Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday time for the Vault. This episode originally aired December eight. It was part one of our series about spinning around in circles. Yeah, these were a lot of fun. We get into sort of the you know, what happens in the body when you spin around in circles? So what happens in the mind, or what can happen in the mind, What kind of practices do we have to deal with these changes? And then also what kind of cultural traditions are there? All right, let's spiral out. Welcome just about to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about spinning around in circles. That's right, This is this is probably gonna be a two partter. Sometimes we figured this out as we go, but I believe this will be a part one in a part two, and we're gonna be We're gonna be looking at at humans spinning around in circles from several different vantage points. So you know what is it doing? Uh at a at a biological level, Uh, you know a psychological level. Um, how does it factor into various traditions and games, etcetera. Um, this is what I'm pretty excited to do. And the genesis for this one was a listener email who wrote in about about spinning uh in um in ballet and we were we we had a brief back and forth in a listener mail of where we talked about then we're like, yeah, we should totally do an episode. So here we are. But to start off, I want to I want to start off somewhere where at least my mind went to, if not first, then maybe second or third. And that is the world of of of fantasy. Combat has found in science fiction and fantasy films, but also especially in video games. Because when I think of people spinning, uh, I have to say, I instantly think of im Bison from Street Fighter doing his Psycho Crusher attack. Do you remember this one, Joe? I didn't know what was called the psycho Crusher, but I remember m Bison. So if you ever played Street Fighter, he's like the big guy in the hat. He's like the final Boss or something. Isn't he. Yeah, yeah, or he tends to be. I think sometimes they you know, later in incarnations they introduce new bosses, but he's he's the boss. He's this boss of street fighter. Yeah. And I think he's supposed to be some kind of dictator or something. He's dressed up in in I don't know, off brand military regalia. He's wearing like a like a captain's hat that's read in some kind of uniform. But he's also got the magic powers, and so he can attack you by flying at you kind of like the raid in like horizontal dive towards you. But he's spinning around in circles, yeah, isn't And he's flaming of course. And also it's it's a cool attack. Um. And you'll see various versions of that particular attack in various games. But there's also the version that you see in the Mortal Kombat games as his character Nam Kong Lao he's the guy with the razor blade hat uh. And you also see something similar with Baraka. But but they both have attacks in some of the games where they spin around like a top and either either it's offensive like they're they're spinning like a top and coming towards you with their blades or they're spinning like a top Kung Mile does this where he he's deflecting you, like so if you jump at him, he starts spinning and then bam, your injury. Well, it's very much child brain self defense logic, where you think, like if I spin my arms around in circles, nobody could come anywhere near me, right right, It's like that Simpsons been I'm gonna move my arms like this, I'm gonna move my feet like this, and if you get in the way, you're gonna get hit. Uh. I think there's also a Loony Tunes Tasmanian Devil vibe to a certainly the the the Kung Lal style attack, you know, where you're just spinning in one spot and you're just spinning so fast that you become a little tornado. Right, So there's at least an intuition people have that, you know, you could really do some damage to somebody by spinning at them in one way or another. Yeah, I have to say in Star Wars, Darth City is busts out a cool psycho crusher style. I'm not sure if it's actually an attack, but more of like an advance, like a way to quickly get at your opponents. But he uses this in both the Revenge of the Sith and the Clone Wars series. Oh okay, you know, I gotta say, I I hate I know you're more of a fan of the prequels than I am, and I'm not trying to start a fight, but I gotta say one of my least favorite things about the prequels is there's just way too much spinning in the lightsaber battles, and the prequels way too much like jumping and flipping around the the lightsaber battles become less dramatic and more frantic. I like the lightsaber battle in the Empire Strikes Back, you know that that's got like classic sword fight drama. The ones where like Yoda is just doing like fourteen somersaults in the air and these three sixty jumps and and they're they're doing the Psycho crusher and twirling around like a screw. I don't know it kind of it kind of takes me out of the Star Wars mindset. Well, Yoda shortened statue, I mean, he's gotta he's gotta do those flips in order to combat a tower opponent. Um. I see what you're saying. But I do think that the City of Spin works really well because it's like it comes out of nowhere, and then he instantly uses more traditional attacks to to kill like three different Jedi masters. So it seems it seems to work well for him. You can't argue with success, Joe. I correct there. And also I admit my ignorance because when you shared this clip from the movie, I thought for a second it was Christopher Lee, and I was like, oh, Christopher Lee, okay, but it shows what I know. Well. It does raise the question, though, do we see that many full spins in actual combat, because I suppose even with something like a spin kick, you have to be careful, right, like you don't want to throw off your your own balance or present your back to your opponent. Um. Without even getting into the magical effects that are often associated with these attacks and movies and video games. UM. Now, I have to say, I'm not a real fight officionado. I'm not like in the M M A or boxing ing or you know any any of these. I tend to like my my combat fictional and worked. Um, and and in those contacts, I love a good spinning kick. I love a nice roaring elbow in Japanese pro wrestling. Um. But but I was initially unsure, like does it make sense to spin or is that just a risky flourish. Well, it's funny. I remember asking this myself from the first person perspective, because when I was a kid, I took I'm doing air quotes here, tae kwond I guess I took whatever like severely watered down version of this martial art was being taught to young children in Tennessee in the ninety nineties. You know, it's like, uh, I'm not sure what exactly I was learning, but I took taekwondo classes, and I remember thinking, even then as a child, having questions about the practicality of the spinning kick moves, because there would be a type of kick you do where you would turn around, you turn all the way around and perform a kick, And I was like, why couldn't you just kick without turning? Does this do some kind of advantage? Would this ever be applicable in a real self defense situation? Uh? Like, even as a