September 2, 2023 • 56 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the nature and history of human whistling – including the subject of whistled languages. (originally published 08/16/2022)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going on
into the vault. This episode originally aired August sixteenth, twenty
twenty two, and it's Part four of our series on whistling.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Enjoy the Whistling, Part four, The Final Conflict, Let's Do It.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part four
of our series about whistling. This episode's going to be
a little weird today because we literally already recorded this
episode and then lost the whole thing to a technical glitch. Rob,
I'm understand that as I was talking when we were
recording this episode the first time, it was just constantly
(01:06):
making the sounds of hell in your ears and can
you describe the terror and the anguish?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
It was kind of like your dialogue was an Afix
twin remix the entire time, and so at first it
was I was like, Okay, I can I can put
up with this. This is fine. We've already gone so
far into the episode, we should just you know, finish
it out. By the end of it, it was kind
of headache and doucing. But I was like, well, at
least we got the episode. This is just audio distortion
(01:33):
that I'm hearing. It's not going to transfer over to
the recorded finished product. Sadly it did, and so here
we are.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It's the worst.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
We were like, well, at least it won't be on
the actual audio, and then it was, and so here
we are. Okay, so this is this is take two.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, I could have been much worse, So no big deal. Hey,
looking on the bright side, we got a rehearsal in there.
How often do we have a rehearsal for a by
guest episodes? So I think it's going to be stronger
because of that.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I was like, is it gonna make the episode better
or worse? I really don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
We'll see out better better for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
All Right, So we're picking up in this series about whistling.
Let's see, what did we talk about in the previous episodes.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, so we're picking up where we left off from
the last Whistling episode, which was Whistling, Part three regarding
superstitions and beliefs concerning whistling. We were talking about whistling
as an ill omen at sea, as a potential mark
of witchcraft, and women as bad theater luck in England
(02:38):
and much more. So we're going to continue this journey
through folklore and mythology concerning whistling, and we're going to
be referencing some of what we covered in another previous
episode about Chinese transcendental whistling, in which a specialized Taoist
form of whistling was almost like meditation, but was also
(03:00):
said to give one both insight and perhaps even power
over the energy of things in the world. So once
more I'm going to be referencing that excellent whistling and
Antiquity paper by AV Van Stakellenberg, but also some other sources. Now,
according to Ed Edwards, in the two thousand and nine
paper The Principles of Whistling, a ten dynasty text called
(03:21):
the shau Chi says that whistling simply calls out to
all spirits, good or bad, and sta Kellenberg summarizes this
as kind of a supernatural neutrality concerning whistling. So whistling
isn't something that is used by bad people or necessarily
use by good people. It's just it's this thing that
(03:43):
signals out into the world around us, into the unknown,
and you know, you could potentially attract the attention of
things you don't want to attract the attention of. But
it also could be basically harmless. It kind of depends
on the circumstances.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah. The raps Un whistling, which was a text we
cited in a previous episode. It talks about whistling having
a kind of withdrawing or distancing power on the whistler.
It says, you know, like the whistling gentleman sort of
distances himself from the things of the world and lets
out a long drawn whistle.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, and that's a thread we're going to definitely come
back to. But first I wanted to add another note
on whistling in Chinese history. So first of all, you know,
anytime we're talking about Chinese history, Chinese culture covers a
great deal of territory, both in terms of distance and
in terms of years, So you know, it's hard to
(04:37):
say with any certainty like this is the traditional Chinese
view of it versus another thing. But mainly, I don't
want to imply here that that whistling was just something
that Dallas sorcerers engaged in. I was looking at a
paper by Julungsu from two thousand and six titled Whistling
and its Magico Religious Tradition, A comparative Perspective, and at
(04:59):
this points out that there are Han Dynasty accounts of
women whistling for both sorrow and this seems in some
cases to tap into this idea of sighing as well. Again,
look thinking back to previous episodes where we've discussed whistling
and it's similarity to other non linguistic sounds that we make,
(05:20):
other breath based sounds that can be used to communicate
something or to get somebody's attention.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, and we were talking about cases where sometimes it's
maybe difficult to precisely translate a word because a word
could be interpreted as meaning like whistling, or could mean
hissing or some other kind of controlled expulsion of breath.
There's sort of some blurriness in the breath based lexicon.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Now, according to Sue here, it's not just for sorrow.
There are also accounts of women whistling out of happiness
or joy. It does seem like it is linked to
traditions of wailing in some cases, and sort of wailing
one might might might engage in, say at a grave,
that sort of thing, but also not just women. In
(06:10):
other sources as well, even the Yellow Emperor is said
to whistle, but the terminology here might actually mean hiss,
or it might mean a sigh. And in the Classic
of Mountains and Seas, the Queen Mother uses a whistle
as a kind of battle cry to disply her ferocity.
So it's kind of a wide spectrum of possible uses
(06:32):
for the whistle even within Chinese tradition here now. Sue
also points out that while yes, in English customs and
Western customs there are a lot of these superstitions against
women whistling particularly, and we don't really see this in
Chinese traditions, though it is sometimes seen as ominous in
general whistling due to the connection between whistling and various
(06:54):
death rituals and you know, and attracting the spirits, but
it is more in inherently magical and not gendered. Sue
also shares some other examples from Western traditions to you know,
for a comparative experience here, but they point out here
quote the Germans believe that a woman's whistling will make
the angels weep and the devil's rejoice.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
This is This would be a fantastic basis for a
German metal band, all female metal band that just employs
whistling instead of singing.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh, now, that's a question to what extent has whistling
been used in metal? The metal scene has come to
encompass a lot of different sounds and ideas, but I
don't know if they've gotten around a whistling have they?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Well, what's the metal version of the rule thirty four idea?
It's kind of like, if you can imagine it, there
is a metal a metal band of it, right.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I guess it depends on what you classifies metal too,
Like are the Scorpions metal? I don't know, probably not,
probably not now. Sue also shares that among various Chinese minorities,
whistling while you work, as in Snow White and the
song the Dwarfs Sing, whistling while you work, at least
in the field was thought to summon demons to damaged crops,
(08:08):
or it could summon demons to damage crops, so it
was discouraged. This Sioue Stresses does not seem to be
linked to say dallast ideas regarding whistling, but is instead
rooted in particular folk traditions. Now here's another really interesting
one that Sue brings up. Sue shares an example from Mythraism.
So Mythraism for sci fi fans out there, some of
(08:31):
you might be familiar with this religion because you may
have watched the really excellently weird HBO mac sci fi
series Raised by Wolves, in which one of the two
factions that's going out into space and colonizing other worlds
are are devoted Mithraists. And you might well think, oh,
(08:53):
this is some sort of cool religion they made up
for the show, but it is not. It is this
is a reference to the Roman street cult of mithras
and in there recorded rituals, and Joe, You're going to
get into this a little bit and talk about what
we mean when we when we bring out the idea
of recorded rituals of Mithraism. But supposedly there is a
(09:15):
system of whistling and tongue clicking that was used to
attract what Sue refers to as theeomorphic star deities.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh, theeomorphic meaning animal formed, so like beast beast forms
of star gods.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Now I haven't seen the show Raised by Wolves, but
I think i'm to understand you were saying that the
title there is a reference to like the myth about
the founding of Rome, the Romulus and Rima story.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, that's right. That seems to be the direct reference
made there, and there are other references as well, and
just a lot of just sheer weirdness on top of it.
So if nothing else, it's a show that's going to
give you lots of strange imagery. It's kind of like
Ridley Scott's continuation of the android centered alien sequels or
(10:04):
prequels that he was working on.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Hmm, okay, so well anyway, I love the idea that
the show would incorporate actual things about Mithraism because I've
long thought we should do a series or at least
an episode on Mithraism because I find it really interesting
because it is a religion that clearly commanded an enormous
following and had huge cultural significance in the Roman Empire.
(10:29):
Like you can find the ruins of their underground temples
called Mithrium, and they're all throughout Roman settlements, and yet
we know way less about this religion than one might assume.
And one of the big reasons for that is that,
as far as I understood, and I guess the text
that you just referred to maybe a counterexample to this,
(10:50):
but modern scholars generally thought, we have basically no access
to any primary literary sources about the religion. So if
it had religious texts, we don't have any of them,
and so what we know about it we've had to
try to piece together through detective work based on imagery
and simple inscriptions and archaeological clues and comments and references
(11:15):
made by external writers trying to say, hey, you know,
this is what's going on with Mithraism. So for a
kind of hopefully interesting analogy, imagine trying to understand what
Christianity was if it like mostly died out and disappeared
in the fourth century or so, and we did not
have any of the writings of the New Testament or
(11:37):
any other writings by Church fathers or any other early Christians,
and we were trying to reconstruct what Christianity was based
entirely on like imagery and artifacts and what other external
writers said about it. So it's a really fascinating problem,
and one of the most common images in Roman mythraism
(11:59):
is apparently important scene from their mythology of the god
Mithras slaughtering some kind of divine bull. But there's another
interesting complication here too, which is that there is a
pre Roman Persian cult of Mithras or Mitra, which is
a Zoroastrian or pre Zoroastrian god of the Persian people
(12:20):
who's kind of a solar deity of justice who I
think was associated with contracts and the honoring of bargains.
And then later you get this widespread Roman mystery cult
that seems to be based on an appropriated version of
that deity. And of course we know the Romans loved
absorbing and reprocessing other cultures gods, like the main Roman
(12:42):
pantheon is mostly a photocopy of the Greek. And then
you've got the Persian Mithras becoming the Roman savior god
of some kind, and even the way you can think
about a Jewish messianic figure in Jesus and the original
context of monotheistic Judaism rather quickly becomes a popular savior
god to people throughout the empire who had been Polytheists
(13:04):
up until the moment they converted to Christianity, So that
whole process is really interesting. But the idea of a
text of Mithraism was very interesting to me because I
didn't think we had one of these. But this is
referring to something called the mithras Liturgy, which I think
is commonly dated to roughly the fourth century. But there's
(13:25):
dispute about whether it actually reflects original Mithraic theology or
whether it's some kind of later synthesis.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Yeah, this is the quote from it that Sue shares
in the paper. Quote. But after you have said the
second prayer, where silence is twice commanded, then whistle twice
and click twice with the tongue, and immediately you will
see stars coming down from the disk of the sun,
five pointed in large numbers and filling the whole air.
(13:54):
But say once again, silence, silence.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Whistle twice, click twice, and then shut up. Here come
the gods.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Now, coming back to we were talking earlier about scholars
in the woods. In Chinese history, there is this idea
that comes up, Sue mentions, and we see this in
the Han dynasty, for example, where you would have Confucian scholars,
other reclusive scholars who would whistle as a means of
(14:24):
expressing disdain for the world and or their absolute freedom.
