From the Vault: The Minotaur, Part 3

Take the Minotaur out of its maze and you have but another beast man -- but within his manufactured environment, he is a singular terror in myth and popular consciousness. But where does this monster come from? What does his existence mean? What does the stalker of these bloody halls reveal about the human mind and human history? In this trio of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe discuss the minotaur. (originally published 10/15/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. This is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is a
Vault episode. It originally aired October and it's part three
of our series on the Minotaur. Let's jump right in.
He lives there. From there he plots my destiny and
schemes to usurp my throne. His eyelids of stone taunt me,

(00:30):
insatiable minotaur. My dreams chafe against his horns. In my dreams,
I enter the labyrinth, I'm there alone, unchained. The scepter
bends in my fist, and he comes before me, monstrous, sweet, monstrous, free,

(00:51):
and I can no longer govern my dreams. So many
deliberations wait for the day when the world of men
will harbor my story and blood. Secret River. You have
not heard me yet. Kill me first. Now you provoke
me as if you're plotting some kind of scheme I've
made up my mind. Ultimate freedom is fostered by that

(01:15):
blade which you hold in your fist, the same as
a sudden parting of waters in the ocean deep. What
do you know of death, grant her of profound life? Look,
there is only one way to kill a monster. And
that is to embrace it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow

(01:41):
your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are you
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three of The Minotaur and the Labyrinth where we're
coming out of the dark. Got you once again. So

(02:01):
those opening selections were from a play called The Kings
by Julio Cortissar, who's an Argentinean writer that we've been
talking about recently. That that translation was by Kari Dad's veach.
But so the first part I read were the words
of of King Minos, and then after that was an
exchange between Theseus and the Minotaur, with our producer Seth

(02:23):
as Theseus as the jerk of the story. Yes, um,
this is a This is such an interesting uh play.
I had never heard of this before until I ran
across this very translation at in translation dot Brooklyn Rail
dot org Um. Because I don't believe it is currently
in print in English. I could be wrong on that.

(02:44):
I see that it is in print in Spanish, but
not in English. Cortissar has a number of really interesting
short stories that I read back when I was in college.
One of them that I remember really liking is called
Axlotal and it's a story about a man who repeatedly
visits an axcel little tank at the Jardine de Parry,
and he gradually finds himself transforming into an axcel odal

(03:08):
as he watches them. It's pretty good. Yeah, I'm looking
forward to read that one. Uh you you sent me
a copy to check out. In fact, a number of
his short story sound just right up my alley, But
I've never read anything by Cortazar. Now. Another fun thing
about this, so some of you might remember that we
had called an opening reading on a previous episode about
the mintur from uh Bores the House of Asterion. Bores,

(03:34):
of course, was also an Argentinian writer. Um, perhaps you
know one of the most famous Argentinian writers. And it's
interesting that this play, The Kings or Lasreles was published
in ninety seven, just a year after Borges wrote, Uh
that story to begin with the House of Hysterion. Oh,
is there like an implication of inspiration or common inspiration

(03:57):
between the two. Well, I was looking into this because
I think a lot of people assumed that Cortisar was
inspired by the House of hysterian Um. Borges himself actually
published the play alongside Asterien in the literary journal that
he edited in nine seven. But I was I was
looking at an article titled The Incessant Return of the

(04:18):
Minotaur by Amy Frasier Yoder and just keeps coming back. Yeah,
And they write that while it was often assumed that
borges story influenced Courtisar, there's evidence from letters between Cortazar
and Borges that Cortisar might not have read borhes story previously,
so there might be more convergence here than inspiration. But

(04:39):
still it seems that Boges was was very much a
fan of this piece. I mean, he published it, and
obviously how could Borhes not like an entire play with
all of this this this beautiful you know, poetic language, uh,
and contemplation of the labyrinth and the and the the
various kings that are caught within its grasp. Really, this

(05:00):
is what I was just telling you earlier, before we
started hitting the cord. You could basically you could print
this play out. You could throw a dart at it,
and you could you could find something beautiful. Uh, Like,
there's this whole stretch where because I should point out
that the minotaur and Theseus have a very long conversation. Um,
considering that most of the time it's just about them fighting,
they have a long conversation in this play. And there's

(05:22):
this whole bit about the string that Theseus has uh
has has has has wound out behind him, you know,
so that he can return so you can escape the labyrinth,
about how it is like a river flowing out to
the ocean. Uh. So it's and and then the ocean
is also the minuteur sister. There's There's just a lot
of beautiful stuff in it. So even if you're you're

(05:42):
not really into reading a lot of unproduced plays, you should.
You should. I recommend you check this out at the
website we mentioned earlier, and if you've had a chance
to see it. Uh, that sounds awesome. I'd love to
hear about it. That's interesting that you mentioned the twine
as a river, because that goes back to in a
It's telling of the story when he's talking about Dadalus's

(06:03):
design of the labyrinth. He describes it as like a
river that twists and turns back and forth, and waters
that churn in upon themselves going this way and that. Ah,
that's right, that's right. So this is indeed our our
third episode on the minotaur um, and we wanted to
I guess, kick things off here first of all with

(06:24):
that that that brief reading, but also just to discuss
pop culture minotaurs a little bit UM and cultural minotaurs
of the more modern era in a little bit more
more detail. UM. As far as just cinema goes, I
have to say, I think it's it's really hard to
find a quality minotaur in a film or TV. I

(06:45):
don't know if you've had the same experience, Joe, but
I feel like even when the costume or the c
g I or overall presentation is solid enough, and lord knows,
it often isn't um. Minotaurs are often presented as just
mirror beastly brutes. You know, they're they're And a big
part of that is that they are not in the labyrinth. Yes,
a minotaur out of its labyrinth is like a hermit

(07:07):
crab out of its shell. It's just not even really
the same creature, is it. The best on screen minotaur
I can think of is actually one that we mentioned
in the first episode, which is the one in Jim
Hinson's storyteller Greek Myths with Michael Gambon as as deadal
as I think, or at least as the storyteller. Uh.
And that that one is really good because you don't

