Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Land, and I'm Seth Nicholas Johnson. That's right, Joe is still out on parentally. Uh. He and his wife are somewhere in the zombie land of of of early parenthood. Uh, they're because they're completely in the dark. I haven't heard from him in a few days, so I think everything. I think he's in the upside down basically right now where where up is up is down, down is up. Uh. Sleep takes place whenever it can be obtained. Uh. Now how long does this period last? Do you know? Rob like like like the like baby won't sleep through the night phase. I I have no idea. Um, I'm not certain either. I think to some extent it varies from child to child. And yeah, I'm more knowledgeable what's sort of like general trends in in child sleep habits. And I know that that that, of course is going to vary a lot from kid to kid. Uh. My wife and I are fortunate that our our child has always been a very very committed sleeper. But but I know that's that's not always the case, well, well, best of luck to Joe right now in his uh, you know, parental duties right now, and I'm sure he is spending his free time listening to this podcast. So hello Joe. All right, So if you joined us on Tuesday, then you know that we began discussing some of this year's winners of the ig Nobel Prizes. Uh. This is a series of awards that are given out each year by the scientific humor journal, the Annals of Improbable Research, that has been edited for many years now by Mark Abrams and their stated purposes to quote honor achievements that make people laugh and then make them think, and so every year on stuff to bow your mind. Since I don't know how long I don't know how long I've been doing this, we generally look at at least some of the winners from from that given year and discuss them, talking about, you know, why they're funny, what's important about the studies, what's interesting about the studies. And it's generally a great exercise because a lot of times the stuff that wins it gets into an area that we might not otherwise explore, or we wouldn't devote an entire episode to certainly, and uh yeah, I always learned something new. So this is the second episode. But this is one of those situations where if you missed Tuesday and you're already listening to today's episode Thursday's episode, you're still probably good to go, because we're just looking at individual winners that revolve around generally one study. Maybe you're a handful of studies, but each one is kind of a self contained topic. So go ahead, feel free to listen to this one and then go back and listen to Tuesday's You'll be just fine. So last time, I think we talked about three different studies, and once again we're gonna talk about three more today. Uh seth, why don't you start us off with your first selection? This one is the winner of the Safety Engineering Prize. This was a paper written by Magnus Gens and it was for developing a moose crash test dummy. And uh that this was out of Sweden. This was published by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, and it's it's just fun to picture crash test dummies in general. Do you remember in like the gosh, late eighties, early nineties, there was a crash test dummy trend for some reason. Yeah, I I definitely remember this because I remember being a bit into it. There were commercials right and had crash test dummies, but they also at least made action figures and in little crash sets, and I think I might have even had one of the action figures. I had a couple of myself. I had a car and two of the action figures of the dummies, because I believe they made an anime series based on it as well. My memory is kind of fuzzy about this, but I definitely remember the toys, and I definitely remember the live action commercials, and yeah, that the toys were interesting because they often had some sort of action where if you like pressed a button on their chest, you know, their arms would fly off or or like the doors would come off the cars or something. And yeah, hey, trends for children are very strange, but there was definitely a crash test dummy trend for children, uh, late eighties, early nineties. But but anyway, Oh no, no, I have to keep going on this because it raises the question now that I think I haven't really thought about this in a long time, but do you think that this was a situation where our desire as children to have action figures of dummies that were used in crash tests like industrial crash test. Was this entirely manufactured this desire and marketed to us, or did they anticipate the fact that children would see these ads and say, hey, I want one of those. This looks fun. I'm in I think this was a Geico Caveman situation where a company probably paid just for some standard like you know, public service announcement ads made some very colorful, friendly looking live action p s as, and when they aired on television, for some reason, children really glommed onto it. Maybe they were aired during the Saturday morning cartoon breaks or something, and for some reason, maybe the bright colors, maybe the action, the goofy like, you know, almost like live action Looney Tunes esqueness of like the explosions and whatnot. Maybe that just appealed to children so hard that some enterprising, you know, business person went, I know, let's sell this to those kids, you know. So I I think it was a television commercial they got too popular for its own good, and then they took advantage of it. That that's my guess. Imagine if they had known, they could have introduced a moose trash test down me as well, a talking moose that would have been amazing, like a funny sidekick Bowwinkle style. Everyone. I love that. So, so that is what we're discussing today. Just picture a moose crash test dummy and why they would need it. And here's a little chunk from the abstract from this paper quote. In certain areas of our planet there are big wild animals. One big species is the moose called elk in certain regions. Scandinavia has a very large moose population and car moose collision is a huge problem with many fatal outcomes. In order to reduce the number of injuries caused by passenger cars colliding with