Stuff to Blow Your Mind Live: Stranger Science

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, today, we've got a special treat for you.
This is a live episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
recorded on Friday, October six that the Hudson Mercantile in
New York. This was an event associated with New York
Comic Con, not a part of the con, one of
those adjacent happenings. We had a nice, friendly crowd come out.
It was really good to see y'all. And uh so,

(00:20):
without any further ado, here's the episode. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind from housetop work dot com. Hey everybody,
how you doing? Hey, nice cozy crowd. Did everybody grab

(00:43):
some some shirts or some buttons or shirts and buttons?
Stuff is legit free. Yeah. In fact, we don't want
to bring any of it back home, so grab more
of it until there's none. You can't regift it for
Christmas or Halloween. Car for Halloween. Yeah. So this is

(01:04):
the Stuff to Blow your Own podcast. How many of
you guys listen to this show? You know to expect Okay, cool,
But who's a newbie here who's never heard us before?
Get ready? The pressure is uncle I press you then,
uh we're pretty weird. Um, we might make you uncomfortable.
I hope you're who Who's Well, we'll get into this

(01:26):
at the beginning. But yeah, so basically we're recording. This
is gonna publish next week. Uh So we're gonna start
the show like we normally do, and it's recording over there,
and then we'll just proceed as normal and then hopefully
afterwards we'll have a couple of minutes to hang out. Yeah, definitely, Okay, cool,
all right, well let's kick it off. Hey, welcome to

(01:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick. So if
you are not familiar with us, if you're one of
those newbies out there who raised your hand, we are
the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast,
which is a science podcast of the How Stuff Works
office in Atlanta. The core of our show is science,
but we take a pretty interdisciplinary approach, so we get
into philosophy, religion, mythology, history, pop culture of course, and

(02:13):
that's where we're going tonight. So, because we're here at
the same time as New York Comic Con, how many
of you are actually going to New York Comic Con?
So a lot. Okay, we were worried. There was like
confusion about whether or not you could come if you
weren't a part of New York Comic Con. Yeah, were
you confused? I was confused? All right, is anybody here

(02:34):
in costume? No? Yeah? Okay, sort of okay, Um. So yeah,
So we that we were doing this at the same
times New York Comic Cons, So they were like, can
you do something pop culture related? And we talked about
it for a bit um and we decided, hey, how
about the science of the show Stranger Things, because we

(02:54):
have fans of Stranger Things out there. Yeah, let's dude,
raise your hand if you have not seeing Stranger Things. Okay, Okay,
we're gonna try. But we're gonna talk about how science
relates to the show. We might drop a couple of things,
because that's one of the really cool things about Stranger
Things is that, you know, it's a fabulous show that's

(03:17):
chock full of nostalgia, but they do a great job
of bringing some science and some tantalizing pseudoscience, uh into
the show, sometimes just as kind of window dressing, but
but it adds to just the potency of the show. Yeah,
we actually have a quote from a physics expert. Later
on he spoke to them and basically said, those guys

(03:40):
did their homework, so that that made it even more
fun for us to cover this for an episode because
there's a lot to dig into. Right. So season two
is coming up. We're big fans of the show, so
we're gonna talk about a few subjects related to plot
points in the show. We're going to be talking about
Parallel Universe, is government psychic research, and the real life

(04:01):
figure in the history of twentieth century science who we
think inspired. Is it fair to say he's the favorite
character of all three of us? Dr Brenner. Oh yeah,
played by the one and only Matthew Modine. Hey, do
you guys remember when Matthew Modine used to follow us
on Twitter? He did follow us on Twitter for like
a week and a half and when that was like

(04:22):
the highlight of our careers. Uh So, Matthew Modine followed us,
and Robert and I did a high five, and then
like maybe a month later he unfollowed us. And then
a month after that, Stranger Things came out and we
were like, what's going on here? We watched the show
and we were like, wait a minute, Matthew Modine is
playing John C. Lily in this and John C. Lily

(04:43):
is one of our favorites, Like if you ever listened
to the show, we bring him up pretty much every
episode and we have a whole episode all about him. Yeah, yeah,
we do. And some of you might be wondering who
is John C. Lily? What does he look like? Well
I'm gonna explain some of this, but also you all
have tiny pocket computers in your possession. We will not
be a finn did if you look up John C.
Lily or if you need a refresher on what Doctor

(05:04):
Brenner looks like, I will refresh you though. Uh. Doctor Brenner,
of course, played by Matthew Mdeen. Silver hair, as you recall, glorious,
glorious silver hair. Uh you know slim tank. Pardon his hair?
Do you think it's natural? Oh? Yeah, silver, that's the
actual color. Yeah. But Brenner, as he's uh presented in

(05:28):
the show, he's obsessed with, I think, connecting with other minds.
So for part of that show, it's connecting with human minds,
and then it becomes more about connecting with these extra
dimensional minds. Andy he initiates this contact with other people
with extra dimensional beings through an isolation tank, a float
tank and uh and and then uses that float tank

(05:51):
to enhance Eleven's psychic powers. Okay, so give me the
compare and contrast essay, how does that compare with the
real John C. Lily? Okay, So for starters, John C.
Lily invented the isolation tank. Everybody out there, if you've
ever gone and floated somewhere, you can thank John C.
Lily for bringing this into the world. In addition, he
was a pioneer in the field of electronic brain and stimulation.

(06:14):
He mapped the pain and pleasure pathways of the brain,
and he founded an entire branch of science sixploring interspecies communication,
mostly between humans and dolphins. He also got into a
good bit of trouble with all that, but we'll touch
on that a little bit later on. He also really
dirty details, So you should you should listen to the
episode that we did just right. We did an episode

(06:36):
a year ago. I'll give you I'll give you a
quick hint and then we'll just move on because we're
not going to talk about this here. But it involves
sexual relations with dolphins. And it's pretty great. Yeah, they're
not really between Lily himself, but one of Lily at
the time was too busy taking massive quantities that all
us to be floating himself. He didn't have time for

(06:58):
that stuff. Yeah, and and and using this experience to
try and connect with the alien intelligence of dolphins. So
we have these two, these two figures right and on
again Brenner on the show is this, uh, you know,
very well put together an old guy in the old
fashioned suit. If you look up pictures of Lily, you
will find images of a man and like an older

(07:20):
man in brightly colored like loud shirts and sometimes the
coon skin cap. He dresses up like he's like about
to fight the Battle of the ALBUMO. Yeah. He he
is dressed like you would expect a counter culture Timothy
Leary esque figure to dress. And so you might say, well,
Brenner doesn't look anything like that. What possible connection could

(07:40):
there be? Well, I was looking at a two thousand
sixteen interview with Observer dot Com, and Matthew Modine himself
mentioned that the Duffer Brothers originally envisioned Brenner as quote,
an unshaven man in jeans and plaid shirts. And then
Modine worked with the Duffers to sort of flesh this
out and change it. Uh. Modine says that he drew
on elements from Anna Atome, Alfred Hitchcock, Carry Grant, and

(08:03):
Lawrence Olivier and stuff to blow your mind. Well, he
clearly clearly followed us on Twitter solely so that we
could help him figure out how to dress for this
TV show alleged. Allegedly, Uh, Matthew, are you here? No,
I don't think he showed. Not yet. Well, hopefully by
the help him in like him in might be late. Okay.
The crazy part though, is that this this version of

(08:26):
a lily S figure that we get on Stranger Things.
He may not resemble that counterculture uh John C. Lily,
but he definitely resembles the establishment John C. Lily that
came before him. So there's like a John cy Lily
arc where he first he's this buttoned up guy, and
then later he becomes this cross between sort of like
George Lucas in the seventies. And if you've ever seen

(08:47):
the Mystery Science Theater episode Final Sacrifice, remember the old
prospector Pepper Pepper. Yeah, yeah, he did kind of look
like Pepper but when he was younger, he was just
kind of this square looking but scary I will say,
scary government scientists. Um, let me just take a minute
to to roll through some of the uh, basically, the

(09:09):
background of John C. Lily So. John C. Really earned
his physics degree from cal Tech in ninety eight, his
doctor in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania nWo, and
as a faculty member he studied biophysics and psychoanalysis at
the University of Pennsylvania, and he was primarily interested in
the physical structures of the brain and the seat of

(09:30):
the conscious self. So even when he was before he
got all um enlightened, uh, he was, he was still
very interested in connecting with other minds. That was always
this thing, whether it's physically or via the use of
LSD later on. But despite the unorthodox nature of his research,
he did do a fair amount of working for the man, right, Yes,

(09:51):
a fair amount. Basically he wanted to pursue his own
agenda and if the man was going to use him to,
you know, to create ways to torment and and extract
information from Cold World War spies, and he was on
board until he started cutting up the brains of macaques
and dolphins. Yeah. So he did this for about a
decade working for the National Institutes of Mental Health or NIM. Uh.

