Companies are accidentally stealing wind from each other with massive wind farms that disrupt local weather patterns, ancient Chinese poets have been documenting climate change for centuries without realizing they were creating the world's longest environmental dataset, and there are rooms so quiet that people start hallucinating from hearing their own bodily functions. Also, spending too long in complete silence can make you go temporarily insane, which explains why sensory deprivation is used as both therapy and torture.
Today we're exploring a world where renewable energy creates unexpected environmental theft, classical literature doubles as climate science, and absolute silence becomes a form of psychological warfare. These stories prove that whether we're talking about wind patterns, historical poetry, or acoustic engineering, humans have an extraordinary talent for discovering that everything is connected in ways we never expected.
Wind Theft: When Green Energy Gets Greedy
Wind farms are supposed to save the planet, but it turns out they might be stealing wind from their neighbors in the process. These massive installations don't just harvest renewable energy - they actually disrupt local wind patterns and alter microclimates, essentially committing meteorological theft on an industrial scale.
The irony is perfect: companies building wind farms to combat climate change are inadvertently changing local climates themselves. It's a delicate balancing act between harnessing nature's power and accidentally breaking the very systems we're trying to protect. Nothing says "environmental responsibility" quite like stealing your neighbor's wind and then wondering why their crops are failing.
Chinese Poetry: The World's Oldest Climate Database
Ancient Chinese poets have been accidentally documenting climate change for over a thousand years, creating what might be the world's most poetic environmental dataset. These literary masters weren't trying to be climate scientists - they were just describing the seasonal shifts, flora, fauna, and weather conditions they observed, but their detailed observations can now be cross-referenced with modern scientific data.
Who knew that classical poetry could serve as a historical climate ledger? While modern scientists use satellites and weather stations, ancient poets used metaphors and seasonal imagery to capture environmental changes with surprising accuracy. It's the ultimate example of art accidentally becoming science, proving that sometimes the best data comes from people who weren't even trying to collect it.
Anechoic Chambers: Where Silence Drives You Mad
Anechoic chambers are rooms so quiet that you can hear your own blood flowing, your heartbeat sounds like a drum, and people regularly start hallucinating from the sensory deprivation. These scientifically engineered spaces absorb 99.99% of sound, creating an environment so unnaturally silent that human brains can't handle it.
Most people can't last more than 45 minutes in these chambers before the psychological effects kick in. You start hearing your own bodily functions so loudly that it becomes disturbing, and your brain begins creating phantom sounds to fill the void. It's both a valuable research tool and an accidental form of psychological torture, proving that sometimes the absence of something can be more powerful than its presence.
From meteorological theft to poetic climate science and acoustic torture chambers - this week reminded us that renewable energy has side effects, art can be accidental science and too much of nothing can drive you completely mental. The natural world keeps finding new ways to surprise us, even when we think we're helping it.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:11 The Concept of Wind Theft
03:36 Legal and Economic Implications of Wind Farms
07:48 The Yangtze Finless Porpoise
12:12 Exploring Ancient Poems and Porpoise Worship
12:47 Mapping Poetry Through the Ages
13:30 Environmental Insights from Poetry
14:00 Introduction to Anechoic Chambers
16:37 The Orfield Challenge: Surviving Silence
18:13 Human Reactions to Extreme Silence
22:38 Final Thoughts and Listener Engagement
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:08] Will: It is time for a little bit of science. I'm will grant an associate professor in science communication at the Australian National University.
[00:00:17] Rod: and I'm Rod Lambert. I'm a 30 year science communication veteran with a mind of a teenage boy.
[00:00:23] Will: and today. Well, we've been at the Beach Large Hadron Collider.
[00:00:27] Rod: Yeah. Drinking in swimming cocktails. In fact, I'm still there. I dunno where you
[00:00:32] Will: are of, uh, isotopes and science and stuff like that. So rather than giving you our regular pile of science, we've
[00:00:39] Rod: saved you something delicious. We've been scrolling away little snippets throughout the millennium and you're gonna get a bunch of those right now.
It's gonna be fab.
[00:00:47] Will: Enjoy.
