March 25, 2014 • 39 mins
Mazes: Join Robert and Julie once more for their classic series on mazes and labyrinths. In this episode, enter the Minoan maze and wander its endless halls. Feel your heart race. Feel your limbs quiver as the minotaur's roar echoes through the walls. Explore the world of mazes and how they affect the brains of humans and rats.
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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, are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Julie Douglas, and we are republishing a couple of older
episodes this week. Two episodes that work together and therefore
had to be republished together, but two episodes that we
(00:25):
definitely wanted to share with everyone again and share with
many newer listeners for the first time. Yeah, because mazes
and labyrinths, these this idea that these physical constructs are
actually mental constructs. And in addition to this, we wanted
to mention that pretty soon there's a movie called The
Maze Runner, which will be released in movie theaters. It is,
(00:46):
according to Bleeding Cool dot com, yet another post apocalyptic
world populated by teenagers who are tasked to save the
world somehow. Yeah, and I was actually just looking at
it yet it starts the guy from teen Woolf the
TV show, not not Jason Bateman or Michael not or
not yea, not Michael j Fox, but the new Team Wolf,
the one that's uh you see on the side of
(01:07):
buses and stuff that yeah, he's in and it looks
pretty cool. It's kind of reminds me a bit of
the older movie Cube, you know, like a like a
very uh, you know, dystopian and high tech kind of
a maze environment. Yeah. I like the premise of it.
Um in it. Their memories, these teenagers are memories are
wiped out and they run through mazes like hamsters, later
(01:28):
discovering in the various truth behind the question why. Yeah,
and these are based, by the way, on a series
of young adult novels by James Dashner. Yeah, so we
hope that you guys enjoy this. It's a maze. Is
is about, in a way elaborate confinement. It's about confusion,
(01:50):
It's about being cut off. It's about not knowing which
way you're going, and which way is the way out,
and if there is even a way out, if there
is a limit to the confusing layout that just flows
out all around you. Now, one thing that's important to
mention here, and we're gonna we're gonna mention this not
only in this episode but the part two of this
(02:11):
series to follow. But essentially, you have mazes and you
have labyrinths, and very often these words are used interchangeably.
One would be tempted to say, it's elegant variation, which
is when you use uh, like when you're talking about
a wolf, but you use the word dog to describe it.
You just wanted to mix it up and use a
different word, but you're actually using a word for a
(02:32):
different thing. Well, mazes and labyrinth is and isn't quite
that bad because the overlap between these two terms has
been around for a while and has become pretty much
the you know, pretty much a mainstay of the English language.
So uh, you can't get two up in arms over it.
But for the purposes of this podcast, and and also
(02:52):
in scientific purposes, you have mazes, which are a place
of confusion, a place of beatings on the walls, as
we're hearing now, and then you have labyrinths and labyrinth
says we'll discuss in the second podcast more in depth,
are a place of serenity. That's right. It's really a
yang and yang proposition here, because yes, maze tangle of
(03:14):
options choices, right, profusion and the labyrinth neatly laid out
a meandering path, but one that has a purpose in
a direction to it. So right now we are going
to tackle mazes, and as we say, we are podcasting
today from a construction zone of our maze like office. Um.
And we should probably get into more or other examples
(03:37):
of mazes, because when you think of mazes, or at
least when I do, I tend to think of the
elaborate hedge mazes popular in the sixteen through the eighteenth centuries. Yes,
you have basically you can divide mazes up into two
or three categories. Well, first, there are two basic categories.
There are mazes that exist in physical space and mazes
(03:58):
that exist merely as saturn or as you know, is
something drawn on a sheet of paper. Uh. For the
most part, we're gonna be talking in this podcast though,
about actual physical mazes that you traverse physically, and these
you tend to see landscape mazes and architectural mazes, mazes
that are made out of you could do dirt, but
most of the time hedges. And then there are architectural
(04:19):
mazes whereas it is an actual physical thing walls and
closing you. Everyone will probably think back to the classic
Jim Hinson David Bowie starring film Labyrinth, which, despite being
called Labyrinth, everything in the movie is amaze. Everything is
about confusing because Sarah has to get to the castle
(04:41):
at the center so that she can free Toby from
the Goblin King, but nobody wants her to actually get there.
The Goblin King doesn't actually want women showing up and
stealing has stolen babies from him, so and there's a
neat little number like a Magic Song by David Bowie
which he's tossing this baby around and by the way,
he looks like Parker Posey to me in in a
(05:04):
Tina Turner wig in this sick Yeah, And there's a
lot of heavy pop synthesizers going on. It's it's pretty
awesome stuff. It is an awesome movie. But pretty much
everything you see in there is is a maze from
the early Stone mazes that Sarah is going through where
it's very much an architectural maze with walls all around her,
until later she's going through a landscape maze of hedges.
(05:27):
Elsewhere people may have encountered mazes in the form of
corn mazes where someone cuts a maze through the maze
and nice and you have around Halloween time, that's certainly
and every year in the news there's always an account
of a family getting lost in one of those mazes. Oh,
(05:47):
I haven't I've never seen one of those, and I've
worked in small papers for quite a while in the past,
so it's strange that we never had that story. Well,
and then they're never found again. Are you sure that
you're just you didn't used to live near a particularly
bad ads where they really went overboard and making it
complex and an unescapable No. No, no. And then there's
like these like sort of evilish children that are dressed
(06:09):
in amish like clothing. Yes, the children are milling around. Yeah, yeah,
you've not heard about No, I guess this is this
is one of your hometown. Yeah, it's pretty common elsewhere
in uh. In fiction, mazes have factored into Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire, the big climactic scene, and
that takes place within a maze. Harry's running around completely disoriented,
(06:32):
doesn't know where he's going, and trying, you know, trying
to figure out how to escape the maze or make
it to the center. I believe it was. What I
like about that maze too, is that the maze is alive,
the root system is, you know, trying to tangle them
and pull them in right. And likewise in Labyrinth, the
maze that Sarah finds herself in is constantly changing their
like little goblin dudes running around and like changing her
(06:55):
markings and presumably changing the actual physical layout of the
of the may behind her. Another fabulous maze uh in
film is that in The Shining. Oh yeah, now it's
different from in the book. There there's just some hedge
animals that are creepy and move when you're not looking
at them. But in Stanley Kubrick's phenomenal film vision of
(07:16):
the novel, he incorporates this this maze, this giant hedge maze,
and there's a model of the hedge maze, and and
the maze comes to symbolize the house itself because the house,
the Haunted Overlook Hotel, is also a sort of maze.
And then, curiously enough, like another maze we're about to discuss,
there is a deadly person at the deadly entity at
(07:40):
the center of it. In The Shining, that's Jack Torrence,
the writer who ends up becoming possessed by the evil
of the place and then is hunting his family through
both the maze that is the house and then in
the actual hedge maze out there in the cold. What
I really like about that maze too, is that it's
got those um those feelings of selation, terror and then
(08:02):
disorientation in that maze. And we'll talk more about that
in in Our Fear Response, our stress response to um
as we go through majors. But to me, that captures
that perfectly. There's also an excellent fictional maze in House
of Leaves by Mark z Danielski. Basically, the book itself
is a maze, and there are all these footnotes and
(08:22):
footnotes upon footnotes, and there's a story within a story
in a documentary film within a story, and the character himself,
this guy Navidson, ends up trying to traverse, trying to
explore this ever changing, featureless, black, otherworldly maze that branches
out from this haunted house presumably haunted, but you never
(08:43):
really know exactly what's going on with this place. The
Name of the Rose by Umberto Echo is pretty great
and that it features a library that is itself a maze.
And this is based in large part on your hey
Lewis Borhes the Library of Babble, where Borhe described an
infinite library maze that contains not only all books, but
(09:04):
all possible books, so it just spreads out forever and
so in the name of the rose umberto Echo creates
within this mediaval Abbey, this this maze library of forbidden
and restricted books. In writing about it, he says that
this is this library is what it's called a rhizome space,
which means there's there's virtually no into it. You could
(09:24):
wander this thing forever without finding an exit unless you
knew how to escape the maze. But perhaps the most
famous and and just the most iconic maze from from
myth and fiction and legend is of course the Maze
of Minos. Yes, and this is the tale of theseus, correct,
(09:45):
the hero and the minotaur, who is at the center
of what they call Again there's confusion between labyrinth and maze,
but it is at the middle of this and is
waiting for people to come through and devour them. Yes,
and kind of wandering the halls and howling and the
maze in this it was commanded to be built by
King Minos, who has this monstrous son that is the minotaur,
(10:10):
half man and half animal. Yes, yeah, monstrous flesh eating creature.
