How Words Shape Your Body

11:35Hannah Fry:they could follow rules but what bees can't do so bees could read the penny they could move things to the right or they could move through a system yeah but what they can't do is is right they can't add the penny so for a universal turing machine um what you need to be able to do is you've got to be able to put a symbol down move away and then come back to it later as though it's a stored variable now i should just say to like close this loop on the universal turing machine thing the reason why this idea was so profound that example of pennies i mean whatever it's a really simplified example but the key point about this is that after turing someone came along called john von neumann and he was like okay i see this because the idea about a universal turing machine is that if you have enough time, it can compute anything that is computable, anything.

12:35Hannah Fry:So John von Neumann saw this and was like, I think there's a way to make this actually happen. So he built this architecture and that is the basis of all modern computers, right? Like this is the origins of everything we built our entire modern world on. This stupid example of the pennies, Like, honestly, at the heart of it, this stuff is so absurdly simple. It's just when you build up and build it up and build it up. And this is the thing about how people say computers don't know what they're doing. They don't understand what they're manipulating because they're the same as you with the eye mask on and the pennies, right?

13:11Hannah Fry:You're just like performing this task.

13:12Michael Stevens:I don't know that I'm adding pennies. I'm just following some rules.

13:16Hannah Fry:Exactly. Exactly. So this is the thing, right? I think that bees could not be a universal Turing machine. Because they can't write, they can't place down the pennies. However, that doesn't mean that there are no biological objects that could be. Because there was in 2011, a team of researchers, this is from a Japanese university and an English university. So Cove University and the University of West of England. And they decided they wanted to build a functioning computer logic gate using animals. right no animals were harmed or hurt in the process of this experiment so they worked out or they noticed i guess that there's this species called the soldier crab and the soldier crab most crabs you know obviously scuttle sideways then kind of hang around alone soldier crabs they they live in these lagoons and um they move in like really tightly packed uh swarms and when two swarms of soldier crabs collide they don't sort of fight and they don't scatter they actually act a bit like soft billiard balls they sort of combine and then they move together in this giant swarm so scientists worked out that you could basically build an and gate a not gate and an or gate right which is one of the the rules that we were describing about computers um this sort of architecture and so on it's it's based on this idea of like you get two bursts of electrical current that come through and it's like two inputs it's like like either both together and and gay either one of them the all gay or not gay so they built these mazes these y-shaped mazes or these x-shaped mazes and then sent crabs through these mazes and they combined in the the ways that you wanted from that from these logic gates so in theory i mean they demonstrated that it worked with like one logic gate.

15:15Hannah Fry:In theory, then, you could build a crab computer, a crab pewter, if you will.

15:25Michael Stevens:Yeah, so you set up the groups with your question. You let them go. They just do their crab thing, combining into groups or not. And then out at the other end of the maze is your output, which is your answer. And not a single crab, none of them, none of those crabs knew what they were doing. So, I mean, this raises the question of like, is that what life on Earth is? Maybe the original, you know, bacterial mats were placed here in a specific position by aliens. And they're like, look, give it five, six billion years. We'll come back and we'll get our answer. And we are all with our own psychologies.

15:59Michael Stevens:We're just following the rules the aliens knew would happen. And we're doing their homework for them.

16:03Hannah Fry:I mean, this is like a massive philosophical question of the ages. There's this giant debate that's going on about whether human brains are approximate Turing machines or not, because the implication of that is that are we actually computing everything? Is there something going on in our brains where it's just computation and this feeling of consciousness, this feeling of being is a direct result of computation? Or is there something else going on? Like, is this experience of being in this room, talking to you, you know, feeling the light on my face? Is that just computation? And at the base level of computation, the neurons have no idea what they're doing.

16:47Hannah Fry:Or is there something extra, something sort of magical on top? I should tell you that I worked it out. But of course, if a bite requires eight logic gates, right? A logic gate, by the way, required about 80 crabs in this experiment. Oh, okay. Oh, that's good to know. If you were going to do like a one gigabyte iPhone update, you'd require 640 billion crafts.

