Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind a listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Monday. So we're going to be reading some messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind mail bag. If you have never gotten in touch with us before, why not give it a try sometime. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any kind of messages are fair game.
We always like feedback to recent episodes. If you want to add something interesting to something we've talked about on the show, or if you want to request a topic for the future, if you want to send a general feedback or corrections. Of course, if need be all fair game. Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Yeah, try it, you might like it now.
I mentioned this on last week's Male episode. We have been getting a lot of message in response to our series on childhood amnesia. Specifically, we were asking about people's earliest memories, and boy, that's really been pouring in. So we will still we will probably be working through those messages for quite some time. There is no way we're going to be able to read them all today, but we'll try to make some headway and read several here.
Yeah, and just as usual, we have to remind everyone we can't read everything on these episodes, especially when the floodgates really open, but we do read everything at least off the mic as it comes in. So yeah, keep it coming regardless.
Right, and even if your message is not featured on the show, we still do appreciate everything we get. It always means a lot when people take the time to write in. Absolutely, let's see this first message about childhood amnesia comes from Mattay. Matey says, Hello, I recently came across your podcast and I think it's great. I'm a truck driver, so I'm always looking for new things to listen to, and you guys will definitely be a continuing
part of that. Thanks Mite. I just listened to part one of your memory episode and I want to share some of my earliest memories. I'm in somewhat of a unique position because I can one hundred percent verified that these memories occurred before I turned four. This is because I was born in Germany and then we moved to Canada shortly before I turned four. My fourth birthday was
celebrated in Canada. I have many memories from Germany, but one is particularly interesting because it was verified by my mother years ago when we were talking about memories and she was shocked that I could remember this random event. I was in daycare wearing a red sweater and I got glue on the sweater, and I remember being scolded by my mother for not being more careful. Memory has always fascinated me because I used to speak German and I have memories with German friends, yet the language is
completely foreign to me. It's as if my brain completely over wrote German as I learned English in Canada. It might be interesting to note that we always spoke Slovak at home because we are of Slovakian heritage, So perhaps there's only so many languages an infant or toddler can hold on to at one time. As for my earliest
jar memory, that would be this is referring to. There is a type of test done in some psychological studies of memory, where it's called a word Q test, where you will say a random word and you will say, tell me a memory associated with this word, and then you'll see what ages people produce. Memories from if you give them a bunch of these kind of prompts. And one of the words we talked about was jar. Rob, you had a memory of, I think, pulling cherries out of a jar before you were old enough to be
allowed them. Yeah.
Absolutely, Yeah. I think it sounds like a good prompt because I think that we grow up in a world with jars around. Jars have things in them that we want, so it seems like we would have we would tend to have those memories.
Anyway, back to Mate's message. Matesas as for my earliest jar memory, that would be from when I was six years old or in the first grade. We loved nutella. My parents would buy it in Germany and they continued to buy it in Canada on a regular basis, so we always had empty jars of nutella. Anyway, we had show and tell one day in the first grade and I found a baby garter snake and put it in one of the empty jars of nutella and put holes in the plastic lid and brought that to school to
show everyone. The teacher was not happy about it, but most of the kids loved it. Anyway. Thanks for the great content. Keep doing what you're doing sincerely, Mattee. Well, first of all, thank you for the message. Second, I
think that that is very interesting about the language thing. So, if I understand correctly, you grew up initially speaking German, I guess German and Slovak at home, but then at an early age, just before you turned four, moved and you still have some memories of the time when you spoke when you were learning to speak German, but now you don't speak German at all. Yeah, that is strange.
I was mostly just distracted by the nutella mentions because this this I've never looked into this, but I had like a cousin of who's older than me, and I remember them traveling to Europe coming back with nutella, and I had had no experience with nutella, and it was like a thing that had to be acquired in Europe and brought back to the States. But you can buy nutella everywhere now. And I was trying to like figure out, well, when did nutella become widely available in the United States,
And I don't know. I ended up looking at the corporate website, which tells me that positivity is the main ingredient, so but it doesn't it was sugar. That's like hazel nut and chocolate, right, but also positivity apparently. But I couldn't find a ready answer on when they have other dates on here. But I'm still scratching my head about when this became so widespread. When did it become an empire of creamy a hazel nut chocolate goodness? It eludes me.
