April 21, 2026 • 49 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the royal histories and curious biologies of such resplendent fish as the common gold fish and koi.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
third and I think for now final episode in our
series about Fishes of gold where we've been talking about orange, yellow,
and golden varieties of fish in the Karp family, like
the goldfish and the cooyfish. In the past two episodes,
we talked about the selective breeding of goldfish, which goes
(00:37):
back more than a thousand years in China and was
historically linked to the practices of Chinese royalty. We also
talked about how even though the orange and golden colors
of goldfish today are mostly the result of artificial selection
by humans, there are some interesting evolutionary reasons that animal
(00:57):
somems develop similar colors in nature, and we talked about
what those reasons are. We also discussed adaptations in goldfish
and close relatives like the Crucian carp to the adaptations
that make them able to survive extremely low oxygen conditions
that would kill most other vertebrates. In the last episode,
(01:18):
we talked about the history of koifish, which are a
much younger project than goldfish being bred from wild species
of carp beginning in nineteenth century Japan. We talked about
claims of extreme longevity in cooyfish and why the evidence
for some of the most amazing claims is a little thin.
And then we also got into some carp legends, such
(01:41):
as stories about carp that transform into dragons, carp human
hybrid creatures like the ningyo, and carp that can be
ridden like a horse at least if you are a
Taoist immortal. And we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
That's right, and I'm pretty excited about this episode because
we're going to get into to a large extent some
of the weirder topics in our Goldfish.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Series, riding the carp and brewing alcohol in their muscles
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Wasn't that wasn't weird enough for it.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I mean, that was plenty weird, But I don't know,
We're getting into stranger scientific territory in these two episodes,
the sorts of science experience. We teased this out in
the last episode, you know, mentioning that goldfish in particular
have been studied quite a lot. We know a lot
about them, and they have popped up in so many
different scientific experiments, and I think we were able to
(02:34):
zero in on a couple of different areas of goldfish
research that are pretty weird and in some ways maybe
a little weirder than what we had been previously talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
They pop up in a lot of experiments that are
not so much about goldfish and not really geared towards
scientists trying to understand the particulars of goldfish as a species,
but they are used often as a model organism to
try to extract generalities about animal capabilities and learning and
even things like we talked about in the first episode,
(03:03):
like the effects of alcohol on learning abilities across the
animal kingdom.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, and while they're useful in these roles, in this role,
it does make it fascinating to then look at all
these studies and you know, we all have this sort
of relationship with the goldfish. We think of it as
being either mundane or dainty and or maybe royal and regal,
depending on what your view is. And then the idea
that that is going to be in some sort of
(03:29):
weird science experiment that makes everything maybe a little more
ridiculous seeming, which is pretty fun.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So I've got a weird one for you. One avenue
of research I've been wanting to talk about in this
series is a story some of you out there might
remember from a few years back. It made some like
weird science news headlines. It was the study where a
bunch of scientists successfully taught a bunch of goldfish to
(03:56):
drive a car, not exactly a car. I'll describe the
vehicle in a second, but the paper was by given
at all and it was called from Fish out of
Water to New Insights on Navigation Mechanisms and Animals, published
in twenty twenty two in the journal Behavioral Brain Research.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Rob.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
I've got a.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Picture in the outline that you can look at here
of this fish operated vehicle.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
It was so called the FOV and.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
I don't know, maybe you can tell me how it
fits in your car buying style. I guess neither of
us are really car guys, so you know, we don't
know like what's cool in a car other than in
the most superficial sense.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
But it looks inexpensive, which is truly my vehicle.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Range economy Sedan. So yeah, So this was research conducted
on goldfish, the species Carassius aratus, like we've been talking about.
And again the question they're looking at was can a
goldfish be trained to drive a wheeled vehicle? It was
not exactly a car, but a tank full of water
(05:01):
mounted on motorized wheels which the goldfish could control with
its movements inside the tank. And so the question is
can a goldfish learn to drive one of these things
across land? The authors designate a name for this type
of experiment. They call it a domain transfer methodology quote,
(05:24):
where one species is embedded in another species environment and
must cope with an otherwise and otherwise familiar in our case,
navigation task. So they're trying to transfer skills into an
unfamiliar domain, taking familiar skills but to an unfamiliar place
or application. And so the question is can a goldfish
(05:47):
reapply existing water based navigation skills onto land in this
wheeled vehicle. Now you might have a lot of questions.
One is, like goldfish, you know, they don't have hands
to grip a steering wheel, they don't have feet to
operate a pedal system, so how would they drive this car? Again,
this was called the fish operated vehicle or FOV, and
(06:10):
it uses a combination of a few things. It has
a camera system and it uses lidar, which is laser
based range finding technology that sends out pulses of light
pulses of laser light to measure distance to objects. And
so it uses the lightar in the camera system to
paired together with some special software to interpret the information
(06:32):
from these sensors to detect the movement and body orientation
of the fish. And the way it works is when
the fish orients its head toward one of the outer
walls of the tank and then swims forward, the drive
system detects this and makes the tank roll in the
direction the fish is swimming, so it can move around
(06:56):
in there. But when it points its face to one
of the outer walls and goes forward forward, the light
bar in the camera say okay, time to move, and
it moves the car in that direction.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
So sort of like a technologically advanced version of the
same principles in a hamster ball.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Oh kind of yeah, yeah, a little bit like a
hamster ball, yeah, except it's full of water, of course.
So the fish operated vehicle, it extends the locomotion activity
of swimming so that it is no longer just moving
the fish's body through the water, but moving the body
of water through outside space. And this twenty twenty two
(07:35):
study by Giving and co authors tested six goldfish in
the vehicle to see how well they could learn to
drive and steer, and they were trained with a form
of positive reinforcement learning.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So if the.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Fish successfully navigated the aquarium car toward a pink target
on the wall, it was like a pink board mounted
on the wall that the you know, the fish would
try to pilot toward and then hit. If it could
hit the pink board, it would get a food reward.
It would get one single pellet of fish food. By
the way, I read in a piece of reporting about
(08:08):
this study, I think this was in a Guardian article
that I read that the authors named the fish in
the experiment after characters from Pride and Prejudice.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
I don't know if there's any significance to that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
But so the way it worked out is that they
did these reinforcement learning tasks and at first the movements
of the fish in the cars were very random, but
the authors found that after about a dozen thirty minute
sessions of training over the course of a few days,
the goldfish could pilot their tanks well enough on average
(08:41):
to drive into the target more than seventeen times in
thirty minutes, and this was a huge improvement from the
first sessions where they managed to hit the target an
average of only two or three times in thirty minutes.
And the fish they showed adaptability when the authors tried
to introduce new problems for them, so they could chase
(09:02):
the pink target around to different locations in the car
if it was moved. You know, initially it's on this wall.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
They learned to get to that wall.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Then the researchers moved the pink target to the opposite wall.
Can the fish figure out how to get there?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Also?
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yes, they could. They got to the new target. They
also learned how to navigate to the target even if
there were walls or obstacles in the way, how to
go around things or distraction objects mounted nearby, like other
colored boards put up on different parts of the wall.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
So the authors found that as training went on, the
fish also took less meandering more direct pathways to the
target to get their food. So I'm imagining they're sort
of turning the fish into terminators. They're becoming laser focused
on getting that food reward and operating this piece of
you know, they're essentially there. It's a marine version of
(09:57):
a mech as we were just discussing. Yeah, they're piloting
their max to the pink board to get the pellet.
A couple of the fish adapted to the training especially well.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
Again.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I was reading one write up of this research in
The Guardian. This was by Natalie Parletta and the article
quotes one of the studies authors mentioning that the fish
named mister Darcy and the one named mister Bingley I
think these are two of the main suitors in pride
and prejudice. They were especially quick to pick up driving skills.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Amazing.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
The purpose of the study had to do with the
question are animals navigation abilities fundamentally tied to the environments
that they evolved to live in, or can animals apply
spatial concepts like distance, movement, orientation and proximity to a
(10:50):
type of space or medium that is totally alien to
their natural habitat. We know that humans can do this
with training, of course, like we can pilot airplane and submarines.
But is this only because there's something special about our brains,
like our intelligence and our cognitive flexibility is so high
that we can adapt our movement capabilities to these strange scenarios,
(11:15):
or is this something more general that animal brains can do.
So the interesting thing here is that it shows even
some animals we think of as pretty cognitively limited, like goldfish,
can adapt their navigation skills to a setting they have
absolutely no ancestral experience with. There is no situation in
nature where a goldfish needs to pilot a car across land.
