Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Christian Saga, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And here we are again for another
Speaker 1: listener mail episode where we get all of the beautiful
Speaker 1: magic that you send us through the Internet. We wrap
Speaker 1: it up in a tight little bundle and we set
Speaker 1: it on fire. No, wait a minute, no, we read it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Well, you know, Carnie, our mail bot goes
Speaker 1: through it first and then games what is appropriate for
Speaker 1: our eyes and then brings it to our eyes. And
Speaker 1: he deemed some really good stuff this time. There are
Speaker 1: some great letters here. Well, yeah, because this is incorporating,
Speaker 1: of course, our October month, so a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: about monsters. It's gonna be incorporating all the drug stuff
Speaker 1: about Timothy Leary, and it's going to be incorporating all
Speaker 1: the responses to the Bicameral Mind episodes, of which there
Speaker 1: were about ten. Building I was gonna say, people, that's
Speaker 1: like a hit, Like you guys got a ton of
Speaker 1: mail for that episode. There are two episodes, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a two parter back in September, and I
Speaker 1: don't I feel like I've gotten more listener mail about
Speaker 1: that one than any other one we've ever done. Would
Speaker 1: would you agree, Robert Um? I mean, I'm hesitant to
Speaker 1: compare it to everything, but we did receive a lot
Speaker 1: of feedback on that way. It's as if they it's
Speaker 1: as if you and I spoke to them through their minds,
Speaker 1: you know, like gods. Well, we we do get at
Speaker 1: least one message today of somebody telling us where they're gods.
Speaker 1: So we're doing something right there. Well, on that note,
Speaker 1: let's let's begin to roll through it. If if you
Speaker 1: have not listened to a listener mail episode from us before. Basically,
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go around
Speaker 1: the table here and we're gonna take turns reading listener
Speaker 1: mails from you, and then we're going to discuss them
Speaker 1: a little bit. You know. Sometimes it invites discussion. Other
Speaker 1: times it's just like, well, there you go. That's the
Speaker 1: that's the listeners statement right there, and there's not much
Speaker 1: additional diet. What I love about listener mail episodes though,
Speaker 1: is that like it's a grab bag in that like
Speaker 1: we get to revisit these topics that we've already covered
Speaker 1: in the last few months, but then just bring them
Speaker 1: all together and what we've learned from them and what
Speaker 1: the audience has learned from them into this like goolash. Also,
Speaker 1: it makes me feel great because y'all out there, you're
Speaker 1: just so smart, You've got great things to say. I
Speaker 1: mean it, Come on, I love reading our mail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have some some variants and very insightful listeners that
Speaker 1: sometimes you guys make connections that did we don't when
Speaker 1: we're researching this stuff. Totally alright, Well, Carney has h
Speaker 1: has ventured forth. He is holding something out here to
Speaker 1: Christian Christian. Uh, why don't you read us our first
Speaker 1: listener mail? This one is glorious. It might be one
Speaker 1: of my favorite letters that I've received on stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. It's from Rick and it is about
Speaker 1: our two parter on Timothy Leary and lsd Uh. He
Speaker 1: writes to us, and he says, this is a bit long,
Speaker 1: but I think it's worth three whole thing. Uh. He says,
Speaker 1: I'd like to respond to the Tim Leary podcast, so
Speaker 1: I will here are my credentials. In nineteen sixty six
Speaker 1: or so, I hung out with Leary dropped acid with him,
Speaker 1: threw him out of our TP one night when he
Speaker 1: got drunk and hit up my wife. We were living
Speaker 1: in New York City. Then I worked as a mime
Speaker 1: and a fire eater at the Electric Circus on St. Mark's.
Speaker 1: We answered a casting call for a film being shot
Speaker 1: at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, home of the LSD
Speaker 1: League for Spiritual Discovery, which we discussed in that episode.
Speaker 1: We lived there for a couple of months. That's how
Speaker 1: we met Leary. When later the film project fell through,
Speaker 1: we took our pay in the form of one of
Speaker 1: a number of tps and sets of polls which had
Speaker 1: been made for the film. We pitched the TP on
Speaker 1: a friends land near Poughkeepsie and spent lots of time
Speaker 1: off there. That's where I threw Leary out. In the
Speaker 1: years following our sojourn with LSD, I relocated to the
Speaker 1: sunny Southwest, went to medical school, and worked for over
Speaker 1: twenty five years as an e R doc. I recently
Speaker 1: retired in many ways as this trajectory was the fulfillment
Speaker 1: of ideas and ideals born in vision during acid trips.
Speaker 1: To the extent your podcast was focused specifically on Leary.
Speaker 1: You got it mostly right. Leary was a deeply flawed man,
Speaker 1: But so have been many important explorers, writers, and spiritual teachers,
Speaker 1: and cult leaders and philosophers. He's kind of a bit
Speaker 1: of all those things, isn't he? Uh? Leary was not,
Speaker 1: by any measure, the worst of these in terms of egocentrism, greed,
Speaker 1: and especially womanizing. Leary did have many important insights regarding
Speaker 1: human spirituality, and was better able than most to explain
Speaker 1: these two would be psycho knots. I first heard him
Speaker 1: speak with Richard Albert in San Francisco, I think in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four. Elsewhere I have referred to Albert and
Speaker 1: Leary as the Abbott and Costello of the psychedelic scene.
Speaker 1: That's that's how they sounded in our research too. But
Speaker 1: in any case, I and many others were galvanized by
Speaker 1: the possibilities they loaded before us. I bought the book
Speaker 1: the two of them had written, along with Ralph Metzner,
Speaker 1: based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that's called
Speaker 1: The Psychedelic Experience. It was a how to manual, and
Speaker 1: it worked very well. I used it in many sessions,
Speaker 1: whether I tripped or guided It provided a framework for
Speaker 1: the cascade of images and sensations LSD brought on which
Speaker 1: could otherwise be quite overwhelming. It contained verbal maps and
Speaker 1: navigational aids. There was a cohort of hippies to which
Speaker 1: we belonged, for whom spiritual seeking was a serious goal.
Speaker 1: Some of us had left oppressive or unsatisfying traditional religions behind.
Speaker 1: This seeking was not akin to the sex, drugs and
Speaker 1: rock and roll ethos of many. The old saw if
Speaker 1: you remember the sixties, you weren't there did not apply.
Speaker 1: We thought of ourselves, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as pathfinders.
Speaker 1: Many modalities were employed in this seeking, including of course
Speaker 1: psychedelic herbs and chemicals LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, and others.
Speaker 1: But as happened with Leary, other techniques often came to
Speaker 1: supplant the chemical aids. The legacy of this is the
Speaker 1: commonplace presence in our culture of yoga, Zen, Buddhism, tai Chi,
Speaker 1: and other Asian martial arts, Sufism, kabbala studies, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But I want to stress that the chemicals provided the
Speaker 1: initial push to open the somewhat sticky doors of perception
Speaker 1: I should note that some of these pharmaceutical aids were
Speaker 1: tied to specific spiritual traditions of their own and were
Speaker 1: regarded as sacred. These were best used in the respectful
Speaker 1: manner taught by their respective masters. This is especially true
Speaker 1: for peyote, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. We I think we mentioned
Speaker 1: that in that episode as well, right we're talking about
Speaker 1: um how I think in order to legally do ayahuasca
Speaker 1: you have to do it with a member of a
Speaker 1: certain tribe present. That's my understanding, at least I've heard
Speaker 1: that before. The experience of ecstatic vision is extremely difficult
Speaker 1: to describe in words or even in visual art or music.
Speaker 1: Some of the efforts to do so have given us
Speaker 1: parts of various holy books. Pretty Much every religion on
Speaker 1: the planet has a mystical wing and teams of prophets
Speaker 1: who attempt the articulation of their mystical experience, and many
Speaker 1: have developed technologies to achieve the experience meditation systems, ecstatic
Speaker 1: dance or postures, sacred psychedelic plants, and so on. Naturally,
Speaker 1: these technologies are tuned to whatever the particular religion or
Speaker 1: philosophy or sect imagines God to be. If you're a
Speaker 1: mystical Christian, you are likely to see Jesus when in
Speaker 1: an elevated state. As a Jew, I once had a
Speaker 1: long visionary dream in which I was a Maccabean warrior.
Speaker 1: It may sound pompous to say this, but if one
Speaker 1: has not had such experience, it's pretty hard to understand
Speaker 1: descriptions of it. Of course, getting glimpses of the gears
Speaker 1: of the universe does not automatically make one a sage.
Speaker 1: The visions come with the obligation to fulfill them in
Speaker 1: good work, as the Buddhists say. Finally, we can agree
Speaker 1: that Leary was not really a scientist. He dabbled in science,
Speaker 1: learned some of its lingo, but science was not his
Speaker 1: native language. What he was instead was a ring master
Speaker 1: in the magic theater for mad men only. He was
Speaker 1: a showman, and yes, a charlatan like any good Cartney,
Speaker 1: but he had a powerful gift of gab. I can't
Speaker 1: tell you how often I saw his book The Psychedelic
Speaker 1: Experience rescue struggling folks from impending bad trips. In Leary's model,
Speaker 1: a full on acid trip always began with a symbolic
Speaker 1: death experience metaphoric or realistic, and this required courage and preparation.
Speaker 1: You mentioned Leary's tongue in cheek motto turn on, tune in,
Speaker 1: and drop out, as I'm sure you know, drop out
Speaker 1: referred to out of the machine, out of the exploit
Speaker 1: of culture. Well, we had a sign in the back
Speaker 1: of our VW bus named the Collective Unconscious, which said,
Speaker 1: turn on, tune in, and drop by. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to this reverie. Well, that's awesome, I I it's wonderful
Speaker 1: to have feedback a from someone who who who was
Speaker 1: active at the time, B who knew Leary and uh
Speaker 1: and then and then see had had these experiences and
Speaker 1: can speak to them in this bit of listener mail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I loved that Rick was able to provide and
Speaker 1: and he wasn't the only one. We received a couple
Speaker 1: more emails that were similar to this, But this was
Speaker 1: this was amazing. Like I just felt like Rick just
Speaker 1: encapsulated everything we were trying to hit with those two episodes. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was this general attitude I think that you and
Speaker 1: I had at the end of it. We were like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's kind of disappointing. Man. Leary just really wasn't the
Speaker 1: figure that we hoped you would be. Well, I think
Speaker 1: one of the advantages that Rick had here is and
Speaker 1: he knew he was. He was their first hand to
Speaker 1: see learies flaws and uh, you know, the human qualities
Speaker 1: that were that sometimes put him apart from this iconic
Speaker 1: vision of him, where whereas we were coming at it
Speaker 1: mostly with the the icon in the forefront and then
Speaker 1: reading about the real man and the real struggles behind it,
Speaker 1: so it was very textual. We didn't we didn't have
Speaker 1: the experience of the human character of his ethos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, And clearly Rick has had more time to
Speaker 1: reflect on who Leary was and what what he contributed. Also,
Speaker 1: Rick sounds totally amazing a guy who worked in the
Speaker 1: e Er for twenty five years and has all of
Speaker 1: these cool experiences behind that. I want him to start
Speaker 1: a podcast. Yeah, I listen. Alright, let's let's move on
Speaker 1: to another bit. Joe, what does Carney have for you? Well,
Speaker 1: I thought before we got into Monsters in the bi
Speaker 1: Cameral Mind, I would do a roundup of lots of
Speaker 1: different emails we got on our episode about the Game
Speaker 1: of Werewolf. Robert, I'm sure you're excited to hear some
Speaker 1: of this stuff. So we got lots of great emails.
