March 27, 2014 • 29 mins
Labyrinths: Join Robert and Julie once more for their classic series on mazes and labyrinths. Having escaped from the confusion of the Minoan maze, it's time to walk the serene, calming paths of the Chartres Labyrinth. Why is this experience so different? Learn all about the calming effects of labyrinths on the mind. Image: © Sylvain Sonnet/Corbis
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey wasn't to stuff the bow of
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
We have just escaped from the world of the maze
and now we're entering into the peaceful world of the labyrinth.
(00:24):
And before we dive into this old episode, let's dive
into this very cool thing that is happening at the
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, which is installing a triangular
walk in glass labyrinth that's scheduled to open to the
public in May. Yeah. This is designed by Kansas City
native Robert Morris. Weighs more than four tons, made up
of dozens of seven foot high, one interestant glass panels,
(00:47):
and it's ultimately going to form a fifty by fifty
by fifty ft glass triangle with a labyrinth in the middle.
And it's a true labyrinth. By the way, there's one
way in, there's one way out. And in this episode
you're gonna hear us discuss why this is important and
what I love about it is it has a maze
quality in that it has those walls, but their glass walls,
so it's still a labyrinth, and it still has that
(01:08):
peaceful sort of meandering feel to it. Morris says, within
the Labyrinth of Paradox is allowed we lose ourselves to
find ourselves. You know. It's interesting. This reminds me of
an old short story uh titled In the Walls of
Erics by HP Lovecraft with Kenneth J. Sterling, in which
and this is, you know, like NT nine. I believe
(01:30):
this is published as an old pulp sci fi story
space Explorers landed on Venus finds himself inside of a
glass maze and it's it's it's very terrifying for this
individual because he cannot find a way out. It's a
true maze. It's confusing, it's it's disorienting, and the walls
are glass so you can see the outside of the
maze so clearly, but there's no way to get to it. Ah,
(01:52):
But this is not terrifying. This is supposed to be
a very soothing construct here at the museum. Yes, So
without further ado, let us enter the labyrinth. Certainly, for
for modern users, there is a distinction between labyrinth and maze.
Is the maze it's just the space of walls that
(02:12):
are confining you in and you're trying to find your
way out. There dead ends, there are corners, there may
or may not be a minotaur wandering around after you. Uh.
It is the stuff of the hedge maze and the shining.
It is the stuff of everything you see in the
movie Labyrinth. Despite the name Labyrinth, that is uh, it
is a movie in which the individual roams through mazes. Yeah,
(02:33):
it's a spatial puzzle. And I really think about Labyrinth
as more of the antidote to amaze. Yes, because you're
not engaging the hippocampus as you would in a maze.
Because in a labyrinth, you don't have to really worry
about the path or your memory or even trying to
stake out a blueprint, because really the blueprint is in
(02:53):
front of you. It may look like a maze, but
really it's one uh, continuing path at circles around. Yeah.
You there's one entrance, there's one exit, and there are
no choices to make you simply follow the path. And
the path is winding, and the path is slow going
because you're having to take all these turns in these
(03:14):
in these twists, but never do you have to actually
think do I go this way or that way because
there are no choices. It is. It is one curving
line from one end to the other. It's like a
ball of string, you know, if you were to travel
through that string on the outside, and it looks intricate
and complicated, but but really it is one path. And
I really think about it as an act of submission
when you enter into this labyrinth, because you are following
(03:36):
a preordained path, right, and you are submitting yourself to
this path, and in doing so, um, it is a
sort of meditative practice because you are now UM, I
guess you could say you were busying your mind just
with the act of walking. And that's what we're going
to talk about today. We talked about the stress response
with m mazes, but now we're going to talk about
(03:58):
this more meditative quality of the labyrinth and what it
means to us on a psychological and physical level. But
first I want to mention that labyrinths are all over
the world, um, and have been for for many thousands
of years. You can find them in the United States,
in Europe and India, Afghanistan, Java, Sumatra, and various sites
(04:20):
in the US left by Pueblo Indians, the Hopi and
Zuni and others. Yeah, you see the design of a labyrinth.
You see it on the classic room and flooring, you
see in the remains of labyrinth throughout Scandinavian Northern Europe.
You see it in the graffiti at Pompeii, Ancient Britain's
cut labyrinths into the turf, Bronze Age tumbs in Sardinia,
other carvings dating back to three thousand DC. It's like
(04:44):
the maze. We discussed how the maze is like this
pure physical or pattern base, but certainly a physical embodiment
of either internal confusion or external navigation confusion. It is
about the state of confusion in the human mind uh
as a physical reality, and like you said, the the
labyrinth is an antidote to that. Yeah, it really is
(05:06):
the polar opposite. And it's funny that those terms are
used interchangeably because when you think about a labyrinth, you
think about wide open spaces, right, because this is typically
something that is uh cut into the earth or made
with stones or made out of stones, and so you
can still see the vista around you. You're not your
vision isn't impaired in anyway. In other words, there's not
(05:28):
something on your right or left, and uh, you can
see and hear everything right. In fact, some would say
that you're able to pay attention more to these aspects
of being. You're able to really tune into the sounds
around you, the smells, the sites. So it really is
the polar opposite of a maze. Yeah. Yeah, there are
no walls rising up around you. It's a winding course,
(05:50):
but there are no choices to be made, and you
generally find these your You often find them rather uh
in churches, either in or in the serene garden environments. Uh.
I encountered one at the Desert Museum in Arizona where
they had one out amid the catt in this one
little cactus garden, and it was just really serene. You
start at the beginning of the labyrinth and it just
(06:11):
curls you around and you're just walking following the path,
noticing all these beautiful succulent plants growing all around you.
And then eventually you wind your way back out and
you just yesterday sought out a labyrinth within the maze
that is Atlanta. So, especially since there aren't really i mean,
(06:31):
labyrinths don't really make for great movie and and fictional storytelling,
you know, because movies and in fiction, and I mean,
it's all about putting you in a situation of drama.
