Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part four of our series about Whistling. This episode is going to be a little weird today because we literally already recorded this episode and then lost the whole thing to a technical glitch. Rob I'm to understand that as I was talking when we were recording this episode the first time, Uh, it was just constantly making the sounds of hell in your ears and can you describe the terror and the anguish um. It was kind of like your dialogue was an a fix twin remix the entire time, and so at first it was I was like, Okay, I can I can put up with this. Uh, this is fine. We've already gone so far into the episode we should just you know, finish it out. By the end of it. It was kind of headache inducing, but I was like, well, at least we got the episode. Uh, this is just audio distortion that I'm hearing. It's not going to transfer over to the recorded finished product. Sadly it did, and so here we are. It's the worst. Yeah. We were like, well, at least it won't be on the actual audio, and then it was and so here we are. Okay, so so this is this is take two. Yeah, it could could have been much worse, So no big deal. Hey, looking on the bright side, we got a rehearsal in there. How often do we have a rehearsal for a podcast episode? So I think it's gonna be stronger because of that, do you think? So? I was like, is it going to make the episode better or worse? I really don't know. Well we'll see, we'll see better better, Okay. Alright, so we're picking up in this series about whistling. Uh let's see, what do we talk about in the previous episodes. Yeah, so we're picking up where we left off from the last Whistling episode, which was Whistling Part three, regarding superstitions and beliefs concerning whistle ing. We were talking about whistling as an ill omen at sea, as a potential mark of witchcraft, and women has bad theater luck in England and much more. Uh So we're going to continue this journey through folklore and mythology concerning whistling, and we're going to be referencing some of what we covered in another previous episode about Chinese transcendental whistling, in which a specialized Dallast form of whistling was almost like meditation, but was also said to give one both insight and perhaps even power over the energy of things in the world. So once more I'm going to be referencing that excellent Whistling and Antiquity paper by A. V. Van ste Kellenberg, but also some other sources. Now, according to Edie Edwards, in the two thousand nine paper The Principles of Whistling, a ten dynasty text called shall Chi says that whistling simply calls out to all spirits good or add and st. Kellenberg summarizes, this is kind of a supernatural neutrality concerning whistling. So whistling isn't something that is used by bad people or necessarily used by good people. It's just it's this thing that that signals out into the world around us, into the unknown, and you know, you could potentially attract the attention of things you don't want to attract the attention of, but it also could be resident basically harmless. It kind of depends on the circumstances. Yeah, the Rhapsody on Whistling, which was a text we cited in a previous episode. It talks about whistling having a kind of withdrawing or distancing power on the whistler. It says, you know, like the whistling gentleman sort of distances himself from the things of the world and lets out a long drawn whistle. Yeah, and that's a thread we're gonna definitely come back to. But but first I wanted to add another note on whistling in Chinese history. So first of all, you know, anytime we're talking about Chinese history, uh, Chinese culture covers a great deal of territory, both in terms of distance and in terms of years. Uh. So you know, it's it's it's hard to say with any certainty, like this is the traditional Chinese view of it versus another thing. But mainly I don't want to imply here that that whistling was just something that Dallas sorcerers engaged in. I was looking at the paper by Julung Sue from two thousand six titled Whistling and It's Magico Religious Tradition A comparative perspective, and this points out that there are han dynasty accounts of women whistling for both sorrow. Uh, and this seems in some cases tap into this idea of sighing as well. Um, again, look at thinking back to previous episodes where we've discussed whistling and it's similarity to other nonlinqual linguistic sounds that we make, other breath based sounds that can be used to communicate something or to get somebody's attention. Yeah, and we were talking about cases where sometimes it's maybe difficult to uh precisely translate a word because a word could be interpreted as meaning like whistling or could mean hissing or some other kind of controlled expulsion of breath. There's sort of some blurry nous in the the breath based lexicon. Now, according to Sue here, it's not just for sorrow. There are also accounts of women whistling out of happiness or joy. It does seem like it is linked to traditions of whaling in some cases, uh, you know, the sort of whaling one might might might engage in, say at a grave, that sort of thing. But also not just women in this. In other sources as well, even the Yellow Emperor is said to whistle but the terminology here might actually mean hiss or it might mean a sigh. And in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the queen mother uses a whistle as a kind of battle cry to just fly her for off city. Uh. So, it's kind of a wide spectrum of possible uses for the for the whistle, even within Chinese tradition here now, Sue also points out that while yes, in English customs and Western customs, there are a lot of these superstitions against women whistling, particularly uh and we don't really see this in Chinese traditions, though it is sometimes seen as ominous in general whistling due to the connection between whistling and various death rituals and you know, and attracting the spirits. But it is more inherently magical and not gendered. Sue also share some other examples from from Western traditions, you know, for a comparative experience here, but they point out here quote the Germans believe that a woman's whistling will make the angels weep and the devil's rejoice. This is this would be a fantastic basis for a German metal band, all female metal band that just employs whistling instead of singing. Now that's a that's a question to what a scent? Has whistling been used in metal? The metal scene has come to encompass a lot of different sounds and ideas, but I don't know if they've gotten around whistling, have they? Well, what's the metal