Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind email address. If you're a listener of the show and you've never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We like all kinds of messages, especially if you have feedback or something really interesting to add to a recent episode of the show. Whatever you want to send, it's
all fair game. Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Let's see rob Oh, we've got a good message to start things off today. That's say response to one of your Monster Fact episodes. You want to do this one from Constantinos?
Yeah, Konstantinos writes in and says, good morning gents. On your Monster Fact episode on the Hecatonkures, you mentioned the artistic renditions of the Hecatonkures were hard to find, probably because the Hecatonkures, they multi headed, multi limbed giant, is
such a weird and difficult creature to render. For those of you out there, if you didn't listen to this episode and and or are not familiar with this creature, these were monsters that were created by Urunos along with the Cyclopses, that were too horrible to look upon, so they were cast away and imprisoned. Then Kronos comes to power, he didn't really want anything to do with them either.
But when Zeus comes to power, he sees that they have potential and he recruits, frees them, and recruits them into his battle against the Titans. And they are briefly described in very weird terms as having like fifty heads and in all these arms one hundred hand ends. And my comment was that, yeah, you don't see many illustrations of these guys, or at least you don't see many
older illustrations of them. If you look around for image of the images of them, you'll tend to find more contemporary images of the Hecatonkrease, you know, things from the age of surrealism and cosmic horror.
You know, I feel like once you get more than three or four of anything on a monster, it starts getting kind of redundant and just hard to represent or less appealing to represent. I think there's a similar problem
with that. There is some wild imagery in the Book of Revelation, in the New Testament that you just don't often see visually represented that much, and I think it's because they've got they're described as having too many things there, these creatures with like seven heads and seven wings and seven crowns. You know, it's like seven is too many.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's interesting when you look at you know, multi headed beings and say Hindu iconography, where you know, sometimes it'd be it's rather ingenious the way that they're there's they sometimes will make even say an odd number of heads fit on a particular entity, because you know, it's like hard coded, it's essential, it's sacred that it is a certain number of heads. But yeah,
I was, I was. I kept crunching over this thinking, you know, you know, why don't we see more illustrations of these clearly fascinating creatures from myth And you know, you think to a lot of through a lot of art history, and there's this, you know, attempt to create realistic bodies, be they animal bodies, human bodies, or some
synthesis of the two. But something like even something as simple as say Goro from Mortal Kombat, there there are certain problems in illustrating this creature because when you start trying to figure out what the like what's the underlying skeleton, like how does the muscle structure work? And it becomes increasingly difficult I would imagine to incorporate actual physiological data into a realistic depiction of said monster. And that's just
with with two extra arms. I'll imagine with ninety eight of them.
Yeah, you tried to draw a Goro skeleton, I imagine you would. You might discover that you had an illusion of explanatory depth there, like it seemed like it made sense to you until you had to figure out where all the bones go, and then you're like, oh, yeah, this isn't how skeletons work.
There was a great paper publically looked at on the show years ago. I'd have to have to dig this up, but somebody had put together a paper about how a centaur might work, trying to figure out like how the circulatory system would work, and I think I think they One of the things that they argued is like, Okay, you're going to need two hearts to run this thing
and so forth. So it's an interesting exercise at times as well, but maybe it's a little more interesting when there are fewer variables to have to consider.
Sorry, I actually did just google Goro skeleton and it's real funny.
Yeah. I mean, some of the later games they incorporate a Goro skeleton in there because there's all sorts of you know, fatalities and whatnot that occurs where you see the skeleton and it always looks really dumb, like it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, this wasn't thought out too much. Anyway, The email continues here back when Disney made fun movies. I think that's a matter of opinion. I think Disney still makes some fun news. I watched the animated Hercules once worked over
twelve hundred times with my kids. In the opening musical number, The Gospel Truth, there is a heavily stylized rendering of the Titano Maki the War with the Titans. Among the Titans silhouettes, there is a stylized two headed giant that I always thought was a simplified image of one of the Hecatonkreas. The movie is actually subtly quite sophisticated in his portrayal of Greek mythology, and I do think the image here was intentional. It is also contextually consistent with
the theme. I don't think that there is any other polycephalic monster that participated in the Tautana monkey that could have inspired this image. So there you go, a modern Hecatonkari hiding in plain sight in American pop culture. And he included an image from this so we didn't have to actually pull up the movie and start watching it. Yeah, we see a creature with two heads in this styling,
normal number of limbs. It's monstrous. Yeah, I can only imagine that this was inspired by these creatures, though clearly if they had worked out any additional limbs or heads, they left that on the cutting room floor.
