From the Vault: The Winter People, Part 1

winter again in Atlanta. That's right, some whipsaw weather. It'll get us back into the correct territory to air the Winter People Part one. This originally aired December. You know what, I'd have to guess that was probably a hot day anyway. It's always hot down here in December. It very often is. So without further ado, let's jump right into the Winter People. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And we are entering into winter, are we. Yeah, well, today it feels more like winter. I would say in Atlanta, we enter into winter sometime around mid March, and then we exit it sometime around mid March, and then it's summer again until December when fall begins. Yeah, that's the way it was this last year. It's it basically stayed fall, then it became spring just enough for my fig tree to begin to to emerge, and then it was winter

again for like three days. This is enough to kill it. This is really disrupting, I think, because you want to be able to have seasonal traditions, and you want them to be able to to be re enacted with some kind of reliability every year. Seasonal traditions or something that I think gives a lot of anchoring meaning to our lives.

When you're a little kid and you have that recognition that like, oh, Christmas is coming or something like that, whatever your traditions, maybe if you don't celebrate Stmas, you probably have something like that sometime in the year that sort of like marks a seasonal transition and and that another part of a season is based around. So like here in America, for kids who celebrate Christmas, winter is

not just a cold time, It's Christmas time. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's almost impossible to escape the trappings of essentially Northern European winter survival traditions. They've been you know, they've been neutered and altered and and and changed into a different form altogether. But the shape is still there, like the deep mythic importance of Santa Claus and and Yule logs and all the all these various trappings, like their their their mythic purpose is still present if you you

just look hard enough. Yeah, but you can also see that there's something kind of wrong with the way we practice Christmas here in Atlanta, Georgia, because when I see all of the traditional aesthetic stuff that's associated with Christmas, it's all got snow on it. There's just snow on everything. Santa's walk around in the snow, He's got snow on him. He kind of looks like he's sort of made of snow.

There is snow on all the Christmas trees you see in all the pictures, and children playing in the snow. And it never snows on Christmas down here. It's usually in the seventies. I think we gotta we got a white Christmas at some point in the last few years. But yeah, for the most part, you're right. The only way you're going to have snow on Christmas as if you import it or you you have your tree flocked.

But yeah, to come back to the point I was making earlier, I think one reason this variable weather and the unreliability of it actually feeling like wintertime at Christmas is so troubling is that we really want to have dependable seasonal cycles that correspond to our ceremonies, because our ceremonies make the seasons mean something, and it almost feels encoded into our bodies that the seasons should mean something. It shouldn't just be a time where the weather is

a little different outside. It feels like seasons should mark something important in our existence. Yeah, though it is hard. It is hard to backtrack because you can't just suddenly say I'm sorry, kids, but a Christian saint is going to climb out of the hearth tonight and start bestowing gifts. You know, if he's actually supposed to be based on St. Nicholas, you should You should do yourself a favor and go look up some of the legends about the actual St. Nicholas.

He's fantastic. There's a great story where St. Nicholas goes into an inn where there's an evil innkeeper who has uh. I guess he just didn't like children. So he took some boys and he killed them, and he chopped them up, and he pickled them in a big pot. And then St. Nicholas resurrects that chopped up pickled children. Oh man, that's wonderful. That's the best resurrection story ever heard. But it does

drive home the inherent darkness of Christmas. When we talk about the like the commercialization and the modernization of holiday traditions, we're generally squeezing the darkness out of it. And that's why I feel like so many people have taken to sat Crampus and other traditional yet dark l mints of holiday and pagan tradition because they represent the darkness that we're trying to get away from. And it ultimately is

a dark time. It is about surviving the winter is it is about the cold moving in, about life draining from all of our vegetation, and we have to somehow stay warm and stay fed and live to see the spring. Yeah, And it feels very possible that this could be something that's like, I don't know, almost kind of a young Gian archetype kind of thing, a thing that's coded deep

into the unconscious. That's some kind of received memory from bioh history, because you look at how a lot of other animals deal with the winter, deal with the cold months, and it is they go. They undergo profound changes beyond just the changes in how humans practice their culture when it gets cold. Oh yeah, I mean one of the most iconic examples is, of course, the bear. Oh yeah.

