From the Vault: Like a Circle in a Spiral, Part 2

Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series about people spinning around in circles. That's right. Part one was was essentially a breakdown of of why we've why we feel dizzy when we spin around in circles, and then we we also went in just a little bit into the art of spinning around in circles, particularly as it relates to

figure skaters and ballet dancers. Now, while figure skaters and ballet dancers, I would say regularly practice feats that that I am in awe of in terms of, you know, their athleticism and their ability to spin around and stuff and and still execute precise movements afterwards, I gotta say there's one thing that that maybe makes them not that impressive, which is, you know, they only spend for a few

seconds at a time. What if you were to spin around in a dance performance that lasted for minutes and minutes on end, maybe hours, who knows. Yeah, And in this we're getting into the realm of of the whirling dervishes of of Sufi mysticism, the Sufi whirlers, uh that you find mostly isolated in in modern day Turkey, but in some other regions as well. And if you haven't seen footage of this and and certainly heard the corresponding music, I really encourage you to to check it out because

it is. It is phenomenal. It is just to watch it. It's a very meditative experience I find. I've always found

this very intriguing. I think, you know, I've seen some clips on TV at some point, and then back in the nineties, at one point, because I was getting increasingly into world music and into Dead Can dance and stuff, I picked up an album off Hemisphere Records titled Mevlana Music of the Whirling Dervishes, and and really I was blown away by it, uh I I looked it up again, and I don't think this particular album is available anymore, but you can find the The particular musician is a

Nesa Usual. That's an easy I h u z e L and uh A couple of their albums are available to stream. Uh, it's it's it's really interesting stuff. Now. I'm not all that well versed in Middle Eastern music, but it does seem to have this very rhythmic quality that inspires a certain kind of circular movement even in the mind. Oh I, I really enjoyed the music too when you shared it with me. Uh, I don't know if I found myself thinking in circular ways. Did you

find yourself ruminating while listening to it? Yeah? I played some of I played Useels music for several hours while working on notes for for these episodes the other day, and yeah, I found it. I mean, granted, you know, part of it is I am thinking about people spinning around in circles and then I'm listening to this music that is, of course uh innately tied to that practice. But but yeah, I found it. Found it give me this kind of like calming, circular feeling. And really I

think it it contributed to yesterday being a pretty good day. Nice. Yeah, watching Sufi whirling dances is um, it's kind of hard to describe exactly the feeling of what's so beautiful about it. It is not like a lot of other dances that um that operate by sort of like surprise, where you know you don't know what moves someone's going to do next.

The Sufi whirling dances are extremely monotonous. I mean, they're basically just There might be versions that offers something else, but the versions I've seen mainly just feature this repetitive turning in place. And yet it is extremely beautiful as a form of dance. Uh, And I think it has something to do with the thing I want to come back to later in this episode, which is the particular movement of the dancers skirts as they twirl. There's a

kind of like beautiful geometry to that. And uh, there was actually a paper I came across the addressed how that happens. But um, but yeah, it's strange that that's such a in a way conceptually straightforward type of dance

would be so interesting to watch for so long. Yeah, there's a real fluidity to it, and and you know, we were talking about watching it because of course that's that's that's my experience with it, uh, seeing it done, listening to the music, and it's my understanding that if you you know, if you're if you're to travel to say Turkey, you can certainly as a tourist see some of it today, observe it as a tourist, But of course it's really based more in the experience of the dance,

of being the dancer. And I guess you can say that's kind of the case with a lot of dance, like it's there's dance to watch, but the dance is also the experience, and to be the dancer is to be within the system of movement. Yeah, so let's let's unpack things a little bit. Yes, Sufi Islam. Sufi Ism is the mystical branch of Islam in which the practitioner

seeks divine love and knowledge through the direct experience of God. Uh. It entails different mystical paths towards this goal, but the one we're gonna be talking about here is, of course, this form of dance. The words sufi itself derives from the Arabic for wool, as early Islamic aesthetics individuals who practice the denial of physical or psychological desires dressed in woolen garments and Islamic mysticism is also known is uh

tassa wolf, which literally means to dress in wool. The movement originally stirred up between six sixty one and seven forty nine c e. Apparently in response to perceptions of

worldliness in Islamic practice at the time. I find it interesting that the mystical tradition can sort of arise as a form of almost any religion, like that, you can take almost any religion and then there will there can be a mysticism interpretation of it, which again is often focused on um individual experience and people having practices such as meditation or other practices to alter the state of consciousness to make themselves have what they believe to be

