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 Julie Douglas, and
Speaker 1: you know Julie Popcorn. I've I've really been thinking a
Speaker 1: lot about advertising recently. I'm just in all the ways
Speaker 1: that it gets inside our head popcorn and uh and
Speaker 1: and how the next thing we know, we're just uh,
Speaker 1: we're just out there buying the products that these big
Speaker 1: companies want us to buy. Popcorn. Yeah, I've I've heard
Speaker 1: about this was um that this uh sort of messaging
Speaker 1: that's subliminal. Um. I don't really think it excess I mean, um, god,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna getting hungry. Um. But I mean when I
Speaker 1: think about it, I always think about in the nineteen fifties, right, yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: um especially, I mean basically the term for subliminal messaging
Speaker 1: goes back to James Vickory, and he was a market
Speaker 1: researcher now fifty seven. So you know, I'm instantly thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, some of mad Men era type of stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: And somewhere in a room smoking going I've got a
Speaker 1: great idea. Yeah, I guess mad Men's a little lated
Speaker 1: in this, but uh, anyway, he was big on the
Speaker 1: idea of like, let's let's insert some images into these
Speaker 1: movies in New Jersey and we'll just we'll just get
Speaker 1: right in their brains. The next thing, you know, they
Speaker 1: got it. They're gonna have to have coca cola or
Speaker 1: even popcorn. That's right, that's that's the message, right, popcorn
Speaker 1: and drink coca cola. Yeah, and they were flashing this
Speaker 1: up for one three thousandth of a second, so it's
Speaker 1: just you know, just flash like like to the point
Speaker 1: where you know, supposedly you wouldn't even register, uh that
Speaker 1: you saw it, but your brain would know it and
Speaker 1: uh and then your brain would demand popcorn and coke.
Speaker 1: Of course, this resulted in a whole new era of
Speaker 1: advertising because people were just nuts about the subliminal advertising. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of paranoia too, because it's the whole idea.
Speaker 1: It's like you're inserting a random image and you're reprogramming
Speaker 1: my brain, right, you're trying to manipulate me in the
Speaker 1: government's involved and so on and so forth. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: of course a lot of it turned out to be
Speaker 1: kind of bunk. Yeah. Well, I mean he actually Uh, didn't.
Speaker 1: He claimed that popcorn sales went up by eighteen percent
Speaker 1: or something like that, or but this was a lot. Yes,
Speaker 1: he said the coke sales went up by eighteen percent
Speaker 1: and popcorn. So it's just according to him, it's just
Speaker 1: like people aren't even finishing the movie. It's just turns
Speaker 1: into an orgy of popcorn munching out out in the lobby. Right,
Speaker 1: people are so excited about this. In between nineteen and
Speaker 1: fifty and nineteen seventy, it's all the rage until want
Speaker 1: want waht fcc Yep, they banned it and uh and
Speaker 1: you can you continue to see see se uses off
Speaker 1: and alleged uses of it pop up. There was an
Speaker 1: instance in like a George W. Bush campaign, a bit
Speaker 1: that had supposedly had a little bit of subliminal messaging
Speaker 1: to threaten there this people got up in arms over.
Speaker 1: And then there's the whole um uh side tangent of
Speaker 1: satanic subliminal messaging and and you know the paranoria paranoia
Speaker 1: over that. Right, most of that was pretty much distressed.
Speaker 1: I can't remember which political figure this is. I can't
Speaker 1: believe I can't remember this right now, but it was
Speaker 1: a big Brujaja because they were filming him and there's
Speaker 1: a bookcase behind him, but it was configured in such
Speaker 1: a way that somehow, like the interstices of the bookcase
Speaker 1: seemed to suggest across if you looked at it, which
Speaker 1: you know, they said, okay, that's that's just a coincidence.
Speaker 1: That's not really across behind me. But it was fascinating
Speaker 1: because it was like, you know, what that does look
Speaker 1: like across? So yeah, I mean, whether or not it's
Speaker 1: meant to look like that or people are mean to
Speaker 1: be inserting subliminal messages is still out there exactly. So,
Speaker 1: I mean the big thing here is that, like anytime
Speaker 1: you're trying to sell a product, or an experience or
Speaker 1: or even a podcast, even though we don't charge for
Speaker 1: this thing, you're gonna level any kind of skill you
Speaker 1: can you can level to try and make people buy
Speaker 1: it or buy into it. It's it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the whole argument that, like the wars between armies, wars
Speaker 1: are are one based on accumulating you know, tiny um
Speaker 1: you know, relatively insignificant advantages, petty advantages, and if you
Speaker 1: if you accumulate enough of these, then you can win
Speaker 1: the battle and so you know, obviously market marketers are
Speaker 1: gonna do is everything they can, everything from studies to
Speaker 1: uh to throwing in maybe something subliminal, a little touches
Speaker 1: like that. And as we're gonna explore in this podcast,
Speaker 1: you know, different stimuli to affect our our sense of smell,
Speaker 1: curing our site and uh and then where is this
Speaker 1: going in the future? Right? Yeah, how are we? Uh?
