Ig Nobels 2017: Vampires, Vaginal Music & Cheese

But hey, if you're here you just want to jump right in. That's okay too, guys. We have already covered liquid cats, cave bugs with swapped genitals, digeri do therapy, crocodile gamblers, weird effects of twins taking selfies or just looking at their own faces, and then whether old man ears are big. I don't know if you can get

any weirder than that. And you know, before we get into the categories, they do want to again point out that the Ignoble Prizes, they come out every year, they put on by the publication the annals have been probable research. I will include a link to their website on the landing page for this episode Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Be sure to check them out. They are a publication. They put out a lot of great content about cool, weird, and occasionally hilarious, well frequently hilarious uh

scientific studies. Uh. They're worth checking out. And we have to thank them, uh for putting out this content every year, drawing everyone's attention to these unique studies so that we can highlight them. Yeah. Actually, and if you're really loving these episodes and you want to know more, you can watch their ceremony online when they gave the awards to all these people for the articles we're talking about. You're a big fan, right. We're thinking of putting together a

Christian singer commentary track. And as people know from past Ignoble episodes, I've watched them all the way through. I didn't do it this time. It's a little bit painful. It's it's not my cup of tea when it comes to sense of humor. But I love the research that they pulled together. Yeah, alright, So what do we have for day? We have three left, one each to round out the twenty seven Igno Bells. What's what's first, I think, Joe, we have you first with the nutrition prize. Let's talk

about vampire bats. Are they nutritious? They sure are delicious, delicious. Yeah. So there are three species of bats that are completely hematophagus, meaning they can survive on blood as their only food. And these three species are des Modus rotundus, which is the common vampire bat. You'll find it all over Central and South America. Uh Diamus yungi, which is the white winged vampire bat, and Diphila eco data, the hairy legged vampire bat. Now, all three of these actually you'll find

in different parts of Central and South America. To survive on a diet of blood, these bats are equipped with some pretty amazing equipment. They've got these razor sharp incisors and canines. And first what they do is they tend to clip away the feathers or hair of their hosts. You get like a free hair cut out of it, and then puncture the flesh. So they get the sort of scissor like teeth to clip away feathers or hair. They get a hole in you. And then they've also

got this saliva laced with anticoagulants. So when they get it in the blood, it helps keep the blood flowing instead of clotting. They're basically surgeons, really, I mean they're they're shaving the surface and then they're making the incision and using in Uh, they're basically drugging you so that you don't feel anything. We have a whole episode about this actually about the physics of blood drinking as it

relates to vampire bats and you know, also fictional vampires. Well, since you know that, you you guys probably know that they don't actually suck blood, but they sort of lap it up. Yeah, they let the blood pool and they lap it up, or they let it flow into the blood funnels. The blood funnels on the tongue or the roof of the mouth. So a blood based diet is a rare and highly specialized way for a mammal to make a living. I would say it's like it's a terrible way for a mamm living, Like it is a

difficult life. There is a reason you don't see a whole lot of blood sucking mammals. It requires weird specific behavioral and physiological adaptations that are not easily turned toward other survival strategies. Basically, it's an extreme lifestyle. And and I'm just imagining that like these bats at the X Games, Like, yeah, that's extreme, bro right, Like I went all in on learning how to rocket skateboard and I can't do anything else. I never learned math, and now now I'm stuck with

this is my career. Um so Hemata fagus bats are not able to store body fat and generally can't survive fasting more than a couple of days. And their bodies are also incredibly incredibly efficient at eliminating waste products from their blood diets, such as urea and excess water. But because of this elimination efficiency, they're also highly susceptible to dehydration.

It's hard being a vampire bat. Yeah. I remember in the episode of The Christian and I did we talked which we extrapolated this to a humanoid vampire, and we're basically describing this nos ferato like creature that would have to like barely drag itself into your room while you were asleep and start feeding on you, and it would be urinating at the same time. Uh and and and basically in a state of constant dehydration because the bathroom

breaks everywhere. If I remember, I don't have the time quantities in my head, but they can only do it for a certain amount of time on specific animals before they're discovered, before you notice you've got one chomping on you, and so they have to like be real quick about it. And they only get like a little bit of blood plasma with each feeding, so they could feed a lot. Yeah that with a lot of these. It's typical that

they can only get one host per night. So I mean it's a it's a it's a rough way to make a living. That's why they're also skinny and harry legged. Yeah, always on the cover of magazines. Uh So, the first two species I mentioned before are they find their blood in more diverse quarters, but the hairy legged vampire bat. The third one I mentioned, Diphila eco data is known

as a bird specialist. That means it makes its foraging niche even tighter by surviving almost entirely or entirely on the blood of wild birds, unless maybe that is it has to adapt. We'll see. So in the in this study that got the ig Nobell from the journal Acta chiropter A Logica Bats, Yeah, authors Ferdinanda Ito Enrico Bernard and Rodrigo A. Torres set out to study the diet of diphila. This third bat I mentioned the wild bird blood lapper in the habitat of the Katinga dry forest. Now.

