Licking, Part 1

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the science, culture and mythology of licking.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, you welcome do Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
begin a series of episodes on the theme of licking
with the tongue, as this behavior appears in nature, in
human culture, in science, and even in the mass manufacture
and consumption of candy, as we'll get into later today.
But Rob, I've got a kind of strange place I
want to begin with this subject because I actually got

(00:39):
the idea to talk about licking on the show, not
by like watching a you know, a deer go for
assault lick, or by observing a snake's tongue, though I
think we will end up talking about all those things
in this series, but by reading about ancient Egyptian curses
last month.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hmmm, all right. It's always an interesting way to go, right,
especially in considering something that is kind of seemingly mundane,
And every day we go we start with the esoteric
in the ritualistic.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I think that's the way to do it, because now
every time we look at licking in the real world,
we can think back to the ways that it's also
infused with evil or protective magic. So yeah, I came
across the idea to do this when we did an
episode earlier in October about ancient Egyptian curses, and in
preparing for that episode, I was reading parts of some

(01:29):
books about magical beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt. There's
one that I mentioned in that episode already. That was
the book by Geraldine Pinch called Magic in Ancient Egypt,
University of Texas Press, nineteen ninety four. But there's another
book that I have in digital form here that is
by Robert K. Rittner, called The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian

(01:52):
Magical Practices, University of Chicago Press, nineteen ninety three. Writtener
I've also referenced in an episode last month, I think
because he did some translations and a paper on a
curse we talked about that cursed the reader for reading it.
But Writtner was an American Egyptologist who lived nineteen fifty

(02:13):
three to twenty twenty one. He was affiliated with the
University of Chicago, and this book draws on archaeological and
literary evidence to try to create a full picture of
how Egyptian magic was performed, so not just the written
words of spells and magical texts, but also the physically

(02:34):
enacted and embodied elements of magic, all the stuff around
the text of the spells. One of the chapters in
this book, chapter three, is called Spitting, licking, and Swallowing,
and it explores what Writtner calls the oral dimension of
Egyptian magic. And I ended up finding this really interesting.

(02:55):
So I just want to talk about some things from
this chapter, especially focused on licking, but we'll have to
discuss spitting a bit too, because spitting is important.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah, and I think spitting is maybe a little more
familiar for folks out there who are used to seeing
it in various fictional depictions of magic. Yeah, you know,
a witch or wizard spitting on something, spitting into some
sort of a potion. And then if you're into the
weirder stuff, there's of course the film Boxer's Omen that
we recently watched on Weird House Cinema that also involves

(03:24):
a lot of oral.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Magic, amazing oral magic, a lot of spitting, a lot
of chewing up and spitting back out, some chicken butts,
all kinds of things. But before we go on to
discuss this licking, spitting, and swallowing chapter. I also just
wanted to briefly go over a couple of principles that
we talked about recently in that Egyptian magic episode, but

(03:47):
that will apply very much here. So one of the
things that's important to remember is the sort of consensus
of scholars that in an Egyptian context, the classical anthropological
distinctions between magic and religion are not very useful. Those
might apply in some cultures sometimes in history, but in

(04:07):
ancient Egypt, state affiliated temple activity, religion was fully enmeshed
with everyday magic. Magic spells were a core part of religion,
and temple priests were also experts in private everyday magic
and may have sold their services as magic spell consultants.
So the magic religion distinction just doesn't really apply to

(04:30):
ancient Egypt. Religion is full of magic, and magic is
enmeshed with religion. Another interesting principle of Egyptian magic is
about language. This is something that on one hand, it
might sound very simple to conceptualize, maybe you even think
about the world this way already. In another sense, if

(04:52):
you really embrace the strangeness of it, it becomes more
and more powerful in the ancient Egyptian worldview. I think
it's fair to say that words were not merely symbols
referring to objects or concepts. Words in themselves, both spoken
and written, had active power to change and create reality.

(05:16):
So it's obviously in our reality words are very powerful
because words convey meaning, and that meaning can be acted
on by people. But that was not the only way
words were powerful in ancient Egypt. In ancient Egypt, the
belief is words themselves do things, and so I think
perhaps in part this is not the only reason, but

(05:37):
perhaps in part because spoken words flow from the mouth.
There is a lot of ritual action in Egyptian magic
centered on the actions of the mouth, like spitting, licking,
and swallowing, and ritual attention given to the fluids of
the mouth cavity. I say that the association with language

(05:58):
is not the only reason, because just generally, the body
fluids in ancient Egypt are thought to convey a power
and vitality of the person they come from, and so
there's a transference power that works on the principle of
contact with body fluids of all kinds. But I think
with the mouth cavity you have this added dimension of
not only is saliva a powerful body fluid, but it

(06:20):
comes from the mouth, which is the part that speaks.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Interesting, so we can I think again, this is probably
a case where we're more familiar with the power of
blood being utilized in various fantasy and magical and semi
magical scenarios and symbolic scenarios as well. So this is
almost kind of an extension of that level of power,
but to the spit in saliva.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
But I don't want to downplay the importance of other
body fluids in ancient Egyptian magic as well. Tears, the
tears of ray are very important. Tears, spit, blood, minstrel blood,
semen is all considered magically potent in different ways.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
And of course medically today, Like we know that this
is this is true, Like there's a lot of data
in all of these fluids. Yeah, so you know it
ultimately stacks up.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
So, according to Rittner, here spitting is the most significant
of these three actions. Spitting plays a huge role in
Egyptian mythology, not just in what you're supposed to do
in the text of these spells, but but in like
the creation narratives. So in some versions of the Egyptian
creation myth, you know, had various forms, but in some

(07:35):
of them, the creator deity, whichever one it is, in
this form, emerges out of the waters of chaos onto
the mound of earth, the initial mound of earth that
comes out of the water, and then creates the other
gods by spitting, sometimes by ejaculating, but sometimes by spitting.
And he gives the example of the Heliopolitan creation myth,

(07:57):
where you've got the sun god coming up out of
water and then is on the mound, and the Sun
God's spittle creates the primordial pair of God's shoe, the
god of the air and Tefnut of moisture. And so
there is this link between spitting and the kind of
creative magic, the creating force that gives rise or generation

(08:19):
to all things. Writtner gives translations of several different text passages.
One of them is referring to this creation narrative where
the sun god Atom is the creator here Atum and
this says Atom spat me out as the spittle of
his mouth, together with my sister Tefnut. But then you
get other expressions such as raise yourself ray. This is

(08:41):
the solar deity, ray, raise yourself, ray, spit out the day,
and as something cast off from a god's body. Body
fluids like spit convey the God's divine power, and so
spitting is used in spells of healing and blessing, often
symbolizing a transfer of the invigorating power of the God

(09:04):
to the recipient of the spittle, whether literal or symbolic.
So spitting is very big in Egyptian magic.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
You know, I can't help but be reminded of I
don't even know if this is This is probably not
even current slang, but in some of the older hip
hop that I have listened to, spit is often used
as a way of talking about I guess you would say,
the delivery of lyrics with a certain amount of skill
and rhythm. Yeah. And it creative force, yeah yeah, creative

