Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton and I'm trace cur. And today it's everything you'd never knew you wanted to know about. Cool stuff that happens in your brain. I think I'm going to get a quiz. I'm so excited. You are totally gonna get a quiz. Are you ready? I'm totally ready. Okay. I have my pen. I have my paper. You want to do that one first? Let's do that one first. If you're gonna make me do math, I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to fail. There is the first activity, actually. Yes. The first activity does not involve your pen and paper. Okay? I want you to think about the taste of chocolate, how it's silky and sweet or dark and bitter. And now I also also want you to add 47 and 56 but I want you to continue thinking about how chocolate tastes.
Speaker 0 00:45 I can't add in my head. I don't even know how much it is too. So I'll keep trying. Give it a good to already seven plus 56 tasted chocolate. How it's sweet and it really can. 47 seven and six is 13 and one that chocolate still nine is a 10 so 103 probably. Oh God. So are you still thinking about or tasting that chocolate? I had no chocolate. All I had was the panicky feeling from seventh grade when I knew I was gonna fail a test. Thank you for that. Coppery and it was awful. Um, at lab in the wild, they talked about this where I found this one test, they said that a lot of people had that fuzzy unripe banana feel in their mouth instead of chocolate. Totally that. Yes. You want to try the other one? Grab your pen and paper. You're going to make me do more mad.
Speaker 0 01:37 Okay. And brain junkies out there. If you want to play along, you need a device that can act as a stopwatch and you need a paper and a pen. So cause you can pause. We're going to move right along because you've paused us, right? So you are going to now spell a phrase out loud as you simultaneously write your name. So you'll be writing your name and when you're ready, tell me are good. Ready? I'll tell you what. Oh, you're telling me the phrase as I do it and I want you to, well, you're going to write your name and I'm going to tell you the phrase right now. Jewelry is shiny. Ready. And I have to spell that. You have to spell it out loud and write your name. Ready to test. Take a deep breath. Go. Uh, calling your name. J. E. Oh my God. Uh, j.
Speaker 0 02:20 E. W. E. I can't spell jewelry. Give it your best shot. Uh, e. L. A. R. Y. A. I. S. A. S. H. I. N. Y. Thank God. My name is short. Okay. I don't think I spelled jewelry right. J. E. W. E. L. R. Y. Okay. That was, that was embarrassing. I'm getting a pen. Okay. No, I'm writing your time down. I'm shouting at the microphone because I'm not close to it. Okay. Get your tablet and your pen again. Okay. We can do another one. Oh God. Right now I want you to spell jewelry is shiny and then out loud. You got to say it out loud to me. Oh, and the listeners of America and all around the world. And so you're going to spell it out loud and then you're going to write your name down. So do not do them together this time. Do them separately. Spell out loud then write your name ready. So go j. E w e l r y.
Speaker 0 03:21 I. S. S. H. I. N. Y writing my name. Done. Are you ready for the stats? Everybody? Okay, hit me up. How dumb am I when trace had to multitask and do two things at once? Things I don't do wells. And with the added pressure of doing it for a recording, it was 24.52 seconds. Oh my gosh. When you did it separately, it was 10.7 seconds. So what that has told scientists is that among other research, what they have found is we don't truly multitask. You're brain toggles between tasks. So when you are doing something like that, that involves a cognitive, physical writing task and a speaking out loud task, your brain's not doing both at once. No, I was, I was writing a letter and then spelling a little bit and then writing a letter. And then the only reason why I picked up on shiny is because trace Kerr is a hell a short, yeah, no, I was done with my name.
Speaker 0 04:20 Oh Man. And then of course, like I said, spelling is not something I do. Well anyway. So then there was that added stress. Yeah. Oh I need to lay down. I'll talk at you while you rest for a minute. I found a quiz on lab in the wild.org. It's a test you can go take, and we'll put this in our show notes cause it was kind of fun. It was a multitasking test. And what they had you do was there were a dropdown menus with shapes that are colors that had the letters in them. So you'll have a list of letters in a shape. And so then they'd pop up on their screen, one for you to go slug. So you'd come up to menu, you dropped down, find it, click it. So you've got maybe seven menus to choose from and seven things in each menu.
