Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is a
Speaker 1: Vault episode. It originally aired October and it's part three
Speaker 1: of our series on the Minotaur. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 1: He lives there. From there he plots my destiny and
Speaker 1: schemes to usurp my throne. His eyelids of stone taunt me,
Speaker 1: insatiable minotaur. My dreams chafe against his horns. In my dreams,
Speaker 1: I enter the labyrinth, I'm there alone, unchained. The scepter
Speaker 1: bends in my fist, and he comes before me, monstrous, sweet, monstrous, free,
Speaker 1: and I can no longer govern my dreams. So many
Speaker 1: deliberations wait for the day when the world of men
Speaker 1: will harbor my story and blood. Secret River. You have
Speaker 1: not heard me yet. Kill me first. Now you provoke
Speaker 1: me as if you're plotting some kind of scheme I've
Speaker 1: made up my mind. Ultimate freedom is fostered by that
Speaker 1: blade which you hold in your fist, the same as
Speaker 1: a sudden parting of waters in the ocean deep. What
Speaker 1: do you know of death, grant her of profound life? Look,
Speaker 1: there is only one way to kill a monster. And
Speaker 1: that is to embrace it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are you
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Speaker 1: part three of The Minotaur and the Labyrinth where we're
Speaker 1: coming out of the dark. Got you once again. So
Speaker 1: those opening selections were from a play called The Kings
Speaker 1: by Julio Cortissar, who's an Argentinean writer that we've been
Speaker 1: talking about recently. That that translation was by Kari Dad's veach.
Speaker 1: But so the first part I read were the words
Speaker 1: of of King Minos, and then after that was an
Speaker 1: exchange between Theseus and the Minotaur, with our producer Seth
Speaker 1: as Theseus as the jerk of the story. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: this is a This is such an interesting uh play.
Speaker 1: I had never heard of this before until I ran
Speaker 1: across this very translation at in translation dot Brooklyn Rail
Speaker 1: dot org Um. Because I don't believe it is currently
Speaker 1: in print in English. I could be wrong on that.
Speaker 1: I see that it is in print in Spanish, but
Speaker 1: not in English. Cortissar has a number of really interesting
Speaker 1: short stories that I read back when I was in college.
Speaker 1: One of them that I remember really liking is called
Speaker 1: Axlotal and it's a story about a man who repeatedly
Speaker 1: visits an axcel little tank at the Jardine de Parry,
Speaker 1: and he gradually finds himself transforming into an axcel odal
Speaker 1: as he watches them. It's pretty good. Yeah, I'm looking
Speaker 1: forward to read that one. Uh you you sent me
Speaker 1: a copy to check out. In fact, a number of
Speaker 1: his short story sound just right up my alley, But
Speaker 1: I've never read anything by Cortazar. Now. Another fun thing
Speaker 1: about this, so some of you might remember that we
Speaker 1: had called an opening reading on a previous episode about
Speaker 1: the mintur from uh Bores the House of Asterion. Bores,
Speaker 1: of course, was also an Argentinian writer. Um, perhaps you
Speaker 1: know one of the most famous Argentinian writers. And it's
Speaker 1: interesting that this play, The Kings or Lasreles was published
Speaker 1: in ninety seven, just a year after Borges wrote, Uh
Speaker 1: that story to begin with the House of Hysterion. Oh,
Speaker 1: is there like an implication of inspiration or common inspiration
Speaker 1: between the two. Well, I was looking into this because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people assumed that Cortisar was
Speaker 1: inspired by the House of hysterian Um. Borges himself actually
Speaker 1: published the play alongside Asterien in the literary journal that
Speaker 1: he edited in nine seven. But I was I was
Speaker 1: looking at an article titled The Incessant Return of the
Speaker 1: Minotaur by Amy Frasier Yoder and just keeps coming back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they write that while it was often assumed that
Speaker 1: borges story influenced Courtisar, there's evidence from letters between Cortazar
Speaker 1: and Borges that Cortisar might not have read borhes story previously,
Speaker 1: so there might be more convergence here than inspiration. But
Speaker 1: still it seems that Boges was was very much a
Speaker 1: fan of this piece. I mean, he published it, and
Speaker 1: obviously how could Borhes not like an entire play with
Speaker 1: all of this this this beautiful you know, poetic language, uh,
Speaker 1: and contemplation of the labyrinth and the and the the
Speaker 1: various kings that are caught within its grasp. Really, this
Speaker 1: is what I was just telling you earlier, before we
Speaker 1: started hitting the cord. You could basically you could print
Speaker 1: this play out. You could throw a dart at it,
Speaker 1: and you could you could find something beautiful. Uh, Like,
Speaker 1: there's this whole stretch where because I should point out
Speaker 1: that the minotaur and Theseus have a very long conversation. Um,
Speaker 1: considering that most of the time it's just about them fighting,
Speaker 1: they have a long conversation in this play. And there's
Speaker 1: this whole bit about the string that Theseus has uh
Speaker 1: has has has has wound out behind him, you know,
Speaker 1: so that he can return so you can escape the labyrinth,
Speaker 1: about how it is like a river flowing out to
Speaker 1: the ocean. Uh. So it's and and then the ocean
Speaker 1: is also the minuteur sister. There's There's just a lot
Speaker 1: of beautiful stuff in it. So even if you're you're
Speaker 1: not really into reading a lot of unproduced plays, you should.
Speaker 1: You should. I recommend you check this out at the
Speaker 1: website we mentioned earlier, and if you've had a chance
Speaker 1: to see it. Uh, that sounds awesome. I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear about it. That's interesting that you mentioned the twine
Speaker 1: as a river, because that goes back to in a
Speaker 1: It's telling of the story when he's talking about Dadalus's
Speaker 1: design of the labyrinth. He describes it as like a
Speaker 1: river that twists and turns back and forth, and waters
Speaker 1: that churn in upon themselves going this way and that. Ah,
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right. So this is indeed our our
Speaker 1: third episode on the minotaur um, and we wanted to
Speaker 1: I guess, kick things off here first of all with
Speaker 1: that that that brief reading, but also just to discuss
Speaker 1: pop culture minotaurs a little bit UM and cultural minotaurs
Speaker 1: of the more modern era in a little bit more
Speaker 1: more detail. UM. As far as just cinema goes, I
Speaker 1: have to say, I think it's it's really hard to
Speaker 1: find a quality minotaur in a film or TV. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've had the same experience, Joe, but
Speaker 1: I feel like even when the costume or the c
Speaker 1: g I or overall presentation is solid enough, and lord knows,
Speaker 1: it often isn't um. Minotaurs are often presented as just
Speaker 1: mirror beastly brutes. You know, they're they're And a big
Speaker 1: part of that is that they are not in the labyrinth. Yes,
Speaker 1: a minotaur out of its labyrinth is like a hermit
Speaker 1: crab out of its shell. It's just not even really
Speaker 1: the same creature, is it. The best on screen minotaur
Speaker 1: I can think of is actually one that we mentioned
Speaker 1: in the first episode, which is the one in Jim
Speaker 1: Hinson's storyteller Greek Myths with Michael Gambon as as deadal
Speaker 1: as I think, or at least as the storyteller. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that that one is really good because you don't
Speaker 1: get too much of a look at the minotaur. I think,
Speaker 1: as it should be, you know, it should be glances
Speaker 1: here and there, and or glances or glimpses whichever I
Speaker 1: meant to say that. But the glimpses you do get
Speaker 1: are full of terror and pity. It's it's very good.