(09:34):
force through language, through spoken word. And it seems very
much in line with what we're talking about here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
I think that's a great parallel actually, because my understanding
of the connotation of spit there is that it is
not just saying like, okay, talk now. It means, like,
you know, you use your power of creation. There's like
an emphasis on the creative generative element there So anyway,
the next thing, of course I want to come to

(10:00):
is licking, the subject of today. Licking is mentioned less
frequently than spitting in Egyptian magical texts, but it is
nevertheless a really interesting and significant action in Egyptian magic
and religion. Licking, I would say, has some of the
same physiomagical properties as spitting, in that it involves the

(10:22):
transfer of saliva, which is again imbued with the divine
power of the mouth from which it comes. But it
also has uses of its own for spells of healing
or blessing and for curses or attacks. So I want
to talk about some of the examples that Rittner brings
up offering rituals of the Pyramid texts. This would include

(10:45):
spells one sixty six and one eighty one, and the
Coffin texts spell nine thirty six, all described the following scenario.
After death, the spirit of the deceased king is presented,
is presented with or put before two bowls of fruit
from the ziziphus plant. This is a fruit known as

(11:07):
the jujub or sometimes as the red date or Chinese date.
The use of the word date there can be confusing
because this is different from the dates that are the
fruit of the date palm.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Okay, so confusing in the same way that a pine
apple is not an apple.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
And exactly yeah, yeah, So this is the fruit of
the zizyphus plant, and the text says these fruits or
fruit bowls, they're referred to in the spells as the
eye of Horus, which they have licked. Were that they
that lick to the eye of Horace a couple of possibilities.

(11:41):
Writtener cites a scholar who argues that they are the
followers of Seth or set the destructive god of storms, chaos,
and the desert wilderness. If that's correct, this licking of
the fruit would represent a magical attack against the eye
of Horace. The licking somehowers heck of violence onto the eye.

(12:03):
But Writtner argues that while there is offensive licking sorcery
of this kind in Egyptian spells, that's probably not what's
going on here. He thinks it is more likely this
passage refers to a motif of the sacred healing of
Horace's eye by way of licks from the gods. After all,
the eye of Horace presented to the king here should

(12:25):
be sound and well, not envenomed with the curse of
the Sethian tongue, and Rittner points out that there are
other spells where an injured or troubled eye is restored
by the power of Holy saliva through healing spells that
involve spitting, and this licking could be envisioned as a
parallel mechanism. And Rittner points out that this mirror's phenomena

(12:48):
observed in nature the licking of wounds by animals as
magical licking here would seem to tap into both what
we see in other animals and perhaps even in instincts
that we ourselves still possess to some extent, even if
we don't always express them. Another important piece of licking
imagery along these lines the healing the healing licks of

(13:11):
the gods. The cow goddess Hathor bestows blessings on her
offspring Horace by licking him in the same manner that
an earthly cow can be seen licking her newborn calf,
and we get texts saying that Hathor blessed the pharaoh
Queen Hatchepsitt of the eighteenth dynasty in the same way.

(13:32):
Quote kissing your hand, licking your limbs, endowing your majesty
with life and dominion. Yeah. Interesting. I think it's interesting
there the way that seems to be casting the Pharaoh,
who we want their image to be one of power
and dominion, life, power, vigor, dominion, Like it's saying they're

(13:55):
being given, you know, the majesty of the throne in
this saying here, But the imagery is actually of a
little baby being taken care of by its mother in nature,
a calf being licked by the mother cow.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah. And if you've ever seen, I mean certainly we have.
We have farmers and folks that live more closely to
cattle out there who can attest to this as well.
But if you've seen at least seen footage of this occurring,
there is almost this sense that like the cow is
the cat, the calf is born, and then the cow
licks this calf, and that is what truly brings it

(14:33):
to life. Yeah. So you can you can see where
this powerful connection could be forged, you know, just via
observation of the natural world.

Speaker 4 (14:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
So I want to come back to some of these
licking behaviors and animals in the next part in this series,
where we're definitely going to talk about wound licking and
about licking of offspring as well. But coming back to
the magical looking here, that which is true of gods
and pharaoh is also true of spirits in the afterlife.

(15:03):
In the Book of the Dead, we are told that
Hathor licks the dead man's hand to give him the
power of rebirth. And then there's a really interesting aside
by Writtener here where he compares this to a story
that's not from Egyptian texts but from Greek legends. So
Writtner writes, quote, a contrasting concept associated with the APIs
bull survives in the Greek legends of the astronomer Eudoxus

(15:27):
of Nidos, a pupil of Plato who subsequently traveled to
Egypt to study with the native clergy in the fourth
century BC. When his cloak was licked by the APIs,
Eudoxus was informed by the priests that his fame would
be great, but that his life would be short. He had,
in effect acquired certain qualities of Osiris transmitted by the

(15:50):
god's earthly representative, the APIs. We know we actually did
some episodes a while back on the Osiris legend, and
of course Osiris is a god who is killed and dismembered,
so that, yeah, there's a duality there. Of course Osiris
is great and powerful and is famed, but does suffer

(16:12):
this fate before being sort of reassembled in the afterlife.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he death is part of his existence.
I mean, as as it is for all of us.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
To be clear, But that combination of greatness and early
doom is transferred to this human being when it is
licked by the bull that represents the power of Osiris.

(16:46):
Now I want to turn to therapeutic licking, So spells
that are actually designed to heal heal wounds. There were
healing rituals performed by human priests that probably would involve
literal licking. An example he is the Coffin Texts spell
eighty one, where the performer of the spell identifies himself
with Shoe, the god of air, light and wind, whose

(17:10):
name means emptiness. In this spell, the hand of the
deceased is painted with representations of eight Egyptian deities in
yellow pigment and Nubian ochre, and then the spell is
spoken aloud over these images, and then finally it says
that the painted images of the gods are to be

(17:32):
quote licked off every day very early. Rittner says that
like many of the Coffin text spells, it sounds like
it is meant exclusively for the benefit of the dead,
but it was probably actually used by the living. It
sounds kind of weird as phrased, But I wonder if
the idea of licking off the images of the gods

(17:54):
very early, meaning in the morning, corresponds to the time
of dawn, because Writtner points out that there is a
mythological passage sighted in the spell, and this passage states
that the gods shoe is blessed with kisses from the
sun god Autumn every day, and the Coffin texts sometimes
use the imagery of a favored deity getting licked with

(18:17):
sunshine by the sun god at dawn.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Oh nice.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
And again this is especially significant because the sun god Autumn,
as one of the creator deities, has especially powerful saliva,
creative saliva. He can spit gods into existence, and now
at dawn he licks the world with his rays. Some
curative looking had nothing to do with funerary use or imagery.
It was just good old fashioned healing. Of body ailments.