The Katinga is an ecoregion found in eastern Brazil, very different from the wet tropical rainforest of the Amazon Basin. The Katinga is this desert like region filled with dry, thorny trees and scrub vegetation. It's often referred to as like thorn forest, and some parts of this region have been strongly disturbed in recent years by human activity, especially agriculture. As always, human presence in and uh and and human

agriculture in an ecosystem can mess up local wildlife. So the researchers reasoned that you would be able to see this disturbance of wildlife through changes in the diet of local vampire bats. If you move a bunch of farmers into a patch of Katinga, driving out and hunting many of the wild birds native to the area, would the local diphila change their lifestyle or to praying on domestic mammals, maybe in farms like cattle, goats, or pigs. Now here's a question for you guys. Let's say you want to

study what a bad eats. How do you figure that out? Follow bats around? Well, that's kind of hard to do, and that maybe you made bat drones to chase something. You go off the grid, man, I mean, I've seen studies that that look at that behavior, and it generally means you have to go where the prey hangs out and you have to just videotape the prey all night and then track what happens. But that would be assuming what the prey is. What if you want to find

out what the pray I imagine that you go through guano. Yep, there you go. So a common method of studying the diet of a bat would be to study the shapes that appear in its poop. So, if it's a fruit eating bat, you can look at the feces and see what kind of seeds and stuff like that you see. If it's an insectivorous bat, you can look for insect body parts. But if you want to study the diet of a blood lapping bat, how do you do it? Yeah? What is a vampire blood poop consist of? Well, I

mean it looks like soft poop. Yeah, it's soft poop. But like you can't identify what animal, Uh, some blood came from just by looking at it in poop. So enter DNA testing of guano. So you can use polymerase chain reaction, which is known as PCR, the PCR technique on vampire bat feces to amplify fragments of degraded hosts DNA in the feces and to turn rman what animal the digested blood came from. So that's what the researchers

did here. They collected fecal samples monthly from to January fifteen from a cave occupied by a colony of Diphila ecadata, which is the hairy legged vampire bat. The blood the bird blood lappers, which was surrounded by many cattle ranches and subsistence farms with a lot of goats in particular in the area. So it's the situation where their natural prey,

the wild birds, have largely been driven out. You've got a lot of agriculture and they're wondering, Okay, are these things feeding on domestic mammals instead of the birds they prefer in the wild. So they preserved all these fecal samples. Then they did their molecular analysis to look for d NA ques as to what species these bats have been gorging themselves on. Researchers found DNA from two species, Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken, and Homo sapetans, the domestic human being.

These bats had been drinking human lud and this is significant because while people have gotten bat bites before, this is the first known evidence of vampire bats consuming human blood under natural conditions in the wild, and it contradicts the previous assumption that di Fila ecuadata would only drink the blood of wild birds. In previous experiments, this had gone pretty far. For example, these bats have even refused to drink mammal blood when it was their only option

in lab conditions. Given the choice between pig blood, goat blood, and nothing, they chose nothing. So the idea here was that they were birds specialists to the point that there was no going back, which is kind of the whole niche. You know, the character of the vampire bat itself is that it's a creature that has chosen or chosen it is. It has gone down a very difficult road and it's just making the best it can out of that to

have those difficult circumstances. Yeah, and they can, and they can specialize in different ways, Like rotundas drinks mammal blood, but but ecudata does not drink mammal blood even when it's got no other choice, except apparently when their habitat is disrupted and food sources are depleted, they'll make an exception. Apparently not so much for goats or pigs, but for us. So this is a consequence of our actions affecting their

