Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Speaker 1: You know, we're both writers. A lot of writing goes
Speaker 1: into what we do here at at How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: and Stuff to Blow your Mind. Um, and as writers
Speaker 1: were always engaging in those, uh, those environmental situations where
Speaker 1: how am I how am I going to focus on
Speaker 1: what I'm working on here on the page and in
Speaker 1: my mind and in that sort of unreal space between
Speaker 1: the two, while also having to deal with vehicles roaring by,
Speaker 1: with people walking by, people falling down, animals, weather patterns,
Speaker 1: you name it. Yeah, it's a lot of wooing of
Speaker 1: the mind. And Chekhov has said, if you look at
Speaker 1: anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you,
Speaker 1: it will come out of that wall. And that's the idea,
Speaker 1: right that we're going to cover today, this idea of
Speaker 1: optimal inattention and willful ignorance, This idea that you can
Speaker 1: put a spell on your mind long enough to concentrate
Speaker 1: on teasing up the things that will come out of
Speaker 1: the wall. Yeah, especially that that woman in the yellow wallpaper,
Speaker 1: ilways got to keep her push back indeed. Um. American
Speaker 1: poet Robert Creeley, uh two thousand five Uh, he said,
Speaker 1: quote the necessary environment is that which secures the artist
Speaker 1: in the way that lets him be in the world
Speaker 1: in a most fruitful manner, which I think is an
Speaker 1: interesting way of thinking about it, because when we sit
Speaker 1: down to work on something, often we think about, um,
Speaker 1: how much we're shutting out, But there's also the attention
Speaker 1: side of it. And and as someone who often works
Speaker 1: in a coffee shop, Um, I it's like I'm purposely
Speaker 1: going to kind of a busy, semi chaotic environment to
Speaker 1: engage with the task that require a lot of concentration,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of like the Goldilocks and the Three
Speaker 1: Bears of sound or optimal sounds, right, because you know,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, you could have something that was
Speaker 1: so silent, like or Field Labs has that quietest room
Speaker 1: in the world that shuts out sound. Too quiet, you'll
Speaker 1: start hallucinating. Actually, you know, on the other end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum, a bar with thumping music is way too distracting.
Speaker 1: That's like a jackhammer on your brain. But yeah, coffee
Speaker 1: houses have just the right amount of ambient noises to
Speaker 1: allow your brain some effort to kind of crowd that out,
Speaker 1: but have enough left over to actually deal with the
Speaker 1: task at hand. Indeed, now we were looking at an
Speaker 1: article titled the Importance of Place where Writers write and
Speaker 1: Whine by Alexandria Enders in the Literary Life, and she
Speaker 1: mentioned a number of different um famous authors and and
Speaker 1: where they've written and what their approach has been, and
Speaker 1: of course it's it's it's all over the board, like
Speaker 1: some of the ones that a that I found interesting.
Speaker 1: Robert Graves wrote in a room furnished only with objects
Speaker 1: made by hand. Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub baalzac
Speaker 1: ate an enormous meal at around five in the morning,
Speaker 1: and he slept on midnight, got up and wrote it
Speaker 1: a small desk in his room for sixteen hours straight,
Speaker 1: just drinking cup after cup of coffee to fuel the
Speaker 1: frenzy brain. We also have the example of Marcel Proust,
Speaker 1: best known for his novel Remember Remembrance of Things Past
Speaker 1: h He decided to shrug off society and all of
Speaker 1: the clamor that came with it. In nine he installed
Speaker 1: himself in his apartment and he actually took cork, and
Speaker 1: he lined his room, his bedroom with it, and to
Speaker 1: keep out the ambient noises of Parisian streets below him.