version of the rule thirty four ideas? Kind of like, if you can imagine it, there is a metal a metal band of it, right, I guess it depends on what you classify as metal too, Like are the Scorpions metal? I don't know, probably not, probably not. Now. Sue also shares that, among various Chinese minorities, whistling while you work, as in you know, snow white and the song that the Dwarfs sing, whistling while you work, at least in the field was thought to to summon demons to damage crops, or it could summon demons to damage crops, so it was discouraged. This Sioux Stresses does not seem to be linked to, say Dallas ideas regarding whistling, but is instead rooted in particular folk traditions. Now here's another really interesting one that that Sue brings up. Sue shares an example from Mythrayism, So Mythrayism. For sci fi fans out there, some of you might be familiar with this religion because you may have watched the really excellently weird HBO Max sci fi series Raised by Wolves, in which one of the two factions that's going out into space and colonizing other worlds are are devoted, uh, myth Rayists, and you might you might well think, oh, this is some sort of cool religion they made up for the show, but it is not. It is this is a reference to the Roman mystery cult of Mithras and in their recorded rituals, and Joe, You're going to get into this a little bit and talk about what what we mean when we when we bring up the idea of recorded rituals of of Mythraism. But supposedly there is a system of whistling and tongue clicking that was used to attract what Sue refers to as theeo morphics star deities, theeomorphic meaning animal formed, so like beast beast forms of star gods. Yeah. Now I haven't seen the show Raised by Wolves, but I think I'm to understand you were saying that the title there is a reference to like the myth about the founding of Rome, the Romuliss and Rema story. Yeah, that's right, that's that seems to be the direct reference made there, and there are there's other references as well, and just a lot of just sheer weirdness on top of it. So if nothing else, it's a show that's going to give you lots of strange imagry. It's kind of like um Ridley Scott's continuation of the the Android centered alien sequels or prequels that he was working on m okay uh. So well, anyway, I love the idea that the show would incorporate actual things about Mythrayism because I've long thought we should do a series or at leased an episode on Mythraism, because I find it really interesting because it is a religion that clearly commanded an enormous following and had huge cultural significance in the Roman Empire, Like you can find the ruins of their underground temples called mithri um uh and they're they're all throughout Roman settlements, and yet we know way less about this religion than one might assume. And one of the big reasons for that is that as far as I understood, and I guess the text that you just referred to, Uh, maybe a counter example to this, but modern scholars generally thought, we have basically no access to any primary literary sources about the religion. So if it had religious texts, we don't have any of them, and so what we know about it we've had to try to like piece together through detective work based on imagery and simple inscriptions and archaeological clues and comments and references made by external writers trying to say, hey, you know, this is what's going on with mythraism. So for a kind of hopefully interesting analogy, imagine trying to understand what chris Ganity was if it like mostly died out and disappeared in the fourth century or so, and we did not have any of the writings of the New Testament or any other writings by Church fathers or any other early Christians, and we were trying to reconstruct what Christianity was based entirely on like imagery and artifacts and what other external writers said about it. So it's a really fascinating problem. And one of the most common images in Roman Mythraism is apparently an important scene from their mythology of the god Mithrus slaughtering some kind of divine bull. But there's another interesting complication here too, which is that there is a pre Roman Persian cult of Mithrus or or Metra, which is a Zoroastrian or pre Zoroastrian god of the Persian people who's kind of a solar deity of justice, who I think was associated with contracts and the honoring of bargains. And then later you get this widespread Roman mystery cult that seems to be based on an appropriated version of that deity. And of course we know the Romans loved absorbing and reprocessing other cultures gods, you know, like the main Roman pantheon is mostly a photocopy of the Greek. And then you've got the Persian Mithras becoming the Roman savior god of some kind, and even the way you can think about a Jewish messianic figure in Jesus and the original context of monotheistic Judaism rather quickly becomes a popular savior god to people throughout the Empire who had been polytheists up until the moment they converted to Christianity. So that whole process is really interesting. But the idea of a text of Mythraism was very interesting to me because I didn't think we had one of these. But this is referring to something called the myth rest Liturgy, which I think is commonly dated to roughly the fourth century. But there's dispute about whether it actually reflects original Mithraic theology or whether it's some kind of later synthesis. Yeah, this is the quote from it that Sue shares in the paper. Quote. But after you have said the second prayer, where silence is twice commanded, then whistle twice and clicked twice with the tongue, and immediately you will see stars coming down from the disc of the sun, five pointed in large numbers and filling the whole air. But say once again, silence, silence, whistle twice, click twice, and then shut up. Here come the gods. Now coming back to we're talking earlier about like scholars in the woods in Chinese history, Um, there is this idea that comes up, Sue mentions, and we see this in like the Han dynasty, for example, where you would have Confucian scholars other reclusive scholars who would whistle as a means of expressing disdain for the world and or their absolute freedom. Uh so this is an interesting concept, and it was also done by other classes as well, uh, Sue writes. Quote in general, poets, hermits, and people of all types in the Six Dynasties utilized whistling to express a sense of untrammeled individual freedom, or an attitude of disobedience to authority or traditional ceremony, or to dispel suppressed feelings and indignation. Whistling was not limited to a certain