a direct experience of the divine in some way. And that there there's Christian mysticism, and there's Islamic mysticism, and there's a mystical face of almost any religion you can imagine. Yeah, absolutely, and and and of course in pretty much any religion you can look at to it. It's a divide that can create problems that can can create conflict as well. Um. So again out of the US, out of Sufi Islam,

we we see the Sufi whirling emerge. And I imagine a lot of you out there have heard of a key individual in this, and that is the Persian poet Roomi, who lived twelve h seven through twelve seventy three, and he himself was a Sufi mystic. Again, he dies in twelve seventy three see and afterwards his followers and his son Sultan Wallad create the MeV Levy Order, an organization of whirling dervishes who sought to experience God through elaborate rituals of dance and music. And this was formed in

thirteen twelve in the Turkish city of Kanya. Now, many of you may have seen, you know, images and videos of of Sufi whirling and uh. And you know the dervishes where these tall camel hair hats that are said to represent the tombstone of the ego, which I really like, uh. And then they have these wide white skirts that twirl around. And of course these are very visually impressive and certainly play on that concept of whirling and turning, but these

are said to represent the egos shroud. Oh I love that. And it's funny because that might be a little bit more literal than people would think. Well, I mean, I guess you can be. You can't have something that's too literal if you're talking about the ego, which is an

intangible concept. But um, the way in which it is somewhat literal is that it's not just you are wearing a symbolic piece of dress, but that when you watch somebody practicing a sufi whirling dance, you will, I think very often find yourself not looking at the person and not looking at their face, but looking at the twirling skirt. The twirling skirt almost becomes the persons. So it's a

kind of second order vanishing of the identity or the ego. Yeah. Yeah, So the big ceremony here is the semi ceremony, and in the in this ceremony, the Dervish dancers rotate anti clockwise around the vertical access of their bodies while also rotate aating around the other dancers. It's all set to this this wonderful music, and it's intended to be a meditative experience, a highly meditative experience by which for the dancers their material self falls away and a state of

oneness is experienced. Yes, and so you can obviously look at the religious, the symbolic, the psychological importance and significance of this dance. But another way to think about this dance is just as a physical act. And it comes back to questions that I, you know that we brought up in our earlier episode and in the first part of this series, which is I watch it and I think, just on a physiological level, how do you do that without becoming so dizzy that you have to stop? Yeah,

because we're talking about a lot of spinning. You may have just seen clips of this, but the dancers will spend continuously for a solid hour with something like thirty spins per minute the performance. And this they performed this without experience saying vertico, without you know, feeling dizzy, following a reported thousand days of training within them. Havev Levie

houses uh to to give another number to you. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most Sufi whirling revolutions in one hour for a male uh the record went to um Shafik Ibrahim on January five, two thousand twelve, for two thousand, nine hundred and five spins in a single hour. Wow. Yeah, I have no words. That's that's so many spins. Yeah, it's just it's it's

a tremendous amount of spinning. Um. And and not only is the individual not like physically ill from it, not only are they they you know, retaining this uh, this fluid movement and this elegance, and they're not crashing into each other the walls. Uh, they're keeping it beautiful. But they're also uh, you know that they're said to have this this this meditative experience throughout it all. So it's not you know, dizzy us it is in many ways

feels like the opposite of of a meditative experience. I mean, into a certain extent, you could, I guess you compare some things about it. But but yeah, what whatever, whatever is going on in the mind of the of the Sufi whirler, of the of the whirling dervish, it is not a state of dizzy chaos. Uh. So it's it's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I would also think of dizziness as sort

of the opposite of a meditative state. Dizziness makes you hyper aware of your body and makes it really difficult to focus your mind, right I guess then the main comparison would be, well, you're you're living in the now now, if you're if you're you're clutching your head on the ground, but not in the way that you want to feel

in the moment. So I looked into this and I found an interesting paper titled a Possible role of prolonged whirling episodes on structural plasticity of the cortical networks and altered vertigo perception the cortex of Sufi Whirling Dervishes by colmac at All, and this was this was combining researchers from New Zealand, the Netherlands and Turkey particularly. Their study looked at quote potential structural cortical plasticity unquote in Sufi