It's been a long time since I saw the Disney Hercules, but I remember it actually having a pretty seeming to have a pretty clever incorporation of the real Greek myth themes.
I don't know that I've ever seen it. I think my son watched it once and he was too pick He was like, this is not accurate, this is not mythologically sound, and so you know, if he's not into it, I was certainly not going to go out and watch it, but I don't know. You know a lot of plenty of people grew up with this movie and it's got a pretty deep cast. I mean, you have ripped torn as Zeus. How you go wrong with that?
Cannot beat that? That is perfect the Man who Fell to Earth.
Indeed, anyway, thank you for writing in that Monster Fact episode. I did put a call out. It's like, if you were familiar with any additional images of the Hecatonkaris, especially ones from throughout art history, you know, much older images right in because I would love to be corrected on this. I would love for someone to point out, actually, you're missing some key images from ancient Greece or ancient Rome
or or medieval iconography. You know. I would love to see that if it exists, but I just can't couldn't find it anywhere.
M okay. Next message concern earns the uh oh the episode that I did while you were out rob about Ambergrease with our friends Annie and Lauren from the Saverer podcast. If you haven't heard that episode, yet, this was this is a couple weeks ago now, Yeah, I guess so. But the episode was titled I believe a delicacy from realms of Insufferable Feater after a quote that is used in Moby Dick to describe where the Ambergrease comes from. So this message is from our h all Right, says,
enjoying the Ambergresse episode. Well listening, I recalled where I first learned about Ambergrease, in the eighth volume of Donald Soball's Encyclopedia Brown series. You know, I had awareness of these books when I was a kid. Friends of mine read them, but I never actually read one, and I feel like I kind of missed out now.
You know, I haven't thought about the name Encyclopedia Brown in a very long time. I don't think I ever read any of them. But yeah, like you, I remember seeing them being passed around. I remember it being in the mix.
My impression was it was like Sherlock Holmes for kids or something. Anyway, so Rh continues, If memory serves, one of Brown's classmates found a mysterious blob of something and sought his encyclopedic encyclopedic mind. I guess Encyclopedia Brown's encyclopedic mind. I wonder if kids read these anymore? Dad, what's an Encyclopedia. These books were great encouragement for great schoolers to be syllogistic thinkers using deductive reasoning. I hope they are still
in heavy demand at the old Scholastic Book Fair. Keep up the great work, rh PS. Repo Man would be a great weird house cinema candidate. Yeah, wow, I haven't seen Repo Man in a long long time, but I remember that one being very weird and very fun.
Yeah, I've never seen it actually, but it's come up on the show before just because of some of the connections that are press there. But yeah, I mean it's it has a strong cult following. It's it's definitely one that's been on the list.
It's got Harry Dean Stanton. So that's that alone is going to get you part of the way there. Seal of quality.
Yeah, Now on the Scholastic Book Fair questions in Encyclopedia Brown, I have reviewed materials from various Scholastic Book Fairs over the years here and I have to say I do not remember seeing Encyclopedia Brown on the list. I mean, kids these days have some amazing choices in books. Far, They're not having to read Stephen King like I did. You know. I mean I didn't just read Stephen King. I also had I had some age appropriate books that I read as well. But there are so many more
age appropriate books covering all sorts of cool topics. I mean, just speaking of mythodology from earlier, Like, there's so many wonderful books based on various world mythologies out there, you know, fictional books that use mythology as the basis, And a lot of these are written by people whose heritage, whose country of origin lines up with said mythology. So it's you know, it's really cool.
