Listener Questions #46

26:14Okay, next up we have a question from Zach number two, the second tier, Zach. Let's go. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My name's Zach Wienersmith. I'm a seven-year-old girl from Indonesia. I was listening to your discussion on Inner Cosmos, and you referred to this idea of an alien being able to experience quantum effects. And it was my understanding that once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes. You can see, like, the effects of the interference, and you can use wave functions to predict them. But I did see how it would be possible to have a, like, sensory apparatus that couples to some system without eliminating quantum weirdness.

26:58Like, if you looked inside a Schrodinger's cat box that had two cats in it, presumably the cats don't see each other as quantum. Only you outside the system do. And similar for the Wigner's friend thought experiment. Love the pod. Thanks for answering my question. This Zach doesn't sound to me like a seven-year-old girl from Indonesia. What do you think? Are we being pranked? You know, we might be being pranked. And I don't want to judge any seven-year-old girls for having deep voices. However, I do suspect that maybe this is the Zach that lives at home with me. Well, here's hoping that Zach number two climbs in the rankings and one day reaches Zach number one status.

27:44Well, it's a tough competition, but I wish him the best of luck. All right. Well, this is a great question from Zach. Thank you very much. And some background. What he's referring to is some speculation I've done in my recent book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Where I was wondering about how aliens might do science and if they think about the universe the same way. and was speculating that something that influences the way we think about the universe that we might not always be accustomed to confronting is our basic senses, that the way we see and the way we hear and the way we touch influences our sort of internal mental intuitive language and the answers we express about the universe.

28:25And so, for example, you know, when we see images from the James Webb Space Telescope, they're shifted into the visible range. Or when we talk about what is a quantum particle? We try to express it in terms that are familiar to us. And often that's not really possible. And so I was wondering if aliens could have a really alien experience in a way that couldn't be translated to our experience. And one way to imagine that is to think, well, we struggle to experience quantum effects. Is it possible for there to be aliens to have such a different experience that they could, for example, interact with the quantum world in a different way and have a different kind of experience, a superposition experience where you're like seeing two states simultaneously.

29:09You know, imagine like a photon that might hit your left eye or your right eye. We see it hit your left eye or your right eye. But is it maybe possible for an alien to like experience both branches of that wave function? And I just want to interject to say that another thing I enjoyed about your book is that you talk about how animals experience the world differently and how we can maybe use that to think about how aliens might experience the universe differently. Yeah. Since we haven't met any aliens yet, we're limited to what we can study here on Earth. And already here on Earth, we see a huge variety of senses and likely experiences.

29:41But of course, we can't really tap into that. And so Zach's comment essentially is like, hold on a second. Is it possible to experience quantum weirdness? Maybe there's some constraint from quantum mechanics here that tells us already that Daniel's fanciful speculation is impossible. And he says, once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes. And is Zach right or is Daniel right? The short answer is that since we're talking about experience, there's a consciousness aspect to this, which means that physics can't cover this whole question. And I'm going to drive a huge truck through that loophole at the end here.

30:23But let's back up and talk about quantum amplitudes and seeing quantum stuff. What does that mean? What are we talking about here? Let's give the background to Zach's question. And I think the first thing to talk about is like, well, what do we mean when we say seeing, right? We're experiencing the world somehow. And so simplify the whole thing from like the world and a person, whatever, and just imagine you have like a photon. That's the thing you're trying to see. And then you have the eyeball. That's the sensor that's trying to see it. Okay. And so in physics, when we say take a measurement, what we do is we try to use some sensor and we try to use the world to change its state so that we can read it out.

31:02Right? So for example, I have this sensor that's my left eyeball and my right eyeball. And I shoot a photon that might go to the left or to the right. And then I want the left eyeball to indicate if it hits the right, right? Very basic. And so the idea is to correlate the sensor with the photon, right? You want a correlation between the two. If it's going to go to the left, you want the left sensor to zing. And so this is really quantum entanglement. We want to entangle the sensor with the photon. If the photon has a possibility to be left or right, then we want the sensor to be entangled with it, meaning that now we can think about them together as one quantum system with two states.