class, but was practiced by men from all walks of life. I love this idea of whistling as a kind of like middle finger to social customs and authority. So it's like you might imagine, um, you know, the behavior of Diogenes the cynic or something, just completely behaving in inappropriate ways in public as a as an expression of contempt for norms and authority. Yeah, I whistle, I do what I want now. Another paper I looked to when I was looking around for various superstitions, We of course found superstitions regarding whistling at sea, but we also find them in another interesting place below the surface of the earth in mines. Oh yeah, and I hadn't really thought about this, but this is apparently a big one. Uh paper, I was looking at an older paper. This is California Miners Folklore. This is from a two edition of California Folklore Quarterly written by Wayland D. Hand And um, yeah, it's it's it's a really interesting read. This one's out there on the internet if anyone wants a deeper dive into it. But uh, for example, he goes into the fear of the Tommy Knockers in the Tunnels. Now, Rob, I am only familiar with Tommy Knockers from the Stephen King novel or actually I never read the novel. I think I watched the made for TV movie adaptation of it, which is quite bad, and I think Stephen King himself regards that as a terrible book. But but I don't know what the original reference here is in the book. I think it's aliens. Yeah, I can never get very far with the book. But not aliens here, No, but it but it apparently refers to a fair variety of things, and they're very haunting and they kind of I feel like they also kind of connect to perhaps older European ideas of creatures that live in the earth, getting into you know, various ideas of dwarves and so forth. Yeah, the Cobald. This is what Hand writes in the paper. These denizens of the deep dark chambers of the earth are conceived in different forms as disembodied spirits of dead miners hovering in a working as patrons, or as little men elf like be whiskered and wizzened. They are usually thought of as benign, occasionally even assisting in the location of ore bodies. If they are not so well disposed, their conduct tends to be mischievous rather than malignant. Many California miners, though not having themselves seen these creatures in person, recall having seen small effigies of them made of clay and set upon portal, sets to a tunnel or on the lagging or elsewhere where their patronage is desired. So I love that image of not only the idea that there are these beings living elsewhere in the tunnels, but there's this kind of uh we talked about a little, you know, we were talking about when when people set to see, when they return, when they're when seamen are are out there on the waters there the newer religions that they have taken to might be set aside for the older ways the older gods, and here we have this example of of California miners potentially having little altars to to kind of dwarven Elvin beings in the minds. That's too good. So Hand discusses some other ideas as well, you know, the go some dead miners working in the tunnels. Um also phantom white mules, headless mules, and strange lights. Apparently he said that there weren't really that many creature myths concerning the minds, though occasionally you would have like a cat come down into the minds and would just scare the b Jesus out of everybody, because it would either way, I'm imagining, you know, the cat would get down there, it would be lurking about, its eyes gleaming and the light and just give everyone the proper spooks. But there there were also these superstitions about about the bad luck concerning well, first of all bringing women anywhere near the cave, but also there was a widespread superstition against anyone whistling down there, and it seems to be sort of twofold. On one hand, there was a real fear of vibrations in the caves, and so the there's this idea that you know, shouldn't whistle because you don't know what that's gonna do. You're gonna set up vibrations that could potentially cause a cave in. But it also seems inked to this older wider idea that if you're whistling, you could draw in spirits and hand shares. A fun little rhyme here quote whistle by night you'll bring the sprite. Whistle by day you'll drive them away. And this is not a sprite you want to bring, right, right, or certainly you don't want them. You don't want anything going on down there in the mind. You don't want you don't want any spirits balking about. You don't want any vibrations going wild. You want everything to just be as safe and quiet as possible. Right, Okay, so this is this is not like a friendly tinker bell. This would be a sprite that's gonna maybe pollute your oar or make a rock fall in your head or something. Yeah. Yeah, though, I guess coming back to the idea of the Tommy Knockers that it kind of comes back to the sort of neutrality of spirits. Right. It's the idea that well, there there, there are or maybe spirits around. Um, they might do some bad things, they might do some good things. We probably shouldn't call them. We shouldn't call an extra spirits, and we should try and be on the on the good side of any spirits that are present. Now, I think all of the examples we've talked about so far are superstitions. Uh. The the way that whistling relates to monsters or spirits or dangerous entities is that it's something humans could do that might in some cases attract them. So you know, be careful about whistling because you might get a monster on your tail. But I was thinking about, are there are there stories of monsters that themselves whistle or are you or do something like whistling? Yeah, I was curious about this. I first of all, I turned to Carol Rose, who has two Extraordinary volumes, one about monsters and giants and so forth, and the others more about fairies and sprites. And there's some overlap between the two books, but they are also things in each book that are not covered by the other, and so there were at least a couple of examples that stood out. One of them is an interesting monster of the people of the Zingu River in Brazil, and this creature was called minata karaia, and these are said to have been giants that were as tall as the trees, with fruit growing out of their armpits, which the giants then consumed to sustain themselves. So it sounds like they weren't themselves dangerous. They weren't like eating humans. But they're big, tall giants. So if they're coming your way, you want to know to get out of their out of their way. And the way you knew this is because the male giants had a hole in the top of their head and