Curiosity Killed the Adage

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Speaker 5 Door listening to Radio Lab.

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Speaker 15 Hey, this is Radio Lab.

Speaker 12 I'm Latif Nasser.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 15 And today, I'm just going to kick things off with our editor.

Speaker 5 That level's on my side.

Speaker 12 Alex Neeson. Cool.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 20 So once upon a time, it was summer.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 12 Hard to remember now.

Speaker 27 Hard to remember remember now.

Speaker 20 And okay, so over the summer, as you know, I'm a runner.

Speaker 12 Legit runner.

Speaker 15 A legit runner.

Speaker 5 Like you run marathons.

Speaker 20 So over this year, I decided to take the year off from marathons.

Speaker 20 And instead, I decided to tackle the one mile. Okay.
And I was going to try and beat my personal record. And so

Speaker 20 as part of doing that,

Speaker 20 last summer, every Tuesday like clockwork,

Speaker 20 I would drag myself out of my apartment and

Speaker 20 head out into the city and

Speaker 5 watch set

Speaker 26 me out.

Speaker 20 Run from my house, which is about a mile and change away from Riverbank State Park in Harlem.

Speaker 26 Okay, gotta get in my car.

Speaker 17 Over to this track.

Speaker 5 Hey, hello, what up?

Speaker 20 To meet up with some people from my running crew.

Speaker 7 I'm okay, how are you?

Speaker 20 And it depends on the night, but it's basically

Speaker 20 10 or 15 people who all get together to do these track workouts together.

Speaker 12 And as somebody who is definitely not a runner, you prefer this? You like running with people more than running alone?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, I do this because I can't be trusted to do it by myself. Running is really hard,

Speaker 20 and having other people there with me to do it just makes me feel, it makes me feel like I'm a team.

Speaker 20 It reminds me of being on a track team in high school, where you show up for yourself and for the rest of the team, and you all do the hard thing together and it's faster it feels better it's just the way that you get it done

Speaker 20 so

Speaker 20 on this particular day it was super hot it's like the dead of summer and

Speaker 5 ref

Speaker 20 our coach tells us check it out we're gonna do we're doing 400s the length of a track is 400 meters so that just means we're doing one long sprint around the entire length of the track and we're gonna do a lot of them

Speaker 20 And everybody sort of makes this collective sigh, and it's like, okay,

Speaker 5 okay.

Speaker 5 Right?

Speaker 20 So we get on the track, we warm up, we stretch, we do drills, kind of get loose, and then we toe the line and

Speaker 20 we start

Speaker 20 immediately out the gate. I'm pumping pumping my legs, swinging my arms, just sprinting for the entire length of this track.

Speaker 20 Oh, shit. I cross the line, I take a little break, a sip of water.

Speaker 20 And then

Speaker 20 I'm sprinting again.

Speaker 20 And I do another lap.

Speaker 4 Rest, lap, rest, lap, rest.

Speaker 17 How many more do you have? Six.

Speaker 20 And that day, I was struggling to breathe.

Speaker 5 Come on, come on, come on.

Speaker 20 My heart was beating super fast. It felt like it was coming out of my chest.
And everybody else around me seemed to be settling into the workout. I don't know.

Speaker 20 It just felt like I just like couldn't get it together. And all of these very, all these like insecurities from like childhood came rushing back.

Speaker 20 Like I was suddenly very aware that I looked like I was struggling and there was all these other people around me who were just watching me struggle. And so I just wanted to disappear.

Speaker 20 And I wanted all the other people on the track to disappear.

Speaker 20 And I just felt like I was mentally spiraling because

Speaker 20 the whole point of this, of showing up at these group workouts, the whole reason why I started running with the crew in the first place was to avoid exactly this moment.

Speaker 20 And there's this adage, misery loves company, that has been the sort of philosophy of my athletic career, if you will.

Speaker 20 The idea that if you are suffering through something and you're in the company of other people suffering the same misery, that it makes all of us a little more capable, that a burden gets lifted and that you just ultimately, you can get through it.

Speaker 20 And here I was at this track workout that was especially miserable that day,

Speaker 20 but the burden wasn't being lifted. It felt heavier actually.

Speaker 20 And after this workout, I remember walking home and just obsessing about this adage. And by the time I get back to my apartment and for days afterwards,

Speaker 4 I had just really started to wonder, like, have I had this wrong the whole time?

Speaker 20 Maybe this thing just isn't true. Like, is it true or not? And I started to think about, like, okay, well, I have to figure this out.
I have to figure out,

Speaker 20 factually speaking, does misery love company?

Speaker 6 Like, who can I call?

Speaker 20 What can I read? What can I do to get like real nitty-gritty, real fussy, so that on the other end, I can sort of like stand up and declare it is true that misery loves company, or it's just not.

Speaker 20 You needed an answer, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a definitive answer.

