#scriptdraft3

(Sit down at the computer. Turn to look at the camera.)

It’s 6 pm. Time to start my essay. It’s due tomorrow so I really hope I can get it done on time. (Type “Essay #1” on the computer on a word document. Have an animated clock on the screen fast forward to 6 pm.) (Next cut to a scene where I am surfing the Internet reading the news while the animated clock fast forwards more.) (Then show a new clip of me playing a game on my cellphone – perhaps Angry Birds – while the clock fast-forwards even more.) (Finally cut to a scene where I google “how to stop procrastinating” while the clock continues to run. Next cut the scene back to the word document where all I have written is “Essay #1” and “Why can’t I stop procrastinating???” The time is now 11 pm.)

(Next change the scene.)

Does this situation seem familiar to you? If it does don’t worry. You are not alone. In fact, almost everyone has struggled with procrastination at some point in his or her life. Procrastination, which basically means putting off a task until later, can affect everyone. Yet, some people still procrastinate more so than others. (Move camera to person right next to me who has finished his entire essay and then back to mine.) What is going on in people’s brains when they procrastinate? How was “Sam” able to finish his whole entire essay before I even wrote a sentence? Let’s take a look at the brain science behind procrastination.

(Change the scene again.)

Whenever you do something that you enjoy or find pleasurable your brain releases a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine makes you feel good and can be released after exercise, sex, and food. For instance, I love doughnuts. When I bite into a doughnut, my brain releases dopamine, because I have satisfied a craving. (Bite into the doughnut and rub stomach.) Yum.

So what do dopamine and feeling good have to do with procrastination? Well when we have two options… 1) to do the work that we need to get done such as writing the essay or 2) to do a more pleasurable activity such as playing Angry Birds… our brain is in conflict. An area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex is responsible for taking in information and making decisions. (Point to the prefrontal cortex on a brain.) So when we procrastinate, our brain’s prefrontal cortex is basically in a state of tug-of-war. Should I do this or should I do that? (Hold up hands on both sides.)

Most of the time we tend to give in to what feels better in the immediate moment. We give in to that kick of dopamine when we procrastinate. Overtime this dopamine kick modifies our brain cells and we become more and more likely to repeat this behavior. In my case, I play Angry Birds instead of writing my essay.

So to me feeling better meant playing Angry Birds instead of writing my essay. But Sam wrote his essay and did not even think about doing something else. What is his brain doing differently than mine? Well some people, such as myself, may be genetically more likely to be distracted by new temptations. Impulsive people may also be more easily distracted by choices that they think will be more enjoyable in the short term. Because of this they often put off their long-term goals, such as writing an essay, until later. People with poorer self-control may also be more likely to procrastinate.

But don’t worry! Procrastination can be prevented. After all it is entirely your choice to make the best long-term decision.

For instance, it may be helpful to imagine yourself in the future. You may want to “time travel”, thinking of how much better you will feel after finishing a task. How might you feel in the future if you still did not finish writing your essay? You may also want to reward yourself in intervals. Why not try writing your essay for 30 minutes and then eating a chocolate bar as a reward?

Why are black holes black? Well, the answer has a lot to do with gravity. In young stars, there is a constant outward pressure that exists in equilibrium with the pull of gravity. When giant stars reach the final stage of their lives, they blow up, and there’s no outward pressure to counteract this pull of gravity. And the star begins to collapse in on itself and starts to become a black hole. It becomes so dense that at a certain boundary, called the event horizon, there’s no escaping this gravity. We usually think of gravity as only affecting objects that have mass, but in the case of black holes, the gravity is a force so strong that it affects [dramatic zoom in to face] space and time.

But let’s take a step back [comedic zoom out] before we get a little too complicated.

Let’s look at an analogy. [pan to empty open street]

Say we had someone [I pop into view, left third of the screen. “Oo, that’s me! Hi, me!”] and this someone decides to walk all the way around the earth. [I walk off to the right, all the way off-screen.]

[view of my feet, from above, walking from left to right.] From their two-dimensional perspective, they would say they are walking in a straight line.

[view of the earth] But look at it from a three-dimensional perspective, they’ve walked in a huge circle.

The same is true from the perspective of a photon or light particle in a black hole. From the three-dimensional perspective of a photon, the light is traveling in a straight line, but from the four-dimensional perspective of time and space, it’s traveling in a curved line.

Why do we laugh?

 To find out why we laugh, let’s first think about what do laughing and fighting have in common.

Let’s start with the eyes: do you see how we squint, and our cheeks raise up to protect our eyes? We also lift the upper lip to expose our sharp teeth, as if to scare others off. Another similarity is that we produce a loud and explosive sound, be it ‘ha-ha’ for laughing or ‘argh’ for fighting. They threaten our opponent and controls our breathing to lower our heart rate and blood pressure during a fight.

 Those similarities are so irrational – why is laughing similar to a fighting? We laugh to show friendliness and happiness, not aggression or defense!

 We may find the answer from something called play-fighting. We see it between animals from puppies to our human ancestors, where they fight with each other in a non-violent, playful way.

