Sometime we get a question that has maybe never been asked before in the history of

questions, and sometimes we get questions that are so universally wondered, that they

get asked over and over again.

So, we've compiled some of those frequent asks into one place, here, so hopefully, if

you've ever wondered these curious questions, you can get a whole bunch of answers right

now.

Recently, Patreon patron, Rob Margolis, reminded us of two of these questions that come up

a lot.

The first, I hope you're not wondering right now, but if you are, I hope you recover quickly

and can watch this video about what causes migraines.

If you've never had a migraine, you might think it's just a really bad headache.

But if you've ever had them, or you know someone who does, you know that they're

much worse -- and much more complicated -- than that.

A true migraine is a multi-symptom disorder of the central nervous system that affects

the brain.

But, yes, really bad headaches are a major component of it -- probably the single most

significant and identifiable component.

But it usually lasts longer than a normal headache -- anywhere from 4 hours to several

days// -- and brings a whole array of other symptoms with it.

Most migraine sufferers experience extreme sensitivity to light and sound, and sometimes

smells.

They also commonly experience nausea, vomiting, even fainting.

What little relief they can find is generally only achieved by being very still in a dark,

silent room until the symptoms pass.

And believe it or not, it gets worse.

Migraines also cause problems both before and after the headache.

It's different for everyone, but the ordeal can start with symptoms as seemingly minor

as constipation, weird food cravings, neck stiffness, or excessive yawning.

As the symptoms worsen, people generally enter a phase called aura, in which they may experience

things like vision disturbances -- like seeing shapes or lights, blurred or doubled vision,

or even loss of vision -- “pins and needles” sensations in the extremities, weakness, and

sometimes even slurred speech.

Now, you might notice that these sound a lot like the symptoms of a stroke, and in fact

migraines have so many things in common with strokes that doctors sometimes have to do

tests to determine which disorder they're dealing with.

After the headache has passed, most migraine sufferers experience a period of weakness

and fatigue that can last from a few hours to a few days.

Obviously this isn't the sort of thing that anyone wants to experience.

So what causes it?

Can it be controlled?

Or at least treated?

Doctors think migraines are probably caused by a sharp drop in your brain's levels of

serotonin -- a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in regulating things like sleep

and mood.

And once that imbalance strikes, it causes a whole cascade of effects.

But what triggers this imbalance is complicated and uncertain.

We do know that one of the most important factors is genetics.

If one or both of your parents has experienced a migraine, odds are that you will too.

For reasons that we don't understand, women are far more likely to have migraines than

men, and they're even more likely to experience one during times of hormonal changes, like

puberty, menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy, when using hormonal contraceptives or hormone

replacements, and menopause.

Beyond that, everyone's triggers are different.

For many people, it may depend on stress, their activity level or their sleep schedule

-- all things in which serotonin plays a role.

And still others may be triggered by things as seemingly random as bright lights, loud

sounds, unusual or strong smells, or even weather changes.

The //treatment// of migraines is further evidence that it's not just a headache.

It's true that the headache itself can sometimes be treated with pain relievers, although they're

often less effective.

In addition to pain relief, migraine sufferers may take medications that try to treat the

source of attacks, like by controlling the constriction of blood vessels in the brain,

blood pressure, serotonin levels, and inflammation.

So clearly a migraine is more than just a bad headache, remember that when you hang

out with people who get them.

If they're in a bad way, the biggest favor you can give them is just to let them be by

themselves in a dark room.

You can just keep watching SciShow //quietly//.

Rob's second question is another that comes up a lot, but is less painful...for humans

anyway.

Welcome to I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means, where we look at bits of scientific

theory that've wiggled their way into popular culture and taken on a life of their own.

Today we're talking about Schrodinger's Cat, a famous thought experiment devised by

Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who helped piece physics back together after Einstein

and his crew blew a giant honkin' hole in it back in the early 20th century.

It can't really be overstated how much of a giant crap circus the 1920's were for

physicists.

Until then, everything had pretty much just been good old-fashioned Newtonian physics

-- where you could observe objects moving, and predict how they'd react to various

forces.

But then along came new research into subatomic particles that showed they didn't act predictably

at all.

In fact, sometimes stuff seemed to be two things at once.

Like, an electron in a beam might act like a particle sometimes and like a wave at other

times.

And to make things even more -- [heaves tense sigh, sort of like hyperventilating]-- the

more you try to observe and measure these particles, the less naturally they seem to

behave.

Sphincter-say-what, now?

[js: Um, it's from Wayne's World and I think I'm trying to bring it back.]

My friends, welcome to one of the biggest mind-flogs of quantum mechanics; it's called

superposition -- the idea that a particle can exist in all of its theoretically possible

states at the same time.

So Schrodinger came up with this thought experiment to help folks understand it: Say you have

a cat and you put it in a steel chamber for an hour with a vial of deadly gas, a Geiger

counter, a hammer, and a tiny bit of something radioactive.

OK just bear with me.

Now say there's a 50/50 chance that one of the radioactive atoms is going to decay

within that hour.

If one of the atoms decays, the Geiger counter is going to trigger the hammer, shattering

the vial of poisonous gas.

Really, Schrodinger?

This is not the best way to get people behind the idea of funding the sciences.