(18:43):
So Writtner cites a twelfth dynasty manuscript known as Papyrus
Turin fifty four zero zero three, which includes the following
spell for the treatment of the eyes. And by the way,
I looked up this papyrus to see what else it said.
In addition to the spells for healing the eyes, which
I'm going to read from here, it's got spells designed
to protect from serpents and to extract fish bones. I

(19:07):
didn't figure out extract them from wear, Maybe from.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
The throat or from the fish.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
I don't know. I want to learn more about that,
but I didn't get there. So this is the part
about healing the eyes. I thought this text is great.
So this is the Writtner's translation here quote, my eyes
are opened by the Great One. My eyes are opened
by the Opener. The eyes of Hathor are opened in
the house of the statue. The eyes of Hathor are

(19:33):
opened in the house of Gold, that she might look
at that red animal when he opens his mouth, when
he opens his jaws, when he looks at that pupil
of gold. Feance. And by the way, we just had
to look that up because neither of us knew what
it was. That's like a type of tin glazed pottery,
pupil of gold, feance, quartz and Carnelian which flourishes on

(19:56):
the eye of the Majesty of Ta when isis bent over,
she licked it. When I bent over my eye, I
licked it from this my face, from this my eye,
I dispelled. The blow of a god, goddess, dead man
or dead woman dispelled. Is the obscurity being thoroughly stripped
away as she has licked what was done to him.

(20:20):
So Mott has licked what was done to her. And
then the last sentence to be said by a man
as he puts water into his eyes. Though these spells
are often best interpreted literally when it comes to physical action,
in this case, Writtner says that the licking might not
be literal because there's that last sentence that seems to

(20:40):
specify the spell is spoken as a man symbolically licks
his eyes by placing eye drops into them.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Hmmm, yeah, yeah, okay, Yeah, you could think of putting
eye drops in as licking. Yeah, the licking of the eye. Yeah,
I mean, it's accomplished the same thing.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, It's like the gods are licking my eyes as
I put eye drops in isis is down licking my eye.
But there is literal licking and healing magic as well.
Many of these spells prescribe actually the licking off of
images or words of the spell, sometimes inscribed on the hand,

(21:15):
like I mentioned earlier, with those you know the eight
gods are written on the hand, and then you must
lick it off very early, very early every day. There
is an anti scorpion sting magical spell from Papyrus Turin
one nine ninety three the legend of Isis and the
secret name of Ray, and it goes like this. This
is written theer's translation again quote words to be recited

(21:38):
over an image of Autumn and horrus of praise, a
figure of Isis and an image of Horus drawn on
the hand of the sufferer, and licked off by the
man do likewise on a strip of fine linen placed
on the sufferer at his throat. Its plant is scorpion plant,
and that is a type of plant. I think it's
supposed to resemble a scorpion's tail or. Ground up with

(22:01):
beer or wine. It is drunk by the man who
has a scorpion sting. It is what kills the poison
truly effective, proved a million times. So you draw the
gods on the scorpion victim's hand and then someone licks
the image off. Actually couldn't tell from the text when
it says licked off by the man. I don't know

(22:22):
if that means licked off by the same part by
the victim they're licking their own hand, or licked off
by someone else like the person performing the spell. I
couldn't quite tell from the text. But then yeah, it
says proof of scorpion cure confirmed, and Writtener cites another
spell curing scorpion sting that includes a recitation of a
myth of a wound received by a Nubis which was

(22:44):
cured by Isis, in which Isis tells a Nubis quote,
lick from your tongue to your heart, and vice versa,
up to the edges of the wound. Lick to the
edges of the wound, up to the limits of your strength.
What you shall lick, you shall swallow. Do not spit
it out on the ground. For your tongue is the
tongue of Shay, and your tongue is that of autumn.

(23:06):
And the patient benefiting from the spell, so is told
to quote, lick your wound with your tongue immediately while
it is still bleeding. And the patient here has become
identified with Anubis, who is at once a god, but
also in these reflections of natural observations observations of animals
in nature, is also a dog licking its wounds. Fascinating,

(23:31):
But it's also interesting how many of these spells advised
licking of a written spell to absorb or consume its power,
and that seems to come back to the belief that
words in themselves have power. It's not just like that
the word causes you to do something that gives the

(23:52):
spell power, but actually writing the spell or having some
kind of inscription on something on a linen or on
the body and then licking it can transfer the power
of the spell because you licked the words into you.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
This is so fascinating because this really feels foreign from
at least the modern Western conception of various magics. You know,
this seems like something that, assuming I'm understanding it correctly,
is largely lost. It's possible I'm not thinking of some
more direct connection, so if anyone out there can think

(24:28):
of one, but yeah, I'm just trying to think of
any other system of magic, real or imagined, that has
involved something like this.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
You eat the words by licking them, and the words
have the power, and the power goes into you when
you lick them.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah, I mean, I guess that. You know, there are
things involving, say the eating of pages, that sort of thing.
I can maybe think to some examples that get into
that area. But like the idea of something is is
printed on the skin and then that is licked off
of the skin and they're and lies the magic.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah. Now, in addition to all of this protective licking, healing, licking,
blessings from licking, there is also offensive licking in Egyptian magic.
Because the hecka magic, as we talked about last month,
it was morally neutral in a way it could be
used to help or to harm than those were equally
legitimate uses for it. There are a bunch of texts

(25:24):
that describe licking in various sometimes obscure ways, as a
violent or offensive act. For example, the threat of being
licked by a venomous serpent. And you know, so there
are texts that talk about the serpent shall lick you,
and that's like a thing you don't want, in which
case I was kind of wondering if some uses of

(25:47):
licking by a serpent could be a case of observing
observing nature and watching the way that a snake will
flick its tongue in the air like and thinking that
a snake maybe deposits its venom with a lick of
the tongue rather than injection through a bite. This might
be a natural conclusion if you've seen a snake flicking

(26:09):
its tongue. And also I don't know of examples from
Age and Egypt that make this connection explicit, but at
lots of other times and places in history people have
thought this. This is a common belief throughout different cultures
and times that people think that the snake delivers venom
with its tongue.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, I mean, well, they are very tongue forward in
their presentation. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
And actually this led into I wanted to do a
brief scientific aside on why do snakes actually flick their tongues?
So I was reading a few things. There's one very
good overview explainer on the research here, hosted on the
Conversation by a herpetologist named Andrew Durso from twenty fourteen,
called why do snakes flick their tongues? People have wondered

(26:52):
about this for ages. Again, there are many people who
thought that the tongue is the thing that delivers venom. Also,
some writers from the seventeenth century even positive that snakes
would use their the forked tips of their tongues like
pincers to catch prey, you know, like tweezers that come
out of the mouth and snatch them. That, as far
as we know, that's not true. In reality, the snake's

(27:14):
tongue is part of a highly developed chemosensory system for
detecting molecules in the air and along the substrate of
the ground, revealing the presence of important things to the snake,
like prey or a potential mate. The closest analogy in
human senses would be taste and smell, though those might

(27:36):
give you the incorrect idea that the flicking tongue itself
is the organ that tastes or smells the chemical signatures,
and it is not. The chemical sensing organ is actually
located on the roof of the snake's mouth, and it
is called the vomeronasal system or Jacobsen's organ. Research has

(27:57):
shown that what generally happens when the snake flick its
tongue out to lick the air or the ground. Is
that the tongue acts like a flypaper trap for chemical signature.
Is it goes out and it touches the ground or
whips around in the air, and then molecules along the
ground are suspended in the air stick to the tongue.