Speaker 15 So, this quest that Alex suddenly wanted to embark on,

Speaker 12 we started talking about it at the show.

Speaker 5 About how there are these things that you hear in your life.

Speaker 12 You hear them in movies, on TV.

Speaker 5 Maybe from a friend, a parent.

Speaker 21 The early bird catches the word.

Speaker 26 Actions speak louder than words.

Speaker 15 These little sayings, these adages

Speaker 19 that are supposed to be these little bits of wisdom, these true facts about how the world world works.

Speaker 7 And we just started to wonder: like, are they true?

Speaker 15 And could we take Alex's mission and start looking at other adages and just getting really in the weeds and being like, okay, is there a way to objectively figure out whether or not an adage is true or it isn't?

Speaker 15 Could we put them to the test in some sort of scientific, rigorous, kind of literal, almost to the degree of being absurd way to try to get an answer?

Speaker 15 So we picked some adages

Speaker 15 and the staff basically fact-checked them.

Speaker 15 Starting with

Speaker 28 number one,

Speaker 28 misery loves company.

Speaker 4 Okay, cool.

Speaker 20 So, so, so, so, so, so. First thing I did.

Speaker 5 Right, right, yeah. Oh, here we go.

Speaker 20 Was rope in producer Simon Adler. And then I went on Google and typed in Misery Loves Company study.
And to my surprise and delight,

Speaker 27 something popped up.

Speaker 23 We are rolling. We are rip roaring and ready to rock.

Speaker 20 This paper published in 2021 does Misery Love Company, an experimental investigation.

Speaker 12 And Kate, could we just have you introduce yourself? Sure.

Speaker 29 Yeah, my name is Kate Hassett. I'm an environmental economist, and I'm interested in the factors that make us do what we do, that make us tick, so to speak.

Speaker 20 And by sheer coincidence.

Speaker 29 I know where you're coming from.

Speaker 20 She is also a runner.

Speaker 29 When it comes to the particular kind of misery that long distance running can be sometimes.

Speaker 20 But yeah, we are going to move away from running. Okay.

Speaker 20 Because, you know, like an attitude should be sort of universal. Like, it should be true in multiple situations.
Yeah. Several years ago, Kate set up a series of experiments.

Speaker 29 In the first experiment, we wanted to know: do people actually believe this?

Speaker 20 Do people actually believe, like me, this adage to be true? That being miserable in company makes the misery a little less miserable.

Speaker 29 So we asked 100 people to complete a survey that said, Imagine, oh, glory be! Someone

Speaker 29 who lives in an apartment building.

Speaker 19 But what I love most of all is and

Speaker 22 my view of the park.

Speaker 20 they have this view of a green park yes here from my window i can see all of the park in its glory i can see the raccoons playing the pigeons flying overhead perched in their trees but the survey says this person and actually pretty much everybody in the building is about to lose their view of the park because of a um a construction project like a big highway going in across the street that sucks so the survey asks imagine you're like the landlord and you have to go tell one of these tenants that they're going to lose their view.

Speaker 29 If you want to minimize this person's disappointment, they're suffering. How would you inform them?

Speaker 13 Would you A

Speaker 20 go knock on their door?

Speaker 5 Oh, it's Tony.

Speaker 16 What can I do here for, Tony? Hey, Gregory, I'm sorry to give you the bad news.

Speaker 29 And just simply inform them.

Speaker 16 They're going to be doing a construction project across the street. They're going to put up a highway.
That means it's going to block your view of the park.

Speaker 29 That they'll lose their view of the park.

Speaker 19 Not my view of the park.

Speaker 12 Tony, I live for my view of the park.

Speaker 20 So that's option A. Option B

Speaker 16 Gregory, it's Tony.

Speaker 20 Everything's the same. Tony.
You tell them, look.

Speaker 16 Big highway outside.

Speaker 20 Construction is going to block the park view. But this time you tell them.

Speaker 16 It's going to block everybody's view of the park, the whole building.

Speaker 20 You're not the only one who's going to be affected by this.

Speaker 16 No one's going to be able to see the park anymore.

Speaker 20 Your neighbors are going to be losing this too. And so if you want to make this person feel better, which one do you do? Option A or option B?

Speaker 15 B. It's got to be B.

Speaker 20 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 20 that's what i said and when kate gave out the survey almost 70 of people they said they choose b so huh but there were still 30 who didn't but yeah sociopaths or something i know right like i honestly don't know why you wouldn't go with b I would I would definitely be one of the 70% but Kate says you know 70% it's a big number you know we took this to mean that people do by and large believe that misery actually does does love company it can you know alleviate suffering However,

Speaker 20 just because you believe something is true for everyone else doesn't mean it's true for you. So they did this second experiment.

Speaker 29 We tried to make it as similar as possible to experiment one.