Mm yeah. I mean, I guess I will at some point soon become acquainted with what the kids are reading these days. But uh yeah, I don't know though. As I said, I like, I never read these books either. I am curious about what RH brings up, like a would kids today even still be acquainted with the idea of encyclopedia, like with the I don't know what's the equivalent concept now, it's just like Facebook misinformation Brown.
Yeah, Wikipedia, Brown, That's that's what it would be.
Misleading TikTok video Brown.
M M.
All right, This next one comes to us from Michael, and this is really in regard to our episode on the illusion of control. Hello again from Tasmania. I'm a bit late listening to this one, but I just wanted to let Rob know that there is nothing abnormal about clicking the button of your key fob three or more times to make sure your car locked properly. But if you can't quite hear the central locking mechanism or one
of the doors slash or the boot is ajar. I am compelled to do mine at least three times before I walk away, and then maybe a couple of more times as I start to get out of range. Thank you for keeping the show running all this time. I have been listening for around ten years and would feel a little lost without the hundreds of conversations at work and home. Your podcast prompts me to have warm regards Michael.
Thank you, Michael. This is a wonderfully mail to get about what's normal.
Yeah, three is good. I feel a little guilty if I do five, but I've but three three feels appropriate. I'm a little antsy if I do less than three.
What if five is not enough?
Five is enough? I mean five again. They're deities in various traditions that have five heads. Five five.
As a nice ring to it, you gotta click lock on your car once for each of the beasts seven heads, and then once for each of its ten horns. Okay, this next message comes from Robin. Robin says, Hi, Rob, Joe, and JJ. The recent listener mail talking about responses to the illusion of control episodes got me thinking down a related train of thought, illusion of control and magical thinking, perhaps being more of a nature of grade than of kind or contingent on a model of belief. As Joe
was musing, brought up some concepts to illustrate. The following is a real life example. Perhaps we've all had this kind of experience, or perhaps it's just me. Say you're walking down the path late in the day and you notice strangely that overhead pedestrian lights seem to be turning on or flickering on and off as you come near them. This happens enough in a short span that you get that spooky magical thinking mode activated in your brain. Lights
turning on around me. I am an electromagnetic god. Rationally, you know nothing spooky is happening, and whatever is happening, you simply don't understand it yet. As it happens. In this case, it was likely some sort of timed event, whether by internal clock software or perhaps light levels, that
triggered multiple lights turning on around the same time. You know, Robin, I seemed to have vague memories years ago of something that was like street lights near my house that had some kind of that had some kind of daylight sensor, or something in my friend's car would make them turn off at night as he drove underneath them. I think it was like the way it reflected the light back
or something. Robin goes on. An event like this and the resulting thoughts make me wonder if, even with no rational, thoughtful belief in magical thinking, it might be a kind of itch that's just nice to scratch once in a while, to almost pretend to yourself that you believe it. Like experiencing a good story, it just soothed something in our base makeup long since baked in by evolution and culture. Simply put, it feels good to engage in some magical thinking,
even if you don't actually believe in it. Thank you, as ever for the work you put into the excellent content you deliver. Cheers Robin, Well, thank you, Robin. Yeah, I certainly think that's totally plausible. Maybe it's just there's some kind of itch, psychological itch that it scratches to imagine that you have, you know, extra normal powers that you you know, can affect things in ways beyond the
causative mechanisms normally available to you. And if that's true, I guess one thing it makes me think about is like,
why that would be like? For example, one reason I think it probably feels good to experience a fictional story like you were talking about in the email, is that a fictional story simulates real life situations of gaining useful information, such as gaining social information about acquaintances through gossip, or gaining information about how social situations, you know, difficult social situations play out, maybe gaining survival information from a story
of someone overcoming adversity or danger. But of course, because the fictional story is fictional, it can be crafted to be like unrealistically juicy and rich with the most exciting and salient kinds of details that these real life narratives could ever contain, you know. And so if that's the case, and if magical thinking does in fact cause pleasure because it scratches some kind of similarly deep rooted itch. I
wonder what that itch is like. Could it be something like, you know, the fact that encouraging you to think what you would do if you had more power than you actually have is useful because it it, you know, makes you think through things in a way that will will be useful pre planning if you actually do gain more realistic power than you have presently. I don't know.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about, and such fictions are always going to be popular. This all reminds me of a of a game that we will playfully do in the car when usually when it's just me and my son, where I guess you could call it turn green now, where we're at a stop light. We'll try and time it so that you know, when one of us goes, we'll sort of take turn saying turn green now, and then you know, we don't actually think we're turning the
changing the light or anything. But it's kind of satisfying when you do occasionally hit it right on the nose and you're like, ah, I did it. My powers are unequaled.
