Learn about whether you can actually feel a storm coming in your bones; an 18th-century woman who convinced doctors she was giving birth to rabbits; the 2 main reasons why everything takes longer than you think it will; and why barber shop poles are red, white and blue. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Can You Really Feel a Storm Coming In Your Bones? — https://curiosity.im/2SeTJjs This 18th-Century Woman Convinced Doctors She Was Giving Birth to Rabbits — https://curiosity.im/2SiLu5Q The 2 Main Reasons Why Everything Takes Longer Than You Think It Will — https://curiosity.im/2SpD39h Additional resources discussed: Early Practitioners | PBS — http://www.pbs.org/kqed/demonbarber/bloodletting/ Why are barber poles red, white and blue? | History — https://www.history.com/news/why-are-barber-poles-red-white-and-blue If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about whether you can actually feel a storm coming in your bones; an 18th-century woman who convinced doctors she was giving birth to rabbits; the 2 main reasons why everything takes longer than you think it will; and why barber shop poles are red, white and blue.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Additional resources discussed:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-everything-takes-longer-than-you-think-storm-predicting-joints-barber-pole-origins-and-mary-toft
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest 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 learn about whether you can actually feel a storm coming in your bones, an 18th-century woman who convinced doctors she was giving birth to rabbits, and the two main reasons why everything takes longer than you think it will. We'll also answer a listener question about the red, white, and blue poles outside of barbershops.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. Some people argue that they can literally feel a storm coming in their bones, especially people who suffer from arthritis. Today we'll explore whether science backs up that claim. I know some pets feel this too.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Dogs mostly. Does a cat do this?
ASHLEY HAMER: Um, I've never really noticed it.
CODY GOUGH: You know how I know when the storm is coming?
ASHLEY HAMER: Your light turns off?
CODY GOUGH: I turn off my lamp.
ASHLEY HAMER: Freaking, Cody. It's not real.
CODY GOUGH: Look, I don't believe in pseudoscience. But I'm just saying, every time I turn on my lamp, the storm goes away.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's not true.
CODY GOUGH: Definitely science. Anyway before we get into the studies looking into the link between pain and weather, let's define barometric pressure. It's also known as atmospheric pressure, and it basically measures how heavily the air weighs on us. This changes with the weather, like when pressure drops right before a rainstorm. And it also varies with altitude. On a mountaintop, barometric pressure is lower than it is at sea level just because there's less air above you to weigh down on you.
The first study looking at joint pain and barometric pressure was in 1990. Four arthritis patients were put in a barometric chamber and subjected to pressure changes, and three of the four participants felt more pain when the pressure in the chamber dropped. But a study with four participants is kind of a small sample size. Other studies since then have had conflicting results.
A 2007 study looked at reports of joint pain from 200 arthritis patients, and it found a major correlation with spikes in self-reported pain and changes in barometric pressure and temperature. But a 2017 study found no correlation between rainfall and insurance claims related to joint pain. Now this could mean there's still joint pain, it's just not severe enough to warrant a visit to the doctor. So the jury's still out.
Now some experts say drops in barometric pressure allow squishy regions of the body to expand, like the fluid that lubricates our joints. That could trigger inflammation in arthritic or damaged joints maybe by tripping nerves called baroreceptors, which are found in load-bearing joints. Other experts argue that changes in barometric pressure reveal pain that's already there.
See, our body's cortisol and adrenaline production drops when barometric pressure drops, and that could account for all the bum knees that act up before a storm. Look, at the end of the day, it's hard to say whether there's a link between joint pain and weather changes, but it does feel like there's something there. Hopefully, future research can throw us a bone that doesn't feel pain.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] Today in weird news, we've got the story of an 18th-century woman who convinced doctors she was giving birth to rabbits. Meet Mary Toft.
CODY GOUGH: Rabbits?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I don't know why you would do this.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: Seems odd. Mary Toft is not the Easter Bunny.
CODY GOUGH: No. Maybe that's what she wanted to be.
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe. So on September 27, 1726, a 25-year-old servant named Mary Toft went into labor. This was odd since she'd had a miscarriage a month earlier, although reports suggested that she still appeared pregnant afterward. She gave birth all right, but it was just something awful. The women helping her give birth withdrew a dead creature resembling a cat with its liver removed. They were understandably disturbed, so they called in a professional obstetrician, John Howard.
With Howard as a witness, the strange occurrences continued to get stranger. Over the course of the next month, Toft gave birth to more deceased animals and parts of animals, the legs of a cat, the head of a rabbit, and on one day, nine dead baby rabbits. Howard sent off a series of letters to the greatest doctors and scientists of England, as well as to the secretary of King George I.
