Matinee Science Playlist, Part 10: ‘The Fly’

these roughly every month or so. Sometimes we skip a month, and of course when Halloween comes around, there's liable to be a little bit more movie centric conversation as we use fictional properties as a way to sort of springboard onto scientific discussions, to discuss topics we've discussed in the past in a slightly different light, or to explore topics that you know, we might not otherwise get into in a full blown episode. I noticed you just said discussed.

And today's episode will involve a different spelling of disgust. Yes, yes, because we're going to be talking about David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. Now, this this is a movie I I re watched it a couple of years ago, as I recall, and you rewatched it last night, and I think it's fitting that we're we're doing this. We're recording this shortly before Valentine's Day, and it is coming out in the week following Valentine's Day. Here you go, everybody,

This is essentially our Valentine's episode for the year. The worst State movie of all time. Yeah, it is not. It has romance in it, I guess some splashes of romance, but it is ultimately a tragic film. Uh, an ikey film, a monstrous film. Uh. It is a film that is not about making you feel good about yourself per se. It's a thorough I mean, I love the movie too. It's a it's a great horror movie, but it is

just a deeply grimy experience at every level. It has like it has like like physical textural sliminess, but it also has really slimy behavior by certain characters. It is a thorough going exploration of slime. It's like, you know, both hands into the slime bucket up to the elbows,

just rooting around in there. Yeah. This film and other films from David Cronenberg are often referred to very loosely as body horror, and I tend to sort of recoil from things that are labeled body hard because sometimes, at least in my experience, uh, that label is sometimes given to work that is maybe a little a little bit more crude for crude's sake, or it's all about more focus, you know, or it's about shock value, or you know, it's very um melt movies. Yeah, I then, you know,

I like a good melt movie. But but I do have to say, like this, this film, and I think that the other films of Cronenberg that fall under this, uh this categorization, they tend to be films that are not just about like the visual exploit of of body and horror, but they get into the metaphorical domain of

body horror. Yeah. A lot of Cronenberg's work, whereas most horror would be about uh, you know, threats to your life, like something wants to harm you and it's chasing you and you have to get away from it, most of his horror is about the threat of having your identity corrupted. It's the threat of being transformed into something that is no longer you. Yeah, and of course this film has

it in spades. So before we we jump into further discussion, let's uh, well, first of all, let's go ahead and say yes, we will be talking about this film with spoilers. So if you have not seen David Cronenberg film The Fly, and you would like to do so unspoiled. Now is a good time to pass the podcast and go out and do that. But for the rest of you, yes, we will be discussing full spoilers for this film, so let's take a quick break to hear just a taste

from the original trailer. There is a limit even to the imagination human teleportation, molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation is inherently perching where our greatest creations met and deep as fears when you went through something went wrong, you are about to go beyond that limit. You know. There's another original and remake pair that I often think about, alongside the nineteen fifties Fly with Vincent Price and then the has it been Surprised? Yeah? Oh yeah, yeah, and the

and and the Cronenberg remake is the Thing. Yes, you know, it's a very similar thing like Howard hawks the Thing in the nineteen fifties. It has one kind of vibe and it is substantially reimagined by the time Carpenter does it in nineteen eighty or whatever it was. And in both cases you see the remake reimagining it to the degree that the remakes become like the the the The

the standing examples of the work. But they're they're both stories about transformation, though the in both cases, the later versions made the transformation much more disgusting. Yes, so so let's yeah, let's let's back up a little bit about just the origin and the Fly, because it also parallels the Thing in that, just as the Thing, the original motion picture was based on a pre existing uh work

of fiction. The same is true of The Fly. The night film The Fly, which was directed by Kurt Newman with a screenplay by future best selling author James Clavell of Showgun Fame. This was based on a short story by George Langoln George Langeliers, Yeah Boy, if you Like, which was published in a June seven issue of Playboy magazine, and I had to look it up. I was curious, like, what, like, what is the presentation like in the original issue of

Playboy magazine? And it indeed, it's pretty impressive because you have on on one side, on one page, you have just the text of the Fly, no illustrations, and then on the other page it's all white except for it just like a blank page, except in the top left hand corner there's a single fly on the page, like to scale, a real size lie. Yeah, where whereas you know, when you look at a picture revenue, you could easily assume that there's just a fly on that particular Playboy magazine.

It's a nice touch. Now, as you mentioned, the film starred Vincent Price as the inventor of a matter transporter device called the disintegrator integrator, which is not as catchy as telepod. H So, but and so he's you know, he's working on this device, and of course he tested out. Things go horribly wrong when a fly ventures into the transporter with him, and he emerges with as two different creatures, a human with the head and arm of a fly

and a fly with the head and arm of a human. Now, in the original movie, I'd say the most iconic scene is when the smaller version, the fly sized body with the tiny Vincent Price head on it, gets stuck in the spider's web and started screaming, help me, help me. But I remember thinking when I saw this original movie, like, okay, so he's got a human head, but like it's to scale, it's a fly size human head. That wouldn't possibly work. He wouldn't be able to fiddle the like human neurons