(11:39):
There's no situation that I can think of in nature
where a goldfish would able to be even able to
understand the idea of not moving itself through water, but
moving the body of water that it's in through an
outer spatial container. But if given the opportunity to learn,
(11:59):
they can learn, and the findings can be interpreted in
a universal way or in a specific way. So the
universal implication is that in animals, it may just be
that across many or most species, navigational skills are generalizable
to any type of movement through space, and they don't
(12:20):
depend on specific adaptations or instincts related to the medium,
or the environment or the method of locomotion. So it's
not just that a fish's brain sees something it wants
and that sort of goes directly to like swimming movements
in the body, that it's able to learn new ways
to use its body to come closer to objects that
(12:43):
it needs. And then so that's a possibility. The more
specific possible interpretation is that maybe just goldfish are much
smarter and better at learning than you might guess. Of
course both could be true, could be generally true about animals,
but also that you know, goldfish are smarter than we
give them credit for. And in fact, this comes up
(13:04):
in one of the things I was reading. The authors
say they hope it disproves the myth that the goldfish
has a three second memory. You've heard this before or
just the common cliche or insult you have the memory
of a goldfish. Goldfish probably don't have as rich and
detailed a capacity for memory as we do, but clearly
their memory is a lot better than they are often
(13:25):
given credit for.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, I mean we part of it is the domesticated
and you know, unnaturally selected, artificially selected form that they're in.
Now like it's we can easily forget that. Still, this
is a creature with wild origins that evolved like all
the other carp to thrive in you know, a dangerous
(13:48):
world with the tools that they need to thrive in
that world, and those tools, you know, via domestication. Sometimes
those tools can be blunted a little bit, sure, but
they're also still there. There's still the survival instinct. These
are still organisms that can fit for themselves. And we
didn't really get into this too much, but they can
(14:09):
also do quite well, a little too well in the wild.
If they're reintroduced somewhere they shouldn't.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Be right as an introduced species, they can kind of
take over sometimes, so Carper Hardy Carper Tough, one of
the authors, shash A Given, was quoted in that article
in The Guardian saying, quote, since on the evolutionary scale,
our commonness ancestor is very very far back, finding that
fish share navigational skills similar to our own really speaks
(14:38):
volumes to the importance of these skills in the animal kingdom,
and I think that's a good point. It is a
characteristic feature of the animal kingdom movement. It's sort of
one of the main things that makes animals different from
plants or fungi. Now, of course, not all animals move
(14:58):
around in all stages of their life. You can think
of animals that are mostly sort of sessile or attached
to something, But most animals do, at least in some
stage of their life, move around and navigate through their environment.
And it is Yeah, it's a key characteristic of the
animal kingdom. And for movement to be useful, we need navigation.
(15:22):
Your body is what allows you to move, but navigational
skills determine where it should move, what type of movement
is beneficial to it. It does make me wonder, really,
like what the ultimate limits of this universality are. Could
starfish be trained to drive cars around? Or you know,
can we have rats piloting submarines? How truly universal across
(15:45):
the animal kingdom is the ability to adapt and learn
new associations between movements of the body and navigation or
movement through space to get things you want.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
I wanted to mention another studies. There was another paper
on this subject published just last year, sharing some of
the same authors as the previous paper. It was called
Whole body motor adaptation in Goldfish using fish operated vehicle.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
This was by.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Jojenlu at All in the European Journal of Neuroscience twenty
twenty five. And so this one extended the idea once again.
They had goldfish who were trained to use fish operated vehicles,
just like in the last experiment, but they introduced new variables.
One was what if the steering in the vehicle is
(16:48):
screwed up? How does the fish adapt to that? And
then also they were looking into the learning capabilities of
fish and the persistence of previously learned lessons.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
So I'm going to.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Read a selection from this paper that addresses the key questions,
and then I'll comment some as i go. So the
author's right quote. Our study aims to address the following questions.
Can goldfish learn from error while operating the vehicle with
constant perturbation? So this perturbation was essentially a steering malfunction
(17:24):
where the movement would always be tilted forty five degrees
to the right of the fish's intended movement of the fishes, well,
not necessarily intended because eventually it would adjust, but of
the fish's initial training. So first it's going to be,
you know, the thing goes straight in the direction that
the fish is pointing its face when it's swimming towards
(17:46):
an outer wall. They say, okay, you initially train them
like that, and then you introduce a malfunction where it's
always pulling to the right forty five degrees from wherever
the fish is going.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Video gamers are used to this sort of thing because like,
you'll have something that'll cause your controls to go screwy,
say in a Bomberman game or Mortal Kombat game, and
then it's like, oh, up is down now and down
is up? And can you adapt while this spell is
taking place?
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Or you know, just drivers of cars, like a lot
of times a car that has misaligned.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Wheels will pull.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
It will pull in one direction and you have to
correct for that. People learn to adapt pretty quick, but
you have to correct your steering. You know, if you
just let it go straight, it's gonna pull and run
off the road, So you have to keep correcting. So
the researchers were asking, can fish learn to overcome a
problem like this when they are driving the car? So
(18:38):
then the quote continues to the second question they addressed,
would fish in the fish operated vehicle show an after
effect in a wash out session? In other words, would
the fish continue to try to correct for the steering
problem after the problem was removed, and the term wash
out that they use there refers to, in the author's words,
(19:01):
quote the gradual decay or elimination of motor adaptation when
the perturbation is removed.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
So the idea is you get them to learn to
correct for the steering that's off kilter, then you set
the steering back to normal. How long do they keep
trying to compensate for the error that is no longer there?
So they do that initially, and then they adapt once
again to the steering being correct. That's this decay period,
(19:28):
the washout time. How long does it take to wash
out the effects of the compensation from the steering problem.
And then on to the next question, they ask, quote
would fish relearn faster after the first adaptation? So you
take away the pulling to the right problem, let the
steering go back to normal. Then introduce the same steering
(19:48):
problem again, have it start pulling to the right. Well,
the fish adapt to it more quickly the second time,
like I've had this problem before.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
I know how to compensate now.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
And then the final question, quote can we observe persistent
effects on fish swimming after the first adaptation? And they say,
as we show, the answers to these questions are yes, yes, no,
and yes, essentially establishing that goldfish adapt to perturbations in
fish operated vehicle control, but raising the possibility that they
(20:21):
do so with mechanisms that are different from classical adaptation
in mammals. So that's interesting about the one answer that's
no there, the fish did learn how to compensate, so
once again, of course, they did learn how to use
the fish operated vehicle. The training worked, They did learn
how to compensate for steering problems. They could drive it
(20:41):
even when the steering was off kilter after some training
they could. But unlike in most mammals that have been
tested with this sort of thing, the fish did not
initially relearn how to compensate for the steering problem significantly
faster the second time they encountered it. Though their overall
(21:03):
performance in the perturbation task was better the second time,
it's just that they didn't improve on it any faster
than they did the first time. So maybe it just
could be that their initial performance on it the second
time is a little bit better. But that's kind of interesting.
So they do show this adaptability, but they don't show
exactly the same kind of patterns of learning and adaptation
(21:26):
to motor problems that mammals usually do. There's something a
little that they can learn, but there's something a little
bit different going on with fish.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Fascinating. So tell me this. These driverless cars that I
see around town, are they actually being driven by goldfish?
Do you think?
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Really good question? Yes.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Do they have goldfish somewhere out there in like a
remote operation base or piloting these things?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, a technician has to come out. They're just they
come out with a little bag with a fresh goldfish
in it, and they switch it out with the tired
goldfish that has to be taken off duty.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Yeah, or you know you can see like when they stop,
they've got to refill with gas, but they've also got
to get more food pellets, so it keeps the fish going.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, well that's this is amazing. Just the idea of
a goldfish navigating essentially like what a land submarine, moving
around our environments and achieving goals pretty amazing. Even if
they even if they do have this, you know, they're
not as great about resolving the problem the second time.
I'm still very impressed.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
My brain was going a strange place with this, which
was like, I wonder what this says about you know,
truly alien scenarios, really alien scenarios, and say the human
beings ability to adapt to like higher dimensional spaces, like
navigating kind of geometries that don't make any sense to us. Now,
(22:55):
I don't know if it actually has any relevance to that,
because of course there's something that the fish's environment of
the water and the air environment that the fish operated
vehicle is driving around through. There's something those have in common,
which is at least there are you know, like straight
lines that you can follow to get to something. You know,
(23:18):
basic geometry and movement through through the three D space
is preserved in a way that's familiar to us. So
I don't know how far the ability to adapt to
new types of space and movement go.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
But but I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Maybe maybe the limits are even further out than we
would think. Maybe maybe animals could with some training, adapt
to you know, moving through hyper spheres and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Wow, well, I think this is a great jumping off
point to talk about the final frontier for goldfish. Goldfish
in outer space. You may be already wondering about this.
We're already talking about them driving cars. You might well question,
do goldfish have the right stuff, and are we fully
(24:05):
prepared for the reality of goldfish in outer space? Real
goldfish in outer space not. I was doing some image
searches related to something later on in this section, and
I kept finding images of the goldfish snack item, the
children's favorite little cheddary goldfish. They have some sort of
space variety, and I think I've been counted them before,
(24:25):
but I can't imagine what they I think they just
taste like normal cheddary goldfish.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah, it seems like, you know, the Mickey mouse shaped ones.