Speaker 1: How are we playing with these new technologies? You know,
Speaker 1: are we actually aiding and abetting advertisers? And that's what
Speaker 1: we're thinking of, Like how what are the different ways
Speaker 1: that we're being manipulated at this very moment and also
Speaker 1: submitting ourselves to be manipulated by And to that end,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about scent. Yes, scent is a
Speaker 1: big one. Uh, I mean our very sense of taste.
Speaker 1: It's like a large percent of it is smell. I
Speaker 1: mean it's wherever you go, smell is going to play
Speaker 1: a huge role in what you you you take in.
Speaker 1: We end up a like like I don't know if
Speaker 1: you ever get this sort of like a not really
Speaker 1: a deja but like a smell memory, Like suddenly you'll
Speaker 1: smell something and you'll instantly be able to go back
Speaker 1: to where you remember smelling that like, right, right, that's
Speaker 1: actually called the Pristine effect by Marcel Proust. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you know of the author. His novel Remembrance of Things
Speaker 1: Past was the first to explicitly link smell in memory.
Speaker 1: So he talked about the emotional power. Um, I think
Speaker 1: it was matteling cakes and how that called up his
Speaker 1: images of his childhood. Yeah, Like I'll like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like I'll be walking down the street and suddenly
Speaker 1: I smell inexplicably the like like the house that I
Speaker 1: lived in when I was seven or something, you know,
Speaker 1: and you'll be it'll be the kind of thing where
Speaker 1: you could never like there's you can't really access this
Speaker 1: catalog of smells or I can't normally, but then suddenly
Speaker 1: it's out of the blue and they're like, hey, there's that.
Speaker 1: The link is made well. And that's because the odorant
Speaker 1: patterns are interpreted as different smells in the olfactory bulb, right,
Speaker 1: And because the factory bulb is part of your limbic system,
Speaker 1: which is our emotional center of the brain. Smell is
Speaker 1: closely connected to the mink, della and hippocamus, and those
Speaker 1: are both structures that influence our behavior, our mood, and
Speaker 1: our memory. So you do have that little storehouse going
Speaker 1: on there, and it's really effective, right. You know real
Speaker 1: estate agents always say to bake cookies or you know,
Speaker 1: or to spray the fake cookie smell, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you know that that encourages people to linger more
Speaker 1: have those cozy feelings of cookies being cooked. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: But marketers of course have figured this out, and they've
Speaker 1: in a big way, right, Like it's it's a science
Speaker 1: for them. They've looked at how people are responding the
Speaker 1: best smells, like their universal smells that people respond to well,
Speaker 1: and they figured out all these different ways to employ
Speaker 1: that in different retails faces. So if you go into
Speaker 1: a let's say, a French themed UH store, you might
Speaker 1: smell hints of lavender, which are just trying to underscore
Speaker 1: the fact that it's you're in a French store, I suppose.
Speaker 1: Or you might go into a home good store and
Speaker 1: smell chocolate chip cookies. But it's not just making you feel,
Speaker 1: you know, nice and cuddly inside. Right, there's an effect here.
Speaker 1: They're buttering you up. They are buttering you up because
Speaker 1: they know that if they pump out those aromas that
Speaker 1: you're going to spend more money. In fact, there was
Speaker 1: one study that was conducted in a Canadian mall and
Speaker 1: they found that there was an increase of over fifty
Speaker 1: dollars per customer that week. And that's from the author
Speaker 1: Martin Howard from We Know What You Want. Well, I
Speaker 1: I was, I forget how I came across this. You
Speaker 1: know how you end up doing the internet searches and
Speaker 1: you end up getting off course a little. But I
Speaker 1: found that all these threads where people trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what the smell was in subway sandwich restaurants, and
Speaker 1: people are like, what does that smell? Or and then
Speaker 1: and then I think some people would have been reading
Speaker 1: from the same inture we we are and they're they
Speaker 1: were like, oh, they're pumping it in their their brainwashing
Speaker 1: us with their fake chemical sense. And then somebody, somebody
Speaker 1: finally uh um enter the conversation was like, well, actually
Speaker 1: it has something to do with the way they bring
Speaker 1: in like frozen yeast and not frozen east, a frozen dough.