Whirling Dervishes. These s w d s as the the abbreviation, because again we're talking about a level of sustained spinning that most healthy adults are not going to be able to handle without experiencing vertigo. As they put it, quote, this unique whirling based meditation style of Sufi Whirling Dervishes achieves extraordinary physiological outcomes that overcome vertico and balance impairment,

which would be expected after prolonged times of whirling. So they looked at quote potential relationship of the motion body perception related cortical networks and the prolonged term of whirling ability without vertigo or dizziness. So a note here again is the vestibular system, which of course we went into and defined in the UH in the first episode, you know, related to the inner ear, in our the inner ear,

in our sense of balance. They point out that vestibular processing is involved not only in space perception and locomotion, but also in cognitive perceptions of self. And so there is this connection, they say, between the vestibular system and the default mode network as well, something we've also discussed on the show quite a bit, tied to self awareness, to consciousness, to embodiment, but also in many cases unhappiness.

You know, this this dwelling on what has happened in the past, what has happened to me, what is happening in the footle, happening in UH, to me in the future, etcetera. And and you know, getting away from that now, nous that we often associate with a meditative calm UH. The default mode network, I think, is highly associated with cognitive patterns that are focused on the self, thinking about self and making judgments about the self, And I mean, what's

more miserable than that. Yeah. I think it's interesting too that we're talking about wheeling and spinning, because there's you know, the sort of thinking associated with the default mode network sometimes takes the form of a wheel, and other belief systems, you know, like some some treatments or interpretations of the like the wheel of being in Buddhism kind of relate to this, you know, or just sort of the feeling of like, oh, I'm on the I'm on the hamster

wheel of my own default mode network right now, I've got to eject myself from that wheel, uh and do something with my time. So the question is does prolonged whirling contribute to structural changes in the networks of the default mode network and self perception in addition to motion

perception related networks. So the authors point out that previous studies have observed, first of all, the decreased cortical thickness and meditator's brains relate to the posterior singulate cortex or PCC and the default mode network also decreased activity in the default mode network as well as long and also they when out long term meditation practices associated with altered resting brain activity, so long lasting activity changes that persist

in the brain. In a way, you could think about meditation as a way of practicing control over what the brain does win at rest, right. Yeah, And you know it's it's you know, we we've talked about meditation on the show in the past. I'm sure we'll continue too, because it is. It can it can feel very elusive at times, and I think part of it comes down to this connection between the mind and body. You know

that that um. I mean that's why I think a lot of us find meditation in meditative states or even the flow state in activities that are physical, you know, like in h in yoga for instance, um or or um you know, even you know, other type forms of exercise, swimming laps, running laps, going for a jog, that sort

of thing. Yes, though I feel like I would identify more of that meta hate of type flow state in physical tasks that also require some degree of constant uh sort of mental engagement, more so than say, jogging does uh you know, Like I I've heard some people complain that maybe they can enjoy sports, but they find quote exercise boring, And I think what they're thinking of is like running on a treadmill, in which like in which case, um, you are engaging your body, but you are not. You

are not being faced with tasks. You know, there's not like any problems for your brain to solve the way there is when you're say playing a sport or something or doing something with um, doing something with like variable activities throughout, such as like a yoga practice or a

or a you know, a dance routine or something. Yeah. Well, but I guess if you're like say jogging around the neighborhood and you're having to solve various problems, right like, Okay, I'm gonna not run onto that sidewalk that's all crooked, I'm gonna jump over that dog, and I'm not going to step in that that or that. Right though. It's

funny because I feel like that just manifests as extreme annoyance. Yeah, I guess, yeah, it can like there's a thin line sometimes between uh, tasks that are fulfilling and tasks that are just a chore. I mean, we've talked before about how, um, sometimes when you're driving in a car, it can make other people just appear as obstacles to you, and there's

this kind of horrible desensitization that goes on. And we talked about one reason for that being that um that perhaps the you know, updating the body schema to include the car makes you feel bigger looking at people through the glass of the windshield, operating on you know, the different rules of the control traffic versus control foot movements,

those things could be separating you. But I think another one that maybe we didn't consider enough when we've talked about this in the past is just speed, because when you're out running on the side walk, it seems like you have a very different relationship to other people than if you're out walking. When you're out running, you start to view other people as like obstacles in the same kind of way you do you're when you're in a car. You're like persons in my way. They're not even really

a person. This is just like a sack of meat that I need to get around. Yeah, you know, I'm not myself a runner, but I do I get I get hints of that from other runners sometimes. Thank so for for this particular study, the authors are going to look at um at a Sufi whirlers now. One thing they note though, is that the practice of Mevlevi ceremonies they're not as robust as they were prior to the twentieth century due to a secular policies that were enforced.