I don't I can't tell those stay standia front, but.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Kids love them. Yeah, all right, So yeah, goldfish in
outer space. We're going to get into this, and it's
actually going to connect quite nicely with some of the
things we were talking about in our episodes on the
Upside Down about particularly about organisms in a low gravity, microgravity,
zero gravity environment. So I'm gonna refer to some of
(24:58):
those terms. So if you skipped those episodes entirely, wouldn't
be a bad idea to go back and check those
out before we get into the rest of this episode.
But I don't know. We'll get you up to speed
one way or another. Okay, and we're also going to
talk about cyborgs, which is the topic we've touched on
on the show in the past and recently came up
on an episode of Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Oh, were there some cyborgs and Nemesis? Did that movie
concern cyborgs?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, Network, Yes, Nemesis definitely had cyborgs. But then the
most recent Mega Godzilla is a cyborg, at least in
the same way that the T eight hundred is a cyborg.
I don't know that Mega Godzilla has any organic interior parts,
but it at least had perhaps a living organic exterior
like the terminate.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Yeah, hair, sweat, bad breath, everything.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
All right, Well, we'll back up here. Obviously, humans have
sent or taken various animal species into orbit before, including fish,
and as discussed in David Samuel Johnson's The First Fish
in Orbit Scientific American twenty sixteen, NASA scientists in the
nineteen seventies were eager to see how fish would adapt
(26:08):
to a low gravity orbital environment, given that they, of
course thrive in the three dimensional environment of water. Goldfish
were apparently considered for this role, as again they're hardy fish.
We keep talking about how tough they are, but apparently
they were not quite cardy enough. They were not tough
enough for NASA back in the seventies. They ended up
(26:30):
going with a different fish altogether, a type of minno
called the mumachog, also known as the chillifish. This is
Fundleus heteroclitis fundalist that if it sounds like Bay of Fundi,
that's because that's one of the places where you'll find
this particular species. Apparently kind of an obscure fish because
(26:54):
humans don't favor it as food or bait, but it
was deemed tough enough for space. Two juvenile fish and
fifty eggs travel aboard the nineteen seventy three Skylab three
mission to the US's first space station. Again, these were
not goldfish, but the fish in this experiment did play
(27:15):
an important role, and it all ties back into something
we were talking about in our Upside Down episodes. So
this is how the experiment with these minnows went down,
and don't worry, this will come back. Well, we'll come
back around to goldfish. So basically, at first, the two
fish just swam in elongated loops. Johnson describes it quote
(27:37):
as though they were the spinning hands of a Salvador
Dolly created clock.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
That's expressive.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, he's good, right, and was apparently due to the
disruption of the fish's understanding of up and down, specifically
disrupting the vestibular writing response in the inner ear.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Okay, so even though fish don't stand on the ground,
they do depend somewhat on a gravitational directional sense.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Right, yeah, and lining up with what we discussed previously
on the upside Down episodes. On the third day, the
fish ended up assuming normal swimming patterns, or at least
you know, they were deemed to be normal in this experiment,
keeping their back to the main interior lights aboard the
space station. So without a functional vestibular writing response, they
(28:25):
adapted to a light source to visual stimuli, with the
light apparently sort of standing in for the sun, because
what direction would light come from in the natural watery environment.
It would come from above, and so they adapted and
they were like, Okay, I can't feel which way is
up and down anymore, but I can see the primary
(28:46):
light source in my universe. It must be the sun
that's up.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
So this reminds me of what we talked about in
those Upside Down episodes where when you are deprived of
your vestibular cues about up and down, the body try
to source a lot of its sense of up and
down when it's still trying to preserve a subjective, vertical
a sense of up and down, and it gets a
lot from visual information.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, I was actually thinking about this a lot. I
did a yoga class earlier today, before this recording, and
you know, I was often the case in yoga classes,
you'll do some sort of a standing routine where you're balancing,
like on one foot or something, and you can, if
you really think about it, during those moments, you can
really you can feel yourself, you know, aligning with what's
up and down. But also you have the visual data
(29:30):
as well, and so that you often are told to
focus on adrichtie, focus on some sort of a spot
on the wall, a stain, or particularly, what works particularly
well for me that was recommended is some sort of
a vertical line, like the corner of something or the
exact corner of a room, and you can focus on
that and that can help you stay more stable. But anyway,
(29:52):
that's humans, and we're talking about fish. Johnson writes that
the fish and the humans as well, in the aboard
the spaceship. Here basically acclimatized to low gravity at the
same rate. Johnson writes, as the movement shogs looped, the
astronauts vomited as the urge to vomit subsided in the astronauts,
(30:14):
So too did the urge to loop in fish? Interesting,
and I read elsewhere in the Lyndon B. Johnson Space
Center Apollo Soyu's test project report that while some of
the fish died, the ones that made it back resume
normal swimming positions without issue. Which, again, if they are
adapting and readapting in the same way that human beings
(30:35):
adapt and readapt this makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
So that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think I would have expected the adaptations to be
similar for like terrestrial mammals, but I would have had
more questions about how space adaptation would affect aquatic animals.
And that's interesting that there are all these similarities.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, And more fish related experiments followed with different space
missions from different countries. Again, this was not a goldfish
or even a carp So when did goldfish finally go up? Well,
let's dig a little deeper. In seventy six, the Russian
Soyu's twenty one mission aboard the Salute five space station
(31:16):
included experiments with aquarium fish. I found at least one
passing reference to these as maybe being goldfish, but most
sources seem to indicate there were maybe zebra fish. So
I don't think the goldfish got to go up on
this mission. So when did the goldfish go up? Well?
I found an excellent online National Geographic article titled Animals
in Space by Taylor Magicomo and Alexander Stegneier. And according
(31:43):
to this article, it points out that in nineteen eighty five,
the US and the USSR both experimented with killefish, again
with guppies, and then both of these countries as well
as the ESA experimented with guppies in nineteen eighty nine,
and then, according to nat GEO, the common carp finally
made up in nineteen ninety two. This was like a
joint US Japan experiment. These were apparently two carp of
(32:08):
twenty six centimeters in size. One was intact, had not
been surgically altered, and one had its autoliths removed. The
audilists remember, these are calcium carbonate structures in the vertebrate
inner ear that detect linear acceleration, gravity, and head tilt,
and they're essential for balance and spatial orientation. And so
(32:32):
they spent eight days of aboard Space Lab j up.
Next we had there was another mission in nineteen ninety two.
This was the STS sixty five Space Lab IML two
year Again ninety two, goldfish missed the call again. Instead,
Japanese rice fish go up and these were used to
study mating behavior in microgravity. But then finally ninety four,
(32:56):
this is when goldfish finally get the call as heart
of a joint US Japanese mission that was to feature
Japan's first female astronaut, Chiaki Muke born nineteen fifty two,
which was also the first Asian woman in space. And
this experiment consisted of six red and white goldfish. There's
(33:17):
a picture here included for you, Joe. They look pretty
orange and white to me, but I think the breed
this variety is referred to as red and white. They
were bred in Japan and then they were sent up
to study space sickness in how the low gravity environment
affects the way that the animal moves in their environment
(33:40):
and how they react to light and so forth. Basically
similar stuff to the very first killyfish experiment that we
highlighted earlier.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
With similar results are different.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Well, it seems to have been a much more focused study,
so there's a little more to discuss here. So this
would have been SDS sixty five a board Space Shuttle Columbia,
and this also featured other aquatic organisms as part of
its payload, including newts and jellies, crabs, crabs, and no
(34:13):
crabs on this one. Crabs and Space will have to
wait for our next crab episode. I don't have any
day to hear in front of me on Crabs and Space.
But the goldfish were definitely there, and yeah, there's a
photo of them on the NASA website if you look.
I would recommend looking up like SDS sixty five or
(34:34):
look up the year ninety four Goldfish in Space NASA
and you will find the image. It's it's still there
on SA's website and it looks really cool. It looks
like something out of Alien if Alien were expressly concerned
with goldfish.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
It does look like that.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, so we have a very metal panel with a
glass bubble and you can see all the fish inside
looking out at you, like help me. I hate this,
just griebles everywhere it's a surface.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah yeah, So the focus of this study was really
on balance and brain plasticity, and I read more about
it in Mechanism of Vestibular Adaptation of Fish under Microgravity
by Takabayashi at All, published in nineteen ninety seven, so
a few years later in Biological Sciences in Space. So
here are some key details pulled directly from that paper. So, again,
(35:28):
six goldfish, and they included one normal goldfish fish, so
this fish had no changes made to it. There was
one with the otoliths removed from both sides, and then
four with the odalists removed from only one side. Okay.
Then as they started studying the way these fish responded,
(35:49):
they also point out that the dorsal light responses or
dlrs of fish with otalists removed were recorded after operation,
until launch, and after land. So this is how it
ends up going down on day double zero. This is
a mission to lapse time day zero zero, two fish
with otalists removed on one side showed flexion of body
(36:12):
toward the operated side. These fish also showed rolling behavior
toward the operated side. Okay, this is going to make
more sense as we roll along the body flextion disappeared
on MET day five or MET day eight. No rolling
behaviors were observed after that time. Then five fish showed
backward looping behaviors during the mission. Although the frequency of
(36:33):
looping episodes decreased after MET day eight, five fish still
showed looping behavior in MET day twelve, final day of recording.