(10:15):
Did he make those really smart rats? Well, mostly he
worked on maccaux uh. And he had he did a
lot of invasive cortical visa section. So again, not already
he's off to some kind of nefarious work. I think
a lot of us would agree. He had a pretty
high security clearance. J Edgar Hoover allegedly knew him by name,
and his projects that he was involved with included reprogramming

(10:38):
or brainwashing, sleep deprivation, and the operant control of animals
via wires and planted in their brain. Yeah. So some
pretty scary stuff. And according to de Graham Burnett's excellent
O Ryan article A Mind and Water, Lily's unpublished paper
Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as reconnaiss sen and

(11:00):
Intelligence Devices UH included this quote. Uh he wrote of
quote A Coort Covort, he wrote a covert and relatively
safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain for the
quote push button control of the totality of motivation and
of consciousness. So, but just to be clear here, he

(11:22):
didn't put electrodes in the brain of eleven year old
girls with shaped heads. Uh, there's no arts that he actually,
you know, did any of this to human being, But
he was he was up for it. If if I think,
if he would have been given me okay, is like
you feel like putting an implant in somebody's brain this weekend, Yeah,
he would have been. He would have been game because

(11:43):
you really get the impression that he was. He was
all in on anything scary the government wanted him to
do so long as it, you know, pursued his interest
in connecting with other minds. This ended up leading him
to conducting some experimentation with dolphins in Florida, and it
was here where he began to have this empathic connection
with dolphins. He began to like, he performed a vivisection

(12:05):
on on a dolphin, and due to some of the
quirks of dolphin physiology, you could not actually put the
dolphin under for this, so it was like a live,
conscious davisection of the dolphin's brain. And this this had
a profound impact on Lily. He ended up going down
this path um of promoting the welfare of dolphins, promoting
the the higher intelligence of dolphins. So he really he

(12:29):
really helped bring about a cultural shift in how we
perceive this animal, that it's not just another dumb animal
in the water, but it's something that we should we
should value, that we should protect even and we wouldn't
have we wouldn't have Flipper if it were not for
John C. Lily. So actually, this is a good point.
I probably should have brought this up earlier. But there
are two movies that you've probably seen that are very

(12:51):
heavily based on John C. Lily's life, the first of
which is Altered States. Uh, and we'll talk more about
that later when we get into the isolation to banks.
But has anybody seen the film The Day of the
Dolphin with George C. Scott? No one, Scotts all right,
so this isn't you go find it. This is a
movie where George C. Scott essentially plays John C. Lily

(13:13):
and he teaches dolphins to talk and and to love
and to love. Yeah, so like they call him fa
he's their father and they say things like fall loves pa. Uh.
It's great. Go watch it if you want to see
George C. Scott just hanging out with dolphins. But the
other thing that we wouldn't have without him. He didn't.
He didn't influence this movie in terms of that it

(13:35):
was about him. But the creature from the Black Lagoons, right, Yeah,
the guy who played the creature worked on Flipper and
worked with John C. Lily while he was down in Florida,
So yeah we can. We can thank him for the creature.
And I would argue that if if anyone ever gets
around to actually remaking the creature from the Black Lagoon,

(13:55):
they should. They should take inspiration from John C. Lily
story and from Altered States and use that to bring
us a proper creature film. Yeah, you get a creature
from the lack Black Lagoon with LSD and isolation tanks
and dolphins throwing some dolphins. I'm on board. Yeah, yeah,
it'd be great Instead of like Tom Cruise running around,
I want to just doing exposition for thirty minutes. Wait,

(14:19):
so I have a question about y'all's predictions for Stranger Things.
Do you think in upcoming seasons we're going to see
Matthew Modine's character follow the same arc as John C.
Lily throughout his life, So will he coming back? He'll
come back in future seasons Hawaiian shirts, Beard long ponytail
gained a significant amount of weight doing you know LSD

(14:41):
orgies and stuff. Yeah, I hope, so, I hope by
season four he is is wearing the coonskin hat and
and helping the kids out. So I didn't think about this,
but I mean, you know, this is a ending was
left open. Let's put it that way. Maybe he's from
a parallel universe, this other Matthew Modine. Oh my goodness,

(15:01):
we could have multiple um doctor Brenners in one versions
of Brenner and Lily together at once. I like it
floating in a tank taking LSD. Thank So I want
to shift now to explore a different element of stranger things,
which is of course the government psychic research being conducted
at Hawkins Laboratory, Hawkins National Lab. I think in the

(15:24):
show that they say is being carried out by the
Department of Energy. Uh so I want I'm gonna put
you in a scenario. See if you can go into
this place with your mind. Imagine you are a Defense
Department analyst in about the spring of nineteen seventy and
so you're just gonna be washed head to toe in
cold war paranoia. You've heard these rumors about a secret

(15:46):
electronic warfare device saimed at the American embassy in Moscow,
And there are also these rumors about weird LSD mind
control experiments going on over at c I A. You
get the sense that we're in an age of unconventional
war are fair, where these strange new technologies are going
to change the balance of power across the globe and
you don't want to fall behind. Sounds like right now, Yeah,

(16:10):
except I guess a little less focused on like social media,
and you know it's Facebook for drones and more on
like controlling people's minds and killing people with electronics with
electromagnetic beams. Well, the thing is in an age before
social media, Like let me, social media is kind of
this weird and sorcery that connects all of these minds together.

(16:32):
And before you had that, you the only thing you
had was the possibility, however distant of of psychic communication, right,
I mean, why would we need to do psychic research
now when you can just get in somebody's news feed? Yeah? Anyway,
I mean sadly, I mean the research is it's remarkably
cold alter someone's mind through I mean, not in a

(16:53):
science fictional way, but in a very very scary real
way that went to a scary place. Okay, now let's
go back to the Cold War where it's fine. So
you're this analyst in nineteen seventy. One of your superiors
calls you in for a meeting in a secured room.
There is a projector screen and somebody puts up. Somebody
gets a film going, and a title card announces that
the following experiment took place at the Oktomski Military Institute

(17:16):
in Leningrad on March tenth of this year. Then you
see a forty something woman, big bun of dark hair.
She seated at a table, and next to her is
a man identified as Ganadi Sergeyev, who is a military
Soviet military physician, and seated uh so on the table
in front of the woman. Somebody comes in and they
set down a small jar containing a throbbing black lump.

(17:41):
It's a frog's heart and it's still beating now. The
film explains that the extracted amphibian heart has been placed
in what's known as Ringer's solution. It's a solution of
salts that can keep muscles pumping even after they've been
separated from circulation. Uh, and from their electrical stimuli in
the body. It's kind of like how if you if
you ever seen the trick where you salt frog's legs,

(18:01):
they'll start to twitch um. And it's known that the
Ringer's solution can keep a frog's heart beating, usually for
about an hour. The heart is connected by wires to
an electro cardiogram and e KG and so is the
woman seated at the table, and then Dr Sergeyev tells
her to begin. So the woman puts her hands on
the table and she glares at the beating frog heart,

(18:24):
and her heart rate increases and her blood pressure increases.
And the film also claims that quote heightened biological luminescence
radiated from her eyes, which I can imagine that she
was doing the like psychic powers thing, like holding her
temples really heard and squinting, but you know, her eyes glowed,
that's what they say. I mean, it's hard to tell
in black and white, right, But anyway, after about seven

(18:48):
minutes of this just staring at this throbbing black lump,
the frog's heart abruptly seizes and stops beating. Then she
does it with a second frog heart when yeah, so
they bringing another. Somebody's got an ice cream scoop back there,
and they're just going to town on the table. I

(19:10):
think a melon baller would be more appropriate. I think
you can really get him there with the Uh. Yeah,
so she's I don't know what frogs did to her,
but she's she's killing the hearts and I guess the
frogs probably don't mind at this point. But next she
turns her attention to what's identified as a skeptical doctor
in the room, and he doesn't believe any of this,

(19:32):
but she concentrates on raising his heart rate telekinetically, and
this goes on for about five minutes before Dr Sergeyev,
the attending physician he steps in, says the experiments becoming
too dangerous and he calls it to a halt. This
sounds like scanners. It's going to scan everyone in this room. Yeah. Um.
It also sounds like such an obvious trick. It's such

(19:55):
an obvious performance. It seems a little over the top. Right,
we're bringing so buddy who doesn't believe, will show him anyway.
This woman didn't explode. Yeah, this woman really existed. Her
name was Nil Coolaghina, also sometimes mistakenly known as Nina Coolaghina.
Her life was truly remarkable in some ways. Cool Agana
was born in Leningrad in nine She enlisted in the

(20:18):
Red Army along with the rest of her family when
she was fourteen, and she served as a tank radio
operator on the Eastern Front of World War Two and
was awarded the Soviet Military merit metal. Can you just imagine,
It's like when you were fourteen, were you ready to
get in a tank and fight Nazis? It's like, it's Nazis.
You know your fourteen get in the tank, let's go. Yes,