So of course fictional characters wind up in mazes. They rarely,
it seems, wind up in labyrinth. So describe your experience
with the labyrinth. UM. I walked it at St. Barthl
(06:52):
Barth follow Mules uh Episcopal Church, I believe, And it
was an outdoor one and it was really like and
I'm sure I was psychologically primed for the event, but UM,
I spent minutes walking in a couple of times. And
what I noticed about it is that it does draw
you out of yourself again. The landscape is open, you
(07:14):
can see the sky, You begin to notice things, and
this is really important. I think we'll talk about this
um a little bit later. But it takes you out
of that chattering part of your brain a bit um
and it puts you it gives you a little bit
more stillness. And that's what I notice. And here's how
I actually tested the level of meditative uh quality to
(07:37):
this experience. I went to the Whole Foods after this.
Now it's uh, it's late December now and there's a
lot of bustling action that Whole Foods. I despise going
to Whole Foods, even when it's a calm period, because
people seem to me to act very aggressively in Whole Foods,
(07:57):
whether or not just trying to get a parking space
or they're just taking their shopping carts around and jamming
into the aisles. For some reason, I find it to
be a disturbing place to be, even though it has
a sort of holistic vibe about it of health and
wellness and all that stuff. Afterwards, after walking this labyrinth,
I was like I was floating on air, did not care.
I parked really far away. Who could care about getting
(08:19):
a parking space up close? I didn't um. But of
course all of this again could be psychological priming. But
I think that does speak to this act, that when
you go through this physical act, that there can be
some sort of transformation mentally. And was it circular basically informed,
because it seems like that that is sort of the
standard for the labyrinth, is that looking at it from above,
(08:42):
it's the circular zone of in which this path twists
and turns. Yeah, it was circular, and at the very
center it had symbols have three things that were a
symbol of something. Now I think you guys, I will
probably been hit to the fact that I'm not a
religious person, so I don't know what the significance of
that is. I guess I'm gonna make a guess that
it was like the what is it, the Holy Spirit
(09:03):
of the three things? Yes, yeah, those those were the faces.
I thought it was just pattern recognition, but now that
you say that, I think it was Larry feeling it
was then. But it's interesting that you've mentioned how it
is this. There's this feeling of guidance in the labyrinth,
so it makes perfect sense that they would be in
holy spaces because, certainly within a church environment, this is
(09:24):
the idea that God is my co pilot, or you know,
I'm gonna gonna trust in something greater than myself to
guide me through this light life. And therefore what is
the labyrinth? But it is allowing the path to guide
you and freeing yourself of the worries about which way
did you go this, this way or that way. One
of the most famous labyrinths that is this in a
(09:44):
church setting is Chartress and m an archaeological excavation has
shown that the cathedral. This is in France, overlies the
alignment and foundations of earlier Roman buildings, and this is
building twelve sixty around today. This is really cool. If
you visit the labyrinth on the summer solstice, you'll see
that exactly at noon, a sunbeam falls directly on a
(10:06):
nail that was placed in the floor, you know, And
there's something beautiful about the I mean, it's still there
because there are no there are no walls to fall
down inside a labyrinth. You construct a maze. We mentioned
the Maze of Minos in the podcast about mazes. You know,
whether that actually existed in any way, shape or form,
you know, that's that's an area of discussion among historians.
(10:27):
Most seem to think it did not. We certainly cannot
find evidence of a vast subterranean maze in which a
monster lived. Uh. There's some speculation that the palace itself
there in crete, was kind of like a maze. It
had big, thick walls, and it was very intimidating and
a little confusing. But a lot of that has fallen
down and we've had to, you know, sort of to
to piece things back together. So a maze not only
(10:50):
a confusing but it can fall and change due to
the weathering of the world. Whereas, uh, it's kind of
beautiful to think of a labyrinth that's something that that
is persistent because there's no thing that can be eroded.
It can be covered up, but it's still there underneath
the turf if you know to look for it. You
know what's interesting about that too. I was I was
thinking about the Nazca lines, and these were lines drawn
(11:11):
by the Nasca people. And this is a civilization living
in modern Peru. Yeah, we're talking four between four hundred
and six. Yeah, and uh, this civilization actually disappeared about
fidred years ago, but you can still see the traces
of these lines, these labyrinths that were designed by scraping
away red dust and rock and revealing the white ground
(11:33):
underneath it. And um, and they're in the shape of
of of animals. Yeah, it's so cool, like animals, the monkeys, monkeys,
some humans, birds and fish are represented coming birds, sharks, lizards. Yeah,
and and these are huge, We're talking about six hundred
and sixty feet across and so ancient aliens people love these.
(11:56):
The idea it's like they would tell on aliens about
monkeys that's what this was about. Well, actually, what they
think is that this was a rite of passage in
that it was a contemplative act done by small groups
of the civilization that they walked these labyrinths in order
to get to the end of UM. What was largely
(12:18):
this metaphorical ritual. For not only the idea here is
not only is this a line that creates the shape
of a monkey as visible from a station, uh, this
is also this is a line that you traverse. You're
traversing the shape of the monkey or the lizard or
what have you. Yeah. So again, you know, this is
probably more meditative practice that was done by the civilization
(12:42):
UM and not communication to ancient aliens. UM. But I
think that it points to this idea that throughout history
there has been this sort of walking meditation done in
different ways. Yes, and we'll get more into the idea
of walking meditation shortly. Yeah, particularly when you consider it
use as a healing practice and and actually in medical
(13:04):
UM centers. Yeah, you around the world, you see them
pop up again and again. And as we mentioned in
the last podcast, a great source for these two episodes
was a book by esther In Steinberg titled The Science
of Healing Places. She devotes one chapter to labyrinth and mazes,
but the whole book is about how physical environments affect
us both in body and mind effectively, how they affect
(13:24):
the mind body through our you know, and this can
be negative, this can be positive, and and how if
you're building something like a hospital, you want to take
that into account. You don't want to build a hospital
it feels like a maze, if anything. You want to
build a hospital that feels like a labyrinth that's open, right,
And failing that, you just build a labyrinth in the courtyard,
which many places do, right, because you have this idea
of opening space metaphorically and physically so that your brain
(13:48):
can sort of acclaimate itself to that space. Um. As
you had mentioned the book Healing Spaces, there is a
Harvard cardiologist that Sternberg, the author talks about. His name
is Harvey Goldberg, and he says that a lot of
these meditative practices, meditative walking, our yoga, or tai chi
(14:08):
um is really about gaming the relaxation response through breathing.