kid, I remember having the thought, this feels more like a dance move than a useful fighting technique, which I think is kind of applicable because at least the way I learned taekwondo, it was in many ways indistinguishable from a dance class, like you were learning routines, like patterns of movement that were you know, they were exercise. It was aerobic exercise, and it was I guess supposed to look good, look cool from the outside. I don't know, well, I mean, there is a lot of crossover between dance and exercise and martial art. Uh you find you can find these these intermingled uh to to a large extent. And I guess also there's the psychological aspect to fight too, right, something might be more about confusing an opponent. So I wasn't just wasn't trre on this either, but I did a quick glance around on YouTube to say, okay, are legit n n A fights um ending with beIN kicks, and I did find this this amazing clip from I think earlier in the summer and apparently went viral. So if you're at all in an m m A out there, I'm sure you've seen this, but it's uh. Hakeen Buckley is the m m A fighter and he busts out this spin kick, uh in the middle of this match, and it's just a complete knockout. I'm usually not one to find a lot of joy in um in clips of like legitimate knockout blows, but this one was pretty impressive. I always fun they make me. They look kind of sickening, like watching somebody's head snap back and then they fall to the ground. It's like, yeah, this one is a bit sickening, So don't don't don't look at it, look for it unless you you want to see this sort of action. But it did answer my question, like, well, that's a spin kick. He certainly did a complete spin on that and just knocked a guy out, so um so, so that initially answered my question. And I started looking around a little bit more on that, and I found an interesting post about taekwondo spinning kicks at turtle press dot com by sang h Kim and the author points out that this apparently what spin kicks weren't a were not a viable tactic in taekwondo until the nineteen eighties uh and and the author explains that this is due to advances in footwork and changes in fighting stance preferences that made it more of a viable option. Also, less restrictive protective gear made it more of an option, as did sort of a broadening of style to include different weight classes and sort of added creativity to the style. So I found that interesting. Okay, well, I'll have to take their word for it on that one. I cannot claim to have thoughts on this. Well, I'd be interested to hear what any and martial arts practitioners out there listening to this episode have to say. Certainly right in and let us know, you know, within your style or within you know, martial arts in general. So one of the things that gets going in my brain when I think about spinning is that, uh and and I'll have an example to talk about a little bit later on. Spinning around in circles as an adult is not fun, and in fact it's it's not fun for like significant periods of time after you're done doing it. But I remember as a child I loved spinning around in circles and I would just like do it. I'd just be out in the yard and be like, yea, I'm gonna spin around until I fall over. This is great. Yeah, I think a lot of adults, and if not, most adults can can can relate to this. Yeah, because you think back on the fun, spinny things you did as a kid, like remember Mary go out rounds. They still have these occasionally at playgrounds, but it was a standard playgrounds when when we were kids, and it would just be kids just getting this thing going to as fast as possible, just incredible speeds and just write it. We had this. There was a playground near my grandmother's house that had the spinning aluminum death machine that I think they originally I think they eventually had to take out because it was just injury city. Every time children got on it, they'd end up having to go to the hospital. And I loved this thing because you could spin it so fast, uh like it was it was human powered, you know. It was one of those where you push it, you'd get it going like Conan the Barbarian pushing the mill wheel. But then you build up a lot of speed and then you just grab hold and hang on. I can't imagine what kind of horrific injuries came off of this thing, but but it was great when I was a kid. And now now that sounds like torture to me. I mean the idea of spinning around like I did as a child for fun. Now that sounds about as appealing as a kick to the groy and it's just like, why would you want to do that? Also, add that the remember the playground mary uh, spinning things, the merrygrounds and whatnot. They would often have that, you know, the foot trail beat into the dirt around it, which of course would become just a complete circular mud pit after a rain, right exactly. Another big one is is, of course, when you're a kid rolling down a hill, like you know where you you lay down and then you just roll down the hill like I remember that being a lot of fun, and I remember, you know, I encouraged that with with my own son at a hill near our our house in a park. But as an adult you're like, oh my goodness, there's a there's a weird rock here, there's some sort of a pipe here, all right, here's a fire ant nest, here's another fire ant nest. And that's not even getting into the fact that, yeah, as an adult, the idea of spinning that much, you would just you'd never get up once you got to the bottom of the hill. Yeah, And I think these, uh, these changes in experience are not unique to us. It seems like there's something going on where like spinning, spinning is highly attractive to children then and it loses its luster as the body ages. Yeah, so let's let's start with the kids. Why did the kids love to spin? Well? I was looking around the for information on this, and I found a wonderful post on this at the pin State Extensions Better Kid Care page, and they point out that spinning, rolling, and swinging are crucial sensory and motor skill inputs to help children's nervous systems mature and organize. So they really need these sorts of big body movements in ways they really make our tendency to isolate them in deaths or in front of teleschool computers and so forth, you know, more than a bit ridiculous. I think maybe there's less of that now. I I know that education has has has evolved somewhat, and they understand the need for big body movements and and and so forth. And then they understood it to a certain extent when I was a kid. You know, you would still have p and whatnot. But yeah, kids need to spin around. You you know, when a child spins in circles, it's because their body craves it. And the same goes for rolling around on the floor, standing on their heads rhythmically swaying. Uh. So they need a space to do these things. I mean it seems in a way it's information gathering. You're you're you're calibrating the system, like you have to do with your phone. When the gyroscope or whatever gets you know, out of whack, you've got to do some exercises to get it back on track. Yeah. So in this extension article, the Penn State Extension article that they point out there are some very specific ways that spinning