Speaker 1: Welcome to host toff Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
Speaker 1: a researcher and writer. Here at host Works eight. Every
Speaker 1: week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
Speaker 1: the weird and wonders advances we've seen in science, technology,
Speaker 1: and culture. This week, new research into squid brains shows
Speaker 1: how different cephalopods really are from humans and explains how
Speaker 1: they pull off some of their most amazing feats and unrelated,
Speaker 1: we answer one of those burning questions, why does hot
Speaker 1: food seems so much more satisfying than cold food? But first,
Speaker 1: staff editor Christopher Hassiotis and our freelance writer Laurie L.
Speaker 1: Dove explores a strange bit of food history. Ancient armies
Speaker 1: sometimes waged war using hallucinogenic honey. In two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: a middle aged couple decided to improve their sex life,
Speaker 1: so they spent a week eating raw honey gathered from
Speaker 1: near Turkey's Black Sea. But then they ended up in
Speaker 1: a hospital with symptoms that mimiced heart attacks. The culprit
Speaker 1: mad honey poisoning a little known destroyer that has brought
Speaker 1: down ancient armies and in modern times been rumored to
Speaker 1: have a hallucinatory effect that increases sexual performance. Mad honey
Speaker 1: is produced by bees that ingest the nectar of Rhododendron
Speaker 1: ponticum and other poisonous plants that grow in Japan, Nepal, Brazil,
Speaker 1: parts of North America and Europe, and the Eastern Black
Speaker 1: Sea region of Turkey. The naturally toxic syrup reportedly tastes
Speaker 1: more bitter than normal honey, and the toxicity is stronger
Speaker 1: and fresh honey gathered in the springtime, when rhododendrons are
Speaker 1: among the first plants to bloom. Mad honey can go
Speaker 1: from intoxicating to lethal in just a few tablespoons, and
Speaker 1: because potency varies from hive to hive, there's really no
Speaker 1: surer way to tell when enough is enough. In the
Speaker 1: case of the couple who wound up in the emergency room,
Speaker 1: increasingly large doses of the toxically tinged honey caused acute
Speaker 1: inferior myocardial infarctions, adding to the dizziness, hypotension, and loss
Speaker 1: of consciousness they may already have experienced from their first taste.
Speaker 1: The honey is so potent that ancient armies used it
Speaker 1: as a weapon, and quite effectively too. According to Adrian Mayer,
Speaker 1: a research scholar in classics and a historian specializing in
Speaker 1: ancient biological and chemical warfare. This goes back awhile the
Speaker 1: ancient Greek commander Xenophon led an army of ten thousand
Speaker 1: soldiers from Persia back to Greece in the year four
Speaker 1: o one b CE. He prided himself on choosing healthy
Speaker 1: and safe campsites for his soldiers while in hostile territory,
Speaker 1: and set up shop in Pontus on the Black Sea
Speaker 1: coast in northeast Turkey. He noted nothing unusual, but did
Speaker 1: make note of an extraordinary number of swarming bees, and
Speaker 1: so that his men soon discovered the hives and gorged
Speaker 1: themselves on the sweet treat of wild honey. Xenophon recorded
Speaker 1: his thoughts for posterity and was quote appalled when his
Speaker 1: soldiers suddenly behaved like crazed madmen and collapsed en mass.
Speaker 1: His entire army was paralyzed and incapacitated for days, totally
Speaker 1: vulnerable to possible enemy attack. Although Xenophon's army recovered before
Speaker 1: they were discovered and slam sane, the Roman general Pompey
Speaker 1: was not so lucky. According to Mayor in the year
Speaker 1: sixty five b c E. During a war against King
Speaker 1: Mithradates of Pontus, Pompey and his troops traveled through the
Speaker 1: exact same area where Xenophan's army had eaten that mad honey.
Speaker 1: His soldiers dined on honeycombs, unaware they were actually trapped
Speaker 1: set by their enemies along the route. One thousand Roman
Speaker 1: soldiers were ambushed and killed after being rendered inert by
Speaker 1: the toxic honey. In addition to being a trap, there
Speaker 1: are also instances of mad honey being used in mead
Speaker 1: as a way of stalling encroaching forces. Mead or honey wine,
Speaker 1: is made by fermenting honey with water and then flavoring
Speaker 1: the mixture with fruits and spices. Two notable occurrences of
Speaker 1: mead made with mad honey took place in the same
Speaker 1: region where the armies of Xenophon and Pompey once stalled.