Yeah, yeah, that's good. I mean, I guess that is actually someonet equivalent to being pleased with yourself. When you hit a good dice roll, it's like it wasn't actually skill but it feels like it. Oh, I don't know, now that I think about it, I guess the timing the green light probably is more skill based than a dice roll, right, it's not totally random. You're like getting a feel for how long it usually takes.
So yeah, and you can also check out what the crosswalk signs are doing. You count If you can see the countdown, you can really cheap and then there's there's absolutely little luck involved. You can get it right down to the wire, but you don't always have those to go off of.
That's a great point. But yeah, so your your turn green game is actually mostly skill based, I would say.
Yeah, all right. This next one comes to us from Peter, Hi, Robert, and Joe. I found your episodes on the illusion of control most interesting. While I consider myself rational and scientifically minded, I have realized that I indeed have this bias to a degree, despite my understanding of odds and probability. When I play games, especially involving dice, I have a belief that I will be lucky. I often roll lucky in pressure situations. Of course, I have probably not paid as
much attention to the unlucky roles. Yeah, this is, of course, of course, key.
Remember the hits, forget the misses.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess it depends on what kind of person you are. You know, if you focus more on the negatives, then yeah, you're gonna be like, something's wrong with this with these dice, or something's wrong with this random number generator in this video game or you know, phone game or what have it. And if you're the other way around, then yeah, you're gonna skew the other direction. Anyway, they continued. This all probably became
reinforced with a childhood event. While playing board games with some friends, I made a challenge to roll one, two, three, four, five six in sequence while passing the die to different people. I began by calling out one and then proceeding to roll a one on a six sided die. I passed it to a friend, who called out two and rolled a two. The challenge continued so forth, and we actually rolled one, two, three, four, five six in sequence by
different people. We did it on the first try. Now I understand that the different people didn't really affect the odds, but it blew us away. I calculated the odds, which came to point zero zero two one four percent, or one in forty six thousand, six hundred and fifty six.
That sounds pretty cool, Peter.
This experience, although founded on randomness and basic probability, at least subconsciously impacts my feelings, my feeling that I can roll lucky and call out dice rolls, although I reserve it for crucial situations. Note, I believe it only really works with physical dice rather than video game rng's or random number generators. I know it doesn't make rational sense, but I can't shake the belief that there may be something more to it, my weird tale of illusion of control. Cheers Peter.
Well, thanks Peter. And yet this is great. I do think our minds work this way. And in fact, there was some research we talked about in the series exactly along these lines that like the research about the early success emphasis increasing our illusions of controls, Like if you have an early winning streak at some kind of game of chance, you are more inclined to think after that that you have control over a random process, and that
seems to perhaps be operating with you. You had a really salient early lucky streak of roles, and as you say, it's like hard to shake the feeling that there's something going on.
Now. The other possibility is that Peter is simply the chosen one.
That's right, Yes, he did see the mouse in the second moon, and now the spice is guiding him. This is also just a great example of realizing how our intuitions can be misleading about the probability of events, because you take, even if we assume that Peter the numbers you give or write about this being an event that's like one in forty six, six hundred and fifty six chance of happening, you still you'd say, Okay, that seems
very unlikely. But then you would have to multiply that by like the number of times in the world that people around the world try to do something like this, which I imagine, given all the time that people sit around playing with dice, is actually quite a lot. So like, given all of those chances to have hits, you will have stories like this where people have a very unlikely
series of roles. Because people are just playing around with dice all the time, there are a lot of chances to make it happen.
Yeah, yeah, I mean we often can We can think to those various runs we've had or our parties have had in Dungeons and Dragons where it's like like three twenties in a row, you know, three natural twenties, or or the other end of the spectrum, you know multiple natural ones, or multiple like you low scoring roles, And yeah, it's the extremes that stand out to us.
There are a lot of roles in each game. There are a lot of people out there gaming. If you know a lot of people who do game, you probably know somebody who had at some point a really unlikely streak.
Yeah I did, we mention. I don't know if we mentioned this before, but it always kind of I always get a little judge when I see someone at at a gaming table just rolling the dice over and over again, out of any necessity to do so, just to see what they get. Yea, because part of my irrational brain is like, like, you're using up your twenties. Man. You know, it's one thing if you're rolling ones on that, but
I just just saw you roll like an eighteen. That's an eighteen you won't roll later because you just rolled it now. And that's silly.
Yeah, well, it also makes me think when I see somebody doing that at the table, I think, are you being opportunistic? Like you're just kind of rolling and then like you might try to claim that most recent role if it was good and your turn has come up.
You know what I mean. I mean there are gaming systems where you get to like, you know, store dice rolls for later, but most D twenty games are not don't work like that. You know. Irrationality in the face of actual statistics is such an interesting concept and something I kept thinking about during this this that these episodes, and something that I think about too sometimes when when I'm dealing with anxious thoughts and I have to share this one bit that came up in my reading of
the book Dead House Gates. This is book two of the malasone book of the Fallen by Steven Ericson. This is like, you know, a high fantasy adventure stuff. But there's one character who has a fear of tunnels. And there's just one little bit in the book goes as follows quote he hated tunnels. No, they terrified him. There was nothing rational in it. Wrong Again, tunnels collapse, people get buried alive, all perfectly reasonable, possible, probable, inevitable, And
I just love this one little bit. It's like, yes, that is exactly the progression that your mind can go through when you're anxiously considering something like that, Like I shouldn't be worried about this, but wait, it has happened, can happen, could happen, will happen.
Yes, It's so easy to jump from possible to probable and then yeah, yeah, all right.
Before we close here, I want to throw out one quick note about Weird House Cinema. On Friday, we did part one of our look at David Lynch's nineteen eighty four adaptation of Doune, and this Friday, if everything goes according to plan, we'll be finishing that up with a part two where we look at the rest of that movie.
And I just want to throw this out there. Hey, if you have any thoughts about David Lynch's Dune, about the New Dune films, and you want to write in and chat with us about it, you want to have it come up on the Listener Mail episodes, please do so, because we always have a lot of fun with this. In fact, we just had a coworker text us on a group text asking us how do they get off of the sandworms after they're done writing them? Good question,
it's a great question. The short answer is you're supposed to write them to exhaustion and then you get off. But I love questions like this.
I don't know if that answers it.
There are additional follow up questions that are very valid. I mentioned this to my wife and she's like, well, what, yeah, what do you do if you're going a shorter distance? And I think the answer is you're supposed to time your distances appropriately, you know, based on the size of the worm you snag and so forth. But yeah, there are a number of follow up questions to this that are valid, and there are not necessarily answers for the sandworm.
Is a is a train ride not an uber ride?
Yeah? I mean you're you're attaching yourself to a force of nature. Uh when you you ride ride the sandworm? When you ride the worm? So uh, you know, strap in.
I will, I will be sure to uh, I think so. Yeah, next week, I'm sure there will be lots of dune talk. Send in, send in your dune talk.
All right. Just a reminder that we're primarily a science podcast, with our Tuesday and Thursday episodes being our core episodes, but Monday is our listener mail time. That's when we UH have a look through the mail bag and UH and respond to various messages from you the listener, so keep them coming. Uh listener mail regarding past episodes, current episodes, and potential future episodes of anything we put together.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuffdblow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.