Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Mind itself, this clear, void, all knowing,
Speaker 1: all aware. It is like sky, primal clarity, voidness, indivisible
Speaker 1: in the clarity of original intuitive wisdom. Just that determination
Speaker 1: is reality. The reason is that all appearance and existence
Speaker 1: is known as your own mind, and this mind itself
Speaker 1: is realized space like in its intelligence and clarity. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. I am
Speaker 1: I have a terrible memory. I'm gonna I'm gonna confess
Speaker 1: something here. Okay, I don't know about you, and you
Speaker 1: don't need to admit to this if you don't want to.
Speaker 1: But when we after we record episodes, you know, we
Speaker 1: build them a lot of research. We record episodes, A
Speaker 1: lot of it just goes right out of my head. Um.
Speaker 1: I retain the basics and the of the knowledge and
Speaker 1: the ideas that we convey, but the very fine details
Speaker 1: like names or locations of things I lose almost immediately.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm very similar in that regard
Speaker 1: off and tell people that I have approximate knowledge of
Speaker 1: all things because they cover so many topics. I do
Speaker 1: not retain all the details. I certainly don't retain the numbers,
Speaker 1: but I retain the basic essence. So yeah, we discussed yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but today's episode is about a topic, or it's tying
Speaker 1: two topics together that I think could help us with
Speaker 1: that if we if we really wanted to write. Although
Speaker 1: I'm now starting to think of the podcast as being
Speaker 1: sort of a portable memory unit as well. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: even a mandola exactly one of the topics here today.
Speaker 1: And that's why the quote at the top of the
Speaker 1: episode here was m the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
Speaker 1: because though in order to unpack the idea of the mind,
Speaker 1: although we have to discuss Tibetan Buddhism a little bit,
Speaker 1: and and in doing that discuss Buddhism a little bit.
Speaker 1: But from there, don't worry, we're gonna get into the
Speaker 1: idea of the memory palace in uh Western and modern traditions,
Speaker 1: as well as a little bit into the idea of
Speaker 1: virtual worlds. Now, in putting this together, we look to
Speaker 1: a number of different sources. One source that I particularly
Speaker 1: enjoyed was Robert E. Fisher's Art of Tibet because Ultimately,
Speaker 1: we're dealing with with an artistic tradition here, and it's
Speaker 1: great to have some wonderful images to look at while
Speaker 1: you're learning about it. So if you're if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about Tibetan art in general, uh, this
Speaker 1: is worth picking up. You can find this online or
Speaker 1: certainly at various museum stores. Yeah, I mean, I would
Speaker 1: recommend to, like, if you're listening to this and you've
Speaker 1: never seen a mandala before in in it's intriguing you, like,
Speaker 1: go image search for them because they there's a lot
Speaker 1: of variety first of all, but also just they're stunning.
Speaker 1: There's and this is across there's so many different styles
Speaker 1: of them too. That's one of the things we're going
Speaker 1: to find out. Yeah, and we'll describe them in greater
Speaker 1: detail later. But essentially, if you don't have one in
Speaker 1: front of you right now, if you're not looking at
Speaker 1: our our home page, then the mandola are are these
Speaker 1: various Tibetan pieces, and they're also mandelas outside of Tibetan tradition,
Speaker 1: where you have a figure at the center usually and
Speaker 1: that figure is often a either a Buddha, buddhistattva or
Speaker 1: a or a god or a goddess, and then there's
Speaker 1: there's like concentric circles and they and even squares around them.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of activity, their additional deities and figures
Speaker 1: all just sort of flowing out from the central entity. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I up until really, when you propose that
Speaker 1: we do this episode, was familiar with them as sort
Speaker 1: of just like the aesthetic trappings of Tibet or India,
Speaker 1: especially from you know, my growing up overseas. I would
Speaker 1: see stuff like this in Singapore occasionally, but like I
Speaker 1: never realized how culturally and almost pneumonically important that they are. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They I think I started learning about them in greater
Speaker 1: detail a few years back when Emory University here in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: they at least in the past, have always done Tibet
Speaker 1: Week and they'll have some actual Tibetan monks come in
Speaker 1: and make mandolas out of sand, out of colored sand,
Speaker 1: which is this, you know, fabulous, you know, quintessentially Buddhist
Speaker 1: practice of creating these wonderful works about art out of
Speaker 1: individual pieces of sand and then you just destroy it
Speaker 1: at the end. Yeah. I have some notes about that
Speaker 1: that will go over later. The process is fascinating. All right,
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk for just a minute about Buddhism
Speaker 1: and the and the Tibetan version of Buddhism. So as ROBERTI.
Speaker 1: Fisher explains in the Art of Tibet uh and and
Speaker 1: this is also something that's come up in previous research
Speaker 1: for me. I did a bit on sky burial for
Speaker 1: House to Work few years ago and got to dive
Speaker 1: into Tibetan history and Tibetan culture a little bit. Have
Speaker 1: we have has stuffed abul your mind on the sky
Speaker 1: burial episode, I don't know that we have. I feel
Speaker 1: like Joe has also done research on that. Separate from this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be something worth it, uh tackling. There was
Speaker 1: a recent War and Ellis comic that was all about
Speaker 1: sky barrel. Yeah. I mean it's a fact. Just to
Speaker 1: explain what we're talking about. It's an exposure burial where
Speaker 1: one takes the body of the disease. There are a
Speaker 1: few different burial practices Intobet, but this one is the
Speaker 1: more famous because, especially to outsiders, it seems mccab that
Speaker 1: they take the body, they break it down into pieces,
Speaker 1: and then the vultures eat the pieces. But it is a.
Speaker 1: This is a very remote region, very mountainous, there's just
Speaker 1: not that much soil in which to plant a body.