Speaker 1: In the year ninety six, the Russian foes of Olga
Speaker 1: of Kiev fell to a similar ruse when they accepted
Speaker 1: several tons of mead to drink from Olga's allies. All
Speaker 1: five thousand Russian soldiers were massacred where they collapsed wheeling
Speaker 1: and delirious, and in fourteen eighty nine in the same region,
Speaker 1: a Russian army slaughtered ten thousand Tatars who had drunk
Speaker 1: many casks of mead the Russians had deliberately left behind
Speaker 1: in their abandoned camp. So that was then, But what
Speaker 1: about now? Mad honey still poses a threat to outsiders
Speaker 1: unfamiliar with its potency, though it's treated differently by locals
Speaker 1: who use it medicinally. In Turkish culture, mad honey is
Speaker 1: seen as a type of medicine known as deli bal,
Speaker 1: and is used in small amounts to treat hypertension, diabetes, mellotists,
Speaker 1: and stomach diseases. In Nepal, the indigenous Guruon community uses
Speaker 1: mad honey not only for medicinal purposes, but also for
Speaker 1: its hallucinogenic properties as well in ritual. The curious and
Speaker 1: determined have purchased mad honey from Internet sites or from
Speaker 1: shopkeepers and eight piaries who surreptitiously sell the substance in
Speaker 1: regions where it's produced. Mad honey these days reportedly cost
Speaker 1: nearly a hundred and seventy dollars per pound, made more
Speaker 1: expensive both by its active ingredient grayanotoxin, which causes paralysis
Speaker 1: and breathing stoppage, and by the difficulty of obtaining it.
Speaker 1: In Nepal, for instance, this hallucinatory honey is harvested by
Speaker 1: people who repel down craggy cliffs while chanting calming words
Speaker 1: to keep away swarms of bees. Although honey and meat
Speaker 1: were among the only natural sweets and antiquity as irresistible
Speaker 1: as candy, today's soldiers are presumably well supplied with candy
Speaker 1: bars and able to forego the temptation of found hives.
Speaker 1: But then again, it's easy to envision a scenario where
Speaker 1: soldiers might accept gifts of food or drink from seemingly
Speaker 1: friendly hosts secretly allied with enemies waiting in ambush. Sounds
Speaker 1: like a delicious but deadly trojan horse. Uh, make that
Speaker 1: trojan bee. Next up, our audio producer Dylan Fagin, along
Speaker 1: with freelance writer jescely and Shields, explain how physiology and
Speaker 1: nostalgic combine to make hot food seem more cravable than
Speaker 1: cold food. You know that ravenously hungry feeling you get
Speaker 1: after going swimming. It feels like you could go to
Speaker 1: an all you can eat buffet and make them rethink
Speaker 1: their business strategy. Even though a salad, granola bar, or
Speaker 1: even in a nice smoothie would probably satisfy you, a
Speaker 1: voice echoing out of the deepest recesses of your brain
Speaker 1: commands you defeat. It's something hot, the entire large pizza,
Speaker 1: perhaps a whole side of rose hog, thirteen plates of
Speaker 1: spaghetti covered in butter and parmesan cheese. There could be
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons we create warm foods when we're
Speaker 1: especially hungry, but one of them probably has to do
Speaker 1: with the link between smell and taste. We talked with
Speaker 1: doctor Stephen Secor, an associate professor in the University of
Speaker 1: Alabama Department of Biological Sciences who studies the physiological design
Speaker 1: of digestive systems. He pointed out that hot foods give
Speaker 1: off far more airborne particles than cold foods, and because
Speaker 1: our sense of taste actually involves a lot of input
Speaker 1: from smell, hot foods give us more to love than
Speaker 1: cold foods. Do. Just consider how quickly the smell of
Speaker 1: meat or vegetables cooking on the barbecue can make you
Speaker 1: feel hungry. You might have not been ready for lunch before,
Speaker 1: but now you shure us that cold gaspacho simply doesn't
Speaker 1: stimulate the senses like a warm minestrone. So even though
Speaker 1: we intellectually know that cold soup is going to be
Speaker 1: tasting and fill us up, our factory apparatus hasn't yet
Speaker 1: been apprised of the situation that makes it hard to
Speaker 1: get all the parts of our brain on the gaspacho
Speaker 1: Bandwagon smell may not be the only reason we create
Speaker 1: a hot meal more than a cold one. Heating food
Speaker 1: unlocks calories and nutrients that we wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: get eating the food raw, and our big old brains
Speaker 1: are very calorie needy. Our preference for hot meals might
Speaker 1: have something to do with our brains steering us towards
Speaker 1: the most potential calories possible in the moment of hunger.
Speaker 1: According to Richard Ringham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard an
Speaker 1: author of Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, the
Speaker 1: important comparison is between foods that are cooked and differ
Speaker 1: only in temperature. Ringham says that hot food very likely
Speaker 1: gields more energy gain than cold food, partly because of
Speaker 1: the changes in digestibility. One example is that starch becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly refractory after hot bread cools, which could be one
Speaker 1: reason why we like hot toast. In the case of
Speaker 1: lipid rich foods, the closer of fat is to its
Speaker 1: melting point when eaten probably the easier it is digested.
