From the Vault: The Winter People, Part 2

stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our discussion of the Winter People, the way in which animal existence and especially human existence is seasonally bifurcated, and the way the seasons really warp in command who and what we are now. Last time, we talked about traditional cultural beliefs and practices around wintertime. Uh so, we talked the amazing winter ceremonials of the Quakwa Kawak people

of the Pacific Northwest and North America. But we wanted to talk about some other cultural beliefs about wintertime changes to the human being. Yeah, we were kind of casting about for something that if it felt felt appropriate to to bring up because there are no shortage of winter traditions. But we we lead with such a fantastic example in the first episode, it felt intimidating to try and come

up with something of of equal weight. Now, one thing you could bring up is, of course, the traditions like the huga. This became very popular, was it? Last year? The year before? There were suddenly all these articles on the internet about uh huga and all these related concepts, especially in you know, uh northern polar Uh, not always polar, but northern types of countries and cultures where they're they have special words for getting cozy when it's really cold

and bad weather outside. Yeah, this is interesting because I mean obviously here in the States people do like to to snug up and they be binge, watched some Netflix or what have you. I have a little hot cocoa during the colder months or something fulfilling about that. I hear they eat pumpkin pie. Have you heard about this the Americans? Like? Okay, I mean I didn't know there are songs about it. I assume it's true. Which song?

Which song is about eating pumpkin There's something about you throw a log on the fire and coffee and pumpkin pie. I'm vaguely connecting to something from another life, all right though. I just have a lot of questions for people who eat pumpkin pie outside of established holidays. Yeah, which you're the ones is Thanksgiving and when, Well, you can have it for Christmas, but I mean you kind of been in the rules, right, But then mostly it is a

Thanksgiving pie. It's a delicious Thanksgiving pie, but it's I don't know, I wouldn't feel comfortable eating it. Fill the time of the year. Filling from a can, crust from a can, well, yeah, you have to use the filling from the can because it doesn't matter, because the because ultimately the pumpkin is just a vehicle for the of the nutmeg and the spice flavoring. Yeah, and the sugar. Yeah.

But no, despite all the coziness traditions, some cultures apparently have this special word for the coziness seeking tradition, and other cultures don't really. I mean, English, as far as I know, doesn't have a word like hugo, and I think that's why it suddenly became so popular in the English speaking part of the Internet. Yeah, and of course it's important to realize that coziness during the winter months

is is something of a luxury. Uh and uh. This led me to seek out a possible example in a wonderful book that I hadn't looked at in many years, And that's Barry Lopez's six book Arctic Dreams, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape which is just which is just full of beautiful descriptions of life in the far North. For instance, he shares the following just about the flow

of seasons in general. Quote in summer, in the sometimes extravagant light of a July day, one's thoughts are not of growth of heading wheat and yellowing peaches, but of suspension, as if life had escaped the bounds of earth in this country, which lacks the prolonged moderations between winter and summer that we anticipate as balmy April mornings and dry Indian summer afternoons. In this two season country, things grow and die, as they do everywhere, but they are more

deeply than living things anywhere else, seasonal creatures. And he goes on later in the book to to bring up this concept of the polar Eskimo people that is called purlar or neck. He says, quote winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the polar Eskimo called parlor neck.

According to the anthropologist Gene the Mallari, the word means to feel quote the weight of life, to look ahead to all that must be accomplished, and to retreat to the present, feeling defeated, weary, before starting a core of anger and miserable sadness. It is to be sick of life, a man named Amina told Millari. The victim tears fitfully at his clothes. A woman begins aimlessly slashing at things

in the igloo with their knife. A person runs half naked into the bitter, freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the poop of dogs. Eventually the person is calmed by others in the family with great compassion and helped to sleep. Pro Laura neck winter. And I have to say he did not say poop. He used a stronger

curse word that we can't say on the show. But I felt compelled to self at it there So, as Lopez describes it, does it seem like the idea is that sort of the farther you go up north or I guess toward either of the poles, but especially because you know they're more people are more concentrated towards the North Pole than in like Antarctica, that sort of the

weight of the seasons becomes more unbearable. Yeah, that that seems to be the point he's he's making here, and it just has to do with the fact that you essentially have two seasons, one of life and one of death, one of one of hardship and one of well, I guess less hardship. Uh. It's it's certainly an impressive concept. And uh. It again brings to mind accounts of say that the alleged wind to go madness that you uh,

you hear about in uh in northern native populations. However, we have to point out here that not everyone is on board with this being a true part of pre colonial traditions and beliefs among Native peoples of North America. Yeah.

