The Winter People, Part 2

around wintertime. Uh so, we talked about the the amazing winter ceremonials of the Quakakawak people of the Pacific Northwest and North America. But we wanted to talk about some other cultural beliefs about wintertime changes to the human being. Yeah, we were kind of casting about for something that if it felt felt appropriate to to bring up, because there

are no shortage of winter traditions. But we we lead with such a fantastic example in the first episode, it it felt intimidating to try and come up with something of of equal weight. Now, one thing you could bring up is, of course, the traditions like the Huga. This

became very popular, was it last year? The year before there was suddenly all these articles on the internet about uh huga and all these related concepts, especially in you know, uh northern polar Uh not always polar, but northern types of countries and cultures where they're they have special words for getting cozy when it's really cold and bad weather outside. Yeah, this is interesting because I mean, obviously here in the States people do like to to snug up and maybe

binge watch some Netflix or what have you. I have a little hot coco during the uh the colder months. There's something fulfilling about that. I hear they eat pumpkin pie. Have you heard about this the Americans? Like? Okay, I mean I didn't know there are songs about it. I assume it's true. Which song? Which song is about eating pumpkin There's something about you throw a log on the fire and coffee and supkin pie. I'm vaguely connecting to

something from another life, all right, though. I just have a lot of questions for people who eat pumpkin pie outside of established holidays. Yeah, which are the ones? Is Thanksgiving and when? Well, you can have it for Christmas. But you're I mean, you've kind of been in the rules, right, right, but mostly it is a Thanksgiving pie. It's a delicious Thanksgiving pie, but it's I don't know, I wouldn't feel

comfortable eating it. Fill the time of the year. Filling from a can, crust from a can, well, yeah, you have to use the filling from the can because it doesn't matter, because the because because ultimately the pumpkin is just a vehicle for the nutmeg and the spice flavoring. Yeah, and the sugar. Yeah. But no, despite all the coziness traditions, some cultures apparently have this special word for the coziness

seeking tradition, and other cultures don't really. I mean, English, as far as I know, doesn't have a word like hugo. And I think that's why it suddenly became so popular in the English speaking part of the internet. Yeah, and of course it's important to realize that coziness do during the winter months is is something of a luxury. Uh

and uh. This led me to seek out a possible example in a wonderful book that I hadn't looked at in many years, And that's very Lopez's book Arctic Dreams, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which is just which is just full of beautiful descriptions of life in the far North. For instance, he shares the following just

about the flow of seasons in general. Quote in summer, in the sometimes extravagant light of a July day, one's thoughts are not of growth of heading wheat and yellowing peaches, but of suspension, as if life had escaped the bounds of earth in this country, which lacks the prolonged moderations between winter and summer that we anticipate as balmy April

mornings and dry Indian summer afternoons. In this two season country, things grow and die, as they do everywhere, but they are more deeply than living things anywhere else, seasonal creatures. And he goes on later in the book to to bring up this concept of the Polar Eskimo people that is called purlar or neck. He says, quote winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimo called

plura neck. According to the anthropologist Gene Mallari, the word means to feel quote the weight of life, to look ahead to all that must be accomplished, and to retreat to the present, feeling defeated, weary before starting a core of anger and miserable sadness. It is to be sick of life, a man named Amina told Malari. The victim tears fitfully at his clothes. A woman begins aimlessly slashing

at things in the igloo with their knife. A person runs half naked into the bitter, freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the poop of dogs. Eventually the person is calmed by others in the family with great compassion and helped to sleep parlora neck winter. And I have to say he did not say poop. He used a stronger curse word that we can't say on the show.

But I felt compelled to self at it there. So, as Lopez describes it, does it seem like the idea is that sort of the farther you go up north or I guess towards either of the poles, but especially because you know they're more people are more concentrated towards the North Pole than in like Antarctica, that sort of

the weight of the seasons becomes more unbearable. Yeah, that that seems to be the point he's he's making here, And it just has to do with the fact that you essentially have two seasons, one of life and one of death, one of one of hardship and one of well, I guess less hardship. Uh it's it's certainly an impressive concept and uh it again brings to mind accounts of say that the alleged wind to go madness that you

uh you hear about in uh in a northern native populations. However, we have to point out here that not everyone is on board with this being a rough part of pre colonial traditions and beliefs among Native peoples of North America. Yeah.

