Listener Mail: The Power of Names

We respond where we can during our busy days. But eventually we build up enough. We have to get to it. We have to let the robot out of his way, and and then this is what happens. We devote a whole episode, especially your your feedback about names. We received so many about nomini determinism, about how the name that we were given, how it affects our ultimate outcome in life, our opportunities in life, and how we see ourselves, how other people see us and treat us. And uh, obviously

everyone out there has a name. Everyone out there has has some sort of an opinion on to what extent their name is affecting who they are so we we received a lot of cool content. We cannot go through all of it. Yeah, at some point I feel like we had something like six a day just on nominative determinism.

So yeah, let him all right? Uh. We heard from Polly who wrote in and mentioned that her name was supposed to be Apollonia, which, of course uh is the god of music, poetry, art oracles, archery, plague, medicine, sun light, and knowledge. But she says her parents chickened out and named her Pauline instead, but she went back around and reclaimed Apollonia, and so she writes to us as Polly okay, and also the Muse of Prince you forgot Apollonia? The

Muse of Princes and Prince Prince singer up. I believe like there's a character Apollonia. Oh, I could be wrong. I remember there was a character in the movie over Drawn at the Memory Bank named Papolonia. But that's that's my main uh in for that name, all right. We also heard from our listener Jasper. Jasper was actually given the birth name Luke. He says he grew up in a very strict with a very strict Christian dad, and he was getting into the trouble trouble all the time.

So he associated that name of getting caught and Luke of course means light and an enlightened one and has the same route as the as the name Lucifer. And so he ended up eventually rebelling against his former identity and choosing Jasper as his new identity, which which I think this is. You know, this is an important aspect

in a lot of people's history with their names. You're either you're given one version of your name and you ended up sort of shifting it into into your own personal identity, or many people just straight up abandon it. Sometimes they're abandoning the simple name for the stranger name, or it seems like just as often it's the it's the the opposite of that, they end up taking the strange name and exchanging it for the normal one. It's

kind of like the star Bellied speeches and the star machine, right. Yeah, I think I took the E off of my name at one point, as as a tiny youth a youth, yeah, And then another point I think I wanted to put some boom lots over the you. But what's the point of that? Yeah, pretty Julie that's true. Yeah, yeah, I just shifted around from various boring versions of my boring name. I mean, it's basically just varying levels of masculine and feminine.

You have Robert, you have Rob, you have Robbie, you have Bob, Bob, and it seems like Robin was name. You know, people would refer to me as all of those, depending on where they were in my family. Didn't you post something once that it was like the lifespan of the name Robert, Like as a young kid, the boys called Robbie. Yeah, you know, I can't take credit for creating it, but someone on the internet created this kind of timeline. Yeah, where it's it's like the cycle of life.

In the in the morning, in the dawn of your years, I guess you're a Robbie, you Robert, and then in the sunset years your Bob. Yeah. All right, Now here's an interesting, uh a bit of feedback on the same topic, and this comes to us from page page right soon and says, I'm surprised you didn't discuss or at least mentioned changing one's name and adulthead, or or for that matter, in infancy. A friend of mine had to rename her

child because no one could pronounce the original name. I was born with a name which stereotypically did not match my gender. There were several boys all through primary school with the same name, and perhaps that influence my departure from the feminine. Apparently, at as young as five or six, I was introducing myself by different names, and at fifteen started going by a nickname completely disconnected from my birth name.

Nicknames changed, and eventually, when I was eighteen, I worked out what would be a good new name for myself, then went down to the Office of Births, Deaths, and Marriages and changed it. I've been Paige ever since, and just hearing my birth name makes me I'm comfortable. Did I've perhaps change my destiny by changing my name? How does hating one's name and refusing to use it whenever possible affect things? How are babies or children affected when

their name is changed? And how do children who cannot pronounce their names fair? My daughter has a speech impediment and cannot pronounce her shortened name uh Meiwi versus neely let alone her first long name. Thanks for the podcast. I've been listening for over a year now. Uh And when I found you. I devoured them all as quickly as I could. Page I read this entire email because here on the episode, because I think she did raise