into the brain of that size, his brain wouldn't work anymore. Well, as we'll continue to discuss with Cronenberg's version, the computer that is power and teleportation is really advanced. This is a godlike machine and it likes to roll the dice. So anyway, in the original, much like the remake, UM, the creature has to struggle to maintain its humanity, ultimately fails and then their tragic results. Now, this David Cronenberg's remake is going to be the main thing we're talking

about here his treatment of it. Cronenberg was of course coming off of success with Videodrome and also an adaptation of Stephen King of the Dead Zone Scanners to write, uh, well, scanners have been before that, but these two had come out the same year, a couple of years prior. But yeah, scanners what was out. By that point, he had established himself as this Um, this new and signature voice in horror,

the King of Bad Feelings. The screenplay was by Cronenberg and an individual by the name of Charles Edward Pogue. It famously stars Jeff gold Bloom as Dr Seth Brundle, a tour de force. So yes, like maximum gold blooming in this, but also gold blooming to just a perfect degree,

like he plays to all his strengths as a performer. Also, Gina Davis stars in it as Veronica Quaif and then John Gets places character named Status Bronze, who is the ultimate sleeves bag in a film full of people that are that are oftentimes, if not exclusively, sleezy, the sleeves

on him in this movie is so thick. I remember after this was like the first movie I saw with John Gets in it, and when I saw like Blood Simple in other movies he was in after this, like the stank wouldn't come off of him, like it's stuck on the actor. Oh yeah, I often forget that he was in Blood Simple. Which which character did you play in that he's like the main dude in it? Oh yeah, okay, often about him he kind of like Francis mcdorman's boyfriend. There you go. Okay, I do need to watch Blood

Simple again. That is a great film. I know it's not fair. I should not hold this this character's flaws against the actor and John Guess is great, but that's that's the sign of a great performance. When you you just kind of dislike the the actor as well because of what their their their character did or how their character came off. So the basic plot in the eight six re make is the same. Um. Uh. This time it's Dr Seth Brundle. He's working on these telepods and uh,

he of course ends up experimenting with it. He had decides to just screw it. I'm gonna get in the pod. I'm going to perform a little self experimentation here, and a fly ventures into the pod with him. Biology is scrambled. Uh, humanity, humanity has lost. Things end up tragically for monsters and men alike. But then there are a lot of key

differences in this adaptation. We've touched on some of them already, like the idea that it's it's less about the monster you become, but the journey towards monstrosity, the change the

monstrous change as opposed to the monster its destination. Well, yeah, and the film spends a decent amount of time stuck in the middle, with Jeff Goblum's character gradually becoming more and more less human and more fly uh and and being able to like having metacognition on this like realizing what is happening to him and being able to react to it still as partially the man he once was. Right.

And then of course, when he first emerges from the telepod, not only does he feel whole and intact, but he feels improved. He feels, you know, more alive than he did previously, starts doing gymnastics and stuff. But he also becomes a jerk, like when he gets out of the thing that I can't get out of my head is when he gets out of the telepod, he's like somebody on cocaine, you know, Like he's like, I'm a god, I'm amazing. Yeah, and and hey, you've got to try

this too. Let's try it right now together. Let's do this. Yeah. And I think that's one of the great things about the transformation in this film is that you can you can apply it to so many other real life changes, Like you can easily take this model and compare it to, say, uh, the impact of drug addiction, like like we just mentioned later, as he begins to transform physically, you could compare that

to various the ravages of various diseases. Um uh, you could even compare to just the you know, the wear and tear of age. There there's so many different things you could compare it to, uh, and it it opens itself up to those comparisons. I'm not saying it's meant as a direct allegory, but you know, I think I think drugs are very good comparison because, like, because it starts off with this euphoria and this sense that things

have never been better. I'm better than I've ever been, life is better than it's ever been, and then there's the decline. It catches up with him. There's a denial about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So, like you said, there's a lot of psychological change, a lot of meta analysis of like what's going on in him trying to understand what's happening to himself because at first he has no idea that that a fly has been merged with his

his being at like the most basic level. And then another another I think one of the most horrifying changes in a film that is full of horrors. They're not even touching on some of the minor things they're thrown in, like inside out baboons and whatnot. But towards the end, as he's almost completely monster, he relates to Veronica that he has a solution in mind, and that is that she and her unborn child and and and him the bundle fly, should climb into the telepods together and then

merge themselves into a single perfect being. Right, he decides, Oh, I'm I'm wasting away because there's too much fly in me. Like I went in just me and fly, and now I'm gonna be fifty fifty when this process finishes. And he's like, if I get some more humans and then merge me with them, then I can be something like, you know, sevent human and that's just enough fly. Right, And of course this is the predominantly fly brain thinking.

This is the you know he talks about like the absence of politics and in insect culture and so forth. But it's it's such a horrifying solution because it makes sense. He's making sense, but you it's it's just unspeakable horror to imagine what this final form would be if he's able to carry this out. And unlike the case with him merging with the fly, this would be presumably merging

too conscious sentient people. I don't know what is what is being assumed about, Like if you tried to like fuse two humans together, what the resulting brain or mind state would be like, Well, it's it's one of these things that it depending on how you would look at that basic concept. It's either horrifying and it's the it's the destruction of self, it's the invasion of self. But it also you could look at it as beautiful, right, because this is what we often talk about love in

this case, right, two people becoming one. Yes, he tries to talk about it in those terms, and obviously Geina Davis does not see it that way quite understandable reasons. But of course she hasn't been through the through the plasma pool, so she doesn't she how could she understand? Right? I know this is one of your favorite things about the movie. Is this the plasma pool rant? Right? It's in one of the cocaine style scenes where Jeff Goldblum is It's it's in the early days after he's been

through the pod. He thinks, he thinks I'm not wasting away. He thinks I'm a god, I'm amazing, I can do anything. And he's lashing out at anybody who doesn't want to get in the pod and try it for themselves. Yeah, he gets very vindictive about it, especially with with Veronica.