So this is an interesting concept, and it was also
done by other classes as well, Sue writes quote in general, poets, hermits,
and people of all types in the Six Dynasties utilized
whistling to express a sense of untrammeled individual freedom, or
(14:47):
an attitude of disobedience to authority or traditional ceremony, or
to dispel suppressed feelings and indignation. Whistling was not limited
to a certain class, but was practiced by men from
all walks of life.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
This idea of whistling as a kind of like middle
finger to social customs and authority. So it's like you
might imagine the behavior of Diogenes the cynic, or something
just completely behaving in inappropriate ways in public as an
expression of contempt for norms and authority.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yeah, I whistle, I do what I want Now another
paper I look to when I was looking around for
various superstitions, we of course found superstitions regarding whistling at sea,
but we also find them in another interesting place below
the surface of the earth, in mines ooh, yeah, And
I hadn't really thought about this, but this is apparently
(15:39):
a big one paper I was looking as an older paper.
This is California Miners Folklore. This is from a nineteen
forty two edition of California Folklore Quarterly written by Waylan
d Hand. And yeah, it's a really interesting read. This
one's out there on the internet if anyone wants a
deeper dive into it. But for example, he goes into
(16:04):
the fear of the Tommy Knockers in the tunnels.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Now, Rob, I am only familiar with Tommy Knockers from
the Stephen King novel or actually I never read the novel.
I think I watched the made for TV movie adaptation
of it, which is quite bad, and I think Stephen
King himself regards that as a terrible book. But I
don't know what the original reference here is in the book.
(16:29):
I think it's aliens.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, I can never get very far with the book, but.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Not aliens here.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
No, but it apparently refers to a fair variety of things,
and they're very haunting and they kind of I feel
like they also kind of connect to perhaps older European
ideas of creatures that live in the Earth, getting into
various ideas of dwarfs and so forth. The Cobald, Yeah,
the Cobald. This is what Hand writes in the paper.
(16:59):
These daizens of the deep dark chambers of the Earth
are conceived in different forms as disembodied spirits of dead
miners hovering in a working as patrons, or as little
men elf like be whiskered and wizened. They are usually
thought of as benign, occasionally even assisting in the location
(17:20):
of ore bodies. If they are not so well disposed,
their conduct tends to be mischievous rather than malignant. Many
California miners, though not having themselves seen these creatures in person,
recall having seen small effigies of them made of clay
and set upon portal, sets to a tunnel or on
(17:41):
the lagging or elsewhere where their patronage is desired. So
I love that image of not only the idea that
there are these beings living elsewhere in the tunnels, but
there's this kind of we talked about a little, you know,
we were talking about when people set to sea, when
they return, when they're when seamen are out there on
(18:03):
the waters, there the newer religions that they have taken
to might be set aside for the older ways, the
older gods. And here we have this example of California
miners potentially having little altars to kind of dwarven elven
beings in the mines.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That's too good.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So Hand discusses some other ideas as well, you know,
the ghosts of dead miners working in the tunnels, also
phantom white mules, headless mules, and strange lights. Apparently he
said that there weren't really that many creature myths concerning
the minds, though occasionally you would have like a cat
come down into the mines and would just scare the
(18:44):
Bejesus out of everybody, because it would either way, I'm imagining,
you know, the cat would get down there, it would
be lurking about, its eyes gleaming and the light and
just give everyone the proper spooks. But there were also
these superstitions about the about bad luck concerning well, first
of all, bringing women anywhere near the cave, but also
(19:05):
there was a widespread superstition against anyone whistling down there,
and it seems to be sort of twofold. On one hand,
there was a real fear of vibrations in the caves
and So there's this idea that you shouldn't whistle because
you don't know what that's going to do. You're going
to set up vibrations that could potentially cause a cave in.
But it also seems linked to this older, wider idea
(19:29):
that if you're whistling, you could draw in spirits and
hand shares. A fun little rhyme here quote whistle by
night you'll bring the sprite. Whistle by day you'll drive
them away.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And this is not a sprite you want to bring.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Right, right, or certainly you don't want them. You don't
want anything going on down there in the mind. You
don't want you don't want any spirits bonking about. You
don't want any vibrations going wild. You want everything to
just be as safe and quiet as possible.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, Okay, so this is not like a friendly tinker bell.
This would be a sprite that's going to maybe pollute
your ore or make a rock fall on your head
or something.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Yeah, yeah, I guess coming back to the idea of
the Tommy Knockers, it kind of comes back to the
sort of neutrality of spirits, right. It's the idea that well, there,
there are, or may be spirits around. They might do
some bad things, they might do some good things. We
probably shouldn't call them. We shouldn't call in extra spirits,
and we should try and be on the good side
of any spirits that are present.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Now, I think all of the examples we've talked about
so far are superstitions. That the way that whistling relates
to monsters or spirits or dangerous entities is that it's
something humans could do that might in some cases attract them.
So you know, be careful about whistling because you might
get a monster on your tail. But I was thinking
(20:54):
about are there stories of monsters that themselves whistle or
do some thing like whistling?
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, I was curious about this. So first of all,
I turned to Carol Rose, who has two Extraordinary volumes,
one about monsters and giants and so forth, and the
others more about fairies and sprites. And there's some overlap
between the two books, but there are also things in
each book that are not covered by the other, and
so there were at least a couple of examples that
stood out. One of them is an interesting monster of
(21:23):
the people of the Xingu River in Brazil, and this
creature is called midhata karaya, and these are said to
have been giants that were as tall as the trees,
with fruit growing out of their armpits, which the giants
then consume to sustain themselves. So it sounds like they
weren't themselves dangerous. They weren't like eating humans. But they're big,
(21:46):
tall giants. So if they're coming your way, you want
to know to get out of their way. And the
way you knew this is because the male giants had
a hole in the top of their head and it
emitted a high pitched whistle when they moved.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
This is a good monster. Okay, so we got armpit autophagi.
They eat the fruit of their own armpits and their
heads whistle.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah. Now another monster that Rose shares Here is a
Russian creature that I think we might well describe as
a sort of a harpie, or at least a harpy
in them the way that modern people will think of
the harpy a kind of bird human hybrid, though in
this case I think they tend to be more male
(22:31):
than female. And its name is soleve Rachtmash, and in
Russian folklore it's said to give a piercing whistle, and
this whistle will kill anyone who hears it, and then
the monster will come and rob.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Your corpse, rob your corpse. So it's looking for money.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, yeah, it's not here to eat you either. It's
interested in one thing, and it's whatever money you got on.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
You checking your armpits for fruit.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah. But and it's kind of an interesting thing because
the next monster I wanted to mention also is not
going to kill you. This one just wants to scare
you real bad. This is a yokai. I was looking
around in yokai traditions because I'm thinking, well, that's just
such a rich font of creatures and beings that it
(23:19):
makes sense that there'd be something out there that whistled.
And the one that I found, some descriptions of it
that I found translated, of course mentioned whistling as something
it does. Others don't mention it, so I can't be
one hundred persent certain if this is something that is
actually part of it or a lot of these yokaia too.
They and when you get into modern ghost stories as well,
(23:42):
like there's there's there's still kind of rich in alive,
so something's could add it and also somethings could added
in translation, but this one is called Oa Guru Batari
and its name apparently means nothing but blackened teeth, which
already sounds pretty pretty amazing. So this is the way
this okais encountered. She appears as a beautiful woman in
(24:05):
a traditional wedding kimono, and I guess you might see
her at a distance, and in some cases as you
get as you're interested and you move closer, she may
whistle to get the attention of single men. Other accounts
say that she may speak in the voice of a
loved one. Others don't seem to mention any kind of
real sound at all. But as you get closer, this
(24:25):
is the main thing that happens. She, like a lot
of these type creatures, will reveal her face. And when
she reveals her face, you find not a not a
beautiful humanoid face, but instead a face that is largely
blank except for a great, big, gaping mouth that's filled
with nothing but blackened teeth. And then she cackles, and
(24:45):
you just scream and run away terrified, And that's it.
She's not interested in hurting you. She's just here to
scare the Bejesus out of you.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
No eyes, no nose, just the teeth. And but yeah,
so she doesn't bite your head off. It's just a
show you the teeth and get you upset.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, yeah, just a ghost. Now. I didn't look super
close at various pop culture and modern whistling entities, but
I thought I would mention briefly that there is something
called the whistling Fiend in Dungeons and Dragons raven Loft setting.
It's supposed to be just like this horrible monster, like
(25:22):
a fiend from the pits of Hell, but it will
whistle beautifully as it's approaching, so before anything goes terribly wrong,
you'll hear the whistling. And then if you happen to
witness what it does when it gets there, well it's
whistling the whole time as well as it's doing, you know, horrible,
gruesome things to people. Now I was I was interested
(25:43):
to run across this. I don't really know much about
old radio dramas, but there was also an old radio
drama about crime and fate titled The Whistler, And apparently
on this show, the titular whistler kind of emerges out
of the night. It's very much a kind of you know,
crime noir kind of a figure. You hear him whistling
(26:05):
a catchy tune, and then he serves as the narrator
and kind of host of the program. And there were
apparently eight different Whistler films during the nineteen forties, and
the first of them was nineteen forty four is the Whistler,
and it was directed by William Castle.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Uh, William Castle of the Tingler fame.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Have to assume he installed special seats in the movie
theaters that what would the whistle into your bud or something.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I don't know, it sounds like the kind of thing
he would do. Yeah, I mean, he is perhaps best
remembered for figuring out what kind of gimmick would get
people into the theater. Maybe just the gimmick here was
just the existing ip. I don't know. But I don't
think you really hear about the Whistler much anymore. I
think there was a nineteen fifties TV series, and I
don't know that anyone's really gone back to this, but
(26:57):
I like this idea because it's essentially it's kind of
like a cripkeeper, you know, it's an anthology host and Apparently
the deal with the movies is you would have the
same star actor in each of them, not the Whistler
but somebody else, though each story is different, and so
he's playing a different character. So it's kind of like
the modern version would be. I don't know, Ryan Gosling
(27:17):
is in every Whistler movie, but Ryan Gosling plays a
different protagonist, a different character that's all wound up in
some sort of tale of crime and fate.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
We just got a producer chime in from Seth who,
by the way, is actually a devoted listener to The Whistler.
I mean, I don't know if you can be devoted
to something that is not currently produced, but he's a fan.
He says, it's great.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
You know this idea of the stranger who whistles, and
it's unknown exactly what their knowledge is, what their powers
may be. I guess you do see that in a
lot of a lot of cinema. It's often We've had
some listeners right in and mentioned that Westerns are a
place where we see a lot of such suspicious whistling.