(07:28):
get too much of a look at the minotaur. I think,
as it should be, you know, it should be glances
here and there, and or glances or glimpses whichever I
meant to say that. But the glimpses you do get
are full of terror and pity. It's it's very good.
It conveys sort of both of the meanings of the
story as we read it today, the probably the more original,

(07:48):
terrifying reading, but also the subtle reading where you see
the monster as an object of of of sadness and pity.
Yeah yeah, yeah again, that one is is just excellent
and I highly recommend folks check that out if you
haven't seen it already. I think it all holds up
really well. David Morrissey, who would go on to of
course play the Governor and the Walking Dad, is in

(08:09):
that a young David Morrissey. As theseus, I have never
seen the Walking Dead, or I never made it past
the second episode, but but when I was looking at
him first of all. He kind of reminds me of
Tom Cruise's creepy looking brother who was in Lost. Do
you remember that guy? No, I don't. Tom Cruise's brother
was in what was Unlost? Seth offers a correction, I

(08:30):
was entirely wrong. He his name is William A. Pother
and he's Tom Cruise's first cousin, not his brother. But
he looks kind of like Tom Cruise, but with an
extra dose of boyish charm and creepiness at the same time.
And he played a role in Lost that was I
don't know. I lost ultimately was was such a betrayal,

(08:51):
but but there was a really good moment in the
first season involving his his character. But anyway, I thought
he kind of looked like him, And in any case,
he does look like a jock bully, which is kind
of what Theseus is. Yeah, I think I mentioned in
the previous episode that John Would, another great actor of
of the British stage, was in the The Greek myths

(09:15):
Um series as well, playing Minos. But in another episode
that's about Data, Lis and Acres. But still, if you
take them all in, you kind of you kind of
get into different were really multiple episodes you get the
story of of Minos and the Minotaur and theseus. Well,
somebody out there who is a filmmaker who is dedicated

(09:36):
to practical sets and effects, you make this movie. Make
the Labyrinth and Minotaur movie. No no, no green screen
set junk no uh no c G I Minotaur. I
want a good costume with really classic makeup effects and
and go all out. Now in terms of Minotaurs out
of context, there is one example that I think works

(09:57):
really well, and it is from the MU video for
Einstree's in The New Baton's song Sabrina, which is which
is on YouTube. I have no idea. Check it out.
Oh it's well. Einstree's on the New Baton is a
Is this this great German band? They started out more
industrial or post industrial, but then they kind of change

(10:18):
their sound as they win. They have a number of
great songs, but this particular video consists entirely of this
sad minotaur. That's that's well brought to life. Uh, putting
on makeup in this really dank kind of bathroom. I'm
looking at it now. Yeah, it's that's all that happens

(10:38):
in it. But it captures this, It captures the sadness
of minotaur at least that that I feel like should
be a vital component alongside the savage minotaur. This video
is strong with the cinematography of a nineties anti drug
p S A commercial. Yeah yeah, kind it's got that
that gross green film on everything like that. This is

(11:01):
your brain on drugs, Yeah it does. It does remind
me in some ways of various p s as I
remember from UH as a child watching Canadian television, where
there might be something that's like really weird and fantastic,
and then at the end you find out, oh, this
is the message. Now, before we get a little more
into the science of mazes and UH and zoonotic diseases,

(11:24):
you promised at some point that you were going to
come back to talk a little bit about the minotaur
and D and D. You mentioned this in the first episode.
Oh yeah, So if the the error is to take
the minotaur out of its place and just presented as
a mere brute uh, Dungeons and Dragons has certainly been
guilty of that. And and not only dungeon dragons, but

(11:46):
just individual dungeon masters who of course had the power
to to take a minotaur and drop him in anywhere
you go into the you go into the end, the
inn keeps a minotaur as see what you'd like to drink? Yeah, so,
I mean, you know, there's a lot of room to
to misuse the minotaur, you know, at an individual level.
But I will say that at least in the fifth edition.

(12:08):
I can't really speak to earlier editions because I just
don't have those numbers in my head. But in the
most recent edition they do have a very high wisdom
score and they have an ability called labyrinthine recall. Uh,
so the minotaur can perfectly recall any path that has traveled,
which I feel like that ability. It least, at the
very least, it is a nudge to the dungeon master. Hey,

(12:30):
you should put this minute our somewhere where it can
take advantage of this. You should create some sort of labyrinth,
be that labyrinth an actual you know, stone dungeon, or
perhaps something like a Hedge maze or like a really um,
you know, complicated city. I mean, there's so many different
directions you could go in there. And in terms of
actual adventure modules and campaigns, uh, the campaign out of

(12:53):
the Abyss does put minotaurs in a place referred to
as the labyrinth, which which is very nice, and I
thought they did a good job in that the labyrinthine
recall things seems like it would also close to the
adventurers the option of certain strategic responses to the minator,
like you can't do to the minotaur what Danny does

(13:15):
to Jack at the end of the Shining movie, Right,
you can't get him turned around in his own maze,
like he's going to know his way around. Yeah, he
is the ultimate master of this location unless you have
some sort of privileged knowledge or magical abilities that have
been gifted to you by other parties. So I was
thinking about mazes, and I actually had an etymological question

(13:36):
that I had to look up because I was wondering,
are the English words maze and a maze as an
amazing related, And it turns out that they are. They
probably do come from the same linguistic route. So by
around the beginning of the fourteenth century, the now maze
meant something like a delusion or a bewilderment confusion, and

(13:59):
this is really related to the Old English verb a
mac n or a m a s i a n
meaning to confuse, And so the origins of this word
are not exactly clear. I saw one comparison on the
online Etymological Dictionary to a Norwegian word mass m a
s or mace meaning exhausting labor, which I thought would

(14:21):
be a kind of interesting place for that concept to
come from. But apparently maze came to have its current
meaning in English, meaning something like a labyrinth the structure
with branching paths around the end of the fourteenth century.
But but so now you know, like amazement is related
to a maze. They're the same thing, and they come
from the idea of bewilderment, confusion and and being confounded.

