From the Vault: The Minotaur, Part 3

I enter the labyrinth, I'm there alone, unchained. The scepter bends in my fist, and he comes before me, monstrous, sweet, monstrous, free, and I can no longer govern my dreams. So many deliberations wait for the day when the world of men will harbor my story and blood. Secret River. You have not heard me yet. Kill me first. Now you provoke me as if you're plotting some kind of scheme I've made up my mind. Ultimate freedom is fostered by that blade which you hold in your fist, the same as

a sudden parting of waters in the ocean deep. What do you know of death, grant her of profound life? Look, there is only one way to kill a monster. And that is to embrace it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of The Minotaur and the Labyrinth where we're

coming out of the dark. Got you once again. So those opening selections were from a play called The Kings by Julio Cortissar, who's an Argentinean writer that we've been talking about recently. That that translation was by Kari Dad's veach. But so the first part I read were the words of of King Minos, and then after that was an exchange between Theseus and the Minotaur, with our producer Seth as Theseus as the jerk of the story. Yes, um, this is a This is such an interesting uh play.

I had never heard of this before until I ran across this very translation at in translation dot Brooklyn Rail dot org Um. Because I don't believe it is currently in print in English. I could be wrong on that. I see that it is in print in Spanish, but not in English. Cortissar has a number of really interesting short stories that I read back when I was in college.

One of them that I remember really liking is called Axlotal and it's a story about a man who repeatedly visits an axcel little tank at the Jardine de Parry, and he gradually finds himself transforming into an axcel odal as he watches them. It's pretty good. Yeah, I'm looking forward to read that one. Uh you you sent me a copy to check out. In fact, a number of his short story sound just right up my alley, But

I've never read anything by Cortazar. Now. Another fun thing about this, so some of you might remember that we had called an opening reading on a previous episode about the mintur from uh Bores the House of Asterion. Bores, of course, was also an Argentinian writer. Um, perhaps you know one of the most famous Argentinian writers. And it's interesting that this play, The Kings or Lasreles was published in ninety seven, just a year after Borges wrote, Uh

that story to begin with the House of Hysterion. Oh, is there like an implication of inspiration or common inspiration between the two. Well, I was looking into this because I think a lot of people assumed that Cortisar was inspired by the House of hysterian Um. Borges himself actually published the play alongside Asterien in the literary journal that he edited in nine seven. But I was I was looking at an article titled The Incessant Return of the

Minotaur by Amy Frasier Yoder and just keeps coming back. Yeah, And they write that while it was often assumed that borges story influenced Courtisar, there's evidence from letters between Cortazar and Borges that Cortisar might not have read borhes story previously, so there might be more convergence here than inspiration. But still it seems that Boges was was very much a

fan of this piece. I mean, he published it, and obviously how could Borhes not like an entire play with all of this this this beautiful you know, poetic language, uh, and contemplation of the labyrinth and the and the the various kings that are caught within its grasp. Really, this is what I was just telling you earlier, before we started hitting the cord. You could basically you could print this play out. You could throw a dart at it,

and you could you could find something beautiful. Uh, Like, there's this whole stretch where because I should point out that the minotaur and Theseus have a very long conversation. Um, considering that most of the time it's just about them fighting,

they have a long conversation in this play. And there's this whole bit about the string that Theseus has uh has has has has wound out behind him, you know, so that he can return so you can escape the labyrinth, about how it is like a river flowing out to the ocean. Uh. So it's and and then the ocean is also the minuteur sister. There's There's just a lot of beautiful stuff in it. So even if you're you're not really into reading a lot of unproduced plays, you should.

You should. I recommend you check this out at the website we mentioned earlier, and if you've had a chance to see it. Uh, that sounds awesome. I'd love to hear about it. That's interesting that you mentioned the twine as a river, because that goes back to in a It's telling of the story when he's talking about Dadalus's design of the labyrinth. He describes it as like a river that twists and turns back and forth, and waters that churn in upon themselves going this way and that. Ah,

that's right, that's right. So this is indeed our our third episode on the minotaur um, and we wanted to I guess, kick things off here first of all with that that that brief reading, but also just to discuss pop culture minotaurs a little bit UM and cultural minotaurs of the more modern era in a little bit more more detail. UM. As far as just cinema goes, I have to say, I think it's it's really hard to

find a quality minotaur in a film or TV. I don't know if you've had the same experience, Joe, but I feel like even when the costume or the c g I or overall presentation is solid enough, and lord knows, it often isn't um. Minotaurs are often presented as just mirror beastly brutes. You know, they're they're And a big part of that is that they are not in the labyrinth. Yes, a minotaur out of its labyrinth is like a hermit crab out of its shell. It's just not even really

the same creature, is it. The best on screen minotaur I can think of is actually one that we mentioned in the first episode, which is the one in Jim Hinson's storyteller Greek Myths with Michael Gambon as as deadal as I think, or at least as the storyteller. Uh. And that that one is really good because you don't get too much of a look at the minotaur. I think, as it should be, you know, it should be glances here and there, and or glances or glimpses whichever I

meant to say that. But the glimpses you do get are full of terror and pity. It's it's very good. It conveys sort of both of the meanings of the story as we read it today, the probably the more original, terrifying reading, but also the subtle reading where you see the monster as an object of of of sadness and pity. Yeah yeah, yeah again, that one is is just excellent and I highly recommend folks check that out if you haven't seen it already. I think it all holds up