(28:01):
It brings to mind a nineteen ninety one TV movie
that I don't remember was especially good, but it was creepy,
and it was called Into the bad Lands, and it
starred Bruce Dern as this creepy old bounty hunter in black,
and if memory serves, he does various things. He cooks
(28:23):
some eggs, he shoots some outlaws, and drags him around
kind of rotting behind his cart. He smiles a big
creepy grin. But I think he also whistles in that one,
And there's a particular ditty that's reoccurring, So there is
something to this. The stranger who whistles, what is he
whistling about? He kind of ties into some of these
(28:44):
other ideas, like he's an outsider that is not tied
to the same rules as everything else. He may have
some sort of communication with knowledge beyond himself, with spirits,
et cetera.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Another producer, Chime ins Seth, had a great example of this,
and it's Earl Hannah and kill Bill, who does a
very creepy whistling while she is on the way to
kill the protagonist.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
And that's a great example too, because this is this
is a female character whistling. So many of these examples,
even if we're touching on traditions where where whistling is
not gendered. It seems like a lot of them tend
to involve male figures that are whistling. So so yeah,
great example seth. All right, So that's all I have
for now anyway, concerning whistling superstitions and whistling monsters. Certainly
(29:30):
we'd love to hear from everyone out there who has
additional things they would like to bring up, be it
you know, folkloric creatures, strange traditions, and certainly any kind
of you know, movie tie in characters who whistle. I'd
love to hear about any of that. So yes, by
all means right in.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So, I guess the next thing we should look at
is some of the psychology research on whistling, which I
have to say, I was shocked how sparse this literature is.
There is, from what I could tell, very little psychological
research about when and why people whistle. One of the
only major papers I could find on it wasn't really
(30:08):
experimental in nature. It was very theoretical, and though it
had a few interesting ideas in it that I do
want to talk about, to the extent that it is theoretical,
it seems kind of based in Freudianism, So it's gonna
be a big caveat there. But before we get to that,
I did want to talk about a medical case report
I came across that had a title that really grabbed
(30:32):
my attention. So this is a paper by pallac at
All published in BMC Psychiatry in twenty twelve, and it's
called Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling following Cardiac arrest. A case
study Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Oh my goodness, So is it the pro is that
the music? You think that?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
That's what I was assuming. Unfortunately, the case report is
not attached a recording or sheet music or anything. So,
and it doesn't name the tunes, so I don't know
what song it is. The most they say about it
is that it is a carnival song. All right, what
are the options? Yeah, so you got that one is
like the Binny Hill theme? Possible? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, I think I don't want to get too far
into this because this is like, this is a realm
I know virtually nothing about. But apparently there's a there's
a fair amount of what we might think of his
circus music that you know, we're talking about circus band stuff.
We're talking about waltzes and fox trots, so there there's
there's probably a lot there, but them is the thing
(31:40):
that that mostly comes to the surface for folks like me.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Okay, So in this case, report the medical history the patient.
In this case it's anonymous of course, so we don't
know their name. But it was a man who was
found unconscious in his car in February nineteen ninety two
at the age of forty eight, having so a heart attack.
He was in cardiac arrest for some period of time,
but he was reanimated successfully in the emergency room at
(32:08):
a nearby hospital, so he survived the heart attack he had.
His heart had stopped, there was reduced a supply of
oxygen to the brain, but they resuscitated him and he
was all right. But during rehabilitation he presented with some symptoms,
including neurological impairment, and so several of the things they
(32:29):
report are disorientation, apathy, what they call bradyphrenia meaning slowness
of thought, short term memory problems and things like that.
And imaging, particularly EEG showed decreased functioning in the brain,
especially in the bezo temporal areas, and he continued to
exhibit some neurological symptoms in the following years. And here's
(32:51):
where we get to the music. I'll read straight from
the case report quote. We were approached in May two
thousand and eight by the patient's wife, who got to
know our center of expertise through the internet. She was
close to desperation from listening to the whistling of the
same carnival song for nearly sixteen years. It would go
(33:12):
on for five to eight hours every day and got
worse when the patient was tired. Oh wow, so it's
a mix. Like obviously it's you know, I was snagged
by the idea of repetitive whistling of a carnival song,
but when you actually hear the details, it is I
don't know, it's a very unfortunate situation to imagine that,
(33:33):
like the whistling of the same song goes on for
five to eight hours a day for sixteen years.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Now, the authors here talk about treatments that were tried,
including a drug called clomipramine, which is a tricyclic antidepressant
that is sometimes used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, which
obviously share some features with what's being described here. That
among other conditions. But basically this drug regimen did manage
(34:02):
to decrease the whistling by about half, but it also
came with some very difficult side effects in this man's case,
and the repetitive whistling of a carnival song non stop
for five to eight hours a day could be considered
an example of what psychiatrists would call compulsivity, which the
authors describe as quote, the repetitive, irresistible urge to perform
(34:23):
a behavior, the experience of loss of voluntary control over
this intense urge, and the tendency to perform repetitive acts
in a habitual or stereotyped manner. So they talk about
how the man would whistle the song on a loop
all day pretty much, and that at certain points they
could make him stop doing it, though he reported after
(34:45):
he stopped that he experienced anxiety. And in their discussion,
the authors explain how the man in this report showed
symptoms that could be consistent with three different interpretations of
his condition. So, first of all, they talk about the
idea of a frontal syndrome characterized by impulsivity and disinhibition.
(35:05):
I think frontal syndrome there because it's the frontal lobe
that is very important for inhibiting behavior that's your sort
of like self control mechanism. And then second a compulsivity
condition known as punding, which is characterized by quote purposeless
and repetitive behavior such as collecting or arranging things often
related to the patient's personal hobbies or occupation, and attributed
(35:29):
to alterations of the brain's reward and motor systems in
both the ventral and dorsal stra atom. And then the
final interpretation would be a sort of acquired form of
obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. And there are other examples
of people acquiring OCD after a brain injury later in life.
The OCD is usually acquired gradually earlier on in life.
(35:52):
And they say all of these explanations match the observations
in some ways but not in others. But one thing
they got into that I thought was interesting here was
talking about the different characteristics of impulsivity versus compulsivity in
the brain. So they write, quote, one may conclude that
the whistling with its repetitions is primarily compulsive rather than
(36:15):
impulsive or disinhibitive, as the patient had a constant urge
to whistle and felt anxiety when asked to stop rather
than acting without foresight. The fact that anxiety was felt
is in line with compulsivity rather than impulsivity, assuming that
compulsive behaviors are performed to prevent perceived negative consequences from happening.
(36:36):
So this is a useful distinction for thinking about because
when we you know, outside of the medical context, when
we think about these words impulsive or compulsive, they both
I think usually refer to situations where a person seems
to lack executive control. They lack the ability to control
their own behavior or prevent themselves from doing something, but
(36:58):
in very different ways. So in impulsivity, you feel an
urge to do something, but some process taking place in
your frontal lobe tells you that's not appropriate and stops
you from doing it. But the urge itself might be
something normal that like we would all think of doing
for a second. It might cross our mind to do it,
(37:18):
but then we would turn away from actually doing it
because of some inhibition mechanism in the brain. Examples of
this include all kinds of stuff, spitting on the floor
or making a rude or inappropriate comment and conversation, or
jumping out of a moving car. They can vary wildly
from you know, minor things to extreme things. They would
(37:39):
all be things though, that even a person with typical
neuroanatomy might think for a second about doing, but then
they would be able to stop themselves.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
All right. I think we can all think of examples
of this from our own life, where yeah, you're just
in a situation and you may think of like something
just ridiculous or absurd or antisocial that you theoretically could do,
and then you sort of but you recoil from it
and you realize, oh, well, of course I'm not going
to do that. And it can be a little shocking
to think that you even thought about doing that. Why
did I think that, hey, I could take my wallet
(38:11):
out and throw it off of this building or off
of this bridge that I'm on. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yeah. We did a whole episode one time called The
imp of the Perverse that was about this idea that
like that there is some kind of It was about
the first half before the inhibition comes in. It's like,
what is that urge to do things that are obviously
not in your best interests but you suddenly just feel like, ooh,
I should do that. But then you're able to put
the you know, put the lid on it and say no,
(38:35):
I shouldn't do that. People with a frontal syndrome often
have impulsivity problems because they whatever the normal disinhibition mechanism
in the brain is, that has been damaged in some
way by their injury. Right, So contrasts that that impulsivity
with compulsivity, where a person also lacks the ability to
stop themselves from performing an action, but it's an action
(38:57):
that they feel they must do repetitively in order to
prevent some kind of bad consequence from happening. So remember
it was said that the man here would whistle constantly,
but he felt the immediate onset of anxiety if he
stopped whistling the carnival song. So that makes it sound
more like it's compulsivity here, that it's something that he
(39:19):
felt he had to do repetitively or else negative consequences
would emerge. And the case history here mentions that the
man once worked as head of a carnival association, and
the authors don't say this, so we don't know this,
but it seems like a reasonable guess that the carnival
tune he was whistling was one he was familiar with
(39:39):
from his own past to working as the head of
a carnival association, maybe even one he associated with a
time when he was more in control.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
That's fascinating because it also this ties into sort of
the power of music, right. We all use music, I think,
at times to augment our current mental state, to draw
in mental feelings of power or assertiveness, but also sadness,
whatever the case might be, whatever we feel like we
(40:10):
need to connect with that is not our current state exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
But it also ties into something that came up in
previous episodes. So here again we have a case of
a man who suffers neurological damage after a period where
his brain isn't getting enough oxygen. He never had any
symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder or anything before this, but
after this event he acquired this tendency to engage in
compulsive whistling. And I thought it was interesting that the whistling,
(40:37):
if it is best interpreted as a way of staving
off anxiety, which the authors here suggested, is it made
me think of our discussion about whistling past the graveyard
or whistling in the dark, other cases where it's commonly
observed that people whistle in order to push out a
fear or thoughts of danger.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, more whistling past the graveyard for sure.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Now, again, as I mentioned earlier, it seemed like the
psychological research on whistling was far less developed than I
would have expected. Maybe there are some great studies out
there that I just wasn't able to find, So if
you know of them, please send them into the show
account contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
But the other major one I found, and this was
cited in some other papers, is a paper from nineteen
(41:30):
fifty nine published in the journal Language and Speech called
When People Whistle, and it's by the UC San Francisco
professor of psychiatry, Peter F. Austwald. As I said earlier,
I do want to mention this one because it has
some interesting ideas in it, but also it is an
older paper. It clearly is not constricted by empirical method.
