The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Why Pain Hurts So Good, Growing Mutant Gardens, Emo Teen Puppies

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Leigh Cowart, science reporter and author of Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose, joins Weirdest Thing for the season finale! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Lee Cowart. Lee, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Listeners, for those of you who don't know, Lee is one of my favorite science writers and the author of an incredible new book. Lee, would you like to tell us a little bit about that? Oh, yeah. My book, It Hurts So Good, The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose, is about all of the ways that humans can send to suffer for fun.

When we think about masochism, we think about like BDSM and sex and 50 Shades, but actually opting into averse of experiences is very human and very normal. So the book covers everything from hot peppers to polar plunges to ballet dancers, ultramarathons, all of this deliberate suffering. And it asks, what the fuck are we doing this for and what do we get out of it? why is this such a thing? I personally am an inveterate masochist, and so it was a huge labor of love and suffering to do the reporting for this, and I am just so happy to be here today. Amazing. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little

tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? So this week I'm going to be talking about teen angst, but the canine edition. Woohoo! Wonderful. Lee, how about your teas? I'm going to talk about how pain is always, always, always subjective in ways that might surprise you. Hmm. Sounds intriguing.

My tea is that I am going to talk about the scientists and high society ladies who used radiation to grow mutant flowers and veggies. That sounds fun. I'm excited about that one. Should we start there? I'm happy to roll us right into it. Yes, do it. Well, so I have to say that this topic is one I have known about for a few years.

It was a great 99PI episode about it. I will definitely link to that in the article for this episode on popsye.com slash weird. But I've been thinking about it recently in particular because I just saw Guillermo del Toro's new noir film, Nightmare Alley. Me too. Which that was really a film that I was like, wow, he really went for the noir in this noir. I was very, it was a real lover, but I love his work. So I was glad to be so bummed. But it largely takes place in an early 20th century circus.

And that made me think of one of my most favorite and also most disturbing books, Geek Love by Catherine Dunn. Shout out to my middle school English teacher who was reading Geeklove while I was in her seventh grade English class and definitely like sideways recommended it to me. And good thing I didn't read it until a few years later, Caroline. But, you know, that's what you get for being a precocious youth, I suppose. Anyway, Geeklove, very intense and weird and fraught book. But some of its characters talk about being inspired by the concept of atomic gardening. Very round about when it gets to my topic.

But I just felt like I needed to shout out all of the disturbing media that helped me get to this. very actually pretty pedestrian fact. So most listeners probably know that during World War II, the Manhattan Project figured out how to harness nuclear chain reactions to commit unspeakably horrifying acts of mass murder and war. But in the early 1900s, when scientists were just starting to really understand radioactivity and there wasn't a giant war to worry about, nuclear science had a much more fantastical and optimistic following.

On previous episode to the weirdest thing, we've talked about how, of course, this led to some very dangerous and misguided nonsense, like irradiating slippers

so they could glow in the dark. Oh, my God. Good stuff. Aged very well. But I'm talking about also, like, the broader idea that understanding nuclear physics would give us unlimited energy,

unlimited food, that it could make resources so abundant that Utopia simply had to follow. And that's, you know, it's nice that people were having those thoughts, even if it clearly didn't pan out. Must be nice to be so optimistic about your future. Exactly. Yeah. And part of that research involved using x-rays, you know, the same wavelength of radiation

that we now use for imaging our bones, to try to induce helpful mutations in all kinds of plants, peanuts, for example. So radiation can break down the bonds. that keep DNA together, causing cancers, for example, when cells start reproducing out of control, or something like radiation burns, for example, when those cells start dying. But DNA damage in sex cells can then get passed on to offspring, and that can result in, like, literally any kind of physiological change. If a gene can control it, radiation could change it. So the hope was that, like x-ray some peanuts and maybe they'll make a better peanut.

So there was a lot of work going on on this in like the 1920s, but it was very much in its infancy. They didn't quite know what they were doing. But all of those rosy utopian avenues for using nuclear physics were put on hold so that the U.S. could make a terrible bomb, which we did, thereby throwing the world into a horrific arms race that in many ways continues to this day. But meanwhile, scientists did keep at least half an eye on the idea of radioactive plants. namely because some of the most brilliant scientists in the world were working on nuclear weapons, and they understood that radioactive fallout was going to fundamentally alter the ecosystem of any place they were testing or dropping bombs.