So he has Daedalus, who of course silt the wings
for his son Icarus. Just you know, the fantastic engineer
of Hellenistic lore. He's commanded to build it, and in
fact builds a maze so complicated that he himself has
trouble escaping from it at one point. But this becomes
just the sort of the defining idea of amaze, this complex,
(10:33):
confusing place that you're trapped in, you're trying to escape,
and then with the Minotaur, you have this added threat
that you are not alone in this confusing space, this confusing,
unreal world. There's also something that is searching for you,
something that or even if it's not searching for you,
you may run into it. And if you run into it,
it's all over. Yeah, And we will talk a little
(10:55):
bit more about the Minotaur as represented by our consciousness
and a bit and how our mind is a bit
like a maze. But I did want to mention that
a a non fictional maze that is probably what you
could call the mother of mazes UM is known as
the Hampton Court Maze, and this is outside of London.
It is really an iconic maze. UM. It is at
(11:17):
the Hampton Court Palace and it's thought that it was
designed around six nine, originally planted using horn beam and
later we planted using you, and it covers a third
of an acre. It's trapezoid in shape and it is
the UK's oldest surviving hedge maze. In fact, I'm sure
listeners some of our resisis and UK have actually experienced
(11:37):
this firsthand. At the time. It was constructed to amuse
the ladies and lords of the court, which I think
is so I love this idea. It's so fascinating to
me that people have so much time on their hands
that it wasn't enough to have a palace and have
all the extravagance of a palace and servants. Then you
(11:57):
had to create a maze out on your lawn on
in order to amuse the people within the palace, something
that would actually um excite fear in your visitors to
the maze, right, yeah, you were. You lined it yesterday
when we were talking about it to h to like
a horror movie in a in an age when you
(12:18):
didn't have horror movie. Uh uh. And and certainly you
can also liken it to a roller coaster. It is
an artificial construction designed to create these feelings of fear
and anxiety in the individuals who are traversing it. So
it's interesting to me that the upper class just you know,
on a social note, that you would be so free
(12:38):
from concerns or troubles that you would have to create
this this uh, three D representation of fear to put
yourself through that experience. Um. And of course we do
that today with with haunted houses. But what is cool
about Hampton Court Maze is that this is the maze
that really helped to inform science. And what I mean
(12:59):
by that is there was a graduate student named Willard Small.
He was the first to use a rodent maze to
study learning, and he did this in nineteen o one,
and he created a platform about six ft long by
eight feet wide, covered it with sawdust and then divided
it into galleries with walls of wire netting, and he
modeled it on a diagram of the Hedge maze at
(13:19):
Hampton Court. So this was such a famous maze in
the minds of everybody, particularly during this ron of the century,
that it really helped um this particular student to create
this thing that really took off in science at least
for a good sixty years. Yeah, because even after they
stopped using the replica of the Hampton Court Maze, which
(13:41):
which from above looks. It's it's weirdly shaped, like it's
kind of like a hacked off pyramid, kind of like
a a weird battle axe looking design. It's it's strange looking,
kind of like a robot woman's hips. It's interesting to
say battle ax because uh, labra is I means yeah,
acts in and um in Greek, and so that's when
(14:02):
you look at the root of labyrinth, it is acts.
But anyway, but even after they stopped using the Hampton Maze,
they use a simplified version of it called the Elevated
Plus Maze, which basically look like a plus sign. In
other words, it's two hallways that they cross over each other. Uh.
And it's like the simplest may as possible because it
sends the mouse or whatever that's inside it. It's they
(14:24):
come to a point where they have three choices. They
can go left, they can go right, they can go
forward or well, presumably they could go backwards as well.
So it's a it's a simplified version of the of
the maze, the maze and brief you know, but what
are they trying to to study with all of this? Right?
It comes back to how a maze makes us feel
when I've touched on this a little bit already. It's
(14:47):
when you're inside of a maze, you feel, first of all,
you feel confined. You're definitely in a strange place. You
you don't know which way to go. Should I go
this way, shouldn't go that way? If I go if
I go this way, am I going to run into
a dead end? Everyone hates running into a dead end?
That just said, I mean you think of actual real
world versions of this, like if you've ever been in
(15:08):
a um, well, say the haunted like a haunted house.
Now haunted house is not a complete maze because nobody
wants to build a professional haunted attraction where people go
in and have trouble getting out, because, if we discussed
in our Science of Haunted Houses episode, you've got to
move a certain amount of people through that haunted house
to make money. You need people going in, you need
people going out at a decent click. But at another
(15:30):
world haunted house in Atlanta, they frequently do have this
section that's kind of a mirror maze where you do
at least momentarily become disoriented and not know and you
don't know which way to go, and so that raises
your anxiety. You you feel stressful because you're like, well,
I thought, this is what how do I get out
of here? Which way am I supposed to be going?
You know? And I find in those environments too, not
(15:51):
only another world, but also in like real world environments
like a museum, there's also that that anxiety where you
reach like a weird kind of a part of the
museum where you wonder if this is off limits, like
maybe they didn't they didn't make it clear enough, And
I'm wandering into restricted territory or likewise, any new city
that you're in, you're wandering around and you're wondering, am
(16:12):
I wandering into a restricted space? Is someone gonna yell
at me for being here? And I can start getting
anxious about that because I hated, you know, when I'm
in trouble somebody's yelling at me? And then second, am
I wandering into a contested space, which, especially in big cities,
you're like, am I wandering into a no man's land
of post apocalyptic violences and face stabbings? You know? I
(16:34):
I don't know, And that raises your instincts and your
anxiety and you're just on edge of the whole time.
Well because in in uh, in my world, I think
of it as just a microcosm of the minotaur in
your head already, right, So within our own minds, we
can think of them as mazes. In particular, we can
(16:55):
think about the default mode network. UM. This is three
areas of the brain, the medial pre frontal cortex, the
medial parietal cortex, and the meteoral temporal lobes. We've talked
about these before being the default mode network. And this
is the area of your brain that deals with the
eye of ourselves, the chattering um sort of subconscious level
(17:16):
where we sit there and we turn over things that
concern ourselves and our ego. And this is really where
you start to see that the mind is like amaze
in this sense because you're going through these thought loops
that you've probably gone through a million times in your
life about certain subjects. They tend to come up in
this area of the brain, right, these concerns that you
(17:38):
have usually about yourself, And it's kind of like a
hyperactive chat room for your brain, and it acts like
an echo chamber in this sense. And we've talked about
this before that when you have hyperactivity in this part
of the brain. It can lead to clinical depression. Right.
So that's why I say that this default mode net
(18:00):
work is really something that's maze that we deal with
every day. Yeah, we sort of we backtrack and we
wander the confusing corridors of the past. We try and
skip ahead a little bit and figure out where we're
going in the future, and for many of us the
whole time there well, for all of us, there are
certain minotaurs out there in that maze as well. I mean,
of course the big one is death. Uh. That beast
(18:22):
is out there somewhere. Maybe he is around the corner,
maybe he is on the other side of the maze
entirely with many many walls between you and it, but
you know it's there and you always hear it's howling.
I love that you brought that up, because when I
was thinking about mazes, and I was thinking about how
a maze is really a concrete manifestation of our abstract
(18:43):
mind me, I began to think about Sarah Winchester. We
have an article that concerns her is the Mystery House. Yeah, yeah,
she is the Winchester Rifle heiress who at the turn
of the century believed herself to be haunted by the
victims of the rifles that her husband's company for used,
and now she had something traumatic events that happened in
(19:04):
her life. She lost her child and her husband, and
after that, for thirty eight years, her house was constantly
under construction and she was changing the configuration of her
house really to create a maze. And the reason that
she did that is she wanted to confuse the spirits,
the ghosts of the people that she thought were killed
(19:24):
by those rifles. So if you've ever visited the house,
this is in San Jose, California, you may have firsthand
seen that there are false stairways to know where. There
are something like forty seven chimneys in the house. Um.