Speaker 1: It conveys sort of both of the meanings of the
Speaker 1: story as we read it today, the probably the more original,
Speaker 1: terrifying reading, but also the subtle reading where you see
Speaker 1: the monster as an object of of of sadness and pity.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah again, that one is is just excellent
Speaker 1: and I highly recommend folks check that out if you
Speaker 1: haven't seen it already. I think it all holds up
Speaker 1: really well. David Morrissey, who would go on to of
Speaker 1: course play the Governor and the Walking Dad, is in
Speaker 1: that a young David Morrissey. As theseus, I have never
Speaker 1: seen the Walking Dead, or I never made it past
Speaker 1: the second episode, but but when I was looking at
Speaker 1: him first of all. He kind of reminds me of
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise's creepy looking brother who was in Lost. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that guy? No, I don't. Tom Cruise's brother
Speaker 1: was in what was Unlost? Seth offers a correction, I
Speaker 1: was entirely wrong. He his name is William A. Pother
Speaker 1: and he's Tom Cruise's first cousin, not his brother. But
Speaker 1: he looks kind of like Tom Cruise, but with an
Speaker 1: extra dose of boyish charm and creepiness at the same time.
Speaker 1: And he played a role in Lost that was I
Speaker 1: don't know. I lost ultimately was was such a betrayal,
Speaker 1: but but there was a really good moment in the
Speaker 1: first season involving his his character. But anyway, I thought
Speaker 1: he kind of looked like him, And in any case,
Speaker 1: he does look like a jock bully, which is kind
Speaker 1: of what Theseus is. Yeah, I think I mentioned in
Speaker 1: the previous episode that John Would, another great actor of
Speaker 1: of the British stage, was in the The Greek myths
Speaker 1: Um series as well, playing Minos. But in another episode
Speaker 1: that's about Data, Lis and Acres. But still, if you
Speaker 1: take them all in, you kind of you kind of
Speaker 1: get into different were really multiple episodes you get the
Speaker 1: story of of Minos and the Minotaur and theseus. Well,
Speaker 1: somebody out there who is a filmmaker who is dedicated
Speaker 1: to practical sets and effects, you make this movie. Make
Speaker 1: the Labyrinth and Minotaur movie. No no, no green screen
Speaker 1: set junk no uh no c G I Minotaur. I
Speaker 1: want a good costume with really classic makeup effects and
Speaker 1: and go all out. Now in terms of Minotaurs out
Speaker 1: of context, there is one example that I think works
Speaker 1: really well, and it is from the MU video for
Speaker 1: Einstree's in The New Baton's song Sabrina, which is which
Speaker 1: is on YouTube. I have no idea. Check it out.
Speaker 1: Oh it's well. Einstree's on the New Baton is a
Speaker 1: Is this this great German band? They started out more
Speaker 1: industrial or post industrial, but then they kind of change
Speaker 1: their sound as they win. They have a number of
Speaker 1: great songs, but this particular video consists entirely of this
Speaker 1: sad minotaur. That's that's well brought to life. Uh, putting
Speaker 1: on makeup in this really dank kind of bathroom. I'm
Speaker 1: looking at it now. Yeah, it's that's all that happens
Speaker 1: in it. But it captures this, It captures the sadness
Speaker 1: of minotaur at least that that I feel like should
Speaker 1: be a vital component alongside the savage minotaur. This video
Speaker 1: is strong with the cinematography of a nineties anti drug
Speaker 1: p S A commercial. Yeah yeah, kind it's got that
Speaker 1: that gross green film on everything like that. This is
Speaker 1: your brain on drugs, Yeah it does. It does remind
Speaker 1: me in some ways of various p s as I
Speaker 1: remember from UH as a child watching Canadian television, where
Speaker 1: there might be something that's like really weird and fantastic,
Speaker 1: and then at the end you find out, oh, this
Speaker 1: is the message. Now, before we get a little more
Speaker 1: into the science of mazes and UH and zoonotic diseases,
Speaker 1: you promised at some point that you were going to
Speaker 1: come back to talk a little bit about the minotaur
Speaker 1: and D and D. You mentioned this in the first episode.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So if the the error is to take
Speaker 1: the minotaur out of its place and just presented as
Speaker 1: a mere brute uh, Dungeons and Dragons has certainly been
Speaker 1: guilty of that. And and not only dungeon dragons, but
Speaker 1: just individual dungeon masters who of course had the power
Speaker 1: to to take a minotaur and drop him in anywhere
Speaker 1: you go into the you go into the end, the
Speaker 1: inn keeps a minotaur as see what you'd like to drink? Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's a lot of room to
Speaker 1: to misuse the minotaur, you know, at an individual level.
Speaker 1: But I will say that at least in the fifth edition.
Speaker 1: I can't really speak to earlier editions because I just
Speaker 1: don't have those numbers in my head. But in the
Speaker 1: most recent edition they do have a very high wisdom
Speaker 1: score and they have an ability called labyrinthine recall. Uh,
Speaker 1: so the minotaur can perfectly recall any path that has traveled,
Speaker 1: which I feel like that ability. It least, at the
Speaker 1: very least, it is a nudge to the dungeon master. Hey,
Speaker 1: you should put this minute our somewhere where it can
Speaker 1: take advantage of this. You should create some sort of labyrinth,
Speaker 1: be that labyrinth an actual you know, stone dungeon, or
Speaker 1: perhaps something like a Hedge maze or like a really um,
Speaker 1: you know, complicated city. I mean, there's so many different
Speaker 1: directions you could go in there. And in terms of
Speaker 1: actual adventure modules and campaigns, uh, the campaign out of
Speaker 1: the Abyss does put minotaurs in a place referred to
Speaker 1: as the labyrinth, which which is very nice, and I
Speaker 1: thought they did a good job in that the labyrinthine
Speaker 1: recall things seems like it would also close to the
Speaker 1: adventurers the option of certain strategic responses to the minator,
Speaker 1: like you can't do to the minotaur what Danny does
Speaker 1: to Jack at the end of the Shining movie, Right,
Speaker 1: you can't get him turned around in his own maze,
Speaker 1: like he's going to know his way around. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: is the ultimate master of this location unless you have
Speaker 1: some sort of privileged knowledge or magical abilities that have
Speaker 1: been gifted to you by other parties. So I was
Speaker 1: thinking about mazes, and I actually had an etymological question
Speaker 1: that I had to look up because I was wondering,
Speaker 1: are the English words maze and a maze as an
Speaker 1: amazing related, And it turns out that they are. They
Speaker 1: probably do come from the same linguistic route. So by
Speaker 1: around the beginning of the fourteenth century, the now maze
Speaker 1: meant something like a delusion or a bewilderment confusion, and
Speaker 1: this is really related to the Old English verb a
Speaker 1: mac n or a m a s i a n
Speaker 1: meaning to confuse, And so the origins of this word
Speaker 1: are not exactly clear. I saw one comparison on the
Speaker 1: online Etymological Dictionary to a Norwegian word mass m a
Speaker 1: s or mace meaning exhausting labor, which I thought would
Speaker 1: be a kind of interesting place for that concept to
Speaker 1: come from. But apparently maze came to have its current
Speaker 1: meaning in English, meaning something like a labyrinth the structure
Speaker 1: with branching paths around the end of the fourteenth century.
Speaker 1: But but so now you know, like amazement is related
Speaker 1: to a maze. They're the same thing, and they come
Speaker 1: from the idea of bewilderment, confusion and and being confounded.
Speaker 1: But hey, practical survival question. Imagine you are not theseus.
Speaker 1: You're not armed with a with a sword or whatever.
