Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail.
This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages sent into the Stuff to Blow Your Mind email account. If you've never gotten in touch before and you would like to give it a shot, you can reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Let's see rob I think I'm going to kick things off today with a response to some of our older episodes on numeracy the human number sense.
All right, let's have it.
This is from Charlotte. Charlotte says, Hi, thank you for a great podcast. A while ago, I listened to your episode on numerosity and the approximate number system where you mentioned that we still don't know much about the ideology of this phenomenon, where it comes from. Therefore, I would just like to highlight that I published an article last year on the heritability of the approximate number system in infancy.
This is the first study on the heritability of the ans the approximate number system and the largest infant twin study in the world. We found that the ANS was partly heritable but also largely influenced by factors unique to each twin. Not sure if this is interest of interest to you, but here's the link anyway, Best regards, Charlotte. So Oh man, I love getting email like this. Always love to hear from a researcher who's done direct research on a topic we touched on. So I looked into
this paper. This is by Charlotte Victorson at All published in the journal Developmental Science just this year twenty twenty three, called infant sense of approximate numerosity, heritability and link to other concurrent traits. So, as Charlotte said, the paper is looking at the approximate number system, which is a very
interesting ability that we have in our brains. Of course, it's obvious that we can look at two groups of objects and tell which group is bigger by counting the objects in each group, but actually we can do it without counting. So the approximate number system is the ability to distinguish the numerical magnitude of different groups of objects
without relying on language or symbols. So, in fact, to be able to look at like two groups of things and know which one has more in it without counting, And the supplies typically to groups of items greater than four. There could be more than four numbers in it when you're just comparing like two of something to three of something. Apparently the brain uses a different system, but obviously this
is a paramount use in our lives. We use it all the time, in fact, without even realizing we're doing it. So like the approximate number system is how you can look at two bushes that each have hundreds of berries on them and just immediately see that one bush has more berries than the other, even though you didn't count them, and you didn't rely on any words or numbers to form that judgment, And so I was doing a bit
of background. The accuracy of a person's approximate number system, it seems, is usually measured by finding the smallest ratio
of difference that you can reliably tell apart without counting. So, for example, if you show me two scattering you flash at me two scatterings of red dots on a screen, quickly, I might reliably be able to tell that a group of one hundred and thirty dots is greater than a group of just one hundred dots, but I cannot reliably tell the difference between one hundred and five dots and one hundred dots, And so from there you would keep on sort of narrowing it down until you eventually determine
what the threshold is, like how big the difference needs to be before you can usually tell them apart. And that might be a difference of ten percent or twenty percent or whatever. Before you reliably get it right with babies, which are studied in this paper, obviously you need a different kind of test. I think they used a gaze tracking apparatus to see what the babies were looking at to determine whether they were sensing novelty.
Just strap that right onto their heads, right.
So yeah, it turns out we do have a sense for approximate numerosity even in infancy before we can count at all. But it's not super well developed. It's certainly not as well developed as it will be in adulthood.
And this paper and Developmental Science, where our listener here was the lead author, it tested five hundred and fourteen five month old twin subjects, and I was just thinking, wow, that must have been the process for assembling that sample group must have been interesting, and it tested them to figure out what portion of the infant skill for approximate numerosity is heritable. Of course, studies on identical identical twins are very useful for figuring out two what extent things
are genetic or heritable? And the author's right quote. We found a small to moderate but statistically significant effect of genetic factors on approximate number system acuity, but only when differences in numerosity were relatively large, such as in a one to four ratio. So to the extent you know that there was evidence for a genetic difference in how babies can tell the difference in numbers of objects. That difference in acuity only manifested for big differences in numbers
for babies. They also found that this acuity for finding difference in approximate numbers was quote not positively associated with concurrent attentional, cognitive or motor abilities. So in a way, it seems to be sort of its own thing.
Fascinating.
So anyway, thank you so much Charlotte for getting in touch for sharing relevant research with us. This is one of my favorite kinds of email. So researchers out there, if you're listening. If you've published a paper on the topic we talked about, you want to share it with us, and especially if you want to explain it and offer some interpretive context, please always send it in contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. It is absolutely of interest to us.
Yeah, absolutely, all right. We also heard from folks already about our Future Shock series they were doing revisiting the topic of Alvin and heid Toffler's Future Shock from nineteen seventy. I'm going to start off with just a couple of messages from our discord server. Now, if you're wondering, well, WHOA there's a discord server for Stuff to Blow your Mind?
