Month: April 2019

Episode 40 – Assumptions

Posted on by Katherine Flores

Assumptions color all aspects of life. Too bad they’re such a crock! This CrockCast explores the confusion of Instagram DMs, how nobody reads, and a munchausen mom’s murder.

Nobody Reads the Whole Thing

It’s a common assumption that people read. Turns out they mostly scan headlines – shocker! Even if they read a bit, it’s rarely an entire piece. Michael kicks off the podcast with a heads up that people aren’t reading. He introduces radical headline tips to help writers get their readers more engaged. Let’s try to get them past the first paragraph fellow writers!

Learn about how accomplished copywriters use everyday words to grip a reader’s attention. All it takes is a listen to Episode 40 of the CrockCast.

Assumptions Hide Abuse

Next Katherine shares a fascinating tale of Munchausen by Proxy and murder. She invokes a vast reservoir of info accumulated in a movie, miniseries, and Buzzfeed clicks. It’s repugnant and gripping all at once.

How could a woman poison her child? She even had her daughter’s salivary glands and teeth removed. Still that was only the beginning of her madness. Hear more about this single mother’s descent toward her own murder. A gripping unbelievable story awaits on your podcast app at Such a Crock. Or just click below to hit the stream immediately.

Keto Assumptions

Then Michael gets feisty because he’s often assumed to “be keto”. This annoys him. He’s a man not a diet! The rant rolls forth with facts galore. Luckily, that includes a clear definition and advice on its validity.

The keto conclusions may surprise you. Turns out Michael eats carbs. Also, keto may serve epileptic children but few others. No matter who or what keto claims to be; on the store shelves, it’s all about marketing.

Instagram DMs Breed Assumptions

The CrockCast winds down with a quick story out of Katherine’s Instagram direct messages. She shares about her own silly assumptions. Turns out they’ve led to lots of @LadyKflo confusion. It’s a healthy reminder to quiet our personal bias and listen. Quick but fruitful, this story will likely make you laugh too.

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Episode 39 – Memory

Posted on by Katherine Flores

Errol Morris and Eye Contact

Picture Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

We all need human connection. Eye contact works as a way to get this kind of intimacy. Errol Morris, the legendary filmmaker and documentarian, also believes we need it to find truth in conversation. That’s why he invented the Interrotron. It’s the camera technology that enables him to get to the truth during his documentary interviews.

Thanks to his innovation, Morris cracked a murder case and those interviews ended up freeing an innocent man from a death sentence. Turns out, the witnesses who testified against this death row prisoner misremembered facts. They thus perjured their witness stand testimony. The Interrotron uncovered five cases of this perjury.

Learn more about these fascinating false memories as well as many other tasty Errol Morris morsels on the Memory episode of Such a Crock.

Witness Testimony

Next the CrockCast delves deeper into eyewitness memory issues from the backend. Why do eyewitness accounts hold such power over juries? How can people give false testimony in such high stakes cases?

These questions are asked and answered. First of all, the brain is a malleable organ and memory is no exception. Also, our popular beliefs about memory are largely false. Turns out, memory works more like narrative storytelling than a video or audio recording. It builds in layers that can bend and fold – more with each remembering.

Courtrooms don’t help clarify this mental mishmash with their leading questions and evidentiary tactics. If anything, a jury trial simply makes matters worse. It’s complicated by the power eyewitness accounts hold over juries. For some reason, they are more likely to believe falsehoods on the witness stand than most other evidence offered in a court case.

Black Mirror Deletions

The Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You engages our CrockCast cohorts. Thus they discuss what it means to remember the events of a marriage. What really matters? Many would say Truth. But this episode points to a different reality.

The TV show illustrates a scenario where people have a video/audio recording of their life embedded into a “grain”. That means they can choose to rewatch events that transpire alone or even share them with a buddy any time they choose. It gives a whole new meaning to the word “memory”.

Listen to Episode 39 of the podcast to hear all about it …and more! Fascinated beyond your wildest? You can read even more about memory with a click of these data-packed links:

National Library of Medicine: Memory 
Neuroscience – Exploring the Brain, Third Edition 
Skill-memory consolidation, Behavioural Brain Research 
Memory reconsolidation, Current Biology 
Digit-span assessments, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 

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Thanks for listening to Such a Crock every other Monday! Please help us out by showing your support and sharing the love. Just Subscribe at Such a Crock – Apple Podcasts then follow us on Instagram. Also, our fledgling Twitter can really use a your attention and love. Send us tweets and we’ll tweet back atcha loud and proud! Thank you for all your Crocktastic support. We appreciate and love you mucho!

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