In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Massive Stone Jars in the Highlands of Laos Are Shrouded in Mystery Here's Why Time Seems to Go So Fast These Days Maybe You Should Be Sleeping Twice a Day Like They Did in Olden Times Want to learn to live in the present? Check out "10-Minute Mindfulness: 71 Habits for Living in the Present Moment" by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport. If you're strapped for time, there's always the audiobook, which is free with a trial of Audible. And for more ways to get a more restful night's sleep, check out "The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It" by W. Chris Winter, M.D., dubbed the "sleep whisperer" by Arianna Huffington. Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Want to learn to live in the present? Check out "10-Minute Mindfulness: 71 Habits for Living in the Present Moment" by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport. If you're strapped for time, there's always the audiobook, which is free with a trial of Audible. And for more ways to get a more restful night's sleep, check out "The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It" by W. Chris Winter, M.D., dubbed the "sleep whisperer" by Arianna Huffington.
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-time-feels-faster-sleeping-twice-a-day-and-laos-massive-stone-jars
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories 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'll learn why time seems to go so fast these days, why you should consider sleeping twice a day, like they did in olden times, and the mystery of huge, ancient stone jars in Laos.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Ashley, have you ever been to Asia?
ASHLEY HAMER: Never been anywhere, Cody. Stop badgering me.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: I forgot.
[LAUGHS]
Oh, I feel so bad now.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's OK.
CODY GOUGH: Well, if it makes you feel any better, I haven't been to Asia either.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
CODY GOUGH: I really want to get to Japan.
ASHLEY HAMER: Me too.
CODY GOUGH: But I haven't made it happen yet. Today in curiosity.com, we wrote about a mysterious archaeological site in Eastern Asia, and it's called the Plain of Jars. Have you heard of it before?
ASHLEY HAMER: I had not. No.
CODY GOUGH: It's a more than 2,500-year-old collection of giant stone jars on a grassy plain. And they ranged in size from 3 to 10 feet, and they weigh up to 14 tons apiece.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait, a 10-foot jar?
CODY GOUGH: Mm-hmm.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's like larger than a person, a huge jar larger than a person.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That weighs 14 tons. Geez.
CODY GOUGH: Really big. So they're huge and they've been studied for decades, but we still don't really know that much about them. We know very little about their origins or what they were used. For a while, we thought that they might have been used as funeral urns for chieftains, but there were very few organic materials that were found inside the jar. So it was like, maybe not until that is 2016.
There was an excavation by researchers out of Australia, and they uncovered a burial site where human remains were found in a few different ways. Some were in ceramic vessels. Some were in pits, covered by limestone blocks. And some were buried in a traditional grave. So they confirmed the jars were used for mortuary purposes and suggests a new theory that the jars served as a place to decomposed bodies before burial, which I didn't know was a thing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, me either.
CODY GOUGH: But researchers have found similar clusters of jars throughout Asia, and they form a path all the way to northern India. So scientists think the jars might have been used in an international trade route through Asia, and it's possible that travelers could have used rainwater collected in the jars during dry seasons. And that might explain why they found prayer beads at the sites, possibly left behind as offerings.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow. You don't want to get those confused, mortuary sites and places to get your drinking water.
CODY GOUGH: Probably not. Not so much. No. Unfortunately, researchers are still limited with how much they can dig into the site's history because of landmines. The grounds are home to thousands of unexploded landmines left over from America's secret war with Laos in the 1960s. It's just so secret. I didn't really know about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Didn't either.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And officials are working on getting the bombs removed, but still only seven of the 85 sites are open to visitors. So it's still a cool place to visit just as long as you stick to the official visitor's destinations. You can see pictures of this and lots of other cool sites on our Curiosity Travel Instagram account. You can search for Curiosity Travel or find our username, all one word spelled out @curiosity.com.travel.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice. Cody, do you sleep through the night?
CODY GOUGH: Through the night, straight through. I mean might wake up for a minute. But otherwise, yeah, pretty much straight through.