(41:50):
This is not like reporting on original experiments. It's more
kind of theorizing about what whistling might mean and why
people whistle, based on models that seem at least influenced
by Freudianism. A lot of it's about fixations that are
sort of emerge from childhood development. But anyway, okay, so
(42:11):
who is this guy who wrote this? Ostwald? He seems
like a kind of interesting guy. So he lived from
nineteen twenty eight to nineteen ninety six, and his life
is sort of divided between an interest in psychiatry on
one hand, and music and music history on the other.
So he wrote biographies of musicians and composers like Schumann
(42:31):
and Glenn Gould. But also, to quote from his New
York Times obituary quote, in nineteen eighty six, he founded
the Health Program for Performing Artists, a voluntary group of
specialists engaged in research, education, and clinical care of the
particular mental and medical problems afflicting musicians, dancers, and other
(42:51):
performing artists, both professionals and students. And I thought that
was very interesting because now that I think about it,
it clearly makes sense that you could have medical center
focused on the mental and physical health needs of performing
artists in particular, because I'd imagine there would be patterns
in their needs. But it never occurred to me that
such a thing would exist.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, I mean it makes sense, right, because we have
sports medicine athletes do extreme things with their bodies. It
puts special types of wear and tear on them, and
you could I think you can very fairly say the
same thing for performers, especially when you're thinking about something
like dance or vocal performance.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Totally, but okay, what does ast Falds say in this
language psychology paper? Mainly this article is focused on questions
of why humans whistle, what purpose it serves, what whistling
tends to mean, and how it differs from other forms
of noise production. I'm not gonna get into everything he
theorizes about in this paper, but I did want to
focus on one part where he's sort of taking a
(43:53):
look at the phenomenology of whistling. What does it feel
like to whistle?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Is it pleasurable to people? And if it is, which
it often seems to be, why is it pleasurable? So
to check one of the very Freudian boxes, he argues that,
first of all, the act of whistling involves manipulation of
the muscles in the face and the mouth in a
way that may produce hedonic states feelings of comfort and
pleasure because of its similarity to the facial and mouth
(44:21):
movements of what he calls oral gratification, and so he
expands that to all kinds of things like eating and smoking,
but he specifically ties it into the facial and mouth
muscle movements of a feeding infant. So this is one
of those things that, well, it's hard to disprove that,
but I'm not convinced there's much evidence to establish that
(44:42):
exact causal chain that like doing the same thing with
your face muscles that you did when you were a
baby in your mother's arms produces comfort and for the
same reason. I don't know how you would show that, yeah, Yeah,
And also I'd be skeptical that there's a general principle
that doing something with the you know, the skeletal muscle
(45:02):
in your body that is similar to what that muscle
does in some other unrelated activity that is pleasurable in
some way gives you pleasure in the secondary activity just
because you're using the same muscles. I don't know. I mean,
you could think of ways that you would use the
same muscles you might use in some pleasurable activity, but
it doesn't bring pleasure. Does just like pretending to chew
(45:25):
bring you the same kind of pleasure you get from
eating and so forth?
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Uh, yeah, generally not. Uh yeah, yeah, you can't. You
can't just say, pretend to be eating your favorite dish.
And I mean maybe if you're hungry enough, you can
you can lean into it a little bit. I don't know,
but yeah, for the most part, I don't really put
a lot of stock in this notion.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, so I got doubts about that. But then you
make some other points that I think are I don't know,
more worth considering. This next one is still sort of
along Freudian lines, but I think it's it's I don't know,
it feels different to me. So see what you think
about this, he says.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
In addition to the mouth and face, whistling involves the
respiratory structures. These structures chest, abdomen, lungs, wind pipes, and
throat move of their own accord, regulated by neuronal and
chemical processes beyond voluntary control. But the whistler in effect
willfully imposes his own rhythm, amplitude, and organization pattern on
(46:23):
these automatic movements. Psychological studies show that if the individual
is rewarded by attention or praise when he first gains
control over such automatic processes, he may continue to expect
satisfaction from this display of skill. As will be shown later,
whistling arouses the attention of listeners so that the whistler's
(46:44):
bodily mastery is almost universally rewarded in some way. And
I don't know, at a gut level, this seemed a
little more plausible to me that there could be like
a learned association of positive reinforcement upon gaining conscious control
over previously automatic or autonomic processes. And I think one
of the main ideas this ties into here is like
(47:06):
toilet training, that you know, there could be some kind
of bleed over with pleasure upon a general pleasure upon
taking conscious control of things like breath, and that would
sort of check out with other things. I mean, there
are a lot of things people do to seemingly bring
themselves pleasure and comfort just by taking conscious control of breath,
(47:27):
which is normally automatic.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, this does remind me of certain potty training techniques
for kids where they'll be for instance, if you're trying
to teach the very young child to have some degree
of control over when they defecate, that there's a there's
a like a technique where you're getting them to hum
while they do it. So it's yeah, I can see
(47:48):
where you can have a lot of connection between the
two here.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Oh and in the next section I want to talk
about he actually ties directly into that. So Ostwald writes, quote,
some of the emotions that accompany the act of whistling
would appear to result from wishful thoughts and magical fantasies
in the mind of the whistler. Whistling, because it involves
the production of wordless sounds, may bring back memories of
(48:11):
that very early period during which the child could not
distinguish between those sounds which came from the outside world
and those sounds which came from his own body. During
this phase of personality development, one is unsure of the
significance of sounds. One cannot tell whether a certain noise,
say one's footsteps, has personal meaning referable only to his
(48:34):
own body, or has a public meaning with some reference
to the world of other people. In this confused state,
the individual may come to believe that the sounds he
produces have some causal relationship to what he experiences. Whistling,
like other noises he makes, may thus be associated with
fantasies of omnipotence, which, unless corrected by reality can lead
(48:58):
to delusions of grandeur. This was really interesting to me
because think about how many things we've already looked at
where there's some belief that, like whistling gives you power
to like change the external world somehow.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah yeah, ties directly into the wind magic we've been
discussing in getting and even connects back to the Taoist
transcendental whistling as.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Well totally, or even the Terence McKinney thing. Yeah yes, yeah, yeah,
but okay, So coming back to this, Ostwald writes, quote
Occasionally parents or other adults inadvertently encourage magical behavior in
their children and thus reinforce fanciful thoughts about whistling and
other sounds. For example, nurses have been known to employ
(49:39):
whistles to quote make the child urinate and kindly. Grandparents
not infrequently whistle away the aches and bruises of a youngster.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Yeah yeah, I can see the again whistling as the
as a sound of wind, but also the sound of
water moving water. We touched on that, and that's some
of these ideas that you can get an ox or
a horse to drink water by whistling at it, which
there may not be anything to that, but using it
as some sort of a potty training. Yeah, I can
(50:08):
imagine the humming sound being for the defecation though, the
whistling sound being for the you know, the creation of
water with one body, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
And that could actually have efficacy when you're whistling to
a person, right because they hear that that has some
associative significance for them that may actually help motivate, i
don't know, going to the bathroom, or may actually make
them feel subjectively less pain or something like that. But
that could lead to the erroneous assumption therefore, that you
can have physically implausible control over the external world with
(50:43):
whistling somehow.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
Ostwald then relates this to reports tying directly back into
our previous episode about sailors who have intense superstitions about
whistling and believe that it contains powerful and dangerous magic,
you know, again whistling for the wind. And he also
discusses magical beliefs about whistling to summon birds and Celtic
tales and this involves a mediating technology. Plenty of stories
(51:10):
about beasts and magical creatures that are commanded by a flute.
You know, think of the god pan and the magical
syringx and so forth, but.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Also the piper, pied piper. Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
But the interesting observation that sort of puts a bow
on this whole thing is he ends up talking about
whistling as a form of non verbal signaling. So here
he would specifically not be talking about actual languages that
use whistles, where there's a full language and the whistles
actually mean words, So you know, he's not talking about
(51:46):
whistling with precise informational content, but rather the more informal
type of communication done via whistling in other contexts, He writes, quote,
wordless signals usually have a vague and imprecise meaning. They
do not usually communicate ideas, but serve rather to attract attention.
And he described some of the same research we've already
(52:08):
talked about, for example, that whistling is a type of
noise making that travels especially well by concentrating energy in
the one to four kilohertz range, which is the best
window for humans to hear. It's sort of a perfect
attention getter. But in the context of most cultures, cultures
where whistling does not constitute a language. It doesn't contain
words or precise information. Again, its meaning is vague. It's
(52:32):
just an attention getter. And personally, I think maybe it's
in this vagueness that a lot of the superstitions and
ideas about the magical danger of whistling could emerge, because
it's sort of a one to two punch. It's this paradox.
Whistling is like the most powerful signal you can make
with your body to attract attention, the most powerful sound
(52:55):
signal you can make. Right, it's this piercing sound. It
travels far, it it makes people turn their heads. It's
like a beacon, and yet in most cases it doesn't
form precise words or phrases, so you can't be sure
what kind of attention you are attracting. It's just a
general beacon. It could attract a friend, or if you're
(53:16):
in a dangerous place, maybe you're on the sea and
there are all kinds of forces at work, it could
just as likely attract unwanted attention, a dangerous enemy of
some kind. And because you can't form precise words with it,
you also don't know what you're saying or what you're
asking for. It's like the scene in the movie where
you know, you like read a spell from an ancient
(53:38):
book in another language and you don't know what the
words are, so you don't know what kind of spell
you're enacting or what kind of trouble you're getting into.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
Yeah, or thinking about the transmissions that we send into
outer space, or that are sent from somewhere else in
outer space by some you know, presumably intelligent or ones
intelligent species, like the potential danger or of just of
whistling into the cosmic darkness, and you don't know who
is going to receive the signal and what they'll make
(54:07):
of the signal.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
I think that's a perfect analogy. Yeah, It's like I
think a lot of these fears and superstitions about the
magical power of whistling would be like if somebody in
the real context said, I have created the most powerful
radio transmitter that will omni directionally broadcast an incredibly clear,
powerful signal that any other intelligence out there could detect.
(54:31):
We don't know what they'll make of it, but let's
just start transmitting. There would obviously be some real concerns
about that from some of the less sanguine of extraterrestrial theorists.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
Yeah, I mean imagine if we just piped circus music out,
like just non stop circus music, what would they make
of it? Maybe the killer clowns from out of space
show up. That's the problem.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
God help us.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up
this four part Whistling series here, but we'd love to
hear from everyone out there, because whistling is something that
I think all of us have some connection to. You
can whistle, or you can't whistle, or you can sort
of whistle where there's some sort of cultural ideas about whistling.
There's something about whistling in the way you were brought up.
