How Bipolar Disorder Works

all good. The original gang. That's going pretty good. Man, How are you? I'm great? Good, Okay, then let's get to it. Yeah, do you have a good set up for this one? It's sorry now, No, I think it kind of speaks for itself. I mean it's bipolar disorder. Like we it's been around long enough, and I think it's been um exposed enough. People have been educated enough

that you know, anything I do would just seem jackasses. Uh. While we were just talking before we hit record about whether not we know anyone who has bipolar disorder, and I think most people probably know someone. You might not even know it, but um, I definitely like I had a very specific friend in college. You had it, and that was you know, it was like twenty, so it was you didn't know about that stuff when you were twenty at least I didn't. So it was very weird.

And that's first time I've ever heard the term. And uh, you know, he fit the profile as far as being super up and uh, full of life and energy one moment and then super down and very troubled to say the least. And this was these are words I'm using from my twenty year old self. You know, I just thought, man, he's like he's super super happy or now he's super down.

But that's this sort of a rudimentary way to describe it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean that is bipolar to order in a nutshell, And that's why they used to call it manic depressive disorder too. Yeah. When did they stop that? I think maybe in the nineties. It seems like to

me it sounds about right. Um, and you're you're not too far off from everybody knowing somebody with bipolar disorder, because apparently about five point seven million adults in the US are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I think three percent of the population worldwide is estimated to suffer from it. Yeah, and you said adults. Um, it can manifest itself in children, but generally, UM, teenage, mid teenage years and up is when you're going to first start seeing signs of it. Yeah,

fifteen to twenty five from what I understand in general. Um, And as you said, Chuckers, like the the condition of bipolarity UM is characterized by intense, frequent swings from very very happy to very very sad. And it's much beyond the average person's mood swings. Because I mean, like if if you're fifteen years old and you're listening to this and you're like, well, sometimes I'm unhappy and then other times I'm said, that's normal. Um, this is far beyond normal.

Like where you are in either case, like you say, super up or super depressed. Um, it's nowhere near what you are normally. And in some cases of the most severe bipolar disorder, there is no normal. It's either totally one way or totally the other, and the person suffering from it to swings back and forth, maybe over the course of a couple of weeks, UM, and lives like that. Yeah. Uh sadly, UM, Like we have a couple of stats

about the effects. We'll get too early here. H you're less likely to have a job if you are bipolar. That seems really high. Yeah. Um, ten times more likely to abuse alcohol or drugs, which is as a cyclical effect because alcohol and drugs are really rough on you if you have bipolar disorder. Well, yeah, they can trigger a swing one way or the other. Yeah. I saw that in my friend actually in college fu. Yeah, and of bipolar patients, uh successfully commit suicide out of who

try it, and those numbers are startingly high. Yeah, yeah, that's very high. That's start startlingly startling. Okay, um, so let's talk about this. What's the what is I've already kind of given a rough overview, but let's dig into the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Yeah. They're basically, um, they characterize two swings, mania and depression. If you're having a manic episode, you're gonna be a great mood, You're gonna be high on life, you're gonna have a lot of energy.

You're probably gonna be talking really fast. And it's called area. So what log area? What's that excessive talking? Talkativeness? Oh yeah, um, just really fast thoughts like everything. What was that movie with brad Cooper and de Niro, Oh, Silverlings Playbook? No, the other one, and you're gonna say that, although that is what other movie of those two been in together, the one with um where you take a pill and you can like tap into more of your brain, which

is de Niro. Isn't that too? Yeah, I don't know the name of that movie. I know what you're talking about. It wasn't a very good movie, but exceptional or amazing or I can't remember. This is at the point when people are yelling into their car stereo, including Bradley Cooper. Yeah, he's like, you idiot. Yeah, And I can't believe I

just forgot about Superlians Playbook because that directly covers this. Yeah, but what I was talking about was the manic He was almost mannek in that other movie where just ideas all that I'm at a hyper speed and he just couldn't do them fast enough. So that's characteristic of a manic episode. Sorry, Bradley Cooper. Uh, you're distracted, you don't maybe need as much sleep, you're restless, you're puritable, you

might want to have a lot of sex. Like everything's just uh, magnified, I think, yeah, and with a manic episode, they're often like all of this is often accompanied by a sensation of euphoria. So most people who suffer from bipolar disorder don't go seeking treatment when they're in a manic state, right, because they can like that. Yeah, for some people a manic state, you can have all these things, but it's instead of accompanied by euphoria, it's accompanied by irritability, uh,

