From the Vault: The Sacred Mountain, Part 2

direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Comp out among the grasses and the gentians of glacial meadows in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darling's climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves as age comes on. One source of enjoyment after another is closed,

but Nature's sources never fail. I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air and the scenes in which pure air is found. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those quotes we just read were, of course from the great John. You're one of the great priests of the

religion of the Mountains, absolutely a true American hero. I say that without a shred of irony, un important individual in the natural preservation efforts of the United States. And I like these two quotes because he's he's getting into the power and the awe of the mountains. And that first quote, and in that second he's talking about the air of the wilderness. And we're going to be discussing the air of the wildern us in this our second

episode on Sacred Mountains. But I suppose we should we should, of course refer you back to the first episode. If you didn't listen to the first episode on Sacred Mountains, go back. That is the uh important first installment. But let's catch everybody up to speed and what we chatted about last time. Sure, well, last time we talked about holy mountains from religious and cultural beliefs around the world

and common types of beliefs about holy mountains. We talked about the idea of mountains as the homes of the gods or as the bodies of gods themselves, as like entrances to other worlds, as pillars that hold up the heavens, as places of pilgrimage, as places where the gods once were or still dwell or sleep. There's almost an infinite array of ways in which mountains have been religiously significant, and so we talked about some reasons that might be.

Of course, there are things having to do with perspective when one climbs a mountain and looks down at the earth. Uh, there are there. There's just the sheer fact of its size, I mean in a pretty basic sense. Yeah, and just how important natural forms are and are the shaping of our cosmologies in our sense of self. Uh. We discussed like the main points along these lines in the last episode.

We also, though, talked about stories expressed by many mountain climbers, though certainly not only by mountain climbers, of hallucinations during the journey of climbing a mountain, including the very common third man syndrome. Uh. The experience of sensing another person making a journey with you, who in fact is not there right, And it's very often um, I would say, a neutral apparition, Uh, you're help not a beneficial one. So it's not like, oh, my goodness, there's a monster

beside me. It's more like, oh, well, there's uh. I thought I was up here alone climbing this mountain, but there's this this other fella, and that's comforting to know that it's not just me. Yeah. We read a section from an account by the mountaineer Frank Smythe, who wrote of his experiences attempting and failing to summit Mount Everest alone in nineteen thirty three, and he wrote in one section of his account, quote, all the time that I was climbing alone, I had a strong feeling that I

was accompanied by a second person. And then later I remember constantly glancing back over my shoulder. And once, when after reaching my highest point, I stopped to try and eat some mint cake, I carefully divided it and turned around with one half in my hand. It was almost a shock to find no one to whom to give it.

And of course there are also plenty of much more recent reports to the same thing, people having strange experiences, delusions, hallucinations, or at least apparently to you know, modern skeptical thinkers, hallucinations. It's very possible if people had these experiences in the ancient world, or if they're just less skeptically minded, they might think, you know, this was a real presence with

me on the mountain. There was something super natural happening up there, right, there was something revolting about my mint cake that drove the spirit away. Now, it's clear that very high altitudes can have a number of health effects that could have neurological and psychological implications. These are generally thought to be caused by the lower air pressure at higher altitudes. This is understood to be the major cause. Though I think it's worth emphasizing that there are things

that are still not fully understood about altitude sickness. Absolutely, and you know, there's a whole They've been numerous studies over the years about individuals who are climatized to a high altitude environments. Uh, that's something we could potentially come back into an entire episode on. Yeah. But I think one of the interesting things about altitude sickness that we still don't fully understand is why it affects different people

so differently. Like you can't always predict whether a person will experience altitude sickness at a certain altitude, so the generally understood major cause of altitude sickness seems to be the lower air pressure means less oxygen is compressed in the atmosphere because you're up higher, so there's less atmosphere sitting on the area you're breathing, right, And it was

an idea that we initially explored in the under pressure episode. Yes, and so this means you literally get less oxygen with each breath, and of course you need oxygen to survive. If you're getting less of it with each breath you take, you can begin to suffer negative consequences in the body and the brain. And meanwhile, you are perhaps climbing a mountain. Yeah, so you're exerting yourself anyway, but it can happen even

