January 8, 2013 • 39 mins
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. Join Robert and Julie as they explore the world of mazes and how they affect the brains of humans and rats.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 Julie Tickless. And
in this podcast, we are speaking to you from a maze,
from a maze that is being constructed all around us
(00:24):
here at the house Stuff Works offices in Atlanta. Turns
out we we shuffled around the floor a little bit
and just decided on a whim, let's create a complex
architectural structure all around us. I can hear them building
it even now, making it even more complicated. Uh so
we may not be able to make our way back
to our desk when we're done with this episode. Well,
(00:45):
the funny thing about this is that about a couple
of weeks ago or so, you noticed construction workers going
around and take measuring going on, and you made the
joke then that they we're going to wallace in Little
did we know that that this maze, the maze that
we are already working in, was going to become even
more elaborate. Yes, because it is. The maze is is about,
(01:07):
in a way, elaborate confinement. It's about confusion, 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
(01:28):
this episode but the part two of this 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
(01:49):
wanted to mix it up and use a different word,
but you're actually using a word for a different thing. Well,
mazes and labyrinth is is it quite that bad? Because
the overlap between these two terms has been around for
ae aisle and it's become pretty much the you know,
pretty much a mainstay of the English language. So uh,
you can't get too up in arms over it. But
(02:10):
for the purposes of this podcast and and also 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 yin and yang
proposition here, because yes, maze tangle of options, choices, right, confusion,
(02:36):
and the labyrinths 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 other or other examples of mazes,
(02:58):
because when you think of mazes, or at least when
I do you, I tend to think of the elaborate
hedge mazes popular in the sixteen through the eighteen 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
(03:18):
that exist merely as pattern or as you know, it's
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 mazes,
(03:39):
whereas it is an actual physical thing walls enclosing 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 at the
(04:01):
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
(04:21):
like Parker Posey to me in in a Tina Turner
wig in this 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
(04:44):
going through a landscape maze of hedges. 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 to an around how the mean 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,
(05:07):
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 a maze where they really went overboard. I'm making
it complex and uh an unescapable. No, no, no. And
then there's like these like sort of evilish children that
(05:28):
are dressed in amish like clothing 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, um mazes have factored into Harry
Potter and the Goblet to fire the big climactic scene,
and that takes place within a maze. Harry's running around
(05:50):
completely disoriented, 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 man Is too, is that the
maze is alive, the root system is, you know, trying
to tangle them and pull them in. And likewise, in Labyrinth,
the maze that Sarah finds herself in is constantly changing there,
(06:12):
like little goblin dudes running around and like changing her
markings and presumably changing the actual physical layout of the
of the maze 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
(06:32):
at them. But in Stanley Kubrick's phenomenal film vision of
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,
(06:56):
there is a deadly person at the deadly to be
at the center of it. In the Shining, it'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 may is too, is that
(07:17):
it's got those um those feelings of isolation, terror and
then 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 mazes, 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
(07:39):
itself is a maze, and there are all these footnotes
and 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
(08:03):
you never 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
Louis Borhes the Library of Babble, where Borhees described an
infinite library maze that contains not only all books, but
(08:23):
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 end to it. You
could wander this thing forever without finding an exit unless
(08:47):
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 Minos. Yes, and this is the tale of theseus correct,
the hero and the minotaur, who is at the center
(09:10):
of what they call Again there's confusion between labyrinth and maze,
but 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 Minotar, this
half half man and half animal. Yes, yeah, monstrous flesh
(09:34):
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 and
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
a maze, this complex, confusing place that you're trapped in,
(09:56):
you're trying to escape, and then with the Minotaur, you
have this added threat that you were 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 bit more about the
minotaur as represented by our consciousness and a bit and
(10:18):
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 the Hampton Court Palace
(10:38):
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
catch mazing. I'm in fact, I'm sure listeners some of
religensis in the UK have actually experienced this firsthand. At
the time. It was constructed to amuse the ladies and
(11:01):
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 had to create
a maze out on your lawn in order to amuse
(11:22):
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 too. U to to like a horror movie
in a in an age when you didn't have horror movies,
uh uh. And and certainly you can also liken it
to a roller coaster. It is an artificial construction designed
(11:45):
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 special
note that you would be so free from concerns or troubles,
you would have to create this this uh, three D
representation of fear to put yourself through that experience. Um.