Speaker 1: I decided to try to summarize them into a small space.
Speaker 1: So our listener, Carissa writes about playing in an online
Speaker 1: werewolf group, which sounds pretty awesome, but they've got a
Speaker 1: lot of amaze sing extra rolls in the game. Now,
Speaker 1: we talked about the standard roles in the game of Werewolf.
Speaker 1: You've got the townsfolk, You've got the werewolves who kill
Speaker 1: in the night, and you create the mob. You try
Speaker 1: to find a werewolf and you execute them and see
Speaker 1: how you did. There's also the seer, which we used
Speaker 1: in our game, who gets to ask every night if
Speaker 1: there's a werewolf. In Carissa's game, there is the Frankenstein monster,
Speaker 1: who absorbs the abilities of every town's person who dies.
Speaker 1: There is also the teen Wolf, who is who is
Speaker 1: apparently so excited about being a werewolf that this person
Speaker 1: has to use the word wolf at least once every
Speaker 1: day cycle or that character dies. Oh wow, that's that's ingenious.
Speaker 1: So you gotta find a way to slip it in
Speaker 1: there without people always noticing. Wow, that's that's brutal in
Speaker 1: terms of game mechanics. Yeah, there is also the cult
Speaker 1: leader who adds one person to the cult every night,
Speaker 1: and if the only townspeople left alive are all in
Speaker 1: the cult, the cult leader wins. Nice. It's a nice
Speaker 1: game within a game. There So multiple people, including Daniel,
Speaker 1: contacted us about a very similar online game called Town
Speaker 1: of Salem, which sounds pretty cool. Our listener Leon on
Speaker 1: Town of Salem says, quote, what's really different than your
Speaker 1: live game of Werewolf is the lack of emotion and
Speaker 1: human interaction. The ability to watch someone's face twitch as
Speaker 1: they're accused of being evil, or hear the strain in
Speaker 1: the voice as they defend themselves is lost, which really
Speaker 1: changes the dynamic of the game. It makes learning the
Speaker 1: minutia of each role that much more important. And I
Speaker 1: think that's kind of interesting. I know some of the
Speaker 1: studies we looked at said that they found similar dynamics
Speaker 1: about what liars tended to do verbally whether the game
Speaker 1: was being played online or in real life, and verbally
Speaker 1: you know, spoken out loud. But I yeah, I do
Speaker 1: have to think it would change some things. I mean,
Speaker 1: in our games we played in here in the office,
Speaker 1: I could I could sniff you out, man, because I
Speaker 1: was just looking at your face. You were trying to say, no,
Speaker 1: it's not me, I'm not aware, but you just you
Speaker 1: couldn't help but grin. And with the grin, I knew it.
Speaker 1: I knew you were the killer. Who in the office
Speaker 1: was like the best at disguising being Awarewolf, It's a
Speaker 1: good question. It all happened so fast. I would imagine
Speaker 1: was bowling there. Boland would be good at it. He
Speaker 1: would been bowling of car stuff of ridiculous history of
Speaker 1: stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah. Well, our
Speaker 1: producer Alex was there. Yeah, I felt like he did
Speaker 1: a pretty good job. He was a great narrator too,
Speaker 1: was a great narrator. However, as one of the bearded
Speaker 1: gentlemen playing the game instant suspicion, he was aware of
Speaker 1: uh and Alex commented that that our colleague Tar he
Speaker 1: thinks was the best. Yeah, she was pretty good. She
Speaker 1: was pretty good. Now, those of you who don't know
Speaker 1: where that probably means nothing, but but let it be
Speaker 1: known she is Awarewolf. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Hey, have you guys,
Speaker 1: I got another tie into one of the house stuff
Speaker 1: work shows here, Have you guys heard that Strickland over
Speaker 1: on tech Stuff has been covering this Mondo game board
Speaker 1: game that just came out about it's related to the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw something about that. Yeah, and it's apparently very
Speaker 1: similar to the mechanics of Werewolf. Yeah, well check that out. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a number of games that that certainly incorporate
Speaker 1: a similar mechanic. I think one of our our listeners
Speaker 1: actually wrote in about the Battlestarkalactica board game that came
Speaker 1: out several years ago, Are you a Toaster? Yeah? Are
Speaker 1: are you a Cylon? And actually encountered that game before
Speaker 1: I ever played Werewolf and had tremendous fun accusing, just
Speaker 1: often blindly accusing friends of being a sideline, to the
Speaker 1: point that it's still kind of an inside joke with
Speaker 1: certain friends, whether whether their cylines. It seems pretty easy.
Speaker 1: It's whoever is wearing the slinky red dress, right right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's sometimes sometimes that'll that'll key and but not always.
Speaker 1: The best cue for for seeing guilt in somebody else
Speaker 1: is just seeing a slight grind, not a big smile,
Speaker 1: with the person who looks a little bit satisfied with themselves.
Speaker 1: You know they've done wrong. Believe it's what Lady Gaga
Speaker 1: calls poker face. Well, I think one of the things
Speaker 1: we talked about too, is that there's often a different
Speaker 1: energy in the person when they have to go from
Speaker 1: being on the offense to being on the defense, you know,
Speaker 1: and and you can see that energy change, and sometimes
Speaker 1: you can feel it. I could definitely feel uh, my, my,
Speaker 1: my energy shift when I was secretly had a different
Speaker 1: role in the game when you had to pretend not
Speaker 1: to be the werewolf. Yeah, okay. A couple more are
Speaker 1: our listener. Heather mentions that she used to play the
Speaker 1: French language version of the game, which of course is
Speaker 1: called Lugaru and uh that's French for werewolf, and included
Speaker 1: the chaste or the hunter. And that makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if the language affects the dynamics of the game. Is
Speaker 1: it easier to lie or to spot liars in French
Speaker 1: versus English, versus Russian or any other language. I can
Speaker 1: speak to this actually because I used to play Mafia
Speaker 1: not Werewolf with a lot of Eastern European friends, and
Speaker 1: we also played this game that they talk me called
Speaker 1: my Hot Check, which is very similar in the sense
Speaker 1: that like it's a game about lying and trying to
Speaker 1: tell if somebody else is lying or not. And they
Speaker 1: definitely were able to read me way easier than I
Speaker 1: was able to read them. Which language were you playing in? English? Okay? Yeah, huh,
Speaker 1: so like you were at a disadvantage being a native speaker,
Speaker 1: I think so. Yeah, Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a lot of fun because maybe playing the game in
Speaker 1: in a secondary language, there's kind of this this firewall
Speaker 1: built up there, like a linguistic firewall. Yeah. Well, they
Speaker 1: all spoke English fluently though, and I didn't speak a
Speaker 1: lick of the They spoke variations of Polish, check uh, Slovakian,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I just whenever they would communicate with one
Speaker 1: of them in those languages, maybe that should have been
Speaker 1: outside of the realm of of the rules. And well,
Speaker 1: this is probably a deeper linguistic question, but do you
Speaker 1: think they were thinking about the game in English? Oh?
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I think they were thinking about Mafia in
Speaker 1: English for sure, because the concepts were very English to them.
Speaker 1: But not when we played my Hot Check though the
Speaker 1: game was invented in Russia. Oh is that right? I
Speaker 1: didn't want that fascinating as Mafia, like we we celebrate
Speaker 1: the werewolf fluff. Really if you want to get technical
Speaker 1: on Mafia. It was the first one. Last quick note
Speaker 1: from a listener about Werewolf. Our listener Valerie said, well,
Speaker 1: she shared a lot of weird and interesting stuff about
Speaker 1: growing up in what she describes as a dysfunctional family.
Speaker 1: She says, quote, what I generally tell people is that
Speaker 1: I was raised by wolves, except that's really unfair to
Speaker 1: the wolves. So I am now in search of some
Speaker 1: wolves who might adopt me. And it sounds like, given
Speaker 1: her life experience and her dim views on the nature
Speaker 1: of humankind, she is excited to play. She wants to
Speaker 1: get into the life space. So she says, quote, at
Speaker 1: the advanced stage of fifty eight, I believe you may
Speaker 1: have finally introduced me to the perfect tool for explaining
Speaker 1: human social interaction. It's quite good. It really does like
Speaker 1: make you think about your friends differently after you play it.
Speaker 1: All right, that's it for Werewolf. All right, Well, here's
Speaker 1: one Carney is handing me. This one comes to us
Speaker 1: from Melanie and she's responding to one of our Monster episodes.
Speaker 1: She says, Hey, I'm currently listening to your podcast on
Speaker 1: cute Versus Monstrous imagery, and I hadn't really thought about
Speaker 1: it before, but there are so many similarities there. Both
Speaker 1: types of stimuli are meant to grab your attention, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of factors can push people to
Speaker 1: feel one way or the other. Lots of people find
Speaker 1: mice adorable, including myself, but others are scared of them.
Speaker 1: I'm terrified of spiders, but I have a friend who
Speaker 1: thinks they're cute. I personally even find snakes cute, even
Speaker 1: though no one seems to agree with me. I actually
Speaker 1: think almost every type of animal is cute, and yet
Speaker 1: actual human babies just seem mostly annoying and gross to me.
