Mazes

it even now, making it even more complicated. Uh so we may not be able to make our way back to our desk when we're done with this episode. Well, the funny thing about this is that about a couple of weeks ago or so, you noticed construction workers going around and take measuring going on, and you made the joke then that they we're going to wallace in Little did we know that that this maze, the maze that we are already working in, was going to become even

more elaborate. Yes, because it is. The maze is is about, in a way, elaborate confinement. It's about confusion, It's about being cut off it's about not knowing which way you're going and which way is the way out, and if there is even a way out, if there is a limit to the confusing layout that just flows out all around you. Now, one thing that's important to mention here, and we're gonna we're gonna mention this not only in this episode but the part two of this series to follow.

But essentially, you have mazes and you have labyrinths, and very often these words are used interchangeably. One would be tempted to say it's elegant variation, which is when you use uh, like when you're talking about a wolf, but you use the word dog to describe it. You just wanted to mix it up and use a different word, but you're actually using a word for a different thing. Well,

mazes and labyrinth is is it quite that bad? Because the overlap between these two terms has been around for ae aisle and it's become pretty much the you know, pretty much a mainstay of the English language. So uh,

you can't get too up in arms over it. But for the purposes of this podcast and and also scientific purposes, you have mazes, which are a place of confusion, a place of beatings on the walls as we're hearing now, and then you have labyrinths, and labyrinth says we'll discuss in the second podcast more in depth, are a place

of serenity. That's right, it's really a yin and yang proposition here, because yes, maze tangle of options, choices, right, confusion, and the labyrinths neatly laid out a meandering path, but one that has a purpose in a direction to it. So right now we are going to tackle mazes. And as we say, we are podcasting today from a construction

zone of our maze like office. Um, and we should probably get into more other or other examples of mazes, because when you think of mazes, or at least when I do you, I tend to think of the elaborate hedge mazes popular in the sixteen through the eighteen centuries. Yes, you have basically you can divide mazes up into two or three categories. Well, first, there are two basic categories. There are mazes that exist in physical space and mazes that exist merely as pattern or as you know, it's

something drawn on a sheet of paper. Uh. For the most part, we're gonna be talking in this podcast though, about actual physical mazes that you traverse physically, and these you tend to see landscape mazes and architectural mazes, mazes that are made out of you could do dirt, but most of the time hedges, and then there are architectural mazes, whereas it is an actual physical thing walls enclosing you.

Everyone will probably think back to the classic Jim Hinson David Bowie starring film Labyrinth, which, despite being called Labyrinth, everything in the movie is amaze. Everything is about confusing because Sarah has to get to the castle at the center so that she can free Toby from the Goblin King,

but nobody wants her to actually get there. The Goblin King doesn't actually want women showing up and stealing has stolen babies from him, so and there's a neat little number like a Magic Song by David Bowie which he's tossing this baby around and by the way, he looks like Parker Posey to me in in a Tina Turner wig in this and there's a lot of heavy pop synthesizers going on. It's it's pretty awesome stuff. It is an awesome movie, but pretty much everything you see in

there is is a maze. From the early stone mazes that Sarah is going through, where it's very much an architectural maze with walls all around her, until later she's going through a landscape maze of hedges. Elsewhere, people may have encountered mazes in the form of corn mazes where someone cuts a maze through the maze and nice and you have to an around how the mean time? That's certainly and every year in the news there's always an account of a family getting lost in one of those mazes. Oh,

I haven't. I've never seen one of those, and I've worked in small papers for quite a while in the past, so it's strange that we never had that story. Well, and then they're never found again. Are you sure that you're just you didn't used to live near a particularly bad a maze where they really went overboard. I'm making it complex and uh an unescapable. No, no, no. And then there's like these like sort of evilish children that

are dressed in amish like clothing milling around. Yeah, yeah, you've not heard about No, I guess this is this is one of your hometown. Yeah, it's pretty common elsewhere in uh. In fiction, um mazes have factored into Harry Potter and the Goblet to fire the big climactic scene, and that takes place within a maze. Harry's running around completely disoriented, doesn't know where he's going, and trying, you know, trying to figure out how to escape the maze or