Speaker 1: So this is very much an option on the table,
Speaker 1: and it falls well in line with the older shamanistic
Speaker 1: animistic traditions, like the pre uh pre Buddhism traditions of
Speaker 1: the bat. Yeah, and there's a which is very much
Speaker 1: connected to what we're going to be talking about today,
Speaker 1: although we did not intend to bring up sky burial,
Speaker 1: but yeah, like the idea that you're sort of giving
Speaker 1: back to the ecosystem, to the universe. Yeah. So again,
Speaker 1: it's a remote region, it's framed by some of the
Speaker 1: world's highest mountains, and it served as quite a fascinating
Speaker 1: I guess you could say an incubator for foreign religion influences,
Speaker 1: most notably that of Buddhism, which came from several different
Speaker 1: directions into Tibet in the seventh and twelfth centuries see.
Speaker 1: And to put that at all in perspective, the historical
Speaker 1: Buddha Sidharta Gattama or the Shakya Mooney Buddha would have
Speaker 1: lived in the fifth century b c. And these foreign
Speaker 1: influences flowed in on top of pre existing shamanistic bond
Speaker 1: religious ideas in Tibet. The shamanistic part is going to
Speaker 1: come back around is it's important for me, But I
Speaker 1: want us to get through the Mandalis stuff first. I
Speaker 1: think there's some interesting connections here between modern storytelling and
Speaker 1: shamanistic thinking. Now, the incorporation of a foreign religion is
Speaker 1: not an overnight sensation, as it's not just like Buddhism
Speaker 1: came and said, all right, this is our jam. Now,
Speaker 1: as Fisher points out, we see cycles of royal import
Speaker 1: and support for Buddhism, along with periods of persecution. But
Speaker 1: eventually we reach this uh, this period of the Second Diffusion,
Speaker 1: a seminal period into Beetan Buddhism in the last quarter
Speaker 1: of the tenth century. Now, at this point, I want
Speaker 1: to challenge everyone to to think about religion a little
Speaker 1: differently for the purposes of understanding to bit and Buddhism,
Speaker 1: or at least to understand it as much as an
Speaker 1: outsider ultimately can. I want you to think about religion
Speaker 1: as technology now, not meaning to directly invoke scientology lingo
Speaker 1: here or to advocate equal footing between science and technology
Speaker 1: and religion, but rather I want you to think of
Speaker 1: religion as a system of rights, beliefs, and mental programs
Speaker 1: intended to bring about one or more particular ends. You know,
Speaker 1: just think about why people engage with religion, right, They
Speaker 1: want peace, happiness, liberation, salvation, elevation to a higher human form,
Speaker 1: what have you. You know what that reminds me of
Speaker 1: cyborg is m Yeah, very much so, which we've discussed
Speaker 1: at length before. If you go back, we have an
Speaker 1: episode from last year, I think last year on cyborgs.
Speaker 1: But we definitely I think we don't. You definitely get
Speaker 1: with the philosophy of and in a sense kind of
Speaker 1: into the religious idea. Yeah. So consider that the Mahayana
Speaker 1: branch of Buddhism one of the three main branches and
Speaker 1: the largest today. Okay, let's consider this one. This is
Speaker 1: the the great path, as opposed to the lesser path
Speaker 1: of Theravada Buddhism, which originated in Sri Lanka. The Mahayana
Speaker 1: way of Buddhism focuses on ordered monastic life and rights,
Speaker 1: and it offers a rather long term technological solution to
Speaker 1: life's problems, a contemplative and intellectual journey to enlightenment. They
Speaker 1: can take eons to complete through endless rebirths across time,
Speaker 1: until at last all livings, all living beings, might be
Speaker 1: free from suffering. Sounds good, right, But then this is
Speaker 1: where the esoteric forms of Buddhism in or the picture
Speaker 1: in particular the the vadrariana or diamond vehicle or thunderbolt vehicle,
Speaker 1: the tantric corpus of Buddhism. Okay, sometimes I've seen this
Speaker 1: referred to as apocalyptic Buddhism. So if Mahayana Buddhism was
Speaker 1: a to put this in sci fi terms, if it
Speaker 1: was a generation ship, a generation starship trudging its way
Speaker 1: endlessly across space towards a distant exoplanet, then the vadre
Speaker 1: Yana Buddhism is a warp drive starship. It promises a
Speaker 1: means of individual liberation from the wheel of suffering within
Speaker 1: a single lifetime. I feel like this came up when
Speaker 1: we were talking about um mummification of monks. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: bet bet it did, because we talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about the bodhistoft for the future. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: And that bodhisoft certainly plays into a Tibetan Tibetan culture
Speaker 1: a bit as well. But the crazy thing about this
Speaker 1: is that this UH, this this idea of esotery Buddhism
Speaker 1: is it's it's not a mere shortcut approach. So it's
Speaker 1: not one of these to to sort of try and
Speaker 1: throw it into like modern Christian terms. It's not like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I just love Jesus and everything's gonna be okay, don't
Speaker 1: worry about any of the steps. It's not something like
Speaker 1: that where it's like, hey, don't do all this work,
Speaker 1: just do this now. They're the approach here is is
Speaker 1: is putting a tremendous amount of work into uh achieving
Speaker 1: this end. The stakes are just as high, and the
Speaker 1: amount of mental effort involved is staggering, entailing the study
Speaker 1: and contemplation of of all these other roots, entailing additional rituals,
Speaker 1: and the worship of two distinct pampions, the five Buddha
Speaker 1: families of the celestial Buddhas UH each residing on one
Speaker 1: of the pure lands, and the appropriated Hindu deities. So
Speaker 1: you have all these different deities going on. It's um
Speaker 1: like reading about it, I couldn't help but think of
Speaker 1: it in terms of say a dungeons and dragons character
Speaker 1: where you know, generally you just wanna you pick your
Speaker 1: character class and you pursue it, and you you do
Speaker 1: everything right, but you can dual class, you can multi class.
Speaker 1: This would be like multi class in your dn D character. UH.
Speaker 1: And and just setting out to achieve all of his
Speaker 1: or her goals by just quadruple classing with wizard Presoorcerer Warlock,
Speaker 1: all to just to take something that would normally take
Speaker 1: lifetimes to achieve in a single lifetime. In the D
Speaker 1: n D comparison, you're combining the arcane and the divine.
Speaker 1: Fisher has a wonderful quote. I think that drives this home.
