Listener Mail: Leary, Bicameralism and Monsters

Once more, Stuff to Blow Your Mind powers up the mailbot and considers YOUR comments, stories, insights and questions on recent episodes. In this installment, Robert, Joe and Christian discuss Timothy Leary, bicameralism, twins and all sorts of monsters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Christian Saga, and
I'm Joe McCormick. And here we are again for another
listener mail episode where we get all of the beautiful
magic that you send us through the Internet. We wrap

(00:25):
it up in a tight little bundle and we set
it on fire. No, wait a minute, no, we read it. Yeah,
that's right. Well, you know, Carnie, our mail bot goes
through it first and then games what is appropriate for
our eyes and then brings it to our eyes. And
he deemed some really good stuff this time. There are
some great letters here. Well, yeah, because this is incorporating,

(00:45):
of course, our October month, so a bunch of stuff
about monsters. It's gonna be incorporating all the drug stuff
about Timothy Leary, and it's going to be incorporating all
the responses to the Bicameral Mind episodes, of which there
were about ten. Building I was gonna say, people, that's
like a hit, Like you guys got a ton of
mail for that episode. There are two episodes, right, Yeah,
it was a two parter back in September, and I

(01:08):
don't I feel like I've gotten more listener mail about
that one than any other one we've ever done. Would
would you agree, Robert Um? I mean, I'm hesitant to
compare it to everything, but we did receive a lot
of feedback on that way. It's as if they it's
as if you and I spoke to them through their minds,
you know, like gods. Well, we we do get at

(01:30):
least one message today of somebody telling us where they're gods.
So we're doing something right there. Well, on that note,
let's let's begin to roll through it. If if you
have not listened to a listener mail episode from us before. Basically,
what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go around
the table here and we're gonna take turns reading listener
mails from you, and then we're going to discuss them
a little bit. You know. Sometimes it invites discussion. Other

(01:53):
times it's just like, well, there you go. That's the
that's the listeners statement right there, and there's not much
additional diet. What I love about listener mail episodes though,
is that like it's a grab bag in that like
we get to revisit these topics that we've already covered
in the last few months, but then just bring them
all together and what we've learned from them and what
the audience has learned from them into this like goolash. Also,

(02:14):
it makes me feel great because y'all out there, you're
just so smart, You've got great things to say. I
mean it, Come on, I love reading our mail. Yeah,
we have some some variants and very insightful listeners that
sometimes you guys make connections that did we don't when
we're researching this stuff. Totally alright, Well, Carney has h
has ventured forth. He is holding something out here to

(02:37):
Christian Christian. Uh, why don't you read us our first
listener mail? This one is glorious. It might be one
of my favorite letters that I've received on stuff to
blow your mind. It's from Rick and it is about
our two parter on Timothy Leary and lsd Uh. He
writes to us, and he says, this is a bit long,
but I think it's worth three whole thing. Uh. He says,

(02:59):
I'd like to respond to the Tim Leary podcast, so
I will here are my credentials. In nineteen sixty six
or so, I hung out with Leary dropped acid with him,
threw him out of our TP one night when he
got drunk and hit up my wife. We were living
in New York City. Then I worked as a mime
and a fire eater at the Electric Circus on St. Mark's.
We answered a casting call for a film being shot

(03:21):
at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, home of the LSD
League for Spiritual Discovery, which we discussed in that episode.
We lived there for a couple of months. That's how
we met Leary. When later the film project fell through,
we took our pay in the form of one of
a number of tps and sets of polls which had
been made for the film. We pitched the TP on

(03:42):
a friends land near Poughkeepsie and spent lots of time
off there. That's where I threw Leary out. In the
years following our sojourn with LSD, I relocated to the
sunny Southwest, went to medical school, and worked for over
twenty five years as an e R doc. I recently
retired in many ways as this trajectory was the fulfillment

(04:02):
of ideas and ideals born in vision during acid trips.
To the extent your podcast was focused specifically on Leary.
You got it mostly right. Leary was a deeply flawed man,
But so have been many important explorers, writers, and spiritual teachers,
and cult leaders and philosophers. He's kind of a bit

(04:22):
of all those things, isn't he? Uh? Leary was not,
by any measure, the worst of these in terms of egocentrism, greed,
and especially womanizing. Leary did have many important insights regarding
human spirituality, and was better able than most to explain
these two would be psycho knots. I first heard him
speak with Richard Albert in San Francisco, I think in

(04:45):
nineteen sixty four. Elsewhere I have referred to Albert and
Leary as the Abbott and Costello of the psychedelic scene.
That's that's how they sounded in our research too. But
in any case, I and many others were galvanized by
the possibilities they loaded before us. I bought the book
the two of them had written, along with Ralph Metzner,
based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that's called

(05:07):
The Psychedelic Experience. It was a how to manual, and
it worked very well. I used it in many sessions,
whether I tripped or guided It provided a framework for
the cascade of images and sensations LSD brought on which
could otherwise be quite overwhelming. It contained verbal maps and
navigational aids. There was a cohort of hippies to which

(05:28):
we belonged, for whom spiritual seeking was a serious goal.
Some of us had left oppressive or unsatisfying traditional religions behind.
This seeking was not akin to the sex, drugs and
rock and roll ethos of many. The old saw if
you remember the sixties, you weren't there did not apply.
We thought of ourselves, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as pathfinders.

(05:51):
Many modalities were employed in this seeking, including of course
psychedelic herbs and chemicals LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, and others.
But as happened with Leary, other techniques often came to
supplant the chemical aids. The legacy of this is the
commonplace presence in our culture of yoga, Zen, Buddhism, tai Chi,

(06:11):
and other Asian martial arts, Sufism, kabbala studies, et cetera.
But I want to stress that the chemicals provided the
initial push to open the somewhat sticky doors of perception
I should note that some of these pharmaceutical aids were
tied to specific spiritual traditions of their own and were
regarded as sacred. These were best used in the respectful

(06:33):
manner taught by their respective masters. This is especially true
for peyote, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. We I think we mentioned
that in that episode as well, right we're talking about
um how I think in order to legally do ayahuasca
you have to do it with a member of a
certain tribe present. That's my understanding, at least I've heard
that before. The experience of ecstatic vision is extremely difficult

(06:56):
to describe in words or even in visual art or music.
Some of the efforts to do so have given us
parts of various holy books. Pretty Much every religion on
the planet has a mystical wing and teams of prophets
who attempt the articulation of their mystical experience, and many
have developed technologies to achieve the experience meditation systems, ecstatic

(07:16):
dance or postures, sacred psychedelic plants, and so on. Naturally,
these technologies are tuned to whatever the particular religion or
philosophy or sect imagines God to be. If you're a
mystical Christian, you are likely to see Jesus when in
an elevated state. As a Jew, I once had a
long visionary dream in which I was a Maccabean warrior.

(07:37):
It may sound pompous to say this, but if one
has not had such experience, it's pretty hard to understand
descriptions of it. Of course, getting glimpses of the gears
of the universe does not automatically make one a sage.
The visions come with the obligation to fulfill them in
good work, as the Buddhists say. Finally, we can agree
that Leary was not really a scientist. He dabbled in science,

(08:01):
learned some of its lingo, but science was not his
native language. What he was instead was a ring master
in the magic theater for mad men only. He was
a showman, and yes, a charlatan like any good Cartney,
but he had a powerful gift of gab. I can't
tell you how often I saw his book The Psychedelic
Experience rescue struggling folks from impending bad trips. In Leary's model,

(08:24):
a full on acid trip always began with a symbolic
death experience metaphoric or realistic, and this required courage and preparation.
You mentioned Leary's tongue in cheek motto turn on, tune in,
and drop out, as I'm sure you know, drop out
referred to out of the machine, out of the exploit
of culture. Well, we had a sign in the back

(08:46):
of our VW bus named the Collective Unconscious, which said,
turn on, tune in, and drop by. Thanks for listening
to this reverie. Well, that's awesome, I I it's wonderful
to have feedback a from someone who who who was
active at the time, B who knew Leary and uh

(09:09):
and then and then see had had these experiences and
can speak to them in this bit of listener mail. Yeah,
and I loved that Rick was able to provide and
and he wasn't the only one. We received a couple
more emails that were similar to this, But this was
this was amazing. Like I just felt like Rick just
encapsulated everything we were trying to hit with those two episodes. Uh,
there was this general attitude I think that you and