(20:41):
that is exactly how much held. No, No, I can't
Did she drive the tank psychically? I don't think so.
I think she operated the radio, But she did believe
that she'd been psychic since childhood, so who knows if
it played into her military career. But she only killed
the hearts of German frogs. I don't know the answer

(21:01):
to that. Christian uh so anyway, Uh yeah, So she
she's had this career and in the nineteen sixties, after
the war's over, cool againa She makes a name for
herself again when she shows up on Russian state TV
performing these demonstrations of psycho kinesis. Where they'd like, have
a big glass box it's all sealed off, and somebody
put a salt shaker or something inside it, and she'd

(21:23):
stare at it and then move it with her mind,
or so they claimed. Uh, Now, everything I just described
to you cool Aghina, the frog Heart tape, that's all real. Uh,
it's at some point the Defense Department really did have
analysts investigate this psychic kill tape. The question is, of course,
what's going on in the film. Uh, if you're this
hypothetical analyst in nineteen seventy, what do you do? Obviously,

(21:46):
if if you're like me and I think like us,
generally you assume, well, this is probably some kind of hoax.
I mean, I'm not personally very keen on the existence
of psychic powers. Either she's some kind of skilled illusionist
hoaxing the Russians or the Russia and stage the whole
thing as a hoax on us, trying to trick us
into wasting money on parallel research. If that was the case,

(22:07):
it worked, it worked. So yeah, if even if you
are skeptical of what's going on, there are going to
be people in the room with you who say, well,
we can't be sure and we sure as hell can't
allow us psychic assassin gap, So bring on the age
of psychic research. Actually, the funny thing is some amount

(22:30):
of paranormal research had already been being funded by the
government of the United States since at least going back
to the nineteen fifties. There had been interested in it
at CIA and UH and in a few places here
and there. But it was in the early nineteen seventies
that the psychic research really got underway. Well, this, this
is when we really got to the point where the
government could throw just tons of cash down the well

(22:52):
after it, right right, Yes, So yeah, rich country worried
about weapons gaps, worried about falling behind in this technology
race I described up at the beginning. Everybody's paranoid about
the Russians getting an edge, so they're like, well, we
might as well train some psychic spies and assassins and
see if it works. Do you think we have something
like that going on now? But it's like a social
media assassination gap. I don't want to. But the crazy

(23:17):
thing about the psychic research is we know it continued
until at least the nineteen nineties and maybe even later.
That's pretty cool. Right, like some people in here we're
alive then yeah. Anyway, So in Stranger Things, we've got
this plot element of the character played by Millie Bobby Brown.
Of course eleven. She's the product of government psychic research.

(23:40):
And if you want to know whether psychic powers are real,
I can't answer that for you. If you're interested in
my opinion, I'm extremely doubtful. But if you're interested in
whether the US government really did psychic research projects like
the kind we see in Stranger Things, the answer is
pretty much absolutely yes. They did stuff like that, not
so much with kidnapped children, and they did it with

(24:00):
consenting adults who claimed to be psychics. But all all
the types of experiments we see are mirrored by real,
real life research. So um, I want to talk briefly
about a couple kinds of science psychic research that we're
done by the government. Research on psychokinesis, which of course
was being able to move things with your mind, and
then research on remote viewing, which is seeing without the eyes.

(24:23):
And I should also mention a couple of books that,
if you want to go deeper on this subject, were
also important sources for me when I was working on this.
If you just want to slim and hilarious investigation into
a grab bag of government paranormal research. John Ronson's two
thousand four book The Men Who Stare At Goats is
excellent and full of really funny stuff. This is the

(24:44):
one upon which the movie is based, right, yes, exactly. Uh,
though there's a lot of stuff in the book. I
think that doesn't make it into the movie. For a
more detailed history of US government psychic research programs, you
can check out a book just published this year called
Phenomena by the journalist Annie Jacobson. This book is great
for all the interviews and historical documents she pulls together. Uh,
though I do want to warn you that she takes

(25:06):
kind of a believers line on it. Like I think
she is far too generous to the possible existence of
psychic psychic phenomena and generally has the attitude that ESP
is real and these experiments prove it. That's surprising given
her her pedigree. Well, it's a good history either way.
I mean, we all want to live in that world.

(25:27):
But I mean, when it comes down to it, like,
nobody has has taken James Randy up on his million
dollar prize, right, and he gets kind of rough treatment
in this book. James Randy, if you're not familiar with him,
is a stage magician, illusion illusionist who is a big
antagonist of all these people who claim to be real psychics.
And he's like, for years he did this thing where

(25:49):
he had lots of money set aside for anybody who
could come demonstrate the reality of psychic powers or esp
or telekinesis anything like that under controlled laboratory conditions, And
a lot of times what people would say it was like, oh,
oh wait a minute, if if there are skeptical scientists
who don't believe in my powers present, they won't work.
I wish I could use that superpower limitation. Can you

(26:13):
imagine saying that in a job interview? Or or what
if like of all X men can only use their
powers in the positive environment? Yeah right, so yeah, man,
school would be rough and they all live in a school.
Uh So. A lot of the government funded psychic research
of the kind like we see in Stranger Things. It

(26:36):
took place at a think tank in northern California called
the Stanford Research Institute or s r I, especially starting
in nineteen seventy two and in nineteen seventy two, s
r I was the second largest research institute working for
the Defense Department. Number one, of course, was the Rand Corporation.
I found out not actually named after Iron Rand kind

(26:56):
of a disappointment. Is named after Danny Rand from Iron
Fist because everybody like that Netflix show. So did you
say he actually has has a corporation? Yeah, this is
we're talking about this earlier. Does anybody know if the
guy who created iron Fist was just like a huge
fan of Atlas Shrugged. We couldn't figure it out. We
thought we maybe we'd ask around, Okay, anyways, without checking

(27:20):
that out for us anyway. So yeah, So the the
sr I was doing all this research, and it had
been it had been founded right after World War two,
so it had been around for a while before it
got deep into the psychic research. But this was a
serious government think tank that did real research. They got
budgets reaching up to like seventy million dollars a year.
That's in like nineteen seventies dollars, So some real money

(27:42):
is going into this kind of stuff. And a major
figure in this history, especially at s r I, is
a guy named Harold how put Off. Now how put
Off was an sr I reach researcher who had worked
on laser physics, and he'd done these n s A
supercomputer projects in the past, and the early nineteen seventies
put Off really interested in research about psychic powers in plants.

(28:06):
So there was this guy named Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter.
Grover Cleveland, Cleve Baxter, like Cleve. Did he rename himself
or did his parents? Just like? I think it was
just his name. What I love about this name is
that it sounds like one of the fake NFL player

(28:29):
or is it college football player names from the Keen
Pel Peel sketch, you know where they all have ridiculous names. Yeah,
Cleve Grover Cleveland Cleve Baxter that I'm going to just
start adding Cleve Baxter after minor Well, it makes me
think of Clive Barker, right, so it's like Clive Barker,
Clive Barker. Yeah. So this guy was essentially he wanted

(28:50):
to make psychic plants cineambites. Really not quite okay, so
let me get there. Baxter was a former CIA employee
who used to administer poly tests for the agency. He
was not probably not a cool guy. He was the
kind of guy who like hook up new agents to
a polygraph and ask them questions like have you ever
smoked the marijuana? Are you a homosexual? And stuff like that.

(29:12):
In the nineteen fifties, um and so, one night, after
hooking his lie detector machine up to a house plant,
he became convinced that plants could read our minds. Do
you think he was just bored and just sort of
going around the house and hooking up various things like
the nightstand and to punch bowl, and then oh, let's

(29:33):
try the fern. See what happens. It's impossible to know
for sure, but I think it's the opposite. I think
he was more like manic and trying to find any
kind of thing to do. And he just saw the
lie detector machine, saw the house plant, put two and
two together, and made and set a plant on fire
to see if it would, you know, communicate with him psychically. Anyway,
he did worse than set it on fire, right, Wait? What? No? No?