(14:45):
But hey, practical survival question. Imagine you are not theseus.
You're not armed with a with a sword or whatever.
You don't have a ball of twine to make your
way out of a maze. If you were just one
of the Athenian youths finding yourself trapped an unfamiliar maze,
could you get out? Is there actually a strategy for
optimizing the solution of a maze other than trying to

(15:08):
cut through walls? Obviously you can't do that well. I mean,
I think a lot of them have heard the whole
only take like right hand turns right turning right exactly,
So it depends on how the maze is constructed, but
that actually is a successful strategy for most mazes. The
solution if you don't have a ball of twine is
what's known as the right hand rule, and that's actually arbitrary.

(15:30):
Could be the right hand or the left hand rule,
but it's as simple as this. So you reach out
with your right hand and you touch the right side
wall of the corridor, and then you just proceed forward
without ever taking your hand off the wall. So if
you come to a dead end, you pivot around with
your hand still touching the right side of the wall. Again.
The same thing would work with the left hand. It's

(15:51):
also known as the wall follower algorithm. And always following
the same wall surface will mean that you bear in
the same direction at every turn, which is what you
were saying. If you always make the right turn, eventually
you will find your way out. This will uh you know,
even if you hit a dead end, you'll double back
on your path. And if you keep following this method,

(16:11):
you can actually solve the maze even blindfolded, because it
doesn't matter what orientation you have mentally, you will just
always be executing a new pathway unless you're trying to
get yourself out of a dead end. But there is
a catch here, and the catches that for this to work,
the maze has to be what they call simply constructed,
and what that means is all of the walls of

(16:33):
the maze are connected to the outer wall or to
each other, and this method will not necessarily work in
a maze with what are called island walls, walls that
are not connected to the outer boundary, and with these
types of mazes, you can just end up going in
circles around a wall segment in the middle. I've actually
read about some funny cases of people going people going

(16:55):
into corn mazes, you know, these things for fun or
hedge mazes, and they get stuck in there and they
try to use the wall follower pathway to get out,
but they get stuck in there because they're just tracing
around some isolated internal wall that doesn't connect to the
outer walls. Forced to wander forever until the fall festival
employees come and retrieve you. But there there is another catch.

(17:17):
So even if you are in a maze with island
walls walls that don't connect to the outer boundary. You
can still use the right hand rule if you use
it beginning at the entrance, because if you start at
the entrance and you stick to it, you will never
actually start following an island wall to begin with, because
you'll always be attached to a wall that's attached to

(17:38):
the exterior boundary. So if you start doing the doing
the right hand rule at the entrance, it will work,
though it might make the maze less fun, I mean,
depending on whether this is like a torture human sacrifice
scenario or just like a corn maze for fun. Right,
But I guess if you if you use the right
hand rule and it's the right kind of maze, you

(17:59):
are in a it's transforming a maze into a labyrinth,
if we're going to that, if you're using those terms
exclusively for a maze is something with many different branching
paths in which you can get lost. In a labyrinth
as being this complex system through which there is only
one path, uh and you don't have to to think
about what you're doing as you follow it. Right multi
cursal versus unicursal, you're turning it into a unicursal pathway

(18:23):
where you are again just submitting to the design of
the maze and taking decision making entirely out of it. Right,
It's kind of like if you go to Ikea and
you just decide, I'm just gonna go with the I'm
not gonna buy anything, but I'm just gonna just go
straight going, just gonna follow the path by everything my
right hand touches. You end up in a maze of meatballs.

(18:45):
But thinking about how to solve maze is also got me, uh,
thinking about another tangent here, which is the role that
mazes have played in the history of psychological research, so
much that in a way, the maze came almost a
physical emblem of the discipline of psychology and popular culture

(19:06):
like well, especially the behavior ast schools. Of course, So
if you saw a research psychologist in a movie made
in the nineteen forties or fifties, what were they doing?
I mean, they're probably running rats through a maze, right,
Like every psychology lab in a movie has a rat
maze in it. Yeah, and you think they feel like

(19:26):
they're a fair number of educational shorts that also feature
footage of mice and mazes. And here I think the
maze as a research tool emerges in a very interesting
relationship with the maze of myths, So consider the following
with the myth of Theseus and the minotaur in mind.
I was reading an article about the history of maze

(19:47):
research by a psychologist named ce James Goodwin in the
Monitor on Psychology, which is the magazine of the American
Psychological Association or the a p A. And Goodwin begins
by producing a really unbelievable quote from a neo behaviorist
psychologist named Edward Chase Tolman, who was president of the

(20:08):
APIA at the time. He uttered these words, and this
was part of his yearly addressed to the a p
A in nineteen thirty seven, And this is what he said.
Everything important in psychology can be investigated in essence through
the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants of
rat behavior at a choice point in a maze. So everything,

(20:32):
every everything, everything you could want to know about minds
can be understood by watching how rats behave in a maze. Like,
given enough time and enough rats and enough mazes, we
can fully understand minds. I mean, undoubtedly it's useful for
various things. That everything is far yeah, So I mean

(20:53):
I guess to be fair to Tolman, I think maybe
he was intentionally overstating his case a bit to be provocative.
But this is actually indicative of like a powerful strain
of thinking in the history of behaviorist psychology, basically that
psychological science is not really concerned with internal phenomena. I remember,
this was the behavior at school, so it's not really
about thoughts or feelings and uh. And also the belief

(21:17):
that differences between species are not necessarily very relevant. Brains
in general were just sort of imagined as learning and
conditioning machines that produce behavior based on how they've been conditioned,
and so careful study of how rats behave under various
controlled conditions and how they respond to various incentives and

(21:39):
stimuli and training can eventually tell you pretty much everything
that you would want to know about brains, even about
human psychology. Now, I think this is clearly an extremely
misguided point of view, but an interesting question is how
did you get to their Like, how how did you
get to the place where somebody could say that about
rats and mazes and not immediate lee be mocked for it,

(22:01):
you know, like, just sounds so ridiculous, So maybe we
should take a break and then when we come back
we can talk about the origins of rat maze research.
Than alright, we're back, So how did we get so
many mice in these mazes? Okay? So I mentioned this
article by by C. James Goodwin, and Goodwin writes in