Speaker 1: So I don't really Melanie, something's probably wrong in my
Speaker 1: brain on that note, l o l uh. The fact
Speaker 1: that a lot of creatures seem to be able to
Speaker 1: go either way, like the II. The I, for anyone
Speaker 1: not familiar, is as this wonderful species of lemur that
Speaker 1: has these big, huge, huge eyes, and it has this
Speaker 1: elongated finger that he uses to like pull grubs, in
Speaker 1: sect feel grapes and stuff too. I remember hearing that,
Speaker 1: maybe so yeah, but I mean it does seem to
Speaker 1: be a horrible hybrid of baby is. Features like the
Speaker 1: big eyes are part of the baby schema, but having
Speaker 1: long tapering, you know, long limbs, is not having short,
Speaker 1: stubby limbs as part of the baby schema. So it
Speaker 1: almost seems like, can you imagine a baby with long,
Speaker 1: slender limbs that's not cute slender man baby. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it also comes out at night. It's a nocturnal creature.
Speaker 1: But it's one of these where when I look at it,
Speaker 1: especially a baby obviously, but an adult I I still
Speaker 1: looks kind of adorable to me. But it is a
Speaker 1: species that has traditionally faced, um, some hardships because of
Speaker 1: superstitions regarding it, and so they'll be like superstitious violence
Speaker 1: against the II. Anyway, she continues, Um, Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of these creatures. Quote made me think of your previous
Speaker 1: episode where you mentioned the woman who doesn't feel fear
Speaker 1: and how in the absence of it, she's actually attracted
Speaker 1: to supposedly fearful stimuli. That's the patient s M who's
Speaker 1: got the lesion on her amygdala. Right, She says, there
Speaker 1: seemed to be these two mechanisms working in tandem, and
Speaker 1: different people may have different levels for those mechanisms. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I'm really bringing up any any
Speaker 1: new ideas here, but I thought i'd write in since
Speaker 1: I found the topic interesting. I love all of your
Speaker 1: Monster episodes. By the way, I'm sad that October is
Speaker 1: over because I would definitely listen to Monster Podcast year round.
Speaker 1: All your other stuff is great too, of course, but
Speaker 1: I have a bias for the Monsters. Thanks for all
Speaker 1: the great stuff you put out. I listened to you
Speaker 1: guys all the time while I work. Well, here's one
Speaker 1: of the things that I'm hoping to see in eighteen
Speaker 1: is that Dr Anton Jessoph gets his own podcast. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll see. We'll have to have to contact the university
Speaker 1: about that. See what, see if he can get funding
Speaker 1: for that study. But yeah, I think Melan he had
Speaker 1: some wonderful thoughts here about that that cute to monstrous
Speaker 1: spectrum that seems to exist. Well. I like how she
Speaker 1: draws the connection to that the case of sm that
Speaker 1: we discussed from the other Monster episode, that from the
Speaker 1: first Monster, where apparently in these cases where there is
Speaker 1: a person who has a lesion on their brain that
Speaker 1: makes them enable or unable to feel fear when they
Speaker 1: see fearful stimuli, instead of just being unaffected by it,
Speaker 1: they're very attracted to it, like they want to touch it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just gets their attention. Yeah. So it's it's more
Speaker 1: that instead of it being like a monster cute spectrum,
Speaker 1: it is like attention grabbing stimuli spectrum. Wait minute, guys,
Speaker 1: I think you just came up with an explanation for
Speaker 1: the scene in Prometheus where that scientist approaches the weird
Speaker 1: albino snake xenomorph and he's like, hey, little buddy, and
Speaker 1: he wants to reach out and touch it. Everybody in
Speaker 1: the theater is going, what are you doing? Why would
Speaker 1: you do that? Yeah, well, you know he was if
Speaker 1: he was a biologist, right, So it's it's very likely
Speaker 1: that he and Melanie would have had this same idea that, like,
Speaker 1: any creature is cute and attention grabbing, and of course
Speaker 1: you want to get right up there and you know,
Speaker 1: let him crawl inside your helmet and down your throat.
Speaker 1: If I remember that movie correctly. Anecdotally, Melanie's comments about
Speaker 1: finding things that are usually perceived as scary cute and
Speaker 1: finding things that are usually cute kind of repellent. Uh,
Speaker 1: that does seem to be one anecdotal case against the
Speaker 1: idea that our categories for what's cute and what's scary
Speaker 1: are biologically inherited. That does seem to be one more
Speaker 1: tick in the column of well yeah, maybe these are
Speaker 1: somehow conditioned in early childhood rather than received through our
Speaker 1: through our inborn instincts. Alright, well, on that note, let's
Speaker 1: take a commercial break, and when we come back, we
Speaker 1: will have another trio of either listener mails or partially
Speaker 1: digest uh, conglomerates of listener males, depending on what Carney
Speaker 1: gives us. Thank alright, we're back. Hey, So, springboarding off
Speaker 1: of that last listener mail about fear and lack of
Speaker 1: fear and the fear of response, I've got a great
Speaker 1: one here from Jev. That's about our episode on the
Speaker 1: science of It meaning Penny Wise in the movie It
Speaker 1: and uh and she specifically references the fear response system
Speaker 1: that you brought up in the episode. This again just
Speaker 1: really touched me, she says, the three phases you mentioned
Speaker 1: lady Da, freeze, and take charge was something I experienced
Speaker 1: and witnessed during nine eleven. Now let's refresh our audiences memory, right,
Speaker 1: So the Lady Da people who the way that they
Speaker 1: respond to fear stimuli that's supposedly seventy of the population
Speaker 1: just kind of like don't know what to do with themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the goodness I wish I had had my
Speaker 1: my name's here in front of me. But referring back
Speaker 1: to the movie Aliens, Yeah, you use that as the
Speaker 1: metaphor what was the name of the guy who just
Speaker 1: freezes and Gorman he didn't know how to respond and
Speaker 1: doesn't respond, and it weren't for other people getting involved,
Speaker 1: he would just be eaten by Zena Morse immediately. That's
Speaker 1: the freeze and the Latti does like some of the
Speaker 1: other soldiers. And then to take charge is ripley. But
Speaker 1: so lady da is s of the population, freezes fifteen
Speaker 1: percent of the population and take charges fifteen percent of
Speaker 1: the population. But we all like to think we're to
Speaker 1: take charge, right, but the numbers are against us. That's
Speaker 1: what this is not Planet Ripley. Yeah. So, as Jeb
Speaker 1: says from her experience with nine eleven, my husband and
Speaker 1: I lived south of the World Trade Towers in Battery
Speaker 1: Park City during eleven we had a view of the
Speaker 1: Hudson River where the planes flew over towards the towers.
Speaker 1: After I alerted my sleeping husband in a nonchalant manner
Speaker 1: that a plane hit the towers. He jumped out of
Speaker 1: bedfast and looked out the window and announced, we are
Speaker 1: under attack. This was long before anyone realized that. He
Speaker 1: dressed and grabbed my hand and started to run. I
Speaker 1: complacently went along. When our neighbor friend came out to
Speaker 1: the hall, she asked, what's going on. My husband said,
Speaker 1: we're under attack. Come and she froze and said no.
Speaker 1: We left her behind, and I found out later that
Speaker 1: she curled up into a ball and cried and prayed.
Speaker 1: My husband knew exactly what to do, and I accepted
Speaker 1: his directions without obstruction to his commands. I always thought
Speaker 1: I was conditioned to listen to him without question, which
Speaker 1: kind of depressed me. But after hearing your explanation of
Speaker 1: how we react in an emergency, my experience came flooding back,
Speaker 1: and everything that happened I see now that my husband
Speaker 1: was in the fifteen percent that take charge. I was
Speaker 1: the seventy percent to follow, and my friend, who did
Speaker 1: get out safely and was not injured, was the fifteen
Speaker 1: percent to freeze. We're all fine, and nine months later
Speaker 1: I had a baby girl. Thanks for your podcast. I
Speaker 1: love listening to you in the entire stuff family, Keep
Speaker 1: up the good work. So I responded to her with
Speaker 1: this because I was really touched that she shared this
Speaker 1: experience with us, and it really put that study into
Speaker 1: perspective for me because I had heard those numbers before,
Speaker 1: but I hadn't thought about them as being applicable to
Speaker 1: real world relationship scenarios. Right, and explains a lot of
Speaker 1: everyday behavior that I often find confusing. Right, Like, as
Speaker 1: I said, like, I'd like to think I'm in the
Speaker 1: pcent that would take charge, but who knows, maybe I'd
Speaker 1: be the one who freezes instead. This is probably, I
Speaker 1: think why people describe when they survive life death situations
Speaker 1: as it being something that teaches them something about themselves
Speaker 1: that they didn't know previously. Right, because this is the
Speaker 1: only way you can discover which of these three categories
Speaker 1: you fall into. That's awesome. I love getting messages like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, but it is true. You can
Speaker 1: you can put yourself in simulated environments and simulated experiences,
Speaker 1: but you ultimately don't really know how you're going to
Speaker 1: react to an event like this unless you're presented with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a fun exercises, like, think about our office and
Speaker 1: like all the people we work with, and then imagine
Speaker 1: like a swarm of Zeno morphs take takes over the
Speaker 1: other end of the building and is coming towards us.
Speaker 1: How do you think our various co workers would react?
Speaker 1: Would they fall into those categories? Who would freeze, who
Speaker 1: would who would uh you know, take charge? And who
Speaker 1: would just be like, I don't know what to do? Well,
Speaker 1: everyone's survival would come down to, uh to whether our
Speaker 1: office manager has has had the office flamethrower properly serve
Speaker 1: that is absolutely true. Our office manager Tamika would absolutely
Speaker 1: be in the fifty percent of take charge, all right,
Speaker 1: so some of us would survive. Well, no, actually I
Speaker 1: can see what would happen, which is that we would
Speaker 1: call a three hour meeting to discuss what to do,
Speaker 1: and we well, actually we'd spend several hours trying to
Speaker 1: schedule the three hour meeting at a time when everyone
Speaker 1: could be there, and then we wouldn't really succeed, And
Speaker 1: so fift would make it to the meeting and then
Speaker 1: they discuss what to do, and then they'd get eaten
Speaker 1: by zenomorph's man. This is this is the next day
Speaker 1: wean film, and really Scott's wondering how to this? Is
Speaker 1: it fresh? This is the shin god Zilla of the
Speaker 1: alien franchise, Alien bureaucracy It alright? Well, Joe, what is
Speaker 1: What does Carney have to do next? Is it a
Speaker 1: single email or is it another partially digested mass. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering how to do the bicameral stuff because We've
Speaker 1: got a whole bunch on that, and I've got one
Speaker 1: other email about cuteness and monsters. Maybe we'll do cuteness
Speaker 1: and monsters and then we can split up the bicameral
Speaker 1: stuff over a couple more rounds. What do you think
Speaker 1: about that sounds good? Okay, So our listener Ming gets
Speaker 1: in touch with us to talk about the cuteness and
Speaker 1: monstrosity spectrum. So she says, hey, guys, my name is
Speaker 1: Ming from Toronto. I love your show and have been
Speaker 1: obsessively listening to it every week since I discovered it.