helps children. So, first of all, it gives them a sense of body awareness, establishing their center for improved coordinated movement, a cross both sides of their bodies. Uh. It also improves shore sure footedness, which is something that might seem counterintuitive sometimes you think, oh, this kid's just spinning around in circles. You know, they're falling all over the place, they're gonna run into things. But it's actually helping them become more short surefooted. Uh. It has also been shown to improve concentration in the classroom, and they point out that a two thousand five study from Choir, Frick and Frick, two different fricks UH found that the centrifugal force of many spinning activities and experiences activate the fluid filled cavities in the inner ear. And these are sensors that help the brain orient the head quote which develops grounding and sustaining attention to task. And then overall it's a boost to the vestibular system, which controls balance, posture, gaze stabilization, and spatial orientation. And and there's also apparently a link to impulse control. Fun fact, right after I finished researching this section, I went off to get some coffee and was immediately attack by my son with imaginary lightsabers. And oh yeah, yeah, he has he has a pair that he he he really likes a sookatano and she has two, uh two lightsabers, so he's made two of them out of uh tinfoil um cardboard tubes and uh So, anyway, he was attacking me, and I observed quite a bit of spinning in his attacks, and I tried to do one spin and I nearly fell down, uh and then he cut my head off. But but but I I looked around and I've noticed that that there are actually lightsaber exercise classes for kids out there that they can do like virtually, and I'm tempted to sign him up for one, especially after learning more about the importance of spinning around in circles. That's genius. I would have done that as a kid. You have exercise, get that energy out. You just pretend to have a lightsaber. How has nobody thought of this before? Yeah, yeah, that's brilliant. I mean my my only hesitation is, uh, is, what what is it going to mean for the lamps and the televisions in your house? You gotta have a good space for that, I imagine. So let's come back to the adults. For for most of us, why does spinning around in circles make us dizzy? Why when a yoga instructor on a yoga video asked me to spin around just like three or five times, why did I have to lay down for like ten minutes after that? Yeah? This is funny because this is a question that I expected to have just a single, totally straightforward physiological answer, and instead I found a strange variety of answers to this question without a lot of acknowledgement that that there was variety in the ways people are answering this, so I'm not sure if I've stumbled on something that's actually controversial or different uh different sources, or just emphasizing different aspects of vertigo induced by spinning. But in any case, the answer to this question definitely ended up taking a shape that I wouldn't expect. But before we get to the direct answer of like why spinning in circles makes you dizzy? I think we have to meet a fascinating and important element in this discussion. When you just mentioned a mintigo, which is the human vestibular system. Uh so interesting. Fact number one. We've talked about this on the show many times before, but maybe you're new the show. Humans actually have way more than five senses. I think it's funny when when people end up talking about the five senses. I guess you could maybe call them the big five senses. They're the most obvious as senses, you know, site, hearing, taste, smell, touch, But we have other ways of getting information from the outside world and coordinating that within the brain. And one of my favorite examples of a lesser known but extremely important sense distinct from the big five is appropriate reception. It's the sense that informs you where the different parts of your body are. So, how is it that you can type without looking at the keys? How is it that you can close your eyes and you still know where your hands are, You know whether they're at your sides or over your head, even if you're blindfolded. We have a sense that's constantly updating the brain with information about the position and orientation of the rest of the body. Yeah, that's one that I can't help but feel that it's it's so invisible to us because it is so constant, it's not as easily disruptible, you know, in the sense that we can close our eyes, we can sort of stopper our ears and so forth. But but in terms of turning off appropriate reception, UM, not so easily done. And then also it's just so it's so close to us. It's you know, this is very much you can't see the forest for the trees situation. Yeah, uh yeah, that is very interesting. That's harder to turn that one off than it is some of the other senses. But in a way, I feel like that's part of the um. When people go for sort of like a sense deprivation or certain types of meditation that are that try to ignore sensory stimuli or just focus on one particular sensory stimuli. I think one of the difficult things is ignoring that feeling of where your body is, and that I think that's one of the important reasons why meditation often requires you to be in a position of rest, because it's easier to ignore the position of your body if you're not really doing anything active with your body. Yeah. Yeah, and definitely it's the case with float tanks where if it's calibrated correctly, you're you're floating in water that's about the same temperature as your own body. And yeah, it's it's about sort of losing a sense of of your physical self. Yeah, thank But they're all kinds of senses, some some bleed more easily into others, or you can make the argument that they do, like you can make arguments that they're different types of touch sensations, you know, feeling of tactile pressure versus feeling of heat. You know, you can talk about that. Another interesting one is chronoception, the sensation of the passing of time and judgment of duration. That actually is a sense of the external world, and there are types of nervous system conditions that can affect your chronoception. In fact, not just conditions as in diseases, but chronoception changes as you age, for example. But here's where things get even weirder. The ear is not only responsible for the sense of hearing. There are other senses that are located within the ear. Organs in the human inner ear are also responsible for one major component of equilibrioception, or the sense of balance, and these organs together in the inner ear, are known as the vestibular system. If you get a chance, you should look up an illustration of the human vestibular system. It is like a chambered nautilus or an alien squid snail. It's got one section which curls, and this is less related to the equilibrioception. That's the cochlea, the swirling snail shell part. But then coming out of the head of the swirling snail shell of the cochlea, there are these strange tentacle things, these three looping canals, each one like a semicircular tube snaking back on itself. And then you've