without exertion. That that's important to note. And exactly what altitude it sets in varies a good bit from person to person, Like we were just talking about, a reasonable figure at which a significant percent of people will display symptoms is sometimes cited to be eight thousand feet or but for each individual person, it's a toss up. You individually might be affected at a lower altitude or a higher altitude. It's it's hard to know for sure. If

you haven't been there before. Um, it's usually said to be worse if you ascend quickly and don't give your body time to adapt to lower air pressure at higher altitude. So that is one thing. If you're expecting to be like hiking at a high altitude, it's good to give yourself time to hang out at high altitude without exerting yourself. First, always be wary if you're aboard the starship Enterprise and you teleport down to a mountaintop, teleport to the lower

mountain area first. Yeah, base camps are still important, guys. But some common symptoms of like mild to moderate altitude sickness would be the kinds of things you would first of all, the kinds of things you would expect with less access to oxygen. So maybe shortness of breath, breathing harder with less physical exertion, uh, faster heart rate. You know your heart's beating hard, is trying to oxygenate your tissues. You're just not getting enough oxygen in each breath, and

so you know you'd expect those kind of things. But also you can experience nausea, dizziness, or lightheadedness, and it can mess with your natural drives such as for sleep and for food, So you can have loss of appetite, headache and that kind of thing. In much more severe cases of altitude sickness, you can have changes in the color of the skin, You can have tightness in the chest. You can have mental effects like you know, a loss of a loss of awareness, loss of coherence, or confusion.

There can even be coughing up of blood or loss of consciousness. And there there are subsequent life threatening conditions that can come out of altitude sickness. One is known as high altitude pulmonary a demo or hape h ape, where altitude sickness leads to a build up of fluid in the lungs. This, if you experience it, is life

threatening and you should act on this immediately. Another is high altitude cerebral ademo or hat, when altitude sickness leads to swelling of the brain, which is very dangerous and of course can cause all kinds of mental disturbances. And so obviously one question we might have is if people often report seeing things that aren't there in the mountains, to what extent can these be traced to known psychological

or not psychological, known physiological conditions like cerebral dima. He absolutely and and as we mentioned in the last episode, you know, we're not looking at this is like this the soul uh cause or the soul um reason that one has mountain myths, but it could certainly a potential

uh thing that augments them or feeds them in some cases. No, as we mentioned previously in the other episodes, there's no way that say, psychological disturbances as a result of you know, less oxygen reaching the brain or something like that could explain all the myths. So one reason for that is that many holy mountains aren't high enough to cause any altitude related symptoms. I mean, there are holy mountains that

are just a few hundred meters high. So it's obvious that you know, these are these are geographical landmarks and they serve you know, they represent things to people. Doesn't have to be that somebody went up on there and had a hallucination that caused them to found a religion

or a myth around the mountain. Though, we do want to point out that it's possible that in higher mountains, people going up into these altitudes could have contributed to beliefs, you know, strange supernatural beliefs about some mountains, right, and or the idea that in general, mountains provide some sort of uh, you know, loosening of the veil between this world and the next. Yeah, that's a great way to

put it. So I want to call attention to one recent paper, in particular in the journal Psychological Medicine that deals with these phenomena of people high up in the

mountains having strange and anomalous experiences. This was by Katerina Hoofner at All called isolated Psychosis during Exposure to very high and extreme altitude Characterization of a new medical entity, and this was published in So the authors here have examined about eighty three documented cases among reports from alpine expeditions, and they believe they've identified a new independent condition that's separate from altitude sickness and separate from any existing mental disorder.

