Where Great Innovation Comes From & Why You Don't Notice What's Right in Front of You

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1:28Today on Something You Should Know, it may be that practice makes perfect, but there is more to the story. Then the strange ways innovation happens. For one thing, a lot of people come up with the same idea. There's 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs, three people who claim to invent the sewing machine, three people who say they invented the typewriter, and six people who claim that they invented the thermometer. Also, why do the hands on a clock move clockwise? Why not the other way? And this odd human quirk that the more we're around something, the less we notice it. So we might even stop noticing the bright red fire extinguisher that's down the hall, and then what if there's a fire?

2:13We might think, gosh, I don't know where it is. We've actually done that study where we asked people where's the nearest fire extinguisher and most people aren't aware of it. All this today on Something You Should Know. I imagine most of us shop for clothes online at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures. But when they arrived, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince.

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3:38I really do recommend Quince. It's one of those companies that has earned our trust. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

4:22So if you want to learn to do something really, really well, the common advice is to practice, practice, practice. But not practicing might also be really important. How? Well, that's what we're starting with today. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. If you're trying to learn something new, like playing the piano or improving your golf swing or mastering a new skill, you might assume the best approach is to keep practicing until you get it right. But research suggests that taking short breaks and not practicing can be just as important as the practice itself. In one experiment, researchers had people learn a new sequence of finger movements.

5:07They practiced for 10 seconds, rested for 10 seconds, and then repeated the process. When the researchers monitored their brains, they discovered something remarkable. During those little 10-second breaks, the brain was rapidly replaying what the participants had just practiced, sometimes dozens of times, and the people whose brains did more of that replaying tended to improve more. The practical lesson is when you're learning something new, don't assume that nonstop repetition is the fastest way to improve. Short breaks give your brain an opportunity to process what you've just done. Sometimes the moments when you're not practicing are really helping you learn.

5:51And that is something you should know.

5:56Think about all the inventions and innovations that have changed your life. The smartphone, the internet, modern medicine, even something as simple as the wheel. Every one of them started out as an idea in somebody's head. But where do those ideas come from? Why do some inventions change the world while others go nowhere? And why do some of the biggest breakthroughs happen completely by accident or when someone's trying to solve an entirely different problem? It turns out the history of innovation is filled with fascinating stories, surprising twists, spectacular failures, and discoveries that almost never happened.

6:38And understanding how innovation really works may tell us something about where the next big breakthroughs will come from. Here to explain is Andrew Lee. He is a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. Currently, he serves as Australia's Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities, and Treasury. He hosts a podcast called The Good Life, and he's author of several books, including The Shortest History of Innovation, From the Wheel to Gene Editing, AI, and Beyond, How New Ideas Shape Our World. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks, Mike.

7:17Great to be with you. When you think about innovation, great inventions, there's a tendency to move the conversation towards the people who invented them, the great innovators, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs, those kind of people. But the story of innovation is more one of teams, of diversity, and of the trade in ideas. It involves a lot of tinkering, a lot of iteration, perhaps less of the eureka moments. But there have been some pretty great aha moments, have there not? There have, but sometimes they're misrepresented. Take the discovery of penicillin. The standard story has that penicillin is discovered when Alexander Fleming returns to his lab after a holiday and sees there the evidence on the Petri dish.

8:10But in fact, penicillin only goes into mass production more than a decade afterwards, after a team working with American military researchers figures out how to synthesize and scale up penicillin. Penicillin is very much a story of teams and one in which there's collaboration across the Atlantic in order to make it work. Well, that's a great story and it illustrates a lot about innovation because penicillin was not an invention, it was a discovery. But even once it was discovered, it took another 10 years of lots of people being involved to make it actually become something. That's right. Fleming wrote the paper, but wasn't able to put penicillin into production.

8:57Putting it into production required industrial chemists. It required further breakthroughs. It required considerable work before the wonder drug that went on to save millions of lives in World War II and beyond was actually something that could be made operational. What's an example of really old innovation? Well, I guess the wheel is certainly old innovation. But when people talk about innovation, it's very much modern day. It's very tech-oriented much of the time. It's recent. But innovation is innovation, and it's been going on forever. So what's a great old example? For hunter-gatherers, one of the big innovations was being able to kill animals more effectively.

