Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail.
This is Robert Land, and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back some messages from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind mailbox. If you've never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try. You can reach us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Any kind of mail is
fair game. Obviously, we like feedback on recent episodes. If you have anything interesting you want to add to a topic we have covered on the show, If you have questions, corrections, suggestions for new topics, or if you just want to say hi, tell us your story, or just share something generally interesting. Any of that's all right, send it on to contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All right, As we've been saying for a few weeks, we've been working through all of the responses we got
to our series on childhood amnesia. Lots of people wanted to share their earliest childhood memories or other commentary on these episodes, and so of course we still have not gotten near the bottom of all the messages we received on that, but we're keeping on working through them, doing a few at a time. So Rob, do you want to kick us off today? Reading this message from column who has written in before and we have called him Calm.
Oh well I don't remember that. Well apologies. Column. Column rights then and says, hi, guys, thanks for reading out my very short email about the orca looking after the juvenile whale of another species. Oh yeah, that was just a week or two ago. Yeah, this is my third time writing in, and I thought i'd give you some help in pronouncing my name. It's spelled Colm, but is pronounced column like there are three columns in this spreadsheet.
The Irish spelling is Colm, the Scottish spelling is c A L l Um, and the England version is colin the old alien. Anyway, I wanted to tell you about a very specific and very early childhood memory I have. I was in my pram and I was being brought around to our local corner shop by my mammy. Yes, grown men in Ireland call their mom or mom mammy their whole life. It's a small grocery shop that is
still there today. This was in late nineteen sixty nine or early nineteen seventy as it was cold outside, and I remember being well tucked in and setting up in the pram. My Mammy parked me up outside and went in to get her shopping. I remember some kids hanging around outside the shop and one of the boys was eating crisps. You call them potato chips. This boy gave me a crisp, and what I remember is that I had no teeth to chew it, and it felt hard
and salty against my gums. This leads me to believe I must have only been between twelve and eighteen months old.
This is just such a British Isles first memory. It's gotten risps, it's got a pram, It's got boys giving you crisps at the corner grocery.
Yeah. Anyway, you both do trojan work, lads. Fair play to you, and please do something about the subject of lighthouses in the future. I mentioned it to Joe a couple of years ago, and he said it was a great idea. As far as I'm aware, you have never covered the subject before, even in the Invention series.
I think that's a great topic. Yeah, I guess we just never got around to it.
Yeah, I don't know why not. Because I'm always I'm like you, Joe. I mean, I'm always going on trips, and I bet you often find yourself at strange lighthouses. That's what that's what I do. It's like, there's a weird lighthouse in the area, I'm gonna go see it.
So I wake up in the middle of the night. I am standing on a rocky shoreline, staring up at the lighthouse, and it's calling to me. It's saying something. Do you hear it? What is it saying. It's saying, put the mask on now.
Yes, we're so excited about the mask as we just we just recorded that episode this morning.
Oh. But also to summarize the end of column's message here, he lets us know that he makes ambient music and sends us a link to his band camp page. Of course, listeners, always, if you make music, you are welcome to send it our way. We can't promise we'll always have time to listen, but if we get a moment, we will do our best, and yeah, send us links to band camp pages. We love music. We love band camp in particular as a music hosting website. I'm a pretty big fan, so yeah, I.
Listen to some of what he's in in. I like the vibe. I love a nice ambient track. Lexicon of sound dot bandcamp dot com. Well, thanks for writing in column. I love the suggestion, and of course I love this tidbit of a very early childhood memory with the crisps.