It's called isolated high altitude psychosis. Now, of course, psychosis is a set of symptoms and luty, I have, right, wait, what you can call it? I have? I have, I have. Oh, I didn't even think about an acronym I have. Yeah, this is I have the International House of Psychosis. Yeah, psychosis is a set of symptoms including quote hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, abnormal psychomotor behavior, and negative symptoms, and additionally

impaired cognition, depression, and mania. So it's characteristic of of underlying conditions like schizophrenia, but can also occur in isolation due to a number of inciting stressors. You know. One of the things is people often think that hallucinations can only occur if somebody has an underlying mental illness, but people who don't have an underlying mental illness sometimes experienced hallucinations just depending on like fleeting, stresses and things that

are affecting them. Oh yeah, absolutely. Um. Oliver Sachs's book Hallucinations is always a fabulous source on all of this because he you know, he discusses hallucinogens a little bit in there, but but for the most part, it's it's

all these various other causes are in play, right. So the authors examined a list of documented cases of mountaineering, and they looked for signs of high altitude psychosis, and then they cross reference this to see whether there were always concurrent symptoms of physiological distress from high altitudes, such as high altitude cerebral a demo or hey. Obviously you can see why if the brain is swelling with fluid,

that might cause things like hallucinations and mental disturbances. So from previous studies, we know that how often psychosis occurs at high altitude seems to vary a lot depending on who's doing the counting and what criteria they use. So this is un fortunately a case where the numbers are not very solid. They seem to be all over the place, like Woo at All in two thousand six found that there were hallucinations in three percent of cases, with Hace.

Wilson at All in two thousand nine reported hallucinations in thirty two percent of climbers above seven thousand, five hundred meters, which is a totally different criterion than the last thing, obviously, so we're not going apple stapples here. We're just seeing what there is to to see about hallucinations at altitude.

Brewger at All in n quote found hallucinatory experiences in seven of eight, or eighty eight percent of world class climbers who reached altitudes above eight thousand, five hundred meters without supplementary oxygen. Obviously, this is a pretty wild fluctuation, and I don't know for sure, but I guess the discrepancy here has to do with the methods they're using

to select cases in these different studies. Right, you'd probably get very different numbers if you just check to see if climbers self reports psychosis versus say, proactively asking them if they've had psychosis. Yeah, this is one of those spreads of numbers that you know brings to mind the whole, Like, you know, it just depends on how you torture the numbers, what kind of story you're going to get out of

them exactly. I mean, I think one of the problems here is that we don't have anything consistent to work with going into the study. So so they had to try to come up with with the method of their own, and they know it's not perfect, but it's just to sort of get a rough idea of where to start looking at this problem. So in the present study, the authors found first of all, that psychosis of some kind

often happens when you're at high altitude. Their sample, which they did from consulting existing literature, yielded a result that found quote hallucinations occurred in forty two percent or thirty five out of eighty three of the episodes that they surveyed at a mean altitude of seven thousand, two hundred and eighty meters, and of these episodes, thirty four percent or twelve out of thirty five. Uh. The hallucinations occurred at the same time that there are signs that the

person had a cerebral demo or HACE. They determined that high altitude psychosis can happen together with HACE or with other physiological effects, or without them. Therefore, they concluded that isolated high altitude psychosis or eyehap your coining should be considered an independent psychological condition related to high altitude and not just as a possible symptom of altitude sickness. And finally, they concluded that high altitude psychosis is associated with an

increased risk of accidents or near accidents. That's kind of not surprising. Uh. Now they propose some hypothetical causes for these non HACE cases of high altitude psychosis. One would be like social and sensory deprivation in conjunction with psychological stress. Stress is often a common inciting factor for people who

don't otherwise have him into illness to have hallucinations. Right, and then, of course, it's so varied depending on how much stress an individual is going to have in a given circumstance, and then how that stress is affecting their performance and their mental capacity. Yeah, and then you add social and sensory deprivation to that. They don't have anybody else there to talk to if their climbing alone, or

or they have limited numbers of people there with them. Uh, their view of the world, you know, there might be a lot less like color and stuff than they'd normally be seeing. Another potential, uh cause they site is quote dysfunction of the temporal parietal junction and angular gyrus due to hypoxia, hypoglycemia and cold. And then finally they say, well, another possibility is just that HACE is going on in these cases and somehow it's being under diagnosed in the field.