(12:08):
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 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
(12:29):
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 Hampton Court. So this was
such a famous maze in the minds of everybody, particularly
during the tuner of the century, that it really helped
um this particular student to create this thing that really
(12:53):
took off in science at least for a good sixty years. Yeah,
because even after they stopped using the rep like of
the Hampton Court Maze, which 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 go kind of like
a robot woman's hips. It's interesting battle ax because uh,
(13:17):
laborra is I means yeah, acts in in um in Greek,
and so that's when 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
(13:38):
simplest may as possible because it sends the mouse or
whatever that's inside it. It's they 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 it's a
simplified version of the of the maze. The maze in brief,
you know, But what are they trying to to study
(14:00):
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 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? Should I go
that way? If I go if I go this way,
(14:20):
am I going to run into a dead end? Everyone
hates running into a dead end? That just I mean,
you think of actual real world versions of this, like
if you've ever been in a um well to say
the haunted, take a haunted house. You know, 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
(14:40):
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 at a decent click. But at another world hunted
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.
(15:02):
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? And I
find in those environments too, not 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
(15:24):
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 I wandering into a
restricted space. Is someone gonna yell at me for being here?
And I could start getting anxious about that because I
hate it, you know, when I'm in trouble somebody yelling
at me? And then second, am I wandering into a
(15:44):
contested space, which, especially in big cities, you're like, am
I wandering into a no man's land of post apocalyptic
violence and luggings and faith stabbings? I you know, I
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
(16:08):
your head already, right, So within our own minds we
can think of them as mazes. In particular, we can
think about the default mode network. Um. This is three
areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial
parietal cortex in the medial temporal lobes we've talked about
these before, being the default mode network, and this is
(16:28):
the area of your brain that deals with the eye
of ourselves, the chattering um sort of subconscious level 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 a maze
in this sense. Because you're going through these thought loops
(16:50):
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
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
(17:11):
of the brain, it can lead to clinical depression. Right.
So that's why I say that this default mode network
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.
(17:32):
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 dead. Uh, that beast 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
(17:54):
brought that up, because when I was thinking about mazes
and I was thinking about how a maze is really
a concrete manifest station of our abstract mind me, I
began to think about Sarah Winchester. We have an article
that concerns her. Yeah. Yeah, she is the Winchester rifle
heiress who at the turn of the century believed herself
(18:15):
to be haunted by the victims of the rifles that
her husband's company produced. And now she had something traumatic
events that happened in 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.
(18:37):
And the reason that she did that is she wanted
to confuse the spirits the ghosts of of the people
that she thought were killed 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
(18:58):
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. And at some
point I believe there are five hundred rooms constructed, but
she would have them demolished and then rebuilt. So here
you go, I mean, here's talk about the hyperactivity of
(19:19):
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 being manifested
in the design of our house. Well, and it's in
the 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
(19:42):
crossroads so that they'll have difficulty finding their way back
to their hometown where they can haunt everybody and be
a menace. So been in what is a crossroads but
a plus maze, like we discussed earlier, we've you've placed
the mouse at the center the rat at the center
of the plus nates. No, the rat has no which,
no idea which way to go. So presume the ghost
of and of an executed murder is there at the crossroots,
(20:04):
has no idea what to go. Maybe he locks down
and doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he heads off in the
wrong direction, and and and this is so cool because
again this is this idea of disorientation. We're gonna take
a quick break, but when we get back, we're going
to talk about anxiety disorientation in mazes. All right, we're back,
(20:30):
and I do want to mention that is we're getting
into the way mazes affect our mind and our body.
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
(20:52):
effect on us or a detrimental effect on us. And
in a large sense, the purest distillation of this idea
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
(21:14):
of an idea are even more than an idea, just
like a state of mind, a state of the world.
Like in a way, the mazes this perfect manifestation of
the of the human experience in its confusing sense, you know,
like I thought, 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
(21:34):
basically just thinking about it, you can sort of catch
the hum Yeah, you know, we are talking about mazes
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
(21:54):
what is so interesting about mazes is this idea that
in as you say that the purest sense is taking
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 perceive things,
(22:18):
there's some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, Now,
stress and anxiety. So stress is not a new idea.
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 injure. But it wasn't until
around ninety six a Nature article by scientists Hans Zeely
(22:40):
published this article where he talked about stress in the
terms of a body's non specific response to an external demand.