(29:56):
Come next? Okay, So so this other guy from SR
how put off, So he got interested in this guy
Cleave call me Cleave Baxter's research, and put Off proposed
an experiment where he would grow an allergy culture and
then split it in half and then separate the two
cultures by five miles and then torture one of the
algae cultures with lasers to see if the other one

(30:19):
would respond. This is the thing that blows my mind
that he had lasers to do it with, Like he
didn't just set it on fire, I don't know, punch
the algae like. He was a laser researcher. He'd done
lasers up and down, so he just had lasers laying
around detecting machine. The lasers make it more science, I guess. Okay,
I see because because his methodology section in the paper. Yeah,

(30:43):
it ends. It lends a layer. Layer lends an air
of credibility if you're doing defense research right well, you know,
and if the lasers were not involved, it is. It
is a lot like, for instance, the power the powder
of sympathy, which we covered on the podcast. The supposed
idea that that you could you could put a magic
powder on a blade that it wounded a dog and

(31:05):
it would make the dog yelp halfway around the world
and you could use this to uh navigate your sailing vessel.
This is a good thing to point out because a
lot of this research that was actually done in these
labs throughout the twentieth century sounds a lot like magical
potions and occult beliefs from like the eighteenth and nineteenth century,

(31:25):
except they've just sort of like put some science e
sounding words in there, but the principles are the same. Uh.
And so here's your science e sounding words. Pudof was
interested in whether a hypothetical particle in physics called a
tach eon could explain psychic communication between plants and humans.
Take eon is a hypothetical particle. Nobody's ever seen it before.
But if it existed, what it would be is a

(31:47):
particle that always moves faster than light. So no particle
with mass in our universe can move up, can accelerate
up to the speed of light. Attack eon would be
something that could never decelerate down to the speed of light. Uh.
And so he thought, yeah, maybe that's involved in psychic
phenomena anyway. Now this is where John Carpenter got the idea.
I assumed to have tachians communicate with people's dreams in

(32:09):
the past of darkness. What a great movie, the best
movie ever to feature a jar of satan. Okay, so
back to put Out put Off got in touch with Baxter,
and through being in touch with Baxter, he got to
know this guy who is an artist and a writer
and a self proclaimed psychic named Ingo Swan. And this

(32:30):
where are these names coming from? These are real names, man.
This guy sounds like like a villain in a Ghostbusters movie. Ingo. Yeah,
like he made the tower that will bring forth the
giant slore. Yeah. Yeah. He has like a book all
about like the book of Ingo Swan. Well, this guy
apparently did he would like dress himself in old like
religious clothes. He found it second hand stores and stuff

(32:52):
like that. But I don't know, I kind of admire
that part of him, and it's like, yeah, you just
do you man well, And it sounds like you want
to wear a priest outfit, go for it. He sounds
like he was a showman too. And that's what we
keep seeing time and time again with these examples. As
you have you have scientists and some showman and uh,
and the scientists don't realize that what they have as
a showman exactly. So put Off in put Off in

(33:15):
excuse me, Swan, Ingo Swan. They have this meeting, and
this meeting kicks off this wave of paranormal research at
the s r I that will continue throughout the nineteen seventies.
So Ingo Swan, he was this self proclaimed psychic. He
said he had esp he said he could do psychokinesis,
and put off In Collies claimed that Ingo Swan demonstrated
all kinds of powers under test conditions that could not

(33:37):
have been faked. For example, they claimed that he was
able to demonstrate unexplainable psychokinesis, such as when he used
his mind to perturb a magnetometer inside a quark detector
buried under the basement of a research facility on Stanford
University campus. And this led put On, I mean it,
that's incredible. If he could actually do that, if the

(33:59):
story is true, Wow, that's your mind. Yeah, I mean yeah.
So in the show we see these these experiments where
they're trying to get her to maybe kill a rabbit
in a cage or crush a coke can, which she
successfully does with the coke can. But yeah, this is
something that you couldn't fake. It would be dealing with
this thing deep underground, and the people at this experiment

(34:21):
claimed that he did it. Now, as as I've implied before,
I'm doubtful about the truth of these claims, but that's
what they said. They said, Wow, he moved this thing
and there's no way he could have faked it. So
this lad put off in a colleague named Russell targ
Uh and a list of other sort of revolving collaborators
to work for years with defense and intelligence grants to

(34:42):
study psychic phenomena through the sr I. And then later
there were all these derivative programs in in the following decades, like,
for example, there was a remote viewing program run out
of the Army out of Fort Mead, Maryland. Now a
lot of this research would end up focusing on the
sp phenomenon known as remote viewing that we mentioned earlier.
That's see stuff you wouldn't be able to see with
your own eyes, and we see examples of this and

(35:04):
stranger things exactly. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Yeah,
like go to Russia and look at this guy and
tell us what he's saying. Those were the kinds of
experiments people wanted to do. In general. The most common
form through throughout the end of after the first year
or so, if this was what came to be known
as coordinate remote viewing experiments. So that would work like

(35:26):
this psychic is given a set of map coordinates, then
the psychic would say what they saw there at the map,
at the at the place on the map. You can
see maybe a few ways that this could be a
little bit flawed as an experimental design, right, like if
somebody went to go get a map and look and
see what was there and then do some reading about it.

(35:47):
But there are some cases where the researchers again insisted
like no, no, no, there's no way they could have
done that. Uh, it's absolutely real. But I want to
give one example. So there was a remote viewer named
Pat Price, who was kind of normal name here, right.
He was famous for these amazingly detailed remote viewing results. Now,
Price was born a Mormon, but he became a scientologist

(36:10):
in the nineteen sixties and he claimed that it was
in the Church of Scientology that his powers were brought forth.
I guess he was having a session with the E
meter and all that, and he gained the power to
see things at long distances by radioactive E meter. How
he got recruited as a pretty good story, but often
Swan met him in the parking lot of a farm

(36:31):
where they were buying the office Christmas tree. Price sold
them a Christmas tree, and then they recruited him for
c I A Remote viewing experiments UH. In one case,
he supposedly was able to use remote viewing to give
intricate detailed descriptions of the inside of a restricted n
S A base called Sugar Grove in West Virginia. Price

(36:52):
was also known for the remote viewing of details of
the Soviet facility in Kazakhstan known as u r d
F three for Unidentified Research and Development Facility three and
UH Price he drew illustrations of this gantry gantry crane
that were determined to be very similar to something that
was actually photographed at the facility, and internal analysis concluded

(37:13):
that he couldn't have done this. And I'm going to
caveat this in a second, but they say he couldn't
have done this unless either he actually saw it through
remote viewing or he was informed of what to draw
by someone knowledgeable of u r d F three. Now,
I think maybe there could have been other possibilities. But
even if you only accept those two possibilities, you've got

(37:33):
to wonder about the second one. And many people in
these research circles did start to wonder like, could his
source of information be the disinformation arm of the KGB.
Could some of these psychics giving us this information be
feeding us disinformation running psy ops basically on our own programs.
But they didn't They didn't consider like maybe that he
was doing like a cold reading. Oh, I mean that

(37:55):
that's a whole other question. Cold reading, of course, is
the technique of you know, looking for Q who is
in the person you're talking to. It's a mentalism trick
and also playing you're also playing off their expectations of
your knowledge too. Yes, uh yeah, So so that's a
way of using people's reactions to the things you're saying
to give the impression that you're getting information that that
you couldn't possibly have. And really what you're doing is

(38:16):
getting sort of hits and miss verification through their body
language and their eyes and and little things they mentioned
that they don't realize they've they've given up. Uh so, yeah,
there are a lot of questions about what went on there,
But I want to mention a couple other examples of
government psychics who were doing this kind of stuff along
the lines that we see eleven doing in the show.

(38:37):
Have you ever seen the performer Uri Geller, who here
is familiar with Uri Geller? Yeah, I think he didn't.
He he's like a guy who would appear in Carson.
He's the Israeli guy who's been spoons. So he claims
to be a psychic, and he his biggest act in
his career was he would get a spoon and he'd
use psychokinesis, so he claimed to bend it. I don't

(38:58):
know what spoons ever did him, why he hates spoons
so much. She's been you know, thousands of spoons in
his career, and people seem to think this is really impressive. Uh.
I think a lot of people who are only a
little bit familiar with him don't realize that he he
claims his powers are real. You know. He's like, yeah,
I'm a real psychic. I'm not an illusionist. This is
not an act. But so, Ri Geller was tested extensively

(39:23):
by the s r I in the nineteen seventies with
these experiments like What's in the Box where they'd have
a box and they'd roll a die in the Yeah.
But here's the question. So Gwyneth Paltrow's head isn't there
which side of it is facing up? Is it or
left ear? Is it the bloody stump of the neck.
And that's what he would have to get. Yeah, which
side of the die is facing up? Another one would

(39:45):
be like can you look inside sealed aluminum film canisters
and say what's there? Is it ball bearings? Is it magnets?
And uh? And of course again we have these stories
by the people conducting the experiments, like put Off and
targ that he was able to get these result that
are just impossible for him to have gotten by chance,
impossible for him to have cheated. It's just too amazing. Um. Again,

(40:08):
you know all the all the asterisks about skepticism there,
and this is consistent throughout a lot of the literature.
Many of the people who worked on these recent research
projects have remained adamant over the years that they were
able to prove psychic powers were real. On the government's time,
and even some internal reviews on the value of these
programs seemed kind of optimistic, like to quote from one

(40:29):
report for the CIA put together in nineteen seventy five,
but the physicist J. A. Ball, who independently reviewed all
the data, quote a large body of reliable experimental evidence
points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist
as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack
of reliability. Just kind of that last part kind of

(40:51):
undercuts everything, doesn't it. Yeah, Because I mean, if it's
because if we were to take that on face value,
and I mean, on one hand, yes, it's amazing if
psychic phenomenal were real, but then if it were not
dependable at all, I could be utterly useless for the government.
You can't send in a psychic assassin and it's like, oh,
there's like a ten percent chance he'll be able to

(41:12):
blow somebody's head up with his mind. Uh, and then
nine chance that he's just arrested and you know, executed
on the spot, or even worse. I mean, how about
you're doing the remote viewing, right, You're the person who's
giving somebody the inside details of some Soviet research facility,
and what you're trying to sell is, well, my my
results are amazingly accurate about one out of a hundred times. Yeah.