We'll have to come back to it. Maybe we'll do an Invention episode on chocolate hazel nutspread.
Honestly, I do remember when I first found out about nutella. My reaction was, like, that's a thing that isn't allowed to exist. Do you can't have spreadable chocolate like peanut butter?
That just no, Yeah, I remember my cousin had nutella.
And then the actual kinderregs, the German style ones where you have chocolate encasing a capsule with a toy inside of It's something that does not fly in the United States, So you can't get that style of kinderreg in recent years, during my son's childhood, at least probably before that, you know, they introduced the kind that is designed differently where it's an egg and then one half contains a spreadable chocolate and the other half contains a toy, but there are
no toys inside of chocolate shells.
Is there positivity in there somewhere?
It depends on the toy, you know. It varies wildly. All right, let's move on to another one. This one comes to us from Jess. Jess rights to be honest with you, I couldn't even pretend to know what my first memory is. I've often pondered that fact and thought it very strange that I couldn't. When forced, I can summon a sort of memory, but I've never really felt it to be real. It's a memory of crawling into my big brother's bedroom, all the way across the single
wide trailer I grew up in. At the same time, I recall a specific picture of me setting on the floor of my brother's bedroom, holding a toy gun of his and sporting a grin on my face. Because of this picture, I almost feel a sort of disembodied sensation about the memory when I try and summon it. Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely certain as to whether it's the potentially false memory it's self that
causes the sensation, or the picture. Having been forced to have a third person perspective on something that my memory allegedly recalls as being experienced as first person. I wonder how much that sort of thing influences our ability to recall memories, or whether it might influence us to recall false memories. Anyway, thanks for making my electric brain meat
cogitate in new and interesting ways. Yeah, this whole subject of remembered photographs is fascinating when you think of that, a thing that certainly did not exist for the vast majority of human history and the history of human memories.
But here is this thing that is, you know, generally considered to be like this one hundred percent accurate, you know, with an asterisk there, of course, snapshot of a moment in time, and then how that influences our highly malleable memory of and and of course, at times the lacking memory of our early life.
Yeah, thank you, Jess. Okay, this next message is from Jonathan. Jonathan says, I'm just catching up on episodes after a period of life changes that kept me off my regular listening schedule and have just finished part one of Before you could remember It might be connected with having gone through those life changes that thinking about our earliest memories put me in mind of something else. What are the through connections between the way we remember ourselves in those
memories and our current experience remembering them. Presumably we are now adults, even young adults, and very different physically and mentally. It's easy to think about the situation as a ship of theseus thought experiment. What is the real me and the real ship? Belated congratulations to Joe and Rachel on their parenthood. I can guarantee it will enrich both of your lives. And congrats to your daughter. Great choice of parents, Best Jonathan. Thanks Jonathan, This is a really good question,
the ship of theseus question about ourselves and memories. Is the person you're remembering from years ago really yourself in a meaningful way? And how do the differences between those two people affect what it means to remember? In fact, we got another message along these lines from Scott rob If you don't mind, I'm going to read this too,
because it's on a similar subject. Go for it, Scott says Hi writing into comment on your recent episodes on the subject of memory, formation and children, and now the most recent listener mail, where a listener reports memories related to sinse one thing that your episodes, and the listener mail from Rose made me think of is how as a child grows, their body schema updates rather quickly compared to the speed of any normally expected updates in later life.
I think it's possible that old memories may become impossible to decode due to that rapid change in one's body schema as one transitions from a completely helpless infant body into what in most cases is a less vulnerable body.
My thinking here is that as the infant body grows into an adult body, the perceptions of the individual's surroundings are changing so drastically that the brain can't later make sense of any potentially stored memories from the earlier period of life in the quote old body, once an individual
is well out of infancy. This change in perspective and sensations from an infant who can hardly move on its own to a child moving about freely and inspecting the world on their own terms from multiple points of view can be compared to attempting memory recall with a human body from memories formed and stored using the sensory experiences and hardware of a dog body. This chimera analogy may be a bit of a stretch, but hopefully it helps
get across the idea I'm trying for here. The idea has no backing I'm aware of, just some thoughts on the episodes. Thank you for the show and idea flows.