So in microgravity, the visual system of the fish did
not seem to provide sufficient cues to prevent them from
looping and rolling. After landing, no looping or rolling behavior
(36:53):
was observed. However, they stressed that the tilt angle of
the DLR increased in the fish with italith removed five
months before launch, but not in normal fish in those
with odalists removed two weeks before the launch. And these results,
they say, suggest that the behavioral dysfunction and the adaptational
process in space is dependent on vestibular inputs.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Okay, so in this.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Focused study, the visual system alone wasn't enough to make
up for what was lacking from the vestibular sense of gravity.
And reading that, reading that that he had this one
fish that didn't show backward looping behavior, I was thinking, well,
this must be the unaltered fish, right, maybe that's what's
going on here, that's the one for one, but this
(37:42):
apparently is not the case. It was one of the
bilateral fish, one that had odalists removed on both sides,
which apparently it didn't backward loop because it didn't get
confusing signals from its odoliths. It was able to like
just focus on vision. But the other bilateral fish, the
other fish that had both odalists removed, it had it
(38:03):
still it was still looping, but had less severe looping,
and it may have been essentially confused by vestigial compensation response.
So you know, like you say it, it gets rather
complicated here, But this study apparently shined more light on
just exactly how this interplay works, at least in the goldfish,
(38:24):
and then we can extrapolate that out for other creatures
as well. Like what happens when you have confusing signals
coming from the odalus from the vestibular system and then
we're having to rely on vision instead. And what happens
if you have completely removed key components of the vestibular
system and you're allowing the fish to just rely on
(38:46):
vision alone.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
You need that for when you come back.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
That's the thing. Yeah, the big the main point being
it's we can certainly create some sci fi visions where
it makes sense for a human space traveler to you know,
to leave behind gravity entirely and say, okay, well, I'm
only going to live in space now, I don't need
to return home. But as far as like near future
(39:11):
of you know, perceivable human space flight, it's just hard
to imagine that sort of scenario, right. You'd have to
be imagining some sort of like generational colony ship sort
of a scenario, or I don't know, some some scenario
that require people to just stay in a weightlesser, near
wightless environment for the duration of their lives. It's pretty clear, however,
(39:32):
there'd be some major downsides as well. I mean, for starters,
if you ever had to return to you know, top
side to the surface of a planet, you know, you
would you wouldn't be able to function properly. But on
top of this, you'd be completely visually dependent as far
as determining up and down, and you could still feel
(39:55):
ill from angular acceleration I'm to understand. So it's not
like you would have you know, free ticket to get
out of any kind of feelings of distortion. Now, obviously
this this is still this is an idea that that
(40:18):
is going to factor into sci fi quite a bit.
There are a number of stories that have and will
continue to ask that question, like, Okay, what could what
could we? Or what would we or what should we
change about the human form to create better astronauts? Like
what does that consist of? Do we need a you know,
do we need to you know, just squirt a little
(40:38):
xenomorph blood in there and see what happens. Do we
need to become cyborgs? This is of course part and
partial to the origin of the word cyborg in many ways, like,
you know, thinking about changes that we could make instead
of changing space and changing other worlds to make make
it to where humans can survive there? What have we
made humans more hearty or made humans more of a
(41:00):
space faring organism? And so changes to the vestibular system
are sometimes employed in these sci fi visions, alongside many
other alterations. So I was looking around for sci fi
tales that concerned this, and I've found a really interesting one.
This is a tale I was not familiar with. I
(41:21):
think vaguely was aware of this author, but I hadn't
read anything by him before, and it's called Scanners Live
in Vain, written in nineteen forty five and published in
nineteen fifty. No connection to the Scanners movies or the
Scanner cop movies. It refers to something different, entire differently, entirely.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
There's the Spy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
This is by Cord Wayner Smith. Yeah. Again, it's a
name that I've seen. I think i'd seen pop up
here and there, but I don't think I've ever read
anything by him. But in the story setting, humans just
cannot endure what is referred to as the Great Pain
of space, and they can only travel while they are
placed in a form of suspended animation. And you know,
(42:06):
as you might expect, somebody's got attend to these sleepers
while they're traveling from point A to point B. And
so that's where the Habermans come into play. And then
the Scanners are the people that are like in charge
of the Habermans. Both of these are classifications of humans
who have undergone a surgical procedure to sever almost all
(42:29):
of their sensory nerves except vision.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
So okay, so trying to imagine that, I would wonder
how in a way would you like control your body,
like if you kind of can't feel or I don't know, well,
I don't know how much does the proprioceptive sense depend
on nerve signals from the rest of the body.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
I don't know. It's I mean, it's a you know,
definitely a sci fi situation here, and and to be
clear that sold the Great Pain of Space is made
be a little broader and also a little bit vague,
but it plays well within a sci fi It's like, Okay,
if spaceflight is painful, I just have to shut off
everything except for revision. But it does line up rather
(43:12):
nicely with some of these experiments we've been talking about
with a vestibular system and vision. So within the context
of the story, this all prevents them from feeling the
Great Pain of space, and it's a necessary sacrifice for
space travel, but it also makes them entirely vision dependent,
and they even have to like monitor readings on a
cybernetic box on their chest just see what their body's
(43:35):
doing to figure out if they've injured themselves or not,
if they have an elevated heart rate, Various things that
you would be able to sort of like feel out
in your body and just be part of your body awareness.
They have to like check a reading. So yeah, it's
a fun little story. Basically, there's a murder plot that
emerges when the Scanners and the Haberman's learn that a
(43:57):
normal human will soon publicly reveal method that allows normal
humans to avoid the great pain of space without having
to surgically sever themselves. And you know, somebody's like, well,
we should murder this person. And I won't spoil how
it all. It all, it works out, but there's some
fun we're world building here, and again it kind of
lines up nicely with some of these experiments we've been discussing.
(44:21):
But again, this is you know a lot of stories
have gotten into this territory of, you know, changing people
for space. There's a fun one nineteen seventy six novel
by Frederick Pohle titled Man Plus that features a cyborg
adapted to colonize Mars, and I think there are various
(44:41):
extreme changes that have taken place with the protagonist here.
He's had his nervous system revised. All the major pathways
connected through a computer backpack that is powered by jet
black solar panels that are described as looking like bat wings. Whoa,
And there's they're very fun paperback covers for this one.
(45:02):
I included one here for you, Joe. This is one
where the vision of humans adapted for life in space
is like basically to turn humans into some sort of
extreme alien like cyborg entity.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah, kind of a bipedal insect with yeah, solar panel
wings and gigantic eyes and looks. Also just like the
like the chest kind of opens up to reveal the organs.
Maybe that's for easy access if you need to do
some maintenance.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah, you never know. I need to reach in there.
And we know how it is with cyborgs. Theyre always
going to pull stuff out, change stuff, put stuff back in.
So you know you don't want it all sealed under.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
Flesh, right, didn't you watch Nemesis come out?
Speaker 2 (45:41):
All Right, there's one more story I want to highlight here,
and I will go ahead and put out the general
call that you know readers have space fearing cyborgs that
they think are applicable here, especially if it ends up
involving the vestibular system. I would love to hear about it,
but I ended up running across a mention of this
(46:02):
story called Vestibular Man by Felix c. Gotshock from nineteen
eighty five. It was later collected in the nineteen ninety
one anthology Future on Fire, but it was originally published
in the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, And so
the title really I knew that it had something to
(46:22):
do with androids, and then calling it vestibular Man, I'm like, well, okay,
I've got to find out what this is about. And
it seems to basically it does have a bionic drill
sergeant in it, but the main character just seems to
be unnaturally aware of what his inner ear is doing,
and or the author is just fixated on the vestibular system.
(46:46):
I can't honestly recommend this story to anyone, but it's
full of just really looney sentences like this one quote.
Deep inside his vestibular nests, the eternal, equal, liberatory fluid
now lay ninety degrees from verticality, and it gave him
to know both comfort as well as the ventral vulnerability
(47:09):
of supinity. And there are numerous sentences as ludicrous as
this in this story that are directly tying into the
vestibular system and talking about what's going on in the
protagonist's inner ear.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I mean, that's a story where you get what the
title says, those are the thoughts of a vestibular man.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, so again, I was disappointed that it doesn't really
relate to vestibular changes in cybernetic space faring humanoids, and
it definitely has nothing to do with goldfish. But it
was so weird I had to mention it here.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
But again, there may be better examples of cyborgs in
sci fi out there that folks may want to bring up.
So definitely, right in, we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Okay, Well, is that the end for now of our
exploration of goldfish?
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I think so, but we'll just go ahead and reiterate
in general. If you have feedback, insight experiences related to
goldfish or any of the goldfish topics we've discussed here,
or koi or carp in general, write in we would
love to hear from you. If you just want to
send us photographs of your beloved goldfish, of your beloved koi,
(48:21):
or a carp you happen to see out in the world,
also send that along. We would love to look at it.