Speaker 1: And then they thought before they cook it, um and
Speaker 1: and baked the bread. But but but it's an interesting ways,
Speaker 1: not nothing nefarious and nothing more nefarious than freezing dough.
Speaker 1: It depends where you fall in that it was like
Speaker 1: accidental marketing, I suppose, yeah, But but you could imagine
Speaker 1: like a situation where say they changed, say Subway sandwiches
Speaker 1: were to change their method, and then suddenly you didn't
Speaker 1: have that smell, Like there might be an advantage in
Speaker 1: figuring out a way to bottle it and pump it in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I swear that the Gap has its
Speaker 1: own signature sense because you know, it's not that I
Speaker 1: hang out at the Gap all up, but anytime that
Speaker 1: I've bought something from there and I've brought at home,
Speaker 1: it still has that scent attached to it, and it's
Speaker 1: a pleasant scent. And I was like, is that that
Speaker 1: gap scent? You know? New car smells another big one
Speaker 1: for people. You know, it's like you get they you
Speaker 1: go on that test ride in that car. It'sme also
Speaker 1: new and nice, right, I mean, I mean I'm not
Speaker 1: particularly you know, enraptured by it, but I know many
Speaker 1: people are. No, You're right, and then like You've got
Speaker 1: your reptilian brain all excited and thinking, oh car, I
Speaker 1: do request it when I go to like the Cactus
Speaker 1: car wash to get the car. You know, they have
Speaker 1: all the bottles and they're like, which one you want?
Speaker 1: And I'll be like fresh, you know, new car, and
Speaker 1: they're like, we're out, and then I have to make
Speaker 1: do with like cum quad or something. Yeah, yeah, something weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I thought I smelled in your car yea um.
Speaker 1: But it can actually go awry though. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, California's Milk processor Board launched a series I've
Speaker 1: Got Milk billboards in San Francisco bus shelters. So the
Speaker 1: print ads um also featured the scent of chocolate chip
Speaker 1: cookies and then the reason that people would smell the
Speaker 1: chocolate chip ease and then they want some milk and
Speaker 1: it would all work fabulously, but people actually complained about it,
Speaker 1: and you know that's yeah, I think about it. That's
Speaker 1: a situation where you've got ink ingruent elements going on.
Speaker 1: You've got the smell of the streets and passers by
Speaker 1: maybe they're smoking. And you know, in my own experience,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're sitting in a bush shelter, it
Speaker 1: might smell like you'urine sometimes. Yeah, well that's like the
Speaker 1: Candler Park marta station here in Atlanta. It's really close
Speaker 1: to a tipe of industrial baking facility, right, yeah, actually
Speaker 1: it's a kash I can't remember the piemaker, but yes,
Speaker 1: sarely or yeah. So it's like, so you're there and
Speaker 1: it'll smell either like cakes baking, pies baking, or pies baking,
Speaker 1: and like you're in you know it just you know
Speaker 1: or or whatever. The the the bus I mean, the
Speaker 1: trained terminal smells happened to be so yeah, you end
Speaker 1: up with a weird mix there. Yeah. I actually tried
Speaker 1: to take a tour of that factory. But you're arrested. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say they didn't me, but client, yes,
Speaker 1: I was arrested. This presentation is brought to you by Intel,
Speaker 1: sponsors of Tomorrow. Um. And then there's music. Right, we
Speaker 1: already know how many it manipulate. I mean we used
Speaker 1: it at the side of this podcast. That's right. You know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of hopefully gets one in the mood. And uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, you go to any fine dining establishment,
Speaker 1: you're you're generally going to be you're paying for the
Speaker 1: the andyhance as much as the food, and so a
Speaker 1: huge part of that is the music. Let's play some
Speaker 1: music that makes people relax, makes some calm down, makes
Speaker 1: them feel like, you know, there's some more special like
Speaker 1: you know, this is the evening's entertainment. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know music, right, you've heard of music which I think
Speaker 1: most of us associate with Elevator Music. They actually that's
Speaker 1: a huge company and they actually create all sorts of
Speaker 1: um different nuanced types of tracks depending on what your
Speaker 1: retail businesses UM And there was actually another study again
Speaker 1: author Martin Howard had talked about this that specially designed
Speaker 1: music loops can keep shoppers in the supermarket for eight
Speaker 1: percent longer, like the song never ends, so you never leave. No.
Speaker 1: I think it's just sort of like if you maybe
Speaker 1: put I don't know, like Enya in a supermarket, like
Speaker 1: maybe it would just slow down people's actions. I don't know,
Speaker 1: there was a time where that might have kept me going,
Speaker 1: but yeah, now it would speed things up. That's it's
Speaker 1: really amazing though how many places don't get this concept. Though.