(22:24):
his article that most historians of science agreed that the
animal maze as a research tool was really pioneered in
the eighteen nineties by researchers at Clark University. Specifically, this
was a couple of graduate students named Willard Small and
Linus Klein, who were working in the lab of the
early American psychologist Edmund Sandford Uh. Though sometime around the

(22:49):
same time the psychologist Edward Thorndyke also experimented with building
a sort of maze for research on baby birds. He
did this by stacking books in odd confuyu curations, but
he he thought of these structures as pens. But the
mazes constructed in the Sanford lab at Clark University had
an interesting couple of points of inspiration. So one was

(23:13):
in the structures built by rats under a porch uh So, Kleins,
Small and Sanford were interested in studying the home finding
ability of rats home finding, of course, is a very
important skill for many motile animals. How do you find
your way back to home base after leaving to forage,
or how do you find your way through confusing twist

(23:35):
and turns to locate a source of food or another
familiar location. And so Klein recalled an incident where there
had been digging under the porch at a cabin on
his father's farm in Virginia, and when the porch was excavated,
they discovered that there were these runways that had been

(23:56):
left quote by large feral rats to their nests under
the porch, and the runways client thought somehow resembled mazes,
and this led to the idea of designing a test
environment based on a maze to study the psychology of rats,
and the model they ended up using for this maze
was the Hampton Court Maze in England. And Robert, I've

(24:18):
got a picture for you to look at here. This
is still a popular tourist attraction. It's a hedge maze
just outside London that was commissioned by William the Third
around the year seventeen hundred and it is said to
be the oldest surviving hedge maze in England. Yeah, this
is a very impressive, very famous maze, kind of trapezoidal
in shape. I think they restructured it somewhat to make

(24:40):
it more of a rectangle in the lab version. The
irony is that mice would have no problem at all
with the actual Hampton coordinates. That's right, Yeah, you just
cut underneath. Yeah, so of course you had to create
one that's much more unforgiving to the body of a mouse.
So what they did was at the Clark Lab they
made a tiny Ursian four rodents for rats with slight redesigns.

(25:03):
UH had a wooden floor and walls made of wire mesh,
and so research with rats there in this maze went
on for several years, mostly under Willard Small, and Goodwin
writes the following quote. This was the time when psychology
was the science of mental life, so it was not
surprising that Small described his maze study in quote mentalistic

(25:26):
terms rather than in the kind of language one might
expect to read in a more modern learning study. So
instead of reporting results in terms of error rates and
time to completion, Small tried to infer what the rats
were doing as they made their way through the maze,
and this led to observations such as and here I'm
going to quote from Small when describing a rat almost

(25:49):
making a wrong turn in the maze, Small wrote that
the rat quote hesitated as if scratching his head, then
entered this dead end path slowly and doubt fully only
a few steps. However, then with a sudden turn and
a triumphant flick of his tail, he returned to the
correct path. Which is funny because that does not sound

(26:10):
like scientific writing. Yes, hesitated as if scratching his head,
the triumphant flick of his tail. I mean this is
This is a kind of qualitative description that's unusual to
more modern psychological methods, where in modern psychological methods you
would try to turn everything into unambiguous quantitative data points

(26:33):
and remove the subjective judgment of the researcher as much
as possible. But here Small is just saying, like, I
wonder what little Mr Rat is thinking as he goes
to the left or the right. Well, I think he
I think he feels triumphant. Now I think he feels
like a big, strong rat. Now I know he's getting
dangerously close to writing a smashing Pumpkins song. You know,
I've always had questions about that song because if the

(26:54):
world is a vampire sent to dray aane, what is
it dray a meaning the world contains everything, doesn't it?
The way the world is invoked there, it's like the
some some total of existence is sent to drain what's
outside of itself to drain? Oh, I think it is
outer reality versus inter reality, right, Okay, it's Newmena and Phenomena. Yeah,

(27:15):
I guess so that's the way I always interpreted. I mean,
not that I spent a lot of time really analyzing
the lyrics that song, but um, but that would be
my guest. The Phenomena is a vampire sent to drain
and the Newmena okay, yeah. Or I guess you could
say the maze or the cage is the thing the
environment that contains the rat or the minotaur what have you.

(27:36):
Here's a twist. What if that song is sung from
the point of view of a minotaur, like among the
Athenian youths, there is a secret destroyer. You know. I
don't think I even looked for actual minotaur songs. Uh.
There may be some really good ones out there, and
I then I just don't know about them. Is there
not a misfits song. Let is there that I just

(27:57):
say the Minotaur and the new you and it's the
minute again or something seems like I can't really I
can't really find much of anything. But yeah, whether you're
talking about the standards of modern research today or the
behaviorist research that would come into vogue in the twentieth century,
in any case, you know, you would not want to say,
I think that the rat is thinking that the world

(28:17):
is a vampire sent to dreane. You just want to
like neutrally describe unambiguous, objective behaviors and and and avoid
being anthropomorphic. And Smallest research was criticized even by some
people at the time for being anthropomorphic, like trying to
inhabit the mind of the rat as if it had
human thoughts. Nevertheless, small made some interesting and influential discoveries,

(28:41):
and these included the idea that rats could learn navigation
and home finding with very little reliance on their sense
of site. Two of the rats in his study group
were blind, and yet they learned the maze just as
well as the sited rats. And the use of senses
other than site can make sense when you consider that
rats are often navigating almost completely dark spaces or navigating

(29:03):
spaces at night, you know, under floorboards and so forth,
and Small believed he had established with his research that
rats learned through a gradual accumulation of direct associations between
sensory stimuli and the maze and patterns of success, and
this would later prove foundational to the behaviorist school of psychology,
which was very focused on associative learning and gradual conditioning

(29:27):
as the root of animal behavior. But probably more important
than what these studies actually found in their conclusions was
the precedent they set for research methods, because Small's research
led to this huge surge in maze research, much of
which used rats as the study animal. The most classic
variation is that you can mess around with independent variables