31:47Instead of it just being the photon that could be left or right, now we have the whole system, the photon and the sensor, and there's two states. One state is the photon went left and the sensor read left, you saw it in your left eyeball. The other one is the photon went right and your right eyeball saw it, right? So you just align the sensor with the photon and you're entangled them because now the off diagonals are not allowed. By off diagonals, do you mean you can't make type one or type two errors? Yeah, exactly. You've entangled them, which means that like photon going left, but right eyeball seeing it is no longer allowed.

32:23In the same way, we talk about entanglement from like particles spin up and spin down. If one is spin up, the other one has to be spin down. That's just a constraint, right? It's a constraint on the possible outcomes. And that's what entanglement is. And that's what's happening here. So the sensor measures it, meaning you've entangled the sensor with the system, with the photon. Okay. And you can just say that, you can be like, and no mistakes. I mean, especially with human eyes. Yeah, no, we're here and we're imagining a perfect sensor, but you could definitely add off diagonal elements here from imperfect sensors, absolutely.

32:57And so this isn't destroying quantum behavior. Entanglement itself is quantum behavior, right? This is all entanglement is. And Tanglewind seems fancy and spooky and whatever, but it's just correlated outcomes, essentially. And there's some subtleties there because you can have quantum versus classical correlations. But right now, we're just talking about correlated outcomes. And so the idea is the sensor and the eyeball are now in a superposition of both possibilities. They're connected and they're not independent. And so if you have a system like we've just described, the photon and the eyeball, you can see quantum weirdness.

33:30You can see interference effects between two branches of the wave function, like the double slit experiment, right? We see interference between the two branches. The photon could have gone to the left slit, could have gone to the right slit. Those two possibilities interfere with each other. We see weird quantum effects like interference, right? So that's what we mean by seeing weird quantum effects. So why don't we see those kind of quantum effects all the time, right? Like why don't we see cats interfering with themselves or baseballs having interference patterns, et cetera, et cetera. And the answer is that you need more than just superposition, in order to see interference, you need something else in addition.

34:07These quantum wave functions are waves, right? They go up, they go down, they wiggle, just like waves in the ocean. And in the same way, to get those interference effects, you have to get those phases of those waves to be just lined up. They have to go up at the right time or down at the right time, so they cancel each other out or they add up together. In order to get nice acoustic effects Because in a room, you need all the sound waves to be like coherent. So they like add up in the right way or cancel each other out in the right way. You have noise canceling headphones in your ear that cancels the sound by producing a coherent opposing wave, right?

34:43It's like lined up just right. So you need these waves to be lined up just right. They need to not only for there to be multiple possibilities, but you need them to be like lined up just right to have the interference effect. Still with me? I think so. So does seeing quantum effects mean that you would also be able to observe these waves in some way? Because to see quantum effects, you sort of need to know why you're getting one answer and not the other? Well, in the case of these quantum amplitudes, you can't see them directly. You can only see the interference effects. The quantum amplitudes are hidden.

35:15But you can see the interference effects without seeing the waves directly, which is why it's so cool. Because that's one way that we reveal that there really is a superposition there, is that we see the interference effects. All right. So to see quantum interference, what you need is a superposition. You need two possibilities at once, and then you need them to be coherent, not scrambled. Like if you scramble the phases of one branch, then you wouldn't be able to see any interference because it would just all be randomized. And you have to bring them into contrast, right? To bring those waves together and say, okay, add up or okay, cancel each other out.

35:50And this is how quantum computers work is they have a bunch of qubits, which can be in a superposition of states. And then you operate on those. In the end, you make a measurement which brings them together. You have the superposition, you have the interference, you get some quantum state. And so you could take advantage of the superposition and all the quantum weirdness, and quantum computers definitely take advantage of all that quantumness. Okay. Okay. So why can't we see cats and baseballs and whatever doing quantum interference? why can't Zach see quantum weirdness in his everyday life? And the answer is two reasons, right?