And I was recently listening to Roaming Imagination What the stories we tell about bear say about a on CBC Radio's Ideas with Paul Kennedy, one of my favorite podcast slash radio programs. Folks out there, you didn't get to hear it, but before we started, Robert was trying to do a Paul Kennedy. Yeah, I sadly I can't. I can. I can nail a few impersonations, but I just can't quite capture Paul Kennedy's lovely voice. You sound kind of like Optimist Prime when you do it. Yeah, he's like

a Canadian Optimist Prime, I would guess. But in this episode, they point out the mythic power of bears in many ancient northern traditions, traditions that gave the bear place of honor as a boundary walker between the human and the divine, because when the cruel winter rolls in, threatening our survival and even our very sanity, the bear ventures into the earth, only to emerge again in the spring. So it's it's

it's like a resurrection really. So this is why you see shaman's have in ancient societies taking on the guys of the holy bear. Norwegian traditions, for example, uh entailed grave routs of bear hide, appropriating the magical power of this animal that seeks and returns from the winter grave. In Finland you have pre Christian traditions that hold that bears can reincarnate, and the indigenous reincarnate as other bears

or reincarnate as other types of creatures as bears. Yeah, so there's like that, there is this this cycle of the bear, so like the bear is following a different set of rules for life and death. And then there's the indigenous I knew people of Japan that holds the bears a god, but in a in an interesting twist, a god made flesh for their consumption and use. So so these are bear eating people's well yeah, yeah, they they eat the bear, they use the bears hide, and

they make products out of the bear. But there's this idea that the god that becomes the bear has become the bear so that they can use its flesh, oh like like a sacrificial like this is my bare body, take and eat actually, yeah, and then afterwards they hold a ceremony to return the bear God's spirit to the spirit realm. And of course, even today, bear hibernation, which which is not a true hibernation, remains of interest to scientists,

even in the consideration of future space travel. Now you say it's not a true hibernation, what would actually be the difference between this pseudo hibernation we see in bears and a true hibernation. Well, what bears do is certainly incredible and and we'll get to the details of that in a second. But but true hibernation is even crazier.

The Arctic ground squirrel, for instance, drops its body temperature below freezing, which is cold enough that neurons in the brain's cortex are physically incapable of firing, so basically it

can put its brain on pause. Yeah, basically. Uh. In the Jason Biddle's Slate article the Great do Bears Hibernate Debate, he points to a wonderful two experiment with torpid marmots, and it found that you could place these hibernating creatures in a glass container full of noxious gas and they were unharmed so long as their body temperature didn't rise enough for them to emerge from hibernation, so they could

sort of freeze. And it's almost like they just cut themselves off from outside influence and some unless something like squishes them. Yeah, yeah, as long as nothing comes in and messes with them during the hibernation, right, I guess you're always going to be vulnerable to getting squished. Yeah,

that's I mean, that's that's the risk of being a marmot. Uh. But in the case of hibernating bears, I mean this they fascinated us for a number of reasons, and a lot of it comes down to the fact that you have this rugged apex omnivore. So it's it's a be steal reflection of us in many respects. I mean, you can even walk on two legs when it needs to. Yeah, I was just thinking about that, all the ways that

the bare mirrors the human. It can walk on two legs, it does eat both, you know, it's it's a total opportunist in terms of diet, can eat both plants and animals, and when it decides to eat animals, it is a formidable predator, just like humans. Um it almost it seems like it's like the other thing like us out there. If you don't have great apes to compare yourself to, Like, if you're not in a place where there are chimpanzees or orangutangs or guerrillas, what's the closest thing to a

human seems like it might be a bear. Yeah. And I was running cross across various folkloric beliefs and myths and involved people turning to bears, bears turning into people, the idea that bears are people who have wandered too far into the wilderness and they've been transformed by the magic of the wilderness. So it feels almost like Grendel. It's like the earth rim roamer becomes a bear. Yeah.

And indeed, and this is an earth rim roamer in many of these traditions, it is it is ranging between life and death because it can it can essentially leap frog over the coldest and cruelest months of the year. They quote unquote hibernate. They cut their metabolic rate in half.