17:12Michael Stevens:That's less than I expected. I thought the number would be some number name that no one ever says. I mean, it's in the billions. For one gigabyte. For one gigabyte. I mean, gosh, a gigabyte is a lot. Like maybe this is coming from a guy who's old enough that I remember, you know, getting a memory drive that had 100 megabytes on it and being like, whoa.

17:34Hannah Fry:It's the future. So many MP3s. Yeah. Yeah, this is true. This is true. But hey, who knows, right? Let's say in theory you've got these billions and trillions and squillions of crabs and then you put them in this setup and let them kind of compute stuff. Would the collective end up having consciousness as an emergent property? I mean, who knows?

17:59Michael Stevens:Well, I mean, this is a topic for a future episode because I've been thinking a lot about it. Up until a week ago, I was very much like, yes, it must emerge somehow. Now you get you get a big enough complex thing and it's going to start it's going to start thinking, you know what? I'm feeling this and I'm doing this. I exist. I have a self. And I'm starting to not believe that so much now. I'm starting to wonder if experiences, phenomenons like feelings are just part of the universe like electromagnetism and gravity. Yeah.

18:37Hannah Fry:Wait, are we talking about panpsychism here?

18:39Michael Stevens:Yeah, we are. Okay.

18:41Hannah Fry:All right. Okay. Okay. Stop what you're doing, everyone. We need to do an episode about Psychic.

18:47Michael Stevens:Yeah, I don't feel like I'm ready yet for it, but I'm just feeling like when you really lay down what I believe and what I think we know well, there's only a few conclusions and it just seems a lot more elegant. It doesn't mean it's true.

19:03Hannah Fry:I should tell you I've switched. I've switched, by the way, and probably actually also definitely within the last month I've switched. I think I used to think that consciousness wasn't an emergent property of complexity or intelligence, if you will, but that it was a property that came from evolution. And now I think I might change my mind.

19:29Michael Stevens:Yeah, I just I've worked really hard for years on consciousness clearly came about through evolution. How is it fit? But the problem is, I just don't think that it's fit. I don't believe that a phenomenal zombie version of us would be any different. Brian, look what you've done. Whether agriculture helps feed you or it helps feed you and makes you feel good doesn't change whether you do it or not.

20:00Hannah Fry:All right, we're going to park this one because I'm conscious that we've already gone through Turing machines, the evolution of consciousness, sort of infinite hard drives. And Brian just wanted to do a cute limerick.

20:14Michael Stevens:I know. I was really shocked by where this went. I'm like, oh, she's going to tell us a story about bees and then, you know, we'll move on to another question. And instead, you're like, why do I exist?

20:27Hannah Fry:Should we go on to another question? Yeah, let's do it Okay, here's what I've noticed, Michael We originally were like, oh, we'll just do half an episode a week on questions We'll just quickly, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, quick fire Turns out, all these questions that people are asking us, they're like episodes in themselves

20:42Michael Stevens:We don't get questions like, hey, how long could a rabbit live? You know, we don't get Google-able questions

20:51Hannah Fry:Okay, this is from Gabola Kotas Do languages and also accents shape facial features through the muscles they make us use and therefore give us subtle but unique characteristics?

21:03Michael Stevens:I love this question because we don't totally know. And yet it feels like it could be true. And yet many people believe that it's completely ridiculous. That the language you speak changes the way your face looks. Now, on the surface of it, sure, right? Like I'm using my lips and my cheeks and my tongue and my jaw to make noises. And so if I'm speaking one language or another my whole life, isn't that going to change the musculature of my skull? Now, here's some things that I found. First of all, it is pretty easy to get a computer to guess what language someone is speaking just by looking at their face.

21:44Michael Stevens:Even just their cheeks and eyes. You can easily tell if a language is tonal or not by how people are moving their facial muscles. There's also an interesting little fact about this language called Ko. Ko was a two language from South Africa. And there was a linguist named Anthony Trail who learned it. And he learned this language and he spoke it for a long time. And he developed a bump on his larynx. because of the sounds in this language. I don't know how this comes about, but biologically it did cause a growth on the larynx. And all the adult speakers of the language co have this bump. The children don't because they haven't spoken the language long enough to have developed the bump.