Hmmm, now that's fascinating. I mean, our body scheme is pretty amazing, but we also have such an amazing ability to update it to make a tool of varying complexity a part of our body and an extension of our body. And I don't think I've ever read anything about it, you know, leading to distortions of memory per se. This would have been a good one to potentially ask David Eagleman about because I know one of the things that he's discussed in his book Live Wired is the idea
of plugging in new senses to the human brain. And then his argument is that the brain can then make use of those new information feeds and that has an impact on just your entire mindset and your entire shape of your consciousness. And would that have any change any effect on your memory? I would tend to suspect it wouldn't, but Eagleman would have been the one to ask about it.
You have to write into him. But of course what we would be talking about here in this example that's brought to mind is something that would occur as part of growing out of childhood into adulthood, and not because as an adult you suddenly started using some sort of complex tool or decided to plug the stock exchange directly into your brain. Well.
Yeah, one of the things I think highlighted in this email that does seem relevant to me is the distinction of basically the adaptation for agency as you get older, like as you can move on your own or really even as you can start using your hands for things, there's an increasing awareness I'm sure that you can act upon the outside world, whereas in you know, when you're just a newborn, you can't really do anything. The world just sort of acts upon you, and then you can
only do a few things. You know, you can like cry, and you can suck and things like that, but you really you can't like move, you can't like I want to know about this to go over and look at it. You can't talk, you can't you know what I mean.
Yeah, the crying is pretty effective though, Yeah, but.
Yeah, anyway, I mean I wonder if as you mature, your increasing awareness of your ability not just to exist in the world, but to act upon the world, to you know, move about freely and to change things by your own volition. If that changes your cognition so radically that I don't know that it would be it would be hard to make sense of experiences from before that. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Yeah, yeah, it's a It's wonderful, thought provoking idea, that's for sure. All right. Before we go into the next listener, mail, I do have to quickly refer to The Daily Beast to a twenty seventeen article how Nutella Conquered America by Emily Schier. I found a partial answer quote, but Nutella's path to a American hearts has been far slower and
more meandering than its European route to success. After appearing on supermarket shelves in the Northeast as early as nineteen eighty three, it would be decades before it had the kind of fan base that might spend a work day morning queued up to celebrate its existence. So there you go. Partial answer eighty three is maybe when it starts really creeping into some markets, but it's still going to be a couple of decades after that before. It's just really
widespread and popular in the United States. So that kind of explains some of these my experience and part of that listener mail about nutella being a primarily a European thing at the time.
I've never lived in the Northeast, but I don't recall seeing nutella any on supermarket shelves or anywhere really until I don't know, probably the late two thousands.
Yeah, yeah, that would that would make sense. That'd be about when I would have begun to notice it. But it's one of those things where like at the time, I was just like, oh, I guess nutella has always been around, and I just wasn't very observant like before that, you know, I didn't really put those those memories of my cousin bringing it back from Europe on trial and really think about it.
The family that I grew up knowing that I associate with nutella were like euro traveling people.
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was like having like frankencense or something on hand.
It's like, yeah, here's here's a box of Underberg shooters and some some neutella.
All right. This next listener mail message comes to us from Chris. Chris wrights, since says Hi, Joe and Robert. I just finished listening to your series on childhood memory, and I thought I would share an experience of mine. When I was maybe six to ten years old, I would have occasional nightmares about being chased down by construction equipment,
specifically backos, front end loader types of things. They would have the bucket at the front with arms that could grab me, and I don't really recall what happened next apart from being scared. My parents have an excavation business, so I was very familiar with this type of equipment and knew to be safe around it. It definitely wasn't something that should have caused fear. By eight, I was comfortable driving a back hoe. I later learned that when I was around one year old that I was involved
in an accident. Dad was working with the back ho with the rear wheels up. If you're not aware, when working with the hoe, use rams to lift the rear wheels for stability. Apparently I tried to climb up to Dad and fell and was struck by the wheel. I'm not really sure what happened. I don't remember beyond what my parents have told me. I ended up with a broken pelvis and not being able to walk until months later.
