The Minotaur, Part 3

Take the Minotaur out of its maze and you have but another beast man -- but within his manufactured environment, he is a singular terror in myth and popular consciousness. But where does this monster come from? What does his existence mean? What does the stalker of these bloody halls reveal about the human mind and human history? In this series of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe discuss the minotaur.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
He lives there. From there he plots my destiny and
schemes to usurp my throne. His eyelids of stone taunt me,
insatiable minotaur. My dreams chafe against his horns. In my dreams,
I enter the labyrinth. I'm there alone, unchained. The scepter

(00:23):
bends in my fist, and he comes before me, monstrous, sweet, monstrous, free,
And I can no longer govern my dreams. So many
deliberations wait for the day when the world of men
will harbor my story and blood. Secret River. You have

(00:44):
not heard me yet. Kill me first. Now you provoke
me as if you're plotting some kind of scheme I've
made up my mind. Ultimate freedom is fostered by that
blade which you hold in your fist, the same as
a sun and parting of waters in the ocean deep.
What do you know of death grant her of profound life? Look,

(01:08):
there is only one way to kill a monster, and
that is to embrace you. Welcome to stot to Blow
Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome

(01:31):
to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with Part three.
Of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. We're coming out of
the dark at you once again. So those opening selections
were from a play called The King's by Julio Cortissar,
who's an Argentinean writer that we've been talking about recently.

(01:52):
That that translation was by Kari Dad's veach. But so
the first part I read were the words of of
King Minos, and then after that was an exchange between
Theseus and the Minotaur, with our producer Seth as Theseus
as the jerk of the story. Yes, um, this is
a This is such an interesting uh play. I had

(02:13):
never heard of this before until I ran across this
very translation at in translation dot Brooklyn Rail dot org Um.
Because I don't believe it is currently in print in English.
I could be wrong on that. I see that it
is in print in Spanish, but not in English. Cortessar
has a number of really interesting short stories that I

(02:33):
read back when I was in college. One of them
that I remember really liking is called Axcelotal, and it's
a story about a man who repeatedly visits an axcel
lotal tank at the Jardine de Paris, and he gradually
finds himself transforming into an axl odal as he watches them.
It's pretty good. Yeah, I'm looking forward to read that one.
Uh you you sent me a copy to check out.

(02:56):
In fact, a number of his short story sound just
right up my alley. But I've never at anything by Cortazar.
Now another fun thing about this, so some of you
might remember that we had a call an opening reading
on a previous episode about the minotaur from uh Borhes
the House of Asterion. Bores, of course, was also an

(03:17):
Argentinian writer. Um, perhaps you know, one of the most
famous Argentinian writers. And it's interesting that this play The
Kings or las Areles was published in nineteen forty seven,
just a year after Borges wrote, uh that story to
begin with the House of Hysterion. Oh, is there like
an implication of inspiration or common inspiration between the two. Well,

(03:39):
I was looking into this because I think a lot
of people assumed that Cortisar was inspired by the House
of Hysterian Um. Borges himself actually published the play alongside
Asterian in the literary journal that he edited in ninety seven.
But I was I was looking at an article titled
the Incessant Return of a Minotaur by Amy Fraser Yoder

(04:02):
and just keeps coming back. Yeah, And they write that
while it was often assumed that bores story influence cortis Are,
there's evidence from letters between Cortazar and Borhees that cortis
Are might not have read borhees story previously, so there
might be more convergence here than inspiration. But still it
seems that Borees was was very much a fan of

(04:24):
this piece. I mean, he published it, and obviously how
could Bores not like an entire play with all of
this this this beautiful you know, poetic language and contemplation
of the labyrinth and the and the the various kings
that are caught within its grasp. Really, this is what
I was just telling you earlier, before we started hitting
the court. You could basically you could print this play out.

(04:46):
You could throw a dart at it, and you could
you could find something beautiful. Uh. That's like, there's this
whole stretch where because I should point out that the
minotaur and theseus have a very long conversation, uh, considering
that most of the time it's just about and fighting,
they have a long conversation in this play, and there's
this whole bit about the string that theseus has uh

(05:07):
has has has has wound out behind him, you know,
so he can return so you can escape the labyrinth,
about how it is like a river flowing out to
the ocean. Uh. So it's and and then the ocean
is also the minute, our sister, there's there's just a
lot of beautiful stuff in it. So even if you're
you're not really into reading a lot of unproduced plays,
you should, you should. I recommend you check this out

(05:30):
at the website we mentioned earlier, and if you've had
a chance to see it, Uh, that sounds awesome. I'd
love to hear about it. That's interesting that you mentioned
the twine as a river, because that goes back to
in Avid Avid's telling of the story when he's talking
about Dadalus's design of the labyrinth. He describes it as
like a river that twists and turns back and forth,

(05:50):
and waters that churn in upon themselves going this way
and that. Ah, that's right, that's right. So this is
indeed our our third episode on the Minotaur Um and
we wanted to I guess kick things off here first
of all with that that that brief reading, but also
just to discuss pop culture. Minotaur is a little bit

(06:11):
um and cultural minotaurs of the more modern era in
a little bit more more detail. Um. As far as
just cinema goes, I have to say, I think it's
it's really hard to find a quality minotaur in a
film or TV. I don't know if you've had the
same experience, Joe, but I feel like even when the
costume or the c g I or overall presentation is

(06:32):
solid enough, and lord knows, it often isn't um. Minotaurs
are often presented as just mirror beastly brutes. You know
they're there, They're in that. A big part of that
is that they are not in the labyrinth. Yes, a
minotaur out of its labyrinth is like a hermit crab
out of its shell. It's just not even really the
same creature, is it. The best on screen minotaur I

(06:55):
can think of is actually one that we mentioned in
the first episode, which is the one in Jim Henson's
Story to Aller Greek Myths with Michael Gambon as as
deadal as I think, or at least as the storyteller. Uh,
And that that one is really good because you don't
get too much of a look at the minotaur. I think,
as it should be, you know, it should be glances