Speaker 20 Everything was basically the same. There's a person in an apartment with the view, but this time the survey said, put yourself in the shoes of the person who's going to lose the view.

Speaker 20 And then one group of those people was told you're going to lose the view of the park, while a a second group was told, For your information, 85% of the other people in your building will also lose their view of the park.

Speaker 29 And then we asked them, both groups, alone or in company, please rate how disappointed you expect that you would be in this situation.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 20 when they looked at the results, they actually found that both groups were miserable. Everybody was just miserable regardless of whether or not their neighbors were going to be miserable or not.

Speaker 15 I would not have thought that.

Speaker 29 Yeah, we didn't find evidence that misery actually does love company.

Speaker 20 What they found is that people believe misery loves company, but it just didn't seem like true that misery loved company in practice.

Speaker 20 However, they did find strong evidence for something that they weren't actually looking for and that I think was like way more interesting, which is that happiness hates company.

Speaker 12 What does that even mean?

Speaker 20 Okay, so one of the things that they found is that if you're one of the lucky ones, if you have a great view of the park from your window, according to the survey results, you don't want anyone else to have it.

Speaker 15 Wow, you want to be the lucky golden ticket winner, and it makes it better.

Speaker 15 It makes the golden ticket better if nobody else has one. Yes.

Speaker 22 That's sick. We're sick, right?

Speaker 22 We're sick. Like, what does that say about us? I don't like that.
I really don't like that.

Speaker 29 I hear you.

Speaker 29 It's kind of a tough finding that we're social beings.

Speaker 29 I think it's just the way we're wired that, you know, what's going on with other people, you know,

Speaker 29 it's not very relevant, you know.

Speaker 20 I realize what Kate is getting at is the fact that we're always keeping track of what we have, of what everybody else has. And that's asking questions about like equity and envy and fairness.

Speaker 20 But I think I was actually asking something even simpler than that, which is just like, when you're running with a group of people and everybody is suffering together, does that fact that we're together and suffering do something for us?

Speaker 27 Is it helpful?

Speaker 4 Svenya, hello.

Speaker 17 Hi.

Speaker 20 It's so nice to talk to you.

Speaker 4 Yes, it is.

Speaker 20 And I felt like I really started to get an answer to that when I found Svenya.

Speaker 6 Svenya Wolf.

Speaker 6 I'm an assistant professor of sports psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and I research anything that has to do with groups and emotions in sport and in other performance domains.

Speaker 6 Amazing.

Speaker 5 Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker 20 I guess I'm curious about this in your professional opinion and also in like your opinion as a runner. Like, does misery love company?

Speaker 6 Yeah, there is a good body and research out there and it's really, it depends. That is the answer.
Not every misery loves every company. That's kind of what it comes down to.

Speaker 6 Misery brought on by fear, she says, where I'm fearful because the situation is dangerous.

Speaker 20 In that case, you probably do want to be around other people.

Speaker 6 Maybe make it less dangerous. So I want company.

Speaker 20 If I am sad, she says with sadness,

Speaker 20 you're often feeling a sense of loss. So you want company.

Speaker 6 To reconnect with others, to kind of like get security again.

Speaker 20 But the one emotion she said that kind of struck me was shame.

Speaker 6 Shame. That is something where I don't want other people to witness that.
So that's something where I don't want company.

Speaker 20 And I think for me,

Speaker 20 that day on the track,

Speaker 20 I think a part of me was feeling that. Like I felt sort of out of shape, like I wasn't doing well.

Speaker 27 I felt slow, like I was dragging.

Speaker 20 You're really getting into that rabbit hole of like, I'm not good enough. I'm pathetic.

Speaker 6 And then the last thing we want is other people witnessing this.

Speaker 27 But

Speaker 6 even in that situation where we want to be alone, where we want to withdraw from others, sharing the emotion ultimately makes us feel better.

Speaker 20 Svenia says this has been studied with groups of people on stationary bikes, with teams that have just lost big games.

Speaker 20 And no matter the setting, when people feel miserable together, it helps them perform better, like they pedal faster on the bikes. And it also helps them feel better.

Speaker 6 That's at least what the research suggests. So to me, the way like this resonates the most is if I'm in a miserable state, I'm yearning for company.

Speaker 6 I am like, I want, like, that's what I want. I want other people to comfort me.
I want people to reach out to me.

Speaker 6 And sometimes I don't have the energy to reach out, but I want that sense of like recognition and validation and like that somebody cares for me.

Speaker 6 So maybe I might rephrase it to

Speaker 6 misery can create company.

Speaker 6 How you feel?

Speaker 6 I feel okay.

Speaker 17 We can slow down because I'm definitely going too fast. Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely going to slow down.
I feel like I'm trying to make sure I'm not in anyone's way.

Speaker 5 No, you're fine.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I feel okay. I would come to the side.

Speaker 5 When I woke up this morning, I'd say it's ready.

