Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it is Saturday. That means it is time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published August second, twenty twenty two, and it is part one of our series on whistling, a surprisingly interesting subject.
All right, let's dive right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be kicking off a multi part series about whistling. This is one of those topics I hope in classic Stuff to Blow Your Mind fashion, we will be able to really surprise you how much weird and interesting stuff there is to learn about whistling around the world.
That's right, I mean, we will make it weird. We will know ard in episode one, so strap in.
Yeah. So, one of the first things that I wanted to talk about, and I think this is something we'll have to revisit in multiple parts of the series, is the idea of whistled languages much to my surprise after reading about the subject, there are multiple examples from around the globe of whistled languages, or at least whistled alternate versions of an existing spoken language. And so to kick us off, I wanted to talk about one particular example
of a whistled language. I was reading about this in a classic linguistics paper from nineteen forty eight by George M. Cowen called Masteco Whistle Speech. This was published in the journal Language in nineteen forty eight. It's by this scholar named George M. Cowen who lived nineteen sixteen through twenty seventeen. He was an expert linguistics. He was associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and apparently this paper is one
of his most important contributions to the field. So it's an article documenting this fascinating type of communication practiced by the Mazatec people living in Wahaca, Mexico. So what we're talking about here is an alternate form of the Mazteko
language that is based entirely on whistles. Cowen writes that as of the nineteen forty Mexican census, there were approximately sixty thousand people in the Mazatec tribe, and almost fifty six thousand of them were monolingual speakers of the Mezateecan languages. The Maztecan languages are part of what Kawen here calls the Popo Loca Mezteko language family, so part of a
broader association of languages found in this area. So Cowen spent several winters in the nineteen forties living among speakers of the Meztecan languge, which is to document these languages and eventually the whistle speech. And I want to begin by reading an anecdote that he just observed during his time there. Quote Usabio Martinez was observed one day standing in front of his hut whistling to a man a
considerable distance away. The man was passing on the trail below, going to market to sell a load of corn leaves, which he was carrying. The man answered Ucabio's whistle with a whistle. The interchange was repeated several times with different whistles. Finally the man turned around, retraced his steps a short way, and came up the footpath to Ucbo's hut. Without saying a word. He dumped his load on the ground. Usebio looked the load over, went into his hut, returned with
some money, and paid the man his price. The man turned and left. Not a word had been spoken. They had talked, bargained over the price, and come to an agreement satisfactory to both parties, using only whistles as a medium of communication, and this is not an isolated incident. The author here writes that the Mazateec people frequently hold entire conversations and express an extremely broad and versatile set
of ideas, all using whistles. As he puts it, quote, the Masteco is frequently converse by whistling to one another. The whistles are not merely signals with limited semantic value, arrived at by common agreement, but are parallel to spoken
conversations as a means of communication. And so to try to elucidate that a little bit, what this means is that the whistle speech is not a code like you may have heard, you may have seen in movies, I don't know, like soldiers crawling around and they sort of like whistle codes at each other, and you get the idea that maybe they've agreed on a handful of whistled signals in advance, like you know that one whistle means
a stop, another one means go forward. But there's probably a very limited array of those whistles, and you had to work on agreeing to them beforehand.
Right, right. Also in contrast to how the sort of every day in our world you will encounter, you know, a handful of uses of whistles that have sort of agreed upon meaning sort of a whistle that is an attention graber, a whistle that might be a little more scandalous, and then a whistle that is it seems to say say whoa, like that's a big truck something of that nature. But it's not really, it's nothing at all like a
robust language of whistles. It's just a few basic whistle signals that seem to be commonly used.
Yeah, that's right, I would say, Like in the standard American English speaking context, there are a few sort of significant whistles. You basically know what they mean when you hear them, but there's only a handful of them, and you certainly can't make sentences out of them, right. Exactly the opposite is true of the mesatago whistle speech. This is a full equivalent to the stand and spoken Mesteko language.
The whistles can be recorded and translated by anybody familiar with the whistle speech, producing the same specific translations with a couple of certain kinds of ambiguities. I'll get into that later. So it's not a kind of loose suggestive code. It's not something that has to be agreed on ahead of time. It's just an equivalent of a spoken language with all the freedom of degrees of expression and lexical
richness found in the spoken language. And I thought this was just amazing, So I guess I want to explore a few more things. The Cowan documents that he observed about the whistle speech during his time in Wahaka in the nineteen forties. So he says also that the Mezteko people use the whistle signals when communicating with animals. For example, there's a sort of slow upgliding whistle to keep burrows moving when on the trail, or whistles to call out
to dogs. But these whistles don't have a translatable language equivalent. So there is whistling that is language. But then there's also a whole set of like whistle sounds that are useful day to day, but are not words.