And that is where we got Gamerae Gardens, which is also just like such a fun phrase. And so this is where a scientist would essentially just plunk a tube of radioactive material. it was usually the isotope cobalt 60 into the center of a field, often like five or six acres across. And then they would plant crops of various sorts in this kind of like pizza pie configuration of concentric circles. Because the idea was that the plants really close to the center would get like a very high dose of radiation. And at the edge, they would be getting a very small dose of radiation.

And then the ones in the middle got something in between. And so they were trying to figure out, you know, like how big of a dose does a town have to get of radiation before we're concerned that like the plants aren't safe to eat, the plants are going to die. Eventually, the isotope rod would just like get dropped into a bunker so that scientists could go out and check out the plants. Now, gamma rays have an even smaller wavelength than X-rays. You can only get to them after you split an atom and they'll shoot through basically anything. It takes layers and layers of shielding to stop them. So it won't surprise you to learn that the plants are right next to the radioactive core would just die. They were dead.

No preamble. Absolutely fried. And then some of the closest ones to survive would grow tumors because plants can get cancer too. Or they would just otherwise look pretty worse for where. You wouldn't want to eat them or replant them. Again, understandable. But yeah, somewhere farther out in the circle, they noticed that you would start to say plants that were like just a little different than what you thought you had planted.

Maybe they were especially tall. Maybe they were producing loads of fruit. Maybe their colors were strange or like you were getting flowers with like multiple colors in each petal, just to name a few examples. And that became very interesting to the U.S. government during the Cold War. when we suddenly found ourselves trying to justify the fact that we basically invented a war crime and a bottle. They were, suddenly the U.S. government was very interested in going back to those sunny utopian

narratives about the potential of nuclear energy. The government wanted to prove to its own citizens and to the world that actually there had been a real bright side to all of the nuclear weapons. And we were totally going to have radically better lives thanks to nuclear physics. We just had to crack the code. Yeah, we really need more crazy flowers. I know. The best thing to come out of nuclear.

Exactly, yeah. So there were a bunch of initiatives designed to like get nuclear physics into our everyday lives in a helpful and morally palatable fashion. And one of them was using those gamma gardens to create exciting and useful new plant varietals. Basically, research facilities would have the setup I described before, and they'd work on spotting any potentially useful adaptations that cropped up. Then they'd take that mutant plant and they'd try to improve on it. They might cross-breed it with something else or irradiate a second or third or fourth generation of it.

And at each stage, they'd be keeping some seeds and breeding those to get more so that when they found something really neat and useful or aesthetically pleasing, they could get those nuclear seeds out to the public. And they did. even folks without any interest in nuclear science probably interacted with some of these plants and we still do today. The Rio Star grapefruit, which is now very common is just one example. It was bred to have very dark flesh and sweet juice.

Also, the predominant variety of cow rose rice was bred to be like a really good height to be harvested by combine using a Gamma Garden. and in fact most of the world's mint oil comes from a peppermint cultivar called Todd's Mitchum. I don't know why that's what the peppermint's called, but... Sounds like an old-timey movie star. Yeah, Todd Mitchum. Todd's Mitchum. The cool taste of Todd Mitchum.

It's resistant to certain fungi. And it was bred at Brookhaven National Labs Gamut Garden. There are more than 3,000 registered plant cultivars that got to be the way they are because of radiation. But some folks wanted to get a much closer look at this exciting new science. One of the most famous was an oral surgeon named C.J. Spez, who turned a bunker in his backyard in Tennessee into a workshop where he shot seeds up with radiation. And then he sold them across the world. And the idea was that it provided kind of a hint of the same mystery of a Gamma Garden without having to bury Cobalt 60 in your own backyard because you're buying the irradiated seeds. You weren't buying like a core of plutonium or something.