a lot of cool points. It's gonna be, you know, chewing over the uh, the issues involved in naming and reclaiming a name or abandoning a name. I kind of feel like altering your name is a sort of rite of passage anyway, and it does seem to happen in those teenage years when you're trying to figure out what

your personality is, who you want to be in the world. Yeah, indeed, and uh And as far as the speech issue goes, um, my son has some catching up on his speech because he had a cliff flip cleft ballot and his name is is Sebastian, but he we just call him Bastion and the home because you know, you can, you can

say that easier. And I also think I, like a little toddler, seemed to really go for more of the one or two syllables anyway, Like that third syllable that's just something to trip over, so you might as well cut it down. Um. But we also made sure that we named the new cat a name that he could stay easily because they're like, we want him to be able to say the cat's name. We're not gonna give it some crazy name like Zartagnan or something. So we called the new cat Mochi, and that he can say. Yeah.

One of my daughter's earliest little snugly toys was named as Morelda, and people would get so annoyed with us. They like, what she can't pronounce as Morelda? What would she she call it? Um? She never really cottoned to it, so we never had to worry about it. But shoot high, That's what I'm saying, because they seem to come up with like if they if they can't or don't want to say all the syllables and something. They they're really

weird about how they choose, pick and choose. For instance, my son, for whatever reason, is still calling water ewa, Like why, Like, clearly you can say waw and you I mean you could, you could, You could hit it more on the head, I think, But instead he's calling it ewa to the point where I have to stop myself from thinking of it as ewa because it does it does sound give him that it sounds good. You did ask me to give you give you your class of EA the other day and I was like, what, yeah,

all right, here's another but listener mail. This comes to us from Nathan in Australia. Nathan says, my grandfather's name was Victor. He was a champion rugby league player, lawn bowler and golfer. So there's another example of of a name that may or may not have have pushed uh the individual onto Victory. Uh. And on a similar note, here's one from Victoria, also in Australia. We have a lot of listeners in Australia. She writes it and says, I thought you might be interesting in a story about

my name. As you can see from my email, it's Victoria's strike But here's more to it because, as you see, I'm adopted. Five years ago. I found my biological family and their surname is Force, so technically i'm Victoria's Strike Force. My boyfriend, on the other hand, has been terribly unlucky. His name is Ben Ben Laden been Lodden, perhaps eat way close enough to conceivably caused some problems. I want to think through the podcast it rocks and makes my

daily train ride to work a joy. Victoria, we had Gillian right into us uh and give us some some very cool feedback on the episode and on some other topics as well. But pointed out that they worked in a hospital where there was a doctor doctor the last name d O C K T O R so and people refer to the doctor as doctor, doctor, doctor doctor. Yes, and here's an interesting question. Finally, this has brought up

to us by our listeners. Zerik Zerrec of course has a very cool first name of him, may say so, a very creative first name. So he mentioned that he even though his parents were very on of the name and uh and and and stead, that they made it up for him especially, he felt he felt limited, but he felt like it wasn't his name. It felt alien

to him anyway. He asked, do you think you quote normals unquote could explain to a person with a weird, foreign, meaningless name, what it feels like to have a common name. Does it just feel like nothing? Because that's more or less how I feel about my name most of the time. And that's an interesting question because, like I say, I've always felt like my name is boring, and I've always felt like my normal name is just it's almost like a number I'm given like, I don't feel a particular

attachment or identity to it. I am just sort of I am who I am in spite of having the name Robert Lamb. Well, I mean, the thing is is that when you have a normal name and you're introducing yourself, people often misremember it as another normal name, like Surely or Judy, Julie, you know, and so Zak. I would say that people probably pay a little bit more attention to your name, maybe even more attention to you as a person, because they don't automatically have these sort of

common associations with your name. I think it's kind of awesome, although I understand like if you don't, maybe there's a sense of otherness with that name that you might feel more than the average Joe. Yeah, it's it does seem like a situation where you can't really win. You give a kid a weird name, they're gonna want a normal one. You give them get a normal name, they're gonna a weird one. Maybe that solution is you have to give them both and then they can sort of pick and