According to Canadian scholar who uh and scholar who specializes in the study of First Nations people, John Steckley, in his book White Lies about the Inuit, he says this idea of Arctic hysteria is backed up by case studies, but it was most frequently touted in the nineteen sixties through the eighties by anthropologists such as Jean Mallari and others, and he points out that historian Lyle Dick suspects, just as Stickley himself concurs, that it's quote more likely the

creature of the white Inuit power imbalance embodied in specific contexts unquote, such as forced risky explorations during the winter, So forcing the native peoples to, among other things, take you out into hostile winter conditions when their their normal pattern of behaviors would have limited such risky measures. So that makes sense to me. And it has also been suggested that there's a possible physical explanations for this kind

of Arctic madness. Can be found in hyper vitaminosis ah, such as when you consume a polar bear liver exactly, and you can and it's something you can also pick. It's most famous for the polar bear liver. We've talked about it before in the show as far as polar bear liver consumption is concerned, But you can also get it from consuming a number of different um uh hunted animals in these regions, So that's one possibility as well.

So I think the take home here is that as fascinating as the concept is, and certainly as beautifully as Lopez wrote about it uh in an Arctic Dreams, it seems like it may be a situation that is, it is somewhat complicated by the impact of colonial Western society

upon the traditions of the native people's. Well, it certainly illustrates the way in which our reactions to the seasons are both sort of endogenous and exogenous, like that they come from both inherent factors in in the climate and in uh, you know, physical constraints around us that arrive when the winter months set in, but they're also heavily tempered by what cultural pressures were having to deal with.

So like a society of abundance is probably going to have very different cultural ways of dealing with winter than a society of scarcity would, and all kinds of cultural factors like that would play in. Certainly, of course, if you're you know, being colonized, that's definitely going to a act what a season of hardship means for you. Indeed, all right, well, we need to take a quick break, and then when we come back we will talk more

about winter changes in winter adaptations thank you. Thank Alright, we're back. Okay, So, Robert, we have discussed how we are not constant beings but sort of like seasonal shape shifters. There are so many ways that culturally, that psychologically, that metabolically, our bodies respond to the changes in the seasons in a way that it might be hard to beat out of us, even though we've got all these nice climate controlled indoor places to dwell. Now our bodies are surfing

the cycles of time. Now, there is one way in which the changes of the seasons affect us much more directly and immediately, and that's by being cold. Apart from, you know, the vitamin D deficiency you might get from shorter days, and the way it might affect the way you eat and affect your your metabolism and even affect your behavior and your dating and your desire for meaning and things like that, it also is just freezing outside. Now. It's no secret that exposure to cold can hurt or

kill you. But did you ever wonder why they are? Like? Several ways you can answer this question. One is pretty straightforward and mechanical. It's that the body has mostly liquid content. I like to think of that this sometimes like whenever you're feeling a little bit down on yourself, you just think like, hey, I'm a bag of fluids doing okay for a bag of fluids. Yeah, and if you if you were to freeze me solid, then a single Jean

Claude van Damn kick could shatter you. And well, in fact, if you were to freeze me solid, just the act of freezing me solid would sort of shatter me because when liquid freezes, it can form ice crystals, which cause damage to the body's tissues, to the cells, to the cell membranes. But here's another way to think about it. Animal life is characterized by two main physical characteristics. I'd say motion and chemical reactions, and cold slows down both

of these things. So cooks out there. I wonder if you ever tried to, like mash up some spinach art to choke dip with a cold block of cream cheese, Robert, do you have any comparable experience? Uh? No, I do not. It's impossible. I means you're just like work in your arm, and you've gotta you've gotta be some kind of like hydraulic press type creature in order to achieve it. A similar thing would be if you're into baking, and you ever tried to like whip something with cold butter, it's

just a bad idea. And likewise, if if you've ever tried to trigger a chemical reaction like lighting a fire when it's freezing cold outside, not so easy. The body needs to be warm, so it's mechanical motions are kind of lubricated and squishy, and it also needs to be warm, so it's chemical reactions have enough energy to take place. But not all bodies are like this. There are creatures in this world that can literally freeze almost entirely solid

and thaw out and survive. So I want to mention one example, the wood frog Lithabades sylvaticus, found throughout the forests of Canada and the northern United States. So this is a frog that survives the harsh winter of northern