(28:17):
The tongue brings the molecules back into the mouth when
it retracts, and it somehow delivers them to the Jacobson's organ.
And this article it was talking about at least in
some snakes, the way it works is the tongue comes
in and it deposits those molecules on pads on the
floor of the mouth cavity, and then these pads then
deliver the molecules to the sensitive cells in the Jacobson's

(28:40):
organ on the roof of the mouth when the snake
closes its jaw.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
We talked a little bit about the Jacobson organ in
our episodes on Urine last year. Yeah, I think it
was last year, in the last year or so, and yeah,
we talked about it's like the stinky kitty face and
so forth, and so the seeming lack of a system
like this in human beings, or at least contemporary human beings.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Yeah, so the Jacobsen's organ is of vastly different levels
of importance to different animals. For snakes, it's highly important
because a lot of snakes have these really sensitive, well
developed chemical sensing powers, and they need them in order
to hunt and to mate. One interesting thing about the
way the snake uses its tongue to sense chemical signatures

(29:28):
is that it can even detect differences in the relative
density of smells across three dimensions. This is at least
in part what the fork of the tongue is for.
So when the snake sticks its tongue out, the tips
of the forked tongue spread apart, and that creates a
stereo signal. So if they detect that the smell trail

(29:52):
they're following, maybe a male copperhead is trying to follow
the trail of a female so it can mate. If
it detects that the smell trail is stronger on the
left tip, the snake will turn its head to the
left and adjust course to follow the scent more directly,
kind of like how we can use the stereo signal
from our two ears to locate the directional origin of sounds.

(30:14):
Another interesting thing is that some snakes have venom that
is specially evolved to work together with their vomor nasal system.
For example, ambush predators these snakes that bite prey and
then wait for that prey to run away and die
before eating. Presumably this helps them avoid struggling with prey

(30:35):
that might fight back in some way. So you've got,
of course, the directly harmful paralyzing compounds in the venom,
But this venom also has stuff in it that is
easy for the snake to smell. It's like putting a
little stinky tracer into your bite, so that later the
predator can follow the scent of the envenomed prey to

(30:56):
the place where it collapses, and then the snake can
feast at its.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Life like a tracker.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
Yeah yeah, but what about so that's you know why
you got the fork, and how what the snake is
using its tongue for. But what about that rapid flicking
of the tongue motion we've all seen. So snake sticks
its tongue out, and it doesn't just go out and
then back in. Sometimes it goes out and then just
like vibrates all over the place, flicks up and down rapidly.

(31:22):
What is that for? It seems this is a trick
to help increase the collection of volatile molecules. It by
flicking back and forth rapidly, the snake's tongue creates vortices
in the air, basically stirring the air up to expose
the surface area of the tongue to more air volume

(31:42):
and thus more volatile molecules. Kind Of like I was
trying to think of an analogy. Imagine you've got a
bunch of styrofoam packing peanuts floating in a bath tub
and you're trying to collect them with a sticky rod.
You would collect a lot more of them by sticking
the rod into the bath and vigorously stirring it up
instead of just doing a simple like dip in and out.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
So anyway, side quest over on the snake tongue science.
Coming back to magical licking for just a moment. There's
also the idea of offensive spell. So that came from
the idea that you know, a snake could, maybe a
serpent could harm you by licking. But I also wanted
to talk about the horrifying idea of magical licks from

(32:28):
a deadly crocodile or of other malevolent actors in the afterlife,
especially which can be attacks in themselves or could remove
your most important spells for the afterlife. So Writtener lists
a number of passages from the Coffin texts and from
the Book of the Dead which invoke the terrible threat

(32:50):
of licking as a way to attack and remove the
protection of the deceased. Just a few of these different passages.
One of them is, as for any God, goddess, spirit,
dead man, or dead woman who shall lick off his
spell against me today, he shall fall to the execution blocks,
to the magic that is in my body, the terrible

(33:12):
flames that are in my mouth. Okay, so that's a
kind of curse. That's saying you're gonna try to lick
my spells off, you're gonna get it. And then it's
funny that one of the threats is almost sounds like
it doesn't say the word licking, but the counter threat
is the terrible flames that are in my mouth. Sounds
like a threat to lick, lick with fire. Another one

(33:32):
of these quotes, as for any god or dead man
who shall lick off his spell in my presence. On
this day he shall fall to the depths. And then
another one back, Oh crocodile who is in the west,
For there is a serpent in this my belly. I
shall not be given to you. You shall not lick
off my spell.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Oh wow, So I thought this was just.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Such interesting imagery, the terror at the idea of licking
off of spells by the crocodile or by some other
evil actor as a grave threat to the deceased. Sometimes
the phrasing is kind of ambiguous in that I'm not
sure whose spell it is saying that the offender is

(34:15):
licking off. Sometimes it's clearly saying like, you're not going
to lick off my spells, But then other times it's
saying like, if you try to lick off your spell
or lick off somebody else's spell, that's really danger. I
wonder then if it's like a threat against you trying
to power up by licking your own spell to give
you power against me. I couldn't quite tell exactly what that.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Means, Like I will lick your spell before you can
lick it and cast it at me. Yeah, So clearly
this needs to be developed into a magical system for
modern role playing games.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah. Yeah, so I admit that I don't fully understand
exactly what's being talked about in some of these texts,
but in some of them it's, oh, it's so interesting.
Just like the lick of the crocodile could itself, I think,
be envisioned as an attack on its own. That's just like,
you know, it's like the crocodile kind of moving to
devour you. The lick is some part of that action,

(35:10):
but also the specific threat of licking off of spells
is a hostile act by which the crocodile removes the
dead person's magical armor. So in the end of this section,
Writtener writes, quote where licking serves primarily to transfer saliva,
it is but a variant of ritual spitting, and maybe
construed as a blessing cure or curse. So that's one mechanism,

(35:32):
the transfer of saliva. But the other is quote where
licking serves primarily as a means of consumption. However, it
is but a variant of ritual swallowing, employed either to
ingest divine force or to devour hostile figures. And this
kind of just by association got me thinking about another

(35:53):
kind of offensive licking, not at all related to ancient
Egyptian magic, though I don't know, maybe some of the
same intuitions are at work, who knows. I was thinking
about when kids lick something to form an attack, to
intentionally contaminate that object, to claim ownership or deny access

(36:15):
to another child. Sometimes I think this is done to say, like,
this object is mine, I'm gonna lick it, like I'm
gonna lick this food so you don't eat the food.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Classic example being like a roll, or like a dinner
roll at a table.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yes, or sometimes so. Sometimes it's like claiming like this
is for me, don't you mess with it because I'm
gonna lick it. But a lot of times it's done,
apparently just to annoy or provoke another child on purpose,
like licking your siblings dinner role or licking your siblings
ice cream cone, or even not non foods, licking their
toy as a provocation. Do you remember this?