22:29But this South African white guy, Anthony Trail,

22:34Michael Stevens:I don't actually know the color of his skin, but the point is that he was not a native who learned co is his first language. He developed this bump as well. What does co sound like? Do you know? I don't know. I love how it's spelled, though. Exclamation point, capital X, O with a mark above it that's diagonal and then O with a tilde above it. Co.

22:57Hannah Fry:Oh.

22:58Michael Stevens:It's a language that might actually have the largest number of phonemes of any language in the world, where a phoneme are the perceptually different speech sounds in a language. Wow.

23:10Hannah Fry:Oh, it's one with lots of clicks, click consonants.

23:12Michael Stevens:It's got the clicks. It's got... And here's the thing that I also found. There are a lot of phonemes, like language sounds, that are very common, like the m, the sound of the letter M, or the sounds of the vowel A, a, a. Those are... We see those a lot. But there are some that we don't see as often, and they seem to potentially correlate with certain lifestyles. So there are some sounds called labiodental sounds. And it is what it sounds like. It's the lips and the teeth. So the V sound and the F sound where I've got my lower lip hitting my teeth. There's a theory out there that those sounds didn't emerge in human languages until we were eating soft enough foods.

24:02Michael Stevens:And it is true that if you look at cultures around the world, tribal cultures especially that eat unmilled grains, their teeth are more flat in the front. And I'm not sure how this works. I'm not an orthodontist. But they don't have their front teeth ahead of their bottom teeth, making the labiodental noises, the Vs and the Fs, harder to do or just not more natural.

24:29Hannah Fry:Because if you run through the alphabet, actually, you don't touch your lips very often at all. Hang on, let me just work it out. I think there's only like three, possibly four letters where you actually touch your lips together, right?

24:43Michael Stevens:B, P.

24:45Hannah Fry:B, M, P, and W.

24:47Michael Stevens:The sound of W is like your lips are just teasing each other. They're not totally touching. W, W, M, M. If they touch, it's an M sound. ma ma ma wah wah wah wah wah.

25:01Hannah Fry:I found that very surprising when I learned that fact because I think you sort of imagine that your lips are together all the time during speech but actually it's a really small fraction of the letters that you're using.

25:14Michael Stevens:Oh man there's even like a little riddle about this where it's like what is different about these two sentences and it's whether or not your lips touch during them. Anyway I was really intrigued by this question and I was amazed that we, I wasn't amazed, but I was even more interested when I found that we are kind of dancing around trying to answer the question because I also feel like people, even in the mid 20th century, like in the fifties, they're just faces looked different. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it because they were talking different their whole lives? What I mean is when I see an actual photo from like 1957 of people, I go, I believe it.

25:54Michael Stevens:But when a really great art designer and costume and makeup department recreates the 50s and they use the exact camera that would have been used back then, I still feel like I look at it and I'm like, I can tell that those people aren't really from the 50s. So I latched onto this question and the research I found by going, I think maybe the facial musculature could have been different because they Their accents, their dialects were a little bit different. The words and the vocabulary they use day to day was different. As it turns out, maybe not. A lot of researchers who actually are in this field say most of those facial differences purely come from grooming, style, and diet.

26:38Michael Stevens:That changes over time. But this is something that I want to do a lot more research on because it's a whole thing. The idea that you put Timothee Chalamet in a movie set in the past, and that no one believes that he's from the past. Because why? They say he's got iPhone face. They say his face looks like a face that has seen an iPhone. And you can't put your finger on exactly why, but it does not look like it belongs 200 years in the past. iPhone face. And I kind of get it. And then you watch like Carl Malden in some older movie and you're like, that guy, that face doesn't exist anymore. That is a face from a generation or two ago.

27:19Now, I don't know what to make of all of these feelings and observations, but I think even language and what we say plays a role in it.