ecological area. Yeah, and I think it's interesting to wonder, like why these would generally not go for other mammals, but they would find human blood acceptable. Probably got a lot of more plasma in it. It's all fat or chicken chicken farmers taste taste like chicken. It could be. Now. One thing they found is that it looks like these bats cannot survive on mammal blood alone. So they can't just drink human blood and survive their diet, right, so they can survive on a mix of chicken blood and

human blood. Uh. And so that's pretty weird. But it makes me wonder what other animals might decide we are worth eating once we destroy their natural habitat and drive out their natural prey, hippos. I think it's hippos that we need to worry about the most. I believe you guys brought up hippos recently, right first monsters, Yeah, yeah, watch out, they're gonna get you. It's harder to imagine, certainly,

the hippo switching over like that. But I remember when our in our episode on bats like that was part of the part of the really cool scientific theorizing is how did vampire bats come to drink blood? And you get into this situation of well, perhaps they were they were cleaning up wounds of mega fauna, or they were praying on parasites of megafauna. So you kind of get into this position where the the the organism eventually just

cuts out the middleman. Why am I? Why am I eating these these blood inflated ticks when I could just drink the blood of the of the of the mammoth or what have you. A. Right, it's big enough, it won't notice. Yeah, that's interesting. So we ask our questions, why is it funny? Why is it important? Things are always funnier when you explain why they're funny. Uh, this is funny because human blood is hilarious and why why is it important? Obviously, human incursion and into natural habitats

has consequences. We should think about what those consequences are. I think it's interesting that, as far as I know, the people this blood came from have not been identified, Like, I don't know who this who the humans supplying these bats with meals are, But these bats are drinking human blood. Someone very anemic chicken farmer? Yeah? Um. I mean. The other thing is it's funny because it's it's a hairy

legged bat. The hairy legged bat just sounds hilarious, harry legged bat in the Henderson's all right, well, we're gonna take a quick break, drink some blood, and then we'll be right back for more ignobles. Thank alright, we're back. So we're just talking about devouring blood, which sounds I mean, somewhat appetizing. Maybe not the best as are you guys disgusted by the idea of drinking blood? I don't know. I mean, if you have a blood funnel, why not

use it? Well, yeah, I mean it's certainly find for a vampire bat. I find that you Yeah, I find that the prospect kind of disgusting. I mean in the past, I'm not I haven't been opposed to having pretty red meat, and I think once a year I'll have have some sort of like a steak that it has a fair amount of blood in it, but the idea of like drinking it like scenes in movies where human drinks blood,

like I'm thinking of. I think the movie Chronos and also the vampire movie Habit both had scenes in which someone drinks the juice out of a out of a steak from the grocery store, you know where they like they drink, just drink the red liquid. We should clarify, that's not blood, that's myoglobin, that's right. So they're not even doing it right, these poor vampires. So then related to how disgusting that is to you, how do you feel about cheese? Oh, cheese is awesome. Is there any

cheese you guys won't eat? Um? Neither. I'm not a big fan of cheese. Whiz well that's the products. I love. All cheese, even the really stinky cheese, blue cheese, goat cheese, feta, you name it. I love cheese. It's part of my I'm a cheese addict. My favorite is the smoked accept pic cheese that comes from sheep milk and zacapona poland it's so good, It's really good. This next study is all about people being disgusted by cheese and it is called the Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese and F

M R I study. Well, that does make me think about how cheese is a is a largely cultural thing. Like there are cultural cuisines that really do not include cheese at all. Indeed, I mean you go to a Chinese restaurant, you're not going to find a lot of cheese on the menu. Now that being said, I believe there are there are some regional Chinese cuisines that have dairy products in them, some form of cheese. But about if you wanted to put some shredded cheese on my

low mane, I wouldn't mind. It does sound kind of gross. Somehow, you can do anything Greeno style exactly everything. Well, I'd ask Chinese listeners out there, do you find cheese revolting? Let us know, so that actually comes into play here, not specifically China, but regional you know, cultural tastes for cheese. Okay,

and it's coming up. But the researchers on this paper were specifically interested in studying disgusted and discussed, as defined by Charles Darwin in eighteen seventy two as a basic emotion that's characterized by peculiar facial expressions, action of distancing oneself from the offending object, and distinctive physiological manifestations like

nausea or revulsion. You know, I have to say that when it comes to the cheese smell, and I'm I'm very picky about this, Like I don't like people talking about stinky cheeses, I because I think you're you're putting a label on it that is that is daring everyone to find other people. I mean, yeah, I like fragrant cheeses. At the same time, I realized that a lot of people use the term stinky cheese um in a positive way, like that's a term of endearment for them. So I