Okay, This next message about childhood amnesia is from Jen, who says, good morning, love the podcast does a fellow science geek and trained neuroscientists, I have a few questions about your research into childhood amnesia. One, how does the growth of the brain impact childhood memories, especially the tripling in size during the first year of life. And how does the growth of subcortical hippocampus and cortical regions e g. Language, auditory,
visual motor areas also impact early memories. Well, Jen, I'm not sure of the full answer to your question, and it's been a few weeks now since our episode, so I hope I'm remembering what I do remember correctly. But I do think it's commonly assumed that rapid structural development in the young brain weakens the connections that form the
basis of long term memories. So whatever early episodic memories are made kind of fall prey to that expansion and development process you talked about, So I think this would entail both the rapid growth and the plasticity of the young brain that probably directly undermines the stability of episodic memories formed in early life. The metaphor we used in the episode, I'm still not sure if this is the
best metaphor. I'd be interested in getting feedback from more neuroscientists, But we were thinking about it sort of like trying to rebuild or renovate a house and moving into the house at the same time. So you might be like making memories in terms of setting up furniture and decorations and a certain arrangement. But then if you have to like rebuild the walls and rebuild a room and make it bigger and add on new things to the house, you will probably also have to end up rearranging all
of the things you've moved in as the house is rebuild. Okay, this is jens second question. Most of the events I remember from childhood involved getting into some kind of trouble. I do remember many happy times too, as well as some moments within daily routines, but I cannot remember day to day routines at all. For example, when I got up in the morning to go to school, did my mom fix me breakfast? Did I fix it myself? Who chose my clothes and helped me get dressed? During early
primary years? I remember snippets from upper elementary school, much like the research you reported supports and looking at old photos jog sum memories. But I find it fascinating that such daily, routine events occurring over years of my childhood would be gone. Is it because they are routine and unimportant? Is it because I was cared for, well fed and dressed ie growing up in a secure, safe and comfortable environment,
Jen another good question. I don't know for sure, but this does connect to one of the things that we talked about in our interview with David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist, and you know, when we were talking with him, he brought up the idea that, of course, the brain records fewer memories for event sequences that we perceive as routine and mundane, and studies show the brain tends to increase the density of memory detail for events that are
unusual and or highly salient for some reason, maybe they have intense social salience, or survival salience. Also, some of the studies we looked at made it seem like events that are actively remembered more often are more likely to be remembered for a longer time. They're less likely to just fade away into nothingness, with the caveat being that revisiting memories through storytelling or reminiscing often introduces changes to them.
But that seems like at least a partial two part explanation for why mundane routine events would be remembered less. You know, they're less likely to be recorded in detail to begin with, because they're not these unusual or highly salient events. And then second, routine events are not likely to be revisited in memory very often, which makes them more susceptible to fading over time. Again, as ral Julia put it in the role of m Bison, for me, it was Tuesday.
You know, yeah, I mean, I mean that's one of the things about we've discussed before, like going on a vacation, it messes with your routine or forces to take on new routines, and that routine may This may apply to something as like, oh, well, on this trip, I'm going to read first thing in the morning, whereas usually I don't have time. Usually I don't have time for that
that sort of thing. Or it can just be like, oh, well, I'm making my coffee here instead of instead of where I normally make it, I'm using a slightly different machine. It introduces all of these novel factors and new factors and altered factors into indo your existing routines, and allows the fostering of new routines, and therefore the whole trip will then be more novel than you're just your average daily week, even though you know, we find a lot
of comfort in routine. Yeah, it doesn't mean that the comfortable moments are as memorable.
But all that novelty means you're going to have way more detailed memories about your vacation than you would an equivalent length of time where you were just doing your normal things staying home and working or whatever. Jen's third question, what about our memory or lack of memory surrounding traumatic events in childhood? How does our brain choose to block
or embed traumatic memories parentheses? This is a huge area of research in recent years, and as a current elementary school teacher in a low income community, the impact of trauma on behavior on behavior and cognition is an ever present concern. Jen, I would say, yeah, that is. I don't know, but that is a very interesting and very important question. Finally, Jen says, most of the research I did as a neuroscientist involved language processing in adults and
studying impacts of brain trauma on disruption in language. So my knowledge of the memory literature is lacking and focused on adult memory. Plus, since switching careers, I haven't kept up with current research. I know there are several theories of how our memories, especially episodic memories, are quote organized or quote stored in the brain. So my last question is how do these theories inform childhood amnesia? Thanks for reading this. I don't expect you to answer these questions. Phew.
Well that's a load off, but rather raise them as things to keep in mind as you work on future episodes of the topic. Well, this is kind of out of order, isn't it now that we're reading this after we finished the series. But yeah, this does raise important questions and maybe we will return to the topic in the future. This will give us more things to plow into.
Absolutely, all right, what do we have next? Looks like we have some comments regarding our episode or episodes, I guess at this point on the Telephone Game, right, So.
Well, I guess. First of all, I want to summarize multiple responses we got concerning the version of the telephone game that you play by switching back and forth between text and drawings. So the game might begin with a text phrase and then somebody has to draw that phrase, and then the next player has to look at the picture only and come up with what text that drawing is supposed to represent, and then you just go back and forth. Three Oh sorry, what.
I was just going to say? I think what the title that we threw out there for it was something like cat Vomit poop Machine or something like cat Yeah, yeah, something just horrible that we just had to read multiple times off of our notes. And it turns out there were better names for this.