also got these two tiny organs below the position down below the bases of these three semicircular canals. These two tiny organs are known as the utricle and the saccule, and together the utricle and the saccule are what's known as the odo lith organs, which literally means ear stones or ear rocks uh. Also in the realm of cool names. This whole complex of organs here is known as the labyrinth or the vestibular labyrinth, the bony labyrinth. You have one labyrinth in each ear. Now, if you go back to these hammer loop snake tentacles, the three semicircular canals, which each sort of loop in a different orientation, these things are hollow, partially filled with fluid, fluid and gel uh the gel known as cupula and the fluid known as indo lymph. And they include interior spaces with these little hair cells, these little follicles that are sensitive and connected to nerve tissue that runs out to the rest of the brain. So when you move your head, so you turn your head to the right or the left, or you tilt your head from side to side, or you tilt your head forward or back. Inside these loops, the fluid moves around in the canals in the inner spaces and it comes into contact with the different hair cells, and the hair cells since the movement of this fluid, and this can give you information about the orientation of your head. And the hair cells are connected to the brain via a nerve fiber called the vestibular nerve, and then the brain interprets the stimulation data from those hair cells into sense information about the orientation of the head. And the main part of the brain involved in processing coordinating information about balance and movement is the cerebellum, which, if you've seen an illustration of the brain, is that little meaty lump position on the rear underside of the brain is kind of the brains, but it's sort of right at the top of the spinal column. So everybody feel your brain and and and you'll you'll feel it. Get your get your hand right in there. Now. About these canals in the labyrinth, one thing that I think is really cool is that, Okay, so there's one canal that is devoted to sensing the tilting of the head forward or backward. There is another canal that's devoted to sensing the turning of the head from side to side, and then there's another that is dedicated to sensing the tilting of the head toward each shoulder. And so what you can realize is that these three canals represent the three different dimensions of space. So if I'm understanding correctly, I think I am. These three canals also correspond to the three attitude variables of aircraft and submarines, which are role, pitch, and yaw. So what mammal heads and B fifty twos have in common is that they live in three dimensional space. And if you're going to adjust movements through three dimensional space, and since uh all the different ways that you can change your attitude or change the vector along which you're moving, then you need a sensor for one of each of these three dimensions. Interesting, Rob, I know you're a big fan of of airplanes. Do do you ever think about your body in terms of role, pitch and y'all? Uh No, you know, I don't think I have, though, it's it's certainly now that you may bring it up here. It's it's making me think back to like flight simulator games, you know, where you you definitely have visual displays of role, pitch and y'all, But we don't think about that in terms of our own personal experience of physical reality. I mean, we are babies of the three D space, so it governs man and machine alike. Now, earlier I also mentioned these otolith organs. They also have sensitive hair cells, but the sensitive hair cells here are arrayed with strange mineral formations made out of calcium carbonate again, hence otolith the name ear stones or ear rocks, and calcium carbonate is the same compound that makes up the bulk of the shells of sea creatures and pearls, but also chalk. It's a very widespread, widely found mineral. Uh. It's used in tons of human technology. It's used in for example, agricultural lime, uh to make chalk for a blackboard, all kinds of things. But I also found one totally off topic connection that I couldn't bear not to mention, and that is that there's one common stable crystal form of calcium carbonate known as calcite, and there is one very strange and beautiful form of calcite known as iceland spar, which is a transparent rock. It's a mineral that is clear like ice or like slightly you know, uh, slightly jacked up glass. And it's been speculated that this transparent crystal Iceland. Spar was actually the historical reference point for an object that is recorded in medieval histories known as the sunstone, and their references to this in medieval Norse texts. I think we're talking about Iceland because this crystal can be used to detect the direction of the sun when you're sailing in the Arctic and the sun is totally obscured by clouds, so you're out, it's a gray day. You can't see where the sun is at all, but you need to know where the sun is in order to navigate your boat. You can apparently use a chunk of this transparent crystal to find the location of the sun by by the crystal's effect on the polarized light coming from the sun through the clouds. Oh fascinating, Yeah, because I think we've all been saying out on the beach perhaps on one of these days where it's overcast, you know the sun's up there, but you're not exactly sure what position it's in. Yeah. So calcium carbonate itself is just a very versatile and mini splendored mineral uh on on its own. In fact, it's the subject of a of a great classic talk in science, the talk about a piece of chalk that was given by by T. H. Huxley. But but I also included a picture for you to look at here, rob, which is a scanning electron micrograph that I found of calcium carbonate crystals from the from the utricle of a cat. And so it's showing these tiny crystals. Each one is microscopically small, but yeah, they these rocks. Basically, these crystals play a role in the physiology and function of the inner ear. Now, what these odo lith organs do that's different from the semicircular canals is that the odoliths detect vectors of acceleration horizontal and vertical. And so this is why you can feel whether you are going up or down in an elevator even though you can't see out of it. So in an elevator, you're not changing the orientation of your head. You know, you're not bending it forward or whatever. The head is staying fixed relative to to gravity basically, but you are moving, You're going up and down, and so the saccula in there can detect that. So we're left with this really strange fact inside your ears you have tiny organs lined with crystals of the material that makes oyster shells and pearls, and they detect which directions you're accelerating in even if you can't see, which I thought was just a beautiful connection. The crystalline new a genus of the inner ear. Oh, that'd be great. I've never heard of that one. And people who like give their friends crystals for like certain healing powers or something. What are the crystals of the human inner ear do if you like slay your enemies and take the crystals out of their ears. Oh, man, that would