Eat Popcorn. Eat Popcorn. Eat Popcorn.

companies want us to buy. Popcorn. Yeah, I've I've heard about this was um that this uh sort of messaging that's subliminal. Um. I don't really think it excess I mean, um, god, I'm gonna getting hungry. Um. But I mean when I think about it, I always think about in the nineteen fifties, right, yes, indeed, um especially, I mean basically the term for subliminal messaging goes back to James Vickory, and he was a market researcher now fifty seven. So you know, I'm instantly thinking,

you know, some of mad Men era type of stuff. Um, And somewhere in a room smoking going I've got a great idea. Yeah, I guess mad Men's a little lated in this, but uh, anyway, he was big on the idea of like, let's let's insert some images into these movies in New Jersey and we'll just we'll just get right in their brains. The next thing, you know, they got it. They're gonna have to have coca cola or even popcorn. That's right, that's that's the message, right, popcorn

and drink coca cola. Yeah, and they were flashing this up for one three thousandth of a second, so it's just you know, just flash like like to the point where you know, supposedly you wouldn't even register, uh that you saw it, but your brain would know it and uh and then your brain would demand popcorn and coke. Of course, this resulted in a whole new era of advertising because people were just nuts about the subliminal advertising. Yeah, and a lot of paranoia too, because it's the whole idea.

It's like you're inserting a random image and you're reprogramming my brain, right, you're trying to manipulate me in the government's involved and so on and so forth. Yeah, and of course a lot of it turned out to be kind of bunk. Yeah. Well, I mean he actually Uh, didn't. He claimed that popcorn sales went up by eighteen percent or something like that, or but this was a lot. Yes, he said the coke sales went up by eighteen percent and popcorn. So it's just according to him, it's just

like people aren't even finishing the movie. It's just turns into an orgy of popcorn munching out out in the lobby. Right, people are so excited about this. In between nineteen and fifty and nineteen seventy, it's all the rage until want want waht fcc Yep, they banned it and uh and you can you continue to see see se uses off

and alleged uses of it pop up. There was an instance in like a George W. Bush campaign, a bit that had supposedly had a little bit of subliminal messaging to threaten there this people got up in arms over. And then there's the whole um uh side tangent of satanic subliminal messaging and and you know the paranoria paranoia over that. Right, most of that was pretty much distressed.

I can't remember which political figure this is. I can't believe I can't remember this right now, but it was a big Brujaja because they were filming him and there's a bookcase behind him, but it was configured in such a way that somehow, like the interstices of the bookcase seemed to suggest across if you looked at it, which you know, they said, okay, that's that's just a coincidence. That's not really across behind me. But it was fascinating because it was like, you know, what that does look

like across? So yeah, I mean, whether or not it's meant to look like that or people are mean to be inserting subliminal messages is still out there exactly. So, I mean the big thing here is that, like anytime you're trying to sell a product, or an experience or or even a podcast, even though we don't charge for this thing, you're gonna level any kind of skill you can you can level to try and make people buy

it or buy into it. It's it's kind of like the whole argument that, like the wars between armies, wars are are one based on accumulating you know, tiny um you know, relatively insignificant advantages, petty advantages, and if you if you accumulate enough of these, then you can win the battle and so you know, obviously market marketers are gonna do is everything they can, everything from studies to uh to throwing in maybe something subliminal, a little touches

like that. And as we're gonna explore in this podcast, you know, different stimuli to affect our our sense of smell, curing our site and uh and then where is this going in the future? Right? Yeah, how are we? Uh? How are we playing with these new technologies? You know,

are we actually aiding and abetting advertisers? And that's what we're thinking of, Like how what are the different ways that we're being manipulated at this very moment and also submitting ourselves to be manipulated by And to that end, I want to talk about scent. Yes, scent is a big one. Uh, I mean our very sense of taste. It's like a large percent of it is smell. I mean it's wherever you go, smell is going to play a huge role in what you you you take in.

We end up a like like I don't know if you ever get this sort of like a not really a deja but like a smell memory, Like suddenly you'll smell something and you'll instantly be able to go back to where you remember smelling that like, right, right, that's actually called the Pristine effect by Marcel Proust. I'm sure you know of the author. His novel Remembrance of Things Past was the first to explicitly link smell in memory.