I've always wondered if the two things were connected. Was there part of my brain that remembered when I consciously could not? Anyway, your series prompted me to ride in as always. Thanks for the content. I look forward to it each week, even if I wait until series are completed before listening to them.
Chris, Well, thanks Chris. That is interesting. Yeah, so like you wonder if somehow the memory inspired the dream even though you couldn't consciously remember the memory.
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting argument to me made there. I mean, obviously there are different memory systems in the brain and when you know when parts of the when when one memory system is impacted by one condition or another, sometimes we fall back on another memory system. So yeah, it's an interesting thought here.
All right, Well, I think we're gonna have to cap it there on the before you could remember messages for today, but we will keep reading through as many of them as we can get to in subsequent weeks as we as we move on down the road. But before we wrap up today, we also wanted to do a bit of weird house cinema email.
All right, Yeah, let's jump into it. This one comes to us from Michael. Michael says, Hello, Joe and Rod. I admit I usually skip the Weird House Cinema episodes, but you've drawn me in again with this one. It's just not my cup of tea to listen about movies I've never seen. But I'm a child of the eighties, so of course I've seen The never Ending Story. I just wanted to share a thought on the comment about it being strained. The narrator changed at some point during
the film. I haven't seen the movie recently, but I remember it well. It may just be a plot hole, but perhaps they changed the narrator at the point that Bastian becomes part of the story. At the beginning, he's reading the book and there's no expectation that anyone other than him is taking us the viewer through the story. Later, Bastian starts to leak into the story, or the story
starts to leak into Bastian's world. At that point, it would be sensible to have a new narrator that is now describing the whole world, including what's happening with Bastian and Atreyu. It would be a complete misunderstanding. It could be a complete misunderstanding on my part, But if I'm right, I think that would be a pretty cool nuance to the storytelling best Michael good insight.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I think I think my any confusion I had on it was probably colored by watching too many films that are are less well executed, because I know I've encountered a film or two before that have multiple narrators in them. But I don't think there's any like high
concept behind it. It's just at some point they're like, I think we need narration here, all right, let's add some and then they forget that they have another narrator elsewhere in the film, or they're like, well, you need another narrator, let's get this character in.
When I think of intrusive narration, I think of the abrupt ending of the animated Lord of the Rings movie, where you know they they're nowhere near the end of the story, but suddenly and thus concludes the tale of the Lord of the Rings.
Oh man, I haven't seen it, and forever so I forgot about that. I keep trying to get my son to watch it, or to finish the book. The books with me, but he's just like he really enjoyed the Hobbit, and I just can't get him interested again in the Lord of the Rings just yet.
All Right, I think I'm gonna do this message from Daniel. If you don't mind, go for it, Daniel says, dear Robin Joe. I listened with interest to your Weird House Cinema episode on the Incredible Shrinking Man. This brought up many nostalgic memories for me, as I had this film along with it came from outer space and many others on two hundred and four hundred foot condensed eight millimeter film, and some full length feature movies on sixteen millimeter sound parentheses.
The sixteen millimeter was due to my media connections back in the set. By the way, what he's about to say, I had no idea about this. Back in the nineteen seventies, you could buy two hundred foot and four hundred foot that is, ten and twenty minute condensed versions of movies. These were optically printed from the thirty five or seventy millimeter releases and so were at the sound speed of
twenty four frames per second. Even though most were silent with captions, most people saw these films at the slow lethargic silent speed of eighteen frames per second, as they did not have sound equipment. These reels usually contained the most exciting action scenes with just enough context to sometimes guess what the movie was about. I remember the mix of large and small elements in The Shrinking Man to be very well done by the standards of the time.
The other movie you mentioned was It Came from Outer Space. I had it on two hundred foot silent Standard eight with captions. It was also one I remember being visually stunning, with lots of rotoscoping, laser and killer ray effects. Anyway, thank you for the memories. I'd forgotten about both of these until I heard your show, as I long since have gone out of film. The last time I actually shot cinema film was in two thousand and one, and I assume he means the year two thousand and one,
not the movie two thousand and one. And it costs two dollars a second to use once you accounted for processing, etc. Cheers Daniel.
Oh, some fascinating av details, nice too.
Yeah, so ten or twenty minute condensed versions of movies on film. I wonder how those were mainly used I mean, do people literally just like buy them for entertainment to project them at home.