But you didn't know what those seeds would turn into because like it's not like he had bred a bunch of plants to do specific things and then was selling you the seeds. He was just like, I blasted these with radiation. have fun. Good luck. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's really looking back at catalogs, I think there were some that he sold because he had like perfected them to do a particular thing. But mostly what he was promising was like, what a mystery. And it was very clear, like, not every crop will be a miracle, but like, ooh, you never know what you might get.

I don't know. It reminds me of like a prize at the bottom of a cereal box. It's like the surprise flavored like Starburst or whatever. It's like, mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. There's also, there was a British woman named Muriel Howorth, who was also quite well known. She started the Atomic Gardening Society, which is what it sounds like.

She basically wanted to popularize using these irradiated seeds. She became CJ's, like, chief overseas distributor. It said that, like, through her, he sold millions of seeds in the UK. But the Atomic Gardening Society also did things. like put on interpretive dance performances to explain how nuclear physics works. I have. I love that. Yeah, exactly.

I have a brief description from Time Magazine in 1950 that I would love to read. Before a select audience of 250 rat ladies and a dozen faintly bored gentlemen, some 13 bosommy A.E. Associates in flowing evening gowns jirated gracefully about a.mated gracefully about a stage in earnest imitation of atomic forces at work. An ample electron in black lace wound her way around two matrons labeled proton and neutron, while an elderly ginger-haired Geiger counter clicked out their radioactive effect on a pretty girl named Agriculture. Oh.

At a climactic moment, a Mrs. Monica Daviol raced across the stage, the stage, inspirited representation of a rat eating radioactive cheese. Okay. Are they still taking members? Because I want in. Yeah, I feel exactly the same way, Sarah Kylie. Do you know about Dancer PhD? Yes, yeah.

That's what this sounds like to me. No, that is a great point. Listeners, definitely Google Dancer PhD. It is basically PhD students doing, this. Yes. To explain their thesis. Yeah, there's nothing quite like a

male reporter in 1950 trying to describe women swaying. It's very they bosomed busily. Yeah, exactly. Gently dirating with their bosoms. And

yeah. So that's really all I have to say about her group. You can learn a lot more about her. I'll reference a couple of books and podcast episodes on popside.com slash weird, but just to give you a little taste of what this was like as a hobby, because there were hobbyists who did it. I kind of, before doing this research was under the mistaken impression that hobbyists were like actually burying radioactive stuff in their backyard. And that's not really the case.

They were being smarter than all that. So now I have a newfound respect for them. They were just planting funky seeds and having funky dance parties. It sounds amazing. Absolutely. It's good to have hobbies. Yeah. Yeah.

Bring the science into your own backyard. That's what Muriel was all about. Apparently when she, before she started the society and before she started kind of selling her own seeds, she has. she had just gotten wind that this was happening and had bought seeds, I think from CJ, for a peanut plant. And her initial kind of introduction of the world of atomic gardening to her society friends was that she had a dinner party serving the mutant peanuts. And she was like, no one was fucking excited. She was just like, no one understood why they should be excited about these peanuts.

So then she decided she just needed to. do some science communication to make people understand. Dance it out. Exactly. Yeah. So this is actually still one mainstream method of getting new kinds of plants. There are a few countries that still have like working gamma ray gardens to find new mutations. But more targeted genetic engineering made gamma gardens pretty obsolete.

I mean, while proponents back in the mid-20th century talked about irradiation as if it jump-started the process of evolution, it actually only jump-starts the process of mutation. And yes, a lot of the ways that an organism evolves comes down to random DNA mutations that happen to be useful and they stick around, they become ubiquitous in the species and the species changes. But evolution is only able to happen that way because so many mutations happen. and most of them are just useless, some of them are harmful. Radiation doesn't make evolution happen faster because the natural selection of beneficial

mutations is what actually changes a species. But the mutation just changes one organism. So they kind of thought they were like putting it on a fast track to being its best self, and they were really just kind of speeding up the process of like, anything can happen. which is life. That is the process of reproduction in life and they made it happen very quickly. But it also required a lot of sorting through those changes

and trying to figure out what was good or bad about them. And with modern genetic engineering, well, of course, there is still some trial and error involved. And there are species we know way less about than others at the genetic level. Scientists are at least attempting to make genetic tweaks based on like what those genes are known to influence. So it is much less scattershot. But yeah, no, there are still lots of varietals we interact with all the time that came from this method. And there are places where this is still being done. Though, unfortunately, with less modern dance involved.