Speaker 1: You don't have a ball of twine to make your
Speaker 1: way out of a maze. If you were just one
Speaker 1: of the Athenian youths finding yourself trapped an unfamiliar maze,
Speaker 1: could you get out? Is there actually a strategy for
Speaker 1: optimizing the solution of a maze other than trying to
Speaker 1: cut through walls? Obviously you can't do that well. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of them have heard the whole
Speaker 1: only take like right hand turns right turning right exactly,
Speaker 1: So it depends on how the maze is constructed, but
Speaker 1: that actually is a successful strategy for most mazes. The
Speaker 1: solution if you don't have a ball of twine is
Speaker 1: what's known as the right hand rule, and that's actually arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Could be the right hand or the left hand rule,
Speaker 1: but it's as simple as this. So you reach out
Speaker 1: with your right hand and you touch the right side
Speaker 1: wall of the corridor, and then you just proceed forward
Speaker 1: without ever taking your hand off the wall. So if
Speaker 1: you come to a dead end, you pivot around with
Speaker 1: your hand still touching the right side of the wall. Again.
Speaker 1: The same thing would work with the left hand. It's
Speaker 1: also known as the wall follower algorithm. And always following
Speaker 1: the same wall surface will mean that you bear in
Speaker 1: the same direction at every turn, which is what you
Speaker 1: were saying. If you always make the right turn, eventually
Speaker 1: you will find your way out. This will uh you know,
Speaker 1: even if you hit a dead end, you'll double back
Speaker 1: on your path. And if you keep following this method,
Speaker 1: you can actually solve the maze even blindfolded, because it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter what orientation you have mentally, you will just
Speaker 1: always be executing a new pathway unless you're trying to
Speaker 1: get yourself out of a dead end. But there is
Speaker 1: a catch here, and the catches that for this to work,
Speaker 1: the maze has to be what they call simply constructed,
Speaker 1: and what that means is all of the walls of
Speaker 1: the maze are connected to the outer wall or to
Speaker 1: each other, and this method will not necessarily work in
Speaker 1: a maze with what are called island walls, walls that
Speaker 1: are not connected to the outer boundary, and with these
Speaker 1: types of mazes, you can just end up going in
Speaker 1: circles around a wall segment in the middle. I've actually
Speaker 1: read about some funny cases of people going people going
Speaker 1: into corn mazes, you know, these things for fun or
Speaker 1: hedge mazes, and they get stuck in there and they
Speaker 1: try to use the wall follower pathway to get out,
Speaker 1: but they get stuck in there because they're just tracing
Speaker 1: around some isolated internal wall that doesn't connect to the
Speaker 1: outer walls. Forced to wander forever until the fall festival
Speaker 1: employees come and retrieve you. But there there is another catch.
Speaker 1: So even if you are in a maze with island
Speaker 1: walls walls that don't connect to the outer boundary. You
Speaker 1: can still use the right hand rule if you use
Speaker 1: it beginning at the entrance, because if you start at
Speaker 1: the entrance and you stick to it, you will never
Speaker 1: actually start following an island wall to begin with, because
Speaker 1: you'll always be attached to a wall that's attached to
Speaker 1: the exterior boundary. So if you start doing the doing
Speaker 1: the right hand rule at the entrance, it will work,
Speaker 1: though it might make the maze less fun, I mean,
Speaker 1: depending on whether this is like a torture human sacrifice
Speaker 1: scenario or just like a corn maze for fun. Right,
Speaker 1: But I guess if you if you use the right
Speaker 1: hand rule and it's the right kind of maze, you
Speaker 1: are in a it's transforming a maze into a labyrinth,
Speaker 1: if we're going to that, if you're using those terms
Speaker 1: exclusively for a maze is something with many different branching
Speaker 1: paths in which you can get lost. In a labyrinth
Speaker 1: as being this complex system through which there is only
Speaker 1: one path, uh and you don't have to to think
Speaker 1: about what you're doing as you follow it. Right multi
Speaker 1: cursal versus unicursal, you're turning it into a unicursal pathway
Speaker 1: where you are again just submitting to the design of
Speaker 1: the maze and taking decision making entirely out of it. Right,
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if you go to Ikea and
Speaker 1: you just decide, I'm just gonna go with the I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna buy anything, but I'm just gonna just go
Speaker 1: straight going, just gonna follow the path by everything my
Speaker 1: right hand touches. You end up in a maze of meatballs.
Speaker 1: But thinking about how to solve maze is also got me, uh,
Speaker 1: thinking about another tangent here, which is the role that
Speaker 1: mazes have played in the history of psychological research, so
Speaker 1: much that in a way, the maze came almost a
Speaker 1: physical emblem of the discipline of psychology and popular culture
Speaker 1: like well, especially the behavior ast schools. Of course, So
Speaker 1: if you saw a research psychologist in a movie made
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties or fifties, what were they doing?
Speaker 1: I mean, they're probably running rats through a maze, right,
Speaker 1: Like every psychology lab in a movie has a rat
Speaker 1: maze in it. Yeah, and you think they feel like
Speaker 1: they're a fair number of educational shorts that also feature
Speaker 1: footage of mice and mazes. And here I think the
Speaker 1: maze as a research tool emerges in a very interesting
Speaker 1: relationship with the maze of myths, So consider the following
Speaker 1: with the myth of Theseus and the minotaur in mind.
Speaker 1: I was reading an article about the history of maze
Speaker 1: research by a psychologist named ce James Goodwin in the
Speaker 1: Monitor on Psychology, which is the magazine of the American
Speaker 1: Psychological Association or the a p A. And Goodwin begins
Speaker 1: by producing a really unbelievable quote from a neo behaviorist
Speaker 1: psychologist named Edward Chase Tolman, who was president of the
Speaker 1: APIA at the time. He uttered these words, and this
Speaker 1: was part of his yearly addressed to the a p
Speaker 1: A in nineteen thirty seven, And this is what he said.
Speaker 1: Everything important in psychology can be investigated in essence through
Speaker 1: the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants of
Speaker 1: rat behavior at a choice point in a maze. So everything,
Speaker 1: every everything, everything you could want to know about minds
Speaker 1: can be understood by watching how rats behave in a maze. Like,
Speaker 1: given enough time and enough rats and enough mazes, we
Speaker 1: can fully understand minds. I mean, undoubtedly it's useful for
Speaker 1: various things. That everything is far yeah, So I mean
Speaker 1: I guess to be fair to Tolman, I think maybe
Speaker 1: he was intentionally overstating his case a bit to be provocative.
Speaker 1: But this is actually indicative of like a powerful strain
Speaker 1: of thinking in the history of behaviorist psychology, basically that
Speaker 1: psychological science is not really concerned with internal phenomena. I remember,
Speaker 1: this was the behavior at school, so it's not really
Speaker 1: about thoughts or feelings and uh. And also the belief
Speaker 1: that differences between species are not necessarily very relevant. Brains
Speaker 1: in general were just sort of imagined as learning and
Speaker 1: conditioning machines that produce behavior based on how they've been conditioned,
Speaker 1: and so careful study of how rats behave under various
Speaker 1: controlled conditions and how they respond to various incentives and
Speaker 1: stimuli and training can eventually tell you pretty much everything
Speaker 1: that you would want to know about brains, even about
Speaker 1: human psychology. Now, I think this is clearly an extremely
Speaker 1: misguided point of view, but an interesting question is how
Speaker 1: did you get to their Like, how how did you
Speaker 1: get to the place where somebody could say that about
Speaker 1: rats and mazes and not immediate lee be mocked for it,
Speaker 1: you know, like, just sounds so ridiculous, So maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a break and then when we come back
Speaker 1: we can talk about the origins of rat maze research.