There is, indeed, and if you would like to access it, just email us at that email address that we just shared with you, and we'll share again at the end of this program. Anyway, one user named Ymz says, quote Rob's wife cracks me up. Future Shock is not real. I feel the same way, but I'm still enjoying the discussion. And then we had then one of our listeners, Steve here I believe, chimes in and says, I feel it
is real. What Joe said about AI killing day jobs for various artists trying to subsidize personal work not the soul is stuff that AI scraped, homogenized plagiaristic generations so often are is spot on. Radiologists, surgeons, and many other professions are already being affected. This does not have to be a bad thing, but it is already happening. Even though many experts said just a handful of years ago that these changes were at least a decade away. This
episode is pure stuff to blow your mind. Gold. I would add that if the primary force motivating future artists of any kind involves winning the favor of almighty algorithms while maximizing likes over convictions and personal vision, a dark age of empty digital kitch will add all the minds of the masses.
My inclination is to agree with you there, Steve. I think the metrics used to measure the quality of a piece of media on social media sites and other platforms are off and actually do not have a huge amount of overlap with what actually brings value to our lives. There may be things that you're very likely to click like on or reshare that are really of quite shallow interest to you, whereas you were less likely to use the metric tract interactions on the platform itself that are
all the platform can really care about. There are things where you're less likely to do that, but that actual piece of content is much more valuable to you.
Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of stuff that's clickable and memeable, but it doesn't mean it actually improves your life. I mean, I think about I can have cheeseburger every day, but it doesn't really really impact my life at all. It just occasionally makes me chuckle or shake my head. And that was a human creation, by the way, that was not AI. I'd like to see AI try to top I can have cheeseburger.
I feel like the kind of engagement and value that is easily tracked on digital platforms will end up prioritizing things that people like in a very shallow and non committal way, and things that actually involve you more intellectually or emotionally or whatever will will suffer for that.
Yeah, all right. We also heard from Fletch in Discord. Fletch is a frequent contributor to discussions there chimes in about Tharg's future Shocks in the British comic book series two thousand and AD. I guess it's more than a series. It's like a publication. Fletch says Tharg's Future Shocks in two thousand and eight was kind of a Twilight Zone series of one off weird tales, if memory serves, One of them was the basis of the Richard Stanley movie Hardware.
Judge Dread also occasionally featured a class of adversary called fut seats, citizens driven to psychotic outburst by the future shock of living in mega city one.
Well, you know, in defense of the Tofflers, I don't know if they were quite picturing the creation of like mad zombies running amok due to future shock. I think it was more like a state of mostly characterized by anxiety and stress and all of the downstream effects of anxiety and stress.
Well, I either don't remember or have not encountered. The futzis myself in the Judge Dread comics that I've read. But I think it is important to recognize that the tone, at least for a lot of Judge Dread comics is more absurdist and inhumorous, something that if you've just seen the movies you might not get, especially if you've just seen like the more recent film The Carl Urban One,
which was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that one and an action packed flick, but it does significantly dial down the absurdest humor that is I think inherent in the world.
But was he the law?
Yeah, he's the law, but he also has like like he has a like a like a robot made with an Italian accent. If I remember, you know, there's all sorts of really odd things that occur in his life, in the life of everyone living in Mega City one. It's like, it's intentionally absurd.
When is it my turn to be the law?
Well, you have to go through the program like everybody else.
Okay, I guess somebody's got to be the law. Okay. This next message is from email. This comes from two two says Hi Joe and Robert, a longtime listener, first time writer. I wanted to express my deep resonance with your recent episode on future shock. As a professional technologist. The discussion struck a chord I couldn't quite articulate before. The concept of future shock, akin to culture shock, but caused by the relentless march of time and evolving standards,
truly resonated with me. In my work. My team is often seen as pioneers and innovation, yet we perceive our efforts as merely keeping pace with competitors. This disparity in perception between our groundbreaking work and how it's perceived creates a significant gap between our team, the creators, and our target audience, the users. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks for shedding light on the insights from a fifty
year old novel. Well, it wasn't a novel, but we can get into that that so accurately captures the daily challenges my team and I face. Best two Well, first of all, thank you for getting in touch and sharing your perspective on that. I find it interesting that you mistakenly thought, based on our discussion, that The Future Shock is a novel. It is not a novel. But the Tofflers do point out that a lot of the work of futurology is similar to the work of fiction writing
and the work of writing science fiction. Obviously, if you are a disciplined person who's trying to make accurate predictions about reality, you're going to be more constrained, probably than a fiction writer, because fiction writers have all kinds of
different relationships with reality. Some of them may be trying to go for as hard and accurate a prediction of what they think will happen in reality as possible, but many writers are going for a kind of more exaggerated satirical approach, or are including things they don't think are actually likely to happen in order to create a world where they can illustrate things about human life or something
like that. But they do highlight that there are big similarities between writing science fiction and doing serious futurology, and they point to the work of great science fiction authors as being truly important in helping helping create what they call the shock absorbers for coming changes in technology and culture.