(41:34):
And then and then it's not necessarily a situation where
they would be It's like, oh, I know, I don't
see anything. Sorry, it's you. You're They would be giving
you false information, perhaps just made up information. Uh, it
would be just completely unreliable for any government purposes. Yeah.
So another problem with all this research, I think is that,
based on my reading, it seems that while we keep
getting all these people involved in this research who say, yeah,

(41:57):
the phenomenon is real, psychics are real. We've shown it
over and over again in these tests, this research and
all of its administrative levels just seems crammed with people who,
in uh, the parapsychologist Gertrudge Schmider Schmidler's terminology are sheep,
meaning people who are committed in advance to the belief
that psychic phenomena are real, as opposed to her term

(42:18):
goats for people who believe in advance that it is
not real. Uh. You know, as as I've said before,
I think I'm kind of a goat. But if you
have a whole lot of people who believe very strongly
in a thing working on experiments to prove that thing,
you're probably not going to get a lot of objectivity
in your methodology. And so this is a criticism that's
been leveled against this research for a long time. I

(42:40):
want to give a couple of examples real quick, um
of the kind of sheep thing going on. So a
major figure in the remote viewing research conducted out of
Fort Mead in Maryland was was like, they would give
people these coordinates or these places to view and it
might be a place of strategic importance. Right, So here's
a Soviet So there's even one story that these psychic

(43:02):
spies out of Fort Mead we're supposed to see what
was happening inside Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis. Now
you can you can easily imagine though the situation there is,
you know, we're trying to figure out how to how
to handle the situation, and then someone says, well, do
you want our psychics to take a crack at it?
And why not? Yeah, we're paying for them. We might

(43:25):
as well see what they got. And maybe they got nothing,
but out I don't know if I believe it's true.
I think I heard that Jimmy Carter was aware that
this had taken place, but yeah, uh yeah. Anyway, So
at Fort Mead, one of the major figures involved in
the remote viewing projects there was this guy named Ed Dames.
Have you ever heard of him before. He shows up
sometimes on uh, what's that show art Bell Coast to

(43:48):
Coast where they talk about UFOs and stuff. Uh. So
he was a guy who who worked on this project
for the Defense Department, and he was intensely interested not
just in the strategic targets, but in having his remote
viewing agents spy on stuff like the alien basis of
the Galactic Federation scattered throughout the Solar system, which are
the forward advanced posts of these aliens that are going

(44:09):
to colonize our our solar system. Okay, sounds reasonable. Yeah,
this is what happens when you when you build a
team of government psychics, right, I mean right, you end
up spying on the galactic impio. Yeah. And so there
were some people, you know, in various ranks who were
a little bit doubtful about whether that was a useful
research project. Uh in uh. In the Sorry and John

(44:31):
Ronson's The Men Who Sarah goatst Ronson claims that one
of Dame's personal remote viewing projects was using ESP to
determine the true nature of the Lockness Monster, which he
eventually determined was the ghost of a dinosaur. Yes like that? Yeah,
that's better than any of the other ones I've heard,
which is sadder that it's the ghost of a dinosaur,

(44:52):
that it's the last living dinosaur and it's all alone.
The last living dinosaur would have been would be far
sadder because it would be just like a dead and
hang out with its other dead ancestors. At least a ghost,
you can imagine, has delight in haunting people. Has there
ever been a ghost dinosaur movie. Oh, there's been a
there's a ghost shark movie, and we need to get

(45:14):
on that copyright that okay. One final anecdote also from
Ronson's The Men who Stare at Goats, and this is
I think exemplary of the kind of thing that may
have been going on to give people who are working
on these psychic experiments the impression that they were turning
up real phenomenon. Ronson interviews this guy who worked at
the Fort Meade project named Lynn Buchanan and uh. He
also interviews another remote viewer named Joseph mc mcmonagle, and

(45:37):
Buchanan tells Ronson the story about mcmonagle's amazing psychic powers.
One time there was a locked door at the facility
and at Fort Meade and mcmonagle used his psychic powers
to remote view what the key to the door looked like,
and then he made a sketch of the key from
that psychic vision, and then took it to a locksmith

(46:01):
and had the locksmith make a copy of the key
from the drawing, and the key worked and he was
able to open the door. If true, that would be amazing, right,
But in his interview with Ronson, mcmonagle admits that what
had actually done, what it actually happened there, was that
he had picked the lock, and he didn't want to
deflate morale among the other psychic spies, so he didn't

(46:24):
tell them that. He just let them believe that it
had been this psychic adventure and they have to be
in a positive environment. But it's it's a it's a
classic magician's trick here, right, I mean, it's it's you
can't see what I'm doing at this hand because all
the stuff this one's doing, this one's busy running to
the locksmith, this one's picking the lock. Yeah. Uh So,
in in final explanation, I mean, there are a lot

(46:46):
of things that could have been going on in these
experiments that people claimed. We're giving these amazingly accurate results
and proving the truth of psychic powers. In some cases
you have to assume there may have been fraud or trickery.
It may have been disinformation at some level. It may
have been intern old psy ops campaigns. There may have
been hoaxers. I mean, plenty of skeptics alleged that the psychics,

(47:06):
like Uri Geller, we're just doing slight of hand tricks
and tricking the scientists. But also I think among the
researchers themselves, there is probably a strong tendency towards what's
known as cherry picking um, meaning that maybe sometimes the
remote viewers did have some truly amazingly accurate descriptions of
stuff they wouldn't be able to see. But what if
these amazingly accurate hits were like four or five sessions

(47:29):
out of thousands, So you think that's what Matthew Modine's
up to and stranger things. He's just like like he
every for a thousand days, he makes a leve and
try to crush it. They just cut a lot of
the scenes out. Well, that's that's the director's cut. That's
one way remote viewing is different than psychogenesis. So if
you make somebody try to crush a coat can with
their mind without touching it a thousand times and they

(47:49):
can only do it once. I'm still impressed. Like, if
you can rule out some kind of intervention, like that's
the kind of thing that would would would would have
won the James Randy Prize. Could if you could without
any without touching it, just crushed that can with your
brain right with proper controls in place, and you can
do that. There, boom, you've got the prize. Psychic phenomena
are real. I'm still impressed. Even though you could only

(48:10):
do it once. With remote viewing, you know, you could say,
I've got a picture here that you can't see, describe
it for me. If you do this hundreds of times
and a few times you come up with a pretty
accurate description, I'm not impressed. That's just I mean, you
could do that randomly. You're just monkeys and a typewriter. Yeah,
they're bound to pound it out eventually anyway. So one

(48:32):
difference between this type of government psychic research and the
stuff we see in Stranger Things is that I never
came across any examples. There may have been some some
out there, because there's still some classified stuff. But I
never came across any examples of psychics using an isolation
tank to enhance their powers, which is one of my
favorite set pieces on the show. That might be why

(48:52):
they didn't have a positive environment all the time. You
need an isolation tank to feel good about yourself. Well,
it's interesting you say that, because, um, well let's just
start with isolation tanks. Who here has has floated? Who
raised your hand? If you have floated, if you've been
in an isolation tank, should host the show. He's like, alright,
so keep your hands up, all right, Now, keep your

(49:15):
hand in the air. If you've been in one more
than once, All right, Okay, did you hallucinate? Okay, so
Robert has floated and I have floated, but only once.
I would love to try it. I tried it once
at home in the washing machine and no good. Well

(49:36):
we all float down. I'll float with you someday. Well.
I think that the show does a pretty great job
of explaining how it works. I mean, it's it's it's soft,
it's boy, and so you're you're floating in the in
the water. Um, it's uh. If you've done it before,
you know that the first time you float a lot
of it is about just getting used to the fact

(49:57):
that you're in this body temperature, you know, a high
salt mixture, and it's it's like stinging every sensitive part
of your body, like cuts and scrapes you didn't realize
you had are crying out to you. No God, I
mean that seems like with all the other deprivation, that
would have the possibility of reducing your entire consciousness to

(50:17):
a hangnail. Yeah. Yeah, because it does play with your consciousness.
I mean that's why people climb into them, and that's
why John C. Lily was I mean, that's why he
invented it. That's why they were researching this at NIM.
Now we should we should clarify the the isolation tanks
that you see in altered states or in stranger things
are usually different than what you would just go to

(50:37):
it like a commercial place. So the ones that we've
floated in at least or horizontal and you're kind of
laying on your back so you can't smell. Yeah, I
sort of see, Yeah, you definitely smell. Because that was
like that distracted me from most of my first float,
was my only float was that was that. Wow, it
really smells salting in here. And I don't know why
I was getting into double float. That's what that The