Some of them are built all the way up, some
of them are not. Some of them actually aren't working chimneys, fireplaces, um.
(19:47):
And at some point I believe there are five hundred
rooms constructed that she would have them demolished and then rebuilt.
So here you go, I mean, here's talking about the
hyperactivity of this part of the brain that is concerned
with um, you know, fear and uh, the self. This
is someone who you can really see her own brain
(20:11):
being manifested in the design of our house. Well, and
it's in a way, it's uh, it's kind of just
another take on the old idea that if you you
have a criminal that needs to be executed, you hang
them at a crossroads so that they'll have difficulty finding
their way back to their hometown where they can haunt
everybody and be a menace. So, but in what is
a crossroads but a plus maze, like we discussed earlier,
(20:33):
you placed the mouse at the center, the rat at
the center of the plus mays the brat has no
which no idea which way to go. So presumably the
ghost of an executed murder is there at the crossroads,
has no idea what to go. Maybe he locks down
and doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he heads up in the
wrong direction. And and this is so cool because again
this is this idea of disorientation. We're gonna take a
(20:56):
quick break, but when we get back, we're going to
talk about anxiety disorientation in mazes. All right, we're back,
and I do want to mention that is we're getting
into the way mazes affect our mind in our body.
(21:18):
Text that we found particularly helpful in this was the
science of healing places by Esther M. Steinberg. Just a
fabulous book from beginning to end, and it deals with
how spaces affect us, how the layout of a space
or the particulars of an environment can have a beneficial
effect on us or a detrimental effect on us. And
in a large sense, the purest distillation of this idea
(21:41):
is the idea of maze and labyrinth. And in this
podcast were of course talking about the maze. Uh And
as you mentioned earlier, it's just this, the mazes is amazing,
and that it is this kind of perfect physical manifestation
of an idea, are even more than an idea, just
like a state of mind, a state of the world.
(22:02):
Like in a way, the mazes this perfect manifestation of
the of the human experience in its confusing sense. You know,
like I said, I it makes me think of the
obelisk from the Monolith rather from two thousand and one
of Space Odyssey. You know, it's just that you can
basically just thinking about it, you can sort of catch
the hum Yeah. You know, we are talking about mazes
(22:24):
in a very literal sense today, but if you took
a bird's eye view of yourself right now, in this
time and space you would see that you are in
a maze somewhere. Right, even if you're just walking down
the city block, you are within a maze. Um. But
what is so interesting about mazes is this idea that
in as you say that the purest sense is taking
(22:45):
all of those different senses of the way that we
perceive the world in creating this this construct that really
amplifies all those feelings. And so when we talk about
new experiences and uh, we talk about how we've received things,
there's some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, Now,
stress and anxiety. So stress is not a new idea.
(23:08):
People have been stressed out for ages. For instance, the
ancient Romans used a word string array, which means to squeeze, tight,
to graze, to touch, or danger. But it wasn't until
around the ninety six a Nature article by scientists Hans
Zeely published this article where you talked about stress in
the terms of a body's non specific response to an
(23:28):
external demand. In in in ninety four, physiologist Walter B. Cannon
for the first time show that animals produce adrenaline in
response to stress. And this is the first proof that
environments trigger bodily responses like this and so in the
decades that follow we learn even more about how the
brain responds to stress. For instance, that hormones and chemicals
in the brain are released to deal with stress. Namely,
(23:50):
we have a stress hormone called c r H that's
corticotra pent releasing hormone UH, and this forces the pteritary
gland to pump out more a c t H and
this travels through the blood to the adrenal glance and
this makes them pump out cortisol courts. Of course, being
the stress hormone and all of this is really important.
You want to be able to tap into this stress response, right,
(24:11):
this fear response, because that's really what helps us to
tune into the details in a novel place or situation
in order to detect the way out to survive in
some way. That's when we see the whites of our
eyes getting even larger because we're trying to really pay
attention to our environments. The problem, of course, comes when
we're overloaded with the stress response, and when we're in
(24:36):
this state of fear for longer than we need to be.
And we'll talk about this in a bit too. UH,
when the situation doesn't necessarily call for the stress response
that is elicited right right, because again when the when
the stress hormones kick in, the nerve cells fired to
release an adrenaline light nerve chemical called nora pinafine. And
(24:57):
this is this is when the brain's fear center, the amigla,
becomes active. And again adrenaline is important, and we'll discuss
that a little more as we go here. But this
is how you want to feel inside of a maze,
because the maze triggers anxiety and stress because of essentially
four things. According to S. C. Em Steinberg. First of all,
(25:18):
you're in an architectural maze or even a hedge maze,
what can you see? What? What are you seeing around you?
With your site? This key sense of it really just
whatever's on either side, right. So of course with blinders, yeah,
it's like blinder here, blinder there. You can see a
little ways in front of you, turn around, you can
see a little ways behind you. But for the most part,
your sense of the world via site is really limited.
(25:40):
And the next one is one that I never really
thought about all that much. But you have no clear
sound to guide you either, because if you're if you're
in a hedge maze, there's gonna be a certain amount
of sound buffering, and then if you're in an actual
architectural maze, you can have sound buffering plus the potential
for echoes as well, like, for instance, the sound of
that minotaur is how echoing through the tunnels. So already
(26:04):
our site, our ability to see the world is a
significantly altered in. Our ability to to navigate the world
via sound is significantly altered. Right. And I don't know
if the listeners can detect this, but there was just
a bunch of hammering going on, and I was just
thinking that we're inside of our little maze right now
inside the podcast. I have no idea what direction that's
kind I don't either. I can feel it, actually can
feel it on my feet, but I know it that's
(26:25):
not under me. I know it's not probably on the
other side of the wall. But again, here's this idea
that you can't get your normal sound clues correct. Um,
you have limited vision, you have a new alien environment. Yeah. Again,
this is like a maze, like a straight up maze,
like out of the shining. This is an unreal environment
and it's like and it's purest sense, it's it maybe
an analog for confusion in the mind and puzzles of
(26:49):
the mind. It maybe an analog for potentially confusing environments
in the natural world, and certainly in the unnatural world
of cities. But this is its purest sense. It is
alien in every sense of the word. And the worst
part of it is you now have choices, and you
have uncertainty along with that novelty. And think about your
poor hippocampus. This is the part of your brain that
is trying to navigate right spatially and is using usually
(27:13):
using memory to do this. So it's a little bit
like if you were dropped into a new city and
you had to find your bearings. What happens, You feel
stressed out, You feel a little bit more aware, because
this is part of your brain that's saying I don't
have a blueprint for this, and I don't know what
is the right choice. Yeah, like for us, like I
know when I go to New York City, I certainly
don't go there enough where I know my way around.
(27:34):
So when I emerged from a subway out into the street,
I'll have no idea which way is north, which way
of south? What does that street sign say out there?
Which is that one say back there, did I take
the wrong course? And I completely out of bounds here
um in regards to where I'm trying to get to
and and certainly even taking something like Atlanta's Marta every day,
which is basically a plush plus mark. It's north, north
(27:57):
and southeast and west, but but still espec fully at
the at the very center of that the center of confusion,
which is a place called the five um, you do
see outsiders and tourists and people who normally don't take
the train wandering around confused, and you can see they
feel the anxiety and the stress of coming off them
because they're like, where am I? Which way am I going?
(28:19):
And what are all these minotaurs doing here? I was
gonna say, it's so sad when you see them gobbled
up in the corners of the station by the minotaurs.
But this reminds me again of the rats, and back
to the Hampton Court maze, because again this is the
maze that inspired the elevated plus line maze. And the
reason why rats were studied in this configuration is because
(28:39):
it's really easy to study anxiety in this, as you
have pointed out, Because you want to make an animal
feel anxiety, it's just bamed. Put them in that space
and the environment makes them feel it. And the reason
why rats had such a run with these mazes, so
to speak, is because you know, pharmacological studies began with
us to see if they to use certain substances to
(29:01):
reduce that anxiety, and so they had rats run these
mazes again and again. In fact, rats became the gold
standard of animals to use in psychology experiments. So again,
what Esther Serberg is saying that when you have all
of these different elements, you have a novelty, you have
a restriction in sight and sound, and you have in
the case of the elevated plus sign elevation to throw
(29:25):
into that. Uh, the rat will actually freeze at these
points that offer what she says, the most frightening combination
of choices available. Yeah, and we're like freezing. We're talking
increased defication, elevations of cortisol, the stress hormone in the blood.