According to Canadian scholar who uh and scholar who specializes in the study of First Nations people, John Steckley, in his book White Lies about the Inuit, he says this idea of Arctic hysteria is backed up by case studies, but it was most frequently touted in the nineteen sixties through the eighties by anthropologists such as Jeane Malari and others.

And he points out that historian Lyle Dick suspects, just as Stickley himself concurs, that it's quote more likely the creature of the White Inuit power imbalance embodied in specific contexts unquote, such as forced risky explorations during the winter, So forcing the native peoples to, among other things, take you out into hostile winter conditions when their their normal

pattern of behaviors would have limited such risky measures. That makes sense to me, And it has also been suggested that there's at that possible physical explanations for this kind of Arctic madness can be found in hyper vitaminosis ah, such as when you consume a polar bear liver exactly, and you can and it's something you can also pick.

It's most famous for the polar bear liver. We've talked about it before in the show as far as polar bear liver consumption is concerned, but you can also get it from consuming a number of different um uh hunted animals in these regions, So that's one possibility as well.

So I think the take home here is that as fascinating as the concept is, and certainly as beautifully as Lopez wrote about it uh in in Arctic Dreams, it seems like it may be a situation that is is somewhat complicated by the impact of colonial Western society upon

the traditions of the native people's well. It certainly illustrates the way in which our reactions to the seasons are both sort of endogenous and exogenous, like that they come from both inherent factors in in the climate and in uh, you know, physical constraints around us that arrive when the winter months set in, but they're also heavily tempered by

what cultural pressures were having to deal with. So like, a society of abundance is probably gonna have very different cultural ways of dealing with winter than a society of scarcity would, and all kinds of cultural factors like that would play in. Certainly. Of course, if you're you know, being colonized, that's definitely going to affect what a season

of hardship means for you. Indeed, all right, well we need to take a quick break, and then when we come back we will talk more about winter changes in winter adaptations. All right, we're back, Okay, So Robert, we have discussed how we are not constant beings but sort of like seasonal shape shifters. There are so many ways that culturally, uh that psychologically, that stabolically our bodies respond to the changes in the seasons in a way that

it might be hard to beat out of us. Even though we've got all these nice climate controlled indoor places to dwell. Now, our bodies are surfing the cycles of time. Now, there is one way in which the changes of the seasons affect us much more directly and immediately, and that's

by being cold. Apart from, you know, the vitamin D deficiency you might get from shorter days, and the way it might affect the way you eat and and affect your your metabolism and even affect your behavior and your dating and your desire for meaning and things like that, it also is just freezing outside. Now. It's no secret that exposure to cold can hurt or kill you. But did you ever wonder why they're Like several ways you can answer this question. One is pretty straightforward and mechanical.

It's that the body has mostly liquid content. I like to think of that this sometimes, like whenever you're feeling a little bit down on yourself, you just think like, hey, I'm a bag of fluids doing okay for a bag of fluids. Yeah, And if you if you were to freeze me solid, then a single Jean Claude van Damn

kick could shatter you. And well, in fact, if you were to freeze me solid, just the act of freezing me solid would sort of shatter me because when liquid freezes, it can form ice crystals, which cause damage to the body's tissues, to the cells, to the cell membranes. But here's another way to think about it. Animal life is characterized by two main physical characteristics i'd say motion and chemical reactions, and cold slows down both of these things,

so cooks out there. I wonder if you ever tried to, like mash up some spinach art to choke dip with a cold block of cream cheese, Robert, do you have any comparable experience? Uh No, I do not. It's impossible. I mean, you're just like work in your arm, and you've gotta you gotta be some kind of like hydraulic press type creature in order to achieve it. A similar thing would be if you're into baking and you ever tried to like whip something with cold butter, it's just

a bad idea. And likewise, if if you've ever tried to trigger a chemical reaction like lighting a fire when it's freezing cold outside, not so easy. The body needs to be warm, so it's mechanical motions are kind of lubricated and squishy, and it also needs to be warm. So it's chemical reactions have enough energy to take place. But not all bodies are like this. There are creatures in this world that can literally freeze almost entirely solid

and thaw out and survive. So I want to mention one example, the wood frog Lithabades sylvaticus, found throughout the forests of Canada and the northern United States. So this is a frog that survives the harsh winter of northern

