The Upside-Down, Part 2

turn upside down. We talked about what that scene meant within Dante's medieval worldview and how subsequent changes in our understanding of physics and cosmology affect how that scene reads.

After that, we started looking at the principle of upside downness in mammal biology, focusing first on bats, very very upside down creatures in multiple ways, and then on tree sloths, and we got into all kinds of questions like why these animals are adapted to hang upside down, how their bodies managed this, especially since it's something that becomes incredibly uncomfortable for us after a few minutes or less. And we're back today to talk about more.

by Bromstoker. I'm going to read it from it here. What I saw was the count's head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case, I could not mistake the hands, which I had had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest

and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and began to crawl down the castle wall, over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow. But I kept looking, and it

could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stone, worn clear of the moor or by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality, moved downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.

You know, as we discussed, not the top tier Carpenter, but still, as it is the case with any John Carpenter film, some interesting moments, And there is a moment where we have the big bad vampire of that picture kind of positioned in a cruciform pose on the ceiling behind one of the characters.

the Philippines. This is spelled just like Alan, but it is the name of a particular creature in Filipino tradition. And I first read about this creature in the work of folk lore's Carol Rose, who I frequently saw it.

She has a couple of tremendous volumes that have a lot of creatures chronicled from around the world, and Rose describes them as a is, this being a group of creatures in the folklore of the Tengean people, also I think referred to as the Itnig of the Philippines, and she describes them as bird like people with fingers and toes that point backwards, which enable them to hang upside

down from the topmost branches of trees. So we get inverted and backwards with this creature, and clearly, despite being described in Avian terms, their basic description brings to mind the various fruit bats of the world, and a number of them are found in the Philippines, including the giant golden crowned flying fox. They roost in the trees, but the al roosts in the trees, but also have houses

of pure gold on the ground. Were told and different tales position them as you know, everything from tricksters to benevolent helpers. So I was looking for more information about these creatures, and I found I ran across the excellent website,

the Aswang Project, which I believe I've encountered before. It's maintained by one Jordan Clark, and he points He points to several other things about these creatures, points out that they're said to adopt lost children, and also that they make new elons out of the sort of pilfer biomaterials associated with female human procreation or the female side of human procreation. So I don't know, they're kind of crafty

genetic tinkerers, I imagine in that regard. Clark's breakdown also points at the possibility in some Western retellings that the Alan is confused and combined with other creatures, and points out that there are a finite number of creature types in the Philippines, but with lots of regional variations, which is something I think we find in a lot of folkloric traditions. So reminder that the Philippines consist of more than seven thousand islands and more than one hundred and

eighty five ethnic groups. So you might have a certain type of creature that's common in different groups, but you know, individual communities even are going to have a different spin on that creature. Now, turning to the world of Japanese yo kai, who I found not one, but two very interesting ceiling related creatures. So the first is the Tinjo kudari, and this is a yokai whose name translates, I believe roughly to the ceiling hangar. I've also seen it described

as the ceiling dropper. So this entity was first reported by noted scholar and yokai chronicler Tori Seki in his illustrated Yokai books of the eighteenth century, and according to Matthew Meyers Yokai dot Com, there's an argument to be made here that Sekian largely created this creature. So it kind of depends on his yokai some of them. Some of them are definitely more folk traditions that he is reporting, some he's maybe putting his own spin on, and some

he may be sort of creating whole cloth. So Matthew Meyer writes, quote in Old Japan, the space above the ceiling was connected with lots of superstitions about dead bodies rolling about or women being confined like prisoners. Tinjo Kudari

seems to have been something Toriyama invented based on those myths. Fittingly, during this time, the phrase to show someone in the ceiling was a colloquial expression for causing trouble, which Tinjo Kudari certainly does, and he adds the possible connection to another tale, a story of a yokai that was something of an attic monster in an inn, descended down at night to drag travelers up to consume them. And of course that one is more overtly threatening than a lot

of yokai. A lot of yokai, as we've discussed in the show before, they're just they're doing their own creepy thing, and just witnessing them is maybe the limit of human interaction.

so forth. You know, there are a lot of ghostly tales like that. And there is another yo kai known as the Tinjonami or the ceiling liquor, and this one is also really fun. So according to Zach Davison at the Hakku Monogatari kaiden Kai website, it visits during cold nights to lick the ceiling, leaving these dark streaks behind on the ceiling, the kind of streaks that say, a child sleeping in a room might they can't go to sleep.