Speaker 1: You'll go into um like like sometimes it will be
Speaker 1: something like like a you know, the kind of place
Speaker 1: where you get like your nails done. I mean not
Speaker 1: that I go to these places a lot, but I
Speaker 1: have on on a rare occasion than one, and they'll,
Speaker 1: you know, they'll totally have their skill set down, but
Speaker 1: they won't understand that you should maybe play music that
Speaker 1: doesn't make you want to strangle yourself. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I've actually noted this before. In breakfast places sometimes they
Speaker 1: have will play extremely loud music, like really bad eighties music,
Speaker 1: and I think, oh my god, really like not that
Speaker 1: I'm hungover, but some of us here might be hungover.
Speaker 1: It's it's not the right choice. So yeah, we know already.
Speaker 1: We talked about this a lot too in the music
Speaker 1: Rebuild Your Brain. How music can affect you. Yeah, mostly positively. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it leaches in and changes the way you
Speaker 1: view the world. I mean, wouldn't. Yeah, it's just just
Speaker 1: across the board. So the next topic sense that you
Speaker 1: would want to leverage this in a marketing situation, right,
Speaker 1: You would want someone's rewards center in the brain ding
Speaker 1: ding dinging and releasing dopamen and you'd be feeling really
Speaker 1: great and you might buy more. But another advertising technology
Speaker 1: that's creeped up in the last couple of years is
Speaker 1: beaming advertisements into people's ears, which is super creepy. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you all have heard about it before, but it's
Speaker 1: called the auditory spotlight. Yeah, and this is we have
Speaker 1: to have a really cool article on the on the
Speaker 1: website by John Fuller about this. Uh. And it's it's
Speaker 1: basically what it sounds like, just sort of just directional,
Speaker 1: like you're just directing the sound at a particular area
Speaker 1: where a person would conceivably be and uh and and
Speaker 1: they're hearing the message, right, yep, that's right. That's actually
Speaker 1: a tiny being just like light, and it's a beam
Speaker 1: from a rooftop speaker. Yeah. Now, so I really don't
Speaker 1: know that I've encountered this in real life. No, I
Speaker 1: haven't either. And I wonder if it's just been used
Speaker 1: in larger cities or if it was just you know,
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, two thousand eight seemed to be
Speaker 1: it's big years. Um. And I think that the main
Speaker 1: brew ha ha was in New York when A and
Speaker 1: he was promoting a show called Paranormal State, and people
Speaker 1: would walk by and a woman's voice would say, who's there,
Speaker 1: who's there? It's not your imagination, but people start to
Speaker 1: get creeped out of course, but out of don't I
Speaker 1: really haven't seen it being used outside of that, you know,
Speaker 1: like outside of actually museums and libraries, places where you
Speaker 1: need it to be quiet and you need this directed
Speaker 1: sound and uh. And the other thing about this technology,
Speaker 1: I think it like it instantly the the idea and
Speaker 1: that the headlines associated with instantly captivated everybody because it
Speaker 1: brought to mind the idea that they're beaming advertised like
Speaker 1: visual advertisements directly into your brain, which which is a
Speaker 1: gag that's featured in uh, one of one of my
Speaker 1: favorite Futurama episodes where where Fry is having this dream
Speaker 1: that that he's in his underwear and it turns into
Speaker 1: an advertisement for underwear and anyway within his dream, Yeah,
Speaker 1: within his dream anyway. Excepting's like, what was that all about?
Speaker 1: And they're like, oh, that's just how how it is.
Speaker 1: Is we all have advertisements in her in her dreams,
Speaker 1: and and you know, it's like we joke about about
Speaker 1: about that. But you know, some of the technology coming
Speaker 1: along is really getting uh, it's really getting into your head.