Like one of the quotes from that that lengthy diatribe is you're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you, which again ties into this the whole theme of the film, this idea of transformation is it is something we all want but but at the same time of the reality of it can be can be horrifying, can be scary,

it can be frightening or horrifying. Alright, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we will start we'll start throwing a little bit of science at this thing. Thank alright, we're back now. I would say the ultimate, uh, the premise of the movie. This is not hard sci fi. This is not something that uh, you know, maybe plausible. We just don't have the technology yet. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Right.

And as we as we talk about this aspect of the film and sort of like nitpick the you know, the various aspects of teleportation, please understand that we were not criticizing the film. We are we are using the film to to explore some topics and we thank the film for being able to uh uh you know, to inspire us. So sure, it's a horror science fantasy, it's there. It's there to uh, to to raise certain ideas about humankind, not to critique the specific capabilities of real technology. Right. Uh,

you know, it's not really apparable about teleportation. Right. Of course. The big mishap that occurs in all this is that the fly managers to zip into the telepod with Brundle, and the computer, not anticipating an additional organism, incorporates that organism into Brundle at the molecular genetic level. That's what it says. Yeah, he's he says, uh, he's like, in my rush to create a telepod, I accidentally created a gene splicer as well. A very good one, it is.

It's it's extremely good. Again. Just the computer powering this thing is as incredible as it is inept Even in its ineptitude, it manages to achieve, you know, really godlike effects. But one of the funny things that I remember thinking watching this movie is wait a minute, okay, so it's saying human goes in, fly goes in, thing comes out

that will be fifty fifty human and fly. If you're gonna work on that basis, if you're just like comparing, well, what kind of genomes are in here, there's a bunch of other stuff in there that's not human either. I mean, did he sterilize the inside of the telepod before he went in? I should hope so, because of a baboon exploded in it. Right, Yeah, So of course there's gonna be stuff on the you know, walls inside the time.

I mean, there's life everywhere. But then more than that, there's also going to be stuff that he can't sterilize because it's gonna be in him and on him. That's right. And this should come as no surprise to regular listeners at the show because we've discussed the microbiome quite a bit. Because there's a there were there would have been a lot more than two life forms in there um because none of us are human, not by a long shot, because we contain vast populations of bacteria, are, chia, and

fungi that are collectively known as the microbiome. In fact, the average human has roughly thirty trillion micro organisms living on and within them, enough to wagh and this is this is amazing to think about roughly a half pound of non human life. So just just imagine this scenario. If you were to step into telepod A and then telepod and then then you were gonna you know, zip into telepod B and C with human emerging from C, and then all your microbiome just left in a pile

in Pod B. That would be a half pound of stuff. Yeah, I mean roughly yes, but yeah, and what like it just by cell count it's gonna be we don't know exactly, but the estimate is something like equal numbers of cells or maybe a two to one or something. Yeah, it's staggering when you look at some some of these numbers. Um. These numbers that I'm reading here, by the way, come from a January uh Simon's Foundation article titled You're Not

All Human The Wonder of Gut Microbes. They also point out that we're talking an average of a hundred and fifty different species of bacteria alone within the average person, and that's out of six thousand possible species worldwide. The human genome contains twenty thousand genes, while your microbiome contains three million genes. So I got another wrinkled Okay, So wouldn't just be your microbiome and the fly, but it would also be the flies microbiome. Yeah, I mean we didn't.

I didn't even get figures for that. They're also there are parasites that live on in pray on flies. Yeah, you've got those as well. That's assuming that Brundle himself does not have some sort of parasite. And we don't know what he had for dinner. He might have had a bad uh you know, pork sandwich or something. Oh no, you go in there with trick gnosis and then it

fuses you with the worms. Yeah, because I mean he's I mean, he's certainly living a bit foul up in that that loft later on, but it's not exactly pristine either. It's like the work abode of, you know, of an obsessed scientist. Right. Sorry, I was just looking up the names of some fly parasites. There's some great ones. One that I was seeing referenced in a lot of research is called Spellingia CAMEROONI Perkins, Perkins, Perkins, the Perkins parasite. So you get a bit of that in there too.