(07:15):
here and there, and or glances or glimpses whichever. I
meant to say that. But the glimpses you do get
are full of terror and pity. It's it's very good.
It conveys sort of both of the meanings of the
story as we read it today, the probably the more original,
terrifying reading, but also the subtle reading where you see
the monster as an object of of of sadness and pity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, again,

(07:38):
that one is is just excellent and I highly recommend
folks check that out if you haven't seen it already.
I think it all holds up really well. Uh. David Morrissey,
who would go on to of course play the Governor
and the Walking Dead? Uh? Is in that a young
David Morrissey As theseus. I have never seen The Walking
Dead or I've never made it past the second episode.
But but when I was looking at him, first of all,

(08:00):
he kind of reminds me of Tom Cruise's creepy looking
brother who was in Lost. Do you remember that guy? No,
I don't. Tom Cruise's brother was in what was Unlost
Seth offers a correction, I was entirely wrong. He his
name is William Pother and he's Tom Cruise's first cousin,
not his brother. But he looks kind of like Tom Cruise,

(08:20):
but with an extra dose of boyish charm and creepiness
at the same time. And he played a role in
Lost that was I don't know. I lost ultimately was
such a betrayal, but but there was a really good
moment in the first season involving his his character. But anyway,
I thought he kind of looked like him, And in
any case, he does look like a jock bully, which

(08:43):
is kind of what Theseus is. Yeah, I think I
mentioned in a previous episode that John Would, another great
actor of the British stage, was in the The Greek
myths Um series as well, playing Minos. But uh in
another episode that's about Data List and Icarus. But still,

(09:04):
if you take them all in you kind of you
kind of get into different We're really multiple episodes. You
get the story of of Minos and the Minotaur and Theseus. Well,
somebody out there who is a filmmaker who is dedicated
to practical sets and effects, you make this movie, make
the Labyrinth and Minotaur movie. No, no, no green screen

(09:24):
set junk no uh no c G I Minotaur. I
want a good costume with really classic makeup effects and
and go all out. Now in terms of Minotaurs out
of context, there is one example that I think works
really well, and it is from the music video for
Einstreew's Into New Baton's song Sabrina, which is which is

(09:46):
on YouTube. I I have no idea. Check it out.
Oh it's well. Einstreet's on the New Baton is a
Is this this great German band? They started out more
industrial or post industrial, but then they kind of change
their sound as they win. They have a number of
great songs, but this particular video consists entirely of this

(10:07):
sad minotaur. That's that's well brought to life. Uh, putting
on makeup in this really dank kind of bathroom. I'm
looking at it now. Yeah, it's that's all that happens
in it. But it captures this. It captures the sadness
of minotaur at least that that I feel like should
be a vital component alongside the savage minotaur. This video

(10:31):
is strong, with the cinematography of a nineties anti drug
p S A commercial. Yeah, it's got that that gross
green film on everything like that, This is your brain
on drugs. Yeah it does. It does remind me in
some ways of various p s as I remember from
UH as a child watching Canadian television, where there might

(10:53):
be something that's like really weird and fantastic, and then
at the end you find out, oh, this is the message. Now,
before we get a little more into the science of
mazes and UH and zoonotic diseases, you promised at some
point that you were going to come back to talk
a little bit about the minotaur and D and D.
You mentioned this in the first episode. Oh yeah, So

(11:15):
if the the error is to take the minotaur out
of its place and just presented as a mere brute uh,
Dungeons and Dragons has certainly been guilty of that. Uh
and and not only Dungeons and Dragons, but just individual
dungeon masters, who of course have the power to to
take a minotaur and drop him in anywhere you go
into the you go into the end, the inn keeps

(11:35):
a minotaur as see what you'd like to drink? Yeah, so,
I mean, you know, there's a lot of room to
to misuse the minotaur, you know, at an individual level.
But I will say that at least in the fifth edition.
I can't really speak to earlier editions because I just
don't have those numbers in my head. But in the
most recent edition they do have a very high wisdom

(11:56):
score and they have an ability called labor then recall. Uh,
so the minotaur can perfectly recall any path that has traveled,
which I feel like that ability. It'll least, at the
very least, it is a nudge to the dungeon master. Hey,
you should put this minotaur somewhere where it can take
advantage of this. You should create some sort of labyrinth.

(12:17):
Be that labyrinth an actual you know, stone dungeon, or
perhaps something like a hedge maze or like a really um,
you know, complicated city. I mean, there's so many different
directions you could go in there. And in terms of
actual adventure modules and campaigns, uh, the campaign out of
the Abyss does put minotaurs in a place referred to

(12:39):
as the Labyrinth, which which is very nice and I
thought they did a good job in that. The labyrinth
then recall things seems like it would also close to
the adventurers. The option of certain strategic responses to the minotaur,
like you can't do to the minotaur what Danny does
to Jack at the end of the Shining movie, right,
you can't get it turned to ound in his own maze,

(13:01):
like he's going to know his way around. Yeah, he
is the ultimate master of this location unless you have
some sort of privileged knowledge or magical um abilities that
have been gifted to you by other parties. So I
was thinking about mazes, and I actually had an etymological
question that I had to look up because I was
wondering are the English words maze and a maze as

(13:24):
an amazing related, And it turns out that they are.
They probably do come from the same linguistic route. So
by around the beginning of the fourteenth century, the now
maze meant something like a delusion or a bewilderment, a confusion,
and this is related to the Old English verb a
mac n or a m a s i a n

(13:46):
meaning to confuse, and so the origins of this word
are not exactly clear. I saw one comparison on the
online Etymological Dictionary to a Norwegian word um mass m
a s or mace meaning exhausting labor, which I thought
would be a kind of interesting place for that concept
to come from. But apparently maze came to have its

(14:08):
current meaning in English, meaning something like a labyrinth the
structure with branching paths around the end of the fourteenth century.
But but so now you know, like amazement is related
to a maze. They're the same thing, and they come
from the idea of bewilderment, confusion and and being confounded.
But hey, practical survival question. Imagine you are not theseus,