Yeah. They just if they were to be translated, they'd be like.
Hey, yeah, or keep walking, keep going another thing. Not everybody whistles, and not everybody who whistles whistles the same amount. Cowan writes that while everyone seems to have listening fluency with the whistled speech, generally only men whistle, and especially men between the ages of boyhood and middle age. So he says old men rarely whistle conversationally. It seems to fade out over the lifespan, and women and girls understand what is whistled by the men and boys, but usually
do not whistle themselves. So he talks about observing a bunch of interactions where like a boy would whistle something to a girl his age, and the girl would reply with spoken language, so she understands the whistles, but she doesn't use them herself. He even talks about one specific example of like a boy teasing a girl and he didn't realize what was happening because he just observed the
boy whistling. He didn't realize it was speech, and suddenly the girl lashed out and hit the boy with the broom Because of what he'd been saying to her, except he hadn't been using the spoken language.
Interesting, Okay, so with the former we have perhaps a physical reason for the limit, but possibly cultural, and then the second one seems to be definitely cultural.
Yeah, I don't know if there's like a biological limitation on older men whistling either. I mean, it seems like this is probably all cultural convention.
Yeah. I think with older men, based on what I've been reading, it would be it would be kind of a case to case situation. You certainly have older gentlemen who are profound whistlers, but there are there are certainly cases even in younger people where if there changes to one's mouth due to injury, due to just changes in dental health, then that could impact one's ability to whistle.
Well, So a big question here would be why. I mean, this is an interesting and beautiful thing about this language that it has the you know, the spoken language and then it's whistled twin, But like, what would cause a whistled version of a language to develop like this? And I think one good way to get some insight into that is to look at what are the common occasions for people to use the whistled version of their language instead of the spoken version, and one of the big
answers here is pretty clear. The author here says that the most frequent use of the whistle speech was observed when the speakers were at a distance from each other. He writes quote, Men scattered widely over a mountainside, each working in his own plot of ground, will often talk to one another with whistles. Travelers on the trails will keep in touch with one another by whistling, though separated
by considerable distance. When wishing to call or get the attention of someone, even though he be within easy speaking distance, the mastacos will often whistle his name. The village shoemaker often calls passers by into his shop with a whistle to chat with him while he works. A man may come to a friend's hut on a visit. While approaching, or when he has actually arrived at the door of the hut, he will frequently whistle rather than call his
friend's name. If the friend is home, he may respond from within with a whistle, then come out to greet his visitor, or he may remain inside and whistle to his visitor to come in. Fascinating Okay, so communicating at a distance seems to be a big one, or also initiating communication at the start of an encounter, which I think is interesting that even when we're not at a distance, we often use language that we employ at a distance, like to get some in a spoken language, to get
somebody's attention from far away, what do you do? You yell hey at them? But also what do you do when you walk up and see somebody you know, you're two feet away from them? You say, oh hey?
And there might be some sort of a wave or something in there as well, And I could I can imagine, I don't know if this is sure, I can imagine where if whistling could maybe take the place of some of the otherwise necessary waving or gesticulating that would be required to sort of get somebody's attention and say, hey, here, I am, there you are, let's.
Converse, right. So okay, So you got communicating at a distance, You've got initiating communication at the start of a meeting. And then along the same lines, he writes here that the whistle is sometimes used as a warning, such as when someone unknown is seen approaching on the trail, you kind of whistle to let all of your friends nearby know that something's up, you know, to get their attention.
Though again he says the most common occation is talking at a distance, and he writes that in these cases, men working in the field seem to be able to communicate easily with people a full quarter of a mile away, like on the opposite mountain side, using the whistle speech. But also, and I found this next part really interesting.
Count says that sometimes, especially boys will hold a whistle conversation if they're trying to talk while older people are also nearby carrying on a spoken conversation or even singing together. And he calls these sort of simultaneous whistled conversations subdued whistles and says that they're quite audible, and yet they are able to happen simultaneously without seeming to much interfere with the spoken conversation of the adults. And I don't
know that one seems really interesting to me. I mean, it reminds me of of being a kid and wanting to talk to other kids while I don't know, while you're in class or something, when you're not supposed to be doing that, and there's just an obvious sort of clash between two sets of spoken words going on at the same time, and this gets the ire of the adults, not only because you're not paying attention, but because you're distracting others. Yet somehow I could imagine that, Yeah, maybe
having like a different form of the language. If you're speaking your language based on whistles instead of the normal of phonetic syllables, that could allow a kind of simultaneity without so much conflict.
