The Room of Infinite Unpleasantness

If you were to create the most unpleasant room humanly possible, what sort of design choices would you employ? What would the space look like and, more to the point, how would it make you feel? Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from house stuff
works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert,
do you ever have this experience where you are about
to have someone over to your house? You're not to

(00:23):
have a house guest, and then suddenly, for the as
if for the first time, you actually see what your
house is like inside, Like you start to notice, like,
what is that smell in here that I had not
noticed for however long it's been here? And what is
the stain on the wall? I don't even know where

(00:43):
that came from. You suddenly or you know, you get
the fresh eyes. Um. I would say no, not in
terms of visitors coming to the house. I mean, you
clean up before visitors come. But aside from discovering things
for the first time, I wouldn't say that's really been
my experience. I will say that, you know, there are
plenty of times where, say, you cook something and it's

(01:06):
kind of as a kind of a strong smell, and
you lose track of that smell while you're hanging out
in the house, even if you've cleaned up dishes and
all then you go outside, maybe you take the garbage out,
and you come back in and you smell it all again,
like the freshest that the scent is fresh now. Or
you go on a trip, you're gone for a week
or two, and you come back and said, you just
if you smell your house for the first time in

(01:27):
the same way that other people's houses have signature smells, Well,
perhaps my brain is just weird then, But I mean,
I I feel like it must be fairly common to
uh suddenly become aware of what your dwelling looks like
to somebody who has not yet become blind to it. Yeah. Yeah,
But anyway, so what do you do when you're having
somebody over, Well, you go through the process. You're like,

(01:48):
I gotta get this place esthetically pleasing to somebody who
isn't me, right, Yeah, you clean it up, you get
rid of the clutter. And I mean, if I guess,
I suppose, if there is something out that would offend
a visitor, you remove it. Um, but that's some nice
music on maybe yeah yeah, And and that's certainly an
area where one thing where I certainly would think about
who is visiting, Like the music that I put on

(02:09):
for say, family coming over to visit might be slightly
different from uh, friends coming over, depends on the friend.
I guess, um, it's not tool either way. No, it's
not tools. Not really entertaining music. Uh, you know, I
would go for more. I would go for something more
ambient anyway. You know, I go for some like the corporation,
and I think I would pretty much go for the record.
If you don't like the recorporation, I don't really want

(02:31):
you in my house anyway. But considering this ritual, another
big thing is the candle. You know, people are having
somebody over, they like they led a nice smelling candle.
A nice smelling candle is is key here, Ideally a
candle with little or no scent, because you can certainly
go in the other direction and get a candle that
smells very strongly of some sort of noxious chemical. Yeah,

(02:53):
like the Yankee what would it be, fake flower factory candle? Yeah,
that kind of stuff. You know, it's interesting. We were
a we're publishing this episode after Christmas, but we were
recording it before Christmas. This is a time when people
do things like what the heat, hot cider and clothes
and orange peel up, you know, on their their stoves,
not so much to drink, but just to fill the

(03:15):
house with a festive odor. Yeah, you want people to
feel like feel as guests that this is a pleasant place.
But considering this ritual, I got to thinking, what if
you wanted to do exactly the opposite, Like, maybe you're
about to be visited by people who drive you nuts
and you want to find a way to subconsciously convince

(03:39):
them to leave your house as soon as possible. So
instead of doing all this lighting the nice smelling candle,
putting on the nice music, cleaning up everything that might
be unsightly, you try to do everything you can to
create the most aesthetically unpleasant environment possible. Do we have
the science? Do we have the technology to build the

(04:01):
ultimate unpleasant room if we wanted to? I think that
everyone will find Even though some of these things are
difficult to put a value on, you know, it's going
to be subjective from person to person, I think we
have phenomenal ability to create a particularly uncomfortable unpleasant room. Okay, well,
if we're gonna go about this exercise, I think we

(04:22):
need to establish a few rules. First of all, I'd
say the goal is to create the most unpleasant environment
we can possibly imagine. But at the same time, we've
got to have some kind of limit, because we're not
going to build a torture chamber right where we are,
assuming what we're not. Well, No, I don't want to
build a torture So let's assume a couple of things.

(04:44):
Number one, the occupant of this room is not a
prisoner and can leave at any time. And number two,
we're not going to consider anything that could be like
violent or inflicting pain. This would be sub no, susceptive,
unpleasantness and discomfort. Okay, So along the lines of say,
and this is something we'll get into the design that

(05:04):
they may go into, say an interrogation room in a
situation again where the individual is perhaps not not being
held against their will and or you know, is not
being a physically abused. And by interrogation room, I mean
not only like police interrogation rooms, but also uh, an
office in which one's boss may may may may lurk.

(05:27):
I think of this because here in our own offices
we have and I don't know who made these choices,
but we have some particularly painful chairs. Uh. They're like
wooden stools with like wrought iron backs, and they're they're
they're perfectly okay if you treat them like a stool,
but you're talking about attempt to recline in them at all.
It is torturous. And I think that's a long history

(05:49):
here because I remember at a previous location for our offices,
they were equally uncomfortable chairs in somebody's office. So if
they had guests come in, guests to in the office
to discuss something, they would be utterly incapable of becoming comfortable. Yeah,
I don't think this is unique to us. This is uh,
this is like a psych power game. That's a business

(06:10):
is all over the place. If you want to be
powerful in the negotiation across the desk, you want your
chair to be taller and more comfortable and give you
the opportunity to lean back. And the person across from
you should be in a shorter chair, lower to the ground,
that's more uncomfortable. That forces them to lean forward, and
then a lot and then suddenly the everybody in the

(06:32):
office says, hey, we want standing desk. You have to
give it to us. And then they give them the
standing desk, and it changes the playing field forever, because
now everybody's elevated. It's true. Standing desks ended capitalism. I
didn't think it would happen, And then most people got
sick of their standing desk and just went back to
some some seated model. You know, we we we're talking.
We're gonna probably talk a lot about office environments as

(06:52):
we go through there, because that is an area where
there has been a lot of thought that has gone
into the design. How do I make this space more
conductive to cooperation or creativity or hard work? And likewise,
how do I, uh, you know, keep my employees down
and make them gaze up in at my fabulous sun
throne that sort of thing. Well, I mean, part of

(07:15):
what you're raising here is just the implication that what
can make a room a really pleasant or unpleasant place
to be is not always just in the physical attributes
of the room itself. It's in the context that caused
you to be in the room, and that is continuing
to cause you to remain there. Oh, certainly. But but
at the same time, a room is rather special, isn't it.

(07:35):
Like a room is a thing that humans created and
perhaps inspired a little you know, you could say, well, okay,
they had caves right in some places you had, you
had holes and ditches, naturally eroded places. But in terms
of like a room, that is an amazing invention of humans,
a place where the human has complete control over, over,

(07:56):
over every aspect of its design. You make your self
a little world. Yeah, you're only limited by really your
your materials, in your imagination, and you can create out
of that. You can create a heaven or you can
create a hell. So I guess what we're doing today
is creating minor hell right now, as long as we're
talking about hell in hellish rooms, I do wanna um,

(08:17):
I do want to make a quick point. Uh. You know,
when we think about hell, which is to say, when
we think about artistic and sometimes cinematic depictions of torment
in the afterlife, we often what do we often see?
We often see big open spaces, lava pits, maybe like
a giant flaming cavern. Yeah, it's like a hellish landscape
out of you know, the paintings of of Bosh or

(08:39):
it's something I always remember the scenes in legend, Ridley
Scott's Legend where there I think in hell. I'm always
a little confused as so what's actually supposed to be happening?
In legend, but it's gorgeous to look at. In the
midst of this sort of a kid's movie, there's this
baroque scene of dwarves being tormented by by Hellish cures

