April 7, 2026 • 56 mins
In this series of episodes from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the concept of the topsy-turvy or the upside-down from the conceptual to the factual, from bat caves to the depths of the Inferno.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on the theme of being upside down.
In the last episode, we started off talking about a
very strange and interesting scene in the Divine Comedy of Dante,
in which Dante the pilgrim and Virgil his guide are
in Hell and they are at the very bottom of Hell.
(00:38):
They are crawling down the wooly haunch of Satan, so
they're on Satan's body and the world suddenly appears to
turn upside down. We talked about what that scene meant
within Dante's medieval worldview and how subsequent changes in our
understanding of physics and cosmology affect how that scene reads.
(00:59):
After that, we started looking at the principle of upside
downness in mammal biology, focusing first on bats, very very
upside down creatures in multiple ways, and then on tree sloths,
and we got into all kinds of questions like why
these animals are adapted to hang upside down, how their
(01:19):
bodies managed this, especially since it's something that becomes incredibly
uncomfortable for us after a few minutes or less. And
we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
That's right. And in the last episode about where we
had ended things, we had been talking about upside down
sloths or sloths, and we were talking about bats, and
we teased out the idea of talking a little bit
about vampires, and you know, especially talking about vampire bats,
like moving this underside of a branch in order to
(01:51):
get at some birds. You know, I couldn't help but
think about vampires and think about Dracula, and it actually
called to mind an excellent passage from the novel Dracula
by Bromstoker. I'm going to read it from it here.
What I saw was the count's head coming out from
the window. I did not see the face, but I
knew the man by the neck and the movement of
(02:13):
his back and arms. In any case, I could not
mistake the hands, which I had had so many opportunities
of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused,
for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest
and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But
my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I
saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and
(02:35):
began to crawl down the castle wall, over that dreadful abyss,
face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like
great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes.
I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some
weird effect of shadow. But I kept looking, and it
could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes
(02:56):
grasp the corners of the stone, worn clear of the
moor or by the stress of years, and by thus
using every projection and inequality, moved downwards with considerable speed,
just as a lizard moves along a wall.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
It's funny because this scene from the book is pretty
faithfully reproduced. I think in the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula movie,
there's a scene where they show Gary Oldman in his
he's still in the Old Man Dracula form with the
butt hair, so he's got the butt hair, but he's
crawling down, face down, down the wall of the castle,
(03:31):
and I think they use some sped up film to
like show him scuttling really quick like a lizard, and
it's almost funny looking, But that is what the what
the novel, says.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, I love that scene in the in the movie.
And and so we see this reference visually a lot
in various vamphire films and other sci fi and horror films.
And I was trying to think of a few examples.
Really one of the first ones that this didn't quite
come to mind, but it came up when I was
looking around. There is a scene in John Carpenter's Vampires.
(04:03):
You know, as we discussed, not the top tier Carpenter,
but still, as it is the case with any John
Carpenter film, some interesting moments, And there is a moment
where we have the big bad vampire of that picture
kind of positioned in a cruciform pose on the ceiling
(04:24):
behind one of the characters.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, almost looks like laying down drunken on the floor,
but on the ceiling right now.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
In films that we've watched for Weird House Cinema, our
Friday episodes of the show when we just talk about
a weird movie, we did recently watch The Boxer's Omen
in which we have a warlock character who is who
has a close affiliation with bats and other creatures, and
he climbs on the ceiling and crawls across the ceiling
in order to what drop a spider down onto a
(04:55):
rival Buddhist sorcerer.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I believe, yes, he has a there's a there's a
good sorcerer and an evil sorcerer, and the evil one
attacks the good one by i think, dropping spiders on
his face that stab his eyes with him.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, yes, and blind him. But yeah. Various movies love
to throw their monsters up onto the ceiling. There is,
of course, a pretty amazing and famous sequence in John
Carpenter is the thing in which one of the you know,
the entity, the entity is pretending to be one of
the humans, and it ends up like flying up onto
the ceiling and begins to you know, bubble and transmute
(05:31):
into a different form.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
I wonder by what mechanism is the thing sticking to
the ceiling, because it's supposed to be human anatomy at.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That point, Yeah, I'm not sure I really need to
sit down and rewatch it. But I there's a lot
of crazy stuff happening in that sequence, so it almost
feels feels sensible that the impossible is happening. So vampires
are of course closely associated with dats in many traditions,
(05:58):
especially modern tradition. But I have another bat related creature
to bring up here, and it is the Alan of
the Philippines. This is spelled just like Alan, but it
is the name of a particular creature in Filipino tradition.
And I first read about this creature in the work
of folk lore's Carol Rose, who I frequently saw it.
(06:20):
She has a couple of tremendous volumes that have a
lot of creatures chronicled from around the world, and Rose
describes them as a is, this being a group of
creatures in the folklore of the Tengean people, also I
think referred to as the Itnig of the Philippines, and
she describes them as bird like people with fingers and
(06:40):
toes that point backwards, which enable them to hang upside
down from the topmost branches of trees. So we get
inverted and backwards with this creature, and clearly, despite being
described in Avian terms, their basic description brings to mind
the various fruit bats of the world, and a number
of them are found in the Philippines, including the giant
(07:02):
golden crowned flying fox. They roost in the trees, but
the al roosts in the trees, but also have houses
of pure gold on the ground. Were told and different
tales position them as you know, everything from tricksters to
benevolent helpers. So I was looking for more information about
these creatures, and I found I ran across the excellent website,
(07:23):
the Aswang Project, which I believe I've encountered before. It's
maintained by one Jordan Clark, and he points He points
to several other things about these creatures, points out that
they're said to adopt lost children, and also that they
make new elons out of the sort of pilfer biomaterials
associated with female human procreation or the female side of
(07:45):
human procreation. So I don't know, they're kind of crafty
genetic tinkerers, I imagine in that regard. Clark's breakdown also
points at the possibility in some Western retellings that the
Alan is confused and combined with other creatures, and points
out that there are a finite number of creature types
(08:06):
in the Philippines, but with lots of regional variations, which
is something I think we find in a lot of
folkloric traditions. So reminder that the Philippines consist of more
than seven thousand islands and more than one hundred and
eighty five ethnic groups. So you might have a certain
type of creature that's common in different groups, but you know,
individual communities even are going to have a different spin
(08:28):
on that creature. Now, turning to the world of Japanese
yo kai, who I found not one, but two very
interesting ceiling related creatures. So the first is the Tinjo kudari,
and this is a yokai whose name translates, I believe
(08:50):
roughly to the ceiling hangar. I've also seen it described
as the ceiling dropper. So this entity was first reported
by noted scholar and yokai chronicler Tori Seki in his
illustrated Yokai books of the eighteenth century, and according to
Matthew Meyers Yokai dot Com, there's an argument to be
made here that Sekian largely created this creature. So it
(09:12):
kind of depends on his yokai some of them. Some
of them are definitely more folk traditions that he is reporting,
some he's maybe putting his own spin on, and some
he may be sort of creating whole cloth. So Matthew
Meyer writes, quote in Old Japan, the space above the
ceiling was connected with lots of superstitions about dead bodies
(09:32):
rolling about or women being confined like prisoners. Tinjo Kudari
seems to have been something Toriyama invented based on those myths. Fittingly,
during this time, the phrase to show someone in the
ceiling was a colloquial expression for causing trouble, which Tinjo
Kudari certainly does, and he adds the possible connection to
(09:54):
another tale, a story of a yokai that was something
of an attic monster in an inn, descended down at
night to drag travelers up to consume them. And of
course that one is more overtly threatening than a lot
of yokai. A lot of yokai, as we've discussed in
the show before, they're just they're doing their own creepy thing,
and just witnessing them is maybe the limit of human interaction.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I see, Yeah, they're living parallel lives in a parallel
world almost. But yeah, but some are more more predatory.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah, yeah, Like some are going to be more aggressive
and might hurt you or harm you in some way,
and some they're just like, well, you've got to peek
into the unseen world there, and I hope you're okay
with it. Okay, Now, I did find this whole treatment
of the ceiling interesting, and I was reading also about
some other tradition, like their ghost stories about for instance,
(10:50):
acts of violence that have taken place that have like
left blood stains that never go away in ceilings and
so forth. You know, there are a lot of ghostly tales
like that. And there is another yo kai known as
the Tinjonami or the ceiling liquor, and this one is
also really fun. So according to Zach Davison at the
(11:11):
Hakku Monogatari kaiden Kai website, it visits during cold nights
to lick the ceiling, leaving these dark streaks behind on
the ceiling, the kind of streaks that say, a child
sleeping in a room might they can't go to sleep.
They're staring up at the ceiling. Maybe there's light from
outside playing on the ceiling and they're noticing these dark
(11:33):
streaks for the first time, and then they can reflect
on where these came from, allegedly the tongue of the
ceiling liquor. So don't stare at the ceiling because you
might see the ceiling liquor and if you see the
ceiling liquor licking the ceiling, you might die. Otherwise, no
real risks involve here. It's not actively trying to hurt you,
(11:53):
but it's not something you actually want to see occurring.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So the licks on the ceiling are an indicator. They're
not gonna mechanistically get you.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, but it's it's one of those interesting things. It's like,
this may be evidence of a ghost, but you don't
want to ever actually see the ghosts. The evidence is
all you really need. And so it's kind of a reminder,
do not look too closely here lest you see something
you can never unsee.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Ceiling liquor almost sounds like one of the Mule Lads,
doesn't that.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Davison also points out that
Sekian might be referring to a line of poetry here
that reads essentially, in the cold winter, tall ceilings swallow
the lantern light. And yeah. So this one was really
weird though, to try and figure out, like what are
(12:42):
we supposed to make of it? Like what is the
intended reader supposed to make of the idea of the
ceiling like liquor, And on one level, you potentially just
have a scary story that also explains mysterious stains. And
we're all familiar from seeing stains like this, you know,
often caused by like water dripping and so leaks in
the roof and so forth, no matter what the structure
(13:03):
of your house might be. But as Michael Dylan Foster
points out in twenty fifteen's Licking the Ceiling, semantic staining
and Monstrous Diversity, Yochai scholars have also brought up the
idea that second is referencing Edo period firefighters or the
especially their sort of signature of clothing, some of the
(13:24):
frills and the way that the clothing and thrills and
fingers of this creature are depicted, and it would be
a visual pun that might have been better understood on
some level by the intended reader. Okay, So Matthew Meyer
mentions this as well, describing the ceiling liquor as essentially
a transform matoid. These are like paper flags that were
(13:47):
carried by Edo period firemen. You can look up pictures
of these. They look like something you would have in
a parade, you know, lots of tassels and all. And
so the idea is maybe this creature is supposed to
be a transformed version of this thing that the firemen
would carry. But beyond that, I can't find much about
(14:07):
the definite connection here. Is it something concerning fire risks
and ceilings? To me at least uncertain because the prime
firefighting tool of these firemen would have been the destruction
or partial destruction of structures that were either on fire
or about to become on fire to keep that fire
from spreading. So water pumps were not really used till later,
(14:28):
because I was initially thinking, oh, well, maybe firefighters water
water damage stains. But I don't think that's the connection
here at all. But fascinating the way these things seem
to stitch together.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
It's interesting regarding ghostly implications of perceived stains on the ceiling.