Yeah, a way to speak while the adults are speaking, without interfering with what they're doing. Now, the example of using the whistles to communicate, say, in the case of a path, you're in the woods, someone's coming. That reminds me that And I'm making an assumption here, but if one were to say, Hey, Carl, there's somebody coming and call out, well, not only are you communicating to Carl,
but you're communicating something about yourself. I wonder if whistling language in specific scenarios like this allow you to communicate without tipping your hand at all, regarding like who you are, like what your age is, what your gender is, etc.
Oh huh, I didn't think about that. That's interesting. Well, another thing I would say along those same lines. Is again, I haven't done experiments to confirm this, but I would just say as a baseline, I might assume that whistling can more easily blend in with nature than spoken language. That, like you hear spoken language, you instantly know a person
is nearby, you hear a little whistle. I don't know that could be a bird or something like that if you're not tuned into it as a linguistic signal.
And I think that's where that's certainly where my assumption comes into play, is that I'm not sure what it would be like for someone who has lived in the world of this kind of whistling. If you're used to it, then maybe you just you've a heightened susceptibility to recognizing it and telling the difference between it and the natural world. And likewise, perhaps if you're used to it, you can definitely tell the difference between a man's whistle and a boy's whistle.
Well, So, to round out the things that the Cowan talks about in this article, he says that there are no lexical limitations on the whistle. Speech sort of already got to this, but basically, anything you can express in spoken language, you can express in the whistles. However, there are some ambiguities caused by the whistle speech, and this
is because of the basic phonetic features of it. So the Mestaken languages are tonal languages, and this would mean they're similar to like Mandarin, where you can have a syllable and you can have maybe four different versions of that syllable, and in English they would all be the same syllable to us, like maybe the classic example in Mandarin is four different ways of saying ma, but pronounced
in each case with a different tone. So you would, you know, if you're trying to write them out phonetically in English, they would all be maa, but one might be a kind of gliding up tone and one is a falling tone and so forth. Well, the Mestaken languages are like this too. They have tones in the speech, and the tones are what eventually becomes the whistle speech. The whistle speech is based on the tonal features of
the spoken language. But if you have, say two different phrases that in the spoken language have the exact same sequences of tones, these can of course cause ambiguity in the whistle speech, and that has to be resolved, you might have to say, wait, what do you mean. Cowan writes that one of the most common sources of ambiguity in whistled speech is just proper names, because there are a lot of proper names that have the same sequence
of tones. But despite this limitation that you know, you don't have spoken syllables, you're just turning the language entirely into sequences of tones. You can communicate a lot, and most of the time people understand each other just fine. Another thing I thought was interesting is that he says there don't appear to be any limitations on whistled speech
mingling with spoken language. Like it's not like you go into one mode and then you're supposed to stay there and back and forth, and like he says that a conversation might start at a distance as as whistles, and then switch to normal speech when the parties get closer to each other, or you might just go back and forth. You might be speaking and then suddenly whistling, and then and so forth.
Interesting this this is not a perfect comparison, but I am I can't help but think of the astro mach droids and star wars. You know how they speak with the kind of whistling language, and and generally when they're talking to somebody like Luke Skywalker or whoever, Luke understands the astro Mach language and then speaks back in English and or whatever we're calling English in the Star Wars universe.
And at times when I'm watching this, I'm always I'll stop and I'll think, and I'll of course i'm you know, caught up in the flow of it, so it ultimately doesn't matter. But if I'm over analyzing it, I'm thinking about the fact that they're they're speaking in two different languages to each other, and there doesn't seem to be any problem. But an example like this from the real world makes me think, well, no, this is entirely believable.
You have both parties know the language, but the Astromac of course can only speak one of those languages, and Luke Skywalker can also only speak one of those languages, but both can understand.
Yeah, that's interesting. I have often thought about that too, about the how exactly the R two D two communication goes on a bolt. But I just wanted to say also that, like this isn't something of the past that the mesateko whistle speech is still in use today, certainly by people in Wahaka and maybe elsewhere as well. If you want to hear what it sounds like, I would
highly recommend looking up videos. There are videos you can find online of native speakers demonstrating the Mesateko whistle speech, and it's totally worth looking up.