Speaker 1: And not only that, he kind of gets a little
Speaker 1: bit o c D with his process here, and I
Speaker 1: feel like a lot of writers do this. By the way,
Speaker 1: He installed heavy blue silk curtains to keep the light out,
Speaker 1: and he slept until late afternoon each day, at which
Speaker 1: point he would get up, smoke some opium, and then
Speaker 1: his housekeeper would bring him an elaborate coffee service for
Speaker 1: him to make his own cafe a. He'd have a croissant,
Speaker 1: he would go through his mail, read his newspaper, have
Speaker 1: a second croissant, which, by the way, this is all orchestrated.
Speaker 1: At certain times his housekeeper knew to bring in the croissant,
Speaker 1: and it had to be from the same backery every day,
Speaker 1: and then and only then would he begin his process
Speaker 1: of writing in this sort of muffled womb like environment
Speaker 1: he had created for himself to actually finish the novel
Speaker 1: Remembrance of things past. Wow, Well, that's that's quite a
Speaker 1: quite a cocktail, quite quite a recipe. He created friend
Speaker 1: stelf there, both both chemically and environmentally, but I think
Speaker 1: all of us can relate to that on some level,
Speaker 1: because we've all had something we had to work on,
Speaker 1: whether or not was a piece of fiction or something
Speaker 1: for work or whatever, that's just required us to get
Speaker 1: that sort of balance in our environment. And here's a
Speaker 1: bit from Alan Lightman writing for The New Yorker about attention.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, the eyes alone convey more than a
Speaker 1: hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears
Speaker 1: receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the fragments
Speaker 1: of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron
Speaker 1: to the next. Much of this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed,
Speaker 1: for us to function must have much of it has
Speaker 1: to be ignored, but clearly not all. How do our
Speaker 1: brains select the relevant data? Indeed, I mean to his
Speaker 1: to his point, we live in a just a chaotic
Speaker 1: storm of sensory information, but we've evolved to navigate it
Speaker 1: with relative ease, weeding out the useless information and focusing
Speaker 1: and on the crucial stuff. I mean to say nothing
Speaker 1: of of the storm within, also dealing with the with
Speaker 1: thoughts of past and future. We're able to ignore internal
Speaker 1: and external distractors, but we can also inhibit competing responses
Speaker 1: to situations in order to accomplish tasks. So yeah, the
Speaker 1: key here is that that we're not processing everything. As
Speaker 1: we've discussed in past episodes, is a great deal of
Speaker 1: sensory computation that occurs beneath cognition, were we don't even
Speaker 1: we're not even consciously aware that we're seeing this or
Speaker 1: hearing that, because we're rooting it out. I think we've
Speaker 1: talked before about the scenario of being at a party
Speaker 1: and being able to focus in on the conversation you're having,
Speaker 1: or tuning out of that conversation and listening to the
Speaker 1: one next to you while also ignoring all the other sounds. Um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the sensory data that enters our
Speaker 1: sensory system remains untouched. I mean, it basically goes one end.
Speaker 1: It basically goes in one ear and out the other
Speaker 1: as the saying goes. Typically, a neuron in the brain
Speaker 1: receives hundreds or even thousands of different inputs along its
Speaker 1: den rights, and yet it sends just one message out
Speaker 1: to the next neural area. So scientists continue to study
Speaker 1: attention to distract, and in this podcast episode, we're looking
Speaker 1: at a couple of more recent studies that look at
Speaker 1: both attention and willful inattention. Uh, and how we roll
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, And when we look at these studies,
Speaker 1: keep in mind that's kind of metaphor when you think
Speaker 1: about all that stimuli and the attention that you need. Um,
Speaker 1: think about a chorus. All right, You have one specific
Speaker 1: part of the brain, the interial front or cortex, that's
Speaker 1: like the conductor, and he or she is muting one
Speaker 1: section of voices while queuing another section to raise its
Speaker 1: voice over the others until there's something that feels like cognition. Right,
Speaker 1: this one cohesive symphony of neurons, even though there's still
Speaker 1: the murmuring or murmurings of these random neurons underneath it.