Canadian forests. How would it do that? Well, what you'll notice it does is that when the cold north winds set in sometime around September, these frogs crawl down and nestle in some dead plant matter like some leaf litter, dead grass, and then they literally freeze almost entirely solid. About two thirds of their bodies water content turns into ice. And even temperatures as low as zero degrease fahrenheit won't kill them. And then when warm weather comes back, they

thaw out, they hop away unharmed. Uh. Speaking to the l A Times, the herpetologist Don Larson said, quote, on an organismal level, they are essentially dead. The individual cells are still functioning, but they have no way to communicate with each other. So you might be ondering how do they do this? Well, the body essentially manufactures cryoprotectant chemicals. It looks like glycogen in the frog's liver gets converted into glucose, which keeps the frog's individual cells alive throughout

the freeze. And then also uriah, which is the nitrogen based crystalline compound you excrete in your urine, might also play a role. Uria came up a little bit earlier when we were talking about cold protection. But Larson points out this thing that's not known, but it's an interesting possibility. He points out that freezing alive might not just be a survival mechanism, but that could actually be beneficial to an animal that wanted to rid itself of parasites. Oh

this is so good. I mean, we we we see a similar cases. For instance, where if you have frozen fish, you know, you worry less about there being parasites in the fish. And also if you're worried about dust mites on one of your child's prize stuffed animals, you stick it in the freezer overnight and that takes care of the mite. So all the dust mights go to your frozen shrimp. Yeah. Well, you know what's the difference between a mite and a shrimp, really shrimp hugettical bugs. So yes,

you've got the wood frog. But we've had another freezing champion, even more hardy that I want to mention, the red flat bark beetle, which is kuka just clavipies. Usually we would find them living under loose bark in North American deciduous trees. And I found a report from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks that biologists Todd's formo quote cooled the beetles in a lab to minus seventy degrees celsius, which is minus ninety four degrees fahrenheit, and they did not die.

And then there was another experiment subsequently in California. They could they found they could lower the temperature of these beetles to minus a hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is minus two hundred and thirty eight degrees fahrenheit, colder than any natural temperature on Earth. Without freezing the beetles. That's incredib Now, obviously our bodies are not like this. We do not have such strong crier protectant mechanisms, and

freezing will definitely injure or kill us. Direct exposure of body parts to cold weather can lead to frostbite, which has a simple explanation and a more complex explanation. The simple version is just that frost bite is when body tissues freeze. The more complex one is a little bit chemical. It's when ice crystals form in the body tissues. It dehydrates cells, causes damage to sell membranes. Essentially, you don't want to let your outer body parts freeze because there's

sort of the point of no return there. They don't come back. Yeah. I feel like most of us have probably read various accounts of explorers, adventurers or refugees and in really chilling environments and accounts of frostbite where you realize that is a it is a terrible thing to have to experience. Yeah, there's something especially disturbing about it because it's almost like, um, I don't know, just having

like it's like necrosis. You know, it's like there's a part of the body that is dying or is dead, but it's still attached to you. It's not like it's been chopped off. It's just it's still there and it's not working for you. Yeah, it is in D and D terms to chronic damage. Yeah. Uh so, we obviously are not as hardy as bark beetles, but we do

have adaptive mechanisms. And you'll see the first signs of the human body reacting to cold weather really just within a few seconds of exposure to sub thermo neutral temperatures. So our skin has these thermo receptors and the detect both absolute and relative temperature differences, and they let us know if the environment is too hot or too cold. So when the body detects cold, it begins to shunt

blood away from the extremities. You you probably feel some sensation of this and kind of you know, the numbness and all that when the blood is being drawn away from the skin and away from the arms and legs to keep it closer to the vital organs like the heart and the lungs. This is essentially a choice to sacrifice the outer skin and use it as a layer of insulation. By keeping the blood away from the outside, the blood stays warmer. Another defense mechanism is runny nose.