(29:49):
to create an average learning curve for rats by you know,
you run rats through a maze multiple times, and you
chart the time it takes them to complete the maze
and the number of errors they make along the way
with each successive attempt, which is a very useful tool
for studying a certain kind of learning and how various
things affect that kind of learning, like drugs and so forth.
But some maze studies also used other animals at the

(30:12):
very simple and we've talked before about the the sort
of maze like research done on worms that was focused
on planaria. Uh. This was the origin actually of the
memory transfer research of James McConnell that we talked about
in a couple of full length episodes that you can
check out in our archive called Devour of Memories. But
the short version is that the American psychologist James McConnell

(30:34):
believed he had discovered that memories in the form of
learned associations could be transferred from one flat worm to
another via cannibalism. So you teach one flat worm, grind
it up, feed it to another flat worm, and it learns,
you know, eat your brains and gain your knowledge. Later
research through some doubts on that conclusion, but there's still

(30:56):
interesting ongoing research today hinting that planariam might possibly retain
memories after having their heads cut off, so there might
be some kind of memory in the bodies that's not
just in the brain. And of course at the opposite
end of the scale, you've got studies that actually put
humans in full size mazes with consent of course, to
study their behavior. But anyway, this huge surge in maze

(31:19):
research lead to regimes that meant a researcher could make
a claim like the one Tolman made in nineteen thirty seven,
the idea that basically all you need to study psychology
is some rats in a maze. And he could say
that and still be taken seriously. Uh. Tolman's assertion, of course,
seems again ridiculous on its face today, but maze research

(31:41):
does still remain very important, especially in narrower domains like
animal motor behavior, problem solving, spatial memory and things like that.
And mazes are used in studying the effects of particular
drugs on behavior, So like you could say, does this
anti anxiety drug cause a rat or a crayfish to
take one path or the other rather than you know,

(32:03):
freezing paralyzed t junction? Or does a drug promote obsessive
recurring checks of the same path and things like that. Now,
and looking at what kind of maze research is going
on today, I came across one thing that I that
I was thoroughly amazed by and very disturbed by, which
is this invention known as automated team mazes. I guess

(32:26):
there's actually nothing more nefarious about this than there is
about a regular maze for for research, but watching video
of it somehow kind of bothered me. Basically, and Automated
Team Maze is a robot maze with movable walls that
can be raised and lowered to alter the maze path
as the animal proceeds. And I don't know, it feels

(32:46):
very house of leaves to me. Yeah, I don't think
we we brought up a house of leaves yet, by
the way, but that is a great use of a
maze and a minute our uh in uh is a
literary example. I'm actually in the middle of reading it
right now for the first time, so I haven't finished yet.
I don't want to spoil too much for people, but yeah,

(33:06):
the middle of that book is a good place to
be because the book is is intentionally quite intentionally is
a labyrinth, and you are supposed to, I think, feel
to a certain extent lost within it and hunted within it. Uh.
It's one of the more unnerving things I think I've read,
and you know, over the past ten years, extremely creepy
now in terms of labyrinths that change and move around you.

(33:30):
First of all, I think datals would be proud like
this is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine. Uh,
you know, they're the great inventor having created. It also
reminds me of of the wonderful cinematic maze that we
find in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Uh. There in the early
phases of that they go through to you know, Sarah
goes through different parts of the Labyrinth to try to

(33:52):
get to the Goblin city to rescue her brother, but
there's a There's one section in particular where she begins
to realize is that she can't mark the path behind
her because the path keeps changing. Goblins keep moving things around,
moving stones that she's marked, or even just seemingly magically,
she'll turn around and what was once a passage is

(34:15):
now just a blank wall. I recall this being a
plot point in the movie Cube as well. Oh yes,
the very very Cube like as well this video. There's
no minotaur in Cube, but that should have been well
in a way, there are a lot of all the
traps are kind of like many minotaurs. There are killing instruments,
and again coming back to the idea that the minotaur
is sort of the kill function of the Labyrinth. Uh,

(34:37):
it just has a lot of little kill functions instead
of one great all encompass and kill function. I want
to come back and say, I, in all honesty, I
don't want to throw aspersions on an automated teammates, which
seems like a perfectly useful research tool. Uh. It seems
like they're actually mainly to automatically track data on the
movements of the animals, so it it makes the human

(34:59):
rat runn obsolete very useful. But before we move on
from rats and mazes, I wanted to talk about one
more thing that I found interesting, and it ties into
something I know you've covered on at least one older episode,
uh Rob, which was the idea of cargo cult science
that was explored in this famous talk given by the
physicist Richard Feynman in nineteen seventy four. He was giving

(35:22):
a commencement address to cal Tech. I guess it was
the graduating class or something, and that's usually who would
be at a commencement address, why, I said, probably uh,
And he was, you know, talking about various subjects, pseudo science,
the need for rigor and in designing experiments, scientific research
and uh. And so in simple terms, I think the

(35:43):
idea of cargo cult science is it's a bad form
of science where uh, there is not enough rigorous effort
devoted to trying to disprove hypotheses. Rather every basically you
just kind of established a hypoth is based on what
data you've already collected, and then further occurrences of the

(36:05):
same types of data are taken as confirmation of the hypothesis. So,
for an example, I'm just making this up. If you
were to find that rats run mazes faster in the
daytime than they do in the nighttime, and then you say, oh,
I'm gonna fit a hypothesis to that, it's because they
come from the planet Crypton and are given extra strength

(36:25):
by the rays of our yellow sun during the day.
And then subsequent studies finding yet again that rats run
mazes faster in the daytime than than in the nighttime,
those are taking as confirmation of the yellow sun hypothesis
when they don't actually provide any support for that at all. So,
in general, Fineman in the speech is advocating that researchers

(36:46):
adhere to more rigorous methods to rule out false positives
and things like that, and and they avoid the temptation
to rush to publish with sloppy experimental designs, and so
I can read from the part of his speech here
where he talks about rats and mazes. He uh, he says, quote.
There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds

(37:07):
of mazes and so on, with little clear result. But
in nineteen thirty seven a man named Young did a
very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors
all along one side where the rats came in, and
doors along the other side where the food was. He
wanted to see if he could train the rats to
go in at the third door down from wherever he

(37:28):
started them off. So what he's looking for is a
spatial relationship between the entrance door and the food reward door.
Will they learn that inference? Uh? And fine man continues, No,
the rats went immediately to the door where the food
had been the time before. The question was, how did
the rats know because the corridor was so beautifully built

(37:50):
and so uniform that this was the same door as before.
Obviously there was something about the door that was different
from the other doors. So he painted the door very carefully,
arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly
the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought
maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used
chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the

(38:14):
rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be
able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement
in the laboratory like any common sense person, So he
covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He
finally found that they could tell by the way the
floor sounded when they ran over it, and he could
only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So

(38:35):
he covered one after another of all possible clues and
finally was able to fool the rats, so they had
to learn to go in the third door. If he
relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now,
from a scientific standpoint, this is an a number one experiment.
That is the experiment that makes rat running experiments sensible

(38:56):
because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really
using and not what you think it's using. And that
is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have
to use in order to be careful and control everything
in an experiment with rat running. I looked into the
subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment and the
one after that never referred to Mr. Young. They never

(39:19):
used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on
sand or being very careful. They just went right on
running rats in the same old way and paid no
attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his
papers are not referred to because he didn't discover anything
about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things
you have to do to decipher something about rats. But

(39:43):
not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic
of cargo cult science. Now, just as a follow up,
I was reading an article by Ross Pomeroy on Real
Clear Science that was about this story that Feineman tells
trying to identify who this unsided researcher was. Uh, the
author of this article, Pomeroy, he thinks that this is

(40:03):
probably referring to the animal scientist Paul Thomas Young, but
it's not known for sure who Fineman is referring to.
If we take Fineman's word that you know, he was
familiar with this unpublished research and stuff. Uh, It's it's
very sad that this went forward, but it's such a
wonderful illustration of how difficult and tedious it can be
just to get to the point where you can start

(40:25):
to establish conclusions in animal research. I also love in
in Froneman's writings here that you you also get the
sense of the the construction of a maze, you know,
like this the thing that is that is just there
to confuse and and and provides no clear solutions to
itself or to the world. Well, yeah, it's really funny

(40:46):
because he is so designed. It highlights how designing amaze
for a rat is kind of different than designing a
maze for a human, right because rats, uh might, because
of their their ecological niche, they might have senses that
are attuned to things that humans wouldn't even imagine would

(41:06):
be a useful clue in in you know, cheating and
seeing through the confusion that the maze is supposed to provide. Yeah, yeah,
we have to remember that that rats, other organisms that
we might put in a maze, they live in a
different sense realm than we do. Like their dependence on
you know, site versus smell, etcetera. Are going to be

(41:26):
rather different than ours. And then they're you know, they're
there's their smell abilities are going to beyond, be beyond
what we have at our disposal. Maybe I'm reaching here,
but I was imagining some interesting parallels here between the
maze as a psychological research instrument and the maze of
myth because what they're doing in both cases is trying
to strip away extraneous detail and context from from the

(41:51):
decision of the character, whether that's a an animal that's
the subject of research or character in a story and
just sort of like isolate one, say, aliant trait at
a time that that's often what mythology does, like it
boils down a human too courage embodied and has no
other really identifiable human traits in that moment in the story.

(42:12):
And the same thing for the rat. You're trying to
like take away all of the things that make a
rat a rat, accept its ability to decide between X
and Y based on Z. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point.
So I guess it doesn't exactly work with theseus because
theseus does bring bring context from the outside world into
the maze. Right. He comes in armed with tools and

(42:34):
with information that he technically should not have if this
were a fair fight. Right, right, he has he has
broken the game. Yeah, he has corrupted the experiment. These
are not legitimate results, all right. On that note, we're
going to take one more break, but we'll be right back.
Than alright, we're back. Uh now, Robert, is it time

(42:55):
to talk about the minotaur and zoonotic diseases? Yes, it is.
I was actually delighted to run to run across this
paper titled Europe The Bull and the Minotaur The Biological
Legacy of a Neolithic love Story. This is by Harold Brusso,
published in the journal Environmental Microbiology back in two thousand

(43:15):
and nine. Now, Harold Brusso is a research scientist and
he's the author of the book The Quest for Food
and Natural History of Eating, And incidentally he's also an
author on several COVID nineteen papers to come out this year. Yeah,
I saw that. I looked about it looks like he's
affiliated with the Nestly Research Center in Switzerland and uh

(43:37):
and at some point I think I also saw him
affiliated with the University of Geneva, but the main things
I saw recently were the Nestly Research Center. I gotta
say he's got a very unusual writing style for scientific papers.
It's very whimsical. Yes, definitely whimsical. Um and you get
a sense of that from the title here as well.
Basically in this article Brusso used is the Minotaur myth

(44:01):
as a means of discussing the Neolithic Revolution and the
manner in which the domestication of goats and cattle, etcetera
opened the door for new pathogens. As he points out,
hunters only had limited contact with prey and most close
contact occurred after the animal's death. Not to say this
is safe for the human hunter, but quote all the

(44:24):
mechanisms which microbes induced in the infected host to assure
their transmission, like sneezing, coughing, or diarrhea, are not any
longer operative in the dead animal. Okay, So he's saying that,
And despite the fact that people who hunted for a
living would be coming in contact with animals and their
body fluids pretty often, people who do animal agriculture are

(44:48):
actually more at risk for animal transmitted diseases than hunters are,
right because suddenly you're not just hunting the animal down,
killing it process and then processing it, which in a
certainly process of the animal could come with some risks,
but it's one's dead, it's not going to sneeze on you.
But with the domestication, humans come into close contact with

(45:09):
these animals all the time. They come into clause contact
with sick animals as well as the animals dung, which
was valuable for fuel and fertilizer. Uh and also another
pathway for disease. And you're going to be spending time.
I mean, I just imagine there's more time with the animal.
Like you kill an animal when you're hunting, and then
you kind of deal with it. But like, but that's