Speaker 0 05:00 So you think that's pretty fast. You just look and go grab it. But they also would occasionally pop some up in a shortcut bar. So your regular menus on your left and your right hand menu was a shortcut bar and they wanted you to grab it from the shortcut bar if it was available. But the shortcut bar would change sometimes. So that was one of your jobs. Oh Wow. Initially I did that a couple times and then the test introduced, you're going to get a series of letters and numbers before you do the toggling task of choosing and boasting. Memorize that. And at the end we're going to ask for it again. Oh, so you do the whole thing again saying FX nine y f x nine y or however you memorize. And I thought I would crush it at this because multitasking is my life.
Speaker 0 05:42 I'm an office lady. I answer the phone and I answered the door and I help a kid with a bloody nose and you know you're doing 82 things at once. Sometimes in an office. Yeah. What they found for me was that my multitasking, initially without a memory, I was 1.2 seconds slower than the rest of the testator's. I was crushed. But when you introduced more chaos with the added, having to remember numbers, my stats went up. I can't remember how much, but I was better than their average. Oh, you did better the higher your cognitive load was. Yeah. So my brain, and I don't know if that means maybe that when I know I have to attend more carefully, I kind of ditch the outliers. The other thing could be I was using a track pad computer and I'm better with a mouse. So my stats improved as I was like an excuse and maybe it is. Yeah, I'm good at excuses. So if you want to take that test and they have all kinds of other completely unrelated tests on lab in the wild, it's a fun site. Go test yourself on the buntings. Wow, that sounds super cool. It was
Speaker 1 06:45 another cool thing that the brain can do. We've known for a while that some birds, bats and turtles and even foxes can sense the earth's magnetic field and they can even use it for navigation. Where sharks, I've seen a shark week show. Yeah. So they, they can sense north and south magnetic poles of the earth and use that sense to orient themselves. Like if you know, longterm migration kind of thing, you would know which way to go. And the way they managed to do this tiny pieces of magnetite which is magnetic in the brain or cryptochrome molecules in the eyes of these animals. Cryptochrome so I was like, what the heck is that? That sounds not as exciting. It sounds like same thing on yeah, like an evil villain would be like, watch out Mr. Bond. I have cryptic roams. They are sensitive to blue light and possibly are involved in the sensing of magnetic fields.
Speaker 1 07:40 And what's cool too is depending on where these materials are located in the brain, the animal might even feel the earth's magnetic field on their faces. Like we feel the wind. Wow. So you know, your pigeon might be turning into the field and feeling that field so they know which way to go. That's crazy. It's super crazy. Well, here's something that's even more crazy. Humans. Some of them have magnetite and or cryptochrome in their brains. Oh, I'm sorry to put, I do not think I'm one of those people. Well, you know, you know, you don't know. So Dr Joe Kirschvink of cal tech, he built a Faraday cage, which blocked out the earth's magnetic field. So if you were in there, there's no magnetic field at all. And then they used an EEG and they watched the brains of people when he made his own small magnetic field.
Speaker 1 08:32 And some people's brains did respond to the direction of the field. Wow. Yes. So, okay, so, but now the brain is responding. So that doesn't mean you know, if I'm in there and they're moving it around, they were, they showed pictures of the EEG scans and the, it was clear that the brain was detecting the field is in front of me. Now. It's to the right of me. The human beings. None of the people had any perception of this going on. It's definitely something that way back in the day we were able to use this in some way, but now just some people are detecting it and some people aren't, but yeah. Wow. I kind of wonder if this isn't one of those things where like my husband Chaz has an extremely good sense of direction. You know, he walks around a city and he'll be like, oh, we need to go south. And he just turns and he's off. You know, going, yeah. I'm like, what the heck dude? And unless I have a landmark, I'm not going to be able to do that. And I kind of wonder, they didn't talk about this in this study, but I wonder if those people who are really good at that are
Speaker 0 09:36 somehow, they might not be consciously aware, but yeah, we're making decisions based on maybe they're a little more in touch with where their head is pointed <inaudible> I don't know. I still posit that I am not one of those people because my aunt, I've been biking together, I think for about seven years, and we started her house every time.