They're staring up at the ceiling. Maybe there's light from outside playing on the ceiling and they're noticing these dark streaks for the first time, and then they can reflect on where these came from, allegedly the tongue of the ceiling liquor. So don't stare at the ceiling because you might see the ceiling liquor and if you see the ceiling liquor licking the ceiling, you might die. Otherwise, no

real risks involve here. It's not actively trying to hurt you, but it's not something you actually want to see occurring.

have a scary story that also explains mysterious stains. And we're all familiar from seeing stains like this, you know, often caused by like water dripping and so leaks in the roof and so forth, no matter what the structure

of your house might be. But as Michael Dylan Foster points out in twenty fifteen's Licking the Ceiling, semantic staining and Monstrous Diversity, Yochai scholars have also brought up the idea that second is referencing Edo period firefighters or the especially their sort of signature of clothing, some of the frills and the way that the clothing and thrills and fingers of this creature are depicted, and it would be a visual pun that might have been better understood on

some level by the intended reader. Okay, So Matthew Meyer mentions this as well, describing the ceiling liquor as essentially a transform matoid. These are like paper flags that were carried by Edo period firemen. You can look up pictures of these. They look like something you would have in a parade, you know, lots of tassels and all. And so the idea is maybe this creature is supposed to be a transformed version of this thing that the firemen would carry. But beyond that, I can't find much about

the definite connection here. Is it something concerning fire risks and ceilings? To me at least uncertain because the prime firefighting tool of these firemen would have been the destruction or partial destruction of structures that were either on fire or about to become on fire to keep that fire from spreading. So water pumps were not really used till later, because I was initially thinking, oh, well, maybe firefighters water water damage stains. But I don't think that's the connection

here at all. But fascinating the way these things seem to stitch together.

stain get on the ceiling? What can drip onto the ceiling? What can scuff the ceiling? Nothing's walking around up there. It must be something uncanny, It must be something from some kind of inverted world.

For example, in fact, I wasn't familiar with this one, but I ran across something called upside Down Man in DC's Justice League series, and you can look up pictures of this creature. Basically a monstrous enemy from another dimension, but in the visual medium of comics, he's very often depicted in an inverted position.

describing like a journey through the desert, the parched landscape that has a world gone wrong and destroyed, and he talks about coming upon a I think, coming upon a city in the desert where bats with baby faces crawl upside down, and he sees inverted towers in the air

hanging upside down. So it seems to be part of the metaphor created there is something I mean, it might also be an indication of the actual scene imagine, because I guess if it's supposed to be in the desert, seeing the upside down towers might be like a mirage or a fata morgana kind of illusion. But I don't know if that's what it's supposed to mean. But I think also all the upside downness, especially the bats with baby faces. Upside down is clearly supposed to indicate something

is wrong here. And it's funny because there's nothing especially bad about being upside down, but we take it as a metaphor for wrongness.

Pixelaro Inredibles, Yeah, Incredibles. Or maybe it's something poltergeisty. I'm not sure, but he's ringing a bell.

vice versa. So Dante is describing this moment of overwhelming confusion at the sudden subjective inversion of up down continuity, and that moment actually brings to mind a similar situation that occurs in reality, and that is a common experience that astronauts report in microgravity. So I want to talk about astronauts something called visual reorientation illusions and something called

the spider Man illusion. To introduce this idea, I was reading a June twenty twenty article in the newspaper of the LSU School of Medicine by Leslie Coppo featuring an interview with a NASA astronaut, and I think at the

time an LSU professor of medicine. I believe she might be with a different institution now, but a medical doctor and professor of medicine named Serena Onen Chancellor, and she's talking in this interview about her experience as a flight engineer in expeditions fifty six and fifty seven to the

International Space Station. These were both in twenty eighteen, and on a Chancellor talks about how one of the biggest challenges of spaceflight and of the especially the early time spent at the space station, is the body's adjustment to microgravity. This is something we've talked about before, but never with this particular angle that I recall. So you know, literally, the space station and its occupants are in free fall.