And it isn't vital to point out that it's important
to have that stress hormone. Um, it helps us solve
(29:47):
the maze if if balanced, It focuses our attention, it
gives us energy, It raises our awareness of the surroundings
so that we notice the small details and they lead
to our escape. Do you think of any story where
an individual is in h maze, what do they have
to do? They have to their their own guard. They
might have to face a minotaur for crying out loud,
But then they also have to be super observant because
(30:08):
especially if the maze is kind of featureless, right, Uh,
maybe they're marking stuff on the walls with chalk, or
they're using string, whatever, but they you have to You
can't just calmly walk through. This is a confusing, challenging environment. Again,
it's the representation of all the confusion and risks in
the real world and you're feeling at all legitimately in
the maze. Yeah. And she talks about this dose effect
(30:30):
and this beneficial stress response as opposed to something that
becomes detrimental and uh. In the book, she talks about
Gary Aston Jones. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania,
and what he did is he embedded electrodes into the
brains of monkeys, specifically a place called the locusts Serulius.
And this is the region that governs vigilance, focused attention,
(30:53):
and the adrenaline component of the stress response. And what
happened is that when the monkeys were relaxed, there was
just a little bit of nerve cell firing in this
part of the brain, But when they were focusing on
something like pressing a lever to obtain a pellet of food,
there was a lot of nerve cell firing in the
locust surrelius. So this is a good thing, right. You
(31:15):
see the monkey performing at optimal levels under stress to
a certain degree, but when the researchers stressed them a
lot all of the nerve cells began firing in this
Sisternberg is what led to the monkey failing at the
task that the researchers were putting them to. So again,
(31:36):
it is this overloaded of circuitry in the stress response
that makes us freeze at times. Yeah, Steinberg compares it
to a U shaped curve. Think of it this way.
You have a speech to give, kind of like our
keynote that we gave in miny Hapolists. So if you
want to go in there with a certain amount of
of of energy, right, you're about to give a keynote.
(31:57):
You don't want to be like I just woke up.
You know, you gotta Yeah, you want to have a
certain amount of energy. So this you shaped curve, it's
like a little hill. Okay, So as our anxiety rises
up towards the middle of this hill, at the very
top of that hill, that is like prime keynote territory.
You're you're the maximum amount of energy and anxiety and
(32:19):
stress that will allow you to get in there and
just kill you know, to just get in there and
deliver on all the front you're alert and focus, right.
But then is that if that anxiety builds past that point,
then it begins to dip down. Uh, and at the
bottom of that hill is freezing up, pooping yourself and
falling off the stage like utter a complete so much
(32:40):
stress over it that you cannot even function at a
basic human level. And then everywhere between the peak of
that hill and the bottom there you know, all the
other things that can happen where all that speech didn't
really go too well. My nerves were a little fraid,
you know. So you shaped curve, and so the ideally
if you're in the maze, you want to uh be
somewhere near the top of that curve, at the top
(33:02):
of that hill, because that is the mindset that you
need to solve the maze, and it's the mindset that
your body is going for, Like, that's where you're that's
why you're having these responses because the body is like,
this is confusing. Let's get in maze solving mode. Well,
and here's the deal. If if just some practical advice here,
if anybody is going to give a keynote address and
(33:23):
they feel like they are about to go down the
hill into self defecation, take that moment to actually stand
in a powerful pose. We talked about this before, um
because this pose, if if you stand in it for
two minutes or more, we'll actually decrease your cortisol stress
levels and increase your testosterone. Increase of the testosterone is
(33:45):
important because that helps your confidence. The lowering of the
cortisol stress means that you will not poop your pants.
So just a little f y either. So what other
methods are at our disposal for escaping a maze? Solving
a maze? How are we going to get out of
dis maze and somehow make it back to our our
chairs and our desks and presumably our families and homes. Okay, well, um,
here is what many people say is the best way
(34:07):
to solve a maze, and it's called the right hand trick,
but sometimes called the left hand trick because doesn't really
matter which hand. You just keep a hand on one
wall and it doesn't matter which one, just pick left
or right when you enter, and then you follow the
path and keep that hand as you are following that
path this way, if you get to a dead end,
you can negotiate it by just following the three walls
(34:30):
and then moving back the way that you came out,
and eventually you will find the exit. This is the idea,
all right. Now, this usually works with most mazes, but
if the maze has a central blank area occupied by
second maze, then your toast, it's not gonna work. Well, certainly,
you can follow theseus's advice and have some yarn with
(34:52):
you or some string and throw that behind you and
just hope that nothing is going to follow in your
wake to disrupt the path you're setting for your self.
In the Name of the Rose, the character of Brother
William of Baskerville says to find the way out of
a labyrinth, that there is only one means at every
new junction, never seen before. The path we have taken
will be marked with three signs. If because of previous
(35:13):
signs on some of the paths of the junction, you
see that the junction has already been visited, you will
make only one mark on the path you have taken.
If all the apertures have already been marked, then you
must retrace your steps. And he continues a little bit
on this line and then add so that the younger
monk that he's he's taking with him on this journey, says,
how do you know that? Are you an expert on labyrinth?
And he says, no, I'm citing an ancient text I
(35:35):
once read and and so asked. And by observing this rule,
you get out. And he says, almost never as far
as I know. But we will still try it all
the same. So, so you're gonna have to be patient
with the maze, I guess, And you're gonna have to
You're gonna have to remain calm, but alert, be very
aware of your surroundings, and uh, and don't be afraid
(35:56):
to make some marks and notations. Um, and whether thoughts
of comfort here? One is that we have learned this before,
We've talked about this, Uh, that a rat's brain during
sleep sometimes mimics what happens during the day. So rats
and a maze, you can actually see the specific patterns
of neurons fired in the rats brains while running a
lab maze that appeared that day what um and then
(36:19):
during ram sleep for those rats. So in other words,
rats can dream about the maze that they've been in
and they can try to figure out a better way
to approach it next time, so they can learn to
navigate a maze given maze, they can actually, Yeah, they
can be trained to do this some part of humans.
Do any even who lives in a city, has learned
to navigate amaze. Yeah, and part of this training, of course,
(36:40):
has to do with rem sleep and going over this
material again and again. So just that that to me
is very comforting when I think about getting out of
a maze. And if you are an amazing and you're
feeling lots of inks, maybe you're in a city, a
new city, or a true maze itself, or you're drawing
amaze or trying to get out of one that's on
a piece of paper. Uh, here's what you should do.
(37:01):
You should start to think about the bunny healthy music
because this apparently is very helpful. I think it decreases anxiety.
And I say this because I watched the clip of
the Shining that was scored to the Benny Healthy music
and it was far less frightening. And if you want
to see that, check out the blog post that accompanies
this this podcast episode. All right, well, I think I
hear the minotaur calling, so we probably need to wrap
(37:23):
this up. I do want to close out with a
poem by your hey, Lewis Borees, who again was obsessed
with mazes and labyrinths and mirrors and all matter of
mentally complex arrangements. And this is his poem called the
Labyrinth Budget. It really sums up the feeling of being
an a maze. Zeus himself could not undo the web
(37:43):
of stone closing around me. I've forgotten the men I
was before. I follow the hated path of monotonous walls.
That is my destiny, severe galleries which curve in secret
circles to the end of the years, parapets cracked by
the day's usury. In the pale dust, I have discerned
earned signs that frightened me. In the concave evenings, the
(38:03):
air has carried a roar toward me, or the echo
of a desolate How I know there is another in
the shadows whose fate it is to wear out the
long solitudes, which weave and unweave this hades, and to
long for my blood and devour my death. Each of
us seeks the other. If only this were the final
day of waiting. So that you have it, we have
(38:28):
escaped from the maze, and in our next episode we
will explore the labyrinth. That's right. They to the yang,
and it is a very different beast here, so do
check it out. In the meantime, you can always check
us out in several different places. Yes, Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is the mothership, that is
where all the podcast episodes live, way back to the
(38:50):
very beginning. You'll find our blog post. You'll find our videos.