(51:00):
thing they always say you need to float more than
one is because that first float is just about getting
used to bring and make it, will record it, Yeah
we should but uh yeah. The now, the tanks that
Lily was using at at NIM, they they were kind
of uh, kind of like they were very and then
they had a nightmare of quality to them. I guess

(51:20):
you'd say that the individuals were dressed in something that
kind of look like a gimp costume with these like
big blackout goggles. Uh yeah, kind of like a really
scary mask and uh and they were They found that
it had a pretty severe effect on the subjects because
you're essentially locking someone away with the inward facing mind

(51:42):
and it doesn't take much of that to um to
start playing with your your sensations and playing with your
thought process. I mean, it's the it's the reason that
solitary confinement it's such a hellacious thing to inflict on somebody. Yeah,
I mean I think that's widely considered a form of
torture now, Yeah, and this is basically what they wanted though, Yeah,
because they were researching quote a psychological stability of human

(52:04):
beings that are sustained isolation and reduced sensory implicity. Little
did they know, like forty years later people would pay
money to do this. Well, I mean this, this is
an area that parallels that. That duality with Lily of
establishment really counterculturally. Establishment really was all about, let's get
this thing and we're gonna take potential spies, will lock

(52:25):
them away in there, and when they lose their mind,
they'll tell us everything. And then counterculture Lily was like, no,
you need to lose your mind in here on LSD
maybe and then potentially talk to alien dolphins. Man. That
Lily mentality of like the self experimentation is something I
have this big conflict about because on one hand, it's

(52:47):
like I like admire it, you know, I'm like, somebody
wants to experiment on themselves. I'm like, that's confidence, that's courage.
At the same time, that's usually not good science, right,
because it's hard to be objective when you're experimenting on yourself.
It tends to who suggest an impatience that is generally
not compatible with scientific ricor right or trying to get
around ethical boundaries that would exist if you were experimenting

(53:10):
on others. Yeah, okay, so we can say Matthew Modine
as far as we know so far. And I refused
to refer to him by whatever. His character's name is
Matthew Modine, R printer whatever. Matthew Modine is a patient
doctor because he hasn't experimented on himself yet in this show.
It's true, they're probably saving that first. Um. Yeah, there's

(53:30):
really really got into it. He he when he floated
himself in this nightmarish contraption. Uh, he saw limitless possibility here. Uh,
in a way to just like to get in touch
with like the the the unaffected mind, like the mind
without any of the the weights of sensation and uh

(53:52):
and he ended up writing about it pretty much for
the rest of his life. His his writings are really
interesting if you ever give him a try, because the
he kind of waffles back and forth between being like
academic writing and being like stream of consciousness writing. But
in a way he wrote while he was high and
then I may also it's really hard to write. But

(54:17):
I have a quick quote from him though. This is
from Lily Tanks for the Memories Flotation Tank talks from
the memories. Yeah, he had. He wore that coonskin cap, remember,
and his favorite what were one of his favorite names
for the tank itself was the womb to tomb wet box.
So um, wow, we should we should all start incorporating

(54:41):
track to our our daily conversation. Did Dad jokes from
the plane? Yeah, but here's the quote he said, at
the highest level of satory from which people return, the
point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which
extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be
called fusion with the universal mon end or God in
more modern terms. Yeah, you have done a mathematical transformation

(55:04):
in which your center of consciousness has ceased to be
a traveling point and has become a surface or solid
of consciousness. It was in this state that I experienced
myself as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of
other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was
distributed around the galaxy a membrane. So it's fascinating about

(55:25):
this to me. Where you give like a quick like
uh foreshadowing, uh, is because my section is all about
parallel universes, and he's essentially memorizing the language of parallel
universes of the multiverse to describe this. Yeah, so um,
that quote kind of sums up just how high minded
and essentially mystical and magical, uh literally got with the

(55:47):
isolation tank. Um, And we don't We're not gonna really
go into the dolphin research, but uh, that becomes a
whole area where he definitely kind of becomes a scientific pariah,
certainly within dolphin research for are the rest of his career.
So I'm curious what does rigorous research say about the
real life effects of of using these isolation tanks. Well,

(56:10):
we do have a fair amount of research to go
on here and a lot of just personal antigoes from
people who have floated a lot. Uh. Floaters often report hallucinations,
out of body sensations, increased introspection because ultimately, you're you're
locked in there, and you when you're not locked in there,
but I mean you you're you feel doing you're right.
If you're not locked in there, you do you feel

(56:33):
as if the limits of your body are kind of
harder to define because of the body tempature water you're
floating in. Floaters, like sleepers, tend to experience decreased alpha
waves and increased data waves in the brain. So this
is the stuff of dreams, except you're still awake. Yes,
uh yeah, you shouldn't fall asleep in There also sensory deprivation,

(56:54):
even of a single sort, so just site or sound, etcetera,
can produce hallucination. A voice or rumble heard in total silence,
the light seen in total darkness, that sort of thing. Yeah,
we've talked about this before with like the creepiness people
report when they go in an antichoa chamber. This is
like a room with acoustic properties, so that sound is

(57:15):
really muffled, you know, nothing echoes. Everything's very very quiet.
People feel like they're going crazy, and they're like they
start to imagine they're hearing their own brain work and stuff.
It troubles you. Yeah, And in fact, a two thousand
and nine study publishing the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease found that a near fifteen minutes of near total
sensory deprivation was enough to trigger vivid hallucinations in many tests.

(57:40):
Subjects now were those people who already had some kind
of condition that would make them prone to hallucinations, but
they were just normal people. I think these were just normal,
you know, run of the mill, average, averagely you know,
brought into the study people, but they were all psychic. No,
not before the experiment. Yeah. Another two thousand and nine paper,

(58:01):
this one from psychopharmacology, explore the possibility that sensory deprivation
induces psychotic symptoms non pharmacologically, and the idea here is
that sensory depth disturbs air dependent updating of one's worldview
and leads to problems with top down perceptive constraints, resulting
in hallucination. However, I do want to point out that

(58:24):
this particular study, they used a sensory deprivation tank with
a panic button, So they told people, are you're gonna
get into this and you might start feeling it might
just get too much for You're gonna feel kind of freaky,
but you can panic and hit that panic button, whereas
other studies have just had the scientists say, hey, when
you've had enough, to tap on the lid and we'll

(58:46):
let you out. So this is like if you went
to yoga and they said here's a panic button just
in case, Like you're probably not going to have that
great a class. Yeah, It's like if you were going
to yoga and you your your mom was talking to
you before and said, now, hold on, I've heard that
some people really hurt their neck doing that, or you know,
or oh, I know a friend who hurt their risk

(59:07):
doing yoga. Yeah, you're gonna go, and you're gonna be
terrified that you're going to paralyze yourself on the mat. Yeah,
like you're trying to figure out if your kid's gonna
have nightmares for some reason. They're going to bed and
you say, now, don't think about machete mimes. Don't just
don't think about machete mimes and it will be fine.
I mean, this is why priming is so important, uh,
to you know, ancient traditions involving the use of psychedelic substances.

(59:30):
It's important for modern practitioners who take a you know,
a serious uh approach to the use of psychedelic substances,
and and even even like meditative even yoga. It's it's
about priming the individual for what's going to occur. And
speaking of which, there's a nine seven study that I

(59:52):
came across on prayer and mystic experience, and they found
that when placed in an isolation tank, people with differing
religious orientation sas related differing specific religious imagery, which is
no surprise, but not in non religious imagery and other
phenomenal experiences. So there's like more similarity among stuff not

(01:00:13):
related to your particular beliefs. Yeah. Yeah, And I think
this is interesting too in light of those of negative
positive experiences in priming that we're talking about here. Uh,
and even the aims of John C. Lily or fictional
Dr Brenner even. I also think it's fascinating to think
of isolation actulation chambers used as laboratory stand ins for prayer,

(01:00:37):
because what is prayer but an attempt to communicate with
an extra dimensional entity? And uh, and that's exactly what
Dr Brenner is trying to do with eleven on on
the show Stranger Things. Well, yes, it makes you think
about how a lot of religious rituals are actually, you know,
all throughout history, are used to bring about some form
of an altered state of consciousness. I mean, you can

(01:00:59):
think about even an act as simple as the repetitive
activity of prayers, like the repetitive words you say in
a prayer. If you've never tried this, just say the
same sentence or the same word five hundred times in
a row, you will probably achieve some kind of mildly
altered state of consciousness, mainly because it starts to disrupt

(01:01:20):
the part of your brain that automatically processes linguistic content.
If you've ever like tried to not hear what a
word means when somebody's saying words you, you can't do
this on purpose. You can't help but hear what the
words mean. But if you say the same word to
yourself hundreds of times, you start to lose the connection
between the sounds of the mouth and the meanings. And
the beautiful thing about this is you do not need

(01:01:41):
l s D or a swimming pool full assault, just
repetition the way of the world. All right, Well, here's
a question for you, Christian. Say you get into your
flotation tank or your children swimming pool full of soli
and you reach out to an extra dimensional entity. Where