27:29Hannah Fry:I think you're right that it's like, even if, well, the world needs to do a lot more research to really be able to tell for sure. But I think mechanistically, I think I can see why this might be the case. I sort of believe that there's a path that might cause this. I think I found your riddle, by the way. Is it this one? When you say the word touch, your lips don't touch. But when you say the word separate, they do.

27:57Michael Stevens:The way it works is that you play this game with people where they just say words or you say words and you say whether they touch or not. You'll say lemons touch, oranges don't touch. And the person tries to guess what the commonality is. Why do lemons touch? Is it because they're like acidic? and you're like, nope, that's not it. And they go, okay, what about bananas? And you're like, bananas touch. And they go, okay, what about doors? And you say, doors don't touch. And they're trying to figure out the rule that separates the touching from the not touching. And it turns out to be whether or not your lips touch when you say the word.

28:36Michael Stevens:And it takes, in some cases, hours for someone to figure it out. Usually they don't.

28:42Hannah Fry:Monkeys touch, but gorillas don't. Yes, exactly. That's the game.

28:47Michael Stevens:It's a fun game to play with someone.

28:49Hannah Fry:Oh, this is going to infuriate everybody who knows me over the course of the following week. Shall we go to a break and then onto your object?

28:58Michael Stevens:Let's go to a break and we'll come back and we'll look at some things I brought.

29:15Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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30:18Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science.

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31:31Michael Stevens:Okay, welcome back. During the break, I had another thought about the touching game. What I love about it is that psychologically, it's so it's such a great demonstration of how little attention we pay to the physicality of word and speech production with our lips and tongue, because people sit there going, apples touch, oranges don't. And they cannot figure out what touching means in that context. But if you know the rule, you're like, how do you not get it? It's so obvious. Then I started thinking it wasn't even that long of a break, but I started thinking about touching and how when you touch yourself, it's you can actually change which hand is doing the touching and which is being touched.

32:17Michael Stevens:You can switch in your mind which one is touching and which one isn't.

32:21Hannah Fry:That game reminds me of a drinking game that I played once at university. My friend introduced it to everybody. And by the end, we all wanted to punch him because none of us could work it out. And it was that he would say a sentence. And the rule was whether he started with an um. That was it. Oh, wow. And I bet it took like all night. Honestly, all night, all night. None of us noticed. where it was in honestly it was infuriating and I really noticed this actually that that with all of my years of training of being um and working on the BBC I am so unbelievably sensitive to people starting sentences with so um but I think almost nobody else in the world notices it

33:12Michael Stevens:I know what you're talking about because there's a game called you can't say um and I played it over Thanksgiving with my family. And also as like someone who presents a lot and writes scripts a lot, I'm very aware of what words I'm saying. And it was trivially easy for me to not say certain words. But like everyone else in my family like struggled so much to not say um or uh. And I just was like, aren't you aware of it right before you say it?

33:40Hannah Fry:It's like, so I think these are all skills

33:42Michael Stevens:that you can learn. Just like once you know that touching means lips touching, you immediately get it and you hear it all the time during the game.

33:51Hannah Fry:Yeah. I still say like too much, but hey, that's my Essex background. All right. Let's see what you got for me today, Michael. Okay. Well, I got a couple of things.

33:58Michael Stevens:One actually came from a viewer and I wanted to talk with you about it. So a listener named Michael, Michael Rourke, who, by the way, makes it clear that he's a Michael and not a Mike, just like me. I've never felt like a Mike. There's a guy I met. I'm I'm not going to give too many details, but he calls me Mike. And I'm like, you don't know my soul at all, dude. Okay.

34:22Hannah Fry:I feel the same. Whenever anyone accidentally calls me Han, there's something inside me that just... Han. Han. Oh, no. I'm sure you get a lot of Hannah banana. Not if I can help it. Not if you can. Okay.

34:35Michael Stevens:Maybe...

34:35Hannah Fry:It only happens once, Mike. Okay.

34:37Michael Stevens:My daughter calls you the Fry person.

34:40Hannah Fry:Yeah.