They're in orbit around the Earth. And since the station inhabitants and the station are all falling at the same rate, there is no ground inside the station, and there's no gravitational queue to tell the astronauts which way is up or down. So inside the space station there is no up or down except that which you try to sort of culturally impose. There's not a physically sensed up or

down and so on. In Chancellor describes the experience going from launch, through the initial burn and into orbit, saying, quote, after that eight minutes and forty seconds, when the third stage finally cuts off, your brain does not perceive your environment the same as it did back on Earth. I almost felt like everything was that a forty five degree tilt to the left in front of me, and even the control panels and the console console in the soused

vehicle itself appear different. That took a couple of hours to resolve. So that's interesting. We can imagine weird sensations of being in microgravity, like you can imagine even if you haven't felt it yourself. You can sort of imagine the feeling of floating, of you know, having this sensation of weightlessness. But there are these other things she's describing, like suddenly it feels like the world is tilted forty

five degrees. That's strange and specific, and I thought it's interesting how we don't always appreciate that the weirdness of being in microgravity is not just a body sensations. It's like a new perceptual and even cognitive regime that causes perceptual and cognitive distortions. In other words, when you lose the ground and the normal gravitational cues for up and down, it leads to illusions of the senses and of the mind. One of the illusions she describes is very Dante crawling

on Satan. So she says that a lot of assauts report what is called an inversion illusion, so that your sense of up and down does not disappear when you are in microgravity. It persists, or maybe sometimes suddenly comes back very strongly, but inverted, so that no matter what position you're in, you feel suddenly like you are hanging upside down. And apparently the astronauts sometimes called this the

Spider Man illusion, I guess especially. I don't know if it predates this, but it makes me think of that scene in the Toby maguire movie where he's hanging upside down with the kiss that's on the poster reserve.

talked about before. I think we've been mentioned in the last episode, like stuffiness in the head and upper body. And then on Chancellor goes on to say more about these confusion and illusions related to the lack of a gravitational up and down. In one sense, you can think of this unhitching from gravity as a kind of freedom. She says, quote, I can do science on any side, talking about any side of the module. I can do science on the ceiling I can do science on the walls.

I can be flipped upside down, I can eat upside down. It doesn't really matter. But that freedom doesn't necessarily feel like freedom. It can also be very difficult, disorienting and uncomfortable, especially at first.

And then usually after three to four weeks, she says, the brain adjusts and becomes somewhat more comfortable with this upless and downless world. And she says, at that point you can kind of move around with less concern for up and down where your feed are pointed where your head is that sort of thing, and the brain, she says,

adapts beautifully. So it's interesting to consider both things here that in one sense, our brains are kind of stubborn and they're trying, and the brain is trying to insist on like vertical orientation. I'll talk more about that in a paper. I want to mention in just a minute, trying to insist on vertical orientation even in a context where it doesn't make sense. On the other hand, give it time. And the brain is highly adaptable in a way. I guess that's kind of our whole lives, isn't it.

You know, the constant tension between the rigidity and the adaptability of our brains.

like various brain functions are affected by microgravity. The authors of this paper are Charles Ohmann, Ian Howard Theodore Smith, Andrew Beal, Alan Natopoff, James Zacker, and Heather Jenkin. And so the authors of this paper start off by talking about the physiology of how we normally sense up and down. Of course, some cues are visual, some are tactle, but under normal circumstances, a big part of how your body

senses constructs a sense of up and down. Really, because again there is no in the universe objective thing, no such objective thing as up and down. But you know it is a subjective feeling created by our relationship to the nearest largest gravitational attractor that our brains construct this idea of up and down with the help of dedicated

acceleration sensing organs in the inner ears called odoliths. These are little tiny crystals stones made of calcium carbonate, which is the same material that makes limestone, cave formations and clam shells. So you've got little kind of you know, stalactites or stalagmites or clamshell type crystals.

orientation and balance. And there's an interesting fact about physics that is actually indirectly discoverable through studying our inner ear function. That fact is that gravity is locally indistinguishable from acceleration. This is not exactly true on a large enough scale because on a large scale you get interesting things like gravity exerting tidal forces on the scale of a human body. With a gravitational attractor the size of planet Earth, you're

not really going to have something like that. So gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration. A person standing on the ground feeling Earth's gravity of nine point eight meters per second squared feels almost exactly the same force as somebody standing head up in a rocket ship that is accelerating at

nine point eight meters per second squared. To that person, the forces are basically the same, and that's why the organs that we use to feel the pull of gravity and orient our bodies with respect to up and down are the same organs we use to feel the sensation of linear acceleration because locally they are the same thing. So on Earth at regular altitude, gravity is experienced as this constant acceleration toward the ground.