moose, a valid and repeatable method to arrange staged accidents is needed. A moose dummy was constructed after thorough research work. Yeah, so a couple of things, Like, first of all, like the moose is very large. The moose is much larger than a deer, and and hitting a deer with an automobile is already a serious concern. But on top of that, you also have behavioral differences with the moose, like a moose uh has a different or can have a different um attitude toward vehicles and in encounters. I've certainly heard tales of vehicles being charged by a moose before. Oh yeah, and and they're huge, which we we will get to. We'll get into some very specific stats very soon. So, so, the two primary goals of this research were accuracy, and they wanted the cars that collided with the dummy moose to have a comparable damage to real cars that collided with real moose. So you know, I think most crash test folks have that goal in mind. And the second was repeatability. They wanted this moose dummy to be able to endure many crash tests before it had to be replaced. Again, makes sense. These are very expensive to construct. You know, you want to get your money's worth out of them. So first and foremost, animal collisions with cars are very common. They're dangerous, and they're also very unpredictable. Animals simply don't tend to follow the rules of the road. Uh, no matter how many signs we put up for them. You know, cross here, your dumb dear, this is your cross swak. But but they just don't pay attention to that. Yeah, add into that, having a disrupted environment which there are fewer predators to actually keep the numbers of say, dear down. Yeah, it becomes becomes a huge issue. No, No, this is their faults. We gave them a side cross here, this is your crosswalk, and they just don't they don't do it. So not. Now. Moose collisions are particularly dangerous because they are very top heavy, very tall, and have relatively spindly legs for a creature of their size. So the average moose is about six ft tall at the shoulder, and it can get obviously much bigger than that, and they can weigh as much as fourteen hundred pounds, and like I said, most of that weight is you know, pretty high up in the air. And if anyone out there has ever like seen a moose in real life, it's it's actually kind of kind of like, I don't know, it's it's it's awesome. It feels shocking to see a creature that large in person. Yeah, I have. I have very vague memories of my childhood and Canada of seeing these seeing a moose and it was quite I mean, I wouldn't say it was terrifying, but yeah, it was kind of on inspiring. They're just so huge, Yeah, for sure. So this study took place in Sweden, where annually thirty thousand car accidents involving cloven footed animals occur. That means ninety accidents daily, and thirteen of those ninety involved a moose. Unrelated to this study, the row deer is actually the cause of the majority of these collisions, but they are much smaller and lighter, so they cause far less damage. Those thirteen out of the ninety daily accidents are the ones that are I'm not gonna say almost always fatal, but are often fatal because, like I said, fourteen hundred pounds, six ft tall, and it's it's they're they're like a very heavy anvil on top of a very small spindle legged table. Like there, it's it's just not it's not smart, you know. So our researcher then has pages and pages of research to determine like the physiology of the moose to be replicated by the dummy UH formulas to determine the velocity during collisions typical car sifty practices that might be found in the average vehicle models, etcetera, ETCeteras. Now that they're going to start to build up this dummy moose one version, they take a bunch of water filled hoses, you know, to try and get that weight and that kind of like oh um that that animal pu push but also solidity didn't quite work. They tried another version with wires and would but but once again it was a bit too fragile that couldn't get the weight quite right with it, but ultimately ended up working. Were these big thick slabs of rubber kind of cross cut um. Specifically, they were thirty six rubber plates assembled vertically and assembled together through through through locking wires. The the way I can describe this is um. I remember as a child there were these like model kits where where they were um, hundreds, if not thousands, of these little flat you know, shapes that you would then stack on top of one another, and it would build like a three D model of something, usually a bust or something like that. You know I'm talking about rob Yeah, I had one of these of jar Jar Binks before the film came out. I didn't I didn't know who this character was. After the film, I perhaps would not have cared to build a model of this character. Uh So you can see these pretty easily online too, if you just search um crash test moose. I'm sure you'll be able to find them. You can also find actually some pretty good footage on television shows or things like that of people using them, and it's it's it's pretty beautiful. You'll know we're talking about the same one if you see this. There's basically like it looks kind of like a swing set hanging above the moose, and then there's a releasing mechanism with electrical magnets that will hold the moose like the correct height pre collision, but then ensuring that the mechanism won't contribute to the results of the damage. It will be completely free and clear when the collision actually occurs. Because once again, these animals are a mystery. So the dummy cannot stand on these little spindle legs on its own. It needs a little support structure to hold it at the correct height before the car actually gets there. Yeah, the sense I kind of get from the image here. It's like if you if you three D printed the torso of a moose, like from from romp to next dump, and then you you hung it from like a swing set structure of some sorry. Yeah, and and to represent the legs they got these uh, big wires hanging down, and they covered it with more rubber disks to represent the weight and the size of each leg. And there there are subtle variations between front legs and back legs. But