So a lot of what remains today apparently isn't as rigorous and is often aimed at at tourist audiences, so it's difficult to study quote the traditional physical and spiritual method involved here. As a result, you know, that's not

a huge sample size they're working with. So they looked at eight males and two females adults right handed traditional Sufi whirling dervishes with more than eight years of whirling meditation experience, so the average was something like ten and a half years of whirling uh, which I think broke down to about like two whirling sessions per week to keep the practice up. They also had a ten person control group that was otherwise matched up with the attributes

of of the individuals that were themselves whirlers. They performed m r I scans and found an average difference in cortical thickness of point ten millimeters for the left hemisphere of the brain and point fifteen millimeters for the right hemisphere of the brain. So they present this as proof of structural plasticity induced by the whirling meditations of Sufi whirling dervishes. Now, one of the take comes in from the study is that this sort of information could lead

to some improvements in vertigo therapy. Uh and I also imagine it goes back to what we mentioned in the last episode about the more we understand this sort of thing, the more we can understand just to how the brain functions, how the brain can heal itself, that sort of thing. But they also stress that there's a lot of possibility in the the potential mood enhancing effect of the defined structurally plastinated cortical areas UM and and and how that

is worth consideration. So they point out that the default mode network is active except when it is suppressed by other networks or stimulated by other states, and that its activity, of course, is generally correlated with unhappiness in the human experience. Quote. Therefore, it is theorized that prolonged periods of gold erected cognitive processes may decrease the mind wandering activity in the s w d's brain because the precunious activity has been decreased.

They also theorized that the suppression of cortical areas related with the discriminational perception here leads to less selfish egocentric behavior and increased levels of happiness. And they think that the decreased activity in the dorso lateral prefrontal cortex may contribute to the behavioral attribute of honesty. And additionally, there could be a neuro protection advantage here as well, you know,

against the likes of say Alzheimer's and other conditions. Well, I guess, like a lot of neuroimaging and neurological studies it it opens up a lot of possibilities that you should we should be careful to remember aren't necessarily proven yet, but are really interesting and worth looking into with other experiments. Yeah, Like, there are a lot of questions about the default mode network, for example, and and just about anything else you could

point out in the human brain. Yeah, we've even talked about how there are some people, I think, who question the validity of the default mode network as a coherent concept and like is this really a thing? But um, but but there are others who advocate for it. So

I don't know how to sort that question out. Yeah, I would say that some of the key takeaways from the study though, or that that, first of all, this incredible act of spinning by by the Sufi whirlers, it is it is producing like physical changes in the brain, like there is there is neural plasticity involved here, and you know it is. It is also a meditative state they enter into and you don't have to it's not

really a stretch to say that. Yes, the meditative states, repetitive medi meditative states, meditative meditative states that are engaged in with with a fair amount of frequency that has an effect on your resting um neural level. Uh So all of that is, you know, really fascinating, makes me, you know, respect this tradition even more and I have to say, it makes me want to spend more in

my life. Um well, wait, I mean it seems difficult that like, is it a thing where you'd have to do it a lot to get used to it enough to get the benefits from it? Is that the case? I guess? I mean, yes, that see it certainly too well to spin at their level, it requires I mean they they prescribe what what I say, a thousand days of of practice to get to the point where you

could actually partake of this ceremony. Um. But I mean just in terms of, like, on on on one level, it may I want to do it just because I I fail at it so much. Now, Like the idea that I can change my brain, that I can change myself to spend better, like to do not feel like my soul has been ripped out of my body when I spin around five times on a yoga mat. Uh. Like that that alone is attractive, you know, the the idea that like, yeah, I'm I can I can change

and become this slightly different version of myself. And you know, it's also worth noting that. Um. You know, while this is the most um intriguing and probably the most extreme example of spinning dance, there are a lot of spinning in circular dance traditions and other regions of the world. You know, maybe not as intense, but certainly the circular

form pops up in traditions around the world. So I wonder if if just even those cases, you have a certain level of a flow state and meditative calm that overcomes you when you're a part of it. I don't have a lot of direct experience with that aside from what square dancing and p class when I was a kid, which is not at all the same thing. God, I also had to do square dancing and pe and that was bizarre, absolutely bizarre. It's a terrible time for it, um,