quickness to anger. So it's not all it's not all fun and games for everybody. But for the most part, if you're in a manic episode and you're bipolar, you're you enjoy the manic episodes way more than you enjoy the depressive eppisodes. Yeah, and I think both are super rough on friends and family because in the manic state, you you don't know quite what you're gonna get, you know, right, well, like you may you engage in um very risky behavior. You may make a bunch of risky investments, may buy

a lot of stuff. Um, it can go so far as to uh, you can have psychotic symptoms. So in a manic episode where you're displaying psychotic symptoms, you may think you are God or totally UM, infallible, untouchable, can do no wrong, and then that can feed into the symptoms of you know, engaging in very risky behavior. You can even hallucinate like full on see things. Yeah, you

can suffer from delusions and hallucinations. So the d s M says that if you have a certain number of manic symptoms UM for at least one week, then that is considered a manic episode. So that has kind of changed apparently with the d s M five. This is ds M four stuff. With the d s M five, they um really kind of they I think that the prevailing idea was what's with this whole um bipolar other otherwise specified, not otherwise specified. It's just a total cop out,

which we'll get to in a minute. But the idea that there's like this, you don't fit this one or this one, so you fit this generic third. Actually I'm glad that's changed. I think they've kind of dug into diagnosing even more. We changed some of the thresholds and exclusionary criteria and now um it's a it's supposed to

be a little more laser guided UM. But one of the ones, one of the things they did change was that for example, UM, I think as little as five days of an episode is enough to constitute a diagnosis rather than like a week or two weeks or something. Right, that makes sense, yeah, um. And then you have hypomania, which is sort of like mania light UM, just a less intense version of mania. UM. So that's the mannic swing. The depressive side of the coin uh is exactly what

you think, but like amplified by a million. Like you're not just sad, you feel despair, and your sluggish and you can't focus, and you're restless and you're irritable. Um. These are where the suicidal thoughts are coming. So it's it's not your garden variety depression that you might feel on a day to day basis, because we all feel that that's right. And you might also experience UM mixed symptoms,

which is called a mixed episode. So for example, you might have UM like a lot of intense energy, but you might also be suffering from feelings of utter despair, which sounds like a horrible combination. Um. And basically you can take stay any mania and then add um just some some of the depressive like suicidal thoughts managed suicidal thoughts, right, that would be a mixed episode, right, and then you have something called rapid cycling, which is uh, when these

swings are presenting themselves. Do you know what d S M Five says? Like, Uh, I couldn't find that it had a lot of um changes to the rapid cycling. I think that what they found was that UM drugs that doesn't necessarily respond to drugs very well. And they've they've kind of started to understand rapid cycling a little more. But I don't know what they changed with the diagnostic criteria for that. Well, here they characterize it by a

year of at least four episodes of mania, hypomania or depression. Right, so like if you have four episodes in a year, you've you've got rapids. Apparently that's rapid. I think it can be a lot more rapid than that. I think like that's the minimum to be considered rapid cycling. Alright, So what are the different types of bipolar disorder today? There's definitely bipolar one, which is essentially your your life is going from one end of the spectrum to the other.

There's not periods in between really where you're um, where where you're stable. Right, that's the most severe obviously, Yeah, you have bipolar to which um the sequel that's right. Uh. That means you have at least one episode of depression and one at least one hypomanic episode, but you could feel, you know, somewhat stabilized in between, which is a big

differentiation apparently between one and two. Um. And then, like we said, there used to be bipolar disorder no, not otherwise specified the cop out right, and it was there was a lot of people who were just kind of fitting into this and weren't necessarily getting the right diagnosis.

And I guess they've expanded the criteria um for bipolar one and two, and then they've also kind of looked into, um, massive depressive disorder uh and then said, well, you you, this has some aspects of mania as well, and that's technically a bipolar disorder too. So they kind of did away with it a little bit, I think as they thought they were looking bad. Yeah, it's so hard to category I mean, I know, they take a lot of heat.