Speaker 1: You guys do such a wonderful job in researching making
Speaker 1: your podcasts that I've been recommending it to anyone who's
Speaker 1: got an interest in things out of the ordinary. We
Speaker 1: really appreciate that than spread the word. That's the best
Speaker 1: thing you can do is support the show. Very nice
Speaker 1: of you to say, sort of mouth, really is I
Speaker 1: think the best way to let people know about the show. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So tell your friends people out there anyway, ming says,
Speaker 1: just wanted to write in and mention something I thought
Speaker 1: of while listening to your podcast regarding monstrosity and cuteness,
Speaker 1: especially in the context of Japanese folklore. One of the
Speaker 1: things that wasn't meant and so the context series that
Speaker 1: in the episode we discussed various folk monsters from from
Speaker 1: Japanese traditions like the One and the Kappa and the Tingu,
Speaker 1: and with the One and Kappa specifically some academic studies
Speaker 1: charting the path by which they've gone from being disgusting
Speaker 1: and terrifying to being turned kind of cute in popular imagery.
Speaker 1: By the way, I don't think I mentioned on the
Speaker 1: episode that on everyone's iPhones we have emoticons of the
Speaker 1: Tingu and the One. I'm not sure about the Kapa
Speaker 1: off hand, but I was. I was in there the
Speaker 1: other day and I noticed the tinger. Yeah, tingos like
Speaker 1: the crow one, right, it's the like the bird human
Speaker 1: hybrid that's often presented as this long nose, red faced human. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the Tingo we were saying hasn't been quite as
Speaker 1: cute ified as the other two, or at least there
Speaker 1: wasn't academic work on it, right, because it was more
Speaker 1: it seems to be a monster that is more spiritualized
Speaker 1: and more regal, and more the property of the the
Speaker 1: either the ruling or the upper intellectual class. So part
Speaker 1: of what we talked about in that episode was trying
Speaker 1: to explain what's going on here psychologically, what's causing people
Speaker 1: to turn terrifying and disgusting monsters into cute versions of
Speaker 1: themselves rendered harmless and cuddly. Anyway, ming continues. One of
Speaker 1: the things that wasn't mentioned that immediately came to mind
Speaker 1: for me was the socio economic climate in postwar Japan.
Speaker 1: The aggressive cutification feels like, at least in part, rooted
Speaker 1: in a rehabilitation of the country's image. Aside from boosting
Speaker 1: the economy through cute consumerism, it may also be a
Speaker 1: reaction to the sudden lack of militarism and nationalism that
Speaker 1: was ubiquitous in Japan during World War Two. I think
Speaker 1: that's a really interesting thought, Like, if you're a country
Speaker 1: where your neighbors, you know, the Americans, Chinese and all
Speaker 1: these have come to see you as the embodiment of
Speaker 1: imperialist violence. I can see how that might lead in
Speaker 1: the culture to a widespread embracing of cuteness imagery. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think she's onto something here. This is a very
Speaker 1: smart observation that makes the status of the tingu all
Speaker 1: the more interesting, doesn't it. Because the Tingu is a
Speaker 1: warrior being. It is a it is a it is
Speaker 1: a creature that that you know, warriors would seek out
Speaker 1: in the wild so that they could learn it's martial arts. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea that this this remains largely untouched is it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the the untouched heart perhaps of of
Speaker 1: the Japanese warrior ethos. Maybe along the lines of what
Speaker 1: Mings saying there was like a rejection of warrior ethos
Speaker 1: after the war. Yeah, but maybe you know, it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of things with either cultural or personal identity.
Speaker 1: You know, you can some things you can only push
Speaker 1: off so far, you know, I mean there's a certain
Speaker 1: war there is a warrior ethos in in every human culture. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just you know, to what extent is it is
Speaker 1: it celebrated to what extent? Is it confronted? Okay, for
Speaker 1: this next part, you should find this in your notes
Speaker 1: and look at this painting. I paste it in so
Speaker 1: ming continues along the same lines, if y'all are particularly
Speaker 1: interested in the arts. One Japanese artist that likes to
Speaker 1: play with monstrosity versus cuteness is Takashi Murakami. His giant
Speaker 1: paintings definitely ride the line of cuteness slash monstrosity, often
Speaker 1: featuring the baby schema, but with sharp teeth and bright
Speaker 1: cute colors that are occasionally pushed to the venomous extreme.
Speaker 1: Via Neon, I am only slightly familiar with Mirakami's work,
Speaker 1: but yeah, this is cool. Uh. Friend of the show
Speaker 1: ec Steiner is big on Mirakami. Yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into him now, so she continues. I believe one
Speaker 1: of the key points in his art has to do
Speaker 1: with the above idea of post war transformation of Japan,
Speaker 1: and he also touches on consumerism by categorizing himself elf
Speaker 1: in the pop art genre, one primary idea of which
Speaker 1: is making art avant garde by making it low class
Speaker 1: and making art for the cold, hard cash instead of
Speaker 1: purely for art's sake. If this episode had an art mascot,
Speaker 1: it would be him for sure. Thanks for taking the
Speaker 1: time to read this. Keep doing what you do. Cheers, Ming,
Speaker 1: So Ming, I really appreciated this email. I thought it
Speaker 1: was fantastic and this painting is awesome. Did you guys
Speaker 1: happen to see there was a Murrakami traveling exhibit at
Speaker 1: the High Museum here in Atlanta a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: I wish I'd known about that. No, it was super cool.
Speaker 1: But so this painting she sent, I've got to try
Speaker 1: to explain it. It's um, it's like a Mickey mouse head,
Speaker 1: but through the lens of a psychedelic warfare terror drug.
Speaker 1: So it's got a white it's got all the baby schema.
Speaker 1: It's got the wide face that's baby schema, large eyes,
Speaker 1: that's baby schema. It's got low set features and a
Speaker 1: large forehead, large ears. It's all the stuff we think
Speaker 1: of for babies and puppies. But it just it looks awful.
Speaker 1: It's eyes look very very intense, which I think is interesting,
Speaker 1: like it seems to be peering into you with its
Speaker 1: with crazy intensity. One of the hallmarks, of course, of
Speaker 1: a baby or a puppy or a kitten. Is that
Speaker 1: it's like it doesn't really you can't really see anything
Speaker 1: all that well, you know, it's just kind of taking
Speaker 1: it all in, or in the case of very young children,
Speaker 1: not only making out blurs and shapes. This reminds me
Speaker 1: of another artist that comes up on the show a lot,
Speaker 1: another Japanese artist, Jungi Edo. We've talked about him before
Speaker 1: his work on Gio and Zamaki, and it's it's similar
Speaker 1: and that, like he has that manga style that's kind
Speaker 1: of cute, but then he like evolves it into something
Speaker 1: that's totally horrific. But I'm wondering if there is going
Speaker 1: to be a point where, like, for instance, Cathulhu h
Speaker 1: that Jungi Edo's monstrous creations will like get turned into
Speaker 1: plush stuff, toys or something like that. So it's like
Speaker 1: a it's like a double reversal, right, it goes cute
Speaker 1: to monstrous and then back to cute. Yeah, the um
Speaker 1: one of his like really big comic storylines is told me,
Speaker 1: I believe that's how you pronounce it. It's all about
Speaker 1: this girl who's like this, you know, cute on Ingenue
Speaker 1: High School Japanese schoolgirl, and but she's got this like
Speaker 1: weird power where she makes everyone around her want to
Speaker 1: kill her, and every part of her body that is
Speaker 1: cut off grows into another tony. Uh so there's just
Speaker 1: like he's got like like twenty five or thirty stories
Speaker 1: about this one character and all the iterations right. Uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's kind of cute to horrific. Dra Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating. I highly recommend it. Alright, Well, it looks
Speaker 1: like carn He is handing me a couple of emails.
Speaker 1: They look kind of short, so I'm gonna read them together. Uh.
Speaker 1: This first one comes to us from Brett. He writes
Speaker 1: in and says, hey, team, I was just listening to
Speaker 1: the Cambrian Monster Mash episode and at the moment you
Speaker 1: couldn't think of an app comparison between arms race and evolution.
Speaker 1: Surely the British utilizing ADAR would be an apt comparison,
Speaker 1: as it literally added a layer of sight to the military.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm oversimplifying. I've stopped a midbike ride to type
Speaker 1: out this email. Anyway, cheers Brett, Brett. I hope you're
Speaker 1: on a sidewalk. Yeah, stay safe, Brett. I think what
Speaker 1: Brett's saying, and because we did talk about arms races
Speaker 1: and evolution, but I think what he's talking about is
Speaker 1: the evolution of sight that we talked about in that episode,
Speaker 1: because we couldn't quite find a technological arms race analogy
Speaker 1: for the first the first introduction of acute vision in
Speaker 1: the history of animals on Earth. Yea, because the idea
Speaker 1: here is that as animals developed the ability to see,
Speaker 1: suddenly things that were not an issue become an issue,
Speaker 1: such as pigmentation. Yeah, and so that was one proposed
Speaker 1: explanation for what might have caused the Cambrian explosion. If
Speaker 1: the Cambrian explosion is to be interpreted as this massive
Speaker 1: explosion of of animal body plan diversity, what what made
Speaker 1: all this evolution suddenly come about? One hypothesis is that, well,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the first time we got I that
Speaker 1: could see very well. Before that, we might have just
Speaker 1: had like you know, light sensitive spots or something. And
Speaker 1: once you've got focusing eyes, these compound eyes that can
Speaker 1: really make out movement and stuff like that, you completely
Speaker 1: change the playing field of what your competition for survival is.
Speaker 1: This follows along the line of stuff that we have
Speaker 1: covered in other episodes, but also on how stuff works,
Speaker 1: about recent discoveries into like really basic life forms like
Speaker 1: slimes and how their cells can sense light. They have
Speaker 1: photo I guess sensitive cells. They can see with their cells.