Canadian forests. How would it do that? Well, what you'll notice it does is that when the cold north winds set in sometime around September, these frogs crawl down and nestle in some dead plant matter like some leaf litter or dead grass, and then they literally freeze almost entirely solid. About two thirds of their bodies water content turns into ice, and even temperatures as low as zero degrease fahrenheit won't kill them. And then when warm weather comes back, they

thaw out they hop away unharmed. Uh. Speaking to the l A Times, the herpetologist Don Larson said, quote, on an organismal level, they are essentially dead. The individual cells are still functioning, but they have no way to communicate with each other. So you might be wondering how do they do this? Well, the body essentially manufactures cryoprotectant chemicals. It looks like glycogen in the frog's liver gets converted into glucose, which keeps the frog's individual cells alive throughout

the freeze. And then also uria, which is the nitrogen based crystalline compound you excrete in your urine, might also play a role. Uria came up a little bit earlier when we were talking about cold protection. But Larsen points out this thing that's not known, but it's an interesting possibility. He points out that freezing alive might not just be a survival mechanism, but that could actually be beneficial to an animal that wanted to rid itself of parasites. Oh

this is so good. I mean, we we we see a similar cases. For instance, where if you have frozen fish, you have you worry less about there being parasites in the fish. And also if you're worried about dust mites on one of your child's prize stuffed animals, you stick it in the freezer overnight and that takes care of the mite. So all the dust mights go to your frozen shrimp. Yeah. Well, you know what's the difference between

a mite and a shrimp, really shrimp hugetticbal bugs. So yes, you've got the wood frog, but we've got another freezing champion, even more hardy that I want to mention the red flat bark beetle, which is kuka just clavippies. Usually we would find them living under loop spark in North American

deciduous trees. And I found a report from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks that biologists Todd's form of quote cooled the beetles in a lab to minus seventy degrees celsius, which is minus ninety four degrees fahrenheit, and they did

not die. And then there was another experiment subsequently in California they could that they found they could lower the temperature of these beetles to minus a hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is minus two hundred and thirty eight degrees fahrenheit, colder than any natural temperature on Earth without freezing the beetles. That's incredible. Now, obviously our bodies are

not like this. We do not have such strong crier protectant mechanisms, and freezing will definitely injure or kill us. Direct exposure of body parts to cold weather can lead to frostbite, which has a simple explanation and a more complex explanation. The simple version is just that frost bite is when body tissues freeze. The more complex one is a little bit chemical. It's when ice crystals form in the body e tissues at dehydrates cells, causes damage to

sell membranes. Essentially, you don't want to let your outer body parts freeze because there's sort of the point of no return there. They didn't come back. Yeah, I feel like most of us have probably read various accounts of explorers, adventurers or refugees and in really chilling environments and accounts of frostbite where you you you realize that is a it is a terrible thing to have to experience. Yeah, there's something especially disturbing about it because it's almost like, um,

I don't know, just having like it's like necrosis. You know, It's like there's a part of the body that is dying or is dead, but it's still attached to you. It's not like it's been chopped off. It's just it's still there and it's not working for you. Yeah, it is in d and d terms ne chrotic damage. Uh So, we obviously are not as hardy as bark beetles, but

we do have adaptive mechanisms. And you'll see the first signs of the human body reacting to cold weather really just within a few seconds of exposure to sub thermo neutral temperatures. So our skin has these thermo receptors and it the detect both absolute and relative temperature differences, and they let us know if the environment is too hot or too cold. So when the body detects cold, it

begins to shunt blood away from the extremities. You you probably feel some sensation of this and kind of you know, the numbness and all that when the blood is being drawn away from the skin and away from the arms and legs to keep it closer to the vital organs like the heart and the lungs. This is essentially a choice to sacrifice the outer skin and use it as a layer of insulation. By keeping the blood away from the outside, the blood stays warmer. Another defense mechanism is

running nose. You ever wonder like why your nose runs in the cold. Uh So, cold air tends to be very dry and of course very cold, and since you're constantly pulling that dry air in through the nose, when you breathe, it dries out the exposed surfaces within the nasal cavity. In the nasal cavity, one of the things it does when you breathe through it is it warms