I feel. But at the same time, after looking at all this, I'm like, yes, they were right to make us dance around in circles and move our bodies and spin. Kids need to spend, like we discussed in the previous episode, and uh, yeah, why not make them square dance, I guess. So there's another aspect of Sufi whirling that I wanted to talk about because I found a strange paper. I alluded to this earlier. Uh, but just to reintroduce the

concept again. So you watch one of these sufi whirling ceremonies, and there's the music, and there's just the human factor, you know, being interested in in other people's religious practices and all that. But there's this other aspect that makes the dance especially beautiful and interesting, and it's the movement

of the dancers skirts. Now, you mentioned earlier that there's this symbolic role of the skirts representing, you know, the shroud of the ego, and I think that is there's something very much to that even as it comes through in the way the dancers look from the outside. But there's also something about the skirts that's undeniably a part of the raw of visual appeal of the dance to

outside observers. As the dancer twirls, the skirt is sort of lifted into the air by the centripetal force of the rotation, but it is not lifted up in a perfect uniform circle. Instead, what you get are these odd, gorgeous hypnotic patterns of ripples with peaks and troughs, as if there were waves in a fluid moving through the fabric. And while watching it, it is very easy to just space out. It's like it's a visual stimulus that creates a feeling that's, at least to me, it's very similar

to watching the undulations of a jellyfish. Yeah, I agree. And so the question is what causes these sort of mesmerizing patterns of movement in the surface of these turning skirts. And believe it or not, there is a physics paper about this. Uh so. This is called Whirling Skirts and Rotating Cones in the New Journal of Physics published by Jamal Gouvin, j Hannah and Martin Michael Muller, and they put a very technical description to these hypnotic movements that

I was just talking about. They call it, They say, quote steady dihedral e symmetric patterns with sharp peaks may be observed on a spinning skirt lagging behind the material flow of the fabric. And so this is quoted in a in a phys dot Or article by co author James Hannah. Quote, The dancers don't do much but spin around at a fixed speed, but their skirts show these very striking, long lived patterns with sharp cusp like features,

which seem rather counterintuitive. And I think it's partially that counterintuitive aspect that makes the skirts so interesting to watch. There there's a there's a soothing rhythm to how the skirts move, but they also seem to sort of defy physics. They don't look like they're moving in the way that they should. Are you watching an example, I'm picturing it in my head. Yeah, as as I said here staring into the zoom camera, I'm I'm imagining that the hypnotic

circular movements of the dancers. Yeah, yeah, Like sometimes the skirts kind of resemble the way that if you watch a helicopter blade spinning on film, uh, if the shutter speed of the camera lines up in the right way with the rotation uh with you know, with the rotations per minute of the helicopter blade, it will look like the blade is spinning backwards. Yeah, there's a similar kind of thing that sometimes goes on with the apparent peaks

and waves in the skirt. So anyway, what what explains this? Well, I thought the answer that came up with here was pretty interesting. They found that the patterns of movement in a free flowing, nearly symmetrical cone shaped structure like the fabric of a dancers skirt, are largely influenced by the Coriolis force. Quote. A perturbative analysis of nearly access symmetric cones shows that Coriolis forces are essential and establishing skirt

like solutions. Skirt like solutions. And I love it when, you know, physicists come up with like a physics way of describing something that you would never normally hear put into those terms. But so Coriolis forces are are themselves very interesting. They are responsible for, for example, determining the rotation ation of weather patterns in the atmosphere, of Earth. The Coriolis effect is a name for the deflection of the motion of free flowing materials on a rotating surface.

And this is one of those things that can be kind of hard to understand intuitively, but I'll do my best with an analogy. Imagine you're trying to play catch with someone. So you're throwing a baseball back and forth. But you're throwing a baseball back and forth on a merry go round. Suddenly you can't just throw in a

straight line, right, You know. If I'm trying to throw to you on the other side of the merry go round and I throw straight at you, suddenly the ball from our point of view will appear to curve off target in some bizarre way, right, And it's because you're moving. Right, I throw the ball in a straight line, it does go in a straight line, but you move and so it looks like the ball just flew off to the side in the middle of its uh traveling. And it's

because we're in a rotating reference frame. A similar thing takes place on larger rotating reference frames, such as the Earth itself. When you have free flowing patterns of fluid, you know, such as weather, you know, it's fluids moving through fluids, it's it's clouds or or winds moving through air. These are affected by the rotation of the Earth, causing winds to typically form clockwise patterns in the northern hemisphere

and counterclockwise patterns in the southern hemisphere. And apparently when a Sufi dancer twirls, the rotation of the skirt also gives rise to Coreoli's forces in the patterns of the fabric. To quote James hannagg In and that that physic or article quote, the flow of a sheet of material is much more restrictive than the flow of the atmosphere, but nonetheless it results in Coriolis forces. What we found was that this flow and the associated Coriolis forces plays a

crucial role in forming the dervish like patterns. And the authors actually came up with equations to dis scribe these effects in free flowing conical materials like the fabric of a skirt. And so now you have an equation that can show you the skirt like solutions. Yeah, we will not read it out to you have to look it up for yourself. Because I found a similar situation in first episode where we talked about spinning kicks, and I found a post about the physics of a spin kick.

