Why We Cry Out In Pain
3/12/202655 min
Have you stubbed your toe and shouted an unrepeatable word? Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were two of the greatest minds in humanity. Did their egos and competition with one another hold them back or drive them onto huge breakthroughs?
Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the bizarre neurology of vocalised pain, revealing how a good yelp actually acts as a biological off-switch for suffering and unearth if Newton was the biggest crybaby in science.
Plus, Hannah gives us a behind-the-scenes look at her brand-new series exploring the...
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsHannah Fry· Host0:00
Welcome to the Rest is Science. This is Field Notes, a sort of ... It's a kind of podcast expedition of the mind, as it were, where Michael and I, we're trading the curious thoughts that have been occupying us.
Michael Stevens· Host0:11
That's right, and we also entertain questions and thought experiments from you all.
Hannah Fry· Host0:17
We certainly do, and, uh, in general, we want you to send them in. Send us in anything you want us to know, your thought experiments, the things that have been troubling you. Um, now, later in this episode, in the second half, I am going ... I've got, it's my sort of object, as it were. It's a metaphorical object this time, Michael. I'm going to be sharing with you the thing that I currently find most troubling about the future with AI. Um, I've got a few stories to tell you. Uh, but we're first gonna go to your questions, as we always do, to our little mailbox.
Michael Stevens· Host0:50
That's right. I wanted to read you an email that we got from John. This is just very cool, and it's so related to our previous episodes, okay?
Hannah Fry· Host0:58
Uh-huh.
Michael Stevens· Host0:58
You get, you get extra brownie points for that. So John emailed us to say, "Hi. To make the link between two of your recent programs, Paul Hoffman, who in his biography of Erdős, the man who loved only numbers, wrote the following." Listen to this.
Hannah Fry· Host1:13
Go on.
Michael Stevens· Host1:14
"A conjecture both deep and profound is whether the circle is round. In a paper of Erdős written in Kurdish, a counterexample is found."
Hannah Fry· Host1:24
[laughs] So we've got maths limericks and Erdős. Erdős. How did we say