This may be a totally idiosyncratic connection that has nothing
to do with history. But I do know from at
least one example of somebody who has a fairly persistent
edge of sleek hallucinations tends to wake up thinking that
they see things in the room with a kind of
(15:03):
dream intrusion on the physical environment. A very very common
manifestation of this is illusory stains on the ceiling and walls.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Oh that is fascinating. Yeah, because the other way I
was thinking about it is like, even in my own house,
there's like one place in the living room where there's
a scuff on the ceiling, and I have no idea
how it got there, Like how did that happen? And
so on one level in our mind we might think,
you know, we might be dwelling on this floor ceiling dichotomy.
(15:37):
So like, if there's a stain on the floor while
it dripped there, it's spilt there, But how does the
stain get on the ceiling? What can drip onto the ceiling?
What can scuff the ceiling? Nothing's walking around up there.
It must be something uncanny, It must be something from
some kind of inverted world.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I personally know the story behind every scuff on my ceiling.
There it's because I tried to move of the acoustic
partition wall, and there because I tried to move the
wall again.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Well, yes, there are the known scuffs, for sure, and
the more embarrassing the story behind them, the better we
remember them.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Most of mine are connected to trying to turn a
basement room with a low ceiling into a recording space.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Now, as far as supernatural creatures of folklore, and legend.
There may be some other good ones out there, So listeners,
if you know of other upside down creatures from folklore
and mythology, and we haven't covered them here on the
show right in because we would love to hear from you.
There are, of course various upside down creatures in comic books.
For example, in fact, I wasn't familiar with this one,
(16:43):
but I ran across something called upside Down Man in
DC's Justice League series, and you can look up pictures
of this creature. Basically a monstrous enemy from another dimension,
but in the visual medium of comics, he's very often
depicted in an inverted position.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Shaped and walking on his hands, or.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Or often kind of in the frames I was looking at,
like kind of gigantic and partially outside of the frame,
but inverted. So it's like you're not necessarily in like
a physical space, but some sort of either an extra
dimensional space or sort of like the visual extra dimensional
space that you find in certain comic book scenes. Well,
(17:22):
we're not supposed to take it as an actual like
physical space. It's just representing interaction between two characters, and
he is often presented upside down.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This is interesting. I didn't fully get into this for
this episode, But I was thinking about how often in
poetry and literature upside downness is a visual and spatial
metaphor just for wrongness or the thing that should not
be and is a violation of the order, is something
(17:53):
that indicates chaos and disorder or moral decay, you know,
thinking about There's a passage in ts Eliot's The Waste Land,
which is very The last section of that poem is
describing like a journey through the desert, the parched landscape
that has a world gone wrong and destroyed, and he
(18:14):
talks about coming upon a I think, coming upon a
city in the desert where bats with baby faces crawl
upside down, and he sees inverted towers in the air
hanging upside down. So it seems to be part of
the metaphor created there is something I mean, it might
also be an indication of the actual scene imagine, because
(18:36):
I guess if it's supposed to be in the desert,
seeing the upside down towers might be like a mirage
or a fata morgana kind of illusion. But I don't
know if that's what it's supposed to mean. But I
think also all the upside downness, especially the bats with
baby faces. Upside down is clearly supposed to indicate something
is wrong here. And it's funny because there's nothing especially
(18:59):
bad about being upside down, but we take it as
a metaphor for wrongness.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Yeah, and I feel like baby's upside down. Baby's on
the ceiling. I've seen that before somewhere, like definitely. I
guess to a certain extent. In Labyrinth, Toby is towards
the end when we have big Esher Room. I guess
Toby's on the ceiling at some point if I'm not mistaken.
But I feel like there's another film out there where
some sort of magic baby or superpowered baby is on
(19:26):
the ceiling. Maybe it's maybe it's Jack Jack from the
Pixelaro Inredibles, Yeah, Incredibles. Or maybe it's something poltergeisty. I'm
not sure, but he's ringing a bell.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Maybe we'll come back to that.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Yeah, let's see.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Are you ready to talk about space, Let's do it?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Okay, So, last time we talked about that scene in
the Inferno where Dante is only bewildered because again they're
crawling down the body of Satan and it seems like
out of nowhere. The world has flipped upside down around him,
and initially he is without explanation until Virgil gives the explanation,
(20:15):
which is that because they have passed through the very
center of the Earth, now the directions of up and
down have reversed, and so up has become down and
vice versa. So Dante is describing this moment of overwhelming
confusion at the sudden subjective inversion of up down continuity,
(20:35):
and that moment actually brings to mind a similar situation
that occurs in reality, and that is a common experience
that astronauts report in microgravity. So I want to talk
about astronauts something called visual reorientation illusions and something called
the spider Man illusion. To introduce this idea, I was
(20:59):
reading a June twenty twenty article in the newspaper of
the LSU School of Medicine by Leslie Coppo featuring an
interview with a NASA astronaut, and I think at the
time an LSU professor of medicine. I believe she might
be with a different institution now, but a medical doctor
and professor of medicine named Serena Onen Chancellor, and she's
(21:23):
talking in this interview about her experience as a flight
engineer in expeditions fifty six and fifty seven to the
International Space Station. These were both in twenty eighteen, and
on a Chancellor talks about how one of the biggest
challenges of spaceflight and of the especially the early time
spent at the space station, is the body's adjustment to microgravity.
(21:46):
This is something we've talked about before, but never with
this particular angle that I recall. So you know, literally,
the space station and its occupants are in free fall.
They're in orbit around the Earth. And since the station
inhabitants and the station are all falling at the same rate,
there is no ground inside the station, and there's no
(22:07):
gravitational queue to tell the astronauts which way is up
or down. So inside the space station there is no
up or down except that which you try to sort
of culturally impose. There's not a physically sensed up or
down and so on. In Chancellor describes the experience going
from launch, through the initial burn and into orbit, saying, quote,
(22:32):
after that eight minutes and forty seconds, when the third
stage finally cuts off, your brain does not perceive your
environment the same as it did back on Earth. I
almost felt like everything was that a forty five degree
tilt to the left in front of me, and even
the control panels and the console console in the soused
(22:52):
vehicle itself appear different. That took a couple of hours
to resolve. So that's interesting. We can imagine weird sensations
of being in microgravity, like you can imagine even if
you haven't felt it yourself. You can sort of imagine
the feeling of floating, of you know, having this sensation
(23:13):
of weightlessness. But there are these other things she's describing,
like suddenly it feels like the world is tilted forty
five degrees. That's strange and specific, and I thought it's
interesting how we don't always appreciate that the weirdness of
being in microgravity is not just a body sensations. It's
(23:35):
like a new perceptual and even cognitive regime that causes
perceptual and cognitive distortions. In other words, when you lose
the ground and the normal gravitational cues for up and down,
it leads to illusions of the senses and of the mind.
One of the illusions she describes is very Dante crawling
(23:56):
on Satan. So she says that a lot of assauts
report what is called an inversion illusion, so that your
sense of up and down does not disappear when you
are in microgravity. It persists, or maybe sometimes suddenly comes
back very strongly, but inverted, so that no matter what
(24:18):
position you're in, you feel suddenly like you are hanging
upside down. And apparently the astronauts sometimes called this the
Spider Man illusion, I guess especially. I don't know if
it predates this, but it makes me think of that
scene in the Toby maguire movie where he's hanging upside
down with the kiss that's on the poster reserve.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Oh yeah, the weird upside down kiss.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
But I guess the Spider Man hangs upside down a lot. Yeah, yeah, so,
yeah called They sometimes call it informally the Spider Man illusion.
I think equally you could have called it the vampire
bat illusion or the sloth illusion. It's that there isn't
necessarily a gravitationally enforced up or down around you, but
your brain's still trying to make up and down happen,
(25:00):
and suddenly it just decides I'm hanging upside down. I'm
hanging upside down, and I don't.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Know why interesting. I wonder if this is related. I've
heard of similar things with pilots fine planes, and this
may be something that's maybe more likely in like high
performance flight. But you can have your horizon sort of
messed up and you can think up as down and
(25:24):
down is up.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, Well maybe we can try to make
more sense of that as we go on, because I
want to get to a study in a minute. It's
very much about how visual information interacts with these feelings
in the body. But on a Chancellor goes on to
describe more common symptoms of space adaptation. So you have
things like nausea, lack of appetite you can imagine, and
(25:46):
then of course the physiological effects of microgravity that we've
talked about before. I think we've been mentioned in the
last episode, like stuffiness in the head and upper body.
And then on Chancellor goes on to say more about
these confusion and illusions related to the lack of a
gravitational up and down. In one sense, you can think
of this unhitching from gravity as a kind of freedom.
(26:09):
She says, quote, I can do science on any side,
talking about any side of the module. I can do
science on the ceiling I can do science on the walls.
I can be flipped upside down, I can eat upside down.
It doesn't really matter. But that freedom doesn't necessarily feel
like freedom. It can also be very difficult, disorienting and uncomfortable,
(26:30):
especially at first.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, and also becomes less of a freedom when you
have to figure out how to use the restroom and
things of that nature.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, you might need some vacuum assistance there.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, because without gravity it can be a little bit
more difficult.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Can't do right. So she says that some of the
astronauts call this early period of adjustment the first reprogramming phase.