But it was just it was there was just no sense in getting into it because I would just be me reading out an equation. But anyway, I don't For some reason, I found something oddly beautiful about this study. Yeah, I mean, and it's it also seems kind of fitting, right, given the mystical nature of it, you know, and and and the idea of there being this mathematical pattern underlying what we see when we uh witness this particular tradition,

you know. Than now, speaking of cultural traditions about spinning around in circles, another one came to mind while we were getting ready for this episode, and it is something you may have seen at a baseball game. It is the dizzy bat race. You know. I had completely forgotten about this until you shared a clip of people doing it.

So this is when the first step is you take a baseball bat and you put the I don't know, the club end on the on the ground does the end and I don't know, yeah, And and then well I guess it. I don't know if it matters. Maybe maybe it doesn't. But then one end of the bat is on the ground and the other end of the bat is on your forehead, so you're bending and then yeah, and you're bending over and then you start spinning around three Stooges style around it right, yep, yep, it spin

around in circles, and then you gotta do something. You gotta run somewhere. I don't think it really matters after that. You just the goal is you get a couple of people out of the audience who maybe been having a few stadium beers. I mean, that's probably watered down beer, but it's still beer. They've got some alcohol in their system. Alcohol.

It does affect the vestibular system, as we know. Uh. And then and then you make it even worse by having them spin around a bunch of times and then say like, hey, run and try to catch this hot dog or something, and they'll typically stumble all over the place. In one example we were looking at, one of the guys runs straight into the stands and falls over the wall. Oh yeah, it's quite a wipeout. But then he's right

back in his feet. Yeah, let you see that. Bra So generally, as you said this, this sport is presented as a impromptu competition that one has not trained for. But based on everything we've discussed here, um, you know training would be able to help you. Uh. You know, the untrained performance seems to be key to the dizzy bat race. But if you were to train for it, you could potentially be in a better position to excel

at it. Oh yeah, like training like a Sufi dancer or like a or like a ballerina or a figure skater. You just dizzy bat yourself for hours a day every day until you can become the ultimate dizzy bat hustler. And like nobody knows when you go in that I'm going to be better at catching the hot dog or whatever it is. I don't know why I said hot dog. I guess that's another thing that's at baseball stadiums. You know,

they may do a hot dog version. I guess one of the versions I was looking at is like you do the dizzy bat thing. You you spin around and then you have to run to like first base and to see if you can run in a straight line, and then you're it's your time, right, It's like they time you on it. So, UM, I have a potential answer to this. It's not a scientific answer, but I come to it via another physical activity that involves spinning, and that's the world of professional wrestling. Um, so I

knew we'd end up back here. I didn't expect to talk about about pro wrestling in this at all. Um beside, well, I guess I already did. I did bring it up briefly. Um, what was the elbow or something from from Japanese wrestling? Yeah, like a roaring elbow where you get you spin around and do an elbow. It's uh, you know, it's flashy looking. But but there are a couple of other more famous spinning maneuvers. So one of them, and tell me if you've seen this before, Joe. One is the airplane spin.

This is when one wrestler puts another in a fireman's carry, you know, up on their shoulders, and then they spin around more or less like a whirling dervish before dumping them over and then the ideas you're both dizzy. Okay. The other version is the giant swing. And in this one, one wrestler grabs the legs of the other, you know, like a wheelbarrow hold, and then spins them around like

a centrifuge and then eventually releases them. And there are a couple of other variants, but these are the main spinning moves. So I guess the idea and that the giant swing is that you are attempting to spin around until the intracranial pressure of the blood flowing up to the top of their head kills them. Right. Is that an execution move? It's a finishing move, and generally, yeah, I guess in Mortal Kombat would it would make the top of your head fly off and your brains splat

again against the camera or something. But in pro pro wrestling, both of these moves generally play out this way, like you spin your opponent around until they're dizzy. You're dizzy as well, but then you take advantage and you either pin the person or or it gives you a chance to do another maneuver on them and then potentially win.