So, there's a 50% chance at the end of the hour that the vial has been broken and the

cat is dead, and an equally good chance that the vial hasn't broken and the cat's just

kickin' it, wondering what's for supper.

But, what's actually happening in the box?

According to quantum mechanics, any one of those radioactive atoms would be in a superposition

of being both decayed and not decayed at the same time.

Because that's how quantum objects act.

So then that decayed atom will have both killed and not killed the cat, right?

Well that's the logical conclusion but the cat isn't a quantum object.

The cat is a big normal thing that obeys old-fashioned Newtonian laws.

So it, just like ever other cat in history is either alive or dead.

Schrodingers point, at least one of them is that the object is subject to two separate

sets of laws that can't be reconciled.

In order to know whether the atom is decayed or not is to open the box as see if the cat

is dead.

But in quantum mechanics, the state of superposition can't be observed.

So when the evil mad scientist finally opens the chamber, to observe, the superposition

collapses once the outcome is ensured.

Today, Schrodinger's Cat is talked about as some undead zombie cat or discussed at

being dead and not dead, alive in the box.

But Schrodingers point wasn't to prove you can make a cat both alive and dead but instead

prove that the quantum world doesn't mesh well with the normal world.

Alternatively the point the universe is pretty freakin' weird.

There are other interpretations of quantum mechanics that resolve the paradox but none

of them are easy to test.

My favorite is of course the “Many Worlds” interpretation that states at the end of the

experiment and at the end of the superposition, alternate universes are created.

But in this case, one in which the cat is alive and one in which the cat is dead.

And to be clear I don't like this interpretation because it's the most likely one, I like

it because it's such a excellent plot device for science fiction novels.

Dreaming is one of the weirdest thing we do.

I mean, I don't want to diminish all the other strange crap our bodies are capable

of, 'cause a lot of it is cracked out on so many levels.

But dreams are a special kind of crazy.

No matter how many dreams you have in your life, every once in a while you wake up like,

“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”

But as with everything else, science is helping us understand why we dream, what our brains

are up to when they do it, and why dreaming may be critically important to the functioning

of our awake brains.

Try to stay awake for this, 'cause it's really cool.

People have been trying to understand dreams since--well, since there've been people.

But the person we associate most with the science of dreaming is probably Sigmund Freud.

In 1899 he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, where he suggested that dreams were largely

symbolic and allowed us to sort through the repressed wishes that piled up in our unconscious

minds.

And most of those wishes involve weird sex stuff.

Freud was kinduva perv, if you must know.

It wasn't until the 1950s, when scientists became able to read the electrical activity

of the brain, that we began to understand what a dreaming brain was actually up to.

Two researchers at the University of Chicago -- Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman

-- pioneered this research by hooking people up to the newly-invented EEG machine and monitoring

their brain activity while they slept.

What they thought they'd find was that a sleeping brain was a resting brain, but they

discovered exactly the opposite.

They found that brain activity fluctuates in a predictable pattern over a period of

about 90 minutes.

This cycle takes sleepers from an initial period of drifting off, gradually into a really

deep sleep with slower brain activity, back into almost-waking.

And this stage of sleep where the sleepers were aaaaalmost awake again was the most interesting:

brain activity in this phase was almost identical to when people were awake.

But even more weird, during this stage, the subjects became functionally paralyzed--the

only parts of their bodies that moved were their eyes, which darted back and forth under

their eyelids.

So Aserinsky and Kleitman called this period R.E.M. sleep, after the rapid eye movement

that characterized it.

They also called it “paradoxical sleep,” because the subjects seemed to be awake, according

to their brain activity, even though they were basically dead to the world.

I guess they figured these names were better than “Sexually Aroused Sleep,” which is

another rather common feature of this stage.

But another thing the scientists found was that if REM sleepers were awakened, they reported

having really vivid dreams that were often emotionally intense.

It wasn't the only stage of sleep in which the subjects dreamed, but it was the time

they reported having the most lifelike dreams.

It turns out that every 90 minutes or so, during the final stage of the sleep cycle,

the brain phases into the R.E.M. sleep and our brains start creating crazy narratives

that last maybe 20 or 30 minutes.

This is when you have those really vibrant dreams that can easily be confused with reality.

So WHYYYYY so busy, Sleeping Brain?

And what's so important about dreaming that you have to paralyze your entire body in order

to have really realistic dreams?

Well, there are probably several answers, but one of them is that during all periods

of dreaming, our brains are making important connections between real-life experiences

that will help us in our waking lives.

These days, researchers are finding that Freud was wrong about dreams in one important way:

We don't dream much about our hidden desires.

We mostly dream about what we did today.

While we sleep, our brains are sorting through what happened while we were awake, deciding

which new experiences were important enough to remember and which should get tossed, searching

for links between seemingly unrelated events that might be able to help us be a more successful

human tomorrow.

And it's actually really important that we do this while we're asleep, because our

conscious, waking brains are generally too controlling to allow this kind of creative

problem-solving.

And this dream-time activity helps our waking brains be better at things that require making

connections and thinking outside the box.

Dreams have actually been responsible for some really important inventions and discoveries

in history.

For instance, Dimitri Mendeleev came up with a system for the structure of the periodic

table of elements in a dream after months of grueling conscious thought was getting