choose which one they want to go with. Well, isn't there already that that idea that this generation um will need to change their name by age eighteen anyway because of security issues and oversharing on the internet. It is just true. So and I wonder to what extent the the normal abnormal name shift will feature into that. Do you tend to have a crazier name during this rebellious wild stage? Or is that when you have a normal

name and you're rebelling against it. And if we're going to live to be five undred years old, as Albredy de Gray that bio gerontologists says, maybe just keep changing your name like every century. Right, Yeah, just keep reinventing yourself because you're going to forget most of it, everything that's happened to you anyway, right, yeah, alright. We got a couple of emails about pro pri exception, this idea of figuring out where your body is and space and time,

and uh, here is one from Brenna. She says, I enjoyed your recent podcast. I am a therapist who works with infants and toddlers with special needs ages zero at five. Many of my kids have challenges with appropriate exception, and children delays ippropriate exception often present its difficulty interacting with objects in themselves. For example, the children's song Wheels on the Bus encourages children to rotate their arms in a

circular pattern around each other. Robert narrating this right now, It is a good song. Children need motor planning appropriate exception to carry out this action. However, because they don't yet understand where their body is in space and time in relation to itself, they often have greater difficulty with this complex action. And she goes on to say that, um, if they have delays appropriate reception, it's not uncommon that their vestibular sense is affected as well, and when that's affected,

it can be really difficult to manage properceptive needs. So you're talking about balance and coordination, and she says that in adults you can kind of adapt, but in kids, it's really hard on paraphrasing, by the way, she says, because they never learn the skill to begin with. And so she says, if there are any listeners with kids who have difficulty with propriate reception or vestibular development, she wanted to share a couple of at home activities that

parents can do with her kids. Um. She says that activities that involve heavy pushing and pulling, which in turn provide greater sensory feedback. You can fill a wagon with toys to pull, pushing a toy grocery cart or rolling weighted balls. She said. That's a great start, but no more than temperation or their body weight for the pushing and pulling. You can buy a pop up tennel or

a tent to give them practice traveling through different spaces. Again, we take all of this for granted, right, um, she said, A good old fashioned pillow forward is great too, and songs like head, shoulders, knees and toes if you know that one, if you're happy and you know it, ladybug. These are all good for coordination with body parts. And finally, she says that you could kind of create a swing with a blanket or a towel. Says she used as a toy parachute, and she twists the ends together with

the child inside. She gently lifts the child a couple inches off the floor and let some swing from side to side, and that the kids love this and they pop their head out to see what's going on. Um. Again, things that we take for granted, this idea that you're moving through space and time, and always I've always wondered about this because I've noticed that as my daughter develops. She's five years old now, um, but she seems to be going through a growth spurt. She seems to be

falling a lot more. And I wonder if it's because the borders of your body are rapidly changing and you don't You're not as um as familiar with how your body he is moving through space and time. It's like having iTunes or Adobe on your machine. It constantly needs the updates. And yes, there you can't keep up with a number of updates that are required to properly orient

yourself in time and space. Perhaps, Yeah, And I also remember too that when I was pregnant, particularly in the third trimester, I really did not know where I was. I mean like I would go through I would bump into things all the time because I didn't really have a sense of the borders of my body. And I wonder if any other women experienced that. So proprioception continues to be this really fascinating topic. Yeah, I had we receiving another email on the topic from Michael. Michael wrote

in with an email titled propri exception Glitches. He says, several years ago, I had a table saw accident. The resulted in my left index finger spending a couple of months wrapped in bandages. When the bandages came out, my doctor told me to touch as many different textures as possible and to look at my finger as I did it, so that my brain would know how to interpret the

signals it was receiving. The damage to my finger, followed by a long swaddling, essentially rebooted my brain's relationship with my finger, and I had to retrain it. During this reboot process, I developed a habit of rubbing my index finger and thumb together. Several years later, I injured my thumb and was surprised to find that my index finger was also feeling the pain of the injury. Apparently a few wires end up getting crossed thanks to my little