So tell me about the pseudo hibernation. Okay, Well, according to Edgar Folk of the University of Iowa, a late fall bears heart beats forty fifty times a minute during sleep, but during deep hibernation it slows to as few as eight beats a minute, so they during this time they don't eat. Their body is stored up enough to provide them up to four thousand calories a day during the winter, and the bear's body even takes uriah, you know, in urine,

and builds new nitrogen from the protein. They don't defecate, they don't drink, and yet when they wake in the spring, there they're They're hydrated, they have a balance of of water in their bodies, and they also avoid muscle cramping in degenerative bone loss during this time despite being just crammed up in a tiny space the whole time. I feel like humans often use the metaphor of hibernation like we think, Okay, it's winter time, I'm going to spend

a lot of time indoors with my loved ones. We're gonna cuttle up. I'm gonna be under a blanket most of the time. But we don't really have anything like this to to compare this experience to This is just a different type of existence where you can go into this sub metabolic state where you really do It's not like you die and come back. I mean metaphorically it's kind of like that, but it is as if you become a different kind of organism for for a significant

part of the year. It's like you it's almost like an animal sort of becomes a plant for the amount time, Yeah, becomes this sort of fleshy rock in the earth and then and and you can see why you capture the imaginations of people. Um though, it is interesting to try and imagine ancient people following the bear and finding out where the bear goes and what that discovery was like, like how they came to this realization that the that this formidable creature is climbing into the earth and just

not emerging for months on end. You can easily see, especially given what we've already said about it being in some cases kind of similar to a human, why this would take on a magical aspect to people. Yeah, so in this episode, we're going to look at what we humans become during the winter. So obviously we don't experience anything like the bear or true hibernators, but the winter does have an effect on our bodies, on our minds, on our personality, and our culture. And through culture, I

think we have sometimes found ways to mirror the bear. Now, obviously there are plenty of examples we could turn to for winter survival culture, but one of the most amazing is that of the qua qua Yuuk people. Yeah. So the qua qua Quuk is the name of a group of First Nations tribes that speak the Quaquala language and that this is basically their home is the Pacific Northwest

around Vancouver Island and stuff. Yeah, and and these various tribes have different names for themselves, but this is just the this is the the catch off for their their their cultural system. Yeah, the language group. Yeah. And interestingly enough, the Field Museum in Chicago, they have an excellent section on the art and culture of various Native American tribe, including this one. And Joe, you and I both visited this during a two thousand seventeen visit. Yeah, that is

a fantastic collection. And these artworks and ceremonial artifacts are just beautiful if you ever get a chance to see it. But Also, if you get a chance, you should check out the u Missed Cultural Center of British Columbia, which is run by the Umistic Cultural Society. And and that's a Qua Kua kuuk uh run center dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage and the h and the traditional artifacts

of the Kua Kua Kuuck people. Yeah, and I'll include a link to that organization on the landing page for this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. So, for the quaku Ku people, summer is a time of travel, gathering of foods, preservation of foods for the winter because when winter comes, which runs November through March, it is a harsh time, but it's also a sacred time. And during this time the people are visited by supernatural spirits.

Everyone takesfferent names and are defined more by their membership in these different dance societies, each based on a different supernatural entity. And so these societies they even take president's over clan affiliation. It basically divides their world up into two phases. You have the summer, which is uh box us, and then there's winter which is uh sets qua, which

which has been translated as secrets. This is a really fascinating aspect of this culture because it takes something that, as we were saying earlier, in some ways as kind of subtly or implicitly present in many other cultures, like the way we sort of change according to the seasons, but it makes it more explicit and and sort of commits the people within the culture to say, yes, we are different beings when the cold months arrive. Yeah, Because it's one thing to think, well, you know, Joe is

a slightly different person during the winter. But if you were to actually change your name, if you were to distinguish between summer Joe and winter Joe and like sign things as winter Joe, and you know that would be that would be a different case altogether and have different intra society association. Yes. So, in other words, for the Qua qua Qua people, all cultural energy shifts from harvesting food to a four month ritual cycle aimed at taming

cosmos threatening supernatural forces. While the rule of summer is a hierarchy based on mythical founding ancestors, Uh said, sae Qua is all about the dance groups. And I have a wonderful quote here I want to read that I

think underlines a lot of this. This is from a paper titled it is a Strict Law that bids Us dance UH Cosmologies, colonialism, death, and ritual authority in the Qua Qua pot Latch eighteen forty nine to nineteen twenty two by Joseph Masco, published in Comparative Studies in Society and History. In total, the seasons present a ritual cycle