[00:00:52] Rod: we know this and we've seen it all the time. There's basically nothing. Humans can't make worse. Nothing. like, as the [00:01:00] world seems to be critical about this, you know, we say like, fucking humans we're stupid or assholes. But what I love about this one is it's that with best of intentions, we make things worse.
[00:01:09] Will: Oh, okay.
[00:01:11] Rod: So I've often wondered it this, this is, this is under the topic of wind theft.
[00:01:16] Will: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:17] Rod: We've all heard of it. And by that all, I mean none of us and me only two days ago,
[00:01:22] Will: I've
[00:01:23] Rod: wondered with wind farms, right? With giant propellers. Yes.
[00:01:26] Will: Yes.
[00:01:27] Rod: I remember
[00:01:27] Will: They're not propellers.
[00:01:28] Rod: No they're not. Because, because if they were, the
[00:01:30] Will: They don't propel,
[00:01:32] Rod: Don't they though? They
[00:01:33] Will: they take
[00:01:34] Rod: they steal. Yes. Wouldn't takers, I, I've thought about this for years. What we're very good at doing is saying, this is an awesome source of energy or whatever. Sure. Let's go crazy. Sure. And then suddenly going, oh shit, there's a side effect.
[00:01:48] Will: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:50] Rod: So there may be a side effect.
[00:01:51] Will: Uhhuh, is this a side effect proof by science or a side effect? Uh,
[00:01:55] Rod: Uh, this is not conspiracy theory.
[00:01:57] Will: people are worried about.
[00:01:58] Rod: can we be a hybrid?[00:02:00]
[00:02:00] Will: There's a
[00:02:01] Rod: of science in here. So apparently wind theft is starting to occur in wind farms across Europe as more and more power plants, renewable power plants, wind based pop up.
What they're noticing is, yes, wind farms produce energy and the energy is extracted from the air and that's fine. That does result in, at some level, even if it's minuscule, a reduction in wind speed
downstream. Downstream.
[00:02:25] Will: You, you, you're of course literally taking energy out of that system. Exactly.
[00:02:29] Rod: There's, they're starting to see wake effects.
[00:02:31] Will: Yeah. Okay.
[00:02:32] Rod: Okay. Wake effects. So offshore wind farms can create wakes that can stretch as much as 60 miles, which is I think 40,000 kilometers, give or take.
[00:02:39] Will: I think that's the
[00:02:41] Rod: rough, roughly.
[00:02:42] Will: no one knows how to
[00:02:43] Rod: convert. No,
no. It's impossible. So what's that? About a hundred, a hundred Ks. But you're talking up to a hundred kilometers wake effect. It may be smaller, it may be larger, depending on the size of, or the number of
turbines, energy creation machines.
They magically produce energy out of nothing.
[00:02:57] Will: not Oh, Jesus Christ.[00:03:00]
[00:03:00] Rod: So the problem is now people are starting to see that the wake effect is growing. And the difficulty is as you get more and more concentrations of these things and you wanna encourage wind
farming for obvious
[00:03:13] Will: yeah, yeah.
[00:03:14] Rod: you're starting to potentially detract from the, the, the appeal of the investment.
No,
If they're too close together, because these wake effects are starting to,
[00:03:24] Will: I totally believe,
[00:03:25] Rod: suck people's
[00:03:26] Will: Wind goes horizontally and, and absolutely. You are taking a bit of energy out of the system, and, and I I, I totally believe this.
I, I, I didn't know the scale of this happening, but,
[00:03:36] Rod: we're getting to the point where people actually starting legal actions because you're plopping up a wind farm in a place that could have an effect on someone else's or the potential side of a future one.
And so now there's actually at least Norwegian legislation and further
Yeah.
That is starting to get ready to prosecute cases against this.
[00:03:55] Will: Issue.
Yeah. It's, I mean, look, no one, no one would put solar panels underneath [00:04:00] someone else's solar panels. You, you know that they're, they, they're, they're
taking the light.
[00:04:03] Rod: I wonder why it was so cheap.
[00:04:06] Will: No one is gonna do, but, but in fairness, like, that's, that's legitimate.