Speaker 1: So maybe that's what we're talking about. Uh, we're evolving
Speaker 1: into pre eyes yeah yeah, or from sorry yeah, yeah, totally. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the introduction of eyes he compares, of course
Speaker 1: to radar. I think that's a pretty good comparison. I
Speaker 1: think so, yeah, yeah, radar, and I mean to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, you could throw sonar in there too and
Speaker 1: just say that, yeah, here's a way of sensing other
Speaker 1: things that change the way everything has to hey, at
Speaker 1: least in a war scenario for the radar. All right,
Speaker 1: here's this other bit though, that Kearney has handed me.
Speaker 1: This one comes to us from Jonathan. Great episode, guys,
Speaker 1: I didn't expect you could make an episode on monsters
Speaker 1: so intellectually stimulating. That's what we do. Man. Is this
Speaker 1: about the first sponsors, about the first monster? Inspired by
Speaker 1: Joe's speculation on our first ancestors ability to imagine a monster,
Speaker 1: I'd like to suggest that it might not have been
Speaker 1: a single epiphanist moment, but that it evolved gradually as
Speaker 1: our ancestors were able to remember and reflect on their dreams.
Speaker 1: They certainly had dreams, and certainly they experienced all kinds
Speaker 1: of irrationality in them. A creature with the body of
Speaker 1: a man in the head of a great cat wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a surprising dream image, And if there's any substance
Speaker 1: at all to the bicameral mind theory, the source of
Speaker 1: images like this might have seemed profound. Thanks again for
Speaker 1: the podcast, Jonathan. Yeah, I can see that that's not
Speaker 1: a bad idea. Hey, did you guys in that episode
Speaker 1: did you talk about the example from Buffy the First Evil? No?
Speaker 1: I don't think we did. I don't know if I
Speaker 1: made it that far. I'm talking about it's pretty close.
Speaker 1: She's like the final Big Bat. We made it to
Speaker 1: the end of the fourth season? Is that there? They?
Speaker 1: So the first Evil shows up in a Christmas episode
Speaker 1: and then, uh, it's the very last season it's the
Speaker 1: Big Bad. Yeah, Robert's right, And essentially the idea is
Speaker 1: that it's the very first monster that humanity ever encountered,
Speaker 1: and that we're all aware of it from our collective unconscious.
Speaker 1: So I forgot about the loftier aspects of that season. Oh, man,
Speaker 1: that would have been perfect for this episode. I wish
Speaker 1: I had known about that. I should have in prep
Speaker 1: for the episode, should have gone and watched the entire
Speaker 1: series of Buffy. I don't know. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: maybe just that last season. But certainly I love Jonathan's
Speaker 1: point here because this kind of gets to This gets
Speaker 1: to an area that we've discussed before when when trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what ancient people were thinking off like,
Speaker 1: it's easy to to fall into the trap of just
Speaker 1: focusing on one area of human experience and human thought
Speaker 1: and to dismiss, say dreams or as we've specifically discussed
Speaker 1: creativity and saying, well, no, if they encountered if they
Speaker 1: thought up a dragon, they must have encountered bones of
Speaker 1: something like a dragon. Yeah. This is so not to
Speaker 1: impugne the work of people like Adrian Mayor, who I
Speaker 1: think is doing very fascinating stuff. But you know, we've
Speaker 1: talked about her saying that ancient monsters may have been
Speaker 1: inspired by people seeing fossils in the ancient world. So
Speaker 1: you see a dinosaur fossil, and that's where dragon legends
Speaker 1: come from. It's not that I think that that's impossible.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting hypothesis to explore. But
Speaker 1: I'm always a little hesitant to undersell the role of
Speaker 1: creative imagination in the origins of ideas and stories. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of things that probably
Speaker 1: just come from people dreaming up weird stuff. Yeah, literally
Speaker 1: or or or figuratively. Um yeah, I mean, and I
Speaker 1: guess with a lot of this too, you can just
Speaker 1: sort of imagine that you can have multiple mechanisms at
Speaker 1: work at the same time. The people are dreaming, people
Speaker 1: are encountering the stimuli in their in their lives, and uh,
Speaker 1: and there it's also a certain amount of creativity going
Speaker 1: on as well. Yeah, I just don't think we have
Speaker 1: to assume that somebody needed to see something like something
Speaker 1: in order to make that thing up. You don't think
Speaker 1: that HP Lovecraft uncovered like the skeleton of a half
Speaker 1: octopus half man giant now, But you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of the things he dreamt up would have would have
Speaker 1: found a fitting home in in the Cambrian era seas.
Speaker 1: Oh totally. But I mean you can totally see somebody
Speaker 1: writing that article, right, Because we like to make connections
Speaker 1: about inspiration so you could say, oh, well, it turns out,
Speaker 1: you know, what we see from his diaries that HP
Speaker 1: Lovecraft visited a museum exhibit in this year in which
Speaker 1: he saw these earlier preserved remains of a Cambrian era
Speaker 1: organism that had these strange tentacles. And that must be
Speaker 1: what I mean. You can imagine somebody writing something like that.
Speaker 1: Now I'm almost I'm almost positive that what you're positing
Speaker 1: is true because I remember reading that HP Lovecraft biography.
Speaker 1: What is it called. I've mentioned it on the show before.
Speaker 1: I think it's like against the World, against Life, I
Speaker 1: let you borrow. At one time it was something like
Speaker 1: not not I am providence for the other one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the profound miss and throw. Yeah, but it mentions exactly
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Yeah. But but I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: you can. People love to come up with theories of
Speaker 1: explanation like that, and a lot of times they might
Speaker 1: have something to them, but a lot of times people
Speaker 1: are just being creative. All Right, We're gonna take one
Speaker 1: more break and we come back a final round of
Speaker 1: listener mail here before we close out the episode. Than
Speaker 1: al right, we have returned. Okay, guys, this is the
Speaker 1: last one that I have from our October series of
Speaker 1: Halloween episodes. This is from Lily and she writes to
Speaker 1: us about our six ghost Stories episode. And you may
Speaker 1: remember that one of those ghost stories came from Malawi.
Speaker 1: She says, Hi, guys, greetings from Southern Africa, Zambia in particular.
Speaker 1: I love your podcast, and I particularly love the episode
Speaker 1: on ghosts and different cultures. I was very excited that
Speaker 1: you covered a story from Malawi, a country that doesn't
Speaker 1: get enough global attention and one that I used to
Speaker 1: live in. While living in Malawi, I also noticed that
Speaker 1: Christian religions were frequently intermingled with traditional beliefs in spirits, prophets, possession,
Speaker 1: and faith healing. Like you supposed, these two belief systems
Speaker 1: are not seen as incongruous to most Malawians. British colonialists
Speaker 1: tried to quash this coexistence by rooting out Malawi's many
Speaker 1: religious secret societies, but were relatively unsuccessful. Although the societies
Speaker 1: are much fewer now, many of their beliefs and traditions remain.
Speaker 1: I did have a minor correction regarding your pronunce pronunciation
Speaker 1: of I pronounced it muthu rika in that episode, In Chichewa,
Speaker 1: which is the main language of Malawi pronounced chi che
Speaker 1: Wa and many of the other Bantu languages in the
Speaker 1: Southern African region, h is are often used to denote
Speaker 1: emphasis and are silent in most cases. Muta Rica is
Speaker 1: not pronounced Mutha Rieka as y'all were pronouncing it, but
Speaker 1: has actually pronounced Muta Rica. Also, it's important to note
Speaker 1: that former President Bingu mutar Rika's brother, Dr Professor Peter
Speaker 1: Peter mutar Rika, is now President of Malawi, so most
Speaker 1: people now refer to the former as simply President Bingu
Speaker 1: and the current president as President Muta Rica. As far
Speaker 1: as I've been able to tell, Bingo is one of
Speaker 1: the most widely revered presidents in Malawian history due to
Speaker 1: his efforts to make Malawi independent from Western AID. Many
Speaker 1: Malawians refer to him by his first name with both
Speaker 1: love and respect. So that I think we might have
Speaker 1: mentioned in the episode that the they were related, and
Speaker 1: that the brother that we were talking about as the
Speaker 1: one from earlier who passed away, and he was one
Speaker 1: of the many presidents who supposedly was afraid of ghosts
Speaker 1: in the presidential mansion. She adds one more thing. This
Speaker 1: is interesting. She says, one more thing. Attacks on people
Speaker 1: with Albanism in Malawi are relatively new and infrequent compared
Speaker 1: to other countries in the region. Example is Tanzania, and
Speaker 1: many Malawians will tell you that it's not a Malawian superstition,
Speaker 1: but one carried down from Tanzania and East Africa. So
Speaker 1: that's interesting because we brought that up as well in
Speaker 1: that episode as being like one of those sort of
Speaker 1: supernatural beliefs that seems to be working its way into
Speaker 1: the westernization of these African states. Yeah. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: always important to remember that superstitions, urban legends and in
Speaker 1: the various related uh uh energies. I guess you could say, uh,
Speaker 1: these continue to move, they continue to migrate, and they
Speaker 1: can and to to evolve with our cultures. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that was the enlightening because honestly, like that was one
Speaker 1: of those stories when we were looking for in that episode.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard it, we tried to cover a
Speaker 1: ghost story from almost every continent and it was really
Speaker 1: hard to find a good African ghost story that was
Speaker 1: translated at least, but this one was widely covered in
Speaker 1: Western media. Well, and then also more to the point,
Speaker 1: too difficult to find authentically African ghost stories that were
Speaker 1: not stories told by a colonial power. Yeah, there's tons
Speaker 1: of South African ghost stories, but they're all based on
Speaker 1: like Eurocentric ideas that were brought there. Yeah. That being said,
Speaker 1: if you know a great African ghost story from anywhere
Speaker 1: in Africa, share it with us. We would love to
Speaker 1: have it in our heads as well. Definitely. Alright, Joe Carney,
Speaker 1: the mail bot is presenting a large lump of of
Speaker 1: emails to you. Hear what's going on? Okay, Well, so
Speaker 1: I'm going to address the bicameral mind emails. And since
Speaker 1: there were so many of these, I picked a few.
Speaker 1: We might not be able to get to all of them,
Speaker 1: but we might, if it's okay with you, guys, split
Speaker 1: this up over a couple of rounds. Uh, Let you
Speaker 1: read a little more if you can, if you can,
Speaker 1: if you have a couple of more here, I believe
Speaker 1: that have been flagged by Karnie. Okay, so we got
Speaker 1: tons of great correspondence about Julian Janes and the origin
Speaker 1: of consciousness in the breakdown of the bi cameral mind.