Yeah, that's a great point, Yeah, because like on one hand, something like Mega City one from two thousand and eight eight, you know, it's not really so much prediction about what, you know, supercities of the future might look like. It's more a commentary and kind of a you know, a change in commentary on where we are now. But you know, I guess it's always the case with science with science fiction.
But then yeah, you have other works that that engage in both activities, you know, a little bit predictive but also as always speaking to contemporary anxieties, fears, and hopes.
Another thing I want to mention about this email. The writer doesn't say exactly what products it is that they're working on in the technology space, but still I think it's interesting that it highlights a lot of us who don't work in the tech space just kind of assume that people who do are like the masters of future progress. They're like the ones who are on top of it. They figure out what's going to happen next, and they've you know, they they understand what's going on. But I
think that that may often not be the case. In fact, I think a lot of people who work in the technology sector are just they're they're feeling also confused and overwhelmed, and you know, they know the one thing, the project that they're working on, and what they're trying to do to achieve that, but may perceive the other, you know, other changes in technology in the world around them as being a thing that is hard to understand and outside
their control and and happening faster than they can keep up with.
Yeah, all right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Taylor. Taylor says, Hello, Robin, Joe, happy to oblige your request for decision fatigue and future shock experiences like the two of you. I'm not sure what to make of the top fours predictions about decision fatigue regarding personal style, but I've definitely experienced the phenomenon in another
aspect of my life. I've been an avid video game player for as long as I can remember, but it felt overwhelmed in recent years by the sheer quantity of compelling video game releases. When I was growing up, it was a reasonable desire to experience every video game that piqued my interest, But as the medium has grown, that expectation has fled away from me at an accelerating pace. Today, a gamer of any persuasion could gluck themselves on their favorite genre day in and day out and never complete
all the offerings available to them. I'm certain my assessment is partially colored by the information bias of childhood, when my ability to consume video games was defined by the consoles I owned, my allowance, my parents, content restrictions, and my greater free time. But the data backs me up here.
According to the market data company Statista, the number of new video games published on the popular video game platform Steam skyrocketed from four hundred and thirty four in twenty twelve to teny nine hundred and sixty three in twenty twenty two, and the rampant development increase isn't the only
bit of future shock effecting my favorite hobby. Playing a cooperative, competitive, or narrative video game is definitely a form of quote unquote serious leisure, akin to reading a book or watching a movie, and is similarly threatened by the many things
competing for our attention moment to moment. In response, many game developers compete for user attention by shifting their games to quote unquote living game models, where content is drip dead instead of being released as a single, discrete experience. All of these changes have introduced sour frustration into a hobby I've always enjoyed and left me with a constant fear of missing out. If I choose to play X game, what might I be missing from Y and Z game.
It's a similar experience to the phenomenon Rob described of browsing a streaming platform until going to bed instead of watching any movies at all. Ultimately, I have had to reconcile myself to the reality that there are many exciting things in the world I don't have time to experience. Perhaps these abundant choices give us greater self determination than ever before, but the fatigue of making these decisions takes a toll, and I'm not certain whether I'm happier for it.
As ever, thank you for creating your wonderfully weird and stimulating podcast. I look forward to the rest of your future Shock series. Cheers Taylor. Ps. I also often find myself racing through one game in the anticipation of another game's pending release, which diminishes my enjoyment of both. I imagine this kind of race to keep up with media isn't unique to video games.
Well, thank you, Taylor. No, I don't think it is, And yeah, I think this is. This is an excellent perspective, and in one sense, there's a feeling that, like, well, what what does one have to complain about with this
particular issue. You know that there are more great games to enjoy than ever before, But there is this other side to it, because we're we're not necessarily always made happier by having more things to choose from, like there is a there is a psychological cost that comes with this greater diversity of content in the world, even if in certain ways you could you could absolutely say it's a good thing.