You should change that. Yeah. I mean, you know, we could. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll bring it back. I want to be the gigger counter. Yeah. I want to be the pretty girl called agriculture. Yeah, pretty girl called agriculture. I just don't want to be the matron that's an electron. That's my other thought reading that time right up is like they did a lot of unnecessarily labeling some people as matrons and some people as bosomy young ladies. All right.

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. fit for your ambition for citizens back Okay we're back And Sarah Kylie Tell me about teen angst in dogs Oh yeah

I am very excited to talk about this So as we all know Everyone has been a teenager once Or if you're like nine and listening to it's coming for you But we've No Leah But basically We've all seen the high or lows

of pubescence and everything is very dramatic. And if you've got siblings, kids, or teens in your life, that melodramatic attitude sometimes comes out into the rest of the world and affects everybody. So during teenagership, a whole bunch of things are happening in the human brain. And we'll get to the dog brain in just a little bit. But it typically lasts from around eight or nine until our 20s is what is pubescence. First of all, it's the largest change in the brain since infantdom and the brain is developing really quickly and increasing in brain matter, which means those teeny bopper brains are gaining some serious processing power. And so according to Sarah Johnson, who is an assistant professor at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

by adolescence, teens brains have computational and decision-making skills of an adult. So you've got all the hardware, but they tend to be influenced by emotions versus rationality. And that's thanks to the limbic system, which is the emotional part of our brain. having more power at this time than the prefrontal cortex. And the limbic systems development gives way for all kinds of new emotions like aggression and sexual attraction and all of that delightful fun stuff of being a teenager. And on top of... I just turned 30 and I'm still waiting to become rational. I just...

Yeah. I thought 25. I was legally allowed to rent a car. I was going to... No. Yeah. I'm still just... Still just rage and sad, but that's okay.

Yeah, I still definitely have questions about when my teenage years are going to end now at 26. But so, yeah, and so on top of like all of the drama that's just happening in the brain, the breaks come online somewhat later than the accelerator of the brain is what Johnson said in an article a couple of years ago. And so enter risky choices and impulsiveness. Yay. hormonal effects like the rhizome receptors are oxytocin, which can manifest in the ways of self-consciousness also come into play. So to outsiders, teens often look self-centered or overly idealistic.

And unsurprisingly, if you are a parent or, again, have a teen in your life on this era, adds a lot of strain on parental relationships with their teens. Shocker. And teens with more insecure relationships with their parents also tend to start puberty earlier. So if you already are having drama with your parents, you might start puberty earlier. So throwing that out there and there's been some research on that. But until fairly recently, there's not been a whole lot of proof that other animals that aren't human undergo some of the like parentally mind-boggling teen drama that humans do. Some animals come close. So elephants have an

angsty teen phase where they're growing up when they're in their like elephant 20s, which is kind of the, you know, equivalent to teen years for us. Male elephants will ditch their moms to hang out in like little crews of rambunctious other teen elephants. It's not a face, ma'am. There's not a face mom. And male dolphins also do this. So they'll like, you know, bounce around with their other crews of like teenage prime

dolphins. So like if that tells you anything. And then this is another fun adolescent animal fact, but adolescent mice given to peer pressure and can be kind of party animals. In the presence of peers, adolescent mice drink more ethanol-spiked water than when they were alone. But the same results were not found in adults.

So drunk mice. Moving on. So perhaps unsurprisingly, anecdotally, we've seen acts of teenage defiance in our favorite pets. There's lots of anecdotes online of teenage pups doing angsty stuff. One dog blog that I found, Fido Savvy, broke this down in a couple of really delightful ways.