And, and it is in a sense blocking a view. Like
[00:04:12] Rod: It is legitimate. It is. But just the fact that, I mean, I always assumed wake effects, et cetera. That didn't, it didn't bother me. It didn't surprise me. But then when you start to see as larger farms go, well, this is another great tunnel of wind.
I wanna put one behind, so to speak to this one. People are starting to get the shits, legally
[00:04:26] Will: the
shits. Oh, you put it in front, Well, putting it behind is not a problem. Like you can, you can be behind me in the view I had to, I'm not bothered. The
[00:04:32] Rod: The wake is behind.
[00:04:34] Will: Yeah, exactly. But no, but no one's worried. If you're putting a wind turbine behind, like,
[00:04:38] Rod: No, the the person who's bought the land and goes, wait a minute, there's already a wind farm in front of it. That's a problem in front of it
[00:04:43] Will: it. Yeah. But you can't sue, you can't sue the person who's got it. Yeah, I get it.
[00:04:46] Rod: No, you, you sue the person who sold you the land and you say,
you didn't tell me.
[00:04:50] Will: me. Oh, okay.
[00:04:50] Rod: You didn't tell me.
[00:04:51] Will: Fair enough. Okay. You're suing the person who's what I was imagining is, uh, you know, you've got a wind farm here, and then someone says, I'm gonna build a wind [00:05:00] farm in front of you.
And you're like, fuck dude, that takes out 10% of my
[00:05:03] Rod: wind. That ain't
[00:05:04] Will: cool.
You know, that ain't cool. Um,
[00:05:05] Rod: I'm gonna build one behind you. Oh, wait a minute. I don't get as much as I thought. Well, you're well, you're a dickhead, you're
[00:05:09] Will: an idiot. Like, like it's, it's already there. Like, it's like there's a high rise building there and you're imagining like the,
[00:05:16] Rod: the,
view that could have been
[00:05:17] Will: the, the view that could have been there. It's like, no, no. The high
rise
[00:05:20] Rod: there. Yeah. So the high rise there and then you build your balcony behind it and go, hang on, I wanna complain. No, the other way around. But it's also now the potential. So if you sell on, you, you sell a bunch of plots of land for, in a nice wind tunnel
[00:05:31] Will: Indeed.
[00:05:32] Rod: and someone puts up theirs, their wind turbines,
and the person who bought the plot behind goes, uh, dirt.
That's an issue. And apparently it's, they're, they're sniffing that it could be getting or moving towards getting bad enough that it could become economically a problem for the people who are putting theirs in. Yeah. In the wake of others. I,
[00:05:50] Will: wow, that's cool. I mean, not cool, but, but
[00:05:53] Rod: it's intriguing. An
[00:05:54] Will: It's an intriguing thing.
[00:05:55] Rod: So my next question then is, and this is, this is why really this one grabbed me was, well, what happens [00:06:00] when let, let's say arguments Say, let's say there are a million wind turbines on the planet. What happens when there's 70 million or a or a billion of
[00:06:08] Will: them? Yeah.
[00:06:08] Rod: One thing we are rarely good at is going, this seems like a great idea.
It's unlikely.
Let's give it a crack. That's what they always say. That's what they always say.
[00:06:16] Will: Look, look. Okay.
[00:06:18] Rod: Next thing you know, the North Atlantic convey current is broken because of there's changes in wind and there's no more
[00:06:23] Will: Do you want me to let you in off secret?
[00:06:25] Rod: Yes.
[00:06:26] Will: Renewable energy is not renewable. 'cause one day the sun will die. That's
[00:06:32] Rod: That's what Elon's worried
[00:06:33] Will: One day the sun will die. And it's like, you know, you know.
[00:06:37] Rod: But Is that tomorrow?
[00:06:38] Will: No. No it's not.
[00:06:39] Rod: What if the wind dies while I'm still
[00:06:41] Will: No, no, no, no, no. Okay. Okay. Here's one scenario. We go, all right, let's, let's catch a whole bunch of wind and a whole bunch of solar, Patrick.