Speaker 5 It's great.

Speaker 15 We have to take a break, but that gives you plenty of time to watch a pot boil, hold some horses, wait for a shoe to drop.

Speaker 7 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 28 Number two,

Speaker 32 an idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Speaker 12 I always heard it as the idle hands or the devil's workshop.

Speaker 30 Yeah, idle hands, idle minds, like people say it all sorts of ways. We're just going to go with idle minds.
Okay.

Speaker 30 And I picked this one because...

Speaker 15 Wait, wait, wait. Just tell everyone who you are first.

Speaker 30 Oh, yes. Okay.
I'm Sindhu Jnana Zamadham. I'm a producer here.

Speaker 30 And I picked this one because it's always felt pretty true to me.

Speaker 5 Huh. How, like, how so?

Speaker 30 Well, I mean, of course, the mind is never like idle, idle, but when I think of a mind that's like not focused on anything, like it's just sort of, you know, wandering around, that's what I'm thinking of as an idle mind.

Speaker 30 And I like try to avoid that mind as much as possible.

Speaker 5 Huh.

Speaker 30 Part of it is that I just feel guilty for not being productive.

Speaker 4 Same.

Speaker 30 But also, when I just sort of like sit around idle.

Speaker 24 Oh, it'd feel so good if I was in a bath right now.

Speaker 30 I wonder what Arcello's up to. All these thoughts start flooding in.

Speaker 24 How do ants like always seem to know exactly where they're going?

Speaker 30 Some of them are fun or helpful.

Speaker 30 Did I leave the stove on? But like, that joke I made last night was so stupid. Others.
I don't think anyone even smiles. You have to say something that offensively that it wasn't.

Speaker 26 Always do this.

Speaker 19 Can really suck.

Speaker 30 Like almost like the devil's in there trying to make me miserable.

Speaker 33 Yes, so a lot of religious writing tends to regard the wandering mind as something that's not particularly desirable.

Speaker 30 This is psychology professor Kalina Kristof-Hajiliva.

Speaker 33 I study spontaneous thought and in general, how people think.

Speaker 30 And when I called them to ask about this adage, they said it's deeply rooted in our culture.

Speaker 33 This industrial kind of capitalist work-based environment. There's this sense that there is a right way and there is a wrong way.
And when you wander, you depart from the right way.

Speaker 33 And that's sometimes how we think of our own minds as time on task.

Speaker 30 Like if I'm focused on something, that's good.

Speaker 33 Am I tasking right now? Or am I not tasking? If I'm not tasking, therefore I'm mind wandering.

Speaker 30 And that's bad.

Speaker 30 But Kalina says.

Speaker 33 That's not necessarily a very rich way of looking at mind wandering.

Speaker 30 That's the wrong way to think about it.

Speaker 7 Huh. Why?

Speaker 30 Well, first of all, you know that like devilish part I was describing of my mind where it can start to just like obsess and like ruminate over things?

Speaker 30 Like Kalina says that stuff isn't actually mind wandering anymore.

Speaker 33 Nope, no. For me, that's the opposite of mind wandering.

Speaker 30 Because when you start to obsess, you're back to a task of sorts. Like you're trying to solve some puzzle that your mind made for itself.

Speaker 33 So that's how people can get into like mental ruts, right?

Speaker 30 But Klina says when a mind truly wanders, like when it's free of any task,

Speaker 30 this isn't the devil's workshop at all.

Speaker 30 It's actually a place where something pretty beautiful is happening, like an act of creation.

Speaker 26 Wow.

Speaker 34 And it starts deep inside the brain with these bursts of neuronal firing called a sharp wave ripple.

Speaker 30 Sharp wave ripples.

Speaker 5 Have you heard of this? Oh, never heard of that. No, never.

Speaker 30 Okay, well, let me tell you, Lettis.

Speaker 5 Yeah, ripples.

Speaker 15 I love the sound of that.

Speaker 30 All right, so we're in the lab.

Speaker 5 Yeah, in the lab.

Speaker 30 So I went to go see one of the world experts on these ripples.

Speaker 14 I'm Yuri Buzzaki. I'm a professor of neuroscience at New York University.

Speaker 30 He showed me around his lab, rooms filled with wires and raises and boxes of fruit loops.

Speaker 14 Rats and mice love fruit loops.

Speaker 30 Is that part of the experiment or just because you want to give them something nice?

Speaker 14 You want to have a good report with them.

Speaker 5 You ever want to be friends. They are pets.

Speaker 4 You're colleagues.

Speaker 30 And one of the things he does in his lab is he listens to the brains of these animals, specifically the hippocampus and and the way he does this is he like sticks these little electrodes into it so that he can see or really hear these sharp wave ripples okay um so let's say he takes a rat and plops him into a maze and maybe we can like play a song

Speaker 30 to represent just like the various neurons firing here and there as he like moves through and you know experiences like a turn over here or like okay runs straight down this path like you know i don't know what else happens in a maze.