Speaker 1: He says, belief in the awesome possibility of harnessing the
Speaker 1: powers needed to achieve enlightenment in this existence inspired complex
Speaker 1: and mysterious practices. Such secret doctrines, visualizations, and magical powers
Speaker 1: were not things that could be easily spelled out in text,
Speaker 1: and the Vadriana literature remains as complex and mysterious as
Speaker 1: any of the world's religions. So, in other words, to
Speaker 1: organize this vast system of beliefs and gods and ways
Speaker 1: of thinking about life in the universe, UH, to make
Speaker 1: it manageable, practitioners developed. Practitioners developed an enormous complex visual system,
Speaker 1: an artistic tradition complete with a host of instruments, symbols,
Speaker 1: and images. So all of this, if we take it
Speaker 1: all together, it touches upon a lot of topics that
Speaker 1: Robert and I have covered on stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind in the last year. I'd say, like a theme
Speaker 1: that we've been working upon is mythology, archetypes, uh sort
Speaker 1: of cultural resonance of those things and how they allow
Speaker 1: us to make sense of the world. Right Like a
Speaker 1: very practical, objective standpoint, human beings need all of this,
Speaker 1: whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or jedi Ism, UH, to
Speaker 1: help them make sense of how the world works. And
Speaker 1: this form of Buddhism just presents a an incredibly complex
Speaker 1: and esoteric answer to that question. And in doing so,
Speaker 1: essentially the practitioner is saying, Look, you're gonna need to
Speaker 1: look at a lot of charts, a lot of graphs,
Speaker 1: a lot of pie. This is kind of the equivalent
Speaker 1: would be like a really in depth power point presentation.
Speaker 1: We have to look at a bunch of charts and
Speaker 1: graphs to get the meaning of what's going on. These
Speaker 1: various symbols and artistic conditions play into that as well,
Speaker 1: and among these one finds the mandala. Yeah, why don't
Speaker 1: we take a break and then we come back. We're
Speaker 1: going to define the basics of the man end to
Speaker 1: look for you so you can understand how we're going
Speaker 1: from power point presentation to the art. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So the basics here of the mandola. So when you're saying, like,
Speaker 1: what is it literally, I've seen some people say have circles,
Speaker 1: some saying arc. I've also seen it translated as quote
Speaker 1: an essence protecting environment. They're ultimately though, nothing short of
Speaker 1: a representation of the entire sacred universe. Yeah. The way
Speaker 1: that I've read about it is that it's a symbol
Speaker 1: of the entire universe, and it can be represented anywhere.
Speaker 1: It could be on a wall, or on paper or
Speaker 1: in the sand, like we talked about earlier, or entirely
Speaker 1: in your mind. Uh, And its purpose is to represent
Speaker 1: an imaginary palace that is contemplated upon during meditation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They can be two D, they can be three D
Speaker 1: in the form of a sculpture or even architecture, or
Speaker 1: they can be this this mental instruct and ultimately, I
Speaker 1: guess the physical representations are about creating the mental constructed mind.
Speaker 1: I really like the way that Robert F. Thurman explained
Speaker 1: it in his translation of the Tibetanan Book of the Dead,
Speaker 1: which I read from from at the top of this episode.
Speaker 1: He said, they are three dimensional perfected environments Buddha verses
Speaker 1: or Buddha lands, created by the enlightenment of an individual
Speaker 1: individual as a place that expresses his or her enlightenment.
Speaker 1: They are realms through which other beings can be incorporated
Speaker 1: into that enlightenment perspective. So since it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: here's a here's a picture, here's a physical representation of
Speaker 1: my head space that allows me to make sense of
Speaker 1: the complexities of reality. Here, gaze into it and pour
Speaker 1: this into your mind. So I may be stretching this
Speaker 1: a little bit, but let me continue on from what
Speaker 1: we were talking about with Dungeons and dragons are okay
Speaker 1: to me? What this sounds like is world building in fiction,
Speaker 1: like science fiction or fantasy. Right that you're you're creating
Speaker 1: an alternative to the real world, and you're giving it
Speaker 1: its own culture and deities and economy and locations. Right,
Speaker 1: And the mandola uh sort of encapsulates all of those
Speaker 1: in one artistic representation. Yeah, I think I think that's
Speaker 1: a fair comparison, because when you think of a fantasy
Speaker 1: book in particular, or done as in Dragons Module, you
Speaker 1: inevitably think of maps and in number, and there's a
Speaker 1: there's a lot of map like structure in these as
Speaker 1: we'll get into the basic cosmology of the Buddhist universe
Speaker 1: with its Holy Mountain at the center, like that's very
Speaker 1: much a part of it. Uh. But yeah, ultimately, their
Speaker 1: their symbolic expressions, they're teaching devices, their externalizations of complex theologies.
Speaker 1: You know. Way you can think of them as thumb
Speaker 1: drives of the gods, I guess. Yeah, Well, I mean
Speaker 1: one of the things I read about Tibetan mandolas in
Speaker 1: particular is that the deities within them, they're represented as
Speaker 1: embodying philosophical views. They serve as role models for us
Speaker 1: to look at and remember, Okay, this is what has
Speaker 1: come before me, these are the lessons learned by my ancestors.
Speaker 1: What can I take from this to guide my life?
Speaker 1: Getting entailed number of symbols and essentially metasymbols. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: reminds me, Okay, this is what I think of this
Speaker 1: idea that number one, culture is how we understand the world. Uh,
Speaker 1: and number two, storytelling is our means of transmitting culture
Speaker 1: to one another as human beings. And then third that
Speaker 1: the arte types that are within such stories they teach
Speaker 1: us lessons about the human experience from other people's perspectives. Right.
Speaker 1: So this is where and I am sort of trying
Speaker 1: to pull this together on my own. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit of young and stuff from what we've talked about
Speaker 1: mythology before, but I'm starting to see storytellers as modern shamans.
Speaker 1: And the mandola seems to me like another expression of that.
Speaker 1: It's just done with art instead of words. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so words or sand even, Yeah, exactly. So we've
Speaker 1: mentioned these sand mandolas. Um, the construction of them has
Speaker 1: to be affirmed as a ritual, which is very shamanistic. Right.
