Do Masks Stunt Emotional Development? Plus: Human Ears Perk Up, Too, and Why Your Shower Curtain Clings To You
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about the "shower-curtain effect," the mystery of why your shower curtain will randomly cling to you; whether masks affect our emotional development; and why humans perk up their ears.
No One Knows Why the Shower Curtain Will Randomly Cling to You by Joanie Faletto
- Why Does the Shower Curtain Move Toward the Water? (2001, July 11). Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-the-shower-curta/
- Inglis-Arkell, E. (2014, June 3). The Enduring Mystery of Why Your Shower Curtain Attacks You. io9. https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-enduring-mystery-of-why-your-shower-curtain-attacks-1585050901
Do masks affect our emotional development? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Nate)
- Valente, D., Theurel, A., & Gentaz, E. (2017). The role of visual experience in the production of emotional facial expressions by blind people: a review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(2), 483–497. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1338-0
- Martins, A. T., Faísca, L., Vieira, H., & Gonçalves, G. (2019). Emotional Recognition and Empathy both in Deaf and Blind Adults. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 24(2), 119–127. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/eny046
- Wiseman, R. (1995). The megalab truth test. Nature, 373(6513), 391–391. https://doi.org/10.1038/373391a0
- Kraus, M. W. (2017). Voice-only communication enhances empathic accuracy. American Psychologist, 72(7), 644–654. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000147
- Kret, M. E., & de Gelder, B. (2012). Islamic Headdress Influences How Emotion is Recognized from the Eyes. Frontiers in Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00110
- Mai, X., Ge, Y., Tao, L., Tang, H., Liu, C., & Luo, Y.-J. (2011). Eyes Are Windows to the Chinese Soul: Evidence from the Detection of Real and Fake Smiles. PLoS ONE, 6(5), e19903. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0019903
Humans perk up their ears, too by Kelsey Donk
- Our animal inheritance: Humans perk up their ears, too, when they hear interesting sounds. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/su-oai070720.php
- Strauss, D. J., Corona-Strauss, F. I., Schroeer, A., Philipp Flotho, Hannemann, R., & Hackley, S. A. (2020, July 3). Vestigial auriculomotor activity indicates the direction of auditory attention in humans. ELife; eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd. https://elifesciences.org/articles/54536
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/do-masks-stunt-emotional-development-plus-human-ears-perk-up-too-and-why-your-shower-curtain-clings-to-you
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:04.8 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about the |
| 0:09.4 | mystery of why your shower curtain will randomly cling to you. |
| 0:13.0 | Then we'll answer a listener question about whether masks affect our emotional development. |
| 0:18.0 | You'll also learn about why humans perk up their ears. |
| 0:21.0 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:23.0 | Unless you've got a lot of open windows, bathrooms generally don't experience random gusts of wind. |
| 0:30.1 | And yet, you've probably had that eerie experience with a shower curtain randomly reaches out and clings to you. |
| 0:37.0 | Why does this happen? |
| 0:39.0 | spoiler alert, we don't know. |
| 0:42.0 | A scientific explanation has alluded physicists for years. No one knows |
| 0:47.2 | exactly what causes the so-called shower curtain effect. But you're here to learn what we know, not what we don't know. So let's talk about a couple |
| 0:56.4 | theories that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon. The first theory is that the hot air from the shower rises, so colder air from outside the shower |
| 1:06.1 | rushes in to fill the void. That pushes the curtain right into your damp leg. |
| 1:11.1 | Definitely an interesting theory and one you could probably test by taking an ice-cold |
| 1:16.2 | shower instead of a hot one. Well it turns out someone actually did that and the curtain still |
| 1:22.1 | clung to them. |
| 1:23.8 | Next, another popular guess is Bernoulli's principle. |
| 1:28.6 | This basically states that the movement of the water |
| 1:31.6 | causes movement of the air in the shower, making the curtain drift inwards. |
| 1:37.2 | But at least one scientist points out that Bernoulli's principle doesn't apply to droplets, |
| 1:42.3 | like the spray of your shower head. |
... |
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