don't mean to judge your your language. No, it's just I don't really call them that either. It's just kind of what I've heard people who are disgusted by cheese or first but but I have heard it used lovingly. Now. At the same time, I feel like that the specific aroma of cheese. It is very contextual. So and I'm even participated in sort of like mild studies of this, you know, you know, the kind of thing that they'll do it like World Science Festival where everybody smells a

tab of something. If you if you smell the cheese smell while eating cheese, it feels perfectly natural. If you smell the cheese smell while changing like your son's shoes, of which I have encountered this, it's revolting because that's not where it should be, right. Yeah, I think you could even use just linguistic priming, Like if you smell blue cheese while you're thinking about blue cheese and that's all,

it probably smells good. If you smell blue cheese and somebody calls it armpit cheese, I think that will probably cause you to recoil. Now, another case where I see something like this is with dury and fruit. Your fruit kind of smells like cheese, but a lot of people are really turned off by durian fruit because it is a fruit and it does not seem like it should have this aroma. Yeah, I, as many of our listeners know, and you guys know, I grew up in Singapore Durian

is quite popular the candy out of dry. Yeah, and when I was living over there, you could get dury and milkshakes from the McDonald's over there. No, I find dury and gross multiple levels. It smells like you're into me. But then also, have you ever like cut dury in before? It's a strange object. It's like this big spiny object and globes sort of. Yeah, when you open it up, the insides of it look like the insides of a of a not a plant. It looks like a cow's

organs just spilled out of this thing. Well, I think it should be classified as an outdoor cheese fruit because you don't eat it indoors necessarily. And this is from me. This is from a Western perspective that someone who hasn't grown up with it and have a cultural appreciation for it. But I think I'm perfectly okay with it at an outdoor scenario where I know that it is during Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And if you want to experiment, I think it's worth checking out as well. Try it.

But here's the thing is, you guys actually just like anecdotally talking about your your cheese experiences, just now hit on a couple of the points that we're going to find in this study, because these researchers focused on sensory factors and not just smell, and they also considered how discussed can be a conditioned a version, So specifically, they were looking at disgust of food and that was interesting to them because studies on food aversion are apparently rare,

and the reason why is because there's ethical issues associated with experimental induction of the gastro intestinal system. So if you cause somebody gastro intestinal pain as part of a study and then you're trying to figure out if they're a you know, they have an aversion to that food, there's some ethical issues, so it's hard to get approval for studies that are designed to make people feel nausea. Yeah. Yeah,

So they turned to cheese. Their first task was to estimate what proportion of individuals are actually disgusted by cheese, and then they aimed to compare the brain activities of people with aversion to cheese with those who commonly eat cheese. And they used functional magnetic resonance imaging to do this and from now and I'll refer to that as f m R. I their hypothesis was that several areas of the brain would be activated depending on if the participant

was either pro cheese or anti cheese. And these people, these people were talking about here, whether they're pro or anti. They claim to be able to detect cheese in a room solely based on its odor. So they gathered a hundred and forty five French men and a hundred and

eighty seven French women using newspaper ads and flyers. Then they asked these people to complete a questionnaire evaluating just general food items, and they broke them up into multiple groups of fifteen which were either pro cheese or anti cheese groups. There were anti cheese French people. It really breaks the stereotype. This is important to this study and surprising right. The groups were matched in age, and the participants were checked for ola factory impairments and detection ability.

So for stimuli, they used six cheese varieties blue cheddar goat, gre air, parmesan, and then is it pronounced tomay? I'm not I don't know this one. Actually don't know that cheese. I don't know it either, but it's t O M m e, so maybe that's a French cheese. Were unaware of over here, they diluted these cheeses the odorance of them in mineral oil down to ten percent in volume, and then five million liters of that solution was absorbed

into a squeeze bottle with a dropper. Then they used an airflow old factometer to deliver a continuous stimuli that was synchronized with the person's breathing through a standard oxygen mask. These participants could provide five logic signals with their hands, so they had like a little like controller uh and it basically indicated how pleasant or unpleasant their experience was.