Speaker 1: In order for the mandala to transmit positive energy to
Speaker 1: its viewers, it's drawn in a ceremony, and the ceremony
Speaker 1: includes monks chanting and dancing. Uh. They use these metal
Speaker 1: funnels that are called check per and apparently they vibrate
Speaker 1: in such a way that it causes the colored sand
Speaker 1: inside to flow out like a liquid. When they're making them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to say, they kind of tap them on
Speaker 1: the side as they go with a little metal implement
Speaker 1: and it causes the like almost the individual granules of
Speaker 1: sand to come out, and they just make a line
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah. And what's important to note about these
Speaker 1: is they're not permanent. They're not meant to be permanent.
Speaker 1: They're destroyed by these same monks. It serves as a
Speaker 1: reminder that our lives are impermanent. Uh. And the sand
Speaker 1: itself is rich turned to an urn, which is then
Speaker 1: that sand is then placed in water. So they see
Speaker 1: it again going back to what we were talking about
Speaker 1: sky burial. They see this as a gift that goes
Speaker 1: back into the environment, back into the universe. I see
Speaker 1: some more accidental synchronicity between this episode and the other
Speaker 1: episode we recorded this week that on Human Bound Human
Speaker 1: flesh Bound books, because this, the creation of the sand
Speaker 1: Mandola is an acceptance of impermanence, that anything that we
Speaker 1: make is just not gonna last, whereas the flesh bound
Speaker 1: book is more in the tradition of this will last forever,
Speaker 1: This person's flesh will be will be immortalized in this
Speaker 1: this tone well, or it's you know, I know that
Speaker 1: I'll be gone and I will just become an object
Speaker 1: at some point. So I want to give the parts
Speaker 1: of my body uh to be used for other purposes,
Speaker 1: such as holding these books of anatomy together object permanence. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: I do want to point out that the use of
Speaker 1: art to convey complex religious ideas can be found many
Speaker 1: other places. Well that the three faced Christs of medieval
Speaker 1: art instantly come to mind. These were not super common,
Speaker 1: but it was only a brief period of time, and
Speaker 1: the Church eventually decided that they did not care for it.
Speaker 1: But you have something like the Holy Trinity in Christian
Speaker 1: Catholic traditions, how do you convey that to the lay person? Well,
Speaker 1: one way is to have an image of Christ that
Speaker 1: has three faces, essentially a monstrous Christ. But it tries
Speaker 1: to encapsulate something that is very difficult to explain language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of these weird monsters from the Transformers called
Speaker 1: the Quinto song. Oh yeah, I love the U They
Speaker 1: had the three faces that rotated around. I wonder if
Speaker 1: there's some connection there. I don't know, but if you
Speaker 1: see that the picture of the three faced Christ, you
Speaker 1: can't help but think of those guys, just no tentacles
Speaker 1: now and then another example from Christian tradition will be
Speaker 1: the crucifix and the cross itself. So think about this.
Speaker 1: The prefrontal cortex as part of the mammalian brain. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is responsible for relating symbols and abstract concepts. The
Speaker 1: unconscious processing prior to perception usually takes around three hundred milliseconds,
Speaker 1: So it's not that surprising that as a psychologist, Adam
Speaker 1: Altar discovered Christians tend to behave more honestly, when they're
Speaker 1: exposed to an image of the crucifix, even if they're
Speaker 1: they have no conscious memory of having seen it, They're
Speaker 1: just exposed to it and just the power of the
Speaker 1: symbol helped inform their behavior. Literally, the power of Christ
Speaker 1: compels you, yeah, or at least the power of Christian symbolism. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in nine there was an experiment from the University
Speaker 1: of Michigan that found that Christians felt less virtuous after
Speaker 1: subliminal exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second.
Speaker 1: And there have been some secular experiments with this as well,
Speaker 1: people tending to think more creatively when exposed to the
Speaker 1: Apple computer logo or an incandescent lightbulb. So that's just
Speaker 1: just a few examples to drive home just the power
Speaker 1: of symbols, the power of non linguistic information, uh, even
Speaker 1: into small examples, and if you roll it all up
Speaker 1: into essentially a meta symbol, as we see in the Mandala,
Speaker 1: you can see how this does really help to to
Speaker 1: to form the mindset of the the younger Buddhist trying
Speaker 1: to learn how to perceive reality. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: this is just a version of that that we here
Speaker 1: in the West maybe aren't as familiar with. How to
Speaker 1: go back to what we said ere there about about
Speaker 1: maps um the kind of mandol as we were talking
Speaker 1: about here, it's an organized system that explains the cosmos
Speaker 1: in terms of the body, in terms of a building,
Speaker 1: in terms of the physical universe. So they referenced the
Speaker 1: notion of the Buddhist cosmos as centered by Holy Mount Meru,
Speaker 1: which is the home of gods and Buddhas, and surrounded
Speaker 1: by seven oceans and seven concentric mountain ranges. And beyond
Speaker 1: these ranges you find another ocean, islands that include human habitation,
Speaker 1: and finally a great wall of rock enclosing everything. Generally,
Speaker 1: you know, square of shape because the image itself is
Speaker 1: question interesting. So a mandola is spatial, it's symmetrical, and
Speaker 1: it's the presentation of all of these ideas. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you've got an example here of sort of how you
Speaker 1: would build out a mandala from the my understanding, as
Speaker 1: you start at the center and you build going out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I think that's or at least that's the
Speaker 1: way that I feel like we look at them, we
Speaker 1: tend to process them. So you have a central deity,
Speaker 1: you know, or Buddha or other figure. You have concentric
Speaker 1: circles of guardian deities. You have square palace grounds featuring gateways,
Speaker 1: you know, ways to get in and out, uh circle
Speaker 1: of create cremation grounds representing the phenomenal world direction deities.
Speaker 1: And then the outer walls oceans, barriers at the very
Speaker 1: edge of the image. So, in other words, we're talking
Speaker 1: about a world generated his art so that it might
Speaker 1: be simulated in the mind. A place where fortresses of
Speaker 1: bone rise above a sea of blood, where a pantheon
Speaker 1: of wrathful and serene the ease a symbol and precise arrangement.