Speaker 1: It's really getting in your head starting and you can
Speaker 1: see a future where a lot of this is going
Speaker 1: to be kind of intrusive. Yeah, And we're talking about
Speaker 1: m r s. Actually again, I feel like we talked
Speaker 1: about mrs all the time, but they're being used everywhere,
Speaker 1: all the time for everything. Yeah, and this is where
Speaker 1: we're looking of the brain while someone is thinking, um,
Speaker 1: and and watching the movement, watching how blood moves around
Speaker 1: how and and just seeing the neural architecture in action. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think at first, you know, of course, they
Speaker 1: were doing this for many reasons that you know, science
Speaker 1: medical based, but you know those crafty market here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I started to try to figure it out. I think
Speaker 1: in fact, they're now calling it neuromarketing, right, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Basically what they have figured out is that you can
Speaker 1: map the data. You can look at someone's thoughts, right,
Speaker 1: like someone For instance, the sixty minutes piece that we watched,
Speaker 1: a person was looking at ten different objects and then
Speaker 1: the m R I was scanning that. And then what
Speaker 1: they did is they took that data, fed it to
Speaker 1: a computer and then told the computer later on, okay,
Speaker 1: well here are two objects based on that one scan
Speaker 1: what is this person looking at? Yeah, and stuff like
Speaker 1: is it a knife for a house? Right? And then
Speaker 1: they would be it's a knife, and that's right. So
Speaker 1: the brain was saying, I'm looking at a knife. That's
Speaker 1: the first scan. Second it was a house, third hammer,
Speaker 1: so on and so forth, And the computer was given
Speaker 1: two choices from what I recall and saying which which
Speaker 1: one was this person looking at? And the computer was
Speaker 1: choosing right almost every time. Of course, there there are
Speaker 1: some oddities that happened, because your brain might light up differently,
Speaker 1: say with a hammer, if you've had a bad experience
Speaker 1: with the hammers. Yeah, it's like every brain is going
Speaker 1: to be a little and it's like a fingerprint, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's very complicated fingerprints, so it's not going to
Speaker 1: be perfect. But they can also look at it in
Speaker 1: terms of which of two decisions is someone going to make? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're trying to predict yeah, which with marketing that comes
Speaker 1: down to a very basic, uh decision. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it's this person going to buy this object or not?
Speaker 1: Are they interested in this or they repulsed by it? Right?
Speaker 1: And this is in Carnegie. Mellon was looking at this right,
Speaker 1: and they were actually trying to have the ability to
Speaker 1: map nuance thoughts within the next three years. So yes,
Speaker 1: this this idea of not just saying Okay, we based
Speaker 1: on this information to everybody's there's universal qualities right that
Speaker 1: um come up when you look at an image, and
Speaker 1: so everybody's going to think about this object this way
Speaker 1: most of the time. But no, I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: more than that. It's like what choices are people going
Speaker 1: to make? And where have you been? The one they
Speaker 1: looked at was you know, it's like we have these
Speaker 1: sort of mintal images of places and they can they
Speaker 1: can you know, answer the question have you seen this
Speaker 1: environment before? And that has a whole there's a whole
Speaker 1: possibility there with like criminal investigations, like you know you
Speaker 1: have the scene of the crime, Well we we just
Speaker 1: scanned you and it said you were in fact e
Speaker 1: g was used to convict a woman of poisoning and
Speaker 1: ex fiance in India. That's right, because they were describing
Speaker 1: the circumstances around his death and at the same time
Speaker 1: she was getting scanned, right, and they said, okay, we
Speaker 1: see all this activity going on. Now you can sort
Speaker 1: of lay that on her for agreeing to the scan,
Speaker 1: because that's the other big thing we have to mentioneer
Speaker 1: when we're talking about getting your getting scanned. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's one of these situations where it's it's like getting
Speaker 1: an m R. I. You know, you're you're going, you're
Speaker 1: laying down, you're being really still very cooperative while this
Speaker 1: uh this you basically go on this giant donut right right,
Speaker 1: As far as we know, governments, corporations cannot stuff us
Speaker 1: into this donut and make us do this. Even in
Speaker 1: total recall, they had trouble get it keeping Arnold Swartzenegger
Speaker 1: and that that that chair, you know, he ended up
Speaker 1: breaking out of it. So well, he's right, So we
Speaker 1: either have this thing was so we're gonna either have
Speaker 1: to develop stronger chairs um or or develop scanning systems
Speaker 1: that are not so that don't demand so much cooperation,
Speaker 1: portable ones and ones that can just sort of scan
Speaker 1: you in a second. Right, and there is a man
Speaker 1: named Paul root Wolpe. He's the director of ethics at
Speaker 1: Emory University, and he says, this is possible that you
Speaker 1: can beam light into your front cortex and that receptors
Speaker 1: would get the reflection of that light, essentially reading your
Speaker 1: thoughts that correspond what you're looking at at that time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we'd be able to do it, not only remotely
Speaker 1: but also covertly, you know, they like you might be
Speaker 1: I'm just throwing this out there, like you're you're looking
Speaker 1: at the billboard the trains station, and it's looking at you.