Speaker 1: If you are not familiar and you want to get
Speaker 1: the full story, you should go back and listen to
Speaker 1: our episodes from late September, but we will do a
Speaker 1: very brief refresher. Here is the super stripped down version
Speaker 1: of the hypothesis. Until about three thousand years ago, human
Speaker 1: beings were not conscious. The evolution of human consciousness, Julian
Speaker 1: Jane says, happened in three stages. First, human ancestors were
Speaker 1: stimulus response machines with no inner mind space. Then, sometime
Speaker 1: around the birth of a language in humans, humans developed
Speaker 1: a quote bicameral mind, which means any situation where you
Speaker 1: couldn't deal with the new stimuli through instinct and conditioned responses,
Speaker 1: you would learn what to do by here ring a voice,
Speaker 1: an auditory hallucination that would tell you what to do.
Speaker 1: And what was actually yeah exactly, uh no, no, I
Speaker 1: mean not usually at the time, so it was a joke.
Speaker 1: What was actually happening here was that the non dominant
Speaker 1: hemisphere of the brain was coming up with a response
Speaker 1: and then delivering it to the dominant hemisphere of the
Speaker 1: brain as a spoken command that people perceived as an
Speaker 1: auditory hallucination, and they called these hallucinated voices gods and
Speaker 1: then finally, about three thousand years ago, a cultural revolution
Speaker 1: caused humans to become conscious in the way that we
Speaker 1: are today. They lost the divided brain, they lost the
Speaker 1: hallucinated voices, and instead experienced this internal theater or mind
Speaker 1: space based on metaphors, where mental imagery is viewed and
Speaker 1: hypothetical scenarios are worked out in the imagination like memory palaces. No,
Speaker 1: it's like it's basically like your internal mind space. Whatever
Speaker 1: you're picturing, whatever you're consciously thinking out, what over hypothetical
Speaker 1: scenario you're working out in your mind. That is the
Speaker 1: mind space for Julian James. So James has vestiges of
Speaker 1: bi cameralism still exists today and you can see the
Speaker 1: most acutely in conditions like schizophrenia, is that it's hard
Speaker 1: to try to get it all into a very tight space.
Speaker 1: But that's the short run. Yeah, and it's also it's
Speaker 1: it's also kind of a story for why the gods
Speaker 1: stopped speaking, first, stop appearing, and then stop speaking to humanity. Uh,
Speaker 1: not not a complete like suddenly they stopped returning our calls,
Speaker 1: but they started calling us less and less. But we're
Speaker 1: still living in a world and living with the with
Speaker 1: this legacy, these religions, these tales as me, these mythologies
Speaker 1: of God's appearing and speaking to humans and telling them
Speaker 1: what they should do. Well, they started calling us less
Speaker 1: and less and we're still sitting by the phone. So uh,
Speaker 1: bicameral mind not an accepted theory. I'm hearing the soul
Speaker 1: Asylum song. I'm waiting by the phone, wait seeing for you.
Speaker 1: But whenever we pick it up these days, it's a
Speaker 1: prank caller. That's the problem. Not an accepted theory, but
Speaker 1: in my view of really interesting hypothesis, very clever, very
Speaker 1: well argued, hasn't quite met the burden of proof, but
Speaker 1: it's it's worth attention. You know. Somebody on Twitter reached
Speaker 1: out to us and was They were kind of like, hey,
Speaker 1: what's the deal? Why? Why why are you ashamed to
Speaker 1: stand by by cameralism. I'm not ashamed. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: what I think. Yeah, well, I mean my my response
Speaker 1: to them was like, I'm I am. I don't admit
Speaker 1: to anybody that I think this is a fabulous theory
Speaker 1: and just instantly just endlessly fascinating. UM. I love to
Speaker 1: bring out this model when contemplating various things in our
Speaker 1: present world or in the ancient world. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, I don't want it to be the only
Speaker 1: model that I pull off the shelf to analyze things.
Speaker 1: So if I am, if I have, if I'm hesitant
Speaker 1: about anything, I am, I'm hesitant about taking it on
Speaker 1: is my sole worldview winds. I think what I detected
Speaker 1: in this uh in this tweet was that somebody was
Speaker 1: basically working on the assumption that it sounds like you
Speaker 1: are convinced by the theory, but you're hedging or something
Speaker 1: UH to to say like, no, I shouldn't publicly commit
Speaker 1: to this. I mean, that's not my position. My position
Speaker 1: is I find it fascinating, but I'm not convinced by
Speaker 1: the theory. So it's not like I'm like pretending to
Speaker 1: find it less convincing than I do. I think I'm
Speaker 1: not fully there for some reasons that we'll get to
Speaker 1: in some of the emails I'm about to read UM,
Speaker 1: but a couple of people wrote in wondering if they
Speaker 1: have a bicameral mind, I think if you're asking that question,
Speaker 1: I think you probably don't have one in the sense
Speaker 1: that Julian Jayne's envisioned. Though it's possibly you have one
Speaker 1: in some other related way. Uh. Some people pointed out
Speaker 1: interesting parallels between bicameralism and occultism and like Crowleyite theology
Speaker 1: and Thelema. I don't know what you think about that.
Speaker 1: I think you guys probably know more about that than
Speaker 1: I do a little. Yeah, well, we talk about Crowley
Speaker 1: and Thalma and our Jack Parsons episode quite a bit
Speaker 1: because that was Jack Parsons, uh theology. I guess that's
Speaker 1: how you would put it. Um, And you know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting based on like a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: we've talked around about occult in various episodes. It's primarily
Speaker 1: based on a system of symbology more so than actually
Speaker 1: like people thinking that they're casting spells and like sumoning
Speaker 1: lightning bolts and stuff like that. So it seems like
Speaker 1: symbology would work its way pretty well into this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could, I mean, um. A couple of listeners that
Speaker 1: mentioned this connection said something about inherent issues with the duality,
Speaker 1: like duality being important to occult theology and that that
Speaker 1: you know, is manifest in the division of the mind
Speaker 1: under bicameralism. Anyway, I don't know enough to comment about it,
Speaker 1: but I thought that was interesting. A listener named Shaun's
Speaker 1: in a great email with a bunch of really interesting thoughts.
Speaker 1: In one I want to mention was about a possible
Speaker 1: cause for the transition from bicameral him to consciousness. Quote
Speaker 1: the subjunctive voice. And that's the subjunctive voices when you say, like,
Speaker 1: if Christian were to give me all the money in
Speaker 1: his wallet, I could go by lunch. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it's the mode of grammar where you're entertaining a counter
Speaker 1: factual um. The subjunctive voice is used to imagine unreal
Speaker 1: scenarios and worlds. Could this have been a way in
Speaker 1: which consciousness took over the bicameral mind instead of hearing
Speaker 1: our ancestors voices in our heads? We can now imagine
Speaker 1: if my father were here, what would he tell me
Speaker 1: to do? Or what would Jesus do? I like this
Speaker 1: because it touches on chronesthesia or mental time travel. Basically,
Speaker 1: basically just the hallmark of human consciousness that allows us
Speaker 1: to try and envision multiple outcomes to a given scenario. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And a key part of what Jane says about the
Speaker 1: nature of human consciousness modern human consciousness is the idea
Speaker 1: of in vision in time as a spatial dimension. Like
Speaker 1: that's an important part of what the mind space is
Speaker 1: is it concertizes time and allows you to to sort
Speaker 1: of view it as a space. So, guys, I have
Speaker 1: a crossover that I want to bring to your attention.
Speaker 1: I did a recent brain Stuff episode that is based
Speaker 1: on an article on the house Stuff Work site that
Speaker 1: is about some recent research where they looked at how
Speaker 1: well kids are able to focus on various tasks, and
Speaker 1: they found that children are able to focus better on
Speaker 1: their tasks when they think of themselves in the third person,
Speaker 1: and specifically, like way better when they think of themselves
Speaker 1: in the third person as an imaginary identity like Batman
Speaker 1: or Dora the Explorers. I'm gonna have to look at
Speaker 1: this study because my my son has been doing this
Speaker 1: a lot, where he'll suddenly talk about himself in the
Speaker 1: third person as if he were a cat. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: It's pretty fascinating and it seems like it's somewhat connected
Speaker 1: to this. That's interesting. I mean, part of the part,
Speaker 1: part of the whole thing in Jane's case about bicameralism
Speaker 1: is like the idea of identity in the self and
Speaker 1: so like One of the things he identifies as regression
Speaker 1: towards the bicameral mind and people with modern cases of
Speaker 1: schizophrenia is not just hearing voices in the head, but
Speaker 1: also the dissociation or the dissolution of the sense of self. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like that they sometimes lose a sense of first person. Well,
Speaker 1: in this case, I believe that the researchers theorized that
Speaker 1: the reason why Batman and Dora the Explorer were examples
Speaker 1: that worked so well for this was because the characters
Speaker 1: themselves embodied hard work, whereas like if they were if
Speaker 1: the kids were just you know, in their own first
Speaker 1: person subjective point of view, they were more likely to
Speaker 1: blow it off. Well, I mean, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: could be compared to Jane's idea of what the ancient
Speaker 1: poets were like. So were the ancient poet might say,
Speaker 1: might not say I need to work hard to compose
Speaker 1: a poem, but say, I am about to be possessed
Speaker 1: by this third entity, the muse, and the muse is
Speaker 1: going to speak a poem through me. And actually what's
Speaker 1: happening is it's coming out of their non dominant hemisphere.
Speaker 1: They are composing a poem, but they find it much easier,
Speaker 1: and they're they're very fluid, and it just comes right
Speaker 1: out in meter and rhyme and all that as composed
Speaker 1: by this god the muse. I think we're onto something here, Uh,
Speaker 1: somebody out there, you might get a dissertation out of this.
Speaker 1: All right, I'll try to do one more for this round.
Speaker 1: And this is going to be from our listener, Amanda,
Speaker 1: who says, hey, guys, my name is Amanda. I'm from
Speaker 1: Canada and religiously listen to your podcast. In regards to
Speaker 1: the latest two part podcast by camera by Cameralism, I
Speaker 1: have a thought and question. When James describes consciousness, it
Speaker 1: almost seemed like the ability to conjure a mental image,
Speaker 1: among other things. I was wondering if he had any
Speaker 1: ideas about people with a fantasia this is the inability
Speaker 1: to form mental images. Yeah, going back to a recent
Speaker 1: podcast of not that recent, sometimes in the past year
Speaker 1: or a couple of years. Um, if they are unable
Speaker 1: to have a mental image, does that mean they still
Speaker 1: have a bicameral mind or where does that leave them
Speaker 1: in the spectrum. I thought this was a really interesting
Speaker 1: question because at first I would say, no, I do
Speaker 1: not think that means they have a bi cameral mind.