which deconstructs and reinvents the social order. The barren winter months, in which the collective spiritual energy of all the tribes must be focused on regenerating the natural world, are turned into a fecundity of the summer months, when the animal world, placated by continuing ritual, offers itself up for human consumption. Thus, the Quouus saw themselves as participants in a universal ecology requiring continuous maintenance. Its root metaphor was that of hunter

and hunted to live means to kill. Now to give you an example of some of the the dance groups the the affiliations at one UH is associated with during the winter UH there is the Hamasta or Cannibal society, and they're defined by the myth of four brothers who ventured into the home of the cannibal spirit at the quote north end of the world, which I can't help

but think of Santa when we touched on that. But uh, here, the cannibal spirit lived with a man eating raven called Crooked Beak of Heaven and a giant bird who cracked open human skulls with its beak and ate the brains. The brothers end up defeating all of these creatures and they gained special powers. So to join the society, you have had to undergo an ordeal in which the cannibal spirit kidnaps you, takes you into the woods, and when you return to the tribe, you're possessed like a wild man.

You're dressed only in scraps of hemlock, you're dancing about in a squatting position, and the others have to entice you to venture close to the fire with either a corpse or a corpse like figure. Yeah, so you lune, you're lunging at people, you're biding at people, you're even actually biding pre selected people. So this is like a choreographed thing. Yeah, well, I wonder to what extent it's it's like choreographed, maybe a little bit of improv, you know,

it's it's theater. It's essentially well, just call it theater is is probably not giving it enough depth, because it is the most potent form of theater. It's not necessarily a performance for an audience, but it's an enactment, yes, an enactment for the people and for the cosmos. It is it is a magical ceremony. Finally, an attendant leads you around the fire by a neck ring, pacifying you with music four times around the fire, and then you climb through a hole in a ceremonial screen and you

reappear in the mask of the man eating raven. Then you reappear maskless, and then as the crooked beak of Heaven. And finally you return for a fifth dance, fully tamed, and dance in an upright position. So we see this like this transformation, this taming of the wild, um and and and it also touches on this idea of the cannibal spirit. Would you see president in a number of different Native people's folk beliefs, probably most famous and typified

in the Wind to Go. In addition to this, you have the grizzly bear society that keeps ordered during the ceremony, sometimes even even punishing transgressions with death, and during some of the dances you see them wearing full bear skins and behaving as bears. You have full fool dancers who run around causing chaos. And then you have the wild Woman of the Wood. That's great, oh yeah, because this one.

She appears as a person clad in bear skins and a horrid mask, and she carries a basket which she uses to to crate away children who have wandered into the woods so that she can eat them. I detect some parallels to cramp Us. Yeah, I mean, both of these are the wild child eating creature that that serves as a warning to naughty children, uh during during the winter.

So on one hand, I my reaction to this is strong in that I not only find this very like esthetically pleasing and beautiful, but also I detect a kind of deep genius in it, if that makes any sense. There's something profound that the practitioners of these ceremonies have tapped into about our nature as human beings that a lot of us have not quite figured out how to

properly animate. Yeah. Yeah, I love how revealing this example feels, even for denizens of the modern world, you know, we're so can a lot artically aided in our battle against winter. We we have heated homes, we have we have you know, all the electricity we can use. We have, we have fresh water, we have we can even have fresh vegetables delivered right to our door. Uh. And yet this still

strikes a court of truth for us. Yeah. Absolutely, because no matter how many space heaters you surround yourself with, and no matter how much you have access to unholy summer foods out of season in the winter. And folks, I should just say, don't buy tomatoes in the winter. Just don't do it. Don't encourage that. But what if you need spaghetti? Spaghetti is such a use can tomatoes? They were canned in the summer. That's okay, that's right. I mean, that's the spirit of surviving the winter is

use the canned goods, use the survival foods. Eat the pickles, as long as they're not made from children. Obviously, Wait

where was I going with that? Well? No, anyway, so um, no, you know, no matter, just like you say, no matter how much we can use technology to ward off some of the worst effects of seasonal changes, whether it's actually winter or hot summer months, or if you live in tropical areas, whether it's the rainy season, you might be able to technologically put yourself into a state of stability,

you know, indoors with all of this electrical equipment. But we sort of can't write seasonal changes out of our DNA, things like the winter, the rainy season, you know, whatever these seasonal changes are that are relevant wherever you live. There are a deep part of us that is not going to dissipate just because we've got climate control. That's right. On that note, We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we will begin to explore