(09:31):
I had at the end of it. We were like, oh,
that's kind of disappointing. Man. Leary just really wasn't the
figure that we hoped you would be. Well, I think
one of the advantages that Rick had here is and
he knew he was. He was their first hand to
see learies flaws and uh, you know, the human qualities
that were that sometimes put him apart from this iconic

(09:52):
vision of him, where whereas we were coming at it
mostly with the the icon in the forefront and then
reading about the real man and the real struggles behind it,
so it was very textual. We didn't we didn't have
the experience of the human character of his ethos. Yeah,
and uh, And clearly Rick has had more time to

(10:12):
reflect on who Leary was and what what he contributed. Also,
Rick sounds totally amazing a guy who worked in the
e Er for twenty five years and has all of
these cool experiences behind that. I want him to start
a podcast. Yeah, I listen. Alright, let's let's move on
to another bit. Joe, what does Carney have for you? Well,

(10:34):
I thought before we got into Monsters in the bi
Cameral Mind, I would do a roundup of lots of
different emails we got on our episode about the Game
of Werewolf. Robert, I'm sure you're excited to hear some
of this stuff. So we got lots of great emails.
I decided to try to summarize them into a small space.
So our listener, Carissa writes about playing in an online

(10:55):
werewolf group, which sounds pretty awesome, but they've got a
lot of amaze sing extra rolls in the game. Now,
we talked about the standard roles in the game of Werewolf.
You've got the townsfolk, You've got the werewolves who kill
in the night, and you create the mob. You try
to find a werewolf and you execute them and see
how you did. There's also the seer, which we used
in our game, who gets to ask every night if

(11:17):
there's a werewolf. In Carissa's game, there is the Frankenstein monster,
who absorbs the abilities of every town's person who dies.
There is also the teen Wolf, who is who is
apparently so excited about being a werewolf that this person
has to use the word wolf at least once every
day cycle or that character dies. Oh wow, that's that's ingenious.

(11:41):
So you gotta find a way to slip it in
there without people always noticing. Wow, that's that's brutal in
terms of game mechanics. Yeah, there is also the cult
leader who adds one person to the cult every night,
and if the only townspeople left alive are all in
the cult, the cult leader wins. Nice. It's a nice
game within a game. There So multiple people, including Daniel,

(12:02):
contacted us about a very similar online game called Town
of Salem, which sounds pretty cool. Our listener Leon on
Town of Salem says, quote, what's really different than your
live game of Werewolf is the lack of emotion and
human interaction. The ability to watch someone's face twitch as
they're accused of being evil, or hear the strain in

(12:23):
the voice as they defend themselves is lost, which really
changes the dynamic of the game. It makes learning the
minutia of each role that much more important. And I
think that's kind of interesting. I know some of the
studies we looked at said that they found similar dynamics
about what liars tended to do verbally whether the game
was being played online or in real life, and verbally

(12:45):
you know, spoken out loud. But I yeah, I do
have to think it would change some things. I mean,
in our games we played in here in the office,
I could I could sniff you out, man, because I
was just looking at your face. You were trying to say, no,
it's not me, I'm not aware, but you just you
couldn't help but grin. And with the grin, I knew it.
I knew you were the killer. Who in the office

(13:07):
was like the best at disguising being Awarewolf, It's a
good question. It all happened so fast. I would imagine
was bowling there. Boland would be good at it. He
would been bowling of car stuff of ridiculous history of
stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah. Well, our
producer Alex was there. Yeah, I felt like he did
a pretty good job. He was a great narrator too,

(13:27):
was a great narrator. However, as one of the bearded
gentlemen playing the game instant suspicion, he was aware of
uh and Alex commented that that our colleague Tar he
thinks was the best. Yeah, she was pretty good. She
was pretty good. Now, those of you who don't know
where that probably means nothing, but but let it be
known she is Awarewolf. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Hey, have you guys,

(13:50):
I got another tie into one of the house stuff
work shows here, Have you guys heard that Strickland over
on tech Stuff has been covering this Mondo game board
game that just came out about it's related to the thing. Yeah,
I saw something about that. Yeah, and it's apparently very
similar to the mechanics of Werewolf. Yeah, well check that out. Well,
there are a number of games that that certainly incorporate

(14:13):
a similar mechanic. I think one of our our listeners
actually wrote in about the Battlestarkalactica board game that came
out several years ago, Are you a Toaster? Yeah? Are
are you a Cylon? And actually encountered that game before
I ever played Werewolf and had tremendous fun accusing, just
often blindly accusing friends of being a sideline, to the

(14:34):
point that it's still kind of an inside joke with
certain friends, whether whether their cylines. It seems pretty easy.
It's whoever is wearing the slinky red dress, right right? Yeah? Yeah,
that that's sometimes sometimes that'll that'll key and but not always.
The best cue for for seeing guilt in somebody else
is just seeing a slight grind, not a big smile,

(14:55):
with the person who looks a little bit satisfied with themselves.
You know they've done wrong. Believe it's what Lady Gaga
calls poker face. Well, I think one of the things
we talked about too, is that there's often a different
energy in the person when they have to go from
being on the offense to being on the defense, you know,
and and you can see that energy change, and sometimes

(15:15):
you can feel it. I could definitely feel uh, my, my,
my energy shift when I was secretly had a different
role in the game when you had to pretend not
to be the werewolf. Yeah, okay. A couple more are
our listener. Heather mentions that she used to play the
French language version of the game, which of course is
called Lugaru and uh that's French for werewolf, and included

(15:38):
the chaste or the hunter. And that makes me wonder
if the language affects the dynamics of the game. Is
it easier to lie or to spot liars in French
versus English, versus Russian or any other language. I can
speak to this actually because I used to play Mafia
not Werewolf with a lot of Eastern European friends, and
we also played this game that they talk me called

(16:00):
my Hot Check, which is very similar in the sense
that like it's a game about lying and trying to
tell if somebody else is lying or not. And they
definitely were able to read me way easier than I
was able to read them. Which language were you playing in? English? Okay? Yeah, huh,
so like you were at a disadvantage being a native speaker,
I think so. Yeah, Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it was

(16:23):
a lot of fun because maybe playing the game in
in a secondary language, there's kind of this this firewall
built up there, like a linguistic firewall. Yeah. Well, they
all spoke English fluently though, and I didn't speak a
lick of the They spoke variations of Polish, check uh, Slovakian,
and yeah, I just whenever they would communicate with one

(16:45):
of them in those languages, maybe that should have been
outside of the realm of of the rules. And well,
this is probably a deeper linguistic question, but do you
think they were thinking about the game in English? Oh?
That's interesting. I think they were thinking about Mafia in
English for sure, because the concepts were very English to them.

(17:06):
But not when we played my Hot Check though the
game was invented in Russia. Oh is that right? I
didn't want that fascinating as Mafia, like we we celebrate
the werewolf fluff. Really if you want to get technical
on Mafia. It was the first one. Last quick note
from a listener about Werewolf. Our listener Valerie said, well,
she shared a lot of weird and interesting stuff about

(17:28):
growing up in what she describes as a dysfunctional family.
She says, quote, what I generally tell people is that
I was raised by wolves, except that's really unfair to
the wolves. So I am now in search of some
wolves who might adopt me. And it sounds like, given
her life experience and her dim views on the nature
of humankind, she is excited to play. She wants to
get into the life space. So she says, quote, at

(17:51):
the advanced stage of fifty eight, I believe you may
have finally introduced me to the perfect tool for explaining
human social interaction. It's quite good. It really does like
make you think about your friends differently after you play it.
All right, that's it for Werewolf. All right, Well, here's
one Carney is handing me. This one comes to us
from Melanie and she's responding to one of our Monster episodes.