make it to the center. I believe it was. What I like about that man Is too, is that the maze is alive, the root system is, you know, trying to tangle them and pull them in. And likewise, in Labyrinth, the maze that Sarah finds herself in is constantly changing there, like little goblin dudes running around and like changing her markings and presumably changing the actual physical layout of the of the maze behind her. Another fabulous maze uh in film is that in The Shining Oh yeah, now it's

different from in the book. There there's just some hedge animals that are creepy and move when you're not looking

at them. But in Stanley Kubrick's phenomenal film vision of the novel, he incorporates this this maze, this giant hedge maze, and there's a model of the hedge maze, and and the maze comes to symbolize the house itself because the house, the Haunted Overlook Hotel, is also a sort of maze, and then, curiously enough, like another maze we're about to discuss, there is a deadly person at the deadly to be

at the center of it. In the Shining, it's Jack Torrence, the writer, who ends up becoming possessed by the evil of the place and then is hunting his family through both the maze that is the house and then in the actual hedge maze out there in the cold. What I really like about that may is too, is that it's got those um those feelings of isolation, terror and

then disorientation in that maze. And we'll talk more about that in in Our Fear Response, our stress response to um as we go through mazes, but to me, that captures that perfectly. There's also an excellent fictional maze in

House of Leaves by Mark z Danielski. Basically, the book itself is a maze, and there are all these footnotes and footnotes upon footnotes, and there's a story within a story in a documentary film within a story, and the character himself, this guy Navidson, ends up trying to traverse, trying to explore this ever changing, featureless, black, otherworldly maze that branches out from this haunted house presumably haunted, but you never really know exactly what's going on with this place.

The name of the Rose by Umberto Echo is pretty great, and that it features a library that is itself a maze. And this is based in large part on your hey Louis Borhes the Library of Babble, where Borhees described an infinite library maze that contains not only all books, but all possible books. So it just spreads out forever. And so in the name of the Rose, Umberto Echo creates within this mediaval Abbey, this this maze library of forbidden

and restricted books. In writing about it, he says that this is this library is what it's called a rhizome space, which means there's there's virtually no end to it. You could wander this thing forever without finding an exit unless you knew how to escape the maze. But perhaps the most famous and and just the most iconic maze from from myth and fiction and legend is of course the

maze Minos. Yes, and this is the tale of theseus correct, the hero and the minotaur, who is at the center of what they call Again there's confusion between labyrinth and maze, but is at the middle of this and is waiting for people to come through and devour them, yes, and kind of wandering the halls and howling and the maze in this it was commanded to be built by King Minos, who has this monstrous son that is the Minotar, this half half man and half animal. Yes, yeah, monstrous flesh

eating creature. So he has Daedalus, who of course silt the wings for his son Icarus, just you know, the fantastic engineer of Hellenistic lore. He's commanded to build and and in fact builds a maze so complicated that he himself has trouble escaping from it at one point. But this becomes just the sort of the defining idea of a maze, this complex, confusing place that you're trapped in, you're trying to escape, and then with the Minotaur, you have this added threat that you were not alone in

this confusing space, this confusing, unreal world. There's also something that is searching for you, something that or even if it's not searching for you, you may run into it. And if you run into it, it's all over yeah, and we will talk a little bit more about the minotaur as represented by our consciousness and a bit and

how our mind is a bit like a maze. But I did want to mention that a a non fictional maze that is probably what you could call the mother of mazes UM is known as the Hampton Court Maze, and this is outside of London. It is really an iconic maze. Um. It is at the Hampton Court Palace and it's thought that it was designed around six nine, originally planted using horn beam and later we planted using you and it covers a third of an acre. It's trapezoid in shape and it is the UK's oldest surviving

catch mazing. I'm in fact, I'm sure listeners some of religensis in the UK have actually experienced this firsthand. At the time. It was constructed to amuse the ladies and lords of the court, which I think is so I love this idea. It's so fascinating to me that people have so much time on their hands that it wasn't enough to have a palace and have all the extravagance

of a palace and servants. Then you had to create a maze out on your lawn in order to amuse the people within the palace, something that would actually um excite fear in your visitors to the maze, right, yeah, you were. You lined it yesterday when we were talking about it too. U to to like a horror movie in a in an age when you didn't have horror movies, uh uh. And and certainly you can also liken it

to a roller coaster. It is an artificial construction designed to create these feelings of fear and anxiety in the individuals who are traversing it. So it's interesting to me that the upper class just you know, on a special note that you would be so free from concerns or troubles, you would have to create this this uh, three D representation of fear to put yourself through that experience. Um. And of course we do that today with with haunted houses.