nervous tick. Huh okay um. Here's another one about appropriate exception. This is from J in Tilsonburg, Ontario, Canada, and he says that when I was younger, I raised a bit of motocross and rode for fun since I was eight years old. On a few rare occasions, when racing as hard as I could, I would get into an almost meditative mind state where I would swear the bike felt

like a part of me. I could almost feel the ground under my front tire as if an extension of my arms, uh, and the field attraction left in the soil through the soles of my feet while either in the air on the throttle where I end it and the bike began felt blurred. This was also when I felt the fastest and most confident on the bike. Now, I was no superstar racers, so I wonder whether the pros or other bikers have had the sensation. Thanks again, Jay,

our boss are sort of not boss anymore. Um connell actually uses a motorcycle, and he had said, he had mentioned before uses that as his main form of transportation, that when he's in traffic and he's on the highway, that he gets into this meditative state with the bike because it's uh such a trepidacious ride that he really has to focus all of his energy into what he's doing on that bike. And I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. That sort of lines up with what Jay

is saying. All right. We also recently did a rerun of our episode on the Science of Beards, which is a popular episode, and to no one's surprise, it was popular again the second time. Uh So we received this one from Renee. Renee writes, and I'm sending this on account of the Signs of Beards episode, which I listened to today while running. The topic of facial hair has always interested me. Why certain people prefer certain styles, different reasons,

why people have it, etcetera. I enjoyed your episode and thought you would like to hear some things. I know, when you talked about Abraham Lincoln liking to wrestle and having a beard, I was surprised you did not mention the story of why he grew his beard. You might already know it, but here is some of the letter written to Lincoln while he was running for office. I'm going to summon my Laura Ingles Wilder here. Okay, dear sir, my father has just come home from the fair and

brought home your picture and Mr Hamlin's. I am a little girl, only eleven years old, but want you to be President of the United States very much, so I hope you won't think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. I have got four brothers and part of them will vote for you anyway, And if you let your whiskers grow. I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you. You would look a great deal better, for your face

is so thin. All the eies like whiskers, and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then you would be president. My father is going to vote for you, and if I was a man, I would vote for you too. But I will try to get everyone to vote for you that I can. Well, there you go from the from the mouths of babes right talking about whiskers, how adorable, making his face looked thicker and more more capable of taking a punch. I think

she was like the first focus group. Yeah, accidentally, I think she was. All right, here's another one about beards. Is it from Martin Howdy from Texas? Y'all, I just heard your podcast on beers. As a bearded fellow, I thought i'd cheer some of my experience with the general public. I have it quite the mixed reaction to my beard.

But the one thing that really struck me was that the larger portion of the younger generation has a positive reaction to my beard and is usually impressed, but the older thirties and up seemed to have a more negative reaction. One seventy is fellow even went so far as to tell me that society would fix me and that if I didn't shave that bleep off, I'd wind up in a loony it. Uh. The older people get, the more

negative their statements. Besides that, my girlfriend likes my beard and most of my friends are in agreement that I look better with it than without it. That might be because I have a hatchet face. Oh we doubt that. The podcast was the first podcast and made me go to y'all's website, and speaking of faces, I was surprised at how y'all looked. Y'all should do a podcast about voices and faces and how we associate them. I thoroughly enjoy the show. Keep up the good work, Martin. All right,

thanks Martin. Yeah. We uh we hear from listeners from time to time they're like, oh my god, I saw photos of you guys and not at all what I imagined, and I'm deeply upset because I imagine something else for you. Well, you know, he mentioned you know, uh, Martin here is from Texas, and I instantly thought, uh, two MPR there

is there's one MPR reporter from Texas. This often featured you've probably heard him as a real, real Texan voice, but a soothing voice almost like there's a little bit of Wilford Brimley in there, and a little bit of h and Marie Stouffer from the old you know, a wildlife show. Very soothing and and so I form in my mind this kind of picture of this bearded Wilfred Brimley s guy, maybe a little a little bit of that character from Parks and rec with a big mustache,

you know, uh, some of that going on. And then I look him up online and he's just a guy, like does not look like my mental helt. I thought you're gonna say, like he had a faux hawk. No, no, he had, he doesn't. You know, he's not on the on the other end of the spectrum, but he's very much at the middle end of the middle portion of the spectrum where I just would not pick him out of a lineup. Is that voice any day of the week.