(45:29):
one animal for a sort of limited period of time.
While you're processing it or carrying it back to home
or wherever this other thing would be, you're just sort
of like wandering around with herds of sheep or cows
or something all day and there's a bunch of them
all crammed together, right, And and thus he states that
you know, we can we can safely anticipate quote that
the early farming society was plagued by new diseases zoonosis

(45:53):
was feeding new pathogens into the human population. Yeah, that's
very interesting to consider. I mean, we we think about
the advent of agriculture in in the Neolithic period as
you know, one of the progenitors of civilization, but we
don't often imagine a lot of the downsides that might
have come along with it, and it seems quite possible
that he's correct that zoonotic diseases and increase in diseases

(46:16):
transmitted from animals to humans would be one of those consequences. Yeah,
so he writes that humanities growth simply created new opportunities
for these microbes, which in turn discovered humans as quote
an attractive life support. Um. Now, this, he says, follows
the principle of the marine microbiologists call killing off the

(46:37):
winning population. So he points out that the viruses had
co evolved with their host during evolution, we would expect
the closest relatives of measles viruses in paramixo viruses of
primates instead. However, the most important human pathogens, such as
highly transmissible agents like measles and smallpox, are closely related

(46:59):
to viruses from domesticated animals. Measles, for instance, circulates exclusively
in the human population, but is a close relative of
render pest virus that is found in cattle. And of course,
this uh is not limited just to ancient times. I mean,
human viruses emerging from cultivated animal stocks still happens today.

(47:22):
I mean, I think it's pretty common for flu strains
to come out of say like pigs or birds that
are domesticated by humans now. Bruso also points out that
the close relationship between smallpox and cow pox was actually
really important for the history of vaccination. Physician Edward Jenner
noticed that milkmaids who had acquired cow pox were resistant

(47:42):
to smallpox. He also points out that tuberculosis is caused
by the Microbacterium tuberculosis complex, to which M. Bovis belongs.
Any lists several other examples and also discusses the idea
popularized by Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs and Steel that
Europeans brought with them their Old World viruses which they had,

(48:05):
which they had generated out of their history of animal domestication,
all this time spent in close confines with their domesticated species. Now,
I will say, with reference to Diamond, Uh, it's been
a long time since I read that book. Years ago
I read Guns, Terms and Steel. Uh. I can tell
that he Diamond has recently been subject to a lot

(48:26):
of criticism by experts in the fields. He covers. Uh.
If so, I don't know, I don't want to be
too unfair, but it seems like there are a lot
of allegations of kind of cherry picking the thing that
often happens when somebody's got a very broad, sweeping explanation
of history. Um, but I do think one of the
basic genres of things explored in that book is interesting,

(48:47):
which is the broad thrust of it is trying to
explain human history in terms of environmental biogeography, So showing
that you know what people's come to power at what
place in time, and at least in large part be
explained by often otherwise overlooked environmental biological and geographical factors

(49:07):
such as like what types of crops grow here, or
what types of animals nearby could be domesticated, what kinds
of pathogens or people exposed to and things like that.
So uh So, whatever one would think of Diamond himself
or or his fuller argument, I do think it's important
to remember that history is not just a battle of
wills and virtues between like powerful individual people and their personalities.

(49:29):
It's also very much about mosquitoes and rainfall patterns and
farming equipment and stuff like that. Now, to come back
to to Bruso here, the idea that he's presenting here
isn't that the Neolithic door opens and immediately all of
these zoonotic diseases rush in um. This would have taken
place over in a long period of time. Uh. It

(49:50):
still opens the door though, But sometimes the these these
basically these zoonotic events are going to occur just throughout
that the history that I'm folds. For example, measles seems
to have emerged from render past between c. E eleven
hundred and c E twelve hundred, and is pointed out
by Ferous at All in Origin of Measles of the

(50:12):
measles virus UH. Divergence from render pest virus between likely
occurred between the eleventh and twelve centuries. That was in
Virology Journal in two thousand ten. UH. And they were
likely limited outbreaks prior to this, when the pathogen wasn't
fully adapted to humans yet. And then Bruso also points
out that there were population issues to consider as well. Um,

(50:34):
you know, as the duration of epidemics are influenced by
population density. So again, not only you know, in the
wake of the you know, the Neolithic Revolution, we get
to the point where we are we are building cities,
we are living in closer confines to each other, and
we're creating not only the the environments in which a
pathogen could leap from one species to another, but also

(50:57):
these robust environments in which a pathogen could then spread,
you know, massively through a larger human population. Yeah, this
is all interesting and important to consider. So I'm wondering,
where does the minotaur come in. Ah, Yes, the minotaur.
Uh so there is a minotaur in all of this
um and uh. And he sets it up right rather nicely.

(51:18):
I think he says, generations of poets, philosophers, and psychologists
have interpreted and reinterpreted ancient Greek myths. I will thus
take the liberty to add a biological interpretation to this
strange story. So, you know, I think he's being very
clear about the fact that he's not making an argument
that the minotaur is about um zoonotic diseases. But he's saying,

(51:41):
I'm going to take the minotaur and it's a myth,
and I am going to use it to make a
statement about about this, to to explain something or attempt
to explain something about this relationship between animals, humans and
their pathogens. Okay, so it's not like there's actually a
good case that zoonotic diseases are literally the historical inspiration

(52:01):
of the minotaur myth, but it does work pretty amazingly
as a metaphor. Yeah, he does a great job with it. Again,
he's a kind of kind of a whimsical writer, especially
in this piece. Okay, let's hear it so point he
he you know, relates the minotar myth a bit, but
points not only to the minotaur but also to uh,
you know, the myth of Zeus in his bull form,
seducing the Princess Europa or Europe and taking her to

(52:25):
creet where he impregnates her with three sons. One of
those three sons is Minos. Uh. Europe's brothers then search
the known world for her and uh. And then Brusso
writes this quote. The paths of Europe's brothers recall partly
the migrations of the early farmers from the Near East
into Europe and North Africa, partly Phoenician colonization. The too