Speaker 1: You've got, you know, multi limbed beings, dancing cyclopean architecture,
Speaker 1: mountains that bridge Earth to the cosmos. It's all present
Speaker 1: and and we're serious about the seas of blood part
Speaker 1: to Bettan art and iconography makes use of many dark
Speaker 1: elements such as bone, blood, flamed skin. But here's just
Speaker 1: to give you a taste of this. This is from
Speaker 1: Himalayan art dot org uh and it's a description of
Speaker 1: the mandola of the Yama Dharma. It describes the the
Speaker 1: mandola in detail. But the more the most interesting part
Speaker 1: here is all of this is encircled by a ring
Speaker 1: of skulls, a sea of blood, and the eight Great
Speaker 1: Charnel grounds again surrounded by a circle of Vadra's uh,
Speaker 1: the bright orange flames of pristine awareness. So i am.
Speaker 1: I go to a yoga studio here in Atlanta called
Speaker 1: Tough Love Yoga, which is infamous for conducting was called
Speaker 1: me a yoga. You do yoga listening to death metal. Um,
Speaker 1: and the woman who started it there um she has
Speaker 1: brought artwork like this to the st also because it
Speaker 1: seems like it's incidental, but it's not. There's lots of
Speaker 1: skull icronography and blood and things like that, things that
Speaker 1: we associate with death metal in in artwork that connects
Speaker 1: to yoga. Then they've got they've got this giant mandola
Speaker 1: wheel painted on the wall by a local tattoo artist.
Speaker 1: Is really cool, awesome. Yeah, I mean there's plenty of
Speaker 1: very death mentally imagery on this. I mean, what we
Speaker 1: just describe sounds like it could be a Slayer album
Speaker 1: covers totally. Yeah. But in looking at these mandal as,
Speaker 1: you'll find a great deal of complexity. Sometimes there are
Speaker 1: mandal is within mandalas. And uh Roberty Fisher at one
Speaker 1: point and his book refers to quote a remarkable visual
Speaker 1: litany of deities, mostly female, a programmatic sequence that can
Speaker 1: be traced back to specific tests. I like that descript
Speaker 1: and because it really brings the technological and the technological
Speaker 1: idea that this is. It's kind of like a program
Speaker 1: that you're loading into your mind. And the study of
Speaker 1: mandola art is a discipline to itself. But we can
Speaker 1: explore a little more of their power and connection to
Speaker 1: the human bind by considering a Western notion, that of
Speaker 1: the memory palace. Yeah, so let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: and then when we come back, we're gonna give you
Speaker 1: a refresher on the memory palace. There's been a previous
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode on it, but we'll
Speaker 1: we'll dive into it a little bit and then we're
Speaker 1: going to connect these two things together. All right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so you in previous host Julie did a
Speaker 1: Memory Palace episode, is that right? We did, and then
Speaker 1: we did rerun of it after you and Joe came
Speaker 1: on board that featured an interview with a memory champion.
Speaker 1: So there are two different versions of that podcast. I'll
Speaker 1: try and link to the interview version the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode, because you get to hear from somebody
Speaker 1: who uses memory palace um and uses the method of
Speaker 1: Loki uh to a very high degree. Yeah. This came
Speaker 1: up a lot in the literature of how memory contestants
Speaker 1: are using this so that they can just memorize vast
Speaker 1: amounts of information. But a lot of you out there
Speaker 1: are probably thinking, well, there's a lot of pop culture
Speaker 1: examples of this right now, I remember hearing about this
Speaker 1: from somewhere. Well, uh, it's certainly in the BBC version
Speaker 1: of Sherlock uh. And as previously discussed on Stuff to
Speaker 1: Buil Your Mind, Uh, somebody who were interested in the
Speaker 1: work of Maria Knakova. She has written a book on
Speaker 1: how to Think like Sherlock Holmes. She talks about memory palaces. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the BBC Sherlock it's called a mind palace, which
Speaker 1: some people think was picked up from British illusionist Darren Brown,
Speaker 1: or from Hannibal Lector in the novels or the TV series.
Speaker 1: Now Thomas Harris, who you know wrote the original novels
Speaker 1: that feature Hannibal lecteror he credits this idea back to
Speaker 1: Francis Yates, who is the author of the Art of Memory.
Speaker 1: And Yates traces the idea of the memory palace back
Speaker 1: to uh someone named Bruno, a sixteen hundreds Dominican monk. Uh.
Speaker 1: But that goes even further back down through the Medieval
Speaker 1: and Renaissance era, back to the Greek poet simon IDEs Uh.
Speaker 1: And Yates argues that the Seven Deadly Sins, or for instance,
Speaker 1: Dante's Divine Comedy, the structures within those of Hell and
Speaker 1: Purgatory and Heaven, those are all versions of memory palaces
Speaker 1: and in and in turn memories of mindless. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of comparison to be made, uh,
Speaker 1: between a map of Dante's Inferno and the model. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just different mythology. The theme of yates work is
Speaker 1: that the Renaissance, which we view now with some skepticism
Speaker 1: as superstitious, is actually full of quote, magical beliefs that
Speaker 1: we now continue on into our scientific revolution. So for instance,
Speaker 1: go cr two episodes on John d for more on
Speaker 1: that and what we actually This is a theme that
Speaker 1: comes up a lot for us, I think, but uh,
Speaker 1: maybe also a little bit in the book Binding of
Speaker 1: Human Skin that we're recording this week. But the same
Speaker 1: idea here that um, there is stuff that seems like
Speaker 1: it's uh superstitious or magical in nature that does actually
Speaker 1: have some purpose to it in our current scientific methodology
Speaker 1: of thinking. Yeah, I mean it basically the idea of
Speaker 1: the memory palace. It basically all boils down to employing
Speaker 1: spatial memory to memorize information by placing it all in
Speaker 1: an imagine palace, uh, a palace filled with memorable symbols.