Maybe a lot of these people experiencing psychosis do have hate and just for some reason, the normal symptoms are not showing up and being recorded. This is I mean especially true if you're going it alone, right or or even if you you have a climbing partner like you you may not I guess be having um just a regular check in a about your your your your feelings

of physical and mental health. Yeah, and of course cerebral adema is like that, that's really dangerous, you know, like if if you have this, you should be getting treated for it. That's not like a time to say, Okay, I'll just power through and try going up to the summit. Now, this is interesting going back to what Frank Smith and the others have talked about with with their experience of

what's known as third Man syndrome. The authors here found that when climbers reported perceptual disturbances of various kinds, the majority, though not all of them, but the majority of them were either neutral or even helpful and comforting. For example, a hallucinated climbing companion who protects and guides them, or

a voice encouraging them or warning them of danger. Now, just because the majority of these perceptual disturbances and hallucinations are positive in nature or at least neutral, doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about them. Since hallucinations high altitude seemed correlated with a risk of accidents, it's not hard to

see why that would be. Climbers at high altitude should be aware that psychosis is very possible and should develop defensive strategies for what happens if it sets in if you think you see somebody that you don't remember being there. Otherwise you should have like procedures in place for that, like reality testing. Now, on the other hand, about the study, obviously there appears to be some weakness in the selection

criteria for cases. But I guess in this kind of study you're limited by the fact that you can't just stick people, you know, random test subjects at the top of a mountain and see if they undergo psychosis. Uh, they're they're Also the authors point out there is survivor bias at play, right, We're hearing the stories of people who were able to report their stories, some people who did not succumb on the mountain or experience some sort of a fatal accident, or didn't have somebody with them

who got to report what happened. Yeah, they say, for future studies, you you could perhaps simulate some conditions like this in chambers that simulate altitude with low oxygen or low atmospheric pressure. Also, you don't need to have a huge or hugely random number of cases if you just want to establish that sometimes people report psychosis at high altitudes. With no record of altitude sickness or cute sickness like

he s now. We mentioned already that that one of the other factors here is that not all sacred mountains are enormous skyscraping um uh, you know, monuments to the sky God, right, not all. Most sacred mountains are probably not even tall enough for people to be reaching the same kinds of altitudes that are in this study, though

some are. The authors your point out that most of these reports of symptoms reminiscent of psychosis among mountain climbers come from very high and extreme altitudes, so like thirty five to fifty meters or even above. So there're gonna be tons of holy mountains around the world that that

do not even reach these altitudes. Nobody could could climb high enough to be at the altitudes like the ones being studied in this in this research, so i'd say whether the physiological or psychological effects of altitude contribute to these types of religious beliefs in some cases, especially at higher peaks, It's hard to know for sure, but absolutely

it seems possible and even attempting. Origin story for some holy mountains and sacred peaks around the world yeah, one thing, and I may come back to this, the whole idea that most of these reported cases of another of this uh you know, this third man or what have you, is going to be neutral or beneficial. And indeed, when we look at all these different myths about holy mountains, um is, so many of them are about like the gods living there um. Like I wanted to find more

mountain monsters. I truly did. I'm always looking for the monsters. And not to say there are not mountain monsters, certainly there um. There are traditions of things coming down from the mountains, crampits, etcetera. But it kind of seems like they're they're weighted in favor of at least the neutral deities, neutral spirits and what have you, uh, and and even beneficial beings as opposed to the monsters of say um Mount doom Um or the lonely mountain. And Tolkien, well,

maybe we can. We will explore mountain monsters a little bit today, but maybe we can explore it more in the future. I'm just now I didn't think about this when we were preparing, but I just now remembered the mountain trolls of Iceland. Oh, that's right. All right. Well, on that note, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll look at another study and we'll move on to a particular mountain creature that, yes, you might qualify,

you might describe as a monster. Thank, alright, we're back, all right, what have we gotten next to? Robert? All right? So I was looking at a study this is one that you found. Then I ended up diving into it. This was yeah, yeah, yeah, I was interested. I didn't know about this one because it seemed like some of them. Well, well, you describe it and then we can discuss. Ok. Yeah. This one was titled why revel Lations have occurred on