You ever wonder, like why your nose runs in the cold? Uh? So, cold air tends to be very dry and of course very cold, and since you're constantly pulling that dry air in through the nose, when you breathe, it dries out the exposed surfaces within the nasal cavity and the nasal cavity, one of the things it does when you breathe through it is it warms the air on the way down

to your lungs. So, if you're drawing in this really dry, cold air that is not being appropriately warmed inside the nose by your warm, nice mucous layers in there and drying out the inside of the nose, the body tries to compensate, and so what it does is it moisturizes these passages by secreting mucous fluid, leading to cold induced rhine a rhea, the diarrhea of the nose. Yeah, I spent a few years in my childhood in Roddington, Newfoundland, Canada,

so we had pretty intense winters up there. Uh so I have on one hand, I have these really pleasant memories of scaling giants snow banks and tunneling through them. But I also have these persistent memories of of wearing a full ski mask that is at once warming but also just soggy with with snot you know, just just partially frozen and partially warmed, snot just covering the whole

front of the ski mask. You know. With exertion in cold weather, one of the risk factors you need to watch out for is that your clothes don't become sweat soaked. Oh yeah, because then though that sweat is going to cool and then you're you're essentially freezing in your own sweat. Yeah, no good. So another thing we've all done it shivering. It's one of the body's main defense mechanisms against cold. The purpose seems to be to force your muscles to

generate extra heat. Movement and friction tend to produce heat. If you doubt this, just rub your hands together for ten seconds. You'll feel them warm up. And so the shivering is the body's way of enlisting your muscle tissues is a kind of emergency internal space heater, forcing them to rapidly contract and rhythmic patterns all over the body and generate extra heat to keep your vital organs and blood warm. Another adaptation that seems to not really help

very much anymore goose bumps. Yes, you ever wonder why, Like, what's the point? It almost feels like when you get goose bumps, the bumps are coming up on your skin, which would seem to increase the surface area of your skin, which would make you get cold even faster. Well, and then also it would seem to move body hair away from the body. Yeah, it was It's like, oh well, now this protective layer of you know, barely visible arm

hair is not even touching my arm anymore. But no, goose bumps are believed to be a vestigial trait from our recent ancestors who had much more body hair than us, so when they got cold, they could raise the hairs on their skin to become extra fluffy and insulated. And it's true that actually lower density things are better insulated. 's right? You notice that, like when you put insulation in the walls in your house. It's not like some

tightly packed metal or would kind of thing. It's this loose, fluffy stuff because it conducts heat less well, and so that's essentially what your body is trying to do. It remembers a time when you your ancestors had much more hair, and it's trying to fluff it up to become less conductive of heat and to insulate skin better from the cold. Now, of course we don't have much of that hair anymore, but we still have this reaction. So we get the bumps,

but without the insulation. Here's the seasonal fact. I know you have heard what time of year do people commit suicide the most? It's winter, right, Yeah, well I believe that is the That is sort of the common idea that's out there. Yeah, I mean it sounds very truthy. Yeah yeah, I mean we it's it's it kind of goes back to the idea of arctic madness. Right. It feels appropriate like it gets a little cold here in Atlanta and we start thinking, oh, this this weather is

driving me crazy. It's it's so it's it's depressing me, or it's making me behave radically, it makes me want to just shut myself up in my home and not encounter the outside world. Again. Yeah, it makes your mind connect naturally to all kinds of anecdotes that you have within, you know, some part of your long term memory, stories about what it's like to be in the in the Antarctic research stations, or or these stories about parlernarek Um.

But yeah, it turns out that this very truthy sounding fact that more people commit suicide in the winter is not in fact a fact. It is a myth and yearly suicide rates do not generally peak in the winter, but they do appear to have a seasonal peak, and it's not in the winter, it's in spring and early summer. So how much more suicide is there in the spring, Well,

it varies a lot between societies. But according to Fotus Papadopoulos, a professor of psychiatry at Uppsala University in Sweden, quote, if we take winter as a baseline, there is a twenty to sixty higher suicide side rate during spring. That's a pretty big difference. I mean, that doesn't sound like noise. That sounds like a real effect. Yeah, I mean it.