And in ninety four physiologist Walter B. Canon 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 decade is that
follow we learn even more about how the brain response
(23:02):
to stress. For instance, hormones and chemicals in the brain
are released to deal with stress. Namely, we have a
stress hormone called c r H that's corticotra pent releasing
hormone UH, and this forces the peteritary gland to pump
out more a c t H and this travels through
the blood to the adrenal glands and this makes them
pump out cortisol Corso, of course being in the stress
(23:23):
hormone and all of us is really important. You want
to be able to tap into this stress response. Right,
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
(23:44):
attention to our environments. The problem, of course, comes when
we're overloaded with a stress response, and when we're in
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
(24:07):
the stress mormons kick in, the nerve cells fired to
release an adrenaline like nerve chemical called nora a pineffine,
and 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
(24:29):
of essentially four things. According to S. C. In Steinberg.
First of all, you're in an architectural maze or even
a hedge maze, what can you see? 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,
(24:51):
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. And the next one is
one that I never really thought about all that, 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
(25:12):
buffering plus the potential for echoes as well, like, for instance,
the sound of that minotaur is how echoing through the tunnels.
So already 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
(25:34):
was just thinking, like, 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 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,
(25:56):
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
the mind, and 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
(26:16):
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
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
(26:37):
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 to where I know my way around.
So when I emerged from a subway out onto the street,
I'll have no idea which way is north, which way
the south? What does that street sign say out there?
(26:58):
Which is that one? Stay back there? Did I take
the wrong course? Am I completely out of bounds here
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 plus uh plus marking because it's north,
north and southeast and west. But but still, especially at
the at the very center of that, the center of confusion,
(27:21):
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 the
feel of the anxiety and the stress is coming off
them because they're like where am I? Which way am
I going? And what are all these mentors doing here?
I was gonna say, it's so sad when you see
them gobbled up in the corners of the station by
(27:43):
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 it's really easy to study anxiety in this
as you have pointed out, because you make an animal
feel anxiety, it's just bamed. Put them in that space
(28:04):
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 could use certain substances to
reduce that anxiety, and so they had rats run these
mazes again and again. In fact, rats became the gold
(28:25):
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
into that. Uh, the rat will actually freeze at these
(28:45):
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 is vital to point out that it's important
to have that stress hormone. Um, it helps us solve
the maze if if balanced, It focuses our attention, it
(29:08):
gives us energy, It raises our awareness of the surroundings
so that we notice the small details that they lead
to our escape. Do you think of any story where
an individual is in a maze, what do they have
to do? They have to their their own guard. They
might have to face a minuteur for crying out loud,
But then they also have to be super observant because
especially if the mazes kind of featureless, right, Uh, maybe
(29:28):
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
in this beneficial stress response as opposed to something that
(29:51):
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 cerulius,
and this is the region that governs vigilance, focused attention,
and the adrenaline component of the stress response. And what
(30:15):
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 cerelius. So this is a good thing, right. You
see the monkey performing at optimal levels under stress to
(30:35):
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,
it's this overload of circuitry in the stress response that
(30:57):
makes us freeze at times. Yuh 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 Minneapolis. So you want to go
in there with a certain amount of of of energy. Right,
you're about to give a keynote. You don't want to
be like I just woke up, you know, you gotta Yeah,
(31:18):
you want to have a certain amount of energy. So
this U 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
amount of energy and anxiety and stress that will allow
you to get in there and just kill you know,
(31:40):
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 stress over it that
you cannot even function at a basic human level. And
(32:02):
then everywhere between the peak of that hill and the
bottom that 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 of that hill, because that
is the mindset that you need to solve the maze,
(32:24):
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 they feel like they
are about to go down the hill into self defecation,
(32:45):
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 is
your testosterone. Then increase of the testosterone is important because
that helps your confidence. The lowering of the cortisol stress
(33:06):
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 this maze
and somehow make it back to our chairs and our
deaths and presumably our families and homes. Okay, well, um,
here is what many people say is the best way
to solve a maze, and it's called the right hand trick.