9:40spears, boomerangs, hunting sticks all of those were important innovations in allowing our ancestors to catch the protein that they needed in order to stay alive fire and containing fire is an important innovation in the pre-agricultural era and then I guess the big innovation that many of us look back to is the wheel developed first by miners in the Carpathian Mountains in order to better enable them to extract copper It's then an innovation which helps to change how people move, allowing nomads to carry more possessions with them as they move from place to place than they could have done when they had to lug everything around on their backs.

10:21So as you say, those early miners were the first ones to utilise a wheel, but doesn't it seem like the wheel was an inevitable invention waiting to happen? Somebody else would have come up with it. And I've heard that there are plenty of inventions that happen simultaneously in multiple places. That's right. Certainly one of those things which emerges independently in different places. And it's striking to see the places where sometimes the pottery wheel emerges before the cart wheel. But there's other places in which the wheel doesn't emerge in part because it's not particularly useful. So many societies in the Pacific, in countries which are sandy or hilly, don't use the wheel because wheeled vehicles are not very useful when you're going up and down mountains.

11:14You see wheeled carts emerging surprisingly late in some areas and much earlier in other areas. But as you say, the conditions are what shape it, a little bit less than the original innovators. Simultaneous invention is surprisingly common through invention history and reminds us that the great person of history theory isn't all that's going on when it comes to understanding innovation. What are some examples of simultaneous inventions that people would be aware of? So you see simultaneous invention emerging with bulbs. There's 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs who precede Edison. There are two people who claim to have invented electromagnetic clocks, three people who claim to have invented the sewing machine, three people who say they invented the typewriter, and six people who claim that they invented the thermometer.

12:14If you remember the 1990s, we saw a whole lot of search engines emerging at much the same time before Google comes in to take the market. And this represents the fact that people are working in what one scholar refers to as the adjacent possible. Inventors are constrained by the information that's around and by the technology that they have in their fingertips. And as that technology advances, it becomes easier for the breakthroughs to happen. And those examples you just gave make you wonder, make me wonder, did we get the best one of all those light bulbs? Did the one that emerged as the way we do light bulbs, was that the best one or was that the one that somebody brought to market better than anybody else?

13:01And the same with all those other examples. That's right. And sometimes that has much more to do with skills in commercialization than it does with the initial breakthrough. and it's a reminder that we can think of innovation as being a little bit more like running the four-minute mile, which is thought impossible until suddenly it happens and then whole dozens of people are doing it in coming decades rather than a unique invention. If da Vinci doesn't paint the Mona Lisa, then perhaps no one does, but a lot of technological innovation is in some sense historically inevitable. In looking at the history of innovation, are there some big milestones you can talk about because you think they're particularly significant or maybe just favourites of yours, but real big home runs in innovation?

13:56Yeah, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution are the big kind of transition points for human history. The agricultural revolution around 8000 BCE is the point at which humanity moves from being nomads to being farmers. Settled agriculture sees a whole lot of crops being grown and animals being domesticated. The Industrial Revolution, with the steam engine, the spinning jenny and other inventions of the time, causes a significant increase, not just in population, but then, Mike, in living standards as well. So living standards, which had essentially remained stagnant for most of human history, take off after the Industrial Revolution.

14:44And now growth is just something we take for granted, that each generation will enjoy a higher standard of living than the one that preceded it. It seems, and maybe it's just a bias of being alive today, but the combustion engine, electricity, these things were just monumental. At least when you look back and see that what has been able to be that would not have been had these things not been invented or in electricity's case, I guess, harnessed. And in those cases, it's much more about how we harness them than the initial breakthrough. So Michael Faraday's discovery of electricity and creation of the first electric generator happens in 1831.

15:32But it's not until the end of the 1800s that you have Thomas Edison managing to create a light bulb through a huge amount of that tinkering process we talked about before and his industrial labs, and then the mass use of electricity first to light our homes and then in order to do so much else in changing factory production. The late 1800s aren't just a period of innovation. They're also a period in which innovations are rolled out to change everyday lives in advanced countries. Steel being used to create our buildings. We see railways and then the mass production of automobiles in the early 20th century.

16:16So innovation sometimes takes decades before it flows out to really change the lives of ordinary people. I want to dive into medical and biological innovation that has happened over the last several years, and we'll do that when we come back. If you have a yard, you probably have some spots in that yard that need some attention. An empty corner where a plant used to be, or some space that just needs color. We have a few of those, or we did have a few of those. I ordered some plants from trees.com. They used to be known as fast-growing trees. We wanted to spruce things up, and here's what really impressed me.

