What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
FACT: Holding a pair of giant balls while you nap really could help make you more creative
The internet insists that Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Da Vinci, and Dalí all shared this own cool hack: they napped while holding something heavy, so the clatter would wake them mid-dream and they could grab hold of their unconscious musings before they evaporated. I could only really find a direct source linking such practices to one of them: Dalí. But modern science suggests he may have been on to something.
In 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, the artist describes “slumber with a key,” which involves a bony Spanish-style armchair, a heavy key, and a plate on the floor. When the key slips out of your fingers and clangs, you wake up. According to Dalí, just a few seconds of slumber could yield priceless creative insights.
There’s some real neuroscience behind this silly-sounding practice, and it comes down to something now known as N1 sleep. As you fall asleep, you pass through N1, the lightest stage of non-REM sleep, where your muscles relax and your brain starts producing dreamlike imagery drawn from your recent experiences. People woken from N1 often swear they were never asleep, yet “microdreams” from these brief siestas can cram elaborate scenes into a few seconds.
Researchers got curious about whether that loose, wandering state could boost creativity. They started with narcolepsy, a condition that involves frequent slips between wake and sleep. They compared 185 patients to 126 typical sleepers and found the narcoleptics scored higher on every creativity measure. The more hybrid-state symptoms they had, the higher the score.
Then, with a strong hunch that this in-between phase could be the key to creativity, they tested N1’s impact directly. Participants worked through a math task with a hidden shortcut, and those who hadn’t found it after 30 rounds took a 20-minute break in a dark room holding a plastic bottle. If they fell asleep and dropped the bottle, they would wake up. Of the 24 who dropped it after reaching N1, 20 (83 percent) found the trick afterward, compared with 15 of 59 (30%) who stayed awake. Even 15 seconds in N1 helped, but dozing deeper erased the benefit.
But unlike Dalí’s reported experiences, people didn’t emerge from N1 with a brilliant idea in tow. The nappers took an average of 94 more trials to crack the math problem. It’s not like they spent their nap time actively working on the math either: the content of their reported N1 dreams had no bearing on how quickly they solved the problem. The link between an N1 wake-up and boosted brainpower was squishier than that, which feels kind of spooky. Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about why we do our best creative work when rudely awoken—and how researchers at MIT are trying to harness this hack.
FACT: Straight men aren’t talking about their sexual problems
Featuring Adam Conover
This week’s episode featured special guest Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything fame. He joined the show to talk about some surprising figures on male sexuality that he learned while working on his new comedy special, Big Divorce Energy.
Adam Conover: Big Divorce Energy | Full Comedy Special
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more than half of women surveyed admit to having faked an orgasm at some point, given how often those performances are referenced in TV shows and movies. But research consistently shows that men fake orgasms, too. One study found that around a quarter of men reported doing so.
Adam certainly found that stat surprising, and he’s spent a lot of time thinking about why—and going down rabbit holes about what other aspects of straight, male sexuality get taken for granted. If men aren’t willing to talk about the orgasms they fake, what else are they sweeping under the rug? Check out this week’s episode for more.
FACT: Human ‘spontaneous’ combustion probably isn’t so spontaneous, but it’s still pretty strange.
There’ve been dozens of reported cases of spontaneous human combustion throughout history, going as far back as 17th Century Europe and as recently as 2010, when 76-year-old Michael Faherty’s death in Galway, Ireland, sparked talk of this spooky phenomenon.
One famous 1731 account of Countess Cornelia Bandi’s untimely demise, written by a priest, Giuseppe Bianchini, is particularly harrowing. It describes just a few blackened bits and body parts remaining, amid the apparent and mysterious destruction of most of her body. Her lower legs allegedly remained intact (stockings and all!) while the rest was burned to greasy ash. It’s not surprising that Giuseppe’s tale took on a life of its own. After all, getting reduced to a pile of cinders and a pair of ankles is quite the way to go.
Famous authors, starting with Charles Dickens in Bleak House, took inspiration from these startling descriptions, which popped up in Enlightenment and Victorian-era tabloids. And Dickens, in particular, latched onto the idea—taking it as 100% fact that a human being could erupt in flames with no particular outside interference. In fact, Dickens was one half of a 10-month long, public debate about whether or not spontaneous human combustion is possible. Dickens and his friend, philosopher George Lewes, had a major disagreement over the science in the form of back and forth published letters and installments of Bleak House, where Dickens would routinely defend spontaneous human combustion in the introduction to each chapter.
Since Dickens helped to popularize and defend the phenomenon, it’s stayed persistent among a certain set of conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists. There are lots of ideas about how and why a person might suddenly burst into flames out there, from lightning strikes, intestinal gases, acts of God, and even ketosis. But the truth is likely a little sadder, if not stranger.
The prevailing scientific wisdom suggests most of these mysterious deaths are the outcome of the “wick effect.” Under the right conditions, some people basically burn like candles. Thanks to experiments with pig carcasses, blankets, and one woman’s osteoporitic bones at the Tennessee Body Farm, we know that an elderly person wearing the wrong clothes at the wrong time near an open flame can unfortunately burn long enough and hot enough to destroy most of a body, bone and all, without necessarily igniting a house fire.