Speaker 1: According to Sea corps Well, it's possible we crave a
Speaker 1: warm meal because it makes it easier to digest and
Speaker 1: get the calories more quickly. He doesn't necessarily agree that
Speaker 1: we crave hot food because it's more nutritious, he said,
Speaker 1: a cooked hamburger that is cold or hot would probably
Speaker 1: provide an equal amount of calories and take the same
Speaker 1: amount of effort to digest. So while there might be
Speaker 1: some selected drive hidden in our behavior to crave cooked
Speaker 1: food for nutritional gains, the craving is very likely driven
Speaker 1: by a nice memory of the taste and smell of
Speaker 1: burger right off the grill, or your mom's macaroni and cheeks. Finally,
Speaker 1: this week, Managing editor Alison louder Milk and MS. Jescelyn
Speaker 1: Shields dive into new research into one of my favorite topics,
Speaker 1: the eld rich and evasive inner workings of squid and
Speaker 1: other cephalopods. Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman once said, if
Speaker 1: you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: The same could be said about cephalopods, those invertebrates that
Speaker 1: include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. The last ancestor we shared
Speaker 1: with one of these animated jello salads was probably a
Speaker 1: worm of some kind. So our DNA is basically nothing
Speaker 1: like their's, not that they care. They didn't really do
Speaker 1: evolution the same way we did, but nevertheless managed to
Speaker 1: independently evolve into uncannily clever camouflage artists with large, complex brains,
Speaker 1: close circulatory systems, and camera style eyes just like ours,
Speaker 1: well not just like ours. The thing about cephalopods is
Speaker 1: they've had five dred million years of independent evolution to
Speaker 1: figure out how to do things their own way. Any
Speaker 1: test you can create to measure something in a human intelligence, say,
Speaker 1: isn't gonna work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists
Speaker 1: studying cephalopods are kind of like electricians figuring out the
Speaker 1: electrical grid on an alien planet. Here's evolutionary biologists. Dr
Speaker 1: Sabrina Panky on cephalopods. We've known for fifty years that
Speaker 1: the cephalopod brain is easily the most complex among invertebrates,
Speaker 1: and also that there dazzingly intricate body patterning behavior is
Speaker 1: controlled by motor centers in the brain. Figuring out the
Speaker 1: neural bases of complex behaviors is inherently difficult in any animal,
Speaker 1: but trying to figure out how a squid can completely
Speaker 1: change its body patterning in a matter of milliseconds is
Speaker 1: a sticky wicket. One hypothesis has been that body coloration
Speaker 1: is organized in the cephalopod brain somatotropically. That means one
Speaker 1: specific part of the central nervous system is solely responsible
Speaker 1: for controlling the patterning in a distinct patch of skin.
Speaker 1: After all, that's how it works in our mammalian cortex.
Speaker 1: But a news study published in the Journal of Neuroscience
Speaker 1: shows again cephalopods aren't like us, very not like us.
Speaker 1: The research team proposes that the oval squid, also known
Speaker 1: as the big fin reef squid, achieves its skin patterning
Speaker 1: through mosaic organization. That the squid actually use multiple motor
Speaker 1: centers within the optic lib of their brain to pretty
Speaker 1: a single skin pattern like stripes, bands, or spots. The
Speaker 1: fact that several parts of the brain work together at
Speaker 1: once to create a single display allows for greater complexity
Speaker 1: and the resulting pattern. It'd be like using multiple keyboards
Speaker 1: to write the same document all at the same time.
Speaker 1: We vertebrates just don't do things that way. Researches at
Speaker 1: Taiwan's National Chingwa University think that because several different areas
Speaker 1: of the optic lobe can be used to display a
Speaker 1: single skin pattern in a specific body part, a dark
Speaker 1: mantle stripe, the tentacles poke it up fins. The squid
Speaker 1: are able to flash up to about fourteen distinct patterns
Speaker 1: in the blink of an eye. Fourteen distinct patterns. We
Speaker 1: tend to think of redundancy as inefficient, but cephalopods have
Speaker 1: overlapping parts of their brains to create specific patterns on
Speaker 1: specific body parts, meaning if one part of their brain
Speaker 1: is busy, they can still flash information onto their bodies
Speaker 1: with awe inspiring quickness. Just think if you had a
Speaker 1: bunch of different parts of your brain in charge of
Speaker 1: remembering a single word, your word recall skills would be amazing.
Speaker 1: Dr Chow, one of the lead researchers involved in the
Speaker 1: squid study, told us the squid's ability to quickly switch
Speaker 1: different body patterns and visual communication a sort of like
Speaker 1: an alphabet visual language. The researchers think the color patterns
Speaker 1: displayed by the squid are not only used as a
Speaker 1: communication signal to the same species, but also used to
Speaker 1: hide or warn off other potential predators a prey. This
Speaker 1: research also highlights the fact that though we vertebrates tend
Speaker 1: to think we've got the best systems for doing everything,
Speaker 1: cephalopods might be onto something, at least when it comes
Speaker 1: to efficient communication. That's our show for this week. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our
Speaker 1: audio producer Dylan Fagin and our editorial liaison Alison louder Milk.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to now Now for more of the latest science
Speaker 1: news and send us links to anything you'd like to
Speaker 1: hear us cover plus a favorite quote of yours. Doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what it's about. You can send us an email
Speaker 1: at now podcast at how staff works dot com, and
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