Speaker 5 Like, whatever, looking up at the researcher, maybe, like, yeah, and maybe you're smelling something and it's behind this wall, but I can't get behind the wall. It's nice.

Speaker 30 Um, and Brat makes it through the maze. He gets to the end and stops.

Speaker 30 And, you know, he's just sort of like chilling, eating his food, drinking some water. And his brain is just sort of like humming around neurons firing here and there.

Speaker 30 When all of a sudden,

Speaker 30 there's this burst of activity, like tens of thousands of neurons fire all at once in this coordinated explosion.

Speaker 14 Extraordinary powerful synchrony.

Speaker 30 Then it happens again,

Speaker 14 then again,

Speaker 30 and again. These explosions of activity, these are sharp wave ripples.

Speaker 30 And they're the biggest, most synchronized firing of neurons that happen in our brain, short of like a seizure.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 30 And Yuri says like when you look at them closely, you see.

Speaker 14 These are snippets that are compressed versions of learned information.

Speaker 30 They're actually just little sections of what the lab rat just experienced getting replayed, but super fast, something like 10 to 20 times faster.

Speaker 5 It's like

Speaker 22 it's like instant replay.

Speaker 30 About like a little.

Speaker 15 But like it's like it's like it's like sped up instant replay.

Speaker 30 Exactly, exactly. And not the whole thing, but like little parts of it, basically.

Speaker 12 Highlights.

Speaker 15 Highlights real.

Speaker 5 Highlight real.

Speaker 30 And these sharp wave ripples, Yuri says they're basically the very beginning of memories being formed.

Speaker 14 They select which information will be remembered and which will go to the trash can.

Speaker 30 And he's not like consciously experiencing this.

Speaker 15 Oh, so this is even, this is below consciousness.

Speaker 30 This is all subconscious.

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 30 And when the rat goes to sleep that night, those ripples that played earlier, they just keep rippling.

Speaker 30 And this is where the memory is like actually getting made, where it consolidates into something that lasts.

Speaker 14 Well, how is it possible that I experienced something once and I will remember it forever? And the answer is that you

Speaker 14 experienced it consciously once,

Speaker 14 but the rest of the brain will experience snippets of it during the sharp repulse a thousand times every single night.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 30 There's more. The next day, we can stay with our rat, our little lab rat, wakes back up and, you know, a postdoc carries him back to the same maze.
You know,

Speaker 30 and now when he's just sitting there and again, just like sort of resting before starting the run,

Speaker 30 guess what we see?

Speaker 15 Oh, the same, the same, the song playing not as replay, but as preplay.

Speaker 30 Yeah, exactly. A sharp wave ripple.
And actually, his lab has found that like the direction of the ripple coincides with whether whether it's like a memory or like a planning ripple.

Speaker 14 When the selection is backward,

Speaker 14 we are talking about memory. When the selection is forward,

Speaker 14 we are talking about planning.

Speaker 15 No,

Speaker 13 that's crazy. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 Wow, that's so literal.

Speaker 30 Huh. So all the stuff that he described happens in rats.
It happens in us too.

Speaker 30 And, you know, that experience when you can't seem to solve a problem or like, there's this word you really want, but like, it's just not, it's like on the tip of your tongue, and you don't have it.

Speaker 30 And then you just sort of like walk away from it, and all of a sudden, like, bam, it's there.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 14 This is the time the sharp ways come very handy. And you disengage, and then a couple of sharp waves occur in your brain.
They prime the circuitry for you, and then you can recall it.

Speaker 30 Like, you've left the task, but these like little, you know, subconscious neural things are just working for you. Yeah.

Speaker 30 I also asked him how these sharp wave ripples connect to like mind-wandery thoughts.

Speaker 30 Out of seemingly nowhere, I have this like memory of

Speaker 30 my mom cooking a specific meal or something like that. Is that connected at all to this sharp wave ripple activity?

Speaker 14 I never measured it. I don't know, but I bet yes.
So sharp wave ripples are good candidates for that.

Speaker 30 And actually, like, there was a nature paper earlier this year that made this exact connection that these like sharp wave ripples seem to be the brain mechanism underpinning those like thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere.

Speaker 5 Huh.

Speaker 12 So how often do these ripples happen?

Speaker 30 Yeah, so he says that they can happen once every 10 seconds or even once a second. But the one time they definitely do not happen is like when your mind is focused on something.

Speaker 14 If you are listening to me now, I guarantee you you don't have a single sharp wave.

Speaker 14 These ripples only happen, Yuri says, when we are idling, when we are not focusing on something, when we are not attending.

Speaker 33 It's almost like a digestion, right? So you go around acquiring experiences. If you don't have a digestion system, you're not going to extract anything from all these experiences.