orbit in a space Shuttle mission. So when astronauts are in freefall in orbit around the Earth, the authors say that the odoliths quote float into unusual positions and tilting the head produces no sustained otolith displacement the way it does on Earth. The unusual signals from the otolith organs and zero G are apparently not sufficient to produce major changes in the inner ear to eye reflexes that allow the eyes to stay fixed on an object while the

body is moving. Also, although astronauts typically don't report sensations of falling. They are susceptible to illusions about body orientation. So what are these other illusions about body movement and orientation. The authors talk about one that is the same thing that On and Chancell are called the spider Man illusion. The authors here refer to these as inversion illusions, and they say that a lot of astronauts report these immediately

after reaching orbit from the initial launch. So they'll be seated in their launch position in the cabin and then suddenly get the overwhelming sensation that they are actually hanging upside down from the ceiling. Inversion illusions can happen with the eyes open or closed, and the illusion most often lasts for only a day or two before it starts to subside. But you can imagine that it could have major potential to interfere with crew members' ability to stay

focused on the task. So this is a this is not without consequence. It's not just like a weird little thing. It's like, you know, you don't want you don't want to be experiencing this if you don't have to.

the paper called the astronauts subjective vertical or SV. Now, we don't usually need to think about our subjective vertical because it's going to be pretty you know, for most people who unless you have some kind of disorder of the inner ear or something like, you know, something going on most of the time. For most people, your subjective vertical is also going to be the same as everybody

else's subjective vertical around you. You know, down is where your feet are pointed, up is where your head is pointed. Is pretty straightforward. But the brain maintains a sense of a subjective vertical even in a microgravity environment. So even though you no longer feel up and down with your odoliths. Your brain still insists we got to find up and down, which way's up, which ways down? And the brain might decide that this wall of the module is the floor

and the opposite wall is the ceiling. But then imagine, so you're working on that assumption. You figured out, okay, here's the floor, here's the ceiling. But then you suddenly see visual information that conflicts with your brain subjective vertical, like you see another astronaut floating upside down from your perspective, or you see a dropped object failing to fall towards your floor, you know, because gravity isn't there, so it's

not going to fall. And then suddenly the brain says, oh, no, something is wrong, and you get a visual reorientation illusion where your subjective vertical instantly flips and the floor becomes the ceiling and now you are upside down. This is described as an unpleasant experience that can trigger attacks of nausea and motion sickness, especially in the first week or so of orbital conditions, but the sense of direction problems

can persist for months. The authors say that vris were first reported by a Russian cosmonaut named German Titov in nineteen sixty one, and by the nineteen nineties they were well known to Skylab and Space Lab crews. They were often known as the downs. So you get them the downs suddenly, oh my down is up? Now, Uh, don't

feel good. So the authors point out that are usually spontaneous and unwelcome when they happen, but that astronauts have reported that they can be either triggered or sometimes reversed by intentional cognitive effort. So you're in microgravity and you force yourself to think about the floor and the ceiling, you can sometimes cause your subjective vertical to flip on purpose, which I wonder exactly. I don't know exactly how that feels, but I'm imagining it kind of like the magic eye.

the objects in the room are not quite flat. They maybe it's tilted a little bit to the side. And so they put people in environments like this and have them try to find and point to up and down. Often the visual information can take over. When asked to point down, people in a tilted room will point not toward the gravitational down, but toward the floor of the tilted room. So in this case, visual information is somewhat overriding the felt information from the odoliths.

a problem. Another interesting fact, this is just a little side note, not really relevant to us, but the authors point out that there are minor gravity sensing capabilities outside the organs of the inner ear. They cite that the kidneys and the cardiovascular system have some ability to sense gravitational orientation, and they don't go into detail about why that is. But I wonder if I has to do with fluid flows the fluid is it's going to be gravitationally attracted to the ground.

drinking glass with the open end pointed up. That sort of thing. The other thing is our own bodies. We have a strong tendency to feel that our feet are pointed down unless other information overwhelms that. And there's an interesting section in the intro here about differences in how the brain handles disagreement between the senses establishing the subjective vertical.

Depending on how big the disagreement is. Quote, if there are minor directional differences between the gravity receptor and visual cues to the vertical, the brain apparently compromises, and the SV the subjective vertical points to an intermediate direction. So quote the remaining component of gravity is then perceived as a mysterious force pulling the body to one side. They say this illusion can be readily experienced in houses tilted

by an earthquake. And this brings us back to what you were saying rob about, like the haunted house or the Museum of Illusions type room, the room that's tilted. I know exactly what they're talking about, this mysterious force. Something feels wrong. There's some kind of uncanny physics that feels like it's pulling you to the side.

gravity receptor cues. Older individuals appear more susceptible to visually induced tilt. Scene motion enhances visually induced tilt for most subjects. So I thought that was really interesting too, about like these individual differences. I am now very curious about myself, and I feel like I don't have an easy way to know. Is my personal subjective vertical more doggedly tied to the gravity receptors and the inner ear, or is

it more susceptible to visual information? I would like to know what kind of up and down man?