Speaker 1: Than alright, we're back, So how did we get so
Speaker 1: many mice in these mazes? Okay? So I mentioned this
Speaker 1: article by by C. James Goodwin, and Goodwin writes in
Speaker 1: his article that most historians of science agreed that the
Speaker 1: animal maze as a research tool was really pioneered in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties by researchers at Clark University. Specifically, this
Speaker 1: was a couple of graduate students named Willard Small and
Speaker 1: Linus Klein, who were working in the lab of the
Speaker 1: early American psychologist Edmund Sandford Uh. Though sometime around the
Speaker 1: same time the psychologist Edward Thorndyke also experimented with building
Speaker 1: a sort of maze for research on baby birds. He
Speaker 1: did this by stacking books in odd confuyu curations, but
Speaker 1: he he thought of these structures as pens. But the
Speaker 1: mazes constructed in the Sanford lab at Clark University had
Speaker 1: an interesting couple of points of inspiration. So one was
Speaker 1: in the structures built by rats under a porch uh So, Kleins,
Speaker 1: Small and Sanford were interested in studying the home finding
Speaker 1: ability of rats home finding, of course, is a very
Speaker 1: important skill for many motile animals. How do you find
Speaker 1: your way back to home base after leaving to forage,
Speaker 1: or how do you find your way through confusing twist
Speaker 1: and turns to locate a source of food or another
Speaker 1: familiar location. And so Klein recalled an incident where there
Speaker 1: had been digging under the porch at a cabin on
Speaker 1: his father's farm in Virginia, and when the porch was excavated,
Speaker 1: they discovered that there were these runways that had been
Speaker 1: left quote by large feral rats to their nests under
Speaker 1: the porch, and the runways client thought somehow resembled mazes,
Speaker 1: and this led to the idea of designing a test
Speaker 1: environment based on a maze to study the psychology of rats,
Speaker 1: and the model they ended up using for this maze
Speaker 1: was the Hampton Court Maze in England. And Robert, I've
Speaker 1: got a picture for you to look at here. This
Speaker 1: is still a popular tourist attraction. It's a hedge maze
Speaker 1: just outside London that was commissioned by William the Third
Speaker 1: around the year seventeen hundred and it is said to
Speaker 1: be the oldest surviving hedge maze in England. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a very impressive, very famous maze, kind of trapezoidal
Speaker 1: in shape. I think they restructured it somewhat to make
Speaker 1: it more of a rectangle in the lab version. The
Speaker 1: irony is that mice would have no problem at all
Speaker 1: with the actual Hampton coordinates. That's right, Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: cut underneath. Yeah, so of course you had to create
Speaker 1: one that's much more unforgiving to the body of a mouse.
Speaker 1: So what they did was at the Clark Lab they
Speaker 1: made a tiny Ursian four rodents for rats with slight redesigns.
Speaker 1: UH had a wooden floor and walls made of wire mesh,
Speaker 1: and so research with rats there in this maze went
Speaker 1: on for several years, mostly under Willard Small, and Goodwin
Speaker 1: writes the following quote. This was the time when psychology
Speaker 1: was the science of mental life, so it was not
Speaker 1: surprising that Small described his maze study in quote mentalistic
Speaker 1: terms rather than in the kind of language one might
Speaker 1: expect to read in a more modern learning study. So
Speaker 1: instead of reporting results in terms of error rates and
Speaker 1: time to completion, Small tried to infer what the rats
Speaker 1: were doing as they made their way through the maze,
Speaker 1: and this led to observations such as and here I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from Small when describing a rat almost
Speaker 1: making a wrong turn in the maze, Small wrote that
Speaker 1: the rat quote hesitated as if scratching his head, then
Speaker 1: entered this dead end path slowly and doubt fully only
Speaker 1: a few steps. However, then with a sudden turn and
Speaker 1: a triumphant flick of his tail, he returned to the
Speaker 1: correct path. Which is funny because that does not sound
Speaker 1: like scientific writing. Yes, hesitated as if scratching his head,
Speaker 1: the triumphant flick of his tail. I mean this is
Speaker 1: This is a kind of qualitative description that's unusual to
Speaker 1: more modern psychological methods, where in modern psychological methods you
Speaker 1: would try to turn everything into unambiguous quantitative data points
Speaker 1: and remove the subjective judgment of the researcher as much
Speaker 1: as possible. But here Small is just saying, like, I
Speaker 1: wonder what little Mr Rat is thinking as he goes
Speaker 1: to the left or the right. Well, I think he
Speaker 1: I think he feels triumphant. Now I think he feels
Speaker 1: like a big, strong rat. Now I know he's getting
Speaker 1: dangerously close to writing a smashing Pumpkins song. You know,
Speaker 1: I've always had questions about that song because if the
Speaker 1: world is a vampire sent to dray aane, what is
Speaker 1: it dray a meaning the world contains everything, doesn't it?
Speaker 1: The way the world is invoked there, it's like the
Speaker 1: some some total of existence is sent to drain what's
Speaker 1: outside of itself to drain? Oh, I think it is
Speaker 1: outer reality versus inter reality, right, Okay, it's Newmena and Phenomena. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess so that's the way I always interpreted. I mean,
Speaker 1: not that I spent a lot of time really analyzing
Speaker 1: the lyrics that song, but um, but that would be
Speaker 1: my guest. The Phenomena is a vampire sent to drain
Speaker 1: and the Newmena okay, yeah. Or I guess you could
Speaker 1: say the maze or the cage is the thing the
Speaker 1: environment that contains the rat or the minotaur what have you.
Speaker 1: Here's a twist. What if that song is sung from
Speaker 1: the point of view of a minotaur, like among the
Speaker 1: Athenian youths, there is a secret destroyer. You know. I
Speaker 1: don't think I even looked for actual minotaur songs. Uh.
Speaker 1: There may be some really good ones out there, and
Speaker 1: I then I just don't know about them. Is there
Speaker 1: not a misfits song. Let is there that I just
Speaker 1: say the Minotaur and the new you and it's the
Speaker 1: minute again or something seems like I can't really I
Speaker 1: can't really find much of anything. But yeah, whether you're
Speaker 1: talking about the standards of modern research today or the
Speaker 1: behaviorist research that would come into vogue in the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: in any case, you know, you would not want to say,
Speaker 1: I think that the rat is thinking that the world
Speaker 1: is a vampire sent to dreane. You just want to
Speaker 1: like neutrally describe unambiguous, objective behaviors and and and avoid
Speaker 1: being anthropomorphic. And Smallest research was criticized even by some
Speaker 1: people at the time for being anthropomorphic, like trying to
Speaker 1: inhabit the mind of the rat as if it had
Speaker 1: human thoughts. Nevertheless, small made some interesting and influential discoveries,
Speaker 1: and these included the idea that rats could learn navigation
Speaker 1: and home finding with very little reliance on their sense
Speaker 1: of site. Two of the rats in his study group
Speaker 1: were blind, and yet they learned the maze just as
Speaker 1: well as the sited rats. And the use of senses
Speaker 1: other than site can make sense when you consider that
Speaker 1: rats are often navigating almost completely dark spaces or navigating
Speaker 1: spaces at night, you know, under floorboards and so forth,
Speaker 1: and Small believed he had established with his research that
Speaker 1: rats learned through a gradual accumulation of direct associations between
Speaker 1: sensory stimuli and the maze and patterns of success, and
Speaker 1: this would later prove foundational to the behaviorist school of psychology,
Speaker 1: which was very focused on associative learning and gradual conditioning
Speaker 1: as the root of animal behavior. But probably more important
Speaker 1: than what these studies actually found in their conclusions was
Speaker 1: the precedent they set for research methods, because Small's research
Speaker 1: led to this huge surge in maze research, much of
Speaker 1: which used rats as the study animal. The most classic
Speaker 1: variation is that you can mess around with independent variables
Speaker 1: to create an average learning curve for rats by you know,
Speaker 1: you run rats through a maze multiple times, and you
Speaker 1: chart the time it takes them to complete the maze
Speaker 1: and the number of errors they make along the way
Speaker 1: with each successive attempt, which is a very useful tool
Speaker 1: for studying a certain kind of learning and how various
Speaker 1: things affect that kind of learning, like drugs and so forth.