And he says, quote, I think of it as an
unclenching when the system gets overly tense. It's like a
tight fist is locked somehow, By focusing your attention elsewhere,
there is an unlocking and unclenching of the fist. Now,
this is really important when you think about an act
(14:31):
of walking meditation, but as in an elabyrinth, when you're
walking around like that, because you are focusing on something
other than yourself and yet you're allowing your thoughts to
unfold naturally, and this is that contemplative act that labyrinth's encourage. Yeah,
so think of this when you're actually walking on the
path of the labyrinth. What are you doing? Why are
(14:52):
you feeling relaxed? First of all, you're focusing on the
path you're having. You're looking down, and you're looking up
a little bit too, but kind of looking down and
watching the path that you're walking. There are no walls
to to head you in. It's about following this path
on the ground. Secondly, because of this, you're moving slower,
and because you're moving slower, you're breathing slower. Also, unlike
(15:13):
a maze, your vision is not obstructed. You're able to
hear and see the world around you like you mentioned,
and you're you're not having to depend on, you know,
landmarks or what have you just kind of on autopilot, Yeah,
which allows you to get into that mental space that
is healing as Sternberg and Goldberg and Herbert Benson, who
is very much an authority of meditative thoughts and actually
(15:35):
meditation itself. We will talk more about this. We're gonna
take a quick break. We're gonna talk about why labyrinths
were built and how it affects us at the physiological level.
When you look back at some of these more ancient labyrinths,
like the Nasca lines, again it comes up why why
(15:57):
did people make these? What? Why were they built? Why
were they created? And certainly a spiritual reason is present.
It's very much possibility for some of them. Some people
think there are astrological reasons behind them. And if you
look again at Chartreu, which is the cathedral in France,
(16:18):
again you see evidence that it was designed in conjunction
with the summer solstice, so that maybe it had something
to do with that. Um. I tend to think that
if the sunlight is beaming down in the middle of
a labyrinth on the summer solstice at noon, that that
would be very powerful to churchgoers, particularly if they're walking
(16:38):
the labyrinth, because it's the idea that this path is
in tune with celestial dynamics, with the mechanics of the universe, right,
and that you are in unity with nature. Yeah, Like
it makes me think that to do Dante's Inferno again,
particularly Dante's Paradise. Paradise is a very strictly ordered thing,
like the cosmos, whereas when Dante's actually in Hell, it's
an ordered system. But it's it's a lot more confusing. Yeah.
(17:02):
And then there's this I like this one. There's the
dancing theory. Oh yes, this is great. This takes me back.
There was there were like a couple of old goofy cartoons.
I'm sure Holly would tell you could tell me exactly
when and where they occur in the long list of
Disney productions. But there were a couple of goofy carloro stuff.
There are a couple of goofy cartoons and one he
(17:23):
quit smoking and another he was trying to lose weight,
I think. And they dealt They were really cool. They
dealt with like an adult goofy like dealing with like
the demands of being like a bachelor. It was weird stuff.
I check it out again. But but there's one where
he's like trying to learn how to dance, and there's
this kid he gets where you listen to a record
and you place these cutouts of feet of on the
(17:46):
on the floor and then you dance by moving and
he has like a mannequin with him and you move
from one these steps to this step, and this teaches
you how to dance by following the patterns on the floor.
It's so that he could now, in his bachelorhood, a woman.
So this is helping kids who are seeing their their
father who's now a new bachelor. Well, I think these
(18:08):
were and again pop stuff will have to clear me
up in this. I think people were aimed at these
were These were kind of like an early Simpsons in
a way because they were they were kind of aimed
at maybe a little bit at kids, but more at
the adults. But anyway, that the dancing ritual. Yeah, and
the idea, So the idea here is that Labyrinth's were
potentially not nearly this thing that you walk on and
serenely follow but you dance through because think about what
(18:31):
dances and I'm not talking like you know, grinding booty
shaking necessarily, but but think of something like like square dancing,
some sort of ritualized dance, certainly the Whirling Dervishes, where
there is a pattern that you're following, and you're you're
giving yourself up to the pattern of the dance, to
(18:52):
the rhythm of the beat, to the You're giving yourself
over body and soul to the music and the movement.
And and that is in a sense of labyrinth you
were becoming. You kind of become the labyrinth, You become
the dance, you become the music. In that becoming, you
cannot be this bundle of worries and and and troubles
(19:14):
that you are the rest of the time. Yeah, it's
the rhythm of the night. You leaven all your cares
behind right the night. Yeah, I won't do that anymore.
So what's interesting about that too is that this is uh,
not just something that is again an act of submission,
but perhaps some sort of right of passage. This is
(19:36):
perhaps something that young men who had proved themselves as
warriors would go through this dance. This is also a
fertility right for women who would go through these um
the labyrinth dancing. And again you're talking about syncopated rhythm.
You're talking about a group activity that would line everybody up. Yeah,
we talked before. When people are singing together, it's like
(19:58):
their neurons are all firing on this in battern and
some more thing with these movements, right, think about it
as the first Congo line. Is it congo or congo?
I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. In the book, Steinberg
points out that this is possibly why like early in
church history, like certainly churches came to embrace their labyrinths.
(20:18):
Sat Bart's here in Atlanta is not ashamed of their labyrinth.
They're rather proud of it. But in the old days
there's maybe a little suspicion where the older members of
the church, especially like I don't know about these labyrinths.
There's something kind of not right about them, fancy about them,
you know why, because they have found all sorts of evidence.
In fact, an entrustan vase from six BC depicts not
(20:41):
just the dance in the labyrinth, but sexual acts going on.
So the church kind of like, m I'm not sure
about showing the positions, the sexual positions, um, you know,
overlaid on the labyrinth here. Maybe we could kind of
cover that up a little bit. But there's a little
bit of that involved with it and that you know,
(21:01):
and that of course hints at paganism, right, So let's
talk about the way that it affects the body. Okay,
So you talked about this idea that when you're walking,
you began to slow down your breath, right, and you
began to relax. So your breathing slows, your heart rate downshifts,
and this is when your body gets the queue that
it's time to slow down and relax. And this is
(21:24):
the opposite of the stress response, This is the relaxation response. Yeah.