There's whistling in various pieces of media, So all of
(55:17):
this is fair game. Writ in. We would love to
hear from you. In the meantime, you can always find
core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays
and Thursdays in these Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do
a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on
Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
strange film.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. 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 Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
H
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're going on
into the vault. This episode originally aired August sixteenth, twenty
twenty two, and it's Part four of our series on whistling.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Enjoy the Whistling, Part four, The Final Conflict, Let's Do It.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part four
of our series about whistling. This episode's going to be
a little weird today because we literally already recorded this
episode and then lost the whole thing to a technical glitch. Rob,
I'm understand that as I was talking when we were
recording this episode the first time, it was just constantly
(01:06):
making the sounds of hell in your ears and can
you describe the terror and the anguish?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
It was kind of like your dialogue was an Afix
twin remix the entire time, and so at first it
was I was like, Okay, I can I can put
up with this. This is fine. We've already gone so
far into the episode, we should just you know, finish
it out. By the end of it, it was kind
of headache and doucing. But I was like, well, at
least we got the episode. This is just audio distortion
(01:33):
that I'm hearing. It's not going to transfer over to
the recorded finished product. Sadly it did, and so here
we are.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
It's the worst.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
We were like, well, at least it won't be on
the actual audio, and then it was, and so here
we are. Okay, so this is this is take two.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, I could have been much worse, So no big deal. Hey,
looking on the bright side, we got a rehearsal in there.
How often do we have a rehearsal for a by
guest episodes? So I think it's going to be stronger
because of that.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
So?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I was like, is it gonna make the episode better
or worse? I really don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
We'll see out better better for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
All Right, So we're picking up in this series about whistling.
Let's see, what did we talk about in the previous episodes.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, so we're picking up where we left off from
the last Whistling episode, which was Whistling, Part three regarding
superstitions and beliefs concerning whistling. We were talking about whistling
as an ill omen at sea, as a potential mark
of witchcraft, and women as bad theater luck in England
(02:38):
and much more. So we're going to continue this journey
through folklore and mythology concerning whistling, and we're going to
be referencing some of what we covered in another previous
episode about Chinese transcendental whistling, in which a specialized Taoist
form of whistling was almost like meditation, but was also
(03:00):
said to give one both insight and perhaps even power
over the energy of things in the world. So once
more I'm going to be referencing that excellent whistling and
Antiquity paper by AV Van Stakellenberg, but also some other sources. Now,
according to Ed Edwards, in the two thousand and nine
paper The Principles of Whistling, a ten dynasty text called
(03:21):
the shau Chi says that whistling simply calls out to
all spirits, good or bad, and sta Kellenberg summarizes this
as kind of a supernatural neutrality concerning whistling. So whistling
isn't something that is used by bad people or necessarily
use by good people. It's just it's this thing that
(03:43):
signals out into the world around us, into the unknown,
and you know, you could potentially attract the attention of
things you don't want to attract the attention of. But
it also could be basically harmless. It kind of depends
on the circumstances.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah. The raps Un whistling, which was a text we
cited in a previous episode. It talks about whistling having
a kind of withdrawing or distancing power on the whistler.
It says, you know, like the whistling gentleman sort of
distances himself from the things of the world and lets
out a long drawn whistle.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, and that's a thread we're going to definitely come
back to. But first I wanted to add another note
on whistling in Chinese history. So first of all, you know,
anytime we're talking about Chinese history, Chinese culture covers a
great deal of territory, both in terms of distance and
in terms of years, So you know, it's hard to
(04:37):
say with any certainty like this is the traditional Chinese
view of it versus another thing. But mainly, I don't
want to imply here that that whistling was just something
that Dallas sorcerers engaged in. I was looking at a
paper by Julungsu from two thousand and six titled Whistling
and its Magico Religious Tradition, A comparative Perspective, and at
(04:59):
this points out that there are Han Dynasty accounts of
women whistling for both sorrow and this seems in some
cases to tap into this idea of sighing as well. Again,
look thinking back to previous episodes where we've discussed whistling
and it's similarity to other non linguistic sounds that we make,
(05:20):
other breath based sounds that can be used to communicate
something or to get somebody's attention.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, and we were talking about cases where sometimes it's
maybe difficult to precisely translate a word because a word
could be interpreted as meaning like whistling, or could mean
hissing or some other kind of controlled expulsion of breath.
There's sort of some blurriness in the breath based lexicon.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Now, according to Sue here, it's not just for sorrow.
There are also accounts of women whistling out of happiness
or joy. It does seem like it is linked to
traditions of wailing in some cases, and sort of wailing
one might might might engage in, say at a grave,
that sort of thing, but also not just women. In
(06:10):
other sources as well, even the Yellow Emperor is said
to whistle, but the terminology here might actually mean hiss,
or it might mean a sigh. And in the Classic
of Mountains and Seas, the Queen Mother uses a whistle
as a kind of battle cry to disply her ferocity.
So it's kind of a wide spectrum of possible uses
(06:32):
for the whistle even within Chinese tradition here now. Sue
also points out that while yes, in English customs and
Western customs there are a lot of these superstitions against
women whistling particularly, and we don't really see this in
Chinese traditions, though it is sometimes seen as ominous in
general whistling due to the connection between whistling and various
(06:54):
death rituals and you know, and attracting the spirits, but
it is more in inherently magical and not gendered. Sue
also shares some other examples from Western traditions to you know,
for a comparative experience here, but they point out here
quote the Germans believe that a woman's whistling will make
the angels weep and the devil's rejoice.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
This is This would be a fantastic basis for a
German metal band, all female metal band that just employs
whistling instead of singing.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Oh, now, that's a question to what extent has whistling
been used in metal? The metal scene has come to
encompass a lot of different sounds and ideas, but I
don't know if they've gotten around a whistling have they?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Well, what's the metal version of the rule thirty four idea?
It's kind of like, if you can imagine it, there
is a metal a metal band of it, right.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I guess it depends on what you classifies metal too,
Like are the Scorpions metal? I don't know, probably not,
probably not now. Sue also shares that among various Chinese minorities,
whistling while you work, as in Snow White and the
song the Dwarfs Sing, whistling while you work, at least
in the field was thought to summon demons to damaged crops,
(08:08):
or it could summon demons to damage crops, so it
was discouraged. This Sioue Stresses does not seem to be
linked to say dallast ideas regarding whistling, but is instead
rooted in particular folk traditions. Now here's another really interesting
one that Sue brings up. Sue shares an example from Mythraism.
So Mythraism for sci fi fans out there, some of
(08:31):
you might be familiar with this religion because you may
have watched the really excellently weird HBO mac sci fi
series Raised by Wolves, in which one of the two
factions that's going out into space and colonizing other worlds
are are devoted Mithraists. And you might well think, oh,
(08:53):
this is some sort of cool religion they made up
for the show, but it is not. It is this
is a reference to the Roman street cult of mithras
and in there recorded rituals, and Joe, You're going to
get into this a little bit and talk about what
we mean when we when we bring out the idea
of recorded rituals of Mithraism. But supposedly there is a
(09:15):
system of whistling and tongue clicking that was used to
attract what Sue refers to as theeomorphic star deities.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh, theeomorphic meaning animal formed, so like beast beast forms
of star gods.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Now I haven't seen the show Raised by Wolves, but
I think i'm to understand you were saying that the
title there is a reference to like the myth about
the founding of Rome, the Romulus and Rima story.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, that's right. That seems to be the direct reference
made there, and there are other references as well, and
just a lot of just sheer weirdness on top of it.
So if nothing else, it's a show that's going to
give you lots of strange imagery. It's kind of like
Ridley Scott's continuation of the android centered alien sequels or
(10:04):
prequels that he was working on.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Hmm, okay, so well anyway, I love the idea that
the show would incorporate actual things about Mithraism because I've
long thought we should do a series or at least
an episode on Mithraism because I find it really interesting
because it is a religion that clearly commanded an enormous
following and had huge cultural significance in the Roman Empire.
(10:29):
Like you can find the ruins of their underground temples
called Mithrium, and they're all throughout Roman settlements, and yet
we know way less about this religion than one might assume.
And one of the big reasons for that is that,
as far as I understood, and I guess the text
that you just referred to maybe a counterexample to this,
(10:50):
but modern scholars generally thought, we have basically no access
to any primary literary sources about the religion. So if
it had religious texts, we don't have any of them,
and so what we know about it we've had to
try to piece together through detective work based on imagery
and simple inscriptions and archaeological clues and comments and references
(11:15):
made by external writers trying to say, hey, you know,
this is what's going on with Mithraism. So for a
kind of hopefully interesting analogy, imagine trying to understand what
Christianity was if it like mostly died out and disappeared
in the fourth century or so, and we did not
have any of the writings of the New Testament or
(11:37):
any other writings by Church fathers or any other early Christians,
and we were trying to reconstruct what Christianity was based
entirely on like imagery and artifacts and what other external
writers said about it. So it's a really fascinating problem,
and one of the most common images in Roman mythraism
(11:59):
is apparently important scene from their mythology of the god
Mithras slaughtering some kind of divine bull. But there's another
interesting complication here too, which is that there is a
pre Roman Persian cult of Mithras or Mitra, which is
a Zoroastrian or pre Zoroastrian god of the Persian people
(12:20):
who's kind of a solar deity of justice who I
think was associated with contracts and the honoring of bargains.
And then later you get this widespread Roman mystery cult
that seems to be based on an appropriated version of
that deity. And of course we know the Romans loved
absorbing and reprocessing other cultures gods, like the main Roman
(12:42):
pantheon is mostly a photocopy of the Greek. And then
you've got the Persian Mithras becoming the Roman savior god
of some kind, and even the way you can think
about a Jewish messianic figure in Jesus and the original
context of monotheistic Judaism rather quickly becomes a popular savior
god to people throughout the empire who had been Polytheists
(13:04):
up until the moment they converted to Christianity, So that
whole process is really interesting. But the idea of a
text of Mithraism was very interesting to me because I
didn't think we had one of these. But this is
referring to something called the mithras Liturgy, which I think
is commonly dated to roughly the fourth century. But there's
(13:25):
dispute about whether it actually reflects original Mithraic theology or
whether it's some kind of later synthesis.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Yeah, this is the quote from it that Sue shares
in the paper. Quote. But after you have said the
second prayer, where silence is twice commanded, then whistle twice
and click twice with the tongue, and immediately you will
see stars coming down from the disk of the sun,
five pointed in large numbers and filling the whole air.
(13:54):
But say once again, silence, silence.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Whistle twice, click twice, and then shut up. Here come
the gods.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Now, coming back to we were talking earlier about scholars
in the woods. In Chinese history, there is this idea
that comes up, Sue mentions, and we see this in
the Han dynasty, for example, where you would have Confucian scholars,
other reclusive scholars who would whistle as a means of
(14:24):
expressing disdain for the world and or their absolute freedom.