Speaker 1: But some maze studies also used other animals at the
Speaker 1: very simple and we've talked before about the the sort
Speaker 1: of maze like research done on worms that was focused
Speaker 1: on planaria. Uh. This was the origin actually of the
Speaker 1: memory transfer research of James McConnell that we talked about
Speaker 1: in a couple of full length episodes that you can
Speaker 1: check out in our archive called Devour of Memories. But
Speaker 1: the short version is that the American psychologist James McConnell
Speaker 1: believed he had discovered that memories in the form of
Speaker 1: learned associations could be transferred from one flat worm to
Speaker 1: another via cannibalism. So you teach one flat worm, grind
Speaker 1: it up, feed it to another flat worm, and it learns,
Speaker 1: you know, eat your brains and gain your knowledge. Later
Speaker 1: research through some doubts on that conclusion, but there's still
Speaker 1: interesting ongoing research today hinting that planariam might possibly retain
Speaker 1: memories after having their heads cut off, so there might
Speaker 1: be some kind of memory in the bodies that's not
Speaker 1: just in the brain. And of course at the opposite
Speaker 1: end of the scale, you've got studies that actually put
Speaker 1: humans in full size mazes with consent of course, to
Speaker 1: study their behavior. But anyway, this huge surge in maze
Speaker 1: research lead to regimes that meant a researcher could make
Speaker 1: a claim like the one Tolman made in nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: the idea that basically all you need to study psychology
Speaker 1: is some rats in a maze. And he could say
Speaker 1: that and still be taken seriously. Uh. Tolman's assertion, of course,
Speaker 1: seems again ridiculous on its face today, but maze research
Speaker 1: does still remain very important, especially in narrower domains like
Speaker 1: animal motor behavior, problem solving, spatial memory and things like that.
Speaker 1: And mazes are used in studying the effects of particular
Speaker 1: drugs on behavior, So like you could say, does this
Speaker 1: anti anxiety drug cause a rat or a crayfish to
Speaker 1: take one path or the other rather than you know,
Speaker 1: freezing paralyzed t junction? Or does a drug promote obsessive
Speaker 1: recurring checks of the same path and things like that. Now,
Speaker 1: and looking at what kind of maze research is going
Speaker 1: on today, I came across one thing that I that
Speaker 1: I was thoroughly amazed by and very disturbed by, which
Speaker 1: is this invention known as automated team mazes. I guess
Speaker 1: there's actually nothing more nefarious about this than there is
Speaker 1: about a regular maze for for research, but watching video
Speaker 1: of it somehow kind of bothered me. Basically, and Automated
Speaker 1: Team Maze is a robot maze with movable walls that
Speaker 1: can be raised and lowered to alter the maze path
Speaker 1: as the animal proceeds. And I don't know, it feels
Speaker 1: very house of leaves to me. Yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: we we brought up a house of leaves yet, by
Speaker 1: the way, but that is a great use of a
Speaker 1: maze and a minute our uh in uh is a
Speaker 1: literary example. I'm actually in the middle of reading it
Speaker 1: right now for the first time, so I haven't finished yet.
Speaker 1: I don't want to spoil too much for people, but yeah,
Speaker 1: the middle of that book is a good place to
Speaker 1: be because the book is is intentionally quite intentionally is
Speaker 1: a labyrinth, and you are supposed to, I think, feel
Speaker 1: to a certain extent lost within it and hunted within it. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's one of the more unnerving things I think I've read,
Speaker 1: and you know, over the past ten years, extremely creepy
Speaker 1: now in terms of labyrinths that change and move around you.
Speaker 1: First of all, I think datals would be proud like
Speaker 1: this is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they're the great inventor having created. It also
Speaker 1: reminds me of of the wonderful cinematic maze that we
Speaker 1: find in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Uh. There in the early
Speaker 1: phases of that they go through to you know, Sarah
Speaker 1: goes through different parts of the Labyrinth to try to
Speaker 1: get to the Goblin city to rescue her brother, but
Speaker 1: there's a There's one section in particular where she begins
Speaker 1: to realize is that she can't mark the path behind
Speaker 1: her because the path keeps changing. Goblins keep moving things around,
Speaker 1: moving stones that she's marked, or even just seemingly magically,
Speaker 1: she'll turn around and what was once a passage is
Speaker 1: now just a blank wall. I recall this being a
Speaker 1: plot point in the movie Cube as well. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: the very very Cube like as well this video. There's
Speaker 1: no minotaur in Cube, but that should have been well
Speaker 1: in a way, there are a lot of all the
Speaker 1: traps are kind of like many minotaurs. There are killing instruments,
Speaker 1: and again coming back to the idea that the minotaur
Speaker 1: is sort of the kill function of the Labyrinth. Uh,
Speaker 1: it just has a lot of little kill functions instead
Speaker 1: of one great all encompass and kill function. I want
Speaker 1: to come back and say, I, in all honesty, I
Speaker 1: don't want to throw aspersions on an automated teammates, which
Speaker 1: seems like a perfectly useful research tool. Uh. It seems
Speaker 1: like they're actually mainly to automatically track data on the
Speaker 1: movements of the animals, so it it makes the human
Speaker 1: rat runn obsolete very useful. But before we move on
Speaker 1: from rats and mazes, I wanted to talk about one
Speaker 1: more thing that I found interesting, and it ties into
Speaker 1: something I know you've covered on at least one older episode,
Speaker 1: uh Rob, which was the idea of cargo cult science
Speaker 1: that was explored in this famous talk given by the
Speaker 1: physicist Richard Feynman in nineteen seventy four. He was giving
Speaker 1: a commencement address to cal Tech. I guess it was
Speaker 1: the graduating class or something, and that's usually who would
Speaker 1: be at a commencement address, why, I said, probably uh,
Speaker 1: And he was, you know, talking about various subjects, pseudo science,
Speaker 1: the need for rigor and in designing experiments, scientific research
Speaker 1: and uh. And so in simple terms, I think the
Speaker 1: idea of cargo cult science is it's a bad form
Speaker 1: of science where uh, there is not enough rigorous effort
Speaker 1: devoted to trying to disprove hypotheses. Rather every basically you
Speaker 1: just kind of established a hypoth is based on what
Speaker 1: data you've already collected, and then further occurrences of the
Speaker 1: same types of data are taken as confirmation of the hypothesis. So,
Speaker 1: for an example, I'm just making this up. If you
Speaker 1: were to find that rats run mazes faster in the
Speaker 1: daytime than they do in the nighttime, and then you say, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna fit a hypothesis to that, it's because they
Speaker 1: come from the planet Crypton and are given extra strength
Speaker 1: by the rays of our yellow sun during the day.
Speaker 1: And then subsequent studies finding yet again that rats run
Speaker 1: mazes faster in the daytime than than in the nighttime,
Speaker 1: those are taking as confirmation of the yellow sun hypothesis
Speaker 1: when they don't actually provide any support for that at all. So,
Speaker 1: in general, Fineman in the speech is advocating that researchers
Speaker 1: adhere to more rigorous methods to rule out false positives
Speaker 1: and things like that, and and they avoid the temptation
Speaker 1: to rush to publish with sloppy experimental designs, and so
Speaker 1: I can read from the part of his speech here
Speaker 1: where he talks about rats and mazes. He uh, he says, quote.