Speaker 1: So that's that's this kind of symphony of cognition that
Speaker 1: we're going to explore today. Now, we'll often find ourself
Speaker 1: in in that situation where you're torn, Betwen, paying attention
Speaker 1: to two different things. It might be your math homework
Speaker 1: versus a TV. It might be the book you're reading
Speaker 1: versus on the beach versus the person playing volleyball on
Speaker 1: the beach, or the motion on the beach. Um you
Speaker 1: want to focus on one thing, but to focus on
Speaker 1: one thing is to ignore the other. How does it
Speaker 1: work well when your face with these two different bits
Speaker 1: of stimuli, It triggers a conflict circuit in the brain's
Speaker 1: dorsal anterior singulate cortex or deck, part of a larger
Speaker 1: brain structure, the anterior cicular cortex that controls rational thought
Speaker 1: and emotions. Uh, that's the inner workings of what's going on.
Speaker 1: But we can also tell a lot from the outside, uh,
Speaker 1: particularly looking at the eyes. In recent years, researchers have
Speaker 1: gained even more appreciation for the importance of eye movements
Speaker 1: pupil size when it comes to trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what the brain is focusing on, how much it's focusing on,
Speaker 1: how much computation power is being leveled at a particular task.
Speaker 1: And in order to examine this conflict right when you're
Speaker 1: trying to attend to attend to one thing but you're
Speaker 1: distructed by another thing. Juke University actually had a study
Speaker 1: in which Michael Platt and his team of researchers implanted
Speaker 1: sensors into the decks of rhesis macaques. And again, the
Speaker 1: deck is the dorsal anterior singulate cortex. Now the best
Speaker 1: way to create conflict in the deck of monkeys is
Speaker 1: to introduce too things that they really love and then
Speaker 1: just kind of square them off. So in this case,
Speaker 1: we're talking about juice, one thing they love, and other monkeys.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm the same way, like juice and monkeys.
Speaker 1: Like really, it's a toss up. It's not juice and humans,
Speaker 1: it's juice and monkeys exactly like, show me a monkey,
Speaker 1: show me a juice box. I don't know which one
Speaker 1: I want to pay attention. All right, Well, if we
Speaker 1: were to implant a censer int your brain into this,
Speaker 1: it would be very interesting to see what the results
Speaker 1: would be. Because the researchers took the two things that
Speaker 1: they love. They offered a juice reward if the monkey
Speaker 1: could keep their eyes trained on a visual target on
Speaker 1: a screen. But then they took the other thing that
Speaker 1: they loved, other monkeys, and they flashed images of them
Speaker 1: on the periphery of the screen. So what was even
Speaker 1: more distracting is that some of the monkey faces that
Speaker 1: they flashed on the screen exhibited specific emotions like terror,
Speaker 1: which would be really hard for another monkey to ignore,
Speaker 1: infect another human to ignore. Right, Yeah, basic social signal
Speaker 1: something terrifying is happening. I should pay attention to what
Speaker 1: that monkey is doing. Right, And again, they had a
Speaker 1: juice reward here. If they could keep their eyes on
Speaker 1: the price, they would get the juice, but a lot
Speaker 1: of times they failed. Now the results here. The researchers
Speaker 1: discovered a set of neurons that were active only when
Speaker 1: monkeys were completing the task and trying to override those
Speaker 1: distracting monkey faces, but not when faced with either of
Speaker 1: the stimuli alone, just the juice box or just the
Speaker 1: monkey faces. And the more active the DAK neurons were,
Speaker 1: the better the monkeys were at tuning out the distracting
Speaker 1: faces in later trials, and the pupils seemed to change
Speaker 1: in size to compensate for how difficult the task was
Speaker 1: constricting when the faces were hard to ignore, such as
Speaker 1: those terrorized faces we were talking about, And the smaller
Speaker 1: they got the pupils, the better the monkeys performed in
Speaker 1: subsequent trial. So the key here is fight or flight.
Speaker 1: The fight or flight response causes the release of the
Speaker 1: stress hormone noor adrenaline, widening the pupils so as to
Speaker 1: take in more sensory information for the challenge at hand.