Speaker 1: In fact, it would almost seem to me that they
Speaker 1: would be something like the very opposite of having a
Speaker 1: bicameral mind, like because one of the things that uh,
Speaker 1: some people report when they're they're describing their experiences with
Speaker 1: a fantasia is they don't necessarily understand the difference between
Speaker 1: mental imagery and hallucination. You know. Sometimes they'll say, like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, you're seeing something that's not there, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to explain, right, You're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not seeing it among all the things I'm seeing
Speaker 1: with my eyes. I'm seeing it in another place in
Speaker 1: my mind or something which would be according to Jane's
Speaker 1: your mind space. But yeah, I thought this was a
Speaker 1: really interesting question, and I think this this kind of question,
Speaker 1: I think does highlight some of the big holes in
Speaker 1: the picture of bicameralism. Like as as interesting as the
Speaker 1: theory is, there are just a lot of questions you
Speaker 1: can ask about it. They're like, huh, I wonder how
Speaker 1: that fits in it. It doesn't really seem to give
Speaker 1: with the whole the whole theory. Huh. Okay, So well,
Speaker 1: this this makes me wonder about about Gozer's roll and
Speaker 1: all of this because I've previously commented, at least on
Speaker 1: the blog and maybe on the show that if Goes
Speaker 1: are the Gazarian UH came and appeared to a bunch
Speaker 1: of individuals with a fantasia and said, um, choose the
Speaker 1: form of the destructor. UH, they would maybe not be
Speaker 1: able to choose the form of the destructor because they
Speaker 1: would move able to form a mental image of the
Speaker 1: state puff marshmallow Man. So that aside what happened, because
Speaker 1: part of the whole thing and Ghostbusters just goes rough.
Speaker 1: The Gozarian has appeared to ancient people, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's essentially like a Babylonian, ancient Babylonian entity. So
Speaker 1: what was Gozer's interaction with an ancient bicameral people. I
Speaker 1: always thought that the form that goes Or took when
Speaker 1: they first encounter her was that was that. I don't
Speaker 1: know if there was that much thought put into the script,
Speaker 1: but I think I think there was. I think there
Speaker 1: was a lot of it. When they encounter and she's
Speaker 1: kind of got like the like makeup in the weird
Speaker 1: like tattered mummy outfit. That's what I thought was that
Speaker 1: was the Babylonian manifestation, and then she was like, oh,
Speaker 1: for this present day, you need something else. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that's the thing. It's like, goes are realized humans today
Speaker 1: are a rather different organism in the way that they're
Speaker 1: they're thinking, and like, clearly she can read their thoughts
Speaker 1: and she's interacting with something that seems entirely different. I
Speaker 1: must update my form to match this new form of
Speaker 1: human cognition. Unfortunately, it didn't work out very well for No,
Speaker 1: No did not work. She's clearly she's just not an
Speaker 1: entity for a post bicameral world. The one interesting comparison
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of now between a fantasia and by moralism
Speaker 1: is the presence of the internal monologue. You know, we're
Speaker 1: reading about a lot of people talking about their experience
Speaker 1: of living with a fantasia. You know, they say, well,
Speaker 1: I never picture things in my head or I almost
Speaker 1: never do with any kind of lucidity. But instead, what
Speaker 1: I sort of hear when I'm thinking are words like
Speaker 1: I hear an internal monologue talking through the things I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about, like a thought balloon in a comic. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: one of our listeners asked this question after the episode
Speaker 1: they said, what is what is the voice that you
Speaker 1: hear in your head when you're reading something? You know?
Speaker 1: And that that kind of throws you for a loop
Speaker 1: because obviously, if you're reading, if you're reading, say, Hunter
Speaker 1: s Thompson book, you might be inclined to hear it
Speaker 1: and Hunter S Thompson's voice, or at least in Johnny
Speaker 1: depths Hunter Hunter s Thompson voice. But if you're reading
Speaker 1: something else that you have no frame of reference for,
Speaker 1: and it's not the voice of a specific character, if
Speaker 1: it's just the narrator, what is that quote unquote voice? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think Jane's might have said that a
Speaker 1: possibility is when ancient people's read before the transition away
Speaker 1: from the bicameral mind, instead of being conscious of reading,
Speaker 1: what was happening was they were hearing a god speak
Speaker 1: the words to them as their eyes read them off
Speaker 1: the page. And that would certainly match up two with
Speaker 1: just the we we touched on this, and we discussed
Speaker 1: this in the episode, the reverence for written languages and
Speaker 1: uh and and hard coded symbols. Yeah, all right, well,
Speaker 1: it looks like Carni's handing me another male here. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read it here. This is from you have Guinea,
Speaker 1: you have Guinea rights, and it says, writing you from
Speaker 1: the cold coasts of the Baltic Sea, my name, name
Speaker 1: is you have Guinea. You have Guinea, or as I
Speaker 1: usually present myself for non Slavic speakers, Jeff, I've been
Speaker 1: occasionally binging on stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast since
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen, but the recent episode on bicameral Mind,
Speaker 1: a concept to which I introduced myself via uh echo
Speaker 1: praxia from Peter Watts, made me finally write you. In
Speaker 1: the podcast, you mentioned that reading literature written by the
Speaker 1: authors of the Times covered by meters of dust give
Speaker 1: you an uncanny feeling that you were reading something alien,
Speaker 1: as if a person's thought process is quite different from
Speaker 1: your own. So I was wondering if you could share
Speaker 1: what piece of literature you were referring to specifically. I
Speaker 1: know I was thinking of like ancient Babylonian and ancient
Speaker 1: Assyrian literature, so like calling back to some of the
Speaker 1: text that we we discussed in the Tower of Babel episodes.
Speaker 1: The Tower of Babel episode, I think I also mentioned
Speaker 1: a couple in the first Monster episode when I when
Speaker 1: I read those texts. I often have this feeling of
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's just something that's getting lost
Speaker 1: in translation, or if it really is I'm genuinely detecting
Speaker 1: that a different kind of human mind produced these things
Speaker 1: than the minds of people living today. And I don't
Speaker 1: mean just like a different culture. I mean like like
Speaker 1: there there is no culture on earth today that feels
Speaker 1: like the mind that produced these Yeah, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I know. In the episode, we specifically mentioned the Iliad
Speaker 1: because the Illiot is an example that the Janes refers to.
Speaker 1: You know what's interesting about that as I actually, in
Speaker 1: my past life worked on a book that was analyzing
Speaker 1: a translation of the oldest copy of the Iliot in existence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was I don't speak a lick of Greek,
Speaker 1: but this was The people who were writing the book
Speaker 1: were all classical Greek scholars. They're translating it. My job
Speaker 1: was to like put the pages down and make it
Speaker 1: look nice and everything. And for me, I remember looking
Speaker 1: at these pages and thinking like this is no pun intended,
Speaker 1: not the whole, like it's all Greek to me, but
Speaker 1: literally like it looks alien. Yeah, you know, I should
Speaker 1: throw in real quick. In the original bi camera mind episode,
Speaker 1: I mentioned that there's a book titled The Rage of
Speaker 1: Achilles by Terence Hawkins that updates the Elliot for modern
Speaker 1: readers and incorporate the bicameral mind. Uh. I have since
Speaker 1: read that book and I highly recommend it. I have
Speaker 1: kind of a mini review of it. Unstuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind dot com. One thing I do want to say,
Speaker 1: in addition to what I just said is that it
Speaker 1: does seem time dependent this alien things. So when you
Speaker 1: read this really really ancient Assyrian Babylonian literature and stuff,
Speaker 1: I don't detect the same stuff from like Iron Age
Speaker 1: literature of the same region. That seems more like that
Speaker 1: seems familiar. So if Jenny says thanks and then he
Speaker 1: has by the way that he adds, would you consider
Speaker 1: making an episode on Peter Watt's writing, especially the Blind
Speaker 1: Site and Echo Proxy of vampire space travel aliens, all
Speaker 1: packed in the hardest sci fi that our marine biologists
Speaker 1: could produce. Sounds like just the stuff to blow anyone's mind. Uh.
Speaker 1: And an additional by the way, great, thanks for the
Speaker 1: things you do. You are a true inspiration. We covered
Speaker 1: Blind Site in one of our summer reading episodes, but
Speaker 1: my piction fit, my piction pick, my fiction pick this year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I read it as well. Yeah, it's a fabulous book.
Speaker 1: I have not read any of the subsequent entries in
Speaker 1: that series. You guys haven't done a science of it yet. No,
Speaker 1: we haven't, so I've gotten I've got a copy of
Speaker 1: Echo Praxia. It's sitting on my table and I was
Speaker 1: planning to start reading it next week independent of this email.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, obviously, Jet, Jeff, you have guinea. You
Speaker 1: should go back and listen to our episode, our summer
Speaker 1: reading episode this year. And yeah, yeah, we get into
Speaker 1: it a little bit. We try to avoid spoilers. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what to do about novels like that.
Speaker 1: We're discussing the science of it is inherently to spoil
Speaker 1: the plot of the book. But uh yeah, maybe we'll
Speaker 1: have to do some kind of bonus spoiler laden discussion
Speaker 1: of it for people who have read it or don't
Speaker 1: plan to read it. And uh and talk about all
Speaker 1: of the weird stuff about consciousness and biology. All right, Jody,
Speaker 1: have us some more bicameral feedback here to share before
Speaker 1: Carney tells us our time is up. Yeah, a couple
Speaker 1: of quick things if you guys don't mind. One of
Speaker 1: them is from our listener Milanie, who says some very
Speaker 1: nice things. Wanted to talk about bi cameralism, and she says,
Speaker 1: I think people seem to strive for a lack of
Speaker 1: conscious thoughts sometimes, such as meditation or the much sought
Speaker 1: after flow state. I'm an illustrator, and a lot of
Speaker 1: my work inking, coloring, rendering, etcetera. Can be done somewhat
Speaker 1: on autopilot without a lot of conscious thought. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's often harder to create when I'm overthinking it, and
Speaker 1: without a lot of stimulation, my conscious mind gets bored
Speaker 1: rather quickly. That's actually where you come in. For the
Speaker 1: past few months, I've been listening to podcasts as I work,
Speaker 1: mostly stuff to blow your mind, which keeps the active
Speaker 1: part of my brain occupied and interested so that my
Speaker 1: hands can do the work, and in turn, working on
Speaker 1: a project keeps me focused so that I pay better
Speaker 1: attention to what you're saying. Splitting my brain this way
Speaker 1: seems to make both parts work better and help me
Speaker 1: be more relaxed and productive. Within the bicameral theory, I
Speaker 1: suppose that you are the gods whose voices I choose
Speaker 1: to occupy my mind any I keep up the great
Speaker 1: work with the show. I always look forward to new
Speaker 1: episodes since I go through them pretty quickly. Thanks Melanie.