(33:27):
That's sometimes called the left hand trick because it 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
(33:47):
and then moving back the way that you came out,
and eventually you will find the exit. This is the
idea right now. This usually works with most mazes, but
if the maze has a central blank area occupied by
a second maze, then your toast it's not gonna work. Well. Certainly,
you can follow theseus's advice and have some yarn with
(34:09):
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 yourself. 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 signs on
(34:31):
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 once
(34:52):
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 it's 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
(35:13):
afraid to make some marks and notations. Um. And two
other 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, um, and
(35:36):
then during rem 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, and humans do. Any
even who lives in a city, has learned to navigate
a maze. Yeah. And part of this training, of course,
(35:57):
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 anks, 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.
(36:19):
You should start to think about the Benny Hialthy 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 Hialthy music
and it was far less framing. 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
(36:40):
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,
but it really sums up the feeling of being an
amaze Zeus himself could not undo the way of stone
(37:00):
closing around me. I've forgotten the men I was before.
I followed 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 signs that frightened me.
In the concave evenings, the air has carried a roar
(37:21):
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 yeah,
that that one gives me chills. All right, So hey, um,
(37:46):
we've got a little long So we're not going to
call the robot over here with the listener mail. It
will take him forever to find us in this He's
stuck out there in amaze any So I do want
to close by saying, if you you want to reach
out to us, we would love to hear from you,
particularly about mazes. Is there a maze and fiction, uh
that that we've neglected to mention? I'm sure there are.
Let us know about them if you think they're really engaging.
(38:08):
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on mazes and video
games because I was looking around and it looks like
earlier in the video game history, like up until you know,
possibly the early nineties, you saw more maze games, games
that were that the idea of a maze was just
the very concept of the game itself. Um and our
(38:28):
producer Matt Frederick said that I think Ultima Online had
a maze in it. I'm I'm to understand that sky
Rim has a maze somewhere in it, but I certainly
haven't found it yet, uh, But but I just wonder
it has. Is the maze in a video game? Is
it's something that we've kind of forgotten. And I'm talking
about an actual maze where when you're in it, whether
it's an above view of the game or you're you know,
(38:48):
third or first persons view, where you're actually confused and
unable to find your way out. Just an open question,
let me know what you think. So you can find
us on stuff to Bowl your Mind on Facebook, you
can find us has stuff to Bow your Mind and Tumbler,
and you can find us as blow the Mind on Twitter,
and you can always drop us a line and blow
the mind at discovery dot com for more on this
(39:14):
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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tickless. And
in this podcast, we are speaking to you from a maze,
from a maze that is being constructed all around us
(00:24):
here at the house Stuff Works offices in Atlanta. Turns
out we we shuffled around the floor a little bit
and just decided on a whim, let's create a complex
architectural structure all around us. I can hear them building
it even now, making it even more complicated. Uh so
we may not be able to make our way back
to our desk when we're done with this episode. Well,
(00:45):
the funny thing about this is that about a couple
of weeks ago or so, you noticed construction workers going
around and take measuring going on, and you made the
joke then that they we're going to wallace in Little
did we know that that this maze, the maze that
we are already working in, was going to become even
more elaborate. Yes, because it is. The maze is is about,
(01:07):
in a way, elaborate confinement. It's about confusion, 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
(01:28):
this episode but the part two of this 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
(01:49):
wanted to mix it up and use a different word,
but you're actually using a word for a different thing. Well,
mazes and labyrinth is is it quite that bad? Because
the overlap between these two terms has been around for
ae aisle and it's become pretty much the you know,
pretty much a mainstay of the English language. So uh,
you can't get too up in arms over it. But
(02:10):
for the purposes of this podcast and and also 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 yin and yang
proposition here, because yes, maze tangle of options, choices, right, confusion,
(02:36):
and the labyrinths 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 other or other examples of mazes,
(02:58):
because when you think of mazes, or at least when
I do you, I tend to think of the elaborate
hedge mazes popular in the sixteen through the eighteen 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
(03:18):
that exist merely as pattern or as you know, it's
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 mazes,
(03:39):
whereas it is an actual physical thing walls enclosing 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 at the
(04:01):
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
(04:21):
like Parker Posey to me in in a Tina Turner
wig in this 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
(04:44):
going through a landscape maze of hedges. 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 to an around how the mean 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,
(05:07):
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 a maze where they really went overboard. I'm making
it complex and uh an unescapable. No, no, no. And
then there's like these like sort of evilish children that
(05:28):
are dressed in amish like clothing 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, um mazes have factored into Harry
Potter and the Goblet to fire the big climactic scene,
and that takes place within a maze. Harry's running around
(05:50):
completely disoriented, 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 man Is too, is that the
maze is alive, the root system is, you know, trying