Speaker 1: So you know, theres we've discussed on here before. There
Speaker 1: are various forms of memory that we employed. There's not
Speaker 1: just one bucket of memory, and this is essentially a
Speaker 1: way that we tweak our mind and using spatial memory
Speaker 1: to to remember often just sometimes numbers or or or
Speaker 1: unimportant facts. The idea here is that humans have a
Speaker 1: knack for remembering spatial layouts. Brain scans even show show
Speaker 1: us that the spatial learning parts of the brain are
Speaker 1: used by people who actually win these memory contests. It's
Speaker 1: particularly useful for remembering things in a sequence or a list,
Speaker 1: like groceries for example. Uh. It requires a lot of
Speaker 1: time to establish, but once once you have it in place,
Speaker 1: you can go back to you continue to walk through
Speaker 1: that memory palace in order to remember the items and
Speaker 1: the order. Yeah. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: saw that connects it back to the mandala is that, Uh,
Speaker 1: someone pointed out that Buddhism uses a lot of sequence
Speaker 1: and list type information in order to get across its philosophy.
Speaker 1: So subsequently, the mandola's then translate really well into these
Speaker 1: memory palaces. Now the origin Okay, so what I just
Speaker 1: took us through brought us all the way back to
Speaker 1: Greek poets simonade Uh. But it was first written in
Speaker 1: the Rhetorica ad hereni Um, which in the eighties b
Speaker 1: c e. Was written by unknown authors. Some people thought
Speaker 1: that it might have been Cicero, but now they think
Speaker 1: they don't know who it is. Um. Now, this is
Speaker 1: the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, and it teaches
Speaker 1: the method of loci, which is the the the idea
Speaker 1: of the memory palace, or the idea of using imagined,
Speaker 1: well known locations like your home to remember things. Now,
Speaker 1: this to me reminded me of my my schooling, and
Speaker 1: in rhetoric it seems inherently connected to the Aristotelian idea
Speaker 1: of the peripatetic learning system. Have you heard about this
Speaker 1: at all? So basically the idea was that Aristotle, when
Speaker 1: he was working with his students in his his quote college,
Speaker 1: his school, that they would learn while they were walking
Speaker 1: and talking. Uh. And the method of loca is essentially
Speaker 1: a walk about, so you're be remembering what you learned
Speaker 1: by going on an imaginary walk. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Other sources say, actually it was invented by Greek poet
Speaker 1: Simon IDs uh. And this was real morbid. Apparently, after
Speaker 1: he stepped out of a banquet hall, it collapsed and
Speaker 1: killed everybody inside, and he was left to identify their remains.
Speaker 1: He had to put a name to each body and
Speaker 1: that's how he invented the method of loci. So he's
Speaker 1: he's thinking of and stuff. All right. So Jim was
Speaker 1: seated over there, he had he had the chicken wings,
Speaker 1: and then and then Joe he was over here. He
Speaker 1: was to my left, and he's piecing this all together exactly. Yeah. Well, Cicero,
Speaker 1: though was involved. He is celebrated as popularizing it. He
Speaker 1: wrote something down basically because writing something down at that
Speaker 1: time was expensive. Paper was expensive. Not everybody knew how
Speaker 1: to write. Uh. It wasn't until the printing press that
Speaker 1: it basically the method of Look how the memory palace
Speaker 1: became obsolete. And we've continued to see that pattern as
Speaker 1: we've changed the ways that we can externalize memory. We
Speaker 1: have to rely on internal memory less. Now as we
Speaker 1: said already, it's employing spatial memory. And it makes sense
Speaker 1: that humans would have a robust ability for spatial memory because,
Speaker 1: as I mean, that's what we do. We live in
Speaker 1: this physical world. And even though most of us have
Speaker 1: probably have our patterns you know down you know to
Speaker 1: ultimately you know of just a few varied environments, and
Speaker 1: you know how to get there and how to get back.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're programmed to deal with the broader world.
Speaker 1: We're programmed to to to make spatial sense of the
Speaker 1: world around us, to catalog its storied away. And so
Speaker 1: this is just taking spatial scaffolding and applying it to
Speaker 1: a list of facts, to a theological structure, to a
Speaker 1: cosmological viewpoint. Um. So the memory palace is not a trick.
Speaker 1: It's it's just how we think about the world, and
Speaker 1: we're taken the way we think about physical reality, the
Speaker 1: way we think about spatial environments, and using it to
Speaker 1: to remember other organized systems. Yeah, it's almost like these
Speaker 1: other older cultures had created a learning system around how
Speaker 1: we naturally adapt to knowledge, how we how we observe knowledge,
Speaker 1: and then we went and somehow broke that and created
Speaker 1: this other learning system that, especially for memorization, that's far
Speaker 1: more difficult and not how our our biology is set
Speaker 1: up to learn. Uh. And now now we're sort of
Speaker 1: coming back and we're going, oh right, right, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is spatial learning is actually much easier. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: again we come back to this idea of the mandola,
Speaker 1: and to see one of these and imagine it on
Speaker 1: the wall, it makes perfect sense. You can't just write
Speaker 1: out everything and have these notes for everybody who's trying
Speaker 1: to to to learn the system. But you can have
Speaker 1: someone guiding through it, refer to this work of our
Speaker 1: and then you look at it, you take it in,
Speaker 1: and you're able to use this as the memory palace
Speaker 1: for the theological ideas. Now, the thought at work here
Speaker 1: is that memory palaces harness our evolved skill at remembering
Speaker 1: details of locations because as hunter gatherers we used to
Speaker 1: recall what was edible, where to find it, or how
Speaker 1: to avoid what was poisonous because of spatial memory. Modern
Speaker 1: research backs this up. After people viewed thousands of images
Speaker 1: for a few seconds each, studies found that, on average,
Speaker 1: they could distinguish eighty percent of the images from those
Speaker 1: that they had not seen. Uh. In addition, people can
Speaker 1: usually recall objects they've seen after seeing hundreds of intervening ones,
Speaker 1: showing our capacity for storing visual memories in the long term.
Speaker 1: This is I I don't know if you've heard this
Speaker 1: a lot, but when I was in academia it was
Speaker 1: really starting to become popular with the idea of visual thinkers.