All right, So you have all this stuff, but potentially in the telepod with brundle with this even this fly thrown in the mix as well. And the computer that is managing this this transport of of the individual and the individuals across the room to the other telepod or the other telepods. Uh, you know, it's having to handle all of this information on top of just like the

basic atom, something like a trillion trillion atoms or more. Yeah, this is another thing that I mean, if we want to get serious about teleportation for a second, I would argue that it is essentially impossible. Right. First of all, the amount of energy that it would take to disassemble your body and then reassemble it in another place is just unfathomable. Um. But also like how would the information be managed? It's too much information to sample and keep

track of. I think teleportation, I'm sorry to say, it's just not a technologically feasible proposition, even in the distant future. Right. Of course, if you watch enough science fiction about it, you probably feel pretty okay about that, because because teleporter mishaps, uh, they kind of compose one of my favorite like subgenres or subsub genres of science fiction. Like I'm a big fan of Stephen King's The Jaunt, which is a different and maybe in some ways more possible. I don't know,

it's a different take on it. For sure that we would require a different episode to break down the science off. We shouldn't spoil that one, but that that is a great horrifying short story. Yeah. Uh. The other one I think of is in Spaceballs, when the guy gets his his butt on his front, it gets the bottom half of his body backwards. Oh man, I haven't seen Spaceballs in a very long time, so I forgot all about that.

But yeah, there you find example Star Trek. Of course you had had regular use of teleportation technology and occasionally would explore mishaps in interesting ways. But even if it's not malfunctioning, I mean, I think something that is at some point explored on Star Trek. I don't I've heard they get there at some point of people contemplating the fact that what's really happening every time you are teleported is that you die and a new version of you

is created. So it's like your consciousness does not survive the process. You are disintegrated, and then there's just a copy of you, and that that copy if you goes on with your business. Yeah, if I remember correctly, there's an episode of the like nineties reboot of The Outer Limits that explores this as well. Um, but yeah, that's a whole other side to it too. Yeah, the idea that every time you teleport, you die. But then I guess again, on the other hand, every time you teleport

you were reborn. Uh sure, well it might be great for the version of you that's reborn, but that's not that doesn't get to be you. You're done. Yeah, well, well but you know he was annihilated down to the flast atom, so you know, he was completely recycled. So anyway, just just contemplating like the sheer number of life forms

that would have been in that telepod. I think it's just a fun um, you know, intellectual exercise, and also creates all sorts of new horrible scenarios, like, indeed, what if you weren't just merging a fly in a human together into one being. What if it was all of those things? What if it was just cut the fly out, the flies shoot out of the pod before it goes off.

What if it's just Brundle and his micro I am all the occupants of the microbiome being fused into one life form Brundle hyphen E cole I. Yeah, yeah, plus it's us everything else, it's it's it's crazy again. I love just trying to imagine what that consists of. Now

here's another question that I think comes up. There's, of course, when when he's trying to figure out what happened in the movie, he's asking the computer in that wonderful way that like, uh, nineteen eighties computers functioned in science fiction where you could just have conversations with them. Yeah, they're just a natural language input and response system. You know

what movie also does that? The thing? Do you remember in the remake of the Thing, when Wilfred Brimley is like asking questions and here he's like how long before all humans on Earth are infected? And it's like it gives him a time frame and then he gets the idea. He's like, well, we're not getting out of here. That was used in Alien as well. Remember was it mother that they would have conversations with? That's right, yes, see, this is what I want to see come back in

science fiction. I want to see computers like that where people type in questions and they're given answers right there on the screen, but the answers are a little stilted, you know, it's not it's not perfect, but yeah, it's

natural language for some reason. So when when he asked about what happening, looks into it he sees, okay, there was a fly in there, and then he asked, was the fly absorbed by Brundle And then the computer says no, uh, they were merged for some confusion, something to that effect. But it makes me wonder, Okay, what if you had Brundle get into the telepod and he goes from telepod A to Telepod B and in the process maybe I

guess the microbiome wasn't factored into the equation. And what if the microbiome is annihilated, shot over to another pod, or somehow absorbed in a way that makes it completely go away, and you just have Brundle human coming out on the other end. What would that be like? Well, he would not be the only organism that's ever been through this. In fact, this is a condition that's sometimes used in the lab to study the effects of the microbiome.

I think we've talked on the show before about research using, for example, germ free mice. This is sometimes called nobiosis or nobiotic conditions, where it just means like when you have control and knowledge of all of the life forms living within one larger life form, and often control and knowledge of that would mean that there are none in there. Um. So yeah, you can create germ free mice that have

no microbiome. They're sterile, they're just mice. There's no bacteria, there's no archaea living in or on them, and this has some very strange effects. I think we actually talked about one study looking at this in our episode on the Tingler when we were talking about indo parasites and fear, and I guess I don't know if it would make sense to talk about the the internal microbiome is a parasite,

but whatever, you know, the symbiosis and and fear. Well, sometimes the line between parasite and symbiosis is less easy to define anyway, and sometimes there is there's change over time in that relationship. That's an extremely good point. I'll come back to that in just a second. But the example from the Tinkler episode was that it turns out that for some reason, in mice that are germ free, if they don't have a functioning microbiome like a normal

mouse would they have inhibited fear response. They have trouble associating specific memories with the fear response, so they do not generate fear of things the same way normal mice do. Isn't that strange? Why would the why would the gut flora have anything to say about you being able to

learn to be afraid of things? Yeah? I mean this this really gets down to, like what is so important and exciting about the microbiome research is that you know, we were talking about this a little before we came in here. Um, it's been pointed out there, like the real importance of the microbiome, right, placing it on the same level as like an organ, seems to come online more in like the late nineties, Um, after this film certainly.