to tangle them and pull them in. And likewise, in Labyrinth,
the maze that Sarah finds herself in is constantly changing there,
(06:12):
like little goblin dudes running around and like changing her
markings and presumably changing the actual physical layout of the
of the maze 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
(06:32):
at them. But in Stanley Kubrick's phenomenal film vision of
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,
(06:56):
there is a deadly person at the deadly to be
at the center of it. In the Shining, it'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 may is too, is that
(07:17):
it's got those um those feelings of isolation, terror and
then 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 mazes, 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
(07:39):
itself is a maze, and there are all these footnotes
and 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
(08:03):
you never 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
Louis Borhes the Library of Babble, where Borhees described an
infinite library maze that contains not only all books, but
(08:23):
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 end to it. You
could wander this thing forever without finding an exit unless
(08:47):
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 Minos. Yes, and this is the tale of theseus correct,
the hero and the minotaur, who is at the center
(09:10):
of what they call Again there's confusion between labyrinth and maze,
but 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 Minotar, this
half half man and half animal. Yes, yeah, monstrous flesh
(09:34):
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 and
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
a maze, this complex, confusing place that you're trapped in,
(09:56):
you're trying to escape, and then with the Minotaur, you
have this added threat that you were 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 bit more about the
minotaur as represented by our consciousness and a bit and
(10:18):
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 the Hampton Court Palace
(10:38):
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
catch mazing. I'm in fact, I'm sure listeners some of
religensis in the UK have actually experienced this firsthand. At
the time. It was constructed to amuse the ladies and
(11:01):
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 had to create
a maze out on your lawn in order to amuse
(11:22):
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 too. U to to like a horror movie
in a in an age when you didn't have horror movies,
uh uh. And and certainly you can also liken it
to a roller coaster. It is an artificial construction designed
(11:45):
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 special
note that you would be so free from concerns or troubles,
you would have to create this this uh, three D
representation of fear to put yourself through that experience. Um.
(12:08):
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 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
(12:29):
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 Hampton Court. So this was
such a famous maze in the minds of everybody, particularly
during the tuner of the century, that it really helped
um this particular student to create this thing that really
(12:53):
took off in science at least for a good sixty years. Yeah,
because even after they stopped using the rep like of
the Hampton Court Maze, which 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 go kind of like
a robot woman's hips. It's interesting battle ax because uh,
(13:17):
laborra is I means yeah, acts in in um in Greek,
and so that's when 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
(13:38):
simplest may as possible because it sends the mouse or
whatever that's inside it. It's they 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 it's a
simplified version of the of the maze. The maze in brief,
you know, But what are they trying to to study
(14:00):
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 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? Should I go
that way? If I go if I go this way,
(14:20):
am I going to run into a dead end? Everyone
hates running into a dead end? That just I mean,
you think of actual real world versions of this, like
if you've ever been in a um well to say
the haunted, take a haunted house. You know, 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
(14:40):
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 at a decent click. But at another world hunted
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.
(15:02):
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? And I
find in those environments too, not 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
(15:24):
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 I wandering into a
restricted space. Is someone gonna yell at me for being here?
And I could start getting anxious about that because I
hate it, you know, when I'm in trouble somebody yelling
at me? And then second, am I wandering into a
(15:44):
contested space, which, especially in big cities, you're like, am
I wandering into a no man's land of post apocalyptic
violence and luggings and faith stabbings? I you know, I
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
(16:08):
your head already, right, So within our own minds we
can think of them as mazes. In particular, we can
think about the default mode network. Um. This is three
areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial
parietal cortex in the medial temporal lobes we've talked about
these before, being the default mode network, and this is
(16:28):
the area of your brain that deals with the eye
of ourselves, the chattering um sort of subconscious level 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 a maze
in this sense. Because you're going through these thought loops
(16:50):
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
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
(17:11):
of the brain, it can lead to clinical depression. Right.
So that's why I say that this default mode network
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.
(17:32):
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 dead. Uh, that beast 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
(17:54):
brought that up, because when I was thinking about mazes
and I was thinking about how a maze is really
a concrete manifest station of our abstract mind me, I
began to think about Sarah Winchester. We have an article
that concerns her. Yeah. Yeah, she is the Winchester rifle
heiress who at the turn of the century believed herself
(18:15):
to be haunted by the victims of the rifles that
her husband's company produced. And now she had something traumatic
events that happened in 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.