Just a reminder to everyone out there. The Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we
have a short form episode, and then on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
third and I think for now final episode in our
series about Fishes of gold where we've been talking about orange, yellow,
and golden varieties of fish in the Karp family, like
the goldfish and the cooyfish. In the past two episodes,
we talked about the selective breeding of goldfish, which goes
(00:37):
back more than a thousand years in China and was
historically linked to the practices of Chinese royalty. We also
talked about how even though the orange and golden colors
of goldfish today are mostly the result of artificial selection
by humans, there are some interesting evolutionary reasons that animal
(00:57):
somems develop similar colors in nature, and we talked about
what those reasons are. We also discussed adaptations in goldfish
and close relatives like the Crucian carp to the adaptations
that make them able to survive extremely low oxygen conditions
that would kill most other vertebrates. In the last episode,
(01:18):
we talked about the history of koifish, which are a
much younger project than goldfish being bred from wild species
of carp beginning in nineteenth century Japan. We talked about
claims of extreme longevity in cooyfish and why the evidence
for some of the most amazing claims is a little thin.
And then we also got into some carp legends, such
(01:41):
as stories about carp that transform into dragons, carp human
hybrid creatures like the ningyo, and carp that can be
ridden like a horse at least if you are a
Taoist immortal. And we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
That's right, and I'm pretty excited about this episode because
we're going to get into to a large extent some
of the weirder topics in our Goldfish.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Series, riding the carp and brewing alcohol in their muscles
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Wasn't that wasn't weird enough for it.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I mean, that was plenty weird, But I don't know,
We're getting into stranger scientific territory in these two episodes,
the sorts of science experience. We teased this out in
the last episode, you know, mentioning that goldfish in particular
have been studied quite a lot. We know a lot
about them, and they have popped up in so many
different scientific experiments, and I think we were able to
(02:34):
zero in on a couple of different areas of goldfish
research that are pretty weird and in some ways maybe
a little weirder than what we had been previously talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
They pop up in a lot of experiments that are
not so much about goldfish and not really geared towards
scientists trying to understand the particulars of goldfish as a species,
but they are used often as a model organism to
try to extract generalities about animal capabilities and learning and
even things like we talked about in the first episode,
(03:03):
like the effects of alcohol on learning abilities across the
animal kingdom.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, and while they're useful in these roles, in this role,
it does make it fascinating to then look at all
these studies and you know, we all have this sort
of relationship with the goldfish. We think of it as
being either mundane or dainty and or maybe royal and regal,
depending on what your view is. And then the idea
that that is going to be in some sort of
(03:29):
weird science experiment that makes everything maybe a little more
ridiculous seeming, which is pretty fun.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
So I've got a weird one for you. One avenue
of research I've been wanting to talk about in this
series is a story some of you out there might
remember from a few years back. It made some like
weird science news headlines. It was the study where a
bunch of scientists successfully taught a bunch of goldfish to
(03:56):
drive a car, not exactly a car. I'll describe the
vehicle in a second, but the paper was by given
at all and it was called from Fish out of
Water to New Insights on Navigation Mechanisms and Animals, published
in twenty twenty two in the journal Behavioral Brain Research.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Rob.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
I've got a.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Picture in the outline that you can look at here
of this fish operated vehicle.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
It was so called the FOV and.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
I don't know, maybe you can tell me how it
fits in your car buying style. I guess neither of
us are really car guys, so you know, we don't
know like what's cool in a car other than in
the most superficial sense.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
But it looks inexpensive, which is truly my vehicle.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Range economy Sedan. So yeah, So this was research conducted
on goldfish, the species Carassius aratus, like we've been talking about.
And again the question they're looking at was can a
goldfish be trained to drive a wheeled vehicle? It was
not exactly a car, but a tank full of water
(05:01):
mounted on motorized wheels which the goldfish could control with
its movements inside the tank. And so the question is
can a goldfish learn to drive one of these things
across land? The authors designate a name for this type
of experiment. They call it a domain transfer methodology quote,
(05:24):
where one species is embedded in another species environment and
must cope with an otherwise and otherwise familiar in our case,
navigation task. So they're trying to transfer skills into an
unfamiliar domain, taking familiar skills but to an unfamiliar place
or application. And so the question is can a goldfish
(05:47):
reapply existing water based navigation skills onto land in this
wheeled vehicle. Now you might have a lot of questions.
One is, like goldfish, you know, they don't have hands
to grip a steering wheel, they don't have feet to
operate a pedal system, so how would they drive this car? Again,
this was called the fish operated vehicle or FOV, and
(06:10):
it uses a combination of a few things. It has
a camera system and it uses lidar, which is laser
based range finding technology that sends out pulses of light
pulses of laser light to measure distance to objects. And
so it uses the lightar in the camera system to
paired together with some special software to interpret the information
(06:32):
from these sensors to detect the movement and body orientation
of the fish. And the way it works is when
the fish orients its head toward one of the outer
walls of the tank and then swims forward, the drive
system detects this and makes the tank roll in the
direction the fish is swimming, so it can move around
(06:56):
in there. But when it points its face to one
of the outer walls and goes forward forward, the light
bar in the camera say okay, time to move, and
it moves the car in that direction.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
So sort of like a technologically advanced version of the
same principles in a hamster ball.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Oh kind of yeah, yeah, a little bit like a
hamster ball, yeah, except it's full of water, of course.
So the fish operated vehicle, it extends the locomotion activity
of swimming so that it is no longer just moving
the fish's body through the water, but moving the body
of water through outside space. And this twenty twenty two
(07:35):
study by Giving and co authors tested six goldfish in
the vehicle to see how well they could learn to
drive and steer, and they were trained with a form
of positive reinforcement learning.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So if the.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Fish successfully navigated the aquarium car toward a pink target
on the wall, it was like a pink board mounted
on the wall that the you know, the fish would
try to pilot toward and then hit. If it could
hit the pink board, it would get a food reward.
It would get one single pellet of fish food. By
the way, I read in a piece of reporting about
(08:08):
this study, I think this was in a Guardian article
that I read that the authors named the fish in
the experiment after characters from Pride and Prejudice.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
I don't know if there's any significance to that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
But so the way it worked out is that they
did these reinforcement learning tasks and at first the movements
of the fish in the cars were very random, but
the authors found that after about a dozen thirty minute
sessions of training over the course of a few days,
the goldfish could pilot their tanks well enough on average
(08:41):
to drive into the target more than seventeen times in
thirty minutes, and this was a huge improvement from the
first sessions where they managed to hit the target an
average of only two or three times in thirty minutes.
And the fish they showed adaptability when the authors tried
to introduce new problems for them, so they could chase
(09:02):
the pink target around to different locations in the car
if it was moved. You know, initially it's on this wall.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
They learned to get to that wall.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Then the researchers moved the pink target to the opposite wall.
Can the fish figure out how to get there?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Also?
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yes, they could. They got to the new target. They
also learned how to navigate to the target even if
there were walls or obstacles in the way, how to
go around things or distraction objects mounted nearby, like other
colored boards put up on different parts of the wall.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
So the authors found that as training went on, the
fish also took less meandering more direct pathways to the
target to get their food. So I'm imagining they're sort
of turning the fish into terminators. They're becoming laser focused
on getting that food reward and operating this piece of
you know, they're essentially there. It's a marine version of
(09:57):
a mech as we were just discussing. Yeah, they're piloting
their max to the pink board to get the pellet.
A couple of the fish adapted to the training especially well.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
Again.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I was reading one write up of this research in
The Guardian. This was by Natalie Parletta and the article
quotes one of the studies authors mentioning that the fish
named mister Darcy and the one named mister Bingley I
think these are two of the main suitors in pride
and prejudice. They were especially quick to pick up driving skills.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Amazing.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
The purpose of the study had to do with the
question are animals navigation abilities fundamentally tied to the environments
that they evolved to live in, or can animals apply
spatial concepts like distance, movement, orientation and proximity to a
(10:50):
type of space or medium that is totally alien to
their natural habitat. We know that humans can do this
with training, of course, like we can pilot airplane and submarines.
But is this only because there's something special about our brains,
like our intelligence and our cognitive flexibility is so high
that we can adapt our movement capabilities to these strange scenarios,
(11:15):
or is this something more general that animal brains can do.
So the interesting thing here is that it shows even
some animals we think of as pretty cognitively limited, like goldfish,
can adapt their navigation skills to a setting they have
absolutely no ancestral experience with. There is no situation in
nature where a goldfish needs to pilot a car across land.