Speaker 1 09:56 I still almost run her over on the first quarter sometimes because you're like, oh, we're going that way. Oh, left. Sure. Okay. Yes, we can go left and not go to the busy streets. Well, that's all right. Maybe you're just, you're just not in touch with your magnetite. That sad. Thankful. We live in modern times and it's not quite as necessary as it might've been.
Speaker 0 10:16 Let's talk about how the brain forgets. When I was kind of noodling topics, one of the most helpful things I learned in my four years of college was how the brain learns how it remembers things. And so it got me to thinking, how do we forget things and watching the movie, have you seen the movie inside out the digital, one of the animated films, and they show memories as little balls in the brain and one of them gets dropped and rolls away, and it's a core memory and what would we do? Yeah. And we do indeed forget, but it's not quite like that. That is sort of a really broad squint your eyes and in this topic, if you're in the scientific community and you're like, no lady, no please no, this is very broad strokes because anytime you delve into how the brain does a thing, there's so much and you start, you could go on all kinds of long tangents.
Speaker 0 11:05 So this is a very broad strokes. How your brain forgets. There are two ways that it remembers. One of the ways is recollection. You see a guy in your leg that is Carpool Michelle Rodriguez from the y and you know exactly, she looks, she looks like Michelle Rodriguez 10 years down the road with a couple of kids and she probably drives a van that's, you know, so you know you have a distinct, you know who she is, you see you're out in public somewhere. Your brain knows, right. That's longterm storage and it's a recollection. It's a very specific, you have knowledge of it. The other type of memory. Familiarity memories are more of a, that's the guy that works out on the stationary machines down there kind of. You don't have a concrete, you don't know that that's Carpool. Michelle Rodriguez, you're just like, I think maybe we see him at target all the time.
Speaker 0 11:52 Oh, those kinds of memories. It's just a familiarity. It's not a distinct, has lots of specific facts. So those two kinds of memories exist. Your hippocampus is the part of your brain that works on storing and making patterns and encoding. That was another thing with this is the way that the memories are stored is it doesn't live in a specific location. Like it's not got a spot. It's more of a Clumby pattern of synapses. So sort of a web like clumpy like thing and it's an encoded pattern. So the process of forgetting is different for both of those types of memories with the recollection where that is Carpool. Michelle Rodriguez, she's The lady at the gym. That kind of memory would be more like on the beach when you've written in the sand and then the waves wash up and wash that gently away. So it sort of starts fraying at the edges.
Speaker 0 12:43 It's not a just chops off and goes away. It's not like the ball in inside out that drops off and goes away. Okay. It's a gentle decay over time. Whereas with familiarity memories where you're kind of like, I think I know that guy. Those are more like someone comes and sees your writing on the beach and they write over it until something takes over it. So this is also where the road of how you have false memories. So interesting. So many roads we could go down that we're not going to today, but the way that forgetting takes place can have some overriding and mixing. So you don't just the fact that if you think about it a lot, you can change it. Yes. You know? And which is kind of disturbing because then it, you know, I often think, gosh, is anything that I remember actually true mostly, but not totally.
Speaker 0 13:33 That was one thing they said that most of your memories are slightly altered and that makes sense with the, it's not a specific place, it's more of a web or a matte of synaptic things. And so your connections loosen re tightened somewhere else because of a new experience or a similar experience. And when I jammed my pinky finger in grade school, I don't remember if it's fourth grade or sixth grade anymore, but I used to really know for sure, and I can't remember if it was balloon volleyball or balloon basketball, but I know that were balloons and there was a pinkie and it was jammed. It was jams. Interesting. So then how do we, so we forget the these things because they're just kind of this blob in the brain or those synaptic patterns. Now the more distinctive memory or the more it doesn't match something else like traumas or really unusual, like you might remember your wedding better because you're not having a lot of weddings that you do.