the air on the way down to your lungs. So if you're drawing in this really dry cold air that is not being appropriately warmed inside the nose by your warm, nice mucous layers in there and drying out the inside of the nose, the body tries to compensate, and so what it does is it moisturizes these passages by secreting mucous fluid, leading to cold induced rhine a rhea, the diarrhea of the nose. You know, I spent a few years in my childhood in Roddington, Newfoundland, Canada, so we

had pretty intense winters up there. Uh So I have on one hand, I have these really pleasant memories of scaling giant snow banks and tunneling through them. But I also have these persistent memories of of wearing a full ski mask that is at once warming but also just soggy with with snot you know, just just partially frozen and partially warmed snot discovering the whole front of the

ski mask. You know. With exertion in cold weather, one of the risk factors you need to watch out for is that your clothes don't become sweat soaked, because then though that sweat is going to the cool and you're you're essentially freezing in your own sweat. Yeah, no good. So another thing we've all done it shivering. It's one of the body's main defense mechanisms against cold. The purpose seems to be to force your muscles to generate extra heat.

Movement and friction tend to produce heat. If you doubt this, just rub your hands together for ten seconds. You'll feel them warm up. And so the shivering is the body's way of enlisting your muscle tissues as a kind of emergency internal space heater, forcing them to rapidly contract and rhythmic patterns all over the body and generate extra heat to keep your vital organs and blood warm. Another adaptation that seems to not really help very much anymore, goose bumps. Yes,

you ever wonder why, Like, what's the point? It almost feels like when you get goose bumps, the bumps are coming up on your skin, which would seem to increase the surface area of your skin, which would make you get cold even faster. Well, and then also it would seem to move body hair away from the body. Yeah, it was. It's like, oh, well, now this protective layer of you know, barely visible arm hair is not even

touching my arm anymore. But no. Goose bumps are believed to be a vestigial trait from our recent ancestors who had much more body hair than us. So when they got cold, they could raise the hairs on their skin to become extra fluffy and insulated. And it's true that actually lower density things are better insulators. Right. You notice that, like when you put insulation in the walls in your house, it's not like some tightly packed metal or would kind

of thing. It's this loose, fluffy stuff because it conducts heat less well, and so that's essentially what your body is trying to do. It remembers the time when you your ancestors had much more hair, and it's trying to fluff it up to become less conductive of of heat and to insulate skin better from the cold. Now, of course we don't have much of that hair anymore, but we still have this reaction, so we get the bumps,

but without the insulation. Here's the seasonal fact. I know you have heard what time of year do people commit suicide the most? It's winter, right, Yeah, well I believe that is the that is sort of the common idea that's out there. Yeah, I mean it sounds very truthy. Yeah, yeah, I mean we it's it's it kind of goes back to the idea of arctic madness. Right. It feels appropriate like it gets a little cold here in Atlanta and we start thinking, oh this this weather is driving me crazy.

It's it's it's it's depressing me, or it's making me behave radically, it makes me want to just shut myself up in my home and not encounter the outside world again. Yeah, it makes your mind connect naturally to all kinds of anecdotes that you have within, you know, some part of your long term memory, stories about what it's like to be in the in the Antarctic research stations, or or

these stories about perlernarek Um. But yeah, it turns out that this very truthy sounding fact that more people commit suicide in the winter is not, in fact a fact, it is a myth and yearly suicide rates do not generally peak in the winter, but they do appear to have a seasonal peak, and it's not in the winter, it's in spring and early summer. So how much more suicide is there in the spring? Well, it varies a

lot between societies. But according to Fotus Papadopoulos, a professor of psychiatry at Upsala University in Sweden, quote, if we take winter as a baseline, there is a twenty to sixty higher suicide rate during spring. That's a pretty big difference. I mean, that doesn't sound like noise. That sounds like

a real effect. Yeah, I mean it. I'm hesitant to try and make too much sense out of it, you know, but it does lend itself to interpretations of Right, if the winter is about survival, then what happens when you get to the other side of that survival. It's like like managing to cross a rickety bridge age and you relieve that you made it across that bridge without plummeting into the abyss. But here you are on the other side and you have how many more leads to walk.