And they also had their behavioral responses measured, their stimulation onset measured, and then the trigger signals were measured from the m r I that was recording them. They first tested this out while these people were in what they called the hunger state with normal food odors, not just cheese, and then again with odor, and then pictures followed up by them. So they wanted to see if like is the odor accompanied by visual going to make a difference

here the hunger state. What they meant here was that these people had only had a light breakfast of either tear coffee and just one single slice of bread, and the researchers hypothesized that the anti cheese subjects would answer far more quickly than the pro cheese subject because they knew they disliked cheese. Okay, here's what their findings were. That a higher proportion of people who disliked cheese existed than other food categories. It was thirty six point nine

percent of the people they studied disliked cheese. Some of these people reported that they had family particularity with cheese. In fact, that meant that up to six family members related to them also disliked cheese. The other foods that received low scores were mainly because of dietary habits, and

this is interesting like vegetarianism. So for instance, back to our thing, if you're a vegetarian and they missed a steak ooze into your face, you might have had a bad reaction to that in the same way some of these people did with cheese. Okay, But there was no significant difference observed between the two groups, the pro cheese and the anti cheese when they were just stimulated by odors only. So if they had cheese blasted in their face,

there wasn't a difference. But if they had cheese blaster in their face and they saw pictures of the cheese, then there was a difference. So visual reference seems to be really important here, and that kind of ties back to what you guys were talking about earlier, right, like what you're seeing. If it's your son's shoe and it smells like cheese, that's gonna make a big difference. Right.

So what's interesting here is this goes against reports that odor has an emotional impact on memory, and it actually suggests that odor on its own is insufficient to trigger disgust reactions. Perhaps what's going on here is it's the subject conception of cheese rather than the actual sensory properties of cheese that give it a disgusting value. That's odd, yeah,

isn't it. It's kind of you know, I have to say when when I am smelling my sun's shoe and it smells like cheese, I mean, I'm kind of giving it away right there. I am interpreting the smell is that of cheese in a place where cheese should not be. That's the thing that should not be the monster. Whereas if I was thinking of it more appropriately, you know, what if I was thinking of what I am actually smelling Without bringing cheese into the scenario, it would be

perhaps it would be a different experience altogether. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I know what you're talking about. So that was just like their behavioral observations. Then they looked at these f m R eyes and they showed that there was a stronger activation of the g P I slash GPE and s N areas of the brain in people who dislike cheese. So okay, that kind of went along with it. They thought that they would you some you know, reactions there.

They also found that a lack of desire to eat cheese was associated with a lack of activation in the VP area, which is a core brain structure in incentive motivation. So subsequently they proposed that the motivation related activation in our brains is suppressed in people who are anti cheese because of their disgust for cheese, that just in general, they won't be motivated, so your brain doesn't get turned on. Yeah, don't get it now. And it's not just about the cheese,

it's about anything else that's around you. Yeah, so here, okay, you guys were talking about France and how this is kind of weird, right, Yeah, their survey showed six percent of the French population dislikes cheese more than any other food category. That's way lower than their finding of thirty six point nine percent in the lab. So they're like,

wait a minute, what's going on. This especially interesting because here in France, the country has the greatest variety of cheeses in the world and has the highest level of cheese consumption in the world. I think of France's cheese cheese City, USA, like, I've never visited France, but I know that if I get to one day, I will eat a lot of cheese. Yeah, the world. So this is fascinating. It seems that like more people actually are repulsed by the smell and visuals of cheese than report

they are. There's something going on here. They also found sixty of the people who said they dislike cheese dislike cheese in all of its forms. It's not like they're just like I don't like blue cheese. These sixty just don't like any cheese. Eighteen percent of the people who said that they had a milk intolerance, so that makes sense. So in conclusion, they found that a higher than expected proportion of individuals are disgusted by cheese to the point

that they can't eat it. So this is interesting. There's way more people at least in this study and in France. We have to obviously do this culturally in different areas, but the disgust seems to be actually encoded into the brain and can subsequently suppress an individual's other motivations. You know, I wonder how smelling cheese affects gambling behavior. There you go, right, you make people inhale the smell of blue cheese while they're gambling. You see what happens. So okay, why why

is this ignoble funny? Well, of course the idea of people breathing in cheese and other smells they hate is kind of amusing, right, especially like they've got these oxygen masks on. Right, it's the d natured version of it. That's even funnier that they like had to extract cheese odor and pump it into their faces. Yeah, they could have just put them in a mascot cost him and they would have had the same effect. But but it