So he talked about the emotional power. Um, I think it was matteling cakes and how that called up his

images of his childhood. Yeah, Like I'll like, you know, it's like I'll be walking down the street and suddenly I smell inexplicably the like like the house that I lived in when I was seven or something, you know, and you'll be it'll be the kind of thing where you could never like there's you can't really access this catalog of smells or I can't normally, but then suddenly it's out of the blue and they're like, hey, there's that.

The link is made well. And that's because the odorant patterns are interpreted as different smells in the olfactory bulb, right, And because the factory bulb is part of your limbic system, which is our emotional center of the brain. Smell is closely connected to the mink, della and hippocamus, and those are both structures that influence our behavior, our mood, and our memory. So you do have that little storehouse going

on there, and it's really effective, right. You know real estate agents always say to bake cookies or you know, or to spray the fake cookie smell, right, yeah, yeah, because you know that that encourages people to linger more have those cozy feelings of cookies being cooked. Yeah. Um. But marketers of course have figured this out, and they've in a big way, right, Like it's it's a science

for them. They've looked at how people are responding the best smells, like their universal smells that people respond to well, and they figured out all these different ways to employ that in different retails faces. So if you go into a let's say, a French themed UH store, you might smell hints of lavender, which are just trying to underscore the fact that it's you're in a French store, I suppose. Or you might go into a home good store and

smell chocolate chip cookies. But it's not just making you feel, you know, nice and cuddly inside. Right, there's an effect here. They're buttering you up. They are buttering you up because they know that if they pump out those aromas that you're going to spend more money. In fact, there was one study that was conducted in a Canadian mall and they found that there was an increase of over fifty dollars per customer that week. And that's from the author

Martin Howard from We Know What You Want. Well, I I was, I forget how I came across this. You know how you end up doing the internet searches and you end up getting off course a little. But I found that all these threads where people trying to figure out what the smell was in subway sandwich restaurants, and

people are like, what does that smell? Or and then and then I think some people would have been reading from the same inture we we are and they're they were like, oh, they're pumping it in their their brainwashing us with their fake chemical sense. And then somebody, somebody finally uh um enter the conversation was like, well, actually it has something to do with the way they bring in like frozen yeast and not frozen east, a frozen dough. And then they thought before they cook it, um and

and baked the bread. But but but it's an interesting ways, not nothing nefarious and nothing more nefarious than freezing dough. It depends where you fall in that it was like accidental marketing, I suppose, yeah, But but you could imagine like a situation where say they changed, say Subway sandwiches were to change their method, and then suddenly you didn't have that smell, Like there might be an advantage in figuring out a way to bottle it and pump it in. Yeah,

I don't know. I swear that the Gap has its own signature sense because you know, it's not that I hang out at the Gap all up, but anytime that I've bought something from there and I've brought at home, it still has that scent attached to it, and it's a pleasant scent. And I was like, is that that gap scent? You know? New car smells another big one for people. You know, it's like you get they you

go on that test ride in that car. It'sme also new and nice, right, I mean, I mean I'm not particularly you know, enraptured by it, but I know many people are. No, You're right, and then like You've got your reptilian brain all excited and thinking, oh car, I do request it when I go to like the Cactus car wash to get the car. You know, they have all the bottles and they're like, which one you want? And I'll be like fresh, you know, new car, and they're like, we're out, and then I have to make

do with like cum quad or something. Yeah, yeah, something weird. Yeah yeah, I thought I smelled in your car yea um. But it can actually go awry though. In two thousand and six, California's Milk processor Board launched a series I've

Got Milk billboards in San Francisco bus shelters. So the print ads um also featured the scent of chocolate chip cookies and then the reason that people would smell the chocolate chip ease and then they want some milk and it would all work fabulously, but people actually complained about it, and you know that's yeah, I think about it. That's a situation where you've got ink ingruent elements going on. You've got the smell of the streets and passers by

maybe they're smoking. And you know, in my own experience, you know, if you're sitting in a bush shelter, it might smell like you'urine sometimes. Yeah, well that's like the Candler Park marta station here in Atlanta. It's really close to a tipe of industrial baking facility, right, yeah, actually it's a kash I can't remember the piemaker, but yes,

sarely or yeah. So it's like, so you're there and it'll smell either like cakes baking, pies baking, or pies baking, and like you're in you know it just you know or or whatever. The the the bus I mean, the trained terminal smells happened to be so yeah, you end up with a weird mix there. Yeah. I actually tried to take a tour of that factory. But you're arrested. Yeah, I'm just gonna say they didn't me, but client, yes, I was arrested. This presentation is brought to you by Intel,