You'll find links out to our various social media accounts
including Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, uh Soundclouds. Also mind
Stuff Show on YouTube. That's their YouTube account. Go check
out our videos there, follow us to support the show
and Julie. If people want to email us, how might
(39:10):
they go about that? Oh, well, they can send it
through the maze of fiber optics, and they can do
it by sending an email to blow the mind at
Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it How Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Julie Douglas, and we are republishing a couple of older
episodes this week. Two episodes that work together and therefore
had to be republished together, but two episodes that we
(00:25):
definitely wanted to share with everyone again and share with
many newer listeners for the first time. Yeah, because mazes
and labyrinths, these this idea that these physical constructs are
actually mental constructs. And in addition to this, we wanted
to mention that pretty soon there's a movie called The
Maze Runner, which will be released in movie theaters. It is,
(00:46):
according to Bleeding Cool dot com, yet another post apocalyptic
world populated by teenagers who are tasked to save the
world somehow. Yeah, and I was actually just looking at
it yet it starts the guy from teen Woolf the
TV show, not not Jason Bateman or Michael not or
not yea, not Michael j Fox, but the new Team Wolf,
the one that's uh you see on the side of
(01:07):
buses and stuff that yeah, he's in and it looks
pretty cool. It's kind of reminds me a bit of
the older movie Cube, you know, like a like a
very uh, you know, dystopian and high tech kind of
a maze environment. Yeah. I like the premise of it.
Um in it. Their memories, these teenagers are memories are
wiped out and they run through mazes like hamsters, later
(01:28):
discovering in the various truth behind the question why. Yeah,
and these are based, by the way, on a series
of young adult novels by James Dashner. Yeah, so we
hope that you guys enjoy this. It's a maze. Is
is about, in a way elaborate confinement. It's about confusion,
(01:50):
It's about being cut off. It's about not knowing which
way you're going, and which way is the way out,
and if there is even a way out, if there
is a limit to the confusing layout that just flows
out all around you. Now, one thing that's important to
mention here, and we're gonna we're gonna mention this not
only in this episode but the part two of this
(02:11):
series to follow. But essentially, you have mazes and you
have labyrinths, and very often these words are used interchangeably.
One would be tempted to say, it's elegant variation, which
is when you use uh, like when you're talking about
a wolf, but you use the word dog to describe it.
You just wanted to mix it up and use a
different word, but you're actually using a word for a
(02:32):
different thing. Well, mazes and labyrinth is and isn't quite
that bad because the overlap between these two terms has
been around for a while and has become pretty much
the you know, pretty much a mainstay of the English language.
So uh, you can't get two up in arms over it.
But for the purposes of this podcast, and and also
(02:52):
in scientific purposes, you have mazes, which are a place
of confusion, a place of beatings on the walls, as
we're hearing now, and then you have labyrinths and labyrinth
says we'll discuss in the second podcast more in depth,
are a place of serenity. That's right. It's really a
yang and yang proposition here, because yes, maze tangle of
(03:14):
options choices, right, profusion and the labyrinth neatly laid out
a meandering path, but one that has a purpose in
a direction to it. So right now we are going
to tackle mazes, and as we say, we are podcasting
today from a construction zone of our maze like office. Um.
And we should probably get into more or other examples
(03:37):
of mazes, because when you think of mazes, or at
least when I do, I tend to think of the
elaborate hedge mazes popular in the sixteen through the eighteenth centuries. Yes,
you have basically you can divide mazes up into two
or three categories. Well, first, there are two basic categories.
There are mazes that exist in physical space and mazes
(03:58):
that exist merely as saturn or as you know, is
something drawn on a sheet of paper. Uh. For the
most part, we're gonna be talking in this podcast though,
about actual physical mazes that you traverse physically, and these
you tend to see landscape mazes and architectural mazes, mazes
that are made out of you could do dirt, but
most of the time hedges. And then there are architectural
(04:19):
mazes whereas it is an actual physical thing walls and
closing you. Everyone will probably think back to the classic
Jim Hinson David Bowie starring film Labyrinth, which, despite being
called Labyrinth, everything in the movie is amaze. Everything is
about confusing because Sarah has to get to the castle
(04:41):
at the center so that she can free Toby from
the Goblin King, but nobody wants her to actually get there.
The Goblin King doesn't actually want women showing up and
stealing has stolen babies from him, so and there's a
neat little number like a Magic Song by David Bowie
which he's tossing this baby around and by the way,
he looks like Parker Posey to me in in a
(05:04):
Tina Turner wig in this sick Yeah, And there's a
lot of heavy pop synthesizers going on. It's it's pretty
awesome stuff. It is an awesome movie. But pretty much
everything you see in there is is a maze from
the early Stone mazes that Sarah is going through where
it's very much an architectural maze with walls all around her,
until later she's going through a landscape maze of hedges.
(05:27):
Elsewhere people may have encountered mazes in the form of
corn mazes where someone cuts a maze through the maze
and nice and you have around Halloween time, that's certainly
and every year in the news there's always an account
of a family getting lost in one of those mazes. Oh,
(05:47):
I haven't I've never seen one of those, and I've
worked in small papers for quite a while in the past,
so it's strange that we never had that story. Well,
and then they're never found again. Are you sure that
you're just you didn't used to live near a particularly
bad ads where they really went overboard and making it
complex and an unescapable No. No, no. And then there's
like these like sort of evilish children that are dressed
(06:09):
in amish like clothing. Yes, the children are milling around. Yeah, yeah,
you've not heard about No, I guess this is this
is one of your hometown. Yeah, it's pretty common elsewhere
in uh. In fiction, mazes have factored into Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire, the big climactic scene, and
that takes place within a maze. Harry's running around completely disoriented,
(06:32):
doesn't know where he's going, and trying, you know, trying
to figure out how to escape the maze or make
it to the center. I believe it was. What I
like about that maze too, is that the maze is alive,
the root system is, you know, trying to tangle them
and pull them in right. And likewise in Labyrinth, the
maze that Sarah finds herself in is constantly changing their
like little goblin dudes running around and like changing her
(06:55):
markings and presumably changing the actual physical layout of the
of the may behind her. Another fabulous maze uh in
film is that in The Shining. Oh yeah, now it's
different from in the book. There there's just some hedge
animals that are creepy and move when you're not looking
at them. But in Stanley Kubrick's phenomenal film vision of
(07:16):
the novel, he incorporates this this maze, this giant hedge maze,
and there's a model of the hedge maze, and and
the maze comes to symbolize the house itself because the house,
the Haunted Overlook Hotel, is also a sort of maze.
And then, curiously enough, like another maze we're about to discuss,
there is a deadly person at the deadly entity at
(07:40):
the center of it. In The Shining, that's Jack Torrence,
the writer who ends up becoming possessed by the evil
of the place and then is hunting his family through
both the maze that is the house and then in
the actual hedge maze out there in the cold. What
I really like about that maze too, is that it's
got those um those feelings of selation, terror and then
(08:02):
disorientation in that maze. And we'll talk more about that
in in Our Fear Response, our stress response to um
as we go through majors. But to me, that captures
that perfectly. There's also an excellent fictional maze in House
of Leaves by Mark z Danielski. Basically, the book itself
is a maze, and there are all these footnotes and
(08:22):
footnotes upon footnotes, and there's a story within a story
in a documentary film within a story, and the character himself,
this guy Navidson, ends up trying to traverse, trying to
explore this ever changing, featureless, black, otherworldly maze that branches
out from this haunted house presumably haunted, but you never
(08:43):
really know exactly what's going on with this place. The
Name of the Rose by Umberto Echo is pretty great
and that it features a library that is itself a maze.
And this is based in large part on your hey
Lewis Borhes the Library of Babble, where Borhe described an
infinite library maze that contains not only all books, but
(09:04):
all possible books, so it just spreads out forever and
so in the name of the rose umberto Echo creates
within this mediaval Abbey, this this maze library of forbidden
and restricted books. In writing about it, he says that
this is this library is what it's called a rhizome space,
which means there's there's virtually no into it. You could
(09:24):
wander this thing forever without finding an exit unless you
knew how to escape the maze. But perhaps the most
famous and and just the most iconic maze from from
myth and fiction and legend is of course the Maze
of Minos. Yes, and this is the tale of theseus, correct,
(09:45):
the hero and the minotaur, who is at the center
of what they call Again there's confusion between labyrinth and maze,
but it is at the middle of this and is
waiting for people to come through and devour them. Yes,
and kind of wandering the halls and howling and the
maze in this it was commanded to be built by
King Minos, who has this monstrous son that is the minotaur,
(10:10):
half man and half animal. Yes, yeah, monstrous flesh eating creature.