So your dog suddenly develops selective hearing. He only hears what he wants to. He forgets, quote unquote, how to follow simple commands that he learned months ago. Concentration and focus become a problem. Potty accidents occasionally happen, even though they've been reliable for ages. Like they just start peeing on things. Quote, bratty behavior increases, including nipping, biting, barking, and jumping, and jumping. jumping. And Fido suddenly gets bossy with other dogs, pets, children, or even adults. So there's

always been kind of like this at it's like, I think, six to nine months, dogs just start acting up a little bit. And of course, most of these puberty, doggy nightmares are just people talking to each other. But in 2020, someone actually did a study about teen angst and dogs, which loved that. And what they found was that they had shockingly similar dramatic changes in attitude, especially towards their human parents. So obviously by this point, your dog's like, you know, it kind of looks like an adult dog, but now it's just acting like a sassy dog. So a bunch of British researchers worked with the charity guide dogs to see if around doggy puberty, you know, six to nine months, if there were substantial behavioral differences,

and there were. So the team took two different groups of puppies. There were German shepherds, golden retrievers, labs, or crosses of these breeds. So, you know, like working dogs. The first group was about five months old, still in their bouncy baby phase, where their human parents are the light of their lives, much like kids before hormones start running amok. And the second group was at eight months, which is a peak of potentially grouchy teen angst era, is what I'd like to call it. And so they took these two teams of dogs, and they did the classic sit command with the parents, and then with like an ounce. outsider. And so at five months, pups respond really well to their parents telling them to sit,

and they're not really great at listening to strangers. But by eight months, this reverses. A teenage pup will gladly sit with some random person asks, but when mom or dad asks, they're angsty about it. So the lead author, Lucy Asher, told the guardian, right when this came out there, nearly twice, is likely to ignore the sit command when they're eight months old as when they're five months. So if your dogs, like, forgotten how to sit, this might be why. So additionally, Asher suggests that dogs with less secure bonds, like clingy dogs, and their parents, they might play up a little bit more to test out the strength. So in dogs, what that means is the animals going back and forth on whether to hang out with

mom forever or follow its teenage horniness and reproductive urge to go find a doggy boyfriend her girlfriend and make puppies, which, you know, sounds kind of familiar. So the researchers, they did the sit thing, and then they also took it a step further by polling hundreds of dog owners. And what they saw is that in a group of 285 dogs, a drop in trainability was reported by pup parents when the dogs are between five and eight months old. However, dog trainers, like actual trainers, didn't see the same thing, likely because these, you know, trained professionals aren't as one-on-one familiar with the teenage dogs themselves, so they're less likely to act rebelliously towards them.

But they're like, heck you, mom, when they're like eight months old. So they do know how to sit. They just won't do it for mom. And on top of that, signs of separation anxiety started popping up around eight months, like shaking when they're home alone. And female dogs with insecure relationship with their people parents started puberty earlier than their peers kind of in a way that mimics what happens with humans. So Naomi Harvey, another author of.

this study, so that many dog owners and professionals have long known or suspected that dog behavior can become more difficult when they go through puberty. But until now, there's been no empirical record of this. A result shows that behaviors change is seen in dogs closely parallel of that of a child-parent relationship. As dog-owner conflict is specific to the dog's primary caregiver and just as with human teenagers, this is just a passing phase. So, fun stuff. And funnily enough, there's even more research out there that shows how human brains are kind of wired similarly to think about their dogs and their kids. So one study showed that when women were shown pictures of their own dogs, their own kids,

and then random dogs are kids, women seeing their own kid or pup ignited some of the same parts of the brain. So the part of the brains that were ignited with both baby and my doggy, but not other people's dogs or other people's babies. like the amygdala, the medial orbofrontal cortex, and the dorsal puttamin, I don't know. So parts of the brain

that are involved in emotion and reward processing. So unsurprisingly, there's also parts that the babies got that dogs didn't get because they are our offspring. And I guess there's some parts that are saved for human babies that we won't feel when we look at dogs.

But still, if it's a loved one and it's either furry or human, we get a similarly loved up response. The authors of this study wrote, these results demonstrate that the mother-child and mother-dog bonds shares aspects of emotional experience in patterns of brain function. So if people are like, I'm a dog mom, they are a dog mom.