36:27So number one is Zach is big and messy, right? So he is, I mean, we've all seen his office. We know about the Doritos bag and whatever. But the device I described earlier, the simple idea of an eyeball that either indicates yes or no, I've seen a photon. It's a very simple device. and you can entangle that with a photon and keep everything crisp and see quantum effects. But in reality, an eyeball is big and it's complicated and it's connected to a brain, which is big and it's complicated and you cannot describe it with one internal state. It's not like the eyeball can say yes or no. It's like a huge, messy system with lots of different internal states.

37:10And so the superposition is still there and the entanglement is still there, but it's spread out across so many internal states inside Zach's eyeball and inside his brain that you're never going to be able to bring these things together to contrast them in the way you need to see quantum interference. It's like washed out across too many different states. It's like if you have a teaspoon of salt, you can taste a teaspoon of salt. You put it in your mouth, it's very salty. But if you add it to an enormous vat of beans, it's still there. right? It's changed it a little bit, but you can't even really tell necessarily this salt in there.

37:48This is like adding a teaspoon of salt to a planet of beans, right? The quantum effects are small, and Zach's brain is really, really big compared to a quantum system that it's essentially just lost. That information is still in principle there, but it's basically washed out. So this is called decoherence for those who want to learn more about it. When you have quantum effects, but they're essentially unrecognizable and unrecoverable because they're averaged out over a big, messy system. So does that suggest that for an alien to be able to observe quantum effects, they would have to have a very, very, very simple brain?

38:26Yeah. And they're not going to be able to tell you the secrets of physics? Well, it does. We're going to get there in a minute, but essentially it suggests that you can't have a human-like brain. Okay. And so that's one reason why Zach can't see quantum effects is decoherence. But there's another one that he raises, which I think is much more interesting, which is that he's inside the system. He's entangled with the system, right? And he mentions this cool experiment, Wigner's friend experiment. And so Wigner's friend says like, all right, you have a cat in a box, right? Schrodinger's cat. The cat is in the box.

39:01You don't know if the cat is alive or dead. Now let's say that Zach is doing that experiment. I mean, he has the cat, he has the box, but Zach himself is inside another box. Oh no. Okay. And Kelly is outside the box. Now, Zach, inside the box, he opens up his own box and he can tell if the cat is alive or dead, right? Okay. Okay. But Kelly has not yet opened up the Zach box. So she doesn't know whether Zach has seen the cat alive or Zach has seen the cat dead. Okay. Okay. So according to Kelly, Zach himself is in a superposition. He's entangled with the cat. If the cat is alive, there's a version of Zach that has seen a live cat.

39:43If the cat is dead, there's a version of Zach that has seen the dead cat, right? But from Kelly's point of view, both Zachs still exist as possibilities. So this is Wigner's friend experiment. And it argues that each of those individual Zachs see a live cat or a dead cat. There is no Zach that sees the superposition that sees the sum of live and dead cats somehow, even though Kelly on the outside can see the superposition. So this is the Wigner's friend experiment that he raises. And the crucial thing to understand here is that the reason Kelly can see the superposition, but Zach cannot, is that Kelly's brain is not part of the quantum system.

40:27Zach's brain is inside the quantum system. And so he can't, for example, see the two branches of the wave function interfere. Kelly could cause the two Zachs to interfere with each other and have weird Zach interference effects. That would be pretty awesome. Zach can't do that because he can't coherently manipulate his own memory and brain state from the outside while that brain is the thing doing the manipulating. You can't use your memory as the instrument that reaches in and re-superposes your memory and also observes it, right? So the thing that makes Zach and Kelly different in this scenario is not that Kelly has access to anything that Zach doesn't have.

41:07It's that Kelly's observation, her memory isn't part of the system, okay? So those are two separate things. One is like Zach's brain is too big and messy to keep quantum effects and recover them. And the other one is that Zach is inside the system. And so he can't use his memory, which is also inside the system, to observe quantum effects by crossing the wave functions. Okay. And so then is Zach's question essentially, wouldn't an alien be in the system? Yeah. And then so how could this possibly work? Yeah, exactly. So Zach is saying once you're entangled with some system, you can't see quantum amplitudes.