And, and then one day, you know, either, either the sun dies, not renewable, or, or we capture every single, you know, we put, we, we wrap. So like a Dyson sphere, we [00:07:00] wrap solar panels all around the sun. Not renewable. 'cause we can't put any more. Yes. Okay. It does max out. And then we go, all right, let's wrap 'em around The whole galaxy.
Wrap 'em around the whole universe. Yes, there's a maximum at some point, shut the fuck up. Like, like this is not happening.
[00:07:15] Rod: is what they said about coal.
[00:07:18] Will: That's
[00:07:18] Rod: they said about cane toads.
[00:07:20] Will: This is not the same.
[00:07:22] Rod: fine. There's no way I'll get big enough and bad enough to fuck people over.
[00:07:25] Will: Okay. Okay. Look, that, that, that is person in the year 400,000, they can deal with that. It
[00:07:31] Rod: could be us.
[00:07:32] Will: it's, it's not you. It's not you and sorry listener. In the year four thou 400,000. If in the year 400,000 that you have captured all of the universe's energy and you were sold a bill of goods, that there was always more, just think about it. I just wanted to tell you a story about a new piece of research that tells a sad story. It's a sad story of one of the particular fish of China, the Yangtze Finless porpoise.
[00:07:59] Rod: Finless [00:08:00] porpoise? Yeah. How the fuck do they swim? No, they could swim. They have a tail, I assume, but they can't, they can't steer right?
They can't steer. Well,
[00:08:06] Will: they, they go straight then until I hit
[00:08:09] Rod: something and can knock in a different direction.
[00:08:10] Will: They're like a billard ball of fish. They're just bouncing off the riverbank in every direction is
[00:08:14] Rod: poor. Sounds like the results of torture. That's
[00:08:16] Will: terrible. It does a little bit. people in China, you know, they, they, they have noticed a lot of environmental degradation over the last few years.
They've noticed a decline in things and, and, um, it's legitimate to think, okay, uh, what might we have done to our species? So some researchers in China have, have thought, okay, how could we track, the decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise, now
[00:08:39] Rod: count, count them
[00:08:39] Will: today. You could count and then count 'em in a month.
that would definitely tell you. Would I have a science degree? That would, that would definitely tell you. Or, you know, you could look at like skeletons or something like that of, of Finless port, you know, if you like fossil record and stuff like that, you, you might be able to look at, um, sort of things they've left behind in the past.
But these [00:09:00] researchers lost their
[00:09:01] Rod: phone or
[00:09:01] Will: whatever they wanted to combine, environmental impact studies and, uh, studying a whole lot of poetry. So hell yeah. So what they've done, hell yeah. And I've just, I just, I just love this concept. Hell yeah. They've gone through and they've looked through heaps and heaps of ancient Chinese poems.
Going back from as far back as 1,045 bce. So that is like But they've looked, they've looked for mentions of the finless porpoise in Chinese poetry, and you'd be like, are there enough mentions of the finless porpoise in,
[00:09:32] Rod: oh, Finless, porus, like a lotus blossom sinking to the bottom of the ocean and only going in one direction.
You are like the eyes of my lover to be.
[00:09:41] Will: You'd be surprised, like how many mentions of the finless porus there are in ancient Chinese poetry. I'm gonna say. 12, 745. That's what I meant. These researchers were like, okay, that's enough that we could start getting some sort of idea about where they were.
And so this
[00:09:57] Rod: is the Yangs Poet School [00:10:00] of Ancient China.
[00:10:01] Will: It's just, it's just all ancient Chinese poetry, but also Right, right, right. Also, they looked in and they could find, through all of these poems, they've got heaps on heaps in the archive. Mm-hmm. And, and there's a bunch of people that have mentioned the Finless Porpoise, because a lot of poets would travel, like they're the intellectual class, they'd often travel by boat.
You go down the Yanks and you're sitting on a boat and what are you doing? You're like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write me a poem and what can I see? Uh, water. It's a, it's a poor po. Water. Water. Oh, so beautiful. Here we go. Look at the sky. There's a tree. Oh, a sheet
[00:10:31] Rod: of fish without
[00:10:31] Will: fins. But this is the interesting thing in, in about half of that number.