But the idea that that the micro organisms were important to life that predates that I saw like a quote from Louis Pasture for example. It's pointing this out that, like it's that that micro organisms are vital for human life. Oh. Absolutely. And one thing that I think is worth pointing out. I mean, they're all kinds of things that are are microbiotic do for us. One thing is related to you talking about the line between parasitism and just an endosymbiosis.

Our immune systems are trained by constantly being an interaction with the microbiome. Uh. And so there are tons of you know, micro organisms in and on our body that are not harmful to us, but they live in a kind of uneasy alliance within the immune system that they are managed buy And that's a lot of what our immune system does. Our immune system is not just you know, fighting the flu when you get infected. It's also managing

the body's relationship with its microbiota. Yeah, so it's not it's not just say, you know, the Roman allegiance and out to conquer territory or to fight an adversary. It is the it is a like a police force. So looking around a little bit about this, obviously, the scenario of all your microbiome being teleported out of you is not realistic. No, and you would not want that to happen. But I do wonder like, is that something that would just pretty much be immediate death? I mean, is it

something you could survive? Well, you know, I was looking at an article that deals this a little bit, uh, titled life in a World without Microbes by Gilbert and Newfeld, published in Plos Biology, and uh, the authors are mainly dealing with really and even you know, you know, larger scenario. They're looking at, what if all the you know, um micro biological life, all all the bacteria on Earth were to just perish. What would happen? That would not be good?

That it would it would not be good. But they write that it would quote be false to claim that macroscopic life cannot exist without microbes. However, although life would persist in the absence of micro robes, both the quantity and quality of life would be reduced dramatically. So they write that humans could get by fine without microbes. Certainly for a few days. We probably wouldn't even notice it, and you know, we can would continue to be able

to eat and digest food, they point out. But uh, their main focus of course on this is the idea that all the you know, the the the the microbiotic population of the world would be wiped out. And if that were to take place, they think it would lead to societal collapse in about a year, with pockets of humans surviving for perhaps centuries after that. So, you know, generations of humans would continue to live on but that

ultimately they would probably die out as well. Every single natural ecosystem depends on microbes, and without their activities, every

ecosystem would begin to break down. Now, as for the individual brundle, the what the the nobiotic brundle um, it's it seems like he would he would probably be fine, He might even feel pretty good but at first, but he would he would almost certainly need to repopulate his body with with microbiota, uh, you know, And we see examples, of course, cases where people say I have part of their gut floor wiped out by antibiotics, um or some other condition, they're able to to, you know, to use

something like a fecal transplant, for example, to reintroduce the necessary uh microbes into the gut. And of course there are other you know, like probiotic techniques as well. So you know, I don't think his condition would be hopeless or anything. Uh probably would not make an interesting movie. Would not be healthy to stay that way again, I mean, it would probably have some drastically negative effects on the

immune response. Right. So certainly if he was like, oh, I feel great, and I'm you know, I'm glad I got all those microbes out of my body, and then he were to, like say, do it on a weekly basis, that would not be good. All Right, on that note, we're gonna take another break. But when we come back to discuss a little bit. We've been a lot of time already talking about what could go wrong with teleportation, and certainly that is kind of the the central exploration

of the film itself. But after the break, I want to talk about what could potentially go right, Alright, we're back, all right. So we were talking about how in the Fly remake, when Seth Brundel Jeff Goldblum first comes out of the telepod the first time he teleports himself, he thinks that it has done something wonderful for him. We we compared him to somebody on cocaine, just like thinking I am a golden god. That's right. I mean, he's

just completely renewed, full of optimism. He's just he's just on fire. He's also though, I mean, it makes him aggressive, unreasonable, manic, and increasingly so with time. Yeah. But but at first he's convinced that this has been I mean, it's been kind of a plasma pool baptism. He's been reborn and you know when he's again, when he starts accusing Ronnie of of not being you know, into the idea. You know,

he's saying, Oh, you're afraid of the plasma pool. You're afraid to be destroyed and remade in it, you know. Uh and in this kind of you know, echoing you know, religious concepts of rebirth, of death and rebirth and renewal. Uh. So, you know, I think it's gonna it would be interesting to discuss this a little bit, like how how could a teleportation scenario like this potentially leave you feeling like

you're a new person or a renewed person. I think one of the other things to look at is Okay, certainly, I think the most likely scenario, again, assuming the teleportation goes off flawlessly, no fly parts, no merging your body with any coli or anything like that, you just emerge what you were before, except you feel different, You feel renewed. And uh and I think you know this is the case where clearly Brundle need not actually be any different

to feel differently. You know, just look two examples of religious rights of baptism and faith healing. For example, the telepod experience might work absolutely perfectly, which means you're no different than you know, when you emerge on the other side than when you'd uh you know, first climbed in.