Speaker 1: You don't even realize that it's it's gauging your reaction
Speaker 1: to the advertisement. And maybe based on those readings, it
Speaker 1: might be able to throw up something that interests you
Speaker 1: more or intereste or or or would you know, interest
Speaker 1: you or not interest you less. But but you know,
Speaker 1: it would be able to if you've ever filled out
Speaker 1: like a survey online or these basic like recommendation engines
Speaker 1: that say like, oh, you like this movie. In this movie,
Speaker 1: you probably love this um. You know it's as wrong
Speaker 1: as Netflix seems to get that on my account. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like that that that's the sort of thing that
Speaker 1: everyone seems to be interested and uh, and this would
Speaker 1: be like a laser shining not a laser, but like
Speaker 1: a beam of light shining at your head. And then
Speaker 1: you could easily imagine a computerized system that wouldn't that
Speaker 1: would then give you recommendations based on your reactions. Well
Speaker 1: that's what I was thinking. I was thinking, Okay, maybe
Speaker 1: I'm at the gap, you know, it's five it's five
Speaker 1: years from now. I'm at the gap. I'm I happen
Speaker 1: to be looking at a red shirt, and you know,
Speaker 1: the beam of light gets that information than it interfaces
Speaker 1: with a marketing company, which then, you know, real time
Speaker 1: tells the salesperson get more red stuff. She loves it,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. And it's it's interesting to think that
Speaker 1: that might happen. But it's also I also feel like
Speaker 1: in this day and age that you know, I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily want that to happen, but I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: giving up so much of my own information to advertisers
Speaker 1: already just to get a quick fix, a quick you know,
Speaker 1: ten percent off of something. Um, that I'm almost a
Speaker 1: willing participant, you know. And I can see this sort
Speaker 1: of thing being used in the future where it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well if you buy into our lightbeam program, well you
Speaker 1: get an extra off your purchases, you know, and then
Speaker 1: I'm complicit in this act. Well, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: I can easily see it. It's because I'm on one
Speaker 1: Level's easy to imagine people like I do not want
Speaker 1: machines reading my mind and trying to sell me things.
Speaker 1: But I mean We're already letting machines read our personal
Speaker 1: emails and give us little ads you over to the
Speaker 1: side in our our Google accounts, Right, so I could
Speaker 1: easily see a situation where you would be like, yes,
Speaker 1: I will let this computer that somebody has assured me
Speaker 1: UM is gonna, you know, keep my secrets. I will
Speaker 1: allow that to scan my brain and give me movie recommendations.
Speaker 1: God only knows what kind of movie recommendations we would
Speaker 1: get on an accurate scan of our of our complex thoughts.
Speaker 1: Because that's the thing you're as soun as you're saying
Speaker 1: with like, within the next five years, the same technology
Speaker 1: that's enabling people to say, hey, are you thinking of
Speaker 1: a knife or a bowl of pudding will be able
Speaker 1: to decipher us so much much more complex thoughts. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of amazing to think of it
Speaker 1: that way. And also there's that element of gratification, Like
Speaker 1: we want instant gratification, we want it now. So if
Speaker 1: we if someone, if there's the promise of that, then
Speaker 1: we're willing to exchange something of ourselves for it. Right,
Speaker 1: And you know, you really begin to think, too, is
Speaker 1: there is the technology inclusible? We reach the point where
Speaker 1: various forms of entertainment respond to the way to to
Speaker 1: our to our brain scans. Like maybe you're in a
Speaker 1: you're in a restroom, so you're in a private room, right,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a scanning system that can tell if you're
Speaker 1: digging the music and in either you know, shift the
Speaker 1: mix to accommodate you, or even shift the music itself.
Speaker 1: You can getting the whole area of intelligent music where
Speaker 1: where there won't be a composition as much, but a
Speaker 1: composition that changes according to your neural requirements. Or yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's just the sky's the limit. Movies that
Speaker 1: sort of right themselves. Uh, you know, depending on how
Speaker 1: you're responding to it in your in your brain, I
Speaker 1: kind of dig that. Actually, yeah, see, now you're you're
Speaker 1: coming around, here's my personal information in exchange for that.
Speaker 1: And then I mean, as long as we're talking about
Speaker 1: things that we can manipulate in the brain, I mean
Speaker 1: they're our brain has as these different pleasure systems. For instance,
Speaker 1: there is a portion of the brain known as the
Speaker 1: orbitofrontal cortex and this is where umu, the joy one
Speaker 1: experiences during sex or um or you know, eating a
Speaker 1: really tasty sandwich take place. So um, you know, they've
Speaker 1: been they've been exploring ways to manipulate that, uh, mainly
Speaker 1: for things like treating like Parkinson's disease, you know, or
Speaker 1: um or or various neurological conditions. But of course, marketing
Speaker 1: initially eventually pokes its head into any research facility and
Speaker 1: starts dreaming about ways you could you could do this.