There are many names for it, So three different listeners told us three different names for it. Eric writes in to say he knows this game as Telephone Pictionary. Lindsay says she has played a boxed version of this game called Telestrations, and then Renata says she played an online version of this game called draw Sception. So it seems like the idea is so good it has come about many times through conversion, evolution.
Bravo, yeah, or rebranding at least. I mean, all of these titles are just far classier than what we were dealing with. I like it draw sception especially. That's a nice one, all right. Now here's one from Dan. Dan writes in and says Kia Orra Robin Joe. I am writing in response to your episode on the Telephone Game. As my trade is in theater and comedy. Your discussion around the recounting of stories via oral tradition and the omission of detail via retelling got me thinking about the
stage play Mister Burns by Anne Washburn. The play deals with many of those themes in a very clever and funny way. The play is in three distinct acts. The first is immediately after a series of simultaneous nuclear meltdowns across the grid have reduced the United States to a post electrical civilization. A small group of survivors sit around a campfire and pass the time and reconnect to their pre meltdown lives. They attempt to recall an episode of
The Simpsons, the spectacular Cape Fear episode. While some of them weren't familiar with the show. We see others teaching the other individuals the material secondhand. No, No, it's excellent. And then he does the thing with his fingers or and is it then that he steps on all of the rakes. We watch them change a televised story into an oral tradition, teaching the characters, the gags and the references initiating.
The acolytes love this already.
Yep, yep, yep, this sounds fun. The second act is set approximately twenty years later. The group have become a company of traveling players and travel the post electrical wasteland performing episodes of The Simpsons Live for Water, Coin and Food. We see them rehearsing the couch gag at the start of the episode and all dressed in costume as the various characters, and see how the Simpsons characters are shifting from cartoons to mythic archetypal characters. They're obsessed with getting
it right. They even do ad breaks, and there's tell that over in sector nineteen there's a guy who use to work on SNL. The final act, and the hardest to pull off, is set seventy five years later. It is the staging of what is, to all intents and purposes, a religious ceremony where the personal history of the nuclear disaster is superimposed onto the narrative of Cape Fear, and
the Simpson's characters become a representative rather than literal. For example, mister Burns aptly becomes the fear of radiation, and add in random Britney Spears lyrics you know that He's toxic and eminem references you get an incredible glimpse of a possible future of storytelling and myth making, all assembled from
pop culture. The characters in the play build their own legends and ways to understand the world, ways to pass on their oral history, to warn of the dangers of going into nuclear facilities and the hazard of invisible radiation, all through song, dance, plain, song, ceremony. The demons Itchy and Scratchy, the everyman Homer and his beautiful family, the law in order of Chief with them, and always always,
the encroaching minutes of a spindly nightmarish mister Burns. It's quite a ride, and if you get the chance, I highly recommend it. Thanks for all you do. The show is a regular part of my week and I always look forward to new episodes.
Dan, Wow, that sounds great. I think I would love this play.
Yeah, that's that's that's inventive to keep an eye out for anyone putting this on. And indeed, yeah, this is a This is something that, like I said, probably capture my imagination the most in those episodes. It's the society of oral transmission of things that that are culturally important and what happens to those things over time and something like The Simpsons. I mean it is culturally important. You know, a lot of the things that we don't think of.
They're certainly not high culture, but they help us understand our lives that it helps us sort of take whatever kind of challenges we're facing or Monday details of our life and kind of like cast it into some sort of maybe not sacred form, but at least some sort of like humorous and timeless form that corresponds with the with the saga of the Simpsons. Now, as with any religious text, there are a lot of books that are gonna end up being thrown out. I think, you know,
I'm not a Simpson's completest. I think there's a lot of stuff that you're gonna end up cutting in order to have a nice concise scripture.
Cape fears are gooding to work from, though, Yeah yeah, okay. This next message is a short response to our Vault episodes on the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. This is from Cindy. Cindy says, I submit to you the vegetable ram of Tartary. Picture and link to real included below. I think this is a screen grab from Instagram. Cindy says, I really listened to the Vault episodes on the Vegetable Lamb, and then Amy Sidaris posted this video. Decided the coincidence was
too great not to share. Thanks for all the great podcast episodes. They keep me entertained as I progress through my day. Cindy, what we're looking at here is like an outdoor grill that that has a ram with curling horns that might be made of like carrots or peppers or something. But the ram's body with all the wool is a head of cauliflower and it looks really good.
Yeah it is. This looks nice. I remember seeing this on Amy Sedaris's Instagram. She's one of the few celebrity types that I followed because her Instagram game is on point. But I didn't put that together. I didn't think, ah, vegetable ram of Tartari here very solid.