be a great Uh. That would be a great function of some sort of like alien invasion story where the alien has to feed on on on these crystals, you know. I was also I didn't get super deep into this because it's kind of a tangent, But I was also just looking at studies indicating the many faces of of a healthy odo lith and what it does for the body. For example, one study I was looking at mission the possibility that auto liths are possibly important for the formation of spatial memories, and that the degradation of the effectiveness of the odo lith oysters may account for the decline of spatial memory with age. So as you get older and the oyster shells in your ears, the odo liths become a little bit less good at what they do, and this actually could be related to people being less accurate at forming spatial memories as they get older. Interesting, Yeah, because there's certainly there's the brain itself, but the brain has to make use of sensory information. Yeah, and this ties into stuff we've talked about before in how um. In some ways the brain remembers spaces by simulating movement but through them. But the vestibular system is also, it should be mentioned, a team player. So these canals and the odoliths, they don't have much use alone, but rather they coordinate information in the brain with other sensory systems, such as the visual system appropriate receptive faculties to form a comprehensive movement detection and feedback and adjustment system. And there's all kinds of stuff that has to happen like uh, For example, your visual system adjusts itself to account for changes in the movement and orientation of your body that are sensed by the vestibular system, and so the eyes can see your orientation with respect to the environment. The vestibular system, since it is the head's orientation, movement with respect to gravity and to inertia. The appropriate receptive system feels where the rest of the body is in relation to the head. These systems, I'll kind of have to work together to to give you a picture of here's where your body is and how it's moving. And so when we come back to the question of dizziness and vertigo, uh, I guess that's addressing what happens when these systems get out of synchronization with each other, or when one of the systems begins to fail or have problems. And so to ask the question like what is dizziness, that's also kind of an interesting question because there are a range of different sensations that people call dizziness that they're all kind of associated with one another. So, for example, I was reading a paper called Dizziness and Vertigo Syndromes Viewed with a Historical Eye by Dorin Hoopert and Thomas Brandt in the Journal of Neurology published in and they cite a definition of dizziness and vertigo from the International Barani Society of neuro Autology, and they say, quote, vertigo is the sensation of self motion when no self motion is occurring dizziness is the sensation of disturbed or impaired spatial orientation without a false or distorted sense of motion. And imbalance or unsteadiness is the feeling of being unstable while sitting, standing, or walking without a particular directional preference. But I gotta say so, so that may be applied at the clinical level or in the in the literature, but it's clear that when people talk about dizziness, a lot of times what they're talking about here is vertigo. Right, It is the sense that you are spinning or moving when you're not. And though a lot of sources I was reading said the sense that you're moving when you're not, to be pedantic, I think technically what you'd really have to say is it's the sense that you're accelerating, not the sense that you're moving, because once you're moving at a constant speed and direction, movement is imperceptible. It's only changes in speed or direction that that are sensed in the inner ear. But I think you have to correct about how we just we we tend to refer to things as dizziness or feeling dizzy, even if we're talking about vertico, etcetera. Right, So, I think a more you know, street level definition that people would use I found on the Mayo Clinic website. Uh. They say, dizziness is a term used to describe a range of sensations such as feeling faint, woozy, weak, or unsteady. Dizziness that creates the false sense that you or your surroundings are spinning or moving is called vertigo. Uh. So these terms might be used differently in the literature sometimes, but I think we can basically say, you know, dizziness vertigo. We're we're sort of talking about the same thing and related things. Now, that same paper I just mentioned, the one by Dorian Hoopert and Thomas Brandt in the Journal of Neurology, Uh, it has a section where it looked into, uh the etymology of terms used for dizziness, which which I thought was actually extremely interesting and revealing. So in this part of their paper they say, uh quote Latin for example, has it lee two source words to describe the condition vertigo. Vertigo in Latin refers to turning, spinning, rotating, and is derived from the verb vertere, meaning to turn. Another word, caligo means darkening of the eyes, funereal crape, and I think that's a cloth that would be placed over a over a body at a funeral and and dizziness, So strange, darkening of the eyes, the cloth over the over the body at a funeral, and dizziness. And they say that this word caligo and not the word vertigo, appears in ancient text passages referring to heights and the symptoms of a fear of heights. So you know, often people will feel vertigo or dizziness if they've got a fear of heights and they you know, look off of a cliff for something. But they say that collego was also used quote metaphorically for dizziness arising from feelings of exultation or for being overwhelmed and losing one's grip on reality. For example, Tacitus in his work History A describes how Vespasian wanted to become an emperor himself after Nero's suicide. He is said to have felt dizzy when the soldiers addressed him as emperor and used other high ranking titles. Interesting. But then this next piece of etymology I thought was also really interesting. They say the word giddy is believed to be derived from the Old English word giddig, meaning insane or literally possessed by a god. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word dizzy as having or involving a sensation of spinning around and losing one's balance. It is said to originate from the Old English word disig, meaning foolish, and is thought to be related to the Low German do sig, meaning giddy, and the old High German tusig, which relates, which translates as foolish or weak. So really interesting this this ancient um historical association between insanity and being possessed by a god with the with the feeling of dizziness. But okay, anyway to look at the question of what's actually happening in the body when you spin around in circles and become dizzy? Uh So, first of all, I have to say I could not find a single authoritative scientific paper that really looks directly at this question. There are some studies that, uh look at dizziness from a question of like things that can be done to alleviate it. But if there's a paper that just looks at what causes dizziness and spinning, I was not able to find that. Yet, maybe maybe it's out there somewhere and somebody can find it and send it our way. I did find a number of articles on popular scientific websites, but again these articles were somewhat in disagreement with each other, without any acknowledgement that they were citing different explanations. So one example that I found in a number of articles had to do with the effects of inertia on the fluid in the can owls in the inner ear. Now, this is an article. This is from an article on Live Science by Natalie Wolkover, and the author here writes that quote when you spin in a circle, inertia initially causes the indo lymph. Remember that's the fluid in the inner ears that moves around to stimulate those hair cells, and that allows your body to detect orientation of the head and motion. Uh. She says, Inertia initially causes the indo lymph to slosh in the direction opposite of your head's motion. It resists the movement of your head dragging the cupula. And again that's the slower moving gel that's in there backwards with it and thus causing the sensory hair suspended inside the cupula to bend against the direction in which you're spinning. However, within moments, the indo lymph and thus the more gelatinous cupula, adjust to the movement of your head and start going with the flow. This causes the hair cells to straighten, and your brain no longer receives the message that you're spinning. Your perception has become normalized, the rotation of your head, giving you the sense that you are still and the world is rotating around you. Okay, So that would sort of pair up with the understanding of dizziness that it is the sensation of motion even when you are not moving right, Like, I'm no longer spinning around in circles. I've stopped, but I feel like I'm spinning around in circles and therefore I have to lay down. Yeah, and from a first person perspective, I would say that is part of the sensation of dizziness. Uh, though dizziness might also be more than that. Um. But but of course, then when you stop spinning wulkover rights, you have halted the rotation of your semicircular canals, and because of inertia, the indo lymph keeps spinning, and so it's kind of the way that you know you can spin a bucket around. But then if you stop spinning the bucket, the water in the bucket will keep spinning, it will keep slashing um, she writes. Because of inertia, the indo lymph keeps spinning, resisting change. Yet again, as fluid continues to move, it once again deflects the cupula, this time in the direction in which you were spinning moments before. And as the using cupula bends those hair cells, a signal of movement is transmitted to the brain you since you are moving but you're not, And that's dizziness. Okay, So you know, based on the other things I've been reading, that explanation would make some amount of sense. It's saying that the effects of inertia on the fluid in the canals in the inner ear after you stop spinning, causes some kind of you know, uh, causes some false signals in the brain. And this is disorienting, especially when paired with your other senses, like your eyes and everything are telling you you're not spinning anymore, but your inner ear feels like you are. Yeah, the slough bladders in our in our head and are all sloshed up basically, and this is mirrored in another article I was I found on the subject, one in Popular Science by Claire Muldarelli, again referencing the movement of the indo lymph in the cupula. Uh Multirelli writes, quote, the problem comes when you stop. Your muscles are able to start and stop really quickly without any issues, but that fluid doesn't work as fast. Even though you stopped, the fluid is still moving and it takes some time for it to finally stop. While it's still moving, those hairs are still picking up on the motion and sending signals saying I'm moving to the brain. The brain receives the signal, but at the same time knows the body is perfectly still. And the same explanation about the the inertial effects of the moving indo lymph within the canals in the brain or in the in the in the interear. This is also mirrored in the House Stuff Works article that I found on the subject. Is basically, the indo lymph keeps moving after you stop spinning. This confuses the brain. While these explanations so I found this across multiple sources, it does seem to sort of make sense. But if this is true, one thing I wonder about is why is it that spinning in particular is liable to make you dizzy? And why not other type of movement couldn't other types of movement apart from spinning also cause you know, inertial drag in the fluids in your inner ears, and that your body would stop moving before the fluid stops moving. Yeah, that's a good question, I am, you know, based on some of the stuff will discuss I think mostly in the next episode. It does make me think about the frequency of of use when it comes to spins, you know, um, like in terms of just straight up acceleration and deceleration, uh, in our daily lives, Like we might not be running marathons and passing batons all that much, but we are still accelerating and decelerating fairly regularly. Whereas the spin especially you know, the sort of spins that we think about, uh and and experience related to dizziness, those are not going to necessarily be a regular part of your daily life, That's true. Yeah, it could be a it could be a conditioning thing, and the conditioning thing would actually tie into something that we're going to talk about in a bit when we get into how like dancers and and ice skaters supposedly deal with this. But before we get into that, I wanted to mention the other explanations I came across um for for why we get dizzy when we spin in circles, and specifically, these other explanations are based in the brain's constant attempt to coordinate vestibular information with visual information from the eyes specifically, So this is from an explainer I found written in Scientific American written by Amir Karadmond, who is a neurologist with Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Kadmond has has this different explanation. He says, quote, if we rotate our head to the right while our eyes remain focused on an object straight ahead, our eyes naturally moved to the left at the same speed. This involuntary response allows us to stay focused on a stationary object. And this is really physiologically important, right, Like, for the body to function, you need to be able to keep focused on something while you're moving around, you know, otherwise it would be really difficult to like hunt or fight or you know, do anything like that if you can't stay focused even while your body is moving. So the eyes adjust as as the body moves um, but Karadmon continues quote. Spinning is more complicated. When we move our head during a spin, our eyes start to move in the opposite direction, but reach their limit before our head completes a full three and sixty degree turn, So our eyes flick back to a new starting position mid spin, and the motion repeats as we rotate. When our head rotation triggers this automatic repetitive eye movement called nastagmus, we get