Listener Mail: Lousy Smarch Weather

last Thursday. Rob, you cool if I do this one alright? This is from Kennedy. Kennedy says, Hi, I just finished listening to the part one episode of The Seven Day Week. I was intrigued because I have time space synesthesia, so I see time in the space around me, including weeks, months, and years. If it hasn't already been done, this would make an interesting podcast topic. I don't know. I don't

know much about this. This sounds fascinating now. Also, while listening, I kept hoping you would bring up menstruation as a biological or natural cause. For weeks or months, I saw a post awhile ago hypothesizing that women may have been the first to track time in a month like pattern. Because of twenty eight day minstrel cycles, a period is also often five to seven days. Just wondering if you looked into the influence of this on our current system

of months and weeks. Thank you for the fantastic episode. Sincerely, Kennedy. Well, thanks Kennedy. Yes, I think these are both really interesting ideas. In part, when we talked about one of the main functions of the week being as an organizing principle for what the historian that we cited in that episode, David Hankin calls stocktaking, but we were also referring to as time conceptualization or mental time travel. Basically, the week plays a role in helping us mentally organize events in the

recent past in near future. And I think on this front, yeah, it's it's totally worth remembering that as much as we all do some extent visualized time, some people really visualized time, or really have even no choice but to visualize time,

and in a very concrete and vivid way. I remember a while back having a conversation with with a family member who was if I recall correctly, I think the way she was describing things was talking about having a form of something like time space synaesthesia, where they would they would vividly perceive time as a type of ribbon that rotates in a circle around them, and there was some kind of visual cue making parts of that ribbon. Um, I don't know, like marking them off in terms of

days or weeks or months. Interesting. Yeah, I mean this instantly makes me think, like, whatever is going on with that that person's individual um uh, you know, synesthesia experience, Like how would it differ if they had grown up

with a different perception of time, a different calendar system. Yeah, But on the second question you raise about the origins of the week, and I guess this would not necessarily be a strict seven day week, but some kind of time organization unit on the order of like five to seven days or so on. The origins of that possibly being linked to the human minstrel cycle. I don't know if anybody has any direct evidence of that, and I

don't know what that would be. Maybe like I don't know, written records from the ancient world from you know, Mesopotamia or anywhere making this connection themselves to tying the earliest concepts of weeks to the minstrel cycle. But it seems like inherently a very plausible biological basis for that kind of organizing principle. Um. Kind of on the same level

as like the the agricultural market cycle hypothesis. Right. You know, there are some fairly universal human experiences that are going to be happening in cycles on the order of you know, some group of days that subdivides the lunar month. Yeah. Yeah, And and of course we do know that in different cultures there would be rituals and practices associated with with Instrell cycles. So uh yeah, I initially thought the same thing.

I thought, well, there have to be some papers out there that discussed this um that that at least consider this connection, uh, if not presents some sort of evidence like we're discussing here. But I I really couldn't find much out there. Uh. Not to say that my research skills are are perfect and above reproach, but if there was, if there was something good out there, I missed it. Uh. And I would love to be corrected if if anyone out there has a paper or or in fact this

post that has mentioned I would love to read more. Well, yeah, I guess anything you came across that was like a biological reasoning that you were hypothesizing to underlie the week. Um, it would be hard to establish a clear link. I mean I think that was also true when you were looking at that paper paper in the journal uh Chronobiology International, that was trying to find some kind of biological origin

for um, for the seven day week. I mean, whatever it is, you'd have a hard time showing like, yes, this is definitely the reason. But I think some things seem at least prima facy plausible and yeah, I would definitely say menstruation as one of them. Yeah, it's actually briefly mentioned. It's mentioned only once in that Rheinberg at

All paper and Chronobiology. Uh. They write, quote, we wish to point out the endogenous roughly thirty day minstrel rhythm of women, which also converts survival rate, is integrated into the complex multiple period biological time structure. This raises the question of whether the roughly seven day rhythms are in any way of survival value for the human or other species. So they're thinking about it, but that's really all there

is about minstrel cycles in this particular paper. But again, if someone knows of some some more research writing contemplation out there about this possible connection. Shoot it our way. We'd love to read about it. But either way, Yeah, strong idea, great email, Kennedy. Oh Rob, there was one other h do you mind if I read this next message about lava boats is pretty short? Yeah, go for it.