Speaker 30 Right? So in other words, without idling?

Speaker 14 You are nobody.

Speaker 14 You are a zombie.

Speaker 15 Okay, so where does this, where does this all leave us with our adage?

Speaker 30 I just, I'm like realizing how off I was about it.

Speaker 7 Like,

Speaker 30 idling is pretty important.

Speaker 5 It uh

Speaker 30 picks our memories, like, yeah, solidifies our memories, imagines new things.

Speaker 30 So, yeah, I guess like it is a workshop. It's just like not for the devil.
It's like, it's like a workshop where we make

Speaker 30 our sense of our world and

Speaker 30 who we are.

Speaker 5 Yeah, beautiful.

Speaker 15 Let that mind of yours idle for a bit.

Speaker 5 We will be right back.

Speaker 18 I'm Lulu, and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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And listen to your hairdresser for a change.

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Speaker 15 Hello, welcome back. This is Radio Lab.
I'm Latif Nasser. We have already covered two adages today.
One was mostly true, one was definitely not.

Speaker 15 And so for this third and final adage, we decided to take on one

Speaker 2 that it seems just has to be true.

Speaker 28 Number three.

Speaker 32 What goes up

Speaker 28 must

Speaker 28 come down.

Speaker 15 And fact-checking this one, we have...

Speaker 4 Okay, here we go. Here we go.

Speaker 2 Producers.

Speaker 6 Annie McEwen. It's irrefutable.

Speaker 15 And Maria Paz Gutierrez.

Speaker 31 Just a part of our lives.

Speaker 15 It's basically a law of physics.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 31 I mean, for example,

Speaker 31 if you take an egg

Speaker 31 and you throw it up.

Speaker 5 Up.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 31 Down it comes.

Speaker 13 Definitely came down.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Feels very inevitable.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Came down confirmed.

Speaker 31 But as we stood there looking down at our egg on the ground, we thought, wait a minute. From a journalistic fact-checking perspective, all this proves is that when an egg goes up, it must come down.

Speaker 31 In this case, there were 1.8 seconds between the up, go,

Speaker 31 and the down.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 24 And we started to wonder: like, what if we could find something that doesn't come down like right away? Like, maybe there are things out there in the world that test this adage.

Speaker 24 And if we can find those things, is there a chance, a teeny tiny chance, that we could disprove it?

Speaker 24 Even just a little bit?

Speaker 12 Okay, well, what kind of things?

Speaker 20 Ah, the sweet sounds in New York.

Speaker 31 Well, we went outside to get inspired.

Speaker 20 I wonder if that's blood or ketchup.

Speaker 31 And after a bit of haphazard research into things that go up, in which

Speaker 31 we chased pigeons.

Speaker 24 You chased them.

Speaker 31 I chased them.

Speaker 31 Okay.

Speaker 24 Hello. We're here to look for balloons.

Speaker 31 Got some helium balloons.

Speaker 10 Uh-huh.

Speaker 24 And then they're all dudes with their big pants.

Speaker 31 Annie even tried to talk to some skateboarders

Speaker 31 about jumping.

Speaker 35 Excuse us.

Speaker 31 Excuse us. Will you talk to us?

Speaker 35 Can we ask you a question?

Speaker 20 You guys want to talk to us?

Speaker 9 No? Okay.

Speaker 31 But then, it's a really pretty, sunny day. As we were looking up at the sky,

Speaker 30 we thought, clouds.

Speaker 7 It looks like The Simpsons.

Speaker 9 It does look like The Simpsons.

Speaker 31 They're basically just water that is up. And so we wondered, how long does it take for water to leave the ground, rise up into the air, become a fluffy white cloud,

Speaker 31 and then come back down as rain.

Speaker 31 We looked it up, and the average is about 10 days.

Speaker 15 Really?

Speaker 12 That's the lifespan of a cloud? Yeah.

Speaker 15 I never thought of that, the lifespan of a cloud.

Speaker 13 That actually doesn't seem that long.

Speaker 24 Well, but there are a bunch of things that stay up in the air longer than clouds, like small particles of dust.

Speaker 24 blown by the wind into the sky can stay up there hanging out in the atmosphere for around 20 days.

Speaker 26 Hmm.

Speaker 31 And then there are these spiders that do this thing called ballooning, where they shoot out these long threads from their butts.

Speaker 31 And using the wind and the Earth's electric field, they lift off the ground and fly through the air for hundreds of miles, traveling across cities, across deserts, across oceans.

Speaker 31 And we don't really know how long they stay up there, but we do know they can only go without eating for about 25 days. So they do have to eventually come down to land on top of your head.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 15 But okay, so max 25 days between up and down?

Speaker 24 No, Latif, no, no.

Speaker 17 Because then there's this bird.

Speaker 24 This little bird that can do something so amazing, it is just ridiculous.