You know, um, it's I can imagine the other hardships of life kind of opening up again for you in a new and perhaps more profound way. Yeah, I can see that too. Now. There have been scientific attempts to look into what causes this spike in spring and early

summer for suicide attempts. There was, for example, a massive literature review combining the findings of studies from nineteen seventy nine until two thousand eleven that had to do with seasonal variations in suicide, and that was by wu uh Uku, Saga and postlach In in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in twelve. In the major findings uh were Here are a few of them, I guess.

Many studies have replicated the finding of a spring suicide p gruffly in the April May June region of the calendar, and this peak does not exist equally in all populations, but shows up with varying intensity among many or most. There are also summer peaks for some populations. In most studies, winter months actually have the lowest rates of suicide of the entire year, so when it's the coldest is when

suicide happens. The least um. However, despite massive amounts of research, the relationship between seasonal change and suicide behavior is still not very well understood, like what would cause these seasonal variations. So here are a few of the ideas that have been studied. One of them is changes in sunlight and temperature. Some studies seem to have demonstrated there's actually a positive correlation between suicide and exposure to sunlight. That seems kind

of counterintuitive, but these findings are also disputed. However, a peak in late spring and early summer would correlate to the longest days of the year. Also, this could be informed by findings that side is more common among rural populations than urban ones, and more common in outdoor workers than indoor workers. It also varies a lot by geographical regions, so spring peaks are found all over the place, but

are a varying intensity in different countries. For example, there was a n study that found a very narrow seasonal fluctuation in Canada, so the ratio of average spring to winter suicide rates was one point zero eight, so barely more in spring. But in the same study in Portugal the ratio was one point seven, so you know, getting close to double as many in spring. Here's another really odd one. A series of findings seemed to link suicide

rates to spring allergies and too people with allergies. For example, one of these studies was a two thousand four study that found a correlation between the times of year with peak suicide rates and the times of year with the greatest concentration of allergenic tree pollen in the air. UH. And that study was called tree poll and peaks are

associated with increased non violent suicide and women. Now, while these changes show up in a lot of countries, UH, there does seem to be a flattening effect in recent decades. Like while suicides are still frequent, recent studies in England, Wales, Hong Kong, Sweden, and Denmark shows seasonal variation on suicide rates. UH, really flattening coming down, So there's not as much variation from time of the year to another time of the year.

But in other countries like Finland, in the United States, you have a much more persistent seasonal pattern still peaking in the spring. So that just makes me think about the rural and un urban distinction that you touched on earlier. You know, like maybe these are these maybe feeling in the US. I mean, certainly there's a urbanization going on in in all major Western cultures, but maybe there's still enough of a rural base to to support like an

uptake in rural environments. Yeah, A lot of times people don't think to think about suicide rates as like a public health question, something that really should be researched and understood, and if you can understand the underlying causes and why and when these things happen, that you could treat it like a disease that can be treated and prevented. Indeed, but to get back to the winter thing, the winter

suicide myth, I'd say that is thoroughly busted. Not only is it not the peak for suicide in the year, it is generally the lowest time in the entire year for suicide. And I wonder why this myth is so persistent, because I think if you'd asked me before I looked

into it, I would have thought, oh, yeah, yeah, wintertime. Well, I think part of it, especially here in the United States and in other Western countries, that there's the link with the holidays, with Christmas, with especially the modern westernized American Christmas, where it's all, it's not as much about surviving the winner, and it's more about this just unrealistic level of happiness that you're supposed to feel every time somebody jingles a jingle bell uh, and and it rarely

matches up with our experience of life, much less wide life during during the winter. I think that's exactly right. I think that there there are two different levels on which this myth is sticky. One is the the sort of straightforward truthiness feeling, which is that in the winter it's darker, it's colder, and we just associate these atmospheric feelings with low mood, and then we associate low mood

with things like suicide. But then also there's the contrarian truthiness, where we think, oh, it's you know, the time when everybody's telling you to be happy, and actually that's just making everybody more miserable and you're you're trying to get ready to for the holidays, and this is leading to all this commercialism and stress and having go to the shopping mall, and so there's a sort of like folk level gut feeling that this is just driving everybody nuts

and making people miserable and unhappy. Well, and it's also wrapped up in some of the culture of our Christmas as well. I mean, It's a Wonderful Life is one of our key American holiday films, and it is about a guy who is depressed and contemplating suicide at Christmas. Yeah, you forget that's a bridge jumping movie. Yeah, but that on some level it's basically letting it telling everybody, Hey, like, suicide at Christmas is uh, it's it's part of Christmas.