(14:31):
You're not armed with a with a sword or whatever.
You don't have a ball of twine to make your
way out of a maze. If you were just one
of the Athenian youths finding yourself trapped in an unfamiliar maze,
could you get out? Is there actually a strategy for
optimizing the solution of a maze other than trying to
cut through walls? Obviously you can't do that well. I mean,

(14:51):
I think a lot of us have heard the whole
only take like right hand turns right, keep turning right exactly,
So it depends on how maze is constructed. But that
actually is a successful strategy for most mazes. The solution
if you don't have a ball of twine. Is what's
known as the right hand rule, and that's actually arbitrary,
could be the right hand or the left hand rule,

(15:13):
but it's as simple as this. So you reach out
with your right hand and you touch the right side
wall of the corridor, and then you just proceed forward
without ever taking your hand off the wall. So if
you come to a dead end, you pivot around with
your hands still touching the right side of the wall. Again,
the same thing would work with the left hand. It's
also known as the wall follower algorithm. And always following

(15:36):
the same wall surface will mean that you bear in
the same direction at every turn, which is what you
were saying. If you always make the right turn, eventually
you will find your way out. This will uh you know,
even if you hit a dead end, you'll double back
on your path. And if you keep following this method,
you could actually solve the maze even blindfolded, because it
doesn't matter what orientation you have mentally, you will just

(16:00):
always be executing a new pathway unless you're trying to
get yourself out of a dead end. But there is
a catch here, and the catches that for this to work,
the maze has to be what they call simply constructed,
and what that means is all of the walls of
the maze are connected to the outer wall or to
each other, and this method will not necessarily work in

(16:21):
a maze with what are called island walls, walls that
are not connected to the outer boundary, and with these
types of mazes you can just end up going in
circles around a wall segment in the middle. I've actually
read about some funny cases of people going people going
into corn mazes, you know, these things for fun or
hedge mazes, and they get stuck in there and they

(16:42):
try to use the wall follower pathway to get out,
but they get stuck in there because they're just tracing
around some isolated internal wall that doesn't connect to the
outer walls, forced to wander forever until the fall festival
employees come and retrieve you. But there there is another catch.
So even if you are in a maze with island
walls walls that don't connect to the outer boundary, you

(17:04):
can still use the right hand rule if you use
it beginning at the entrance, Because if you start at
the entrance and you stick to it, you will never
actually start following an island wall to begin with, because
you'll always be attached to a wall that's attached to
the exterior boundary. So if you start doing the doing
the right hand rule at the entrance, it will work,

(17:26):
though it might make the maze less fun, I mean,
depending on whether this is like a torture human sacrifice
scenario or just like a corn maze for fun. Right.
But I guess if you if you use the right
hand rule and it's the right kind of maze, you
are in a sense transforming a maze into a labyrinth,
if we're going to that, if you're using those terms

(17:46):
exclusively for a maze is something with many different branching
paths in which you can get lost in a labyrinth
as being this complex system through which there is only
one path, uh, and you don't have to to think
about what you're doing as you follow it. Right, multi
cur soul versus unicursal, you're turning it into a unicursal
pathway where you are again just submitting to the design

(18:07):
of the maze and taking decision making entirely out of it. Right.
It's kind of like if you go to Ikea and
you just decide, I'm just gonna go with the I'm
not gonna buy anything, but I'm just gonna just go straight,
just gonna follow the path. By everything my right hand touches,
you end up in a maze of meatballs. But thinking
about how to solve maze is also got me, uh,

(18:30):
thinking about another tangent here, which is the role that
mazes have played in the history of psychological research, so
much that in a way, the maze became almost a
physical emblem of the discipline of psychology and popular culture
like well, especially the behavior at schools. Of course, So

(18:51):
if you saw a research psychologist in a movie made
in the nineteen forties or fifties, what were they doing?
I mean, they're probably running rats through a maze, right,
Like every psychology lab in a movie has a rat
maze in it. Yeah, and you think, I feel like
they're a fair number of educational shorts that also feature
footage of mice and mazes. And here I think the

(19:14):
maze as a research tool emerges in a very interesting
relationship with the maze of myths. So consider the following
with the myth of Theseus and the minotaur in mind.
I was reading an article about the history of maze
research by a psychologist named ce James Goodwin in the
Monitor on Psychology, which is the magazine of the American

(19:35):
Psychological Association or the a p A. And Goodwin begins
by producing a really unbelievable quote from a neo behaviorist
psychologist named Edward Chase Tolman, who was president of the
APIA at the time. He uttered these words, and this
was part of his yearly addressed to the a p
A in nineteen thirty seven, And this is what he said.

(19:58):
Everything important in psych cocology can be investigated in essence
through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants
of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze.
So everything, every everything, everything you could want to know
about minds can be understood by watching how rats behave

(20:20):
in a maze. Like, given enough time and enough rats
and enough mazes, we can fully understand minds. I mean,
undoubtedly it's useful for various things. That everything is going
a bit far. Yeah, So I mean, I guess, to
be fair to Tolman, I think maybe he was intentionally
overstating his case a bit to be provocative. But this

(20:41):
is actually indicative of like a powerful strain of thinking
in the history of behaviorist psychology, basically that psychological science
is not really concerned with internal phenomena. I remember, this
was the behaviorist school, so it's not really about thoughts
or feelings and uh. And also the belief that differences
between in species are not necessarily very relevant. Brains in

(21:04):
general were just sort of imagined as learning and conditioning
machines that produce behavior based on how they've been conditioned,
and so careful study of how rats behave under various
controlled conditions and how they respond to various incentives and
stimuli and training can eventually tell you pretty much everything

(21:24):
that you would want to know about brains, even about
human psychology. Now, I think this is clearly an extremely
misguided point of view, But an interesting question is how
did you get to their Like, how how did you
get to the place where somebody could say that about
rats and mazes and not immediately be mocked for it,
you know, like, it just sounds so ridiculous. So maybe

(21:45):
we should take a break and then when we come
back we can talk about the origins of rat maze research. Alright,
we're back, So how did we get so many mice
in these mazes. Okay. So I mentioned this article by
by C. James Goodwin, and Goodwin writes in his article