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20:14And so, Andrew, I want to ask about medical and biological innovation, because what has happened in medicine over the last several decades is seemingly remarkable compared to what medicine was like not really all that long ago. It's remarkable to see what innovations around gen technology are able to achieve now. The age of personalised medicine means that increasingly we're looking at treatments that are tailored towards the patient. But the innovations that we've seen in vaccines have in past centuries been extraordinarily important. The smallpox vaccine saves huge numbers of lives. And in our own era, the COVID vaccine was developed at a speed that would have been astonishing to previous generations.

21:07Now, when you look at the Spanish flu, it was essentially a flu which ran its course untreated, but COVID was dealt with through the rapid innovation of a vaccine. And the pace at which that was developed, I think, is another reminder of the way in which innovation has sped up and what humanity can do when we put our minds to it. You know what I'm interested in hearing about, and I don't know why, but it's plastic. because plastic to me, I mean, people complain about it today and there's too much of it and we're all getting it in our bodies, but plastic had to be, I don't know why it was invented or what its first use was, but I mean, that was a big deal.

21:47It had to be. Yeah, so the first plastic was invented in 1855 by Alexander Parks, a British inventor who modestly said that he would like to call it Parkinson. seen. And it's a bit like Bakelite, if any of your listeners recall, that old, quite brittle plastic. And it was very quickly used to replace ivory, which is extraordinarily expensive. So things such as combs, piano keys came to be made out of Bakelite. That early plastic then gave way to the much more flexible and adaptable plastics, which flowed through society in the 20th century. And then, of course, you get the lovely line in The Graduate where the career advice is just one word, plastics.

22:38One of the things that I find also rather remarkable is how fast the innovations have come in the world of flight since the Wright brothers. I mean, we've gone from that to going out into outer space in a remarkably short amount of time, it seems to me. I think that's right. We've certainly seen huge innovations in flight, and particularly innovations in flight safety as well. It's looking back at the early history of flight, the accident rate is terrifying. These days, driving to the airport is a much more dangerous endeavour than flying on a plane, even if you're going across the country or around the world.

23:24We've seen significant improvements, but we haven't quite seen the same pace of improvements as in other areas. By my calculations, if flight had improved at the same rate as, say, solar panel technology since 1975, then a flight across the US would now take an hour and cost about$25. You want to put the flight improvements into perspective, and solar has clearly accelerated in leaps and downs that the flying public would love to see in their technology. Can you think of any innovations that at the time they showed up, showed tons of promise, looked like a home run that have just disappeared and I wouldn't even know what they are today?

24:12One invention that your listeners may not be aware of is three-dimensional television. We might be familiar with going along to the cinema and putting on those glasses and watching a movie which is full immersion. But 3D TV at home can be done with the same technology, yet it's just never taken off. And it might be something about the consumer experience that we're willing to put on silly glasses when we go to the movies, but we're not willing to put on silly glasses just to sit down in front of the television at home. So that's an innovation which sounded promising in theory, but hasn't worked in practice.

24:53And the video phone, which was introduced, I think, in the 60s with great fanfare, never went anywhere because nobody wanted to be seen, I guess. That's right. And yet these days, if my teenagers want to chat with their friends, they will FaceTime far more often than they will make a telephone call. so that sort of discomfort has changed perhaps as it's been adopted more widely perhaps also because the quality of the calls is better and now when you can do it for free a zoom call a team's call or a facetime call is something which has become much more socially acceptable covid might have had something to do with it too right yeah can you talk about the clock i've always been interested in the clock because I understand there were sundials and what, but that's not a clock.

25:44That's a, you know, sundial. So at some point it, a clock showed up and I don't know what that story is. Yeah. So one of the key things you need to do with a clock, if you're going to use a windup clock, is to have a mechanism that accounts for the fact that as the spring uncoils, the force that it applies changes and diminishes over time. So anyone who's ever wound up anything will know this. Huge amount of force at the start, but by the end, the spring is putting out less force. And that mechanism is known as a fusée. That innovation only comes about in the late 1400s. And once it does, it allows spring-powered clocks then to be used on ships.