It's in it's in the Christmas movie that you're watching. So it's Christmas as a as an American holiday since of some weirdly mixed messages. Yeah, though, of course we should say no matter what time of year it is, if you are having suicidal feelings or ideation, you should reach out to somebody. You should talk to somebody, let them know. That's right. And hey, if anyone out there needs to make a call, you can contact the National Suicide Preventional Lifeline at two seven, three eight to. Now

here's a cold weather question, does true or false? Robert? Going out in cold weather can cause you to catch cold. Ah. We hear this one all the time. Right, go out in that cold you'll catch your death. But you also here nowadays from you know, your skeptical say like that is a myth, not true. It's actually more complicated than true or false. It seems to be somewhere in between. Now. Of course, we know that the cold itself will not make you sick. Winter is traditionally known as cold and

flu season. But we do not live in the you know, the miasma theory of disease age anymore, where people thought that disease was caused by bad air. We live in the age of the germ theory of disease. So the cold weather itself does not directly cause infection. But winter months do seem to put us at risk for these seasonal epidemics, and it's not an illusion. There are studies that show that that these these infection rates really do go up in the winter, and there are several reasons

people have hypothesized why that might be. A commonly cited hypothesis is that people spend more time indoors huddling together in winter months due to the cold weather, and physical proximity to other people and touching and stuff can increase your transmission rate of infectious diseases. Of course, your general really more likely to catch something from somebody you're sharing a blanket and cuddling with. But there there are also

other mechanisms that might be operative. For example, there was a twenty sixteen study from the Yale School of Medicine that found that some of the human body's viral defense mechanisms are simply less effective at lower temperatures. But there's actually a much deeper way that your body adapts to the germ threats of winter months. The change in seasons is in your d n A. Alright, we're gonna take

a quick break and we come back. We will dive into this, uh, this alarming notion that that that winter changes our genetic expression than alright, we're back. So we tend to think of our d n A is being safe from the winter. I would think, you know, I

had not really thought about this previously. I mean, you tend to think of your d n A as being safe from pretty much everything except you know that which would cause mutations or uh maybe maybe maybe you're not safe from cosmic rays, maybe you're not safe from X ray bombardment, but you are at least safe from the

seasons down in your very DNA. But no, it turns out our our d N A. While the basic genome does not tend to change the way it's expressed, does tend to change based on a lot of different factors, and I'll explain what that means in a minute. So a study in Nature Communications found that roughly twenty three percent of the genes found in human white blood cells and adipose tissue change their expression depending on the change

in seasons. Now, if you if you've read about this before, you might have seen headlines like your DNA changes in the winter that maybe you know, if you're being generous, that could be thought of as correct, but it could also meeting misleadingly implied that the literal code of the genome is altered, and that's not the case. So we should explain the difference between the genome itself and gene expression.

Your genes are sequences of DNA code found in the cells in your body, and the genes generally don't change unless there's a mutation. What changes is the expression of individual genes and gene expression. Whenever you hear gene expression, you can sort of think of that as genes doing something. Gene expression is when the code inside a gene is chemically translated into a product like a protein or a string of RNA, usually a protein that does something inside

the body. And gene expression is how the genome makes things happen. So if there are changes in which genes get expressed and when this leads to changes in the body, Yeah, I often think about this and about the you know, just epigenetic changes in general as being kind of like these settings in a video game, particularly in a simulation game, where you have all these various realism toggles you can switch on and off, and they ultimately affect how the

game manifests to the player. Yeah, where you can think about, I mean to follow the video game and alogy. Another way you can think of it is that the code of the video game does not change. That like the programming code that creates the game is set, but different parts of it are executing at different times, and so the expression is sort of like the execution of a

line of code. So what's the chemical basis for gene expression. Well, genes are expressed when they get exposed to another chemical called messenger RNA or mrn A, and the mRNA reads the code and the genes and uses it to set off a process that creates proteins that lead to changes within and between cells. So the question then would be, how come mr and A isn't constantly reading all of our genes at once all the time and setting off these these protein creating processes all the time. Well, here's

one reason. There are tons of genes inside a cell nucleus of a eukaryotic organism, and the body fits them in there by coiling them tightly around alkaline protein means called his stones. Now, if you've seen a picture of this before, it's often compared to beads along a string. That's kind of what it looks like. The DNA associates very easily with the histones because the DNA is negatively