it emitted a high pitched whistle when they moved. This is a good monster. Okay, so we got armpit autophagi. They eat the fruit of their own armpits and their heads whistle. Yeah. Now another monster that Rose shares here is uh is a Russian creature that I think we might well describe as a sort of a harpy, or at least a harpy in them the way that modern people will think of the harpy a kind of bird human hybrid, though in this case I think they're They tend to be more male than female. And its name is Solve Rochtmas and in Russian folklore it's said to give a piercing whistle and this whistle will kill anyone who hears it, and then the monster will come and rob your corpse, rob your corps. So it's looking for money. Yeah, it's not not here to eat you either. It's interested in one thing, and it's whatever money you got on you checking your armpits for fruit. Yeah. But here in it's kind of an interesting theme because the next monster I wanted to mention also is not going to kill you. This one just wants to scare you real bad. Uh. This is yokai. I was looking around in Yokai traditions because I'm thinking, well, that's just such a rich font of creatures and beings that it makes sense that there'd be something out there that whistled. And the one that I found some descriptions of it that I found translated to of course mentioned whistling is something it does. Others don't mention it, so um, I can't be one and to present certain if this is something that is actually part of it or in a lot of these yokaia too, they and when you get into modern ghost stories as well, like there's there's there, there's still kind of rich and alive, so something's could added, and also some things could added in translation. But this one is called um Oa guru batari, and its name apparently means nothing but blackened teeth, which already sounds pretty pretty amazing. So this is this is the way this yokai has encountered. She appears as a beautiful woman in a traditional wedding kimono, and I guess you might see her at a distance, and in some cases as you get as your your interest and you move closer, she may whistle to get the attention of single men. Other accounts say that she may speak in the voice of a loved one. Um others don't seem to mention any kind of real sound at all. But as you get closer, this is the main thing that happens. She, like a lot of these type creatures, will reveal her face. And when she reveals her face, you find not a not a beautiful humanoid face, but instead a face that is largely blank except for a great, big, gaping mouth that's filled with nothing but black into teeth. And then she cackles, and you just scream and run a runaway, terrified uh, and that's it. She's not interested in hurting you. She's just here to scare the Bejesus out of you. No eyes, no nos, just the teeth and but but yeah, so so she doesn't bite your head off. It's just to show you the teeth and and get you upset. Yeah yeah, just just just a ghost. Um. Now, I didn't look super close at various pop culture and modern whistling entities, but I thought I would mention briefly that there is something called the whistling Fiend in Dungeons and Dragons raven Loft setting that's supposed to be this like this horrible monster, like a fiend from the pits of Hell, but it will whistle beautifully as it's approaching, so before anything goes goes terribly wrong, you'll hear the whistling. And then if you happen to witness what it does when it gets there, well it's whistling the whole time as well as it's doing you know, horrible, gruesome things to people. Now I was I was interested to run across this. I don't really know much about old radio dramas, but there was also an old radio drama about crime and fate titled The Whistler, and apparently on this show, the titular whistler kind of emerges out of the night. It's very much a kind of uh, you know, crime noir kind of a figure. You hear him whistling a catchy tune, and then he serves as the narrator and kind of host of the program. And there were apparently eight different Whistler films during the nineteen forties, and the first of them was The Whistler, and it was directed by William Castle, William Castle of the Tingler fame. Yeah, so I have to assume whom he installed special seats in the movie theaters that what would the whistle into your bud or something. I don't know, it sounds like the kind of thing he would he would do, Yeah, I mean his he is perhaps best remembered for figuring out what kind of gimmick would get people into the theater. Maybe they just the gimmick here was just the existing I p. I don't know, but I don't think you really hear about the Whistler much anymore. I think there was a nineteen fifties TV series, and I don't know that anyone's really gone back to this, but I like this idea because it's essentially it's kind of like a crip keeper. You know, it's an anthology host um. And apparently the deal with the movies is you would have the same star actor in each of them, uh, not not the Whistler but somebody else, though each story is different and so he's playing a different character. So so it's kind of like the modern version would be. I don't know, Ryan Gosling is in every Whistler movie, but Ryan Gosling plays a different protagonist, uh, a different character that's that's all wound up in some sort of tale of crime and fate. We just got a producer, Chiman from Seth who, by the way, is actually a devoted listener to The Whistler. I mean, I don't know if you can be devoted to something that is not currently produced, but he's a fan. He says, it's great. You know this idea of that the stranger who whistles, and they're there. It's unknown exactly what their their knowledge is, what their powers. Maybe I guess you do see that in a lot of a lot of cinema. It's often we've had some listeners right in and mentioned that Western's are a place where we see a lot of of such suspicious whistling. Um. It brings to mind a TV movie that I don't remember was especially good, but but it was creepy and it was called Into the bad Lands, and it starred Bruce dern as this creepy old bounty hunter in black. And if memory serves, uh, he does he does variously. He cooks some eggs, he shoots some um, some outlaws and dry him around kind of rotting behind his cart. Uh. He smiles a big creepy grin. But I think he also whistles in that one, And there's a particular ditty that's reoccurring. Uh, So there there is something to this the stranger who whistles. What is he whistling about? He's kind of ties into some of these other ideas, like like he's an outsider that is not tied to the same rules as everything else. He may have some sort