Speaker 1: I feel like we've talked about that in memory before.
Speaker 1: You know, those like really stressful situations, it may at
Speaker 1: least seem like you're taking in more sensory information well,
Speaker 1: especially in fear as well. So Key findings that DACK
Speaker 1: doesn't directly control pupils size, but it connects to other
Speaker 1: regions of the brain that do. The researchers think that
Speaker 1: DAC might play a role in keeping us calm in
Speaker 1: the face in face of the demands for our attention
Speaker 1: that might otherwise make us confused or stressed out. Now,
Speaker 1: in a follow up study in two thousand and thirteen,
Speaker 1: platfound that the cats performing the same I gaze task
Speaker 1: did a better job of concentrating if they had inhaled oxytocin,
Speaker 1: And the idea is that the hormone may have contributed
Speaker 1: to better task attention because of its calming effects and
Speaker 1: its role as a social bonding agent, Which makes you
Speaker 1: wonder if one day classrooms will have oxytocin piped in there.
Speaker 1: We're more likely this is just going to give us, uh,
Speaker 1: these studies are just going to give us better insight
Speaker 1: into how something like say driving while texting or even
Speaker 1: talking on the phone while we're driving means that we're
Speaker 1: seriously impairing the neuronal symphony that's been set forth by
Speaker 1: the brain right to try to get us where we're going. UM.
Speaker 1: These studies could also give us insight into attention deficit
Speaker 1: hyperactivities disorder a d h D as well. And I
Speaker 1: do love that term optimal inattention because it really it
Speaker 1: really makes you think twice about any kind of task
Speaker 1: you're doing, about what you're focusing on, but also what
Speaker 1: you're shutting out. That the the optimal inattention level that
Speaker 1: you're reaching in order to get things done. It's just
Speaker 1: something that I want to put on my next assessment
Speaker 1: I was demonstrating optimal inattention. Well, there's a two thousand,
Speaker 1: fifteen study from Brown University that that really digs into
Speaker 1: this that UM neuroscientists they're scanned the brain waves of
Speaker 1: twelve volunteers while they were told that they would feel
Speaker 1: a brief tap either on the left middle finger or
Speaker 1: on their left big toe. Now, some were told to
Speaker 1: ignore stimuli on the foot and some were told to
Speaker 1: ignore stimuli on the hand. The researchers measured the power
Speaker 1: and timing of different brainwave frequencies in various brain regions.
Speaker 1: While this was going on, UH and a particular interest
Speaker 1: in the brain wave synchronization between the part of the
Speaker 1: somatosensory cortex that processes touch in the hand and the
Speaker 1: right inferior frontal cortex tied to suppression of attention and
Speaker 1: end action. Now, I wanted to mention that the researchers
Speaker 1: used magneto and cephalography to scan subjects. And this is
Speaker 1: significant because I'm like f M R I, which has
Speaker 1: a pretty decent delay when scanning the brain. MEG is
Speaker 1: more precise because it can really reveal the timing of
Speaker 1: neural activity down to the middleseconds, so you can see
Speaker 1: that neuronal symphony at play here. And the researchers anticipated
Speaker 1: that they would see a greater synchrony between the somatosensory cortex,
Speaker 1: that part of the brain again that processes touch, and
Speaker 1: the right inferioral frontal cortex, which is again governing suppression.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to control though right because I wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure that this right inferial frontal cortex was
Speaker 1: in fact governing, So they looked out at the frontal
Speaker 1: cortex to make sure there wasn't a lot of activity
Speaker 1: going on there, and they found indeed that there was not,
Speaker 1: that it was the r I f C that was
Speaker 1: tamping down their urges to become distracted, and they did
Speaker 1: indeed find that correlation of synchrony between the sematosensory cortex
Speaker 1: and the r I f C. Moreover, when volunteers were
Speaker 1: simply told what was about to happen just a fraction
Speaker 1: fraction of a second later, they saw the alpha wave
Speaker 1: synchrony increase between those two brain regions already gearing up
Speaker 1: to partner in this sort of shared process of stimuli
Speaker 1: and reporting. And researchers found a similar spike in synchrony
Speaker 1: when volunteers were about to report a sensation. This time though,
Speaker 1: it was beta wave synchrony between the somati sensory cortex
Speaker 1: and the r I f C, which is painting this
Speaker 1: picture of these two brain processes really trying to tether
Speaker 1: themselves together and create that willful ignoring. Now at this
Speaker 1: point you might be wondering, well, what are what are
Speaker 1: some of the possible applications of this, because you know,
Speaker 1: we've we've been talking about you know, taps on the
Speaker 1: hand and the foot ignoring slight sensory information like that UH.