The slow breathing activates the vegas nerve that counters the
adrenaline like sympathetic nervous system response of stress. Yeah. And
what's really cool about this nerve is that we've known
that it has it's workings with stress and counteracting stress,
(21:45):
but it also regulates the immune system, in particular in
fighting inflammation. So when we start to talk about this
in the stress response, we start to talk more about
the immune system as a whole, because we know that
if your body is in a constant state of just stress,
that this can be destructive at a cellular level. So
this is why it's important to try to uh promote
(22:06):
as much of this relaxation response that you can. Yeah,
and it's really crazy to think about it about the
mazes and labyrinths in this sense, the idea that a
maze in physical space can physically harm you, like on
a cellular level, and likewise a labyrinth can heal you.
Because when we talk about healing spaces, it's easily to
think of it in terms of some hippie dippy nonsense,
has some some spiritual talk. And maybe I'm not that
(22:28):
into the idea that a space has all these magical
properties about it, But as we've discussed, a space does
have an effect on the body and mind, and and
we see that in a way in their purest forms
in the maze and the labyrinth. Yeah, Because again I
will bring up the default mode network. This is that
part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and medial
parialtial cortex in the meadle medial temporal lobe. This is
(22:50):
that part that is the midline chatter that me, me, me,
the fear of response. This is all this is concerned
with the ego and the seat of consciousness that really
helps to inform is this used to balance our sense
of self? But when we have too much of the chatter,
there's hyperactivity. That's when depression sets in. That is stressful, right,
And as we discovered in our podcast The Shaman and
(23:13):
the Scientist, it is meditation that is one of the
things that can quiet this part of the mind. And
this was really important in helping to relieve depression. And
I wanted to bring up once more that Dr Judson
Brewer used fm R I to scan experienced meditators and
he found this decreased activity in the default mode network. Now,
(23:35):
meditation really is just about again gaining your breath and
because if you do that, obviously that your body is
going to get these cues that it needs to relax.
So this walking meditation through a labyrinth is very much
a type of meditation. So when you think about that,
then then as you say, it's no longer just like
(23:55):
this hippie dippie, like, hey, meditate and you will fill
one with the world. It's that it is changing you
at a cellular level. And we talked about this too,
with meditation changing you um your genes as well your
stressed genes, being able to actually turn those off their
stress responses. Steinberg pointed out too, with resuscitation. When you're
(24:16):
resuscitating an individual, you're you're talking about one breath every
six to seven seconds once the heart is started back
up again, and that is the optimal breathing pattern to
get the optimal amount of oxygen carbon dioxide into the
body to nourish tissue and keep the brain working. So
it makes sense to me that you would begin to
see some of these labyrinths popping up in medical centers
(24:38):
because no doubt, those are some of the most stressful
places to be in because either you or a loved
one um is in this medical center of being treated,
or you're someone who works there. It's a high stress job,
right um to be in the medical professions. So if
you have this labyrinth there and you had patients walking it,
that could or you have family members or friends who
(25:01):
are walking in these times of despair and stress, then
it could help you that relaxation response to open you
up a little bit more in your mind and to
sort of tamp that down again at a mental level.
At the cellular level, yeah, it has a lot in
common with walking meditation, which is a form of meditation
you do walking being and remaining conscious of your steps
(25:22):
and your breathing. But it is also, as Cimberg points out,
it has a lot in common with tai chi as
a gentle exercise. You might not think of walking a
labyrinth as exercise, but essentially it is. It's a gentle exercise.
But even this has a positive effect on the body. Yeah,
it does. There is a small study that finds that
mindfulness meditation and moderate exercise have protective effects against cold
(25:46):
and flu, with people who engage in the practices having
less severe, shorter, and fewer symptoms of acute respiratory infection.
So what we're talking about is a study that was
published in the Annals of Family Medicine, and it included
a hundred and forty nine people and average age of
fifty nine. Fifty one of them were assigned to have
(26:07):
mindfulness meditation training for eight weeks, forty seven did moderate
exercise for eight weeks, and fifty one they didn't have
to do anything. And what they found is that those
who went through the mindfulness training were linked with a
forty to decrease in symptoms fluid symptoms, while exercise was
(26:27):
linked to a thirty decrease in symptoms. So, in other words,
again what you're seeing here is that this act in
hi achieving a moderate exercise, in walking being a moderate
exercise does have real ramifications on your health. All right,
I'm going to close out here with just a brief
little bit of quotation from Kick not Hahn, who is
(26:48):
of course a zen master in the Vietnamese tradition, and
he wrote a book called Walking Meditation that came with
like a DVD in a c D. It's still out
there if you want to learn more about walking meditation.
It's a good source. So this is the Welcoming Path
by Tignahan. The empty path welcomes you, fragrant with grass
and little flowers, the path paved with paddy fields, still
(27:10):
bearing the marks of your childhood and the fragrance of
mother's hand. Walk leisurely, peacefully, your feet touch the earth deeply.
Don't let your thoughts carry you away. Come back to
the path every moment. The path is your dear friend.
She will transmit to you her solidity and her peace.
And I think that applies beautifully to the idea of labyrinth.
(27:32):
I think so too, And it's very nice if you're
interested in finding a labyrinth in your city, you can
actually go online and there is a database of them.
I believe it's called WORLDWIBEH or Hold Wide Web Labyrinth
UM or something along these lines. Just google it and
you'll find it UM and it will actually give you
all the locations. That's how I found the one near
(27:53):
our work here in Atlanta. All right, So there you
have it. Mazes and labyrinths. Two sides of the same coin,
one dark, one light, one confusing, one uh inspiring. One
is intentionally losing yourself. The other is trying really not
(28:15):
to try to lose yourself exactly. I wanted to call
the robot over here for just a minute. There we go.
I'm not going to read this email of its entirety,
but I wanted to mention that a listener, Dominic from France,
wrote in and he mentioned that the final episode of
the first season of HBO's True Detective includes both a
(28:36):
maze and a labyrinth. Now I'm not gonna get into
the details here because I don't want to spoil it
for anybody. It's a fantastic series and I'm a huge fan.
But if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about.
And if you haven't, this won't spoil anything. But just
know that two characters engage in the same environment, and
for one of those characters you could argue it is
a maze and for the other character it is a labyrinth. Yeah,
(28:59):
so think about that when you see it or when
you see it again. All right, Well, thanks for listening, guys.
If you want to check out more of our stuff,
you can do so in many different places, but there
is one place that contains at all, Yes, stuff to
blow your mind dot com. Hopefully it's more of a
labyrinth than a maze, and in that labyrinth you will
find all of our podcast episodes are blog posts, our
(29:20):
videos links out to our various social media accounts, including Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter,
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(29:42):
because it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey wasn't to stuff the bow of
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
We have just escaped from the world of the maze
and now we're entering into the peaceful world of the labyrinth.