Speaker 1: I'm a visual thinker. I can't I can't read that
Speaker 1: text any something visual uh is something that's making its
Speaker 1: way through sort of just the education system. Other studies
Speaker 1: have shown that the memory palace, or the usage of it,
Speaker 1: it doubles the proportion of people who can remember an
Speaker 1: eleven to twelve item grocery list. So again, sequences and
Speaker 1: lists work really well. Students who use it in economics
Speaker 1: outperformed those who did not when they take an exam,
Speaker 1: and medical students who used it learned more about the
Speaker 1: end of crime system than those who did not. It's
Speaker 1: apparently also useful for patients who have had treatments that
Speaker 1: can potentially impair their recall or cognitive function. Hm. Well
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Like again, they're again they're multiple forms
Speaker 1: of memory, and if you can cap into another form
Speaker 1: of memory to achieve the goals of one that's damaged,
Speaker 1: then then you can find a good bit of success. Yeah.
Speaker 1: As I was doing the research, I immediately thought to myself,
Speaker 1: if as I become older, I start experiencing memory loss
Speaker 1: and or dementia, gonna have to turn to a memory
Speaker 1: palace and just really develop one. So we've already had
Speaker 1: a number of the parallels here between the memory palace
Speaker 1: and the mandala um, and you know, a number of
Speaker 1: the parallels are just obvious. Again, it's all about using
Speaker 1: um our spatial memory to to internalize either you know,
Speaker 1: a long list of data or a theological system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's all really brought together here for us by
Speaker 1: an East Asian scholar named Dan o'huigan uh, and he
Speaker 1: provides interesting commentary on the concept of the mandala being
Speaker 1: like a memory palace. He argues the mandalas serves the
Speaker 1: same purpose as memory palaces that Roman orders used. Uh.
Speaker 1: For instance, they used it to help monks organize their knowledge. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind that in both instances, these people had
Speaker 1: to rely on their memories more than we do, right, um,
Speaker 1: they didn't have paper, they didn't have flash drives, they
Speaker 1: didn't have smartphones. His primary example is Quintillion's use of
Speaker 1: placing some Bolck items in his home to help him
Speaker 1: remember things about law and the courts. And then people
Speaker 1: like Robert flood Are Giordano Bruno who I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: They went on to visualize memory palaces as imagined spaces
Speaker 1: more similar to the mandola. Ohuigan though he thinks that
Speaker 1: these techniques were developed independently from one another, even though
Speaker 1: they're extremely similar. Uh, and the mandola allows them to
Speaker 1: visualize something colorful to help you remember what's going on.
Speaker 1: And it's similar to how Buddhism uses lists to help
Speaker 1: you remember its tenants, so mentioning earlier. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: see this in in in really a number of different
Speaker 1: Asian religions. But all of these various gods and artistic motifs,
Speaker 1: like every detail of it is important. You know, what
Speaker 1: is what is the deity or the Buddha holding, what
Speaker 1: position is their their body in? Like all of it
Speaker 1: tells you something. If you know what the symbols mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you can recall that visual then you can sort
Speaker 1: of race your way back through what what Lesson is
Speaker 1: trying to teach. Yeah, and you'll see descriptions for these
Speaker 1: where they're like, all right, well this particular Buddha, Bodhist
Speaker 1: for God, or their hand is like this that means
Speaker 1: such and such they're holding this weapon or that and
Speaker 1: this too is a symbol. So it all comes together.
Speaker 1: It's not just pure, you know, artistic entertainment. So Huigan
Speaker 1: points out that new monics and memory palaces are now
Speaker 1: replaced by libraries, computers, and paper uh. And these function
Speaker 1: as extensions of our brains, so we don't need tools
Speaker 1: like mandalas or memory palaces anymore. And he he goes
Speaker 1: so far to argue that this is an area where
Speaker 1: he says, quote humanity scholars can justify their existence by
Speaker 1: contributing something useful to the knowledge of our culture. So
Speaker 1: he has a little bit of a lower esteem for
Speaker 1: the humanities, uh just throughout the piece, and generally is
Speaker 1: kind of dismissive of academia. That's okay, I get that
Speaker 1: sometimes too, but uh so, anyway, he started bringing these together,
Speaker 1: but at the ultimately at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: he says, I don't think like there was some kind
Speaker 1: of like hidden connection that we haven't discovered yet where
Speaker 1: these cultures came in contact with one another and we're
Speaker 1: sharing information like this. It's just naturally how these different
Speaker 1: cultures of humanity developed. Now, in the past, Mandela creation
Speaker 1: has been limited by human thought but also by the
Speaker 1: limits of art and construction. So certainly we've seen some
Speaker 1: epic attempts to reflect Mandala schema in architecture. But modern
Speaker 1: technology makes something even grander possible. A complete simulation of
Speaker 1: the Mandola of virtual world based on the Mandola which
Speaker 1: I think is kind of beautiful because essentially the Memory Palace.
Speaker 1: Take come, the mandola is a simulated world, a world
Speaker 1: you simulate simula in your head, and you make the
Speaker 1: world in your head conform uh to the the shape
Speaker 1: in this other individual's head, and the virtual word old
Speaker 1: is is the potential to do that in this this
Speaker 1: third mind, the mind of the machine. Yeah. I couldn't
Speaker 1: help but imagine that when Second Life was really at
Speaker 1: its high, there must have been somebody in their building
Speaker 1: a mandola within the virtual world there that somehow represented
Speaker 1: multiple things. Yeah, I mean, because there's certainly have been
Speaker 1: a several different virtual mandala projects creating three D simulations
Speaker 1: of these meaning laden medicymbols. Yeah. One example I've got
Speaker 1: here is from cal mel Chen's mapping Scientific Frontiers The
Speaker 1: Quest for Knowledge Visualization, and he talks about virtual environments
Speaker 1: being created that are based on the mandala and using
Speaker 1: it as an organizing metaphor for shared cyberspace. He connects
Speaker 1: this to the idea of the Memory Palace. Up there
Speaker 1: we go. So there's another person who put them together,
Speaker 1: and he says Cicero was the most authoritative advisor on
Speaker 1: that subject. But basically Lee. He says, you know, you
Speaker 1: want to begin by imagining an very well lit place.