(22:06):
that most historians of science agreed that the animal maze
as a research tool was really pioneered in the eighteen
nineties by researchers at Clark University. Specifically, this was a
couple of graduate students named Willard Small and Linus Klein,
who were working in the lab of the early American
psychologist Edmund Sandford Uh. Though sometime around the same time,

(22:31):
the psychologist Edward Thorndyke also experimented with building a sort
of maze for research on baby birds. He did this
by stacking books in odd configurations, but he he thought
of these structures as pens. But the mazes constructed in
the Sanford lab at Clark University had an interesting couple
of points of inspiration. So one was in the structures

(22:56):
built by rats under a porch. Uh the so Klein's
Mall and Sanford were interested in studying the home finding
ability of rats. Home finding, of course, is a very
important skill for many motile animals. How do you find
your way back to home base after leaving to forage,
or how do you find your way through confusing twist

(23:16):
and turns to locate a source of food or another
familiar location. And so Klein recalled an incident where there
had been digging under the porch at a cabin on
his father's farm in Virginia, and when the porch was excavated,
they discovered that there were these runways that had been

(23:37):
left quote by large feral rats to their nests under
the porch, and the runways client thought somehow resembled mazes,
and this led to the idea of designing a test
environment based on a maze to study the psychology of rats.
And the model they ended up using for this maze
was the Hampton Court Maze in England. And Robert, I've

(23:59):
got a picture or for you to look at here.
This is still a popular tourist attraction. It's a hedge
maze just outside London that was commissioned by William the
Third around the year seventeen hundred and it is said
to be the oldest surviving hedge maze in England. Yeah,
this is a very impressive, very famous maze, kind of
trapezoidal in shape. I think they restructured it somewhat to

(24:21):
make it more of a rectangle in the lab version.
The irony is that mice would have no problem at
all with with the actual handed chordinates. That's right, Yeah,
you just cut underneath. Yeah, So of course you had
to create one that's much more unforgiving to the body
of a mouse. So what they did was at the
Clark Lab they made a tiny version for rodents for

(24:43):
rats with slight redesigns. UH had a wooden floor and
walls made of wire mesh, and so research with rats
there in this maze went on for several years, mostly
under Willard Small, and Goodwin writes the following quote. This
was the time when it's like pology was the science
of mental life. So it was not surprising that Small

(25:04):
described his maze study in quote mentalistic terms rather than
in the kind of language one might expect to read
in a more modern learning study. So instead of reporting
results in terms of error rates and time to completion,
Small tried to infer what the rats were doing as
they made their way through the maze, and this led

(25:25):
to observations such as and here I'm going to quote
from Small. When describing a rat almost making a wrong
turn in the maze, Small wrote that the rat quote
hesitated as if scratching his head, then entered this dead
end path slowly and doubtfully only a few steps. However,
then with a sudden turn and a triumphant flick of

(25:46):
his tail, he returned to the correct path. Which is
funny because that does not sound like scientific writing. Yes,
hesitated as if scratching his head, the triumphant flick of
his tail. I mean this. This is a kind of
qualitative description that's unusual to more modern psychological methods, where

(26:06):
in modern psychological methods you would try to turn everything
into unambiguous quantitative data points and remove the subjective judgment
of the researcher as much as possible. But here Small
is just saying like, I wonder what little Mr Rat
is thinking as he goes to the left or the right. Well,
I think he I think he feels triumphant. Now I
think he feels like a big, strong rat. Now I

(26:28):
know he's getting dangerously close to writing a smashing pumpkin song.
You know, I've always had questions about that song because
if the world is a vampire sent to drain aane,
what is it drain ain Ing? The world contains everything,
doesn't it? The way the world is invoked there. It's
like the some some total of existence is sent to
drain what's outside of itself to drain. Well, I think

(26:51):
it is outer reality versus inter reality, right, Okay, it's
Newmana and Phenomena. Yeah, I guess so that's the way
I always interpreted. I mean, not that I spent a
lot of time. I'm really analyzing the lyrics that song.
But um, but that would be my guest. The Phenomena
is a vampire sent to dra and the New Mina. Okay, yeah,
Or I guess you could say the maze or the

(27:12):
cage is the thing the environment that contains the rat
or the minotaur, what have you. Here's a twist. What
if that song is sung from the point of view
of a minotaur, like among the Athenian youths, there is
a secret destroyer. You know. I don't think I even
looked for actual minotaur songs. Uh. There may be some
really good ones out there, and I then I just

(27:34):
don't know about them. Is there not a misfit song?
Is there that they just say the minotaur and then
you and it's the minotaur again or something? It seems
like I can't I can't really find much of anything.
But yeah, whether you're talking about the standards of modern
research today or the behaviorist research that would come into
vogue in the twentieth century, in any case, you know,

(27:54):
you would not want to say, I think that the
rat is thinking that the world is a vampire sent
to dray a a. And you just want to like
neutrally describe unambiguous objective behaviors and and and avoid being anthropomorphic.
And Smallest research was criticized even by some people at
the time for being anthropomorphic, like trying to inhabit the

(28:15):
mind of the rat as if it had human thoughts. Nevertheless,
small made some interesting and influential discoveries, and these included
the idea that rats could learn navigation and home finding
with very little reliance on their sense of site. Two
of the rats in his study group were blind, and
yet they learned the maze just as well as the

(28:35):
sighted rats. And the use of senses other than site
can make sense when you consider that rats are often
navigating almost completely dark spaces, or navigating spaces at night,
you know, under floorboards and so forth. And Small believed
he had established with his research that rats learned through
a gradual accumulation of direct associations between sensory stimuli and

(28:57):
the maze and patterns of success, and this would later
prove foundational to the behavior as school of psychology, which
was very focused on associative learning and gradual conditioning as
the root of animal behavior. But probably more important than
what these studies actually found in their conclusions was the
precedent they set for research methods, because Small's research led

(29:21):
to this huge surge in maze research, much of which
used rats as the study animal. The most classic variation
is that you can mess around with independent variables to
create an average learning curve for rats by you know,
you run rats through a maze multiple times, and you
chart the time it takes them to complete the maze
and the number of errors they make along the way
with each successive attempt, which is a very useful tool