the winter changes to the human body. Thank you, Thank alright, we're back, all right. So we've talked about rituals that reimagine the person is sort of a different type of being living in a different type of cosmic significance regime with within the seasonal changes, like within the winter versus the summer. But there are many ways in which our bodies are very, uh you might say, very finely and delicately sensitive two seasonal changes. Right, yeah, And this is

in this area of the discussion. We're going to get into some areas here where there's no question that the winter has an effect on the body. So, for starters were creatures who evolved to thrive in the sun. So you can expect some firm biological reasons that you would need to say, catch a few rays, right, even as the rays become rarer in the colder months. Now, Robert, I know you can tell me good reasons we shouldn't

extinguish the sun. There are some days, especially here in our office, where in the wintertime, in the afternoon, the sun comes around and comes just through the window in such a way that I am an aunt under a magnifying glass at my desk, and like my screens just turned into a tunnel of white light into death where I can't see anything for the glare. And I have at those times said I want to extinguish the sun. Can we find a way to do it? Just put

it out? But that's probably a bad idea, right, And probably yeah, I would. I would advise as that you know for starters that it does light and heat and sustain the world. But but then there's also a vitamin D to consider. So vitamin D this is a fat soluble nutrient that our bodies need to absorb calcium and phosphorus, both of which are central to the development of strong bones. Now, we can get vitamin D from oily fish, from fortified milk, but for the most part, you're gonna need the sun

to get your vitamin D or supplements. But when we get into the subject of supplements, that's that's where things get surprisingly sticky, and I have to admit I really was not up on all of this too. I read an article by Gina Colada in The New York Times titled why are so many people popping Vitamin D because it tastes so good? Well? Uh, maybe, but but basically the situation here is that about a decade ago, some doctors became concerned about potential vitamin D deficiency in people

enduring far northern climates. People such as Dr Michael F. Holick, a professor of medicines, physiology, and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine, advocated the importance of vitamin D supplements based on what seemed to be an association between low vitamin D levels and higher rates of various diseases. The idea was that vitamin D levels were that were lower that considered normal. Back in early two thousands might be linked to multiple school rosis and mental illness, as well

as cancer risk and bone health. I mean, those are some wide ranging effects. Yeah, So they recommended daily allowance uh IS is currently said at six hundred international units up to age seventy and eight hundred international units for people who are older and as alot of points. How

this would require near constant exposure to sunlight. Well, that doesn't sound practical, especially during the winter right where there is literally less sunlight to go around, and you can couple that with the possibility that you're huddling inside of a cave or you know, or or or at least

a very nice heated apartment or home. Now, one thing, I guess we should go ahead and say right here it probably would have come up at some point, but we also we don't want to encourage northern hemisphere bias. So we should mention that the winter is not just say December, January, February. The winter is affected by what hemisphere you dwell in, right, So it's about the tilt of the earth and the amount of direct sunlight that

you're receiving your latitude on the earth. So the winter months for the northern hemisphere the summer months for the southern hemisphere and vice versa. Both both hemispheres will get a summer in a winter unless you're near the equator. Um. But yeah, so there you go. It's colota explorers. Small studies and even larger ones, however, have failed to support a link between vitamin D and the prevention of heart attacks, cancer,

and strokes. Uh. Yet, vitamin D supplements remain big business, but there's been some pushback against the notion that they provide a true measureable medical boost. Uh. Nor they say, is there a good reason for people without osteoporosis or vitamin D absorption interfering conditions to undergo regular tests for vitamin D? Huh. Now, that's not to say vitamin D deficiency is in a problem, especially in utero enduring early childhood.

It can result in rickets, which is a defective mineralization or calcification of bones and growing bodies, and this is still a problem in the developing world. Can cause skeletal growth, retardation, skeletal deformities, and increase the risk of hip fractures in later life. Uh. This this last bit according to Dr Michael F. Hollick, who I referenced earlier, Hallock is a is an author that comes up time and time again

in these various studies about vitamin D deficiency. Man, I feel like vitamin supplements is one of those incredibly controversial issues that I can never really get a settled opinion on. And it's something I've read about multiple times. But I you know, I read people saying yeah to ACoM no, don't take them. Yeah, no, you should take them. No,