But over time the brain is able to adapt. She says,
in her experience, the first one to two weeks there
tends to be a lot of disorder related to the
brain trying to insist that the head is up and
(27:05):
the feed are down, but then getting this conflicting sensory data.
And then usually after three to four weeks, she says,
the brain adjusts and becomes somewhat more comfortable with this
upless and downless world. And she says, at that point
you can kind of move around with less concern for
up and down where your feed are pointed where your
(27:25):
head is that sort of thing, and the brain, she says,
adapts beautifully. So it's interesting to consider both things here
that in one sense, our brains are kind of stubborn
and they're trying, and the brain is trying to insist
on like vertical orientation. I'll talk more about that in
a paper. I want to mention in just a minute,
(27:46):
trying to insist on vertical orientation even in a context
where it doesn't make sense. On the other hand, give
it time. And the brain is highly adaptable in a way.
I guess that's kind of our whole lives, isn't it.
You know, the constant tension between the rigidity and the
adaptability of our brains.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I don't know if
we'll get into it in this episode or in the next,
but yeah, there are other examples of how our brain
just sort of makes makes the best it can out
of the sensory data that it is provided with. In
the sensory data may concern what's up and what's down,
and the brain is like, all right, we're gonna work
with it. We're gonna make it work for us.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
So I was reading more about inversion illusions and related
phenomena among astronauts. In a two thousand and three paper
that was based on research carried out on the NASA
Neurolab space lab mission. The paper was called the Role
of Visual Cues in Microgravity Spatial Orientation. Neurolab was a
(28:49):
sixteen day space shuttle mission carried out in nineteen ninety
eight specifically to study the neuroscience of spaceflight, particularly how
like various brain functions are affected by microgravity. The authors
of this paper are Charles Ohmann, Ian Howard Theodore Smith,
Andrew Beal, Alan Natopoff, James Zacker, and Heather Jenkin. And
(29:14):
so the authors of this paper start off by talking
about the physiology of how we normally sense up and down.
Of course, some cues are visual, some are tactle, but
under normal circumstances, a big part of how your body
senses constructs a sense of up and down. Really, because
again there is no in the universe objective thing, no
(29:37):
such objective thing as up and down. But you know
it is a subjective feeling created by our relationship to
the nearest largest gravitational attractor that our brains construct this
idea of up and down with the help of dedicated
acceleration sensing organs in the inner ears called odoliths. These
(29:57):
are little tiny crystals stones made of calcium carbonate, which
is the same material that makes limestone, cave formations and
clam shells. So you've got little kind of you know,
stalactites or stalagmites or clamshell type crystals.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's like a little biopunk level, right.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yeah, well, I think actually it might be a slightly
different crystal arrangement, but it's calcium carbonate of one form
or another. These the odorliths are made of and they're
suspended in the inner ear in a kind of gel
or a kind of fluid gel, and they interact with
these tiny hairs in the inner ear so that they
are able to sense changes in the speed and orientation
(30:42):
of the body. So we use these organs to feel
the sensations of movement, of linear acceleration, of gravity, of
orientation and balance. And there's an interesting fact about physics
that is actually indirectly discoverable through studying our inner ear function.
(31:03):
That fact is that gravity is locally indistinguishable from acceleration.
This is not exactly true on a large enough scale
because on a large scale you get interesting things like
gravity exerting tidal forces on the scale of a human body.
With a gravitational attractor the size of planet Earth, you're
(31:24):
not really going to have something like that. So gravity
is indistinguishable from acceleration. A person standing on the ground
feeling Earth's gravity of nine point eight meters per second
squared feels almost exactly the same force as somebody standing
head up in a rocket ship that is accelerating at
nine point eight meters per second squared. To that person,
(31:46):
the forces are basically the same, and that's why the
organs that we use to feel the pull of gravity
and orient our bodies with respect to up and down
are the same organs we use to feel the sensation
of linear acceleration because locally they are the same thing.
So on Earth at regular altitude, gravity is experienced as
(32:06):
this constant acceleration toward the ground.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And as we've discussed on the show before, that's why
some of these artificial gravity proposals would seem to be functional,
like artificial gravity via propulsion in a space ship, where
you have a spaceship that's like a skyscraper and you
feel as if you have gravitational force on each of
(32:33):
those floors, or of course the big double tourist situation
like we have in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Yeah, spinning surface if it's big enough.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, as we discussed in those episodes, you'll find them
in the archive. Yeah, there are a lot of additional
factors to concern yourself with.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
That's right. So acceleration can function as a pretty much
perfect substitute for gravity if you get the you know,
if you get all the details right. This is where
things get wild in space. About the space if you
(33:10):
don't have artificial gravity, if you are in freefall like
the astronauts and the ISS are, or if you're in
orbit in a space Shuttle mission. So when astronauts are
in freefall in orbit around the Earth, the authors say
that the odoliths quote float into unusual positions and tilting
(33:30):
the head produces no sustained otolith displacement the way it
does on Earth. The unusual signals from the otolith organs
and zero G are apparently not sufficient to produce major
changes in the inner ear to eye reflexes that allow
the eyes to stay fixed on an object while the
body is moving. Also, although astronauts typically don't report sensations
(33:54):
of falling. They are susceptible to illusions about body orientation.
So what are these other illusions about body movement and orientation.
The authors talk about one that is the same thing
that On and Chancell are called the spider Man illusion.
The authors here refer to these as inversion illusions, and
they say that a lot of astronauts report these immediately
(34:17):
after reaching orbit from the initial launch. So they'll be
seated in their launch position in the cabin and then
suddenly get the overwhelming sensation that they are actually hanging
upside down from the ceiling. Inversion illusions can happen with
the eyes open or closed, and the illusion most often
lasts for only a day or two before it starts
(34:39):
to subside. But you can imagine that it could have
major potential to interfere with crew members' ability to stay
focused on the task. So this is a this is
not without consequence. It's not just like a weird little thing.
It's like, you know, you don't want you don't want
to be experiencing this if you don't have to.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Right, Generally, there is a lot to do on a
mission like this, and it's you know, it's an extreme environment,
you need to be on your toes and ready to
jump in and work on things. And so the idea
of being disoriented for an extended period of time right
at the top, that doesn't sound like a positive prospect.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
There's another type of illusion the authors talk about called
visual reorientation illusions or VRIS. These are illusions that can
happen when someone is in a microgravity environment and they
get visual cues that conflict with their established working sense
(35:38):
of where up and down are. So that established working
sense of up and down is what the authors of
the paper called the astronauts subjective vertical or SV. Now,
we don't usually need to think about our subjective vertical
because it's going to be pretty you know, for most
people who unless you have some kind of disorder of
(36:00):
the inner ear or something like, you know, something going
on most of the time. For most people, your subjective
vertical is also going to be the same as everybody
else's subjective vertical around you. You know, down is where
your feet are pointed, up is where your head is pointed.
Is pretty straightforward. But the brain maintains a sense of
a subjective vertical even in a microgravity environment. So even
(36:24):
though you no longer feel up and down with your odoliths.
Your brain still insists we got to find up and down,
which way's up, which ways down? And the brain might
decide that this wall of the module is the floor
and the opposite wall is the ceiling. But then imagine,
so you're working on that assumption. You figured out, okay,
here's the floor, here's the ceiling. But then you suddenly
(36:47):
see visual information that conflicts with your brain subjective vertical,
like you see another astronaut floating upside down from your perspective,
or you see a dropped object failing to fall towards
your floor, you know, because gravity isn't there, so it's
not going to fall. And then suddenly the brain says, oh, no,
(37:08):
something is wrong, and you get a visual reorientation illusion
where your subjective vertical instantly flips and the floor becomes
the ceiling and now you are upside down. This is
described as an unpleasant experience that can trigger attacks of
nausea and motion sickness, especially in the first week or
(37:29):
so of orbital conditions, but the sense of direction problems
can persist for months. The authors say that vris were
first reported by a Russian cosmonaut named German Titov in
nineteen sixty one, and by the nineteen nineties they were
well known to Skylab and Space Lab crews. They were
often known as the downs. So you get them the
(37:52):
downs suddenly, oh my down is up? Now, Uh, don't
feel good. So the authors point out that are usually
spontaneous and unwelcome when they happen, but that astronauts have
reported that they can be either triggered or sometimes reversed
by intentional cognitive effort. So you're in microgravity and you
(38:16):
force yourself to think about the floor and the ceiling,
you can sometimes cause your subjective vertical to flip on purpose,
which I wonder exactly. I don't know exactly how that feels,
but I'm imagining it kind of like the magic eye.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, you look at just the right stimuli,
or if you bring a Tsliot bat baby with you
on the flight there, you you just stick that sucker
up to what may seem like the ceiling and damn
you're triggered.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah. But interesting question here, like since gravity no longer
rains in the orbital environment, so objects you drop an
object and it doesn't fall, you might just expect the
brain to not care about which direction is down, but
reports from astronauts indicate that the usually the brain, especially
(39:02):
at first, still tries to maintain the sense of the vertical.
It's just part of our programming and it's hard to shake.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Again, it is the it is where we evolved as being.
So it makes sense that it's kind of you know,
stitched in, hardwired to our understanding to or even are
like an understanding of what our body is and where
our body is in space.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Yeah. So, the authors point out that experiments on Earth
have demonstrated that people substantially use visual information and not
just their inner ear organs, to determine which way is down,
and they cite a bunch of examples of this. One
thing they talk about is experiments where scientists build a
(39:48):
slightly tilted room or build a tumbling room where they
can adjust the direction. So you can, you know, imagine
being in a room where the floor and all of
the objects in the room are not quite flat. They
maybe it's tilted a little bit to the side. And
so they put people in environments like this and have
them try to find and point to up and down.
(40:10):
Often the visual information can take over. When asked to
point down, people in a tilted room will point not
toward the gravitational down, but toward the floor of the
tilted room. So in this case, visual information is somewhat
overriding the felt information from the odoliths.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah. Yeah, And I think if anyone out there, if
you've got to any like high end haunted attraction or
some of the various like Museum of Illusions out there,
you'll encounter rooms like this designed to throw off your
perception of up and down, tilted floors, spinning rooms, and
so forth.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yeah. Yeah, In fact, I've got something about that in
just a minute. But from this, the author's posit that
the subjective vertical is actually established by a combination of cues.