Speaker 1: So imagine that like you're you're in a store and
Speaker 1: you're you know, you're suddenly you're just feeling really great
Speaker 1: about this purchase you're about to make. Now, I think
Speaker 1: that would probably be invasive, but yeah, just a little bit.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they're working on this sex chip thing, which
Speaker 1: which shows supposed yeah and uh, and they're you know,
Speaker 1: hoping to say, help people with a condition called and
Speaker 1: head donia, yeah, and and hedonia, which means you just
Speaker 1: can't you can't feel joy, uh in regards to sex
Speaker 1: and food. And so they would treat this by putting
Speaker 1: a chip in. But that's like just creating a chip
Speaker 1: for that is years away, much less the idea of
Speaker 1: some sort of external, um, you know, laser device that's
Speaker 1: gonna being july directly into your brain. So the idea
Speaker 1: is that this implant, right, is it's going to be
Speaker 1: stimulated the orbital or orbital frontal cortex. And so I'm
Speaker 1: just trying to imagine, like, you know, wearing that during
Speaker 1: intimate moments, I mean, or just on the train, you know,
Speaker 1: to work in the morning, you know, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: and people are like, look, I see what you have on.
Speaker 1: I know what you're doing over there because you see.
Speaker 1: But what if we all had them? Like, like, I
Speaker 1: can imagine a situation where everybody gets seas installed so
Speaker 1: you can better interface with your movie that rights itself.
Speaker 1: You know, It's like it's righting itself based on how
Speaker 1: you're responding to it. And it's also pumping you with
Speaker 1: pleasure every time there's a you know, a shot of
Speaker 1: a slice of pie on the screen. Wow. You just
Speaker 1: never would have to leave your home? You just, yeah,
Speaker 1: I never would. Yeah. Um. According to the Scientific American
Speaker 1: article that I read, Stuart Malloy a North Carolina physician
Speaker 1: who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes for pain, mostly or
Speaker 1: to relieve pain. Rather, he found by chance that a
Speaker 1: slightly off kilter placement in the lower spine caused one
Speaker 1: woman to exclaim, you're going to have to teach my
Speaker 1: husband how to do that, and here we go. Um,
Speaker 1: he has actually created a machine explicitly for what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, and it's a modified spinal cord stimulator and
Speaker 1: the name is really subtle. It's called the Orgasmatron. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds fake, but yeah, yeah yeah, it's actually I
Speaker 1: think it's an homage to Woody Allen in the film Sleeper.
Speaker 1: What was the device? And Barbara Ella? I do not recall.
Speaker 1: There's like the scene where Duran Duran has barb Barbarella
Speaker 1: in the I don't know. It has some sort of
Speaker 1: crazy name. It looks like a big organ just called
Speaker 1: the organ or maybe not. That's an unfortunate name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. That's that's some technology that's far
Speaker 1: off and it's kind of crude sounding right now, right,
Speaker 1: that's Barbara Alla territory. Yeah, and we'll get there eventually.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Oh but again it begs that question, like
Speaker 1: what are we willingly allowing ourselves to participate in? And
Speaker 1: it made me think about this new interface that students
Speaker 1: at m I T Media Lab have developed. It's a
Speaker 1: wearable computing system that turns any surface your arm, table, wall,
Speaker 1: whatever into an interactive display screen. Yeah. And the where
Speaker 1: can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will just
Speaker 1: on their arm. Yeah. But if you were like what
Speaker 1: time it is, you could just draw a watch and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so it's very cool. Um. Their goal is to
Speaker 1: harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion,
Speaker 1: like our existing senses. So it's this idea that computers
Speaker 1: might become our sixth sense. Yeah. Um, and and in fact,
Speaker 1: I mean it's so nuts that, um, you could encounter
Speaker 1: someone at a party in this system would project a
Speaker 1: cloud of words onto that person's body and provide more
Speaker 1: information about that person, like a blog. You are all
Speaker 1: the name of his company, likes dislikes, so like we
Speaker 1: become our Facebook profile. Yeah, pretty much like the end
Speaker 1: of the Black Hole where the mad scientists and the
Speaker 1: robot and merge into one horrifying thing. Well, that's what
Speaker 1: I was thinking. I mean, not specifically that specifically that,
Speaker 1: but I was thinking, like, that's the juncture of where
Speaker 1: advertisers and and ourselves like come together, right, because you
Speaker 1: know that in that situation that you're there's no privacy, right,
Speaker 1: that you're sharing everything about yourself in exchange for the
Speaker 1: ability to move throughout the world in a more fluid way.
Speaker 1: It's a little scary, and again, I know I've heard
Speaker 1: it up before, but it's like super sad, true love
Speaker 1: story in which people wear an apparatus are apparatti around
Speaker 1: their necks and it gives everybody's credit scores and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. Well, no, you're allowed to continually
Speaker 1: compos you like I did it. Just I keep being
Speaker 1: reminded of that story. It's super true, super sad, and
Speaker 1: it's a love story. Well, excellent, Well, um, popcorn, I'm
Speaker 1: going to um turn to our listener mail. Now we
Speaker 1: have a couple here from some listeners. Um, here's one
Speaker 1: from Nathaniel's gonna have a snack over here. Yeah, alright.