And the same could be said when you were, say, baptized at a church, or when you're touched by a faith healer like a televangelist or something you know, uh, you know, outside of you know, obviously you could be introduced to some new microbes in either of those cases, in any of these cases, but other than that, you're still going to be pretty much the same. But you

could feel elated. You could even feel like your pain has been relieved or your body has been healed because you know, naturally, as humans, we encounter physical illnesses, and we encounter you know, psychological barriers of varying form, origin, and resiliency, and depending on what the issue is, we

have a great number of science based treatments and cures. Uh. We have powerful psychological tools as well, but we also readily engage in practices that rest on, you know, many times very shaky scientific ground or they just fall just flat into the domain of ritual, written religion and superstition and UH and a lot of us do this, uh. Their varying stats on this, I think, but one once that I was looking at came from a two thousand

sixteen Baylor University epidemiology study. They found that nearly nine out of ten Americans have relied upon healing prayer at some point in their lives. Now, most of these individuals do so alongside actual medical care UM, and I've seen cases where embracing both has been argued to help push medical care and say, highly religious places UM. But this particular study didn't tackle the perceived success of of healing prayer. Though a lot of studies have weighed in on this question,

some quite controversially. Some some critics in the scientific community have have urged the end of clinical trials for quote, highly implausible treatments UM, because you know, well you can argue that there there there may be room for some alternative medical treatments to actually work reasons that we don't quite understand yet scientifically. You know, be a some sort of you know rare um HERB that's used traditionally somewhere, and maybe scientists just haven't explored it enough to see

it actually has some sort of of an effect. UM. And you can argue that some rituals have psychological virtue for a variety of reasons, such perhaps you know, perhaps they have elements of mindfulness to them and that that's useful. But a lot of this stuff ultimately ends up working

to some degree because of the placebo effect. Sure, and that's one thing where I think even if you believe, say, in some cases prayer works like intercessory prayer changes outcomes, you would you would have to still acknowledge that in some cases it's also going to be due to placebo effect, and you aren't always going to know which is which,

Like we know the placebo effect happens either way. Yeah, But then the weird thing about placebo effect is you also have to kind of you have to believe in it for it to work, um or you have to believe in the thing that is working via the placebo effect. You I just I mean, I don't know, I get if you could just believe in the placebo effect and just be like, oh, mighty placebo effect, heal my my

body pains. But anyway, well, I mean, there are some things that I would say, are they're gonna have placebo like implications that transcend just your your personal cognitive beliefs are awareness. Like, uh, one example I would use is that you talk about faith healing scenarios and how sometimes people go to a faith healer get hands laid on them and they actually feel better. They're like, my pain went away. Oftentimes it returns soon thereafter, but it does

really seem to go away for a short time. And I would say something that's probably going on in a lot of these cases is a high is a powerful social effect. You're you're in a group with a lot of people, and you are feeling profoundly socially included for a moment, all these different people paying attention to you and caring about your problem. That that is a profound

and somewhat rare situation to be in. Yeah, I mean, in in some of those cases, to people are going to tell you it's going to be okay, even if it's probably maybe not going to be okay. But sometimes nothing helps in the short term like a soothing voice telling you that right right. Um, I mean I bet almost everybody listening has had the feeling of like you're worried about something something in your body, and you go to the doctor and it's just like as soon as

the doctor tells you it's okay, your complaint just vanishes. Yeah, yeah, I've I've had that experience where and then later someone says, well what did they say, and they're like, I don't know. I kind of stopped listening after they said everything was all right, you know, or like it. It didn't like I was so wrapped up in just the initial explanation that I didn't so call the information in so at any rate, we're not going to go into excessive detail

in the placebo effect. We've discussed it um in more depth in the past. But uh, for this episode, I was looking at great expectations the evolutionary psychology of faith healing in the placebo effect by one Nicholas Humphreys, and I thought he made for one thing, he made some concise points about this entirely inward experience. Uh. He also shared a wonderful quote from Plato at the beginning that can be applied to our understanding of the placebo effect.

Plato wrote, I said that the cure itself is a certain leaf, but in addition to the drug, there is a certain charm, which is someone chance when he makes use of it. The medicine altogether restores him to health. But without the charm, there is no profit from the leaf. Well, that would be a very good point. It would not be helpful to slip somebody placebo pills. In order for a placebo medication to be effective, the person needs to be aware that it's being prescribed and to take it.

You can't do the thing you do to the dog, where you like stick the tick pill and a bunch of peanut butter or something exactly. Yeah, Humphries stresses. For the placebo effect to work, the patient has to be aware of the tree. Meant, they have to believe in the treatment due to experience or reputation. They have to expect improvements afterwards. And then these experiences, these expectations influence the patient's capacity for self cure. So um, you know.

To bring it back to Brundle, uh, you know, Brundle can't just be slipped through the telepod in his sleep. He's knowingly going through it. He knows what is going to happen, that his body is going to be taken down and then reassembled. And then you know, either you know, proactively or retroactively begins to uh as sign certain um you know, ideas of of rebirth to that equation, where does all that language come from? When he starts ranting, it's as if he I mean, he's ranting quickly about

the plasma pool and everything. It's like he's already had these phrases kicking around in his head. Right. Yeah, he's been thinking about it, he just hasn't been ranting about

it to his um uh, to his girlfriend now. In this paper, Humphreys ultimately explores the idea that was proposed by others that the cebo effect we we see today, uh you know, are seeming tendency to experience it and its use in traditional healing rights throughout history means that the placebo effect and may have been subject to strong

pressure from natural selection. Humphreys contends that the placebo effect is probably not inherently adaptive because sometimes it is also maladaptive, but that evolution may well have helped shape a talent in humans for quote, a tradition of self deception and delusion, because he points out that if you're feeling back pain and then you take some snake oil and you feel better afterwards, without you know, obviously, without actually healing the