So this is in response to the episode we did, I guess a couple of weeks ago now about lava boats in In sort of both ways, you could interpret that. I talked for a long time about pumice rafts, you know, these volcanic rocks that you know, floating on the surface of the ocean and make these vast, undulating parking lots

in the middle of the Pacific. But then we also talked about the idea of, well, could you sail a boat on a on a flowing river of lava like you might see it one of the volcanoes in Hawaii. And Zach had some a great point about the latter idea about trying to actually sail a boat on on a river of lava. So Zack says, Hey, Robert and Joe, I was thinking about the idea of riding a superheated steel boat from lava into water. One thing that came

to mind was the Leaden frost effect. Depending on your momentum when entering the water uh and style of boat flat bottom or keeled, you could potentially be in for a wild ride. Love the show. It sure helps keep this trucker entertained. Thanks for all you guys and your team do Zach, Zach. This is a This is a great point. The leaden frost effect, for anybody out there who's not familiar is a is a really interesting physics

principle that essentially has a counterintuitive effect. So like, if you heat up a pan and you dribble some water into it. Uh, you know, the water the heat the heat from the bottom of the metal panel transfer into the water and will start to boil. But if you get the pan really hot, like ripping hot before you

dribble the water in, something totally different happens. Instead of it pooling on the bottom of the pan and then boiling and then boiling off into steam, the droplets of water will instead appear to float over the surface of the pan and kind of skitter around madly. Uh. And they actually, in this form take a longer time to boil off than they do if the pan is at a lower temperature. And the reason for that is this

principle known as the leading frost effect. It's where when there's a huge temperature difference, the h the steam that comes off of that you know, piece of that, that little droplet of water creates an insulating layer. It's sort of like a cushion of water vapor that's instantly vaporized. That makes it take longer for the heat to transfer into that droplet of water and essentially makes it float

over the surface of the pan. And you can imagine a similar thing going on with any kind of superheated piece of metal coming into contact with water, maybe sort of like dancing around on a on a cushion of steam. Oh wow, Yeah, I didn't really think about this in our initial discussion. Yeah that this this, this might make a really wild ride for sure. Yeah. All right. We have a response to a Vault episode here from Jim in New Jersey. Uh, specifically our ketchup episode of Invention,

which we recently re aired. Uh. Jim says, Robert and Joe, there was a Hines processing plant in my hometown of south central Pennsylvania. A family friend worked there. He refused to eat Hinz Ketchup based on what he witnessed in the processing. Figuratively, he saw how the sausage was made, but literally he saw how the Ketchup was made. But he would eat other brands of Ketchup. His family would tease him and ask, do you think they make Ketchup

any differently? I didn't think about this. Is is Hins gonna come after us with their lawyers for reading this or whatever? I like Hines Ketchup. There you go, unpaid endorsement. Yeah, anyway, he continues. You ended your invention of of the Ketchup episode by asking if you had any listeners who had never eaten ketch Up. I can't be that listener, but I know one person whom I can guarantee never tasted catch Up. My father. My dad was an extremely picky eater.

He wouldn't eat any foods to contain tomatoes in any form. No catch up, spaghetti and sauce, pizza, sliced tomatoes, etcetera. He would eat spaghetti with melted butter on it. Tomatoes was only one of his forbidden foods, but it was probably the one that cast the widest net. Unfortunately, Dad died years ago, so I can't follow up with him about this due to his tomato aversion. I never tasted pizza until age fifteen, when on the way home from a Saturday school trip, the bus stopped at Pizza Hut

for dinner. After one taste, I practically moaned, what is this food of the gods? Jim and New Jersey? Oh wow, Jim. Well, so I can sort of relate because I never went that far. Like, I always liked pizza and stuff, but um, unless it was in a highly sort of processed and sort of hidden form, actually did not much like tomatoes

when I was a little kid. Uh. There there were weird exceptions though, I mean I did like some things with tomatoes in them, but like most of the time, if if there were visible chunks of tomato and something I did not like it, did not want it. And I don't know what changed. I mean, now tomatoes are one of my favorite foods. But but yeah, as a kid, I remember being grossed out. Yeah, I don't remember being super into just like raw tomatoes when I was a

little kid. My son, however, as always eating them. He's a He's a much better eater than I was at his green up growing up, Um, like a pretty early age you would pick up a tomato and just eat like an apple. So yeah, no problem there. But you know, if you're not in you know, even if you're not into tomato based substances or for some reason you can't have tomato based foods, you can certainly still have pizza. You can get a white pizza, you can have like

