Welcome to stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuffed to All Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. If you tuned into our podcast recently, you might have enjoyed an episode about century deprivation, about sensory deprivation tanks, about entering the womb to tomb wet box, which which you don't like that term, but I think issue with wet box. Yeah it does sound kind of weird, little Chris, But but entering this this chamber of salty water and deprivated senses and experiencing something phenomenal. Yeah, you go into the moist box. See that's no better, is it? Um? And it really is sort of an amazing experience. Um, simply because you're doing something that's pretty elementary, right, You are taking out all that sort of stimuli that's surrounding you every day, and then you are trapped with your mind, which some of us feel sometimes like we are trapped within the box of our minds. So we sort of like you're trapped within a box within a box. I feel like in a way, when we're trapped in our own mind, in our daily life, we tend it's more like we are trapped in a party with one party guest that we desperately want to annoy a void, but they keep cornering us and talking at us. So it's like we're in this party. There's lots of stuff around us. I got work to do. If I don't want to do my work for some reason, I've got things I'm reading. I can always look something up on the internet or or do something on my to do list. So they're all these people that I can interact with at this party. But the my this nagging voice in my mind keeps coming up and saying, hey, remember when you were in high school, and remember that thing you said to your friend last week, And what are you gonna do next week? You know? And then you're like, oh, I'm cornered by this creep again. But then you you go on, Whereas the censory deprivation tank is kind of like saying, all right, you and this annoying party guests are going to spend some time together and you're gonna figure out what doesn't work. And there's no cheese plate too to escape to, right, Like it's just you and you. Yeah, you can't see, you have to run refresh your drink or use the bathroom. You gotta fight it out right, right, So we both underwent the sensory deprivations sixty minutes long. And uh, I will say that for for my first session, because I did too. I put a little hand towel in the door because I was not really all that interested in sealing myself into something, because I wasn't quite sure if I was claustrophobic. And we described the thing for them enough but essentially kind of like a not as casket like as I was hoping, and I imagine you were maybe fearing, but kind of you know, like this big pod with kind of a squarish like back portion because it it has like an auto auto cleaning and filtration system and it's about chest high, so it was a lot higher than I thought it was going to be, which is good because you have more room to to move around and get in and out right. Um, it's got a little hatch that opens and closes, and it's kind of filtration system, very very important for anybody who's not interested in soaking in someone else's body stuff. Yeah, and in the water itself is is high salt content, I mean how many how many pounds was like pounds, right, Yeah, so you're just you're soaking in that no, just soaking it, floating on it because you float in water that's salty and uh. And then the hatches closed or partially closed, and that cuts out most of the sound. Also, you're using wax waxy earpes, yeah, like little bits of bubblegum to go in your ear. You're wearing those. So that's helping to deaden out the sound as well, and keep the water out and keep the water out. Your eyes are kept mostly I mean your your eyes are kept above the water because you're floating on your back and uh. And then the hatches closed or partially closed, thus obscuring light. Right, and the water is heated to believe it's swept a thirty three degrees celsius either thirty or thirty three and degrees fahrenheit. Yeah. So the idea here is you're not like, oh this water is a little chili or oh this is so nice and warm, but more it's in it's in keeping with your body. So the idea is that it blurs the line between where year flesh ends and the water begins. Right, the borders are just this fall away, and in some sense they certainly do that. Yeah, except if you have a scratch on you or something, and then the salt water will let you know where your flesh ends and the water begins, and that's something they warn you about. There's like a tub of asoline on top of the tank. You're supposed to put on your cuts before you go in if you, I mean, ideally, if you just you know, ran through a thornbush, you probably should skip going to the Century deprivation tank that day until you're or if you've just shaved, or you've just shaved. And even then though, if you get like a little stain because I went in there and I was not expecting that, and it stung a little bit, but then you sort of get used to it and it goes the feeling goes away. Yeah, And I will say the first time I floated, a lot of the float was dealing with this the limit. It's stimuli that I had access to. In other words, you know, oh, I have many more bug bites than I knew of