underlying condition, you're missing the importance of the pain because quote, your back pain was designed by natural selection to protect you. It's warning you something is wrong and like, don't keep putting pressure onto on that foot or something. Yeah, So I thought that was an interesting and point, and it was. It's interesting to think about, um, you know, the role of natural selection to what extent it might have played in the placebo effect and in our ability to self

deceive about about the curative properties of various non curative methods. Well, obviously our brains have evolved to to be easily deceived in certain scenarios, and it's interesting to study what those scenarios are and try to figure out what evolutionary pressures would have driven that. So obviously one way they work is sometimes we can generate a kind of confidence that overcomes negative physiological feedback. Uh, And there there must I mean,

you can imagine scenarios where that's also adaptive. Obviously, you don't want to just be ignoring pain because pains useful information. But on the other hand, you want the body to have some kind of override mechanism. For said, when maybe maybe your foot's in pain, you shouldn't be putting pressure on it. But there's a tiger and you've got to run right now. Obviously, it would not be advantageous for the body to just in cyst on you staying put

even in that scenario. And there might be other scenarios other than like immediate physical danger. There might be cases where there are social signals, social cues that override our natural physiological feedback mechanisms. Absolutely so, I think again, coming back to the bundle scenario, you can well imagine someone going through a telepod uh situation, teleporting their body being destroyed and remade, and then feeling renewed about it even

if nothing has changed. They're still the same baseline person they were before. Like I'm wondering, like, surely this idea has been explored in science fiction before, Like maybe even in Star Trek fiction, Like does someone get obsessed with using the teleporter They're like I'm feeling a little down,

I'm going through the teleporter. We're just gonna gonna reset for the day, Like that's better than a quick shower or a power nap, right, But for the rest of the episode, I thought we might explore just a few you know, relatively briefly. I think, um, how going through the teleporter could potentially actually change you actually uh you know alter say, your your mind and your mood. Okay, so that's made some kind of physical change to the

body and and now you are now brundle fly is different. Yeah. So I think one way to look at, of course, is neurological because again like the complexities of teleportation or again just fantastic and uh and and and not really realistic compared to you know, our understanding of science. But like, how do you imagine just the moving of one mind state from from here to there, from my brain, uh

to the other teleporter? Well it uh, teleportation naturally invites questions about the connection between the mind and the physical brain because again, you know, we were talking earlier about the idea that teleportation would almost certainly kill you if it could actually be done, and probably can't even be done. But imagine you could be destroyed down to you know, every last atom, disassembled and then rebuilt as a perfect

copy somewhere else. What reason do you have to believe that your consciousness would be continued there instead of it's just you know, lights out. This gets into the whole ship of THESEUS situation, right, is the is the copy

of the original, etcetera. Yeah, when we've talked about this in previous episodes with like the Donald Davidson Swampman thought experiment, where you know your imagine you are struck by lightning and a swamp and atomized, and then nearby a a tree gets struck by lightning that rearranges its atoms in a way that just happens to be an exact copy of you down to including all of your memories and everything.

Davidson's question was, is that still you even if it goes and recognizes all your friends and all that, but that those atoms that body has never actually met your friends before. It's just a coincidence. And I guess another question to add on I don't think Davidson addresses this is is there any reason to think that your consciousness would continue and that other thing? And I don't know

if we have any reason to say it would. Yeah. Uh, Now, I'm glad you brought up the lightning because because this brings brings me to the next point I wanted to make is that assuming you're the same person in Telepod B that you were in Telepod A, and assuming that for the most part, there are no changes, one way that you could see like an alteration in mood or personality is if there was some imperfection in the copy, saying it essentially damaged your brain and some uh in

some fashion in reproducing you on the other side. And uh and we have you know, plenty of examples of of this in science. We've discussed numerous cases on the show before where brain injuries and alterations to the brain can impact mood. And one of my favorite uh and and also I think it's great because it's kind of it's essentially a positive tale of this sort of thing.

UH is the case of Dr Tony Csuria, an orthopedic surgeon who was electrocuted in a lightning strike and then afterwards began to hear music in his head and developed what has been described as an insatiable desire to learn to put up to learn listen to the piano, and learned to play the piano, and then he eventually became a composer and a performer. But did he die? Did he die in these No? No, he's he's very much alive. Still. Wait, I have a u I'm gonna be using this word wrong.

Does electrocuted necessarily mean you died? Oh? Now this is good question. Perhaps I'm using the word wrong. Oh, perhaps I've been using it wrong. I don't know. I always assumed electrocuted means dead, but well, just in case to be sure, he was. He suffered an electric shock via lightning strike, did not die, but afterwards, Yeah, he heard music in his head. He wanted to play the piano. He learned to play the piano. He became a composer. Uh.

And and he's cool. Yeah, he's written books. I understand. He's what's sometimes referred to as an acquired savant, someone who exhibits extraordinary abilities after sustaining central nervous system damage or disease. Now, of course, this is not the only case of somebody going through a large electrical stimulation of the nervous system and coming out of it feeling better.