really well. David Morrissey, who would go on to of course play the Governor and the Walking Dad, is in that a young David Morrissey. As theseus, I have never seen the Walking Dead, or I never made it past the second episode, but but when I was looking at him first of all. He kind of reminds me of Tom Cruise's creepy looking brother who was in Lost. Do you remember that guy? No, I don't. Tom Cruise's brother was in what was Unlost? Seth offers a correction, I

was entirely wrong. He his name is William A. Pother and he's Tom Cruise's first cousin, not his brother. But he looks kind of like Tom Cruise, but with an extra dose of boyish charm and creepiness at the same time. And he played a role in Lost that was I don't know. I lost ultimately was was such a betrayal, but but there was a really good moment in the

first season involving his his character. But anyway, I thought he kind of looked like him, And in any case, he does look like a jock bully, which is kind of what Theseus is. Yeah, I think I mentioned in the previous episode that John Would, another great actor of of the British stage, was in the The Greek myths Um series as well, playing Minos. But in another episode

that's about Data, Lis and Acres. But still, if you take them all in, you kind of you kind of get into different were really multiple episodes you get the story of of Minos and the Minotaur and theseus. Well, somebody out there who is a filmmaker who is dedicated to practical sets and effects, you make this movie. Make the Labyrinth and Minotaur movie. No no, no green screen set junk no uh no c G I Minotaur. I want a good costume with really classic makeup effects and

and go all out. Now in terms of Minotaurs out of context, there is one example that I think works really well, and it is from the MU video for Einstree's in The New Baton's song Sabrina, which is which is on YouTube. I have no idea. Check it out. Oh it's well. Einstree's on the New Baton is a Is this this great German band? They started out more industrial or post industrial, but then they kind of change

their sound as they win. They have a number of great songs, but this particular video consists entirely of this sad minotaur. That's that's well brought to life. Uh, putting on makeup in this really dank kind of bathroom. I'm looking at it now. Yeah, it's that's all that happens in it. But it captures this, It captures the sadness of minotaur at least that that I feel like should

be a vital component alongside the savage minotaur. This video is strong with the cinematography of a nineties anti drug p S A commercial. Yeah yeah, kind it's got that that gross green film on everything like that. This is your brain on drugs, Yeah it does. It does remind me in some ways of various p s as I remember from UH as a child watching Canadian television, where there might be something that's like really weird and fantastic, and then at the end you find out, oh, this

is the message. Now, before we get a little more into the science of mazes and UH and zoonotic diseases, you promised at some point that you were going to come back to talk a little bit about the minotaur and D and D. You mentioned this in the first episode. Oh yeah, So if the the error is to take the minotaur out of its place and just presented as a mere brute uh, Dungeons and Dragons has certainly been

guilty of that. And and not only dungeon dragons, but just individual dungeon masters who of course had the power to to take a minotaur and drop him in anywhere you go into the you go into the end, the inn keeps a minotaur as see what you'd like to drink? Yeah, so, I mean, you know, there's a lot of room to to misuse the minotaur, you know, at an individual level. But I will say that at least in the fifth edition. I can't really speak to earlier editions because I just

don't have those numbers in my head. But in the most recent edition they do have a very high wisdom score and they have an ability called labyrinthine recall. Uh, so the minotaur can perfectly recall any path that has traveled, which I feel like that ability. It least, at the very least, it is a nudge to the dungeon master. Hey, you should put this minute our somewhere where it can

take advantage of this. You should create some sort of labyrinth, be that labyrinth an actual you know, stone dungeon, or perhaps something like a Hedge maze or like a really um, you know, complicated city. I mean, there's so many different

directions you could go in there. And in terms of actual adventure modules and campaigns, uh, the campaign out of the Abyss does put minotaurs in a place referred to as the labyrinth, which which is very nice, and I thought they did a good job in that the labyrinthine recall things seems like it would also close to the adventurers the option of certain strategic responses to the minator, like you can't do to the minotaur what Danny does to Jack at the end of the Shining movie, Right,

you can't get him turned around in his own maze, like he's going to know his way around. Yeah, he is the ultimate master of this location unless you have some sort of privileged knowledge or magical abilities that have been gifted to you by other parties. So I was thinking about mazes, and I actually had an etymological question that I had to look up because I was wondering, are the English words maze and a maze as an amazing related, And it turns out that they are. They

probably do come from the same linguistic route. So by around the beginning of the fourteenth century, the now maze meant something like a delusion or a bewilderment confusion, and this is really related to the Old English verb a mac n or a m a s i a n meaning to confuse, And so the origins of this word

are not exactly clear. I saw one comparison on the online Etymological Dictionary to a Norwegian word mass m a s or mace meaning exhausting labor, which I thought would be a kind of interesting place for that concept to come from. But apparently maze came to have its current meaning in English, meaning something like a labyrinth the structure with branching paths around the end of the fourteenth century. But but so now you know, like amazement is related

to a maze. They're the same thing, and they come from the idea of bewilderment, confusion and and being confounded. But hey, practical survival question. Imagine you are not theseus. You're not armed with a with a sword or whatever. You don't have a ball of twine to make your way out of a maze. If you were just one of the Athenian youths finding yourself trapped an unfamiliar maze, could you get out? Is there actually a strategy for optimizing the solution of a maze other than trying to