sponsors of Tomorrow. Um. And then there's music. Right, we already know how many it manipulate. I mean we used it at the side of this podcast. That's right. You know, it's sort of hopefully gets one in the mood. And uh. And you know, you go to any fine dining establishment, you're you're generally going to be you're paying for the the andyhance as much as the food, and so a

huge part of that is the music. Let's play some music that makes people relax, makes some calm down, makes them feel like, you know, there's some more special like you know, this is the evening's entertainment. Yeah, and you know music, right, you've heard of music which I think

most of us associate with Elevator Music. They actually that's a huge company and they actually create all sorts of um different nuanced types of tracks depending on what your retail businesses UM And there was actually another study again author Martin Howard had talked about this that specially designed music loops can keep shoppers in the supermarket for eight

percent longer, like the song never ends, so you never leave. No. I think it's just sort of like if you maybe put I don't know, like Enya in a supermarket, like maybe it would just slow down people's actions. I don't know, there was a time where that might have kept me going, but yeah, now it would speed things up. That's it's really amazing though how many places don't get this concept. Though. You'll go into um like like sometimes it will be something like like a you know, the kind of place

where you get like your nails done. I mean not that I go to these places a lot, but I have on on a rare occasion than one, and they'll, you know, they'll totally have their skill set down, but they won't understand that you should maybe play music that doesn't make you want to strangle yourself. Yeah. Yeah, And

I've actually noted this before. In breakfast places sometimes they have will play extremely loud music, like really bad eighties music, and I think, oh my god, really like not that I'm hungover, but some of us here might be hungover. It's it's not the right choice. So yeah, we know already. We talked about this a lot too in the music Rebuild Your Brain. How music can affect you. Yeah, mostly positively. Yeah, I mean it leaches in and changes the way you

view the world. I mean, wouldn't. Yeah, it's just just across the board. So the next topic sense that you would want to leverage this in a marketing situation, right, You would want someone's rewards center in the brain ding ding dinging and releasing dopamen and you'd be feeling really great and you might buy more. But another advertising technology that's creeped up in the last couple of years is

beaming advertisements into people's ears, which is super creepy. I'm sure you all have heard about it before, but it's called the auditory spotlight. Yeah, and this is we have to have a really cool article on the on the website by John Fuller about this. Uh. And it's it's basically what it sounds like, just sort of just directional, like you're just directing the sound at a particular area where a person would conceivably be and uh and and

they're hearing the message, right, yep, that's right. That's actually a tiny being just like light, and it's a beam from a rooftop speaker. Yeah. Now, so I really don't know that I've encountered this in real life. No, I haven't either. And I wonder if it's just been used in larger cities or if it was just you know, two thousand and seven, two thousand eight seemed to be

it's big years. Um. And I think that the main brew ha ha was in New York when A and he was promoting a show called Paranormal State, and people would walk by and a woman's voice would say, who's there, who's there? It's not your imagination, but people start to get creeped out of course, but out of don't I really haven't seen it being used outside of that, you know, like outside of actually museums and libraries, places where you need it to be quiet and you need this directed

sound and uh. And the other thing about this technology, I think it like it instantly the the idea and that the headlines associated with instantly captivated everybody because it brought to mind the idea that they're beaming advertised like visual advertisements directly into your brain, which which is a gag that's featured in uh, one of one of my favorite Futurama episodes where where Fry is having this dream that that he's in his underwear and it turns into

an advertisement for underwear and anyway within his dream, Yeah, within his dream anyway. Excepting's like, what was that all about? And they're like, oh, that's just how how it is. Is we all have advertisements in her in her dreams, and and you know, it's like we joke about about about that. But you know, some of the technology coming along is really getting uh, it's really getting into your head. It's really getting in your head starting and you can see a future where a lot of this is going

to be kind of intrusive. Yeah, And we're talking about m r s. Actually again, I feel like we talked about mrs all the time, but they're being used everywhere, all the time for everything. Yeah, and this is where we're looking of the brain while someone is thinking, um, and and watching the movement, watching how blood moves around how and and just seeing the neural architecture in action. Yeah.