of communication with knowledge beyond himself, with spirits, etcetera. Another producer, Chime ins Seth, had a great example of this, and it's Darryll Hannah and kill Bill who does a very creepy whistling while she's uh she is on the way to kill the protagonist. And that's a great example too, because this is this is a female character whistling. So many of these examples, even if we're touching on traditions where where where whistling is not gendered, it seems like a lot of them tend to involve male figures that are whistling. So so yeah, great example seth. Alright, So that's all I have for now anyway, concern whistling superstitions and whistling monsters. Certainly we don't love to hear from everyone out there who has additional things they would like to bring up, be it you know, folkloric creatures, strange traditions, and certainly any kind of you know, movie tie in characters who whistle. I'd love to hear about any of that. So yes, by all means right in So I guess the next thing we should look at is some of the psychology research on whistling, which I have to say, I was shocked how sparse this literature is. There is, from what I could tell, very little psychological research about when and why people whistle. One of the only major papers I could find on it wasn't really experimental in nature. It was very theoretical and uh and though it had a few interesting ideas in it that I do want to talk about. To the extent that it is theoretical, it seems kind of based in Freudianism, so it's gonna be a big caveat there. But before we get to that, I did want to talk about a medical ca east report I came across that had a title that really grabbed my attention. So this is a paper by Pollock at All published in BMC Psychiatry in two thousand twelve, and it's called Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling following Cardiac arrest A case study Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling. Oh my goodness, So is it the BA? Is that the music? You think that? That's what I was assuming. Unfortunately, the case report does not attach a recording or sheet music or anything, so, and it doesn't name the tunes, so I don't know what song it is. The most they say about it is that it is a carnival song. Alright, what are the options? Yeah, so you got that one is like the Binny Hill theme? Possible? I don't know, Yeah, I think, Oh, I don't want to get too far into this, because this is like, this is a realm I know virtually nothing about. But apparently there's a there's a fair amount of what we I think of his circus music that you know, we're talking about circus band stuff. We're talking about waltzes and fox trots. Uh So, there, there's there's probably a lot there. But the is the thing that that mostly comes to the surface for for folks like me. Okay, So in this case, report the medical history the patient. In this case it's anonymous of course, so we don't know their name. But it was a man who was found unconscious in his car in February at the age of forty eight, having suffered a heart attack. Um he was in cardiac arrest for some period of time, but he was reanimated successfully in the emergency room at a nearby hospital, so he survived the heart attack he had. His heart had stopped, there was reduced supply of oxygen to the brain, but they resuscitated him and he was all right. But during rehabilitation he presented with some symptoms, including neurological impairment and uh So, several of the things they report are disorientation, apathy. What they called brady phrenium, meaning slowness of thought, short term memory problems and things like that. And imaging particularly E. G. Showed decreased functioning in the brain, especially in the bezo temporal areas, and he continued to exhibit some neurological symptoms in the following years. And here's where we get to the music. I'll read straight from the case report quote. We were approached in May two eight by the patient's wife, who got to know our center of expertise through the internet. She was close to desperation from listening to the whistling of the same carnival song for nearly sixteen years. It would go on for five to eight hours every day and got worse when the patient was tired. So it's a mix like obviously it's uh, you know, I was snagged by the idea of of repetitive whistling of a carnival song, but when you actually hear the details, it is I don't know that it's a very unfortunate situation to imagine that like the whistling of the same song goes on four five to eight hours a day for sixteen years. Now. The authors here talk about treatments that were tried, including a drug called clamypramine, which is a tricyclic antidepressant that is sometimes used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, which obviously share some features with what's being described here uh that among other conditions. But basically this drug regimen did manage to decrease the whistling by about half, but it also came with some very difficult side effects in in this man's case, and the repetitive whistling of a carnival song NonStop for five to eight hours a day could be considered an example of what psychiatrists would call compulsivity, which the authors describe as quote, the repetitive, irresistible urge to perform a behavior, the experience of loss of voluntary control over this intense urge, and the tendency to perform repetitive acts in a habitual or stereotyped manner. So they talk about how the man would whistle the song on a on a loop all day pretty much, and that at certain points they could make him stop doing it, though he reported after he stopped that he experienced anxiety um and in their discussion, the authors explain how the man in this report showed symptoms that could be consistent with three different interpretations of his condition. So, first of all, they talk about the idea of a frontal syndrome characterized by impulsivity and disinhibition. I think frontal syndrome there because it's the frontal lobe that is very important for inhibiting behavior. That's your sort of like self control mechanism um. And then second a compulsivity condition known as punding, which is characterized by quote, purposeless and repetitive behavior such as collecting or arranging things often related to the patient's personal hobbies or occupation, and attributed to alterations of the brain's reward and motor systems in both the ventral and dorsal stree atom. And then the final interpretation would be a sort of acquired form of obsessive compulsive disorder or o c D UH, And there are other examples of people acquiring o c D after a brain injury later in life. The o c D is usually