(09:00):
in this infernal domain. I think about the nineties movie Spawn.
I don't remember exactly what it looked like, but I
think there was a really bad c g I hell
seen there. It was basically just like it was like
a big cave that was on fire. Yeah, so you
see a lot of that, which is also kind of
ridiculous when you think of caves like of course it
would be more of a cramped environment. But despite all

(09:22):
these big, wide open spaces we see, particularly in Western
Christian traditions, as Alice Cape Turner points out in her
book The History of Hell, Eastern influenced Byzantine art often
depicts the damned in isolated boxes. Uh and uh. I
actually looked up some pictures of this, and indeed, in
Byzantine art you'll see these little cubes, almost like a

(09:43):
cube farm situation, but instead of each cube containing you know,
a desk and a computer or what have you, it
contains a pair of centers in some state of torment.
I guess it really forces you to ask, is hell?
Would a true hell be more open office pla in
or a cubicle farm. I think it would be more
cubicle And I think we see that by looking again,

(10:05):
we can look to cinematic inspiration. We can look to
the modern uh secular hells, that being interrogation rooms and
also torture rooms, torture chambers and dungeons that we see
in so many different works of fiction. Uh, and we've
see in so many films and movies, right, holding cells,
interrogation cells, and and cells of torture. And when I

(10:29):
think of excellent cinematic torture rooms, my mind, which sometimes
they do, my mind inevitably goes to David Cronenberg's film
video Drone. Yeah, the show you only see them watching
on TV right, unless you, well, unless you have the
special Criterion Collection edition, then you get to watch all

(10:50):
the footage. You've watched it all. Yeah, I watched it yesterday. Um,
the FedEx man came while I was doing it. It It
was a little weird, but um, but at any rate,
part of the plot in this this film is that
there is this kind of guerrilla radio transmission or pirate
radio transmission that they pick up. That is just this orange,
sort of a dusky red orange room, and and I'll explain.

(11:14):
I'll describe that room a little bit more as as
as we come back to it, but it is it
is a very unpleasant looking room, even before you really
notice any unpleasantness happening in it. Well, yeah, I think
the idea is that he was Cronenberg was just trying
to come up with what would be the most depraved
possible TV program you can imagine, and it's just this

(11:35):
ugly room with a person being tortured in it with
no plot. Yeah, I'll go and describe this room for
anyone who either hasn't seen the film or hasn't seen
it in a while. It's again this dusky red color.
And then the opposing wall is clay, this big slab
of clay that's also of that coloration. The slab of
clay is apparently electrified in order to allow the tormentors

(11:56):
to like push people up against it, and then they
will than then they'll be shocked by it. And the
there's like a water trough in front of or at
the base of that clay slab. And then there's also
this area of black grating on the floor and in
the main video that that is picked up in this transmission.

(12:17):
The lighting is also just kind of I don't know
what the term is, just kind of like obnoxious, uneven lighting.
We see it lit artistically later in like a dream sequence,
but in these transmissions it's just ugly lighting. It looks
like an ugly, wet, dank, cold, lonely room. And then
on top of that, people are tortured in it. So
this is your gold standard for the ultimate unpleasant space. Okay,

(12:42):
Now we have stipulated, as as I said earlier, no torture, right,
no imprisonment, no torture. So we're gonna have to take
those elements out right, But I I think if you
take the torture out of this scenario, the room itself
is still very unpleasant. I agree entirely. I think it
was made exactly for that purpose, and Cronenberg did a
fine job of envisioning one of the ugliest rooms you

(13:04):
could imagine. Like I will say, I will say this,
I have never seen anyone having reproduced this room, like
even individuals who who who might be into some level
of of simulated torment, you know, like you see if
you see images of some sort of like a B
D S M. Dungeon. They tended generally to stick to
like a black coloration black or metal, or or perhaps

(13:28):
you know, some sort of like a subway tile white
kind of situation. But I've never seen this reproduced, which
I think is very telling. Not that I've done like
an exhaustive cattle hugging or anything, but you know, I
feel like I would have probably come across it. Okay,
I cry, uncle, we I think we've got to get
away from any actual association with any real torture rooms

(13:51):
and and build our room, build our special non torture
room of infinite unpleasantness. All right, let's let's go for it. Now.
I guess that you could divide it into multiple categories
of things you could do to this space. You could
have sites, sounds, smells, and then other sensations. Maybe so
in the same way that on the TV series Queer Eye,

(14:14):
you have a different host who's responsible for different aspects
of somebody's makeover recreation. Oh, it's true. You've got like
the hair guy and like the food guy. Right, So
in this sort of the reality show we're we're constructing,
you would have like a different expert that would handle
each sensory arena of the room. Well, if we're gonna

(14:35):
start with sites, I think our first guru to come
in should be Pinhead from Hell Raiser, right, because he
has such sights to show you. It's true he did.
He did claim to have a lot of sites to show. Now,
in terms of visual stimuli, the very first thing I
must mention is that this room has got to have
a low ceiling, right, not just my personal preference either.

(14:56):
According to environmental psychologist Dr Sally august Ston, research has
shown that when people are in a room with a
ceiling lower than about nine feet, they are more vulnerable
to feeling crowded, having their their physical space invaded, and
they're distressed more easily. And apparently studies have shown that
the psychological difference between like an eight foot ceiling and

(15:17):
a tin foot ceiling is serious. People feel less creative
in a space with lower ceilings. Now, of course, ceilings
that are eight feet higher pretty common. You'll find those
all over the place. I think to get really nasty,
you would want to get lower than eight feet, like
just barely low enough that it is really unpleasant without
making anybody have to or anybody you know who's a

(15:39):
normal height have to bend over. So I'm thinking a
ceiling of about six ft eight inches, how tall is
the ceiling? And uh, there's a there's a weird floor
on a building and being John Malkovich, Oh yeah, I
think that people have to stoop over, don't they? Yeah,
that would that would be unpleasant if I had to stoop.
But you could be in a six foot eight room

(16:00):
without having to bend over, It's true. But but I
can see what you're saying, like, even if you've never
had to actually stoop, there is that feeling that the
ceiling is closer than it should be. That's what I'm
talking about. Yeah, and that is like a measured psychological phenomenon.
Low ceilings make people feel uncomfortable. Yeah, they feel crowded,
they feel cramped, and their stress levels go up. And

(16:22):
just anecdotally, I've read about like people trying to live
in apartments that had low ceilings and that that it
eventually drives them crazy. They've They're like, I've got to
move out of here. Huh. Now, I think in addition
to that, we should address other aspects of the construction
of the room itself, like you gotta have a low ceiling.
What about windows. Oh, it almost goes without saying that

(16:44):
you can't have windows. Right, there are no windows in
the video drum room, at least not that we we
see windows at least when not obstructed. They provide you
a taste of the world for which we evolved, right,
a place full of uh cycles and change of fixed
features moving into these no matter how boring the room is,
if you can look out and see even just a

(17:05):
drab city street, you can you can see something, right,
you can see life, You can see change. Um, So
I think the windows absolutely have to go. Anything we
need to have, like a bricked up window just to
drive the home. The fact that there used to be
a way to see out of this room, but we
we just didn't have time for that. So I was
looking to find some research on like empirical research on

(17:27):
the effects of window versus windowless rooms. And what I
found was by Kelly Farley and Jennifer and Vitch a
Room with a View, A Review of the Effects of
Windows on Work and well Being for the Institute for
Researching Construction the National Research Council of Canada two thousand ones.
This is a big literature review of the research on
the relationship between windows, well being and productivity, and so

(17:51):
here's what they found. First of all, people definitely prefer windows,
they really want to have them, and doesn't always appear
to be necessary for like health and performance. For example,
some studies in British schools showed that children in windowless
classrooms did just as well as kids who could see
the outside world. But lots of studies have found that
people just tend to hate spaces without windows. Uh. And