charged and the his stones are positively charged. And a gene from this coiled strand of DNA that coils around the his stones gets expressed when it picks up a methyl marker, which makes it loosen from the his stone core. And once it loosens and uncoils, the DNA can match up with mRNA and then undergo expression, which, as we said,

generally means making proteins, which means something is happening. So all kinds of triggers lead to changes in gene expression, which genes are are sort of like being brought forth to manufacture their will on the world. One example, it's been shown in a lot of context that some gene expression changes occur over the natural day night cycle. In the morning, you're going to be expressing some genes, and

then at night you're going to be expressed others. Uh So, for example, if you're studying what genes are being expressed in a sample of tissue, it could actually matter what time of day you take the sample. So one of the authors of this twenty sixteen study I mentioned earlier, the Cambridge immuno geneticist Chris Wallace, told Wired magazine in a good article about this quote. We knew that there's

some genes that changed their expression throughout the day. Then it hit us, lam, what is the effect on genes of the length of the day throughout the year. Great piece of deductive reasoning. So of course it's leading to experiments.

Wallace inter colleagues compared findings from several studies which tracked gene expression in populations from different times of the year in both the northern and southern hemispheres and the countries where Germany, Australia, the US, the UK, Iceland, and the Gambia. And of course, as we we've said before, this matter is because in the northern and southern hemispheres, winter and summer are reversed, so in the summer hemisphere it's summer

January and winter in July. And this helps because it allows you to isolate that any differences really were caused by natural changes in the seasons and not probably by human cultural factors like the calendar or the month or something like that. So they found that in these white blood cells there were thousands of genes that showed seasonal

changes in expression. Uh, there were two thousand, three hundred eleven summer genes they identified and two thousand, eight hundred and twenty six winter genes, and it looks like most of these changes had to do with immune system function. Now, of course they were looking at white blood cells as if the immune system were ramping up inflammation responses to

deal with the germ threat of winter. And in the samples from tropical Gambia, the changes for immune system gene expression came not during winter, but during the rainy season when people are exposed to the greatest risk of malaria.

So what we're seeing here is that the body does have some kind of seasonal changes in the way that it expresses your genome, different parts of the code that makes you you get activated depending on what time of the year it is, uh and on you know, not so much what time of the year it is, but the seasonal triggers around you in the environment. And one of the things that this is very tightly controlling is the inflammation response. Now, the inflammation response, as we know,

it helps keep us from getting sick. It's very primitive, ancient type of immune response. It's not very pleasant, but it does help keep you know, germs and stuff from destroying your body. But as we also know, inflammation can lead to all kinds of other health problems. It can lead to metabolic problems, it can lead to arthritis. You know,

it's implicated in wide arranging medical problems. So this sort of opens up a door into a whole arena of new research that could take place about how our genes are not just helping defend us from these seasonal epidemics,

but also in how they put us at risk. Now, earlier we mentioned the idea that there are certain like cardiovascular problems that people have increased risk of of of dying from in the winter, and this also seems to indicate that there are inflammation related problems that could really put us at risk in these months, and maybe studying the way our genes change over the seasons could help

figure out ways help us figure out ways to protect us. Now, a question in the study, of course, is what exactly triggers the change in gene expression. Is it the temperature, is it the length of the days and how much the body has access to sunlight? Or could it be something else? I mean, maybe it's not impossible. There could be some kind of cultural practices that that trigger this, but it doesn't seem likely because it's manifested across so

many different countries and regions. It would be different. There there's a group where they eat a particular pickled fish during the winter, and you could you could potentially blame it on that one pickled fish totally. So the traditions that cast us as seasonal shape shifters are in anyways literally correct. There are ways in which our bodies are adapting to these seasonal changes to make us a different kind of animal when the winter sets in isn't that interesting?