(01:02:06):
is that entity? Like, scientifically, where is the the you
are here arrow for that being? Right? So, what we
have to clarify here is the difference between you're talking
about alternate dimensions or extra dimensions versus parallel universes and
stranger things. Seems to be unclear on what's going on there? Right, Well,

(01:02:29):
basically I guess what's going on with stranger things, and
obviously is that this is this is a fairy realm.
This is um this is a typical trope of a
various you know, dimensional travel, uh, science fiction or fantasy.
The upside down is is it's like they're the realm
of shadows. As they draw that comparison, what is it

(01:02:51):
in Zelda, It's like the Dark World or something? Man, Yeah,
I mean it's a version of this world with slight.
You know, it's dark and it's toxic and it's slight
the altered Well, okay, so there's science fiction fans probably
all in this room that are familiar with the idea
of parallel universes or alternate dimensions. They've been in our fiction,

(01:03:11):
our pop culture and comic books and TV and movement
movies for decades now, right, what's your favorite fictional parallel
universe of Mine's Crisis on Infinite Earths from TC comics.
I like, because there's an infinite amount of them. I
have to go with the Realm of the Goblin King
and Labyrinth. Oh that's so good. I have to go
with the Super Mario Brothers movie where they go to

(01:03:34):
the other parallel dimension where Dennis Hopper is King Coopa.
So but with all of those, it actually turns out
that there is some basis in scientific theory for a multiverse.
And I'm going to present you with three possibilities here
and we can try to crack the nut of what's
going on here in Stranger Things. So so, right after
Stranger Things came out, Popular Science interviewed this theoretical physicist

(01:03:57):
named Brian Green. Oh yeah, he's he's from New York City. Yeah,
and they asked him about Stranger Things. And the first
distinction he made is what I was just talking about.
He's like, whoa, there's a difference between alternate dimensions and
parallel universes. Don't don't just use those interchangeably. We kind
of do in pop fiction. But but he wanted to
clarify that different. So here's the difference. An alternate dimension

(01:04:18):
implies you've got one universe, right, and that universe has
more dimensions to it than what we can perceive, so
beyond the three dimensions of space and the one dimension
of time. So yeah, it's like, if you imagine that
we are squares or triangles, and suddenly we encounter a
cube or a sphere or something we just like, wouldn't
be able to perceive this extra dimension of it exactly, Yeah,

(01:04:42):
you wouldn't even be able to see it or cure
any of your senses. Right. Whereas a parallel universe implies
the whole multiversal proposal. This is that there are multiple universes,
but each one of these universes has three dimensions of
space and one dimension of time to them. Why should
we trust this Green guy, Well, he's kind of a

(01:05:03):
big deal in science. But remember the scene in Stranger
Things when the teacher is using the analogy where he's
talking about the tightrope walker on the tight rope and
how there's a flea underneath it. That analogy originally comes
from Green's book, which is called The Fabric of the Cosmos.
So this guy that they basically researched him to figure
out how to write this stuff about the upside down

(01:05:25):
on the TV show, and in fact, Green himself says,
whoever is writing this show is well versed in some
of the popular descriptions of these ideas. Whether it's mine
or not, it doesn't really matter. When he added, also,
if there's a monster. Its head should open like a flower.
His other book. If you've never seen a picture of
the physicist Brian Green, he's a favorite virus on the show.

(01:05:47):
He comes up a lot. You should look him up
because I think he looks a lot like David DUCHOVNYA
total tangent. Sorry, so all right, so let's stick with
the three major theories though, and in Green out nzse.
But some other people do as well. So the very
first academic proposal of parallel universes came in nineteen fifty
four by this guy named Hugh Everett the Third. And

(01:06:10):
Hugh came up with what we now call many worlds theory.
And he did this while he was a doctoral student,
so he hadn't even graduated yet. And he's like, hey,
this is my dissertation. There's parallel universes, and just like
drops a big book and he says, look, they're they're
related to ours, are branching off others branch off of them,
YadA YadA. So to better understand this, though, I'm sorry everybody,

(01:06:33):
We're gonna have to talk about some quantum physics for
a little bit. It's it's a little painful, but I'm
gonna try to boil it down and make it as
easy for all of us as possible, because it does
hurt my head a little bit. Come on positive thinking.
It's not painful. It's everybody think positively in my psychic
powers related to quantum physics. I do. But there is
a famous quote about quantum physics where if it if
it does not make your head hurt a little bit,

(01:06:55):
you're you're not engaging with it properly, right, he said
Richard I am and the famous physicist who said that
if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand.
I'm afraid I'm misquoting. I don't think so. So everytt
was inspired by two scientists that were quantum physicists, and
they were Werner Heisenberg and Neil's Bore. And Heisenberg suggested

(01:07:17):
that if you just observe quantum matter, that we're affecting
its behavior just looking at it. And he said subsequently,
we can never be sure of what its attributes are.
This is called the Heisenberg on certainty principle. So here
here's an examswer. Here's an example. I cribbed from our
colleague Josh Clark from stuff you should know. He has
this great analogy and he says, imagine you're looking at Joe,

(01:07:41):
specifically Joe, uh, and Joe is a human being who's solid. Okay,
Now everybody look away from Joe, and then when you
look back, all of a sudden, Joe is made out
of gas. That hope it's right on gas. So that
is essentially the idea behind the Heisenberg on certainty principle that,
like the the attributes of the physical form change every

(01:08:03):
time you stop looking at it and look at it again, right,
And it's suggesting essentially that. And this is where Borer
comes in. He's this Danish Danish physicist and he says, well,
actually it doesn't exist in one state or the other.
It exists in all states simultaneously. But like Heisenberg, he says,
it's it's got to stay in one form as long

(01:08:24):
as we're looking at it. So this is you've probably
heard of. This is the Copenhagen interpretation. This is the
idea that you know, a quantum event is both A
and B at the same time until it interacts with
something that forces it to collapse into one or the other.
So ever comes along. He's working on his dissertation, and
he argues, Okay, I agree with Bor on everything except

(01:08:45):
for one respect. He says, measuring UH and observing quantum
objects don't actually force it into a comprehensible state. What
it does is it splits it into an entire other universe.
And he says, this literally duplicates the universe every time
you observe quantum matter, and then that subsequently splits every
other time any action is taken or not taken related

(01:09:09):
to it. So this is like the infamous stuff that
you see in in you know, pop science, popular fiction,
where there's a there's an altered universe where I'm a
bank robber and not a podcast host, right, because I
just didn't decide to rob that bank, And under many
worlds there probably would be such a universe because there's
an infinite number of quantum events to split the universe

(01:09:31):
and infinite number of times. It's it's like the Library
of Battle. It's the idea that it's a library that
contains not only all books, but all possible books, right, right,
So this is usually called daughter universe theory. Okay, now
let's put it in stranger things terms. So let's say
eleven is our quantum object. When you look at her
once she appears to be a little girl, you turn away,

(01:09:53):
you look again, maybe she looks like the demogorgon. That's
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The new Bore was suggesting that a
quantum eleven is both the little girl and the demogorgon
at the same time, and all other other possible forms,
like there's one where she's played by Carrie Fisher and
she's she's that form simultaneously with the you know, infinite

(01:10:15):
other ones. And then Everett comes along and he says,
but wait, every time eleven is measured or looked at,
say by Matthew Modine, then it causes a split in
the universe, and this creates a daughter universe. And so
subsequently there's just all these parallel universes that are based

(01:10:36):
on the observation of the quantum eleven. Now it's crazy
as this sounds, a lot of physicists actually do hold
to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's something
that's popular. I know, recently on the show we talked
about the Caltech physicist Sean Carroll. I know he favors
the many worlds interpretations. So it is taken seriously by
real physicist, and it's a good way of thinking that

(01:10:58):
there's a lot of other universes is out there, but
could you get between them? Yeah? Yeah, how does this?
How does this? How do we get from here to
demagorg Yeah? Many worlds doesn't really get into that as
far as I could tell. But that's one possible explanation
I guess for what the upside down is. Right. Another
possibility is string theory. We've all probably heard this thrown around.
It's related to Albert Einstein's theory of everything. It proposes

(01:11:20):
that there's an even smaller level than quantum, uh, the
quantum level, there's the sub quantum level. This is like
an ant man where he shrinks down like so small
that it just turns into the psychedelic nightmare, so small
that the c g I budget for the entire film
just implodes upon its approaches Infini. So the argument here
is that all the essential building blocks of all matter

(01:11:42):
and all physical forces exist on the sub quantum level.
And here there are these things that are referred to
as rubber bands basically that are strings, and they make
up quantum particles. And then that makes up everything else,
like everything in this room, every every force of nature
is all made up of these strings. Well, it is
the theory of everything exactly. That is exactly what it is.