(18:15):
in the words of one study by Russ in nineteen seventy,
people believe that windowless workspaces were causing them to feel
feelings of isolation, depression, and tension. Now, I don't know
to what extent it would actually have an impact on
our hellish designs here, but I have read that that
if the windows are open for any extended period of time,

(18:37):
that can have a beneficial effect on the human microbiome.
Probably like it, that's just going to come back to
not only visual connection with nature, but actual, uh microbial
connection with nature. Well, I'm assuming that with our room,
probably nobody's going to stay in it longer than an
hour or so. So uh so we we we wouldn't
have to worry about the long term health effects, I

(18:59):
would hope. But here's the next thing. So there is
also evidence that people when they're in a windowless environment,
they dislike it so much that they try to compensate
for a lack of windows with decorations. So Summer in
nineteen seventy four found that people in windowless places often
start hanging up pictures and posters containing images of natural landscapes,

(19:22):
bodies of water, and animals, and these go all over
the walls. This of course reminds me of a good friend,
Dr Hannibal Elector, who in the Silence of the Lambs,
he's in a cell with no window, and so what
does he do. He's created a mural. He's created I
can't I don't recall exactly what the mural is, draws
pictures of Florence, and yes, because then of course he

(19:44):
goes to Florence in the in the next book, you know,
speaking of Hannibal Elector, who was in some kind of institution.
The same has also been found in hospitals. In nineteen
seventy two, Wilson found that patients were twice as likely
to experience post operative delirium when they were in windowless
versus windowed intensive care units, and even the ones that

(20:05):
didn't get post operative delirium were more likely to develop
post surgical depression in windowless areas. Quote the author suggested
that windows might provide some sort of necessary psychological escape
from the grim realities of surgery, and without them, the
additional stress is sufficient to tip the balance toward a
brief psychotic episode for a large percentage of patients. Now.

(20:27):
On the other hand, an interesting fact is that people's
negative attitudes about windowless spaces seemed to be based on
what kind of space it is. Like workers on the
floors of windowless factories didn't seem as bothered as people
who worked in small windowless office spaces. And there are
other interior spaces where there's evidence that people don't really

(20:50):
mind a lack of windows, like they don't really seem
to mind a lack of windows in theaters, in restaurants,
in bowling alleys, in nightclubs, and department stores and museums.
This also makes me think of and I'm not a
big fan of this term, but the man caves that
some some some male listeners may either have or aspire

(21:15):
to have or have at least heard of, right, And
and it does bring to mind just a dark window
lists basement in which you know, video games and socks
are everywhere. I guess you've got a bar with the
sink that you never run water in soup stinking well. No,
I mean, when you think about it, what what all
these places that people don't really mind a lack of

(21:36):
windows in seem to have in common. They tend to
be large interior spaces, usually with plenty of freedom to
move around and lots of activity or points of interest inside. Right,
or certainly, if you're in the cinema, the film itself
is the window exactly, that would be the point of interest.
And yeah, and it is kind of like a window.
That's a good point. So I would say busy, open

(21:56):
interior spaces seem to somewhat mitigate the unpleasant as of
a lack of windows, presumably because people in these other
environments have stuff to look at and room to move around.
So you know what this means for us? Our temple
of infinite unpleasantness should have no windows, and it should
also be small, small, and cramped, without much open floor
space to move around or things to look at. Indeed,

(22:18):
and in terms of things to look at, I think
Mr Pinhead would would probably be on board with the
idea that the worst thing that you can show someone
is nothing. Well, yeah, I mean there's a really there
are some forms of rooms that don't actually inflict physical
pain on people that could be considered torture, and one
example would be solitary confinement. Right. I believe we've covered

(22:38):
this on the show before the the the debilitating effects
of solitary confinement are well defined at this point. Yeah,
it is. It is a mental torture to put somebody
in a space like that, right, which is why it's
very important than in our scenario, the person is not imprisoned, right,
they can leave it any time, they can leave. How

(22:58):
long could you stand it? Though? Yeah? How long can
you just stand in a featureless room without any kind
of art to engage in, etcetera. You might actually, I
suspect overestimate your abilities on this count, because I think
people underestimate sometimes how much their environment affects them. You know.
I think we tend to think like, well, if I'm
mentally prepared, I can deal with anything. But I don't.

(23:22):
We're very susceptible to the aesthetic qualities of our environments
more so than we give our environments credit for Now,
maybe we should take a quick break and then when
we come back, discuss what color to paint the walls.
Than alright, we're back, um, Mr Pinhead has brought in
some cans of paint, watches, watches, what color? What colors

(23:44):
are our best candidates for painting this unpleasant room, because
we know quite well just from personal experience, right, that
colors play a big role in our mood. Right, Yes,
So I want to start with an example here that
I'm just gonna go ahead and find everybody that this
one is one that there's a fair amount of disagreement on.
So this is and this is of course so called

(24:06):
drunk tank pink or Baker Miller pink. So one. Dr
Alexander Schaus, PhD, director of the American Institute for Biosocial
Research into in Tacoma, Washington. He claimed back in the
sixties and seventies that this specific shade of pink had
a calming effect on humans, slowing heart rate and a

(24:27):
lowering string. I'm suspicious, yeah, and it did this this uh,
this announcement of his it did indeed lead to cells
in some places being painted pink, or opposing locker rooms
being painted pink. Supposedly you know, to to make the
opponent less aggressive, but follow up studies provide minimal support
for this effect. If anything, it's a very short term effect. Yeah,

(24:50):
I was looking for research on this, and some of
the research that was coming up was in the Journal
of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which I think is not a considered
a legitimate field. Right. So, I think on one is
a good, nice cautionary tale because I think, on one hand,
we do have to acknowledge that the color is only
going to have so much effect on on our feelings

(25:13):
in our in our inner world. Well, this sounds kind
of like what the opposite of what we want anyway.
We don't want to calm people, right right, we want
I mean to come back to the video drone room.
The video drone room is that weird orange color, and
orange is certainly an arresting color. It's hard to ignore.
It's highly visible in low light, and it's one of
the reasons that that's one of the reasons we see
it on life vests and so forth. So I think

(25:36):
that was another excellent aesthetic choice by Cronenberg and his team. Well,
I've got another one, and this next one is again
I look for an answer informed by empirical research. So
say hello to Pantone for so my source here is
a two thousand twelve article in the Brisbane Times by
Rachel Wells and so apparently, in two thousand twelve, the

(26:00):
Australian federal government was embarking on a public health project.
It wanted to discourage smoking, and in order to discourage smoking,
it wanted to make cigarettes as unappealing as possible. And
this project would require commercial tobacco products in Australia to
be given new packaging, which was not the packaging that

(26:22):
would have been selected by the by the you know,
the tobacco producer, but the manufacturer, but mandated by the government.
And so it would be logo free, uh, manufacturer art free,
with huge health warnings and and so forth. They were
trying to force cigarettes to be sold in packages that
would discourage people from using them. And of course they

(26:44):
had to mandate a color scheme for the cigarette packs,
and that color scheme was supposed to make the cigarettes
look disgusting and unpleasant. So they brought in help and
they consulted for several months with a market research agency
called GfK Blue Moon. There was a person who worked
at this company named Victoria Parr who told the author

(27:04):
of this article in the Brisbane Times quote, we didn't
want to create attractive, aspirational packaging designed to win customers. Instead,
our role was to help our client reduce demand, with
the ultimate aim to minimize use of the product. And
the winner in their competition to select a color, which
they did through you know, normal market research means, was

(27:25):
a really strange and unpleasant color called pantone for forty s,
a sort of depressing, drab color somewhere between dull brown
and green. How would you describe this color? Well, I
would say that for starters, I actually printed my notes
out in in full color to take advantage of this.
Yeah and yeah, can I can barely tell that it's

(27:46):
in color, Like, it's so brown and brown that it
kind of gray green brown. Yeah, Like it barely registers
as having used, you know, pigments from the printer. On
the other hand, I have to say that this color
does remind me of some of the Panzer colors that
my dad would use to paint scale models of German tanks.