[00:10:35] Rod: Yeah,
[00:10:35] Will: they can, so these poems go back over 1400 years. So there are older ones, but no mention of the porpoise before that. I don't think they found anyway. Um, about half of them, there's geographical information as well, so it's Oh, beautiful.
[00:10:48] Rod: porpoise at longitude. Seven
[00:10:49] Will: three.
You'd
be fricking surprised, man.
Holy shit. I was like, I, I is that
[00:10:54] Will: IIC pen? Okay. So I downloaded their spreadsheet and this is wild. This is wild. Oh damn. [00:11:00] Um, so it's got the poem. Yeah. And it's got the, you know, it's, it's got the, the region here in, uh, sort of easy, easy. So the Yangs River or, or a lake or something like that. Yeah.
But it's, it's literally got longitude and latitude of, of what, either where the poem is from, or I'll read you an example here. So in the original language, it, it, no, I won't in the original language, but, um, or do with the accent at least. I'm not gonna do that either, but it or it mentions something. Here we go.
Here we go. So this is, uh, climbing the yellow crane tower by Lin. So this is about 500 years ago. Green smoke and fragrant trees in Yang City. So there we go. So, so it's like, here's, here's here's, here's your longitudal latitude. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
[00:11:41] Rod: Ang city.
Yeah.
[00:11:42] Will: On a sunny day, pulpos worship the waves. The egrets turn around the painted tower sails past the shadows and the cranes. Return to the sound of immortal pipes and flutes. Kui Lang's verses are the only ones left in ancient and modern times. And fan lau's feelings are hung in the halls and temples drunk.
I [00:12:00] strike coral and stroke my long sword. Leaning against the sky and whistling alone at the peak. We've all been there. I know, right?
I know, right?
[00:12:10] Will: I love that whistling at the peak. Here we go. That's a, that's a rather horny poem to, to survive the time. But anyway, I like at the time of the clouds and rain, it's like,
I'm gonna have awan at the wind,
[00:12:22] Will: but yeah. Okay. So there's, porpoises mentioned Han Young City, and they can, they can date all of these. Yeah. Yeah. And so the, the, the fascinating thing, so they've gone through and they've looked at all of these poems and it's, it's bizarre how many of them talk about worshiping the porpoise.
I, I look through a bunch of them again.
[00:12:37] Rod: It sounds like masturbation. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you doing? Just gonna worship the porpoise and then I'll be out for dinner. The,
so they,
[00:12:47] Will: they've got these, they've put all of these poems on a, on a grid where they're located. Yes, they have. And then they can, and, and look at this, like there's a map of the Ysy River here, and this is just going back, uh, ancient times like, uh, eight, 800 [00:13:00] years ago, 600 years ago, back to, and there you can see the poems of the more modern era.
Suddenly we've collapsed.
[00:13:07] Rod: So Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like the very similar e as the time progresses, if that's what I'm looking at. Yep. You
[00:13:11] Will: go around similar,
[00:13:12] Rod: similar, similar, similar. Very, not similar. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:15] Will: And it's, so
[00:13:16] Rod: for people listening. The extent of the poetry spread. Therefore, the river, I assume as well, is quite broad.
And it's broad across six graphs. There's, it's broad across five of them. And then the sixth graph, that's it. Way less. Look, look, I, but I just think this
[00:13:30] Will: is, this is just such an interesting way. Look, what does it tell us? It's, that's great. You know, we could, we could talk about, we could talk about environmental disruption in a whole bunch of ways and there's lots of different evidence, but it's interesting that we could track some of that decline through literally poetry.
Yeah, that's, and I'm like, yeah,
[00:13:45] Rod: it's
[00:13:45] Will: great.
[00:13:45] Rod: Like, like there you go, poets. It's like they stopped writing poetry in this area about porpoises '
[00:13:51] Will: cause they're all fucking dead there. Well, that's true. That's true. You could do, you know, it makes sense. Yeah. Other ways to track SSEs. So there you go. [00:14:00]
[00:14:00] Rod: the world's first anechoic chamber, anechoic.
[00:14:05] Will: No Echoes.
[00:14:06] Rod: No Echoes, no echoes built in 1947 in, uh, Massachusetts. So basically the idea was, it was, um, it was at the time, at least the world's quietest room.