cut through walls? Obviously you can't do that well. I mean, I think a lot of them have heard the whole only take like right hand turns right turning right exactly, So it depends on how the maze is constructed, but that actually is a successful strategy for most mazes. The solution if you don't have a ball of twine is what's known as the right hand rule, and that's actually arbitrary. Could be the right hand or the left hand rule,

but it's as simple as this. So you reach out with your right hand and you touch the right side wall of the corridor, and then you just proceed forward without ever taking your hand off the wall. So if you come to a dead end, you pivot around with your hand still touching the right side of the wall. Again. The same thing would work with the left hand. It's

also known as the wall follower algorithm. And always following the same wall surface will mean that you bear in the same direction at every turn, which is what you were saying. If you always make the right turn, eventually you will find your way out. This will uh you know, even if you hit a dead end, you'll double back

on your path. And if you keep following this method, you can actually solve the maze even blindfolded, because it doesn't matter what orientation you have mentally, you will just always be executing a new pathway unless you're trying to

get yourself out of a dead end. But there is a catch here, and the catches that for this to work, the maze has to be what they call simply constructed, and what that means is all of the walls of the maze are connected to the outer wall or to each other, and this method will not necessarily work in a maze with what are called island walls, walls that are not connected to the outer boundary, and with these types of mazes, you can just end up going in

circles around a wall segment in the middle. I've actually read about some funny cases of people going people going into corn mazes, you know, these things for fun or hedge mazes, and they get stuck in there and they try to use the wall follower pathway to get out, but they get stuck in there because they're just tracing around some isolated internal wall that doesn't connect to the outer walls. Forced to wander forever until the fall festival

employees come and retrieve you. But there there is another catch. So even if you are in a maze with island walls walls that don't connect to the outer boundary. You can still use the right hand rule if you use it beginning at the entrance, because if you start at the entrance and you stick to it, you will never actually start following an island wall to begin with, because you'll always be attached to a wall that's attached to

the exterior boundary. So if you start doing the doing the right hand rule at the entrance, it will work, though it might make the maze less fun, I mean, depending on whether this is like a torture human sacrifice

scenario or just like a corn maze for fun. Right, But I guess if you if you use the right hand rule and it's the right kind of maze, you are in a it's transforming a maze into a labyrinth, if we're going to that, if you're using those terms exclusively for a maze is something with many different branching paths in which you can get lost. In a labyrinth as being this complex system through which there is only one path, uh and you don't have to to think

about what you're doing as you follow it. Right multi cursal versus unicursal, you're turning it into a unicursal pathway where you are again just submitting to the design of the maze and taking decision making entirely out of it. Right, It's kind of like if you go to Ikea and you just decide, I'm just gonna go with the I'm not gonna buy anything, but I'm just gonna just go straight going, just gonna follow the path by everything my right hand touches. You end up in a maze of meatballs.

But thinking about how to solve maze is also got me, uh, thinking about another tangent here, which is the role that mazes have played in the history of psychological research, so much that in a way, the maze came almost a physical emblem of the discipline of psychology and popular culture like well, especially the behavior ast schools. Of course, So if you saw a research psychologist in a movie made in the nineteen forties or fifties, what were they doing?

I mean, they're probably running rats through a maze, right, Like every psychology lab in a movie has a rat maze in it. Yeah, and you think they feel like they're a fair number of educational shorts that also feature footage of mice and mazes. And here I think the maze as a research tool emerges in a very interesting relationship with the maze of myths, So consider the following with the myth of Theseus and the minotaur in mind.

I was reading an article about the history of maze research by a psychologist named ce James Goodwin in the Monitor on Psychology, which is the magazine of the American Psychological Association or the a p A. And Goodwin begins by producing a really unbelievable quote from a neo behaviorist psychologist named Edward Chase Tolman, who was president of the

APIA at the time. He uttered these words, and this was part of his yearly addressed to the a p A in nineteen thirty seven, And this is what he said. Everything important in psychology can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determinants of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze. So everything, every everything, everything you could want to know about minds

can be understood by watching how rats behave in a maze. Like, given enough time and enough rats and enough mazes, we can fully understand minds. I mean, undoubtedly it's useful for various things. That everything is far yeah, So I mean I guess to be fair to Tolman, I think maybe he was intentionally overstating his case a bit to be provocative. But this is actually indicative of like a powerful strain of thinking in the history of behaviorist psychology, basically that

psychological science is not really concerned with internal phenomena. I remember, this was the behavior at school, so it's not really about thoughts or feelings and uh. And also the belief

that differences between species are not necessarily very relevant. Brains in general were just sort of imagined as learning and conditioning machines that produce behavior based on how they've been conditioned, and so careful study of how rats behave under various controlled conditions and how they respond to various incentives and stimuli and training can eventually tell you pretty much everything that you would want to know about brains, even about

human psychology. Now, I think this is clearly an extremely misguided point of view, but an interesting question is how did you get to their Like, how how did you get to the place where somebody could say that about rats and mazes and not immediate lee be mocked for it, you know, like, just sounds so ridiculous, So maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can talk about the origins of rat maze research. Than alright, we're back, So how did we get so

