Learn about why you have tiny rocks in your ears; why you may prefer music by artists who have a similar personality to you; and how chemotherapy began as a chemical weapon.
Learn about why you have tiny rocks in your ears; why the self-congruity effect of music says you may prefer music by artists who have a similar personality to you; and how chemotherapy began as a chemical weapon.
There are tiny rocks in your ears that help you detect motion by Cameron Duke
You may prefer music by musicians who have a similar personality to you by Kelsey Donk
Chemotherapy began as a chemical weapon by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/you-have-tiny-rocks-in-your-ears-how-artists-personas-influence-your-music-choices-and-chemotherapy-began-as-a-chemical-weapon
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, you’ll learn about why you have tiny rocks in your ears; why you may prefer music by artists who have a similar personality to you; and how chemotherapy began as a chemical weapon.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
You’ve probably heard that your inner ear helps you keep your balance. But have you ever wondered exactly...how? It turns out that your inner ear contains some precise machinery to help you keep tabs on your place in space. That machinery uses fluids and gels... aaaaaand piles of tiny rocks. You have tiny rocks in your ears that help you detect motion. [ad lib this is CRAY]
Your inner ear is located behind your eardrum and made up of two parts. The cochlea is a snail-shaped organ about the size of your fingernail that helps you hear. The other part is called the vestibule and it makes up your balance, or vestibular system. None of these parts of the inner ear are empty — they’re all filled with a fluid called endolymph.
The vestibule itself contains two parts. The semicircular canals measure your head’s position in space. Those are three fluid-filled rings that extend from the vestibule — one each to detect direction from side to side, forward and back, and up and down.
The vestibule also contains two tiny sacs that detect movement, or acceleration. The utricle [YOO-trih-cull] measures it in the horizontal plane, and the saccule [SACK-yool] handles the vertical. And how they do it is pretty wild. Each one contains a patch of sensory cells called the macula [MACK-yoo-luh], which is covered by a jiggly gelatinous layer, which itself is covered by a fibrous membrane. That membrane is embedded with roughly 1000 tiny pebbles called otoliths [OH-tuh-lith] — that’s Greek for “ear stones.”
The whole setup is sort of like a waterbed covered with gravel. If you tip your head, the heft of the stones makes the gel layer slosh in the opposite direction. That triggers little hairlike cells connected to nerves, and this tells your brain how to balance your body. So yeah: you sense motion because of thousands of tiny rocks on a tiny waterbed inside your head.
Sometimes, those little rocks can get dislodged and tumble their way into the semicircular canals. That causes the dizzying sensation of vertigo, which can be debilitating. To fix it, doctors just try to guide the rocks back into place with a series of head movements called the Epley maneuver [EPP-ley]. It’s a lot like those games where you tilt a board to roll a marble through a maze. But it’s not a sure-fire fix — it’s successful in about 80 percent of patients, but about half of them have their vertigo return eventually. But even without treatment, the condition usually clears up on its own after a few months.
So the next time you feel the thrill of a speeding roller coaster or dizziness from a spin through a field, remember that you have thousands of tiny rocks to thank for it.
Ok Ashley, let’s play a game. Whose music do you prefer?
Radiohead or Dave Matthews Band? high/low openness
Marvin Gaye or David Bowie? low/high neuroticism
Britney Spears or Norah Jones? low/high agreeableness
You might think that reveals something about your taste in music, but it could actually say something about your personality, too. A new study suggests that people prefer music by artists whose public personalities are most similar to their own. If we go by that metric, the artists you chose might mean you’re high/low in openness, high/low in neuroticism, and high/low in agreeableness. Nice/sorry!
The scientists behind this study call this the "self-congruity effect of music." Self-congruity describes the tendency for a person to seek out the people and things that match their own self-concept — like, maybe your friends’ personalities are like yours, or maybe you bought the car that felt most like “you.” Here, it means that people prefer music by artists who project a persona that matches how those people see themselves.
Researchers conducted three separate studies of more than 80,000 people to figure this out. And they looked at a bunch of different factors. First, they took persona ratings of the 50 most popular musicians on Facebook. They did that in two ways: by asking fans to describe those musicians’ personas, and by using machine learning to predict those musicians’ personas from their lyrics. Then, they used data from a previous study where Facebook users took personality tests and allowed researchers access to their Facebook profiles — including the artist pages they had ‘liked.’ That let them compare the personalities of music fans to the public personas of their favorite artists.
The results showed that yes, people tend to prefer the music of artists with personalities that seem to match their own. People high in openness tended to like artists with complex music like David Bowie and Radiohead; those high in conscientiousness liked mellow and unpretentious music from artists like Marvin Gaye and Carrie Underwood; extroverts preferred pop and hip-hop like that of Justin Beiber and 50 Cent; people high in agreeableness liked mellower artists like John Mayer and Norah Jones; and people high in neuroticism preferred metal and hard rock — think Evanescence and Ozzy Osbourne.
The researchers say what they’ve found is a huge advance in music research. Their findings show that musical preferences are driven by more than just whether the music sounds good or not. Instead, psychological, social, and group dynamics are all at play when it comes to the music we love.
If you’ve ever been through the harrowing, nauseating process of chemotherapy, this next fact may not come as a surprise: the first chemotherapy began as a chemical weapon. Get ready to learn about the strange origins of this life-saving treatment.
Cancer has plagued humans since the beginnings of medicine, and for most of history, it was a death sentence. Invasive surgery was often the only treatment, and the cancer would usually just return. So when scientists discovered that certain chemicals could target cancerous cells — what came to be known as chemotherapy — it was pretty miraculous. And ironically, the first modern cancer-treating drugs came from the opposite of a miracle: mustard gas.
During World War I, two American doctors named Helen and Edward Krumbhaar began studying the long-term health effects of mustard gas and discovered its most heinous effect: it decimated victims’ bone marrow. Bone marrow produces the body’s blood cells, and these victims white blood cells had been hit particularly hard. It seemed that the main ingredient in mustard gas could target and kill these specific cells. In 1919, the pair wrote an academic paper that was ignored by the medical community, which was preoccupied with the war.
But 20 years later, two Yale doctors rediscovered the Krumbhaars’ paper. The world was about to break out in war again, and these doctors had been tasked with developing an antidote to chemical weapons — specifically, to nitrogen mustard, a recent variation on mustard gas. That was when they came across the findings that the chemical targeted bone marrow and white blood cells. Why was that so important? Well, leukemia and lymphoma are both cancers caused by mutations in white blood cells. If mustard gas targets healthy white blood cells, it could probably kill cancerous white blood cells, too.
Amazingly, they got permission to test nitrogen mustard on a cancer patient. The whole thing was kept top secret. In the trial, a patient with lymphoma known only as J. D. was given a drug they ominously labeled as substance X. After just four days of treatment, J. D.‘s tumor shrank. It didn’t save his life, but it showed that nitrogen mustard could be used to treat lymphoma. J.D. was the first cancer patient to receive chemotherapy.
After the war, researchers learned that nitrogen mustards enter white blood cells and bond to DNA, which makes that DNA impossible for the cell to use and triggers its death. This knowledge allowed nitrogen mustards to be refined into safer and more effective cancer drugs, some of which are still in use today. Chemotherapy is an unpleasant, blunt instrument that will hopefully be eclipsed by more effective treatments, but there’s no denying that it’s saved countless lives.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!