Speaker 1: There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds
Speaker 1: of mazes and so on, with little clear result. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty seven a man named Young did a
Speaker 1: very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors
Speaker 1: all along one side where the rats came in, and
Speaker 1: doors along the other side where the food was. He
Speaker 1: wanted to see if he could train the rats to
Speaker 1: go in at the third door down from wherever he
Speaker 1: started them off. So what he's looking for is a
Speaker 1: spatial relationship between the entrance door and the food reward door.
Speaker 1: Will they learn that inference? Uh? And fine man continues, No,
Speaker 1: the rats went immediately to the door where the food
Speaker 1: had been the time before. The question was, how did
Speaker 1: the rats know because the corridor was so beautifully built
Speaker 1: and so uniform that this was the same door as before.
Speaker 1: Obviously there was something about the door that was different
Speaker 1: from the other doors. So he painted the door very carefully,
Speaker 1: arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly
Speaker 1: the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought
Speaker 1: maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used
Speaker 1: chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the
Speaker 1: rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be
Speaker 1: able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement
Speaker 1: in the laboratory like any common sense person, So he
Speaker 1: covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He
Speaker 1: finally found that they could tell by the way the
Speaker 1: floor sounded when they ran over it, and he could
Speaker 1: only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So
Speaker 1: he covered one after another of all possible clues and
Speaker 1: finally was able to fool the rats, so they had
Speaker 1: to learn to go in the third door. If he
Speaker 1: relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now,
Speaker 1: from a scientific standpoint, this is an a number one experiment.
Speaker 1: That is the experiment that makes rat running experiments sensible
Speaker 1: because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really
Speaker 1: using and not what you think it's using. And that
Speaker 1: is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have
Speaker 1: to use in order to be careful and control everything
Speaker 1: in an experiment with rat running. I looked into the
Speaker 1: subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment and the
Speaker 1: one after that never referred to Mr. Young. They never
Speaker 1: used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on
Speaker 1: sand or being very careful. They just went right on
Speaker 1: running rats in the same old way and paid no
Speaker 1: attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his
Speaker 1: papers are not referred to because he didn't discover anything
Speaker 1: about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things
Speaker 1: you have to do to decipher something about rats. But
Speaker 1: not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic
Speaker 1: of cargo cult science. Now, just as a follow up,
Speaker 1: I was reading an article by Ross Pomeroy on Real
Speaker 1: Clear Science that was about this story that Feineman tells
Speaker 1: trying to identify who this unsided researcher was. Uh, the
Speaker 1: author of this article, Pomeroy, he thinks that this is
Speaker 1: probably referring to the animal scientist Paul Thomas Young, but
Speaker 1: it's not known for sure who Fineman is referring to.
Speaker 1: If we take Fineman's word that you know, he was
Speaker 1: familiar with this unpublished research and stuff. Uh, It's it's
Speaker 1: very sad that this went forward, but it's such a
Speaker 1: wonderful illustration of how difficult and tedious it can be
Speaker 1: just to get to the point where you can start
Speaker 1: to establish conclusions in animal research. I also love in
Speaker 1: in Froneman's writings here that you you also get the
Speaker 1: sense of the the construction of a maze, you know,
Speaker 1: like this the thing that is that is just there
Speaker 1: to confuse and and and provides no clear solutions to
Speaker 1: itself or to the world. Well, yeah, it's really funny
Speaker 1: because he is so designed. It highlights how designing amaze
Speaker 1: for a rat is kind of different than designing a
Speaker 1: maze for a human, right because rats, uh might, because
Speaker 1: of their their ecological niche, they might have senses that
Speaker 1: are attuned to things that humans wouldn't even imagine would
Speaker 1: be a useful clue in in you know, cheating and
Speaker 1: seeing through the confusion that the maze is supposed to provide. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have to remember that that rats, other organisms that
Speaker 1: we might put in a maze, they live in a
Speaker 1: different sense realm than we do. Like their dependence on
Speaker 1: you know, site versus smell, etcetera. Are going to be
Speaker 1: rather different than ours. And then they're you know, they're
Speaker 1: there's their smell abilities are going to beyond, be beyond
Speaker 1: what we have at our disposal. Maybe I'm reaching here,
Speaker 1: but I was imagining some interesting parallels here between the
Speaker 1: maze as a psychological research instrument and the maze of
Speaker 1: myth because what they're doing in both cases is trying
Speaker 1: to strip away extraneous detail and context from from the
Speaker 1: decision of the character, whether that's a an animal that's
Speaker 1: the subject of research or character in a story and
Speaker 1: just sort of like isolate one, say, aliant trait at
Speaker 1: a time that that's often what mythology does, like it
Speaker 1: boils down a human too courage embodied and has no
Speaker 1: other really identifiable human traits in that moment in the story.
Speaker 1: And the same thing for the rat. You're trying to
Speaker 1: like take away all of the things that make a
Speaker 1: rat a rat, accept its ability to decide between X
Speaker 1: and Y based on Z. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 1: So I guess it doesn't exactly work with theseus because
Speaker 1: theseus does bring bring context from the outside world into
Speaker 1: the maze. Right. He comes in armed with tools and
Speaker 1: with information that he technically should not have if this
Speaker 1: were a fair fight. Right, right, he has he has
Speaker 1: broken the game. Yeah, he has corrupted the experiment. These
Speaker 1: are not legitimate results, all right. On that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take one more break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Than alright, we're back. Uh now, Robert, is it time
Speaker 1: to talk about the minotaur and zoonotic diseases? Yes, it is.
Speaker 1: I was actually delighted to run to run across this
Speaker 1: paper titled Europe The Bull and the Minotaur The Biological
Speaker 1: Legacy of a Neolithic love Story. This is by Harold Brusso,
Speaker 1: published in the journal Environmental Microbiology back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine. Now, Harold Brusso is a research scientist and
Speaker 1: he's the author of the book The Quest for Food
Speaker 1: and Natural History of Eating, And incidentally he's also an
Speaker 1: author on several COVID nineteen papers to come out this year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw that. I looked about it looks like he's
Speaker 1: affiliated with the Nestly Research Center in Switzerland and uh
Speaker 1: and at some point I think I also saw him
Speaker 1: affiliated with the University of Geneva, but the main things
Speaker 1: I saw recently were the Nestly Research Center. I gotta
Speaker 1: say he's got a very unusual writing style for scientific papers.
Speaker 1: It's very whimsical. Yes, definitely whimsical. Um and you get
Speaker 1: a sense of that from the title here as well.
Speaker 1: Basically in this article Brusso used is the Minotaur myth
Speaker 1: as a means of discussing the Neolithic Revolution and the
Speaker 1: manner in which the domestication of goats and cattle, etcetera
Speaker 1: opened the door for new pathogens. As he points out,
Speaker 1: hunters only had limited contact with prey and most close
Speaker 1: contact occurred after the animal's death. Not to say this
Speaker 1: is safe for the human hunter, but quote all the
Speaker 1: mechanisms which microbes induced in the infected host to assure
Speaker 1: their transmission, like sneezing, coughing, or diarrhea, are not any
Speaker 1: longer operative in the dead animal. Okay, So he's saying that,
Speaker 1: And despite the fact that people who hunted for a
Speaker 1: living would be coming in contact with animals and their
Speaker 1: body fluids pretty often, people who do animal agriculture are
Speaker 1: actually more at risk for animal transmitted diseases than hunters are,
Speaker 1: right because suddenly you're not just hunting the animal down,
Speaker 1: killing it process and then processing it, which in a
Speaker 1: certainly process of the animal could come with some risks,
Speaker 1: but it's one's dead, it's not going to sneeze on you.
Speaker 1: But with the domestication, humans come into close contact with
Speaker 1: these animals all the time. They come into clause contact
Speaker 1: with sick animals as well as the animals dung, which
Speaker 1: was valuable for fuel and fertilizer. Uh and also another
Speaker 1: pathway for disease. And you're going to be spending time.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just imagine there's more time with the animal.