they don't do anything. Yeah. I feel like, especially for a lot of us who grew up, you know, being preached at sometimes by whole Cogan himself on the importance of taking our vitamins. Uh, it's it's this weird revelation to to realize that, well, actually the science isn't isn't solid on the necessity of some of these vitamins. Well it's not. I think it's not the vitamins themselves, right, But yes, the supplements supplement for because there's no denying

that vitamin D is important to the human body. What what the sticking point is to what extent do we need to be taking supplements or does the average person need to take supplements to make up for what you're perhaps not getting from the sun. Now, there's still a lot of research out there on the degree to which vitamin D via supplements, supplements and fortification is important to human health. And I mean, there's a lot of research in this area, and and perhaps it's something will have

to circle back around to in the future. But here's just to take to some of the recent studies. Two thousand seventeen. Here are just a few Vitamin D linked with better live birth rates in women undergoing assisted reproduction. Vitamin D maybe simple treatment to enhance burn healing. Vitamin D supplements could help pain management. Vitamin D deficiency increases

risk of chronic headache. And then here's a two thousand sixteen when increasing nursing mother's vitamin D levels may benefit babies. As I said earlier, apparently wide ranging effects. I'm always kind of curious about stuff that that seems to have effects so broad. Not to say I doubt the research, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot to be learned

about how how important nutrients like this are. Now. Interestingly enough, a number of the studies have come out of Finland, a northern European country known for its cold winters, and of course it's sauna dependency. You know, that doesn't surprise me. I mean, if you've got a deficiency of sunlight, this seems like a thing very much worth studying. Yeah, and

this among the studies. There was a large scale two thousand seventeen study published in Neurology that finds women with low levels of vitamin D in their blood are more likely to develop multiple sclerosis later in life. Still, as Gina Colada drives home in a New York Times article, there has never been widely accepted evidence that vitamin D is helpful in preventing or treating depression, fatigue, muscle weakness, or even heart disease or cancer. Huh sounds like we

got a lot of question marks. Yeah, so yeah again, you you kind of I feel like you kind of leave this section perhaps with more questions than answers. I feel like that happens almost any time we get into nutrition. Nutrition is just one of the thorniest subjects out there. And whenever it comes down to what nutrient really does prevent x y or Z or cause x y or Z, you think you know something, but then there are a

lot more question marks. But still, undeniably we can say we need vitamin D. We get a lot of it from the sun, and there is less sunlight in the winter. Yes, so do with that information what you will. All right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank you, Thank Alright, we're back now. Another area of consideration is the effect of

sunlight on melatonin. And I'm sure everyone has at least some familiarity with what we're talking about here, seasonal effective disorder. Oh really, So, I've actually wondered about this before because I've wondered if I have some mild form of this. But that also led me to do a little reading on it, and I know some people would allege that

this is not really a real or distinct condition. Now, of course there are mood disorders, and some people might experience them more often in winter months, But it is this a distinct disorder of its own? Yeah? This is This is another area with a fair amount of conflict in it. And yet at the same time, I'm like you, I can't help but think about the winters. Actually, when I'm in the winter and ask myself, well, am I feeling a bit blue today because because it's it's cold out? Yeah?

Is it is? It? Is it? Do I have some level of seasonal effective disorder? Yeah? And then again, I mean when you do that, you run the risk of of blowing out of proportion or self medicalizing sort of basically normal levels of mood fluctuation, Like I might feel

a lot more down in the winter. Especially. It does seem to be somewhat seasonally related, because I feel it especially in the afternoon when I noticed the sun is very low, very early in the afternoon, and that's sort of the visual and and uh sensory trigger for it. I start to feel the doom creeping in. But I don't want to get carried away and and start thinking, oh, yeah,

I've got I've got a disorder, I've got a mood disorder. Yeah. Well, but one of the interesting things is that on one level, you can say, oh, well, well, Joe is Josie's the approaching darkness and uh and and is frightened by the terror of night. It may just be that I suddenly have insight in the truth is that doom is always creeping in. Well, But the other side of it is

your body has insight. Is We're going to discuss here, like the perception of of of darkness and light is taking place at a you know, at a far subconscious level, at a bodily level. So the pineal gland secretes melatonin. This is a hormone that communicates information about environmental lighting to various parts of the body. It's especially key to biological rhythms, and the duration of melotonin secretion each day