Speaker 1: But one application here gets into possible UH use as
Speaker 1: a as a means of treating chronic pain. UM study
Speaker 1: co authors Stephanie Jones and Katherine Kerr are actually working
Speaker 1: with the Dr Breen Brent Dr Ben Greenberg, a professor
Speaker 1: of psychiatry and human behavior, to explore the possible use
Speaker 1: of non invasive transcranial altering current electrical stimulation or TAX,
Speaker 1: to take advantage of this willful and attention process. Now,
Speaker 1: TAX has previously been explored for possible applications tackling diseases
Speaker 1: where abnormal oscillatory patterns in the brain player roles, such
Speaker 1: as Parkinson's disease or schizophrenia, as well as in therapy
Speaker 1: for optic nerve injuries. In this case, however, Kieren Jones
Speaker 1: are curious as to whether TAX could be used to
Speaker 1: manipulate alpha and beta waves between parts of the brain
Speaker 1: such as the somount of sensory cortex and the right
Speaker 1: inferior frontal the right inferior frontal cortex to suppress attention
Speaker 1: to or even the detection of pain. So again that
Speaker 1: the possibilities here in the treatment of chronic pain especially
Speaker 1: are pretty significant well. And also pain is probably the
Speaker 1: most distracting thing that you could throw out their rights
Speaker 1: in some sort of environment your internal state um to
Speaker 1: try to tamp down. So what's interesting is that researchers
Speaker 1: also looked at pain through meditation. So if you want
Speaker 1: to test out how well meditation works and blocking pain, well,
Speaker 1: here's the study by wake Forest Baptist Medical Center which
Speaker 1: was published in the April six and eleven edition of
Speaker 1: the Journal of Neuroscience. And what they did is they
Speaker 1: recruited fifteen healthy volunteers who had never ever meditated before.
Speaker 1: They attended for twenty minute us is to learn a
Speaker 1: meditation technique known as focused attention. This is a kind
Speaker 1: of mindfulness in which people are taught to attend to
Speaker 1: the breath and then let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the meditation app that I use does
Speaker 1: this um to great effect. It really teaches you how
Speaker 1: to not force these thoughts away but let them just
Speaker 1: recede into the background. So they learned how to do this,
Speaker 1: and both before and after meditation training, their brain was examined.