So he has Daedalus, who of course silt the wings
for his son Icarus. Just you know, the fantastic engineer
of Hellenistic lore. He's commanded to build it, and in
fact builds a maze so complicated that he himself has
trouble escaping from it at one point. But this becomes
just the sort of the defining idea of amaze, this complex,
(10:33):
confusing place that you're trapped in, you're trying to escape,
and then with the Minotaur, you have this added threat
that you are not alone in this confusing space, this confusing,
unreal world. There's also something that is searching for you,
something that or even if it's not searching for you,
you may run into it. And if you run into it,
it's all over. Yeah, And we will talk a little
(10:55):
bit more about the Minotaur as represented by our consciousness
and a bit and how our mind is a bit
like a maze. But I did want to mention that
a a non fictional maze that is probably what you
could call the mother of mazes UM is known as
the Hampton Court Maze, and this is outside of London.
It is really an iconic maze. UM. It is at
(11:17):
the Hampton Court Palace and it's thought that it was
designed around six nine, originally planted using horn beam and
later we planted using you, and it covers a third
of an acre. It's trapezoid in shape and it is
the UK's oldest surviving hedge maze. In fact, I'm sure
listeners some of our resisis and UK have actually experienced
(11:37):
this firsthand. At the time. It was constructed to amuse
the ladies and lords of the court, which I think
is so I love this idea. It's so fascinating to
me that people have so much time on their hands
that it wasn't enough to have a palace and have
all the extravagance of a palace and servants. Then you
(11:57):
had to create a maze out on your lawn on
in order to amuse the people within the palace, something
that would actually um excite fear in your visitors to
the maze, right, yeah, you were. You lined it yesterday
when we were talking about it to h to like
a horror movie in a in an age when you
(12:18):
didn't have horror movie. Uh uh. And and certainly you
can also liken it to a roller coaster. It is
an artificial construction designed to create these feelings of fear
and anxiety in the individuals who are traversing it. So
it's interesting to me that the upper class just you know,
on a social note, that you would be so free
(12:38):
from concerns or troubles that you would have to create
this this uh, three D representation of fear to put
yourself through that experience. Um. And of course we do
that today with with haunted houses. But what is cool
about Hampton Court Maze is that this is the maze
that really helped to inform science. And what I mean
(12:59):
by that is there was a graduate student named Willard Small.
He was the first to use a rodent maze to
study learning, and he did this in nineteen o one,
and he created a platform about six ft long by
eight feet wide, covered it with sawdust and then divided
it into galleries with walls of wire netting, and he
modeled it on a diagram of the Hedge maze at
(13:19):
Hampton Court. So this was such a famous maze in
the minds of everybody, particularly during this ron of the century,
that it really helped um this particular student to create
this thing that really took off in science at least
for a good sixty years. Yeah, because even after they
stopped using the replica of the Hampton Court Maze, which
(13:41):
which from above looks. It's it's weirdly shaped, like it's
kind of like a hacked off pyramid, kind of like
a a weird battle axe looking design. It's it's strange looking,
kind of like a robot woman's hips. It's interesting to
say battle ax because uh, labra is I means yeah,
acts in and um in Greek, and so that's when
(14:02):
you look at the root of labyrinth, it is acts.
But anyway, but even after they stopped using the Hampton Maze,
they use a simplified version of it called the Elevated
Plus Maze, which basically look like a plus sign. In
other words, it's two hallways that they cross over each other. Uh.
And it's like the simplest may as possible because it
sends the mouse or whatever that's inside it. It's they
(14:24):
come to a point where they have three choices. They
can go left, they can go right, they can go
forward or well, presumably they could go backwards as well.
So it's a it's a simplified version of the of
the maze, the maze and brief you know, but what
are they trying to to study with all of this? Right?
It comes back to how a maze makes us feel
when I've touched on this a little bit already. It's
(14:47):
when you're inside of a maze, you feel, first of all,
you feel confined. You're definitely in a strange place. You
you don't know which way to go. Should I go
this way, shouldn't go that way? If I go if
I go this way, am I going to run into
a dead end? Everyone hates running into a dead end?
That just said, I mean you think of actual real
world versions of this, like if you've ever been in
(15:08):
a um, well, say the haunted like a haunted house.
Now haunted house is not a complete maze because nobody
wants to build a professional haunted attraction where people go
in and have trouble getting out, because, if we discussed
in our Science of Haunted Houses episode, you've got to
move a certain amount of people through that haunted house
to make money. You need people going in, you need
people going out at a decent click. But at another
(15:30):
world haunted house in Atlanta, they frequently do have this
section that's kind of a mirror maze where you do
at least momentarily become disoriented and not know and you
don't know which way to go, and so that raises
your anxiety. You you feel stressful because you're like, well,
I thought, this is what how do I get out
of here? Which way am I supposed to be going?
You know? And I find in those environments too, not
(15:51):
only another world, but also in like real world environments
like a museum, there's also that that anxiety where you
reach like a weird kind of a part of the
museum where you wonder if this is off limits, like
maybe they didn't they didn't make it clear enough, And
I'm wandering into restricted territory or likewise, any new city
that you're in, you're wandering around and you're wondering, am
(16:12):
I wandering into a restricted space? Is someone gonna yell
at me for being here? And I can start getting
anxious about that because I hated, you know, when I'm
in trouble somebody's yelling at me? And then second, am
I wandering into a contested space, which, especially in big cities,
you're like, am I wandering into a no man's land
of post apocalyptic violences and face stabbings? You know? I
(16:34):
I don't know, And that raises your instincts and your
anxiety and you're just on edge of the whole time.
Well because in in uh, in my world, I think
of it as just a microcosm of the minotaur in
your head already, right, So within our own minds, we
can think of them as mazes. In particular, we can
(16:55):
think about the default mode network. UM. This is three
areas of the brain, the medial pre frontal cortex, the
medial parietal cortex, and the meteoral temporal lobes. We've talked
about these before being the default mode network. And this
is the area of your brain that deals with the
eye of ourselves, the chattering um sort of subconscious level
(17:16):
where we sit there and we turn over things that
concern ourselves and our ego. And this is really where
you start to see that the mind is like amaze
in this sense because you're going through these thought loops
that you've probably gone through a million times in your
life about certain subjects. They tend to come up in
this area of the brain, right, these concerns that you
(17:38):
have usually about yourself, And it's kind of like a
hyperactive chat room for your brain, and it acts like
an echo chamber in this sense. And we've talked about
this before that when you have hyperactivity in this part
of the brain. It can lead to clinical depression. Right.
So that's why I say that this default mode net
(18:00):
work is really something that's maze that we deal with
every day. Yeah, we sort of we backtrack and we
wander the confusing corridors of the past. We try and
skip ahead a little bit and figure out where we're
going in the future, and for many of us the
whole time there well, for all of us, there are
certain minotaurs out there in that maze as well. I mean,
of course the big one is death. Uh. That beast
(18:22):
is out there somewhere. Maybe he is around the corner,
maybe he is on the other side of the maze
entirely with many many walls between you and it, but
you know it's there and you always hear it's howling.
I love that you brought that up, because when I
was thinking about mazes, and I was thinking about how
a maze is really a concrete manifestation of our abstract
(18:43):
mind me, I began to think about Sarah Winchester. We
have an article that concerns her is the Mystery House. Yeah, yeah,
she is the Winchester Rifle heiress who at the turn
of the century believed herself to be haunted by the
victims of the rifles that her husband's company for used,
and now she had something traumatic events that happened in
(19:04):
her life. She lost her child and her husband, and
after that, for thirty eight years, her house was constantly
under construction and she was changing the configuration of her
house really to create a maze. And the reason that
she did that is she wanted to confuse the spirits,
the ghosts of the people that she thought were killed
(19:24):
by those rifles. So if you've ever visited the house,
this is in San Jose, California, you may have firsthand
seen that there are false stairways to know where. There
are something like forty seven chimneys in the house. Um.
Some of them are built all the way up, some
of them are not. Some of them actually aren't working chimneys, fireplaces, um.
(19:47):
And at some point I believe there are five hundred
rooms constructed that she would have them demolished and then rebuilt.