Mountains Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. This was published in Medical Hypotheses from Autoto back It Old Land, SIB and blank ep quote. Here's a quote from the piece. Quote. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings, we suggest that exposure to altitudes might

contribute to the induction of revelation. Experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor and religion. So they're really going for it on this one, and they point to the major revelations in the three major monotheistic religions. Uh. In Judaism, the burning bush uh this is where God speaks through the burning bush. This is from Exodus. Christianity, there's the transfiguration from the Book of Math to you. This is a in which Jesus's divine nature is revealed

to onlookers. And then in Islam there's also the point where Allah speaks to the prophet Muhammad, and that is also like a mountain revelation. Now, one of the problems here is getting into the idea of insufficient altitudes, right Yeah. So I'd seen the study brought up on a science blog somewhere, and I thought, um, it was interesting because

it's touching on this question we're asking. But I saw it in the context of it being ridiculed because the main mountains that it's talking about aren't really that hot, you know, So they're not like super high mountains that would be likely to cause altitude sickness, right right, Yeah, they're not dealing with him. Alayan peaks here, right, Um, this is what the paper says though about the idea

of moderate altitudes. They said, although the revelations discussed here had occurred in moderate altitudes, it may be assumed that in subjects who are prone to mystical experiences, already moderate altitudes are sufficient to trigger revelation like experiences and revelations. So the argument here, then, I guess is, is, first of all, you know, not not everyone's gonna have the same reaction to high altitude like we've discussed, and that

even moderate high altitude they're arguing, could be sufficient. Potentially, this is one of those more research needed areas, but it could be enough to push people's minds toward mystical experiences, especially if those minds are already uh susceptible to say, hallucination to voices or to the experience of the supernatural.

And then the the the remembrance of supernatural experience. You know, it's funny that they focus on like the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, because in the last episode, you remember, we had a discussion about how it seems to me that um that actually sacred geography plays less of a role in the Abrahamic religions than it does in many other

religions around the world. Whereas in in the Abrahamic religions, it seems that when a place is wholly, it's usually because the idea something important happened there, whereas in many other religions around the world, the place itself has some religious significance. The the land itself, the mountain is the home of the gods, or is the body of a God, or is sacred in its own right, and not just

because of something that happened there. Right, you know, I don't imagine there could be this is room for a lot of theological discussion, uh, you know, in each of these three religions. But but yeah, but all three of these even as we as we were mentioning them, uh, we were mentioning the event they were mentioning in the paper, the event that took place, the meeting of of an individual in the divine, for instance, in the case of

the the uh the Jewish and Islamic examples. So at this point I want to turn to um a particular mountain entity because I think it lines up with some of what uh we were just discussing here, and that's that entity, is the yetti everybody's favorite cooler. No, not the cooler. I mean unless the cooler has an actual Yeti in it. That'd be a good trick for discovered one. What was it the Was there somebody in Georgia who claimed they had a big foot and like a beer

cooler and it was like a freezer? Right? Yeah, it was a whole the whole thing about ten or eleven years ago. Yeah. I remember it well because for one fleeting second it made me wonder, are we about to know that there is a sasquatch? And of course that turned out to not be the case. It's like a costume or something. Right now, the yetie in modern Western culture, it has become just kind of a Himalayan variant of

the sasquatch. You know, if I say yetie, you may just picture a big foot or skunk gape, whatever the regional variation of this creature is. And I do think that is important as we're moving forward to to think about the fact that there are variations of the wild man uh being in various cultures. Basically like a bipedal creature covered in hair that is seen all around the world, but has distinct origins in each case, right right, Yes,