41:46And so I don't think I would agree with that statement exactly. I would say, you know, once the information has leaked uncontrollably into many degrees of freedom, like his brain, interference becomes effectively impossible. But let's do this point by point. So point number one, which you already alluded to, like, okay, what about being big and messy? And so, yeah, the idea here is like, well, maybe aliens have a brain that operates completely differently, right? Like, maybe number one, maybe it's very, very small, right? Because you have an alien that's effectively like a qubit. And so it can be in a superposition with a photon without being big and messy, keeping all of that coherence.

42:26But if you want an alien to experience that superposition, that's probably not going to do it because I don't think qubits experience anything. But already, we're bumping up against what do we mean by experience? How sophisticated does the system have to be to be conscious? We totally don't know. And that's the direction I was gesturing towards in the book, which is like, look, this whole business about experience is totally unknown. What is an alien experience like anyway? We don't even know what an octopus experience is like with their multiple brains. And so that's the loophole I'm basically driving this entire thing through.

43:00But, you know, it's also possible to imagine not just small brains that can maintain quantum coherence, but larger brains. Like we are currently trying to build quantum computers, which are larger and larger. And one of the challenges of that is keeping them coherent, keeping them from decohering by interacting with the environment. And we're getting better and better at that. And so you can imagine perhaps there's some alien out there who's got a brain that's effectively like a quantum computer, which can maintain these phases. And so, you know, it can somehow interact with a photon without decohering.

43:36But then you still have this question of like, can that alien experience it? The second point of like, you're inside the system. Can you experience the system from the inside since your memory is also inside? And here again, I'm just going to say like, look, experience is a fuzzy thing. We don't know what it means to experience it. And our sense of experience means like you see it with your eyeball, you record it in your memory, you then call that up, you think about it. What did I feel about seeing that photon? Or what did I feel about seeing that cat? And now we're speculating about what it's like to be an alien.

44:11And if you imagine an alien with like a quantum computer-like brain that can maintain those superpositions, then it's not important that the alien can construct interference, that the alien can bring the two sides of the wave function into contrast with each other to create interference effects. We're just talking about experiencing the superposition. So maybe this alien brain can exist across these two branches of the wave function. And there's some alien-like experience. This is totally hand-wavy, right? This is not supported by physics, but I think it's also not a question quantum mechanic answers because it depends on what does it mean to experience and whether it's possible to experience a superposition if your brain is very different and quantum mechanical coherent.

44:57So I would say to Zach, quantum mechanics doesn't say that's impossible, but it's not well enough to find, I think, really is the reason why there's a loophole there. Okay. One, clearly your writing process involves a lot of smoky banana peels. And two, so does this suggest that like if you track an organism through evolution, like when it realizes it's observing something, it would lose the ability to observe it? Because based on what you said, it's like you kind of need to know what's going on and be like conscious of what's happening. So could bacteria on our planet that don't know what's going on observe quantum effects and we don't realize it because they don't know what's happening, but we can't because we're like too smart for that?

45:41It's possible, but again, we don't know if bacteria experience anything. I mean, I can't even understand what it's like to be another human being, not to mention a bacteria. And so saying anything concrete about the nature of another being's experience is all just extrapolation from their outward behavior. And so we don't know. And that was essentially the point I was trying to make with my book is that, look, we want to make this sort of mental connection with aliens. We should be prepared for the fact that their internal experience could be so alien, we might not be able to map not just our ideas about physics, but our ideas about what it means to be alive and experience the world, the very basic nature of interacting with the world.

46:25They could have a very alien sense of that. And this is just part of the argument of the book of like, I don't know what aliens it's going to be like, but I suspect we haven't thought it through and it's going to be much weirder than we imagine. Maybe in this direction, maybe in that direction. And so I was looking for like, which parts of this are not crisply defined so that I can gesture vaguely in that direction. Well, this was a very complicated question for a seven-year-old. This little girl is going to take over the world one day. So let's go ahead and see what little Zachy Wienersmith had to say.

47:02Hello, this is Zach Wienersmith. I'm a nine-year-old girl from Austronesia, and I just wanted to say I appreciated the answer to the question. I was talking to some other kids here in Austria about it, and what we were wondering is, what happens if you do like a daisy-chain version of Wigner's Friend where there's like 80 outer layers of observers? how is it that when the topmost observer starts observing everyone down, you have causality maintained the whole way down? How does the universe do that off? We thought that would be nice to know. And thanks again. Big fans of the show down here. And as we say down in Antarctica, good day, mate.