The brain is is consulting an interaction between sensory information,
not just the inner ear, but also visual information and
(41:09):
maybe other things too, And usually this information is in harmony,
so it doesn't cause a problem, but in microgravity it
can be wildly out of wax, so it does cause
a problem. Another interesting fact, this is just a little
side note, not really relevant to us, but the authors
point out that there are minor gravity sensing capabilities outside
(41:30):
the organs of the inner ear. They cite that the
kidneys and the cardiovascular system have some ability to sense
gravitational orientation, and they don't go into detail about why
that is. But I wonder if I has to do
with fluid flows the fluid is it's going to be
gravitationally attracted to the ground.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, I mean that seems like the most likely explanation.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Yeah, So if the brain uses visual information to determine
up and down, what are the main visual cues, Because
there aren't necessarily objective up and down that we can
see with our eyes, you know, it depends actually on
knowing the context of the environment around you. So we
(42:13):
might consult familiar objects, like we expect to see ceiling
type objects like light fixtures up, and we expect to
see floor type objects like furniture down. We expect to
see writing right side up, We expect to see a
drinking glass with the open end pointed up. That sort
of thing. The other thing is our own bodies. We
(42:35):
have a strong tendency to feel that our feet are
pointed down unless other information overwhelms that. And there's an
interesting section in the intro here about differences in how
the brain handles disagreement between the senses establishing the subjective vertical.
Depending on how big the disagreement is. Quote, if there
(42:57):
are minor directional differences between the gravity receptor and visual
cues to the vertical, the brain apparently compromises, and the
SV the subjective vertical points to an intermediate direction. So
quote the remaining component of gravity is then perceived as
a mysterious force pulling the body to one side. They
(43:20):
say this illusion can be readily experienced in houses tilted
by an earthquake. And this brings us back to what
you were saying rob about, like the haunted house or
the Museum of Illusions type room, the room that's tilted.
I know exactly what they're talking about, this mysterious force.
Something feels wrong. There's some kind of uncanny physics that
(43:42):
feels like it's pulling you to the side.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I have felt this.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Yeah. And then the quote goes on to say, if
the disparity in direction of the gravity receptor and the
visual verticals is large, one sensory modality or the other
typically captures the subjective vertical. So one just takes over
and says, vertical is mine. Now, they say, quote Tilting
the head away from the gravitationally erect position enhances the
(44:11):
effect of visual cues. There seem to be consistent differences
between individuals in the relative weighing assigned to visual versus
gravity receptor cues. Older individuals appear more susceptible to visually
induced tilt. Scene motion enhances visually induced tilt for most subjects.
(44:32):
So I thought that was really interesting too, about like
these individual differences. I am now very curious about myself,
and I feel like I don't have an easy way
to know. Is my personal subjective vertical more doggedly tied
to the gravity receptors and the inner ear, or is
it more susceptible to visual information? I would like to
know what kind of up and down man?
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I am, well, you know, maybe you got to wait
till October on this one and find a good uh
hanta detraction of it.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
It maybe, But again they do say that visual information
tends to be stronger if you are older. I don't
know if that means visual information is stronger or if
that means the inner ear is weaker. And it also,
visual information tends to be more powerful if you are moving,
or if the scene around you appears to be moving.
(45:29):
So anyway, the authors of the study, they talk about
some more interesting things in their introduction, but I guess
we should get to their finding. So the mission is
not like a huge sample size. There was sort of
a pilot study of this sort of thing, and this
has been followed up on with larger studies of astronauts
over time. But this initial test used the four adult
(45:50):
male astronauts of this mission in orbit with a variety
of experiments, many including virtual reality goggles as a stimulus,
and their major findings were as follows. Again, there were
fairly strong individual differences in how people created their subjective
vertical and these tended to continue during spaceflight, though one
(46:13):
astronaut became more dependent on visual cues to determine up
and down while in microgravity. They say that they found
astronauts in microgravity became a lot more vulnerable to what
they call circular self motion illusions, the illusion that you
are spinning or rolling triggered by visual cues of rolling.
(46:35):
And then they also looked at visual cues associated with
linear movement through a scene. So this was studying quote
whether a virtual scene moving past the subject produces a
stronger linear self motion illusion. So imagine your stationary in microgravity,
(46:56):
you put on virtual reality goggles that suggest you are
moving forward linear motion through a scene. Do you feel
in your body like you're actually moving through a scene?
The research found yes, absolutely, in microgravity they experienced this
feeling of gliding like a ghost or like the camera
(47:17):
in Dario Argento's Deep Red gliding through the scene forward.
This feeling of illusory linear motion came on faster, and
it was stronger when triggered by the virtual reality in
these in the microgravity conditions. The study also found that
these self motion illusions could be somewhat counteracted by having
(47:37):
the astronauts where force springs that press on the body
to simulate gravity. I thought this was interesting. So even
rather crude approximate approximations of gravitational force that I hope
I'm right about this from what I could tell, would
not really be acting on the inner ear organs. It
would be like pressing on maybe the shoulders or the hips,
(47:58):
pressing on the body with springing. That even that kind
of crude approximation, if I'm understanding correctly, could help reduce
self motion illusions.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
And finally, the study also found that changing the subjective
vertical This was really interesting to me. Changing which direction
you feel is up or down could cause changes in
how astronauts perceived objects. So not changing how the object looks,
but just changing which way the astronaut feels the ceiling
(48:33):
or the floor is. That could cause astronauts to make
different judgments about whether a curved surface is convex or concave.
This apparently depends on where you subjectively believe the floor is,
but even more interestingly, on object recognition. So sometimes it
could become harder to recognize a familiar object that you're
(48:55):
used to seeing if you have inverted your sense of
where the floor is. You can imagine again in space
that being able to recognize familiar objects is actually quite important,
especially if you are manning controls or trying to do
any kind of mechanical task or you know, scientific pass Yeah,
(49:15):
so like suddenly recognizing things in your environment. Again, nothing
that you are physically looking at has changed, but your
brain flips and now the floor is the ceiling, and
now what the way you recognize things is different the
author's right quote. Overall results show that most astronauts become
more dependent on dynamic visual motion cues, and some become
(49:40):
responsive to stationary orientation cues. The direction of the subjective
vertical is labile in the absence of gravity. So interesting
that so much depends on up and down. Even in
an environment where up and down cease to have any
gravitational relevance. You're not stuck to the floor, objects don't
(50:04):
fall when you drop them, and yet your brain can't
let up and down go. It still relies on the
sense of up and down to recognize things in its environment,
to interpret visual cues like object shading, to interpret which
way a surface is curved. That depends on where you
think the floor is. To interpret do I recognize this
(50:26):
or not? Do I know what this tool is? Depends
on where you think the floor is. And to understand
how the body itself is moving.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and you know, it comes back to
something that I thought about before, Like, you know, we
have all of these we've gone over all these different
ways that the body is thrown for a loop when
it's taken out of a lot of Earth gravity and
placed in a microgravity environment. But at the same time,
it's also kind of alarming in its own way, Like
(50:57):
we can totally live up there. Granted, we have to
do things like bring our own portion of the atmosphere
with us, you know, because up there, our appropriate portion
of the atmosphere is not you know, it's not gravitationally bound.
You know, we have to bring it with us obviously.
But but we can actually go up there if we
take care of the the some of the environmental conditions.
(51:18):
It's it's not like if we were like a Japanese
Kappa yo kai with the little pool of water in
the top of its skull, like if it goes into space,
the water is going to float away and it's vital
escence is gone. Like like all of our systems they
still work. It's not like they won't work without gravity.
And like that in and of itself is kind of interesting, right,
(51:40):
It's like because again we we evolved in this, in
this gravitationally bound existence, and you know, our systems function
in ways that that depend on or play upon those conditions.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yeah. And then of course the other interesting thing is
talking about the different way is that these probably can
be overcome. Like one of them, as I mentioned earlier,
is that astronauts have found that sometimes with intentional cognitive
force they can undo a visual reorientation illusion, like they
can flip the floor and ceiling back despite concentrating on it,
(52:17):
not always but sometimes. And then the other thing is
so that's like the short term ability to overcome this weirdness,
and then in the long term you also have just
the adaptability and plasticity of the brain. It was what
on and Chancellor was talking about that at first it
can be pretty bad, but over time your brain does adapt.
The brain sort of reprograms itself to feel more comfortable
(52:40):
and natural in this environment. And eventually, I don't I
actually don't know the answer to whether these types of
illusions and problems ever completely stop, but there certainly become
less problematic and persistent over time, and maybe at some
point stop completely. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
Yeah, our brains just have this amazing ability, this neuroplastic
ability to take whatever is available and make the best
out of it, to stitch together an understanding of body
and time and space and place out of whatever is available.
You know, mcguiver's in existence for you, or it's like
(53:17):
one of those shows where it's like, okay, chef, these
are the ingredients you have to cook dinner with and
the brain's like, Okay, yeah, I can work with that.
It would be great if I had garlic. I don't
have garlic, I'll find a way you can live without it.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
That's one of the worst things to be without.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, hopefully you have you know, some shallots around or
some green onions. But yeah, but if the recipe calls
for garlic, what are you gonna do? Maybe garlic is
like gravity in that respect, I don't know. All Right, Well,
we're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we have a lot
more to discuss about the upside Down. We're going to
get into some more areas of this that are tied
(53:55):
in their own way to gravitation. We're going to get
into optics a bit more, and who knows what else
we will summon out of the upside down. So we
hope that you'll join us for that one. In the meantime,
we'll just remind everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on Fridays. We
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
(54:16):
weird film on Weird house cinema, So you know that
helps you make sense of whatever you happen to see
in the stuff to blow your mind. Feed be it
the audio feed wherever you get your audio podcasts, and
we have archives going about years there, or if you're
catching us on Netflix in an audio video format, which
is relatively new for us, wherever you happen to get
(54:37):
the show wherever you're listening and or viewing right now,
we just asked that, hey, pull whatever triggers are available
to you in terms of subscribing or liking, adding stars
or thumbs, just make sure that you know which way
is the thumbs need to go up. Yeah, so if
your sense of up and down is momentarily distressed by microgravity,
(55:00):
let a level out a bit before you rate the show.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
You just mentioned that we were venturing into the audio
visual format. You know, so we've done audio for so long.
Now we've got audio visual as well. I think the
next step has got to be our podcast a silent film.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Okay, sure, yeah.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
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 (55:40):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Wrist watt ter
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on the theme of being upside down.