But what is cool about Hampton Court Maze is that this is the maze that really helped to inform science. And what I mean by that is there was a graduate student named Willard Small. He was the first to use a rodent maze to study learning, and he did this in nineteen o one, and he created a platform about six ft long by eight feet wide, covered it with sawdust and then divided it into galleries with walls of wire netting, and he modeled it on a diagram

of the Hedge maze at Hampton Court. So this was such a famous maze in the minds of everybody, particularly during the tuner of the century, that it really helped um this particular student to create this thing that really took off in science at least for a good sixty years. Yeah, because even after they stopped using the rep like of the Hampton Court Maze, which which from above looks it's it's weirdly shaped like it's kind of like a hacked off pyramid, kind of like a a weird battle axe

looking design. It's it's strange looking go kind of like a robot woman's hips. It's interesting battle ax because uh, laborra is I means yeah, acts in in um in Greek, and so that's when you look at the root of labyrinth, it is acts. But anyway, but even after they stopped using the Hampton Maze, they use a simplified version of it called the Elevated Plus Maze, which basically look like a plus sign. In other words, it's two hallways that

they cross over each other. Uh, And it's like the simplest may as possible because it sends the mouse or whatever that's inside it. It's they come to a point where they have three choices. They can go left, they can go right, they can go forward or well presumably they could go backwards as well. So it's it's a simplified version of the of the maze. The maze in brief, you know, But what are they trying to to study with all of this? Right? It comes back to how

a maze makes us feel. When I've touched on this a little bit already, it's when you're inside of a maze, you feel, first of all, you feel confined. You're definitely in a strange place. You you don't know which way to go. Should I go this way? Should I go that way? If I go if I go this way, am I going to run into a dead end? Everyone hates running into a dead end? That just I mean, you think of actual real world versions of this, like if you've ever been in a um well to say

the haunted, take a haunted house. You know, haunted house is not a complete maze, because nobody wants to build a professional haunted attraction where people go in and have trouble getting out, because, if we discussed in our Science of Haunted Houses episode, you've got to move a certain amount of people through that haunted house to make money. You need people going in, you need people going out

at at a decent click. But at another world hunted house in Atlanta, they frequently do have this section that's kind of a mirror maze where you do at least momentarily become disoriented and not know and you don't know which way to go, and so that raises your anxiety. You you feel stressful because you're like, well, I thought, this is what how do I get out of here?

Which way am I supposed to be going? And I find in those environments too, not only another world, but also in like real world environments like a museum, there's also that that anxiety where you reach like a weird kind of a part of the museum where you wonder if this is off limits, like maybe they didn't they didn't make it clear enough, and I'm wandering into restricted territory or likewise, any new city that you're in, you're wandering around and you're wondering, am I wandering into a

restricted space. Is someone gonna yell at me for being here? And I could start getting anxious about that because I hate it, you know, when I'm in trouble somebody yelling at me? And then second, am I wandering into a contested space, which, especially in big cities, you're like, am I wandering into a no man's land of post apocalyptic violence and luggings and faith stabbings? I you know, I I don't know, And that raises your instincts and your anxiety and you're just on edge of the whole time.

Well because in in uh, in my world, I think of it as just a microcosm of the minotaur in your head already, right, So within our own minds we can think of them as mazes. In particular, we can

think about the default mode network. Um. This is three areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial parietal cortex in the medial temporal lobes we've talked about these before, being the default mode network, and this is the area of your brain that deals with the eye of ourselves, the chattering um sort of subconscious level where we sit there and we turn over things that concern ourselves and our ego. And this is really where you start to see that the mind is like a maze

in this sense. Because you're going through these thought loops that you've probably gone through a million times in your life about certain subjects. They tend to come up in this area of the brain, right, these concerns that you have usually about yourself. And it's kind of like a hyperactive chat room for your brain, and it acts like an echo chamber in this sense. And we've talked about this before that when you have hyperactivity in this part

of the brain, it can lead to clinical depression. Right. So that's why I say that this default mode network is really something that's maze that we deal with every day. Yeah, we sort of we backtrack and we wander the confusing corridors of the past. We try and skip ahead a little bit and figure out where we're going in the future. And for many of us the whole time there well, for all of us, there are certain minotaurs out there in that maze as well. I mean, of course the