(00:24):
And before we dive into this old episode, let's dive
into this very cool thing that is happening at the
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, which is installing a triangular
walk in glass labyrinth that's scheduled to open to the
public in May. Yeah. This is designed by Kansas City
native Robert Morris. Weighs more than four tons, made up
of dozens of seven foot high, one interestant glass panels,
(00:47):
and it's ultimately going to form a fifty by fifty
by fifty ft glass triangle with a labyrinth in the middle.
And it's a true labyrinth. By the way, there's one
way in, there's one way out. And in this episode
you're gonna hear us discuss why this is important and
what I love about it is it has a maze
quality in that it has those walls, but their glass walls,
so it's still a labyrinth, and it still has that
(01:08):
peaceful sort of meandering feel to it. Morris says, within
the Labyrinth of Paradox is allowed we lose ourselves to
find ourselves. You know. It's interesting. This reminds me of
an old short story uh titled In the Walls of
Erics by HP Lovecraft with Kenneth J. Sterling, in which
and this is, you know, like NT nine. I believe
(01:30):
this is published as an old pulp sci fi story
space Explorers landed on Venus finds himself inside of a
glass maze and it's it's it's very terrifying for this
individual because he cannot find a way out. It's a
true maze. It's confusing, it's it's disorienting, and the walls
are glass so you can see the outside of the
maze so clearly, but there's no way to get to it. Ah,
(01:52):
But this is not terrifying. This is supposed to be
a very soothing construct here at the museum. Yes, So
without further ado, let us enter the labyrinth. Certainly, for
for modern users, there is a distinction between labyrinth and maze.
Is the maze it's just the space of walls that
(02:12):
are confining you in and you're trying to find your
way out. There dead ends, there are corners, there may
or may not be a minotaur wandering around after you. Uh.
It is the stuff of the hedge maze and the shining.
It is the stuff of everything you see in the
movie Labyrinth. Despite the name Labyrinth, that is uh, it
is a movie in which the individual roams through mazes. Yeah,
(02:33):
it's a spatial puzzle. And I really think about Labyrinth
as more of the antidote to amaze. Yes, because you're
not engaging the hippocampus as you would in a maze.
Because in a labyrinth, you don't have to really worry
about the path or your memory or even trying to
stake out a blueprint, because really the blueprint is in
(02:53):
front of you. It may look like a maze, but
really it's one uh, continuing path at circles around. Yeah.
You there's one entrance, there's one exit, and there are
no choices to make you simply follow the path. And
the path is winding, and the path is slow going
because you're having to take all these turns in these
(03:14):
in these twists, but never do you have to actually
think do I go this way or that way because
there are no choices. It is. It is one curving
line from one end to the other. It's like a
ball of string, you know, if you were to travel
through that string on the outside, and it looks intricate
and complicated, but but really it is one path. And
I really think about it as an act of submission
when you enter into this labyrinth, because you are following
(03:36):
a preordained path, right, and you are submitting yourself to
this path, and in doing so, um, it is a
sort of meditative practice because you are now UM, I
guess you could say you were busying your mind just
with the act of walking. And that's what we're going
to talk about today. We talked about the stress response
with m mazes, but now we're going to talk about
(03:58):
this more meditative quality of the labyrinth and what it
means to us on a psychological and physical level. But
first I want to mention that labyrinths are all over
the world, um, and have been for for many thousands
of years. You can find them in the United States,
in Europe and India, Afghanistan, Java, Sumatra, and various sites
(04:20):
in the US left by Pueblo Indians, the Hopi and
Zuni and others. Yeah, you see the design of a labyrinth.
You see it on the classic room and flooring, you
see in the remains of labyrinth throughout Scandinavian Northern Europe.
You see it in the graffiti at Pompeii, Ancient Britain's
cut labyrinths into the turf, Bronze Age tumbs in Sardinia,
other carvings dating back to three thousand DC. It's like
(04:44):
the maze. We discussed how the maze is like this
pure physical or pattern base, but certainly a physical embodiment
of either internal confusion or external navigation confusion. It is
about the state of confusion in the human mind uh
as a physical reality, and like you said, the the
labyrinth is an antidote to that. Yeah, it really is
(05:06):
the polar opposite. And it's funny that those terms are
used interchangeably because when you think about a labyrinth, you
think about wide open spaces, right, because this is typically
something that is uh cut into the earth or made
with stones or made out of stones, and so you
can still see the vista around you. You're not your
vision isn't impaired in anyway. In other words, there's not
(05:28):
something on your right or left, and uh, you can
see and hear everything right. In fact, some would say
that you're able to pay attention more to these aspects
of being. You're able to really tune into the sounds
around you, the smells, the sites. So it really is
the polar opposite of a maze. Yeah. Yeah, there are
no walls rising up around you. It's a winding course,
(05:50):
but there are no choices to be made, and you
generally find these your You often find them rather uh
in churches, either in or in the serene garden environments. Uh.
I encountered one at the Desert Museum in Arizona where
they had one out amid the catt in this one
little cactus garden, and it was just really serene. You
start at the beginning of the labyrinth and it just
(06:11):
curls you around and you're just walking following the path,
noticing all these beautiful succulent plants growing all around you.
And then eventually you wind your way back out and
you just yesterday sought out a labyrinth within the maze
that is Atlanta. So, especially since there aren't really i mean,
(06:31):
labyrinths don't really make for great movie and and fictional storytelling,
you know, because movies and in fiction, and I mean,
it's all about putting you in a situation of drama.
So of course fictional characters wind up in mazes. They rarely,
it seems, wind up in labyrinth. So describe your experience
with the labyrinth. UM. I walked it at St. Barthl
(06:52):
Barth follow Mules uh Episcopal Church, I believe, And it
was an outdoor one and it was really like and
I'm sure I was psychologically primed for the event, but UM,
I spent minutes walking in a couple of times. And
what I noticed about it is that it does draw
you out of yourself again. The landscape is open, you
(07:14):
can see the sky, You begin to notice things, and
this is really important. I think we'll talk about this
um a little bit later. But it takes you out
of that chattering part of your brain a bit um
and it puts you it gives you a little bit
more stillness. And that's what I notice. And here's how
I actually tested the level of meditative uh quality to
(07:37):
this experience. I went to the Whole Foods after this.