I know it is interesting psychologically what we do, and we make up these ideas of what people should look like. And I do that a lot in fiction, you know, so I can see how people when they're listening to us might be a little bit like what's what you know? Like I think I said before, nothing works me more than being uh, you know, many pages into a book, maybe even halfway through, and then the narrator decides to tell me some it as a mustache. Noache, tell me

like the first sentence. Alright, we have an email from Will and he is talking about our episode Heartbeat in the Brain. He says, Hey, guys, first time writing in long time listener. While listening to Heartbeat in the Brain, Hole in the Skull podcast on my way into work this morning, I found it very interesting, as I do most of the topics. As I was listening, I couldn't help but think about a different kind of hole in

the school for quote unquote medical purposes, allabotomy. I first heard of a lot body of procedure while at college. I went to college down the road from Weston, West Virginia, at West Virginia Wesleyan College, which is home to the second largest handstone building in the world, now known as trans Alleghanty Lunatic Asylum. When it was first built, though

it was known as Western State Hospital. As the new name implies, the Western State Hospital with Mental Hospital and operated from eighteen sixty four to nine and has a very dark history over the one in thirty years of

it being open. I believe that either the history of West Instant Hospital or lobotomies would be an awesome follow up after the treped Nation podcast always Listening, will Um thanks well, and that just reminded me that in one of the World Science Festival panels had to do with genetics.

Eugenics was brought up because eugenics sort of as they discussed it, UM proliferated during a time period in which a lot of people were being put in mental institutions, and they should not have been put into mental institutions. A number of these people they might have been UM drug or alcohol addicts, or they may have just had anxiety problems. In society's um idea here in the late

eight hundreds was just lock them up. At the same time, you've got eugenics happening, and they're saying maybe we could root out these sort of unsavory characters and UM along those lines, people began to be sterilized in these institutions. Well, we also have a number of other things happening, like lobotomies, and so I agree. I think this is a really ripe area for exploration, so it's not quite on the

same level. It's the procedure that came up there in our Digestion series about the individual who was treating constipation chronic constipation by removing the uh, the large intestines and just rerouting it. Right. For a second, I thought you were talking about that moment in Mary Rich's Gulp in which they were talking about which president is it? Um. He had got shot in the liver and so he couldn't be I think so he had to be fed through the anus. Yeah, that read the rectal feeding. Yeah, uh,

I don't really have anything. I was not talking about rectal feeding, but the thank you. That's why I just had that moment where I was like, I don't know how to get out of this. Robert help, Well, let's get out of by grabbing another listener mail from the

robot here. This one comes to us from You'll You'll write to us and says one of my favorite facts about the moon, which we recently did an episode on, is that it moves away from the Earth at a rate of about one point five inches per year over an average person's lifetime eighty years or so the moon would have moved around ten feet away from the Earth. There's something comforting and strangely intimate about being able to visualize something that's happening on a celestial scale and relate

it to one's time on this planet. Well, certainly we can relate our time on this planet constantly to celestial movements, which is kind of which is kind of beautiful in a way. Yeah, and I thought that was a beautiful email and kind of in the sort of like Nil de grass Cosmos column of looking at the universe in a in a very big and poetic way. So thank you, you'll. Um, we have an email from Alliston on super Stimuli and she attached a picture of Conan the Barbarian. By the way, yes, Swartzenegger,

great film. Actually I think this one is a different a different Conan the Barbarian is the one played by the guy from Game of Thrones then or the TV show maybe even I think so he's got giant pecks. Well, I'll just put it that way. That could be an Okay, she says, When I think of super Stimuli, my mind goes straight to those big, tall and muscular guys and action movies who don't really exist outside of bodybuilding and pro pro wrestling. It's such an unreal and unrealistic body type.