47:49Hey, Zach, who's from Virginia but can't seem to admit it on the pod. Great follow-up question, but the key thing is that causality actually works the other way, bottom up rather than top down. So remember the setup here. We have an experimenter with a cat in a box. Until they observe it, the cat is in a superposition of alive and dead. Now you put that whole experiment inside another box with Wigner on the outside. So if the inner guy opens his box first, he gets entangled with the cat's alive or dead state. And for Wigner on the outside, the bigger box is now in a superposition of two states.

48:29One, the cat is dead and the inner guy says it's dead. And two, the cat is alive and the inner guy says it's alive. There's no cross term there where the cat is alive and the inner guy saw it dead. That's the crucial thing. The quantum evolution here is linear, so it acts on each term separately and can't mix them. When Wigner opens the outer box, he either sees a live cat and an experimenter saying it's alive, or a dead cat and an experimenter saying it's dead. So that's why causality goes bottom up. The correlation starts when the inner guy entangles with his box, and Wigner just joins a chain that was already consistent.

49:07You can do this 80 times and daisy chain them, but it doesn't change the basic setup. but still two branches, just a lot more guys entangled. Okay, but maybe does it depend on the ordering of the box openings? We described the inner guy going first. What if you do it the opposite direction? Well, that's not as interesting. If Wigner opens his outer box first, he finds the inner experimenter sitting next to a still-sealed box, just an ordinary guy with a superposition of alive and dead inside the box. The guy he sees is not in a superposition. And now Wigner is basically just part of the inner box experiment, and whoever opens the cat box entangles them both.

49:49So there's no causality issues. Causality still works bottom up.

50:02I'm Mungish Hatigular, and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble.

50:48I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all been there. We've had seasons that have shaken everything. The question is, what remains when the shaking stops? Hi, I'm Gary Valenciano, and on my podcast, Unshaken with Gary V., I sit down with amazing personalities and we talk about the seasons that nearly broke them, the lows that carried them to their highs. Listen to Unshaken with Gary Vee on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

51:58is as good as Rami Malek, as Freddie Mercury, and it's as good as Timothee Chalamet, as Bob Dylan. And I say that with love and respect for both of those actors. And I don't know how many Oscar nominations they give out. I don't know if it's five, six for Best Actor. 150%, this kid Jafar Jackson should absolutely, positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am Rapaport on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I Am Rapaport Podcast. Bill, why is my eye twitching? Does this mean I'm in perimenopause? Maybe I have adult ADHD. I need to look this up.

52:43Where's my phone? Juliana, your phone is hot to the touch. I think it's asking you for a break. You know what? Maybe I should just ask ChatGPT. Or maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, like a couple sex therapist. Whoa, that escalated quickly, but okay. Because I have questions. We have questions. And I bet everyone has questions. Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that. How about this one? Is bribing your kids bad parenting or just negotiating? Oh, and I still do need to know, why was my poop green that one time? Hypothetically, right? Okay, well, instead of letting the internet guess, we've got actual people answering these exact questions.

53:21And laughing with us has got to be better than spending three hours down a rabbit hole online. Listen to Bill and Juliana, the podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

53:46All right, our last question of the day is from Senia about fibroids. Dear Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for an awesome podcast and thank you for taking your time to looking into my question about fibroids. I just finished listening to your episode on perimenopause. I want to thank you, Kelly, for being so open about your own situation and for talking about this important topic. I'm 38 years old and I have a uterus and ovaries. So I'm especially concerned about this topic. I have a personal history with uterine fibroids. I have had severe problems for seven years or more. I've had surgeries and hormone therapy.

54:36And I've seen a lot of different doctors. they all seem to give very different answers to my questions about why we get fibroids and how they might affect fertility. Fibroids seem to be very common. To my understanding, it's estimated that 70 to 80 percent of women by the age of 50 will have fibroids. And that's just basically most women, yet we seem to know so little about them. So, like, did Mother Nature plan for this condition? Or is there a relationship with our modern lifestyle? And how come we know so little about a condition that is so common? I would love to learn more about this if you have the time to investigate.