(28:07):
So I'm not gonna go as far as to say
it's a pleasant color. I think this is ultimately an
unpleasant color, But I think this is an example of
a color that probably produces more positive memories or matt
might stir some nostalgia in me where others would just
see brown. Uh, you know, I don't. I don't believe
it's exactly one of the colors that's used in various

(28:27):
tank models and whatnot, and some aircraft models from the
Second World War, but I think you'll agree that it
would be right at home in the kind of bleak
rainbow that is that's that's that's displayed in some of
these like Panzer military color paint sets. It's specifically the
bleakness and dulness. Because they did try many other colors

(28:48):
when they were doing this research, including like shades that
we more directly perceived as brown, actually didn't make it
because people sometimes saw those I think as like kind
of classy. Yeah, they're more like earth tones. There's something
kind of unnatural about this this shade, the kind of
green grayness of it. So anyway, the firm went through

(29:09):
this process. They had seven studies conducted on over a
thousand smokers between the ages of sixteen and sixty four
testing out different colors to see which were the most
and least appealing for cigarette packaging. Quote. Participants indicated that drab,
dark brown packages had the lowest overall appeal and looked
like they would contain the lowest quality cigarettes, which would

(29:31):
cause the most harm. The cigarette packaging was supposed to
go into effect in December. Here's what they look like, Robert, I,
I showed you that they've got these horrible pictures of
like the side effect the health effects of smoking, or
of like revolting torture images on the cover of them. Yeah,
there's one that was like an eye with the lids
being pulled back and it looks like a flash scene

(29:53):
from Event Horizon or something. Yeah, so apparently other countries
are adopting this for their packages as well. Uh. Now,
a few things to consider here. The testing was done
on Australians, and we know that color preferences can vary
from person to person and also on average between different cultures.
But I somehow suspect this drab color will be pretty

(30:14):
unpopular around the world. Yeah, I would be surprised if
there if there any cultures out there where this is
just an exciting color, you know, because we've talked about before,
how like, oh, well, you know, red has more prominent,
say and in traditional Chinese culture versus some other cultures.
Or we talked about green, about green being the color

(30:34):
of the evil fairy folk in uh in in in
older English traditions. But those are those are remarkable colors
that stand out. This is this is a color that
is nefarious in its unremarkable nous. It's also something about
the way that it looks unnatural. Like I like earth tones.
I like things with like brown and green packaging. Brown

(30:56):
and green individually are good. This is some weird, kind
of dull thing between them that I don't feel like
I've ever seen in the world except on a computer screen.
It does make me wanna look into camouflage again. I
know you have a past episode of camouflage on the show,
but a number of the different camouflage patterns that were
developed during the Second World War and uh and and

(31:17):
after that, a lot of scientific thought went into them.
And I wonder if if there's any if there's any
synchronicity between this topic and that, if there are any
particular colors that I mean, obviously you want natural colors,
earthen colors and many of your camouflage patterns, but you
also don't want it to be remarkable. You know, you

(31:38):
want it to be unremarkable because you're not supposed to
look at the tank that has painted up like this.
You know. One more anecdote I read about was that
the Australian government, uh was originally they were calling this
color some it's something, it's something involving the word olive
because it does kind of have like an olive green
thing going on. But apparently, like the Olive Growers Association

(31:58):
got in touch with them and they were like, please
don't call it that. You're insulting our product. It is
insulting to olives because olives have really a rich variety
of coloration. Well, like we said, the world is full
of wonderful brown green things that are I don't know,
they're not whatever. This is all right, So we've painted

(32:18):
our walls with this awful color. What's next? Well, I
guess the next question is whether the walls should be
blank or decorated with something. Okay, Well, you know, to
go back to the video drum example, you have that
awful piece of clay. I like that. I think Pinhead
would probably just hang a bunch of chains everywhere, right,
and he would and he would have stuck to just

(32:39):
like a black color coloration, which I don't think it
is that remarkable or that intimidating. Really, I don't know. Yeah,
black can be an interesting color. I mean yeah, I
mean it's it's been two houses that have black walls before.
You know the right environment if you're going for that
kind of mood, if you want something kind of gothy.
You know what happens when Pinhead tortures goths to go

(33:00):
to a different room. I don't know. So I think
if we are going to hang some wall art, I
know just where to consult to figure out what it
should be. So in nine the Russian American artists and
I think they would probably consider themselves sort of conceptual art.
Comedians Vitali Comar born ninety three and Alexander Millimed born

(33:21):
nineteen forty five released a book chronicling and interesting project.
The book was called Painting by Numbers, Coomar and Millimed's
Scientific Guide to Art with University of California Press at nine.
So what the authors did here is. They teamed up
with the Nation Institute and a professional polling group to

(33:41):
conduct market research style preference polling in America and ten
other countries around the world, including Russia, China, Kenya, etcetera. Essentially,
they wanted to identify and quantify the features that people
like the most and like the least in art. So
they pulled people these polls to find out what colors
they like the most in the least in paintings. It

(34:03):
turns out that blue, green, and white are very popular, fucia, gold,
maroon or the least popular, but also all kinds of
other things is popular. No it's not. Yeah, well, I
mean when you look at gold and some of these paintings,
it does look ugly. I guess it depends on how
the gold is created, Like like our art that has

(34:23):
like a very kind of like tactile gold leaf look
to it. Like I think of the work of Gustav Klimt,
there's a fair amount of gold or gold like colors
in there, and that's like that's part of the beauty
of it. Well, the can't argue with the results. I mean,
this is what people said, But then there's also other stuff.
What kind of shapes, what kind of angles, styles, representative contents,

(34:46):
all that, What did people like and dislike? And it
turns out the results are a little bit different in
different countries, but not very much. Pretty much everyone around
the world agrees the most pleasant paintings are natural landscapes
dominated by the color blue, with views of water and
a tree. Oh. That that reminds me of the the
hypothesis we discussed in the show in the Path, that

(35:07):
it's the paintings like that are are we we dig
them because we're drawn to that kind of environment, that
that's in our genes to want to to be up
on a hill in such an environment and gaze out
at this world. Well, sure, I mean it might be
another one of the reasons people like having windows. They'll
have to be able to see the natural world and
failing that put this cool pastoral picture up there. The

(35:31):
only major variation between the countries and the most wanted
types of paintings was like whether or not there were
people in the paintings and who those people were. For example,
do you want do you want some farmers hard at work,
or do you want George Washington? Or do you want Jesus?
Or do you want a naked lady. These are all
fine options, I mean preferably all these things at once. Yes,

(35:53):
some of them had more than one naked George Washington
high up there. Yes, my my list of requests, salutely. Now,
on the other hand, what about the most hated possible paintings.
This offered a little bit more variation, but it still
had some pretty consistent themes across the different countries. What
people around the world seemed to hate the most were

(36:15):
abstract geometric art with sharp angles and color combinations like fucia, maroon, orange,
and mauve. Now this is interesting because, um, on one hand,
I can't think of a painting that I like that
has a bunch of like triangle shapes in it. There
might be one, I'm just not remembering it. But it

(36:35):
also makes me think that there are to come back
to camouflage. There are certain camouflage patterns that have this
this kind of look going on, with lots of jagged angels,
angles or even a zig zag arrangement. Well, I'd say
easily one of the least popular was like square shapes.
It was like square shapes with you know, four corners

(36:57):
and really horrible color combinations like fuchia and orange and
gold that video drum orange coming back up. But I
wonder if part of it is that the squares is
rather unnatural and then the square itself is this unnatural color. Yeah,
I think that could be it. I mean, people like
people were, you know, they were kind of going against
the art critics, right, the art critics the stuff that

(37:19):
they would scoff at, like the realistic representative painting of
just like Jesus standing by a lake with a tree
that you know, that probably doesn't do very well in
the art scene, but that is what people wanted to see,
you know. On the other hand, though, there are a
lot of like Cubist paintings that are that are that
are very beautiful or or I certainly think of the
some of the work of Salvador Dali, who you know,

(37:40):
would use these um this. He has this one piece
in particular, that is the Crucifixion, but it's created with
the with these uh these kind of like large pixels,
So it's a different image if you're standing further away
from it as opposed to close up. How far away
could you really get from the art though, in the
room we're creating, That's true, It would be it would
be that are small. And I should say that the

(38:02):
examples that you included in our notes, these do not
look like the work of Salvador Dollars. These are these
are for the most part, not that engaging. I do
like one or two of them, but some of them
just look like like Cubist birthday cake. Oh yeah, they
do have like a one thing that a lot of
people really don't seem to like is very, very like

(38:23):
thick layers of paint where you can see the texture
in three dimensions. Yeah, but it looks like icing. Yeah,
I mean, that's a weird area because on one hand,
there are there are plenty of great paintings where that
have that kind of three D e quality that you
you do almost want to touch them and feel the
texture of them, and that's part of their beauty. But
then on the other end of the spectrum you have

(38:43):
like faux wall finishes right where it's just the kind
of the tacky version of that same technique. Oh yeah,
I hadn't even considered that in the basic coat of
paint on the room itself. But either way, I mean,
so it seems like if we want to go with
what has been and found to be least popular in
uh in at least these studies. We want like a

(39:04):
base code of like Panto four forty eight C and
then some abstract art with sharp angles and colors like
like fuschia and mav and maroon. Yeah, I think we do.
We do really have to shop around for that piece
of art that we hang in there, But I bet,
I bet something could be produced. All right, now, we've
talked plenty about sites, so I think maybe we should
discuss the sounds of this room. Okay, let's do it.

(39:26):
You know, I think we've mentioned this on the podcast before,
but the same two guys, Comar and Melamed, they also
used the same method, used market research polling to try
to figure out what we're all the characteristics that people
most widely loved and hated in music. Oh yes, I
remember this one. Yeah, And they teamed up with the
musician named Dave Soldier and combined the things at the

(39:47):
top of the list to synthesize what they called the
people's choice music most wanted song, and that included stuff
like like low vocals, saxophone, piano, and humble ambition. Yeah.
I remember listening to the track that they produced to
represent this, and it's just so unmemorable because it is.

(40:09):
It's just, Oh, it sounds a little bit like everything else,
but nothing stands out about it. Yeah, it sounds a
little bit like a combination of like oh like like
early nineties R and B and like Springsteen sort of
rolled into the same song. It's It's very lukewarm. But

(40:29):
then they also combined all of the most hated, most
annoying things according to their market research, into a single
unpleasant song called Most Unwanted Song. If you've never heard it,
it's worth hearing. It contains tuba's bagpipes, wood blocks, accordion,
cheap synth, drum machine, pipe organ, a soprano, opera singer,

(40:52):
sort of opera rapping about being a cowboy, and a
children's chorus, plugging retail chains and screaming about Christmas Us,
and then somebody yelling political slogans into a megaphone. It's
pretty awful, but it's memorably awful. It is impossible to forget. Well,
I was gonna say, you know, we I don't think
we can just like outsource to that for the sounds

(41:13):
we're playing in the room, because it's actually so awful.
It's pretty enjoyable, right. I think if we want to
be more guaranteed of unpleasantness in our sonic atmosphere, we
don't want to accidentally make people laugh, all right. Well,
for possible inspiration here, I think we can actually look
to the real life architects of unpleasant rooms, who sometimes

(41:34):
do a lean on music and sound in order to
you know, carry out their various psychological operations. According to
a two thousand three BBC article, U S psy ops
used quote unquote culturally offensive music to break prisoner resistance
among Iraqi po debuts. So we're talking, and these are

(41:54):
specific songs that are mentioned in the piece. Inter Sandman
by Metallica, okay, which I don't think it's a bad song,
Bodies by Drowning Pool, Um, yeah, no, no comment. And
then Barney's I Love You song, which is not a
song for grown ups. It is a song is a
song for very young children of a bygone era. H

(42:17):
So in in in all of these cases, we're not
talking about one playing of the song. We're talking about
putting this particular song on repeat for say hours, and
then that is used in conjunction with and enabling sleep
deprivation in the individual, so you're playing inter sand Man
over and over again to keep them from sleeping. I

(42:38):
think it would be the volume would be key, volume
would be played very loud. So I think we're sort
of that would be sort of breaking the rules. I
would say, I don't think we should be in the
room of infinite unpleasantness be allowed to play something at
a volume that actually hurts people. That that seems like
that's uh, that's edging in torture right right now. I
do think that we should. We can look to examples

(43:01):
of what people do do in order to make a
room more pleasant, and two things come to mind. Of course,
at the airport, they will of course play the news,
which I've never understood, but I guess it's engaging, right
at least people are watching it. It's something to pay
attention to. What we said before. What they should be
doing is they should be playing music for airports by

(43:22):
Brian Ena exactly. And that is exactly the kind of music,
the kind of soundscape we should not employ in our
room because something pleasant and ambient, dependable like that is
totally at odds with our objective. And this brings us
to the world of misophonia and this is This has
been explored in an older episode of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, But basically it boils down to this certain

(43:43):
sounds like gum shoeing, lip smacking, basically, whatever whatever your
pet peeves out there, whatever your individual pet peeves for
sounds are, uh, they probably line up with those that
are frequently discussed in a discussion of mssophonia. Miss Aphonia
being uh this condition that individuals some individuals have where

(44:05):
they simply react very strongly to the same the same
sort of triggers. According to a two thousand seventeen Newcastle study,
it was is quote an abnormality in the emotional control
mechanism which causes their brains to go into overdrive on
hearing trigger sounds. Now, obviously we can't bank on landing

(44:26):
only individuals with miss aphonia in our evil room, but
we can think about those common triggers chewing, breathing, snoring.
Perhaps we mix this in with other accepted trigger sound
stuff that we're hardwired to take notice of, like a
crying or a whining child, which was also we've also
discussed on the show, or another one that I've seen

(44:47):
mentioned is incomplete phone calls, something where you can't help
and this at this we run the risk of making
the room engaging. But there is frequently something very annoying
about not being able to decode the meaning of a
particular uh communication. Oh yeah, like you can only hear
half of a phone call, but it's in your language,

(45:08):
so you you sort of can't help but pay attention
to it, but at the same time you can't understand it. Yeah,
and it would have to be something supermundane too. You
don't want to You don't want your interest to be really,
you know, perked. And what you're saying, Oh, what are
they talking about? What is this? What is this scandalous
situation they're discussing. Well, as we've done before, I think
we should try to look for some kind of empirical

(45:29):
research on what would be the most universally accepted unpleasant
sounds of this kind. So the question would be, has
anybody done research on the most unpleasant sounds in the world? Oh? Yes,
they have, of course. So uh, I guess if you
had to guess, right, if you had to guess, what's
the most unpleasant sound in the world there is you
might go with the classic nails on the chalkboard. Oh, Yeah,

(45:52):
that's the one that is typically mentioned. I think of
the great quin scene in Jaws, right, how does he
get everybody's attention in the room at the town hall?
You'll know me know how I make a living. Yeah,
it is undeniably an awful sound. And yes, of course
research confirms that, in fact, people do hate this noise,
but it actually doesn't always make the top of the list. Now,

(46:12):
there have been multiple studies into this. So first of all,
there was one by Professor Trevor Cox of the Acoustic
Research Center in Salford University in England, and he's conducted
one form of research through sort of massive online voting,
and his project found a winner for the most unpleasant
sound out of the ones that they were able to

(46:32):
have people rank, and that was the sound of vomiting. Okay, Now,
actually it was just a simulation. It was a recording
of I listened to it. It was a very convincing
simulation of vomiting. Is a dude making wretching sounds and
then slopping water down baked beans into a bucket. Okay,
it is an unpleasant sound. I'll give him that. Did

(46:53):
you listen to it? I haven't, but I don't have to.
I can. I can just imagine it because someone barfing.
It's is like that shows up in every TV show, right,
there's always gonna be that scene of vomiting, and it's
it's always disgusting, even if they don't show you anything.
And it seems like half the time they do go
ahead and show you something. Now, this was back in
two thousand seven or so, and so after vomiting. Runners

(47:16):
up in this voting included microphone feedback, uh, the squeaks
of a train on the tracks, the sound of babies crying,
and then the next four after that where a squeaky seesaw,
a poorly played violin, whoopee cushion, and an argument in
a soap opera. Okay, um, the train track is an

(47:36):
interesting one because I actually live next to train tracks,
and I mean, there, that's the sound. I probably hear
a lot, but I almost I really don't hear it anymore.
Like nothing about the train tracks ever bother me, and
there's always sound coming from. Actually, I live next to
two train tracks. I live next to both the traditional
train tracks and public transportation train tracks, the Marta tracks

(47:58):
here in Atlanta. As for the whoopee cushion. I don't
understand that one, because that is funny. The whoopie cushion
is an instrument of joy. I mean maybe it's if
these sounds are repeated for a certain period of time.
Uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, interestingly, there were
like some differences in the rankings along demographic lines, Like
young people found the sound of eating an apple with

(48:21):
the mouth open more unpleasant than older people did, and
on average, men found the sound of babies crying more
unpleasant than women did, at least in this study. Yeah,
so there there's gonna be some variation. Uh, nails on
a chalkboard six On this list, people hated the train
way more than nails on a chalkboard. Now, something interesting

(48:43):
to note here. I think it should be clear that
some sounds are unpleasant because of their meaning, right because
like we're picturing the act that produced them, and others
are somehow more intrinsically unpleasant for sonic reasons, Like there
is something conceptually horrible about vomiting that seems to be
the reason we don't like that sound, But there's nothing

(49:06):
conceptually horrible about microphone feedback or a squeaky seesaw or
a train on the track, right, It's got to be
just something about that sound itself. We can't microphone feedback though.
Can't that harm recording equipment and sound equipment though? I
guess so, But I would I would think that most
people who heard it would not, you know, be familiar
with it. In that context, it can also be is

(49:28):
often allowed enough to whear it is physically painful, you know,
like you will want to cover your ears exactly. Yeah,
so there that it does have that going for it,
but that would be like a sonic connotation, not like
a thing about what it meant. Apart from that, right,
I wonder if the sound of a record scratching if
that used to be more like potently offensive a sound

(49:51):
before because you're like, my record is being damaged. Right?
But then, yeah, you have sort of like two things
that emerge, Like there's the scribe the record scratch that
is a a comedic cue I thought, you know that
some sort of social faux pa has happened. Or of
course you have the world of scratch deejaying that emerges
where scratching or various levels of scratching a record become

(50:13):
part of the musical art form. Yeah, that's interesting. I've
never thought of a scratched record record scratches being all
that painful sound, but I can absolutely see how it
would be and how you might have to reclaim it
for good anyway. But all this, I think it might
be useful to separate the idea of sounds that we
hate because they bring to mind things that we hate,

(50:34):
versus sounds that we hate simply because of what they
sound like. Like why do we hate squeaky, screechy, high
pitch sounds that don't inherently indicate like a disease risk
or a predator threat or anything like that, Like the
sound of vomiting might right, Or like the sound of
a train, Like you're not in danger of a train
that is like slowly stopping or squeaking as it travels

(50:58):
at low speeds close by. I mean, that's that's not
a danger, certainly not an instinctual one. That could maybe
be a learned one. I don't know. Let's look at
another study, this one from twelve in the Journal of
Neuroscience UH features versus feelings Dissociable Representations on the acoustic
features and valance of aversive sounds by Kumar von Kraigstein

(51:20):
Friston and Griffith's uh so, this was a neuroimaging study
identifying the most unpleasant sounds and what is happening in
the brain when we experience them. They got a small
group participants who underwent m R I while listening to
a collection of forty seven different sounds, and then the
participants rated which ones were the worst. Here's the list again,

(51:40):
nails on chalkboard is not number one. The number one
most hated sound was knife on a bottle. I guess
I'm not even sure what that sounds like. I mean
it and nothing's coming to mind. I just don't think
I have a strong reaction to that one. I mean,
imagine scraping a knife on a glass bottle? Who does that? Though,
it seems like it's not wise to have on the

(52:02):
list the people who sabor the champagne bottles, I'd say,
I guess, okay, Well, anyway, continue. You seem really bothered
by this. I just it seems like like it was
created entirely for this. I don't know. I'll have to
try it next when I get home. I will start
carving on bottles and it annoys me. It may have
been created for the test. Yeah, I don't know that.
I mean, for some reason, just the idea of it
is annoying, so maybe maybe the sound will be even

(52:24):
more so. Nails on a blackboard was number five on
this list. Actually, what was worse than nails on a
blackboard was chalk on a black bool. That was number three.
And you know what, I'll go along with that. I
hate the sound of chalk on a chalkboard. It might
be worse than fingernails. Yeah, it is kind of an
annoying sound because it's the kind of squeaky. And I
think here's here's something about about chalk on a chalkboard.

(52:47):
Even if you know what is being written on the chalkboards,
you know what the words are going to be, there's
an unpredictable nature to what kind of sounds are going
to be produced. You know, there's not there's sort of
a rhythm, right, there's kind of that tac tac tac squeak,
squeak squeaked, tac tac tac squeak, and then the squeaking
will will will change in volume. I can't help but
think that that probably plays into the annoyance factor of

(53:09):
chalks on a chalkboard. And I imagine some of our
listeners are younger listeners just have no idea what we're
talking about, because they're just not used that much anymore.
It's always been the dry race markers, yeah, or just computers.
I guess. Well, I when I when I was when
I got out of college, I went I can taught
high school for a little bit. It was already all
marker boards. So yeah, no, I had some chalkboard classes.

(53:32):
Also in the top ten list where a female scream,
a baby crying, and an electric drill. Oh, and a
thing called an angle grinder, which is some kind of
power tool I've never used. Ok, well those all those
all make more sense. The least unpleasant sounds, the ones
that people like the most, were things like flowing water,
baby laughter, thunder, applause. Makes sense. All sounds pretty good now.

(53:55):
So the question is what happened in the brain when
the most irritating sounds were played. Aid it was not
just activity in the auditory cortex, which is where you
have sound processing sound information processing, but apparently there was
a lot of activity in the amygdala, which is a
brain region highly associated with the processing of emotions and
emotional learning, including things like fear, and fear conditioning. So

(54:19):
the level of activity in the amygdala seemed directly correlated
with how unpleasant people reported the sounds were, and the
worst range of sounds seemed to occur at frequencies between
two thousand and five thousand hurts for comparison. I don't
know if we actually want to do this, but maybe
we could play a sound at about one thousand hurts

(54:40):
and then a sound at about four thousand hurts, and
that one is right inside the hate range. So why
are sounds between two about two thousand and five thousand
hurts so unpleasant and so apt to produce negative emotions?
I was reading an article about this by science writer
named Joseph Stromberg, and he points to a few competing explanations.

(55:02):
One of them is that maybe this is this frequency
range it includes the natural alarm call of our nearest
primate relatives, and of course includes the natural frequency range
of screams. So the thinking goes, maybe we have a
natural tendency to associate sounds in this range with alarm,
alarm calls, fear and distress, and they generate avoidance behaviors.

(55:24):
It's like a chimpanzee screaming to indicate a predatory. That
makes sense. But then on the other hand, going against this,
strong Bird points out that researching cotton top tamarins has
shown that these animals react the same to both high
frequency scraping noises like nails on a chalkboard and to
normal white noise. They don't seem to mind nails on

(55:44):
a chalkboard much in particular, even though it's in a
frequency range that they could potentially associate with primate alarm calls.
So that's a complication. But he also points out that
it could potentially be purely mechanical because the shape of
the human ear just tends to amplify some frequencies more
than others, and this amplification can make certain tones cause

(56:06):
physical pain. So I mean, we would just get emotional
negative conditioning for sounds in this range because they sometimes hurt. Now,
I feel like we could probably do a whole episode
on infrasound, but I do want to point out that
we could, of course pipe infrasound into our awful room,
and the infrasound generated by wind turbines, for instance, may
affect some people's nervous systems by stimulating the vestibular system,

(56:29):
producing something a kind to see sickness. Other studies have
linked it to annoyance and fatigue. But I don't think
there's anything really conclusive out there. But but this is
a topic that we could easily return to in the future.
And likewise, we just wanted to pipe some infrasound into
the room, just to be on the safe side. I
think it would be well within our rights. So let's see,

(56:50):
so we want uh we maybe want really annoying music,
but maybe not. Uh. We definitely want some high pitched,
you know, between maybe like four thousand hurts type sounds. Uh.
We we definitely want some glass being scraped with metal instruments,
some nails on a chalkboard, maybe some babies crying. Okay, yeah,

(57:15):
I think that all sounds good. I guess Penhead's not
in charge of this project, gives the site. Uh, Overlord,
I'm not sure who would be in charge of sound.
It's gotta be a little red Okay, All right, Well,
and then now let's take a quick break and we
come back. We shall enter the realm of smell. Alright,
we're back now. I have to say, before we did

(57:38):
any additional research on this, I was convinced that The
only answer here was to have a strong lavender air
freshener as artificial as possible, something you know, one of
those that just that smells only like purple air freshener
and nothing like fresh lavender, which is actually quite pleasant.
I think you are right on the money there, but
I'm But the thing is, I have to admit I'm
probably just right as far as you and I go,

(58:00):
because people do love that stuff. I mean, the reason
we can say we hate it is because we've encountered
it places where people feel very feel the opposite about it,
where they love it and they think this is a
fine thing to pump into a room or a house. Well,
like many other things, this seems to be you know,
smells or something that our reaction to is highly conditional,

(58:20):
depending on the context in which we encounter the smell.
We've discussed before how you can give people the same
smell into their nose, and if they think it's cheese
or something, they find it appetizing, and if they think
it's feet, they think it's gross. Right, Yeah, context is key,
and likewise, smells become coded to memories and feelings, so
there's not a perfect template to refer to a lot

(58:42):
of the time for picking out particularly annoying smells are
really positive smells. You know, even you could again my
air freshener example doesn't hold up to that, uh to
to that standard. One could you could scrub down a
room I guess with urine or feces of course, or
some other you know, naturally occurring or manufactured ode or
like really strong bleach. I think would be a strong

(59:04):
a strong contender. I think we'd have to draw the
line at any smell that would be uh, that would
have volatiles that would maybe be like poisonous to Yeah,
there's like I think a lot of these uh, these
components there, it's like a slider uh, towards poisoning them.
And we don't want to actually poison someone would say,
you know, with chlorine gas or something, right, so it'd
have to be something that wouldn't hurt people, would just

(59:25):
be extremely unpleasant, right, And along those lines, we don't, Yeah,
we don't want it to be such a strong smell
that's giving somebody a headache or you know, they're actually
some people suffer from a particular type of migraine that
can be triggered by smells and actually cause them to
pass out. And again, we we can't build our room
hoping to encounter uh, people who have abnormal reactions to

(59:47):
the stimuli we provide them. But but still that's a
sign that there's certain types of stimuli that would be
going too far. Yeah, I think this is this one's
going to be a little bit less of an exact science,
but a good place to look for some of the
worst smells on Earth, I think would be to consult
field biologists, right because they're gonna be interacting with things
that are alive. Things that are alive tend to produce

(01:00:08):
some of the most interesting horrible smells. Uh, there are
things that have been recently alive. And then again that
is also the smell of things that are alive. I mean,
there's when something's decomposing that is the smell of a
lot of biological activity. The smell of death is the
smell of life. So last year, the wildlife ecologist and
conservation biologist David Steen, who is an expert on reptiles

(01:00:31):
and amphibians, kicked off this glorious thread on science Twitter,
which I saw written up in a couple of places, uh,
and it got lots of people who work in the
biosciences competing to name the worst odor they have ever
encountered in their lives. Right, please tell me that science
Twitter is a separate Twitter. I can go to just science.
It's it's it is not a separate Twitter, but it

(01:00:53):
is a it is a better place on Twitter than
most places on Twitter. So this is just people. This
is just the science folk on Twitter. Yes, Okay, well
I already know about that. I was. I think it
was its own thing. That would be a very nice
thing if it were its own thing, and we uh
and did not depend on Twitter as a whole. But
so there was a few competitors worth mentioning that I
was reading about. One thing that somebody mentioned was musk

(01:01:16):
glands of dead long tailed weasels. Okay, so this is
their anal glands. They've got these oily contents that are
supposedly just awful. Uh, dead whales washed up and rotting
on the shore. Vulture vomit got got to mention, but
Steen and several others agreed though for some reason, uh
and I've not been able to find the any hypothesized

(01:01:39):
reason for this is that the absolute worst smell is
dead turtle rotting turtle carcass can apparently induce immediate vomiting,
even in field biologists who should be kind of hardened
to bad smells. Yeah, I wonder why that is now. Sadly,
one of the problems with this, uh, the smell conundrum

(01:01:59):
is that, of course, odor receptors stop sending messages to
the brain about a lingering odor after a few minutes,
instead focus on novel smells. This is why, to get
back to an earlier example, you get used to that
weird cooking smell in your kitchen until you pop out
and then come back in, uh, you know, triggering it
a few minutes later. Yeah, this is a great point,

(01:02:21):
and this is what's known as olfactory fatigue. After a
few minutes, your brain tends to stop paying attention to
bad smells. Uh. Now, whatever smell we ultimately wanted to
put in this room, I think the answer to make
it ultimately unpleasant would be that it must cycle it's
bad odors, changing them every few minutes to provide high
contrast nasal discomfort. Alright, so timed little odor spitters in

(01:02:45):
the corners. Okay, I like that right now? I guess
we we still haven't landed on an odor because dead
turtle might just be too strong. We don't want to
necessarily make people vomit. Well, well, I tell you what
is often a sweet sweet spot, I think is when
you have a bad odor and then some sort of
artificial odor, perhaps that lavender we were talking about earlier,

(01:03:06):
fighting just to cover it up, you know, where everything
smells a little like artificial lemon, but also like illness.
But again that might be going too strong. To know
you are a warped master. You should be one of
the cinembytes Robert. Okay, So I think we've got the visual,
auditory and and uh and smell based aspects of this room. Uh,

(01:03:29):
we got a good idea what to do with that,
But what about the other sensations? Oh well, I have
to say that dampness goes a long way towards making
me uncomfortable, especially if it's paired with with betting. Um.
So I found this in the past, and say camping
trips where everything gets a little wet and a little cold.
Also when I was recently in Costa Rica there at

(01:03:50):
one point we're staying in the cloud forest and the
little house that we were staying in it was it
was very nice, but given the environment, uh, and everything
got a little bit moist and stayed moist and it
was just part of the environment. And I found that
a bit unpleasant. And and to come back to that
videodrome room, Uh, the opposing wall is clearly wet clay.

(01:04:11):
There's a trough of of of water beneath it. And
based on I think it was a Cronenberg um a
bit of commentary, I think he was the one who
said that the room was as as cold and unpleasant
to be in as it as it looks like. It
was just a very unpleasant place in terms of the
moisture and the temperature. Well, the temperature is a good

(01:04:32):
point because obviously the room of infinite unpleasantness should be
uncomfortably hot or uncomfortably cold. But the question is which.
I think it has to be cold, because for hot,
as long as you're not getting into dangerous temperatures, you
can always take off of, you know, a little more clothing, right,
people can always strip down a little bit, and I

(01:04:54):
mean we don't. If you succeed in making a steam
room or a sauna, then you have made a pleasant environment.
Have you ever noticed this is something that people love
to fight about. People love to have arguments about whether
it's worse for a place to be too hot or
too cold. Well, and I've heard our coworkers arguing about this. Yeah,
I mean, it's that's gonna it's gonna very tremendously from

(01:05:14):
person to person, depending on you know, your background, your age,
all these things. Because I probably there was probably a
time when I would have said, oh, I just don't
want to be too hot at all, But nowadays I'm
I'm I'm the reverse, Like I would just prefer to
be a little too hot versus a little too cold.
I think for me, it depends on what I'm doing.
I think if I'm like, if it's like hanging out

(01:05:35):
recreational time, I'd rather be a little too warm. And
if it's like I'm trying to work and focus on something,
I'd rather be a little too cold. I want it
hot on both ways. Like like sometimes when I'm working
on the podcast during the summer, I'll be on my
front porch just sweating bullets. I like, Like I like
sweating in my sleep. I like that too, you know,
I really I would just I would, I guess just

(01:05:57):
live in Florida. I'm just I just need to move
to Florida at this point. Okay, weirdo Okay. So the
question though, is do we have any like actual factual
data we can base our conclusion on here? Should it
be too warm or too cool? Uh? And yep, we
have the technology here. So I was reading about this
in the Washington Post an article from twenty sixteen. There's

(01:06:19):
a guy named Patrick Bayliss, who at the time was
a fifth year PhD candidate in agricultural and resource economics
at Berkeley, and he used the power of social media
for what's known as sentiment analysis. And while I really
still hate social media, this is one very cool and
interesting thing you can do with it. You can gather
massive amounts of cross referenced organic data through something like Twitter,

(01:06:43):
and then you could research something like what types of
words do people start tweeting more often than they normally
would in a given location when the president arrives in
town or something like that. So what Bayliss did here
was he examined about a billion tweets in twenty team
and he cross reference to the user's locations with weather

(01:07:04):
data reporting temperature, and then used an automated program to
analyze the mood indicating contents of the tweets and correlated
that to changes in temperature. So basically, did the words
people were using in their tweets indicate they were currently
happy or unhappy? And to h to quote from the
right up in the Washington Post quote, he found that

(01:07:27):
compared with a day when the high temperature is seventy
two point five degrees, a day with a high temperature
of ninety degrees makes the typical person experience a drop
in happiness similar to the drop in happiness between Sunday
and Monday. And so he controlled for a bunch of
different kinds of factors and found that the trend still held.
Quote A one degree increase in temperature has an effect

(01:07:50):
on your happiness. That's similar to living in an area
with a median income that is five hundred dollars lower.
So hot temperature has made people unhappy. Cold temperature also
made people less happy, but the effect the effect was
much less consistent in how it correlated with moods. So,
according to this research, if if that's correct, if you
want to make more people on average more uncomfortable, it

(01:08:13):
should be too warm instead of too cool. All right, Well,
I mean I can't. I can't argue with the raw
data here, but my experience and certainly that the standard
set by the video drum set would indicate that we
should go cold. But but but I'll go with the
science here and then we'll go we'll go warm. Well,
if we're gonna try to tip, maybe you could alternate,

(01:08:34):
you know, based on the person. Like if you were
going to test your metal in the room and see
how long you can hang out in there without leaving,
we should make it what like fifty two degrees, Yeah,
that would probably do it. On the other hand, I
guess it should be in there what what like maybe
about eighties seven something like that. Yeah, I guess. But
I guess it's important to for us to remember too

(01:08:55):
that it's not just going to be the temperature with
our room. It's gonna be all these other factors as well.
And when I think to my own experiences with warm
or hot places that I like, uh, there are other
aspects there as well, you know, like I am in
a sauna which is kind of a sacred space, or
I am on my porch, you know, writing or researching,
doing something enjoyable, and uh, and that is not the

(01:09:16):
overall experience that we are creating in our our awful room.
I wonder if we will inspire somebody as like an
art project to build this room and have it as
like a museum exhibit that people could visit. Yeah, I'd
love to. I'd love to hear from anybody who dares
to try to create this room. And likewise, if you
encounter rooms and spaces as you go about your daily
life that kind of match up with what we've been

(01:09:37):
talking about here, we would definitely love to hear from you,
and yes, take a picture of it if you can.
You know. Another thing I will say is that though
we keep emphasizing that no torture is allowed, I would say,
if you were to actually create this room and in
in some way try to make people go into it
without the true freedom to enter and leave at their
own will at any time, this would be torture well

(01:10:00):
or or art. You know, sometimes art is about It's
about it about strong emotional responses, it's about entering into
saying an art installation that makes you feel uncomfortable, that
makes you the challenges your your ideas about the world.
So really we're asking people not to create torment, but
an artistic experience. Yeah. Oh, I guess it's key that

(01:10:23):
it's of of the entrance, own free will and may
leave at any time. Yeah, I'm saying, if you're like
a landlord, don't do this here tenants, just to say
what will happen? Right Likewise, I know we have some
realtors out there. I bet some realtors have some stories
like this. There are their houses that just accidentally ended
up this way. Yeah, there have to be. There have

(01:10:43):
to be, because I I'm friends with some realtors on
social media and they'll post they'll post some some very
odd rooms from time to time. So surely, surely there's
some intel intel out there, art with jagged angles, drab
colors never found in nature, sounds of metal scraping on glass,
sort of shrimp smell everywhere. I think, yeah, that that
must exist somewhere. All right, Well, there you have it,

(01:11:08):
the most unpleasant room, room of imfident unpleasantness. We've provided
the blueprint. We leave you to do what you will
with the rest of it. As always, if you want
more episodes of stuff to blow your mind, head on
over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. That's
our mothership. That's where we'll find all the episodes. That's
where you'll find links out to our various social media accounts.
There is also a tab on there for our store,
which has some cool logo designs, but also episode related designs.

(01:11:32):
In fact, just before we came in to record this episode,
we found out that there is a new squirrel shirt,
a new skug shirt in the market. What is it
the squirrels or not what they seem And there's this
charming illustration of a squirrel and it has like death's
head eyes, so it's black and white. Check it out.
You can also get it. I think you can get
into any color though. That's one of the beauties of

(01:11:52):
the t public stores. You can choose your own color scheme,
but check that out. It's a great way to support
the show, and if you want to support the show
without spending a dime, just simply rate and review us
wherever you have the power to do so, and don't
forget about invention. Big thanks as always to our excellent
audio producers, Alex Williams and Torry Harrison. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on

(01:12:13):
this episode or any other uh to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hi, let us know
where you listen from. You can email us at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how

(01:12:35):
stuff works dot com b