a pesto based pizza. Um. And I would agree that the pizza not a controversial opinion here is pretty great. Uh. And I would expand that to to when I say pizza did not just mean like literal pizza, and also some of the sort of turf wars between like one pizza tradition in another. But if you just take in into account like all flat bread based foods, um, it's it's a perfect formula. You know. Actually thinking about food versions of this type though it's making me wonder, like

what is the psychological basis of food aversion? Like how is a food you don't like represented in the brain? Because it just remembering my childhood, so there were so many things I didn't want to eat because I thought I didn't like tomatoes, but like I loved tomato salsa, and I would eat pizza that had tomato sauce on. It was like tomato worked as a sauce or something like if it was in liquid form, But I didn't

want chunks of tomato. I think I don't know why that would be, like what's happening in my little kid brain to cause me to feel like that. I mean, it's a pretty complex issue. I know there've been some some papers written on this. I know some of it comes down to two textures and uh, and I'm not sure in all cases what the exact principle is there. I mean, sometimes it's something to do with the path

the actual like physical palate of the mouth. I've also read that, of course, when you're getting into things like spices and more complex flavors. Uh. You know, part of that, of course is it's literally a developed taste. But in other cases, I think there's a strong argument that like a smile child could not survive a dose of a of a poison that might otherwise be okay in an adults body, and therefore there they have to be more

selective in what they will actually tolerate. Oh interesting, Yeah, lower lower body mass means that you you have to

protect yourself more with your mouth. Yeah. Now, I haven't actually looked at at the research on that, so I don't know if that's a popular opinion right now or you know, popular hypothesis, or if they're uh, you know, it's the kind of thing that we have to perhaps come back and discuss in greater detail, but very I mean, you do have kids, little kids that are all in on spice, but a lot of kids seem to be, you know, kind of you have to ease into it.

You have to develop that spice taste over time. All right. This next message was in response to the Moses effect. This is from Shannon. If you didn't catch that recent Vault episode. The Moses effect, again, is a phenomenon that falls under the category of knowledge neglect, where if you ask somebody how many of each type of animal did Moses take onto the arc, most people will say too even though they know that it was in the story, it was Noah and not Moses. So you just like

ignore that part of the question. It just like doesn't even register in your mind. Um so, so Shannon says, Hi, guys, I don't know if you explicitly mentioned it, but it seems to me that the Moses effect is dramatically lowered when a foreign language is involved. I speak German, and if I were to translate a question to or from English, I know that I would detect the trickery much more quickly than if I simply answered when I was more fluent in German, I might have been more prone to

fall for the deception. I assume the same is true for any non native English speaker, that they would notice that Moses is the incorrect actor in the question. I think the implication of this is that the trickery in the Moses illusion relies on fluency, and the trickster quote surfs the wave of that fluency to get past our usual breakers. Thanks for all you do, Shannon, Uh yeah, I'd say on his face that that totally makes sense to me. In fact, it's been a while since we

did that episode, so I don't remember for sure. But I think some of the studies that looked at the Moses effect looked into whether altering processing fluency, like doing something to make it harder to understand the question or make it go slower as you absorb it, would increase people's chance of noticing it. But again, I don't remember. It's been a bit alright. As some of you know, we have a discord, uh message board? Is that what you call it? Discord? We have a discord. I guess

it's maybe the way of saying it. I've still never been there. Yeah, I I poke around in there, and there's a a number of users in there. It's it's very chill. If you were interested in joining the discord, just shoot us an email. You doing the email address at the end of this episode, and I'll shoot you back the invite code UM, because I don't think there's a way to just automatically point you to it. But anyway, we heard from a listener by the name of ev