34:41Michael Stevens:I like that. She's really stuck on the fact that your last name is Fry. And that's who you are. Oh, I like her. So anyway, you know, we did an episode about time and about how the calendar and the numbering system for the years came about. Well, Michael Rourke emailed us a Holocene calendar that he put together himself. So the Holocene calendar starts with zero, not at the birth of Christ, but at the beginning of the Holocene era. OK, so what that what does that mean? And geologically, it means the end of what we call the Ice Age. OK, when Earth started warming up again, suddenly there's I mean, we don't know a lot about what it was like back then.

35:25But this was a major turning point in human history, but also the history of Earth.

35:31Michael Stevens:So it's kind of perfect. It's like both geological and anthropological. Anyway, this happened, what, like 10 ,000 or a few more years ago. And if you count that as zero, it makes it easier to talk about human history because you're not having to deal with BC, AD, or BCE and CE. And of course, our current system doesn't even have a year zero. So it's really hard to calculate ages and stuff that span that gap. And I personally, I've talked about this before. One of my biggest pet peeves is the way BC numbers work. And when people say things like, well, in the first millennium BC, my brain always goes first millennia BC means 1000 BC.

36:15Michael Stevens:But it doesn't. It means everything before that because the first thousand years of BC mean as you go backwards from zero, the first thousand years you hit. So 200 BC, 12 BC, 900 BC, that's the first millennia BC. The second, the second millennia BC is the 1000 BCs. Oh, I hate it. Whereas the Holocene calendar allows you to just say... The year 8 ,000 and 40, whatever. Exactly. So like pottery was invented in the year 2000. There you go. Because zero is whatever 12 ,000 years ago. To convert the current year to the Holocene calendar, you just add 10 ,000. So right now it is the year 12 ,026.

36:58Hannah Fry:Hey, we missed the great 10 ,000 anniversary of pottery.

37:02Michael Stevens:I know we did. 26 years ago, pottery turned 10 ,000. And I forgot to get it anything. I was going to get it, this really cool clay pot. And I thought, oh, shoot, that's you. But anyway, Michael Rourke, let me read you. He sent this email in about how we mentioned the Holocene calendar in that video. And he thought, man, this perspective is so cool. He wanted to visualize it. And so he put together a website. We will link it here where you've got the entire Holocene era and notable events from it, both from a standpoint of politics, science, all these different events. And you can scroll through it and see how close together they are or how far apart they are.

37:46Michael Stevens:You can even change how many pixels there are between every year. So you can crunch everything together or spread it out. But I actually had a hard time finding anything like this because I would love to be able to say things like, well, yeah, you know, Jesus was crucified in the year 10 ,030. Like that, I just it's just more clear. I'd love to be able to say things like the Mayflower landed in 11620. Now, that's a big number. I get it. But it's better for B.C. things.

38:14Hannah Fry:But also, I think what this does is it just puts ourselves in a better perspective of our history and our ancestors. I think it connects us to the past in just a really different way. Because all of a sudden then, you know, I don't know, people going on about the Second World War and like political agreements after it. And it was such a long time ago and whatever. And it's like when you put it on this scale, no, it really wasn't. I know. It really wasn't.

38:42Michael Stevens:I know. Exactly. If you have to talk about the 40s versus the 90s, it sounds like they're two different universes. But if you talk about events that happened in 11945 and 11990, it sounds like they're really the same. And that better fits the actual scale of human history. I love saying like, oh, yeah, the Great Wall was constructed in the 9700s. and I don't have to use BC because I think saying BC makes it almost sound like in fictional times like it's a different world but it's not it's still the world that we are reacting to and living in in many ways I mean are we we're still in the stone age look how much concrete we use every year give me a break also copper smelting 4 ,500

39:29Hannah Fry:that just makes way more sense to me

39:32Michael Stevens:ah yeah in the 11300s black death time not good but only a blip when you consider the history the history back to the beginning of the holocene era and yeah and then in the 11 500s we've got galileo we've got shakespeare i i think people might be annoyed if i use this more often but i really want to use it especially because like i said i've been doing a lot of research on how consciousness has changed over time as potentially revealed through the literature humans have written and i hate that there was obviously such a change in the first millennia BC and the second. And I'm having to talk about BC and thousands of years ago.