In the last episode, we started off talking about a
very strange and interesting scene in the Divine Comedy of Dante,
in which Dante the pilgrim and Virgil his guide are
in Hell and they are at the very bottom of Hell.
(00:38):
They are crawling down the wooly haunch of Satan, so
they're on Satan's body and the world suddenly appears to
turn upside down. We talked about what that scene meant
within Dante's medieval worldview and how subsequent changes in our
understanding of physics and cosmology affect how that scene reads.
(00:59):
After that, we started looking at the principle of upside
downness in mammal biology, focusing first on bats, very very
upside down creatures in multiple ways, and then on tree sloths,
and we got into all kinds of questions like why
these animals are adapted to hang upside down, how their
(01:19):
bodies managed this, especially since it's something that becomes incredibly
uncomfortable for us after a few minutes or less. And
we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
That's right. And in the last episode about where we
had ended things, we had been talking about upside down
sloths or sloths, and we were talking about bats, and
we teased out the idea of talking a little bit
about vampires, and you know, especially talking about vampire bats,
like moving this underside of a branch in order to
(01:51):
get at some birds. You know, I couldn't help but
think about vampires and think about Dracula, and it actually
called to mind an excellent passage from the novel Dracula
by Bromstoker. I'm going to read it from it here.
What I saw was the count's head coming out from
the window. I did not see the face, but I
knew the man by the neck and the movement of
(02:13):
his back and arms. In any case, I could not
mistake the hands, which I had had so many opportunities
of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused,
for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest
and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But
my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I
saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and
(02:35):
began to crawl down the castle wall, over that dreadful abyss,
face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like
great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes.
I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some
weird effect of shadow. But I kept looking, and it
could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes
(02:56):
grasp the corners of the stone, worn clear of the
moor or by the stress of years, and by thus
using every projection and inequality, moved downwards with considerable speed,
just as a lizard moves along a wall.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
It's funny because this scene from the book is pretty
faithfully reproduced. I think in the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula movie,
there's a scene where they show Gary Oldman in his
he's still in the Old Man Dracula form with the
butt hair, so he's got the butt hair, but he's
crawling down, face down, down the wall of the castle,
(03:31):
and I think they use some sped up film to
like show him scuttling really quick like a lizard, and
it's almost funny looking, But that is what the what
the novel, says.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, I love that scene in the in the movie.
And and so we see this reference visually a lot
in various vamphire films and other sci fi and horror films.
And I was trying to think of a few examples.
Really one of the first ones that this didn't quite
come to mind, but it came up when I was
looking around. There is a scene in John Carpenter's Vampires.
(04:03):
You know, as we discussed, not the top tier Carpenter,
but still, as it is the case with any John
Carpenter film, some interesting moments, And there is a moment
where we have the big bad vampire of that picture
kind of positioned in a cruciform pose on the ceiling
(04:24):
behind one of the characters.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, almost looks like laying down drunken on the floor,
but on the ceiling right now.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
In films that we've watched for Weird House Cinema, our
Friday episodes of the show when we just talk about
a weird movie, we did recently watch The Boxer's Omen
in which we have a warlock character who is who
has a close affiliation with bats and other creatures, and
he climbs on the ceiling and crawls across the ceiling
in order to what drop a spider down onto a
(04:55):
rival Buddhist sorcerer.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I believe, yes, he has a there's a there's a
good sorcerer and an evil sorcerer, and the evil one
attacks the good one by i think, dropping spiders on
his face that stab his eyes with him.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, yes, and blind him. But yeah. Various movies love
to throw their monsters up onto the ceiling. There is,
of course, a pretty amazing and famous sequence in John
Carpenter is the thing in which one of the you know,
the entity, the entity is pretending to be one of
the humans, and it ends up like flying up onto
the ceiling and begins to you know, bubble and transmute
(05:31):
into a different form.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
I wonder by what mechanism is the thing sticking to
the ceiling, because it's supposed to be human anatomy at.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That point, Yeah, I'm not sure I really need to
sit down and rewatch it. But I there's a lot
of crazy stuff happening in that sequence, so it almost
feels feels sensible that the impossible is happening. So vampires
are of course closely associated with dats in many traditions,
(05:58):
especially modern tradition. But I have another bat related creature
to bring up here, and it is the Alan of
the Philippines. This is spelled just like Alan, but it
is the name of a particular creature in Filipino tradition.
And I first read about this creature in the work
of folk lore's Carol Rose, who I frequently saw it.
(06:20):
She has a couple of tremendous volumes that have a
lot of creatures chronicled from around the world, and Rose
describes them as a is, this being a group of
creatures in the folklore of the Tengean people, also I
think referred to as the Itnig of the Philippines, and
she describes them as bird like people with fingers and
(06:40):
toes that point backwards, which enable them to hang upside
down from the topmost branches of trees. So we get
inverted and backwards with this creature, and clearly, despite being
described in Avian terms, their basic description brings to mind
the various fruit bats of the world, and a number
of them are found in the Philippines, including the giant
(07:02):
golden crowned flying fox. They roost in the trees, but
the al roosts in the trees, but also have houses
of pure gold on the ground. Were told and different
tales position them as you know, everything from tricksters to
benevolent helpers. So I was looking for more information about
these creatures, and I found I ran across the excellent website,
(07:23):
the Aswang Project, which I believe I've encountered before. It's
maintained by one Jordan Clark, and he points He points
to several other things about these creatures, points out that
they're said to adopt lost children, and also that they
make new elons out of the sort of pilfer biomaterials
associated with female human procreation or the female side of
(07:45):
human procreation. So I don't know, they're kind of crafty
genetic tinkerers, I imagine in that regard. Clark's breakdown also
points at the possibility in some Western retellings that the
Alan is confused and combined with other creatures, and points
out that there are a finite number of creature types
(08:06):
in the Philippines, but with lots of regional variations, which
is something I think we find in a lot of
folkloric traditions. So reminder that the Philippines consist of more
than seven thousand islands and more than one hundred and
eighty five ethnic groups. So you might have a certain
type of creature that's common in different groups, but you know,
individual communities even are going to have a different spin
(08:28):
on that creature. Now, turning to the world of Japanese
yo kai, who I found not one, but two very
interesting ceiling related creatures. So the first is the Tinjo kudari,
and this is a yokai whose name translates, I believe
(08:50):
roughly to the ceiling hangar. I've also seen it described
as the ceiling dropper. So this entity was first reported
by noted scholar and yokai chronicler Tori Seki in his
illustrated Yokai books of the eighteenth century, and according to
Matthew Meyers Yokai dot Com, there's an argument to be
made here that Sekian largely created this creature. So it
(09:12):
kind of depends on his yokai some of them. Some
of them are definitely more folk traditions that he is reporting,
some he's maybe putting his own spin on, and some
he may be sort of creating whole cloth. So Matthew
Meyer writes, quote in Old Japan, the space above the
ceiling was connected with lots of superstitions about dead bodies
(09:32):
rolling about or women being confined like prisoners. Tinjo Kudari
seems to have been something Toriyama invented based on those myths. Fittingly,
during this time, the phrase to show someone in the
ceiling was a colloquial expression for causing trouble, which Tinjo
Kudari certainly does, and he adds the possible connection to
(09:54):
another tale, a story of a yokai that was something
of an attic monster in an inn, descended down at
night to drag travelers up to consume them. And of
course that one is more overtly threatening than a lot
of yokai. A lot of yokai, as we've discussed in
the show before, they're just they're doing their own creepy thing,
and just witnessing them is maybe the limit of human interaction.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I see, Yeah, they're living parallel lives in a parallel
world almost. But yeah, but some are more more predatory.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah, yeah, Like some are going to be more aggressive
and might hurt you or harm you in some way,
and some they're just like, well, you've got to peek
into the unseen world there, and I hope you're okay
with it. Okay, Now, I did find this whole treatment
of the ceiling interesting, and I was reading also about
some other tradition, like their ghost stories about for instance,
(10:50):
acts of violence that have taken place that have like
left blood stains that never go away in ceilings and
so forth. You know, there are a lot of ghostly tales
like that. And there is another yo kai known as
the Tinjonami or the ceiling liquor, and this one is
also really fun. So according to Zach Davison at the
(11:11):
Hakku Monogatari kaiden Kai website, it visits during cold nights
to lick the ceiling, leaving these dark streaks behind on
the ceiling, the kind of streaks that say, a child
sleeping in a room might they can't go to sleep.
They're staring up at the ceiling. Maybe there's light from
outside playing on the ceiling and they're noticing these dark
(11:33):
streaks for the first time, and then they can reflect
on where these came from, allegedly the tongue of the
ceiling liquor. So don't stare at the ceiling because you
might see the ceiling liquor and if you see the
ceiling liquor licking the ceiling, you might die. Otherwise, no
real risks involve here. It's not actively trying to hurt you,
(11:53):
but it's not something you actually want to see occurring.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So the licks on the ceiling are an indicator. They're
not gonna mechanistically get you.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, but it's it's one of those interesting things. It's like,
this may be evidence of a ghost, but you don't
want to ever actually see the ghosts. The evidence is
all you really need. And so it's kind of a reminder,
do not look too closely here lest you see something
you can never unsee.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Ceiling liquor almost sounds like one of the Mule Lads,
doesn't that.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Davison also points out that
Sekian might be referring to a line of poetry here
that reads essentially, in the cold winter, tall ceilings swallow
the lantern light. And yeah. So this one was really
weird though, to try and figure out, like what are
(12:42):
we supposed to make of it? Like what is the
intended reader supposed to make of the idea of the
ceiling like liquor, And on one level, you potentially just
have a scary story that also explains mysterious stains. And
we're all familiar from seeing stains like this, you know,
often caused by like water dripping and so leaks in
the roof and so forth, no matter what the structure
(13:03):
of your house might be. But as Michael Dylan Foster
points out in twenty fifteen's Licking the Ceiling, semantic staining
and Monstrous Diversity, Yochai scholars have also brought up the
idea that second is referencing Edo period firefighters or the
especially their sort of signature of clothing, some of the
(13:24):
frills and the way that the clothing and thrills and
fingers of this creature are depicted, and it would be
a visual pun that might have been better understood on
some level by the intended reader. Okay, So Matthew Meyer
mentions this as well, describing the ceiling liquor as essentially
a transform matoid. These are like paper flags that were
(13:47):
carried by Edo period firemen. You can look up pictures
of these. They look like something you would have in
a parade, you know, lots of tassels and all. And
so the idea is maybe this creature is supposed to
be a transformed version of this thing that the firemen
would carry. But beyond that, I can't find much about
(14:07):
the definite connection here. Is it something concerning fire risks
and ceilings? To me at least uncertain because the prime
firefighting tool of these firemen would have been the destruction
or partial destruction of structures that were either on fire
or about to become on fire to keep that fire
from spreading. So water pumps were not really used till later,
(14:28):
because I was initially thinking, oh, well, maybe firefighters water
water damage stains. But I don't think that's the connection
here at all. But fascinating the way these things seem
to stitch together.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
It's interesting regarding ghostly implications of perceived stains on the ceiling.