Now it's uh, it's late December now and there's a
lot of bustling action that Whole Foods. I despise going
to Whole Foods, even when it's a calm period, because
people seem to me to act very aggressively in Whole Foods,
(07:57):
whether or not just trying to get a parking space
or they're just taking their shopping carts around and jamming
into the aisles. For some reason, I find it to
be a disturbing place to be, even though it has
a sort of holistic vibe about it of health and
wellness and all that stuff. Afterwards, after walking this labyrinth,
I was like I was floating on air, did not care.
I parked really far away. Who could care about getting
(08:19):
a parking space up close? I didn't um. But of
course all of this again could be psychological priming. But
I think that does speak to this act, that when
you go through this physical act, that there can be
some sort of transformation mentally. And was it circular basically informed,
because it seems like that that is sort of the
standard for the labyrinth, is that looking at it from above,
(08:42):
it's the circular zone of in which this path twists
and turns. Yeah, it was circular, and at the very
center it had symbols have three things that were a
symbol of something. Now I think you guys, I will
probably been hit to the fact that I'm not a
religious person, so I don't know what the significance of
that is. I guess I'm gonna make a guess that
it was like the what is it, the Holy Spirit
(09:03):
of the three things? Yes, yeah, those those were the faces.
I thought it was just pattern recognition, but now that
you say that, I think it was Larry feeling it
was then. But it's interesting that you've mentioned how it
is this. There's this feeling of guidance in the labyrinth,
so it makes perfect sense that they would be in
holy spaces because, certainly within a church environment, this is
(09:24):
the idea that God is my co pilot, or you know,
I'm gonna gonna trust in something greater than myself to
guide me through this light life. And therefore what is
the labyrinth? But it is allowing the path to guide
you and freeing yourself of the worries about which way
did you go this, this way or that way. One
of the most famous labyrinths that is this in a
(09:44):
church setting is Chartress and m an archaeological excavation has
shown that the cathedral. This is in France, overlies the
alignment and foundations of earlier Roman buildings, and this is
building twelve sixty around today. This is really cool. If
you visit the labyrinth on the summer solstice, you'll see
that exactly at noon, a sunbeam falls directly on a
(10:06):
nail that was placed in the floor, you know, And
there's something beautiful about the I mean, it's still there
because there are no there are no walls to fall
down inside a labyrinth. You construct a maze. We mentioned
the Maze of Minos in the podcast about mazes. You know,
whether that actually existed in any way, shape or form,
you know, that's that's an area of discussion among historians.
(10:27):
Most seem to think it did not. We certainly cannot
find evidence of a vast subterranean maze in which a
monster lived. Uh. There's some speculation that the palace itself
there in crete, was kind of like a maze. It
had big, thick walls, and it was very intimidating and
a little confusing. But a lot of that has fallen
down and we've had to, you know, sort of to
to piece things back together. So a maze not only
(10:50):
a confusing but it can fall and change due to
the weathering of the world. Whereas, uh, it's kind of
beautiful to think of a labyrinth that's something that that
is persistent because there's no thing that can be eroded.
It can be covered up, but it's still there underneath
the turf if you know to look for it. You
know what's interesting about that too. I was I was
thinking about the Nazca lines, and these were lines drawn
(11:11):
by the Nasca people. And this is a civilization living
in modern Peru. Yeah, we're talking four between four hundred
and six. Yeah, and uh, this civilization actually disappeared about
fidred years ago, but you can still see the traces
of these lines, these labyrinths that were designed by scraping
away red dust and rock and revealing the white ground
(11:33):
underneath it. And um, and they're in the shape of
of of animals. Yeah, it's so cool, like animals, the monkeys, monkeys,
some humans, birds and fish are represented coming birds, sharks, lizards. Yeah,
and and these are huge, We're talking about six hundred
and sixty feet across and so ancient aliens people love these.
(11:56):
The idea it's like they would tell on aliens about
monkeys that's what this was about. Well, actually, what they
think is that this was a rite of passage in
that it was a contemplative act done by small groups
of the civilization that they walked these labyrinths in order
to get to the end of UM. What was largely
(12:18):
this metaphorical ritual. For not only the idea here is
not only is this a line that creates the shape
of a monkey as visible from a station, uh, this
is also this is a line that you traverse. You're
traversing the shape of the monkey or the lizard or
what have you. Yeah. So again, you know, this is
probably more meditative practice that was done by the civilization
(12:42):
UM and not communication to ancient aliens. UM. But I
think that it points to this idea that throughout history
there has been this sort of walking meditation done in
different ways. Yes, and we'll get more into the idea
of walking meditation shortly. Yeah, particularly when you consider it
use as a healing practice and and actually in medical
(13:04):
UM centers. Yeah, you around the world, you see them
pop up again and again. And as we mentioned in
the last podcast, a great source for these two episodes
was a book by esther In Steinberg titled The Science
of Healing Places. She devotes one chapter to labyrinth and mazes,
but the whole book is about how physical environments affect
us both in body and mind effectively, how they affect
(13:24):
the mind body through our you know, and this can
be negative, this can be positive, and and how if
you're building something like a hospital, you want to take
that into account. You don't want to build a hospital
it feels like a maze, if anything. You want to
build a hospital that feels like a labyrinth that's open, right,
And failing that, you just build a labyrinth in the courtyard,
which many places do, right, because you have this idea
of opening space metaphorically and physically so that your brain
(13:48):
can sort of acclaimate itself to that space. Um. As
you had mentioned the book Healing Spaces, there is a
Harvard cardiologist that Sternberg, the author talks about. His name
is Harvey Goldberg, and he says that a lot of
these meditative practices, meditative walking, our yoga, or tai chi
(14:08):
um is really about gaming the relaxation response through breathing.