It's tough to categorize mental illness because it's so different for everyone, and well, a lot of people criticize the approach. The basis of the d s M is tell me how you're feeling, which is flawed in and of itself to begin with, because subjective reporting is just completely unreliable. Yeah,

but you can't take a blood test. And and then secondly to to to further subjectively interpret those subjective self reports uh into supposed you know criteria and then saying well, you have XX and X, but you don't have X, so technically you're not bipolar, which means you don't have

your insurance won't cover these meds that you need. The whole system is very screwed up, which is why they're hoping to do things like create blood test that's say, ah, you have bipolar one, and it's because of this UM, these neurotransmitters are messed up, so you will respond very

well to this specific dose of this medicine. I don't think we're more than ten years fifteen years away from it, but it's it's gonna be a long, horrible ten or fifteen years for people who are suffering the most from bipolar disorders. That can't come fast enough. Uh. And then the final um unless that's gone away, to psyclothymia, is that's still around, that is the least severe, and that is um at least two years of hypomania and milder

depression swings. And I think also that's I believe it's still around, but I think it's um it's changed a little too. And I think that um. Apparently the child psychologists of the field said, you guys, there's a lot of um exuberance and even mania symptoms that are totally normal in adolescents. So let's let's tighten this up a little bit because we don't want kids to be diagnosed with bipolars because their parents think that they're hyper. Right.

Put my fifteen year old on lithium exactly. Yeah. So I think that they managed to kind of change the criteria for cyclothymia, saying this is just above the normal threshold of mood swings. Yeah. Um. So, like we said, they don't know or I don't know if we did, they don't still know what causes it directly, um, nor do they know how the drugs that treat it are. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of like try this out. It's like we know spaghetti will start to stick to

a refrigerator. We don't know exactly why, but let's strow it at the side anyway, but what they do know is that genetics can play a role. You are gonna have an increased likelihood to develop it if someone in your like if your parents had it, let's say, but they also have these odd outliers, like you could be a twin and your twin has bipolar disorder, but you don't, right,

So it's just sort of a mystery still. But yeah, it seems like they that it does have people are genetically predis post and then an environmental factor can trigger their bipolar disorder, like a really rough childhood or a bad life event or something really really good. But a sudden swing in normalcy and a person that is genetically predisposed um to bipolar disorder is what can kick it

off in your life. Yeah. Um, other we already talked about drugs and alcohol that can definitely trigger um seasonal changes. I think we've talked about seasonal effective disorder SAD. Yeah, SAD, which I think I think most people experience a little bit of that, right. But again, if you're genetically predisposed for the way I see it, and this is totally unscientific, but just from researching this, it seems like you you have there's a normal baseline for brain chemistry. Uh. And

it's not a thin line. It's like a pretty good sized block. And it's easy to also get outside of that one way or the other right, and when you are outside of it, you have the symptoms of bipolar disorder. And if you're bipolar one, you're just constantly going from the top to the bottom of that block. And that sounds very scientific and needs to understand the block. Well, I mean maybe not scientific, but easy to understand, okay.

And then if you if you say, have bipolar two, you can exist within that normal range, but you can be knocked out of it, but your brain chemistry is already predisposed to having bipolar disorder by virtue of being able to overproduce or underproduce certain neurotransmitters. That's it, I think will ultimately be the understanding of it. Well, I know, they definitely tie a lot of mental disorders to either

too much or not enough uh dopamine and serotonin. Like it's it's definitely brain chemistry going on, yes, you know, and that's yeah, they think that that's the basically the basis of it is just fluctuations in brain chemistry like super low serotonin during manic and depressive episodes is charted. Yeah, and apparently sarotonin's one of the brain one of the narrow transmitters that are like, everybody calmed down, let's just

keep things stable here. That's what sarotonin is. And you can have too much dopamine, which can result in both mania and depression. Yeah, and I think too much is also present in psychosis too, so hallucinations delusions, that's why you can have those during such a tough thing to try and study, you know. Yeah, I'm reading that. I started that book. John Ronson, the great John Ronson, who listens to our show, by the way, writer of Men who Stare at Goats, oh neat. Yeah, he's a fan.