is directly proportional to the length of the night. Okay, so this, for just one thing among many, probably helps to deal with our sleep cycles. Our body needs to know when it's time to sleep right exactly, so naturally, shorter days mean less melotonin, and this kind of decrease in melotonin is often linked to seasonal effective disorder, which to just to to define it more clearly, is seen as a mood disord or subset that sees otherwise mentally

healthy individuals experience a mood dip during the winter. It affects women more than men, and theories regarding its cause also include dropping serotonin levels due to reduce sunlight, as well as disrupted uh circadian rhythm. At any rate, rates of seasonal effective disorder do seem to increase the farther you move away from the equator. So this this is how the National Institutes of Mental Health currently defines it. Seasonal effective disorder is not considered as a separate disorder.

It is a type of depression displaying a recurring seasonal pattern. To be diagnosed with with seasonal effective disorder, people must meet full criteria for major depression conciding with specific seasons, appearing in the winter or summer months, interestingly enough, for

at least two years. Seasonal depressions must be much more frequent than any non seasonal depressions, and uh the full range of symptoms and clude low energy, hypersomnia, over eating, weight gain, craving for carbohydrates, and of course social withdrawal, which some people say feels like hibernating. Now, I'm sure some people would just say rather cheekily, like, well, you just describe my personality, that is who I am. But I think what we're talking about here is like these

symptoms to a level that it causes problems in your life. Now, Seasonal effective disorder has always been somewhat divisive. It's it's only been recognized as a condition since the late nineteen nineties, and not everyone agrees that it's a full fledged disorder. A two thousand sixteen study headed up by Dr Stephen Lobello, professor of psychology at Auburn University at Montgomery, found that quote, the prevalence of depression is very stable across different latitudes,

seasons of the year, and sunlight exposures. And in getting to to this point, the researchers examined data from UH thirty four thousand two D participants age A teen to nine who took part in a phone survey about their health through the two thousand and six Okay, so this would seem to contrast with what you said earlier, which was that at least it had been alleged that the rates of seasonal effective disorder type symptoms were reported more

at higher latitudes. Right, Yeah, this would seem to fly in the face of that. Okay. On the other hand, however, a recent Northwestern Medicine study found that daily exposure to bright white light at midday significantly decreased symptoms of depression and increased functioning in people with bipolar disorder, and previous studies have found the morning bright light therapy reduced symptoms

of depression in patients with seasonal effective disorder. You know. Once, so one thing I'm taking away from this is this is yet another situation where once you try to nail down exactly what this condition is, and you know, you medicalize it and you put it in scientific terminology, it

does seem to get a little fuzzy. Maybe um, but there's no denying that there's some thing people are experiencing, what whether or not, whether or not it fits the medical definition of the disorder as established, people anecdotally report things like this enough that you know, at least people are feeling something, right, I think it's it's undeniable that winter can impact one's existing emotional state, and sometimes that impact is sufficient enough to where it it's it seems

to be an actual, uh, psychological condition. Now here's another weird thing about the way our bodies changed with the seasons. It is not just vitamin D deficiency or mood changes that can be caused by the winter months, but you actually see a pretty stark increase in the risk of

mortality from certain diseases during winter. That's right, there's something that's referred to as winter cardiovascular disease is phenomenon because there does seem to be a seasonal trend of cardiovascular diseases, and these range from anis thrombosis to sudden cardiac death, with the highest incidences occurring during the cold or winter months. Now, there could be a lot of reasons for that, right, That's one of those things where you you say, Okay,

we're correlating two variables here. You know, this cardiovascular disease death and the winter months. And it might not necessarily be the winter conditions itself that causes it, but they do appear to be correlated. Yes. Now, in a lighter note, there is something that's also referred to as cuffing season. Were you familiar with this? No, I wasn't. I went and read the article. I mean, I think this is pretty funny. Why do they call it cuffing? I don't

know where's that term come from. It comes from It's it's handcuffing. So there's a house stuff Works article about this that came out last year. I understand it's from handcuffing, yes, but I want to handcuff yourself to another person. It's like it is cold, I am lonely. I need to find somebody to shackle myself too, so that we may survive the winter together. It's the season of that movie Fled. Yeah,

it's it's kind of like Fled. Uh. Yeah. The idea here is that to get through the winter, you you need to find somebody um and uh you want into a warming relationship. And there may be a biological reason behind it all. According to biochemist Dr Jennifer Stagg, it may be coded into our DNA, so in the fall, jenes get turned on. That results and changes in both hormones and neurotransmitters that may be responsible for driving us