Absolutely, yeah, it's quite beautiful.
But as I alluded to earlier, this is not the only case in the world. This is just one example I picked. There are other examples and I might get into them in part two of this series of whistled languages popping up, especially it seems in mountainous and forested regions around the world, And there is a paper I want to talk about in the next part of the series about what are some of the common features that
may cause whistled versions of languages to arise. It's very interesting to think about what are the pressures and environmental characteristics that tend to give rise to certain characteristics of language.
Absolutely now in discussing whistling here. When we first started looking into this topic, I was thinking, well, what is whistling? And at first I was thinking, well, this has to be one of those questions that shouldn't be too complicated, right, in part because for many of us, a whistle is
literally as close as our own breath. We can produce a whistle without giving it too much thought, and we can generally pick out the sound of whistling rather eas maybe not as quickly as we were discussing in our previous example compared to other things. But hear it for a second and you'll say, yeah, yeah, somebody's whistling, and then maybe you can pick out the tune. But yeah, we know it when we hear it, and we know
it when we produce it. So I honestly expected to kind of springboard pass the basic what is a whistle question here, and so can get more into some of the media stuff. But then I read this definition of whistling from the paper the Physiology of Oral Whistling by A. Zola at All, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology
in twenty eighteen. Quote. Experimental models support the hypothesis that the sound in human whistling is generated by a Helmholtz resonator, suggesting that the oral cavity acts as a resonant chamber bounded by two orifices, posteriorly by raising the tongue to the hard palate and anteriorly by pursed lips. So I don't know about you, but when I heard that that instantly it made me realize, Okay, it's a little more
complicated than I had perhaps realized at first. And I don't think I had actually heard of a Helmholtz resonator before, and when I heard that, I instantly thought of like the Holtzman effect in Dune. But this has nothing to do with personal shields and suspensers.
Well, yeah, I think that's interesting too, that it's like not a fully settled question how exactly the physics of whistling work. But I do think it's clear and you can sort of test this in your own body. That part of what's happening with whistling is you are relocating the primary resonating chamber that's producing the vibrations the sound when you whistle, as opposed to when you produce regular speech.
Because if you just feel it in your body while you're talking, you can kind of feel least I can that the vibrations sort of seem to be coming from the throat. It's also sort of happening in the mouth a little bit. But then when you whistle. At least, what I feel is I feel the vibration beginning in my mouth.
Yeah, I would certainly advise everyone as you're whistling, you may be whistling right now, to sort of test this out, like, really focus in on how it feels, Focus on how you feel the air flowing through your mouth. You'll find these lateral air passages between cheek and molars, and it's really quite quite fascinating, because again, it's easy to just take this for granted, it's not something for most of us. Is certainly after a point, you don't really have to
think about it. You don't have to have to look up and read instructions for how to do it. You just your mouth assumes the form necessary to create the whistle, and you whistle.
As a total sidetrack. I'm sorry, but I found the title of that paper, The Physiology of Oral Whistling, very funny because it immediately made me think, are there other types of whistle? Is there ocular whistling?
Well, I mean, I guess there may be some sort of nasal variety. I mean, I'm instantly reminded of the various nasal flutes that exist in different cultures. So the airflow from the mouth is not the only way that we have to produce sound. But yeah, when you say whistling, you tend to think oral whistling. Now, I want to come back to the Helmholtz resonator here. So this is named for important German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz,
who lived eighteen twenty one through eighteen ninety four. If you're studying anything about sound and sound generation, you'll generally find out find something about von Helmholtz. For instance, after we had started this particular topic, I was in Asheville, North Carolina, and I went to the Moge Museum there, the synthesizer Museum, and Helmholtz's name comes up in some of the materials there because it's just it's hard to avoid him when you get into the science of sound.
So the Helmholtz resonator is a kind of spherical chamber with an aperture at the top or at one end called the nipple and tapering there for insertion into the ear, and then has another larger aperture on the other end of this sphere. So each Helmholtz resonator has a known fixed volume size and therefore is made to pick up on a particular tone. There's no mechanical parts in this. It's essentially it's kind of like a very finely engineered
seashell pick one up. You place the nipple in your ear, and you can pick out a particular frequency, and you generally will have a selection of these to analyze complex sounds. Joe, for your benefit, I included a photo here of various Helmholtz resonators, and if you do a Google search out there of Helmholtz resonators, you'll see selections like this. They're often made out of some sort of a metal. You know.