Speaker 1: They used something called a s l m R I
Speaker 1: which actually captures longer duration brain processes than just regular
Speaker 1: f M R I. And during these scans, this is
Speaker 1: the great part, a pain inducing heat device was placed
Speaker 1: on the participant's right legs and this device heated in
Speaker 1: an area of their skin to one and twenty degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: a temperature that most people would find, you know, uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and even painful in just like a cigar, because that's
Speaker 1: what I know. Now, this was not like run by
Speaker 1: the mafia or anything. This experiment um and they endured
Speaker 1: this for over a five minute period. Now here are
Speaker 1: the cool findings. The scams taken after meditation training showed
Speaker 1: that every participant's pain rating was reduced, with decreases ranging
Speaker 1: from eleven to and moreover, activity in the smuto sensory cortex,
Speaker 1: which was processing the intensity of the heat, was really
Speaker 1: high when scans were taken before the participants underwent meditation
Speaker 1: training and while they were experiencing the heat. But when
Speaker 1: participants were meditating during the scans and having the heat
Speaker 1: applied to them, activity in this region, this pain processing
Speaker 1: processing region could not be detected at all. So Fidel Zaidon,
Speaker 1: who is a lead author of the study, wrote, we
Speaker 1: found a big effect about a four what do you
Speaker 1: percent reduction and pain intensity in a fifty seven percent
Speaker 1: reduction and pain unpleasantness. Now compare that to something like
Speaker 1: morphine or other pain relieving drugs, and they typically only
Speaker 1: reduced pain ratings by about And this is even more
Speaker 1: telling when you again realize that these are just normal
Speaker 1: people that were essentially given a crash course in meditation,
Speaker 1: not yogis, not Tibetan monks, just normal folks, right, not
Speaker 1: zen level. You know, I'm gonna endure this pain and
Speaker 1: suffering from my entire life, right, people who are just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll participate in this study. All right, it's okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna get in our time machine. And you are in
Speaker 1: serious need of some sort of isolation so that you
Speaker 1: can really concentrate. And uh, by the way, you're this
Speaker 1: guy who happens to be named Hugo Gernsback. You're an
Speaker 1: editor of Science and Invention magazine, and you're a pioneer
Speaker 1: and sci fi. What do you do when you need
Speaker 1: a little respite from the world and you need to concentrate, Well,
Speaker 1: you cook up a little sci fi essentially a space
Speaker 1: helmet to escape from the environment that you're working in,
Speaker 1: which I imagine is filled with cigarette smoke as well.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, because this is again so it's probably one
Speaker 1: of those When I was in newspapers, I would I
Speaker 1: would hear about old environments where someone would would have
Speaker 1: to say cigarette me while they were working on a story,
Speaker 1: you know, where someone comes up and actually just puts
Speaker 1: the cigarette in your mouth and lights it for you.
Speaker 1: So I think it's very much a cigarette me world
Speaker 1: that Hugo was the suffering through, that's right. And he
Speaker 1: didn't come up with a solution, which he called the isolator. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically just a big sort of Darth Vadery looking contraption,
Speaker 1: a big helmet that he would put over his head,
Speaker 1: uh soundproof headcage essentially with its own oxygenainst oxygen supply again,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to you're not distracted by all
Speaker 1: that cigaret at smoke or what have you that you're
Speaker 1: breathing in in your in your office. Yeah, it has
Speaker 1: just those two round eye holes in a sort of
Speaker 1: protruding mouth hohole area where the hose for the oxygen
Speaker 1: comes in. And it really is just an example of
Speaker 1: artful terror. Yeah, it kind of has a man in
Speaker 1: the iron mask look to it, or some sort of
Speaker 1: like face shackle that you would put on a suspected
Speaker 1: warlock in a medieval setting. But hey, I mean, you
Speaker 1: gotta do what you gotta do, and you need to
Speaker 1: get down to business. And the hugo Grim's back was
Speaker 1: just taking the reins there and if you want to
Speaker 1: see a picture of it, uh the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode, I'll make sure to include a link at
Speaker 1: the bottom. All Right, you know we've got a few
Speaker 1: minutes here. Let's call over the robot and get through
Speaker 1: a little listener mail. This is from Brian. He says, Hello,
Speaker 1: Julie and Robert. I'm seventeen years old and have been
Speaker 1: listening to your podcast since you guys were stuff from
Speaker 1: the Science Lab, which is a pretty long time. But
Speaker 1: I never bothered to write you, as I'm sure you
Speaker 1: have enough emails and junk to go through. I love
Speaker 1: the podcast and it inspired me to learn oodles. Is
Speaker 1: this a word of creativity? But one problem I have,
Speaker 1: and I hate to be a party pooper, is how
Speaker 1: you guys seem to be almost purposely avoiding the concept
Speaker 1: of race. While race should be unimportant in society. It
Speaker 1: no doubt has an effect on how we treat each
Speaker 1: other in modern day society. Plenty of topics you've done
Speaker 1: could have mentioned race, but I feel like you guys
Speaker 1: are just avoiding it. There's plenty of science, interesting science
Speaker 1: about race and discrimination that can be talked about in
Speaker 1: a completely objective way, the same way you talk about
Speaker 1: homosexuality or religion. There's no need to feel like you
Speaker 1: can't talk about the subject. People are just different colors
Speaker 1: and there's nothing to feel awkward about. But I still
Speaker 1: love the podcast and really enjoy Roberts really obscure metaphors.