This may be a totally idiosyncratic connection that has nothing
to do with history. But I do know from at
least one example of somebody who has a fairly persistent
edge of sleek hallucinations tends to wake up thinking that
they see things in the room with a kind of
(15:03):
dream intrusion on the physical environment. A very very common
manifestation of this is illusory stains on the ceiling and walls.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Oh that is fascinating. Yeah, because the other way I
was thinking about it is like, even in my own house,
there's like one place in the living room where there's
a scuff on the ceiling, and I have no idea
how it got there, Like how did that happen? And
so on one level in our mind we might think,
you know, we might be dwelling on this floor ceiling dichotomy.
(15:37):
So like, if there's a stain on the floor while
it dripped there, it's spilt there, But how does the
stain get on the ceiling? What can drip onto the ceiling?
What can scuff the ceiling? Nothing's walking around up there.
It must be something uncanny, It must be something from
some kind of inverted world.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I personally know the story behind every scuff on my ceiling.
There it's because I tried to move of the acoustic
partition wall, and there because I tried to move the
wall again.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Well, yes, there are the known scuffs, for sure, and
the more embarrassing the story behind them, the better we
remember them.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Most of mine are connected to trying to turn a
basement room with a low ceiling into a recording space.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Now, as far as supernatural creatures of folklore, and legend.
There may be some other good ones out there, So listeners,
if you know of other upside down creatures from folklore
and mythology, and we haven't covered them here on the
show right in because we would love to hear from you.
There are, of course various upside down creatures in comic books.
For example, in fact, I wasn't familiar with this one,
(16:43):
but I ran across something called upside Down Man in
DC's Justice League series, and you can look up pictures
of this creature. Basically a monstrous enemy from another dimension,
but in the visual medium of comics, he's very often
depicted in an inverted position.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Shaped and walking on his hands, or.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Or often kind of in the frames I was looking at,
like kind of gigantic and partially outside of the frame,
but inverted. So it's like you're not necessarily in like
a physical space, but some sort of either an extra
dimensional space or sort of like the visual extra dimensional
space that you find in certain comic book scenes. Well,
(17:22):
we're not supposed to take it as an actual like
physical space. It's just representing interaction between two characters, and
he is often presented upside down.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
This is interesting. I didn't fully get into this for
this episode, But I was thinking about how often in
poetry and literature upside downness is a visual and spatial
metaphor just for wrongness or the thing that should not
be and is a violation of the order, is something
(17:53):
that indicates chaos and disorder or moral decay, you know,
thinking about There's a passage in ts Eliot's The Waste Land,
which is very The last section of that poem is
describing like a journey through the desert, the parched landscape
that has a world gone wrong and destroyed, and he
(18:14):
talks about coming upon a I think, coming upon a
city in the desert where bats with baby faces crawl
upside down, and he sees inverted towers in the air
hanging upside down. So it seems to be part of
the metaphor created there is something I mean, it might
also be an indication of the actual scene imagine, because
(18:36):
I guess if it's supposed to be in the desert,
seeing the upside down towers might be like a mirage
or a fata morgana kind of illusion. But I don't
know if that's what it's supposed to mean. But I
think also all the upside downness, especially the bats with
baby faces. Upside down is clearly supposed to indicate something
is wrong here. And it's funny because there's nothing especially
(18:59):
bad about being upside down, but we take it as
a metaphor for wrongness.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Yeah, and I feel like baby's upside down. Baby's on
the ceiling. I've seen that before somewhere, like definitely. I
guess to a certain extent. In Labyrinth, Toby is towards
the end when we have big Esher Room. I guess
Toby's on the ceiling at some point if I'm not mistaken.
But I feel like there's another film out there where
some sort of magic baby or superpowered baby is on
(19:26):
the ceiling. Maybe it's maybe it's Jack Jack from the
Pixelaro Inredibles, Yeah, Incredibles. Or maybe it's something poltergeisty. I'm
not sure, but he's ringing a bell.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Maybe we'll come back to that.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Yeah, let's see.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Are you ready to talk about space, Let's do it?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Okay, So, last time we talked about that scene in
the Inferno where Dante is only bewildered because again they're
crawling down the body of Satan and it seems like
out of nowhere. The world has flipped upside down around him,
and initially he is without explanation until Virgil gives the explanation,
(20:15):
which is that because they have passed through the very
center of the Earth, now the directions of up and
down have reversed, and so up has become down and
vice versa. So Dante is describing this moment of overwhelming
confusion at the sudden subjective inversion of up down continuity,
(20:35):
and that moment actually brings to mind a similar situation
that occurs in reality, and that is a common experience
that astronauts report in microgravity. So I want to talk
about astronauts something called visual reorientation illusions and something called
the spider Man illusion. To introduce this idea, I was
(20:59):
reading a June twenty twenty article in the newspaper of
the LSU School of Medicine by Leslie Coppo featuring an
interview with a NASA astronaut, and I think at the
time an LSU professor of medicine. I believe she might
be with a different institution now, but a medical doctor
and professor of medicine named Serena Onen Chancellor, and she's
(21:23):
talking in this interview about her experience as a flight
engineer in expeditions fifty six and fifty seven to the
International Space Station. These were both in twenty eighteen, and
on a Chancellor talks about how one of the biggest
challenges of spaceflight and of the especially the early time
spent at the space station, is the body's adjustment to microgravity.
(21:46):
This is something we've talked about before, but never with
this particular angle that I recall. So you know, literally,
the space station and its occupants are in free fall.
They're in orbit around the Earth. And since the station
inhabitants and the station are all falling at the same rate,
there is no ground inside the station, and there's no
(22:07):
gravitational queue to tell the astronauts which way is up
or down. So inside the space station there is no
up or down except that which you try to sort
of culturally impose. There's not a physically sensed up or
down and so on. In Chancellor describes the experience going
from launch, through the initial burn and into orbit, saying, quote,
(22:32):
after that eight minutes and forty seconds, when the third
stage finally cuts off, your brain does not perceive your
environment the same as it did back on Earth. I
almost felt like everything was that a forty five degree
tilt to the left in front of me, and even
the control panels and the console console in the soused
(22:52):
vehicle itself appear different. That took a couple of hours
to resolve. So that's interesting. We can imagine weird sensations
of being in microgravity, like you can imagine even if
you haven't felt it yourself. You can sort of imagine
the feeling of floating, of you know, having this sensation
(23:13):
of weightlessness. But there are these other things she's describing,
like suddenly it feels like the world is tilted forty
five degrees. That's strange and specific, and I thought it's
interesting how we don't always appreciate that the weirdness of
being in microgravity is not just a body sensations. It's
(23:35):
like a new perceptual and even cognitive regime that causes
perceptual and cognitive distortions. In other words, when you lose
the ground and the normal gravitational cues for up and down,
it leads to illusions of the senses and of the mind.
One of the illusions she describes is very Dante crawling
(23:56):
on Satan. So she says that a lot of assauts
report what is called an inversion illusion, so that your
sense of up and down does not disappear when you
are in microgravity. It persists, or maybe sometimes suddenly comes
back very strongly, but inverted, so that no matter what
(24:18):
position you're in, you feel suddenly like you are hanging
upside down. And apparently the astronauts sometimes called this the
Spider Man illusion, I guess especially. I don't know if
it predates this, but it makes me think of that
scene in the Toby maguire movie where he's hanging upside
down with the kiss that's on the poster reserve.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Oh yeah, the weird upside down kiss.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
But I guess the Spider Man hangs upside down a lot. Yeah, yeah, so,
yeah called They sometimes call it informally the Spider Man illusion.
I think equally you could have called it the vampire
bat illusion or the sloth illusion. It's that there isn't
necessarily a gravitationally enforced up or down around you, but
your brain's still trying to make up and down happen,
(25:00):
and suddenly it just decides I'm hanging upside down. I'm
hanging upside down, and I don't.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Know why interesting. I wonder if this is related. I've
heard of similar things with pilots fine planes, and this
may be something that's maybe more likely in like high
performance flight. But you can have your horizon sort of
messed up and you can think up as down and
(25:24):
down is up.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, Well maybe we can try to make
more sense of that as we go on, because I
want to get to a study in a minute. It's
very much about how visual information interacts with these feelings
in the body. But on a Chancellor goes on to
describe more common symptoms of space adaptation. So you have
things like nausea, lack of appetite you can imagine, and
(25:46):
then of course the physiological effects of microgravity that we've
talked about before. I think we've been mentioned in the
last episode, like stuffiness in the head and upper body.
And then on Chancellor goes on to say more about
these confusion and illusions related to the lack of a
gravitational up and down. In one sense, you can think
of this unhitching from gravity as a kind of freedom.
(26:09):
She says, quote, I can do science on any side,
talking about any side of the module. I can do
science on the ceiling I can do science on the walls.
I can be flipped upside down, I can eat upside down.
It doesn't really matter. But that freedom doesn't necessarily feel
like freedom. It can also be very difficult, disorienting and uncomfortable,
(26:30):
especially at first.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, and also becomes less of a freedom when you
have to figure out how to use the restroom and
things of that nature.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Yeah, you might need some vacuum assistance there.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, because without gravity it can be a little bit
more difficult.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Can't do right. So she says that some of the
astronauts call this early period of adjustment the first reprogramming phase.
But over time the brain is able to adapt. She says,
in her experience, the first one to two weeks there
tends to be a lot of disorder related to the
brain trying to insist that the head is up and
(27:05):
the feed are down, but then getting this conflicting sensory data.