As word spread, the King dispatched one of his premier anatomist to Howard's home office, and he arrived at the very moment Toft was in labor with her 15th bunny. Several more followed that same day. The anatomist, Nathaniel St Andre, had seen enough. And he published an explanation called maternal impression.
His theory was that a child could be deeply influenced by the experiences of the mother, and Toft had claimed that she'd failed to capture two rabbits when she was in the wild. After that, she'd been overcome with an insatiable hunger for rabbit meat, hence the rabbit births.
Well, some skeptical and well-respected doctors had Mary Toft brought to London where a crowd of physicians watched as she went into labor many, many times, but a rabbit never came out. A few days later, a porter was caught attempting to smuggle a small dead rabbit into the room. Toft admitted to the hoax. The news papers had a field day, and Toft faced a few months in prison. If nothing else, the rabbit birthing incident taught the medical community that maybe it shouldn't be so quick to hop to conclusions.
CODY GOUGH: If you've ever wondered why everything takes longer than you think it will, then you've come to the right place. There are two main reasons why you haven't finished that thing you thought you'd be done with yet. Ready for a productivity wake-up call?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, this is so real. This is every Monday. It's like, OK. I'm going to get into work. I'm going to do a million things, and I'm going to get them all done by 5:00. And of course, I get like two of them done. And I don't know why.
CODY GOUGH: Here's why. The first major thing in your way is called Parkinson's Law. It came from a 1955 article in The Economist by Cyril Northcote Parkinson. And it goes like this, quote, "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," unquote.
This law says that psychologically speaking, you can make the same amount of progress in four hours that you can make in 30 minutes. You've just got to have deadlines and clearly defined time frames. This means don't give yourself a week to complete a task when you just need one productive afternoon because you'll just end up filling most of that week with unnecessary angst and wasted energy. Lifehack recommends making a to-do list then taking the time slots you've allowed yourself for each task and slashing them in half. Don't work harder, work smarter by avoiding time sucks.
But what happens when a job seems to take forever even when you give yourself the perfect amount of time? Enter the second law, Hofstadter's Law. Douglas Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist and author. And his law from 1979 reads, quote, "It always takes longer than you expect even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law," unquote. Yes, it's self-referential.
In other words, people tend to underestimate how long a task will take even when they know about this flaw. It's a planning fallacy. If you gave yourself an hour to do your taxes last year, but it really took you four hours, you might blame the delay on outside forces, like saying maybe your kids kept interrupting you, so it's not your fault. Then instead of setting a realistic time frame, you generously give yourself two hours instead of one. Yeah, that doesn't work.
Psych Central says the best way to fight this is to work on whatever will give you the most positive impact. Resist the temptation to clear up those smaller, easier tasks on your to-do list first. Good luck.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Maui in Spain who asks, what is the origin and meaning of the blue, white, and red twisting pole that advertises barbershops? Great question, Maui, and weirdly perfect timing because I've already had two conversations about barber poles this week. Weird, right?
So the barber pole is a symbol that's so old, most people have completely forgotten what it meant in the first place, which is probably good because it's kind of gruesome. In the early Middle Ages, priests were the ones you'd go to for a routine bloodletting or tooth extraction.
CODY GOUGH: What is bloodletting in this context again?
ASHLEY HAMER: There's a belief back then that said that certain illnesses could be caused by having too much blood, so you just had to get rid of some of it.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES] Perfect.
ASHLEY HAMER: But in 1163, the Pope outlawed the practice, leaving an opening for another profession who was handy with a blade, barbers. By then, actual trained physicians were doing most of the surgery, but they considered minor tasks, like bloodletting, to be beneath them. So barbers got in the game. It got even better for them in the 14th and 15th centuries when the Black Plague took out a bunch of actual doctors, putting barbers in even higher demand.
In the mid-1500s, surgeons and barbers even joined forces to create a unified trade guild known as the Company of Barber Surgeons. It's believed that the barber pole is symbolic of that era when medicine met manscaping. The red stripe is supposed to represent blood. The white stripe represents bandages. And the blue, well, some say it's symbolic of the color of veins before they're cut. Others say it's just something American barbers added to be patriotic.
But Maui mentioned blue stripes and is in Spain, so that last explanation doesn't seem quite right to me. Anyway, thanks for your question, Maui. If you have a question, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com, and we might answer it on a future show.
CODY GOUGH: Before we wrap up, we want to give a special shout-out to one of our patrons for supporting our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Dr. Mary [? Yancey, ?] who gets an executive producer credit for her generous support on Patreon. You are the best.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thanks so much, Mary. If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit patreon.com/curiosity.com, all spelled out. Even a couple bucks a month would be a huge help. That's less than a medieval bloodletting. And our patrons get lots of cool bonus content, like exclusive episodes. One more time, that's patreon.com/curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.
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