Speaker 32 It is ridiculous. It is.
So here's the thing about Swifts.

Speaker 24 This is natural history author Scott Wiedensahl, who told us about the common Swift.

Speaker 32 They are the most aerial of birds.

Speaker 24 They're blackish brown, could fit in the palm of your hand, have wings shaped like a boomerang, and they do basically everything in the air.

Speaker 32 They eat nothing but flying insects.

Speaker 24 It's thought that the two hemispheres of their brain take turns sleeping so they can sleep while they fly.

Speaker 32 They are the only group of birds that mate on the wing.

Speaker 22 Wait, it has sex in the air?

Speaker 15 How does it do that?

Speaker 13 Are they both flying?

Speaker 31 Oh, yeah. I mean, pictures on the internet saying they're just stacked on each other.

Speaker 4 They're just stacked.

Speaker 7 They're just stacked.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 32 And if they could figure out a way to to carry an egg and incubate it on the wing, I'm sure they would do it.

Speaker 15 Oh, because you can't lay an egg while you're migrating.

Speaker 15 That would be a mistake.

Speaker 32 Yes.

Speaker 32 And when they migrate to Africa, from the moment they leave their breeding grounds in Central Europe, all the way south to Africa through the entirety of the winter in Africa and all the way back on their spring migration, they never touch ground.

Speaker 24 These birds lift up off the ground and don't come down again for 10 months of the year.

Speaker 15 10 months of the year?

Speaker 35 Yes, it flies.

Speaker 24 It flies for 10 straight months.

Speaker 32 They only come to the ground for the shortest period of time that they possibly can manage.

Speaker 32 They have stretched the thread connecting them to the ground absolutely to the breaking point.

Speaker 32 Wow.

Speaker 24 And these birds, because they don't often need them, have very tiny legs and feet. So tiny that...

Speaker 5 They can't walk.

Speaker 32 All they can do is cling.

Speaker 12 Wait, they can't walk at all?

Speaker 24 No.

Speaker 24 And it made us think: like, just like that fish that long ago pulled itself out of the ocean and became a creature of land, maybe the common swift is on its way to becoming a creature purely of the sky.

Speaker 31 But then we thought,

Speaker 31 what about us?

Speaker 31 Like, we have astronauts. You know the drill.
Astronauts, unlike eggs or clouds or birds, they have rockets.

Speaker 31 Rockets that have taken them farther than any other species has gone before.

Speaker 24 And then

Speaker 24 once they're up there,

Speaker 24 they can just stay up there.

Speaker 24 Just totally floating, defying our adage, we're going to get Tim to spin me around.

Speaker 5 somersaults olympic caliber flip technique back flips then he could come right back up again

Speaker 9 they are truly up like superman

Speaker 24 and theoretically if they had enough food and supplies they could stay up there forever never coming down again

Speaker 31 So, in conclusion, we have found something that disproves the adage, and therefore, the adage is incorrect.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 31 We are done here. Yes.

Speaker 24 At least that's what we thought.

Speaker 17 Until we talked to Dr.

Speaker 31 Michelle Faller.

Speaker 10 I am an astronomer and a science communicator.

Speaker 31 Who told us that, well, you see, although it might look like the astronauts are up there floating.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 31 They're not.

Speaker 5 They're not?

Speaker 10 Absolutely not. No.

Speaker 31 They're not flying. They're not weightless.
They're not in zero-g, but instead up there in the space station.

Speaker 10 The reason you can put your pen right beside you, it'll just float when you let go of it. The pen and you are falling towards the earth at exactly the same rate

Speaker 10 what they're falling they're falling yes every second of every day they're up there their whole space containment their their their capsule their their their space station everything's falling they are freely falling towards the earth oh my god i mean if you've ever been on like a really great roller coaster that drops that kind of thing i mean that that is what they feel that they feel like they're falling oh that's nauseating Oh yeah, some people get very sick.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 12 But then

Speaker 15 why don't they fall straight down and just smack into the earth?

Speaker 24 Well, Michelle says that these astronauts and the space station, they're not falling like how an egg falls when I throw it.

Speaker 5 Two, three,

Speaker 24 straight up in the air.

Speaker 31 But more like if I took that egg and just

Speaker 31 threw it as hard as I could. As it's traveling, it is technically falling.
It's being pulled down towards the earth, but it's also zooming forward.

Speaker 31 And so it travels a certain distance before it inevitably comes down.

Speaker 24 Okay, now imagine the egg is a space station.

Speaker 24 And it's just been thrown by rockets upwards and curving away from the earth into the sky, going so fast

Speaker 10 and traveling so high and so far about 200 miles up that though they are falling, instead of hitting the earth, earth the earth curves away as you fall and you actually kind of keep curving around the earth and so every second of every day that it's up there it basically keeps missing the earth

Speaker 24 never landing forever coming down and around

Speaker 24 and down and around and down and around this wonderful kind of stable path called an orbit

Speaker 15 But haven't we also shot things into space that did not go into orbit? Like we did the story on the Voyager probes, right? Like we literally shot them out of the whole solar system.