And he says, quote, I think of it as an
unclenching when the system gets overly tense. It's like a
tight fist is locked somehow, By focusing your attention elsewhere,
there is an unlocking and unclenching of the fist. Now,
this is really important when you think about an act
(14:31):
of walking meditation, but as in an elabyrinth, when you're
walking around like that, because you are focusing on something
other than yourself and yet you're allowing your thoughts to
unfold naturally, and this is that contemplative act that labyrinth's encourage. Yeah,
so think of this when you're actually walking on the
path of the labyrinth. What are you doing? Why are
(14:52):
you feeling relaxed? First of all, you're focusing on the
path you're having. You're looking down, and you're looking up
a little bit too, but kind of looking down and
watching the path that you're walking. There are no walls
to to head you in. It's about following this path
on the ground. Secondly, because of this, you're moving slower,
and because you're moving slower, you're breathing slower. Also, unlike
(15:13):
a maze, your vision is not obstructed. You're able to
hear and see the world around you like you mentioned,
and you're you're not having to depend on, you know,
landmarks or what have you just kind of on autopilot, Yeah,
which allows you to get into that mental space that
is healing as Sternberg and Goldberg and Herbert Benson, who
is very much an authority of meditative thoughts and actually
(15:35):
meditation itself. We will talk more about this. We're gonna
take a quick break. We're gonna talk about why labyrinths
were built and how it affects us at the physiological level.
When you look back at some of these more ancient labyrinths,
like the Nasca lines, again it comes up why why
(15:57):
did people make these? What? Why were they built? Why
were they created? And certainly a spiritual reason is present.
It's very much possibility for some of them. Some people
think there are astrological reasons behind them. And if you
look again at Chartreu, which is the cathedral in France,
(16:18):
again you see evidence that it was designed in conjunction
with the summer solstice, so that maybe it had something
to do with that. Um. I tend to think that
if the sunlight is beaming down in the middle of
a labyrinth on the summer solstice at noon, that that
would be very powerful to churchgoers, particularly if they're walking
(16:38):
the labyrinth, because it's the idea that this path is
in tune with celestial dynamics, with the mechanics of the universe, right,
and that you are in unity with nature. Yeah, Like
it makes me think that to do Dante's Inferno again,
particularly Dante's Paradise. Paradise is a very strictly ordered thing,
like the cosmos, whereas when Dante's actually in Hell, it's
an ordered system. But it's it's a lot more confusing. Yeah.
(17:02):
And then there's this I like this one. There's the
dancing theory. Oh yes, this is great. This takes me back.
There was there were like a couple of old goofy cartoons.
I'm sure Holly would tell you could tell me exactly
when and where they occur in the long list of
Disney productions. But there were a couple of goofy carloro stuff.
There are a couple of goofy cartoons and one he
(17:23):
quit smoking and another he was trying to lose weight,
I think. And they dealt They were really cool. They
dealt with like an adult goofy like dealing with like
the demands of being like a bachelor. It was weird stuff.
I check it out again. But but there's one where
he's like trying to learn how to dance, and there's
this kid he gets where you listen to a record
and you place these cutouts of feet of on the
(17:46):
on the floor and then you dance by moving and
he has like a mannequin with him and you move
from one these steps to this step, and this teaches
you how to dance by following the patterns on the floor.
It's so that he could now, in his bachelorhood, a woman.
So this is helping kids who are seeing their their
father who's now a new bachelor. Well, I think these
(18:08):
were and again pop stuff will have to clear me
up in this. I think people were aimed at these
were These were kind of like an early Simpsons in
a way because they were they were kind of aimed
at maybe a little bit at kids, but more at
the adults. But anyway, that the dancing ritual. Yeah, and
the idea, So the idea here is that Labyrinth's were
potentially not nearly this thing that you walk on and
serenely follow but you dance through because think about what
(18:31):
dances and I'm not talking like you know, grinding booty
shaking necessarily, but but think of something like like square dancing,
some sort of ritualized dance, certainly the Whirling Dervishes, where
there is a pattern that you're following, and you're you're
giving yourself up to the pattern of the dance, to
(18:52):
the rhythm of the beat, to the You're giving yourself
over body and soul to the music and the movement.
And and that is in a sense of labyrinth you
were becoming. You kind of become the labyrinth, You become
the dance, you become the music. In that becoming, you
cannot be this bundle of worries and and and troubles
(19:14):
that you are the rest of the time. Yeah, it's
the rhythm of the night. You leaven all your cares
behind right the night. Yeah, I won't do that anymore.
So what's interesting about that too is that this is uh,
not just something that is again an act of submission,
but perhaps some sort of right of passage. This is
(19:36):
perhaps something that young men who had proved themselves as
warriors would go through this dance. This is also a
fertility right for women who would go through these um
the labyrinth dancing. And again you're talking about syncopated rhythm.
You're talking about a group activity that would line everybody up. Yeah,
we talked before. When people are singing together, it's like
(19:58):
their neurons are all firing on this in battern and
some more thing with these movements, right, think about it
as the first Congo line. Is it congo or congo?
I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. In the book, Steinberg
points out that this is possibly why like early in
church history, like certainly churches came to embrace their labyrinths.
(20:18):
Sat Bart's here in Atlanta is not ashamed of their labyrinth.
They're rather proud of it. But in the old days
there's maybe a little suspicion where the older members of
the church, especially like I don't know about these labyrinths.
There's something kind of not right about them, fancy about them,
you know why, because they have found all sorts of evidence.
In fact, an entrustan vase from six BC depicts not
(20:41):
just the dance in the labyrinth, but sexual acts going on.
So the church kind of like, m I'm not sure
about showing the positions, the sexual positions, um, you know,
overlaid on the labyrinth here. Maybe we could kind of
cover that up a little bit. But there's a little
bit of that involved with it and that you know,
(21:01):
and that of course hints at paganism, right, So let's
talk about the way that it affects the body. Okay,
So you talked about this idea that when you're walking,
you began to slow down your breath, right, and you
began to relax. So your breathing slows, your heart rate downshifts,
and this is when your body gets the queue that
it's time to slow down and relax. And this is
(21:24):
the opposite of the stress response, This is the relaxation response. Yeah.
The slow breathing activates the vegas nerve that counters the
adrenaline like sympathetic nervous system response of stress. Yeah. And
what's really cool about this nerve is that we've known
that it has it's workings with stress and counteracting stress,
(21:45):
but it also regulates the immune system, in particular in
fighting inflammation. So when we start to talk about this
in the stress response, we start to talk more about
the immune system as a whole, because we know that
if your body is in a constant state of just stress,
that this can be destructive at a cellular level. So
this is why it's important to try to uh promote
(22:06):
as much of this relaxation response that you can. Yeah,
and it's really crazy to think about it about the
mazes and labyrinths in this sense, the idea that a
maze in physical space can physically harm you, like on
a cellular level, and likewise a labyrinth can heal you.