(01:12:03):
It is entirely theoretical, so there's no I should be
clear about this. There is no evidence that this is true.
Some scientists feel like this discredits it entirely, but it's
worth bringing it up because string theory also ends up
leading us into a theory of parallel universes. So this
theory says, okay, they parallel universes exists like bubbles next

(01:12:26):
to each other, and when they come in contact with
one another, it's because gravity flows in and out of
these bubbles back and forth to each other. But every
time these universes interact, a big bang occurs, just like
the one that created our universe. So every time they
touch it creates another universe. But what we don't know
is what happens when these you know, to to these

(01:12:48):
actual bubbles themselves, like do do they explode? Is it
really bad or is it totally benign? Well, this is
it's worth of keeping in mind. Like and when it
creates another universe, it's not it's not like a uh
of a total fantasy universe where it's like, oh, here's
the universe where everyone is a Nazi. Here's the universe
where everyone has um you know, the sheep's head or

(01:13:09):
something that sounds like a great universe. This is more like,
here is a a new big bang in a new
contained universe, and who knows what it it results in.
It's very much like the Library of Babel where many
of the books I mean, I guess the majority of
the books in the Library of Babel are illegible, right,
almost every single one. It's it's only the minority that

(01:13:31):
makes sense. Yeah. So Brian Green, remember him. He actually
argues that the recent discovery of gravitational waves make this
slightly testable, so it might actually have some evidence in
the next couple of years. Uh. You might have noticed this.
This week the scientists who discovered gravitational waves won the
Nobel Prize. So that's probably why it's a big I mean,

(01:13:54):
there's lots of recent points, but that's one of them.
Maybe we'll find parallel universes. Uh. So they're hoping that
they can test string theory with that. And then the
idea here is essentially that as the universe expands, each
one of these strings is getting stretched out, and as
they're stretching, it produces a crack. And it's not an
audible crack. It's a crack that exists through gravitational waves.

(01:14:16):
So the researchers are hoping that now that they've discovered
gravitational waves, they can test them and subsequently maybe fine
strings and or sub quantum reality. That's fascinating. I mean,
we've talked about string theory on the show before and
never never come across a good way to test it today.
It's always sort of one of those things where they say,
maybe on the very on the next high energy particle collider,

(01:14:39):
we'll get too high enough energies that we can test.
But I hadn't heard of this. So in terms of
stranger things, okay, if we're using string theory here, maybe uh,
the upside down is one of these bubbles, and then
the stranger things like real world is another bubble and
they touched, and then that means that while they could
pass back and forth between one another, they would have
created another being bad big bang, So we might see

(01:15:01):
a third universe. Okay, that's a possibility, and the and
this and the upside down is just a universe that
happened to turn out just like ours, except a little
ikey looking. Sure. Okay, Now, the final theory is called
eternal inflation. I love that name, and it argues that
if you could zoom back and look at all of

(01:15:23):
spacetime simultaneously, you'd find that some areas of space stop
inflating the way that the Big Bang did, and that
others continue at like a rapid pace. So some some
parts are inflating, some aren't. They're all at different rates.
And guess what. They use the bubble metaphor too. They
couldn't come up with their own thing, so they've got
this bubble metaphor. Our universe is a bubble. It's in
a network of other bubbles. But the big difference here

(01:15:45):
is that the universes in these potentially have different laws
of physics than ours do. So this is a combination
idea of parallel universes with alternate dimensions, which makes it
a little more complicated, but it's essentially asking, like, what's
going to happen if these bubbles collide? Right now? Astrophysicist
Ethan Siegel came along in and he added a limitation,

(01:16:08):
or maybe a complexity to this theory that I think
makes it more fun. He says, well, here's the thing.
Spacetime could go on forever in theory, but our universe.
We know our universe is measurable and that it's under
fourteen billion years old, so it's not infinite. Therefore, it's
subsequently has to have a limit to the number of

(01:16:28):
ways that particles can arrange themselves in the universe. So again,
this is all these different possibilities that lead to physics,
but not an infinite amount of them. Okay, there's another
theory though, that's kind of buried inside of eternal inflation theory,
and it's called brains universe theory, and brains is suppelled

(01:16:49):
b A B A Barnes B R A N E. S.
This is what you're referring to when I read the
Lily quote. What he's talking about membrane membranes exact late. Yeah,
So he's using language it's you know, steeped in this stuff.
It imagines this though, that these universes are all intersecting
and overlapping. But instead of using the bubble metaphor they

(01:17:12):
say in brains theory, they say, well, it's like bread,
it's like a bunch of slices of bread and they're
all stacked on top of each other. Uh. And they
call these brains, and each one of these brains has
three dimensions. But if you refine the idea, and maybe
there's some more complex versions of these brains, some have
three dimensions, maybe some of them have seventeen dimensions, and

(01:17:33):
when they overlap, what we would experience is in three
dimensions because we are our bodies are physically only able
to perceive that many dimensions plus time. So maybe what's
going on in Stranger Things is actually these two universes
have overlapped, and what they're experiencing in the upside down

(01:17:55):
is sort of like the in the middle of like
a ven diagram, right that will that would I like
this theory because this would explain why there's a swimming pool,
why they see like it just a shadow version of
their own world. It's just like slightly different because they're
not able to perceive all of these other dimensions of
reality that are occurring around them. So here's where it

(01:18:16):
gets exciting, because this theory has a lot of evidence
that seems to make it look like it's possible. Uh.
In two thousand five, a paper was published in Physical
Review Letters that said, oh, we just found this big
cold spot in space, and we detected it with NASA's
w M a P satellite. Then in two thousand eight,
two more studies were conducted to try to detect this

(01:18:37):
as well, and they did this by looking at cosmic microwaves.
And the reason why is because cosmic microwaves are left
over from the Big Bang, and if cooled down to
about two point seven Kelvin's is it's like a thing
that we know, we can kind of measure it. Sometimes
throughout the universe it's a little hotter, sometimes they're a
little cooler, and that corresponds to fluctuations in the density

(01:18:58):
of the early universe as it was growing after the
Big Bang and clumping like thing mass was clumping together
and forming gap galaxies. Okay, so they thought, may thine,
this cold spot that we've just found, this could be
where another universe has overlapped with ours while ours was
inflating during the Big Bang. Then in the cold spot

(01:19:21):
was detected again by the European Space Agency's Plank mission,
and then more recently it was detected yet again by
the Very Large Array Radio Telescope and they found that
the cold spot and get ready for this. It's this
giant void that is one billion light years across. It
is huge. It is largely empty of of everything we
understand to be in space. There's no galaxies, there's no

(01:19:43):
dark matter as far as they can tell. So maybe
this is evidence of a bubble collision or I guess
a bread collision. These these universes have have come together,
and that's the vandire craun Man. Do you think they
could call it the bread zone? That that great? Yeah?
So okay, here's the Stranger Things like attempt at explaining this.

(01:20:06):
So maybe the Stranger Things universe and the upside Down.
They're part of all of space and time that's around us, right,
but they inflated at different rates and you can either
think of them as bubbles or bread whatever works for you. Subsequently,
the upside Down could have different laws of physics than
we do. However, based on what we've seen in the show,

(01:20:27):
the laws of things that have to be fairly aligned
with ours, and not just because we don't see people
defying the laws of physics, but like the universe of
the upside Down is held together because we or would
not a writer and hell Boy can only experience the
upside down three three dimensions and then the fourth dimension

(01:20:49):
of time. So maybe what we've seen in this show,
the idea of the upside down is actually not another universe,
but it's where two universes are overlapping. Huh. Well, that
that opens up all sorts of storytelling possibilities for future seasons. Totally.
If when you're in the upside down you can defy
the your expectations of physics. Uh, if you just believe

(01:21:11):
in yourself so positive vibes. Man hypothetical question if there
could be other universes with different laws of physics than
our own maybe maybe not, and if we could go
to them? Uh, that seems very unlikely. But let's just
say we did. You went to another universe at different
laws of physics, would that universe immediately kill you? Yeah?

(01:21:32):
Because if if I depend on and I do depend
on the laws of the physics of this universe to
hold my body together, right, I mean, how am I
gonna go into a universe that has a maybe a
drastically different structure. Yeah, Like, say you go to a
universe with your body made of atoms and suddenly one
of the four fundamental forces. The nuclear force is weaker,
and so the atoms in your body are just not

(01:21:54):
quite as keen to hold together. That seems like maybe
that wouldn't be great. Yeah, but this is so again
this points to the idea that they're overlapping, so that
you've still got the forces of our universe overlapping with
all of their forces. But hey, it's a television show. Yeah. Uh,
maybe that's another episode though. Yeah. Alright, guys, there you

(01:22:19):
have it. We have We've rolled through some science, uh,
a little culture, a little history, some pseudoscience, all all
of which seems to flow out of stranger things. And
uh so then hopefully this helps enrich your appreciation of
a show you already dig and maybe prepares you for
some of the twist and turns in the upcoming season,
which what airs at the end of this month. Yeah, yeah,

(01:22:41):
thanks so much for joining us tonight. Y'all got a
lot of fun and uh, once more, everything on the
table has to go, so don't don't be shy about
grabbing some T shirts and some buttons. Thanks everybody for

(01:23:06):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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