not like a huge sample size. There was sort of a pilot study of this sort of thing, and this has been followed up on with larger studies of astronauts over time. But this initial test used the four adult male astronauts of this mission in orbit with a variety of experiments, many including virtual reality goggles as a stimulus,

and their major findings were as follows. Again, there were fairly strong individual differences in how people created their subjective vertical and these tended to continue during spaceflight, though one astronaut became more dependent on visual cues to determine up

and down while in microgravity. They say that they found astronauts in microgravity became a lot more vulnerable to what they call circular self motion illusions, the illusion that you are spinning or rolling triggered by visual cues of rolling. And then they also looked at visual cues associated with linear movement through a scene. So this was studying quote whether a virtual scene moving past the subject produces a

stronger linear self motion illusion. So imagine your stationary in microgravity, you put on virtual reality goggles that suggest you are moving forward linear motion through a scene. Do you feel in your body like you're actually moving through a scene? The research found yes, absolutely, in microgravity they experienced this feeling of gliding like a ghost or like the camera in Dario Argento's Deep Red gliding through the scene forward.

This feeling of illusory linear motion came on faster, and it was stronger when triggered by the virtual reality in these in the microgravity conditions. The study also found that these self motion illusions could be somewhat counteracted by having the astronauts where force springs that press on the body to simulate gravity. I thought this was interesting. So even rather crude approximate approximations of gravitational force that I hope I'm right about this from what I could tell, would

not really be acting on the inner ear organs. It would be like pressing on maybe the shoulders or the hips, pressing on the body with springing. That even that kind of crude approximation, if I'm understanding correctly, could help reduce self motion illusions.

This apparently depends on where you subjectively believe the floor is, but even more interestingly, on object recognition. So sometimes it could become harder to recognize a familiar object that you're used to seeing if you have inverted your sense of where the floor is. You can imagine again in space that being able to recognize familiar objects is actually quite important, especially if you are manning controls or trying to do any kind of mechanical task or you know, scientific pass Yeah,

so like suddenly recognizing things in your environment. Again, nothing that you are physically looking at has changed, but your brain flips and now the floor is the ceiling, and now what the way you recognize things is different the author's right quote. Overall results show that most astronauts become more dependent on dynamic visual motion cues, and some become responsive to stationary orientation cues. The direction of the subjective

vertical is labile in the absence of gravity. So interesting that so much depends on up and down. Even in an environment where up and down cease to have any gravitational relevance. You're not stuck to the floor, objects don't fall when you drop them, and yet your brain can't let up and down go. It still relies on the sense of up and down to recognize things in its environment, to interpret visual cues like object shading, to interpret which way a surface is curved. That depends on where you

think the floor is. To interpret do I recognize this or not? Do I know what this tool is? Depends on where you think the floor is. And to understand how the body itself is moving.

we can totally live up there. Granted, we have to do things like bring our own portion of the atmosphere with us, you know, because up there, our appropriate portion of the atmosphere is not you know, it's not gravitationally bound. You know, we have to bring it with us obviously. But but we can actually go up there if we take care of the the some of the environmental conditions.

It's it's not like if we were like a Japanese Kappa yo kai with the little pool of water in the top of its skull, like if it goes into space, the water is going to float away and it's vital escence is gone. Like like all of our systems they still work. It's not like they won't work without gravity.

And like that in and of itself is kind of interesting, right, It's like because again we we evolved in this, in this gravitationally bound existence, and you know, our systems function in ways that that depend on or play upon those conditions.

not always but sometimes. And then the other thing is so that's like the short term ability to overcome this weirdness, and then in the long term you also have just the adaptability and plasticity of the brain. It was what on and Chancellor was talking about that at first it can be pretty bad, but over time your brain does adapt. The brain sort of reprograms itself to feel more comfortable

and natural in this environment. And eventually, I don't I actually don't know the answer to whether these types of illusions and problems ever completely stop, but there certainly become less problematic and persistent over time, and maybe at some point stop completely. I don't know.

It would be great if I had garlic. I don't have garlic, I'll find a way you can live without it.

in their own way to gravitation. We're going to get into optics a bit more, and who knows what else we will summon out of the upside down. So we hope that you'll join us for that one. In the meantime, we'll just remind everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with

core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird house cinema, So you know that helps you make sense of whatever you happen to see

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is the thumbs need to go up. Yeah, so if your sense of up and down is momentarily distressed by microgravity, let a level out a bit before you rate the show.