Yeah, I feel like just ten years ago, it was more likely that my friends and I would be playing the same games. Yeah, you know, And nowadays it's like there's just so many choices. None of us are playing the same games because I mean, and in a way, you know that we have such great options. You can just whatever if you're more into you know, simulation versus
you know, something real time, I don't know whatever. The distinction, like you're just going to sort of go down that hallway, go down that avenue, and your friends are going to go down their own hallways and avenues, and then you it seems like it's less often that I have something to connect with with them in the video game realm.
I've had exactly the same experience years ago. It used to be like if I was playing a game that was probably also the same game that my friend was currently playing, and now it's like, I don't know. Also, I'm rarely playing something new. Yeah, I'm always like years behind whatever the hot thing is.
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes that's easier because it's already out, it's cheaper, and it's like Okay, I'm going to I'm going into this, but it's not like a living system that I have to live with as well.
Right, it's gotten all the patches and now it's ten bucks instead of sixty. Right.
But yeah, and the other side, coming back to what Taylor said, these games these days, some of these games are so long, and you have so many other games or other experiences in life you want to get to.
It's just you end up feeling this rush in the latter portion of it if you actually complete the game at all, which you know, makes it feel a little more hollow, because it's like, I'm not even completely enjoying the back half of this game because I'm thinking about the next thing that I am going to try and make time to play. And yeah, and I think part of that's a product of just length and scope of these games, the whole play to Extinction model on some
of them, for sure. As I've said before, I actually kind of get excited when I see a review for a game and people are like and it's so short. I'm like, great, yeah, wonderful.
I totally agree. I really appreciate a well crafted, tight video game. I like one that's tight. It's like the whole experience is there. Maybe it could even be played in one long sitting. And it's all good because like, this whole thing is the main experience you were meaning to get. It's not like an open world that you explore for one hundred hours or something of variable quality.
Yeah, no, grind, none of that.
But anyway, Taylor, Yes, it does seem we were talking mainly I guess about like like books and movies and music in the episode, but I think video games follow an absolutely similar pattern. Yeah, all right. Next message comes from Matt. Matt says, Hey, Robin Joe, longtime listener and big fan here, just wanted to share the perfect example of future shock, gentlemen, I present you Squidward. And then
there was a link. Matt says. It's a link to a thirty second clip from SpongeBob in which Squidward, SpongeBob's neighbor, ends up in the future and has a short mental breakdown over the changes. But then Matt says, I know links from strangers on the Internet can be dicey. You can also just search Squidward Future and find it easily. Keep on doing what you'all do, Thanks Matt. Matt I
appreciate that. Note. Yes, I am very hesitant to click links in listener emails, not because I don't trust you all out there, but it's just, you know, it's smart to be hesitant about clicking things, so appreciate the search terms. Anybody else who wants us to click something that would be helpful as well.
So this episode specifically, it's from the first season of SpongeBob. It's episode fourteen A and its title is SB one twenty nine. You can definitely find clips from this episode all over the place, and certainly on YouTube. I would advise folks to go for the slightly longer clip. I had not seen this before before Matt brought it to my attention here. I watched it last night with my wife, and I think I'm gonna have to go back and
watch the full episode as well. I agree that this absolutely nails the extreme essence of future shock, because, yes, squid Word is in the future where everything is chrome, there are multiple SpongeBob clones greeting him, there's high technology, he's he's his eyes have been open to the to the realities and paradoxes of time travel, and it causes him to just lower himself to the floor, to the chrome floor, curl up into sort of a what is in yoga known as a boat pose, and just start
going future future. And Yeah, I feel like this is I'm gonna have to make this my default behavior for anytime I feel overwhelmed by technological change.
But squidward, once you're there, it's not the future anymore. It's the present.
I think he does get back. He's like, I would just want to go back. Okay, but like I said, I need to watch the full episode to get the whole story. But it looks marvelous. I haven't seen a lot of SpongeBob, but what I have seen is super weird, and every time I see something like this, I just reminded of how weird it is and how I need to make room for more SpongeBob in my life.
Yeah. I don't know any SpongeBob, but this was great. Thank you, Matt. Okay, I think we need to close it out there for today, but we've got some great messages still in the bag that we'll have to say for next time, including some responses to our episode, our Weird House on Danger, Diabolic, and other things to come, so tune in next week and keep sending the listener mail our way, So.
Yeah, see you next Monday. But as always we'll have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for you. We'll have we usually have an artifact or a monster fact or something of that nature on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer jj Pos. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuffdo Blowyourmind dot com.
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