Éclat for the smartest girl in the room
Today: why you’re terrible at predicting how long you’ll feel awful (or amazing) about something, the canvas sneaker that began life as a basketball shoe, the tiny bit of physics that makes popcorn jump, a rainbow that is secretly a full circle and a fruit-labelling scandal — plus a French phrase for the luxury of a lazy morning and the case of the reflected clock.
The Big Idea · Psychology
The Impact Bias: You Feel Things Less, and for Less Time, Than You Predict
Ask people how they’d feel after a big win or a big disappointment, and they imagine the feeling lasting for ages. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson called this error the “impact bias”. In one famous set of studies, academics who were denied tenure (a career-defining promotion) predicted months of misery, yet they bounced back much faster than they expected. The reason is that we picture the event on its own, and forget that the rest of life keeps happening around it: friends, lunch, a good song, a new problem to solve. Our minds also run a quiet repair crew, a kind of psychological immune system, that starts making sense of bad news the moment it lands, and we forget to count it in our forecast. A fair caveat: later research suggests we’re better at guessing how strong a feeling will be than how long it will last, so the “duration” part is the weak spot. Still, the pattern is robust enough to be taught in universities everywhere.
Daniel Gilbert’s research page
Why it's cool Next time you’re sure a bad grade or an embarrassing moment will ruin everything, you’ll know your brain is a notoriously unreliable fortune-teller.
Read moreThe Chuck Taylor Began as a Basketball Shoe
The canvas high-top we call the Chuck was launched by Converse in 1917 as the “Non-Skids”, a basketball shoe with a rubber sole and a diamond-patterned tread. Its name came later: a former player turned salesman called Chuck Taylor promoted it around the country and pushed for design changes, and in 1932 his name was added to the ankle patch. For decades it was a serious sports shoe, until leather and cushioned trainers took over the courts. That’s exactly why it became a style classic: it was cheap, plain and made no promises, so skaters, punk bands and students could make it their own. The lesson in trend terms is that the longest-lasting fashion pieces are often blank canvases, quite literally, rather than statements. Sources differ on a few dates, so treat the exact timeline as “widely cited” rather than carved in stone.
Wikipedia: Chuck Taylor All-Stars
Read morePopcorn Pops at 180 °C, and the Jump Is a Starch “Leg”
A popcorn kernel is a tiny pressure cooker: a hard hull wrapped around starch and a little water. When the kernel hits about 180 °C (356 °F), the water turns to steam and the pressure inside reaches roughly ten times the air around you. The hull then ruptures and the starch bursts out as a foam that sets almost instantly. French physicists who filmed this in 2015 found that the jump is not the steam rocketing the kernel: a stubby starch “leg” pushes against the pan and then springs, like a gymnast.
Tell someone Popcorn doesn’t just explode, it does a tiny gymnastic jump using a leg made of starch.
Bananas Are Berries, and Strawberries Are Not
To a botanist, a berry is a fleshy fruit that grows from a single ovary and has its seeds embedded inside. By that rule bananas qualify (and so do grapes and tomatoes). Strawberries don’t: the red fleshy part grows from the flower’s base, and each little “seed” on the outside is actually a separate tiny fruit with a seed inside. Raspberries and blackberries are another special case, made of many tiny fruits stuck together. The kitchen word “berry” and the scientific one simply don’t match.
Tell someone By botanical rules a banana is a berry, but a strawberry is not, because the “seeds” on its skin are actually tiny fruits.
A Rainbow Is Really a Full Circle
A rainbow forms when sunlight enters raindrops, reflects once inside and exits at about 42 degrees from the point exactly opposite the Sun. That means every drop at that angle sends colour to your eyes, and together they make a circle around that point. From the ground the horizon cuts off the lower half, so we see an arch. From a mountain or an aircraft, with enough rain below you and the Sun behind you, you can sometimes see the whole circle, with your own shadow near the middle.
Tell someone The rainbow arch is just a circle with the bottom cut off by the ground.
faire la grasse matinée
fair la grass ma-tee-NAY · verb phrase
to sleep in; to have a lazy, late morning in bed on purpose.
« Dimanche, je ne fais rien : je vais faire la grasse matinée jusqu’à midi. »
On Sunday I’m doing nothing: I’m going to sleep in until noon.
Literally it means “to do the fat morning”. In old French “gras” also meant rich or generous, so a “fat” morning is one that’s plump with extra hours, much like we say a “rich” dessert. It sounds charming and a little luxurious, not lazy-as-an-insult, so it’s a perfect thing to say about a Saturday.
The Case of the Reflected Clock
The school’s bake-sale cake was on the kitchen counter when the caretaker checked at 7:45 p.m. By 8:00 p.m. it had vanished. Only three students had a key: Pia, Ro and Sol. Ro was on stage in front of two hundred parents until 8:05 p.m. Sol was on a recorded video call with her grandmother in the library from 7:40 to 8:10 p.m. Pia says she left the kitchen long before and offers proof: a selfie she took in the mirrored cupboard door, showing the wall clock behind her at ten past four, with the numbers on its face appearing back to front. “Look,” she says, “I was gone hours before the cake even arrived.”
Who took the cake, and what does Pia’s photo really show?
Reveal the answer
Pia did. Because the photo is of a reflection, the clock is flipped left to right, so ten past four in the mirror is really ten to eight (12:00 minus 4:10 is 7:50). Her own “proof” puts her in the kitchen at 7:50 p.m., right in the window when the cake disappeared, while Ro and Sol both have solid alibis.
Popcorn needs 180 °C and a lot of pressure before it finally pops. Honestly, same, but with group projects.
The impact bias says you’ll feel worse for longer than you really will. The only exception is a text left on “read”, which, scientifically, lasts forever.
Why was the strawberry upset at the botany lecture? It found out it wasn’t a berry and its seeds weren’t even seeds. It’s having an identity crisis on the outside.
Guess Before You Learn: A Wrong Answer Is a Head Start
Most of us study by reading first and testing later. Research on the “pretesting effect” suggests flipping that order. In experiments by Nate Kornell and colleagues, students who first tried to answer a question they couldn’t possibly know, and were then shown the right answer, remembered it better than students who just studied it. A later study by Lindsey Richland and colleagues found the same thing with a passage of text: questions asked before reading helped students afterwards. The likely reason is that a guess makes your brain care about the answer and opens a little “slot” for it to fall into. You don’t even have to be right; in these studies, only the wrong guesses counted.
Try it today Before you read the next chapter or watch the next lesson, write down three questions you think it will answer, plus a guess for each. Then check how you did.
Spotlight
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
As a Cambridge PhD student in 1967, she spotted a faint, repeating blip in data from a radio telescope she had helped build, and she kept pushing until it was recognised as the first pulsar. The 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery went to her supervisor instead. In 2018 she received a Special Breakthrough Prize of $3 million and gave it all to the Institute of Physics to fund scholarships for people underrepresented in physics. More →