many mice in these mazes? Okay? So I mentioned this article by by C. James Goodwin, and Goodwin writes in his article that most historians of science agreed that the animal maze as a research tool was really pioneered in the eighteen nineties by researchers at Clark University. Specifically, this was a couple of graduate students named Willard Small and Linus Klein, who were working in the lab of the

early American psychologist Edmund Sandford Uh. Though sometime around the same time the psychologist Edward Thorndyke also experimented with building a sort of maze for research on baby birds. He did this by stacking books in odd confuyu curations, but he he thought of these structures as pens. But the mazes constructed in the Sanford lab at Clark University had

an interesting couple of points of inspiration. So one was in the structures built by rats under a porch uh So, Kleins, Small and Sanford were interested in studying the home finding ability of rats home finding, of course, is a very important skill for many motile animals. How do you find your way back to home base after leaving to forage, or how do you find your way through confusing twist and turns to locate a source of food or another

familiar location. And so Klein recalled an incident where there had been digging under the porch at a cabin on his father's farm in Virginia, and when the porch was excavated, they discovered that there were these runways that had been left quote by large feral rats to their nests under the porch, and the runways client thought somehow resembled mazes, and this led to the idea of designing a test environment based on a maze to study the psychology of rats,

and the model they ended up using for this maze was the Hampton Court Maze in England. And Robert, I've got a picture for you to look at here. This is still a popular tourist attraction. It's a hedge maze just outside London that was commissioned by William the Third around the year seventeen hundred and it is said to be the oldest surviving hedge maze in England. Yeah, this is a very impressive, very famous maze, kind of trapezoidal in shape. I think they restructured it somewhat to make

it more of a rectangle in the lab version. The irony is that mice would have no problem at all with the actual Hampton coordinates. That's right, Yeah, you just cut underneath. Yeah, so of course you had to create one that's much more unforgiving to the body of a mouse. So what they did was at the Clark Lab they made a tiny Ursian four rodents for rats with slight redesigns.

UH had a wooden floor and walls made of wire mesh, and so research with rats there in this maze went on for several years, mostly under Willard Small, and Goodwin writes the following quote. This was the time when psychology was the science of mental life, so it was not surprising that Small described his maze study in quote mentalistic terms rather than in the kind of language one might

expect to read in a more modern learning study. So instead of reporting results in terms of error rates and time to completion, Small tried to infer what the rats were doing as they made their way through the maze, and this led to observations such as and here I'm going to quote from Small when describing a rat almost making a wrong turn in the maze, Small wrote that the rat quote hesitated as if scratching his head, then entered this dead end path slowly and doubt fully only

a few steps. However, then with a sudden turn and a triumphant flick of his tail, he returned to the correct path. Which is funny because that does not sound like scientific writing. Yes, hesitated as if scratching his head,

the triumphant flick of his tail. I mean this is This is a kind of qualitative description that's unusual to more modern psychological methods, where in modern psychological methods you would try to turn everything into unambiguous quantitative data points and remove the subjective judgment of the researcher as much as possible. But here Small is just saying, like, I wonder what little Mr Rat is thinking as he goes to the left or the right. Well, I think he

I think he feels triumphant. Now I think he feels like a big, strong rat. Now I know he's getting dangerously close to writing a smashing Pumpkins song. You know, I've always had questions about that song because if the world is a vampire sent to dray aane, what is it dray a meaning the world contains everything, doesn't it? The way the world is invoked there, it's like the some some total of existence is sent to drain what's outside of itself to drain? Oh, I think it is

outer reality versus inter reality, right, Okay, it's Newmena and Phenomena. Yeah, I guess so that's the way I always interpreted. I mean, not that I spent a lot of time really analyzing the lyrics that song, but um, but that would be my guest. The Phenomena is a vampire sent to drain and the Newmena okay, yeah. Or I guess you could say the maze or the cage is the thing the environment that contains the rat or the minotaur what have you.

Here's a twist. What if that song is sung from the point of view of a minotaur, like among the Athenian youths, there is a secret destroyer. You know. I don't think I even looked for actual minotaur songs. Uh. There may be some really good ones out there, and I then I just don't know about them. Is there not a misfits song. Let is there that I just say the Minotaur and the new you and it's the minute again or something seems like I can't really I

can't really find much of anything. But yeah, whether you're talking about the standards of modern research today or the behaviorist research that would come into vogue in the twentieth century, in any case, you know, you would not want to say, I think that the rat is thinking that the world is a vampire sent to dreane. You just want to like neutrally describe unambiguous, objective behaviors and and and avoid

being anthropomorphic. And Smallest research was criticized even by some people at the time for being anthropomorphic, like trying to inhabit the mind of the rat as if it had human thoughts. Nevertheless, small made some interesting and influential discoveries, and these included the idea that rats could learn navigation and home finding with very little reliance on their sense of site. Two of the rats in his study group were blind, and yet they learned the maze just as

well as the sited rats. And the use of senses other than site can make sense when you consider that rats are often navigating almost completely dark spaces or navigating spaces at night, you know, under floorboards and so forth, and Small believed he had established with his research that rats learned through a gradual accumulation of direct associations between sensory stimuli and the maze and patterns of success, and this would later prove foundational to the behaviorist school of psychology,

which was very focused on associative learning and gradual conditioning as the root of animal behavior. But probably more important than what these studies actually found in their conclusions was the precedent they set for research methods, because Small's research led to this huge surge in maze research, much of