55:27Thank you again. Bye. All right, Kelly, what is a fibroid? Well, first, I would like to prudently start by reminding everybody that I'm not that kind of doctor. I do not have a medical degree. So if you are concerned about any of this for yourself or your loved ones after hearing this segment, please go talk to an OBGYN or your family practitioner. OK, so what are fibroids? So fibroids are growths. And I think when most of us hear the word growth, we immediately think cancer. These are very, very rarely cancerous. But these are just places in the uterus where you start getting rapid growth of cells.

56:06And sometimes these growths, they can be small. They could be like, you know, poppy seed, whatever. You totally don't notice you have it. But sometimes they can be as big as like grapefruits or even bigger. Grapefruits? Grapefruits, yes. That sounds uncomfortable. Yes. And sometimes you have one, but sometimes you have many. And by the time you are a woman who's 50 years old, about 80 % of us have these. And the number is higher for African-American women than it is for Caucasian-American women. But yeah, these are very common. And so when you say they're benign, they're not cancerous. I understand cancer is sort of like a category.

56:44It's not a single pathology. And it has to do with cells growing out of control. And so here we have cells that seem to be growing kind of out of control. What makes them non-cancerous? So one, they're not going to metastasize. And two, so I am not a cancer doctor. I'm guessing that a part of the issue is that if you have uncontrolled growth in something like your liver, it is likely to cause problems that could kill you. Whereas if you have uncontrolled growth in your uterus, most of the time it's not going to cause problems. So a lot of us who have fibroids experience no problems from it. And so, you know, it might be interesting to have a cancer doctor, an oncologist on the show at some point.

57:24But to me, what's important is that one, it's not metastasizing and two, it's probably not going to cause like a life threatening illness. It does sometimes cause problems. So if it gets too big, then it can, for example, push against your rectum and cause issues with constipation or it can push against your bladder and cause issues with urination. In very rare instances, it can cause infertility issues. I hear that that's not very common, but it does happen sometimes. It can increase period bleeding or increase the frequency of bleeding in between periods. And so some of these things are things where you can be like, well, that's annoying.

58:01I can ignore it. And then some of those are problems where you're like, I absolutely need to deal with this. And so this sounds like it's never good, but it's not always bad. It's just sometimes uncomfortable or there are some other issues. But if a lot of women have this, like 70 to 80 percent, then like, is there some benefit to them? Is there some reason we have them? Yeah. So as far as I can tell from my research, I have never found a benefit. So I think what's happening is that in the uterus, you have a lot of cells that have receptors for estrogen and progesterone. So these are hormones that we think of as being important for females.

58:37They're important for maintaining your menstrual cycle, your estrus cycle. So maintaining like the cycle of things that happen to the female body every month. And one of the things that your uterus does is at certain times of the month, it produces a lot of uterine lining where, you know, eggs can implant in this. And then it releases all of that once a month during your period. And so you have cells that are used to getting the message that it's time to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, make a lot more of me. And then they also get messages that it's time to stop doing that. And so I think what's happening is that some of these cells get the message that it's time to start replicating and they replicate a little bit out of control.

59:16and that might explain why this is a problem that is typically not experienced until after you get your first period and stops being a problem after menopause because your body stops like producing a lot of estrogen, for example, to induce these cycles. So is this something people have been dealing with like throughout all of human history? Do we have like records of it from ancient Egypt and stuff? Ah, okay. Yeah. So I did not come across records of it from ancient Egypt. It is possible that this is a problem that we are dealing with more now because a lot of the risk factors for getting this are things that happen more in our modern life.

59:55So for example, if you have a higher body mass index, you are more likely to have fibroids and higher body mass indices were probably not a thing that was happening to our species thousands of years ago when food was much harder to come by, but is more common for people to be experiencing now. Earlier onset of menstruation, so the age that you get your first period as a predictor. And if you get your first period sooner, you're more likely to experience fibroids. And over time, young girls have been getting their periods earlier and earlier. So that might contribute to why we're seeing this in a lot of women.