Let’s say there are two Apes, A and B, play-fighting with each other, and Ape A puts its finger on to the stomach of Ape B. We know that the stomach is a sensitive and vulnerable region, so when Ape A sees the finger coming, or feels the finger at its stomach, its body turns into an alert, defensive state, where we see its eyes squint and teeth exposed.

 But moments later, when Ape A realized that the ‘attack’ comes from its friend Ape B, and it’s only a harmless play, the defensive Ape will turn its halfway exposed teeth into a smile-like expression, and produce the ‘ha-ha’ sound, as a signal saying that ‘this is a false alarm; there is nothing to worry about’.

This is also why we laugh when being tickled by a friend. We don’t laugh when we tickle ourselves, because we have expected it to happen. We also don’t laugh when a creepy stranger suddenly tickles us.

 What we see in the tickling case is summaries in a theory called a ‘Benign-Violation’ theory. Benign means the action is harmless, it doesn’t hurt us in any way, and violation refers to the unexpectedness, that we don’t see it coming. When the ‘benign’ and ‘violation’ happen at the same time, we laugh.

 This benign violation is not limited to physical ‘attacks’, but to social ones too. For example, [two people high five, one takes back his or her hands like in a jelly-fish movement] we laugh in this case, because normally when people high five, we expect the two hands to clap, this jelly fish is unexpected. At the same time, this violation of our social expectation is benign, because it doesn’t hurt us in any sense. Because there are both benign and violation factors happening, we laugh.

 So this is why we laugh when we laugh, and here are some fun facts about laughing:

1.    Why laughing is contagious

What do this GMO apple [hold up apple (make sure GMO label, or label it myself, is visible)] and this dog [hold up Daisy] have in common? [Bring both to center of frame] They’ve both been genetically modified by us. Something’s genetics, or DNA, are like the building blocks that tell it what traits to have, like what to look like or how big it is. [Jump to close up] Anything that is living has DNA, and we’ve changed the DNA of crops, dogs, and tons of other stuff over many years by picking traits that we like and eliminating the ones that we don’t! [Pan back out to wide screen] But my dog, Daisy, hasn’t earned the label “GMO,” so what’s the difference between a GMO and something that was selectively bred? Well, let’s look at the term “GMO.”

[On the common] In the simplest sense, GMO mean [pan out, text on screen] Genetically Modified Organism. [Close shot] Let’s go back to my dog. [Show Daisy in park with other dogs] Notice how Daisy and the other dogs look really different! Over the years, we bred dogs like her to be small, happy, agile, and good companions. How did we do that? [start evolution of papillon breed animation] Well, the breeders found a male and a female dog with the most desirable traits and bred them, making puppies that were more likely to be what they wanted. [More papillon animations] This has changed the DNA of her breed. Now, this process took hundreds of years to end up with all of the dog breeds we have today, but what if science could do it faster? Well, we're getting there and that's where the term GMO come in. 

[In front of my fridge] Scientists can modify the DNA of crops to give the organisms some new advantage or desirable trait. Just like we do with dogs, we’ve already been doing this through crop selection for thousands of years. [pull cut watermelon out of fridge] Take this watermelon: what does this look like on the inside? If you guessed this [open watermelon up] you’d be right! But what if this watermelon was 400 years old?  400 years ago, watermelons probably looked like this! [show old watermelon] Over the last 400 years, we’ve selectively chosen to plant seeds from the watermelons with the most edible stuff. Yea, the ones from 400 years ago were probably just as refreshing on a hot summer day, but you’d definitely get a lot less of it!

So what’s wrong with selecting crops for specific traits by choosing which seeds to plant? Nothing really, but it takes a long time. Instead, we can do it really quickly in the lab. [Show friend in lab? Or B roll of genetics lab stuff ] Not only that, but scientists can add new traits that you wouldn’t normally see in nature! Some of these traits help a crop or animal to survive, like adding insect or virus protection and some of these traits are really strange but useful, like adding a fluorescent protein to a rabbit to help study disease. 

(Open scene with a stereotypical scene from a fictional movie about the differences between boys and girls, e.g. a boy and a girl fighting and a girl saying that the boy is being insensitive)

(Then turn to look at the camera.)

These are all stereotypical statements that a girl might say about a boy or that a boy might say about a girl. Boys and girls clearly have different ways of dealing with people. Why might this be? Why is it that boys and girls think so differently?  

(Switch scene/camera view)

The answer lies in the fact that the brains of boys and girls are different. The brain, one of the biggest organs in our body, affects our perception of the world. Because boys and girls have such different brains, it is no surprise that they see the world so differently! So how do the brains of boys and girls differ?

One of the main differences in male and female brains is that male brains have nearly seven times more GRAY matter while female brains have nearly ten times more WHITE matter.

Gray matter? White matter? What is all this?  