So this is an interesting concept, and it was also
done by other classes as well, Sue writes quote in general, poets, hermits,
and people of all types in the Six Dynasties utilized
whistling to express a sense of untrammeled individual freedom, or
(14:47):
an attitude of disobedience to authority or traditional ceremony, or
to dispel suppressed feelings and indignation. Whistling was not limited
to a certain class, but was practiced by men from
all walks of life.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
This idea of whistling as a kind of like middle
finger to social customs and authority. So it's like you
might imagine the behavior of Diogenes the cynic, or something
just completely behaving in inappropriate ways in public as an
expression of contempt for norms and authority.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yeah, I whistle, I do what I want Now another
paper I look to when I was looking around for
various superstitions, we of course found superstitions regarding whistling at sea,
but we also find them in another interesting place below
the surface of the earth, in mines ooh, yeah, And
I hadn't really thought about this, but this is apparently
(15:39):
a big one paper I was looking as an older paper.
This is California Miners Folklore. This is from a nineteen
forty two edition of California Folklore Quarterly written by Waylan
d Hand. And yeah, it's a really interesting read. This
one's out there on the internet if anyone wants a
deeper dive into it. But for example, he goes into
(16:04):
the fear of the Tommy Knockers in the tunnels.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Now, Rob, I am only familiar with Tommy Knockers from
the Stephen King novel or actually I never read the novel.
I think I watched the made for TV movie adaptation
of it, which is quite bad, and I think Stephen
King himself regards that as a terrible book. But I
don't know what the original reference here is in the book.
(16:29):
I think it's aliens.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, I can never get very far with the book, but.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Not aliens here.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
No, but it apparently refers to a fair variety of things,
and they're very haunting and they kind of I feel
like they also kind of connect to perhaps older European
ideas of creatures that live in the Earth, getting into
various ideas of dwarfs and so forth. The Cobald, Yeah,
the Cobald. This is what Hand writes in the paper.
(16:59):
These daizens of the deep dark chambers of the Earth
are conceived in different forms as disembodied spirits of dead
miners hovering in a working as patrons, or as little
men elf like be whiskered and wizened. They are usually
thought of as benign, occasionally even assisting in the location
(17:20):
of ore bodies. If they are not so well disposed,
their conduct tends to be mischievous rather than malignant. Many
California miners, though not having themselves seen these creatures in person,
recall having seen small effigies of them made of clay
and set upon portal, sets to a tunnel or on
(17:41):
the lagging or elsewhere where their patronage is desired. So
I love that image of not only the idea that
there are these beings living elsewhere in the tunnels, but
there's this kind of we talked about a little, you know,
we were talking about when people set to sea, when
they return, when they're when seamen are out there on
(18:03):
the waters, there the newer religions that they have taken
to might be set aside for the older ways, the
older gods. And here we have this example of California
miners potentially having little altars to kind of dwarven elven
beings in the mines.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
That's too good.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So Hand discusses some other ideas as well, you know,
the ghosts of dead miners working in the tunnels, also
phantom white mules, headless mules, and strange lights. Apparently he
said that there weren't really that many creature myths concerning
the minds, though occasionally you would have like a cat
come down into the mines and would just scare the
(18:44):
Bejesus out of everybody, because it would either way, I'm imagining,
you know, the cat would get down there, it would
be lurking about, its eyes gleaming and the light and
just give everyone the proper spooks. But there were also
these superstitions about the about bad luck concerning well, first
of all, bringing women anywhere near the cave, but also
(19:05):
there was a widespread superstition against anyone whistling down there,
and it seems to be sort of twofold. On one hand,
there was a real fear of vibrations in the caves
and So there's this idea that you shouldn't whistle because
you don't know what that's going to do. You're going
to set up vibrations that could potentially cause a cave in.
But it also seems linked to this older, wider idea
(19:29):
that if you're whistling, you could draw in spirits and
hand shares. A fun little rhyme here quote whistle by
night you'll bring the sprite. Whistle by day you'll drive
them away.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And this is not a sprite you want to bring.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Right, right, or certainly you don't want them. You don't
want anything going on down there in the mind. You
don't want you don't want any spirits bonking about. You
don't want any vibrations going wild. You want everything to
just be as safe and quiet as possible.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, Okay, so this is not like a friendly tinker bell.
This would be a sprite that's going to maybe pollute
your ore or make a rock fall on your head
or something.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Yeah, yeah, I guess coming back to the idea of
the Tommy Knockers, it kind of comes back to the
sort of neutrality of spirits, right. It's the idea that well, there,
there are, or may be spirits around. They might do
some bad things, they might do some good things. We
probably shouldn't call them. We shouldn't call in extra spirits,
and we should try and be on the good side
of any spirits that are present.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Now, I think all of the examples we've talked about
so far are superstitions. That the way that whistling relates
to monsters or spirits or dangerous entities is that it's
something humans could do that might in some cases attract them.
So you know, be careful about whistling because you might
get a monster on your tail. But I was thinking
(20:54):
about are there stories of monsters that themselves whistle or
do some thing like whistling?
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, I was curious about this. So first of all,
I turned to Carol Rose, who has two Extraordinary volumes,
one about monsters and giants and so forth, and the
others more about fairies and sprites. And there's some overlap
between the two books, but there are also things in
each book that are not covered by the other, and
so there were at least a couple of examples that
stood out. One of them is an interesting monster of
(21:23):
the people of the Xingu River in Brazil, and this
creature is called midhata karaya, and these are said to
have been giants that were as tall as the trees,
with fruit growing out of their armpits, which the giants
then consume to sustain themselves. So it sounds like they
weren't themselves dangerous. They weren't like eating humans. But they're big,
(21:46):
tall giants. So if they're coming your way, you want
to know to get out of their way. And the
way you knew this is because the male giants had
a hole in the top of their head and it
emitted a high pitched whistle when they moved.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
This is a good monster. Okay, so we got armpit autophagi.
They eat the fruit of their own armpits and their
heads whistle.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah. Now another monster that Rose shares Here is a
Russian creature that I think we might well describe as
a sort of a harpie, or at least a harpy
in them the way that modern people will think of
the harpy a kind of bird human hybrid, though in
this case I think they tend to be more male
(22:31):
than female. And its name is soleve Rachtmash, and in
Russian folklore it's said to give a piercing whistle, and
this whistle will kill anyone who hears it, and then
the monster will come and rob.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Your corpse, rob your corpse. So it's looking for money.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, yeah, it's not here to eat you either. It's
interested in one thing, and it's whatever money you got on.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
You checking your armpits for fruit.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah. But and it's kind of an interesting thing because
the next monster I wanted to mention also is not
going to kill you. This one just wants to scare
you real bad. This is a yokai. I was looking
around in yokai traditions because I'm thinking, well, that's just
such a rich font of creatures and beings that it
(23:19):
makes sense that there'd be something out there that whistled.
And the one that I found, some descriptions of it
that I found translated, of course mentioned whistling as something
it does. Others don't mention it, so I can't be
one hundred persent certain if this is something that is
actually part of it or a lot of these yokaia too.
They and when you get into modern ghost stories as well,
(23:42):
like there's there's there's still kind of rich in alive,
so something's could add it and also somethings could added
in translation, but this one is called Oa Guru Batari
and its name apparently means nothing but blackened teeth, which
already sounds pretty pretty amazing. So this is the way
this okais encountered. She appears as a beautiful woman in
(24:05):
a traditional wedding kimono, and I guess you might see
her at a distance, and in some cases as you
get as you're interested and you move closer, she may
whistle to get the attention of single men. Other accounts
say that she may speak in the voice of a
loved one. Others don't seem to mention any kind of
real sound at all. But as you get closer, this
(24:25):
is the main thing that happens. She, like a lot
of these type creatures, will reveal her face. And when
she reveals her face, you find not a not a
beautiful humanoid face, but instead a face that is largely
blank except for a great, big, gaping mouth that's filled
with nothing but blackened teeth. And then she cackles, and
(24:45):
you just scream and run away terrified, And that's it.
She's not interested in hurting you. She's just here to
scare the Bejesus out of you.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
No eyes, no nose, just the teeth. And but yeah,
so she doesn't bite your head off. It's just a
show you the teeth and get you upset.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, yeah, just a ghost. Now. I didn't look super
close at various pop culture and modern whistling entities, but
I thought I would mention briefly that there is something
called the whistling Fiend in Dungeons and Dragons raven Loft setting.
It's supposed to be just like this horrible monster, like
(25:22):
a fiend from the pits of Hell, but it will
whistle beautifully as it's approaching, so before anything goes terribly wrong,
you'll hear the whistling. And then if you happen to
witness what it does when it gets there, well it's
whistling the whole time as well as it's doing, you know, horrible,
gruesome things to people. Now I was I was interested
(25:43):
to run across this. I don't really know much about
old radio dramas, but there was also an old radio
drama about crime and fate titled The Whistler, And apparently
on this show, the titular whistler kind of emerges out
of the night. It's very much a kind of you know,
crime noir kind of a figure. You hear him whistling
(26:05):
a catchy tune, and then he serves as the narrator
and kind of host of the program. And there were
apparently eight different Whistler films during the nineteen forties, and
the first of them was nineteen forty four is the Whistler,
and it was directed by William Castle.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Uh, William Castle of the Tingler fame.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Have to assume he installed special seats in the movie
theaters that what would the whistle into your bud or something.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I don't know, it sounds like the kind of thing
he would do. Yeah, I mean, he is perhaps best
remembered for figuring out what kind of gimmick would get
people into the theater. Maybe just the gimmick here was
just the existing ip. I don't know. But I don't
think you really hear about the Whistler much anymore. I
think there was a nineteen fifties TV series, and I
don't know that anyone's really gone back to this, but
(26:57):
I like this idea because it's essentially it's kind of
like a cripkeeper, you know, it's an anthology host and Apparently
the deal with the movies is you would have the
same star actor in each of them, not the Whistler
but somebody else, though each story is different, and so
he's playing a different character. So it's kind of like
the modern version would be. I don't know, Ryan Gosling
(27:17):
is in every Whistler movie, but Ryan Gosling plays a
different protagonist, a different character that's all wound up in
some sort of tale of crime and fate.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
We just got a producer chime in from Seth who,
by the way, is actually a devoted listener to The Whistler.
I mean, I don't know if you can be devoted
to something that is not currently produced, but he's a fan.
He says, it's great.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
You know this idea of the stranger who whistles, and
it's unknown exactly what their knowledge is, what their powers
may be. I guess you do see that in a
lot of a lot of cinema. It's often We've had
some listeners right in and mentioned that Westerns are a
place where we see a lot of such suspicious whistling.