(29:44):
for studying a certain kind of learning and how various
things affect that kind of learning, like drugs and so forth.
But some maze studies also used other animals at the
very simple and we've talked before about the the sort
of maze like research done on worms that was focused
on plan areah. This was the origin actually of the
memory transfer research of James McConnell that we talked about

(30:06):
in a couple of full length episodes that you can
check out in our archive called Devour of Memories. But
the short version is that the American psychologist James McConnell
believed he had discovered that memories in the form of
learned associations could be transferred from one flat worm to
another via cannibalism. So you teach one flat worm, grind

(30:28):
it up, feed it to another flat worm, and it learns,
you know, eat your brains and gain your knowledge. Later
research through some doubts on that conclusion, but they're still interesting.
Ongoing research today hinting that planaria might possibly retain memories
after having their heads cut off, so there might be
some kind of memory in the bodies that's not just

(30:48):
in the brain. And of course, at the opposite end
of the scale, you've got studies that actually put humans
in full size mazes with consent, of course, to study
their behavior. But anyway, this huge sir in maze research
lead to regimes that meant a researcher could make a
claim like the one Tolman made in nineteen thirty seven.

(31:08):
The idea that basically all you need to study psychology
is some rats in a maze, And he could say
that and still be taken seriously. Uh. Tolman's assertion, of course,
seems again ridiculous on its face today, but maze research
does still remain very important, especially in narrower domains like
animal motor behavior, problem solving, spatial memory and things like that.

(31:31):
And mazes are used in studying the effects of particular
drugs on behavior, So like you could say, does this
anti anxiety drug cause a rat or a crayfish to
take one path or the other rather than you know,
freezing paralyzed at T junction? Or does a drug promote
obsessive recurring checks of the same path and things like that. Now,

(31:52):
and looking at what kind of maze research is going
on today, I came across one thing that I that
I was thoroughly amazed by and very disturbed by, which
is this invention known as automated team mazes. I guess
there's actually nothing more nefarious about this than there is
about a regular maze for for research, but watching video

(32:14):
of it somehow kind of bothered me. Basically, an automated
team maze is a robot maze with movable walls that
can be raised and lowered to alter the maze path
as the animal proceeds, and I don't know, it feels
very house of leaves to me. Yeah, I don't think
we we brought up a house of leaves yet, by
the way, but that is a great use of a

(32:35):
maze and a minotaur uh in uh is a literary example.
I'm actually in the middle of reading it right now
for the first time, so I haven't finished yet. I
don't want to spoil too much for people, but yeah,
the middle of that book is a good place to
be because the book is is intentionally, quite intentionally is
a labyrinth, and you are supposed to, I think, feel

(32:56):
to a certain extent lost within it and hunted within it.
It's one of the more unnerving things I think I've read,
and you know, over the past ten years, extremely creepy
now in terms of labyrinths that change and move around you.
First of all, I think datals would be proud, like
this is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine. Uh.

(33:18):
You know, they're the great inventor having created it also
reminds me of of the wonderful cinematic maze that we
find in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Uh. There, in the early
phases of that they go through to you know, Sarah
goes through different parts of the Labyrinth to try to
get to the Goblin city to rescue her brother. But
there's a there's one section in particular where she begins

(33:40):
to realize that she can't mark the path behind her
because the path keeps changing. Goblins keep moving things around,
moving stones that she's marked, or even just seemingly magically,
she'll turn around and what was once a passage is
now just a blank wall. I recall this being a
plot point in the movie Cube as well. Oh yes,

(34:03):
the very very Cube like as well this video. There's
no minotaur in Cube, but that should have been well
in a way, there are a lot of all the
traps are kind of like mini minotaurs. There are killing instruments,
and again coming back to the idea that the minotaur
is sort of the kill function of the Labyrinth, it
just has a lot of little kill functions instead of
one great all encompass and kill function. I want to

(34:25):
come back and say, I, in all honesty, I don't
want to throw aspersions on an automated team maze, which
seems like a perfectly useful research tool. Uh. It seems
like they're actually mainly to automatically track data on the
movements of the animals, so it it makes the human
rat run are obsolete very useful. But before we move
on from rats and mazes, I wanted to talk about

(34:46):
one more thing that I found interesting, and it ties
into something I know you've covered on at least one
older episode, uh, Rob, which was the idea of cargo
cult science that was explored in this famous talk given
by the physicist Richard Feynman in nineteen seventy four. He
was giving a commencement address to cal Tech. I guess
it was the graduating class or something, and that's usually

(35:09):
who would be at a commencement address, why, I said,
probably uh, And he was, you know, talking about various subjects, pseudoscience,
the need for rigor in in designing experiments, scientific research,
and uh. And so, in simple terms, I think the
idea of cargo cult science is it's a bad form
of science where uh, there is not enough rigorous effort

(35:33):
devoted to trying to disprove hypotheses. Rather every basically you
just kind of establish a hypothesis based on what data
you've already collected, and then further occurrences of the same
types of data are taken as confirmation of the hypothesis. So,
for an example, I'm just making this up. If you

(35:53):
were to find that rats run mazes faster in the
daytime than they do in the night time, and then
you say, oh, I'm gonna fit a hypothesis to that,
it's because they come from the planet Crypton and are
given extra strength by the rays of our yellow sun
during the day. And then subsequent studies finding yet again
that rats run mazes faster in the daytime than than

(36:16):
in the nighttime, those are taking his confirmation of the
yellow sun hypothesis when they don't actually provide any support
for that at all. So, in general, Fineman in the
speech is advocating that researchers adhere to more rigorous methods
to rule out false positives and things like that, and
and they avoid the temptation to rush to publish with

(36:36):
sloppy experimental designs. And so I can read from the
part of his speech here where he talks about rats
and mazes. He uh, he says, quote, there have been
many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes and
so on, with little clear result. But in ninety seven
a man named Young did a very interesting one. He

