear-cough reflex can make you cough when you clean your ears; why it’s important to teach your kids about giving when they’re learning about money; and a hidden letter in the alphabet that you already sing.
Learn about how Arnold’s ear-cough reflex can make you cough when you clean your ears; why it’s important to teach your kids about giving when they’re learning about money; and a hidden letter in the alphabet that you already sing.
Why do I cough when I clean my ears? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Rachita)
Teaching Kids about Money? Don't Forget Giving by Sonja Hodgen
There's a hidden letter in the alphabet song, and you already sing it by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-do-i-cough-when-i-clean-my-ears
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 cough when you clean your ears. Then, you’ll learn about something you shouldn’t forget when you’re teaching your kids about money; and a hidden letter in the alphabet that you already sing.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We got a listener question from Rachita in India, who writes “the other day I was cleaning my ears using ear swabs and I started coughing. I noticed this was not the first time, this happened every time I cleaned my ears. So my question to you is, why does this happen?” Great question, Rachita!
There’s a weird name for this tendency: Arnold’s ear-cough reflex. It’s rare — only two to four percent of people experience it. But here’s why it happens. Arnold’s nerve is named after Friedrich Arnold, the 19th-century German scholar who first described it, and it’s the nerve that delivers touch signals from your ear canal to your brain.
But it’s a complicated little nerve. It starts as a branch of the vagus nerve, a great big nerve that travels all the way through your body, from your brain to your butt. That nerve controls all sorts of functions that you need to live, including breathing, eating, swallowing, digesting, and even keeping your heart pumping.
When you touch the ear canal with something, like a cotton swab, an earbud, or a hearing aid, it sends a touch signal to the vagus nerve, which delivers that signal to the brain. In some people, the source of that signal gets mixed up with some of the other nerves that branch off from the vagus nerve, like the one that controls breathing and coughing. When that happens, it triggers a cough. But coughing isn’t the only thing that can happen in this mix-up. Pretty much anything the vagus nerve controls is fair game — which is why for some people, a sensation in the ear canal can make them gag, make their heart beat strangely, make their eyes water, and even make them vomit. Yikes!
So why does this happen to some people and not others? Well, scientists aren’t totally sure. But at least one study found that the healthier the skin was in the ear canal, the less likely it was to trigger a cough reflex. Which brings us to the true irony of this question: it’s possible that the less you use cotton swabs, the healthier your ear canal will be, and the less likely you’ll be to cough when you do use a cotton swab. Because cotton swabs aren’t good for you — they risk pushing the wax in deeper and causing damage to your ear canal and eardrum. Your ear has its own ways of clearing out old earwax. Let it do its job! Thanks for your question. If you have a question, send it in to curiosity at discovery dot com, or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
When you think about what to teach kids about money, saving and budgeting are probably the first items on your list. That’s what researchers assumed, too. But in a 2019 study, they realized they were overlooking a big lesson that parents were already teaching their kids: how to give money away. Giving may be more fundamental to financial literacy than experts thought.
For the study, the researchers interviewed 115 participants, including college students, parents, and grandparents, about what they learned about money from their parents. The parents and grandparents were also asked what they taught their children about money. That gave researchers a picture of how families share financial lessons across four generations.
The researchers didn’t even ask about financial giving directly, but nearly 83 percent of the participants mentioned it as an important financial lesson they got from their parents or that they gave to their kids.
That surprised the researchers. Like I said, when we think about children learning about money from their parents, we think of budgeting and savings as fundamental principles, but not giving.
The kind of giving the participants talked about wasn’t always your classic donation to charity, although that was one category. Giving also included acts of kindness, like giving meals to the homeless or buying Christmas presents for neighbors who are down on their luck. Giving could also mean investing in your own family, by sacrificing financially to put a kid through college or take a family vacation.
Teaching kids to give is important for a couple of reasons. For one thing, setting aside a certain amount of money for a purpose like giving is the definition of budgeting. Plus, it can make kids more generous, and people who are generous tend to be happier and have healthier relationships.
The researchers say it’s a good idea to let kids witness their parents giving, or even to directly involve them in the act. That’s a win-win, since the parents and grandparents in the study said that they tend to give more when they know their children are watching.
The conclusion is clear: teaching ‘giving’ in a practical way makes sense for everyone.
[HOST 1] HOST 2, I want you to do something for me. Go ahead and sing the alphabet song.
[HOST 2] *sings*
[HOST 1] Nice work. [optional ad lib] But I’ve got some bad news: the alphabet in that song you just sang is actually obsolete.
Ok, well most of the letters are correct. Currently, in American English, we have 26 letters in our alphabet. But when you sang the alphabet song, you actually sang a hidden 27th letter you probably didn’t know about.
It’s the “and” between Y and Z. You know, that thing you call the ampersand. The ampersand was once a real, honest-to-goodness letter in the alphabet!
This gift to the English language came from the Romans. It began life as the word et [like “et tu, Brute?”], spelled E-T, which is Latin for and. Because Roman scribes wrote exclusively in cursive, the letters E and T eventually blended into the curly-Q symbol on the Barnes & Noble and H & M signs at the mall. When the English language adopted the Latin alphabet, “and” came along with it.
This was all long before the symbol became known as the ampersand. For most of its history, it was simply known as “and.”
The modern name of the symbol, “ampersand,” is less than three hundred years old. Its origin is strangely similar to the origin of the letter itself. It was also born out of repetition and expediency, but not by Roman scribes. It came from schoolchildren.
See, when learning the alphabet in the 1700s, schoolchildren would recite the alphabet by naming the first twenty-six letters. When they got to the twenty-seventh, “and,” they would use the phrase “and per se and.” The phrase “per se,” another Latin relic, was used to denote that a letter stood by itself as the letter and not the word — like instead of saying “the letter I,” you’d say “I, per se, I.” “And, per se, and” is kinda cumbersome, so eventually the phrase melded together into the word “ampersand” — a lot like how the letters E and T squished together to make the symbol in the first place.
About the same time that “and” became known as “ampersand,” this 27th letter began to fall out of favor. It was eventually dropped from the alphabet altogether sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s.
It might have fallen out of favor, but it lives on in song.
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 how researchers created an artificial sun that's hotter than our actual sun;
How you can tell when you’re running low on key vitamins;
The time a bunch of birds became milk bottle thieves;
A new analysis that debunks the “blood type diet”;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Sonja Hodgen, and Cameron Duke, 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 to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!