to pair up. Plus, you have testosterone levels and men. Uh, they appear to be lowest during times of warmer weather in longer daylight. Peak testosterone occurs around October November, but elevation is seen throughout the winter months. So there seems to be a a winter drive to pair up, a winter drive to mate. Yeah, and this apparently is not just a tiny uptick like as measured by dating apps

and stuff like that. One of the figures was that apparently, okay Cupid reports about a thirty percent increase in love seeking activity during winter. I mean you can't deny almost a third more leven. Yeah, that that is a lot more love and winter leven. Now, one of the things you mentioned. Is a possible symptom outlined by NIM for seasonal effective disorder is cravings for carbohydrates. Yes, that immediately

made me think of our Thanksgiving and Christmas feasting traditions. Yeah, exactly what what do we all inevitably do around Thanksgiving? But like just just stuff ourselves with all of these fatty rich foods. Uh. And it also, like anecdotally makes me think of teleworking working from home during the fall or winter, where I seem to just inevitably just turn the house upside down to find various things to to spread peanut butter on. Like I feel like my work

is disrupted by this constant rummaging for food. Okay, now I gotta put you on the spot. What's the weirdest thing you've ever put peanut butter on? Oh? Um, lego, spaceship? Nothing, nothing so um exotic? Probably something salty like a potato chip or something you know, or done. Peanut butter on beef turkey? Oh gosh, that's that's that's that's pretty bad. Have you know how about peanut butter on a lemon?

Oh no, no, I haven't done that. Uh yeah, but you almost get to that point like, luckily you reach the point where you just eat it off a spoon. I think before you get to the point where you're you're spreading it on things that are too horrible. But as you might expect, there have been some studies that have looked at at this at the idea of of there being a slightly different winter diet for humans. Some studies have observed seasonal rhythms to human diet, which which

shouldn't come as surprise. Study in Physiology and Behavior marked to quote, an increased total caloric intake, especially of carbohydrate in the fall, associated with an increase in meal side is in a greater rate of eating rate of eating. It's like a D and D stat. Yeah, tim percent boost in in eating, you can boost your eating stat for the month. Now. Specifically, the researchers found that subjects were hungrier at the end of their meals, perhaps due

to a suppression of satiation mechanisms. Okay, so it's not necessarily that you want to eat more at the beginning, but you start eating and it's a longer time before you actually feel full. Yeah, it just takes longer to reach that point where you are full or stuffed. Um, They argue that this could be an evolved adaptation that remains with us even in this you know, ultimately evolutionarily

brief age of artificial heating and light. Right. Well, we obviously think about the bear who feasts before going into hibernation so that they can have that that stored up fat for the four thousand calories a day even while hibernating. Yeah, it does seem to be the sort of the shadow of the bear, doesn't it, where we're kind of mirroring its behavior. Eat as much as you you can while the food still remains plentiful in order to to to

shore up for the months of winter ahead. Oh and by the way, there was there was actually a recent two thousand seventeen study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and they explore the idea that obesity as an epidemic might also be due in large part to a circadian disorder. I think I've heard hints of this before, like that that stuff about metabolic disorders could be related

to uh to like sleep schedules and things like that. Yeah, I guess through through all of this, I'm I'm reminded that humans, like all animals, are not just creatures that live within summer or live within winter, but they live ultimately in some sort of sink with their natural environments.

You know, we're not we're not immune to changes in um, in the degree of some light that we're receiving in the warmth of the world, or the availability of resources, and we've evolved to thrive amid this, uh, this, this seasonal flow. Okay, so we're gonna have to wrap it up there for the first part of our discussion about

the seasonal changes that warp and command our lives. But we had a lot to say about this, So we're gonna be back next time with part two of this conversation, when we'll discuss more about the winter beings we become. In the meantime, you can find all the episodes of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, along with blog post videos and links out to our various social media accounts such

as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and so forth. And hey, if you do seek us out on Facebook, well then look for our Facebook group, the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Discussion Module. That's a wonderful place where if you sign up and you can discuss episodes or things you would like to become episodes with other listeners to the show as well as Joe and and I as well. It's a great place. It gets weird in there, but

it's always so nice indeed. And if you want to get in touch with this direct actually, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. B