Speaker 1: Then once you get to know, then you store and
Speaker 1: retrieve objects there. So I can see how you would
Speaker 1: both do that within your imagination and within a virtual world.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I'm interested in as we
Speaker 1: reach the end of the discussion here is we're at
Speaker 1: a current place where we have, as we said, we've
Speaker 1: we've we've gotten to abandon these memory palaces for the
Speaker 1: most part. We've gotten to the point where we can
Speaker 1: abandon mondolas and other religious uh paintings and and and
Speaker 1: meta symbols that give us this information. Instead we just
Speaker 1: we go online, right, or we go to the book UH,
Speaker 1: and we can find lists, we can find all the
Speaker 1: data spelled out for us. But as we get more
Speaker 1: and more into a virtual reality age, and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to to say that not in a like mid nineties
Speaker 1: law and more Man sense, right, but but looking at
Speaker 1: some of the very real virtual reality applications that are
Speaker 1: going on out there and trying to imagine a near
Speaker 1: future in which the virtual use of cyberspace is more ubiquitous,
Speaker 1: are we going to see a sort of return to
Speaker 1: some of these what we see, for instance, could we
Speaker 1: see spatial memory employed more as an educational tool maybe.
Speaker 1: I think that what you might see before that is
Speaker 1: creative types maybe trying to use the medium of virtual
Speaker 1: reality or augmented reality in such a way that it's
Speaker 1: representative like a mandala is uh So that like it
Speaker 1: takes you through a virtual story and you you you
Speaker 1: learn as you go through it. I mean, we're so,
Speaker 1: I'm going to south By Southwest in a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: and I was just looking at the program schedule and
Speaker 1: I can't tell you like probably like of the panels
Speaker 1: there are about virtual reality and augmented reality. Uh So,
Speaker 1: it is definitely something that's coming down the road. We
Speaker 1: know Facebook is heavily invested in it. Our other colleagues
Speaker 1: here at how Stuff Works have covered this at nauseum.
Speaker 1: But the Oculus rift and Palmer Lucky and all the
Speaker 1: work that's gone into that and Facebook buying it up
Speaker 1: and stuff. So yeah, I think that that's going to
Speaker 1: be like a new palette for people to create on.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take a while, though, I think for education
Speaker 1: to catch up to it, especially when you think about it,
Speaker 1: like education hasn't really even figured out yet, Hey, maybe
Speaker 1: we should return back to the spatial learning system that
Speaker 1: seems to work so well for our spatially inclined brains. Uh. There,
Speaker 1: we have a friend of the show, uh goes by
Speaker 1: p K who runs kingle Lux Records out of Canada. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's involved in a project to build a virtual space
Speaker 1: station for like, you know, for sort of artistic musical purposes.
Speaker 1: And he'll occasionally seen send me some some videos or
Speaker 1: some information on the project, and I see those and
Speaker 1: and some of the really beautiful imentry is going on there,
Speaker 1: And as much as I can tell without being like
Speaker 1: hooked into some sort of VR rig, it seems very
Speaker 1: immersive to whoever is controlling these characters. So so those
Speaker 1: those videos, when I when I view them, it does
Speaker 1: make me think about how we're going to make use
Speaker 1: of that territory. And I feel like maybe we're gonna
Speaker 1: make use of that territory in ways that we can't
Speaker 1: connect to all that much now, but we can look
Speaker 1: back to our use of purely spatial memory in the
Speaker 1: past and see and see some sort of hint of
Speaker 1: where we're going. Yeah, I think it would be nice
Speaker 1: to see your return to that. I remember when I
Speaker 1: was working at the university, I worked out here in town.
Speaker 1: There was maybe like a six month window there where
Speaker 1: they were super hyped up about Second life, and they
Speaker 1: built an actual like version of the university in second
Speaker 1: life where students, because they thought second life was going
Speaker 1: to be like the next big thing, uh, they had like,
Speaker 1: you know, students could go there and like interact with
Speaker 1: f a Q forums and stuff like that. But not
Speaker 1: only that, but they had like a Greek lecture hall
Speaker 1: set up where theoretically a professor could come in there
Speaker 1: with their avatar and give a presentation to all of
Speaker 1: the second life avatars of students that were there. So
Speaker 1: if you get that far and you're sort of just
Speaker 1: taking the real world analogy and applying it into the
Speaker 1: virtual world, I would imagine then when you get to
Speaker 1: the spatial reasoning, uh, that you would say, hey, this
Speaker 1: is actually here's a far better way for us to
Speaker 1: do this. Let's build the university as a memory palace
Speaker 1: rather than just like you know, have your little avatar
Speaker 1: go and sit down on a fake bench or something
Speaker 1: and watch an avatar deliver a presentation to you. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, we only have a limited knowledge of
Speaker 1: virtual worlds out there. But I know that listeners of
Speaker 1: the show have been out there explore worring. Perhaps that
Speaker 1: you have some examples of of the of the Mando
Speaker 1: law or other constructures that have been recreated in the
Speaker 1: virtual world, maybe even in Minecraft. I didn't even think
Speaker 1: about Minecraft, would be perfectly right. Yeah, you're right. Um,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. So we would love to hear about any
Speaker 1: of those examples or just your general thoughts on Tibetan art,
Speaker 1: virtual reality, or the Memory Palace. Really, this is an
Speaker 1: episode that opens itself up to various interpretations and tidbits
Speaker 1: from your personal life. Yeah, you can hit us up
Speaker 1: with information about that on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram,
Speaker 1: and you can always go and visit us at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we've got
Speaker 1: me and everything, all of the podcasts, all the videos
Speaker 1: that we've done, blog posts galore. Uh, it is full
Speaker 1: of stuff, including links back to those social media accounts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'll make sure the landing page for this episode
Speaker 1: includes links to some of the bits that we've talked
Speaker 1: about here, including sky Burial, the previous Memory Palette episode,
Speaker 1: and in any other little bits of related information in
Speaker 1: the pop shop over the years, and as always you
Speaker 1: can email us at Blow the Mind how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: that how stuff Works dot com