40:09Michael Stevens:And I want to be able to just say, look, let me give these all positive integers and then it's easier.

40:15Hannah Fry:I tell you what this really does, just scrolling through it. I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. And I'm so impressed that he coded this over his Christmas break as well. But what this really, really hammers home for me is just the sort of exponential of acceleration of progress and technology. Because this thing, nothing happens for such a long time. And then they start popping up, events start popping up, pottery, copper smelting, domestication of the horse, the Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, and so on and so on and so on. And then they start picking up around the turn of when the Romans come to be.

40:57Hannah Fry:But then you get into the modern era. And it is like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I mean, absolutely constant. These extraordinary, extraordinary moments, civilization changing moments happening, you know, literally all of the time.

41:13Michael Stevens:That's right. And it really makes me reflect on the difference between things happening and civilization relevant things happening. Because of course, between the domestication of the dog and pottery, a lot of stuff happened. People lied to each other. They fell in love. They had children. They lost loved ones. But the stuff that makes it onto a timeline like this is the civilization technology based stuff. It's pottery. It's the kings and the battles. It's the construction of stuff. It's the moon landing. It's vaccines. And of course, as those become more relevant to what it means to be human, we're like, oh, there's so many now.

41:56Michael Stevens:But gosh, imagine if you lived at the beginning of the Holocene where nothing ever happened. There were no moon landings. There was no AI. There was no Super Bowl every year. But it's like, wow, that's a very biased way of thinking.

42:09Hannah Fry:Yeah, because you're missing the heartbeats of individual human lives.

42:13Michael Stevens:And of course, writing only existed around like, you know, 3000 BC. So there's a lot of prehistory here where the majority of humans lived that we just don't have records of. Writing has only been around since like 3000 BC. We've only had written stuff for like 5000 years. It's true. Yeah. So to put this in the Holocene calendar, we're talking about like writing didn't exist until the 7000s. But humans had been around, living in settlements, participating in agriculture had been happening for 7 ,000 years before they were like, oh, dude, let's like write down, you know, how much oil you owe me.

42:51Hannah Fry:That's incredible.

42:53Michael Stevens:And from there, we see the emergence of history as we know it. That's what history is. It's written accounts.

43:01Hannah Fry:What about art? Did art, like the cave paintings, when were those? I mean, those were, that's all the way through this, right? Like all the way through this, there were some forms of art in paintings. Oh, yeah.

43:13Michael Stevens:I mean, art predates the Holocene. I mean, depending on how you define art, there's human-made artworks that seem to just exist for their aesthetic value, potentially, long before the Ice Age even ended. I mean, humans were around, like anatomically, behaviorally modern humans were around before the Ice Age ended. But as the Ice Age ended, it's pretty cool. I mean, so much of this is speculative, but it was quick. Ice melted. Glaciers retreated really quickly. Like within 50 years, oceans rose to a point where it was like, OK, we've got to move our settlement. And that could have spawned agriculture.

43:52Michael Stevens:In fact, a lot of that rising sea level at that time could also explain ancient flood myths and where they came from, that they really were in oral traditions, that they were being shared as like, oh, you know, I've always heard that there was this flood. And that may have been true.

44:08Hannah Fry:Like Noah's Ark, for example.

44:10Michael Stevens:Noah's Ark, Gilgamesh. We see these flood myths all over the place. When they were first written down, they may have been the results of a long multi-millennia game of telephone. It reminded me of this book. I wanted to leave you with some things from this book. It's called If. And it's a great book for kids, actually, but it's good for everybody. A mind-bending new way at looking at big ideas and numbers. it's full of wonderful illustrations and visualizations of time and money and population so like here's the page on life on earth and it breaks down life on earth into say like one hour okay if if the whole story of life on earth was all condensed into just one hour when would things happen so let's let's just say let's just say that this it's compressed into the hour between noon and one.