EVI writes in and says the following. From the episode Music and Memory, Rob mentions a song in the beginning uh m nine. This is by Boards of Canada from a Few Old Tunes, Volume one. They include a link to both the discogs page about it discogs dot com of course, tremendous resource anytime you're you're researching albums and

artists and in particular releases and so forth. And they also include um YouTube clip uh and they say this song reminded me of music featured in the computer animated movie The Mind's I. The similarities in the music were not as close as I originally thought, but I figured you all might enjoy this classic and maybe someone will hear the song M nine and spark a memory of something else that gets closer. And for your auditory and visual pleasure, here's the sequel, Beyond the Mind's Eye, and

they include a link to that as well. Um, Joe, do you remember The Mind's I? Uh, not by title alone. I don't know, maybe if I watched it. So this was especially the first one i've I've kind of finally remember, because there were a lot of TV ads for it you could you could send off to get a copy of this. It was a like a VHS of all of this just cutting edge computer animation stuff that I

don't know. I haven't I haven't rewatched all of it, but some of it would probably come off a bit rough by today's standards for sure, But you know, it's very like dreamy and kind of new a G and futuristic and I had to look it up one. James Reynolds did the music for the first one. I think some different artists were involved in music for the subsequent releases, but yeah, this one, this one was advertised all over the place, and I think I may be rented it

from a VHS store at some point. So this was like a mail order computer animation clip show. Yeah. Yeah, there's like an eight hundred number you could call and you could order your own copy of The Mind's Eye. And uh. I remember at the time it was like you would you would see these commercials and you're like, wow, the future is here. Look at this. It's like pure moods for the eyes. Oh yeah, I mean I would.

I would very much classify in the same category. Have pure moods is another one of those that is the Your Moods was a purely a musical release, of course, but there were a lot of TV ads for it, and it had had some great tracks on it. I still think about Pyramids at least once a month. Wait, my memory can't be right because I'm remembering. It had like the Exorcist theme and the theme from the X Files, but also India and stuff. It was pretty great. Great.

I definitely had a copy together. Yeah, and it I think it actually it introduced me to a number of these artists. Yeah, you had Enigma, Anya um uh. A number of big evangelist is on there, Micah um oldfield In, Neil Morriconi, the Orb, Brian Eno. You also got a little Kinny g in there. But yeah, a lot of big names and sort of the like the New Age and electronic uh uh, you know world U Tubular Bells part one being the Exorcist theme song. See now I want to listen to it. Can practically I can hear

that Enigma song returned to Innocence. I just pounding through my head. Now, wow, what a strange idea, But like, I don't know, I just it was one of those things you see it on TV as a kid, You're just like, Okay, this is what culture is. Yeah, this this is the world I was born into. Let's see, Rob, I'm taking a look at some of these other messages you brought in from the discord, since I haven't seen

these before. Oh we have one from Robin tying back to Jim's message about the about the Ketchup Vault episode. Robin says, with regards to the Ketchup episode, if you folks have not yet tried kim chi on your hot dog type food of choice, I will highly recommend it. Uh, well, Robin would go right along with that, because obviously, you know, a cabbage type vegetable, especially in some sort of fermented or dressed form, works well on a hot dog, and

some people put cole slaw on there or Sauer kraut. Yeah, kimchi works great as well. But then Robin goes on to say, um may I also recommend squigging some q P Japanese style mayo on there, in keeping with Joe's recommended go chu jong and mayo dipping sauce. Um. I don't think I've ever tried exactly that QP spelled k e w P i e in in English is a I don't know how exactly it's different than just regular American mayonnaise, but but there there's something different about it,

has a different kind of richness or something. The bottle looks very cute too, like I wanted to squeeze it. But but I don't think I've ever actually had it myself. I always end up using um mayo or vegan mayo just from the grocery store. Um, but I want to try it. I'm actually having kim chi with mayo on veggie dogs for dinner. Tonight. Wow, I'm excited. Well, what

a coincidence. So I don't think I would normally, under regular circumstances just go with a type of mayonnaise on a hot dog, but yeah, I can go well when paired with other types of condiments like sharper condiments or something that secidic, like like kim chi or something. Um. I remember many many years ago when I went to Iceland. There they have a special way of dressing their pilcer the hot dogs there, like you would get it basically

any any gas station there. That's like, uh, there's like I don't remember, like four or five condiments that go on everything. It includes like some onions and some kind of sharper kind of sweet and sour sauce, and then I think also some type of mayonnaisy creamy sauce. It sounds good. It sounds very good. Anyway, Thank you, Robin. All right, Well, it looks like we're at a time we had we had some weird house listener man we wanted to read. We're gonna save that for next time. Uh,

and when is next time? Well, it's gonna be next Monday. That's when we do listener mail and the stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed We do our core episodes on two season Thursdays, we do a short form artifact or monster fact on Wednesdays, and then on Friday, that is time for Weird House Cinema. That's when we set aside most serious matters and we just discuss a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth

Nicholas Johnson. 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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.