ASHLEY HAMER: I sleep like the dead. I just sleep all the way through. I'm a very heavy sleeper. Well, a third of Americans are not like me. They have some trouble staying asleep through the night. It's pretty normal. But I've got good news. Maybe, you don't have to. Maybe, I'm the one doing something wrong. And this third of Americans are doing just what's natural. It's actually possible to plan a sleep schedule that keeps you rested even if you hit a three-hour insomnia patch every night.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. In fact, that's actually how pretty much everyone slept throughout most of history. People used to divide their sleep into two separate periods, which we'll call first sleep and second sleep, kind of like first breakfast and second breakfast.
CODY GOUGH: Like the Hobbits do.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Exactly. Between those sleeps, people would do chores. They'd read. They'd pray. They'd even go outside to visit friends. Lots of non-Western cultures did this, including Indigenous communities in Nigeria, Central America, and Brazil. Historian A. Roger Ekirch says that that's how humans actually evolved, and our sleep cycles were disrupted later.
The main reason, I think you can guess, is the electric light. You used to have to stop what you were doing when it got dark outside, so that's what people would do. And experiments have shown that people wake up for a while in the middle of the night when they're deprived of artificial lighting for long periods of time. I would love to try that.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Go camping forever and see what happens to my sleep.
CODY GOUGH: Forever?
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe not forever.
[LAUGHS]
I'm just going to run into the hills.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: But that suggests that a pattern of segmented sleep is actually hardwired into our brains. You can read the details of the science behind all this today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But you can try segmented sleep for yourself.
If you work a 9:00 to 5:00 job, then you might have to go to bed within a few hours of getting home to let yourself wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night and then go back to sleep. So it might be hard for us, like office workers. But if you work the night shift, this could be a way to fight the health effects of your unnatural sleep schedule, which are pretty bad. Let us know if you try it and how it goes for you.
CODY GOUGH: In other news about how the modern world has ruined everything, Ashley, is it just me, or does it feel like time flies these days?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. I never have time for anything.
CODY GOUGH: Especially at work.
ASHLEY HAMER: Especially at work.
CODY GOUGH: Well, back in the day, things objectively took more time. I've wondered about this a lot. Like, taking a horse and buggy versus-- I don't know-- flying somewhere or handwriting an entire book or sending a letter overseas. It would take months for a letter to arrive versus made an email. So if we objectively have more leisure time than before, then why does it feel like we have less time than ever? Well, today, we're going to answer that question with a three-part answer from history and science.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ooh.
CODY GOUGH: The main things are awareness, insecurity, and progress. So we'll talk about each of those. Andrew Taggart is a philosopher, and he recently wrote that capitalism and the rise of hourly wage labor is a big reason. If your boss is always watching the clock, then you'll start watching the clock. And the more aware you are of the time, the faster it seems to go. But we're also watching the clock because we're insecure about our jobs between the economy and the idea that another human or robot might replace us. We're obsessed with seeing how productive we are.
And there's some research that backs us up, from Business Psychologist Tony Crabbe. He said that whenever we complete a task, we end up taking on more tasks. So basically, even if we get more done by managing our time better, the result is just that we become busier.
ASHLEY HAMER: That is so sad and bleak. Oh my gosh.
CODY GOUGH: It's not super positive. I promise we'll end on a positive note. But Andrew Taggart put it another way. The philosopher really put it in a bleak way saying, quote "financial insecurity begets endless, anxious activity, and in turn, an acute sense of time famine" unquote. Well, the last time we mentioned is progress, and that has to do with a fundamental philosophical shift in how humans see the world.
Back when religion was like the backbone of society, and law, and everyday life, and was like the center of the universe, people thought we were made in God's image, and we figured, that's about as good as it gets. But these days, people are really obsessed with progress. And because the world is never perfect, there's always more to do.
So we've got a couple of ideas for feeling like you've got more time, though. First, be aware that according to in-depth surveys about how we use our time, Americans actually do have more leisure time than our ancestors and more time than we ourselves had a few decades ago. And the other thing that you can do to not feel this way about losing time is to chill out.
Anxiety fuels panic feelings about time, so try things like meditation, yoga, breathing exercises. There are tons of ways to work on your anxiety, and you can find a lot of ideas for where to start on curiosity.com. Won't cost you a penny.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. and I find that it seems like being more organized with the things you have to do makes you less anxious about those things. And so maybe using a few productivity tips could also help.
CODY GOUGH: We love productivity tips.
ASHLEY HAMER: We do. We have a lot of them.
CODY GOUGH: Any you can read more about this report and productivity hacks a lot more on curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.