I mean it not only does it back up this idea that there there is a winter self in some ways, but it also just drives home the the ever changing nature of of of the human being. You know, not just not just in in our thoughts and our memories, but not just in the aging of the body and the acquiring and the healing of injuries or or illnesses, but that our our body is going through cyclical phases in order to keep up and thrive within the seasons

of our environment, even if we don't actually hibernate. Now here's the question I really want to understand. What is the biological mechanism that forces humans to continually make new adaptations of Charles Dickens a Christmas care starring the cast of pre existing chises of cartoons. Ah, well, you got flint Stones, You've got Mr Magoo, you got uh. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. But there's like a Jetson's Christmas Carol? Was it really a flint Stone's Christmas Carol? There's a

flint Stones. There's famously a Mickey Christmas Carol. H yeah for me, muppets, muppets for me. I really only have two that I get really only one. It's got to be the musical Scrooge. One of the few musicals that I enjoy, uh to this day is is the Albert Finney. Albert Finney is Scrooge, and that the film all has wonderful songs, and also like the one of the darker visions of the supernatural elements found in a Christmas Carol,

like that the ghosts are all tremendously frightening. Um Alec Guinness plays Marley, and I believe that even muscular devil show up. There's a scene where scroogees in Hell and having to deal with the chains of Hell, and you have all these muscular red devils up trooping around. That's awesome. Have you ever seen the nineteen forty nine vincent Price Christmas Carol? What? No, I had no idea how he ever played No, no, no no. I don't get excited.

He doesn't play Scrooge. He just shows up holding a book and he's like, well, Charles Dickens and sort of introduces it. It's it's worth a watch. It's on YouTube. It's hilarious. It's uh, probably the worst adaptation of a Christmas Carol. I've ever seen a list of issues include it spells Ebeneezer wrong in the opening credits, It gets the title of the book wrong. It is called the Christmas Carol. You can sometimes see like the wrong side of set walls, so there's just like beams holding up

the walls of the set. And their Scrooge is this guy who's like chrish mesh bag heysh. Now, now here's the here's a question. You see so many different actors who've played Dracula, so many different actors have played Scrooge. But how many actors can you think I've have played both? The only one that comes to my mind off hand is Jack Palin's whoa that's was Michael Caine ever Dracula? Oh? No, I don't think he was. It seems like it seems like he could. He easily could have been. Kine could

have played Dracula. But I go through the others, like, um, has uh Albert Finney ever played Dracula? Knowledge has has Luis or Don ever played Scrooge? No, I don't think there's ever been a French Scrooge. Likewise, like all the Draculas and all the Scrooges, there seems to be very little overlap between the two roles much, you know, much less the characters. I don't think anyone's ever made a

Christmas Carol with Dracula in it was Gary Oldman. Ever Scrooge, I don't think he was, But again, there's no reason why he shouldn't. He's played Churchill, and I believe what Albert Finny has played Churchill. So it's there's there's every reason in the world that you would see more crossover between these two roles. You here about the upcoming Christmas Carol with Christian Bale as Scrooge. Is that true? Is that real? No? I'm missing But because Christian Pale Bale

ever played Dracula, I guess not. He's got to choose, right, there's some hidden, like hooded council that decides whether you get to play Scrooge or Dracula. And unless you're Jack Palents, you you cannot choose both. We're just digging ourselves deeper

and deeper. All right, Well, this week I feel like we've we've really had a fabricous exploration here of of how we think about our winter selves, how we culturally frame our winter selves in some cases, and then what our body is actually doing during the winter, What is it doing differently, how is it adapting, how is it behaving within different parameters, and what those two different things

may have to do with each other. Yeah. So I would suggest for listeners out there, one thing you might want to try this winter is come up with the new winter name for yourself. Yes, I like this, Either an adaptation of your existing name or just something altogether new but fitting for the winter you. Maybe it's just your name but with a W as the first letter, Yeah, so woe and Wobert. Yeah. Or it could be more like really like more of a title that defines what

you do. Like he who binge watches Netflix and eats chili, that's sort of a thing. He who foolishly buys fresh tomatoes in the winter, that's a good one. But hey, we'd love to hear from all of you out there. What would your winter name be? And indeed, how is the winter you different from the summer you? Do you experience seasonal effective disorder? Uh? Do you think you have seasonal effective disorder? Either way, let us know we would love to hear from you. Oh, and especially if we

have any listeners with Kua Kwakuwa heritage. I would love to hear from you with your thoughts about these winter ceremonial traditions. Indeed, in the meantime, you can always check out past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. You'll also find links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler and Instagram. As always, big thanks to our audio

producers Alex Williams and Tary Harrison. And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com the biggest