This is actually a trick. I know. Electroshock therapy gets a bad reputation and fiction and stuff, but for some people it is actually a very helpful intervention for say, depression that resists other treatments. Uh. You know, sometimes there are brain states that are very negative where electro convulsive therapy applying an electric current to the brain causes some kind of internal reset that gets people out of negative

mental scenarios. Well, yeah, so you could you could imagine and as long as we're imagining teleportation, you know, you can imagine a situation where in recreating the brain, or in the process of the brain coming back online in pod b uh that you essentially have it's like an

electro shock to the brain. Uh. And then of course there are plenty of other examples of people whose moods, personalities, and cognitive abilities have been impacted, in any cases negatively impacted by changes or injuries to to the So say, I think there's a lot of room for that scenario to to take place again if if you actually had teleportation technology uh. And then to come back to the microbiome,

I think that's another place to consider. So, assuming that you don't have your entire microbiome uh fused with your genetic code, assuming that your microbiome is not dumped out into another telepod left to just sort of melt on the floor and have to be scrubbed up by the telepod scrabber. Um, what a job? Imagine? Like, what else

could happen? Right? Like, what if it just readjusted your your microbiome to a certain degree because we know we're still learning more about this, but we know that the microbiome has has an impact on our on our personality, on our moods, on our cognitive ability like it's it's it's roots run deep. Yes, and there are ways to have a healthier or less healthy microbiome. Uh. I mean again, we already referenced fegal transplants, and this is an actual

cure for some diseases. Yeah, so you could potentially you could have a situation where okay, the teleporter didn't quite know how to how to handle the entire microbiome. Some things maybe through, some things were left out. I don't want to even explore the possibility of some individual microorganisms being fused into all new micro organisms, because the Lord

knows what that would consist of. But um, but you could imagine where you might emerge with maybe an improved microbiome by pure accident, in the same way that not everyone that is struck by lightning turns into a piano virtuoso,

you know. But you could have a situation where you clearly have a situation where at least one person was and you could, I guess consumably have a situation where one person survived a teleportation and came out on the other end with improved microbiome and maybe a you know, improved health or even mental health due to it. You know, I know I've read in uh, looking at the downsides of when he comes out, So he comes out feeling very purified, but he's also a jerk, you know, He's like,

he comes out being aggressive and mannic and stuff. And I know I've read about imbalances in the gut microbiome of dogs possibly leading to aggression and dogs. Interesting. Yeah, Um, I was looking around a little bit about like other things that can adjust your microbiome. Like one that's of course being studied is how space travel can change your microbiome.

And the most obvious factor, of course is radiation. But one of the studies I was looking at was was was saying, Okay, well, radiation accounts for some of what we're seeing, but we think it like micro gravity is playing a role as well, so uh, and then other environmental conditions that they're still you know, figuring out. So it's just such an amazing revelation to again just to come back to the power of the microbiome and just how how close it is to us how it is

essentially like an organ. You are a person, but you're also a world. You're an environment. Your body is a wonderland. Yeah, that's what's in the plasma. Fool. All right, Well, hopefully we gave everybody some some additional food for thought on the Fly and on teleportation, and we didn't even get into some of the things people were probably expecting, like discussion of fly anatomy and feeding by vomiting up acid on things. But who knows, maybe we could come back

and do that in the future. We also didn't talk about the Simpsons episode Fly Versus Fly. Yes, yeah, yeah, it goes to great places. I love it when Homer drags one of the telepods in front of the toilet and tries to think avoid climbing the stairs. Y. Yeah, lots of reckless use of the telepod, which I enjoy. All right, so let us know what you think. Are you a big fan of the original Fly, You're a

fan of Cronenberg's Fly? Are you like me disappointed that Cronenberg has not gotten to make his sequel to The Fly? He apparently wrote a screenplay and everything. Really yeah, and uh, well wait, there was the Fly too, I've never seen it. Well, the Fly two is is a gross monster movie. Um, it's not certainly not as contemplative as Cronenberg's original. But if you go into it just expecting kind of a big monster movie, UM, with some teleportation Shenanigan's uh, you know,

it's it's entertaining in its own right. But Cronenberg has, at least in past years he's mentioned a script that he wrote that and he's kind of kg about it, like it's it seems like it's maybe not a direct sequel to the Fly, but it is very much about teleportation. I don't know to what extent, like you know, merging of of you know, genomes comes into it, there's any kind of you know, chimera in it at all. And and maybe it's ultimately more exciting about, you know, the

possibility that maybe it doesn't have have that. Maybe it's more about some of these ideas we've been discussing here in this episode about teleportation. What if it's from the flies perspective and it's about the horrors of becoming part human, that would be interesting. I would I would watch that. So I still hold out hope that one day we'll see I mean, I would love to see Cronenberg returned to direct at all. I don't think he's directed in several years, but I would love to see his his

vision for a Fly sequel come to life. Failing that, Gina Davis could write and direct. Yeah, sure, uh really. Ultimately the end of the day, I'm just I just want more teleportation movies. That's that's all I want, all right. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcast. If you go to stuff to Bow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you over to the I Heart listing for this show.

But you'll find us wherever you get your shows these days, wherever that is. Just rate and review and subscribe. Those are the things that help us out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Sethan Nicholis Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind It's pret auction of iHeart

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