because now it's just stinging, and it's much more amplified because I have nothing else to concentrate on. Um, there's also a particular smell to the water, and I'm attributing that to the aps some salt. Yeah, and also just sort of I mean, it is essentially kind of enclosed, sort of hot tub type environment. So if you've if you ever owned a hot tub or frequently use a hot tub, you know there are certain smells associated with that. I'm talking about a functioning hot tub. I'm not talking like a funky, um, you know, disease written hot tub. But in other words, what I'm saying is that even though you're deprevating, deprevating certain senses, your sense of smell is still going to be intact unless you plug up your nose, I guess. Um, so you are going to get certain salty hot tubby odors. And this is all stuff for the money to chew on while you are immersed in this water, right because again you have very limited stuff here to work with. So um, that doesn't mean that your entire float you would be you know, sitting here being driven crazy by these different elements. It's just sort of easing into this process. And of course it is different for every single person who floats. Yeah, Now, the feel of it, Um, we should we should talk about next. I was I knew I was going to be floating, but I haven't really floated in anything like this before, Like I've never been to the Dead Sea or anything like that. So this was a first for me. And it was really kind of surprising because I climbed into it. Uh and uh and you you climb you you don't think you have to climb into it naked, but it's it's implied that you should. It is because again, you become much more aware of what stimuli is there. So if you have a bathing suit on, then you're going to be aware of the elastic or or whatnot. And ultimately it's more hygienek that way, because I think I've talked about sauna is a bit before. Um. You know, in the US, everyone's going into a sauna with some sort of bathing suit on, whereas in Europe and you're going to encounter more of a nude tramp end in your saunas and and and the nude trend is arguably far more sanitary because it's you don't know where the bathing suits have been or how clean those are. People are bringing these soggy um you know, lower torso garments that have been soaking in water and and you know whatever else. So ultimately, I think I think that everyone going into the isolation tank naked is really better for everyone. Then you're taking a shower before and after as well. Yeah, those are the rules. Those are the rules. Where was I talking about on that round? I was talking about the feeling. Yes, so I climbed in and then I and you kind of slipped the last little bit. It's kind of like going into a torpedo tube and then suddenly I'm just floating and it's it's really weird sensation if you've never felt it before. Yeah, because you can't see anything. So um. We talked about this and the episode I believe about the quietest room in the world that even just deprived of your auditory cues, you begin to lose your sense of where you are in time and space. So that's why people in the quiet stroom in the world at the oar Field Labs, they have to sit down after thirty minutes because they don't really feel like they're pinned in space and time. Well, think of yourself in this tank, floating um, naked, and those borders of yourself melting away and This is when people begin to feel as though they're spinning inside. And some people feel like they're spinning really really fast, or they're just kind of cruising around, but it's a very odd feeling. Well, I kept having this this feeling, and this would happen sort of the more I was in there. Um, you know, I'm floating, and I'm floating essentially on a on a horizontal plane, and but there's a little bobbing around and occasionally your your your hand, your foot will touch the side and then I would get get to get this feeling as if the horizontal plane were tipping forward, but that I was staying in one place, and then kind of a feeling like I was shooting down a tube. So there's this like false feeling of movement as well. Um, it never felt woozy or anything. I didn't feel like it was gonna be sick or like it was on a roller coaster exactly. But it was this this this feeling of movement that I knew wasn't actually happening. Yeah, and how did your brain deal with that? You know, did you were you consumed by it? Or Um? I was kind of like thinking, WHOA, I really feel like I'm moving, and I would picture myself in like a plane of darkness, um, you know, and then being tipped forward and then occasionally and this is where I got into trouble a little bit, is that I would sort of I feel myself tipping forward. So I tipped my head back a little bit, presumably to keep my head above the water, and of course my since the water plane wasn't actually tilting, all I managed to do was was get a little salt water in my eyes. Yeah, And it's really interesting all these little things, all this minutia you begin to sort of get caught up with, and then your body becomes accepting of it eventually because it adapts. And now I thought that was the fascinating part of all of this, is that here we are just completely bombarded by everything, um, by all the little undercurrent suff sound of you know, the state of our hunger, you know, if we're super hungry or not very hungry at all, or not feeling great, um, the interactions with everybody, all the data we're taking in with our eyes. You shut all of that out and the brain kind of goes a little bit. I will say, nuts like light nuts, good nuts, right, um, And then adapt to that and you begin to feel that release into the water. And I think that is the key point that that everybody has talked about anecnotally is you know, this is this is what the tank is really good for, is that you do have a release in your your brain and your body finally decide to just sort of submit to the experience and things do get quiet. And I'm not going to say that I had a completely you know, meditative state. You know, after twenty minutes, who knows. Because time is nonexistent in the town. Like basically they tell you don't think about time because a number of things will happen. You'll hear the filtration system kick in the end, and then they'll make some music play in the room, and then if that didn't work, they'll come and knock on the door. So the idea is, don't worry about how close you are to the finish line. We'll tell you when your time is right. It's just sort of slipping in and out of different states. Um. So that was to me one of the most interesting things altered Stass, which we talked about, is that the main thing that comes out of this experiences that people are having altered states of consciousness. Now you mean you were talking about We're talking about sound there. One of the impressions I definitely had is that I you know, I'm in there, I'm in my own head. And then time sort of starts to slip by, and then suddenly I'm hearing this noise and it sounds like the crashing of waves on a beach. And then I realized that it's my own breathing because I have the have the plugs in, I'm in the in the water, and uh, and so most of the noises, I mean pretty much all the noises I'm hearing is simply the noises of my body. So I'm hearing my breathing. And that was a really interesting experience because it did feel like waves crashing. Sound like waves crashing. I had that same experience, and I thought, wow, that sounds like I'm on the beach. And then the same thing, I was old to realize that it was just my own breath. Um. And you can cure your your heart beating. UM. At one point I decided that the towel in the door that just had the crack of light coming through was not good because I would sort of go into these into the void of nothingness and be taken out when I floated near the top where that crack of light was, and and again you you left that there because you're maybe a little claustrophobic. I didn't know. You know, I've never been sealed into anything. Um I didn't wasn't crazy about the idea, honestly. Um So I thought, I'll just do that, and then I know that I have you know, I can just push it open, which I could do anyway. But once I got past the fear of that, I wanted to take it out. But here's the thing. I started to lift my head maybe a couple of inches, and I was so incredibly heavy and so shocked by that that I said never mind, because it felt like my my neck way a thousand pounds. And that's when I realized the extent to which my body had just become entirely relaxed, as well as my mind. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to enter one of the more obvious realms of the senses here, that is that is being taken away from us in the tank. We're going to talk about sight and we're gonna talk about the darkness, and then after that we're also going to try and catch up on a little of the stroman. All right, we're back, and now it's time to talk about the darkness and talk about the darkness. Darkness? What about what our encounter with the darkness inside of the tank? All right? So are you talking about hallucinations? Yes? Yes, Okay, Well, the first time, I really, like I said, it was sort of a struggle between being present and letting myself go and being preoccupied with what was going on with my body or you get my stomach gurgling um. But I did see a crusty eyeball staring at me. Whoa, which I wasn't crusty sort of well, sort of like opaque looking eyeball that just looked crusty and old. And I wasn't I mean, I wasn't thrilled with that. I wasn't scared by it, but uh no, it was just sort of, like I said, opaque looking. And that was the extent of that. But the second time, I floated by the way it just when I went back in. It's amazing how your brain just mapped all this stuff out, and it's ready for the experience. The smell, everything, the water temperature. None of this was surprised to me, so I was able to get into that altered state much quicker. And the second time, I just sort of saw a bunch of very odd things, like um as if I were a lizard crawling up a rock, and seeing my little lizard arms crawling up those sorts of things, and not to mention having just um a lot of very interesting thoughts about either how I operate in the world or things I've experienced, wouldn't call them revelations, but things that were sort of important that I needed to maybe acknowledge or discuss with myself. Yeah, and I had trapped myself in a box to do. So. Yeah, you're you're taking that person that corners you at the party. You're trapping them in the box with you, and you may think to realize, I should maybe ask them about their job, maybe I right, or maybe we have something or unresolved issue I should talk about with this part of myself. And it was really interesting because, as you say, there are so many things that we can occupy our brains with, you know, with trying to escape that person at the party that when you are in that space and it's just you and you. Then it becomes like, well, this is very important, and those sort of things do rise to the surface and you do have to deal with them, albeit in a good way. I don't mean to say that, you know, there's any sort of strife associated with us. Now when you were picturing yourself as a lizard and uh and some more things, were these colorful in any way? Were they? Like? No, it was more like desert colors. Is that makes it's like more sort of fitting in with the rain than I was scaling? Okay, cool? Oh well with me? Um? Well, I basically, you know, I go into the tank and it's all dark in your eyes kind of a just to you know, sort of dancing lights a little bit, you know. At first, and after a while i'd been in there and I had the experience hearing the ocean, and then I I was observing some light and at first I thought that light was leaking in through the tank, and my my first thought was, well, this is kind of a crappy sensory deprivation tank because there's all this light leaking into it, or somebody has come into the room and opened a window or something or the or something's a jar. And then I quickly realized that this was not actual light. I was seeing light. I was seeing this kind of gray light as if it were leaking in to the tank, but it wasn't actually illuminating anything, like I couldn't see my body or anything. I was just seeing light, uh, specifically at the the edges of my site. And as I sort of watch the light some more, I saw like a human skull um like a gray light made of the same gray light that I was receiving, a human skull made of this rotating. And of course if you know me, then you know it probably didn't take much for me to think or imagine a skull, So I don't know, but it hello, dear Horatio did. I did not speak to it, but I saw it rotating there. And then that kind of went away, and I saw like a like a whole bunch of like like gray sea an enemy tentacles of the They're not really tend are they tentacles? I'm not up on my see an enemy an enemy they are well, and I mean maybe uh, maybe they are, but they don't remind me of technacle, right, Yeah, those appendages that they have, um, so they were kind of dancing, They're just kind of undulating, as if in a c current, and they were also composed of that same sort of gray light, almost kind of an ectoplasmy substance as the skull. And then that kind of faded away and I didn't have any more visual hallucinations for the remainder of the episode. UM, I have to share with you that the first time that I floated, I did find myself at one point giggling, just crazy giggling, and I was sort of like afterward afraid of well, I wonder if they heard me in the other room. But the reason I was giggling is because they were things that I started to think about that seems so important that I was stressed out about that. In the light of that experience, I just it became hilarious. And I will say that after my second float, a couple of hours after that, my husband was, you know, we were talking about something fixing dinner, and he started stressing out about something and I started laughing again at him because he was stressed out. I was still in this state and he was like, oh, it was like, seriously, is this how you're going to be all night. Um. So I will say that the second time, I really felt like the after effects of that were much more announced, that I was viewing the world a little bit more outside of myself and not trying to make my my husband feel bad by laughing at him. But it was funny. Time was really strange in the in the tank because when I first got in, you know, everything was sort of new and I'm taking it in, and then nothing was really happening, and I started thinking, oh, I'm going to be in here an hour. I I and I actually started thinking what if I just would How badly would the lady at the front judge me if I left after fifteen minutes? You know, how how much of a of a square would I appear to be? If that was my story. I sat there for fifteen minutes, so I just got wet, so I just left, you know. But but then I stayed there longer, and eventually I did lose complete track of time. So when the when the filtration system finally kicked in and the music came on, I was really shocked. I was like, Wow, I can't believe an hour's passed. That was interesting to talk to Maryland. She she's the person at the Harmony Wellness and Yoga Center in Georgia and Tucker, Georgia, and she was saying that, Um, she says, the tank is the teacher, which, by the way, the tank is made by somebody, which is the somebody And is this idea of um being the tool of meditation right? And somebody the company John cy Lily actually helped to develop this current iteration of the tank, by the way, so we were in a John sale see Lily approved tank UM. But anyway, she was saying that the tank is essentially the teacher and that She said that there was one person who got out after fifteen minutes, and he said that he kept spinning and spinning and spinning, or felt like he was spinning uncontrollably, and he realized that his mind was so disordered and was always spinning and he couldn't stop it, and so he decided that he would get out. And she said, you know, even though he just had a fifteen minute experience, he sort of had the breakthrough of realizing that his life was in such disorder because of his his mind. UM. So she was saying, you know, there's something to be learned from every single moment that you're in there. But that being said, as you said, you just don't really realize time is passing, or you do and you're trying to tag it, but the brain isn't quite letting you. And so I thought it would be interesting just to drop in UM that there was some research by neurophysiologists and chemists who are working on time processing, and they showed how emotions can speed up or slow down our perception of time. In our last episode, you actually touched on this too, about how emotion can color time perception. In Professor Droit Vollette and Sandrine gil published a study on emotional states, and they did this by having their volunteers watch films and seeing how that affected their sense of time. So these students, these volunteers were looking at films like horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, Scream and The Shining Um. And then they looked at film really sad films like City of Angels, Philadelphia, Dangerous Minds. Um. That's what they say, is that sad movie A third cat a glory with neutral footage. So weather forecasts, um, stock market updates. Some people can think that was side by the way. Uh. And then they asked the students to estimate the duration of a visual stimulus, like how long they were looking at this or experiencing this, and they found that feared shorted time and the simuls being perceived was much longer than it actually was, and that fear prompted a state of arousal that speeded up the rate of the internal clock. And the state also involved that late to pupils, higher pulse rate, increased blood pressure, you know, all the known quantities. So in the fearful situation, it seemed to last longer than it actually Wasn't interesting though, because we always think about fear, something fearful happening and like have just in a split second. But we also know that when you feel like you're under attack that things do slow down. They seem to slow down because you're trying to take in every single element of what you're experiencing, which is why your pupils dilate, right, huh, Well, that reminds me of like recently, I was looking up a clip from The Ring, the American remake, and I was looking it was looking at the scene where um Samara, the ghost slash entity emerges from the television set and I was surprised at how short that segment was when I saw it, you know, on on on a YouTube clip as being an I forget how long it was, but you know, you saw the clear time stamp of stamp of when it began and when it ended, and I was like, wow, that really felt like a much longer scene when I saw it the first time. Right, So because you you were, as we know, with our mirror neurons sort of in empathy going through the experience, right, and and things felt sort of drawn out. Um. Now, they found out that sadness does not affect our perception of time. And they thought that it would, that it would slow it down or speed it up, um, And they feel like the emotion that was felt while watching the film wasn't strong enough to slow down physiological functions. Now, that does not mean that, um, severe depression is not affected in this way. That they were taking people who were quote unquote how healthy volunteers who didn't have any depression problems and sort of measuring it that way, that doesn't mean that, you know, people who do suffer from severe depression don't experience time dilation right anyway, So I thought this was just sort of interesting information to add when we're talking about taking all that stimuli out in the tank and trying to gauge time. Well, it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of like Convengence and Dragons, where you have like a sword and it does a certain amount of based damage. But then if it's magical, they don't have like a modifier of a plus three year a plus two. But then if the individual is in a stressful situation or he is cursed or something, you have maybe a modifier of a negative one, and and all of that adds up to what the sword's actual power is. So in a sense, when you go into a tank like this, you were removing some of the modifiers on your on your appreciation of time and your experience of time, the things that make it speed up and the things that slow it down. Well, you know, we we've talked so much about the default mode network, this idea that this is the center of the ego in the self, and that's where all this chatter happens. And when we have excessive chatter, this leads to depression, right because you you get sort of caught up in this sort of I eighness of the experience. Um so it's kind of funny. You would think that if you put yourself in the tank that this default mode network might go crazy, right and be like, oh, this is the opportunity just to to really focus on the self. But because we discussed before, since re deprivation is used as a mode of an enhanced interrogation or or light torture, so there is definitely a dark side to it. So you can see where you would enter the situation thinking well, I'm going to go crazy in there and turn into a neander Doll. But it didn't happen to us, and it doesn't happen to mostly Yeah, I don't think so. So yeah, in the end, uh, I know you you went once and you went the second time, and uh and and found it even more amazing, and you have what two more scheduled I do continue the journey. Yeah, let's just pretty cool because when I left Chap, you know she's just telling me, um, well, you know the no float is like the next or the one before, at each one is different and you really understand it. You need to come back for a second one, which you know part of that I'm thinking, well, of course you want me to come back for a second one because I have to pay for it. UM, And obviously you want to encourage it's a business. You want people to come back in and be a repeat listener. But from your experience, it sounds like that is definitely the case. And it makes sense because the first time you're in there, you're just experiencing the tank for the first time, and the next time you can focus less on the tank and more in the experience. Well, and um Marilan was saying that there's a recovery group that she works with that also uses the tank and it's very effective. And I thought about that afterward, and I thought it, I can completely see that being very therapeutic because you are you are in a space where you have where you have to confront the way that your mind is working and uh, not just working, but some of the falsities that we tend to wrap ourselves in. Yeah, you know, there's no escaping that go set in the corner and think about what you've done kind of a little bit, A little bit. In fact, I have a quote here that I thought that I would read that that that UM pairs up with us pretty nicely. UM. And this is a sutra from the ancient sanscrit text called the Vigian by Rava Tantra, and the Guyana means wisdom and insight, perception that is free of thought, and by Rava means the fearsome form of Shiva, in this case consciousness, which destroys ignorance and mental conditioning. I've also seen this translated as the joy and terror of realizing oneness with the soul um. The text is thought to date that to eight and it's a collection of one twelve meditation techniques using the senses as a point of departure. So it seemed pretty fitting to cap this section off with the quote is attend to the skin as a subtle boundary containing vastness. Enter that shimmering and pulsing fess. Discover that you are not separate from anything there, and there is no other, no object to meditate upon that is not you. That's nice, all right. Well, on that note, let us call over the robot so that we may catch up on a little listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from Marta, not to be confused with our our transportation system public transportation system here in here in Atlanta, but um Marta, as in a person Marty Wrightson and says, Hey, guys, I just finished listening to You or Eating a live podcast, and I can't avoid thinking about the book I recently listened to by Christopher Moore Fluke or I Know Why the Wing Whale Sings. It's an amazingly funny tale of a biologist who has actually eaten alive whole by a whale. And that's just the start. It's fantasy mixed with real science and environmental questions, all wrapped up in smart humor. I totally recommend it to you. Uh and and this is a this is Have you ever read anything by Christopher Moore? Christopher Moore I can personally vouch is is that is a fine author and well worth reading. I've I've read read a book he wrote called Lamb, which is a fictional, humorous at times but also surprisingly poignant um account of the life of Jesus the Lost Years where he and he goes on adventures. And he has this it's told by his friend. Uh his name's friend was built Lost Years. Yeah, so he has this kind of Uh. He has his friend Biff, who's talking about his travels with Jesus and they end up deff and they travel to India and they fight a demon at one point, so they go in adventures the fun book, but also it's not one where it's like, let's just have some stupid adventures with Jesus and and make fun of, you know, somebody's faith or something like. It's a it's a really poignant book as well as a hilarious one. And then he also wrote one called Fool, which is kind of a medieval Shakespearean story that brings in elements of a few different shakespeare plays, but it's it's told from the point of view of a fool, and uh, and that one's just a lot of fun, especially for any Shakespeare buff out there. Um, I highly recommend that one. So anyway, Marta continuous, he says, just to close, I didn't write in at the time regarding the lebri Cons podcast and the migraines that can cause visual allusions, but I was amazed by the exact description you made of whole scenes I read in Hruki Mirakami's tales, particularly the small creatures coming out of the TV. It's kind of a recurrent theme and his writing, and I'm surprised to find out it might be because he suffers from my drinks migraines. Thanks for so much fantastic work, Marta from Portugal. All right, very cool. Um. Speaking of books, I wanted to interject that, Um, I am in the middle of reading The Hitman's God to House Cleaning. If anybody has picked that up and you are shocked by the language, I apologize. If anybody has picked it up and they are sort of delighted by how uh how crazy pulp fiction a e crime this is, then then I hope you're enjoying it. Um, I have to say that I'm struggling between both of those hemis bears. All right, Well, here's our next one. This one is from Eric uh, frequent contributor to the Listener mail section. He says he's responding to our control equism episode because when I was seven or eight, I was interested in introl equism. My parents got me a dummy and I started learning the art. I was having fun until while watching The Twilight Zone I saw the dummy episode titled the Dummy. It scared the ever living blank out of me. What made it so bad was my dummy looked exactly the same as the one on the show, so I had nightmares for weeks after, and it still creeps me out like crazy. Many years later, I saw the episode again with my mother. I told her how much this episode scared me, especially because I had a dummy like the one in the episode. She told me she wondered why she had found my dummy under my bed with his arms, legs, and head torn off. Killing and dismembering my own dummy also led to nightmares where it tried to take revenge on me. I love this episode. Thanks Wow. I mean we talked a lot about the relationship of the puppeteer and the puppet and how you feel this some sort of like a you know, like loyalty to it or disloyalty in this case. So it's interesting to hear that, and also interesting to learn that that Eric has a committed Chris Ventral side Puppets. Yeah, he killed the puppet, but it's it's it's quite as quite a little story you created in our head there. Yeah, I don't judge. I have to say, if if I the same thing had happened to me at that tender age, I might do the same. Well, these these you know, stories, be a horror movie, your horror show. You're watching at the young age and something something creepy happens was was something in the real world, it can freak you out. Like I remember watching Poulder Guys way too young in age, and there's that whole scene where like stuff starts, weird starts happening in the night, and then the door opens, and there's also branches tapping, so like for ages, like the idea of a tree branch tapping against my window that was horrorfiing. And I think there's a weird puppet, like a kind of a Harlequin looking puppet in there as well, and a clown, I believe, speaking of clowns and harlequin's, I wanted to point out in the past, we've talked about clowns a bit and about scary clowns, and we've we've never done an episode on clowning traditions, though Pop Stuff did one where they're going a lot of the history. I mean, he gets really interesting, you know, you look at various Native American traditions and and just how important the clown of the fool of the harlequin is. I'm currently reading a horror short story by Thomas Logatti called The Last Feast of Harlequin, and so far it's pretty creepy because there's a there's an anthropologist who's investigating a like a love craft ian um north eastern town that has some sort of rich and possibly grotesque harlequin tradition. But he's really excited about going because he also partakes and clowning himself and is into juggling, and so I don't know where it's going to go, but it's probably part I have to wonder what's the grotesque. Well, there's like grotesquery meaning like exaggeration or like disgusting. Well I'm not sure because at this point in the story I haven't finished it yet, but there's some sort of weird harlequin type of ceremony that goes on, so some sort of clowning going about, but then also some sort of uh, some sort of belief system that is really heavy on the circlical idea that that maybe we've begin his worms and we end his worms. So there's bound to be something kind of CORPSEI in there. I don't know. I'm not that familiar with this author yet, so it's all kind of news. Yeah, Well, now I'm intrigued, all right, Here's another one about our eventual equism episode. This one comes from David. David writes and it says, HI happen to come across the Ventriloquism cast, and I loved it. I was especially interested in the tethered to an object idea, which goes well beyond ventriloquism. You might be interested in my book in the Rutledge series, Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture. The book is Art and Ventriloquism, and is really a way of showcasing ventriloquism as a metaphor and performance act in many aspects of philosophers like Nietzsche, food, cult, Plato, Derita, and in many philosophical areas, but especially aesthetics, by unpacking the metaphor, I mean of all of the things that you two spoke about, such as speaking in other voices, the Greek notion of its status of being beside oneself, illusion without deception, the animation of inanimate objects, and so forth. I'm sure you are busy with the next podcast, but if you chance to check out the book, do so. Thanks for the cast. Will be sure to listen regularly. Best David, uh and will since David's an author. I let me go and give you his name, so you can look that up at that interests you, That's Aid David gold Plat Goldblat, So that's d A v I D G O L D B L A T T in that. The that again is the Rutledge series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture, and the book is Art and Ventriloquism. So that sounds interesting. I'm gonna have to seek that out myself, and and that would probably interest us some of our listeners as well. That sounds really cool. Um. I actually wrote a paper, a Zarada paper, and I think it was I won't be able to remember the content so well, but I believe the title was Dwelling in the Tomb of A. So if there's anybody out there who has studied Dareda, you know, probably a sense of what I'm talking about there. But um, I can't help but sort of laughing about that title now, all right. We also heard from France and she contacted us about our episode on Finnish education. She wanted to point out that we referred to Finland as a Scandinavian country and that we should not have. She is correct, we should have referred to it more in the general sense as a Nordic country, so I wanted to say that. She also said that she she wanted to take some issue with us referring to uh Finland as as a becoming independent from Russia in the sixties, and I just wanted to point out that we did not say that Finland became independent from Russia in the sixties. What we said is that they came out of a cocoon of influence from Russia in the sixties. Okay, well, let's look at one last bit of listener mail, and this one comes to us from Brian. Brian write, since is hey guys, I just listen to your cat Parasite episode, and one of the listener emails about your art freak Out episode made me take notice. You proposed that many that maybe people in Italy had a strip mall syndrome. And this we were talking about how when what you know, Americans that live in strip Mall country travel to say Italy, go to one of the amazing museums there, or see some of the historical sites, and it's just too much, you know, getting a standall syndrome where it just overpowers you and maybe you pass out right. So someone from Rome, for instance, who is is just surrounded by all this antiquity. If they were to go to a strip mall in America, what would happen? So, Brian Sell says, I have had a version of this. I've lived in several cities in Europe and the US, but the only big reaction I remember from culture shock came when I moved back home to the Twin Cities after living in New York City for a few years. Grocery stores, any stories, really are dominutive in New York City because space is very expensive. This isn't true in the Cities. The first time I went to a large grocery store, I had a freak out. The scale of the place, the ceiling so high they could contain their own weather patterns, the forty types of yellow mustard, not to mention brown, et cetera, and the terrible use of space. My wife had to steer the cart as I fought hyperventilating. This hasn't happened since, but I can remember the sensation viscerally. I'm going to have to go back and listen to the whole episode. Thanks for some great content, Cheers, Brian. I think He brings up a really good point because I've been in cities for a while that had small grocery stores, and I know exactly what it means. I'm thinking about Star Market and Boston stock Market and then coming back to Atlanta and then being in these big box retailers, and it is sort of disorienting to to be in this huge hall of consumerism. Yeah. I mean even here in Atlanta, where we are playing big stores and a lot of sprawl. I tend to not go to Walmart a lot. So when I do, it is always a bit of insanity because it's so big and there's just so much stuff, and they're just vast distances, Like, oh, I the grocery thidem I need is on the other side of the store. It's time for an enormous walk. And you know then it's their idea of of a quick checkout is like fifty items are less or something. But anyway, that's the whole rent. Yeah, and you know there's this other thing to compound that, which is Sam's or Costco. Right, you can go down to Aisle and you can see the largest jar of peanut butter that you've ever seen in your life. That's bigger than your head. Uh, and just jars and jars of him, and it's it's sort of like being like Alice in Wonderland. Yeah, well there you go. Um, Hey, if any of you have something you would like to share with us about giant jars of peanut butter in Wonderland or about Stendall syndrome at the strip mall about sensory deprivation. Uh, this episode, we ended up putting this out. Actually, we ended up recording this the day after our initial episode aired, so it didn't really leave any time for for you guys and girls to to respond with your own stories of sensory deprivation. So feel free to send those in because we'll still hopefully read read those in future episodes. You can find us in a number of ways to interact with us, to catch up on past episodes and see what we're up to. Our mothership is stuff to bowl your mind. That's where our blogs are. 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