but but you know, uh, the body was the big concern of this, know, uh, more or less it's um it's that big weight. It's that big high center of gravity weights that just falls on the car. Because I mean, if you think about it, um here here's more or less what happens to think about a typical car's height in relation to a moose and its anatomy, especially when you think about like where a bumper is on a typical sedan. So so the bumper is gonna come in real low, it's just a couple of feet from the ground, hits the moose in its tall, thin legs, and as a result, the animal will then rotate over the engine hood and crashed through the windshield pounds, which then releases all that weight directly onto the driver and the passenger. That's why it's often so deadly. It's it's not because it's heavy. It's not because they stand in the road and sometimes charge at you. It's because they're heavy and they're tall, so that our cars are almost like engineered to get hurt the most from this creature. It's it's it's a it's a difficult thing. So ultimately this stummy was successful. They were able to you know, repeat their crashes multiple times with this giant rubber body. And also it was able to accurately duplicate the real life damage from these creatures. So. Um, currently, if if you see the images of this, I haven't seen any with a head yet. They say that eventually they do plan to build one with a head and antlers because apparently there's a pendulum like effect when the body is hit, then the head follows afterwards, etcetera, etcetera. Um, but that's secondary damage. Like I said, they're focusing on that big, hulking pound body. And this study came out in two thousand one, so maybe they have done the head since then. Yes, yes, perhaps so. Uh So, So why is this funny? Um, it's a it's a most stummy. It's it's very specific, it's very silly, and ultimately moose are just kind of like an interesting, odd creature. Um. Also, I can say that as as a lifelong fan of the TV show MythBusters. I have to mention that this subject was also tackled in season six, episode one of that show. This was in their Alaska special UH. Specifically, what they did is they tested the myth that it's better to hit a moose going quickly rather than slowing down. So so, like I, I I believe in this show they may have used the exact same crash test dummy from this UM from this UH, from this paper. However, I couldn't find the exact footage, so I can't confirm that I'm just going based on memory that myth was busted going really fast. The The myth was that if you're going really fast when you hit the moose, that like like the aerodynamic kind of curve of a car will just fling the moose directly over your car and you'll be perfectly safe. That is not the case. Like I said, it's four pounds, Nah, it's it's it's crushing that front of your car. Unfortunately, you can, like I said, you can see footage. You can look this up on YouTube. It's wild to see. UM. So yes was busted. Don't think that going extra fast will make you safer when when running into a moose and which brings me to why this is important. This can genuinely lead to saving lives, particularly in areas like Scandinavia or the Pacific Northwest regions of of the of North America, basically anywhere that a moose can be found easily. This data can you know, be duplicated and given to car manufacturers, so they can know which parts of their cars, especially cars that are sold often in these regions where they need extra you know enforcement, you know, Uh, can they make a moose proof windshield? Is that even possible? Will will cars have like not not not a cow catcher, but a moose catcher in the in the near future who knows, who knows? But but now they can test it over and over again and hopefully make safer cars for these regions that uh, you know, are I want to say moose proof, but that's probably a bit too ambitious. Well, I mean, the moose test is definitely a thing. Um. Just doing a little searching around, I found this is a website called hot cars dot com and they have an article five cars that have passed Sweden's moose test and five that failed. And yeah, these are all different vehicles and they just look like normal automobiles are just about normal automobiles with enough like safety protocol and um like structural integrity I suppose, and in some cases larger looking vehicles but sometimes not so large um that that have done well. So I guess in a way, I'm not disappointed that there are no crazy Swedish moose proof vehicles that look like the front of a train, but it is great that they've been able to take this data and then use it to ensure safety in various vehicles. This is a complete tangent. But have you ever seen Land of the Dead, the George A. Romero film? Is that the one with the tower and John Lacosama. Yes, yes, exactly, I have, but I haven't seen it since it came out, so I'm a little foggy. There's a vehicle there's a vehicle in in that film called Dead Reckoning, which is like their major like vehicle for like going out into the world, and it's basically zombie proof. And in the end of that movie they all hop in Dead Reckoning and they drive to Canada and that's like they're like, hey, where we're okay? And I think you know what, I think Dead Reckoning is moose proof. So that would be that'd be a real kicker, that'd be a real down or ending where they escape in this vehicle, then they hit their first moose and they're just done for. They could survive the zombie hordes, but they can't survive a zombie moose. All Right, For the next one, I'm gonna be talking about the Art History Prize. So I suppose the other side of covering Ignobile Award winning studies is that sometimes it forces us to cover topics that we might not otherwise cover um at least these days, and that's certainly the case with the r History winner. For two honored are this page is This paper from was published in the Journal of ethno Pharmacology by Peter de Smett and Nicholas Hellmuth, titled a Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery. So, just to kick things off, why is it funny? Well, I guess it's supposed to be funny because it features enemas, but I also kind of have to I mean, just in general, yes, I buy that logic. I didn't particularly find this one to be a humorous inclusion, but I mean everyone's sense of humor is going to vary on this sort of thing, and I suppose it's it's the juxtaposition to that, if you are to see depictions of enemas, you don't expect it to be on your your pottery, on on your on your fine china. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so like that, it's art history and that and and that's the thing because because the next question why is it important? Well, it's kind of a double whammy here, because first of all, the discipline of ethno pharmacology is highly fascinating. It can also be illuminate. It can also be rather illuminating and potentially illuminating about the use of various substances that Western medicine has not quite come around to yet. And then also we're talking about Mayan history here, my in history and culture, so I feel like it is the sort of thing that shouldn't be ignored. So I'm not going to lean as much into the humor on this one, but it was all very fascinating and I want to explain it all a bit, maybe demystify it. So to kick things off, though, I feel like what we should have a little refresher on Mayan civilization that kind of refresher is very much in order. So we're talking about the Mesoamerican civilization that occupied southern Mexico, Guatemala, and northern Belize. The Mayan pre Classic period is measured back to two thousand b C, with the Classic period running to fifty c Eed and nine and the post Classic period running up until fifteen thirty nine. This was an advanced civilization with agriculture, a sophisticated right system, mathematics, calendar and astronomical systems, and a highly developed architectural and artistic style, as we've discussed on the show before. Of course, the arrival of Europeans to to this region constituted a kind of outside context event that designated the civilizations and cultures of the Americas. But many aspects of Mind culture survived and are cherished. I believe something like thirty Mind languages are still spoken today. And there has been a pan Maya movement that's an ethno political movement in Mexico and Guatemala by often marginalized Maya people there. And of course, on top of this, there have been many efforts to better understand and celebrate the culture and history of the Mayans. Despite all the Spanish initially destroyed. Okay, so that's your refresher on the Mayans. Now let's get into a refresh on enemies. So strictly speaking, uh, an enema is an injection of liquid into the lower bowel through the rectum, and the most often reason for this procedure is to relieve constipation or to prepare for medical procedures. It's it's simply stool evacuation. It's liquid aided stool evacuation. Now, the mere act of waste leaving the body already kind of has a myriad of real and imagine benefits, because obviously waste leaving the body is a good thing. We've kind of talked about this in the last episode. What happens when a scorpion loses its anus and it cannot relieve itself, Well, its stuff builds up and uh and it's it's not necessarily great for the scorpion. So excess materials do need to leave the body after our bodies have extracted as much from the matter as can be extracted. But then on top of that, again we have this, we have this deep history of humanity's attempt to to understand our bodies and also conflating and confusing hygiene with purity at times. I'm reminded particularly of a book I had to pick this one off the shelf for this one A little Bit UH by Virginia Smith titled Clean, A History of Personal Hygiene Impurity, which is a great read if anyone's interested in like the history of things like like just bathing rituals and so forth. Sona rituals and how you have these sort of dual columns of the ways that these things are actually good for us, the way they actually cleanse us. And then on the other side are complicated understanding of purity, spiritual purity, and also getting into various um, you know, pre medical theories of how the body works. So, for instance, Smith points out that according to Greek humoral theory UH, a strong bowel movement was an indicator of of a healthy body ridding itself of dangerous waste. And if this didn't seem to be the case with them in a an an individual, if you didn't seem to to to be having good strong bowel movements, well, then a whole host of quote herbal or mineral purges and emetics might ensue. Now coming back to those to the detail that the entire gut is all about processing organic material and absorbing water and nutrients from it, and then displacing whatever can't be digested at all or can't be digested in a timely matter. UH. It shouldn't come as a surprise that even at the very final leg of the journey, the system is still capable of absorbing water and due to the rectum's blood supply, the rectum can also absorb various substances and drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, and UH, and also various like hallucinogenic materials as well. Now at this point, I know some of you might be thinking of various like shocking headlines and scare headlines that have appeared in the media over the years, and I do want to just drive home. Do that you should not try this at home. UH. Do not try to absorb things on your own recreationally through your rectum. UH. Two major issues to keep in mind here is that, first of all, there's usually a lower threshold for the side effects of a given substance if it's taken rectally. And also if you take it rectly, it bypasses your body's natural defense of vomiting. UH. So the the level entering your system might be too high and you can't just vomit as a means of your body trying to rid yourself of that substance. This makes me wonder if there has ever been a headline where someone, let's say, did get alcohol poisoning through a ingesting alcohol the wrong way and basically the headline just said rectum damn never killed him. Maybe so and some of you more scandalous newspapers and the kind of newspaper you find in a barber shop that kind or if you get your news from like a mad magazine that sort of thing, you know, or the crip keeper, I guess. But but at any rate, this