1:00:33Late age for menopause is a contributor. But then there's also some like quintessential, quote, modern life issues that might be at play here. And one of them is that a lot of the stuff that we put into plastics has chemicals in it that mimic things like estrogen. And so it's possible that our estrogen receptors are getting bound by stuff more often and are getting the message, hey, replicate, replicate, replicate more often than they did in the past because our environments are now sort of inundated by these chemicals that look like hormones but are not things that were made by our body to actually send a message about something that should happen.

1:01:10So as far as I can tell, there's not a benefit to fibroids. for most women, having fibroids is not a problem. You may not even notice you have them. You may never have to get treatment for them. If you do need to get treatment, sometimes those treatments are things like, hey, I'm going to take some pain medications because I feel a little uncomfortable. Or maybe they are like birth control pills to help deal with the problems of excess bleeding. Sometimes it'll be a surgery if the fibroid is big enough and it needs to be removed because it's causing problems. And in very extreme cases, you might end up wanting to get a hysterectomy where you essentially take out your whole uterus so you don't have to deal with the problem anymore.

1:01:49But that means you can't have children anymore. So that's a pretty extreme option that a lot of folks decide to not go with unless they are done with their uterus and are ready to yeet it into the sun. And I'm getting close. And has there been enough science about this? Have we studied this as well as we need to? No. No, we have not. Yes, right. So the last part of the question is why don't we know more about this? And the answer, unfortunately, is that women's health problems are very understudied. In fact, in general, when you study medical issues, it's much more likely that men are part of the experiment relative to women.

1:02:25For a long time, women were thought of as something like a complicating factor. Let's just study it in men so we don't have to worry about the fact that women have cycles that, you know, change over the course of the month and we'd have to like control for that. And then sometimes women might be pregnant. So we don't want to be like testing drugs on them because, you know, what if we end up messing with the fetus in some way? And so for a variety of reasons, some of them nice, like trying to make sure that fetuses don't get exposed to chemicals we don't intend to expose them to. And some of them just sort of overlooking women in general, which is not so nice, is how we got to this place today.

1:02:58And so if I can make a book recommendation, Invisible Women, Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. This is a great book that goes through a variety of different places where data has essentially been collected for men. And the thought that data on men will tell us everything we need to know about humans in general and how this has sort of harmed women in a variety of ways. And she has a great chapter on how this has impacted women in medical settings, which is where I learned, you know, that we are often even today, even today, when you do rodent studies, they're more often done on male rodents.

1:03:31Sometimes even when they're related to questions about female reproductive health, you'll do them on male rodents. And so anyway, totally blows my mind. This book won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. And so it's got, you know, like the science. And only the best books win that prize. Oh, that's not what I was going for. But thanks for saying it. But anyway, so yeah, in a lot of domains, women are simply understudied relative to men, and that includes medical research. And so we don't know a lot about this issue that affects something like 80 percent of women around my age and a little bit older.

1:04:03So I'm sorry to be giving sort of a sad answer, but I think that's exactly what the listener expected when they sent this question. And let's go ahead and hear what Xenia has to say. Hello again, Daniel and Kelly. thank you for looking into my question about fibroids thank you for the book recommendation i will look into that but yes it's more or less what i expected we don't know so much we haven't done much research so i just try to stay positive that we can talk about this problem and that there are gofundme campaigns and stuff like that to try and collect money to do more research for instance there's the project called Make Fibroids Count.

1:04:48I was curious to hear that there has been an earlier onset of the first period for young women. I wonder if that is also tied to modern lifestyle or if there's some other reason for that. Yeah, thanks a lot. Your podcast keeps me thinking and challenging my ideas about the world. So please keep it up. Thank you. Bye. All right. Thank you so much to everybody who sent questions in to us. If you have a question, you can shoot it our way at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can join us on Discord and share your questions with the Discord community. Even if your name is not Zach, you are very welcome to send us a question.

1:05:34Even particularly if your name is not Zach. We answer every question and some of them end up on the show. Write to us. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time.

1:05:51Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

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