(18:15):
She says, Hey, I'm currently listening to your podcast on
cute Versus Monstrous imagery, and I hadn't really thought about
it before, but there are so many similarities there. Both
types of stimuli are meant to grab your attention, and
I think a lot of factors can push people to
feel one way or the other. Lots of people find
mice adorable, including myself, but others are scared of them.
I'm terrified of spiders, but I have a friend who

(18:37):
thinks they're cute. I personally even find snakes cute, even
though no one seems to agree with me. I actually
think almost every type of animal is cute, and yet
actual human babies just seem mostly annoying and gross to me.
So I don't really Melanie, something's probably wrong in my
brain on that note, l o l uh. The fact

(18:58):
that a lot of creatures seem to be able to
go either way, like the II. The I, for anyone
not familiar, is as this wonderful species of lemur that
has these big, huge, huge eyes, and it has this
elongated finger that he uses to like pull grubs, in
sect feel grapes and stuff too. I remember hearing that,
maybe so yeah, but I mean it does seem to

(19:18):
be a horrible hybrid of baby is. Features like the
big eyes are part of the baby schema, but having
long tapering, you know, long limbs, is not having short,
stubby limbs as part of the baby schema. So it
almost seems like, can you imagine a baby with long,
slender limbs that's not cute slender man baby. Yeah, and
it also comes out at night. It's a nocturnal creature.
But it's one of these where when I look at it,

(19:41):
especially a baby obviously, but an adult I I still
looks kind of adorable to me. But it is a
species that has traditionally faced, um, some hardships because of
superstitions regarding it, and so they'll be like superstitious violence
against the II. Anyway, she continues, Um, Yeah, a lot
of these creatures. Quote made me think of your previous

(20:03):
episode where you mentioned the woman who doesn't feel fear
and how in the absence of it, she's actually attracted
to supposedly fearful stimuli. That's the patient s M who's
got the lesion on her amygdala. Right, She says, there
seemed to be these two mechanisms working in tandem, and
different people may have different levels for those mechanisms. Anyway,

(20:23):
I'm not sure if I'm really bringing up any any
new ideas here, but I thought i'd write in since
I found the topic interesting. I love all of your
Monster episodes. By the way, I'm sad that October is
over because I would definitely listen to Monster Podcast year round.
All your other stuff is great too, of course, but
I have a bias for the Monsters. Thanks for all
the great stuff you put out. I listened to you

(20:44):
guys all the time while I work. Well, here's one
of the things that I'm hoping to see in eighteen
is that Dr Anton Jessoph gets his own podcast. Well,
we'll see. We'll have to have to contact the university
about that. See what, see if he can get funding
for that study. But yeah, I think Melan he had
some wonderful thoughts here about that that cute to monstrous
spectrum that seems to exist. Well. I like how she

(21:06):
draws the connection to that the case of sm that
we discussed from the other Monster episode, that from the
first Monster, where apparently in these cases where there is
a person who has a lesion on their brain that
makes them enable or unable to feel fear when they
see fearful stimuli, instead of just being unaffected by it,
they're very attracted to it, like they want to touch it. Yeah,

(21:29):
it just gets their attention. Yeah. So it's it's more
that instead of it being like a monster cute spectrum,
it is like attention grabbing stimuli spectrum. Wait minute, guys,
I think you just came up with an explanation for
the scene in Prometheus where that scientist approaches the weird
albino snake xenomorph and he's like, hey, little buddy, and

(21:51):
he wants to reach out and touch it. Everybody in
the theater is going, what are you doing? Why would
you do that? Yeah, well, you know he was if
he was a biologist, right, So it's it's very likely
that he and Melanie would have had this same idea that, like,
any creature is cute and attention grabbing, and of course
you want to get right up there and you know,
let him crawl inside your helmet and down your throat.

(22:13):
If I remember that movie correctly. Anecdotally, Melanie's comments about
finding things that are usually perceived as scary cute and
finding things that are usually cute kind of repellent. Uh,
that does seem to be one anecdotal case against the
idea that our categories for what's cute and what's scary
are biologically inherited. That does seem to be one more
tick in the column of well yeah, maybe these are

(22:36):
somehow conditioned in early childhood rather than received through our
through our inborn instincts. Alright, well, on that note, let's
take a commercial break, and when we come back, we
will have another trio of either listener mails or partially
digest uh, conglomerates of listener males, depending on what Carney

(22:56):
gives us. Thank alright, we're back. Hey, So, springboarding off
of that last listener mail about fear and lack of
fear and the fear of response, I've got a great
one here from Jev. That's about our episode on the
science of It meaning Penny Wise in the movie It
and uh and she specifically references the fear response system

(23:19):
that you brought up in the episode. This again just
really touched me, she says, the three phases you mentioned
lady Da, freeze, and take charge was something I experienced
and witnessed during nine eleven. Now let's refresh our audiences memory, right,
So the Lady Da people who the way that they

(23:40):
respond to fear stimuli that's supposedly seventy of the population
just kind of like don't know what to do with themselves. Yeah,
this is the goodness I wish I had had my
my name's here in front of me. But referring back
to the movie Aliens, Yeah, you use that as the
metaphor what was the name of the guy who just
freezes and Gorman he didn't know how to respond and

(24:03):
doesn't respond, and it weren't for other people getting involved,
he would just be eaten by Zena Morse immediately. That's
the freeze and the Latti does like some of the
other soldiers. And then to take charge is ripley. But
so lady da is s of the population, freezes fifteen
percent of the population and take charges fifteen percent of
the population. But we all like to think we're to

(24:25):
take charge, right, but the numbers are against us. That's
what this is not Planet Ripley. Yeah. So, as Jeb
says from her experience with nine eleven, my husband and
I lived south of the World Trade Towers in Battery
Park City during eleven we had a view of the
Hudson River where the planes flew over towards the towers.
After I alerted my sleeping husband in a nonchalant manner

(24:48):
that a plane hit the towers. He jumped out of
bedfast and looked out the window and announced, we are
under attack. This was long before anyone realized that. He
dressed and grabbed my hand and started to run. I
complacently went along. When our neighbor friend came out to
the hall, she asked, what's going on. My husband said,
we're under attack. Come and she froze and said no.

(25:12):
We left her behind, and I found out later that
she curled up into a ball and cried and prayed.
My husband knew exactly what to do, and I accepted
his directions without obstruction to his commands. I always thought
I was conditioned to listen to him without question, which
kind of depressed me. But after hearing your explanation of
how we react in an emergency, my experience came flooding back,

(25:34):
and everything that happened I see now that my husband
was in the fifteen percent that take charge. I was
the seventy percent to follow, and my friend, who did
get out safely and was not injured, was the fifteen
percent to freeze. We're all fine, and nine months later
I had a baby girl. Thanks for your podcast. I
love listening to you in the entire stuff family, Keep

(25:56):
up the good work. So I responded to her with
this because I was really touched that she shared this
experience with us, and it really put that study into
perspective for me because I had heard those numbers before,
but I hadn't thought about them as being applicable to
real world relationship scenarios. Right, and explains a lot of
everyday behavior that I often find confusing. Right, Like, as

(26:17):
I said, like, I'd like to think I'm in the
pcent that would take charge, but who knows, maybe I'd
be the one who freezes instead. This is probably, I
think why people describe when they survive life death situations
as it being something that teaches them something about themselves
that they didn't know previously. Right, because this is the
only way you can discover which of these three categories

(26:38):
you fall into. That's awesome. I love getting messages like this. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, but it is true. You can
you can put yourself in simulated environments and simulated experiences,
but you ultimately don't really know how you're going to
react to an event like this unless you're presented with it. Yeah,
like a fun exercises, like, think about our office and

(26:59):
like all the people we work with, and then imagine
like a swarm of Zeno morphs take takes over the
other end of the building and is coming towards us.
How do you think our various co workers would react?
Would they fall into those categories? Who would freeze, who
would who would uh you know, take charge? And who
would just be like, I don't know what to do? Well,
everyone's survival would come down to, uh to whether our

(27:21):
office manager has has had the office flamethrower properly serve
that is absolutely true. Our office manager Tamika would absolutely
be in the fifty percent of take charge, all right,
so some of us would survive. Well, no, actually I
can see what would happen, which is that we would
call a three hour meeting to discuss what to do,
and we well, actually we'd spend several hours trying to

(27:42):
schedule the three hour meeting at a time when everyone
could be there, and then we wouldn't really succeed, And
so fift would make it to the meeting and then
they discuss what to do, and then they'd get eaten
by zenomorph's man. This is this is the next day
wean film, and really Scott's wondering how to this? Is
it fresh? This is the shin god Zilla of the
alien franchise, Alien bureaucracy It alright? Well, Joe, what is

(28:08):
What does Carney have to do next? Is it a
single email or is it another partially digested mass. Well,
I'm wondering how to do the bicameral stuff because We've
got a whole bunch on that, and I've got one
other email about cuteness and monsters. Maybe we'll do cuteness
and monsters and then we can split up the bicameral
stuff over a couple more rounds. What do you think
about that sounds good? Okay, So our listener Ming gets

(28:30):
in touch with us to talk about the cuteness and
monstrosity spectrum. So she says, hey, guys, my name is
Ming from Toronto. I love your show and have been
obsessively listening to it every week since I discovered it.
You guys do such a wonderful job in researching making
your podcasts that I've been recommending it to anyone who's
got an interest in things out of the ordinary. We
really appreciate that than spread the word. That's the best

(28:52):
thing you can do is support the show. Very nice
of you to say, sort of mouth, really is I
think the best way to let people know about the show. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah,
So tell your friends people out there anyway, ming says,
just wanted to write in and mention something I thought
of while listening to your podcast regarding monstrosity and cuteness,
especially in the context of Japanese folklore. One of the

(29:13):
things that wasn't meant and so the context series that
in the episode we discussed various folk monsters from from
Japanese traditions like the One and the Kappa and the Tingu,
and with the One and Kappa specifically some academic studies
charting the path by which they've gone from being disgusting
and terrifying to being turned kind of cute in popular imagery.