Thanks for sharing, Cindy, as I'm not on the GRAM so I never would have seen this otherwise.
All right, shall we dive into a little weird house cinema listener mail? Oh? Yes, this first one comes to us from Carl Sennen, says Dear Robin Joe, thanks for featuring the nineteen fifty three House of Wax. This is one of the first I remember well do a lock to its three D effects and vincent price. I really liked learning that it featured several actors and actresses that I later liked, but had no idea who they were
at the time. The scenes I remember the most were when Professor Jared drops Burke's body down an elevator shaft and when he swings with the grappling hook to Kathy's window, both with max three D jump scare effect. Also I remember the paddleball sequences, But over the years I lost the association with House of Wax. Maybe my nine year old mind was trying to make sense of an otherwise somewhat random but fun insertion in the plot.
When you're nine. It's like, you see the thing where he like fits that he like knocks the three different balls from the paddleballs into his mouth all at the same time, and you're just like that, is that unique to this or is that just something adults do?
Or is this the first movie. It's like, I guess all movies have this. You're gonna want to have somebody doing paddleball tricks during the middle of the movie just to keep things rolling. Remember that scene in The Godfather where a guy comes out with a pair of paddle balls.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, We're in the middle of Solaris and here comes the paddleballs. The balls go in the mouth, the three in the mouth, all in a row, all.
Right, Carl continues here. At that age, I related much more to the Professor Jared character than any others, and was rooting for him all the way to the tragic end. Price's portrayal of him really brought out the pathos and sympathy for his character with formative me As for Vincent Price, he was a favorite of my parents, dad, especially later on. We had a coffee table book about him that I enjoyed. He was quite a refined art expert, epicurean and enophile.
That means he was a connoisseur of wines, and that part helped me appreciate the finer things of life to this day. Later, he got me interested in Edgar Allan Post, one of my favorite authors and poets. Another reason I remember this movie so much is that it was one of the few in my early years that we saw in a proper theater. Growing up in a small Nebraska town, we attended many movies, but usually at the drive in theater, which was way more practical for our family of six
on a tight budget. I really enjoy most weird house cinema reviewed movies. I've collected several of them based on your deep dives, but this one was extra special, so many thanks. Now I need to screen it again, hoping I won't be disappointed in its quality without the three D enhancement and with my adult perspective, but I'll enjoy following the actors more. Best car. Oh and we have an almost immediate follow up from Karl, so I'll read
this as well. Dear Robin Joe, Again, I just finished House of Wax, presumably the rewatch here, and I must say I certainly misremembered a lot in these seventy intervening years. The scares I remember were not at all that scary, and the story was more interesting than I remember. I think maybe the three D made some effects better in the immersive theater experience or something. I also got the window entrance wrong. It was Sue, not Kathy. Anyway, I
did enjoy it and we'll probably watch it again. Just wanted you to know that it was a great trip down memory lane and a good example of a kid's imagination running them up to generate new impressions of past events. And the paddleball guy was amazing. Carl. Thanks Carl, Well that's great again. I love anytime we get to hear about people who got to see any of these movies in the theater, be the older or more recent films. And you know, this is spot on about Vincent Price.
I think the Vincent Price element that he brings is that he makes just about any villain he plays likable on some level, even no matter how far they lean into making them dastardly. It's just his portrayal is so alive, it's so charismatic. He'll win you over, at least to some extent. Maybe he'll cross the lines. Character crosses the
line at some point in the movie. But you know, also a lot of the films he goes in, there's a certain balance of camp that allows you to go ahead and root for the villain because you're able to separate yourself from it. So yeah, even is he's about to cover Sue and Wax, you know, you're still at least halfway rooting for him.
You know, maybe he was right to do that, Maybe we all should be turned into wax materials. But no, Yeah, like I said in the Weird House episode, I mean, yeah, that's the Vincent Price magic. Even as Prince Prospero in Mask of the Red Death, the character is supposed to be just cruelty, decadence and wickedness incarnate, and yet you still you kind of like him.
Yeah.
All right, Well, I think we got to wrap it up there for today, but we've got plenty more messages to read when Listener Mail comes around again next week.
That's right. And when does it come around, Well, it arises from the miss every Monday, that's when listener mail. Or but hey, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that's when when you'll encounter our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. On Wednesdays, a monster fact or an artifact creeps into the scenario, and by Friday while there's no stopping a weird House cinema episode from rampaging across the feed.
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.
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.