(52:49):
close relationship of Mino's wife with a bull leads to
a children eating chimera, stretching a bit of the fantasy.
I would interpret this monster as the species crossing virulus,
derived from the new close contact between cattle and farmer.
The labyrinth might be a type of quarantine imposed on
infected subjects. Sir Evans, the excavator of the minoah Crete,

(53:12):
suggests that it reflects the plan of the Royal Palace innsis.
Some viruses are bovine human cameras like Minotaur, which both
ate the young children of the earlier inhabitants of Europe.
This myth might thus keep the memory of the hardship
following the encounter of the cattle farmers with the hunter
gatherers of prehistoric Europe. And then the rest of the

(53:35):
article deals primarily with examples of this and discussions of
its import. That's great, I mean, I would say to reiterate,
of course, I'm not convinced, and I don't think he's
necessarily making the case that actually this was the literal
inspiration of the myth, But it is a really awesome
metaphor the idea that the introduction of domesticated livestock such
as cattle and sheep and stuff into the lives of

(53:57):
humans would have these echoes throughout his story that have
biological implications. In the myth, they are the biological implications
of creating a hybrid monster. In reality, the biological implications
are creating these zoonotic diseases that are in a way
a hybrid type being because they jump from one species
to another when you're living in close contact long enough.

(54:19):
And even though the inspiration of the myth is probably
not direct in any way, I mean, I do wonder
about a kind of loose, un semi conscious connection in that, Like,
isn't there always a sort of quiet, wordless unease about
civilization and its products? And it just shows up again
and again every generation, even while we enjoy the fruits

(54:40):
of civilization, like we enjoy the stability of food supply
and the opportunity for the diversification of labor and all
of that, all the stuff we get from a settled
urban existence, from agriculture, from technology and so forth, isn't
there in every generation a new expression of the feeling
that something is kind of wrong with all this, that

(55:01):
there it is somehow perverted or dangerous, even monstrous, and
that people should somehow get back to nature in one
way or another. Some version of this philosophy is always there.
It seems like, yeah, I mean, really, to come back
to the the idea of the labyrinth itself and and
the other creations of datalists, there's this ide. You know,

(55:22):
there's so much of that science fictional energy, that anxiety
concerning technology. Uh in this figure. You know, what if
we created something that lifted us up on high but
also lead to our destruction? Uh? What if we created
something so elegantly designed that it was too confusing for
even its creator to escape that sort of thing? Yes, totally.

(55:45):
I mean you can look at a million different kinds
of technology as essentially the labyrinth, the thing that becomes
so complicated it escapes the intentions of its creator. And
uh yeah, I mean an obvious place to look at
that would be artificial intelligence. I mean, people off and
use the people often use the metaphor of Pandora's box.
They're like, are you opening the box? Who knows what

(56:05):
what will come out? But the labyrinth is also a
pretty good metaphor for for what's happening with AI. Yeah.
And and there's always the concern that there will be
the minotaur within it as well, the thing that is
not just passively anti human but actively anti human. But
I mean it's easy to imagine that kind of thing
with AI, because at least AI reaches such a level

(56:25):
of complexity that you're imagining it almost as an agent
that you can't control. You know, I think you can
even apply this idea of our our perennial anxiety or
suspicions about the downsides of of civilization and it's technological
products um too too earlier innovations, even things as seemingly

(56:47):
simple as agriculture, because in fact agriculture comes with tons
of consequences that would not have been predicted by the
people who invented. It comes with risk of zoonotic diseases,
It comes with changes in diet and how that affects
human life, and a million other things. Oh yeah, I mean,
whereas many of the the catastrophic problems that we're dealing

(57:08):
with today in our world, are you know, the the
end results of this these initial revolutions. But you mentioned
Pandora's box earlier. So I want to come back just
one more time to Brusso here, because he has this
particularly haunting closing to the paper. And again this is
from two thousand nine, in which he considers how modern
global environmental changes will lead to another quote highly dynamic

(57:31):
phase of viral transmissions into the human population. He writes,
quote viruses must be the dark side of the heritage
from the Neolithic Revolution to remain. With Greek myths, they
might correspond to a half open Pandora's box, a poisoned
gift of the bull god Zeus to mankind. Humans go
now into a phase of globalization whose ecological impact might

(57:55):
represent a full opening of this cursed box. Man is
today a major evolutionary force, and we can safely anticipate
that man made environmental changes will lead to a new
deal in our relationship with microbes. When the diseases had
left the box, the Greek myth told that only hope
remained in the box. Today, we are probably better served

(58:17):
with science as our best defense against surprise attacks from
the viral Empire UH, than with the principal hope. Got
some chills from that. I mean to say nothing against hope.
I mean, hope is good, but don't show up with
a hope to a science fight. Yeah, Or if you're
gonna bring hope in one hand, bring science in the other.

(58:37):
All right, So there you have it. This was episode
three of our Journey through the Labyrinth, our consideration of
the minotaur UH and the and the myth that it
emerges out of the culture, It emerges out of the
various ideas that it is still stirring and the human
imagination today. Uh, this one is a lot of fun. Yeah, totally,
And we have got so much more October stuff for you.

(59:00):
We're busting it seems here. Yes, there's so yeah, we
we've we've got We've got so many more ideas to go.
I think we even still have a few ideas to
come up with. But but it's gonna be a full
month of of Halloween related wonder In the meantime, if
you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, if you want to catch up
on our current Halloween offerings, uh, explore our past Halloween offerings,

(59:23):
or some of our past myth related episodes, you know,
such as our our study of the Medusa from earlier
this year. Well, you can find this podcast wherever you
get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We
just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. If you
want to find us, like really quickly, you can just
go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and
that will take you to the I heart listening for

(59:45):
this show. And if you do go there, there's a
place you can click on somewhere on that page kind
of a labyrinth. Uh. You can click on like store
or merchandise or what have you. That'll take you to
our our t shirt store where we have a few
different designs with stuff like our logo, maybe a Medusa
or to that sort of thing. Huge thanks, as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you

(01:00:07):
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
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(01:00:29):
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