26:31That's really important because the use of time is the way in which ultimately the problem of longitude is solved. So clocks are important not only for allowing people to get to work on time, allowing the trains to operate on a timetable, but also in allowing ships to navigate. And from ships, they just kind of made their way into homes? They steadily flowed out. And you can actually see this, Mike, in looking at the scales in which the early clocks are measuring. At first, they're just measuring hours. Then they're measuring quarters of hours, then minutes. And then finally, by the time you're getting to the mid-1500s, clocks are measuring in seconds as well.

27:18It allows people to organise meetings, to coordinate events, to plan travel. And in the workplace, it leads to the measurement of productivity. Is there any area, any industry where you think maybe innovation has not kept up? One of the areas I'd love to see more innovation is in the area of house building. When you look at the way in which Henry Ford changes the production of cars, the big transition is the assembly line in which the parts are moved around the line and moved to the worker. If we built cars the same way we built homes, then when you ordered a new car, the bonnet would arrive in your driveway and then someone else would drop off an engine and someone else would drop off an exhaust system.

28:09And then some people would come around to your house and bang it all together. And if we still made cars that way, then they would cost 10 times what they do now. We don't tend to produce houses in factories, but I think we should. And improving the technology for that could help us produce housing more affordably and deal with the challenge that I think many of your younger listeners will face, that it's just become much harder to break into the housing market in many advanced countries over the last few decades. Technology can help us solve that. Well, this has been quite a tour through the world of innovation, and I think it gives people a better sense of how innovation works, how things come about, and how they become part of our lives.

28:57I've been speaking with Andrew Lee. He is a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. He's currently Australia's assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities, and treasury, and he is host of a podcast called The Good Life. The name of his book is The Shortest History of Innovation, From the Wheel to Gene Editing, AI and Beyond, How New Ideas Shape Our World. There's a link to that book in the show notes. And Andrew, appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Take care. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of.

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32:36Have you ever walked into someone else's house and immediately noticed something's odd? Maybe it's the clutter, something's out of place, or it's just weird. And you wonder, well, how can they not notice that? Well, chances are, if they came to your house, they'd notice things you've stopped seeing. Because the longer we're around something, the less we tend to notice it. And this goes beyond clutter in your living room. We routinely fail to notice things that are right in front of our eyes. Sometimes it's harmless, but other times it could have serious consequences. Think about all the fire extinguishers and emergency exit signs you walk past without a second thought.

33:17You've seen them a million times, but in an emergency, you might not remember where they are. Why does the brain tune out things that might actually be important? How much are we missing without even realizing it? Here to explore this is Alan Castell. He is a professor of psychology at UCLA and author of the book Better With Age. Hey, Alan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Great to be here. So this idea that we don't tend to notice the clutter around us, I think everybody has a sense of that. And we figure, well, we just kind of get used to it. We get used to our environment. That's what people do.

33:57I imagine all creatures do that. So we stop noticing things. And is it sort of as simple as that? Well, we stop noticing things that are constant, that don't change in our environment. So even if we can still see them, we don't notice it. And this process is called habituation. And so this can lead us to stop noticing kind of the traffic in the background or the buzzing sound of our refrigerator. but it can also stop us from noticing kind of the mess and clutter that's on our desk or even in our living room, even though other people might notice immediately. And it's interesting, like, as we were just talking about this, that you don't notice the humming of your refrigerator until it stops.

34:40And then you noticed it stopped, but you didn't notice it while it was going. That's right. So we really are monitoring constant things. And if something's constant, it kind of goes away from our attentional filter. And that can be beneficial. It allows us to focus on things and tune things out. But we've also found in our research it can lead to some really striking oversight sometimes. So we might even stop noticing the bright red fire extinguisher that's down the hall or outside our door. And then what if there's a fire? We might think, gosh, I don't know where it is. So it's these sorts of instances that might draw our attention to things.

35:21And there can be even more drastic situations where people, unfortunately, will put an infant in the back of the car and then start driving to work and then completely forget they have an infant in the back of the car. So they just stop noticing this and it can lead to some really dangerous outcomes. Yeah. You know, I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. If you go to work in an office every day and there's a fire extinguisher down the hall, you forget that. You don't notice it anymore if you ever noticed it at all. And then when there's a fire, you go, geez, now what do I do? Gosh, I wish I had a fire extinguisher.

