Future You Is a Stranger, Babylonian Trig, Reversed Organs
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about why it’s hard to save money for our future; how Babylonians knew the Pythagorean theorem; and situs inversus.
It's hard to save money because we see our future selves as strangers by Steffie Drucker
- Johnson, S. (2021, August 10). Brain hacks for saving money. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/how-to-save-money
- Qin, P., & Northoff, G. (2011). How is our self related to midline regions and the default-mode network? NeuroImage, 57(3), 1221–1233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.028
Did the ancient Babylonians discover the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras did? by Briana Brownell
- Calabretto, S. (2021, August 13). A new angle on ancient trigonometry. Cosmos Magazine. https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/mathematics/babylonian-tablet-trigonometry-pythagorean-triplets/
- Plimpton 322. (2021). Math.ubc.ca. https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m446-03/pl322/pl322.html
- Mansfield, D. F., & Wildberger, N. J. (2017). Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry. Historia Mathematica, 44(4), 395–419. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2017.08.001
- Mansfield, D. F. (2021). Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles. Foundations of Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0
- Pythagorean theorem | Definition & History | Britannica. (2021). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Pythagorean-theorem
Some People Are Born With Their Organs Reversed by Reuben Westmaas originally aired June 1, 2018 https://omnystudio.com/p/curiosity-daily/clips/b453641c-9bf5-427e-acbd-ab530157338a
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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 Curiosity.com. |
| 0:06.5 | I'm Cody Goth. |
| 0:07.5 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:08.5 | Today you learn about how the way we see ourselves in the future makes it hard to save money, why the Pythagorean theorem may |
| 0:15.0 | predate Pythagoras, and why some people are born with their organs reversed. |
| 0:20.3 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:24.7 | Saving money is hard. |
| 0:29.4 | Saving money to use decades into the future is even harder. |
| 0:35.6 | And one reason for that is that your brain sees your future self as a total stranger. |
| 0:41.9 | You see, like the ghosts in a Christmas carol, there are at least three versions of you, your past, your |
| 0:43.1 | presence, and your future self. |
| 0:45.9 | You do small favors for your future self all the time, |
| 0:49.3 | like laying out your clothes and packing a lunch |
| 0:52.1 | so that future you has a smooth morning. |
| 0:55.1 | But we can also be unkind to our future selves by putting off bigger problems or decisions. |
| 1:01.5 | When it comes to something super long term like saving for retirement, |
| 1:05.8 | we struggle and that's because that future self is so unknown that it's almost |
| 1:11.7 | like saving for a stranger. And brain science backs this up. |
| 1:16.5 | When we think about ourselves, an area in the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex |
| 1:21.3 | lights up. But that region quiets down when we think about |
| 1:24.8 | other people especially folks we don't have much in common with and when we think |
| 1:30.0 | about our future selves the medial prefrontal cortex stays dark, as if we're thinking about a total |
... |
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