And I think at first, you know, of course, they were doing this for many reasons that you know, science medical based, but you know those crafty market here. Yeah, I started to try to figure it out. I think in fact, they're now calling it neuromarketing, right, yeah. Yeah. Basically what they have figured out is that you can

map the data. You can look at someone's thoughts, right, like someone For instance, the sixty minutes piece that we watched, a person was looking at ten different objects and then the m R I was scanning that. And then what they did is they took that data, fed it to a computer and then told the computer later on, okay, well here are two objects based on that one scan what is this person looking at? Yeah, and stuff like is it a knife for a house? Right? And then

they would be it's a knife, and that's right. So the brain was saying, I'm looking at a knife. That's the first scan. Second it was a house, third hammer, so on and so forth, And the computer was given two choices from what I recall and saying which which one was this person looking at? And the computer was choosing right almost every time. Of course, there there are some oddities that happened, because your brain might light up differently, say with a hammer, if you've had a bad experience

with the hammers. Yeah, it's like every brain is going to be a little and it's like a fingerprint, you know, it's it's very complicated fingerprints, so it's not going to be perfect. But they can also look at it in terms of which of two decisions is someone going to make? Yeah, we're trying to predict yeah, which with marketing that comes down to a very basic, uh decision. You know, it's like it's this person going to buy this object or not?

Are they interested in this or they repulsed by it? Right? And this is in Carnegie. Mellon was looking at this right, and they were actually trying to have the ability to map nuance thoughts within the next three years. So yes, this this idea of not just saying Okay, we based on this information to everybody's there's universal qualities right that um come up when you look at an image, and so everybody's going to think about this object this way most of the time. But no, I mean it's it's

more than that. It's like what choices are people going to make? And where have you been? The one they looked at was you know, it's like we have these sort of mintal images of places and they can they can you know, answer the question have you seen this

environment before? And that has a whole there's a whole possibility there with like criminal investigations, like you know you have the scene of the crime, Well we we just scanned you and it said you were in fact e g was used to convict a woman of poisoning and ex fiance in India. That's right, because they were describing the circumstances around his death and at the same time she was getting scanned, right, and they said, okay, we

see all this activity going on. Now you can sort of lay that on her for agreeing to the scan, because that's the other big thing we have to mentioneer

when we're talking about getting your getting scanned. It's it's it's one of these situations where it's it's like getting an m R. I. You know, you're you're going, you're laying down, you're being really still very cooperative while this uh this you basically go on this giant donut right right, As far as we know, governments, corporations cannot stuff us

into this donut and make us do this. Even in total recall, they had trouble get it keeping Arnold Swartzenegger and that that that chair, you know, he ended up breaking out of it. So well, he's right, So we either have this thing was so we're gonna either have to develop stronger chairs um or or develop scanning systems that are not so that don't demand so much cooperation, portable ones and ones that can just sort of scan you in a second. Right, and there is a man

named Paul root Wolpe. He's the director of ethics at Emory University, and he says, this is possible that you can beam light into your front cortex and that receptors would get the reflection of that light, essentially reading your

thoughts that correspond what you're looking at at that time. Yeah, so we'd be able to do it, not only remotely but also covertly, you know, they like you might be I'm just throwing this out there, like you're you're looking at the billboard the trains station, and it's looking at you. You don't even realize that it's it's gauging your reaction

to the advertisement. And maybe based on those readings, it might be able to throw up something that interests you more or intereste or or or would you know, interest you or not interest you less. But but you know, it would be able to if you've ever filled out like a survey online or these basic like recommendation engines that say like, oh, you like this movie. In this movie, you probably love this um. You know it's as wrong

as Netflix seems to get that on my account. You know, it's like that that that's the sort of thing that everyone seems to be interested and uh, and this would be like a laser shining not a laser, but like a beam of light shining at your head. And then you could easily imagine a computerized system that wouldn't that would then give you recommendations based on your reactions. Well that's what I was thinking. I was thinking, Okay, maybe I'm at the gap, you know, it's five it's five

years from now. I'm at the gap. I'm I happen to be looking at a red shirt, and you know, the beam of light gets that information than it interfaces with a marketing company, which then, you know, real time tells the salesperson get more red stuff. She loves it, you know. Um. And it's it's interesting to think that

that might happen. But it's also I also feel like in this day and age that you know, I don't necessarily want that to happen, but I feel like I'm giving up so much of my own information to advertisers already just to get a quick fix, a quick you know, ten percent off of something. Um, that I'm almost a

willing participant, you know. And I can see this sort of thing being used in the future where it's like, okay, well if you buy into our lightbeam program, well you get an extra off your purchases, you know, and then I'm complicit in this act. Well, you know, it's it's I can easily see it. It's because I'm on one Level's easy to imagine people like I do not want machines reading my mind and trying to sell me things.