(36:56):
had a long corridor with doors all along one side
where the rats came in, and doors along the other
side where the food was. He wanted to see if
he could train the rats to go in at the
third door down from wherever he started them off. So
what he's looking for is a spatial relationship between the
entrance door and the food reward door. Will they learn

(37:17):
that inference? Uh? And fine man continues, No, the rats
went immediately to the door where the food had been
the time before. The question was, how did the rats know?
Because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform
that this was the same door as before. Obviously there
was something about the door that was different from the

(37:38):
other doors, So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging
the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same.
Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the
rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to
change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell.
Then he realized the rats might be able to tell

(37:59):
by seeing the fights and the arrangement in the laboratory
like any common sense person. So he covered the corridor
and still the rats could tell. He finally found that
they could tell by the way the floor sounded when
they ran over it, and he could only fix that
by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one
after another of all possible clues and finally was able

(38:21):
to fool the rats. So they had to learn to
go in the third door. If he relaxed any of
his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint,
this is an a number one experiment. That is the
experiment that makes rat running experiments sensible because it uncovers
the clues that the rat is really using and not

(38:41):
what you think it's using. And that is the experiment
that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in
order to be careful and control everything in an experiment
with rat running. I looked into the subsequent history of
this research. The subsequent experiment and the one after that
never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of
his criteria of putting the corridor on sand or being

(39:04):
very careful. They just went right on running rats in
the same old way and paid no attention to the
great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not
referred to because he didn't discover anything about the rats.
In fact, he discovered all the things you have to
do to decipher something about rats. But not paying attention

(39:25):
to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science. Now,
just as a follow up, I was reading an article
by Ross Pomeroy on Real Clear Science that was about
this story that Fineman tells trying to identify who this
uncited researcher was. Uh, the author of this article Pomeroy,
he thinks that this is probably referring to the animal

(39:46):
scientist Paul Thomas Young, but it's not known for sure
who Fineman is referring to. If we take Fineman's word
that you know, he was familiar with this unpublished research
and stuff. Uh, It's it's very sad that this went forward,
but it's such a wonderful illustration of how difficult and
tedious it can be just to get to the point
where you can start to establish conclusions in animal research.

(40:10):
I also love in Environment's writings here that you you
also get the sense of the the construction of a maze,
you know, like this, the thing that is that is
just there to confuse and and and provides no clear
solutions to itself or to the world. Well, yeah, it's
really funny because so design It highlights how designing a

(40:31):
maze for a rat is kind of different than designing
a maze for a human, right because rats, uh might,
because of their their ecological niche, they might have senses
that are attuned to things that humans wouldn't even imagine
would be a useful clue in in you know, cheating
and seeing through the confusion that the maze is supposed

(40:53):
to provide. Yeah, yeah, we have to remember that that rats,
other organisms that we might put in maze, they live
in a different sense realm than we do. Like their
dependence on you know, site versus smell, etcetera. Are going
to be rather different than ours. And then there you know,
they're theirs. Their smell abilities, they are going to beyond,
be beyond what we have at our disposal. Maybe I'm

(41:15):
reaching here, but I was imagining some interesting parallels here
between the maze as a psychological research instrument and the
maze of myth, because what they're doing in both cases
is trying to strip away extraneous detail and context from
from the decision of the character, whether that's a an
animal that's the subject of research or a character in

(41:37):
a story, and just sort of like isolate one salient
trait at a time. That that's often what mythology does,
like it boils down a human too courage embodied and
has no other really identifiable human traits in that moment
in the story. And the same thing for the rat.
You're trying to like take away all of the things

(41:58):
that make a rat a rat at accept its ability
to decide between X and Y based on z Yeah. Yeah,
that's a great point. So I guess it doesn't exactly
work with theseus because theseus does bring bring context from
the outside world into the maze. Right. He comes in
armed with tools and with information that he technically should
not have if this were a fair fight, right, right,

(42:21):
he has he has broken the game. Yeah, he has
corrupted the experiment. These are not legitimate results. All right.
On that note, we're going to take one more break,
but we'll be right back than alright, we're back. Uh now, Robert,
is it time to talk about the minotaur and zoonotic diseases? Yes,
it is. I was actually delighted to run to run

(42:43):
across this paper titled Europe The Bull and the Minotaur
The Biological Legacy of a Neolithic love Story. This is
by Harold Brusso, published in the journal Environmental Microbiology back
in two thousand and nine. Now, Harold Bruce is a
research scientist and he's the author of the book The

(43:03):
Quest for Food and Natural History of Eating, And incidentally
he's also an author on several COVID nineteen papers to
come out this year. Yeah, I saw that. I looked about.
It looks like he's affiliated with the Nestly Research Center
in Switzerland and uh and at some point I think
I also saw him affiliated with the University of Geneva,
but the main things I saw recently were the Nestly

(43:25):
Research Center. I gotta say he's got a very unusual
writing style for scientific papers. It's very whimsical, Yes, definitely whimsical.
Um and you get a sense of that from the
title here as well. Basically, in this article, Brusso uses
the minotaur myth as a means of discussing the Neolithic
revolution and the manner in which the domestication of goats

(43:48):
and cattle, etcetera. Opened the door for new pathogens. As
he points out, hunters only had limited contact with prey
and most close contact occurred after the animal death. Not
to say this is safe for the human hunter, but
quote all the mechanisms which microbes induced in the infected

(44:08):
host to assure their transmission, like sneezing, coughing, or diarrhea,
are not any longer operative in the dead animal. Okay,
So he's saying that. And despite the fact that people
who hunted for a living would be coming in contact
with animals and their body fluids pretty often, people who
do animal agriculture are actually more at risk for animal

(44:31):
transmitted diseases than hunters are, right because suddenly you're not
just hunting the animal down, killing it, process and then
processing it, which is you know, certainly processing the animal
could come with some risks, but it's one's dead. It's
not going to sneeze on you. But with the domestication,
humans come into close contact with these animals all the time.