I'm hesitant to try and make too much sense out of it, you know, but it does lend itself to interpretations of Right, if the winter is about survival, then what happens when you get to the other side of that survival? It's like like managing to cross a rickety bridge and you relieve that you made it across that bridge without plummeting into the abyss. But here you are on the other side, and you have how many more

leads to walk? You know? Um, it's I can imagine the other hardships of life kind of opening up again for you in a new and perhaps more profound way. Yeah, I can see that too. Now, there have been scientific attempts to look into what causes this spike in spring

and early summer for suicide attempts. There was, for example, a massive literature review combining the findings of studies from nineteen seventy nine until two thousand eleven that had to do with seasonal variations in suicide and that was by wu uh Kusaga and Postolache and in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in in the major

findings uh were Here are a few of them. I guess many studies have replicated the finding of a spring suicide peak roughly in the April May June region of the calendar, and this peak does not exist equally in all populations, but shows up with varying intensity among many or most. There are also summer peaks for some populations. In most studies, winter months actually have the lowest rates of suicide of the entire year, so when it's the

coldest is when suicide happens the least. Um However, despite massive amounts of research, the relationship between seasonal change and suicide behavior is still not very well understood, like what would cause these seasonal variations. So here are a few of the ideas that have been studied. One of them is changes in sunlight and temperature. Some studies seem to have demonstrated there's actually a positive correlation between suicide and

exposure to sunlight. That seems kind of counterintuitive, but these findings are also disputed. However, a peak in late spring and early summer would correlate to the longest days of the year. Also, this could be informed by findings that suicide is more common among rural populations than urban ones, and more common in outdoor workers than indoor workers. It also varies a lot by geographical region, so spring peaks are found all over the place, but are a varying

intensity in different countries. For example, there was a n study that found a very narrow seasonal fluctuation in Canada, so the ratio of average spring to winter suicide rates was one point zero eight, so barely more in spring. But in the same study in Portugal the ratio was one point seven, so you know, getting close to double as many in spring. Here's another really odd one. A series of findings seemed to link suicide rates to spring

allergies and to people with allergies. For example, one of these studies was a two thousand four study that found a correlation between the times of year with peak suicide rates and the times of year with the greatest concentration of allergenic tree pollen in the air. And that study was called tree pollen peaks are associated with increased nonviolent

suicide and women. Now, while these changes show up in a lot of countries, UH, there does seem to be a flattening effect in recent decades, Like while suicides are still frequent, recent studies in England, Wales, Hong Kong, Sweden, and Denmark shows seasonal variation on suicide rates. Uh. Really flattening coming down, so there's not as much variation from time of the year to another time of the year.

But in other countries like Finland. In the United States, you have a much more persistent seasonal pattern still peaking in the spring. So that just makes me think about the rural and an urban distinction that you touched on earlier, you know, like, maybe these are these are maybe finling in the US. I mean, certainly there's a urbanization going on in in all major Western cultures, but maybe there's still enough of a rural base to to support like

an uptick in rural environments. Yeah, a lot of times people don't think to think about suicide rates as like a public health question, something that really should be researched and understood, and if you can understand the underlying causes and why and when these things happen, that you could treat it like a disease that can be treated and prevented. Indeed, but to get back to the winter thing, the winter

suicide myth, I'd say that is thoroughly busted. Not only is it not the peak for suicide in the year, it is generally the lowest time in the entire year for suicide. And I wonder why this myth is so persistent, because I think if you'd asked me before I looked

into it, I would have thought, oh, yeah, yeah, winter time. Well, I think part of it, especially here in the United States and in other Western countries, there's the link with the holidays, with Christmas, with especially the modern westernized American Christmas, where it's all it's not as much about surviving the winter, and it's more about this just unrealistic level of happiness that you're supposed to feel every time somebody jingles a jingle bell uh and and it rarely matches up with

our experience of life, much less wide life during during the winter. I think that's exactly right. I think that there there are two different levels on which this myth is sticky. One is the the sort of straightforward truthiness feeling, which is that in the winter, it's darker, it's colder, and we just associate these atmospheric feelings with low mood, and then we associate low mood with things like suicide.

But then also there's the contrarian truthiness, where we think, oh, it's you know, the time when everybody's telling you to be happy, and actually that's just making everybody more miserable, and you're you're trying to get ready to for the holidays, and this is leading to all this commercialism and stress and having go to the shopping mall. And so there's a sort of like fulk level gut feeling that this

is just driving everybody nuts and making people miserable and unhappy. Well, and it's also wrapped up in some of the culture of our Christmas as well. I mean, It's a Wonderful Life is one of our key American holiday films, and it is about a guy who is depressed and contemplating suicide at Christmas. Yeah, you forget that's a bridge jumping movie. Yeah, but but on some level it's basically letting it telling everybody, Hey, like, suicide at Christmas is uh, it's it's part of Christmas.