big one is dead. Uh, that beast is out there somewhere. Maybe he is around the corner, maybe he is on the other side. Of the maze entirely with many many walls between you and it, but you know it's there and you always hear it's howling. I love that you brought that up, because when I was thinking about mazes and I was thinking about how a maze is really a concrete manifest station of our abstract mind me, I began to think about Sarah Winchester. We have an article

that concerns her. Yeah. Yeah, she is the Winchester rifle heiress who at the turn of the century believed herself to be haunted by the victims of the rifles that her husband's company produced. And now she had something traumatic events that happened in her life. She lost her child and her husband, and after that, for thirty eight years her house was constantly under construction and she was changing the configuration of her house really to create a maze.

And the reason that she did that is she wanted to confuse the spirits the ghosts of of the people that she thought were killed by those rifles. So if you've ever visited the house this is in San Jose, California, you may have firsthand seen that there are false stairways to know where there are something like forty seven chimneys in the house. Um. Some of them are built all the way up, some of them are not. Some of

them actually aren't working chimneys, fireplaces, um. And at some point I believe there are five hundred rooms constructed, but she would have them demolished and then rebuilt. So here you go, I mean, here's talk about the hyperactivity of this part of the brain that is concerned with, um, you know, fear and uh, the self. This is someone who you can really see her own brain being manifested in the design of our house. Well, and it's in

the way. It's uh, it's kind of just another take on the old idea that if you you have a criminal that needs to be executed, you hang them at crossroads so that they'll have difficulty finding their way back to their hometown where they can haunt everybody and be a menace. So been in what is a crossroads but a plus maze, like we discussed earlier, we've you've placed the mouse at the center the rat at the center of the plus nates. No, the rat has no which,

no idea which way to go. So presume the ghost of and of an executed murder is there at the crossroots, has no idea what to go. Maybe he locks down and doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he heads off in the wrong direction, and and and this is so cool because again this is this idea of disorientation. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we get back, we're going

to talk about anxiety disorientation in mazes. All right, we're back, and I do want to mention that is we're getting into the way mazes affect our mind and our body. Text that we found particularly helpful in this was The Science of Healing Places by Esther M. Steinberg. Just a fabulous book from beginning to end, and it deals with how spaces affect us, how the layout of a space or the particulars of an environment can have a beneficial

effect on us or a detrimental effect on us. And in a large sense, the purest distillation of this idea is the idea of maze and labyrinth. And in this podcast were of course talking about the maze. Uh And as you mentioned earlier, it's just this the mazes is amazing, and that it is this kind of perfect physical manifestation of an idea are even more than an idea, just like a state of mind, a state of the world.

Like in a way, the mazes this perfect manifestation of the of the human experience in its confusing sense, you know, like I thought, I it makes me think of the obelisk from the Monolith rather from two thousand and one

of Space Odyssey. You know, it's just that you can basically just thinking about it, you can sort of catch the hum Yeah, you know, we are talking about mazes in a very literal sense today, but if you took a bird's eye view of yourself right now, in this time and space, you would see that you are in a maze somewhere right even if you're just walking down

the city block, you are within a maze. Um. But what is so interesting about mazes is this idea that in as you say that the purest sense is taking all of those different senses of the way that we perceive the world in creating this this construct that really amplifies all those feelings. And so when we talk about new experiences and uh, we talk about how we perceive things, there's some anxiety that comes along with that. Yeah, Now, stress and anxiety. So stress is not a new idea.

People have been stressed out for ages. For instance, the ancient Romans used a word string array, which means to squeeze, tight, to graze, to touch, or injure. But it wasn't until around ninety six a Nature article by scientists Hans Zeely published this article where he talked about stress in the terms of a body's non specific response to an external demand. And in ninety four physiologist Walter B. Canon for the first time show that animals produce adrenaline in response to stress.