(44:51):
They come into clause contact with sick animals as well
as the animals dung, which was valuable for fuel and fertilizer,
uh and also another pathway for disease. And you're going
to be spending time. I mean, I just imagine there's
more time with the animal. Like you kill an animal
when you're hunting, and then you kind of deal with it.
But like, but that's one animal for a sort of

(45:12):
limited period of time. While you're processing it or carrying
it back to home or wherever this other thing would be,
you're just sort of like wandering around with herds of
sheep or cows or something all day and there's a
bunch of them all crammed together, right, And and thus
he states that you know, we can we can safely
anticipate quote that the early farming society was plagued by

(45:32):
new diseases zoonosis was feeding new pathogens into the human population. Yeah,
that's very interesting to consider. I mean, we we think
about the advent of agriculture in in the Neolithic period
as you know, one of the progenitors of civilization, but
we don't often imagine a lot of the downsides that
might have come along with it. And it seems quite

(45:53):
possible that he's correct that zoonotic diseases, an increase in
diseases transmitted from animals to humans would be one of
those consequences. Yeah, so he writes that humanities growth simply
created new opportunities for these microbes, which in turn discovered
humans as quote an attractive life support um. This, he says,

(46:14):
follows the principle of the marine microbiologists call killing off
the winning population. So he points out that the viruses
had co evolved with their host during evolution, we would
expect the closest relatives of measles viruses in paramixo viruses
of primates instead. However, the most important human pathogens, such

(46:35):
as highly transmissible agents like measles and smallpox, are closely
related to viruses from domesticated animals. Measles, for instance, circulates
exclusively in the human population, but is a close relative
of render pest virus that is found in cattle. And
of course this uh is not limited just to ancient times.

(46:56):
I mean, human viruses emerging from cultivated animal stocks still
happens today. I mean, I think it's pretty common for
flu strains to come out of say like pigs or
birds that are domesticated by humans now. Bruso also points
out that the close relationship between smallpox and cow pox
was actually really important for the history of vaccination. Physician

(47:18):
Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had acquired cow pox
were resistant to smallpox. He also points out that tuberculosis
is caused by the Microbacterium tuberculosis complex, to which M.
Bovis belongs. Any lists several other examples, and also discusses
the idea popularized by Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs and

(47:40):
Steel that Europeans brought with them their Old World viruses
which they had, which they had generated out of their
history of animal domestication, all this time spent in close
confines with their domesticated species. Now, I will say, with
reference to Diamond, Uh, it's been along time since I
read that book. Years ago I read Guns, Terms and Steel. Uh,

(48:03):
I can tell that he Diamond has recently been subject
to a lot of criticism by experts in the fields
he covers. Uh. If so, I don't know, I don't
want to be too unfair, but it seems like there
are a lot of allegations of kind of cherry picking,
the thing that often happens when somebody's got a very broad,
sweeping explanation of history. Um. But I do think one

(48:25):
of the basic genres of things explored in that book
is interesting, which is the broad thrust of it is
trying to explain human history in terms of environmental biogeography.
So showing that you know what people's come to power
at what place in time, can at least in large
part be explained by often otherwise overlooked environmental biological and

(48:47):
geographical factors such as like what types of crops grow here,
or what types of animals nearby could be domesticated, what
kinds of pathogens or people exposed to and things like that.
So uh So, whatever one would think of Diamond himself
or or his fuller argument, I do think it's important
to remember that history is not just a battle of
wills and virtues between like powerful individual people and their personalities.

(49:10):
It's also very much about mosquitoes and rainfall patterns and
farming equipment and stuff like that. Now, to come back
to Bruso here, the idea that he's presenting here isn't
that the Neolithic door opens and immediately all of these
zoonotic diseases rush in um. This would have taken place
over early in a long period of time. Uh It

(49:31):
still opens the door, though, but sometimes the these these
basically these zoonotic events are going to occur just throughout
that the history that unfolds. For example, measles seems to
have emerged from render past between c E eleven hundred
and c E twelve hundred, and is pointed out by

(49:51):
Ferous at All in Origin of measles of the measles
virus UH. Divergence from render pest virus between likely occurred
between the eleven and twelveth entries that was in Virology
Journal in two thousand ten UH, and they were likely
limited outbreaks prior to this, when the pathogen wasn't fully
adapted to humans yet. And then Bruso also points out

(50:12):
that there were population issues to consider as well. Um,
you know, as the duration of epidemics are influenced by
population density. So again, not only in the wake of
the you know, the Linolithic Revolution, we get to the
point where we are we are building cities, we are
living in closer confines to each other, and we're creating
not only the the environments in which a pathogen could

(50:35):
leap from one species to another, but also these robust
environments in which a pathogen could then spread, you know,
massively through a larger human population. Yeah, this is all
interesting and important to consider so I'm wondering, where does
the minotaur come in. Ah, yes, the minotaur. Uh so
there is a minotaur and all of this um and uh.

(50:58):
And he sets it up out rather nicely. I think
he says, generations of poets, philosophers, and psychologists have interpreted
and reinterpreted ancient Greek myths. I will thus take the
liberty to add a biological interpretation to this strange story. So,
you know, I think he's being very clear about the
fact that he's not making an argument that the minotaur

(51:18):
is about um zoonotic diseases. But he's saying, I'm going
to take the minotaur and it's myth, and I am
going to use it to make a statement about about this,
to to explain something or attempt to explain something about
this relationship between animals, humans and their pathogens. Okay, So
it's not like there's actually a good case that zoonotic

(51:40):
diseases are literally the historical inspiration of the minotaur myth.
But it does work pretty amazingly as a metaphor. Yeah,
he does a great job with it. Again, he's a
kind of kind of a whimsical writer, especially in this piece. Okay,
let's hear it, so point he he you know, relates
the minotar myth a bit, but points not only to
the minotaur but also to Uh, you know, the of
Zeus in his bull form, seducing the Princess Europa or

(52:04):
Europe and taking her to Crete, where he impregnates her
with three sons. One of those three sons is Minos Uh.
Europe's brothers then search the known world for her and Uh,
and then Bruso writes this quote. The paths of Europe's
brothers recall partly the migrations of the early farmers from

(52:24):
the Near East into Europe and North Africa, partly Phoenician colonization.
The too close relationship of Mino's wife with a bull
leads to a children eating chimera, stretching a bit of
the fantasy. I would interpret this monster as the species
crossing virus derived from the new close contact between cattle