So here you go, I mean, here's talking about the
hyperactivity of this part of the brain that is concerned
with um, you know, fear and uh, the self. This
is someone who you can really see her own brain
(20:11):
being manifested in the design of our house. Well, and
it's in a way, it's uh, it's kind of just
another take on the old idea that if you you
have a criminal that needs to be executed, you hang
them at a crossroads so that they'll have difficulty finding
their way back to their hometown where they can haunt
everybody and be a menace. So, but in what is
a crossroads but a plus maze, like we discussed earlier,
(20:33):
you placed the mouse at the center, the rat at
the center of the plus mays the brat has no
which no idea which way to go. So presumably the
ghost of an executed murder is there at the crossroads,
has no idea what to go. Maybe he locks down
and doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he heads up in the
wrong direction. And and this is so cool because again
this is this idea of disorientation. We're gonna take a
(20:56):
quick break, but when we get back, we're going to
talk about anxiety disorientation in mazes. All right, we're back,
and I do want to mention that is we're getting
into the way mazes affect our mind in our body.
(21:18):
Text that we found particularly helpful in this was the
science of healing places by Esther M. Steinberg. Just a
fabulous book from beginning to end, and it deals with
how spaces affect us, how the layout of a space
or the particulars of an environment can have a beneficial
effect on us or a detrimental effect on us. And
in a large sense, the purest distillation of this idea
(21:41):
is the idea of maze and labyrinth. And in this
podcast were of course talking about the maze. Uh And
as you mentioned earlier, it's just this, the mazes is amazing,
and that it is this kind of perfect physical manifestation
of an idea, are even more than an idea, just
like a state of mind, a state of the world.
(22:02):
Like in a way, the mazes this perfect manifestation of
the of the human experience in its confusing sense. You know,
like I said, I it makes me think of the
obelisk from the Monolith rather from two thousand and one
of Space Odyssey. You know, it's just that you can
basically just thinking about it, you can sort of catch
the hum Yeah. You know, we are talking about mazes
(22:24):
in a very literal sense today, but if you took
a bird's eye view of yourself right now, in this
time and space you would see that you are in
a maze somewhere. Right, even if you're just walking down
the city block, you are within a maze. Um. But
what is so interesting about mazes is this idea that
in as you say that the purest sense is taking
(22:45):
all of those different senses of the way that we
perceive the world in creating this this construct that really
amplifies all those feelings. And so when we talk about
new experiences and uh, we talk about how we've received things,
there's some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, Now,
stress and anxiety. So stress is not a new idea.
(23:08):
People have been stressed out for ages. For instance, the
ancient Romans used a word string array, which means to squeeze, tight,
to graze, to touch, or danger. But it wasn't until
around the ninety six a Nature article by scientists Hans
Zeely published this article where you talked about stress in
the terms of a body's non specific response to an
(23:28):
external demand. In in in ninety four, physiologist Walter B. Cannon
for the first time show that animals produce adrenaline in
response to stress. And this is the first proof that
environments trigger bodily responses like this and so in the
decades that follow we learn even more about how the
brain responds to stress. For instance, that hormones and chemicals
in the brain are released to deal with stress. Namely,
(23:50):
we have a stress hormone called c r H that's
corticotra pent releasing hormone UH, and this forces the pteritary
gland to pump out more a c t H and
this travels through the blood to the adrenal glance and
this makes them pump out cortisol courts. Of course, being
the stress hormone and all of this is really important.
You want to be able to tap into this stress response, right,
(24:11):
this fear response, because that's really what helps us to
tune into the details in a novel place or situation
in order to detect the way out to survive in
some way. That's when we see the whites of our
eyes getting even larger because we're trying to really pay
attention to our environments. The problem, of course, comes when
we're overloaded with the stress response, and when we're in
(24:36):
this state of fear for longer than we need to be.
And we'll talk about this in a bit too. UH,
when the situation doesn't necessarily call for the stress response
that is elicited right right, because again when the when
the stress hormones kick in, the nerve cells fired to
release an adrenaline light nerve chemical called nora pinafine. And
(24:57):
this is this is when the brain's fear center, the amigla,
becomes active. And again adrenaline is important, and we'll discuss
that a little more as we go here. But this
is how you want to feel inside of a maze,
because the maze triggers anxiety and stress because of essentially
four things. According to S. C. Em Steinberg. First of all,
(25:18):
you're in an architectural maze or even a hedge maze,
what can you see? What? What are you seeing around you?
With your site? This key sense of it really just
whatever's on either side, right. So of course with blinders, yeah,
it's like blinder here, blinder there. You can see a
little ways in front of you, turn around, you can
see a little ways behind you. But for the most part,
your sense of the world via site is really limited.
(25:40):
And the next one is one that I never really
thought about all that much. But you have no clear
sound to guide you either, because if you're if you're
in a hedge maze, there's gonna be a certain amount
of sound buffering, and then if you're in an actual
architectural maze, you can have sound buffering plus the potential
for echoes as well, like, for instance, the sound of
that minotaur is how echoing through the tunnels. So already
(26:04):
our site, our ability to see the world is a
significantly altered in. Our ability to to navigate the world
via sound is significantly altered. Right. And I don't know
if the listeners can detect this, but there was just
a bunch of hammering going on, and I was just
thinking that we're inside of our little maze right now
inside the podcast. I have no idea what direction that's
kind I don't either. I can feel it, actually can
feel it on my feet, but I know it that's
(26:25):
not under me. I know it's not probably on the
other side of the wall. But again, here's this idea
that you can't get your normal sound clues correct. Um,
you have limited vision, you have a new alien environment. Yeah. Again,
this is like a maze, like a straight up maze,
like out of the shining. This is an unreal environment
and it's like and it's purest sense, it's it maybe
an analog for confusion in the mind and puzzles of
(26:49):
the mind. It maybe an analog for potentially confusing environments
in the natural world, and certainly in the unnatural world
of cities. But this is its purest sense. It is
alien in every sense of the word. And the worst
part of it is you now have choices, and you
have uncertainty along with that novelty. And think about your
poor hippocampus. This is the part of your brain that
is trying to navigate right spatially and is using usually
(27:13):
using memory to do this. So it's a little bit
like if you were dropped into a new city and
you had to find your bearings. What happens, You feel
stressed out, You feel a little bit more aware, because
this is part of your brain that's saying I don't
have a blueprint for this, and I don't know what
is the right choice. Yeah, like for us, like I
know when I go to New York City, I certainly
don't go there enough where I know my way around.
(27:34):
So when I emerged from a subway out into the street,
I'll have no idea which way is north, which way
of south? What does that street sign say out there?
Which is that one say back there, did I take
the wrong course? And I completely out of bounds here
um in regards to where I'm trying to get to
and and certainly even taking something like Atlanta's Marta every day,
which is basically a plush plus mark. It's north, north
(27:57):
and southeast and west, but but still espec fully at
the at the very center of that the center of confusion,
which is a place called the five um, you do
see outsiders and tourists and people who normally don't take
the train wandering around confused, and you can see they
feel the anxiety and the stress of coming off them
because they're like, where am I? Which way am I going?
(28:19):
And what are all these minotaurs doing here? I was
gonna say, it's so sad when you see them gobbled
up in the corners of the station by the minotaurs.
But this reminds me again of the rats, and back
to the Hampton Court maze, because again this is the
maze that inspired the elevated plus line maze. And the
reason why rats were studied in this configuration is because
(28:39):
it's really easy to study anxiety in this, as you
have pointed out, Because you want to make an animal
feel anxiety, it's just bamed. Put them in that space
and the environment makes them feel it. And the reason
why rats had such a run with these mazes, so
to speak, is because you know, pharmacological studies began with
us to see if they to use certain substances to
(29:01):
reduce that anxiety, and so they had rats run these
mazes again and again. In fact, rats became the gold
standard of animals to use in psychology experiments. So again,
what Esther Serberg is saying that when you have all
of these different elements, you have a novelty, you have
a restriction in sight and sound, and you have in
the case of the elevated plus sign elevation to throw
(29:25):
into that. Uh, the rat will actually freeze at these
points that offer what she says, the most frightening combination
of choices available. Yeah, and we're like freezing. We're talking
increased defication, elevations of cortisol, the stress hormone in the blood.