35:57And that's the difference between seeing and noticing. So your brain has certainly processed that visual input before and many times, but you stop noticing it. So we've actually done that study where we asked people where's the nearest fire extinguisher, and most people aren't aware of it. And the best way to make people aware of it is not to tell them where it is, but to have them find it. And so people get up from their office and look down the hall. Oh, there it is. And miss the one that's right next to their doorway. But when they then notice it, they won't forget it. And so we followed up a month later and, you know, found these same people.

36:32And right away they knew where it was. So I think that's another thing is when you draw people's attention to it and then they realize that they're not processing it or noticing it, they'll remember it. Have you ever though had that experience? Seems like I've had the experience sometimes of using that example of, oh, there's a fire. And then all of a sudden it clicks in. Oh, wait, there's one down the hall. Like it registered somehow somewhere and I'd kind of forgotten about it. But when the need arose, it's like, oh yeah, there it is. It's down the hall. Yeah, I think we can get hyper-focused.

37:10So that information is definitely stored in your brain somewhere. And I hope, you know, when you're on an airplane and they're pointing at the emergency exits, maybe you're not paying attention. But, you know, if there is an emergency, you might kind of go into this survival mode where you're like, okay, I know there's probably one five rows in front of me, but I have to look behind me as well. So maybe that's when our, you know, we really then start to notice things that we weren't processing before. when people talk about clutter there's a negative connotation to it that clutter shouldn't be there but there are plenty of people who are very content with their clutter it is no problem to them it may be a problem to someone who comes over and sees it but it's no problem to them i think it's very personal to one person's treasure is another person's clutter right and sometimes you you think well the reason i don't want to get rid of that there's something valuable in there, right?

38:05You know, I know where everything is. But, you know, sometimes you can get rid of things and then you realize, wow, I've opened up all this space or I feel refreshed. And especially as we get older, you know, you can have an attic full of stuff or a garage full of stuff. And certainly there's prized possessions in there, but not things you might miss if you didn't realize you didn't have access to them anymore. So why do you study this? What's the importance of this? We're interested in attention and memory because we're overwhelmed with information, especially now everywhere. And so our brain has perhaps evolved or has always been able to kind of focus on what's important and ignore the rest.

38:46And it's something that we've studied as we get older as well, because we know memory declines with age typically. But we've found that in a lot of our healthy older participants, they're able to selectively remember what's important. And so we think that this system might evolve and become more tuned to, in fact, forget things or stop noticing things that aren't relevant, but then remember the things that are the most important. So that's kind of our goal is to better understand how our brain works and from our lab's perspective, how that might change as we get older. Well, it does seem, I like to think that I remember what's important.

39:23It's just that I'm not sure that what I think is important is always going to be what's important, like that fire extinguisher. I don't remember it because it's, you know, chances are I'll never need it until I do. So maybe I didn't remember what's important. Exactly. And it's very subjective in nature, too. So maybe the fire extinguisher, thankfully, hasn't been relevant to you. And as we get older, we might forget things that we haven't used in a while. But as we, you know, especially as we get older, we might be more aware that our memory might not be as good as it used to be. So we learn to focus what's important.

40:00You know, if you're taking care of a grandchild, you might remember their allergies, right? But you might forget, you know, what you gave them for lunch yesterday. So being able to kind of remember what's important and perhaps overlook or forget the rest might actually be beneficial in some situations. So I'm wondering if noticing what's important is a lot easier if there's less to notice, if there's less stuff from which to pick out what's important. So you get rid of a lot of the clutter, then it's easier to notice what's important. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think in some situations that might be the case.

40:38But it can also work the other way that when you really feel overwhelmed, you might then realize I need to focus on what's important You know, I'm getting all sorts of information Let me now realize and this is something we call metacognition when you're aware of how your own cognitive abilities work That you now need to focus on what's the most important And do people basically fall into a category of it? they either like things well organized and everything has a place and it's in its place and other people are less so, or I suspect it's more of a spectrum. It's probably a continuum and it depends on the context.

41:20You know, your workspace might be very specific to you and you want it set up in a certain way. On the other hand, an artist might be set up in a different way. And I think people, you know, under certain circumstances want their things where they can access them and kind of feel out of sorts if things are moved around. So clutter is very personal. On the other hand, sometimes it can be helpful when someone else points it out to you. Well, so I was thinking is, you know, if clutter has become somewhat invisible to you, then where's the motivation and how would you even go about clearing it out when it isn't even there, sort of, and it isn't even a problem?