(29:35):
By the way, I don't think I mentioned on the
episode that on everyone's iPhones we have emoticons of the
Tingu and the One. I'm not sure about the Kapa
off hand, but I was. I was in there the
other day and I noticed the tinger. Yeah, tingos like
the crow one, right, it's the like the bird human
hybrid that's often presented as this long nose, red faced human. Yeah,

(29:56):
but the Tingo we were saying hasn't been quite as
cute ified as the other two, or at least there
wasn't academic work on it, right, because it was more
it seems to be a monster that is more spiritualized
and more regal, and more the property of the the
either the ruling or the upper intellectual class. So part
of what we talked about in that episode was trying

(30:16):
to explain what's going on here psychologically, what's causing people
to turn terrifying and disgusting monsters into cute versions of
themselves rendered harmless and cuddly. Anyway, ming continues. One of
the things that wasn't mentioned that immediately came to mind
for me was the socio economic climate in postwar Japan.
The aggressive cutification feels like, at least in part, rooted

(30:39):
in a rehabilitation of the country's image. Aside from boosting
the economy through cute consumerism, it may also be a
reaction to the sudden lack of militarism and nationalism that
was ubiquitous in Japan during World War Two. I think
that's a really interesting thought, Like, if you're a country
where your neighbors, you know, the Americans, Chinese and all

(31:00):
these have come to see you as the embodiment of
imperialist violence. I can see how that might lead in
the culture to a widespread embracing of cuteness imagery. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
I think she's onto something here. This is a very
smart observation that makes the status of the tingu all
the more interesting, doesn't it. Because the Tingu is a

(31:23):
warrior being. It is a it is a it is
a creature that that you know, warriors would seek out
in the wild so that they could learn it's martial arts. Uh.
The idea that this this remains largely untouched is it's
kind of like the the untouched heart perhaps of of
the Japanese warrior ethos. Maybe along the lines of what

(31:44):
Mings saying there was like a rejection of warrior ethos
after the war. Yeah, but maybe you know, it's like
a lot of things with either cultural or personal identity.
You know, you can some things you can only push
off so far, you know, I mean there's a certain
war there is a warrior ethos in in every human culture. Uh,

(32:05):
it's just you know, to what extent is it is
it celebrated to what extent? Is it confronted? Okay, for
this next part, you should find this in your notes
and look at this painting. I paste it in so
ming continues along the same lines, if y'all are particularly
interested in the arts. One Japanese artist that likes to
play with monstrosity versus cuteness is Takashi Murakami. His giant

(32:26):
paintings definitely ride the line of cuteness slash monstrosity, often
featuring the baby schema, but with sharp teeth and bright
cute colors that are occasionally pushed to the venomous extreme.
Via Neon, I am only slightly familiar with Mirakami's work,
but yeah, this is cool. Uh. Friend of the show
ec Steiner is big on Mirakami. Yeah, I'm going to

(32:48):
get into him now, so she continues. I believe one
of the key points in his art has to do
with the above idea of post war transformation of Japan,
and he also touches on consumerism by categorizing himself elf
in the pop art genre, one primary idea of which
is making art avant garde by making it low class
and making art for the cold, hard cash instead of

(33:09):
purely for art's sake. If this episode had an art mascot,
it would be him for sure. Thanks for taking the
time to read this. Keep doing what you do. Cheers, Ming,
So Ming, I really appreciated this email. I thought it
was fantastic and this painting is awesome. Did you guys
happen to see there was a Murrakami traveling exhibit at
the High Museum here in Atlanta a couple of years ago.
I wish I'd known about that. No, it was super cool.

(33:32):
But so this painting she sent, I've got to try
to explain it. It's um, it's like a Mickey mouse head,
but through the lens of a psychedelic warfare terror drug.
So it's got a white it's got all the baby schema.
It's got the wide face that's baby schema, large eyes,
that's baby schema. It's got low set features and a
large forehead, large ears. It's all the stuff we think

(33:55):
of for babies and puppies. But it just it looks awful.
It's eyes look very very intense, which I think is interesting,
like it seems to be peering into you with its
with crazy intensity. One of the hallmarks, of course, of
a baby or a puppy or a kitten. Is that
it's like it doesn't really you can't really see anything

(34:15):
all that well, you know, it's just kind of taking
it all in, or in the case of very young children,
not only making out blurs and shapes. This reminds me
of another artist that comes up on the show a lot,
another Japanese artist, Jungi Edo. We've talked about him before
his work on Gio and Zamaki, and it's it's similar
and that, like he has that manga style that's kind

(34:36):
of cute, but then he like evolves it into something
that's totally horrific. But I'm wondering if there is going
to be a point where, like, for instance, Cathulhu h
that Jungi Edo's monstrous creations will like get turned into
plush stuff, toys or something like that. So it's like
a it's like a double reversal, right, it goes cute
to monstrous and then back to cute. Yeah, the um

(34:59):
one of his like really big comic storylines is told me,
I believe that's how you pronounce it. It's all about
this girl who's like this, you know, cute on Ingenue
High School Japanese schoolgirl, and but she's got this like
weird power where she makes everyone around her want to
kill her, and every part of her body that is

(35:20):
cut off grows into another tony. Uh so there's just
like he's got like like twenty five or thirty stories
about this one character and all the iterations right. Uh,
but yeah, it's kind of cute to horrific. Dra Yeah,
it's fascinating. I highly recommend it. Alright, Well, it looks
like carn He is handing me a couple of emails.

(35:43):
They look kind of short, so I'm gonna read them together. Uh.
This first one comes to us from Brett. He writes
in and says, hey, team, I was just listening to
the Cambrian Monster Mash episode and at the moment you
couldn't think of an app comparison between arms race and evolution.
Surely the British utilizing ADAR would be an apt comparison,
as it literally added a layer of sight to the military.

(36:05):
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. I've stopped a midbike ride to type
out this email. Anyway, cheers Brett, Brett. I hope you're
on a sidewalk. Yeah, stay safe, Brett. I think what
Brett's saying, and because we did talk about arms races
and evolution, but I think what he's talking about is
the evolution of sight that we talked about in that episode,
because we couldn't quite find a technological arms race analogy

(36:27):
for the first the first introduction of acute vision in
the history of animals on Earth. Yea, because the idea
here is that as animals developed the ability to see,
suddenly things that were not an issue become an issue,
such as pigmentation. Yeah, and so that was one proposed
explanation for what might have caused the Cambrian explosion. If
the Cambrian explosion is to be interpreted as this massive

(36:49):
explosion of of animal body plan diversity, what what made
all this evolution suddenly come about? One hypothesis is that, well,
maybe this is the first time we got I that
could see very well. Before that, we might have just
had like you know, light sensitive spots or something. And
once you've got focusing eyes, these compound eyes that can
really make out movement and stuff like that, you completely

(37:12):
change the playing field of what your competition for survival is.
This follows along the line of stuff that we have
covered in other episodes, but also on how stuff works,
about recent discoveries into like really basic life forms like
slimes and how their cells can sense light. They have
photo I guess sensitive cells. They can see with their cells.