And it isn't vital to point out that it's important
to have that stress hormone. Um, it helps us solve
(29:47):
the maze if if balanced, It focuses our attention, it
gives us energy, It raises our awareness of the surroundings
so that we notice the small details and they lead
to our escape. Do you think of any story where
an individual is in h maze, what do they have
to do? They have to their their own guard. They
might have to face a minotaur for crying out loud,
But then they also have to be super observant because
(30:08):
especially if the maze is kind of featureless, right, Uh,
maybe they're marking stuff on the walls with chalk, or
they're using string, whatever, but they you have to You
can't just calmly walk through. This is a confusing, challenging environment. Again,
it's the representation of all the confusion and risks in
the real world and you're feeling at all legitimately in
the maze. Yeah. And she talks about this dose effect
(30:30):
and this beneficial stress response as opposed to something that
becomes detrimental and uh. In the book, she talks about
Gary Aston Jones. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania,
and what he did is he embedded electrodes into the
brains of monkeys, specifically a place called the locusts Serulius.
And this is the region that governs vigilance, focused attention,
(30:53):
and the adrenaline component of the stress response. And what
happened is that when the monkeys were relaxed, there was
just a little bit of nerve cell firing in this
part of the brain, But when they were focusing on
something like pressing a lever to obtain a pellet of food,
there was a lot of nerve cell firing in the
locust surrelius. So this is a good thing, right. You
(31:15):
see the monkey performing at optimal levels under stress to
a certain degree, but when the researchers stressed them a
lot all of the nerve cells began firing in this
Sisternberg is what led to the monkey failing at the
task that the researchers were putting them to. So again,
(31:36):
it is this overloaded of circuitry in the stress response
that makes us freeze at times. Yeah, Steinberg compares it
to a U shaped curve. Think of it this way.
You have a speech to give, kind of like our
keynote that we gave in miny Hapolists. So if you
want to go in there with a certain amount of
of of energy, right, you're about to give a keynote.
(31:57):
You don't want to be like I just woke up.
You know, you gotta Yeah, you want to have a
certain amount of energy. So this you shaped curve, it's
like a little hill. Okay, So as our anxiety rises
up towards the middle of this hill, at the very
top of that hill, that is like prime keynote territory.
You're you're the maximum amount of energy and anxiety and
(32:19):
stress that will allow you to get in there and
just kill you know, to just get in there and
deliver on all the front you're alert and focus, right.
But then is that if that anxiety builds past that point,
then it begins to dip down. Uh, and at the
bottom of that hill is freezing up, pooping yourself and
falling off the stage like utter a complete so much
(32:40):
stress over it that you cannot even function at a
basic human level. And then everywhere between the peak of
that hill and the bottom there you know, all the
other things that can happen where all that speech didn't
really go too well. My nerves were a little fraid,
you know. So you shaped curve, and so the ideally
if you're in the maze, you want to uh be
somewhere near the top of that curve, at the top
(33:02):
of that hill, because that is the mindset that you
need to solve the maze, and it's the mindset that
your body is going for, Like, that's where you're that's
why you're having these responses because the body is like,
this is confusing. Let's get in maze solving mode. Well,
and here's the deal. If if just some practical advice here,
if anybody is going to give a keynote address and
(33:23):
they feel like they are about to go down the
hill into self defecation, take that moment to actually stand
in a powerful pose. We talked about this before, um
because this pose, if if you stand in it for
two minutes or more, we'll actually decrease your cortisol stress
levels and increase your testosterone. Increase of the testosterone is
(33:45):
important because that helps your confidence. The lowering of the
cortisol stress means that you will not poop your pants.
So just a little f y either. So what other
methods are at our disposal for escaping a maze? Solving
a maze? How are we going to get out of
dis maze and somehow make it back to our our
chairs and our desks and presumably our families and homes. Okay, well, um,
here is what many people say is the best way
(34:07):
to solve a maze, and it's called the right hand trick,
but sometimes called the left hand trick because doesn't really
matter which hand. You just keep a hand on one
wall and it doesn't matter which one, just pick left
or right when you enter, and then you follow the
path and keep that hand as you are following that
path this way, if you get to a dead end,
you can negotiate it by just following the three walls
(34:30):
and then moving back the way that you came out,
and eventually you will find the exit. This is the idea,
all right. Now, this usually works with most mazes, but
if the maze has a central blank area occupied by
second maze, then your toast, it's not gonna work. Well, certainly,
you can follow theseus's advice and have some yarn with
(34:52):
you or some string and throw that behind you and
just hope that nothing is going to follow in your
wake to disrupt the path you're setting for your self.
In the Name of the Rose, the character of Brother
William of Baskerville says to find the way out of
a labyrinth, that there is only one means at every
new junction, never seen before. The path we have taken
will be marked with three signs. If because of previous
(35:13):
signs on some of the paths of the junction, you
see that the junction has already been visited, you will
make only one mark on the path you have taken.
If all the apertures have already been marked, then you
must retrace your steps. And he continues a little bit
on this line and then add so that the younger
monk that he's he's taking with him on this journey, says,
how do you know that? Are you an expert on labyrinth?
And he says, no, I'm citing an ancient text I
(35:35):
once read and and so asked. And by observing this rule,
you get out. And he says, almost never as far
as I know. But we will still try it all
the same. So, so you're gonna have to be patient
with the maze, I guess, And you're gonna have to
You're gonna have to remain calm, but alert, be very
aware of your surroundings, and uh, and don't be afraid
(35:56):
to make some marks and notations. Um, and whether thoughts
of comfort here? One is that we have learned this before,
We've talked about this, Uh, that a rat's brain during
sleep sometimes mimics what happens during the day. So rats
and a maze, you can actually see the specific patterns
of neurons fired in the rats brains while running a
lab maze that appeared that day what um and then
(36:19):
during ram sleep for those rats. So in other words,
rats can dream about the maze that they've been in
and they can try to figure out a better way
to approach it next time, so they can learn to
navigate a maze given maze, they can actually, Yeah, they
can be trained to do this some part of humans.
Do any even who lives in a city, has learned
to navigate amaze. Yeah, and part of this training, of course,
(36:40):
has to do with rem sleep and going over this
material again and again. So just that that to me
is very comforting when I think about getting out of
a maze. And if you are an amazing and you're
feeling lots of inks, maybe you're in a city, a
new city, or a true maze itself, or you're drawing
amaze or trying to get out of one that's on
a piece of paper. Uh, here's what you should do.
(37:01):
You should start to think about the bunny healthy music
because this apparently is very helpful. I think it decreases anxiety.
And I say this because I watched the clip of
the Shining that was scored to the Benny Healthy music
and it was far less frightening. And if you want
to see that, check out the blog post that accompanies
this this podcast episode. All right, well, I think I
hear the minotaur calling, so we probably need to wrap
(37:23):
this up. I do want to close out with a
poem by your hey, Lewis Borees, who again was obsessed
with mazes and labyrinths and mirrors and all matter of
mentally complex arrangements. And this is his poem called the
Labyrinth Budget. It really sums up the feeling of being
an a maze. Zeus himself could not undo the web
(37:43):
of stone closing around me. I've forgotten the men I
was before. I follow the hated path of monotonous walls.
That is my destiny, severe galleries which curve in secret
circles to the end of the years, parapets cracked by
the day's usury. In the pale dust, I have discerned
earned signs that frightened me. In the concave evenings, the
(38:03):
air has carried a roar toward me, or the echo
of a desolate How I know there is another in
the shadows whose fate it is to wear out the
long solitudes, which weave and unweave this hades, and to
long for my blood and devour my death. Each of
us seeks the other. If only this were the final
day of waiting. So that you have it, we have
(38:28):
escaped from the maze, and in our next episode we
will explore the labyrinth. That's right. They to the yang,
and it is a very different beast here, so do
check it out. In the meantime, you can always check
us out in several different places. Yes, Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is the mothership, that is
where all the podcast episodes live, way back to the
(38:50):
very beginning. You'll find our blog post. You'll find our videos.
You'll find links out to our various social media accounts
including Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, uh Soundclouds. Also mind
Stuff Show on YouTube. That's their YouTube account. Go check
out our videos there, follow us to support the show
and Julie. If people want to email us, how might
(39:10):
they go about that? Oh, well, they can send it
through the maze of fiber optics, and they can do
it by sending an email to blow the mind at
Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it How Stuff Works dot com
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