But I mean We're already letting machines read our personal emails and give us little ads you over to the side in our our Google accounts, Right, so I could easily see a situation where you would be like, yes, I will let this computer that somebody has assured me UM is gonna, you know, keep my secrets. I will allow that to scan my brain and give me movie recommendations. God only knows what kind of movie recommendations we would get on an accurate scan of our of our complex thoughts.

Because that's the thing you're as soun as you're saying with like, within the next five years, the same technology that's enabling people to say, hey, are you thinking of a knife or a bowl of pudding will be able to decipher us so much much more complex thoughts. So, I mean, it's kind of amazing to think of it that way. And also there's that element of gratification, Like we want instant gratification, we want it now. So if we if someone, if there's the promise of that, then

we're willing to exchange something of ourselves for it. Right, And you know, you really begin to think, too, is there is the technology inclusible? We reach the point where various forms of entertainment respond to the way to to our to our brain scans. Like maybe you're in a you're in a restroom, so you're in a private room, right, maybe there's a scanning system that can tell if you're digging the music and in either you know, shift the mix to accommodate you, or even shift the music itself.

You can getting the whole area of intelligent music where where there won't be a composition as much, but a composition that changes according to your neural requirements. Or yeah, I mean it's just the sky's the limit. Movies that sort of right themselves. Uh, you know, depending on how you're responding to it in your in your brain, I kind of dig that. Actually, yeah, see, now you're you're coming around, here's my personal information in exchange for that.

And then I mean, as long as we're talking about things that we can manipulate in the brain, I mean they're our brain has as these different pleasure systems. For instance, there is a portion of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex and this is where umu, the joy one experiences during sex or um or you know, eating a

really tasty sandwich take place. So um, you know, they've been they've been exploring ways to manipulate that, uh, mainly for things like treating like Parkinson's disease, you know, or um or or various neurological conditions. But of course, marketing initially eventually pokes its head into any research facility and starts dreaming about ways you could you could do this. So imagine that like you're you're in a store and you're you know, you're suddenly you're just feeling really great

about this purchase you're about to make. Now, I think that would probably be invasive, but yeah, just a little bit. But yeah, they're working on this sex chip thing, which which shows supposed yeah and uh, and they're you know, hoping to say, help people with a condition called and head donia, yeah, and and hedonia, which means you just can't you can't feel joy, uh in regards to sex and food. And so they would treat this by putting

a chip in. But that's like just creating a chip for that is years away, much less the idea of some sort of external, um, you know, laser device that's gonna being july directly into your brain. So the idea is that this implant, right, is it's going to be

stimulated the orbital or orbital frontal cortex. And so I'm just trying to imagine, like, you know, wearing that during intimate moments, I mean, or just on the train, you know, to work in the morning, you know, and then yeah, and people are like, look, I see what you have on. I know what you're doing over there because you see. But what if we all had them? Like, like, I can imagine a situation where everybody gets seas installed so you can better interface with your movie that rights itself.

You know, It's like it's righting itself based on how you're responding to it. And it's also pumping you with pleasure every time there's a you know, a shot of a slice of pie on the screen. Wow. You just never would have to leave your home? You just, yeah, I never would. Yeah. Um. According to the Scientific American article that I read, Stuart Malloy a North Carolina physician who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes for pain, mostly or

to relieve pain. Rather, he found by chance that a slightly off kilter placement in the lower spine caused one woman to exclaim, you're going to have to teach my husband how to do that, and here we go. Um, he has actually created a machine explicitly for what we're talking about, and it's a modified spinal cord stimulator and

the name is really subtle. It's called the Orgasmatron. Okay, yeah, it sounds fake, but yeah, yeah yeah, it's actually I think it's an homage to Woody Allen in the film Sleeper. What was the device? And Barbara Ella? I do not recall. There's like the scene where Duran Duran has barb Barbarella in the I don't know. It has some sort of crazy name. It looks like a big organ just called the organ or maybe not. That's an unfortunate name. Yeah,

but I don't know. That's that's some technology that's far off and it's kind of crude sounding right now, right, that's Barbara Alla territory. Yeah, and we'll get there eventually. Yeah yeah. Oh but again it begs that question, like what are we willingly allowing ourselves to participate in? And it made me think about this new interface that students at m I T Media Lab have developed. It's a wearable computing system that turns any surface your arm, table, wall,

whatever into an interactive display screen. Yeah. And the where can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will just on their arm. Yeah. But if you were like what time it is, you could just draw a watch and yeah, it's so it's very cool. Um. Their goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses. So it's this idea that computers

might become our sixth sense. Yeah. Um, and and in fact, I mean it's so nuts that, um, you could encounter someone at a party in this system would project a cloud of words onto that person's body and provide more information about that person, like a blog. You are all the name of his company, likes dislikes, so like we become our Facebook profile. Yeah, pretty much like the end of the Black Hole where the mad scientists and the robot and merge into one horrifying thing. Well, that's what