42:03Yeah, I think stepping away from it is the first thing. You know, sometimes if you go away for a week and then come back, you notice, gosh, is my office always looked this way? Having someone else pointed out, sometimes that can be difficult if a family member points out, gosh, this is a real mess. And you're like, well, it's not a mess. This is the way I want it. One's own possessions have value or importance, even emotional attachments, so it's hard to part with them or get rid of them. And so a cluttered desk might be perfectly fine to the person who created that clutter, but other people might feel uncomfortable when they start moving things around.

42:39So I had an uncle, a wonderful man, who was a lifelong academic, professor at Yale, his name was William Parker, and his home office was a disaster. I mean, it was just clutter everywhere. And clearly he didn't see it. Or he didn't. He would have never labeled it clutter. He had more books and more files and more junk, but seemed completely comfortable with it. But when a stranger, when I walked into his office, it hit you like a smack in the face. Like, how could anyone function in here? Yeah, I think you see that in many instances sometimes. And clutter, again, is personal. You probably found value in every bit of information.

43:29And I think people feel like there's loss if they get rid of it. On the other hand, sometimes when people move offices, I find that actually beneficial every five years if I had to move or pack up or work somewhere else. I think differently in these different scenarios. And so what's the, is this just observational or is there some advice from all of this? Well, I think, you know, attentional blindness can carry over to this kind of clutter phenomenon where you just stop noticing these things and tune it out. But it can also have some, you know, it can make people feel comfortable when they're in their own personal space.

44:07But it could also be distracting when everywhere you look, there's a reminder of something. So, you know, I'm not in the business of giving people advice, but a cluttered desk can be perfectly fine to the person who created the clutter because that kind of haphazard system makes sense to them. But it can make other people very uncomfortable. Like you say, when you walk in, you're like overwhelmed with mess. And so it really depends on, you know, who's created it. And there is some evidence that suggests that people with a clear, clean desk might be more creative just because they have spent less time looking for things.

44:43Well, you know, I wonder if you've studied this. There are those people who claim that, you know, my clutter is fine. I'm very comfortable with this. I know where everything is. This is my space and this is how I like it. But if you actually cleaned it up, if you really organized it, brought somebody in and really did it, what kind of reaction do you get from that person? Do they go, well, you know, actually, this isn't too bad. Or is this, no, I want it back the way it was? Yeah, I think people do have that reaction sometimes where they're like, wow, this is so much cleaner. But they will also say, I miss having access to my stuff, even though it might be stuff they haven't touched in months or even years.

45:26So I think sometimes getting over that hump is the first step to cleaning and getting rid of things. But my sense is that if you did that, for a lot of people, it wouldn't take long for that nice, clean office to get all messy again. Yeah, I think there's definitely, you know, that happens with time. And I have a colleague who says, you know, at the end of every semester, he takes a box, clears off all the clutter in his desk, puts it in a box, puts it under his desk. And then if he doesn't need to access that, you know, six months later, he just gets rid of that box. So I think that's a pretty good system.

46:06So the stress that people supposedly feel when there's clutter around because it bothers them, what is that stress? They're stressed about what? I think simply having clutter at home can be stressful because it doesn't allow for a sense of organization. And sometimes it can be associated with depression and anxiety. When people have to part with their possessions, it can be very challenging, you know, making these decisions. And people might even value the importance of the things they have more than they're actually valued. So there's a subjective attachment. And when people have to work with that, it can make people feel anxious or things feel out of order.

46:53But I think, like you said, either way, the clutter is only going to accumulate. So you have to have some sort of system in place. Well, I remember, I think it was like, it might have been a woman that cleaned the house or something once. And she told me that when she goes through and, because she doesn't want to disturb people's stuff, or is obviously not going to make decisions to throw things away. But she said, if I can put things in piles so you see more of the desk than you see of the papers on the desk, that it feels less cluttered. And she was 100 % right. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's why it's nice to have an outside person to kind of help you manage clutter.

47:38Because to you, it seems to work. but to someone else they might see a way to make it much more efficient. Yeah. Well, and it wasn't even so much that it was more efficient. There was something about seeing more of the desktop underneath. It's kind of like seeing the blue sky between the clouds. Like the more of it you could see, the nicer it looked. And it's totally cosmetic. I think it's also just getting the ball rolling. You know, sometimes once you see, oh, there is a desk there, or I could use that workspace for something before it was just holding things, you might say, I'm going to work hard to keep that space usable.

48:16Or you could say, well, there's another spot I could put more crap. But I think that whole idea of clutter being a form of stress, and I suspect, because I've known people all my life who say, you know, I don't mind a mess, it makes me feel comfortable. when it when they're not in a mess i it seems like they appreciate that they they say they like a mess but do they really or or do they just not want to go through the pain of cleaning it up and throwing things away yeah i think a lot of people enjoy being in a neat and clean environment if they can feel comfortable there if they feel that you know they're not being judged and i think when you say mess and clutter, sometimes that's, again, a subjective thing that things can have value.

49:06You could have a mess of photographs, you know, but they're all valuable and important. They just haven't been well organized. So I think that's the distinction you made earlier about neatness versus clutter. You know, they can be very useful things, just not set up in an organized away. Well, do you see, have you studied whether or not when people who say they don't mind the mess clean up, what the effects of that are? Do they tend to be positive effects or do they tend to be negative or neutral? What's the result? Yeah, I don't do research on that topic, but I think there's evidence that suggests that people feel relieved when things are tidy.

49:51and that might be why sometimes we enjoy going on a vacation even. You know, when you're in a hotel room that might be very generic, it also feels very clean. But people also feel comfortable coming back to their own home because they know where everything is. Yeah, but I've also had the experience of coming back to my home after being away and noticing things I kind of didn't see anymore that really need to not be there. Yeah, and I think that comes back to this idea of, you know, know, attentional blindness and habituation that you stop noticing these things because they're constant. But as soon as you leave, you know, for two or three days and come back, you realize, gosh, has that box always been there?

50:30Or why do we have the hat rack there? We haven't touched those in, you know, months. And so that's probably a good way to, you know, begin the process of deciding what needs to stay and what needs to go. And so what's the takeaway from all of this? What is it you want people to understand about this that maybe they don't? We're interested in, again, how attention works and how memory works. I've illustrated this with something as simple as just because you see something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it. And we've talked about the fire extinguisher, but I think a very more striking demonstration is something like the Apple logo.

51:07You've seen it many times. It's on the back of your phone or maybe even looking at you on your computer. But if you close your eyes and try and remember what side is the bite on or is there a stem or a leaf, you start to realize that you actually don't remember that, even though you've seen it so many times. So I think the takeaway here is, you know, seeing something many times can lead to very interesting outcomes. You can stop noticing things that are not relevant, and whether that's the mess or the features of the Apple logo, or, you know, something that's important for safety. But hopefully that allows you to focus on what is important, because you can tune out these things that are less relevant.

51:48Well, this is one of those topics, one of those conversations that fall into the category of, I never really thought much about this before. So I'm glad you brought it to everyone's attention and explained what it is you study. I've been talking with Alan Castell. He is a professor of psychology at UCLA and author of the book Better With Age. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Alan. I appreciate you being here. Thanks, Mike. That was a lot of fun.

52:20Have you ever wondered to yourself why the hands on a clock turn clockwise? Pink Panther us here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, Built just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at Coach.com. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just$5.

53:04Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. Why not the other direction? After all, there's nothing about the mechanics of a clock that require its hands to move to the right in a clockwise fashion. Well, the answer appears to go back thousands of years long before mechanical clocks were ever invented. Some of the earliest timekeeping devices were sundials, which used the shadow cast by the sun to tell the time. In the northern hemisphere, where sundials were widely developed, the shadow moves around the dial in what we would now call a clockwise direction.

53:44So when mechanical clocks came along in medieval Europe, clockmakers apparently followed the same pattern people were already familiar with. But here's what's interesting. In the southern hemisphere, a sundial shadow moves in the opposite direction. So if mechanical clocks had first become popular there, we might be calling the opposite direction clockwise. In other words, something we take for granted as completely natural may simply be an accident of geography and history. And that is something you should know. With all the podcast choices that are out there, and literally there are millions of podcasts available, People tend to like to get recommendations from people they know as to which podcast to listen to.

54:32And so I hope you will feel very free in using your recommending skills and recommend this podcast to people you know, and that will give them a good podcast to listen to and help us grow our audience. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.