is the same issue though. This is why it is sometimes an advantageous route for medication and by medical professionals, because it's a way of bypassing nausea and vomiting. So if some sort of condition is keeping the individual from you know, being able to really keep anything down, well, then the the rectal application of the medication might be the best way to go via suppository. So this is nothing that the humans figured all of this out quite a long time ago. I was reading about this a little bit the ancient Egyptian uh Ebber's Papyrus from fifteen fifty b c. E makes mention of of medical enemas, and other evidence indicates that it was an important tool of ancient Egyptian medical practice, and it was said to have been invented by the god thought, the divine physician, and the God of secret knowledge. Now I'm not going to go through the entire global history of enema usage, but I think if one had the appetite for it, one could probably do an entire episode of stuff to blow your mind on it. There's a lot of stuff out there. They are numerous notable examples from historic writings from Greece, from Babylon, from China, and of course Western European cultures across the centuries. And the reasons for these practices breakdown into basic traditions of of either cleansing or drug and alcohol absorption, or in some cases mere sensation. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna listen through all these, but I did have two that I wanted to bring up because I was cross checking some stuff in a book titled The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris. This is a really fun book and it contains multiple mentions of enemas. Uh some Sometimes you'll you'll have a even a very serious history book and you go to the index and they don't have anything about enemas. Uh clean. The book I referenced earlier really only has one mention of enemas in it, and it's not listed in the index. But Morris has your back on enema mentions multiple mentions in this in this tone, and want to I want to highlight a couple of them. First of all, this is a headline from an eighteen fifty eight study published in the British Medical Journal eight quote port wine in amata as a substitute for transfusion of blood in cases of postpartum hemorrhage. Needless to say this, uh this, This may have seemed like a possible sensible alternative at the time, but it turns out this would this would not be the best practice. Yikes. I mean, I'm not going to jump into conclusions. But what they like, their their their their structure of thought was back then, But was the idea like, oh it's red wine, so you know, it looks like blood. What I didn't get into this one's super deep. But it does seem a little late for for that kind of logic, but uh, it was. It was presented as a possibility. Morris also discusses a seventeen sixty nine version of the Swiss physician Samuel Tissot's medical writings, but and and so this was like a Swiss physicians writings that then were then also published. And to some extent it was a little foggy on what exactly has meant here. But essentially this comes out again. It's from years earlier, but then it comes out again in seventeen sixty nine, with amateur physician and founder of Methodism John Wesley also credited on it. I think basically Wesley was a fan of Samuel Tissett's writings, and one of the recommendations in the book is to revive near drowned individuals by not only blowing tobacco smoke into their lungs through their mouths, but also pumping it into quote the fundament. Tissa advised using pipe and bladder system to do this, which was not a new method, as European doctors were already using this treatment as an attempt to revive the sick. Elsewhere in Europe, I think it was like there there was a Dutch method in particular that used this technology. So this was not new. This was not an invention of Samuel Tessed, but he was very much advocating, Yes, if you have somebody that may have been underwater too long, then you might want to pump smoke into any orifice available to you. Wow, and we all have a new uh euphemism, the fundament, The fundament. Yes, I've never heard that one before. Yeah. This, Uh, that's another thing. Some of these writings will you'll find. I mean it varies, I guess from source to source. But some don't really want to get into this particular part of the human anatomy or into various animate treatments. But I mean, I guess one of the things is, first of all, clearly humans have been using this technology for a very long time. And I guess if you're getting into situations of life and death, yeah, I mean, people were like, well, what can we try? What have we not tried? Have we tried pumping tobacco smoke uh into their body by any means necessary? Yeah? Wild? I mean, hey, trial and error, you know, over the years, it has benefited us that someone tried putting tobacco smoke in someone's fundaments. Again, listening at home, do not attempt any of this at home. Meanwhile, in the Americas, however, where of course we're ultimately going with all of this, there's evidence that the oldmes used inema technology to administer psychoactive substances and smoke inemas were definitely used by various North American tribes, and this is also mentioned in Morris's book. But finally coming back around to the Mayans. So the Mayans certainly engaged in ritual intoxication. For example, they drank this substance called bal cha, which was made from the bark of the evergreen tree Luncho Carpus violachias. It was soaked in water and honey and then it was fermented. So they had this this drink, this balcha. Also, the honey apparently would have been from ease who fed on a high ergine morning glory. This, according to F. J. Kared artall in hallucinogenic drugs in pre Columbian Mesoamerican cultures from So this is where it gets interesting with the ball cha though, And this is this is the way Kara Artel explains it. So ball cha is alcoholic at the end of this process, but it's it's kind of low in its alcohol level, so you have to drink a lot of it to reach the desired level of intoxication to the point. It sounds like that you'd become sick well before you reach that point. So there are a lot of