(37:35):
So maybe that's what we're talking about. Uh, we're evolving
into pre eyes yeah yeah, or from sorry yeah, yeah, totally. Uh.
And so the introduction of eyes he compares, of course
to radar. I think that's a pretty good comparison. I
think so, yeah, yeah, radar, and I mean to a
certain extent, you could throw sonar in there too and
just say that, yeah, here's a way of sensing other

(37:57):
things that change the way everything has to hey, at
least in a war scenario for the radar. All right,
here's this other bit though, that Kearney has handed me.
This one comes to us from Jonathan. Great episode, guys,
I didn't expect you could make an episode on monsters
so intellectually stimulating. That's what we do. Man. Is this
about the first sponsors, about the first monster? Inspired by

(38:19):
Joe's speculation on our first ancestors ability to imagine a monster,
I'd like to suggest that it might not have been
a single epiphanist moment, but that it evolved gradually as
our ancestors were able to remember and reflect on their dreams.
They certainly had dreams, and certainly they experienced all kinds
of irrationality in them. A creature with the body of

(38:41):
a man in the head of a great cat wouldn't
be a surprising dream image, And if there's any substance
at all to the bicameral mind theory, the source of
images like this might have seemed profound. Thanks again for
the podcast, Jonathan. Yeah, I can see that that's not
a bad idea. Hey, did you guys in that episode
did you talk about the example from Buffy the First Evil? No?

(39:05):
I don't think we did. I don't know if I
made it that far. I'm talking about it's pretty close.
She's like the final Big Bat. We made it to
the end of the fourth season? Is that there? They?
So the first Evil shows up in a Christmas episode
and then, uh, it's the very last season it's the
Big Bad. Yeah, Robert's right, And essentially the idea is

(39:26):
that it's the very first monster that humanity ever encountered,
and that we're all aware of it from our collective unconscious.
So I forgot about the loftier aspects of that season. Oh, man,
that would have been perfect for this episode. I wish
I had known about that. I should have in prep
for the episode, should have gone and watched the entire
series of Buffy. I don't know. I don't know, man,
maybe just that last season. But certainly I love Jonathan's

(39:49):
point here because this kind of gets to This gets
to an area that we've discussed before when when trying
to figure out what ancient people were thinking off like,
it's easy to to fall into the trap of just
focusing on one area of human experience and human thought
and to dismiss, say dreams or as we've specifically discussed

(40:10):
creativity and saying, well, no, if they encountered if they
thought up a dragon, they must have encountered bones of
something like a dragon. Yeah. This is so not to
impugne the work of people like Adrian Mayor, who I
think is doing very fascinating stuff. But you know, we've
talked about her saying that ancient monsters may have been
inspired by people seeing fossils in the ancient world. So

(40:30):
you see a dinosaur fossil, and that's where dragon legends
come from. It's not that I think that that's impossible.
I think that's a really interesting hypothesis to explore. But
I'm always a little hesitant to undersell the role of
creative imagination in the origins of ideas and stories. I mean,
I think there are a lot of things that probably
just come from people dreaming up weird stuff. Yeah, literally

(40:53):
or or or figuratively. Um yeah, I mean, and I
guess with a lot of this too, you can just
sort of imagine that you can have multiple mechanisms at
work at the same time. The people are dreaming, people
are encountering the stimuli in their in their lives, and uh,
and there it's also a certain amount of creativity going
on as well. Yeah, I just don't think we have

(41:13):
to assume that somebody needed to see something like something
in order to make that thing up. You don't think
that HP Lovecraft uncovered like the skeleton of a half
octopus half man giant now, But you know, a lot
of the things he dreamt up would have would have
found a fitting home in in the Cambrian era seas.

(41:35):
Oh totally. But I mean you can totally see somebody
writing that article, right, Because we like to make connections
about inspiration so you could say, oh, well, it turns out,
you know, what we see from his diaries that HP
Lovecraft visited a museum exhibit in this year in which
he saw these earlier preserved remains of a Cambrian era
organism that had these strange tentacles. And that must be

(41:57):
what I mean. You can imagine somebody writing something like that.
Now I'm almost I'm almost positive that what you're positing
is true because I remember reading that HP Lovecraft biography.
What is it called. I've mentioned it on the show before.
I think it's like against the World, against Life, I
let you borrow. At one time it was something like
not not I am providence for the other one. Yeah,

(42:18):
the profound miss and throw. Yeah, but it mentions exactly
what you're talking about. Yeah. But but I'm just saying,
you can. People love to come up with theories of
explanation like that, and a lot of times they might
have something to them, but a lot of times people
are just being creative. All Right, We're gonna take one
more break and we come back a final round of
listener mail here before we close out the episode. Than

(42:41):
al right, we have returned. Okay, guys, this is the
last one that I have from our October series of
Halloween episodes. This is from Lily and she writes to
us about our six ghost Stories episode. And you may
remember that one of those ghost stories came from Malawi.
She says, Hi, guys, greetings from Southern Africa, Zambia in particular.

(43:05):
I love your podcast, and I particularly love the episode
on ghosts and different cultures. I was very excited that
you covered a story from Malawi, a country that doesn't
get enough global attention and one that I used to
live in. While living in Malawi, I also noticed that
Christian religions were frequently intermingled with traditional beliefs in spirits, prophets, possession,

(43:25):
and faith healing. Like you supposed, these two belief systems
are not seen as incongruous to most Malawians. British colonialists
tried to quash this coexistence by rooting out Malawi's many
religious secret societies, but were relatively unsuccessful. Although the societies
are much fewer now, many of their beliefs and traditions remain.

(43:46):
I did have a minor correction regarding your pronunce pronunciation
of I pronounced it muthu rika in that episode, In Chichewa,
which is the main language of Malawi pronounced chi che
Wa and many of the other Bantu languages in the
Southern African region, h is are often used to denote
emphasis and are silent in most cases. Muta Rica is

(44:09):
not pronounced Mutha Rieka as y'all were pronouncing it, but
has actually pronounced Muta Rica. Also, it's important to note
that former President Bingu mutar Rika's brother, Dr Professor Peter
Peter mutar Rika, is now President of Malawi, so most
people now refer to the former as simply President Bingu

(44:31):
and the current president as President Muta Rica. As far
as I've been able to tell, Bingo is one of
the most widely revered presidents in Malawian history due to
his efforts to make Malawi independent from Western AID. Many
Malawians refer to him by his first name with both
love and respect. So that I think we might have

(44:51):
mentioned in the episode that the they were related, and
that the brother that we were talking about as the
one from earlier who passed away, and he was one
of the many presidents who supposedly was afraid of ghosts
in the presidential mansion. She adds one more thing. This
is interesting. She says, one more thing. Attacks on people

(45:11):
with Albanism in Malawi are relatively new and infrequent compared
to other countries in the region. Example is Tanzania, and
many Malawians will tell you that it's not a Malawian superstition,
but one carried down from Tanzania and East Africa. So
that's interesting because we brought that up as well in

(45:32):
that episode as being like one of those sort of
supernatural beliefs that seems to be working its way into
the westernization of these African states. Yeah. I mean, it's
always important to remember that superstitions, urban legends and in
the various related uh uh energies. I guess you could say, uh,

(45:53):
these continue to move, they continue to migrate, and they
can and to to evolve with our cultures. Yeah. So
that was the enlightening because honestly, like that was one
of those stories when we were looking for in that episode.
If you haven't heard it, we tried to cover a
ghost story from almost every continent and it was really
hard to find a good African ghost story that was

(46:13):
translated at least, but this one was widely covered in
Western media. Well, and then also more to the point,
too difficult to find authentically African ghost stories that were
not stories told by a colonial power. Yeah, there's tons
of South African ghost stories, but they're all based on

(46:34):
like Eurocentric ideas that were brought there. Yeah. That being said,
if you know a great African ghost story from anywhere
in Africa, share it with us. We would love to
have it in our heads as well. Definitely. Alright, Joe Carney,
the mail bot is presenting a large lump of of
emails to you. Hear what's going on? Okay, Well, so

(46:54):
I'm going to address the bicameral mind emails. And since
there were so many of these, I picked a few.
We might not be able to get to all of them,
but we might, if it's okay with you, guys, split
this up over a couple of rounds. Uh, Let you
read a little more if you can, if you can,
if you have a couple of more here, I believe
that have been flagged by Karnie. Okay, so we got
tons of great correspondence about Julian Janes and the origin

(47:15):
of consciousness in the breakdown of the bi cameral mind.
If you are not familiar and you want to get
the full story, you should go back and listen to
our episodes from late September, but we will do a
very brief refresher. Here is the super stripped down version
of the hypothesis. Until about three thousand years ago, human
beings were not conscious. The evolution of human consciousness, Julian