And this is the first proof that environments trigger bodily responses like this, And so in the decade is that follow we learn even more about how the brain response to stress. For instance, hormones and chemicals in the brain

are released to deal with stress. Namely, we have a stress hormone called c r H that's corticotra pent releasing hormone UH, and this forces the peteritary gland to pump out more a c t H and this travels through the blood to the adrenal glands and this makes them pump out cortisol Corso, of course being in the stress hormone and all of us is really important. You want

to be able to tap into this stress response. Right, this fear response, because that's really what helps us to tune into the details in a novel place or situation in order to detect the way out to survive in some way. That's when we see the whites of our eyes getting even larger because we're trying to really pay attention to our environments. The problem, of course, comes when we're overloaded with a stress response, and when we're in this state of fear for longer than we need to be.

And we'll talk about this in a bit too. Uh, when the situation doesn't necessarily call for the stress response, that is elicited, right right. Because again, when the when the stress mormons kick in, the nerve cells fired to release an adrenaline like nerve chemical called nora a pineffine, and this is this is when the brain's fear center, the amigla, becomes active. And again adrenaline is important, and we'll discuss that a little more as we go here.

But this is how you want to feel inside of a maze, because the maze triggers anxiety and stress because of essentially four things. According to S. C. In Steinberg. First of all, you're in an architectural maze or even a hedge maze, what can you see? What are you seeing around you? With your site? This key sense of it really just whatever's on either side. Right. So of course with blinders, yeah, it's like blinder here, blinder there.

You can see a little ways in front of you, turn around, you can see a little ways behind you. But for the most part, your sense of the world

via site is really limited. And the next one is one that I never really thought about all that, But you have no clear sound to guide you either, because if you're if you're in a hedge maze, there's gonna be a certain amount of sound buffering, and then if you're in an actual architectural maze, you can have sound buffering plus the potential for echoes as well, like, for instance, the sound of that minotaur is how echoing through the tunnels.

So already our site, our ability to see the world is a significantly altered in our ability to to navigate the world via sound is significantly altered. Right. And I don't know if the listeners can detect this, but there was just a bunch of hammering going on, and I was just thinking, like, we're inside of our little maze right now, inside the podcast. I have no idea what direction that's kind I don't either. I can feel it, actually can feel it on my feet, but I know

it that's not under me. I know it's not probably on the other side of the wall. But again, here's this idea that you can't get your normal sound clues correct, Um, you have limited vision, you have a new alien environment. Yeah. Again, this is like a maze, like a straight up maze,

like out of the shining. This is an unreal environment, and it's like and it's purest sense, it's it maybe an analog for confusion in the mind and puzzles of the mind, and maybe an analog for potentially confusing environments in the natural world and certainly in the unnatural world of cities. But this is its purest sense. It is alien in every sense of the word. And the worst part of it is you now have choices, and you have uncertainty along with that novelty. And think about your

poor hippocampus. This is the part of your brain that is trying to navigate right spatially and is using usually using memory to do this. So it's a little bit like if you were dropped into a new city and you had to find your bearings. What happens, you feel stressed out, You feel a little bit more aware, because this is part of your brain that's saying, I don't have a blueprint for this, and I don't know what

is the right choice. Yeah, like for us, like I know, when I go to New York City, I certainly don't go there enough to where I know my way around. So when I emerged from a subway out onto the street, I'll have no idea which way is north, which way the south? What does that street sign say out there? Which is that one? Stay back there? Did I take the wrong course? Am I completely out of bounds here

in regards to where I'm trying to get to? And and certainly even taking something like Atlanta's Marta every day, which is basically a plus uh plus marking because it's north,

north and southeast and west. But but still, especially at the at the very center of that, the center of confusion, which is a place called the five Um, you do see outsiders and tourists and people who normally don't take the train wandering around confused, and you can see the feel of the anxiety and the stress is coming off them because they're like where am I? Which way am I going? And what are all these mentors doing here?

I was gonna say, it's so sad when you see them gobbled up in the corners of the station by the minotaurs. But this reminds me again of the rats, and back to the Hampton Court maze, because again this is the maze that inspired the elevated plus line maze. And the reason why rats were studied in this configuration is because it's really easy to study anxiety in this as you have pointed out, because you make an animal feel anxiety, it's just bamed. Put them in that space

and the environment makes them feel it. And the reason why rats had such a run with these mazes, so to speak, is because you know, pharmacological studies began with us to see if they could use certain substances to reduce that anxiety, and so they had rats run these mazes again and again. In fact, rats became the gold