[00:14:15] Will: Yep.
[00:14:15] Rod: So deliberately built, you know, um,
[00:14:17] Will: sound recording studio, but this is souped up.
[00:14:19] Rod: but this soup down, yeah, it's, it's, yeah. Where we are right now, but on absolute steroids. And so, um, later on in Minneapolis Orfield Laboratories, which became the site of the Orfield Challenge, beat it, and it had a record of the lowest sound it could. Um, the lowest sound that would work in there was minus 24.9 decibels,
[00:14:37] Will: Lowest as in quietest.
[00:14:39] Rod: Yeah, like the things you couldn't hear below that, it always confused me. I don't know how, I didn't understand how you got minus decibels, but it turns out, a negative a zero decibels probably means you're talking about threshold of human hearing. So anything below it negative is below
[00:14:53] Will: threshold
but still like possibly detectable with super microphones or
[00:14:57] Rod: Yeah. Yeah. Mega material, mega uh, instruments [00:15:00] and stuff. So Orfield have off and on held the crown for the quietest room in the world. They quite regularly, it's them. So, um, these and echoic chambers basically do what they say on the tin. They get rid of echo. So any sound generated in there just disappears.
It's
[00:15:15] Will: absorbed. Well, It
goes, it goes into your ears, but then it hits the walls and then just gets sucked in.
[00:15:18] Rod: Yeah. And you, and you hear no background resonance. There's nothing. It's just literally dead. So, and the only sound in there is, has to be generated in there. Yeah. That's it. So sound comes as I put it, solely from the sound waves vibrating through the air contained in the room, which is fine.
There's
all kinds of them though. Like, I didn't realize this, so I thought, okay. There's a great picture on this article I was reading. It's this weird, wacky looking angular, it looks like a music studio, but all that, the foam you see on the walls, far more dramatic, different colors, really long
[00:15:44] Will: Oh, different colors.
[00:15:45] Rod: Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of them are, um, kind of beige.
[00:15:48] Will: Oh.
[00:15:48] Rod: I don't think that matters. They just beige them for some reason. So there's one in Central Washington University. It's about four meters by four meters, and the oilfield one's about a bit smaller than that, but not much. But there are bigger ones. So [00:16:00] there's one at NASA's Godard Space Center.
It's large enough to put in huge space communication antenna.
Oh, cool.
Apparently that's relevant. I don't dunno why I didn't get into that. There's one at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It can fit the largest of US military planes, so they've got a fucking monster one. I don't know why
[00:16:17] Will: I, I can tell you a big military plane is gonna be loud. Like
[00:16:22] Rod: it will be,
[00:16:22] Will: I, I don't need, I don't know if we need a super quiet room to say
[00:16:25] Rod: you put it outside and shut the windows.
[00:16:28] Will: Do I? So are they starting up the plane in there?
[00:16:30] Rod: I don't know. See, this didn't delve into it because it was just, this is about, this more about the, uh, what they call the oilfield
[00:16:36] Will: Oh, okay. Well, I'm keen to know about the oilfield challenge.
[00:16:39] Rod: Oh,
[00:16:39] Will: you're gonna know. Oh, good.
[00:16:40] Rod: so when scientist first built these things first, he basically to make them. Work the way they do. They, they experiment with over a thousand different shapes to line the walls. Different kind of shaped sort of foam fiber.
Glassy foam,
yeah. Yeah.
Materials. And ultimately they discovered that a wedge was the best shape
because, [00:17:00]
how did I put it?
Different areas of the wedge capture different frequencies.
Okay.
So higher, I think it's higher pitch at the tip. And then as it gets wider, it, it
actually,
[00:17:08] Will: But, but also, isn't it something like, As a sound bounces, it'll bounce directionally into the corner of the wedge. Like it's sort
[00:17:15] Rod: something
[00:17:16] Will: like
you know, you can think about like billard balls that it sort of just inherently gets trapped into the corner.
[00:17:20] Rod: Yeah. And apparently it all, they, they go deeper into the, um, the crevices.