Speaker 15 Like you can't you say that those are just going up and up and up?

Speaker 5 They're not falling.

Speaker 24 Well, actually, they are.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 24 According to Michelle, everything is in some way going down and around.

Speaker 10 The Earth is always falling towards the sun.

Speaker 10 You know, the sun is falling towards the center of the galaxy, which is a big black hole.

Speaker 10 We go around the center of the galaxy at about half a million miles an hour. So, right now, you are freely falling towards a giant black hole at half a million miles an hour.

Speaker 5 You personally, Ray Paul.

Speaker 4 You personally,

Speaker 5 yes.

Speaker 31 Oh, and what's the galaxy falling?

Speaker 5 The galaxy is also freely falling.

Speaker 10 You got it.

Speaker 10 The Milky Way galaxy is freely falling towards the middle of a galactic cluster at more than a million miles an hour. Don't you see it?

Speaker 5 We're always falling.

Speaker 10 Nothing is holding you up.

Speaker 10 falling, always falling, always falling, always

Speaker 10 falling, always

Speaker 10 falling, always falling and seriously.

Speaker 10 I just feel like throwing up.

Speaker 10 Yeah, me too. I really, really feel like throwing up.

Speaker 10 Whoa.

Speaker 26 Uh,

Speaker 12 so, so, is this one true or no?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 4 um,

Speaker 31 I think, yes, it is, but it's different than what we originally thought.

Speaker 31 Like, when we started out, we thought down was like falling on the pavement like an egg, or falling to earth as rain, or or landing on a branch like a bird.

Speaker 31 Things go up and then they must come down and then they're down.

Speaker 31 But

Speaker 31 what we found is that all that stuff that appears to be down isn't really down,

Speaker 31 but it's actually in a perpetual state of coming down.

Speaker 31 So maybe it's not what goes up must come down, but really

Speaker 28 everything that is

Speaker 28 must come down

Speaker 7 forever.

Speaker 5 That sounds depressing.

Speaker 6 I don't know. I mean, like, I think it's really cool.

Speaker 24 Like,

Speaker 31 it's almost as if we're on this rock, but we're just like those astronauts

Speaker 31 floating and somersaulting and

Speaker 31 like

Speaker 10 flying. Like Superman.

Speaker 7 Forever

Speaker 28 and ever

Speaker 28 and ever

Speaker 5 and ever

Speaker 5 and ever

Speaker 5 and ever

Speaker 5 and ever

Speaker 28 and ever

Speaker 28 necessity

Speaker 28 is the mother of invention.

Speaker 28 Yeah, I guess so, but let's think about all the things that were invented by accident, where like no one was even trying to invent shit that day and they ended up making a new medication or discovering a new element or whatever.

Speaker 15 Big thanks to Chioki Iansen, who performed our voice of wisdom for this episode.

Speaker 28 Morgan Freeman was not available.

Speaker 15 If his voice sounds familiar, it's because he does the underwriting for NPR.

Speaker 28 I spend most of my life as a disembodied voice.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Tell me about it.

Speaker 15 This episode was reported and produced by Alex Neeson, Simon Adler, Matt Kilty, Sindhun Yana Sambuddan, W. Harry Fortuna, Annie McEwen, and Maria Paz Gutierrez.

Speaker 28 Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Speaker 37 What are you saying here?

Speaker 37 We need some space?

Speaker 15 It was edited by Alex Neeson and Pat Walters, fact-checked by Emily Krieger and Diane Kelly, and has original music and sound design by Jeremy Blue.

Speaker 32 Good things come to those who wait.

Speaker 37 This one I hate. Awful things also come to those who wait

Speaker 15 so what are we doing here what's happening special thanks to pamela dark daniella murcillo and jonathan schooler as well as amanda breen akmal tajahan patrick keen stephanie lescheck and alexandria iona from the upright citizens brigade to alex's crew we run uptown and coaches ref and patty from circa 95 julia lucas and coffee from the no name program diane kelly hilly bressler kim ward dwong and tom Friedman.

Speaker 28 I don't know that I would use any of these in

Speaker 28 my regular life.

Speaker 15 And of course, thank you for listening. I'm Latip Nasser.
This is Radio Lab. We'll be back soon with more stories, more questions, and if I'm being honest, questionable wisdom.

Speaker 15 But I can promise it'll be fact-checked.

Speaker 17 So, until then.

Speaker 36 Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latzv Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 36 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 36 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yanan Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster.

Speaker 36 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 38 Hi, my name is Treza. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK.

Speaker 38 Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Saymans Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 39 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P.

Speaker 38 Sloan Foundation.