acquired gradually earlier on in life. And they say all of these explanations matched the observations in some ways but not in others. But one thing they got into that I thought was interesting here was talking about the different characteristics of impulsivity versus compulsivity in the brain. So the rite quote, one may conclude that the whistling with its repetitions is primarily compulsive rather than impulsive or disinhibitive, as the patient had a constant urge to whistle and felt anxiety when asked to stop rather than acting without foresight. The fact that anxiety was felt is in line with compulsivity rather than impulsivity, assuming that compulsive behaviors are performed to prevent perceived negative consequences from happening. So this is a useful distinction for thinking about because when we you know, outside of the medical context, when we think about these words impulsive or compulsive, they both I think usually refer to situations where a person seems to lack executive control. They lack the ability to control their own behavior or prevent themselves from doing something, but in very different ways. So in impulsivity, you feel an urge to do something, but some process taking place in your frontal lobe tells you that's not appropriate and stops you from doing it. But the urge itself might be something normal that, like we would all think of doing for a second, it might cross our mind to do it, but then we would turn away from actually doing it because of some inhibition mechanism in the brain. Examples of this include all kinds of stuff, spitting on the floor, or making a rude or inappropriate comment and conversation, or jumping out of a moving car. They can they can vary wildly from you know, minor things to extreme things. They would all be things though, that even a person with typical neuro anatomy might think for a second about doing, but then they would be able to stop themselves. All right. I think we can all think of examples of this from our own life, where you have it's like it's you're just in a situation and you may think of like something just ridiculous or absurd or antisocial that you theoretically could do, and then you sort of but you recoil from it and you realize, oh, well, of course I'm not going to do that. And it can be a little shocking to think that you even thought about doing that, Like why did I think that, hey, I could take my wallet out and throw it off of this building or off of this bridge that I'm on. Yeah. Yeah, we did a whole episode one time called the imp of the Perverse. That was about this idea that like that there is some kind of It was about the first half before the inhibition comes in. It's like, what is that? Or to do things that are obviously not in your best interests, but you suddenly just feel like, oh, I should do that. But then you're able to put the you know, put the lid on it and say no, I shouldn't do that. People with a frontal syndrome often have impulsivity problems because they whatever the normal disinhibition mechanism in the brain is that has been damaged in some way by their injury. So contrast that that impulsivity with compulsivity, where a person also lacks the ability to stop themselves from performing an action, but it's an action that they feel they must do repetitively in order to prevent some kind of bad consequence from happening. So remember it was said that the man here would whistle constantly, but he felt the immediate onset of anxiety if he stopped whistling the carnival song. So that makes it sound more like it's it's compulsivity here, that it's something that he felt he had to do repetitively or else negative consequences would emerge. And the case history here man is that the man once worked as head of a carnival association. And the authors don't say this, so we don't know this, but it seems like a reasonable guess that the carnival tune he was whistling was one he was familiar with from his own past working uh, working as the head of a carnival association, maybe even one he associated with a time when he was more in control. That's fascinating because it also this ties into sort of the power of music, right like we have we we all use music, I think at times to to augment our current mental state, to draw in uh mental feelings of of of power or assertiveness, but also uh sadness, whatever the case might be, whatever we feel like we need to connect with that is not our current state exactly. But it also ties into something that came up in previous episodes. So here again we have a case of a man who suffers neurological damage after a period where his brain isn't getting enough oxygen. Uh. He never had any symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder or anything before this, but after this event he acquired this tendency to engage in compulsive whistling. And I thought it was interesting that the whistling, if it is best interpreted as a way of staving off anxiety, which the authors here suggested, is it made me think of our discussion about whistling past the graveyard or whistling in the dark, other cases where it's commonly observed that people whistle in order to push out of fear or or or thoughts of danger. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, more and more whistling past the grave yard for sure. Now, again, as I mentioned earlier, it seemed like the psychological research on whistling was far less developed than I would have expected. Maybe there are some great studies out there that I just wasn't able to find, So if you if you know of them, please send them into the show account contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But the other major one I found, and this was cited in in some other papers, is a paper from nineteen fifty nine published in the journal Language and Speech called Win People Whistle, And it's by the you see San Francisco professor of psychiatry Peter F. Austwald, As I said, earlier. I do want to mention this one because it has some interesting ideas in it, but also it is an older paper. It clearly is not constricted by empirical method. This is not like reporting on on original experiments. It's more kind of theorizing about what whistling might mean and why people whistle, based on models that seem at least influenced by Freudianism. A lot of it's about, you know, fixations that uh uh sort of emerge from childhood development. But anyway, okay, so who is this guy who wrote this? Austwald. He seems like a kind of interesting guy. So he lived from nineteen to nineteen six, and his life is sort of divided between an interest in psychiatry on on one hand, and music and music history on the other. So