So it's a combination of the geometry and the materials out of which these things are made. So what, what they represent. I didn't know about this. They represent what classic physics calls a free field. This is basically the closest real world equivalent. To an an echoic chamber, which is apparently an open grassy field on a windless dry day.
Literally a big empty free field because there's nothing to echo off. So if you stand out in one of these fields and
[00:17:48] Will: you kind oh, okay, so so it's flat,
[00:17:51] Rod: flat dry.
[00:17:52] Will: So the, so the sound waves, like you bellow, sound waves are just gonna keep going away
[00:17:56] Rod: off? yeah.
[00:17:56] Will: There's nothing to bounce back. Oh, okay.
[00:17:59] Rod: So they cause it free [00:18:00] field. So you could scream at the top of your lungs, no echo, nothing would happen. But this is a situation, whether it's artificial or natural, it's not normal for humans to be in.
[00:18:09] Will: No, I'm sure. I'm sure
[00:18:11] Rod: it's not,
it's not standard.
[00:18:12] Will: So what is the challenge?
How long you can stay in there? It
[00:18:14] Rod: is because we're always surrounded by something hums of air conditioners, like background
noise
[00:18:21] Will: I suspect, I suspect I would be quite low like, like
[00:18:25] Rod: what? What if you're with someone else?
[00:18:27] Will: Oh, that's fine. Then that's
[00:18:28] Rod: Because they did say one of these, I was saying, you, you go into the room, they shut the door and the lights are off as well. And I'm like, don't panic, it's gonna be fine. Put you in a box.
[00:18:37] Will: I wouldn't mind trying a few things though. Like you, you gotta, you gotta do your, do your s or something like that to, to hear the background resonance of the universe.
[00:18:44] Rod: it's quite enough that basically you can hear your heartbeat or the blood pulsing through your Oh,
that's
cool. Ears and stuff, which for some, I imagine would be quite calming. And for others
Not calming. Mm.
[00:18:53] Will: yeah.
[00:18:54] Rod: Because we're, we're used to it, but also apparently because we're so sort of subliminally trained to [00:19:00] listen
[00:19:00] Will: Echoes,
[00:19:01] Rod: they orient us in the real world.
Like we literally use them in a way that we don't really think
[00:19:06] Will: about.
No, of course. I mean, we are not, we're not bats. But you know, it's clearly been shown before that, um, blind people are using echo location. Yeah. Deliberately either strategically or just using it more, but, but we all do it a little bit like you can hear when a wall is in front of you, if you
[00:19:20] Rod: doing this. Yeah. And it helps us also just psychologically we we're just used to getting that kind
of
feedback. Mm-hmm.
So in one of these you don't, and so, I mean, these things are invented 'cause they're like, let's get a handle maybe on what happens when there's no stimulation to the brain as minimal external stimulation.
[00:19:37] Will: they're invented as a psychological
[00:19:39] Rod: one of the reasons, one of the reasons, or at least at the moment, and, and that's what this, um, Orfield challenge is about.
It's like, so. One, one way to use it. What, what's the, what's the brain doing at default at rest when there's minimal stimulus stimuli? is the, is there a default setting? Um, you know, is it delightfully peaceful and quiet
and
[00:19:56] Will: Meditated? Yes. Or do the demons get in?
[00:19:59] Rod: Well, it turns out people's [00:20:00] reactions could vary.
[00:20:02] Will: are, are you allowed to ethically put crazy people in here and, and you know, obviously you don't write that on your ethics application,
[00:20:08] Rod: We wanna put in a few crazy dudes. We, we don't think we call 'em dudes. I mean, crazy. Either the people who are disquiet by matters that others might not be. So this one, the challenge that, the challenge is what caught my attention.
'cause it's basically how long can you last in a, in a, a koic chamber. So some humans, it turns out, really don't get on well. They're, they're not fans when they can hear their blood moving through their ears or they can hear their heart pumping, they can hear their fingers and their bones crack or, or like little
noises.
[00:20:36] Will: say, you can hear your fingernails growing like that. That
[00:20:39] Rod: Can't you hear that? Anyway, that's how I get to sleep at night. So I don't count sheep. I listen to my fingernails. Growing a lot of people don't find that comforting. hearing their blood pumping without having to try or like hearing your heart. 'cause when you think you don't really tend to hear your heart.