A lot of times it's kind of played up for comedy though, like oh, you did the airplane spin, and now both people are dizzy and they can't punch each other, and they're kind of doing a you know, kind of a dizzy bat humor spot where like, oh, now we can't connect it. It's a way to kind of like break down the action for a little bit. It seems like a move that the bush Whackers would have done,

remember them. Yeah, But you know, I've often dismissed the move because I think, oh, well, that just makes you both dizzy. It's not very realistic. What's the point of making your opponent really dizzy if you yourself are equally dizzy. But given everything we've talked about here, it absolutely makes sense that a wrestler who regular uses a spinny move or just trains and spinning would be less affected by the maneuver and could then, you know, better utilize it

in a match. Of course, the reverse would be true as well, right if you in in cafe, within the within the fiction of pro wrestling, If you knew you were going to go up against someone who uses a move like this, say Hiroshi Hayes or Cesarrow or Daniel Bryant, you could train and prepare for it so that they wouldn't be able to, you know, to to to to

use it effectively against you. I don't think I don't think that's ever been used from a wrestling psychology standpoint, but it seems like it could be a good angle. I'm imagining the Ric Flair monologue now, you can't use that role on me. It's Rolex time. You could have a training montage of somebody spinning around in circles preparing for their match, and then you know, making themselves less susceptible to the move. But but outside of the fictional

world of the you know, the match itself. The other question, of course, is do wrestlers like the ones I just mentioned do they adapt to using the maneuver? You know, if you're using an airplane spin or a giant swing in you know, a couple of times a week or just regularly, you know, in your matches, do you become less susceptible to dizziness? And I couldn't find a real

answer on this. I looked around a little bit for you know, interviews and all, but I did find footage of a dizzy bat competition featuring w w E wrestlers, and one of the wrestlers was this guy Cesaro who who uses this um this giant swing a lot in his matches and has also i think on one in one case he used a hundred revolutions in a single match, so so yeah, he'll really get spinning. And he has another spinning move called a UFO which is basically an

inverted airplane spin. It's also very impressive, uh, just to be performed. So it raises like it's it is the question, how's he going to do in this? In this dizzy bat competition? And you know, this is very unscientific. He only was competing against I think two other people, but he did win. He had better time doing the dizzy bat thing and then running out the first base. He he had better time than either competitor. That's so that's interesting. Yeah,

so there you go. Maybe maybe it does. Uh, maybe there is a way to prepare for the dizzy bat competition and maybe spinning around a lot in pro wrestling does produce these results. I mean, it makes complete sense based on everything we've looked at. I think what it means is that Cesarro has a future in ice skating or ballet probably, so. I mean, professional dance and professional wrestling have a lot in common. And uh, I mean

he's a hoss. He could do it well. What that makes me wonder is are there any well known pro wrestlers who were also professional dancers in something that is acknowledged as dance. Um, I don't know, I'm not sure on that offhand, it seems like they're they're m be. I mean, you have wrestlers coming in with all sorts of backgrounds, Um, you know, certainly gymnastics backgrounds in some cases. So uh, I'm sure there's there's one out there that has some sort of a dance background. Hulkster was he

also a square dancing champion. I don't know if the Hulkster was a square great dancing champion now, um, But Mike, I'm trying to remember if he ever did the giant swing he might have I can't recall. While on the subject of of airplane spins as a as an offensive move, I guess we've come full circle to like in Bison territory. There was another thing I was thinking about when we were doing this episode that was, um, it was a Simpsons episode with a certain type of spinning torture as hazing.

It's the episode where Barton Lisa get enrolled in a military academy and there's a scene where they're being hazed and they're apparently strapped to airplane propellers and then the the airplane runs, so they like spin around with the propeller. That's a different kind of spinning than we're usually talking about, because we're talking about spinning along a different axis of the body. This would be again more like the giant swing.