dizzy. Uh so nastagmus again. Yeah, it's this repetitive jerking around of the eyes UM and nastagmus can be triggered by certain kinds of stimuli, Like if you show people a rotating drum that has stripes painted on it, you can trigger na stagmas as the eye tries to track the fast moving stripes as as they go past. Um. But another interesting fact I found is that nastagmus plays an important role in the arsenal of field sobriety tests used by law enforcement. So the normal procedure for this is if you know a police officers trying to do a field sobriety test on somebody they've pulled over, they will ask them to hold their heads still, and then they will ask the subject to follow a moving stimulus with their eyes without moving their head. And then you move the stimulus steadily, sort of in an arc around towards the person's side, and as they follow it with their eyes. Supposedly there are types of nastagmus, or these repetitive jerking movements of the eyes that are usually indicative of intoxication. Though I should note that just in poking around a little bit, it looks like there's some controversy over the reliability of this test. And it's used by police. Yeah, I mean, it's not like you have a tricorder type device that you hold up and and scan the eyes. It's based on what the police officer is observing and then reporting regarding the movement the the the slight movements of the individual's eyes. Right. And so this is interesting because I feel like now we've got at least two different explanations. In fact, this would be getting into a whole other cannon worms. I found another explanation in a very short explainer article uh for the BBC by a by a zoologist and science communicator who who framed their explanation more in terms of the brain getting desensitized to spinning input and then deciding to ignore it. And then when you stop spinning, the canceling out it has had to do of the spinning input is uh is suddenly counterproductive and makes you think the body is still moving. I'm going to ignore that one for now and look at these other main two explanations. So one is about the inertia of the fluids in the canals in the inner ear as as you spin around, and and that inertia calling a feeling of spinning even after the body has stopped spinning. The other is UH is about this very different thing about what's happening with the eyes when you spin around. And so I actually I was like, maybe I can get some insight onto which of these is correct uh. Though though I guess one thing I should say is that these explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I mean, it could be that both of these things contribute to dizziness. UM. But I wanted to get some insight on this by experimenting on myself. I was actually lying in bed last night thinking about this, trying to sort out like why these two different explanations have come across, which one could be correct or more correct, and I decided I had to get up out of bed and spin around to test this out. So um so I recognized this experiment is just on me. I just did it once. This is not going to pass peer review. This is not scientifically rigorous, but it was at least interesting to me. So what what I did was I tried spinning around for twelve revolutions uh boat in two different conditions, one with my eyes closed so i'd be unlikely to experience na stagmas, and one with my eyes open so I would be and I was trying to go to constant speed. I tried to keep the number of revolutions the same for for each test condition um and and have the only thing different being whether my eyes were open or closed. So I will say I felt dizzy after both spinning sessions, but I felt significantly worse significantly dizzy or after the one with my eyes open. Though it's complicated because that was the second one I did, so there could also be cumulative effects. I tried to rest in between them, but I didn't rest that long, and so there could have been cumulative effects where it wasn't necessarily that spinning with the eyes open is worse, but just that I spun around in circles twenty four times recently instead of twelve times after that one. So the other thing is I really really do not recommend spinning in circle twenty four times before bed I was lying there feeling pretty gross. Yeah, yeah, definitely. As you listen to these episodes, you're going to want to try a little bit of spinning. That's understandable, and we encouraged that. But please be careful, Please be careful spinning. Uh and you know, realize that you will probably become dizzy and you, I mean, you don't want to suffer a fall or anything like that. Yeah. Uh So I don't think my my personal experiment really settled the question, and it could be their confounding varials variables. But I did find that at least seemed possible to me that having your eyes open during spinning makes the dizziness issue significantly worse than than spinning with the eyes closed, which would seem to lend some credence to the explanation offered by Karadmond that it has something to do with the movement of the eyes. But like I said, it could be the case that actually both of these things contribute to dizziness, and they were just emphasizing different aspects of why we get dizzy from spinning. Though, there's another idea that I that I got. I guess maybe a hypothesis that my experiment brought up, which is, what if dizziness from spinning is strongly influenced by the amount of time spent spinning as opposed to just the number of rotations. So if we're, you know, in a minute, we're going to talk about like ballerinas and skaters, you would have to think that if a skater does ten turns really fast, as as opposed to me doing you know, ten or twelve turns pretty slow standing in my bedroom. Uh, is that you know that the skater would have it worse. But but maybe it's actually worse to be spinning for a longer period of time slower than a shorter period of time really fast. Thank well, all right, let's let's talk a little bit about the art of spinning, particularly as it relates to ballet dancers and figure skaters. So certainly both of these involve a fair amount of spinning around in circles. They are the most amazing examples figure skaters, ballerinas balot ballet dancers whose feats of spinning athletics are certainly enough to cause feelings of a vertigo in the viewer, you know. Uh, and yet we don't see these individuals tremendously affected. You know, like like if of a dancer, does you know a really impressive pirouette, Uh, they don't immediately fall onto the floor, or at least that's not supposed to happen. Um. The same goes for figure skaters, Right, they do some phenomenal spin and then they're out informed to continue their routine, right, I mean so if I spinning around slowly like twelve times, have to stumble to my bed afterwards? Yeah? What how do how do you continue a a really difficult intricate you know, executing dance moves or or or continuing to skate? I mean skating alone is difficult enough, right with your balance thrown off like it like you would think it should be after one of those spinning moves. Yeah, And and yet they're not. And what it basically seems to come down to is that they've essentially trained their brains not to pay as much attention to the input from from the vestibular system, so not to be thrown off by the signals coming in. And this is something that that comes through just continual practice and the ratcheting up of your sort of spinning tolerance. Yeah, this seems to be what I was reading as well. It's it seems to be one of the main explanations is just conditioning. It's like practice and conditioning of the brain to not get as thrown off by the vestibular system's response to spinning. Right, And it's and and that's not to discount it. It's like it's really impressive. I was looking at a paper about this two thousand thirteen Imperial College London study published in the journal Cerebrial Cortex by the by Nigga Enigma Tolina at All, and it was looking at why dancers don't get dizzy. So what they did is they looked at twenty nine female dancers and twenty female age matched controls with no dancing experience. And this is we see this in another study we'll talk about in the second episode, where basically you have your expert spinners and your control group is gonna consist of people who are more or less comparable individuals just without that spinning experience, without that dancing experience in this case. So they took these individuals and they put them through a series of spinning tests in a chair in a dark room. Um. Then they measured the brains of the two groups and how the volunteers reacted to the spinning, and they found that the dancers recovered faster than the non dancers. Basically, the dancers brains have adapted over years of training to suppress the input that causes dizziness. It's a case of training related brain plasticity. It's the sort of thing that uh, you know, could one day be used to actually treat other conditions. Knowledge of this could be used to treat other conditions and enhance our understanding of how the brain heals itself. Now, many ballet dancers, including those used in the study, use something called spotting in their training. Yeah, that explained by Karadmond mentions this that uh I think more so for ballet dancers than for ice skaters. Uh Yes, having to do with the speed of the rotation. But the ballet dancers use this trick of how they move the head and focus the vision to prevent them being overwhelmed by nastagmus was the reason he cited for it, right. I believe this is pretty well presented in I mean you can you can see it in dance and if you are like me and most of your ballet experience these days comes from watching ballet horror movies like The Two Suspirias and Black Swan, and then you know what I'm talking about, Like, it's really, you know, interesting to watch the way their head seems to like swing back around to the same position as their body spins. You focus as the dancer, you focus your eyes on one area in front of you as you spin around over and over again, and this helps you stay steady. You keep moving your head around to the same point while the body spins. But the authors in this particular studies say that that spotting alone isn't enough to account for the ability. And likewise, as you mentioned, figure skaters don't really do spotting, not exactly. So basically there's figure skaters are spinning way too fast for one thing. So I've read that some figure skaters do use a form of spotting to count their revolutions. So just just counting how many times a particular spot on the ice passes you buy uh. They may also instantly focus on something as they come out of an intense spin in order to get their bearing straight. But as with ballet dancers, figure skaters simply get used to the spin. I was reading that they they only really feel dizzy when they start upping their spin levels and training, but then their their bodies their minds adjust to that as well. Okay, so it sounds like it's not just like there is a trick to not feeling dizzy from spinning. It's there are tricks like spotting, but that doesn't fully explain it. A lot of it's probably just conditioning. It's just this, right, the more you spin, the more your your brain becomes a customed to this input and realizes, yeah, the spinning is what we do. This is we can. We can. It basically acclimatizes to the spinning reality. It makes me wonder if you could, you know, create a generation of like super ballerinas or super skaters by by bringing them up from from infancy in an environment where they're deeply desensitized to like different types of vestibular disorientation, like if you maybe if you raise them in space or something. Um well, I mean, on one hand, I feel like what you just described it and seem that far from like the really hardcore world of of professional dance, right, like just start conditioning them very young. But on the space question, uh, I looked that up as well. You know, can you get Disney and Space? I mean, what does dizziness and space consists of? And I found an Avery Thompson piece and popular Mechanics. They discussed this citing personal experiments, um you know personal um, you know, informal experien moments performed by astronaut Tim Peak. And basically it's a case again of of of the brain adapting. In this case, the brain adapting to the initial feeling of spinning that one experiences in low gravity, and the brain adapts to this change, and then it's very difficult to feel dizzy, um Peak says, unless sudden acceleration is involved. I think this was the ultimate plan of that guy from Moonraker. He wanted to let you know what he was like going to sterilize the Earth or kill all the humans, and he's like moved all of his beloved people up to the to the space station. Clearly he's trying to create a generation of super ballerinas to rule the post apocalyptic earth. Oh man, Yeah, Moonraker so good. I feel like Moonraker is probably good. Uh, the one Bond film we could do for weird house cinema, like it's the it's the weirdest. Yeah, I think you're right. Well, well, I don't know. Maybe that last pierced Bras in the movie with the Invisible car and the castle made of ice, that that's Oh I never saw that one, but I yeah, I have heard it has some pretty bonker elements to it. It's up there with Moonraker for for weirdness. Those are the two goodest ones. All right, Well, again, this was part one. We're gonna come back for part two, and in part two we're going to discuss, among other things, um meditative states in spinning. We're gonna we're gonna discuss the Sufi whirling uh Sufi mysticism and uh and the spinning that is involved in that and in a particular study that looks at at it. Uh. So we hope that you will come back for that episode. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just ask that you rate, review and subscribe. If you want to find us really quickly, you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that will shoot you over to uh uh to what are I Heart listing, and there's a place on there you can click for our store that I'll take you to our T shirt store and if you know, just for fun, if you want to pick up a T shirt with our logo on at a sticker, tote bag, whatever you can find did there. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. 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