(28:01):
It brings to mind a nineteen ninety one TV movie
that I don't remember was especially good, but it was creepy,
and it was called Into the bad Lands, and it
starred Bruce Dern as this creepy old bounty hunter in black,
and if memory serves, he does various things. He cooks
(28:23):
some eggs, he shoots some outlaws, and drags him around
kind of rotting behind his cart. He smiles a big
creepy grin. But I think he also whistles in that one,
And there's a particular ditty that's reoccurring, So there is
something to this. The stranger who whistles, what is he
whistling about? He kind of ties into some of these
(28:44):
other ideas, like he's an outsider that is not tied
to the same rules as everything else. He may have
some sort of communication with knowledge beyond himself, with spirits,
et cetera.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Another producer, Chime ins Seth, had a great example of this,
and it's Earl Hannah and kill Bill, who does a
very creepy whistling while she is on the way to
kill the protagonist.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
And that's a great example too, because this is this
is a female character whistling. So many of these examples,
even if we're touching on traditions where where whistling is
not gendered. It seems like a lot of them tend
to involve male figures that are whistling. So so yeah,
great example seth. All right, So that's all I have
for now anyway, concerning whistling superstitions and whistling monsters. Certainly
(29:30):
we'd love to hear from everyone out there who has
additional things they would like to bring up, be it
you know, folkloric creatures, strange traditions, and certainly any kind
of you know, movie tie in characters who whistle. I'd
love to hear about any of that. So yes, by
all means right in.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So, I guess the next thing we should look at
is some of the psychology research on whistling, which I
have to say, I was shocked how sparse this literature is.
There is, from what I could tell, very little psychological
research about when and why people whistle. One of the
only major papers I could find on it wasn't really
(30:08):
experimental in nature. It was very theoretical, and though it
had a few interesting ideas in it that I do
want to talk about, to the extent that it is theoretical,
it seems kind of based in Freudianism, So it's gonna
be a big caveat there. But before we get to that,
I did want to talk about a medical case report
I came across that had a title that really grabbed
(30:32):
my attention. So this is a paper by pallac at
All published in BMC Psychiatry in twenty twelve, and it's
called Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling following Cardiac arrest. A case
study Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Oh my goodness, So is it the pro is that
the music? You think that?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
That's what I was assuming. Unfortunately, the case report is
not attached a recording or sheet music or anything. So,
and it doesn't name the tunes, so I don't know
what song it is. The most they say about it
is that it is a carnival song. All right, what
are the options? Yeah, so you got that one is
like the Binny Hill theme? Possible? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, I think I don't want to get too far
into this because this is like, this is a realm
I know virtually nothing about. But apparently there's a there's
a fair amount of what we might think of his
circus music that you know, we're talking about circus band stuff.
We're talking about waltzes and fox trots, so there there's
there's probably a lot there, but them is the thing
(31:40):
that that mostly comes to the surface for folks like me.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Okay, So in this case, report the medical history the patient.
In this case it's anonymous of course, so we don't
know their name. But it was a man who was
found unconscious in his car in February nineteen ninety two
at the age of forty eight, having so a heart attack.
He was in cardiac arrest for some period of time,
but he was reanimated successfully in the emergency room at
(32:08):
a nearby hospital, so he survived the heart attack he had.
His heart had stopped, there was reduced a supply of
oxygen to the brain, but they resuscitated him and he
was all right. But during rehabilitation he presented with some symptoms,
including neurological impairment, and so several of the things they
(32:29):
report are disorientation, apathy, what they call bradyphrenia meaning slowness
of thought, short term memory problems and things like that.
And imaging, particularly EEG showed decreased functioning in the brain,
especially in the bezo temporal areas, and he continued to
exhibit some neurological symptoms in the following years. And here's
(32:51):
where we get to the music. I'll read straight from
the case report quote. We were approached in May two
thousand and eight by the patient's wife, who got to
know our center of expertise through the internet. She was
close to desperation from listening to the whistling of the
same carnival song for nearly sixteen years. It would go
(33:12):
on for five to eight hours every day and got
worse when the patient was tired. Oh wow, so it's
a mix. Like obviously it's you know, I was snagged
by the idea of repetitive whistling of a carnival song,
but when you actually hear the details, it is I
don't know, it's a very unfortunate situation to imagine that,
(33:33):
like the whistling of the same song goes on for
five to eight hours a day for sixteen years.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Now, the authors here talk about treatments that were tried,
including a drug called clomipramine, which is a tricyclic antidepressant
that is sometimes used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, which
obviously share some features with what's being described here. That
among other conditions. But basically this drug regimen did manage
(34:02):
to decrease the whistling by about half, but it also
came with some very difficult side effects in this man's case,
and the repetitive whistling of a carnival song non stop
for five to eight hours a day could be considered
an example of what psychiatrists would call compulsivity, which the
authors describe as quote, the repetitive, irresistible urge to perform
(34:23):
a behavior, the experience of loss of voluntary control over
this intense urge, and the tendency to perform repetitive acts
in a habitual or stereotyped manner. So they talk about
how the man would whistle the song on a loop
all day pretty much, and that at certain points they
could make him stop doing it, though he reported after
(34:45):
he stopped that he experienced anxiety. And in their discussion,
the authors explain how the man in this report showed
symptoms that could be consistent with three different interpretations of
his condition. So, first of all, they talk about the
idea of a frontal syndrome characterized by impulsivity and disinhibition.
(35:05):
I think frontal syndrome there because it's the frontal lobe
that is very important for inhibiting behavior that's your sort
of like self control mechanism. And then second a compulsivity
condition known as punding, which is characterized by quote purposeless
and repetitive behavior such as collecting or arranging things often
related to the patient's personal hobbies or occupation, and attributed
(35:29):
to alterations of the brain's reward and motor systems in
both the ventral and dorsal stra atom. And then the
final interpretation would be a sort of acquired form of
obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. And there are other examples
of people acquiring OCD after a brain injury later in life.
The OCD is usually acquired gradually earlier on in life.
(35:52):
And they say all of these explanations match the observations
in some ways but not in others. But one thing
they got into that I thought was interesting here was
talking about the different characteristics of impulsivity versus compulsivity in
the brain. So they write, quote, one may conclude that
the whistling with its repetitions is primarily compulsive rather than
(36:15):
impulsive or disinhibitive, as the patient had a constant urge
to whistle and felt anxiety when asked to stop rather
than acting without foresight. The fact that anxiety was felt
is in line with compulsivity rather than impulsivity, assuming that
compulsive behaviors are performed to prevent perceived negative consequences from happening.
(36:36):
So this is a useful distinction for thinking about because
when we you know, outside of the medical context, when
we think about these words impulsive or compulsive, they both
I think usually refer to situations where a person seems
to lack executive control. They lack the ability to control
their own behavior or prevent themselves from doing something, but
(36:58):
in very different ways. So in impulsivity, you feel an
urge to do something, but some process taking place in
your frontal lobe tells you that's not appropriate and stops
you from doing it. But the urge itself might be
something normal that like we would all think of doing
for a second. It might cross our mind to do it,
(37:18):
but then we would turn away from actually doing it
because of some inhibition mechanism in the brain. Examples of
this include all kinds of stuff, spitting on the floor
or making a rude or inappropriate comment and conversation, or
jumping out of a moving car. They can vary wildly
from you know, minor things to extreme things. They would
(37:39):
all be things though, that even a person with typical
neuroanatomy might think for a second about doing, but then
they would be able to stop themselves.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
All right. I think we can all think of examples
of this from our own life, where yeah, you're just
in a situation and you may think of like something
just ridiculous or absurd or antisocial that you theoretically could do,
and then you sort of but you recoil from it
and you realize, oh, well, of course I'm not going
to do that. And it can be a little shocking
to think that you even thought about doing that. Why
did I think that, hey, I could take my wallet
(38:11):
out and throw it off of this building or off
of this bridge that I'm on. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yeah. We did a whole episode one time called The
imp of the Perverse that was about this idea that
like that there is some kind of It was about
the first half before the inhibition comes in. It's like,
what is that urge to do things that are obviously
not in your best interests but you suddenly just feel like, ooh,
I should do that. But then you're able to put
the you know, put the lid on it and say no,
(38:35):
I shouldn't do that. People with a frontal syndrome often
have impulsivity problems because they whatever the normal disinhibition mechanism
in the brain is, that has been damaged in some
way by their injury. Right, So contrasts that that impulsivity
with compulsivity, where a person also lacks the ability to
stop themselves from performing an action, but it's an action
(38:57):
that they feel they must do repetitively in order to
prevent some kind of bad consequence from happening. So remember
it was said that the man here would whistle constantly,
but he felt the immediate onset of anxiety if he
stopped whistling the carnival song. So that makes it sound
more like it's compulsivity here, that it's something that he
(39:19):
felt he had to do repetitively or else negative consequences
would emerge. And the case history here mentions that the
man once worked as head of a carnival association, and
the authors don't say this, so we don't know this,
but it seems like a reasonable guess that the carnival
tune he was whistling was one he was familiar with
(39:39):
from his own past to working as the head of
a carnival association, maybe even one he associated with a
time when he was more in control.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
That's fascinating because it also this ties into sort of
the power of music, right. We all use music, I think,
at times to augment our current mental state, to draw
in mental feelings of power or assertiveness, but also sadness,
whatever the case might be, whatever we feel like we
(40:10):
need to connect with that is not our current state exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
But it also ties into something that came up in
previous episodes. So here again we have a case of
a man who suffers neurological damage after a period where
his brain isn't getting enough oxygen. He never had any
symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder or anything before this, but
after this event he acquired this tendency to engage in
compulsive whistling. And I thought it was interesting that the whistling,
(40:37):
if it is best interpreted as a way of staving
off anxiety, which the authors here suggested, is it made
me think of our discussion about whistling past the graveyard
or whistling in the dark, other cases where it's commonly
observed that people whistle in order to push out a
fear or thoughts of danger.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, more whistling past the graveyard for sure.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Now, again, as I mentioned earlier, it seemed like the
psychological research on whistling was far less developed than I
would have expected. Maybe there are some great studies out
there that I just wasn't able to find, So if
you know of them, please send them into the show
account contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
But the other major one I found, and this was
cited in some other papers, is a paper from nineteen
(41:30):
fifty nine published in the journal Language and Speech called
When People Whistle, and it's by the UC San Francisco
professor of psychiatry, Peter F. Austwald. As I said earlier,
I do want to mention this one because it has
some interesting ideas in it, but also it is an
older paper. It clearly is not constricted by empirical method.