Speaker 1: My two favorite are sharks being like movie producers and
Speaker 1: mortality being like the bubble scene from Charlie in the
Speaker 1: Chocolate Factory. Yes, I'm not sure how to end an
Speaker 1: e mail. I haven't sent an email in years. I'm
Speaker 1: going to assume to end it like a letter. Brian,
Speaker 1: your oldest fan who still happens to be very young.
Speaker 1: Uh so, Brian, besides being one of our youngest and
Speaker 1: most precocious fans, by the way, he's planning on studying
Speaker 1: neuroscience in college. He is an excellent observer. We have
Speaker 1: not covered race in earnest. Though it's not intentional by
Speaker 1: any means. We've lit on it a few times with
Speaker 1: studies that have come up from time to time. But
Speaker 1: you know that's not enough. So we will be recording
Speaker 1: a podcast called The Gordian Knot of Race that will
Speaker 1: deal with this erroneous line of logic, like Sino color,
Speaker 1: this idea that sometimes can gloss over the more deep
Speaker 1: seated issues that exist today. And we'll discuss how the
Speaker 1: unconscious and the conscious uh play out in terms of
Speaker 1: racial biases that shape socio economics. And we'll also see
Speaker 1: how that can lead to something called the school to
Speaker 1: prison pipeline. Yeah, and if I remember correctly, we did
Speaker 1: go We discussed in the seven S of Memory Um
Speaker 1: episode how false memories work. We discussed a little about
Speaker 1: racial bias in terms of how we remember things. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, I'm looking forward to diving into it in earnest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so thank you Brian for writing that. That was really
Speaker 1: helpful and great to hear from you. All Right, this
Speaker 1: one comes to us from Rico. Rico says, Hi, guys,
Speaker 1: been listening to the podcast for a while now, and
Speaker 1: no matter the topic, I have been thoroughly enthralled until
Speaker 1: the recent episode about babies. It wasn't the thought of
Speaker 1: both of you eating a small child that might have
Speaker 1: been better. It was the constant and repetitive reference to
Speaker 1: babies and their features. They gave me a physical feeling
Speaker 1: of nausea and disgust. I don't know why it affected
Speaker 1: me in a way that the triple phobia episode never did.
Speaker 1: This is not a complaint, just an amusing anecdote. Further,
Speaker 1: I have a UV tattoo. A few points. Number one,
Speaker 1: finding an artist who is willing to tattoo you in
Speaker 1: UV inc has been difficult, even here in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: Number two, tattooing the UV inc is difficult. It has
Speaker 1: a run any texture that my artists suggested was quote
Speaker 1: akin to tattooing someone with lemonade. Number three, the UV
Speaker 1: property of the ink fades. I have the clear UV
Speaker 1: ink and after a short time it will no longer glow.