Because when we talk about healing spaces, it's easily to
think of it in terms of some hippie dippy nonsense,
has some some spiritual talk. And maybe I'm not that
(22:28):
into the idea that a space has all these magical
properties about it, But as we've discussed, a space does
have an effect on the body and mind, and and
we see that in a way in their purest forms
in the maze and the labyrinth. Yeah, Because again I
will bring up the default mode network. This is that
part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and medial
parialtial cortex in the meadle medial temporal lobe. This is
(22:50):
that part that is the midline chatter that me, me, me,
the fear of response. This is all this is concerned
with the ego and the seat of consciousness that really
helps to inform is this used to balance our sense
of self? But when we have too much of the chatter,
there's hyperactivity. That's when depression sets in. That is stressful, right,
And as we discovered in our podcast The Shaman and
(23:13):
the Scientist, it is meditation that is one of the
things that can quiet this part of the mind. And
this was really important in helping to relieve depression. And
I wanted to bring up once more that Dr Judson
Brewer used fm R I to scan experienced meditators and
he found this decreased activity in the default mode network. Now,
(23:35):
meditation really is just about again gaining your breath and
because if you do that, obviously that your body is
going to get these cues that it needs to relax.
So this walking meditation through a labyrinth is very much
a type of meditation. So when you think about that,
then then as you say, it's no longer just like
(23:55):
this hippie dippie, like, hey, meditate and you will fill
one with the world. It's that it is changing you
at a cellular level. And we talked about this too,
with meditation changing you um your genes as well your
stressed genes, being able to actually turn those off their
stress responses. Steinberg pointed out too, with resuscitation. When you're
(24:16):
resuscitating an individual, you're you're talking about one breath every
six to seven seconds once the heart is started back
up again, and that is the optimal breathing pattern to
get the optimal amount of oxygen carbon dioxide into the
body to nourish tissue and keep the brain working. So
it makes sense to me that you would begin to
see some of these labyrinths popping up in medical centers
(24:38):
because no doubt, those are some of the most stressful
places to be in because either you or a loved
one um is in this medical center of being treated,
or you're someone who works there. It's a high stress job,
right um to be in the medical professions. So if
you have this labyrinth there and you had patients walking it,
that could or you have family members or friends who
(25:01):
are walking in these times of despair and stress, then
it could help you that relaxation response to open you
up a little bit more in your mind and to
sort of tamp that down again at a mental level.
At the cellular level, yeah, it has a lot in
common with walking meditation, which is a form of meditation
you do walking being and remaining conscious of your steps
(25:22):
and your breathing. But it is also, as Cimberg points out,
it has a lot in common with tai chi as
a gentle exercise. You might not think of walking a
labyrinth as exercise, but essentially it is. It's a gentle exercise.
But even this has a positive effect on the body. Yeah,
it does. There is a small study that finds that
mindfulness meditation and moderate exercise have protective effects against cold
(25:46):
and flu, with people who engage in the practices having
less severe, shorter, and fewer symptoms of acute respiratory infection.
So what we're talking about is a study that was
published in the Annals of Family Medicine, and it included
a hundred and forty nine people and average age of
fifty nine. Fifty one of them were assigned to have
(26:07):
mindfulness meditation training for eight weeks, forty seven did moderate
exercise for eight weeks, and fifty one they didn't have
to do anything. And what they found is that those
who went through the mindfulness training were linked with a
forty to decrease in symptoms fluid symptoms, while exercise was
(26:27):
linked to a thirty decrease in symptoms. So, in other words,
again what you're seeing here is that this act in
hi achieving a moderate exercise, in walking being a moderate
exercise does have real ramifications on your health. All right,
I'm going to close out here with just a brief
little bit of quotation from Kick not Hahn, who is
(26:48):
of course a zen master in the Vietnamese tradition, and
he wrote a book called Walking Meditation that came with
like a DVD in a c D. It's still out
there if you want to learn more about walking meditation.
It's a good source. So this is the Welcoming Path
by Tignahan. The empty path welcomes you, fragrant with grass
and little flowers, the path paved with paddy fields, still
(27:10):
bearing the marks of your childhood and the fragrance of
mother's hand. Walk leisurely, peacefully, your feet touch the earth deeply.
Don't let your thoughts carry you away. Come back to
the path every moment. The path is your dear friend.
She will transmit to you her solidity and her peace.
And I think that applies beautifully to the idea of labyrinth.
(27:32):
I think so too, And it's very nice if you're
interested in finding a labyrinth in your city, you can
actually go online and there is a database of them.
I believe it's called WORLDWIBEH or Hold Wide Web Labyrinth
UM or something along these lines. Just google it and
you'll find it UM and it will actually give you
all the locations. That's how I found the one near
(27:53):
our work here in Atlanta. All right, So there you
have it. Mazes and labyrinths. Two sides of the same coin,
one dark, one light, one confusing, one uh inspiring. One
is intentionally losing yourself. The other is trying really not
(28:15):
to try to lose yourself exactly. I wanted to call
the robot over here for just a minute. There we go.
I'm not going to read this email of its entirety,
but I wanted to mention that a listener, Dominic from France,
wrote in and he mentioned that the final episode of
the first season of HBO's True Detective includes both a
(28:36):
maze and a labyrinth. Now I'm not gonna get into
the details here because I don't want to spoil it
for anybody. It's a fantastic series and I'm a huge fan.
But if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about.
And if you haven't, this won't spoil anything. But just
know that two characters engage in the same environment, and
for one of those characters you could argue it is
a maze and for the other character it is a labyrinth. Yeah,
(28:59):
so think about that when you see it or when
you see it again. All right, Well, thanks for listening, guys.
If you want to check out more of our stuff,
you can do so in many different places, but there
is one place that contains at all, Yes, stuff to
blow your mind dot com. Hopefully it's more of a
labyrinth than a maze, and in that labyrinth you will
find all of our podcast episodes are blog posts, our
(29:20):
videos links out to our various social media accounts, including Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter,
and oh Yeah. Check us out on YouTube where we
are mind Stuff Show. And if you would like to
send us some correspondence, you may do so by sending
us an email at below the mind at discovery dot
com For more on this and thousands of other topics
(29:42):
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