(47:36):
Jane says, happened in three stages. First, human ancestors were
stimulus response machines with no inner mind space. Then, sometime
around the birth of a language in humans, humans developed
a quote bicameral mind, which means any situation where you
couldn't deal with the new stimuli through instinct and conditioned responses,

(47:58):
you would learn what to do by here ring a voice,
an auditory hallucination that would tell you what to do.
And what was actually yeah exactly, uh no, no, I
mean not usually at the time, so it was a joke.
What was actually happening here was that the non dominant
hemisphere of the brain was coming up with a response
and then delivering it to the dominant hemisphere of the

(48:20):
brain as a spoken command that people perceived as an
auditory hallucination, and they called these hallucinated voices gods and
then finally, about three thousand years ago, a cultural revolution
caused humans to become conscious in the way that we
are today. They lost the divided brain, they lost the
hallucinated voices, and instead experienced this internal theater or mind

(48:43):
space based on metaphors, where mental imagery is viewed and
hypothetical scenarios are worked out in the imagination like memory palaces. No,
it's like it's basically like your internal mind space. Whatever
you're picturing, whatever you're consciously thinking out, what over hypothetical
scenario you're working out in your mind. That is the

(49:04):
mind space for Julian James. So James has vestiges of
bi cameralism still exists today and you can see the
most acutely in conditions like schizophrenia, is that it's hard
to try to get it all into a very tight space.
But that's the short run. Yeah, and it's also it's
it's also kind of a story for why the gods
stopped speaking, first, stop appearing, and then stop speaking to humanity. Uh,

(49:29):
not not a complete like suddenly they stopped returning our calls,
but they started calling us less and less. But we're
still living in a world and living with the with
this legacy, these religions, these tales as me, these mythologies
of God's appearing and speaking to humans and telling them
what they should do. Well, they started calling us less
and less and we're still sitting by the phone. So uh,

(49:51):
bicameral mind not an accepted theory. I'm hearing the soul
Asylum song. I'm waiting by the phone, wait seeing for you.
But whenever we pick it up these days, it's a
prank caller. That's the problem. Not an accepted theory, but
in my view of really interesting hypothesis, very clever, very

(50:12):
well argued, hasn't quite met the burden of proof, but
it's it's worth attention. You know. Somebody on Twitter reached
out to us and was They were kind of like, hey,
what's the deal? Why? Why why are you ashamed to
stand by by cameralism. I'm not ashamed. I'm just saying
what I think. Yeah, well, I mean my my response
to them was like, I'm I am. I don't admit
to anybody that I think this is a fabulous theory

(50:34):
and just instantly just endlessly fascinating. UM. I love to
bring out this model when contemplating various things in our
present world or in the ancient world. But at the
same time, I don't want it to be the only
model that I pull off the shelf to analyze things.
So if I am, if I have, if I'm hesitant

(50:56):
about anything, I am, I'm hesitant about taking it on
is my sole worldview winds. I think what I detected
in this uh in this tweet was that somebody was
basically working on the assumption that it sounds like you
are convinced by the theory, but you're hedging or something
UH to to say like, no, I shouldn't publicly commit
to this. I mean, that's not my position. My position

(51:19):
is I find it fascinating, but I'm not convinced by
the theory. So it's not like I'm like pretending to
find it less convincing than I do. I think I'm
not fully there for some reasons that we'll get to
in some of the emails I'm about to read UM,
but a couple of people wrote in wondering if they
have a bicameral mind, I think if you're asking that question,
I think you probably don't have one in the sense

(51:41):
that Julian Jayne's envisioned. Though it's possibly you have one
in some other related way. Uh. Some people pointed out
interesting parallels between bicameralism and occultism and like Crowleyite theology
and Thelema. I don't know what you think about that.
I think you guys probably know more about that than
I do a little. Yeah, well, we talk about Crowley
and Thalma and our Jack Parsons episode quite a bit

(52:03):
because that was Jack Parsons, uh theology. I guess that's
how you would put it. Um, And you know, it's
interesting based on like a lot of the stuff that
we've talked around about occult in various episodes. It's primarily
based on a system of symbology more so than actually
like people thinking that they're casting spells and like sumoning
lightning bolts and stuff like that. So it seems like

(52:26):
symbology would work its way pretty well into this. Yeah,
it could, I mean, um. A couple of listeners that
mentioned this connection said something about inherent issues with the duality,
like duality being important to occult theology and that that
you know, is manifest in the division of the mind
under bicameralism. Anyway, I don't know enough to comment about it,

(52:50):
but I thought that was interesting. A listener named Shaun's
in a great email with a bunch of really interesting thoughts.
In one I want to mention was about a possible
cause for the transition from bicameral him to consciousness. Quote
the subjunctive voice. And that's the subjunctive voices when you say, like,
if Christian were to give me all the money in
his wallet, I could go by lunch. You know, it's

(53:12):
it's the mode of grammar where you're entertaining a counter
factual um. The subjunctive voice is used to imagine unreal
scenarios and worlds. Could this have been a way in
which consciousness took over the bicameral mind instead of hearing
our ancestors voices in our heads? We can now imagine
if my father were here, what would he tell me

(53:35):
to do? Or what would Jesus do? I like this
because it touches on chronesthesia or mental time travel. Basically,
basically just the hallmark of human consciousness that allows us
to try and envision multiple outcomes to a given scenario. Yeah,
And a key part of what Jane says about the
nature of human consciousness modern human consciousness is the idea

(53:59):
of in vision in time as a spatial dimension. Like
that's an important part of what the mind space is
is it concertizes time and allows you to to sort
of view it as a space. So, guys, I have
a crossover that I want to bring to your attention.
I did a recent brain Stuff episode that is based
on an article on the house Stuff Work site that

(54:20):
is about some recent research where they looked at how
well kids are able to focus on various tasks, and
they found that children are able to focus better on
their tasks when they think of themselves in the third person,
and specifically, like way better when they think of themselves
in the third person as an imaginary identity like Batman

(54:44):
or Dora the Explorers. I'm gonna have to look at
this study because my my son has been doing this
a lot, where he'll suddenly talk about himself in the
third person as if he were a cat. Okay, yeah, yeah,
It's pretty fascinating and it seems like it's somewhat connected
to this. That's interesting. I mean, part of the part,
part of the whole thing in Jane's case about bicameralism

(55:04):
is like the idea of identity in the self and
so like One of the things he identifies as regression
towards the bicameral mind and people with modern cases of
schizophrenia is not just hearing voices in the head, but
also the dissociation or the dissolution of the sense of self. Yeah,
like that they sometimes lose a sense of first person. Well,

(55:26):
in this case, I believe that the researchers theorized that
the reason why Batman and Dora the Explorer were examples
that worked so well for this was because the characters
themselves embodied hard work, whereas like if they were if
the kids were just you know, in their own first
person subjective point of view, they were more likely to
blow it off. Well, I mean, I wonder if this

(55:48):
could be compared to Jane's idea of what the ancient
poets were like. So were the ancient poet might say,
might not say I need to work hard to compose
a poem, but say, I am about to be possessed
by this third entity, the muse, and the muse is
going to speak a poem through me. And actually what's
happening is it's coming out of their non dominant hemisphere.

(56:10):
They are composing a poem, but they find it much easier,
and they're they're very fluid, and it just comes right
out in meter and rhyme and all that as composed
by this god the muse. I think we're onto something here, Uh,
somebody out there, you might get a dissertation out of this.
All right, I'll try to do one more for this round.
And this is going to be from our listener, Amanda,

(56:31):
who says, hey, guys, my name is Amanda. I'm from
Canada and religiously listen to your podcast. In regards to
the latest two part podcast by camera by Cameralism, I
have a thought and question. When James describes consciousness, it
almost seemed like the ability to conjure a mental image,
among other things. I was wondering if he had any
ideas about people with a fantasia this is the inability

(56:54):
to form mental images. Yeah, going back to a recent
podcast of not that recent, sometimes in the past year
or a couple of years. Um, if they are unable
to have a mental image, does that mean they still
have a bicameral mind or where does that leave them
in the spectrum. I thought this was a really interesting
question because at first I would say, no, I do
not think that means they have a bi cameral mind.