Well gray matter and white matter refer to the two main types of brain tissue, a type of material that is found in your brain. These two types of tissue are literally gray or white. (Hold up colors) This difference in coloring has to do with something called myelination, which is found only in white matter. Myelination is basically fat, which wraps around the axon, which is a long nerve cell. (Show an animation or schematic) Yes, it’s kind of like a pig in a blanket!

So what do these differences in gray and white matter mean for girls and boys?

Well first off, gray matter areas of the brain process information. White matter, on the other hand, connects these gray matter areas together with other information areas of the brain.

This difference in the amount of gray versus white matter may explain why girls tend to be better at multitasking whereas boys tend to be better at task-focused projects. Isn’t that interesting? Girls, in fact, also tend to be more able to transition quickly between tasks than boys.

The second reason is that the brains of boys and girls differ in terms of their chemistry (e.g. what types of chemicals are in their brains). Males tend to have higher amounts of testosterone, a hormone that is involved when you are angry. Females tend to have higher amounts of estrogen and oxytocin, a chemical, which is involved in making someone feel happy.

So what do these differences in the amount of chemicals in the brain mean? Well for one, males tend to be more physically aggressive. This means that they are more likely to get angry more quickly. Females on the other hand are also more likely than males to want to take care of a baby.  

Okay, now we know some of the differences, but how do the brains of males and females differ in how they are built?

Well, females generally have a larger hippocampus than males. What is a hippocampus? It is a brain region involved in memory. Females also have more brain areas that connect into the hippocampus than males. This means that they are able to absorb more information than males from all 5 senses.

In fact, the brains of males and females even differ before they are born! Females tend to have verbal centers on both sides of the brain, while males only have verbal centers on the left hemisphere. This means that girls tend to enjoy talking about emotions and feelings more so than boys. So the stereotypical statement of girls being more emotional than boys may in fact be true!

The 4th main difference between males and females is that the amount of blood flowing into the brain and the brain activity may differ. Females tend to have greater blood flow throughout the brain and in an area of the brain called the cingulate gyrus. (Point to the cingulate gyrus on a brain.) Because of this, they tend to think about memories that are emotional more so than do males.

Remember this scene from Matrix? It is not just a stuff of science fiction anymore. See, back in 2014, Google released a Virtual Reality headset made with cardboards, two plastic lenses and a magnet. It’s so simple that you can actually make it at your home.

So, how does this virtual reality work?

Let’s look at it to find out the basic principles of Virtual Reality at work.

This headset looks like a simple box with a couple of holes, and a cutout to place your forehead in. If you open it up, inside the holes there’s two lenses; It’s just like glasses. Do you notice this piece that separates the two lenses? This is the key to 3D vision.

3D vision is pretty simple. We have two eyes which are approximately 3 inches apart. Because of this separation, each eye sees the world from a slightly different viewpoint. Our brain fuses these two views, one from the left eye and the other from the right eye, and creates a sense of depth. That’s what 3D vision is.

Here’s a simple way to experience this. Hold your thumb up, and stretch out your arms. Then, close one eye. Now, try closing the other eye. Do you notice how your thumb “jumps” a little bit to the left or right when you switch between your eyes? Now hold out your thumb closer to you and do the same experiment. Depending on how close or far you hold out your thumb, it will jump more or less. That’s how we sense depth. Depending on how different an object appears from your left eye from your right eye, we get a sense of how far it is.

Now, back to our cardboard. The cardboard has a slot to put your phone in. The screen is just the right distance away from the lenses so that the images are on focused in your eyes. You see the two different images on the left and right side? Each eye is looking at a different image and because of that, your brain makes you think that it’s actually 3D.

Now strap the box on your forehead, and move your head around. The phone has a couple of sensors that can measure its position and movement like a GPS. Since the phone is now attached to your head, it can effectively measure your head position and angle. The images on the screen adjust as you turn your head, and you feel like you are immersed in a totally new place.

So, if all it takes is a piece of cardboard and a couple of cheap lenses, why are we not living in Matrix right now? Well, virtual reality is not just about 3D vision. If we are going to be immersed in a virtual world, we  want to not only see but also hear, smell, touch and interact with that world, right? For instance, if we want to make friends in a virtual school, we want to be able to hear his voice even when he calls us from our back, and shake his hands too. And to make that real, there’s a whole array of science and engineering that goes behind it all. For example, haptic technologies study the science of touch. Why somethings feel the way they do.

You know how sometimes 3D movies just make you dizzy? Well virtual reality can make you sick too, like when you feel car sick. We don’t really understand why this happens, but one classic theory is that you get sick when you have conflicting signals from your senses. Say you are reading in a car. Your internal motion sensor, which all of us have inside of our ears, sense that you are moving, but your eyes are just looking at the book so it thinks you are not moving. And this conflict is what makes you sick. This is one of the reasons why virtual reality is not so popular yet. Because it’s not comfortable!

Finally, to experience immersive environments, someone needs to create them. It’s not just shooting a scene from two different perspectives to get 3D views. It means we need to capture or create an entire 3 dimensional world, where you can walk around and move your head to see all the possible views. Several companies are developing special cameras and software to do this, but it is still very expensive and takes a lot of time.