45:04Michael Stevens:Okay, so noon is when the very first life forms, like one celled organisms appear, like bacteria. And one o 'clock is today, this very moment that I'm talking. Okay, so here's what happens. First life forms form within that first second. But it's not until 1251 that fish appear on Earth. The dinosaurs arrive at 1256. And they only exist for three minutes. And then mammals appear at about 56 minutes and 25 seconds. The earliest birds appear at 1258, two minutes until today. And modern humans, the ones that we're related to, that are like biologically and anatomically modern, they show up at 12.59 and 59.8 seconds.

46:00Michael Stevens:No! Two tenths of a second before right now.

46:03Hannah Fry:But hold on a second. That's still way before even the beginning of this calendar, right? Yes.

46:09Michael Stevens:Yes, I know.

46:11Hannah Fry:Wow. It's nothing.

46:14Michael Stevens:And then here's something that's not related to time. Well, it's not related to history so much as it's related to your life. There's a page about if your life was a pizza. Here we go. Okay, so if your life was a pizza, cut into 12 slices. Here's what all those slices could represent. Four of them would be the time that you spend in school or at work. Another four of them would be the time that you spend getting ready to and sleeping. Getting ready to sleep and sleeping. So you spend four of your slices sleeping, four of them at work. That's already eight of the 12. One slice would be spent shopping, caring for others, and doing things around the home.

46:54One slice would be spent traveling, whether it be to school, on errands, on holidays.

47:02Michael Stevens:One slice would be the time that you spend preparing food and eating. And that final 12th slice would be the time that you spend on leisure activities, whether that's recreation, exercise, games, surfing the internet.

47:15Hannah Fry:And that's your life as a pizza. I mean, there's a book by Oliver Burke, 4 ,000 Weeks. It essentially says the average human life is 4 ,000 weeks long and talks about how that should change your perspective of what you want to do with it.

47:32Michael Stevens:I should check that out because I think about that a lot. I think about 4 ,000 weeks means that I only get in my life 4 ,000 Saturdays. Yeah. And then it starts shrinking as you start to say, well, but how many rainy Saturdays am I going to get? How many rainy Saturdays with my daughter am I going to get? And the number becomes magnificently small.

47:58Hannah Fry:It really does. I think especially when you think about, let's say, if you have parents who are around, you know, and you've left home already. Once you start counting the number of times that you have left, when you're going to get to spend really good time with them, really good quality time, exactly as you said, it's vanishingly, terrifyingly small.

48:23Michael Stevens:I know.

48:24Hannah Fry:it's a good exercise though you know I think it's so easy to to go through life seeing the little bubble that you're in but I think that stuff like this like Michael has built of understanding the context of your life your human life in the much bigger picture of of who we are and where we've come from how it's so much bigger than you and then looking at things like your if book of understanding what you have for yourself in the context of what you have left. I think it's a really useful exercise to do.

48:57Michael Stevens:I know. It makes you think so many things like, gosh, if I spend a third of my life sleeping, which we all do, about a third of our life is spent sleeping, then I'm not 40. I'm 26. That's how much life experience I actually have.

49:13Hannah Fry:Are we counting the traveling time? I'm happy to keep the sleep bit. I just want to get rid of the traveling bit. That was the bit that was the most painful.

49:21Michael Stevens:Yeah, right. I mean, but at the same time, traveling can be worth it. You know, if you're traveling with people or even traveling by yourself, then it gives you time to think through something. Maybe it's worth having a slice be just that. Not always. Depends what you do when you travel.

49:35Hannah Fry:Well, okay, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that mind-expanding episode of Field Notes. Love doing Field Notes episodes with you, Michael. Always, always fun. Um, you can join us again next week. We're back on Tuesday with our usual episodes and, uh, another podcast expedition, um, on Thursday next week. If you've got any questions you'd like us to answer, make sure you send them in to us. The rest is science at goalhanger.com.

50:00Michael Stevens:And you can join our newsletter at the rest is.com slash science.

50:05Hannah Fry:See you next week.

50:06Michael Stevens:See you next week. Thank you for spending some of your slice with us.

50:10Hannah Fry:Ha ha.

50:24Michael Stevens:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and cueing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.