It's in It's in the Christmas movie that you're watching. So it's Christmas as a as an American holiday sent of some weirdly mixed messages. Yeah, though, of course we should say, no matter what time of year it is, if you are having suicidal feelings or ideation, you should reach out to somebody. You should talk to somebody, let them know that's right. And hey, if any in out there needs to make a call, you can contact the National Suicide Preventional Lifeline at two seven, three, eight to five.

Now here's a cold weather question. Does true or false? Robert, going out in cold weather can cause you to catch cold? We hear this in all the time, right God, in that cold you'll catch your death. But you also here nowadays from you know, your skeptical say like that is a myth, not true. It's actually more complicated than true or false. It seems to be somewhere in between. Now, of course, we know that the cold itself will not make you sick. Winner is traditionally known as cold and

flu season. But we do not live in the you know, the miasthma theory of disease age anymore, where people thought that disease was caused by bad air. We live in the age of the germ theory of disease. So the cold weather itself does not directly cause infection. But winter months do seem to put us at risk for these seasonal epidemics. And it's not an illusion. There are studies that show that that these these infection rates really do go up in the winter, and there are several reasons

people have hypothesized why that might be. A commonly cited hypothesis is that people spend more time indoors huddling together in winter months due to the cold weather and physical proximity to other people and touching and stuff can increase your transmission rate of infectious diseases. Of course, you're generally more likely to catch something from somebody you're sharing a blanket and cuddling with, but there there are also other

mechanisms that might be operative. For example, there was a twenty sixteen study from the Yale School of Medicine that found that some of the human bodies viral defense mechanisms are simply less effective at lower temperatures. But there's actually a much deeper way that your body adapts to the germ threats of winter months. The change in seasons is in your DNA. Alright, we're gonna take a quick break

and we come back. We will dive into this. Uh. This alarming notion that that that winter changes our genetic expression. Thank thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. So we tend to think of our d N A is being safe from the winter. I would think, you know, I had not really thought about this previously. I mean, you tend to think of your d n A as being safe from pretty much everything except you know that which would cause mutations or uh maybe maybe maybe you're

not safe from cosmic rays. Maybe you're not safe from X ray bombardment, but you are at least safe from the seasons down in your very d n A. But no, it turns out o our d n A. While the basic genome does not tend to change the way it's expressed, does tend to change based on a lot of different factors. And I'll explain what that means in a minute. So a study in Nature Communications found that roughly twenty three of the genes found in human white blood cells and

adipose tissue change their expression depending on the change in seasons. Now, if you if you've read about this before, you might have headlines like your DNA changes in the winter that maybe you know, if you're being generous, that could be thought of as correct, but it could also meeting misleadingly implied that the literal code of the genome is altered, and that's not the case. So we should explain the

difference between the genome itself and gene expression. Your genes are sequences of DNA code found in the cells in your body, and the genes generally don't change unless there's a mutation. What changes is the expression of individual genes and gene expression. Whenever you hear gene expression, you can

sort of think of that as genes doing something. Gene expression is when the code inside a gene is chemically translated into a product like a protein or a string of RNA, usually a protein that does something inside the body. And gene expression is how the genome makes things happen. So if there are changes in which genes get express

st and when this leads to changes in the body. Yeah, I often think about this and about the you know, just epigenetic changes in general as being kind of like the settings in a video game, particularly in a simulation game. We have all these various realism toggles you can switch on and off, and they ultimately affect how the game manifests to the player. Yeah, or you can think about I mean to follow the video game analogy. Another way you can think of it is that the code of

the video game does not change. That like the programming code that creates the game is set, but different parts of it are executing at different times, and so the expression is sort of like the execution of a line of code. So what's the chemical basis for gene expression. Well, genes are expressed when they get exposed to another chemical called messenger RNA or mRNA, and the mRNA reads the code and the genes and uses it to set off a process that creates proteins that lead to changes within

and between cells. So the quest and then would be how come mr and A isn't constantly reading all of our genes at once all the time and setting off these these protein creating processes all the time. Well, here's one reason. There are tons of genes inside a cell nucleus of a eukaryotic organism, and the body fits them in there by coiling them tightly around alkaline proteins called his stones. Now, if you've seen a picture of this before, it's often compared to beads along a string. That's kind