which used rats as the study animal. The most classic variation is that you can mess around with independent variables to create an average learning curve for rats by you know, you run rats through a maze multiple times, and you chart the time it takes them to complete the maze and the number of errors they make along the way with each successive attempt, which is a very useful tool for studying a certain kind of learning and how various

things affect that kind of learning, like drugs and so forth. But some maze studies also used other animals at the very simple and we've talked before about the the sort of maze like research done on worms that was focused on planaria. Uh. This was the origin actually of the memory transfer research of James McConnell that we talked about in a couple of full length episodes that you can

check out in our archive called Devour of Memories. But the short version is that the American psychologist James McConnell believed he had discovered that memories in the form of learned associations could be transferred from one flat worm to another via cannibalism. So you teach one flat worm, grind it up, feed it to another flat worm, and it learns,

you know, eat your brains and gain your knowledge. Later research through some doubts on that conclusion, but there's still interesting ongoing research today hinting that planariam might possibly retain memories after having their heads cut off, so there might be some kind of memory in the bodies that's not just in the brain. And of course at the opposite end of the scale, you've got studies that actually put humans in full size mazes with consent of course, to

study their behavior. But anyway, this huge surge in maze research lead to regimes that meant a researcher could make a claim like the one Tolman made in nineteen thirty seven, the idea that basically all you need to study psychology is some rats in a maze. And he could say

that and still be taken seriously. Uh. Tolman's assertion, of course, seems again ridiculous on its face today, but maze research does still remain very important, especially in narrower domains like animal motor behavior, problem solving, spatial memory and things like that. And mazes are used in studying the effects of particular drugs on behavior, So like you could say, does this anti anxiety drug cause a rat or a crayfish to take one path or the other rather than you know,

freezing paralyzed t junction? Or does a drug promote obsessive recurring checks of the same path and things like that. Now, and looking at what kind of maze research is going on today, I came across one thing that I that I was thoroughly amazed by and very disturbed by, which is this invention known as automated team mazes. I guess there's actually nothing more nefarious about this than there is about a regular maze for for research, but watching video

of it somehow kind of bothered me. Basically, and Automated Team Maze is a robot maze with movable walls that can be raised and lowered to alter the maze path as the animal proceeds. And I don't know, it feels very house of leaves to me. Yeah, I don't think we we brought up a house of leaves yet, by the way, but that is a great use of a maze and a minute our uh in uh is a literary example. I'm actually in the middle of reading it right now for the first time, so I haven't finished yet.

I don't want to spoil too much for people, but yeah, the middle of that book is a good place to be because the book is is intentionally quite intentionally is a labyrinth, and you are supposed to, I think, feel to a certain extent lost within it and hunted within it. Uh. It's one of the more unnerving things I think I've read, and you know, over the past ten years, extremely creepy now in terms of labyrinths that change and move around you. First of all, I think datals would be proud like

this is exactly the sort of thing that you can imagine. Uh, you know, they're the great inventor having created. It also reminds me of of the wonderful cinematic maze that we find in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Uh. There in the early phases of that they go through to you know, Sarah goes through different parts of the Labyrinth to try to get to the Goblin city to rescue her brother, but there's a There's one section in particular where she begins to realize is that she can't mark the path behind

her because the path keeps changing. Goblins keep moving things around, moving stones that she's marked, or even just seemingly magically, she'll turn around and what was once a passage is now just a blank wall. I recall this being a plot point in the movie Cube as well. Oh yes, the very very Cube like as well this video. There's no minotaur in Cube, but that should have been well in a way, there are a lot of all the

traps are kind of like many minotaurs. There are killing instruments, and again coming back to the idea that the minotaur is sort of the kill function of the Labyrinth. Uh, it just has a lot of little kill functions instead of one great all encompass and kill function. I want to come back and say, I, in all honesty, I don't want to throw aspersions on an automated teammates, which

seems like a perfectly useful research tool. Uh. It seems like they're actually mainly to automatically track data on the movements of the animals, so it it makes the human rat runn obsolete very useful. But before we move on from rats and mazes, I wanted to talk about one more thing that I found interesting, and it ties into something I know you've covered on at least one older episode, uh Rob, which was the idea of cargo cult science that was explored in this famous talk given by the

physicist Richard Feynman in nineteen seventy four. He was giving a commencement address to cal Tech. I guess it was the graduating class or something, and that's usually who would be at a commencement address, why, I said, probably uh, And he was, you know, talking about various subjects, pseudo science, the need for rigor and in designing experiments, scientific research

and uh. And so in simple terms, I think the idea of cargo cult science is it's a bad form of science where uh, there is not enough rigorous effort devoted to trying to disprove hypotheses. Rather every basically you just kind of established a hypoth is based on what data you've already collected, and then further occurrences of the same types of data are taken as confirmation of the hypothesis. So,

for an example, I'm just making this up. If you were to find that rats run mazes faster in the daytime than they do in the nighttime, and then you say, oh, I'm gonna fit a hypothesis to that, it's because they come from the planet Crypton and are given extra strength by the rays of our yellow sun during the day. And then subsequent studies finding yet again that rats run mazes faster in the daytime than than in the nighttime, those are taking as confirmation of the yellow sun hypothesis

when they don't actually provide any support for that at all. So, in general, Fineman in the speech is advocating that researchers adhere to more rigorous methods to rule out false positives and things like that, and and they avoid the temptation to rush to publish with sloppy experimental designs, and so I can read from the part of his speech here where he talks about rats and mazes. He uh, he says, quote. There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds

of mazes and so on, with little clear result. But in nineteen thirty seven a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. So what he's looking for is a spatial relationship between the entrance door and the food reward door.