standard of animals to use in psychology experiments. So again what Esther Serberg is saying that when you have all of these different elements, you have a novelty, you have a restriction in sight and sound, and you have in the case of the elevated plus sign elevation to throw into that. Uh, the rat will actually freeze at these points that offer what she says, the most frightening combination

of choices available. Yeah, and we're like freezing. We're talking increased defication, elevations of cortisol, the stress hormone in the blood. And it is vital to point out that it's important to have that stress hormone. Um, it helps us solve the maze if if balanced, It focuses our attention, it gives us energy, It raises our awareness of the surroundings so that we notice the small details that they lead

to our escape. Do you think of any story where an individual is in a maze, what do they have to do? They have to their their own guard. They might have to face a minuteur for crying out loud, But then they also have to be super observant because especially if the mazes kind of featureless, right, Uh, maybe they're marking stuff on the walls with chalk or they're using string whatever, but they you have to you can't

just calmly walk through. This is a confusing, challenging environment. Again, it's the representation of all the confusion and risks in the real world and you're feeling at all legitimately in the maze. Yeah, And she talks about this dose effect in this beneficial stress response as opposed to something that becomes detrimental and uh. In the book, she talks about

Gary Aston Jones. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and what he did is he embedded electrodes into the brains of monkeys, specifically a place called the locusts cerulius, and this is the region that governs vigilance, focused attention,

and the adrenaline component of the stress response. And what happened is that when the monkeys were relaxed, there was just a little bit of nerve cell firing in this part of the brain, But when they were focusing on something like pressing a lever to obtain a pellet of food, there was a lot of nerve cell firing in the

locust cerelius. So this is a good thing, right. You see the monkey performing at optimal levels under stress to a certain degree, but when the researchers stressed them a lot all of the nerve cells began firing in this Sisternberg is what led to the monkey failing at the task that the researchers were putting them to. So again, it's this overload of circuitry in the stress response that makes us freeze at times. Yuh Steinberg compares it to

a U shaped curve. Think of it this way. You have a speech to give, kind of like our keynote that we gave in Minneapolis. So you want to go in there with a certain amount of of of energy. Right, you're about to give a keynote. You don't want to be like I just woke up, you know, you gotta Yeah, you want to have a certain amount of energy. So

this U shaped curve, it's like a little hill. Okay, So as our anxiety rises up towards the middle of this hill, at the very top of that hill, that is like prime keynote territory, You're you're the maximum amount amount of energy and anxiety and stress that will allow you to get in there and just kill you know, to just get in there and deliver on all the front. You're alert and focus. Right, But then is that if that anxiety builds past that point, then it begins to

dip down. Uh, and at the bottom of that hill is freezing up pooping yourself and falling off the stage like utter a complete so much stress over it that you cannot even function at a basic human level. And then everywhere between the peak of that hill and the bottom that you know, all the other things that can happen, where all that speech didn't really go too well. My

nerves were a little fraid, you know. So you shaped curve and so the ideally, if you're in the maze, you want to uh be somewhere near the top of that curve, at the top of that hill, because that is the mindset that you need to solve the maze, and it's the mindset that your body is going for, Like that's where you're That's why you're having these responses because the body is like, this is confusing. Let's get

in maze solving mode. Well, and here's the deal. If if just some practical advice here, if anybody is going to give a keynote address and they feel like they are about to go down the hill into self defecation, take that moment to actually stand in a powerful pose. We talked about this before, um because this pose, if if you stand in it for two minutes or more, we'll actually decrease your cortisol stress levels and increase is

your testosterone. Then increase of the testosterone is important because that helps your confidence. The lowering of the cortisol stress means that you will not poop your pants, So just a little f y either. So what other methods are at our disposal for escaping a maze? Solving a maze? How are we going to get out of this maze and somehow make it back to our chairs and our

deaths and presumably our families and homes. Okay, well, um, here is what many people say is the best way to solve a maze, and it's called the right hand trick. That's sometimes called the left hand trick because it doesn't

really matter which hand. You just keep a hand on one wall and it doesn't matter which one, just pick left or right when you enter, and then you follow the path and keep that hand as you are following that path this way, if you get to a dead end, you can negotiate it by just following the three walls and then moving back the way that you came out, and eventually you will find the exit. This is the