And the big difference, other than, of course, that dogs are dogs and babies are babies, is that we can, theoretically, it pains me to think about it, but giving up your dogs if they're going through this. And you can't give up your teen for adoption. If they're driving you crazy, you're kind of stuck with them. But folks do have the ability to rehome their dogs if they start acting out of control, even if it's just their hormones, making them a little grumpier than usual. So that's the kind of point of all this research is that it's a crucial reminder that this phase will end.

Like if you have an eight-month-old puppy and it's just acting strange, it's okay. It's going to end. And keep loving all your pops and training them and being nice and doing your best like you would with a grumpy teenager and maybe sign up for some socialization or obedience classes. But at the end of the day, always give your dog and your teens some love because they are going through it, apparently. So, and that's all I know about doggy. Ask your dog what they're interested in. Play some fortnight with them. Play some fortnight with the puppy.

There's actually a doggy daycare near my mom. house. I don't have a dog. I wish I did. But my 16-year-old cat would, um, she would just laid out and die. So not going to do that to her. But there is a dog daycare near me that is just their whole schick is that it is designed to look like a fancy living room. It has like fireplaces and like shiz lounges and the dogs just sit around having like business meetings together. That's amazing. Cute. Anyway.

My favorite bar is like that. It's like a living room. Fancy grandma's living room. Oh my God. Okay. We'll take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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pain. All right. So today I want to talk about the subjective nature of pain. There's a common misconception that, like, there is a linear relationship between, like, the sensation on your skin and what your brain does. There's also, like, no way for me to put your brain into a scanner and know exactly how much pain you're in, at least at this point, we can't do it. It turns out it's really chaotic and pain is always cooked up fresh by your brain like every time and it depends on what you're doing it depends on your emotional state arousal inner life expectations all of this comes together to output a painful sensation and there is this incredible story that i'm going to tell that is absolutely true and i think that it demonstrates this beautifully

So we start with Dr. Lormore Mosley. He is a researcher at Neuroscience Research Australia, and he's also an avid hiker. So our Dr. Mosley is hiking in the bush, which he does all the time. And he's just kind of trekking along. His legs are exposed. He's having a great day. It's beautiful. Hiking, all of that stuff.

he feels something on the outside of his leg. And when you feel a sensation on your skin, your no susceptors, like the signal from your no susceptors, zip up the nerve into the spine and go up to the brain where your brain has to figure out what is happening. So in this moment, he feels something on his leg and his brain is just like, okay, okay, cool. Well, I mean, like, we are hiking and it's probably like a stick. I think it's a stick. I think it's a stick. We're hiking, bare legs is totally a stick. Cool, keep going.

No big deal. No big deal. And so he just like keeps walking. It's just like, you're right. No big deal. I am hiking. And he gets into the water for a little dip and he's just like, oh, swimming and and hiking.

That does sound like a great day. Right? It's just like chilling. having the time of his life, just like out there in nature, feeling it out, he gets out of the water, collapses on the beach, and almost dies. Drama. I bet that was not a stick. It was not a stick, my friends.

It was one of the most venomous snakes in the entire world, the eastern brown snake. Oh, good. Oh, my gosh. So it usually kills people, right? He survives. And the crazy thing is that the very very. venom from that snake causes a lot of no-susceptive, like, noise, like screaming. It is activating nerve fibers.

But since his brain was, like, absolutely convinced that he was fine, his brain was just like, a psps-ps-p-p-s-p-no. I reject this input. We are on a hike, and that's what we're doing. So, he almost dies, and miraculously, he recovers. Six months later, he's hiking again. And this time he's with some friends and his legs are bare and, you know, same old thing. Hiking, hiking, beautiful day, hanging out.

And he feels something on the outside of his leg. And his brain immediately drops his ass like a bag of hammers. Like 10-10 agony, screaming in pain. The worst pain he has ever felt in his whole life. His friends are like, holy shit. And he's just like writhing and stooping. screaming in agony on the ground. Except that time, it was a stick.

Oh, my God. Right? Yes, so his brain was just like, oh, shit. I did fuck this up last time. And so the arrow on the side of caution, I'm going to make sure that you do not miss this alarm and that you pay attention to this sensation on your leg. And I'm going to absolutely put you through hell, like full cenobite, full torch, just like the worst pain.