(57:16):
In fact, it would almost seem to me that they
would be something like the very opposite of having a
bicameral mind, like because one of the things that uh,
some people report when they're they're describing their experiences with
a fantasia is they don't necessarily understand the difference between
mental imagery and hallucination. You know. Sometimes they'll say, like,

(57:37):
wait a minute, you're seeing something that's not there, and
it's kind of hard to explain, right, You're like, well,
I'm not seeing it among all the things I'm seeing
with my eyes. I'm seeing it in another place in
my mind or something which would be according to Jane's
your mind space. But yeah, I thought this was a
really interesting question, and I think this this kind of question,

(57:57):
I think does highlight some of the big holes in
the picture of bicameralism. Like as as interesting as the
theory is, there are just a lot of questions you
can ask about it. They're like, huh, I wonder how
that fits in it. It doesn't really seem to give
with the whole the whole theory. Huh. Okay, So well,
this this makes me wonder about about Gozer's roll and

(58:20):
all of this because I've previously commented, at least on
the blog and maybe on the show that if Goes
are the Gazarian UH came and appeared to a bunch
of individuals with a fantasia and said, um, choose the
form of the destructor. UH, they would maybe not be
able to choose the form of the destructor because they
would move able to form a mental image of the

(58:41):
state puff marshmallow Man. So that aside what happened, because
part of the whole thing and Ghostbusters just goes rough.
The Gozarian has appeared to ancient people, right, I mean,
it's it's essentially like a Babylonian, ancient Babylonian entity. So
what was Gozer's interaction with an ancient bicameral people. I

(59:03):
always thought that the form that goes Or took when
they first encounter her was that was that. I don't
know if there was that much thought put into the script,
but I think I think there was. I think there
was a lot of it. When they encounter and she's
kind of got like the like makeup in the weird
like tattered mummy outfit. That's what I thought was that
was the Babylonian manifestation, and then she was like, oh,

(59:25):
for this present day, you need something else. Yeah, maybe
that's the thing. It's like, goes are realized humans today
are a rather different organism in the way that they're
they're thinking, and like, clearly she can read their thoughts
and she's interacting with something that seems entirely different. I
must update my form to match this new form of

(59:45):
human cognition. Unfortunately, it didn't work out very well for No,
No did not work. She's clearly she's just not an
entity for a post bicameral world. The one interesting comparison
I'm thinking of now between a fantasia and by moralism
is the presence of the internal monologue. You know, we're
reading about a lot of people talking about their experience

(01:00:07):
of living with a fantasia. You know, they say, well,
I never picture things in my head or I almost
never do with any kind of lucidity. But instead, what
I sort of hear when I'm thinking are words like
I hear an internal monologue talking through the things I'm
thinking about, like a thought balloon in a comic. Right. Well,
one of our listeners asked this question after the episode

(01:00:27):
they said, what is what is the voice that you
hear in your head when you're reading something? You know?
And that that kind of throws you for a loop
because obviously, if you're reading, if you're reading, say, Hunter
s Thompson book, you might be inclined to hear it
and Hunter S Thompson's voice, or at least in Johnny
depths Hunter Hunter s Thompson voice. But if you're reading

(01:00:49):
something else that you have no frame of reference for,
and it's not the voice of a specific character, if
it's just the narrator, what is that quote unquote voice? Well,
I mean, I think Jane's might have said that a
possibility is when ancient people's read before the transition away
from the bicameral mind, instead of being conscious of reading,

(01:01:10):
what was happening was they were hearing a god speak
the words to them as their eyes read them off
the page. And that would certainly match up two with
just the we we touched on this, and we discussed
this in the episode, the reverence for written languages and
uh and and hard coded symbols. Yeah, all right, well,

(01:01:30):
it looks like Carni's handing me another male here. I'm
gonna read it here. This is from you have Guinea,
you have Guinea rights, and it says, writing you from
the cold coasts of the Baltic Sea, my name, name
is you have Guinea. You have Guinea, or as I
usually present myself for non Slavic speakers, Jeff, I've been
occasionally binging on stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast since

(01:01:53):
two thousand fourteen, but the recent episode on bicameral Mind,
a concept to which I introduced myself via uh echo
praxia from Peter Watts, made me finally write you. In
the podcast, you mentioned that reading literature written by the
authors of the Times covered by meters of dust give
you an uncanny feeling that you were reading something alien,

(01:02:15):
as if a person's thought process is quite different from
your own. So I was wondering if you could share
what piece of literature you were referring to specifically. I
know I was thinking of like ancient Babylonian and ancient
Assyrian literature, so like calling back to some of the
text that we we discussed in the Tower of Babel episodes.
The Tower of Babel episode, I think I also mentioned

(01:02:36):
a couple in the first Monster episode when I when
I read those texts. I often have this feeling of
I don't know if there's just something that's getting lost
in translation, or if it really is I'm genuinely detecting
that a different kind of human mind produced these things
than the minds of people living today. And I don't

(01:02:57):
mean just like a different culture. I mean like like
there there is no culture on earth today that feels
like the mind that produced these Yeah, yeah, I know,
I know. In the episode, we specifically mentioned the Iliad
because the Illiot is an example that the Janes refers to.
You know what's interesting about that as I actually, in

(01:03:17):
my past life worked on a book that was analyzing
a translation of the oldest copy of the Iliot in existence. Yeah,
and it was I don't speak a lick of Greek,
but this was The people who were writing the book
were all classical Greek scholars. They're translating it. My job
was to like put the pages down and make it

(01:03:37):
look nice and everything. And for me, I remember looking
at these pages and thinking like this is no pun intended,
not the whole, like it's all Greek to me, but
literally like it looks alien. Yeah, you know, I should
throw in real quick. In the original bi camera mind episode,
I mentioned that there's a book titled The Rage of
Achilles by Terence Hawkins that updates the Elliot for modern

(01:03:59):
readers and incorporate the bicameral mind. Uh. I have since
read that book and I highly recommend it. I have
kind of a mini review of it. Unstuff to blow
your mind dot com. One thing I do want to say,
in addition to what I just said is that it
does seem time dependent this alien things. So when you
read this really really ancient Assyrian Babylonian literature and stuff,
I don't detect the same stuff from like Iron Age

(01:04:21):
literature of the same region. That seems more like that
seems familiar. So if Jenny says thanks and then he
has by the way that he adds, would you consider
making an episode on Peter Watt's writing, especially the Blind
Site and Echo Proxy of vampire space travel aliens, all
packed in the hardest sci fi that our marine biologists
could produce. Sounds like just the stuff to blow anyone's mind. Uh.

(01:04:45):
And an additional by the way, great, thanks for the
things you do. You are a true inspiration. We covered
Blind Site in one of our summer reading episodes, but
my piction fit, my piction pick, my fiction pick this year. Yeah,
and I read it as well. Yeah, it's a fabulous book.
I have not read any of the subsequent entries in

(01:05:06):
that series. You guys haven't done a science of it yet. No,
we haven't, so I've gotten I've got a copy of
Echo Praxia. It's sitting on my table and I was
planning to start reading it next week independent of this email.
So uh yeah, obviously, Jet, Jeff, you have guinea. You
should go back and listen to our episode, our summer
reading episode this year. And yeah, yeah, we get into

(01:05:27):
it a little bit. We try to avoid spoilers. I
don't know exactly what to do about novels like that.
We're discussing the science of it is inherently to spoil
the plot of the book. But uh yeah, maybe we'll
have to do some kind of bonus spoiler laden discussion
of it for people who have read it or don't
plan to read it. And uh and talk about all
of the weird stuff about consciousness and biology. All right, Jody,

(01:05:50):
have us some more bicameral feedback here to share before
Carney tells us our time is up. Yeah, a couple
of quick things if you guys don't mind. One of
them is from our listener Milanie, who says some very
nice things. Wanted to talk about bi cameralism, and she says,
I think people seem to strive for a lack of
conscious thoughts sometimes, such as meditation or the much sought
after flow state. I'm an illustrator, and a lot of

(01:06:13):
my work inking, coloring, rendering, etcetera. Can be done somewhat
on autopilot without a lot of conscious thought. In fact,
it's often harder to create when I'm overthinking it, and
without a lot of stimulation, my conscious mind gets bored
rather quickly. That's actually where you come in. For the
past few months, I've been listening to podcasts as I work,