Speaker 2 (36:50):
No, I remember the dinner roll sort of situation, But yeah,
not so. I mean, you know kids do this sort
of thing, but I don't have a lot of direct
experience with it.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
Okay, Well, anyway, I was wondering if there was any
research in psychology or child development on this. I went looking.
I couldn't find anything directly investigating the practice of intentionally
licking things, either to inflict harm or annoyance or to
claim them. But I did find a peripherally related study.
This was by Jasmine DeJesus, Kristin Schutz, and Catherine Kinsler,

(37:26):
published in the journal Appetite in twenty fifteen called ew
She Sneezed. Contamination context affects children's food preferences and consumption.
This is kind of funny. So the study looked into
the question how does a child's understanding of contamination in
food develop and how does contextual information about the life

(37:49):
history of a piece of food affect a child's disgust reaction,
like apart from qualities of appearance or taste in the
food itself. So to study this, the researchers looked at
children between the ages of three and eight, and they
presented them with identical food items. The only difference was
that one was the control where nothing had happened to it,

(38:10):
and the other, while the food item was exactly the same,
was given a story with a visual aid which is
somebody licked the spoon you have to use to eat this.
And then they also tested somebody sneezed on the bowl
in which this is served. They didn't really do this,
there was some trickery involved, but they made the children

(38:30):
think the spoon had been licked or the bull had
been sneezed on and the author's rite quote. When given
the opportunity to eat the foods, five to eight year
old children consumed more clean food and rated the clean
food's taste more positively. Younger children did not distinguish between
the foods. The relation between contamination and subjective taste held

(38:52):
even among children who ate both foods and had direct
evidence that they were identical. So, yeah, I thought it
was kind of interesting. Like, three year olds, on average,
at least in this sample, don't seem to much care
if food is contaminated with a spoon somebody else's licked,
as long as it still appears yummy. But by ages
five to eight, we've got a psychological contamination reflex. Food

(39:16):
that has been contaminated by a licked spoon or is
served in a sneezed on bowl acquires this ick factor.
The kids desire to eat the food less, and when
they do eat it, they think it tastes worse, even
though they can sample both foods directly and there's actually
no difference. And so, of course, in my many, like

(39:37):
you know, wondering about parenting things, I have been thinking
about the different like trade offs in the development of
the disgust reaction, because it's clearly not that young children
fully lack a disgust reaction, Like young children will often
show disgust reactions to perfectly healthy, nutritious foods, but it's
just like I don't like, I don't want to eat
that vegetable. I don't know, no, no disgusting, you know,

(39:59):
instant disgust reaction to just the appearance or smell of
a food they haven't even tried.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
I've heard it put before that some of this gets
down to the fact that if a child were to
eat something that we're toxic, their smaller bodies would make
them more susceptible to damage from said thing, and therefore
they're more susceptible to the ick factor. On top of that, though,
of course, there's a lot of room for just sort

(40:26):
of like additional social contamination, you know, like this is
like a personal pet peeve. But anytime I've encountered small
children who describe food they are presented with as disgusting,
and I mean a lot of that is just has learned,
like how do you how do you describe food that
you do not wish to eat? And so like, that's

(40:48):
something we always really hammered home. It's like, okay, it's
okay to not want to eat something, but you don't
describe it as disgusting or gross. You would say something like,
well that is not for me, or maybe you get
down to it, like why do I not like it?
Is it too spicy? Is there something in the texture
of it? And so forth? Is it too sour? Like?
There's so much more room to explore what's going on.

(41:10):
But when you know, they throw out the oh this
is gross or this is disgusting. Yeah, that's not going
to win win friends and influence people either.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
But disgusting is an interesting descriptive word about food because
it doesn't actually refer to any objective qualities or inherent
qualities of the food itself. Disgusted is an emotion, so
it's just merely describing the child's own emotional reactions. I
totally am with you. And it's yeah, it's frustrating.

Speaker 4 (41:34):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
I feel like, you know, the adults in our household
are very non picky eaters and discovering that even if
you try to create the ultimate like you know, non
picky eating environment for a child, sometimes a child's just
going to be a picky eater.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's often out of your control. Yeah,
but we work at it.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Yeah yeah, but yeah, I totally understand what you're saying
about the it's frustrating to hear a child describe some
is disgusting, but yeah, that is a word that refers
to their own emotions. But anyway, yeah, I'm thinking about
the ways that these emotions trade off. So as a
child grows up, I think they a common pattern, it seems,
is that they lose a lot of the the pickiness

(42:18):
declines over time, and they will become more open to
trying different kinds of foods inherently, but that they acquire
new dimensions of the disgust reaction. And some of that
is based around knowledge of contamination of food by like
body fluids. So it's like if somebody licked this spoon,
now that's a disgust reaction and it makes the food yucky,

(42:41):
but I might still eat it.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
I should also throw in that I've also heard it
put that. Another aspect in play here is that young
children often you know, do not have a lot of
choices that they can make in life, and a lot
of choices are made for them. But this becomes a
dimension where they have They often feel like they have
a great deal more power. Yeah, and that you know,

(43:04):
it may not be on an actual, like conscious level,
it's you know, maybe more subconscious, but it may be
in play in some of these scenarios. I guess adults
do sometimes lick food items to claim it, though I
think generally it's a way of intentionally acting childish, perhaps
for laughs, but there may be situations where someone is
actually employing this as a protected strategy for their food,

(43:27):
or in a very childish fashion offensively against people they
don't like.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
It might be more subtle in the way the adult
does it. It's not like the eh and they like
the control, but they just kind of, you know, I'll
take one bite of this plate before walking away.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah. Generally, as an adult, you're going to find yourself
in a situation where I would imagine once food is
on your plate. It is safe, it is off limits
from other people taking it, but I don't know. It's
like some if there's only one of a particular bait
good and it's particularly nice that it might be different.

(44:07):
All Right. To close out this episode, I want to
turn to something that came to mind the second that
you proposed an episode on licking, and it concerns something
that in general, children have never had any problem licking,
and that is the Tutsi pop. Joe, I'm sure you
grew up with this candy as well. It's been around

(44:28):
for quite a while. This is, of course a Tutsi
roll that's a kind of chocolate chew candy. It's not
really chocolate per se, but it is. It's a chocolate
chew that has been entombed in the middle of a
hard candy sucker. This comes in different flavors. I think
the one I most remember is kind of an orange flavor.
And so they're kind of like the scorpion lollipops that

(44:50):
you see in Arizona, but instead of there being an
iraq knet at the center, there is a chunk of
like a glob of chocolate chewic wait.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
I don't know about the scorpion LOLLI.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Oh yeah, I mean you see these outside Arizona, but
I mean it's like anytime I'm at the Sky Harbor
Airport in Phoenix, like you know, I have a few
minutes signed up, wandering into a gift shop and they
have all those these little brightly colored suckers and in
the middle there is an actual scorpion.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
So you like, lick your tongue makes contact with the scorpion.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
I don't know, I've never purchased one. I don't know
how much of it is. Just it's just the idea
of it is irresistible, so people get it. I don't
know what happens if you actually lick to the to
the center and get the scorpion, or or in some
other way get to the center. I have no idea,
but their eye catching.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Wow, well I've never heard of that does seem like
an inversion of the Tutsi role principle, because let me
run this by you. See what you think is the
idea of the Tutsi pop that the best part of
it is in the middle, and you got to work
through the outside to get down to the best part
in the middle.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
This is a very hard question to answer, because I
vaguely remember as a child being far more into the
candy coating as opposed to the sinner. But I think
I ate the center as well. But then I know,
like children's taste of candy is is weird, Like like
there was a point where my kiddo's favorite candy, like