of what it looks like. The DNA associates very easily with the his stones because the DNA is negatively charged and the his stones are positively charged. And a gene from this coiled strand of DNA that coils around the his stones gets expressed when it picks up a methyl marker, which makes it loosen from the his stone core. And once it loosens and uncoils, the DNA can match up with mRNA and then undergo expression, which, as we said,

generally means making proteins, which means something is happening. So all kinds of triggers lead to changes in gene expression, which genes are are sort of like being brought forth to manufacture their will on the world. One example, it's been shown in a lot of context that some gene expression changes occur over the natural day night cycle. In the morning, you're going to be expressing some genes and

then at night you're going to be expressing others. Uh So, for example, if you're studying what genes are being expressed in a sample of tissue, it could actually matter what time of day you take the sample. So one of the authors of this sixteen study I mentioned earlier, the Cambridge immuno geneticist Chris Wallace, told Wired Magazine in a good article about this quote, we knew that there's some

genes that change their expression throughout the day. Then it hit us, lam, what is the effect on genes of the length of the day throughout the year, great piece of deductive reasoning. So of course it's leading to experiments. Wallace inter colleagues compare findings from several studies which tracked gene expression in populations from different times of the year in both the northern and southern hemispheres, in the countries where Germany, Australia, the US, the UK, Iceland, and the Gambia.

And of course, as we we've said before, this matter is because in the northern and southern hemispheres, winter and summer are reversed, so in the summer hemisphere it's summer in January and winter in July. And this helps because it allows you to isolate that any differences really were caused by natural changes in the seasons and not probably by human cultural factors like the calendar or the month

or something like that. So they found that in these white blood cells there were thousands of genes that showed seasonal changes in expression. Uh, there were two thousand, three hundred eleven summer genes they identified and two thousand, eight hundred and twenty six winter genes, and it looks like most of these changes had to do with immune system

of function. Now, of course they were looking at white blood cells as if the immune system we're ramping up inflammation responses to deal with the germ threat of winter. And in the samples from tropical Gambia, the changes for immune system gene expression came not during winter, but during the rainy season when people are exposed to the greatest

risk of malaria. So what we're seeing here is that the body does have some kind of seasonal changes in the way that it expresses your genome, different parts of the code that makes you you get activated depending on what time of the year it is, uh and on you know, not so much what time of the year it is, but the seasonal triggers around you in the environment. And one of the things that this is very tightly controlling is the inflammation response. Now, the inflammation response, as

we know, it helps keep us from getting sick. It's very primitive, ancient type of immune response. It's not very pleasant, but it does help keep you know, germs and stuff from destroying your body. But as we also know, inflammation can lead to all kinds of other health problems. It can lead to metabolic problems, it can lead to arthritis.

You know, it's implicated in wide ranging medical problems. So this sort of opens up a door into a whole arena of new research that could take place about how our genes are not just helping defend us from these seasonal epidemics, but also in how they put us at risk. Now.

Earlier we mentioned the idea that there are certain like cardiovascular problems that people have increased risk of of of dying from in the winter, and this also seems to indicate that there are inflammation related problems that could really put us at risk in these months, and maybe studying the way our genes change over the seasons could help figure out ways help us figure out ways to protect us. Now, a question in the study, of course, is what exactly

triggers the change in gene expression. Is it the temperature, is it the length of the days and how much the body has access to sunlight, or could it be something else? I mean, maybe it's not impossible. There could be some kind of cultural practices that that trigger this, but it doesn't seem likely because it's manifested across so

many different countries and regions. Yeah, it would be different there if there's a group where they eat a particular pickled fish during the winter, and you could you could potentially blame it all on that one pickled fish totally. So the traditions that cast us as seasonal shape shifters are in many ways literally correct. There are ways in which our bodies are adapting to these seasonal changes to make us a different kind of animal when the winter

sets in. Isn't that interesting? I mean, not only does it back up this idea that there there is a winter self in some ways, but it also just drives home the the ever changing nature of of of the

human being. You know, not just not just in in our thoughts and our memories, but not just in the aging of the body and the acquiring and the healing of injuries or or illnesses, but that our our body is going through cyclical phases in order to keep up and thrive within the seasons of our environment, even if we don't actually hibernate. Now here's the question I really

want to understand. What is the biological mechanism that forces humans to continually make new adaptations of Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol starring the cast of pre existing franchises of cartoons, well you got flint Stones, You've got Mr Magoo, you got uh. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. I bet there's like a Jetson's Christmas Carol. Was it really a flint Stone's Christmas Carrol? Yeah, there's a flint Stones. There's famously a Mickey Christmas Carol. Yeah, yeah for me and Muppets.