And hey John Ronson his his book The psychopath Test. Let's started reading that. Yeah, it's super interesting. So far. Is it uh, semi historical fiction? Is it nonfiction? Is it totally fiction? It's sort of a look at how the industry, the mental health industry, tackles mental health. So it's not fiction. Yes, that sounds like it's up my alley. Then, yeah, I should have said nonfiction right off the bat. You're like,

I'm gonna make you guess. Yeah, I will let you. Uh, I'll let you borrow it after a fenshion Actually how about that? Okay, and then I will take you up on that right after these messages. All right, So I guess we can talk a little bit about how it has treated medication wise. Um, it is a long term illness that is is basically looked at as a uh even a lifelong illness for most people, something you have to deal with, uh forever. Yeah, Um, medication wise, lithium

since the nineteen seventies has been the go to. Uh it still is. It's a mood stabilizer and it's gonna help out with both sides of your mood swings and apparently which it works for you, right, And I like, like you said, that's the go to and it typically like people tend to respond to that. Yeah, it's it's a go to for a reason, not just because it was first or that there's a Nirvana song he he was bipolar, right, sure? Um, and uh, there are alternatives

to lithium because not everybody responds to it. Not everybody has a good reaction to it. With even somebody who does respond well to lithium, UM, they have to keep a pretty good eye on your lithium levels in your blood stream, so you have to visit the doctor quite

a bit. The whole point of I guess the rigamar role that you will go through when you're diagnosed with bipolar and say I want to combat this with meds UM is basically shooting blind and using a pragmatic approach to medicating you into saying, Okay, you're reacting well to this one, Let's try a slightly lower dose and see what happens. And with lithium in particularly, they keep an eye on it through through blood tests. But with all meds using used to treat bipolar disorder, they're going to

really kind of like, um, try everything. Yeah, and it's still like how you feeling, Yeah, tell me how you're feeling, not let's do this uh test to read on the screen how you're feeling still yeah, you know uh. And again part of the reason why is because they don't quite know how some drugs work. They just know that they do work for some people, but not everybody. Yeah.

Anti convulsants is another UM another one that they use, and it's also a mood stabilizer and I think that calms down the when your brain is the parts of your brain at least that are ramped up and overacting. Right. One of the ways that it affects that is by um, increasing the amount of GABBA in your brain. You know, gabba kind of What does that stand for? Again, it stands for gamma amino beautyic acid. Obviously, well done, thank you,

It's been a while since I tried to pronounce something hard. Uh. Well, you can use the anti convulsants sometimes, even with lithium. Again, it's can be a cocktail of drugs that you're on. Right, depending on what works for you. A typical anti psychotics can help. Um. They usually use those after they've tried the lithium. I think they tried lithium first, unless you're a teenage girl or a pregnant woman, right. Um. And then uh, the antipsychotics work because um, they affect the

amount of dopamine in your brain. And again, high levels of dopamine can lead to psychotic symptoms, which is why they call the drugs that treat those anti psychotics, right. Um. And then benzodiazepine a k A. Relaxants. I think those are used less, probably because uh, they're addictive or can be addictive. Yeah, and then least the short term used and they yes, they use them to promote healthy sleep.

To um, Like you said, one of the symptoms, especially of mania, is just going without sleep, like you got too much to do and you don't even need it, so you don't sleep. Um. And one of the I guess the presence of gabba or low amounts of gabba, which is a neuro transmitter that's involved in getting sleep. I believe staying asleep too, um kind of underlies this idea that your sleep cycle is off and it's either the result of your bipolar disorder or it's helping to

cause your bipolar disorder. Either way, they found that promoting healthy sleep. For example, there is a thing called dark therapy, which is no exposure to artificial light after dark for a certain amount of time can help promote healthy sleep

and can help stabilize bipolar disorder symptoms. All that makes sense, Well, yeah, the like it always kills me when I see people on Facebook at like three am saying on Facebook that they have insomnia, Like, well, you've got a little shiny bright screen in your face, start by putting that down and see what happens. Um. So yes, So with there's all these little clues out there, Chuck that, like so many pieces of the jigsaw puzzler on the table, they

just haven't been fit together yet, you know. But it seems like there's, um, there's a kind of a hornet's nest out there. I wondered, can you live with bipolar disorder without medication? And apparently there's a big divide in the bipolar community, like there's pro med and anti med And I've seen comparisons between talking about like religion or politics or meds with bipolar people. It's all the same,

like you want to avoid those things to keep things friendly. Um. But I've seen that some people are like, yes, you can live without meds, but you probably can't get too stable without meds. And you get the stable, then maybe you can. But um, there's practically no way to get

the stable without the help of medications. So people who have bipolar story will be like, I've been med free for a year, which is great because it means that they have managed to fight off episodes and triggers, but they've done that through other therapy to not just avoiding treatment. Because if you avoid treatment, not only does the does does your condition get worse, it gets harder to treat. Yeah, yes,