images in the Mayan art of individuals vomiting from the drink. And it also sounds like you would actually wear some manner of of bag around your neck, like essentially you'd have a barf bag on hand um to use while consuming it. Now, of course, this this wouldn't be the only right of using some sort of a substance that involved vomiting. I mean this is also common to things like you hear about this in ayahuasca uh ceremonies and so forth. So at any rate, very hard to reach this desired level of intoxication with this stuff, you're gonna be vomiting. Also, other substances were also taken, including tobacco laced with datura and in addition to ball chay, psycho stimulants and hallucinogens were also consumed and ritual animals were also taken, and we see that on various surviving examples of Mayan pottery, including I included a picture of this for you. Seth Uh. There is a ritual jar from the met collection and it's from the eighth to ninth century, and it seems to display wise women aiding or instructing men in the use of the enemas with the liquid for the enemies originating from a large jar like the artifact itself here with some sort of foaming liquid in it. And this is I think widely thought to be a fermented drink, likely ball chay. It's quite beautiful to this piece of pottery. Um, if you were just walking through a museum and you glanced at it, you wouldn't think twice about it. But then you you take that second look, and uh, yeah, it's it's even more interesting. Yeah. I don't remember this from any visit I've I've had to the mat. It may not be something that is of course on regularly on display, uh, but it does seem like the kind of thing that one could easily walk by and you not realize that this is the subject of it, and this was perhaps the purpose for the artifact. I think this is an important lesson to all of us that we need to pay more attention when we're in the museums. Yes, I mean especially in the matt there's so much to see. But at any rate, this would all make sense given the fact that again balja had a lower alcohol content to it, and if you were to take it via enema, this would enhance absorption of set alcohol and also it would bypass the whole barfing thing. Now what where it gets also interesting here is that you might hear all this and it sounds um hedonic, you know, it sounds like some sort of you know, crazy rich will um. But according to smit at All, this is the This is the the the authors of the ignoble winning paper, the Mayans were largely understood to have been a contemplative people. So on one hand, this seems to have sort of presented a conundrum to some people studying the Mayans, because it seemed maybe out of character that they would that they would, you know, do all these other serious minded things, but then engage in this sort of ritual. Well uh, And I should also add that smit at All also suggests that while the substance used may well have been alcohol. Some scenes also might suggest the use of tobacco and quote water lily or some other flowering plant as key ingredients. At any rate, the argument, sort of the counter argument, I guess made by a caret artal is that this wasn't a hedonic practice. This was a spiritual practice, and it was typically conducted in caves uh and these would have been considered places that were closer to the spirit realm. And that the consumption of the these various substances I mean basically like a whole cocktail of mind and body alternating substances that would have included apparently psychoactive mushrooms as well potentially, and these were widely used among Mesoamerican cultures. That all of this the location the ritual, like the non psychoactive aspects of the ritual, just the performative aspects of it, and then of course the psychoactive aspects of it. That this would all serve to bring you closer in line with the spirit world. And again this would have been a spiritual ritual that everyone was engaging in here. Needless to say, the Spanish disapproved of all of this, even the production of ball Chay itself, So I find I found all this rather interesting. Um again, not a topic I would think I would I would have I would have normally researched on my own. But once you start getting into it and uh and taking it apart. Uh yeah, very fascinating. Yeah yeah, the the the twists and turns of this, it goes deeper than I would have would have thought. It's it's not not just the punch line, right, but if that punchline forces people to look a little closer at it than than Yes, the Ignal Bells have done their purpose here sneaker at the study or the or the paper, but then look closer and and learn a few things. So I applaud them for this selection. Thank you, thank you. All Right, We've got one last study today from the Igno Bell Award winners. This was the Applied Cardiology Prize, so this had multiple contributors. We had pro Jakova, Saksi, Baron's, Lynde, and Kretz. And this was for seeking and finding evidence that when new romantic partners meet for the first time and feel attracted to each other, their heart rates synchronize. It's a bold claim and I was fascinated by this just from the beginning, and I will say that's that's a bit of a sensationalist headline, and I think it's actually a bit deeper than that, but but still it's it's it's pretty accurate, yeah, because if you're just taking it faith value, it sounds sort of like a scientific attempt to understand something you saw on a Looney Tunes cartoon. It's like when a wolf sees of a pretty lady, does do his eyeballs really stick out like that and his heart fall on the table and crawl around and his tongue grows twelve sizes and and unrolls like a carpets. Yeah. Yeah, these are all facts. So to determine what drives attraction, the researchers measured the physiological dynamics between real people on real dates. And this was outside of the lab environments. It was still controlled environments, but it was not happening inside a lab. They gathered the data in multiple ways. Um they had eye tracking glasses with embedded cameras. They had a heart rate monitors and skin conductivity sensors all happening at the same time while they did their multiple prodding and testing, which I'll