Will they learn that inference? Uh? And fine man continues, No, the rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform that this was the same door as before. Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the door very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly

the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any common sense person, So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it, and he could

only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats, so they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, this is an a number one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat running experiments sensible because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really

using and not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment and the one after that never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on

sand or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to decipher something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic

of cargo cult science. Now, just as a follow up, I was reading an article by Ross Pomeroy on Real Clear Science that was about this story that Feineman tells trying to identify who this unsided researcher was. Uh, the author of this article, Pomeroy, he thinks that this is probably referring to the animal scientist Paul Thomas Young, but it's not known for sure who Fineman is referring to. If we take Fineman's word that you know, he was

familiar with this unpublished research and stuff. Uh, It's it's very sad that this went forward, but it's such a wonderful illustration of how difficult and tedious it can be just to get to the point where you can start to establish conclusions in animal research. I also love in in Froneman's writings here that you you also get the sense of the the construction of a maze, you know, like this the thing that is that is just there to confuse and and and provides no clear solutions to

itself or to the world. Well, yeah, it's really funny because he is so designed. It highlights how designing amaze for a rat is kind of different than designing a maze for a human, right because rats, uh might, because of their their ecological niche, they might have senses that are attuned to things that humans wouldn't even imagine would be a useful clue in in you know, cheating and

seeing through the confusion that the maze is supposed to provide. Yeah, yeah, we have to remember that that rats, other organisms that we might put in a maze, they live in a different sense realm than we do. Like their dependence on you know, site versus smell, etcetera. Are going to be rather different than ours. And then they're you know, they're there's their smell abilities are going to beyond, be beyond

what we have at our disposal. Maybe I'm reaching here, but I was imagining some interesting parallels here between the maze as a psychological research instrument and the maze of myth because what they're doing in both cases is trying to strip away extraneous detail and context from from the decision of the character, whether that's a an animal that's the subject of research or character in a story and just sort of like isolate one, say, aliant trait at

a time that that's often what mythology does, like it boils down a human too courage embodied and has no other really identifiable human traits in that moment in the story. And the same thing for the rat. You're trying to like take away all of the things that make a rat a rat, accept its ability to decide between X and Y based on Z. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. So I guess it doesn't exactly work with theseus because theseus does bring bring context from the outside world into

the maze. Right. He comes in armed with tools and with information that he technically should not have if this were a fair fight. Right, right, he has he has broken the game. Yeah, he has corrupted the experiment. These are not legitimate results, all right. On that note, we're going to take one more break, but we'll be right back. Than alright, we're back. Uh now, Robert, is it time to talk about the minotaur and zoonotic diseases? Yes, it is.

I was actually delighted to run to run across this paper titled Europe The Bull and the Minotaur The Biological Legacy of a Neolithic love Story. This is by Harold Brusso, published in the journal Environmental Microbiology back in two thousand and nine. Now, Harold Brusso is a research scientist and he's the author of the book The Quest for Food and Natural History of Eating, And incidentally he's also an author on several COVID nineteen papers to come out this year. Yeah,

I saw that. I looked about it looks like he's affiliated with the Nestly Research Center in Switzerland and uh and at some point I think I also saw him affiliated with the University of Geneva, but the main things I saw recently were the Nestly Research Center. I gotta say he's got a very unusual writing style for scientific papers. It's very whimsical. Yes, definitely whimsical. Um and you get a sense of that from the title here as well.

Basically in this article Brusso used is the Minotaur myth as a means of discussing the Neolithic Revolution and the manner in which the domestication of goats and cattle, etcetera opened the door for new pathogens. As he points out, hunters only had limited contact with prey and most close

contact occurred after the animal's death. Not to say this is safe for the human hunter, but quote all the mechanisms which microbes induced in the infected host to assure their transmission, like sneezing, coughing, or diarrhea, are not any

longer operative in the dead animal. Okay, So he's saying that, And despite the fact that people who hunted for a living would be coming in contact with animals and their body fluids pretty often, people who do animal agriculture are actually more at risk for animal transmitted diseases than hunters are, right because suddenly you're not just hunting the animal down, killing it process and then processing it, which in a certainly process of the animal could come with some risks,

but it's one's dead, it's not going to sneeze on you. But with the domestication, humans come into close contact with these animals all the time. They come into clause contact with sick animals as well as the animals dung, which was valuable for fuel and fertilizer. Uh and also another pathway for disease. And you're going to be spending time. I mean, I just imagine there's more time with the animal. Like you kill an animal when you're hunting, and then

you kind of deal with it. But like, but that's one animal for a sort of limited period of time. While you're processing it or carrying it back to home or wherever this other thing would be, you're just sort of like wandering around with herds of sheep or cows or something all day and there's a bunch of them all crammed together, right, And and thus he states that you know, we can we can safely anticipate quote that the early farming society was plagued by new diseases zoonosis