he wrote biographies of musicians and composers like Schumann and Glenn Gould. But also, to quote from his New York Times obituary quote, in nineteen eighty six, he founded the Health Program for Performing Artists, a voluntary group of specialists engaged in research, education, and clinical care of the particular mental and medical problems afflicting musicians, dancers, and other performing artists. Both professionals and students. And I thought that was very interesting because now that I think about it, it clearly makes sense that you could have a medical center focused on the mental and physical health needs of performing artists, in particular, because I'd imagine there would be patterns in their needs, but it never occurred to me that such a thing would exist. Yeah, I mean it makes sense, right, because we have sports medicine. Athletes do extreme things with their bodies that put special types of wear and tear on them, and you could I think you can very fairly say the same thing for performers, especially when you're thinking about something like d ats or vocal performance. Totally, But okay, what what does Ostfauld say in this language psychology paper? Mainly, this article is focused on questions of why humans whistle, what purpose it serves, what whistling tends to mean, and how it differs from other forms of noise production. I'm not gonna get into everything he theorizes about in this paper, but I did want to focus on one part where he's sort of, uh, taking a look at the phenomenology of whistling. What does it feel like to whistle? Like? Is it pleasurable to people, and if it is, which it often seems to be, why is it pleasurable? So to check one of the very Freudian boxes, he he argues that, first of all, the act of whistling involves manipulation of the muscles in the face and the mouth in a way that may produce hedonic states and feelings of comfort and pleasure because of its similarity to the facial and mouth movements of what he calls oral gratification. And so he expands that to all kinds of things like eating and smoking, but he specifically ties it into the facial and mouth muscle movements of a feeding infant. So this is one of those things that, well, it's hard to disprove that, but I'm not convinced there's much evidence to establish that exact causal chain that like doing the same thing with your face muscles that you did when you were a baby in your mother's arms produces comfort and for the same reason. Uh, I don't, I don't know how you would show that. Yeah, And also I'd be skeptical that there's a general principle that doing something with the you know, the skeletal muscle in your body that is similar to what that muscle does in some other unrelated activity that is pleasurable in some way gives you pleasure in the secondary activity just because you're using the same muscles. I don't know. I mean, you could think of uh ways that you would use the same muscles you might use in some pleasurable activity, but it doesn't bring pleasure. Does just like pretending to chew bring you the same kind of pleasure you get from eating and so forth? Uh yeah, generally not Uh yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't just say, pretend to be eating your favorite dish and uh. I mean maybe if you're hungry enough you can you complete into it a little bit. I don't know, but yeah, for the most part, I don't really put a lot of stock in this this notion. Yeah, so I got doubts about that. But then he makes some other points that I think are I don't know, more worth considering. Uh, this next one is still sort of along Freudian lines, but I think it's it's I don't know, it feels different to me. So see what you think about this. He says, quote. In addition to the mouth and face whistling involves the respiratory structures. These structures, chest, abdomen, lungs, wind pipes, and throat move of their own accord regulated by neuronal and chemical processes beyond voluntary control. But the whistler in effect willfully imposes his own rhythm, amplitude, and organization pattern on these automatic movements. Psychological studies show that if the individual is rewarded by attention or praise when he first gains control over such automatic processes, he may continue to expect satisfaction from this display of skill. As will be shown later, whistling arouses the attention of listeners, so that the whistler's bodily mastery is almost universally rewarded in some way. And I don't know at a at a gut level, this seemed a little more plausible to me that there could be like a learned association of positive reinforcement upon gaining conscious control over previously automatic or autonomic processes. And I think one of the main ideas this ties into here is like toilet training, that you know, there could be some kind of bleed over with pleasure upon a general pleasure upon taking conscious control of things like breath, and that would sort of check out with other things. I mean, there are a lot of things people do to seemingly bring themselves pleasure and comfort just by taking conscious control of breath, which is normally automatic. Yeah, this does remind me of certain potty training techniques for for kids where there will be for instance, if you're you're you're trying to teach the the the very young child to have some degree of control over when they defecate. Uh, there's a there's a like a technique where you're that you're getting them to hum while they do it. So it's yeah, I can see where you can have a lot of connection between the two here. Oh and in the next section I want to talk about he actually ties directly into that. So oust Bald writes, quote, some of the emotions that accompany the act of whistling would appear to result from wishful thoughts and magical fantasies in the mind of the whistler. Whistling, because it involves the production of wordless sounds, may bring back memories of that very early period during which the child could not distinguish between those sounds which came from the outside world and those sounds which came from his own body. During this phase of personality development. One is unsure of the significance of sound. One cannot tell whether a certain noise, say one's footsteps, has personal meaning referable only to his own body, or has a public meaning with some reference to the world of other people. In this confused state, the individual may come to believe that the sounds he produces have some causal relationship to what he experiences. Whistling, like other noises he makes, may thus be associated with fantasies of omnipotence, which, unless corrected by reality, can lead to delusions of