But I was looking. I wanted to get a little like a better snapshot of the this ape like beast um as far as like Himalayan traditions go. So I ran across a very very insightful piece titled Boutanese Tales of the Yettie by Kunzang Codin. Tales of the creature exist through the Himalayan region, and uh. The author points to the different names that are given to this entity. So into Tibet, there's gangs Me or glacier man. There's me Champo or strong man, and meet chin Po or

great man Um. The sherpas Uh called it Yetie. The lep Shaws call it chew moon or snow goblin. I like that one, or Hello Moon or mountain goblin. And Nepaul there's Nilemu or Banmanchi. He didn't provide a translation translation for those, but I'm assuming some treatment on these various ideas, you know. Uh. And then the mutiniese say, me goy or strongman are also gred po. So you know, we get this idea of something like figure of of savage cold strength with possible. Um, you know, Goblin e

qualities as well. So Childen writes that the megy idea here it dates back to the pre Buddhist Bond writings. The UH is the pre Buddhist animist religion. I believe we mentioned this briefly in the last episode. Yeah, the

indigenous religion of Tibet. It came up because Mount Kai Loosh or Mount Kailassa in UH in the Himalayas is a peak that is holy, not just to Hindus who believe uh, some of whom believe that the Lord Shiva and Parvati dwell on top of Mount Kailash, but it's also holly to some Buddhists, chains and members of the Bond religion, the Tibetan indigenous religion and uh and apparently some Bond rituals call for the blood of Amigoy slain with a sharp weapon. Whoa, yeah, so yeah, so this

is a pre existing idea. But then you get some Westerners involved, right, and then you get this idea exported and uh and and reignited in the Western mind. Uh. So British traveler William Hugh, Knight of the Royals, the Royal Society's club recorded a Yeti siding in nineteen o three on his way back to India from Tibet. And then there was another siding in eighteen twenty five by a Westerner by a Greek zoologist in a Tombazi, who

described it like this. Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull. It's some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow, and as far as I could make out, wore no cloth. And then later you had print sightings and UH and so forth in the nineteen fifties that helped popularize the idea of the

Yeti in the West. UM various films UH. Certainly television series like In Search Of helped to contribute to this idea, and today the interest interest in the Yetti continues, but there remains no proof that the creature exists. In fact, examination of preserved evidence of Yetti's tends to lean toward the intentional or accidental misinterpretation of of another animal or its handiwork. So DNA work from the past few years, for instance, points duh you know directly to at Asian

bears as the source of the samples. So in all of this and any anytime we're talking about a YETI sighting,

even in like the Himalayan region. You know, we can't discount hoaxes and various other reasons, but we when we consider the potential effects of hypoxia and uh and and these other like high altitude situations, which all I think in some degree or related to hypox Yeah, you know, we we might be talking more of a full blown hallucination and then it lower altitudes, the effect could just be enough to make the individual you know, see what they want to see when they glimpse a normal animal

or another human being. So I found this idea of first of all, there is I did see this idea echoed in um Searching for the Yetty Mysterious Monsters two thousand fourteen, book by General for Rithkin. Now this is a kid's book. I want to be about this. So you normally we don't cite a lot of of of of kids book, but this one was. Actually I was reading through it. It's pretty good. Uh. It seems to to to balance the sort of mystical what if with

a lot of legitimate skepticism. Uh. And then also I did see this idea also echoed in a couple of journals and books such as High Altitude Medical Science by you Dah Kushma and Vocal. And I think there is a lot of you know, there a lot of similarities between, for instance, that that yetty account that I read earlier and accounts of a third man right like here there was some other creature there and uh, you know, it wasn't human, but it was. It was hanging out, it

was there. I glimpsed it. And then once you have this and and this is of course on top of a pre existing idea of there being some sort of a yetty creature in the mountains. Uh. And then once this idea gets becomes a part of of Western culture as well, then there's more room to misinterpret the the

evidence or even uh, your senses. Now, I wonder if the if like a psychological thing kind of like the the climbing companion, the third man syndrome is going on here, what do you think it might be that would cause people to see a bipedal human like creature covered in hair as opposed to seeing you know, another just another human dress like them or to seeing like a dead relative or something, you know, one of these common hallucinations

of comforting figures. Well, on the hair thing, I think certainly of one glimpse to bear that could throw you off. I mean, if you've ever seen a bear in the in the flesh, you know it can be this weird, surreal and frightening experience. I mean, hopefully a little frightening, because as far as I'm concerned, if you encounter a bear and you don't have like a certain amount of fear that you're doing it wrong. Oh, I think there are good reasons why we see bears as objects of