Speaker 0 14:28 Maybe maybe my grandpa had four, I don't know. There was cake. Something that happened overriding some recollection, some decay. So the more like a trauma, your brain doesn't have a place to put it and it's very distinct. So those are a little harder. That decay happens much more slowly because nothing's going to overwrite it. And so it just has to go unless you have repeated is a drag. So create lots of great experiences. Really distinct. I'm like, I really remember zip lining. I don't do things like that very often. That's a very distinct memory. So yeah, see that would be imprinted on my brain because it would just be full of terror. Lots of screaming, so much screaming. It's very loud memory. I was a little worried that there would be like limp Amy at the end of the longest one because at the place I went there was like a half mile and they've got a longer one now and I had to think as I didn't keep increasing in speed. Oh you have to breathe now or you're going to pass out. Like nothing bad has happened yet. So it's time to breathe. Yeah, that would be, Huh? That's how you forget the very, very short version. What were we talking about? This was clearly a very distinct moment for you.
Speaker 1 15:42 Okay. So I want to talk about language learning and sleep. Excellent. So we had an episode with Zebra finches who seem to be learning how to sing their songs by like thinking about them. They're actually singing out loud, but they're thinking about them while they're sleeping. Their dreams, singing I guess would be a clearer way to put it. And Dr Phillip Gilly from the neurodynamics lab at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Boulder, Colorado. Whew. That was long. He heard our bird singing episode and he commented on on it because he does research on what infants seem to hear in their sleep and how that seems to have a huge effect on their brain activity and may even shape language learning later in life. So, so cute. They have pictures on their website of little babies and they've got all these little EEG sensors all over their heads, ones even on the tip of their noses.
Speaker 1 16:42 And I gotta tell you these are some nice babies because they're doing them less than a year old, maybe like less than six months old. And my children would have been ripping all those wires off and they have some truly stellar little cherubs that looked so happy to have all this equipment on them. And then they let them go to sleep with all these sensors on. Yeah, 24 infants under the age of five months. There we go. And the egs attached, they fall asleep and then infants tend to spend about 80% of their time asleep. So here's the cool thing they did. So a speaker played a sequence of repeated sounds like, ah, ah, ah, or blah blah, blah, repeating over and over again. And their brains just kind of let that roll through them. But they'd insert occasionally this oddball sound like an a or a Duh. Okay. And the odd sound made a huge
Speaker 0 17:35 shift in their brain waves enough that it's like, are they rem sleep during <inaudible>?
Speaker 1 17:40 Well, I'm not the, you know, I didn't see that part, but they're asleep clearly. And probably they need to be at a certain level of sleep. The brain is tuned in. Suddenly brain goes, Whoa, that's a different sound. And um, once that novel sound was heard a few times that they no longer reacted to it because they recognize that sound, they brought it into their group of it's cool. Yeah. So it's, it's kind of recognized as a new pattern. So they feel that new neurological pathways are being built all the time as the brain learns to distinguish these new sounds because you've got a pathway that recognize, ah, and then bought and then Eh, and these weird sounds. And so that's super important because discriminating between sounds is how we learn language. Cause then it just doesn't sound like, ah, it's actually words. The surprise was how quickly their brains got used to these new sounds like it only took a few repetitions of this new sound to have their brain go. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 18:40 I've heard that before. It's not novel anymore. Totally make sense. Um, for some reason a lot of the students and my taekwondo class are bilingual, the young kids, and they have a much less distinct accent in a much more concrete grasp on two languages. Whereas the adults that come with them are very articulate and intelligent. But that shift is a little bit harder. They're clearly, um, proficient English speakers, but the kids are wizards. They're so fast. Yup. Although,
Speaker 1 19:12 um, like when Anson was in kindergarten and preschool, preschool, when he was in preschool, there was a child whose dad spoke to him only in German and dad was a native German speaker and mom only spoke to him in Japanese and she was a native Japanese speaker. And then the parents spoke to each other in English. So the children were learning three languages at one time. How'd that go for them? Well, they, they lagged behind on their learning, on all of them. Comprehension was slower, but then when they finally get a grasp of all of them, then they jump ahead head.
Speaker 0 19:47 It's like the little lines in Mario Cart where you hit those lines. All of a sudden when the brain kind of coalesces and meshes all of that. Yep.