(01:06:34):
mostly stuff to blow your mind, which keeps the active
part of my brain occupied and interested so that my
hands can do the work, and in turn, working on
a project keeps me focused so that I pay better
attention to what you're saying. Splitting my brain this way
seems to make both parts work better and help me
be more relaxed and productive. Within the bicameral theory, I

(01:06:54):
suppose that you are the gods whose voices I choose
to occupy my mind any I keep up the great
work with the show. I always look forward to new
episodes since I go through them pretty quickly. Thanks Melanie.
I think that's really interesting, and I think the flow
state is one of the most fascinating examples of the
of reduction or limited consciousness that we usually experience, because

(01:07:17):
the flow state is like when you're at the height
of having fun and feeling good about what you're doing.
But I agree that in that flow state there does
appear to often be a sense of reduced consciousness. It's
almost like being hypnotized. You're not really aware of yourself
and what you're doing, right. Yeah. We've actually heard that
from a lot of artists who are listeners of the

(01:07:38):
show who have a similar experience to Melanie. And I'm
thinking of the ones that I've met in real life,
like Meg Hutchinson and Jaime Dragoons who we we met
at C two E two last year. Um, But yeah,
it seems like that is a common thing that they're
using podcasts to sort of shut down the part of
their mind that's actively thinking about the work in front
of them. Yeah. So I know when I because I

(01:08:00):
do illustration. I'm nowhere near as good as those people.
But whenever I'm working on illustration or coloring specifically, like
she was mentioning, I usually have a movie on in
the background, and that helps me do the same thing.
I mean, I do wonder if it sort of helps
you harness the muse, the old sense of that if
the muses the non dominant hemisphere taking over the creative process,

(01:08:22):
if you can sort of like sort of like tie
up the executive function of the dominant hemisphere doing something else,
you can sort of let that that that non dominant
hemisphere takeover more effectively. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah,
I think further research is required here. Well. It also
makes me think too of some of the various rituals

(01:08:43):
that are used to or have been in you used
to invoke not only a meditative state, but some sort
of a prayer state, some sort of communion trans We've
talked about saying the Rosary before along those lines. Finally,
our listener Andrew sent us a email that is too
long to read, but he does say a lot of
really interesting stuff in it about the bicameral mind, and

(01:09:04):
one of the things he points out is I think
perhaps my biggest objection to the theory. It's one of
my biggest questions, which is about Jane's definition of consciousness.
So James has this definition he establishes in the book.
I think he does a really interesting job of characterizing
what he thinks consciousness is. It's this metaphor based mind

(01:09:25):
space where you can entertain thoughts and ideas. Jeff says,
I consider it given that to be conscious of something
is to experience it. I think awareness is essentially the
same as consciousness, and I don't believe that there is
an unconscious experience. But I do think it's obvious that
our minds can unconsciously gather information and present it to consciousness.

(01:09:46):
Later we give examples of that in the book, like
you can unconsciously use your brain to do things. But
he's saying consciousness and experience are the same thing, So
he continues, I don't see how a bicameral person can
hallucinate without conscious experience. Of those hallucinations, what is an
unconscious hallucination? And then he goes on to say, I

(01:10:09):
think Jane's definition of consciousness is ad hoc. I think
he wrongly defines consciousness as being what we experience as
modern humans, with the defining feature being internal dialogue. So
I may be completely off base here because I wasn't
on this bi cameral mind episode. But when he says
hallucinating unconsciously, the first thing I think of from previous

(01:10:31):
episodes that we've done is experiencing the supernatural. So like,
if you feel like you've seen a ghost, that could
be that, but you'd be conscious of it. So I
think what what he's saying is, what does it mean
for a non conscious person to hallucinate? So he's saying
to to hallucinate is to experience the detection of something

(01:10:55):
that is not physically there in reality. But if you're
not conscious, how would you experience it? Now, I'm not
quite sure. I'm want to. I think that's a really
interesting point, but I'm not quite sure I'm won over
by it because I think of the analogy of like
a computer. So imagine you've got a computer that is
set up to detect things in a room, and it

(01:11:15):
detects maybe it's got like a motion sensor, when a
thing could walk in front of it. Now you could
implant a computer virus on that computer that could make
it sense people walking by the motion sensor, even when
nobody's walking by the motion sensor and sense. In that way,
the computer would be hallucinating motion. But that doesn't mean
the computer is conscious of that motion, right, It's all

(01:11:38):
just a machine. So I'm not sure I'm convinced by this,
but I think it is a really interesting objection, and
it's worth considering. What is the difference between Jane's idea
of consciousness and the idea of experience itself? Is there
nothing that it would be like to be a bicameral
person or would there be something that it was like

(01:11:59):
to be a bi cameral person just very different than
what it's like to be us. Yeah, I mean it's
quite it's quite a conundrum. Um, you know, I thought
about a lot of this too, uh. In reading Terence
hawkins The Rage of Achilles, where he has the he
sets himself up with the challenge of of writing about
characters who have a bicameral mind, but also writing about

(01:12:21):
them in a way that you're gonna we're gonna also feel, um,
we were also going to be able to sympathize with
an empathize with them to some extent as if they
are you know, normal humans. Uh, how do you, truly
how do you imagine the mindset of a of an
unconscious human? I wonder if somebody could develop a derivative

(01:12:42):
theory of the bicameral mind that gets rid of the
idea that ancient humans were not conscious, or at least
reformulates that to say their consciousness was different than ours,
because I think it's entirely possible that there was something
going on in the brains of ancient humans that caused
them to hear voices and hallucinate far more often than

(01:13:03):
we do today, and those hallucinations may have been of
a different sort of relevance to their lives, more useful,
more practical, more accurate than hallucinations are today. But at
the same time, they were conscious in some sense, they
had an experience. They weren't hallucinating robots. They were people
kind of like us, just different. So it all comes

(01:13:24):
back to the same conundrum, right what is consciousness? What
am I experiencing right now? Ultimately, that's Andrew's big question.
He says he he liked like He's got a lot
of thoughts about the theory, but he doesn't think it
ultimately sheds light on the hard problem of consciousness. The
question you just asked. We all have this thing, but
what is it? Alright? I have one final listener mail

(01:13:45):
and this comes to us from Meg and she's responding
to one of our ignoble episodes. I believe it was
the second one. Let's see. She says, Hi, there. Uh,
there is a lot to be said about this, but
most concisely, as a twin, I can tell you that
my experience and the experience of my identical twin in
recognizing ourselves and photos was that we each always saw

(01:14:08):
the other. As in, if there was a photo of me,
by and large, my conclusion was that it was a
photo of my sister. The reverse was true for her.
Of course, it seems to be that we spent far
more time looking at the other person than we did
it ourselves or at a mirror. Plus a mirror is
a reverse image. Additionally, we did have issues of self
and referred to ourselves in the plural, despite our parents

(01:14:30):
best efforts to have us be individuals and not a unit. Uh.
They were aware of that problem with twins, but we
persisted unintentionally. Love your show, Mac, That's fascinating. Yeah. The
the study that we focused on just had to do
with with self facial recognition in identical twins? Uh, you
know what is different with identical twins and what that

(01:14:52):
reveals about self facial recognition for the for the rest
of us. I saw something recently that is very tangentially
nect it to this. But you remember in that episode,
I brought up the idea that the facial recognition software
on our phones maybe would have difficulty just telling you
and your twin apart, right, Apparently a drag queen tried

(01:15:14):
to trick the facial recognition software by like being out
of drag and then in drag to see if it
could work or not, and and it it depended on
the phone, I believe. Yeah, yeah, but that that makes
me wonder as well, like depending on what kind of
costumed identities I guess that you create. Well, let me
tell you this, anyone out there who's looking to conduct

(01:15:35):
a study, I bet if you do a facial recognition
drag queen study, you will definitely win an ignoble prize.
And I think we've been doing as long enough and
that they would like that they would Yeah, that's a
great idea. All right, all right, Well, thanks everybody, and
thanks to Carney for bringing out all this wonderful email.

(01:15:56):
Thanks to all of you for writing to us and
sharing your thoughts, your questions, your and your insights and
your personal experiences related to these topics. And hey, if
you just listen to this and you're like, I want
to add too, I want you to read my thing
on the next Listener Mail episode. There's so many ways
that you can get in touch with us. There's Facebook,
for instance, We've got our regular Facebook page. We've also

(01:16:18):
got our discussion module. We're also on Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
There's also stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And
if you want to get in touch with us directly,
as always, you can email us at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this

(01:16:42):
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
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