(11:39):
There's no situation that I can think of in nature
where a goldfish would able to be even able to
understand the idea of not moving itself through water, but
moving the body of water that it's in through an
outer spatial container. But if given the opportunity to learn,
(11:59):
they can learn, and the findings can be interpreted in
a universal way or in a specific way. So the
universal implication is that in animals, it may just be
that across many or most species, navigational skills are generalizable
to any type of movement through space, and they don't
(12:20):
depend on specific adaptations or instincts related to the medium,
or the environment or the method of locomotion. So it's
not just that a fish's brain sees something it wants
and that sort of goes directly to like swimming movements
in the body, that it's able to learn new ways
to use its body to come closer to objects that
(12:43):
it needs. And then so that's a possibility. The more
specific possible interpretation is that maybe just goldfish are much
smarter and better at learning than you might guess. Of
course both could be true, could be generally true about animals,
but also that you know, goldfish are smarter than we
give them credit for. And in fact, this comes up
(13:04):
in one of the things I was reading. The authors
say they hope it disproves the myth that the goldfish
has a three second memory. You've heard this before or
just the common cliche or insult you have the memory
of a goldfish. Goldfish probably don't have as rich and
detailed a capacity for memory as we do, but clearly
their memory is a lot better than they are often
(13:25):
given credit for.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, I mean we part of it is the domesticated
and you know, unnaturally selected, artificially selected form that they're in.
Now like it's we can easily forget that. Still, this
is a creature with wild origins that evolved like all
the other carp to thrive in you know, a dangerous
(13:48):
world with the tools that they need to thrive in
that world, and those tools, you know, via domestication. Sometimes
those tools can be blunted a little bit, sure, but
they're also still there. There's still the survival instinct. These
are still organisms that can fit for themselves. And we
didn't really get into this too much, but they can
(14:09):
also do quite well, a little too well in the wild.
If they're reintroduced somewhere they shouldn't.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Be right as an introduced species, they can kind of
take over sometimes, so Carper Hardy Carper Tough, one of
the authors, shash A Given, was quoted in that article
in The Guardian saying, quote, since on the evolutionary scale,
our commonness ancestor is very very far back, finding that
fish share navigational skills similar to our own really speaks
(14:38):
volumes to the importance of these skills in the animal kingdom,
and I think that's a good point. It is a
characteristic feature of the animal kingdom movement. It's sort of
one of the main things that makes animals different from
plants or fungi. Now, of course, not all animals move
(14:58):
around in all stages of their life. You can think
of animals that are mostly sort of sessile or attached
to something, But most animals do, at least in some
stage of their life, move around and navigate through their environment.
And it is Yeah, it's a key characteristic of the
animal kingdom. And for movement to be useful, we need navigation.
(15:22):
Your body is what allows you to move, but navigational
skills determine where it should move, what type of movement
is beneficial to it. It does make me wonder, really,
like what the ultimate limits of this universality are. Could
starfish be trained to drive cars around? Or you know,
can we have rats piloting submarines? How truly universal across
(15:45):
the animal kingdom is the ability to adapt and learn
new associations between movements of the body and navigation or
movement through space to get things you want.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
I wanted to mention another studies. There was another paper
on this subject published just last year, sharing some of
the same authors as the previous paper. It was called
Whole body motor adaptation in Goldfish using fish operated vehicle.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
This was by.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Jojenlu at All in the European Journal of Neuroscience twenty
twenty five. And so this one extended the idea once again.
They had goldfish who were trained to use fish operated vehicles,
just like in the last experiment, but they introduced new variables.
One was what if the steering in the vehicle is
(16:48):
screwed up? How does the fish adapt to that? And
then also they were looking into the learning capabilities of
fish and the persistence of previously learned lessons.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
So I'm going to.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Read a selection from this paper that addresses the key questions,
and then I'll comment some as i go. So the
author's right quote. Our study aims to address the following questions.
Can goldfish learn from error while operating the vehicle with
constant perturbation? So this perturbation was essentially a steering malfunction
(17:24):
where the movement would always be tilted forty five degrees
to the right of the fish's intended movement of the fishes, well,
not necessarily intended because eventually it would adjust, but of
the fish's initial training. So first it's going to be,
you know, the thing goes straight in the direction that
the fish is pointing its face when it's swimming towards
(17:46):
an outer wall. They say, okay, you initially train them
like that, and then you introduce a malfunction where it's
always pulling to the right forty five degrees from wherever
the fish is going.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Video gamers are used to this sort of thing because like,
you'll have something that'll cause your controls to go screwy,
say in a Bomberman game or Mortal Kombat game, and
then it's like, oh, up is down now and down
is up? And can you adapt while this spell is
taking place?
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Or you know, just drivers of cars, like a lot
of times a car that has misaligned.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Wheels will pull.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
It will pull in one direction and you have to
correct for that. People learn to adapt pretty quick, but
you have to correct your steering. You know, if you
just let it go straight, it's gonna pull and run
off the road, So you have to keep correcting. So
the researchers were asking, can fish learn to overcome a
problem like this when they are driving the car? So
(18:38):
then the quote continues to the second question they addressed,
would fish in the fish operated vehicle show an after
effect in a wash out session? In other words, would
the fish continue to try to correct for the steering
problem after the problem was removed, and the term wash
out that they use there refers to, in the author's words,
(19:01):
quote the gradual decay or elimination of motor adaptation when
the perturbation is removed.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
So the idea is you get them to learn to
correct for the steering that's off kilter, then you set
the steering back to normal. How long do they keep
trying to compensate for the error that is no longer there?
So they do that initially, and then they adapt once
again to the steering being correct. That's this decay period,
(19:28):
the washout time. How long does it take to wash
out the effects of the compensation from the steering problem.
And then on to the next question, they ask, quote
would fish relearn faster after the first adaptation? So you
take away the pulling to the right problem, let the
steering go back to normal. Then introduce the same steering
(19:48):
problem again, have it start pulling to the right. Well,
the fish adapt to it more quickly the second time,
like I've had this problem before.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
I know how to compensate now.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
And then the final question, quote can we observe persistent
effects on fish swimming after the first adaptation? And they say,
as we show, the answers to these questions are yes, yes, no,
and yes, essentially establishing that goldfish adapt to perturbations in
fish operated vehicle control, but raising the possibility that they
(20:21):
do so with mechanisms that are different from classical adaptation
in mammals. So that's interesting about the one answer that's
no there, the fish did learn how to compensate, so
once again, of course, they did learn how to use
the fish operated vehicle. The training worked, They did learn
how to compensate for steering problems. They could drive it
(20:41):
even when the steering was off kilter after some training
they could. But unlike in most mammals that have been
tested with this sort of thing, the fish did not
initially relearn how to compensate for the steering problem significantly
faster the second time they encountered it. Though their overall
(21:03):
performance in the perturbation task was better the second time,
it's just that they didn't improve on it any faster
than they did the first time. So maybe it just
could be that their initial performance on it the second
time is a little bit better. But that's kind of interesting.
So they do show this adaptability, but they don't show
exactly the same kind of patterns of learning and adaptation
(21:26):
to motor problems that mammals usually do. There's something a
little that they can learn, but there's something a little
bit different going on with fish.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Fascinating. So tell me this. These driverless cars that I
see around town, are they actually being driven by goldfish?
Do you think?
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Really good question? Yes.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Do they have goldfish somewhere out there in like a
remote operation base or piloting these things?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, a technician has to come out. They're just they
come out with a little bag with a fresh goldfish
in it, and they switch it out with the tired
goldfish that has to be taken off duty.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Yeah, or you know you can see like when they stop,
they've got to refill with gas, but they've also got
to get more food pellets, so it keeps the fish going.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Yeah, well that's this is amazing. Just the idea of
a goldfish navigating essentially like what a land submarine, moving
around our environments and achieving goals pretty amazing. Even if
they even if they do have this, you know, they're
not as great about resolving the problem the second time.
I'm still very impressed.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
My brain was going a strange place with this, which
was like, I wonder what this says about you know,
truly alien scenarios, really alien scenarios, and say the human
beings ability to adapt to like higher dimensional spaces, like
navigating kind of geometries that don't make any sense to us. Now,
(22:55):
I don't know if it actually has any relevance to that,
because of course there's something that the fish's environment of
the water and the air environment that the fish operated
vehicle is driving around through. There's something those have in common,
which is at least there are you know, like straight
lines that you can follow to get to something. You know,
(23:18):
basic geometry and movement through through the three D space
is preserved in a way that's familiar to us. So
I don't know how far the ability to adapt to
new types of space and movement go.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
But but I don't know.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Maybe maybe the limits are even further out than we
would think. Maybe maybe animals could with some training, adapt
to you know, moving through hyper spheres and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Wow, well, I think this is a great jumping off
point to talk about the final frontier for goldfish. Goldfish
in outer space. You may be already wondering about this.
We're already talking about them driving cars. You might well question,
do goldfish have the right stuff, and are we fully
(24:05):
prepared for the reality of goldfish in outer space? Real
goldfish in outer space not. I was doing some image
searches related to something later on in this section, and
I kept finding images of the goldfish snack item, the
children's favorite little cheddary goldfish. They have some sort of
space variety, and I think I've been counted them before,
(24:25):
but I can't imagine what they I think they just
taste like normal cheddary goldfish.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah, it seems like, you know, the Mickey mouse shaped ones.
I don't I can't tell those stay standia front, but.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Kids love them. Yeah, all right, So yeah, goldfish in
outer space. We're going to get into this, and it's
actually going to connect quite nicely with some of the
things we were talking about in our episodes on the
Upside Down about particularly about organisms in a low gravity, microgravity,
zero gravity environment. So I'm gonna refer to some of
(24:58):
those terms. So if you skipped those episodes entirely, wouldn't
be a bad idea to go back and check those
out before we get into the rest of this episode.
But I don't know. We'll get you up to speed
one way or another. Okay, and we're also going to
talk about cyborgs, which is the topic we've touched on
on the show in the past and recently came up
on an episode of Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Oh, were there some cyborgs and Nemesis? Did that movie
concern cyborgs?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, Network, Yes, Nemesis definitely had cyborgs. But then the
most recent Mega Godzilla is a cyborg, at least in
the same way that the T eight hundred is a cyborg.
I don't know that Mega Godzilla has any organic interior parts,
but it at least had perhaps a living organic exterior
like the terminate.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Yeah, hair, sweat, bad breath, everything.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
All right, Well, we'll back up here. Obviously, humans have
sent or taken various animal species into orbit before, including fish,
and as discussed in David Samuel Johnson's The First Fish
in Orbit Scientific American twenty sixteen, NASA scientists in the
nineteen seventies were eager to see how fish would adapt
(26:08):
to a low gravity orbital environment, given that they, of
course thrive in the three dimensional environment of water. Goldfish
were apparently considered for this role, as again they're hardy fish.
We keep talking about how tough they are, but apparently
they were not quite cardy enough. They were not tough
enough for NASA back in the seventies. They ended up
(26:30):
going with a different fish altogether, a type of minno
called the mumachog, also known as the chillifish. This is
Fundleus heteroclitis fundalist that if it sounds like Bay of Fundi,
that's because that's one of the places where you'll find
this particular species. Apparently kind of an obscure fish because
(26:54):
humans don't favor it as food or bait, but it
was deemed tough enough for space. Two juvenile fish and
fifty eggs travel aboard the nineteen seventy three Skylab three
mission to the US's first space station. Again, these were
not goldfish, but the fish in this experiment did play
(27:15):
an important role, and it all ties back into something
we were talking about in our Upside Down episodes. So
this is how the experiment with these minnows went down,
and don't worry, this will come back. Well, we'll come
back around to goldfish. So basically, at first, the two
fish just swam in elongated loops. Johnson describes it quote
(27:37):
as though they were the spinning hands of a Salvador
Dolly created clock.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
That's expressive.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, he's good, right, and was apparently due to the
disruption of the fish's understanding of up and down, specifically
disrupting the vestibular writing response in the inner ear.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Okay, so even though fish don't stand on the ground,
they do depend somewhat on a gravitational directional sense.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Right, yeah, and lining up with what we discussed previously
on the upside Down episodes. On the third day, the
fish ended up assuming normal swimming patterns, or at least
you know, they were deemed to be normal in this experiment,
keeping their back to the main interior lights aboard the
space station. So without a functional vestibular writing response, they
(28:25):
adapted to a light source to visual stimuli, with the
light apparently sort of standing in for the sun, because
what direction would light come from in the natural watery environment.
It would come from above, and so they adapted and
they were like, Okay, I can't feel which way is
up and down anymore, but I can see the primary
(28:46):
light source in my universe. It must be the sun
that's up.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
So this reminds me of what we talked about in
those Upside Down episodes where when you are deprived of
your vestibular cues about up and down, the body try
to source a lot of its sense of up and
down when it's still trying to preserve a subjective, vertical
a sense of up and down, and it gets a
lot from visual information.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, I was actually thinking about this a lot. I
did a yoga class earlier today, before this recording, and
you know, I was often the case in yoga classes,
you'll do some sort of a standing routine where you're balancing,
like on one foot or something, and you can, if
you really think about it, during those moments, you can
really you can feel yourself, you know, aligning with what's
up and down. But also you have the visual data
(29:30):
as well, and so that you often are told to
focus on adrichtie, focus on some sort of a spot
on the wall, a stain, or particularly, what works particularly
well for me that was recommended is some sort of
a vertical line, like the corner of something or the
exact corner of a room, and you can focus on
that and that can help you stay more stable. But anyway,
(29:52):
that's humans, and we're talking about fish. Johnson writes that
the fish and the humans as well, in the aboard
the spaceship. Here basically acclimatized to low gravity at the
same rate. Johnson writes, as the movement shogs looped, the
astronauts vomited as the urge to vomit subsided in the astronauts,
(30:14):
So too did the urge to loop in fish? Interesting,
and I read elsewhere in the Lyndon B. Johnson Space
Center Apollo Soyu's test project report that while some of
the fish died, the ones that made it back resume
normal swimming positions without issue. Which, again, if they are
adapting and readapting in the same way that human beings
(30:35):
adapt and readapt this makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
So that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think I would have expected the adaptations to be
similar for like terrestrial mammals, but I would have had
more questions about how space adaptation would affect aquatic animals.
And that's interesting that there are all these similarities.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, And more fish related experiments followed with different space
missions from different countries. Again, this was not a goldfish
or even a carp So when did goldfish finally go up? Well,
let's dig a little deeper. In seventy six, the Russian
Soyu's twenty one mission aboard the Salute five space station
(31:16):
included experiments with aquarium fish. I found at least one
passing reference to these as maybe being goldfish, but most
sources seem to indicate there were maybe zebra fish. So
I don't think the goldfish got to go up on
this mission. So when did the goldfish go up? Well?
I found an excellent online National Geographic article titled Animals
in Space by Taylor Magicomo and Alexander Stegneier. And according
(31:43):
to this article, it points out that in nineteen eighty five,
the US and the USSR both experimented with killefish, again
with guppies, and then both of these countries as well
as the ESA experimented with guppies in nineteen eighty nine,
and then, according to nat GEO, the common carp finally
made up in nineteen ninety two. This was like a
joint US Japan experiment. These were apparently two carp of
(32:08):
twenty six centimeters in size. One was intact, had not
been surgically altered, and one had its autoliths removed. The
audilists remember, these are calcium carbonate structures in the vertebrate
inner ear that detect linear acceleration, gravity, and head tilt,
and they're essential for balance and spatial orientation. And so
(32:32):
they spent eight days of aboard Space Lab j up.
Next we had there was another mission in nineteen ninety two.
This was the STS sixty five Space Lab IML two
year Again ninety two, goldfish missed the call again. Instead,
Japanese rice fish go up and these were used to
study mating behavior in microgravity. But then finally ninety four,
(32:56):
this is when goldfish finally get the call as heart
of a joint US Japanese mission that was to feature
Japan's first female astronaut, Chiaki Muke born nineteen fifty two,
which was also the first Asian woman in space. And
this experiment consisted of six red and white goldfish. There's
(33:17):
a picture here included for you, Joe. They look pretty
orange and white to me, but I think the breed
this variety is referred to as red and white. They
were bred in Japan and then they were sent up
to study space sickness in how the low gravity environment
affects the way that the animal moves in their environment
(33:40):
and how they react to light and so forth. Basically
similar stuff to the very first killyfish experiment that we
highlighted earlier.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
With similar results are different.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Well, it seems to have been a much more focused study,
so there's a little more to discuss here. So this
would have been SDS sixty five a board Space Shuttle Columbia,
and this also featured other aquatic organisms as part of
its payload, including newts and jellies, crabs, crabs, and no
(34:13):
crabs on this one. Crabs and Space will have to
wait for our next crab episode. I don't have any
day to hear in front of me on Crabs and Space.
But the goldfish were definitely there, and yeah, there's a
photo of them on the NASA website if you look.
I would recommend looking up like SDS sixty five or
(34:34):
look up the year ninety four Goldfish in Space NASA
and you will find the image. It's it's still there
on SA's website and it looks really cool. It looks
like something out of Alien if Alien were expressly concerned
with goldfish.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
It does look like that.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, so we have a very metal panel with a
glass bubble and you can see all the fish inside
looking out at you, like help me. I hate this,
just griebles everywhere it's a surface.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah yeah, So the focus of this study was really
on balance and brain plasticity, and I read more about
it in Mechanism of Vestibular Adaptation of Fish under Microgravity
by Takabayashi at All, published in nineteen ninety seven, so
a few years later in Biological Sciences in Space. So
here are some key details pulled directly from that paper. So, again,
(35:28):
six goldfish, and they included one normal goldfish fish, so
this fish had no changes made to it. There was
one with the otoliths removed from both sides, and then
four with the odalists removed from only one side. Okay.
Then as they started studying the way these fish responded,
(35:49):
they also point out that the dorsal light responses or
dlrs of fish with otalists removed were recorded after operation,
until launch, and after land. So this is how it
ends up going down on day double zero. This is
a mission to lapse time day zero zero, two fish
with otalists removed on one side showed flexion of body
(36:12):
toward the operated side. These fish also showed rolling behavior
toward the operated side. Okay, this is going to make
more sense as we roll along the body flextion disappeared
on MET day five or MET day eight. No rolling
behaviors were observed after that time. Then five fish showed
backward looping behaviors during the mission. Although the frequency of
(36:33):
looping episodes decreased after MET day eight, five fish still
showed looping behavior in MET day twelve, final day of recording.