Muppets for me. I really only have two that I get, really only one. It's got to be the musical Scrooge. One of the few musicals that I enjoy uh to this day is is the Albert Finney. Albert Finney is Scrooge, and that the film all has wonderful songs and also like one of the darker visions of the supernatural elements found in a Christmas Carol, like that the ghosts are all tremendously frightening. Um Alec Guinness plays Marley, and I

believe that even muscular devil show up. There's a scene where Scrooge is in hell and having to deal with the chains of hell, and you have all these muscular red devils trooping around. That's awesome. Have you ever seen the nineteen forty nine vincent Price Christmas Carol? What no I had no idea he ever played No, no, no, I don't get excited. He doesn't play Scrooge. He just shows up holding a book and it's like, well, Charles Dickens and sort of introduces it. It's it's worth a watch.

It's on YouTube. It's hilarious. It's uh, probably the worst adaptation of a Christmas Carol I've ever seen. A list of issues include it spells Ebeneezer wrong in the opening credits, It gets the title of the book wrong. It is called the Christmas Carol. You can sometimes see like the Wrong Side have set walls, so there's just like beams holding up the walls of the set, and their Scrooge is this guy who's like krish Mesh, Hey, creish Mesh. Now,

now here's the here's the question. You see so many different actors who have played Dracula, so many different actors have played Scrooge. But how many actors can you think I have played both? The only one that comes to my mind off hand is Jack Palince, WHOA that's good. Was Michael Caine ever Dracula? Oh No, I don't think he was. It seems like it seems like he could. He easily could have been Kane could have played Dracula. But I go through the others like um, has uh

Albert Finney ever played Dracula? Knowledge has has Luis Jordan ever played Scrooge? No? I don't think there's ever been a French Scrooge. Likewise, like all the Draculas and all the Scrooges, there seems to be very little overlap between the two roles much, you know, much less the characters. I don't think anyone's ever made a Christmas Carol with Dracula in it was Gary Oldman? Ever Scrooge? I don't think he was, But again, there's no reason why he shouldn't.

He's played Churchill, and I believe what Albert Finney's played Churchill. So it's there's there's every reason in the world that you would see more crossover between these two roles. Do you hear about the upcoming Christmas Carol with Christian Bale is Scrooge? Is that true? Is that real? No? I'm missing because Christian Pale they all ever played Dracula. I

guess not. He's got to choose, right, there's some hidden, like hooded council that decides whether you get to play Scrooge or Dracula, and unless you're Jack Talents, you cannot choose both. We're just digging ourselves deeper and deeper. All right, Well, this week I feel like we've we've really had a fabricous exploration here of of how we think about our winter selves, how we culturally frame our winter selves in some cases, and then what our body is actually doing

during the winter. What is it doing differently, how is it adapting, how is it behaving within different parameters, and what those two different things we have to do with each other. Yeah. So I would suggest for listeners out there, one thing you might want to try this winter is come up with the new winter name for yourself. Yes, I like this, either an adaptation of your existing name or just something altogether new but fitting for the winter you. Maybe it's just your name but with a W as

the first letter. Yeah, so Woe and Wobert. Yeah. Or it could be more like, really more of a title that defines what you do. Like he who binge watches Netflix and eats chili, that's sort of a thing. He who foolishly buys fresh tomatoes in the winter, that's a good one. But hey, we'd love to hear from all of you out there. What would your winter name be? And indeed, how is the winter you different from the summer you? Do you experience seasonal effective disorder? Uh? Do

you think you have seasonal effective disorder? Either way, let us know we would love to hear from you. Oh and especially if we have any listeners with Quakua heritage, I would love to hear from you with your thoughts about these or ceremonial traditions. Indeed, in the meantime, you can always check out past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. You'll also find links out to our various social media

accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. As always, big thanks to our audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at Blow the Mind at how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com starts my b