Speaker 1: I was listening to your awesome podcast on alien abduction,
Speaker 1: and I realized that something similar to that paraplysis thing
Speaker 1: was going on. On occasion, I will wake up during
Speaker 1: a moment of pain in my dream, such as being
Speaker 1: hit in the face with a baseball or being kicked
Speaker 1: in the chest by a thug. At this moment, I
Speaker 1: wake up with intense pain all over my body at
Speaker 1: some horrible hour, and typically can't fall asleep. Again, I
Speaker 1: don't know that this is unusual, and was wondering if
Speaker 1: you could use your epic minds and power to explain
Speaker 1: this huge fan love the show and you will never
Speaker 1: cease to figuratively blow my mind. Um well that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: Uh well, one possibility is that thugs are kicking you
Speaker 1: in your chest during the night, and I would look
Speaker 1: into that possibility first. Yeah, it's happened to me before. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, beyond that, we'd have to we'd have to
Speaker 1: look into it. I mean it's certainly it sounds off
Speaker 1: hand like it's similar to the phenomena where supposedly we
Speaker 1: have this evolutionary hold over where we're afraid of falling
Speaker 1: out of tree and beaten by ground uh predators, and
Speaker 1: so that we'll if we feel like we're slipping in
Speaker 1: our dream or or falling over, like I'll have it
Speaker 1: where I'm like slipping on milk or something and then
Speaker 1: I'll just fly away. I think you've been hanging out
Speaker 1: with sloths too much. I mean the SLOs monkey. I
Speaker 1: did see a monkey. Thought of the tree and of
Speaker 1: Costa Rica. Yeah, plummeted. I mean just not just like
Speaker 1: a little fall, but like a really embarrassing fall monkey. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think he was embarrassed, feel shamed. But
Speaker 1: we're all watching me just falls out of the Maybe
Speaker 1: that's part of their truck, you know, like, all right
Speaker 1: now you're gonna fall and we'll get a gasp from
Speaker 1: the audience. Well, Nathaniel, I will say that we do
Speaker 1: need to we will. We will return to the world
Speaker 1: of dreams in a future podcast. I would really like
Speaker 1: to do one with having to do with nightmares and
Speaker 1: night terrors specific quick, so we'll keep you posted on
Speaker 1: all that. So we have another listener mail from someone
Speaker 1: who wishes UH to remain anonymous. UH and he writes
Speaker 1: in I'm a long time listener, first time writer, and
Speaker 1: I have come back from a trip to Japan, where
Speaker 1: I just happened to listen to your episode is your
Speaker 1: Gut of Genius. On the sixth day of battling about
Speaker 1: of constipation, while this happens basically every time I leave
Speaker 1: the country, as you could imagine, after six days, it
Speaker 1: was pretty irritable and I was getting pretty anxious about
Speaker 1: being clogged up for so long. But listening to the
Speaker 1: podcast and finding out that this happens to most people
Speaker 1: along with you guys providing an explanation for it just
Speaker 1: seemed to lift the anxiety immediately. Don't know whether it
Speaker 1: was the fact that I now understood what was happening
Speaker 1: in my brain talked to my bowels, or whether it
Speaker 1: was just me, but suffice to say that before the
Speaker 1: podcast was over, I did the deed as nature intended.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately it was using a Japanese style toilet on a
Speaker 1: moving bullet train. However, I was grateful nonetheless. So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm glad to know that our our poets from
Speaker 1: our listeners find our podcasts a moving, nice nice upon there. Um,
Speaker 1: I know, and that makes me think about something called
Speaker 1: the sphincter law, which we don't have time to get
Speaker 1: into now, but it's it's definitely something that I think
Speaker 1: we need to talk about in some other format. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: look look for that title to show up and gets
Speaker 1: the law of the sphincter excellent. Why if you have
Speaker 1: any tales of toiletry tears on the on your travels,
Speaker 1: then you know, stop by our Facebook page where we
Speaker 1: will blow the mind and we'll also blow the mind
Speaker 1: on Twitter and where we update that feat pretty regularly
Speaker 1: with Cool Happenings at how stuff Works Discovery and just
Speaker 1: neat Stuff, We find out what's so swarre in the Whip.
Speaker 1: If you have any questions or you're interested to find
Speaker 1: out more about some of our research notes or links
Speaker 1: that we've used in this episode, or any others, feel
Speaker 1: free to drop us a line at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. To learn more a about the podcast, click
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