I mean, maybe in the nineteen seventies people were like, look, we've made a lot of films by this point, but maybe it's not employ impossible to catch up with all the movies that have come out. If we just get some shorter cuts of these films, then we'll be okay. And then later, you know, by decades later, you're just like, well, I'll never see all the films I want to see, no matter what the cut happens to be. I'm just gonna have to accept the fact that I'll never see I don't know, Funky Monkey.
Fortunately, though, Rob, You're gonna see all of Funky Monkey when we do it on Weird House Cinema. Yeah, okay, So you can imagine what might be in the ten minute cut of The Incredible Shrinking Man. You had missed a lot of the great character drama and those aspects of the story. Uh, there's probably like the fight with the spider or the confrontation with the cat or whatever. What do you think would be in the ten minute condensed version of Attack of the Puppet People?
Oh? Well, I mean it would be a it would be easier to cut that one down. I think just because there's there's there's a there's a maybe a little more wasted space, there's a little more uh you know, fat on the bone in that one that you could potentially trim. Uh you know, you'd want all those special effect shots in there, but you can maybe maybe cut a lot of the meandering around the office.
Yeah, you'd have the scene where the puppet people are running around while mister Franz is like telling his friend to go away so he can get back to his living dolls.
Yeah.
Or oh, the scene where John Agar beats up the puppet that's got to be in the.
Oh, well, that's that's that's key, that's that's that's an important moment in the film. All right, let's do one last Weird House Cinema listener mail. This one comes to us from Alena. Elena says, Robert and Joke, thanks for the great podcast. I have a couple of movie recommendations for weird House Cinema. The Troehlenberg Terror aka Crawling I
nineteen fifty eight. The creature is a giant eyeball with tentacles that kills people in the Swiss Alps, and then also Fantastic Voyage nineteen sixty six, a submarine and its crew get reduced to microscopic size to enter the human body and say a life.
We always appreciate suggestions for weird house cinema. In fact, we have done movies before that were suggested by listeners, so never give up. In fact, we did one recently. Treasurer of the Four Crowns was a listener suggestion.
Yeah. Yeah, Like these suggestions sometimes introduce us to something that we were not familiar with, or if it's a film we're familiar with, sometimes it like bumps, it towards the top of the list. So yeah, the crawling I I'm trying to remember. Yeah, yeah, this was featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand back in the day, and I think it was it was a ktm A episode, So I don't know that I've actually seen it, but I remember seeing a clip from it in the old
old intro to MST. And then as far as Fantastic Voyage goes, I mean, that's that's a classic. Isaac Asimov wrote a novel based on the screenplay, but also worked on the screenplay, and I think I read that book When I Was a Kid has a pretty strong cast as well, and for the time, had some pretty amazing effects. But yeah, I wrote, Raquel Welch is in it. Donald Pleasants is in it. Author Kennedy is in it. So yeah, that would be a fun one to potentially watch.
At some point when we did our back back Shrink movies, I think multiple listeners suggested fantastic voyage. Yeah, so yeah, we may have to come back to it. By the way, I just looked up the poster for the Crawling Eye to see does the eye somehow like is it carrying a screaming woman or an unconscious woman? Yep, yep, it is. It's an I I guess the tentacles are what's holding her.
It's kind of like how she's kind of screaming. It's almost like the when I look at it, it's like the eyes like, I'm not really sure how to pick this up. Yeah, my tentacles are not really leadbearing, They're more for undulating as I float through the astral plane. I don't really know how to how to hold this woman in my arms, but the director and the promotions team says that I must do it.
I cannot yet I must Yeah, how do you calculate that? Okay, we got to wrap it up there.
Oh we do. Oh, but I have to point out the Janet Monroe is in that film, so that's kind of exciting. She was in Darby O'Gill and the Little People opposite Sean Connery, which is a film I have a lot of affection for. So I don't know. Both of these are strong candidates. Maybe we'll come back and consider one of them in the future.
Yeah, I'm on the hook.
All right, we'll go and shut the book. But we'll go ahead and remind you that listener mails every Monday and the Stuff to Blue Remind podcast feed core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday we do a short form monster or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film celebrate 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 topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow 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.