So in microgravity, the visual system of the fish did
not seem to provide sufficient cues to prevent them from
looping and rolling. After landing, no looping or rolling behavior
(36:53):
was observed. However, they stressed that the tilt angle of
the DLR increased in the fish with italith removed five
months before launch, but not in normal fish in those
with odalists removed two weeks before the launch. And these results,
they say, suggest that the behavioral dysfunction and the adaptational
process in space is dependent on vestibular inputs.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Okay, so in this.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Focused study, the visual system alone wasn't enough to make
up for what was lacking from the vestibular sense of gravity.
And reading that, reading that that he had this one
fish that didn't show backward looping behavior, I was thinking, well,
this must be the unaltered fish, right, maybe that's what's
going on here, that's the one for one, but this
(37:42):
apparently is not the case. It was one of the
bilateral fish, one that had odalists removed on both sides,
which apparently it didn't backward loop because it didn't get
confusing signals from its odoliths. It was able to like
just focus on vision. But the other bilateral fish, the
other fish that had both odalists removed, it had it
(38:03):
still it was still looping, but had less severe looping,
and it may have been essentially confused by vestigial compensation response.
So you know, like you say it, it gets rather
complicated here, But this study apparently shined more light on
just exactly how this interplay works, at least in the goldfish,
(38:24):
and then we can extrapolate that out for other creatures
as well. Like what happens when you have confusing signals
coming from the odalus from the vestibular system and then
we're having to rely on vision instead. And what happens
if you have completely removed key components of the vestibular
system and you're allowing the fish to just rely on
(38:46):
vision alone.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
You need that for when you come back.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
That's the thing. Yeah, the big the main point being
it's we can certainly create some sci fi visions where
it makes sense for a human space traveler to you know,
to leave behind gravity entirely and say, okay, well, I'm
only going to live in space now, I don't need
to return home. But as far as like near future
(39:11):
of you know, perceivable human space flight, it's just hard
to imagine that sort of scenario, right. You'd have to
be imagining some sort of like generational colony ship sort
of a scenario, or I don't know, some some scenario
that require people to just stay in a weightlesser, near
wightless environment for the duration of their lives. It's pretty clear, however,
(39:32):
there'd be some major downsides as well. I mean, for starters,
if you ever had to return to you know, top
side to the surface of a planet, you know, you
would you wouldn't be able to function properly. But on
top of this, you'd be completely visually dependent as far
as determining up and down, and you could still feel
(39:55):
ill from angular acceleration I'm to understand. So it's not
like you would have you know, free ticket to get
out of any kind of feelings of distortion. Now, obviously
this this is still this is an idea that that
(40:18):
is going to factor into sci fi quite a bit.
There are a number of stories that have and will
continue to ask that question, like, Okay, what could what
could we? Or what would we or what should we
change about the human form to create better astronauts? Like
what does that consist of? Do we need a you know,
do we need to you know, just squirt a little
(40:38):
xenomorph blood in there and see what happens. Do we
need to become cyborgs? This is of course part and
partial to the origin of the word cyborg in many ways, like,
you know, thinking about changes that we could make instead
of changing space and changing other worlds to make make
it to where humans can survive there? What have we
made humans more hearty or made humans more of a
(41:00):
space faring organism? And so changes to the vestibular system
are sometimes employed in these sci fi visions, alongside many
other alterations. So I was looking around for sci fi
tales that concerned this, and I've found a really interesting one.
This is a tale I was not familiar with. I
(41:21):
think vaguely was aware of this author, but I hadn't
read anything by him before, and it's called Scanners Live
in Vain, written in nineteen forty five and published in
nineteen fifty. No connection to the Scanners movies or the
Scanner cop movies. It refers to something different, entire differently, entirely.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
There's the Spy.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
This is by Cord Wayner Smith. Yeah. Again, it's a
name that I've seen. I think i'd seen pop up
here and there, but I don't think I've ever read
anything by him. But in the story setting, humans just
cannot endure what is referred to as the Great Pain
of space, and they can only travel while they are
placed in a form of suspended animation. And you know,
(42:06):
as you might expect, somebody's got attend to these sleepers
while they're traveling from point A to point B. And
so that's where the Habermans come into play. And then
the Scanners are the people that are like in charge
of the Habermans. Both of these are classifications of humans
who have undergone a surgical procedure to sever almost all
(42:29):
of their sensory nerves except vision.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
So okay, so trying to imagine that, I would wonder
how in a way would you like control your body,
like if you kind of can't feel or I don't know, well,
I don't know how much does the proprioceptive sense depend
on nerve signals from the rest of the body.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
I don't know. It's I mean, it's a you know,
definitely a sci fi situation here, and and to be
clear that sold the Great Pain of Space is made
be a little broader and also a little bit vague,
but it plays well within a sci fi It's like, Okay,
if spaceflight is painful, I just have to shut off
everything except for revision. But it does line up rather
(43:12):
nicely with some of these experiments we've been talking about
with a vestibular system and vision. So within the context
of the story, this all prevents them from feeling the
Great Pain of space, and it's a necessary sacrifice for
space travel, but it also makes them entirely vision dependent,
and they even have to like monitor readings on a
cybernetic box on their chest just see what their body's
(43:35):
doing to figure out if they've injured themselves or not,
if they have an elevated heart rate, Various things that
you would be able to sort of like feel out
in your body and just be part of your body awareness.
They have to like check a reading. So yeah, it's
a fun little story. Basically, there's a murder plot that
emerges when the Scanners and the Haberman's learn that a
(43:57):
normal human will soon publicly reveal method that allows normal
humans to avoid the great pain of space without having
to surgically sever themselves. And you know, somebody's like, well,
we should murder this person. And I won't spoil how
it all. It all, it works out, but there's some
fun we're world building here, and again it kind of
lines up nicely with some of these experiments we've been discussing.
(44:21):
But again, this is you know a lot of stories
have gotten into this territory of, you know, changing people
for space. There's a fun one nineteen seventy six novel
by Frederick Pohle titled Man Plus that features a cyborg
adapted to colonize Mars, and I think there are various
(44:41):
extreme changes that have taken place with the protagonist here.
He's had his nervous system revised. All the major pathways
connected through a computer backpack that is powered by jet
black solar panels that are described as looking like bat wings. Whoa,
And there's they're very fun paperback covers for this one.
(45:02):
I included one here for you, Joe. This is one
where the vision of humans adapted for life in space
is like basically to turn humans into some sort of
extreme alien like cyborg entity.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah, kind of a bipedal insect with yeah, solar panel
wings and gigantic eyes and looks. Also just like the
like the chest kind of opens up to reveal the organs.
Maybe that's for easy access if you need to do
some maintenance.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah, you never know. I need to reach in there.
And we know how it is with cyborgs. Theyre always
going to pull stuff out, change stuff, put stuff back in.
So you know you don't want it all sealed under.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
Flesh, right, didn't you watch Nemesis come out?
Speaker 2 (45:41):
All Right, there's one more story I want to highlight here,
and I will go ahead and put out the general
call that you know readers have space fearing cyborgs that
they think are applicable here, especially if it ends up
involving the vestibular system. I would love to hear about it,
but I ended up running across a mention of this
(46:02):
story called Vestibular Man by Felix c. Gotshock from nineteen
eighty five. It was later collected in the nineteen ninety
one anthology Future on Fire, but it was originally published
in the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, And so
the title really I knew that it had something to
(46:22):
do with androids, and then calling it vestibular Man, I'm like, well, okay,
I've got to find out what this is about. And
it seems to basically it does have a bionic drill
sergeant in it, but the main character just seems to
be unnaturally aware of what his inner ear is doing,
and or the author is just fixated on the vestibular system.
(46:46):
I can't honestly recommend this story to anyone, but it's
full of just really looney sentences like this one quote.
Deep inside his vestibular nests, the eternal, equal, liberatory fluid
now lay ninety degrees from verticality, and it gave him
to know both comfort as well as the ventral vulnerability
(47:09):
of supinity. And there are numerous sentences as ludicrous as
this in this story that are directly tying into the
vestibular system and talking about what's going on in the
protagonist's inner ear.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I mean, that's a story where you get what the
title says, those are the thoughts of a vestibular man.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, so again, I was disappointed that it doesn't really
relate to vestibular changes in cybernetic space faring humanoids, and
it definitely has nothing to do with goldfish. But it
was so weird I had to mention it here.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
But again, there may be better examples of cyborgs in
sci fi out there that folks may want to bring up.
So definitely, right in, we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
Okay, Well, is that the end for now of our
exploration of goldfish?
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I think so, but we'll just go ahead and reiterate
in general. If you have feedback, insight experiences related to
goldfish or any of the goldfish topics we've discussed here,
or koi or carp in general, write in we would
love to hear from you. If you just want to
send us photographs of your beloved goldfish, of your beloved koi,
(48:21):
or a carp you happen to see out in the world,
also send that along. We would love to look at it.
Just a reminder to everyone out there. The Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we
have a short form episode, and then on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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