And then usually after three to four weeks, she says,
the brain adjusts and becomes somewhat more comfortable with this
upless and downless world. And she says, at that point
you can kind of move around with less concern for
up and down where your feed are pointed where your
(27:25):
head is that sort of thing, and the brain, she says,
adapts beautifully. So it's interesting to consider both things here
that in one sense, our brains are kind of stubborn
and they're trying, and the brain is trying to insist
on like vertical orientation. I'll talk more about that in
a paper. I want to mention in just a minute,
(27:46):
trying to insist on vertical orientation even in a context
where it doesn't make sense. On the other hand, give
it time. And the brain is highly adaptable in a way.
I guess that's kind of our whole lives, isn't it.
You know, the constant tension between the rigidity and the
adaptability of our brains.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I don't know if
we'll get into it in this episode or in the next,
but yeah, there are other examples of how our brain
just sort of makes makes the best it can out
of the sensory data that it is provided with. In
the sensory data may concern what's up and what's down,
and the brain is like, all right, we're gonna work
with it. We're gonna make it work for us.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
So I was reading more about inversion illusions and related
phenomena among astronauts. In a two thousand and three paper
that was based on research carried out on the NASA
Neurolab space lab mission. The paper was called the Role
of Visual Cues in Microgravity Spatial Orientation. Neurolab was a
(28:49):
sixteen day space shuttle mission carried out in nineteen ninety
eight specifically to study the neuroscience of spaceflight, particularly how
like various brain functions are affected by microgravity. The authors
of this paper are Charles Ohmann, Ian Howard Theodore Smith,
Andrew Beal, Alan Natopoff, James Zacker, and Heather Jenkin. And
(29:14):
so the authors of this paper start off by talking
about the physiology of how we normally sense up and down.
Of course, some cues are visual, some are tactle, but
under normal circumstances, a big part of how your body
senses constructs a sense of up and down. Really, because
again there is no in the universe objective thing, no
(29:37):
such objective thing as up and down. But you know
it is a subjective feeling created by our relationship to
the nearest largest gravitational attractor that our brains construct this
idea of up and down with the help of dedicated
acceleration sensing organs in the inner ears called odoliths. These
(29:57):
are little tiny crystals stones made of calcium carbonate, which
is the same material that makes limestone, cave formations and
clam shells. So you've got little kind of you know,
stalactites or stalagmites or clamshell type crystals.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's like a little biopunk level, right.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yeah, well, I think actually it might be a slightly
different crystal arrangement, but it's calcium carbonate of one form
or another. These the odorliths are made of and they're
suspended in the inner ear in a kind of gel
or a kind of fluid gel, and they interact with
these tiny hairs in the inner ear so that they
are able to sense changes in the speed and orientation
(30:42):
of the body. So we use these organs to feel
the sensations of movement, of linear acceleration, of gravity, of
orientation and balance. And there's an interesting fact about physics
that is actually indirectly discoverable through studying our inner ear function.
(31:03):
That fact is that gravity is locally indistinguishable from acceleration.
This is not exactly true on a large enough scale
because on a large scale you get interesting things like
gravity exerting tidal forces on the scale of a human body.
With a gravitational attractor the size of planet Earth, you're
(31:24):
not really going to have something like that. So gravity
is indistinguishable from acceleration. A person standing on the ground
feeling Earth's gravity of nine point eight meters per second
squared feels almost exactly the same force as somebody standing
head up in a rocket ship that is accelerating at
nine point eight meters per second squared. To that person,
(31:46):
the forces are basically the same, and that's why the
organs that we use to feel the pull of gravity
and orient our bodies with respect to up and down
are the same organs we use to feel the sensation
of linear acceleration because locally they are the same thing.
So on Earth at regular altitude, gravity is experienced as
(32:06):
this constant acceleration toward the ground.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And as we've discussed on the show before, that's why
some of these artificial gravity proposals would seem to be functional,
like artificial gravity via propulsion in a space ship, where
you have a spaceship that's like a skyscraper and you
feel as if you have gravitational force on each of
(32:33):
those floors, or of course the big double tourist situation
like we have in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Yeah, spinning surface if it's big enough.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, as we discussed in those episodes, you'll find them
in the archive. Yeah, there are a lot of additional
factors to concern yourself with.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
That's right. So acceleration can function as a pretty much
perfect substitute for gravity if you get the you know,
if you get all the details right. This is where
things get wild in space. About the space if you
(33:10):
don't have artificial gravity, if you are in freefall like
the astronauts and the ISS are, or if you're in
orbit in a space Shuttle mission. So when astronauts are
in freefall in orbit around the Earth, the authors say
that the odoliths quote float into unusual positions and tilting
(33:30):
the head produces no sustained otolith displacement the way it
does on Earth. The unusual signals from the otolith organs
and zero G are apparently not sufficient to produce major
changes in the inner ear to eye reflexes that allow
the eyes to stay fixed on an object while the
body is moving. Also, although astronauts typically don't report sensations
(33:54):
of falling. They are susceptible to illusions about body orientation.
So what are these other illusions about body movement and orientation.
The authors talk about one that is the same thing
that On and Chancell are called the spider Man illusion.
The authors here refer to these as inversion illusions, and
they say that a lot of astronauts report these immediately
(34:17):
after reaching orbit from the initial launch. So they'll be
seated in their launch position in the cabin and then
suddenly get the overwhelming sensation that they are actually hanging
upside down from the ceiling. Inversion illusions can happen with
the eyes open or closed, and the illusion most often
lasts for only a day or two before it starts
(34:39):
to subside. But you can imagine that it could have
major potential to interfere with crew members' ability to stay
focused on the task. So this is a this is
not without consequence. It's not just like a weird little thing.
It's like, you know, you don't want you don't want
to be experiencing this if you don't have to.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Right, Generally, there is a lot to do on a
mission like this, and it's you know, it's an extreme environment,
you need to be on your toes and ready to
jump in and work on things. And so the idea
of being disoriented for an extended period of time right
at the top, that doesn't sound like a positive prospect.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
There's another type of illusion the authors talk about called
visual reorientation illusions or VRIS. These are illusions that can
happen when someone is in a microgravity environment and they
get visual cues that conflict with their established working sense
(35:38):
of where up and down are. So that established working
sense of up and down is what the authors of
the paper called the astronauts subjective vertical or SV. Now,
we don't usually need to think about our subjective vertical
because it's going to be pretty you know, for most
people who unless you have some kind of disorder of
(36:00):
the inner ear or something like, you know, something going
on most of the time. For most people, your subjective
vertical is also going to be the same as everybody
else's subjective vertical around you. You know, down is where
your feet are pointed, up is where your head is pointed.
Is pretty straightforward. But the brain maintains a sense of
a subjective vertical even in a microgravity environment. So even
(36:24):
though you no longer feel up and down with your odoliths.
Your brain still insists we got to find up and down,
which way's up, which ways down? And the brain might
decide that this wall of the module is the floor
and the opposite wall is the ceiling. But then imagine,
so you're working on that assumption. You figured out, okay,
here's the floor, here's the ceiling. But then you suddenly
(36:47):
see visual information that conflicts with your brain subjective vertical,
like you see another astronaut floating upside down from your perspective,
or you see a dropped object failing to fall towards
your floor, you know, because gravity isn't there, so it's
not going to fall. And then suddenly the brain says, oh, no,
(37:08):
something is wrong, and you get a visual reorientation illusion
where your subjective vertical instantly flips and the floor becomes
the ceiling and now you are upside down. This is
described as an unpleasant experience that can trigger attacks of
nausea and motion sickness, especially in the first week or
(37:29):
so of orbital conditions, but the sense of direction problems
can persist for months. The authors say that vris were
first reported by a Russian cosmonaut named German Titov in
nineteen sixty one, and by the nineteen nineties they were
well known to Skylab and Space Lab crews. They were
often known as the downs. So you get them the
(37:52):
downs suddenly, oh my down is up? Now, Uh, don't
feel good. So the authors point out that are usually
spontaneous and unwelcome when they happen, but that astronauts have
reported that they can be either triggered or sometimes reversed
by intentional cognitive effort. So you're in microgravity and you
(38:16):
force yourself to think about the floor and the ceiling,
you can sometimes cause your subjective vertical to flip on purpose,
which I wonder exactly. I don't know exactly how that feels,
but I'm imagining it kind of like the magic eye.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, you look at just the right stimuli,
or if you bring a Tsliot bat baby with you
on the flight there, you you just stick that sucker
up to what may seem like the ceiling and damn
you're triggered.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah. But interesting question here, like since gravity no longer
rains in the orbital environment, so objects you drop an
object and it doesn't fall, you might just expect the
brain to not care about which direction is down, but
reports from astronauts indicate that the usually the brain, especially
(39:02):
at first, still tries to maintain the sense of the vertical.
It's just part of our programming and it's hard to shake.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Again, it is the it is where we evolved as being.
So it makes sense that it's kind of you know,
stitched in, hardwired to our understanding to or even are
like an understanding of what our body is and where
our body is in space.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Yeah. So, the authors point out that experiments on Earth
have demonstrated that people substantially use visual information and not
just their inner ear organs, to determine which way is down,
and they cite a bunch of examples of this. One
thing they talk about is experiments where scientists build a
(39:48):
slightly tilted room or build a tumbling room where they
can adjust the direction. So you can, you know, imagine
being in a room where the floor and all of
the objects in the room are not quite flat. They
maybe it's tilted a little bit to the side. And
so they put people in environments like this and have
them try to find and point to up and down.
(40:10):
Often the visual information can take over. When asked to
point down, people in a tilted room will point not
toward the gravitational down, but toward the floor of the
tilted room. So in this case, visual information is somewhat
overriding the felt information from the odoliths.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah. Yeah, And I think if anyone out there, if
you've got to any like high end haunted attraction or
some of the various like Museum of Illusions out there,
you'll encounter rooms like this designed to throw off your
perception of up and down, tilted floors, spinning rooms, and
so forth.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yeah. Yeah, In fact, I've got something about that in
just a minute. But from this, the author's posit that
the subjective vertical is actually established by a combination of cues.