[00:20:52] Will: No, no.
[00:20:53] Rod: You gotta try pretty
[00:20:54] Will: hard.
You certainly, you certainly feel your heart when you know you've gone for a run or something like that, but actually hearing it.
[00:20:59] Rod: [00:21:00] yeah. And you would apparently, and so there's this, the YouTuber guy called, I think it's a guy, Cole Lab, Brent.
[00:21:06] Will: Tried
[00:21:06] Rod: break the record for the longest amount of time spent.
So the record was 45 minutes.
[00:21:11] Will: Is that all? Yeah. Like that's, look, that's within challenge distance. Like that's not, you know, someone's gone in there for four weeks. I'm like, I don't care about it. I'm, I'm not, I'm not beating that record. Like, like
[00:21:21] Rod: fine. Do the lights out as well. You're just like
[00:21:23] Will: 45 minutes. I'll give that a go.
[00:21:25] Rod: he says, the quote, first few minutes were excruciating.
[00:21:29] Will: I
[00:21:30] Rod: tried to keep calm. I tried not to freak out and run out of the room, but it felt like the room was closing in on me and I couldn't breathe. Wow. So he had a reaction. Wow.
[00:21:39] Will: But
[00:21:39] Rod: made an hour and five minutes. So you're 20 minutes over the previous record.
[00:21:43] Will: Alright.
[00:21:44] Rod: imagine the thing you just, you're about to do what?
65 minutes. In the first couple of minutes you're freaking out trying to keep calm. You feel like the room's closing in on you. Wow. I don't know if, if that was my opening experience. I mean, I, we out and have to go into an MRI head [00:22:00] first. I'm one of those people who's like, everything's
fine.
[00:22:02] Will: I, I feel like everything's fine. Surely, surely you could do some sort of mantra. Surely, surely. A a, a Buddhist monk, you could put 'em in there
[00:22:08] Rod: of course,
[00:22:09] Will: a couple of days or something like that. One grain of rice and.
[00:22:11] Rod: Yeah. But I actually, I mean that might sound a bit tough, but I'm thinking, I reckon I could handle that silence,
[00:22:17] Will: All right, well look, uh,
[00:22:18] Rod: last
[00:22:18] Will: word, challenges
there. Let's go find one and, um, let's see how, how long you can do versus me. Like we don't have to beat
[00:22:24] Rod: just put your head in it, just like a box on your head.
[00:22:27] Will: your head. Just a head one.
[00:22:28] Rod: Just your head. Sit here quietly. Promise you won't put rats in there as well.
[00:22:32] Will: oh my God.
Well, that was your little bit of science for the week.
[00:22:41] Rod: holiday edition. You're special by the pool wearing a bikini edition.
[00:22:44] Will: But because you're on holiday, you know that you still have the power to give us the rating that you need to give us. Yeah,
[00:22:52] Rod: seven stars on every app. Even things that don't do podcasts.
Yeah.
[00:22:55] Will: Go out there and write it on like a recipe app
[00:22:57] Rod: an Uber and Yelp. Is it Yelp still? a thing? [00:23:00]
[00:23:00] Will: I think. so. I'm
[00:23:01] Rod: I don't know. I'm at a restaurant where Don't ye
[00:23:02] Will: listener, if you've got some topics that you want us to explore,
[00:23:06] Rod: tell Will.
[00:23:07] Will: How would you tell Will his
[00:23:08] Rod: number is 0 4 0 5 Oh. Uh, cheers. At a little bit of science Do com
[00:23:15] Will: au.
[00:23:16] Rod: au.
[00:23:16] Will: Do that. We want your stories.
[00:23:18] Rod: we wanna hear from you.
[00:23:19] Will: Lovely listener. Enjoy the pina colada.
[00:23:22] Rod: Oh, and the
[00:23:24] Will: col. Pin colada.
[00:23:25] Rod: Pini Kaia Pina Pia
[00:23:26] Will: Pina Kaia of
[00:23:27] Rod: of the Clade
[00:23:28] Will: Penai. Cate.