Let me see it. He described it as a white, hot poker pain, screaming up my leg. And both of those sensations were real. Like there's this, like when people say like, oh, pain is all in your head, blah, blah, blah. It's like a derogatory thing. Like, it is true that pain is all in your head. But like that does not make it any less real ever. Everything we experience is all in our head.

Me talking to you right now, it's all in my head. Me perceiving the little boxes on my screen, all in my head. So I don't like it when people try to like poo-poo pain is like, oh, well, you could just like get through it because it's not really real. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because it is real. It's very real. It's just like so enormously subjective. And this reminds me of one of the worst things that I did for my book research.

I ate the hottest pepper. I remember seeing your video of that. Yeah, yeah. It didn't look fun to me. I, you know what? It wasn't. It was not fun, Rachel. It was not fun at all.

And the crazy thing about that is so, like, at this point, when I decided to eat the pepper, which, spoilers, was one of the most painful things I've ever done. and I have done and experienced a lot of painful things, both consensually and non. The hot pepper pain was like, I didn't know how I was going to explain it. Because it literally felt like someone just poured molten lava into my mouth. Like, I thought I was dying. If I didn't know what was happening, I would have, like, immediately gone to the hospital and possibly tried to cut my own tongue out.

Like, there was no, like, it was, I was, like, speechless. I did it again, by the way, but... Oh, my God. So I learned nothing. And actually, it just makes you so high afterwards that you're just like, oh, my God, I'll absolutely do this again. I am completely untethered from reality and drifting through space. So I grew my own peppers and I did it again. But in that moment with that pepper, I knew that capsaicin, the molecule in peppers, is a heat mimics.

It's not, it doesn't interact with your taste receptors, it interacts with your temperature receptors, and it makes them just scream. And I knew I wasn't actually in danger. And I knew the story of Dr. Mosley and how pain is always subjective and how his own experience of excruciating pain came from a situation where there was like actually no danger. and yet he was an agony. And I really, I was so cocky. I really felt like I can handle this because I know it's not real. And because my brain, my conscious brain, knows that I'm not in danger. I'm going to be such a badass.

I'm going to eat the world's hottest pepper. And it's going to be amazing. And I'm going to talk through it on camera and make a cute little video. And none of that happened. I just cried and snotted on myself and tried to crawl out of my seat. And I got it in my eye. And I'm just like, uh-uh, uh-uh. I am alone in a rental car in a parking lot in California, eating this pepper by myself.

I didn't bring a milkshake. I didn't bring anything. I really thought that since pain is subjective, I got this. And I absolutely did not got this. I thought I was going to die. I was just like weeping and crying and gagging and just like drool, soap the front of my shirt. And even in that moment, I knew I wasn't in danger. And there wasn't anything I could do about it.

There wasn't any way to get off the ride. My nosusceptors were just like screaming, you as loudly as possible. It's like unrelenting, shrieking noises. I felt it in my ear canals. I felt it like in every part of my face. I got it in my eye. I felt like I was dying.

And eventually, and I just fought, I fought like hell, right? Because, like, I knew that pain was subjective. And I was just like, Lorimer Mosley got a stick on his leg. And he was fine. It's okay. I am fine. I am fine.

I am fine. I am fine. And eventually, I just had to be like, oh, you were so stupidly. You were so stupid. You were so stupid. And the only thing that you can do in this moment is to surrender and just take the ride. You know, just be in pain. And I got, maybe, I was just like, okay, well, we'll do it, if we can't do it, the like, logic, you know, Vulcan way of like understanding that like, it's not real and I am in control.

I just decided that I was like, well, it's my pain cave and I'm going to stay in it. Ha, ha, ha. So I was just like a little gremlin in my car, just like, yeah, take it, take it, take it. Oh, man. I am. Coincidentally, it was my birthday a few days ago. And my mom loves to retail every year. My mom used to be an OBJN. And she loves to tell the story of how because she had had the experience of being catheterized before and had placed many catheters, she was like, I know what this feels. like, and I know how to do it, I'm going to insert my own catheter. Uh-uh. Nope.