get into. So so there were multiple findings. Three specifically, one, women were typically more expressive than males. Two, men stared at women more than women stared at men. And most importantly the point of this paper from from the ignoble point of view, three visible signals that can be controlled, such as facial expression or gaze did not predict attraction. Instead, attraction was predicted by synchrony and heart rate and skin conductance between partners, which is involuntary, unconscious, and very difficult to regulate. So with a modern dating culture the way it is right now, you know, you'll just go into your mind of either things you experience or your friends experience. Uh, you know, we're all utilizing dating apps and dating websites, which has become far more common than it ever has been before. The three big consequences that this paper pointed out from that are that people are dating strangers far more often. It's not just like your friend's friend or a co worker or whatever, it's just someone you met online. Um, so ergo, less time is spent with a potential partner before you decide on having subsequent dates, and that like the potential dating pool and the candidates for dating is much much larger. But also kind of much more anonymous. So, you know, with all these potential limiting factors with relationships that's happening in today's world, people still, you know, get attracted to each other, People still date, people still get married. So they really wanted to research what was the root predictor for attraction and that was the goal of this research. So they set up a series of tests and they were fascinating and really wild. But um, I'm going to try and describe it, but they they had actual graphs in the paper, So look up the paper if you want to see some artists renderings of how this all looked. But basically, they set up a blind date for the participants. They set them up in this nice little cabin where they set them down at a table and then there's a partition and in between them, okay, and it can raise and lower on a timer or as the researchers needed. So with the the there was a wide variety of circumstances. You know, the partition is up, the partition is closed. Now I want you to talk freely for two minutes. I want you to look at each other for two minutes but not talk, etcetera, etcetera. Etcetera. All kinds of different tests and variables and controls. They they all were there and they were all pointed out in this paper. After gathering their data from this you know, blind date into cabin with robots, uh, the researchers would then ask the participants a series of questions about their date. Number one, do you think your partner would want to date you again? Number two? How attractive do you think your partner is? And number three how attractive do you think your partner finds you? So here here are the findings with the question do you think your partner would want to date you again? Only about fifty were correct. Females were slightly more accurate than males. Females got correct while males got fifty, but all pretty close to overall pretty much just you know, flip of a coin. With the questions involved in attractiveness, their findings were pretty fascinating. The more attractive the subject found their partner, the more likely they were to think that their partner was attracted to them. I'm gonna say that again, just kind of be as clear as possible. The more attractive the subject found their partner, the more likely they were to think that their partner was attracted to them. Okay, So so to sort of translate, like, the more out of your league you find the other person, statistically, the more likely you think that that person is actually attracted Yes, yes, which which is fascinating I I I would think that that that the opposite was true. But but here we are now. May maybe it's got something to do with like flood Like maybe it's like part of our evolution of like flooding our body with endorphins when you are attracted to someone just to give you the confidence to ask them out on a date or whatever. So huh but uh, there was no correlation found in that at all, and it was actually found to be counterintuitive. Uh. If you look at the graphs, it's not exactly a wrong to right, but it's close to it. The graphs are moving in opposite directions, so so that is a wrong estimation. And in general, it was just proven that people are not very accurate when reading a partner's romantic intentions full stop. Like that's just one of the biggest things they found. Um, so, ultimately, our biology is a much better judge of what's happening than our than our thoughts that are than our brains. More or less, here's a chunk that's going to kind of explain that this is directly from the paper quote. Intriguingly, people are often una were of being influenced by others effective displays. This is evident from studies showing that friends and lovers implicitly mimic each other's nonverbal behavior, such as gaze and facial expressions. Remarkably, a series of recent studies demonstrated that committed romantic partners synchronize their heart rate and skin conductance, and that the level of synchrony was positively associated with the quality of relationship emotional ties, such as the amount of time spent together and the ability to identify the emotions of one's partner. Contemporary theories proposed that behavioral and psychological synchrony results from the biologically mediated tendency to adapt to incoming social information. Specifically, during an interaction, individuals continuously exchange information via verbal and non verbal routes like a date, for example. Continuing during this process, the sensory receptors convert vibrational energy from the partner's face and body to electrical impulses that the brain then uses to acquire social and emotional information. A recent fmr I study showed that the human brain possesses a neural mechanism which attracts individuals to partners who effective nonverbal behavior. They can easily understand. From this point of view, emotional expressions that people display do not only communicate emotions, they embody human feelings, build social bonds, and