I think of myself as an adventurous seeker of experiences. But somehow I don't want to put the big ones of these in my ear. That's just I would fear oral injury.
Well, the nipple is the same size on all of them, nipple that is inserted into your ear.
I guess I'm just I guess what I mean is I'm afraid it looks like it would suddenly produce an incredibly loud sound. But I guess the size of the resonator cavity is not actually about the volume, but about the pitch.
So these resonators they have various applications in engineering, architecture, and music. But when it comes to studying and describing the mechanisms of human whistling, something that the aforementioned authors say isn't done enough and again is not maybe fully understood. The Helmholtz resonator is apparently a good model of what seems to be going on inside of our head, inside of our you know, our head and face when we whistle. And Joe I included an illustration from that paper that
I thought was very useful. This kind of takes the airflow, those lateral air passages who are describing, as well as the central resonance chamber, and illustrates those inside of this drawling of a human female who is supposedly whistling, and it makes whistling look like some sort of strange organ inside the mouth.
Uh yeah, it looks like, well, you got your regular liver down below, and then you've got your whistling liver, and that's up somewhere underneath the nose.
Right now, going back to that paper by Azola at all, I want to read this quick quote that sums a lot of this up quote. The results of this study indicate that the acoustic mechanism in human person lip whistling
follows a Helmholtz resonator model. The oral cavity acts as the resonant chamber and the anterior posterior movements of the tongue play a major role in changing the volume and thus the whistle frequency produced For their studies, performed with high resolution measurements may help elucidate the contribution of changes to other parameters of the Helmholtz equation.
Okay, so this is sort of in line with what I was at least guessing based on the feelings inside my head. When I whistle, it feels like the vibrations are coming from the mouth when I whistle, and hear they're saying that, yes, when you whistle, the oral cavity is what's acting as the resonant chamber. It's sort of acting as a Helmholtz resonator.
Right, And it is stressing though that, Yeah, there's a lot going on here and even though it may feel pretty natural for most of us to whistle, we don't have to again put a lot of thought into it, though if you may be overthinking it now and find yourself having to think more about doing it, but you still have to have the proper prerequisites in place. Some people lack the ability to whistle for a few different reasons. It's also something that does have to be initially learned
and can get really good with practice. So it's like it's one of those scenarios like when you hear somebody do it really well, it has an almost otherworldly beauty to it. Some of those examples earlier in the whistling speech definitely have this quality to them. But also I think of whistling used in music sometimes I think of the whistling of say, Leon Redbone whistle during some of performance.
So an amazing whistler. My whistle is nothing like that, and a large part of that just may simply be practiced. I have not applied the hours of whistling that Leon Redbone applied during his lifetime to achieve that level of art.
So off, Mike, we were talking about our favorite examples of music that features whistling. One example that immediately comes to my mind is there's a great Bolivian folk song called Jorando se Foe and the band, the experimental rock band Sun City Girls do a cover of that song. I think their cover is called the Shining Path and there's a part usually before the lyrics come in that I think on earlier recordings of this song is done on a flute, but they whistle this part, and the
whistling is just intense. It sounds very much the comparison a lot of people seem to make. I think Seth said the same thing when we played it for him earlier, is that it feels like Anyomricone. It feels like kind of a very dramatic, dangerous Western scene.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's something about the West cinematically that makes me think of whistling, And a big part of it is, you know, probably Morricone's scores, but also the score by Carter Burwell for a Raising Arizona, the Coen Brothers film, So good, fabulous score that includes a lot of like yodeling and banjo, but also whistling, really powerful, like pure whistling that sounds like it's from just straight from heaven.
But the other one Seth reminded reminded me of was the Peter Bjorn and John song that was popular. I think that was like really big my last year in college. It was like two thousand and eight or so.
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great example Another one that I think Seth and I both thought of at the same time was Otis Redding sitting on the dock of the bay. That is a wonderful whistling part in it.
I was trying to think, based on all these examples we just brought up, whether there are sort of common connotations to whistling and music. But I guess not really, because in some of these examples we've talked about, the whistling feels very, very happy and languid. It's a relaxed kind of sound. I think of sitting on the dock of the bay, whereas in the first example I mentioned, it's it's a fiery, intense, you know, a danger rising from from the canyon kind of sound.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm glancing at a list right now, and oh, this is a big one. Winds of Change by the Scorpions. That's some powerful whistling in there. Feel it, Feel it in your bones. Golden Years by David Bowie. That's another good one. MM Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel.
Oh I know that one.