idea right now. This usually works with most mazes, but if the maze has a central blank area occupied by a second maze, then your toast it's not gonna work. Well. Certainly, you can follow theseus's advice and have some yarn with you or some string, and throw that behind you, and just hope that nothing is going to follow in your wake to disrupt the path you're setting for yourself. In the name of the Rose, the character of Brother William of Baskerville says, to find the way out of a labyrinth,

that there is only one means. At every new junction never seen before, the path we have taken will be marked with three signs. If because of previous signs on some of the paths of the junction, you see that the junction has already been visited, you will make only one mark on the path you have taken. If all the apertures have already been marked, then you must retrace

your steps. And he continues a little bit on this line, and then add so that the younger monk that he's he's taking with him on this journey says, how do you know that? Are you an expert on labyrinth? And he says, no, I'm citing an ancient text I once read and and so asked, and by observing this rule you get out and he says, almost never as far as I know, but we will still try it all

the same. So, so you're gonna have to be patient with the maze, I guess it's and you're gonna have to You're gonna have to remain calm but alert, be very aware of your surroundings and uh, and don't be afraid to make some marks and notations. Um. And two other thoughts of comfort here. One is that we have learned this before. We've talked about this. Uh, that a rat's brain during sleep sometimes mimics what happens during the day.

So rats and a maze, you can actually see the specific patterns of neurons fired in the rats brains while running a lab maze that appeared that day, um, and then during rem sleep for those rats. So in other words, rats can dream about the maze that they've been in and they can try to figure out a better way to approach it next time. So they can learn to navigate a maze given maze, they can actually Yeah, they

can be trained to do this, and humans do. Any even who lives in a city, has learned to navigate a maze. Yeah. And part of this training, of course, has to do with rem sleep and going over this material again and again. So just that that, to me is very comforting when I think about getting out of a maze. And if you are an amazing and you're feeling lots of anks, maybe you're in a city, a new city, or a true maze itself, or you're drawing amaze or trying to get out of one that's on

a piece of paper. Uh, here's what you should do. You should start to think about the Benny Hialthy music because this apparently is very helpful. I think it decreases anxiety. And I say this because I watched the clip of the Shining that was scored to the Benny Hialthy music and it was far less framing. And if you want to see that, check out the blog post that accompanies this this podcast episode. All right, well, I think I hear the minotaur calling, so we probably need to wrap

this up. I do want to close out with a poem by your hey Lewis Borees, who again was obsessed with mazes and labyrinths and mirrors and all matter of mentally complex arrangements, and this is his poem called the Labyrinth, but it really sums up the feeling of being an amaze Zeus himself could not undo the way of stone closing around me. I've forgotten the men I was before.

I followed the hated path of monotonous walls. That is my destiny, severe galleries which curve in secret circles to the end of the years, parapets cracked by the day's usury. In the pale dust, I have discerned signs that frightened me. In the concave evenings, the air has carried a roar toward me, or the echo of a desolate How I know there is another in the shadows whose fate it is to wear out the long solitudes which weave and unweave this hades, and to long for my blood and

devour my death. Each of us seeks the other, if only this were the final day of waiting. So yeah, that that one gives me chills. All right, So hey, um, we've got a little long So we're not going to call the robot over here with the listener mail. It will take him forever to find us in this He's stuck out there in amaze any So I do want to close by saying, if you you want to reach out to us, we would love to hear from you, particularly about mazes. Is there a maze and fiction, uh

that that we've neglected to mention? I'm sure there are. Let us know about them if you think they're really engaging. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on mazes and video games because I was looking around and it looks like earlier in the video game history, like up until you know, possibly the early nineties, you saw more maze games, games that were that the idea of a maze was just the very concept of the game itself. Um and our producer Matt Frederick said that I think Ultima Online had

a maze in it. I'm I'm to understand that sky Rim has a maze somewhere in it, but I certainly haven't found it yet, uh, But but I just wonder it has. Is the maze in a video game? Is it's something that we've kind of forgotten. And I'm talking about an actual maze where when you're in it, whether it's an above view of the game or you're you know, third or first persons view, where you're actually confused and unable to find your way out. Just an open question,

let me know what you think. So you can find us on stuff to Bowl your Mind on Facebook, you can find us has stuff to Bow your Mind and Tumbler, and you can find us as blow the Mind on Twitter, and you can always drop us a line and blow the mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com