(18:37):
And the reason that she did that is she wanted
to confuse the spirits the ghosts of of the people
that she thought were killed 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
(18:58):
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. And at some
point I believe there are five hundred rooms constructed, but
she would have them demolished and then rebuilt. So here
you go, I mean, here's talk about the hyperactivity of
(19:19):
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 being manifested
in the design of our house. Well, and it's in
the 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
(19:42):
crossroads so that they'll have difficulty finding their way back
to their hometown where they can haunt everybody and be
a menace. So been in what is a crossroads but
a plus maze, like we discussed earlier, we've you've placed
the mouse at the center the rat at the center
of the plus nates. No, the rat has no which,
no idea which way to go. So presume the ghost
of and of an executed murder is there at the crossroots,
(20:04):
has no idea what to go. Maybe he locks down
and doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he heads off in the
wrong direction, and and and this is so cool because
again this is this idea of disorientation. We're gonna take
a quick break, but when we get back, we're going
to talk about anxiety disorientation in mazes. All right, we're back,
(20:30):
and I do want to mention that is we're getting
into the way mazes affect our mind and our body.
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
(20:52):
effect on us or a detrimental effect on us. And
in a large sense, the purest distillation of this idea
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
(21:14):
of an idea are even more than an idea, just
like a state of mind, a state of the world.
Like in a way, the mazes this perfect manifestation of
the of the human experience in its confusing sense, you know,
like I thought, 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
(21:34):
basically just thinking about it, you can sort of catch
the hum Yeah, you know, we are talking about mazes
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
(21:54):
what is so interesting about mazes is this idea that
in as you say that the purest sense is taking
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 perceive things,
(22:18):
there's some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, Now,
stress and anxiety. So stress is not a new idea.
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 injure. But it wasn't until
around ninety six a Nature article by scientists Hans Zeely
(22:40):
published this article where he talked about stress in the
terms of a body's non specific response to an external demand.
And in ninety four physiologist Walter B. Canon 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 decade is that
follow we learn even more about how the brain response
(23:02):
to stress. For instance, hormones and chemicals in the brain
are released to deal with stress. Namely, we have a
stress hormone called c r H that's corticotra pent releasing
hormone UH, and this forces the peteritary gland to pump
out more a c t H and this travels through
the blood to the adrenal glands and this makes them
pump out cortisol Corso, of course being in the stress
(23:23):
hormone and all of us is really important. You want
to be able to tap into this stress response. Right,
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
(23:44):
attention to our environments. The problem, of course, comes when
we're overloaded with a stress response, and when we're in
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
(24:07):
the stress mormons kick in, the nerve cells fired to
release an adrenaline like nerve chemical called nora a pineffine,
and 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
(24:29):
of essentially four things. According to S. C. In Steinberg.
First of all, you're in an architectural maze or even
a hedge maze, what can you see? 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,
(24:51):
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. And the next one is
one that I never really thought about all that, 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
(25:12):
buffering plus the potential for echoes as well, like, for instance,
the sound of that minotaur is how echoing through the tunnels.
So already 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
(25:34):
was just thinking, like, 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 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,
(25:56):
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
the mind, and 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
(26:16):
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
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
(26:37):
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 to where I know my way around.
So when I emerged from a subway out onto the street,
I'll have no idea which way is north, which way
the south? What does that street sign say out there?
(26:58):
Which is that one? Stay back there? Did I take
the wrong course? Am I completely out of bounds here
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 plus uh plus marking because it's north,
north and southeast and west. But but still, especially at
the at the very center of that, the center of confusion,
(27:21):
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 the
feel of the anxiety and the stress is coming off
them because they're like where am I? Which way am
I going? And what are all these mentors doing here?