Yep, yep, that's a great one.
War Without Tears.
Yeah, yeah, they are a bunch of them, and I'm not going to go through this whole list, but I'd love to hear from folks out there if you have particularly favored examples of songs with whistling in them, or favorite whistling performers. Oh here's another great one. I Always look on the bright Side of Life from Monty Python's The Life of Brian m hm. Great stuff. There's walk like in Egyptian by the Bengals.
I did not remember the whistling in that.
Yeah, don't worry, be happy. Bobby McFerrin, there you go.
Ooh.
I don't know if I remember the I remember this song, but I don't remember the whistling. Me and Julio down by the schoolyard.
Paul Simon, Oh yeah, yeah, okay, I shouldn't do that too much.
Love is a battlefield, Pat Benattar.
Great song. I don't remember the whistling, you know. Coming back to the idea of whistled languages, part of me thinks, oh, man, I it would be difficult for me living in a culture like that, because I feel like I don't whistle very well. But then again, I guess it's a it's a skill that you develop with practice, like other language skills, and that unless you have some kind of like anatomical
reason that's interfering with your ability to whistle it. Imagine it's largely a function of how much you do it, how much you practice it, and how much you learn it at an early age. But yes, I am one of those who I don't whistle great.
Yeah, my whistling is It's okay for my own purposes, but it is not a performance level whistle. So I will catch myself occasionally whistling a particular tune. But I'm also just as just as inclined to maybe sing a little bit from a particular song, or to hum a little bit, did to use those more or less in tandem. But pure whistling. Yeah, I've never really applied myself to it because I felt like my whistling, yeah, it's good enough for me, not so much for anybody else I'm around.
I did get into a habit a while back of when I would be singing a song and I would start getting up to the high notes that I couldn't sing, I would just switch to whistling them.
Yeah. As we were researching this, I was, of course, like a lot of you out there listening to the episode, So I was a little. I was hyper conscious of my own whistling, so I was trying it out, and I decided, well, what if I tried to whistle better?
You know what if I sort of really concentrate on it and try and see what happens when I change the shape of my mouth a little bit and I was feeling I found that I was able to make a stronger whistle, but it was also I felt it straining, like muscles in my face and in my head, that I maybe don't strain that much when I do my default whistle. And then I was able to go back
to my default whistle and it felt more natural. So I kind of took that as an indicators like, Okay, this is kind of the gateway to better whistling if I wanted to actually pursue this, probably, but I'm not going to do that.
Oh well, this makes me think of how actually, to some degree, the same thing is true about spoken language, Like I find at least if I think too hard about what my body is doing while I'm reducing words with my mouth, suddenly they become a lot harder to produce, Like if I'm thinking about my lungs and my larynx and my mouth, the syllables become kind of strange. You
get that. Actually, I would say it's a feeling kind of similar to semantic satiation, where when you say a word too many times in a row, you start like the words starts to feel strange and it loses its association with the with the meaning that it signifies.
Yeah. In a way, it's kind of like if you're riding a bicycle and you suddenly start thinking really hard about how you were riding the bicycle, how this is being in pained, and maybe don't do that. Maybe just just just ride the bicycle, think about something else, because everything's in motion, it's working. Just don't second guess it. But as we were saying, though, it's by second guessing it that we are able to potentially improve it as well.
We can certainly fall into a habit of whistling a certain way, and there are conceivably ways to improve upon that whistle. But you've got to want to do that or have some reason to do that, And certainly communication would be a big one. If you're engaging in some sort of whistling communication with people, then there's going to
be sort of a whistling standard. I imagine you're going to hear other people use it, and there is going to be a positive social pressure to improving your whistle to match the whistles of those around you.
Right right, Well, maybe we need to call part one of our Whistling series here, but we've got so much more interesting stuff to talk about in subsequent parts. We're going to talk about religious uses of whistling. We're going to talk about whistling superstition, whistling psychology, whistling technology. That there are a lot of monsters in this closet.
All right, well, join us for that when we come back, and certainly go ahead and send in your messages regarding your own experience with whistling. We would love to hear from you. As a reminder. Stuff to Blow your minds Core episodes published Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Monday it's a listener mail, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
just talk about a weird film. If you want to converse with other Stuff to Blow your Mind listeners, Well, there are a couple of places you can go on Facebook. You can go to the discussion module and you can also go to the Discord. If you're a Discord user, go to the discord email us and we'll send you the link you need to join that. But there are a lot of cool discussions going on there, and they're
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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 MHM.
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