(46:17):
they got to choose which candy they got to keep
before the rest went to the switch witch. And there
was one year where they're like, I choose the Tutsie rolls.
And so it's like, you know, I don't know fair enough,
Like you're in different taste sensations that they've since it evolved,
So now they're more they're more of a dark chocolate
enjoyer as opposed to a Tutsi roll enjoyer. So you

(46:39):
know it changes over time.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Sophisticated now, yeah, but that would be It's funny. I
just had a very similar experience of my child this year.
We did switchwich for the first time. This is our
first real trick or treating year, and yeah, we did
switch witch and she kept only the most disgusting candies.
I think they were based on the colorfulness of the rapper,
which tends to correspond with the actually least good candy.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff
out there. I don't even know if Tutsi rolls were
necessarily made. I mean surely Tutsi rolls were out there
in circulation, and I assume Tutsi pops as well, because
they were definitely in circulation when I was triggered treating
back when I was a kid. So just to refresh,
the tutsi roll itself is an eighteen ninety six invention,

(47:28):
and I think that probably matches up with sort of
like the chocolate chew aspect of the thing. If you
were to have a tutsi role today, and maybe you're
having one right now, I think it does feel like
a classic candy in this regard. The Tutsi pop, however,
was a nineteen thirty one innovation. To put that in

(47:48):
cinematic terms, that is the year that the original Boris
Carlos Frankenstein movie came out coincidence, and then it's much
later though, in nineteen sixty nine, the year Frankenstein Must
Be Destroyed comes out the hammer picture that we get
what is probably one of, if not the most famous

(48:13):
TV ad campaigns of all time, and I would also
argue one of the best commercials of all time. I
think everyone can. I think everyone out there has probably
seen this. If you haven't, just go to YouTube or
anywhere you will find video of this classic commercial. This
is the how many licks does it take to get
to the tutsi role center of a Tutsi pop commercial.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
I don't know how I would be wrong about this
that I'm wondering if I am wrong. I have memories
of being a kid in the not the late sixties
or seventies. I have memories of being a child in
the eighties and nineties and still seeing this original commercial airing.
Do they just run the same commercial for decades?

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Yeah? It is often presented that this is the longest
running televisionmercial of all time, and that's of course difficult
to impossible to actually quantify, but it might be true,
Like it is across multiple generations. People have seen this ad,
and I think legitimately is a testament to just how
good it is. Like it is just almost a perfect

(49:16):
ad campaign.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Okay, so wait for people who have never actually seen it,
how does this ad go?

Speaker 2 (49:22):
All? Right? So it's brilliant. It's presented in the form
of a fable in which a young boy brings this
particular conundrum to a series of talking animals, first a cow,
then a fox and turtle, and finally a wise owl.
The child is wondering how many licks does it take
to get to the center of this TUTSI pop And

(49:42):
before I get into describing what happens, and I do
want to just mention a little bit about the behind
the scenes here because it's pretty interesting. It was directed
by Jimmy T. Murakami, American Irish animator of Japanese American heritage,
who directed a segment of nineteen eighty one's Heavy Metal
and nineteen eighties Battle Beyond the Stars, which we've discussed

(50:03):
on in depth on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
Oh, Okay, Battle Beyond was that the Roger Corman Star
Wars ripoff. Yes, yeah, okay, the good one Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
And then among the vocal talents involved, it featured the
prolific Paul Freese mister Fox. He does a voice of
mister Fox here. Paul Freese has his voice and sometimes
his physical performance have shown up in multiple films that
we've talked about on a Weird House, like When You
Go to Letterbox dot Com and look at the stats
for the movies we've covered, Paul Freeze is up there

(50:34):
in appearing in the most titles that we've covered, just
sort of incidentally because you just did a lot of
bit parts and voices. But then you also have in
this voicing the wise owl, legendary ventriloquist Paul Winschell. He
was the original tigger voice, for example, So he's doing
the owl voice. And the short itself was written by

(50:55):
ad wizard Jerry Bernstein and looked into him a little bit,
and he's He's was a big name, and part of
his legendary status was this campaign. Like this is almost
like this is like a Madman like level successful ad
campaign like it again, survived for decades and still has
cultural reach and importance today.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
Wow. Yeah, I guess I never thought about it like that,
but it is like one of the ads I really
remember most from childhood.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Yeah, because it is legitimately thought provoking. Like let's start
with the question, you know, how much how many licks
does it take to get to the center of this
this tutsi roll pop that implies how much candy does
a single lick remove from a tutsi pop? How do
we quantify it, and indeed, when have we actually reached
the center of the thing, as we'll discuss, This is

(51:45):
a question that truly ensnares the listener and forces them
to contemplate the infantiesimal. So, but then there's also the
way that is it is presented. So the cow, fox,
and turtle all reply that, hey, we don't know. We
can't know because we just end up biting through the
candy too soon. We just bite through it, so we

(52:05):
can't answer this question. We've never really attempted to have
the experience you're seeking to quantify. And they say you
should go ask the wise owl, and so the child does,
and the wise owl's answer to the question it smacks
of both the Gordian knot, you know, in which the
Gordian knot is untied by cutting it into half. And
then it also it feels vaguely almost like a like

(52:28):
a Buddhist coon, you know, a phraser riddle that serves
as a meditation tool, sometimes in the form of a paradox,
like what is the sound of one hand clapping? And
so the way the owl says, well, I will answer
this question for you. Give me the tootsi pop, and

(52:48):
he do an experiment. He says, let's do an experiment.
He says, let's find out, and he goes. He licks
it and says A one, looks at another time, says
a two, looks at a third time and says A three,
And then Crunch bites through it and then answers three
three is the answer, And the child is not amused
and says, if there's anything I can't stand, it's a

(53:09):
smart owl. And then the narrator of the commercial asks
the question once more and says, we may never know.

Speaker 3 (53:17):
So, in addition to being funny, it's actually, at the
risk of sounding silly, it's actually kind of philosophically interesting
because I think so it points out that there are
questions that we can ask that sound like perfectly sensible
questions that in fact do not contain enough specificity in

(53:40):
the question to actually be answered.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
I think that's a good read of it. Yeah, yeah,
I wonder too if they're Like what else we could
take away from it? Like should we feel ashamed that
we can't truly savor something like this that long, that
will eventually grow tired or impatient and simply rush to
the big finish of a thing. Yeah, that too, or
are we meant or are we simply you know, refuting

(54:04):
the logic of the question. You know, maybe TOUTSI pops
are simply not meant to be licked to the center.
You know, perhaps you're supposed to crunch through it. Maybe
some things in life are like that. I don't know,
but it is also interesting to think about it. This
is a case where an attempt to measure the perhaps immeasurable,
is always interrupted by desire. So there's perhaps something telling

(54:27):
there like desire prevents you from answering the question, and
maybe what does that say about human nature?