Speaker 1: I think that's really interesting, and I think the flow
Speaker 1: state is one of the most fascinating examples of the
Speaker 1: of reduction or limited consciousness that we usually experience, because
Speaker 1: the flow state is like when you're at the height
Speaker 1: of having fun and feeling good about what you're doing.
Speaker 1: But I agree that in that flow state there does
Speaker 1: appear to often be a sense of reduced consciousness. It's
Speaker 1: almost like being hypnotized. You're not really aware of yourself
Speaker 1: and what you're doing, right. Yeah. We've actually heard that
Speaker 1: from a lot of artists who are listeners of the
Speaker 1: show who have a similar experience to Melanie. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of the ones that I've met in real life,
Speaker 1: like Meg Hutchinson and Jaime Dragoons who we we met
Speaker 1: at C two E two last year. Um, But yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like that is a common thing that they're
Speaker 1: using podcasts to sort of shut down the part of
Speaker 1: their mind that's actively thinking about the work in front
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah. So I know when I because I
Speaker 1: do illustration. I'm nowhere near as good as those people.
Speaker 1: But whenever I'm working on illustration or coloring specifically, like
Speaker 1: she was mentioning, I usually have a movie on in
Speaker 1: the background, and that helps me do the same thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do wonder if it sort of helps
Speaker 1: you harness the muse, the old sense of that if
Speaker 1: the muses the non dominant hemisphere taking over the creative process,
Speaker 1: if you can sort of like sort of like tie
Speaker 1: up the executive function of the dominant hemisphere doing something else,
Speaker 1: you can sort of let that that that non dominant
Speaker 1: hemisphere takeover more effectively. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think further research is required here. Well. It also
Speaker 1: makes me think too of some of the various rituals
Speaker 1: that are used to or have been in you used
Speaker 1: to invoke not only a meditative state, but some sort
Speaker 1: of a prayer state, some sort of communion trans We've
Speaker 1: talked about saying the Rosary before along those lines. Finally,
Speaker 1: our listener Andrew sent us a email that is too
Speaker 1: long to read, but he does say a lot of
Speaker 1: really interesting stuff in it about the bicameral mind, and
Speaker 1: one of the things he points out is I think
Speaker 1: perhaps my biggest objection to the theory. It's one of
Speaker 1: my biggest questions, which is about Jane's definition of consciousness.
Speaker 1: So James has this definition he establishes in the book.
Speaker 1: I think he does a really interesting job of characterizing
Speaker 1: what he thinks consciousness is. It's this metaphor based mind
Speaker 1: space where you can entertain thoughts and ideas. Jeff says,
Speaker 1: I consider it given that to be conscious of something
Speaker 1: is to experience it. I think awareness is essentially the
Speaker 1: same as consciousness, and I don't believe that there is
Speaker 1: an unconscious experience. But I do think it's obvious that
Speaker 1: our minds can unconsciously gather information and present it to consciousness.
Speaker 1: Later we give examples of that in the book, like
Speaker 1: you can unconsciously use your brain to do things. But
Speaker 1: he's saying consciousness and experience are the same thing, So
Speaker 1: he continues, I don't see how a bicameral person can
Speaker 1: hallucinate without conscious experience. Of those hallucinations, what is an
Speaker 1: unconscious hallucination? And then he goes on to say, I
Speaker 1: think Jane's definition of consciousness is ad hoc. I think
Speaker 1: he wrongly defines consciousness as being what we experience as
Speaker 1: modern humans, with the defining feature being internal dialogue. So
Speaker 1: I may be completely off base here because I wasn't
Speaker 1: on this bi cameral mind episode. But when he says
Speaker 1: hallucinating unconsciously, the first thing I think of from previous
Speaker 1: episodes that we've done is experiencing the supernatural. So like,
Speaker 1: if you feel like you've seen a ghost, that could
Speaker 1: be that, but you'd be conscious of it. So I
Speaker 1: think what what he's saying is, what does it mean
Speaker 1: for a non conscious person to hallucinate? So he's saying
Speaker 1: to to hallucinate is to experience the detection of something
Speaker 1: that is not physically there in reality. But if you're
Speaker 1: not conscious, how would you experience it? Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: quite sure. I'm want to. I think that's a really
Speaker 1: interesting point, but I'm not quite sure I'm won over
Speaker 1: by it because I think of the analogy of like
Speaker 1: a computer. So imagine you've got a computer that is
Speaker 1: set up to detect things in a room, and it
Speaker 1: detects maybe it's got like a motion sensor, when a
Speaker 1: thing could walk in front of it. Now you could
Speaker 1: implant a computer virus on that computer that could make
Speaker 1: it sense people walking by the motion sensor, even when
Speaker 1: nobody's walking by the motion sensor and sense. In that way,
Speaker 1: the computer would be hallucinating motion. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: the computer is conscious of that motion, right, It's all
Speaker 1: just a machine. So I'm not sure I'm convinced by this,
Speaker 1: but I think it is a really interesting objection, and
Speaker 1: it's worth considering. What is the difference between Jane's idea
Speaker 1: of consciousness and the idea of experience itself? Is there
Speaker 1: nothing that it would be like to be a bicameral
Speaker 1: person or would there be something that it was like
Speaker 1: to be a bi cameral person just very different than
Speaker 1: what it's like to be us. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: quite it's quite a conundrum. Um, you know, I thought
Speaker 1: about a lot of this too, uh. In reading Terence
Speaker 1: hawkins The Rage of Achilles, where he has the he
Speaker 1: sets himself up with the challenge of of writing about
Speaker 1: characters who have a bicameral mind, but also writing about
Speaker 1: them in a way that you're gonna we're gonna also feel, um,
Speaker 1: we were also going to be able to sympathize with
Speaker 1: an empathize with them to some extent as if they
Speaker 1: are you know, normal humans. Uh, how do you, truly
Speaker 1: how do you imagine the mindset of a of an
Speaker 1: unconscious human? I wonder if somebody could develop a derivative
Speaker 1: theory of the bicameral mind that gets rid of the
Speaker 1: idea that ancient humans were not conscious, or at least
Speaker 1: reformulates that to say their consciousness was different than ours,
Speaker 1: because I think it's entirely possible that there was something
Speaker 1: going on in the brains of ancient humans that caused
Speaker 1: them to hear voices and hallucinate far more often than
Speaker 1: we do today, and those hallucinations may have been of
Speaker 1: a different sort of relevance to their lives, more useful,
Speaker 1: more practical, more accurate than hallucinations are today. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, they were conscious in some sense, they
Speaker 1: had an experience. They weren't hallucinating robots. They were people
Speaker 1: kind of like us, just different. So it all comes
Speaker 1: back to the same conundrum, right what is consciousness? What
Speaker 1: am I experiencing right now? Ultimately, that's Andrew's big question.
Speaker 1: He says he he liked like He's got a lot
Speaker 1: of thoughts about the theory, but he doesn't think it
Speaker 1: ultimately sheds light on the hard problem of consciousness. The
Speaker 1: question you just asked. We all have this thing, but
Speaker 1: what is it? Alright? I have one final listener mail
Speaker 1: and this comes to us from Meg and she's responding
Speaker 1: to one of our ignoble episodes. I believe it was
Speaker 1: the second one. Let's see. She says, Hi, there. Uh,
Speaker 1: there is a lot to be said about this, but
Speaker 1: most concisely, as a twin, I can tell you that
Speaker 1: my experience and the experience of my identical twin in
Speaker 1: recognizing ourselves and photos was that we each always saw
Speaker 1: the other. As in, if there was a photo of me,
Speaker 1: by and large, my conclusion was that it was a
Speaker 1: photo of my sister. The reverse was true for her.
Speaker 1: Of course, it seems to be that we spent far
Speaker 1: more time looking at the other person than we did
Speaker 1: it ourselves or at a mirror. Plus a mirror is
Speaker 1: a reverse image. Additionally, we did have issues of self
Speaker 1: and referred to ourselves in the plural, despite our parents
Speaker 1: best efforts to have us be individuals and not a unit. Uh.
Speaker 1: They were aware of that problem with twins, but we
Speaker 1: persisted unintentionally. Love your show, Mac, That's fascinating. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: the study that we focused on just had to do
Speaker 1: with with self facial recognition in identical twins? Uh, you
Speaker 1: know what is different with identical twins and what that
Speaker 1: reveals about self facial recognition for the for the rest
Speaker 1: of us. I saw something recently that is very tangentially
Speaker 1: nect it to this. But you remember in that episode,
Speaker 1: I brought up the idea that the facial recognition software
Speaker 1: on our phones maybe would have difficulty just telling you
Speaker 1: and your twin apart, right, Apparently a drag queen tried
Speaker 1: to trick the facial recognition software by like being out
Speaker 1: of drag and then in drag to see if it
Speaker 1: could work or not, and and it it depended on
Speaker 1: the phone, I believe. Yeah, yeah, but that that makes
Speaker 1: me wonder as well, like depending on what kind of
Speaker 1: costumed identities I guess that you create. Well, let me
Speaker 1: tell you this, anyone out there who's looking to conduct
Speaker 1: a study, I bet if you do a facial recognition
Speaker 1: drag queen study, you will definitely win an ignoble prize.
Speaker 1: And I think we've been doing as long enough and
Speaker 1: that they would like that they would Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: great idea. All right, all right, Well, thanks everybody, and
Speaker 1: thanks to Carney for bringing out all this wonderful email.
Speaker 1: Thanks to all of you for writing to us and
Speaker 1: sharing your thoughts, your questions, your and your insights and
Speaker 1: your personal experiences related to these topics. And hey, if
Speaker 1: you just listen to this and you're like, I want
Speaker 1: to add too, I want you to read my thing
Speaker 1: on the next Listener Mail episode. There's so many ways
Speaker 1: that you can get in touch with us. There's Facebook,
Speaker 1: for instance, We've got our regular Facebook page. We've also
Speaker 1: got our discussion module. We're also on Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
Speaker 1: There's also stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us directly,
Speaker 1: as always, you can email us at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Twitty Proper first char