Speaker 1: And number four, because of the above, I have gotten
Speaker 1: the tattoo redone a few times, and now the appearance
Speaker 1: is closer to scarification appreciations Rico so that, Indeed, it's
Speaker 1: always interesting to hear about people's responses to outright disturbing
Speaker 1: content or um unexpectedly deserving content and really great to
Speaker 1: hear some uh, some actual firsthand experience on uvy tattoos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we certain certainly didn't mean to, uh to scare
Speaker 1: you away there with our descriptions of juicy babies. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, each of us has a tender spot
Speaker 1: and you never know how or when it's going to
Speaker 1: be revealed. Alright. Our last bit of listener mail here
Speaker 1: comes from Jason says, Hi, I'm Jason. I just listen
Speaker 1: to your podcast about the weight of the soul. I've
Speaker 1: always on subjects like this interesting because I happened to
Speaker 1: work in the health care field, specifically respiratory therapy. I
Speaker 1: have currently worked in a major I currently work in
Speaker 1: a major hospital, and I'm constantly exposed to the dead, dying,
Speaker 1: the very ill. My job is literally to improve the
Speaker 1: breathing of or breath for my patients. Early on in
Speaker 1: my career, I noticed that I could tell whether a
Speaker 1: person was alive or dead by looking at their eyes.
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure where this phrase came from, but
Speaker 1: the eyes of the window into the soul. I believe
Speaker 1: that is how it goes, and it feels like a
Speaker 1: very literal translation. On one hand, when we look in
Speaker 1: to each other's eyes, we see a life force that
Speaker 1: I still have no words to describe. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: I never see any activity, just emptiness. Their eyes always
Speaker 1: changed right before the code occurs. Example, a patient of
Speaker 1: mine was having issues breathing. He was un a ventilator
Speaker 1: with the trichyostomy and had been getting a continually anxious
Speaker 1: over the last hour or so. I had been in
Speaker 1: and out of his room that night, doing various things
Speaker 1: to attempt to help him calm down. Although his vital
Speaker 1: signs were fairly stable and his oxygenation status looked perfect,
Speaker 1: I was still concerned. While waiting in his room, I
Speaker 1: started to notice and acute change in his appearance and
Speaker 1: told one of the nurses to get a doctor. As
Speaker 1: soon as the words came out of my mouth, I
Speaker 1: looked into his eyes, saw them glaze over, lose their light, energy,
Speaker 1: life force, focus, and he was gone. When I say
Speaker 1: go dark, I always feel that there is a light
Speaker 1: in those eyes that goes away, such as a candle
Speaker 1: being blown out. This was one of those cases where
Speaker 1: at the moment of death, you could see his eyes
Speaker 1: go dark while still talking to him. It's at this
Speaker 1: point that I should mention that I've seen this light, energy, focus,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, come back into someone's eyes.
Speaker 1: This is usually This usually occurs in patients with injuries
Speaker 1: or illnesses that are serious enough to kill someone, but
Speaker 1: can also be fixed if they if they do die.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly hard to explain, but watching someone's eyes, you
Speaker 1: can see them go from empty and glazed over to
Speaker 1: lit up and active. I can't explain this phenomenon, but
Speaker 1: I know this is something that not everyone talks about
Speaker 1: or even notices, not that I know of. I thought
Speaker 1: you might find this interesting, so I figured I would share.
Speaker 1: If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Well. Indeed,
Speaker 1: thank you for sharing that that firsthand account indeed of
Speaker 1: of something that most of us never get to witness.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're so far removed from from death in
Speaker 1: our culture that that's certainly the moment of death is
Speaker 1: often lost to us. Indeed, at Harkenspect when we were
Speaker 1: talking about end of life robots, at one point there
Speaker 1: was an artist who was creating a bit of AI
Speaker 1: to help people at the end of their lives, and
Speaker 1: we were debating about the really the necessity and the
Speaker 1: helpfulness of that when pales in comparison to having that
Speaker 1: human connection and the other person with you. Indeed, so, Jason,
Speaker 1: thanks again for sharing. Thanks to the others as well,
Speaker 1: and Hey, in the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's where
Speaker 1: you'll find all of our podcast episodes. That's where you'll
Speaker 1: find all of our videos, our blog post as most
Speaker 1: links out to social media accounts, and you can send
Speaker 1: us your thoughts on this and any other podcast by
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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com.