Speaker 3 (54:35):
The idea of getting to the center of a tissy
pop sounds uncomplicated, but actually it's a very complicated proposition.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yeah, but you know, despite how amusing it is and infectious,
the idea again legendary commercial. I can scarcely think of
one that it just sticks in the mind more. But
still it does ask a question that is subject to experimentation.
And since this commercial has aired so long and so often,

(55:05):
you know, it has this huge pop culture footprint across
multiple generations, so plenty of folks over time have taken
this question, experimented it with it, and produced varying results
and this, you know, it varies. I've seen cases where
it's scientists doing it, you know, probably at least partially

(55:26):
as a lark. Other cases, this is the sort of
question that makes for a great student experiment at various levels.
I've seen like you know, college and graduate students writing
about this, and I'm sure it has also been explored
in like science fairs and the like. Definitely, So I'm
not sure it would be the best use of our
time to go through all of the results or even

(55:46):
some of the big ones. I'm going to refer to
a few here, but I thought maybe we could highlight
some of the basic issues. So, first of all, this
is a quandary of tribal corrosion, meaning the synergistic degradation
of the material surface from the combined action of mechanical
wear and chemical or electrochemical corrosion.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
All right, so there are at least two different things
removing the material from the tutsi pop. One is mechanical,
the scraping with the tongue, and one is chemical, the
dissolving of the sugar content of the candy by the saliva.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Right right. In general, tribocorrosion questions impact designs and everything
from biomedical implants to aerospace. You know, this is this
is an important area of study when you get into
the designing things and figuring out what sort of materials
are going to use and how are you going to
deal with steady corrosion, be it like brutal, like ongoing corrosion,

(56:45):
or something that is taking place at almost like a
licking a tutsi roll level of of things. And more specifically,
this is a question of bio tribocorrosion, as pointed out
by row at All in twenty fourteen's Lessons from the
Lollipop published in Tribology Letters.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Now, as we alluded to earlier, answering the question how
many licks does it take to get to the center
is actually not a straightforward question to answer. You kind
of have to break this, you'd like, have to add
some detail or break it down into smaller questions.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
Right, that's right. Yeah, It ultimately involves the quantification of
a number of factors. So, first of all, we're generally
trying to figure out how many licks does it take
to remove a single millimeter of hard candy thickness? Okay,
how many millimeters of hard candy thickness exist between the
surface and the tutsi roll center of the pop. Generally,

(57:42):
I think you're looking to reach just the threshold or
surface of that chocolate center, and then supposedly we would
have the answer, right if we knew these two factors.
It's kind of like, Okay, if I know how fast
my car is traveling and I know how far I
need to drive, then I can compare. I can use
these two facts to figure out how long it takes
to get there, right.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
You would think so, but what if getting there in
your car is like a poorly defined area or range.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
That's right, and that this seems to be perhaps the
biggest factor in the papers I was looking at. So
despite being a mass produced candy product, you know, in
which you know, pretty much every Tutsi pop to the
casual eye looks exactly like the next Toutsi pop, you know,
unless there's a difference in flavor of the hard candy shell.

(58:30):
You know, it is almost almost an icon of the
industrial candy age. And yet not every Tutsi roll pop
is the same. Specifically, the size and shape of the
Tutsi rolls center has been found in studies to vary
from sucker to sucker, and not in not in a
way that necessarily influences the experiencing of eating the thing.
So it's not like, you know, this would pass some

(58:52):
sort of like a QA test for Tutsi rolls pop
Tutsi roll pops. But when you're getting into this very
specific quest question, it's going to complicate attempts to generate
a catch all answer.

Speaker 3 (59:04):
I have no evidence of this, but I just had
the thought, what if the creation of Tutsi roll pops
was a way to make use of poorly formed tutsi
rolls that came off the assembly line with not the
right shape.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
I mean, I mean such You see such things occurring
in food products for sure, A tater tot. Yeah yeah,
but yeah, I suspect it has something to do with
like the way that the Tutsi pop is produced. Here.
Another issue that will become important later on is the
Tutsi pop also features a thick, longitudinal band of hard candy,

(59:39):
so it's almost like like it's a planet with a
ring on it, and then it is turned up so
that the ring is vertical instead of horizontal. If you
have a Tutsi roll pop in your mouth right now,
remove it. Take a look at it, you'll see what
I'm talking about, unless you have sucked the pop down
enough to wear that particular band and is no longer present.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
It's also like a really pronounced version of the ring
ridge running around Saturn's moon yapotus.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Yeah, yeah, that sort of thing. Okay. Another factor is
the positioning of the candy center tends to be a
bit off, so it very much depends. So in other words,
it's not like we might think of this as like
a cross section of a planet where you're going to
have like the various layers and then you're going to
get down to the core, and the core is going
to essentially be, you know, a spherical object in the

(01:00:33):
center of the pop. But this doesn't seem to be
the case. It can be rather lopsided, if you see.
You can see in some of these papers where they've
sawed through the candy to show like where the tutsi
roll center lies. It's not always at the center. Sometimes
it's pushed up more towards the top, and it definitely

(01:00:53):
can be pushed more to one side or the other,
so the candy center can be closer to the surface
on one side of the side or versus another, meaning
that one side will often offer at least a slightly
shorter licking pathway to the center to the surface of
the tutsi roll center devilish. So again, lots of recorded
experiments on this quandary, both as a kind of fun

(01:01:15):
lark by professionals as well as by students, and in fact,
some of the student papers are really good. There's actually
a really good twenty fifteen student paper from the University
of Wisconsin is titled World May Never Know, Unwrapping the
Mystery of the Tutsi Pop by Tyler T. Schmidt. It's
published in the University of Wisconsin's Minds Journal, and the

(01:01:39):
individual who wrote this also conducted his own research. That's
the great thing about this is that generally the research
is very easily obtainable. All you need are tutsi pops
and some tongues. You could just do it with the
one tongue you have in your mouth, or like some
of these studies, they talk about acquiring human liquors some

(01:02:00):
test subjects in on the action. So Schmidt in that
paper did refer back to some other studies. I'm just
going to throw out some numbers here because it will
give you an idea of some of the range we're
dealing with, because we get again some wildly different estimates
on how many licks it takes. He cites a paper
by Zerra from nineteen ninety six involved twenty two trials.