was feeding new pathogens into the human population. Yeah, that's very interesting to consider. I mean, we we think about the advent of agriculture in in the Neolithic period as you know, one of the progenitors of civilization, but we don't often imagine a lot of the downsides that might have come along with it, and it seems quite possible that he's correct that zoonotic diseases and increase in diseases

transmitted from animals to humans would be one of those consequences. Yeah, so he writes that humanities growth simply created new opportunities for these microbes, which in turn discovered humans as quote an attractive life support. Um. Now, this, he says, follows the principle of the marine microbiologists call killing off the

winning population. So he points out that the viruses had co evolved with their host during evolution, we would expect the closest relatives of measles viruses in paramixo viruses of primates instead. However, the most important human pathogens, such as highly transmissible agents like measles and smallpox, are closely related to viruses from domesticated animals. Measles, for instance, circulates exclusively in the human population, but is a close relative of

render pest virus that is found in cattle. And of course, this uh is not limited just to ancient times. I mean, human viruses emerging from cultivated animal stocks still happens today. I mean, I think it's pretty common for flu strains to come out of say like pigs or birds that are domesticated by humans now. Bruso also points out that the close relationship between smallpox and cow pox was actually

really important for the history of vaccination. Physician Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had acquired cow pox were resistant to smallpox. He also points out that tuberculosis is caused by the Microbacterium tuberculosis complex, to which M. Bovis belongs.

Any lists several other examples and also discusses the idea popularized by Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs and Steel that Europeans brought with them their Old World viruses which they had, which they had generated out of their history of animal domestication, all this time spent in close confines with their domesticated species. Now, I will say, with reference to Diamond, Uh, it's been a long time since I read that book. Years ago

I read Guns, Terms and Steel. Uh. I can tell that he Diamond has recently been subject to a lot of criticism by experts in the fields. He covers. Uh. If so, I don't know, I don't want to be too unfair, but it seems like there are a lot of allegations of kind of cherry picking the thing that often happens when somebody's got a very broad, sweeping explanation

of history. Um, but I do think one of the basic genres of things explored in that book is interesting, which is the broad thrust of it is trying to explain human history in terms of environmental biogeography, So showing that you know what people's come to power at what place in time, and at least in large part be explained by often otherwise overlooked environmental biological and geographical factors such as like what types of crops grow here, or

what types of animals nearby could be domesticated, what kinds of pathogens or people exposed to and things like that. So uh So, whatever one would think of Diamond himself or or his fuller argument, I do think it's important to remember that history is not just a battle of wills and virtues between like powerful individual people and their personalities. It's also very much about mosquitoes and rainfall patterns and

farming equipment and stuff like that. Now, to come back to to Bruso here, the idea that he's presenting here isn't that the Neolithic door opens and immediately all of these zoonotic diseases rush in um. This would have taken place over in a long period of time. Uh. It still opens the door though, But sometimes the these these basically these zoonotic events are going to occur just throughout

that the history that I'm folds. For example, measles seems to have emerged from render past between c. E eleven hundred and c E twelve hundred, and is pointed out by Ferous at All in Origin of Measles of the measles virus UH. Divergence from render pest virus between likely occurred between the eleventh and twelve centuries. That was in Virology Journal in two thousand ten. UH. And they were likely limited outbreaks prior to this, when the pathogen wasn't

fully adapted to humans yet. And then Bruso also points out that there were population issues to consider as well. Um, you know, as the duration of epidemics are influenced by

population density. So again, not only you know, in the wake of the you know, the Neolithic Revolution, we get to the point where we are we are building cities, we are living in closer confines to each other, and we're creating not only the the environments in which a pathogen could leap from one species to another, but also these robust environments in which a pathogen could then spread, you know, massively through a larger human population. Yeah, this

is all interesting and important to consider. So I'm wondering, where does the minotaur come in. Ah, Yes, the minotaur. Uh so there is a minotaur in all of this um and uh. And he sets it up right rather nicely. I think he says, generations of poets, philosophers, and psychologists have interpreted and reinterpreted ancient Greek myths. I will thus take the liberty to add a biological interpretation to this

strange story. So, you know, I think he's being very clear about the fact that he's not making an argument that the minotaur is about um zoonotic diseases. But he's saying, I'm going to take the minotaur and it's a myth, and I am going to use it to make a statement about about this, to to explain something or attempt to explain something about this relationship between animals, humans and

their pathogens. Okay, so it's not like there's actually a good case that zoonotic diseases are literally the historical inspiration of the minotaur myth, but it does work pretty amazingly as a metaphor. Yeah, he does a great job with it. Again, he's a kind of kind of a whimsical writer, especially

in this piece. Okay, let's hear it so point he he you know, relates the minotar myth a bit, but points not only to the minotaur but also to uh, you know, the myth of Zeus in his bull form, seducing the Princess Europa or Europe and taking her to creet where he impregnates her with three sons. One of those three sons is Minos. Uh. Europe's brothers then search the known world for her and uh. And then Brusso

writes this quote. The paths of Europe's brothers recall partly the migrations of the early farmers from the Near East into Europe and North Africa, partly Phoenician colonization. The too close relationship of Mino's wife with a bull leads to a children eating chimera, stretching a bit of the fantasy. I would interpret this monster as the species crossing virulus, derived from the new close contact between cattle and farmer. The labyrinth might be a type of quarantine imposed on