Speaker 1: Like you kill an animal when you're hunting, and then
Speaker 1: you kind of deal with it. But like, but that's
Speaker 1: one animal for a sort of limited period of time.
Speaker 1: While you're processing it or carrying it back to home
Speaker 1: or wherever this other thing would be, you're just sort
Speaker 1: of like wandering around with herds of sheep or cows
Speaker 1: or something all day and there's a bunch of them
Speaker 1: all crammed together, right, And and thus he states that
Speaker 1: you know, we can we can safely anticipate quote that
Speaker 1: the early farming society was plagued by new diseases zoonosis
Speaker 1: was feeding new pathogens into the human population. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: very interesting to consider. I mean, we we think about
Speaker 1: the advent of agriculture in in the Neolithic period as
Speaker 1: you know, one of the progenitors of civilization, but we
Speaker 1: don't often imagine a lot of the downsides that might
Speaker 1: have come along with it, and it seems quite possible
Speaker 1: that he's correct that zoonotic diseases and increase in diseases
Speaker 1: transmitted from animals to humans would be one of those consequences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he writes that humanities growth simply created new opportunities
Speaker 1: for these microbes, which in turn discovered humans as quote
Speaker 1: an attractive life support. Um. Now, this, he says, follows
Speaker 1: the principle of the marine microbiologists call killing off the
Speaker 1: winning population. So he points out that the viruses had
Speaker 1: co evolved with their host during evolution, we would expect
Speaker 1: the closest relatives of measles viruses in paramixo viruses of
Speaker 1: primates instead. However, the most important human pathogens, such as
Speaker 1: highly transmissible agents like measles and smallpox, are closely related
Speaker 1: to viruses from domesticated animals. Measles, for instance, circulates exclusively
Speaker 1: in the human population, but is a close relative of
Speaker 1: render pest virus that is found in cattle. And of course,
Speaker 1: this uh is not limited just to ancient times. I mean,
Speaker 1: human viruses emerging from cultivated animal stocks still happens today.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's pretty common for flu strains
Speaker 1: to come out of say like pigs or birds that
Speaker 1: are domesticated by humans now. Bruso also points out that
Speaker 1: the close relationship between smallpox and cow pox was actually
Speaker 1: really important for the history of vaccination. Physician Edward Jenner
Speaker 1: noticed that milkmaids who had acquired cow pox were resistant
Speaker 1: to smallpox. He also points out that tuberculosis is caused
Speaker 1: by the Microbacterium tuberculosis complex, to which M. Bovis belongs.
Speaker 1: Any lists several other examples and also discusses the idea
Speaker 1: popularized by Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs and Steel that
Speaker 1: Europeans brought with them their Old World viruses which they had,
Speaker 1: which they had generated out of their history of animal domestication,
Speaker 1: all this time spent in close confines with their domesticated species. Now,
Speaker 1: I will say, with reference to Diamond, Uh, it's been
Speaker 1: a long time since I read that book. Years ago
Speaker 1: I read Guns, Terms and Steel. Uh. I can tell
Speaker 1: that he Diamond has recently been subject to a lot
Speaker 1: of criticism by experts in the fields. He covers. Uh.
Speaker 1: If so, I don't know, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: too unfair, but it seems like there are a lot
Speaker 1: of allegations of kind of cherry picking the thing that
Speaker 1: often happens when somebody's got a very broad, sweeping explanation
Speaker 1: of history. Um, but I do think one of the
Speaker 1: basic genres of things explored in that book is interesting,
Speaker 1: which is the broad thrust of it is trying to
Speaker 1: explain human history in terms of environmental biogeography, So showing
Speaker 1: that you know what people's come to power at what
Speaker 1: place in time, and at least in large part be
Speaker 1: explained by often otherwise overlooked environmental biological and geographical factors
Speaker 1: such as like what types of crops grow here, or
Speaker 1: what types of animals nearby could be domesticated, what kinds
Speaker 1: of pathogens or people exposed to and things like that.
Speaker 1: So uh So, whatever one would think of Diamond himself
Speaker 1: or or his fuller argument, I do think it's important
Speaker 1: to remember that history is not just a battle of
Speaker 1: wills and virtues between like powerful individual people and their personalities.
Speaker 1: It's also very much about mosquitoes and rainfall patterns and
Speaker 1: farming equipment and stuff like that. Now, to come back
Speaker 1: to to Bruso here, the idea that he's presenting here
Speaker 1: isn't that the Neolithic door opens and immediately all of
Speaker 1: these zoonotic diseases rush in um. This would have taken
Speaker 1: place over in a long period of time. Uh. It
Speaker 1: still opens the door though, But sometimes the these these
Speaker 1: basically these zoonotic events are going to occur just throughout
Speaker 1: that the history that I'm folds. For example, measles seems
Speaker 1: to have emerged from render past between c. E eleven
Speaker 1: hundred and c E twelve hundred, and is pointed out
Speaker 1: by Ferous at All in Origin of Measles of the
Speaker 1: measles virus UH. Divergence from render pest virus between likely
Speaker 1: occurred between the eleventh and twelve centuries. That was in
Speaker 1: Virology Journal in two thousand ten. UH. And they were
Speaker 1: likely limited outbreaks prior to this, when the pathogen wasn't
Speaker 1: fully adapted to humans yet. And then Bruso also points
Speaker 1: out that there were population issues to consider as well. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, as the duration of epidemics are influenced by
Speaker 1: population density. So again, not only you know, in the
Speaker 1: wake of the you know, the Neolithic Revolution, we get
Speaker 1: to the point where we are we are building cities,
Speaker 1: we are living in closer confines to each other, and
Speaker 1: we're creating not only the the environments in which a
Speaker 1: pathogen could leap from one species to another, but also
Speaker 1: these robust environments in which a pathogen could then spread,
Speaker 1: you know, massively through a larger human population. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is all interesting and important to consider. So I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: where does the minotaur come in. Ah, Yes, the minotaur.
Speaker 1: Uh so there is a minotaur in all of this
Speaker 1: um and uh. And he sets it up right rather nicely.
Speaker 1: I think he says, generations of poets, philosophers, and psychologists
Speaker 1: have interpreted and reinterpreted ancient Greek myths. I will thus
Speaker 1: take the liberty to add a biological interpretation to this
Speaker 1: strange story. So, you know, I think he's being very
Speaker 1: clear about the fact that he's not making an argument
Speaker 1: that the minotaur is about um zoonotic diseases. But he's saying,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take the minotaur and it's a myth,
Speaker 1: and I am going to use it to make a
Speaker 1: statement about about this, to to explain something or attempt
Speaker 1: to explain something about this relationship between animals, humans and
Speaker 1: their pathogens. Okay, so it's not like there's actually a
Speaker 1: good case that zoonotic diseases are literally the historical inspiration
Speaker 1: of the minotaur myth, but it does work pretty amazingly
Speaker 1: as a metaphor. Yeah, he does a great job with it. Again,
Speaker 1: he's a kind of kind of a whimsical writer, especially
Speaker 1: in this piece. Okay, let's hear it so point he
Speaker 1: he you know, relates the minotar myth a bit, but
Speaker 1: points not only to the minotaur but also to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the myth of Zeus in his bull form,
Speaker 1: seducing the Princess Europa or Europe and taking her to
Speaker 1: creet where he impregnates her with three sons. One of
Speaker 1: those three sons is Minos. Uh. Europe's brothers then search
Speaker 1: the known world for her and uh. And then Brusso
Speaker 1: writes this quote. The paths of Europe's brothers recall partly
Speaker 1: the migrations of the early farmers from the Near East
Speaker 1: into Europe and North Africa, partly Phoenician colonization. The too
Speaker 1: close relationship of Mino's wife with a bull leads to
Speaker 1: a children eating chimera, stretching a bit of the fantasy.