(01:02:22):
Average number of licks to get to that center. One
hundred and forty two sounds low to me. Then there's
a Wakespan paper from twentousand and nine, twenty two trials
as well, two hundred and fifty four licks to reveal
one side of that TUTSI roll center.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
Huh, that's a big range.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Yeah, And I think that study also looked like, okay,
how many licks total, like they wanted to expose both sides.
I don't know. Again, you have to really nail these
things down before you attempt to answer. And then there's
a there's a really good overview that was provided by
Corey Hyde in twenty thirteen for the Royal Statistical Society's

(01:02:59):
Journals Sgnificance. The title of this was Tutsi pops colon
how many licks to the chocolate.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
To the chocolate? Something sounds kind of terse about that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
I mean, I think you're being generous calling it chocolate,
but anyway get the So this author points out that
three different US universities at least have not only used
human licking trials to try and answer the question, but
they have also constructed licking machines.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
God bless them wonderful licking machines.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Now a note on licking machines. We're talking about custom
made machines in these situations that would utilize some manner
of soft artificial tongue or some sort of tongue like
you know, implement that would be mechanically used to apply
lick after lick to the sucker. Not to be confused
with the various licking machines that will pop up if you,

(01:03:54):
like me, do a search on your work computer for
that turn. So there are other devices. I don't know.
Maybe in the future someone will take some of these
devices and use them to try and solve the TUTSI
roll pop enigma.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
But licking machines designed for personal use are not what
we're used in these studies.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
These are I believe created for the experiments. But even
then there seems to be just some wild variety in
the results we get. So according to hyde, licking machine
results for each of these three universities. Purdue University took
three hundred and sixty four mechanical licks, University of Michigan

(01:04:34):
four hundred and eleven mechanical licks, Harvard University's licking machine
two hundred and fifty five licks.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
That sounds like that's got to be a difference in
method or malfunction or something.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
Yeah, because that's that's pretty far away from like the
various human licking trials, which, by the way, it also
points to three different university studies that used human licking trials. Again,
Purdue University was involved two hundred and fifty two licks,
Swarthmore College one hundred and forty four licks, and then

(01:05:07):
the University of Cambridge four hundred and eighty one licks.
What I don't know. Again, I didn't get into all
the details of how they conducted their experiment versus others,
But I mean, it just goes to show that depending
on how you roll out the question and how you
attempt to answer it, you could get some crazy different numbers. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
Yeah, this sounds like this's got to be a different
threshold they're going for or something.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yeah, And this probably goes without saying, but I want
to drive home that none of these experiments human or
a machine involved the chomp of desire, because you could
easily question that. You could say, well, after one hundred
and forty four licks, they just gave up and bit it.
They're just like the owl. The commercial was absolutely correct.
Three four hundred and eighty one is what you get

(01:05:53):
if desire is somehow absolutely prohibited. But no, no, these
are all just pure licks, no chumps.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
Now, I want to ask a question that challenges the
very premise of this investigation and goes back to what
the wise philosopher Owl may have been implying. What if
you don't actually get to the center by licking, You
can only get to the center by chomping, because the
achievement of the center is the satisfying chomp through the

(01:06:22):
last bits of hard candy.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
You know, I would, I mean, I think there's a
strong argument for that. I read this may be apocryphal,
because you know, you encounter this sort of thing certainly
in the creation of candies and an invention in general.
But I think the idea was that the I may
have this backwards, but I think the inventor of the
tutsi role pop the guy who proposed this idea. He

(01:06:46):
was eating a tutsi roll and at the same time
he took a lick of his kids sucker, and he
was like, these two go great together. So if that
is indeed true, and that is the genesis of the idea,
then you perhaps have to ask yourself which experience gives
you that taste combination the best, because if it were
a piece of sushi, right, you don't lick to get

(01:07:09):
the center of a sushi role the ideas you want
to encount. You want to have it all at once.
I mean, not that there's I guess the wrong way
to eat it. I guess it's valid as well, But yeah,
you could you could easily ask, well, which which version
gets you the combination of, say, the orange hard candy
and the tutsi roll at the same time.

Speaker 4 (01:07:26):
Yeah, yeah, Now.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Hide also pointed out that via their own slicing of
tutsi pops in half, they became concerned that the center
is more coin shaped than it is spherical, and thought
that having human liquors go at the thicker banded part
of the sucker was actually the way to go. You know,
this would mean you it would inevitably mean more licks

(01:07:58):
to get to the center because you're going at the
thick is part. But they thought that this would enable
the liquors to quote find the center with much smaller variability.
And their answer via experimentation like this was four hundred
and seventeen licks, give or take thirty nine licks. So
I don't know's I guess the idea is again, it

(01:08:21):
would just be more uniform and you would have a
definite place to start. Hyde also looked at variables in
human saliva and in individual tongue details, and these included
lick force, mouth temperature, pH, level of saliva, and solubility level.
Only the latter seemed to have an observable impact, and

(01:08:42):
even it had little to no effect on average licks.
So everything the author here contends really has to do
with the positioning of the candy center inside the sucker.
The other factors did not apparently have that much of
an impact, like person to person, liquor to.

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
Liquor, or they might kind of even out on a.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Yah are certainly even out when you're dealing with enough
tongues licking enough lollipops, which is of course you know
with any scientific experiment, like that's what you're looking for,
like not what is not what the exceptional liquor does,
but what does the average liquor accomplish, you know, over
multiple test subjects. So I think there's a strong case
to be made here that that you really have to

(01:09:22):
have a standardized lick location for these experiments, and you
have to take into account the variability in the candy
core and like that that's key. If you dismiss the
idea that each TOTSI pop is a little bit different
compared to the next, than you're kind of doomed from
the start.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
Can I bring up one possible way this research is interesting.
I guess we've sort of already touched on this, but
to make it more explicit, this research might be interesting
in the way it illuminates the gaps between a mechanistic
or quantitative understanding of a behavioral phenomenon and the enjoyment

(01:10:01):
or experience we get out of that phenomenon. This comes
back to, you know, the wisdom of the owl. Is
it really getting to the center if you lick your
way all the way to the center and you deny
yourself the bite, which at least the owl obviously likes.
The owl likes biting through part of the candy to
get to the center that is defining the experience for

(01:10:21):
the owl. And thus, by even if you come up
with a really good method to investigate this and you
find out, you know, okay, this is a reliable way
of knowing how many licks it takes to get to
the center, just by licking, you have misunderstood the question
of the Tutsi pop's existence and you have not really
found what makes the Tutsi pop valuable to people. And

(01:10:45):
this is a common thing actually, and not just in
you know, funny little experiments like this, but in very
real experiments, especially in the social sciences, like we can find.
And this is not at all to criticize quantitytive ways
of exploring the world, but it's to remember there's a
difference between quantitatively studying a phenomenon that affects human life

(01:11:09):
and understanding the value of that phenomenon to human life.
If that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Yeah, yeah, because you know, once you get to the
center of the Tutsi pop, it's also over. So yeah,
you know, the experience is done with and then I guess,
especially if you're a kid on Halloween in like the
nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties, you just move on to
the next Tutsi pop. You've probably got six of them
in there, and yes, you are going to eat all
of them in one Halloween night. But I'd love to

(01:11:35):
hear from folks out there. What was your approach to
eating a Tutsi roll pop? What is it like today?
Did you chomp through it? Did you actually lick through
the whole thing? Yeah? Feel free to share your thoughts
on the philosophy and the experimental science of this whole scenario. Likewise,

(01:11:56):
magical licking and spitting too, for that matter, examples from
Magic Systems, real and imagined. If you've got something you
would like to share with us on these, definitely ride
in and chat with us. Absolutely again. We'll be back
in our next core episode of Stuff to Blow Your
Mind to continue our exploration of licking. We'll definitely get

(01:12:17):
into more animal world licking. We will probably talk about
cats and dogs and who knows what else. Just a
reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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