But there's something so compelling about the image. I'm sure this is my version version of the super feminized women in pornography. I can't imagine actually having a dude like that over for a pot. Look, I don't think he'd fit in the chairs at my table, So why do I go all gooey for them in movies? It's pure super stimula. Great episode. I love your podcast and I hope that you do them for a very long time. Thank you, Allison. And that just reminded me too of

Joe Mangelo. I believe that's his name. He was in True Blood. You play the giant wolf. Dude. Yeah, like that is super normal stimuli. So I think it's really interesting to look at it from the male perspective. We always think about the male gaze, thinking about females and corn. But yeah, no, he's a handsome man. I'll give it to him. I mean, I give I will admit that he's a handsome man. That's what I'm trying to her point.

You know, how how practical is that when you want to have someone over for Pollock, you can't have someone crushing your chairs. Yeah, and then you don't want them to come over to and there and all they eat or you know, they have some sort of diet where they have to eat two whole chicken breasts and then some sort of protein shake every meal because their whole,

their whole life is about building and maintaining this body. Um. And that's what I always remind myself if I'm watching a movie and someone is particularly ripped, Um, I remind myself, well, what does that person have to do in life but remain ridiculously ripped. That's kind of their job roasted chickens. Yeah, And actually I find that it tends to get in the way of the film narrative if the actor is

unrealistically in shape. I didn't actually I haven't watched the show yet, but my wife watched this The Mr. Self Ridge Show, which is the PBS show about self Ridge. The uh, the the American and went to Britain and revolutionized the shopping mall experience over there. But Jeremy Piven plays the character. And there's a scene where you know, this dude early twentieth century is has a shirt off and he's like super ripped in a way that you just wouldn't and you just wouldn't expect that kind of

body on someone, uh, in that position, in that time frame. No, that was very unusual, it wasn't it. It's like when you see super white teeth on an actor in a in a period piece. You know, it's like super white, straight teeth, Like, what are you doing that doesn't look you're you're just by smiling, You're taking me out of the historical immersion of the picture. I know, But there's that whole willing suspension of disbelief. You got to meet

him halfway, Robert, and I will. I'll meet them halfway on the fact that all Romans speak with a British accent, but all Romans shouldn't have teeth that looked that perfect. Fair enough, all right, We've got one more super normal stimuli email from Mike, who says, while listening to the episode, I couldn't help but think of about decisions I make every day to either indulge or deny an instinct we're

talking about here. The supernormal stimuli is that sort of thing where like you need a little bit of sugar, right, you need a little bit of energy. But you don't need a slice of cheesecake, he says, I would be interested in learning how the decision to deny instinct works to result in a dose of dopamine. Let's say I decline a piece of cheesecake and instead eat a stock of celery. Do I feel great because I use my

imagination to calculate a supernormal positive outcome. Do people who make virtuous choices actually do so in order to indulge their dopamine habit? Mm? I don't. I mean, I understand where you're going here. Um, because we talked about this in the last episode where we were talking about the future of addiction, is that if you want to replace a bad habit, you need to do it with another

habit because the neural pathway has been established. So if you want to avoid drinking glasses of wine, go and exercise because you're gonna get a high from a but the celery stick. What if you did ants on a log instead? Get a little peanut better in there? Yeah? Reasons? Well, I guess it brings up the power of psychology, Like to what degree can you trick yourself into making it

a reward? Yeah? I don't know. The salary. I can't help but think of the recent skit on Portlandia where a Stevie Simmy is on there trying to rebrand Celery and make it exciting and sexy again, and all they keep they can, they just keep coming back around to ants on a log is the only real option to to make Selery exciting? Because other than than that and sup preparation, you know, what do you do with Celery? I would agree you gotta tart that up yea into

a super normal stimuli. All right, So there you have it. We've we've cleared out the listener mail a bit. Again. We don't have time to to read or respond to everything that that you guys and gals send us, but we greatly appreciate it. Your feedback helps us know what's working, what's maybe not working. You know what, what topics we need to revisit, what topics we need to explore. For the first time, we received lots of cool ideas and

we would love to continue to get those. So hey, you want to find us, you want to reach out to us, You can find us at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is our main side, our mothership, our homepage. You will find all of our podcast episodes are videos, blog posts, links out to our various social media accounts including including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Also links

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