All by myself
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
French president Emmanuel Macron recently announced that Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa painting will be moved to her very own room at the Louvre, as part of a plan to renovate the iconic museum.
And that got us thinking. Once the crowds have gone home every night, the Mona Lisa will be all by herself, with no other paintings to smile at enigmatically across the room.
So this week, we are talking all things isolation. We start things off by finding out about a key cognitive skill that may have been impacted by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Next, we discover more about the history of loneliness and the impact it can have on your health, before discussing what evolutionary roads isolated island species will go down.
Plus, we’re joined by Professor Jonathan Harrington from the University of Munich. He reveals how our accents can be affected by isolation. That, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenters: Marnie Chesterton, with Christine Yohannes and Affelia Wibisono. Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Dan Welsh, William Hornbrook and Imaan Moin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
| 0:01.5 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | It's such a wonderful listen. |
| 0:05.6 | So nice. |
| 0:06.5 | There are loads more like it on BBC sounds. |
| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.6 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.8 | Sort of expecting that every week now. |
| 0:45.0 | So this weekend, I was in a car with a friend discussing the end of the world. It was her birthday and there's something about birthdays that leads to big questions of time and space. |
| 0:51.5 | Okay, mainly time. I added the space because Because have you heard of the Fermi paradox? |
| 0:58.2 | In the 1950s, Enrico Fermi, Nobel Prize winning Italian physicist, asked why, given the billions of |
| 1:05.1 | planets out there, we hadn't yet bumped into aliens. One depressing answer is that any civilization powerful enough to investigate life beyond its own planet |
| 1:15.4 | is also powerful enough to wipe itself out pretty soon afterwards. |
| 1:20.8 | It's the sort of thought experiment I try not to bring up at birthday parties, |
| 1:25.1 | but it does mean that odds are we are the only smart planet |
... |
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