What Came Before the Big Bang?
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2021
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about how hoarders’ brains see their belongings; why dolphins consciously lower their heart rates; and what scientists think happened before the big bang.
How Hoarders' Brains See Their Belongings by Ashley Hamer
- Tolin, D. F., Stevens, M. C., Villavicencio, A. L., Norberg, M. M., Calhoun, V. D., Frost, R. O., Steketee, G., Rauch, S. L., & Pearlson, G. D. (2012). Neural Mechanisms of Decision Making in Hoarding Disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 69(8), 832. https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.1980
- Szalavitz, M., & Time.com. (2012, August 7). Inside the hoarder’s brain: A unique problem with decision-making. CNN Digital; CNN Health. https://www.cnn.com/2012/08/07/health/inside-hoarders-brain/index.html
- DSM-V: Hoarding New Mental-Disorder Diagnoses. (2013, May 3). Promises Behavioral Health. https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-blog/dsm-v-hoarding-new-mental-disorder-diagnoses/
Dolphins consciously decrease their heart rates before diving by Grant Currin
- How dolphins avoid “the bends”. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/f-hda111720.php
- Fahlman, A., Cozzi, B., Manley, M., Jabas, S., Malik, M., Blawas, A., & Janik, V. M. (2020). Conditioned Variation in Heart Rate During Static Breath-Holds in the Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Frontiers in Physiology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2020.604018
- Fox, A. (2020, December). Dolphins May Be Able to Control Their Heart Rates. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-may-be-able-control-their-heart-rate-180976422/
What Came Before the Big Bang? originally aired September 3, 2018: https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/what-came-before-the-big-bang-diner-designs-and-th
Powers of Ten (1977): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-came-before-the-big-bang
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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 |
| 0:04.6 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Goff, and I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how |
| 0:08.9 | hoarders brains to see their belongings, how dolphins can consciously lower their heart rates, and what came |
| 0:15.0 | before the Big Bang. |
| 0:16.5 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:19.2 | Have you ever wondered why excessive hoarding happens? Well, people with hoarding disorder have an |
| 0:24.4 | uncontrollable urge to accumulate possessions and they experience mental |
| 0:28.8 | anguish at the thought of parting with them. That might sound like obsessive compulsive disorder or |
| 0:34.2 | OCD and until about 10 years ago that's what psychiatrists thought too. But in |
| 0:39.9 | 2012 a brain imaging study showed just how different this disorder really is. |
| 0:45.9 | And on the bright side, that paves the way for new treatments. |
| 0:50.1 | The study included about 100 participants. |
| 0:52.5 | Roughly a third were diagnosed with hoarding disorder. |
| 0:55.6 | Another third had OCD, and the final third were normal controls. |
| 1:00.2 | The participants brought a few pieces of their junk mail to the lab with the assurance that they would get it back at the end of the experiments |
| 1:07.3 | Their mail was labeled yours and shuffled in with junk mail from the lab that was labeled hours. |
| 1:14.2 | The participants went in a brain scanner and then had to decide whether to keep or shred |
| 1:18.9 | each piece of mail. |
| 1:20.9 | Unsurprisingly, the people with hoarding disorder chose to keep more of their own male than the other two groups |
| 1:26.2 | But it was the activity in their brains that fascinated the researchers |
| 1:29.8 | The anterior cingulate cortex is a region associated with decision-making, |
| 1:35.0 | especially in times of uncertainty, and it was more active than the other groups. |
... |
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