(41:50):
This is not like reporting on original experiments. It's more
kind of theorizing about what whistling might mean and why
people whistle, based on models that seem at least influenced
by Freudianism. A lot of it's about fixations that are
sort of emerge from childhood development. But anyway, okay, so
(42:11):
who is this guy who wrote this? Ostwald? He seems
like a kind of interesting guy. So he lived from
nineteen twenty eight to nineteen ninety six, and his life
is sort of divided between an interest in psychiatry on
one hand, and music and music history on the other.
So he wrote biographies of musicians and composers like Schumann
(42:31):
and Glenn Gould. But also, to quote from his New
York Times obituary quote, in nineteen eighty six, he founded
the Health Program for Performing Artists, a voluntary group of
specialists engaged in research, education, and clinical care of the
particular mental and medical problems afflicting musicians, dancers, and other
(42:51):
performing artists, both professionals and students. And I thought that
was very interesting because now that I think about it,
it clearly makes sense that you could have medical center
focused on the mental and physical health needs of performing
artists in particular, because I'd imagine there would be patterns
in their needs. But it never occurred to me that
such a thing would exist.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, I mean it makes sense, right, because we have
sports medicine athletes do extreme things with their bodies. It
puts special types of wear and tear on them, and
you could I think you can very fairly say the
same thing for performers, especially when you're thinking about something
like dance or vocal performance.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Totally, but okay, what does ast Falds say in this
language psychology paper? Mainly this article is focused on questions
of why humans whistle, what purpose it serves, what whistling
tends to mean, and how it differs from other forms
of noise production. I'm not gonna get into everything he
theorizes about in this paper, but I did want to
focus on one part where he's sort of taking a
(43:53):
look at the phenomenology of whistling. What does it feel
like to whistle?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Is it pleasurable to people? And if it is, which
it often seems to be, why is it pleasurable? So
to check one of the very Freudian boxes, he argues that,
first of all, the act of whistling involves manipulation of
the muscles in the face and the mouth in a
way that may produce hedonic states feelings of comfort and
pleasure because of its similarity to the facial and mouth
(44:21):
movements of what he calls oral gratification, and so he
expands that to all kinds of things like eating and smoking,
but he specifically ties it into the facial and mouth
muscle movements of a feeding infant. So this is one
of those things that, well, it's hard to disprove that,
but I'm not convinced there's much evidence to establish that
(44:42):
exact causal chain that like doing the same thing with
your face muscles that you did when you were a
baby in your mother's arms produces comfort and for the
same reason. I don't know how you would show that, yeah, Yeah,
And also I'd be skeptical that there's a general principle
that doing something with the you know, the skeletal muscle
(45:02):
in your body that is similar to what that muscle
does in some other unrelated activity that is pleasurable in
some way gives you pleasure in the secondary activity just
because you're using the same muscles. I don't know. I mean,
you could think of ways that you would use the
same muscles you might use in some pleasurable activity, but
it doesn't bring pleasure. Does just like pretending to chew
(45:25):
bring you the same kind of pleasure you get from
eating and so forth?
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Uh, yeah, generally not. Uh yeah, yeah, you can't. You
can't just say, pretend to be eating your favorite dish.
And I mean maybe if you're hungry enough, you can
you can lean into it a little bit. I don't know,
but yeah, for the most part, I don't really put
a lot of stock in this notion.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, so I got doubts about that. But then you
make some other points that I think are I don't know,
more worth considering. This next one is still sort of
along Freudian lines, but I think it's it's I don't know,
it feels different to me. So see what you think
about this, he says.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
In addition to the mouth and face, whistling involves the
respiratory structures. These structures chest, abdomen, lungs, wind pipes, and
throat move of their own accord, regulated by neuronal and
chemical processes beyond voluntary control. But the whistler in effect
willfully imposes his own rhythm, amplitude, and organization pattern on
(46:23):
these automatic movements. Psychological studies show that if the individual
is rewarded by attention or praise when he first gains
control over such automatic processes, he may continue to expect
satisfaction from this display of skill. As will be shown later,
whistling arouses the attention of listeners so that the whistler's
(46:44):
bodily mastery is almost universally rewarded in some way. And
I don't know, at a gut level, this seemed a
little more plausible to me that there could be like
a learned association of positive reinforcement upon gaining conscious control
over previously automatic or autonomic processes. And I think one
of the main ideas this ties into here is like
(47:06):
toilet training, that you know, there could be some kind
of bleed over with pleasure upon a general pleasure upon
taking conscious control of things like breath, and that would
sort of check out with other things. I mean, there
are a lot of things people do to seemingly bring
themselves pleasure and comfort just by taking conscious control of breath,
(47:27):
which is normally automatic.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, this does remind me of certain potty training techniques
for kids where they'll be for instance, if you're trying
to teach the very young child to have some degree
of control over when they defecate, that there's a there's
a like a technique where you're getting them to hum
while they do it. So it's yeah, I can see
(47:48):
where you can have a lot of connection between the
two here.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Oh and in the next section I want to talk
about he actually ties directly into that. So Ostwald writes, quote,
some of the emotions that accompany the act of whistling
would appear to result from wishful thoughts and magical fantasies
in the mind of the whistler. Whistling, because it involves
the production of wordless sounds, may bring back memories of
(48:11):
that very early period during which the child could not
distinguish between those sounds which came from the outside world
and those sounds which came from his own body. During
this phase of personality development, one is unsure of the
significance of sounds. One cannot tell whether a certain noise,
say one's footsteps, has personal meaning referable only to his
(48:34):
own body, or has a public meaning with some reference
to the world of other people. In this confused state,
the individual may come to believe that the sounds he
produces have some causal relationship to what he experiences. Whistling,
like other noises he makes, may thus be associated with
fantasies of omnipotence, which, unless corrected by reality can lead
(48:58):
to delusions of grandeur. This was really interesting to me
because think about how many things we've already looked at
where there's some belief that, like whistling gives you power
to like change the external world somehow.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah yeah, ties directly into the wind magic we've been
discussing in getting and even connects back to the Taoist
transcendental whistling as.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Well totally, or even the Terence McKinney thing. Yeah yes, yeah, yeah,
but okay, So coming back to this, Ostwald writes, quote
Occasionally parents or other adults inadvertently encourage magical behavior in
their children and thus reinforce fanciful thoughts about whistling and
other sounds. For example, nurses have been known to employ
(49:39):
whistles to quote make the child urinate and kindly. Grandparents
not infrequently whistle away the aches and bruises of a youngster.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Yeah yeah, I can see the again whistling as the
as a sound of wind, but also the sound of
water moving water. We touched on that, and that's some
of these ideas that you can get an ox or
a horse to drink water by whistling at it, which
there may not be anything to that, but using it
as some sort of a potty training. Yeah, I can
(50:08):
imagine the humming sound being for the defecation though, the
whistling sound being for the you know, the creation of
water with one body, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
And that could actually have efficacy when you're whistling to
a person, right because they hear that that has some
associative significance for them that may actually help motivate, i
don't know, going to the bathroom, or may actually make
them feel subjectively less pain or something like that. But
that could lead to the erroneous assumption therefore, that you
can have physically implausible control over the external world with
(50:43):
whistling somehow.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
Ostwald then relates this to reports tying directly back into
our previous episode about sailors who have intense superstitions about
whistling and believe that it contains powerful and dangerous magic,
you know, again whistling for the wind. And he also
discusses magical beliefs about whistling to summon birds and Celtic
tales and this involves a mediating technology. Plenty of stories
(51:10):
about beasts and magical creatures that are commanded by a flute.
You know, think of the god pan and the magical
syringx and so forth, but.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Also the piper, pied piper. Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
But the interesting observation that sort of puts a bow
on this whole thing is he ends up talking about
whistling as a form of non verbal signaling. So here
he would specifically not be talking about actual languages that
use whistles, where there's a full language and the whistles
actually mean words, So you know, he's not talking about
(51:46):
whistling with precise informational content, but rather the more informal
type of communication done via whistling in other contexts, He writes, quote,
wordless signals usually have a vague and imprecise meaning. They
do not usually communicate ideas, but serve rather to attract attention.
And he described some of the same research we've already
(52:08):
talked about, for example, that whistling is a type of
noise making that travels especially well by concentrating energy in
the one to four kilohertz range, which is the best
window for humans to hear. It's sort of a perfect
attention getter. But in the context of most cultures, cultures
where whistling does not constitute a language. It doesn't contain
words or precise information. Again, its meaning is vague. It's
(52:32):
just an attention getter. And personally, I think maybe it's
in this vagueness that a lot of the superstitions and
ideas about the magical danger of whistling could emerge, because
it's sort of a one to two punch. It's this paradox.
Whistling is like the most powerful signal you can make
with your body to attract attention, the most powerful sound
(52:55):
signal you can make. Right, it's this piercing sound. It
travels far, it it makes people turn their heads. It's
like a beacon, and yet in most cases it doesn't
form precise words or phrases, so you can't be sure
what kind of attention you are attracting. It's just a
general beacon. It could attract a friend, or if you're
(53:16):
in a dangerous place, maybe you're on the sea and
there are all kinds of forces at work, it could
just as likely attract unwanted attention, a dangerous enemy of
some kind. And because you can't form precise words with it,
you also don't know what you're saying or what you're
asking for. It's like the scene in the movie where
you know, you like read a spell from an ancient
(53:38):
book in another language and you don't know what the
words are, so you don't know what kind of spell
you're enacting or what kind of trouble you're getting into.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
Yeah, or thinking about the transmissions that we send into
outer space, or that are sent from somewhere else in
outer space by some you know, presumably intelligent or ones
intelligent species, like the potential danger or of just of
whistling into the cosmic darkness, and you don't know who
is going to receive the signal and what they'll make
(54:07):
of the signal.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
I think that's a perfect analogy. Yeah, It's like I
think a lot of these fears and superstitions about the
magical power of whistling would be like if somebody in
the real context said, I have created the most powerful
radio transmitter that will omni directionally broadcast an incredibly clear,
powerful signal that any other intelligence out there could detect.
(54:31):
We don't know what they'll make of it, but let's
just start transmitting. There would obviously be some real concerns
about that from some of the less sanguine of extraterrestrial theorists.
Speaker 1 (54:43):
Yeah, I mean imagine if we just piped circus music out,
like just non stop circus music, what would they make
of it? Maybe the killer clowns from out of space
show up. That's the problem.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
God help us.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up
this four part Whistling series here, but we'd love to
hear from everyone out there, because whistling is something that
I think all of us have some connection to. You
can whistle, or you can't whistle, or you can sort
of whistle where there's some sort of cultural ideas about whistling.
There's something about whistling in the way you were brought up.
There's whistling in various pieces of media, So all of
(55:17):
this is fair game. Writ in. We would love to
hear from you. In the meantime, you can always find
core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays
and Thursdays in these Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do
a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on
Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
strange film.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. 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 Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
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