I was thinking. I mean, not specifically that specifically that, but I was thinking, like, that's the juncture of where advertisers and and ourselves like come together, right, because you know that in that situation that you're there's no privacy, right, that you're sharing everything about yourself in exchange for the ability to move throughout the world in a more fluid way.

It's a little scary, and again, I know I've heard it up before, but it's like super sad, true love story in which people wear an apparatus are apparatti around their necks and it gives everybody's credit scores and so on and so forth. Well, no, you're allowed to continually compos you like I did it. Just I keep being reminded of that story. It's super true, super sad, and it's a love story. Well, excellent, Well, um, popcorn, I'm going to um turn to our listener mail. Now we

have a couple here from some listeners. Um, here's one from Nathaniel's gonna have a snack over here. Yeah, alright. I was listening to your awesome podcast on alien abduction, and I realized that something similar to that paraplysis thing was going on. On occasion, I will wake up during a moment of pain in my dream, such as being hit in the face with a baseball or being kicked in the chest by a thug. At this moment, I wake up with intense pain all over my body at

some horrible hour, and typically can't fall asleep. Again, I don't know that this is unusual, and was wondering if you could use your epic minds and power to explain this huge fan love the show and you will never cease to figuratively blow my mind. Um well that's pretty interesting. Uh well, one possibility is that thugs are kicking you in your chest during the night, and I would look

into that possibility first. Yeah, it's happened to me before. Yeah. Um, but yeah, beyond that, we'd have to we'd have to look into it. I mean it's certainly it sounds off hand like it's similar to the phenomena where supposedly we have this evolutionary hold over where we're afraid of falling out of tree and beaten by ground uh predators, and so that we'll if we feel like we're slipping in our dream or or falling over, like I'll have it where I'm like slipping on milk or something and then

I'll just fly away. I think you've been hanging out with sloths too much. I mean the SLOs monkey. I did see a monkey. Thought of the tree and of Costa Rica. Yeah, plummeted. I mean just not just like a little fall, but like a really embarrassing fall monkey. Okay, yeah, I mean I think he was embarrassed, feel shamed. But we're all watching me just falls out of the Maybe that's part of their truck, you know, like, all right now you're gonna fall and we'll get a gasp from

the audience. Well, Nathaniel, I will say that we do need to we will. We will return to the world of dreams in a future podcast. I would really like to do one with having to do with nightmares and night terrors specific quick, so we'll keep you posted on all that. So we have another listener mail from someone

who wishes UH to remain anonymous. UH and he writes in I'm a long time listener, first time writer, and I have come back from a trip to Japan, where I just happened to listen to your episode is your Gut of Genius. On the sixth day of battling about of constipation, while this happens basically every time I leave the country, as you could imagine, after six days, it was pretty irritable and I was getting pretty anxious about

being clogged up for so long. But listening to the podcast and finding out that this happens to most people along with you guys providing an explanation for it just seemed to lift the anxiety immediately. Don't know whether it was the fact that I now understood what was happening in my brain talked to my bowels, or whether it was just me, but suffice to say that before the podcast was over, I did the deed as nature intended. Unfortunately it was using a Japanese style toilet on a

moving bullet train. However, I was grateful nonetheless. So you know, I'm I'm glad to know that our our poets from our listeners find our podcasts a moving, nice nice upon there. Um, I know, and that makes me think about something called the sphincter law, which we don't have time to get into now, but it's it's definitely something that I think we need to talk about in some other format. Okay, well, look look for that title to show up and gets

the law of the sphincter excellent. Why if you have any tales of toiletry tears on the on your travels, then you know, stop by our Facebook page where we will blow the mind and we'll also blow the mind on Twitter and where we update that feat pretty regularly with Cool Happenings at how stuff Works Discovery and just neat Stuff, We find out what's so swarre in the Whip.

If you have any questions or you're interested to find out more about some of our research notes or links that we've used in this episode, or any others, feel free to drop us a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more a about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes