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 my name is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week we read back some messages from the mail bag. We've gotten a lot of good responses recently to our series on childhood amnesia to recent Weird House Cinema episodes. But before we get into all that, Rob, do you want to read this message we got from Chandra Shekhar about the artifact episode you did on the origins of the Pinata.
Absolutely, and by the way, this is not the individual's full name. We just had to double check that off my care Anyway, they write in and say hello, gentlemen, thanks for the fantastic podcast. I was listening to the latest episode and when you read through the listener mail about the Philippines and the Pinata, it occurred to me that we have something similar in India too. Jean mash Tommy is the birthday of a Hindu hero god Krishan.
He's widely known and one of the most popular gods, considering he spoke the Ghita Bagavad Gita closely translates to sayings of the God, where Bagavon equals God and ghita equals speech. On his birthday, one of the widely celebrated traditions is to crack open a pot tied onto a vertical pulley system. It is a game where the striker has a stick and they run up and jump to hit the pot. Simultaneously, the pot is hoisted up on the pulley by other players, making it go out of reach.
The game continues until a striker breaks the pot, which is filled with butter, coconut water, honey, and all the delicious stuff. In other traditions of Hinduism, people form giant human pyramids to reach the pot that is held high up in the sky by a crane or some other contraption. And I bet you there are a hundred or even more ways. This same tradition is celebrated across India and
the surrounding countries. Something you might find interesting. I would gladly listen to you to go down that rabbit hole and experience our beautiful culture spiral out.
Really interesting. I'd never heard of this before. Thanks, thanks for sending this. Yeah, all right, so we got a lot of messages in response to our series on childhood amnesia. A lot of people wanted to share their earliest memories or memories that they think make have come from before they were three years old. Let's see. We certainly can't feature all of the ones we've gotten already on this episode,
but we'll plow through as many as we can. So I'm going to start with this message from longtime correspondent Jim in New Jersey.
Ah.
Yes, Jim says, Robert and Joe, Some of my first memories involved seeing Mary Poppins in the theater in its original release. According to my mom, it was the weekend after the Kennedy assassination. She and some of her friends were growing weary of the depressing TV coverage of the tragedy in Dallas, Texas, so they decided to take their kids to the movies to see Mary Poppins. Based upon my mother's story, this would put my earliest memories before
two and a half years. Kennedy's assassination was in November nineteen sixty three, but Mary Poppins wasn't released until August nineteen sixty four, about nine months later. My mom has definitely constructed a false memory of when we saw the movie. She loves this story so much that I don't have the heart to correct her. This place is my Mary Poppins memory at a bit after age three, which is
a much more common age for early memory acquisitions. Once I realized the timeline disconnect, I tried to find what movie the moms could have taken the kids to see on that weekend. I was unable to find any Disney or family based movies that seem to fit the bill. The actual events are still a mystery to me, but I'm not curious enough to shatter my mother's memory by asking her. Jim.
This is interesting because it brings to mind, just in general, earliest memories of films seen, because they occupy kind of an interesting place. Because on one hand, they are milestone events, you know, the first time you take a child to a movie theater, your first, your earliest cinema experiences. These are notable. They also can be attached to a timeline
and can be fact checked to some degree. But the other interesting thing about them is that they seem highly susceptible to reinterpretation based on later viewings of the films. You know, like I think back on the movies that I know I saw at an early age, and it's very easy to sort of build a false memory of what that would be like because unlike other things in life,
like the movie is largely unchanged. You can account for, you know, changes in film quality and cuts and so forth, but for the most part, like Mary Poppins is the same, and you can watch it now and you can get a one hundred percent accurate representation of what the movie would have been when you saw it in the theater.
Of course, the interesting thing about seeing a movie is, of course it is not just the document that contributes to your experience. It's like, you know, you're what you understand going into it, the environment you saw it in, and all that stuff, especially when you're a little kid, because like when you're a little kid, you don't understand
so many things about the stories told in movies. It just kind of like opens the door to all sorts of wild interpretations and associations that I think there would be less of when you're when you're an adult and you essentially perceive the machinations of a plot more straightforwardly
or realistically. But also, Jim, I totally understand what you're saying about like, so, like the way your mother tells the story of when you saw Mary Poppins cannot be correct, but not wanting to, you know, go like tell her that this story that she loves remembering and sharing with the family is wrong, because I mean, I don't know what's really to be gained from that, right, So, yeah, that's weird. But it also makes you wonder why, so if this cannot be what literally happened, why did she
put together that false memory? Like what is it about the experience of taking you to see Mary Poppins, which you do still remember that she came to associate with that weekend of the Kennedy assassination.
Yeah, yeah, fascinating to tease it all apart, all right. This next one comes to us from Ranata. Ranata's email is titled my earliest memories are Nightmares. One of the wondrous things about memory that I think about every day our ability to distinguish dream memories from other memories. Obviously, if I remember something totally strange and counterfactual, I will suspect it was a dream. But occasionally I do have to stop and think if a mundane work conversation was
actually a real event or a dream. Yet, without fail, my brain picks up on something about dream memories that's different. It's like my brain puts that memory in a box called dreams, and if I find a memory there, it must be a dream. Like childhood amnesia, dreams seem to disappear really quickly in memory. Unless you write them down or rehearse remembering them, they get lost forever. And yet
some of my earliest memories are dreams and in fact nightmares. Joe, you talked about a feeling of nostalgia that isn't like nostalgia from a toy or a moment, but more like being taken back to a specific emotional state of childhood. That's how I feel about marbles due to one of my earliest nightmares, which happened when my father had an
exotic fish tank. He put marbles in the tank as decoration, and one night I dreamt that they floated out of the tank and chased me around the living room trying to bite me like pac Man.
That is a really good childhood nightmare. I'm sure it must have been terrifying as a child, but yeah, the thumbs up.
Now, I'm positive this was a real dream I had, and not an implanted memory, because why would anyone be telling me a story of my dream. I'm not sure I've ever told anyone this dream until now I know it must have occurred before my parents' divorce, so before the age of five. When I recall that dream, and anytime I look at a marble, I have that feeling of being transported, unfortunately not in a positive way. I don't have a phobia of marbles, but they have a
sinister quality to me even now. Is it possible to implant a dream memory? I doubt it, but maybe. Plus, dreams and nightmares are bizarrely specific, so they aren't like memories of catching fireflies in a jar that could have been a more general experience. So early dreams and nightmares might be some of the earliest memories we can be sure are real memories, even though they are about things that never happened. I love the episodes about cognitive science topics best'na.
Great email Ranata, so yes, as I said, I love the idea of killer marbles coming out of the fish tank attacking you like the ball from the Prisoner, except I guess they're much smaller. Yeah, I wonder about this. I mean, it is very interesting the way that we we have a tendency to really rapidly forget dreams. I mean, even on the course of minutes after waking, they can
become hard to recall. In fact, I almost seem to remember that we've read hypotheses before about why that would be, but I don't actually remember what the proposed answers are now. But yeah, that is very interesting that we tend to forget them so fast. But there are some that really stick, and I would tend to think that those are the ones that, much like our earliest childhood memories, that we
are likely to remember. They're the ones that we rehearse the most often, with the paradox being that by coming back to them and dwelling on them and thinking about them and talking about them more often, it's also more likely they are changing over time, and so we don't remember them actually the same way we did the first time we remembered them.
Yeah, this is a great topic though, because I know, in my case, there are nightmares I remember from my early childhood from time periods where I really probably don't remember much else around them, you know, I mean, there are other scattered memories but when you start lining them up, it's like, how many memories do I have from this year of my life? And and how how how many of them are our dreams and how many are reality? You know, like, what would be the percentile there? It's
probably kind of telling Granada thanks for writing in. That's that's a twofer. We get an earliest memory and an account of a dream, okay.
We also ask people, you know, if they have memories from before the typical threshold of about three years that's coming for most people, if they believe they have memories from before this period. With the caveat that, in most cases it's hard to verify whether these are real memories or later confabulations that now feel like memories. It's often
hard to know for sure. But we did want to hear from people, and so we heard from Lindsey, who said, Hello, I often think about what it means to be alive but not remember, especially as an infant. So your latest show before you could remember part one was right up my alley. My earliest memory has to be when I was about fifteen months old. I know it's not from a photo or anything because of the way I remember it, although I did see a photo later to confirm that
what I remembered was actually an event that happened. My great grandmother was in a nursing home until she died in April nineteen eighty six. In April nineteen eighty five, my great aunt took her out and brought her home for Passover slash Easter dinner. We didn't do a traditional Satyr, but had a meal that conformed with being Kosher four Passover, while also celebrating Easter for my dad, who was Catholic
close parentheses. The memory I have is my great grandmother sitting in her wheelchair at the end of the table set up in my great aunt's living room. I'm taken out of my high chair and placed on her lap, sit there for a bit, and then clamber down to toddle over to the window. I remember walking up to the window and looking out because she had a very large picture window that went almost floor to ceiling, so the ledge of it was perfect for a toddler to
lean on. The confirmation came from a photo taken of me sitting on my great grandmother's lap and looking at the camera. I saw this photo years later as a child of seven or eight, and I told my mother that I remembered my great grandmother being at dinner, but I didn't remember having a picture taken of us. She said, this was the only time my great grandmother had been home like this since she was in the nursing home, so it would have in a very special time all around,
and that's why the photo of us was taken. Perhaps this contributed to me being able to remember it since it was a novel event. I am looking forward to
hearing the other parts of the series. Sincerely, Lindsey. Yeah, I guess this would connect to research we talked about, I think in part two of the series, where you know there there is maybe some connection between the the richness or novelty of new declarative memories and one's ability to remember them from an early age, especially if they get rehearsed in the mind or in conversation as time goes on.
Yeah, Now, for the sake of argument, it is interesting that this is a this is a memory of remembering, yes, and it's and there's also media involved in the stirring
of that that memory. So there's there's a lot going on there that could you know, you can you can imagine where at a young age, you see this picture of yourself and you may be you know, encouraged to remember what is in the picture, or you may you know, create that memory based on the photographic evidence you're presented with, and then later as you remember that act of remembering, like you access the created memory of the thing. You know.
Yeah, it's totally true. Now again, of course, Lindsay, we're not telling you your memory is wrong. You don't actually remember that, but it's it is the thing that we all have to face about. Like, it's hard to know because if the memory were not real, it would still feel.
Real, right, And this would be a case too of if this is a created memory, well then you have over time created a memory of value then and this, yeah, this is you know, it's not only harmless, it's it's beneficial. So like, yeah, why not embrace it totally? So thank you, Lindsey. All Right, This next one comes to us from Scott. Scott says, Hi, Robert and Joe, regarding your recent episode
on childhood, amnesia and memory. I have an interesting first memory for you, as it is precisely of a moment of realizing I lacked certain kinds of previous memories I was always a precocious child, reading Doctor Seuss before the age of three, according to my parents, and having an early vivid imagination and interest in science and philosophy, which may help to explain the following event in my life.
When I was about three years old in our central Minnesota home, I woke up in my bed in the middle of the night and had the strange feeling of never having been there before, or for that matter, having been anywhere before. What struck me as most puzzling was that I knew exactly where my room was in the house,
where my parents' room was, and so forth. I was especially fixated on the fact that I knew where certain trees were in our front yard, though it was night and I wasn't even facing that way, so I couldn't see them. How then, I wondered, did I know these things? I walked to my parents' room and woke them up, explaining this experience as best I could by saying I just appeared in my bed. They didn't understand, so I elaborated, you know how a magician can make a rabbit disappear, Well,
I just appeared. They still didn't understand, and how could they for I surely didn't understand it either, and gently put me back to bed. I have long interpreted this as being my first or very first, persistent awareness of myself. I had earlier memories of the house and the trees,
et cetera. I even have a very distinct early memory of living temporarily in a relative's basement a few blocks away before we moved into this particular house, when I was only two years old, and my older sister and I were put to bed with raggedy ann and andy dolls, the scenario my parents later confirmed. But perhaps my earlier awareness was only of these various external objects, and it was only after months in the newer house that I became abruptly aware in some deeper and persistent sense of
myself as a being in that world. My cousin reported a memory of a similar experience he had outside during the daytime of Oh here I am, But most others I have related it to, including a few psychologists, were unfamiliar with any similar reports and could shed no light on it. But surely other people have had or can remember similar experiences, So I wish this phenomenon could get more attention.
Scott, that's very interesting. So the idea is that you suddenly became aware of yourself as as a subject independent from the world.
Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know that I have anything like that. I think I was just watching I watched TV instead.
One way in which I can definitely relate to this is that I distinctly recall a feeling when I was a young child of having not exactly this realization, but lots of realizations that seemed to me incredibly profound, but not in a way that I could explain to anybody else, in the same way that realizations that people believe they have while on psychedelic drugs often are that there's like an ineffability of the profundity of your realizations, Like you
try to put into words and it just doesn't sound all that interesting or compelling to somebody else, But like in the moment, it feels like you have stumbled across some type of truth that is earthshaking, and that truth might be the question of like why am I me when I could have been somebody else. I remember having that thought.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this were there but for fortune moments, Yeah yeah, it can be quite even you know today, when when you really stop and engage with those thoughts that it can be quite overwhelming.
Okay, we're going to do a message about Weird House Cinema and then close things up.
Yes, please read Lurch's email.
Okay, Lurch says, subject line Weird House definitive explanation. Maybe so, this I think is related to our questions about the bird Eye Gordon movie Attack of the Puppet People. We were a little bit shaky on the title there, since the people in the movie who seem to be referred to as the puppet people in the title people Will Get Shrunk do not attack anyone except a literal, inanimate puppet. So I don't know, kind of confusing there, But Lurch says,
good morning, gentlemen. After a brief hiatus, I'm binging stuff to blow your mind and just finish the Weird House episode covering Bert Eye Gordon's Attack of the Puppet People. I suggest the title is actually more accurate than you might think, though, I'm guessing the bulls Eye either ended up on the cutting room floor or came up a victim of a script rewrite. I'm betting the ladder, knowing
what little I know of the divine Gordon's habits. Besides, if it's the former, my flight of fancy crashes on takeoff. So if you squint just a little and hold your tongue over your right lower molar, you can accept that mister Franz, the villain of the movie, as a puppeteer, could readily be considered a puppet person. Okay, assume a rewrite changed his old colleague to a past friend from a current collaborat. Thus you have the requisite plurality to
justify the collective people in the title. There's no question mister Franz attacks his various victims. Of course, the title allows for this twofold interpretation, which seems to me to be a relatively common device from the era, especially when
considering movies from Gordon or Corman for Indie Roger. Okay, so I think I see what Lurg is saying here that if there was an earlier version of the movie in which mister Franz was currently a puppeteer like his friend Amiel, they were both puppeteers, and they were both turning people into puppets, maybe to I don't know, use in their puppet shows or something like that, they would be the puppet people as in The Puppet Masters turning
people into puppets, in which case they're obviously attacking people. It's not you know, there's no ambiguity there. Okay, Lurch goes on on another note, I'm glad one of your other listeners mentioned Ringo, Starr and Caveman. I actually saw this in a theater and it's been a guilty pleasure ever since. I've been compiling a small list of movie suggestions, and Caveman is right at the top, even above the happiness of the Katakuris. The list of actors is surprising.
You mentioned Ringo, Dennis Quaid, and Barbara Bach, who is dumped by Ringo's character in the movie but married to him in real life. There's Shelley Long, Jack Guilford, John mattushak, Evan Kim dot dot. What's not to like? This does bring me to another guilty pleasure. Besides monster movies, I
love utterly silly spy movies. James Bond is okay, But when Derek Flint, James Coburn, Matt Helm, Dean Martin, or Modesty Blaze Monica Viti are on, I'm parked on the couch wishing I could teach my dog to get me a soda and chips. I'm not sure if they strictly fit your weird house criteria, but they do fit mine. Keep your eyes on the road, your foot on the floor, and your gravy warm regards lurch ah.
Oh, there's a lot of good stuff too to discuss there. I'm not sure what to make about the puppet people argument. I guess I can see, I can I have. It's a valid hypothesis as far as Ringo Star's Caveman goes. Yeah, my curiosity is is perked. And I don't know, in terms of spy movies, it would be neat for us to do a proper spy movie. I don't know that we've done a real, even a groovy, weird spy movie. And there that's the thing. There are plenty of weird
spy movies out there. I mean, even the James Bond franchise gets weird enough for us with films like Moonraker.
I think we could do Moonraker, or we could do maybe one of the Bava spy movies like Danger, Diabolic or something.
Yeah, you know, have nothing else. It's going to be a colorful affair, all right. Well, thanks for writing in lurch, and yeah, let us know if any other films than
genres come to mind. And in the meantime, if you want to catch up on listener mail episodes, well those are on Mondays and the Stuff to Wild Mind podcast feed Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Artifact on Snster Effect on Wednesdays, and on Friday, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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