(52:44):
and farmer. The labyrinth might be a type of quarantine
imposed on infected subjects. Sir Evans, the excavator of the
Minoa Crete, suggests that it reflects the plan of the
Royal Palace Innsis. Some viruses are bovine. Human chimera is
like Minotaur, which both ate the young children of the
earlier inhabitants of Europe. This myth might thus keep the

(53:07):
memory of the hardship following the encounter of the cattle
farmers with the hunter gatherers of prehistoric Europe, and in
the rest of the article deals primarily with examples of
this and discussions of its import That's great, I mean,
I would say, to reiterate, of course, I'm not convinced,
and I don't think he's necessarily making the case that
actually this was the literal inspiration of the myth, But

(53:30):
it is a really awesome metaphor the idea that the
introduction of domesticated livestock such as cattle and sheep and
stuff into the lives of humans would have these echoes
throughout history that have biological implications. In the myth, they
are the biological implications of creating a hybrid monster. In reality,
the biological implications are creating these zoonotic diseases that are

(53:53):
in a way a hybrid type being because they jump
from one species to another when you're living in close
contact long enough off. And even though the inspiration of
the myth is probably not direct in any way, I mean,
I do wonder about a kind of loose, un semiconscious
connection and that like, isn't there always a sort of quiet,
wordless unease about civilization and its products? And it just

(54:16):
shows up again and again every generation, even while we
enjoy the fruits of civilization, like we enjoy the stability
of food supply and the opportunity for the diversification of
labor and all of that, all the stuff we get
from a settled urban existence, from agriculture, from technology and
so forth, isn't there in every generation a new expression

(54:38):
of the feeling that something is kind of wrong with
all this, that there, that it is somehow perverted or dangerous,
even monstrous, and that people should somehow get back to
nature in one way or another. Some version of this
philosophy is always there. It seems like, yeah, I mean, really,
to come back to the the idea of the labyrinth

(54:59):
itself and and the other creations of datalists, there's this,
I you know, there's so much of that science fictional energy,
that anxiety concerning technology. Uh in this figure. You know,
what if we created something that lifted us up on
high but also lead to our destruction? Uh? What what
if we created something so elegantly designed that it was

(55:21):
too confusing for even its creator to escape that sort
of thing, Yeah, totally. I mean you can look at
a million different kinds of technology as essentially the labyrinth,
the thing that becomes so complicated it escapes the intentions
of its creator. And uh, yeah, I mean an obvious
place to look at that would be artificial intelligence. I
mean people often use the people often use the metaphor

(55:43):
of Pandora's box. They're like, are you opening the box?
Who knows what what will come out? But the labyrinth
is also a pretty good metaphor for for what's happening
with AI. Yeah, and and there's always the concern that
there will be the minotaur within it as well, the
thing that is not just passively anti human but act
the anti human. But I mean it's easy to imagine
that kind of thing with AI, because at least AI

(56:05):
reaches such a level of complexity that you're imagining it
almost as an agent that you can't control, you know.
I think you can even apply this idea of our
our perennial anxiety or suspicions about the downsides of of
civilization and it's technological products um to too earlier innovations,

(56:26):
even things as seemingly simple as agriculture, because in fact,
agriculture comes with tons of consequences that would not have
been predicted by the people who invented. It comes with
risk of zoonotic diseases, It comes with changes in diet
and how that affects human life, and a million other things.
Oh yeah, I mean when it was many of the

(56:47):
the catastrophic problems that we're dealing with today in our world.
Are you know the the end results of this these
initial revolutions. But you mentioned Pandora's Box earlier. So I
want to come back just one more time to Bruso
here Be because he has this particularly haunting closing to
the paper, and again this is from two thousand nine,
in which he considers how modern global environmental changes will

(57:10):
lead to another quote highly dynamic phase of viral transmissions
into the human population. He writes, quote viruses must be
the dark side of the heritage from the Neolithic revolution
to remain with Greek myths, they might correspond to a
half open Pandora's box, a poisoned gift of the bull
god Zeus to mankind. Humans go now into a phase

(57:33):
of globalization whose ecological impact might represent a full opening
of this cursed box. Man is today a major evolutionary force,
and we can safely anticipate that man made environmental changes
will lead to a new deal in our relationship with microbes.
When the diseases had left the box, the Greek myth

(57:53):
told that only hope remained in the box. Today we
are probably better served with science as our best fence
against surprise attacks from the viral empire, uh, than with
the principal hope. Got some chills from that. I mean
to say nothing against hope. I mean, hope is good,
but don't show up with a hope to a science fight. Yeah,

(58:14):
Or if you're gonna bring hope in one hand, bring
science in the other. All right, So there you have it.
This was episode three of our journey through the Labyrinth,
our consideration of the minotaur, uh and and the myth
that it emerges out of the culture, It emerges out
of the various ideas that it is still stirring and
the human imagination today. Uh. This one is a lot

(58:37):
of fun. Yeah, totally. And we have got so much
more October stuff for you. We're busting it seems here. Yes, yes,
there's so yeah, we we've we've got We've got so
many more ideas to go. I think we even still
have a few ideas to come up with. But but
it's gonna be a full month of of Halloween related
wonder In the meantime, you would like to check out

(58:57):
other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind if you
want to catch up on our current Halloween offerings, uh,
explore our past Halloween offerings, or some of our past
myth related episodes, you know, such as our our study
of the Medusa from earlier this year. Well, you can
find this podcast wherever you get your podcasts and wherever
that happens to be. We just ask that you rate, review,

(59:18):
and subscribe. If you want to find us, like really quickly,
you can just go to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com and that will take you to the I
heart listing for this show. And if you do go there,
there's a place you can click on somewhere on that
page kind of a labyrinth. Uh, you can click on
like store merchandise or what have you. That'll take you
to our our t shirt store where we have a

(59:39):
few different designs with stuff like our logo maybe a
Medusa or to that sort of thing. 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, just to say hello, you can
email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow Your Mind
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(01:00:07):
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