infected subjects. Sir Evans, the excavator of the minoah Crete, suggests that it reflects the plan of the Royal Palace innsis. Some viruses are bovine human cameras like Minotaur, which both ate the young children of the earlier inhabitants of Europe. This myth might thus keep the memory of the hardship following the encounter of the cattle farmers with the hunter gatherers of prehistoric Europe. And then the rest of the article deals primarily with examples of this and discussions of

its import. That's great, I mean, I would say to reiterate, of course, I'm not convinced, and I don't think he's necessarily making the case that actually this was the literal inspiration of the myth, But it is a really awesome metaphor the idea that the introduction of domesticated livestock such as cattle and sheep and stuff into the lives of humans would have these echoes throughout his story that have biological implications. In the myth, they are the biological implications

of creating a hybrid monster. In reality, the biological implications are creating these zoonotic diseases that are in a way a hybrid type being because they jump from one species to another when you're living in close contact long enough. And even though the inspiration of the myth is probably not direct in any way, I mean, I do wonder about a kind of loose, un semi conscious connection in that, Like, isn't there always a sort of quiet, wordless unease about

civilization and its products? And it just shows up again and again every generation, even while we enjoy the fruits of civilization, like we enjoy the stability of food supply and the opportunity for the diversification of labor and all of that, all the stuff we get from a settled urban existence, from agriculture, from technology and so forth, isn't there in every generation a new expression of the feeling that something is kind of wrong with all this, that

there it is somehow perverted or dangerous, even monstrous, and that people should somehow get back to nature in one way or another. Some version of this philosophy is always there. It seems like, yeah, I mean, really, to come back to the the idea of the labyrinth itself and and the other creations of datalists, there's this ide. You know, there's so much of that science fictional energy, that anxiety

concerning technology. Uh in this figure. You know, what if we created something that lifted us up on high but also lead to our destruction? Uh? What if we created something so elegantly designed that it was too confusing for even its creator to escape that sort of thing? Yes, totally. I mean you can look at a million different kinds of technology as essentially the labyrinth, the thing that becomes

so complicated it escapes the intentions of its creator. And uh yeah, I mean an obvious place to look at that would be artificial intelligence. I mean, people off and use the people often use the metaphor of Pandora's box. They're like, are you opening the box? Who knows what what will come out? But the labyrinth is also a pretty good metaphor for for what's happening with AI. Yeah. And and there's always the concern that there will be the minotaur within it as well, the thing that is

not just passively anti human but actively anti human. But I mean it's easy to imagine that kind of thing with AI, because at least AI reaches such a level of complexity that you're imagining it almost as an agent

that you can't control. You know, I think you can even apply this idea of our our perennial anxiety or suspicions about the downsides of of civilization and it's technological products um too too earlier innovations, even things as seemingly simple as agriculture, because in fact agriculture comes with tons of consequences that would not have been predicted by the people who invented. It comes with risk of zoonotic diseases, It comes with changes in diet and how that affects

human life, and a million other things. Oh yeah, I mean, whereas many of the the catastrophic problems that we're dealing with today in our world, are you know, the the end results of this these initial revolutions. But you mentioned Pandora's box earlier. So I want to come back just one more time to Brusso here, because he has this

particularly haunting closing to the paper. And again this is from two thousand nine, in which he considers how modern global environmental changes will lead to another quote highly dynamic phase of viral transmissions into the human population. He writes, quote viruses must be the dark side of the heritage from the Neolithic Revolution to remain. With Greek myths, they might correspond to a half open Pandora's box, a poisoned

gift of the bull god Zeus to mankind. Humans go now into a phase of globalization whose ecological impact might represent a full opening of this cursed box. Man is today a major evolutionary force, and we can safely anticipate that man made environmental changes will lead to a new deal in our relationship with microbes. When the diseases had left the box, the Greek myth told that only hope

remained in the box. Today, we are probably better served with science as our best defense against surprise attacks from the viral Empire UH, than with the principal hope. Got some chills from that. I mean to say nothing against hope. I mean, hope is good, but don't show up with a hope to a science fight. Yeah, Or if you're gonna bring hope in one hand, bring science in the other.

All right, So there you have it. This was episode three of our Journey through the Labyrinth, our consideration of the minotaur UH and the and the myth that it emerges out of the culture, It emerges out of the various ideas that it is still stirring and the human imagination today. Uh, this one is a lot of fun. Yeah, totally, And we have got so much more October stuff for you. We're busting it seems here. Yes, there's so yeah, we we've we've got We've got so many more ideas to go.

I think we even still have a few ideas to come up with. But but it's gonna be a full month of of Halloween related wonder In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, if you want to catch up on our current Halloween offerings, uh, explore our past Halloween offerings, or some of our past myth related episodes, you know, such as our our study of the Medusa from earlier this year. Well, you can find this podcast wherever you

get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just ask that you rate, review, and subscribe. If you want to find us, like really quickly, you can just go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that will take you to the I heart listening for this show. And if you do go there, there's a place you can click on somewhere on that page kind of a labyrinth. Uh. You can click on like store

or merchandise or what have you. That'll take you to our our t shirt store where we have a few different designs with stuff like our logo, maybe a Medusa or to that sort of thing. Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, 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 i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.