This would be like centrifuging you. Uh. And while it's funny in the show, I think I would have to say my suspicion is that this would be absolutely one fatal. In reality, it was just like, you know, shove all the blood in your body up to the top of your head and kill you. Yeah, I mean it's it basically comes back to the Moonraker example that we talked about earlier, you know, where there's a scene and Moonraker where James Bond is put in a centrifuge as torture, right, Yeah,

the G Forces simulator for astronauts. Yeah, except I think that's different because the way his body is oriented, the way I thought it was supposed to be, was that the g forces would be operating. The other way would be like taking the blood out of his head, you know, and pulling it towards his feet like would normally Hugh,

I don't know. Well, actually I don't know, because if the astronauts are the astronauts are usually exeeded, what with the back of their bodies face saying the facing the the exhaust, right, So maybe that would just mean that the blood is pulled not up or down your body, but towards the back of your body, towards the back of your skull. Yeah, I guess, And it would also

depend on the maneuver you're taking in the airplane. But but certainly when you're talking about the effects of of G force on the blood flow and the body, particularly blood flow to the brain, that's where you can get into hypoxia territory where not enough blood and oxygen is reaching the brain, and you can certainly lose consciousness that way, um, which is of course extra dangerous if you are also

piloting an aircraft. Um, especially if you're piloting an aircraft that is to say, in a spin or something like that. So um, yeah, the idea of this being a potentially lethal way to torment parton Lisa, absolutely. What is there's some movie where that's there's like a scene where a character has to execute a move in an airplane or a spaceship or something that they know is going to cause them to lose asciousness student forces and they have to like recover in time. Do you does that ringing

a bell for you? Oh? It vaguely does. I mean this kind of thing comes up a fair amount in in films about about to say, fighter crafts and all, so it could have been some of the usual suspects. They're like the like top Gun or that one where Clint Eastwood flies s R seventy one or some version of it. I don't know that one. Yeah, I forget

it was. I always wanted to watch it as a kid because I remember really loving the SR seventy one and the the SR seventy one Blackbird, which was right, you know, it was a reconnaissance aircraft that could fly super fast, super high altitude that um, I think you got it a pretty high altitude as well. Not to be confused with the YouTube which just does you know,

really long wings and his high altitude reconnaissance. But the SR seventy one was beautiful and the he's supposed to be flying a fighter plane in this in this film that's based on the SR seventy one, or maybe they use an SR seventy one stand in. And I used to see the VHS copy think oh that that looks like such a great movie, and I think later I did see it, and it's it's not great, but it has a cool plane in it. So what can you

do but to come back to video games. Certainly, anyone who's ever played a flight simulator you know that, uh, if you you take on too many G forces, the screen is gonna go black or the screen is gonna go red. You know you're gonna potitionally black out or red out based on the G forces. Oh and by the way, that Clint Eatwood movie was two Firefox. I had to look it up to make sure that I was, uh, you know, giving everybody the uh, the the full recommend there.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood. Um, I would have had Ronald Lacy in it, uh of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, who played U, you know, the villainous taught uh the s S officer. Wait what, oh, I see you. I'm confusing this the name of the movie you're talking about with the movie that I watched as a child called fire Birds, not Firefox. This was a helicopter action movie starring Nicolas Cage and yeah, Nicolas Cage and Tommy Lee Jones and Sean Young and I

think some other recognizable character actors. And I remember there's a scene where Nicolas Cage has to like drive a car with one of his eyes covered up looking through a periscope in order to train his brain. Oh nice, Well, that's a perfect place to close out here, because so much of what we've talked about it comes down to training the brain um of the brain, becoming used to what the body is is going through and and altering the way that it understands the signals that are delivered

to it. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close out these episodes here then. Um, obviously we'd love to hear from everybody out there about these episodes. You know, what are your experiences with spinning around in circles related to say, dance? Uh? Do we have skaters and dancers and I know we have at least one uh individual listens to show with the ballet background. We'd love to

hear from them on this. Um. Also, do we have any Sufi listeners who would like to chime in on either the experience of the Sufi whirling or just the place that it has within the religion. Uh, you know, basically, any any anything you have to add or if you just have stuff about video games and movies. Will also be happy to listen to you on on that front as well. In the meantime, if you like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you

know where to find it. You can find it anywhere you get a podcast and wherever that happens to be. If they let you rate, review and subscribe because that helps us out. Go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that will shoot you over to the I heart listing for our page. There's a store button. Go there if you want to buy a shirt with a monster or a logo on it. And uh, I I know some of you are probably intrigued by the mention of the of the Whirling Dervishes, the video and

the and of course the music. I'm gonna put a post up about that at my my website, Samooda music dot com. Uh that's just a little impersonal blog that I do, uh you know, the low key blogging I call it. But I'll do a post there about about the music that I'll have a few links for you in some bedded video that you can check out if you so desire. Huge thanks as always to our excellent

audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.