promote attraction. It's a pretty big thing to find. I mean that that that really does I. I know you and I are both both married men, but it makes me think that I would approach dating differently knowing that, you know, like like just just kind of thinking about like how I feel and and just kind of like duplicating the intentions and the subtle signals of of my potential dating partner. Like it's just I don't I think, thankfully I haven't had had to date someone in like twenty years, but it's still it's a fascinating idea. Yeah, I mean, especially when you think about the things that prepare one to enter the dating world are it's it's stuff you're you're hearing, maybe parentally, just to varying degrees depending on what the parental presence is, like also socially, Also things that are presented to you in media, but and in music, you know, obviously in movies and so forth. But uh, but there's there's never I don't think there's ever like a time when someone says, all right, here's the science of what you're about to go out and do. I mean, certainly when you get down to uh, physical sexuality, yes, hopefully there is going to be that in place, but in terms of like, this is actually what's going on when you're just even anticipating how another person feels about you. Yeah, this is so going back to the data, this is what they found to be true, Um, when these attractions were genuine, not based on what people thoughts, but actually like you know, is this person attractive yes? Is this person attractive yes? Completely separates isolated answers. They found that analyzing the heart rates during the dates, it was far more accurate, I mean, like absurdly more accurate than just asking you know, do you think they liked you? Like it was it's just off the charts different. This also went with uh, skin conductivity, but the heart rate was the part that they really focused on on this paper. Um, so, I mean they even did some things. Once again, you should read the paper, it's fascinating where they just just to test their theory, they started matching the heart rates from randomly selected other dates to see if perhaps this was just something that happened to anyone on a date with anyone. But no, no, they didn't match up at all, Like like, it wasn't something that happened. That there is a subtle, unconscious, non verbal pairing that's happening, and and the closer that pairing occurs biologically, the more you are attracted to each other. And it's fascinating that that this might have much deeper implications that are provided just here in this paper. But it's it's it's a really interesting, uh piece of information. Uh So, So basically keep in mind that facial cues, movements, and words would sometimes attempt a similar mimicry in these dates, but the heart was the best indicator for sure. So why is this funny? It's it's kind of proving like an old adage, you know, you should listen to your heart, you know, if you're out on a date with someone, you know. It's it's funny because in so many um instances of like you know, romantic love, the heart really is like the center point. It's saying like this is you know where love comes from? Valentine's etcetera, etcetera. Hearts, hearts, hearts, and then like you know, maybe being a bit cynical, we go, oh, it's actually from the brain, it's from personality, etcetera, etcetera. No, No, no, actually, you know Valentine's are kind of right that that your heart really does factor in in a pretty substantial at least in terms of accurately predicting attraction. And why this is important is that self awareness and self analysis is always a good thing. It's it's important first of all to know that perhaps your um perception of whether or not someone is attracted to you, you could be way off on that, substantially way off. And perhaps if you use heart monitors on yourself and your date, then you'll have a more accurate representation. Uh. If this is actually going somewhere, so that rock Set was right, listen to your heart. There's nothing else to Rocks that were right. Rock Set was a duo now I'm remembering, Yes, the Rocks that was not was not an individual but to Swedish pop stars, I believe, and I think that wraps up our Ignobles for two. I believe it does now. There there were some other winning studies from this year we're not going to cover here. If you want the full list, you're gonna have to go to Improbable dot com slash i g. That's their website and just look look up Improbable Research on any search engine and it will be one of the first two things that come up for you. They always do a great job of just on one page you can see all the winner since they have links to the various studies. Now, sometimes those studies are gonna be hidden behind pay walls or in one case, for one of the award winners this year entirely in Japanese. There's one about like how do people turn a door knob? That I wanted to know more about, but I could not find an English translation of the study, so I'm just had to be like, all right, I just I'm gonna have to leave this whe it phays value. So anyway, check that out. There always a lot of fun, and of course we have past episodes of stuff to blow your mind that have looked at winners from years past. So that's gonna be it for this episode. But let's see just to run through a few things here. Um. First of all, yes, core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind come to you on two days and Thursdays. And the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, where you can find wherever you get your pot gusts. On Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's their time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. Thanks as always to Set for producing the show and of course on this episode co hosting while Joe was out on for rental leave. And if you want to get in touch with us about anything we discussed here about other ig Nobel Prize winning studies, about past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, present episodes and Stuff to Blow Your Mind or future episodes, just drop us a line at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeart Radio. 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