the episodes supposedly definitely get worse. Yes, you go. Uh. Well, there are all kinds of therapies that you use along either in place of your medications or along with and we won't get too much into these because we've gone through most of them before, but cognitive behavioral therapy of course, family therapy, group therapy e c T. We did. We did a whole show on e c T, didn't we. Yeah, we did. That was a good one. Yeah, electro convulsive therapy and UM. One that I hadn't heard of, social

rhythm therapy. I hadn't heard about this either, but it makes utter and complete sense. Yeah, and that has to do with UM. I think getting your yourself and your body on a set schedule is much better for you if you have bipolar disorder, not only just sleep, but just regular regulating your your day and your schedule. Yeah.

And I don't think anybody's suggesting that bipolar disorder is a mind over matter type situation, like I think there are very few mental illnesses that are that more clearly demonstrate the brain based understanding of mental illness than bipolar disorder. Like your neurotransmitters and the chemicals in your brain are

out of whack. It's as simple as that. UM. What these other non medication therapies seek to do, especially the UM the interpersonal and social rhythm therapy and coignitive behavioral therapy, is to get you to confront this thing, to confront your condition and learn to understand it. Like, understand what your triggers are. Understand that you have to have X amount of hours of sleep or night or else you may end up in like a manic episode. Understand that,

like you just can't drink whiskey. Maybe you can have a beer like every couple of weeks or something, but you can't touch whiskey because you'll end up in like a manager a depressed Like, there are triggers out there and for you personally, these are your triggers and if you avoid them, you can stay in that stable range and and learn to live with bipolar disorder. Yeah, you know,

super interesting. Yeah, alright, so right after this break, we're gonna talk about whether or not there's a link between creativity and bipolar disorder. Hey, Chuck, we've got a pretty good website, but not everybody does, even though they might want one, Well, we have a team of people putting it together. We do, but just the everyday person walking around out there has a team of people just waiting to help them get their website together. And then a

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u f F. Alright, buddy. There has long been um debate on whether or not creative people are either more likely to be bipolar or bipolar can lead to creative genius. Yeah, didn't we talk about do we do an episode on that? It wasn't in a Thinking Cat? I think it was in Can this Thinking Cat Make Me a Genius? Episode? Yeah? Trans magnetic stimulation Yeah yeah, yeah, Um, yeah, there's there's that. It's that latent inhibition kind of thing for schizophrenia and creativity. Yeah.

I mean, there's definitely like a laundry list of very creative people throughout the years that suffer from bipolar, from Beethoven to Jimmy Hendrix who wrote Manic Depression, Sylvia Plath, at Garlin, Poe excel Rose is on the list. Yeah, Graham Green Dickens, did I say, Dickens, No, but you just did Francis Ford Coppola, Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys. Yeah, he he really had a terrible episode after um did Smile ever get released and it it just flopped? Well,

it got released recently. I never got released at there, So something happened that set him off. I guess the band, the rest of the band members wanted to go in a different direction. Well, he was obsessed with the Beatles too, and trying to be better than the Beatles. And I mean Smile was up there was pretty good. But yeah, I guess it never got released in maybe that's what triggered his episode and started the dark years. Yeah, and

this was long before anybody understood anything like this. Is prior to the advent of the use of lithium for bipolar disorder. Oh yeah, they didn't come around to the seventies. Uh. So, I have a thing that I like to read. It's a little long, but there's this great article from Slate called what does it feel Like to Have Bipolar Disorder? And it was written by someone named Mills Baker. Uh And it kind of backs up a lot of what we're feeling here, but gives you just a little insight

since uh, we're not. Since we can't talk firsthand, we'll let Mills Baker do it. See mine please. I think only in their extremes, armenia and depression actually unintelligible to ordinary folks. That is, at their utmost intensity, they're unlike anything a normal person experiences. UM, But at most times they're not at all so different from the maximally intense moods that everyone knows, just more so, longer lasting, and disconnected from normative causes. And that seems to be one

of the big points. Is basically what he's saying is that it's not so different maybe than feeling manager depressed yourself, but it's way more intense, it lasts for way longer, and there's may not be a cause, right and not to I don't have bipolar sort of, but it would seem like it's too a debilitating degree, like it affects the rest of your life negatively. Yeah. Um, bipolar is less about short term mood instability than about long term mood cycles. Uh. Instability is a part of it, but

not the only part. Second, the cumulative effected these cycles on the formation of a personality significant, so after a childhood of radically of radically changing interest and attitudes. On such a timeline, one develops a certain excitability, flightiness, distractability, or perhaps that's just me again. It's different for everyone, but it is a major part of being bipolar, the personality that is shaped by a lifetime of intense, fluctuating moods.