prehistoric religions. I mean, I think it's quite clear that that bear worship in various forms goes back a long way. That's one of those where it's kind of obvious why that would happen. Is this kind of like too many people. The bear would clearly seem to be like the king of nature. Yeah, this base that can also rise up on two legs and stand like us, that is seemingly slow and lethargic, but then full of inner g and ferocity. That also we got into this in our Winter People

episode a couple of years back. A creature than in some cases uh digs its own grave and seems to die and then re emerge with life in the spring. Yeah. Yeah, it does seem quite mystical. You can totally see why bear would be a thing that you would be, you know, afraid to speak its name, speak it's it's dangerous holy name. And uh and why if you saw one out in the wild, yeah, you you might think you'd had some

kind of other worldly encounter. All right, Well, on that note, let's leave the jettie and take one more break and we come back. We'll continue to discuss the topic. Thank you, all right, we're back. Now. We've been discussing our records of delusions, hallucinations and other just various strange sightings and encounters that seem to occur often at high altitude. Some possible explanations for what might be going on physiologically, neurologically,

psychologically there, but we're gonna continue with this now. Yeah. So really a couple of other just to examples of not mountain climbers, but individuals encountering some sort of phantom stranger. Well, there was a case of uh, Sir Ernest Shackleton, um he uh uh he encountered such an apparition. Also, Antarctic explore Peter Hillary Um actually encountered a presence that manifested as the double of his dead mother. Oh yeah, the

whole ancestors appearing. Yeah, which which is important to to think think of when when we're thinking about the mountains as a potential, uh you know, place where one can encounter the spirits of the departed. Um. So, as I was reading around about about this, I ran across a Scientific American article from on the since presence effect. And this was from Michael Schermer, always a great source to turn to four discussions of paranormal experiences because he is

an individual who has has had paranormal experience. I didn't know. Yeah, it was, if I am remembering correctly, it was like a like a cycling marathon he was on. It was, you know, it was like a strenuous exercise and then he ended up like seeing an alien. But it was because of like something he'd been watching previously. He's written

about it um quite a bit. But you know, applying the skeptical mindset and then understanding how hallucinations occur, uh, you know, how we think about the hallucinations after they occur. Takes all of this into account. So um he he touched on all of this, and he pointed to four or so scientific explanations. Uh. That that that, he says, really really get to the heart of what's going on when when people like this encounter um uh some sort

of spectral apparition or a third man, et cetera. First of all, isolation triggers the mind to hallucinate the normal feeling we get when we're working or traveling among other people, which seems to be a standard here. Uh. Then the rational cortical control over emotions shuts down due to oxygen deprivation, sleep deprivation, or exhaustion, and this opens the door for inner voices and imaginary companions. Next, he says, are temporal

low body schema. This is the brain's image of our body and what it's doing is tricked into thinking you have a double, um, and ever up for a game of rationalization and story making. The brain then constructs a plausible explanation for this double's presence, like there's another person. Uh, there's another human being that's covered in furs. Uh and they're next to me. Oh, well, I guess that is

another mountain climber. Likewise, though, I could see where this would be exactly the kind of thing that could be misinterpreted as a yetty, right, because if you're climbing a mountain in the Himalayas, you're probably bundled up head to toe. You probably don't look like a low altitude human anymore. Then there's the mind schema. This is our psychological sense of self, and it's simply coordinating independent neural networks to

solve the problem with survival and extreme situations. And the hallucination comes out of its function of making us feel like we're a single mind. Ah yeah, uh. But then oh, on the on the sleep deprivation, uh situation. He uh.