I was gonna say, it's so sad when you see
them gobbled up in the corners of the station by
(27:43):
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 it's really easy to study anxiety in this
as you have pointed out, because you make an animal
feel anxiety, it's just bamed. Put them in that space
(28:04):
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 could use certain substances to
reduce that anxiety, and so they had rats run these
mazes again and again. In fact, rats became the gold
(28:25):
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
into that. Uh, the rat will actually freeze at these
(28:45):
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 is vital to point out that it's important
to have that stress hormone. Um, it helps us solve
the maze if if balanced, It focuses our attention, it
(29:08):
gives us energy, It raises our awareness of the surroundings
so that we notice the small details that they lead
to our escape. Do you think of any story where
an individual is in a maze, what do they have
to do? They have to their their own guard. They
might have to face a minuteur for crying out loud,
But then they also have to be super observant because
especially if the mazes kind of featureless, right, Uh, maybe
(29:28):
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
in this beneficial stress response as opposed to something that
(29:51):
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 cerulius,
and this is the region that governs vigilance, focused attention,
and the adrenaline component of the stress response. And what
(30:15):
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 cerelius. So this is a good thing, right. You
see the monkey performing at optimal levels under stress to
(30:35):
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,
it's this overload of circuitry in the stress response that
(30:57):
makes us freeze at times. Yuh 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 Minneapolis. So you want to go
in there with a certain amount of of of energy. Right,
you're about to give a keynote. You don't want to
be like I just woke up, you know, you gotta Yeah,
(31:18):
you want to have a certain amount of energy. So
this U 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
amount of energy and anxiety and stress that will allow
you to get in there and just kill you know,
(31:40):
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 stress over it that
you cannot even function at a basic human level. And
(32:02):
then everywhere between the peak of that hill and the
bottom that 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 of that hill, because that
is the mindset that you need to solve the maze,
(32:24):
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 they feel like they
are about to go down the hill into self defecation,
(32:45):
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 is
your testosterone. Then increase of the testosterone is important because
that helps your confidence. The lowering of the cortisol stress
(33:06):
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 this maze
and somehow make it back to our chairs and our
deaths and presumably our families and homes. Okay, well, um,
here is what many people say is the best way
to solve a maze, and it's called the right hand trick.
(33:27):
That's sometimes called the left hand trick because it 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
(33:47):
and then moving back the way that you came out,
and eventually you will find the exit. This is the
idea right now. This usually works with most mazes, but
if the maze has a central blank area occupied by
a second maze, then your toast it's not gonna work. Well. Certainly,
you can follow theseus's advice and have some yarn with
(34:09):
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 yourself. 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 signs on
(34:31):
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 once
(34:52):
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 it's 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
(35:13):
afraid to make some marks and notations. Um. And two
other 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, um, and
(35:36):
then during rem 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, and humans do. Any
even who lives in a city, has learned to navigate
a maze. Yeah. And part of this training, of course,
(35:57):
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 anks, 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.
(36:19):
You should start to think about the Benny Hialthy 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 Hialthy music
and it was far less framing. 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
(36:40):
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,
but it really sums up the feeling of being an
amaze Zeus himself could not undo the way of stone
(37:00):
closing around me. I've forgotten the men I was before.
I followed 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 signs that frightened me.
In the concave evenings, the air has carried a roar
(37:21):
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 yeah,
that that one gives me chills. All right, So hey, um,
(37:46):
we've got a little long So we're not going to
call the robot over here with the listener mail. It
will take him forever to find us in this He's
stuck out there in amaze any So I do want
to close by saying, if you you want to reach
out to us, we would love to hear from you,
particularly about mazes. Is there a maze and fiction, uh
that that we've neglected to mention? I'm sure there are.
Let us know about them if you think they're really engaging.
(38:08):
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on mazes and video
games because I was looking around and it looks like
earlier in the video game history, like up until you know,
possibly the early nineties, you saw more maze games, games
that were that the idea of a maze was just
the very concept of the game itself. Um and our
(38:28):
producer Matt Frederick said that I think Ultima Online had
a maze in it. I'm I'm to understand that sky
Rim has a maze somewhere in it, but I certainly
haven't found it yet, uh, But but I just wonder
it has. Is the maze in a video game? Is
it's something that we've kind of forgotten. And I'm talking
about an actual maze where when you're in it, whether
it's an above view of the game or you're you know,
(38:48):
third or first persons view, where you're actually confused and
unable to find your way out. Just an open question,
let me know what you think. So you can find
us on stuff to Bowl your Mind on Facebook, you
can find us has stuff to Bow your Mind and Tumbler,
and you can find us as blow the Mind on Twitter,
and you can always drop us a line and blow
the mind at discovery dot com for more on this
(39:14):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works
dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com