So he's taken just a more macro approach. It's gonna make you who you are. You can't just look at the bad mood or the upmood. It's gonna basically form your personality over the years. Yeah, I would imagine. Uh. To know what it feels like is to know the quality of that uh phenomenon logical experiences a bipolar person encounters that an unaffected person does not. I don't think there are many of these going berserk, being creative, having an awful temper, not being able to trust my own

emotional reactions. These have a certain weight when I list them out. Uh, they can even sound unique. But everyone loses it. Everyone has moments of charisma and creativity and success, strength and achievement, and everyone struggles with himself. You may not hallucinate, which this guy does, by the way, but I can bet you understand what it's like for your mind to misbehave and react insanely. If you haven't yet

lost control of your life, just wait. Uh. And for me, the most enduring way that bipolar feels different is in how I cannot trust my reactions. I thought this part was really interesting. When someone says something to you and you recognize it as an insult, for instance, as abuse or abuse, you your react to anger is appropriate and you can commit to it, or you can make some determination based on your values and your reason and choose

a different course of action. I can't even trust the person in that the person even insulted me, So I can't trust my emotional perceptions or reactions. So that's got to make you just feel way out of sorts if you can't even you know, feel like you're trusting your own emotions, right like if you that's one that's the one thing that you have is your how you're feeling about any given situation that makes up your personality and

large part and if that seems flawed to you, that untrustworthy. Uh. And then finally, that is the strangest thing about how it feels after the dust of the actual disorder settles more than a decade in Uh, this guy is talking about his twelve year I think since he was diagnosed after more than a decade in the open, insanity has abated and visits only briefly. The idea that I'm a

secret artist is absurd. What's left is a more less normal life in which I have to emphasize mental hygiene like prioritizing regular sleep, for example, and which I always feel doubt about what I think and feel, as we all probably should anyway. Yeah, so he seems and he's on medication, and uh, it seems like he has a healthy attitude about it. I think it's interesting to hear people talking first person about mental illness. Well, it's I'm sure it's a lot easier for him to talk about

it now too, that he's got it licked. Yeah, or you know, coping with it at least. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. This is a good one. Hopefully it helps some people. Yeah, thanks to Mills Baker for being open to Slate about the disorder. Thanks to Slate and Mills, Mills and Slates. If you want to learn more about bipolar disorder, you can type those words into the search part how stuff works dot com. Uh, it will bring up a very good article and a

bunch of other stuff too. Uh. And since I said very good article, that means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna call this a shark correction. Really. Yeah, remember how we um talked about sharks basically perfected themselves and haven't changed in millions of years? Yeah? Oh yes, yes, I was like, we haven't talked about sharks forever, Now I remember yet. Yeah. Well, there's some brand new findings, which is pretty excited in Jake Hayes from New York

City Sitnizsen. I really enjoyed the Darwin in Natural Selection episodes, guys, and thought you might find this recent study published in the journal Nature. Uh. That is interesting given the example

you gave about sharks. Apparently, contrary to the theory that they have barely changed over the past hundreds or millions of years, they may have evolved significantly actually from their ancient ancestors and may not be the living fossils we thought they were scientists that thought that shark gills were an ancient system that predated modern fish. However, a newly discovered fossil of a shark that dates back million years,

so it's a remarkably different gilt skeleton than modern shark. Uh. This fossil provides evidence that shark gills have evolved over time and that it is actually modern day fish that may be the ones with the old GIL systems. The new GIL system may have changed over time to help sharks sprint after their prey or pry open their jaws to eat larger things. So uh, he said, he just came across this article and I saw it all over the place. Of course, like you know, two weeks after

we recorded. I think it was even like a day or an hour or something. Yeah, I think you're right, But it's pretty cool info. And that is uh. Once again, Jay Hayes from New York City. Nice, thanks a lot, Jake. We appreciate you. And I think a few other people let us know about it too. Yeah, um, but none but Jake was from New York City, so we selected him. Uh. If you want to let us know you're from New York City, we want to hear about it. You can hang out with us outside of the podcast on Twitter

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