He points to Charles A. Lindbergh's Transatlantic flight UM and Shermer quotes his writings, quote, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences, vaguely outlined forms, transparent moving writing, waitless with me in this plane, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving

me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life. UM. Shermer also shared that his own brother in law, man by the him of Fred zeal Or Zile experienced a sense presence on both of his everest climbs. The first case involved frostbite and the lack of oxygen, and the second

entailed his collapse from dehydration and hypoxia. Quote telling Lee, when I asked his opinion as a medical doctor, impossible hemispheric differences to account for such phenomena, Fred noted both times the sense was on my right side, perhaps related to my being left handed. The sense presence maybe the left hemisphere interpreter's explanation for right hemisphere anomali. Oh, this takes us back to our split brain episodes. That the idea of the the interpreter. Now normally this would be

the left hemisphere interpreter. This Michael Gazaniga's idea of the interpreter being this function in the brain that sort of ties together disparate neural phenomena into one experience that that we sense as a single, unified whole and sort of tells a story that makes it all part of the same game. Where in fact, you know, the hemispheres, as was shown in the split brain experiments, can behave quite

independently of one another. Yeah, but but we've got this thing that Gazaniga calls the interpreter that says, no, no, no, that's all you. It's just you. So two things come to mind and discussing all of this. First of all, is I'm all anytime we discuss altitudes and pressure, I'm reminded of the fact that human beings are not a creature that evolved to thrive on the Earth. They're they're a creature that that evolved to thrive in a very thin atmospheric layer on the Earth, and and then only

within certain ranges. And when we get out of those ranges, when we get out of there are layer that we we thrive in, we can run into problems. The other thing I'm reminded of is, Joe, have you ever been to a like a children's musical performance, preferably a band or an orchestra. I've been in that performance. I've been to one too. So you know how ideally if everybody's doing doing their job and the you know, the conductor's

pulling it all together, Uh, there's a unity. You know, they're performing this this piece sometimes, but in other cases things kind of drift and fall apart, and I feel like that's kind of what's what's being described here at at high out too, Like the the the orchestral performance that is our mind state is is drifting a little bit. It is like it is. It's it's not so much, you know, a professional level of performance anymore. It is a middle school band performance. And things are getting out

of sync, things are getting out of whack. And then what does that mean when we are the performance. That's a really good analogy because in that case, I mean, when you've got Even if Gazanga's interpreter theory is not exactly right there, there clearly is a way in which the mind, that the human brain is performing itself for an audience of itself, like you in a way are

the audience of what your brain is doing. And so you're there watching how the show is going, and if the show is not going right, you you are sensing it, even though you are also the thing that's messing up. All right. So I'm not a mountain climber, I'm not

a mountaineer. I've visited mountains. I've had I think I discussed like maybe a very limited reaction to an increase in altitude that was slightly noteworthy, But I know we have to have some mountaineers out there who are listening to the to these episodes or our listeners regular listeners to the podcast, so we would obviously love to hear about your experiences at how high altitude? Have have you ever experienced anything like what we were discussing here, or

have you simply have you never experienced it? Or or perhaps you can just speak to the awe and majesty of the mountains. Perhaps you've visited some of the sacred mountains that we mentioned in the first episode, and you have a particular favorite you wanted to discuss. We'd love

to hear from you. Another question I have is, so outside of Lord of the Rings, outside of skeletor Snake Mountain and Masters of the Universe and the Traveling Mountain, Fortress of the Beast and crull Um, are there evil mountains in mythologies and folklore that we uh we neglected to mention because I was I was looking around for him, and I, like I say, the mountains tend to be uh you know, part of just a sacred ecosystem of sacred geography, or you know, their home to various beings.

But like this idea of there being like a mountain doom, a place of of evil, you know, or or or a place that has been occupied solely by an evil force. I just didn't see as much of that, like, aside from a few mountain trolls and a few crampuses here and there, um, and certainly a few things that could maybe be classified as monsters that are thriving amid other magical creatures and spirits. That's say, Kunlan Mountain. Uh, you know, what are some potential examples here? I don't know. That's

a good question. I'm sure there must be mountains that are believed to be Hell or something like that, a place of evil gods and that our physical mountains on Earth, But I didn't. I don't think I came across any. So bring us your monsters, is what I'm saying. Bring them unto us so that we might see them and consider them. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's the mother ship. That's where we find all the episodes. You find links out to social media, and hey, if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is to rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. Rate, review, leave us some stars. Leave us a nice comment. Really helps out the algorithm and helps spread the word about the show. Totally huge, thanks as always to our excellent audio producers

Alex Williams and Tary Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode, or 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 a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows at the busy point four four four four Foo