also cheese is inherently funny. The word cheese has that, Like, I feel like there have been studies that have pointed this out that or at least there. It has been pointed out that the funnier words, uh, the most humorous words in the English language, you're going to have the chu uh kind of a sound of the sound is gonna be like clown cheese, clown cheese. That's innately. I wonder what pennymizes cheese smells like, Yeah, I wouldn't want

that cheese Texas chainsaw mask or nine clown cheese. Well, they had cheese. It plays into that a lot. That's probably so. But why is this study important? Well, it's what I said earlier, because it's really rare to find individuals who have the same type of food discussed. So to find that like thirty basically thirty seven percent of the population dislikes this one specific food is important. But also it's really difficult to study this without triggering gastro

and testinal problems. So they found a way to do this without like actually inflicting harm on these people. So that's my cheese report. Why don't we take one more break and then when we get back, Robert's got our last ig Nobel study for us. All right, we're back, So we have one left, and it is the obstetrics Prize. He guys, ready for this, bring it forth into the world. Alright, So I'm going to read you the title of the paper, and in doing so, I'm going to answer the question

why the the Ignoble Prize committee found this funny. The title is fetal facial expression in response to intro vaginal music in mission. Oh music, emission, Yes, that is. I don't think emission should be the verb for music. Shouldn't it be like playing or well, wait, let's see if we can guess what this is about without having so Okay, I'm going to guess that this is looking at the faces of fetus in utero. As you're I don't know, you put like a bluetooth speaker up against like the

belly of the mother or something like that. Well, let's you are not taking the premise far enough. Okay. Yeah, this sounds like a speaker is inserted through the vagina to play for the fetus in utero and then they measure the fetus is face all expressions somehow exactly. Yeah, I mean, the basic idea here is that if music has an effect on the fetus, then and this is just like playing music outside of the body or touching

the speaker to the belly. Uh, then wouldn't it make more sense to get the speaker closer to baby and then baby will react even more. Sounds like somebody's trying to sell a product. I was gonna say, is there a specific speaker that is built for this? Am I just woefully unaware of this? Yeah, as the as the Ignoble Prices point out, there was, there was a patent filed in and you can currently buy a product called baby Pod if you look them up, go to the

baby Pod website. They even proudly have their Ignoble Prize like stamp of approval there to sell the product. I have a look on my face right now that thirties seven percent of people in France have when they sent paches. Well, well, let's get into the into the study, let's get into the science, and maybe it'll it'll change your mind a little bit. So studies have found that fetuses can hear

sounds from the side world while in the womb. They can even learn to recognize words in the in the womb, and they can retain memories from this time after birth. So into a two thousand thirteen University of Helsinki study published in p os one found it playing music while you're pregnant may influence your child's auditory system. It's just that's just this this one study. But but building up here.

According to a two thousand fourteen Max Playing Institute study, from twenty eight weeks that's the start of the third trimester and pregnancy onward, the heart rate of the fetus changes when it hears a familiar song, and from thirty five weeks on there is, uh, there's even a change in its movement patterns. So the fetus is dancing in in a way. And if yeah, basically you're you're stimulating the fetus, you're providing auditories, uh stimuli, and it is reacting.

Based on you know, my conversations with my friends who have been pregnant, this doesn't sound surprising to me, Like people believe that there the fetus in utero can hear music like while they'red that Like we react to music too, yeah, at that stage, I mean, yeah, obviously, yeah, yeah, I mean you see a lot of this book playing music for the fetus and then of course playing music for

the baby, for the infant. Once four friends who are very specific about like what the playlists were that they played for their kids, and like, like Brian Eno, I think was like a really big thing. Well, okay, I mean a lot of this relates to the parents, Like, yeah, if if you're having to deal with the newborn baby or the stress of paranacy, imagined some soothing ambient music

is great. I thought you were going to say a lot of black flag so that's why I'm not allowed to have kids now, I imagined a number of you were thinking about the so called Mozart effect here. Uh to remind everyone, this was proposed, and this was proposed in a science journal paper. Um, and the ideas they play classical music, specifically Mozart for a child, and it's going to have give them cognitive benefits. I remember hearing that people were questioning the mot There has been a

lot of questioning. Uh. So, first of all, everyone has to remember that the effect in question in the original paper, it's stemmed from the study of teen students, not babies, not fetuses. And plus the effect in question was merely an increase in performance on a specific spatial imagery task and it only lasted for a few minutes. So for the most part, the Mozart effect is largely dismissed as