Oh, my God. She, uh, doing it herself was just really different. And she says she immediately stood up and walked out to a nurse who was her colleague and friend and said, if you don't get this fucking thing out of me right now, I'm not having. a baby because I will kill myself. And they were like, I'm sure she made it. Okay. So anyway, I almost didn't exist

because my mom insisted on inserting her own catheter, but it all worked out in the end. Like, I'm like sweating over here, hearing this story. I was stressing me out. I am also sweating. Just reliving it has given me the swamp armpits. Like, I feel sweat like dripping down the sides of my body. Have you seen the video of Lord eating the

spicy hot wings with like no no emotion so there's like it's a weird like celebrity eating hot wings right i feel like i see gifts from that show and i've never actually i've never seen the show from it but yeah lord just like sits there and it's like mm delicious my my partner absolutely terrified me because i grew reaper peppers to like have this like kind of psychedelic pain experience with them, and I filmed it. And they'd never eaten a Reaper Pepper before, but I had. So again, again, I'm cocky in a situation where I absolutely ate shit. And I go to watch the video afterwards, and my partner ate the pepper and, like, gave like a really dignified, like, and then they folded their legs, cross their arms and close

their eyes. Like, what? I've, I've seen so many pepper eating competitions and they were just like, yeah, I did a lot of psychedelics when I was younger. And when you're tripping too hard, you really can't fight it. And it kind of felt like that. And I'm like, yeah, I know that logically.

But I've never, like, before or since, seen anyone just kind of like meditate through a Carolina Reaper pepper experience. Have they considered going on the competitive circuit? Right? I think they, I think their bowels are too precious. That's really fair. Whenever I watch the hot pepper competition, I mean, there was that great show, we are the champions. That was like, yes, I love that. I love that show. And the episode about hot peppers, I thought was really well done, but yes, watching the competitors, I was like, I don't judge them for loving this. I do worry about their poops. Oh, my God.

You have to puke. You have to puke afterwards. Otherwise, you get the caps aesan cramps. And I think that's the real thing that keeps my partner off the circuit is that once they, we did do a hot wing eating competition, which they won, unsurprisingly. This is before the Reaper Pepper happened. I'm surprised they even tried it. Oh, full disclosure, I spit out my Reaper peppers.

I just do it in my mouth and then I spit it out because I love my ass-a-t too much to put it through something like that. Like I want to stay friends with my sphincters forever. Forever. And they got the cap cramps and it was like as close to an endurable agony

that like you could be without like they were like I think I need to like bang my head unconscious just like I cannot handle this. And like they weren't in any danger. Right. You just had to wait through it because again, it's like it's a mimic. It's only dangerous if you're allergic to it, which is like less than 1% of people. But yeah, so if you do want to experience the absolute agony, like if you want to fight God and feel like one, chew and spit the pepper, you'll have like 30 to 40 minutes of the worst pain in your face that you ever thought beyond what you.

you thought possible. And then afterwards, you will be so ludicrously high that you will forget how bad it was and you will probably do it again. And you can do it with the knowledge that your whole experience is subjective and cooked up fresh by your poor brain, just trapped up there in the dark, just shimmering with electricity, trying to figure out why you are dying. That's beautiful. Yeah. Stunning. Love it. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this be?

I think Lee wins it easily. A wild ride from start to finish. And also, I think, a great argument for buying hurts so good. Thank you. You can read all about it. And I narrate the audiobook. So if you want to hear me tell you exactly how bad it was to eat that pepper in grueling detail. you can have that experience for yourself.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us, Lee. Thank you so much for having me. This has been so fun. All right, listeners, and that is a wrap on season five of the weirdest thing I learned this week, which is just absolutely wild. We are so grateful to you all, new listeners, people who have been with us since way back in the beginning.

We will definitely be back in your feed really soon. Season six is not too far away, and we will definitely have some. fun bonus content dropping in in the meantime. You should also join our Facebook group. You can find it by searching Weirdest Thing on Facebook. It's a great place to meet other fans of the podcast, share weird stories, just get weird. It's great. And keep an eye out for our sister show, Ask Us Anything, which will be coming back to your feeds really shortly. Okay. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear,

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