grandeur. Uh. This was really interesting to me because think about how many things we've already looked at where there's some belief that, like whistling gives you power to like change the external world somehow. Yeah yeah, ties directly into the wind magic we've been discussing and uh and getting, and even connects back to the the Taoist transcendental whistling as well totally, or even the Terence mckenneth thing. Yeah yeah, yeah, but okay, So coming back to this, um Ostfald writes, quote, Occasionally parents or other adults inadvertently encourage magical behavior in their children, and thus reinforce fanciful thoughts about whistling and other sounds. For example, nurses have been known to employ whistles to quote, make the child urinate and kindly. Grandparents not infrequently whistle away the aches and bruises of a youngster. Yeah. Yeah, I can see the whip again, whistling as the as a sound of wind, but also the sound of water moving water. We touched on that and then some of these ideas that you can get an ox or a horse to drink water by whistling at it um, which there may not be anything to that, but using it as some sort of a potty training. Yeah, that I can imagine the humming sound being for the deification that with the whistling sound being for uh, you know, the creation of water with one's body, that sort of thing. And that could actually have efficacy when you're whistling to a person, right because they hear that that has some associative significance for them. It may actually help motivate, i don't know, going to the bathroom, or may actually make them feel subjectively less pain or something like that. But that could that could lead to the erroneous assumption therefore that you can have have physically implausible control over the external world with whistling somehow. Yeah, anyway. Ostwald then relates this to reports tying directly back into our previous episode about sailors who have intense superstitions about whistling and believe that it contains powerful and dangerous magic. You know, again whistling for the wind. And he also discusses magical beliefs about whistling to summon birds and Celtic tales. Uh, and this involves a mediating technology. Plenty of stories about beasts and magical creatures that are commanded by a flute, you know, think of the god pan and the magical cy rings and so forth, but also the the piper pie piper. Yes, but the interesting observe ration that sort of puts a bow on this whole thing is he uh he ends up talking about whistling as a form of non verbal signaling. So uh here he would uh specifically not be talking about actual languages that use whistles, where there's a full language and the whistle is actually mean words. Um, so you know, he's not talking about whistling with precise informational content, but rather the more informal type of communication done via whistling in in other contexts, he writes, quote, wordless signals usually have a vague and imprecise meaning. They do not usually communicate ideas, but serve rather to attract attention, And he describes some of the same research we've already talked about, for example, that whistling is a type of noise making that travels especially well by concentrating energy and the wonderful kill hurts range, which is the best window for for humans to hear. It's sort of a perfect attention getter. But in the context of most cultures, cultures where whistling does not constitute a length, which it doesn't contain words or precise information, again, it's meaning is vague. It's just an attention getter. And personally, I think maybe it's in this vagueness that a lot of the superstitions and ideas about the magical danger of whistling could emerge, because it's a it's sort of a one to punch. It's this paradox. Whistling is like the most powerful signal you can make with your body to attract attention. The most powerful sound signal you can make, right, is this piercing sound. It travels far, it makes people turn their heads. It's like a beacon, and yet in most cases it doesn't form precise words or phrases, so you can't be sure what kind of attention you're attracting. It's just a general beacon. It could attract a friend, or if you're in a dangerous place, maybe you're on the sea, and they're all kinds of forces at work, it could just as likely attract unwanted attention, a dangerous enemy of some kind. And because you can't form precise words with it, you also don't know what you're saying or what you're asking for. It's like the scene in the movie where you know, you like read a spell from an ancient book in another language, and you don't know what the words are, so you don't know what kind of spell you're enacting or what kind of trouble you're getting into. Yeah, or thinking about the transmissions that we send into outer space, or that are sent from somewhere else in outer space by some you know, presumably intelligent or once intelligent species, like the potential danger of just of whistling into the cosmic darkness, and you don't know who is going to receive the signal and what they'll make of the signal. I think that's a perfect analogy. Yeah, it's like I think a lot of these fears and superstitions about the magical power of whistling would be like, uh, if somebody in the real context said, I have created the most powerful radio transmitter that will omnidirectionally broadcast an incredibly clear power or full signal that any other intelligence out there could detect. We don't know what they'll make of it, but let's just start transmitting. There would obviously be some some real concerns about that from from some of the less sanguine of extraterrestrial theorists. Yeah. I mean, imagine if we just pipe circus music out, like just NonStop circus music, what would they make of it? Maybe maybe the killer clowns from outer space show up. That's the problem. God help us. All Right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up this four part whistling series here, But again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there, because whistling is something that I think all of us have some connection to. You can whistle, or you can't whistle, or you can sort of whistle, or there's some sort of cultural ideas about whistling. There's something about whistling in the way you were brought up. Uh, they're whistling in in various pieces of media. So all of this is fair game right in and we would love to hear from you. In the meantime, you can always find core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always, who are excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. Uh. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. Five n