Speaker 1: I would interpret this monster as the species crossing virulus,
Speaker 1: derived from the new close contact between cattle and farmer.
Speaker 1: The labyrinth might be a type of quarantine imposed on
Speaker 1: infected subjects. Sir Evans, the excavator of the minoah Crete,
Speaker 1: suggests that it reflects the plan of the Royal Palace innsis.
Speaker 1: Some viruses are bovine human cameras like Minotaur, which both
Speaker 1: ate the young children of the earlier inhabitants of Europe.
Speaker 1: This myth might thus keep the memory of the hardship
Speaker 1: following the encounter of the cattle farmers with the hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers of prehistoric Europe. And then the rest of the
Speaker 1: article deals primarily with examples of this and discussions of
Speaker 1: its import. That's great, I mean, I would say to reiterate,
Speaker 1: of course, I'm not convinced, and I don't think he's
Speaker 1: necessarily making the case that actually this was the literal
Speaker 1: inspiration of the myth, But it is a really awesome
Speaker 1: metaphor the idea that the introduction of domesticated livestock such
Speaker 1: as cattle and sheep and stuff into the lives of
Speaker 1: humans would have these echoes throughout his story that have
Speaker 1: biological implications. In the myth, they are the biological implications
Speaker 1: of creating a hybrid monster. In reality, the biological implications
Speaker 1: are creating these zoonotic diseases that are in a way
Speaker 1: a hybrid type being because they jump from one species
Speaker 1: to another when you're living in close contact long enough.
Speaker 1: And even though the inspiration of the myth is probably
Speaker 1: not direct in any way, I mean, I do wonder
Speaker 1: about a kind of loose, un semi conscious connection in that, Like,
Speaker 1: isn't there always a sort of quiet, wordless unease about
Speaker 1: civilization and its products? And it just shows up again
Speaker 1: and again every generation, even while we enjoy the fruits
Speaker 1: of civilization, like we enjoy the stability of food supply
Speaker 1: and the opportunity for the diversification of labor and all
Speaker 1: of that, all the stuff we get from a settled
Speaker 1: urban existence, from agriculture, from technology and so forth, isn't
Speaker 1: there in every generation a new expression of the feeling
Speaker 1: that something is kind of wrong with all this, that
Speaker 1: there it is somehow perverted or dangerous, even monstrous, and
Speaker 1: that people should somehow get back to nature in one
Speaker 1: way or another. Some version of this philosophy is always there.
Speaker 1: It seems like, yeah, I mean, really, to come back
Speaker 1: to the the idea of the labyrinth itself and and
Speaker 1: the other creations of datalists, there's this ide. You know,
Speaker 1: there's so much of that science fictional energy, that anxiety
Speaker 1: concerning technology. Uh in this figure. You know, what if
Speaker 1: we created something that lifted us up on high but
Speaker 1: also lead to our destruction? Uh? What if we created
Speaker 1: something so elegantly designed that it was too confusing for
Speaker 1: even its creator to escape that sort of thing? Yes, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean you can look at a million different kinds
Speaker 1: of technology as essentially the labyrinth, the thing that becomes
Speaker 1: so complicated it escapes the intentions of its creator. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I mean an obvious place to look at
Speaker 1: that would be artificial intelligence. I mean, people off and
Speaker 1: use the people often use the metaphor of Pandora's box.
Speaker 1: They're like, are you opening the box? Who knows what
Speaker 1: what will come out? But the labyrinth is also a
Speaker 1: pretty good metaphor for for what's happening with AI. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and there's always the concern that there will be
Speaker 1: the minotaur within it as well, the thing that is
Speaker 1: not just passively anti human but actively anti human. But
Speaker 1: I mean it's easy to imagine that kind of thing
Speaker 1: with AI, because at least AI reaches such a level
Speaker 1: of complexity that you're imagining it almost as an agent
Speaker 1: that you can't control. You know, I think you can
Speaker 1: even apply this idea of our our perennial anxiety or
Speaker 1: suspicions about the downsides of of civilization and it's technological
Speaker 1: products um too too earlier innovations, even things as seemingly
Speaker 1: simple as agriculture, because in fact agriculture comes with tons
Speaker 1: of consequences that would not have been predicted by the
Speaker 1: people who invented. It comes with risk of zoonotic diseases,
Speaker 1: It comes with changes in diet and how that affects
Speaker 1: human life, and a million other things. Oh yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: whereas many of the the catastrophic problems that we're dealing
Speaker 1: with today in our world, are you know, the the
Speaker 1: end results of this these initial revolutions. But you mentioned
Speaker 1: Pandora's box earlier. So I want to come back just
Speaker 1: one more time to Brusso here, because he has this
Speaker 1: particularly haunting closing to the paper. And again this is
Speaker 1: from two thousand nine, in which he considers how modern
Speaker 1: global environmental changes will lead to another quote highly dynamic
Speaker 1: phase of viral transmissions into the human population. He writes,
Speaker 1: quote viruses must be the dark side of the heritage
Speaker 1: from the Neolithic Revolution to remain. With Greek myths, they
Speaker 1: might correspond to a half open Pandora's box, a poisoned
Speaker 1: gift of the bull god Zeus to mankind. Humans go
Speaker 1: now into a phase of globalization whose ecological impact might
Speaker 1: represent a full opening of this cursed box. Man is
Speaker 1: today a major evolutionary force, and we can safely anticipate
Speaker 1: that man made environmental changes will lead to a new
Speaker 1: deal in our relationship with microbes. When the diseases had
Speaker 1: left the box, the Greek myth told that only hope
Speaker 1: remained in the box. Today, we are probably better served
Speaker 1: with science as our best defense against surprise attacks from
Speaker 1: the viral Empire UH, than with the principal hope. Got
Speaker 1: some chills from that. I mean to say nothing against hope.
Speaker 1: I mean, hope is good, but don't show up with
Speaker 1: a hope to a science fight. Yeah, Or if you're
Speaker 1: gonna bring hope in one hand, bring science in the other.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it. This was episode
Speaker 1: three of our Journey through the Labyrinth, our consideration of
Speaker 1: the minotaur UH and the and the myth that it
Speaker 1: emerges out of the culture, It emerges out of the
Speaker 1: various ideas that it is still stirring and the human
Speaker 1: imagination today. Uh, this one is a lot of fun. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: And we have got so much more October stuff for you.
Speaker 1: We're busting it seems here. Yes, there's so yeah, we
Speaker 1: we've we've got We've got so many more ideas to go.
Speaker 1: I think we even still have a few ideas to
Speaker 1: come up with. But but it's gonna be a full
Speaker 1: month of of Halloween related wonder In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, if you want to catch up
Speaker 1: on our current Halloween offerings, uh, explore our past Halloween offerings,
Speaker 1: or some of our past myth related episodes, you know,
Speaker 1: such as our our study of the Medusa from earlier
Speaker 1: this year. Well, you can find this podcast wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We
Speaker 1: just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. If you
Speaker 1: want to find us, like really quickly, you can just
Speaker 1: go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and
Speaker 1: that will take you to the I heart listening for
Speaker 1: this show. And if you do go there, there's a
Speaker 1: place you can click on somewhere on that page kind
Speaker 1: of a labyrinth. Uh. You can click on like store
Speaker 1: or merchandise or what have you. That'll take you to
Speaker 1: our our t shirt store where we have a few
Speaker 1: different designs with stuff like our logo, maybe a Medusa
Speaker 1: or to that sort of thing. Huge thanks, as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
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