The brain is is consulting an interaction between sensory information,
not just the inner ear, but also visual information and
(41:09):
maybe other things too, And usually this information is in harmony,
so it doesn't cause a problem, but in microgravity it
can be wildly out of wax, so it does cause
a problem. Another interesting fact, this is just a little
side note, not really relevant to us, but the authors
point out that there are minor gravity sensing capabilities outside
(41:30):
the organs of the inner ear. They cite that the
kidneys and the cardiovascular system have some ability to sense
gravitational orientation, and they don't go into detail about why
that is. But I wonder if I has to do
with fluid flows the fluid is it's going to be
gravitationally attracted to the ground.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, I mean that seems like the most likely explanation.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Yeah, So if the brain uses visual information to determine
up and down, what are the main visual cues, Because
there aren't necessarily objective up and down that we can
see with our eyes, you know, it depends actually on
knowing the context of the environment around you. So we
(42:13):
might consult familiar objects, like we expect to see ceiling
type objects like light fixtures up, and we expect to
see floor type objects like furniture down. We expect to
see writing right side up, We expect to see a
drinking glass with the open end pointed up. That sort
of thing. The other thing is our own bodies. We
(42:35):
have a strong tendency to feel that our feet are
pointed down unless other information overwhelms that. And there's an
interesting section in the intro here about differences in how
the brain handles disagreement between the senses establishing the subjective vertical.
Depending on how big the disagreement is. Quote, if there
(42:57):
are minor directional differences between the gravity receptor and visual
cues to the vertical, the brain apparently compromises, and the
SV the subjective vertical points to an intermediate direction. So
quote the remaining component of gravity is then perceived as
a mysterious force pulling the body to one side. They
(43:20):
say this illusion can be readily experienced in houses tilted
by an earthquake. And this brings us back to what
you were saying rob about, like the haunted house or
the Museum of Illusions type room, the room that's tilted.
I know exactly what they're talking about, this mysterious force.
Something feels wrong. There's some kind of uncanny physics that
(43:42):
feels like it's pulling you to the side.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I have felt this.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Yeah. And then the quote goes on to say, if
the disparity in direction of the gravity receptor and the
visual verticals is large, one sensory modality or the other
typically captures the subjective vertical. So one just takes over
and says, vertical is mine. Now, they say, quote Tilting
the head away from the gravitationally erect position enhances the
(44:11):
effect of visual cues. There seem to be consistent differences
between individuals in the relative weighing assigned to visual versus
gravity receptor cues. Older individuals appear more susceptible to visually
induced tilt. Scene motion enhances visually induced tilt for most subjects.
(44:32):
So I thought that was really interesting too, about like
these individual differences. I am now very curious about myself,
and I feel like I don't have an easy way
to know. Is my personal subjective vertical more doggedly tied
to the gravity receptors and the inner ear, or is
it more susceptible to visual information? I would like to
know what kind of up and down man?
Speaker 2 (44:53):
I am, well, you know, maybe you got to wait
till October on this one and find a good uh
hanta detraction of it.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
It maybe, But again they do say that visual information
tends to be stronger if you are older. I don't
know if that means visual information is stronger or if
that means the inner ear is weaker. And it also,
visual information tends to be more powerful if you are moving,
or if the scene around you appears to be moving.
(45:29):
So anyway, the authors of the study, they talk about
some more interesting things in their introduction, but I guess
we should get to their finding. So the mission is
not like a huge sample size. There was sort of
a pilot study of this sort of thing, and this
has been followed up on with larger studies of astronauts
over time. But this initial test used the four adult
(45:50):
male astronauts of this mission in orbit with a variety
of experiments, many including virtual reality goggles as a stimulus,
and their major findings were as follows. Again, there were
fairly strong individual differences in how people created their subjective
vertical and these tended to continue during spaceflight, though one
(46:13):
astronaut became more dependent on visual cues to determine up
and down while in microgravity. They say that they found
astronauts in microgravity became a lot more vulnerable to what
they call circular self motion illusions, the illusion that you
are spinning or rolling triggered by visual cues of rolling.
(46:35):
And then they also looked at visual cues associated with
linear movement through a scene. So this was studying quote
whether a virtual scene moving past the subject produces a
stronger linear self motion illusion. So imagine your stationary in microgravity,
(46:56):
you put on virtual reality goggles that suggest you are
moving forward linear motion through a scene. Do you feel
in your body like you're actually moving through a scene?
The research found yes, absolutely, in microgravity they experienced this
feeling of gliding like a ghost or like the camera
(47:17):
in Dario Argento's Deep Red gliding through the scene forward.
This feeling of illusory linear motion came on faster, and
it was stronger when triggered by the virtual reality in
these in the microgravity conditions. The study also found that
these self motion illusions could be somewhat counteracted by having
(47:37):
the astronauts where force springs that press on the body
to simulate gravity. I thought this was interesting. So even
rather crude approximate approximations of gravitational force that I hope
I'm right about this from what I could tell, would
not really be acting on the inner ear organs. It
would be like pressing on maybe the shoulders or the hips,
(47:58):
pressing on the body with springing. That even that kind
of crude approximation, if I'm understanding correctly, could help reduce
self motion illusions.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
And finally, the study also found that changing the subjective
vertical This was really interesting to me. Changing which direction
you feel is up or down could cause changes in
how astronauts perceived objects. So not changing how the object looks,
but just changing which way the astronaut feels the ceiling
(48:33):
or the floor is. That could cause astronauts to make
different judgments about whether a curved surface is convex or concave.
This apparently depends on where you subjectively believe the floor is,
but even more interestingly, on object recognition. So sometimes it
could become harder to recognize a familiar object that you're
(48:55):
used to seeing if you have inverted your sense of
where the floor is. You can imagine again in space
that being able to recognize familiar objects is actually quite important,
especially if you are manning controls or trying to do
any kind of mechanical task or you know, scientific pass Yeah,
(49:15):
so like suddenly recognizing things in your environment. Again, nothing
that you are physically looking at has changed, but your
brain flips and now the floor is the ceiling, and
now what the way you recognize things is different the
author's right quote. Overall results show that most astronauts become
more dependent on dynamic visual motion cues, and some become
(49:40):
responsive to stationary orientation cues. The direction of the subjective
vertical is labile in the absence of gravity. So interesting
that so much depends on up and down. Even in
an environment where up and down cease to have any
gravitational relevance. You're not stuck to the floor, objects don't
(50:04):
fall when you drop them, and yet your brain can't
let up and down go. It still relies on the
sense of up and down to recognize things in its environment,
to interpret visual cues like object shading, to interpret which
way a surface is curved. That depends on where you
think the floor is. To interpret do I recognize this
(50:26):
or not? Do I know what this tool is? Depends
on where you think the floor is. And to understand
how the body itself is moving.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, it's fascinating, and you know, it comes back to
something that I thought about before, Like, you know, we
have all of these we've gone over all these different
ways that the body is thrown for a loop when
it's taken out of a lot of Earth gravity and
placed in a microgravity environment. But at the same time,
it's also kind of alarming in its own way, Like
(50:57):
we can totally live up there. Granted, we have to
do things like bring our own portion of the atmosphere
with us, you know, because up there, our appropriate portion
of the atmosphere is not you know, it's not gravitationally bound.
You know, we have to bring it with us obviously.
But but we can actually go up there if we
take care of the the some of the environmental conditions.
(51:18):
It's it's not like if we were like a Japanese
Kappa yo kai with the little pool of water in
the top of its skull, like if it goes into space,
the water is going to float away and it's vital
escence is gone. Like like all of our systems they
still work. It's not like they won't work without gravity.
And like that in and of itself is kind of interesting, right,
(51:40):
It's like because again we we evolved in this, in
this gravitationally bound existence, and you know, our systems function
in ways that that depend on or play upon those conditions.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yeah. And then of course the other interesting thing is
talking about the different way is that these probably can
be overcome. Like one of them, as I mentioned earlier,
is that astronauts have found that sometimes with intentional cognitive
force they can undo a visual reorientation illusion, like they
can flip the floor and ceiling back despite concentrating on it,
(52:17):
not always but sometimes. And then the other thing is
so that's like the short term ability to overcome this weirdness,
and then in the long term you also have just
the adaptability and plasticity of the brain. It was what
on and Chancellor was talking about that at first it
can be pretty bad, but over time your brain does adapt.
The brain sort of reprograms itself to feel more comfortable
(52:40):
and natural in this environment. And eventually, I don't I
actually don't know the answer to whether these types of
illusions and problems ever completely stop, but there certainly become
less problematic and persistent over time, and maybe at some
point stop completely. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
Yeah, our brains just have this amazing ability, this neuroplastic
ability to take whatever is available and make the best
out of it, to stitch together an understanding of body
and time and space and place out of whatever is available.
You know, mcguiver's in existence for you, or it's like
(53:17):
one of those shows where it's like, okay, chef, these
are the ingredients you have to cook dinner with and
the brain's like, Okay, yeah, I can work with that.
It would be great if I had garlic. I don't
have garlic, I'll find a way you can live without it.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
That's one of the worst things to be without.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, hopefully you have you know, some shallots around or
some green onions. But yeah, but if the recipe calls
for garlic, what are you gonna do? Maybe garlic is
like gravity in that respect, I don't know. All Right, Well,
we're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we have a lot
more to discuss about the upside Down. We're going to
get into some more areas of this that are tied
(53:55):
in their own way to gravitation. We're going to get
into optics a bit more, and who knows what else
we will summon out of the upside down. So we
hope that you'll join us for that one. In the meantime,
we'll just remind everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on Fridays. We
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
(54:16):
weird film on Weird house cinema, So you know that
helps you make sense of whatever you happen to see
in the stuff to blow your mind. Feed be it
the audio feed wherever you get your audio podcasts, and
we have archives going about years there, or if you're
catching us on Netflix in an audio video format, which
is relatively new for us, wherever you happen to get
(54:37):
the show wherever you're listening and or viewing right now,
we just asked that, hey, pull whatever triggers are available
to you in terms of subscribing or liking, adding stars
or thumbs, just make sure that you know which way
is the thumbs need to go up. Yeah, so if
your sense of up and down is momentarily distressed by microgravity,
(55:00):
let a level out a bit before you rate the show.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
You just mentioned that we were venturing into the audio
visual format. You know, so we've done audio for so long.
Now we've got audio visual as well. I think the
next step has got to be our podcast a silent film.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Okay, sure, yeah.
Speaker 3 (55:18):
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 (55:40):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Wrist watt ter
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