a myth. That being said, again, if you were to play music for a fetus, which undoubtedly, again it's audio audio stimuli that generates a response, and uh, and there are situations where that is certainly beneficial. Wouldn't they hear it better if you put the speaker closer to the fetus. And that's where this study comes in. I'm going to read from you this is the the what I think

is a pretty straightforward approach. Quote. The main aim of this study was to analyze fetal response to an acoustic stimulus emitted by a device which, due to its location and characteristics, might provide better sound intensity and quality. To that end, we used a device specifically designed to emit a melody or vibration from inside the mother's vagina. This location is closest to the fetus, so there are fewer

obstacles to attenuate the acoustic waves. The secondary objective was to identify quantifiable fetal movements that could be associated with the acoustic stimulus. So you know, they're not getting into any situation here. You know, Can we pipe music into the womb and make babies smarter, et cetera. This is very much based on just stimulating the fetus with sound

and or vibration. This is not a prelude to super babies baby genuses too well, in a way, it's maybe a prelude to that, but but it's not intentionally a prelead to that in thing. So these are the findings quote at present, our data appears to suggest to interpretations that intravaginal application with fewer obstacles could be more effective and transmitting music to the fetus, and that the feet might perceive these higher frequencies at an earlier age than

reported to date. Now, Robert, you mentioned a product earlier. I assume we're getting to that here. Yes, I mentioned the baby Pod, which I've seen with a price tag of around a hundred and thirty three dollars, And it is essentially a speaker device you can plug into any musical device. You can plug it into your phone, MP three player speaker with the appropriate jack, turn table, yeah, turntable, what you can get a DJ out there. It's a

an an FDA approved device. Uh, and it's sold with the idea that will quote stimulate vocalization for babies with music. So oh interesting, Okay, Yeah, so it's it's going beyond this study and picking up on some of the results of other studies that it made the argument that exposing the unborn child to music will help in the the development of vocalization. Got it so that they'll try to like make accompanying noises? Yeah, okay. One of the things here is that we are getting into the realm if

not only like parenting science, but parenting advice. And I mean, even when something has a scientific has a scientific basis to it, uh, it's often hard to really sort through it all. I get the feeling that in parenting advice and parenting in general, there is a whole lot of overinterpretation of tenuous scientific results. That that is the that is what I get from my experience with it. And then of course, on top of that, there are a lot of people with very firm ideas of like what

is good parenting and what is bad parenting? And um, you know it's not always it's generally not as simple as that for the most part. That being said, you know, regardless of what may or may not be the benefits, I can definitely see, you know, there's a benefit of connecting with one's growing child like this. You know that you're that you're you're playing music and you can see a response. You know, there's something kind of magical about that.

UM as far as cognitive benefits go, I think that's that's something that if we were to talk about it here, we need to discuss it in more detail and draw in more studies. But there have been a lot of studies conducted about this. Uh, it's just difficult to really boil it down to you know, just a few minutes now.

I would do want to drive already hit on why this is funny obviously, but as to why it's important, well, there is one one potential takeaway here that has nothing to do with playing baby a song or you know, Mozart music for babies and so so forth, and that is that the researchers argue that the technology could also be used to evoke arousal responses of the fet is, to stimulate movements, to facilitate and shorten obstetric ultrasound examinations.

So the idea here is you're you're you're trying to evoke responses and the feet is to determine its health. And if you could reach the baby, you know, more easily and perhaps earlier, through this method, then there there would there might be a reason to just to use it across the board. Yeah, well that's definitely got some applications that are very important. Uh, you know what, Like now, now I'm thinking of all these kinds of like ways

in which like further research needs to be done. Like I wonder what midwives would have to say about this, given their like, you know, experience and matters. And I would be very interested to hear from anyone who's tried out the baby pot or or if there's another similar device, and just hear from you what your experiences were. Yeah. Well, the best way to do that, although if you want to do it privately, this might not be the best way.

But one way to do that is to reach out to us on social media and you could do that on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram. What you could do is also go to our website where there's lots of potential music to play for babies on their why because Robert blog posts all the time about space music. Yeah, there's some eto in there. Yeah, definitely some good ambience

selections for baby. DJ food for the unborn. Yeah, um, you know there was what's the name there was an early synth guy that I've covered on there before that actually they did. There's like a compilation of his work for babies and well like or at least I can't recall the artist stuff hand. I'm sure it'll come to

me later. Hey, and Enforced. If you'd like to get in touch with us directly, 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. Does it how stuff works dot com