Our Little Stupid Bodies

SPEAKER_18: Listen to Support It, WNYC Studios. SPEAKER_20: The Ozymptic craze is far from over, and beyond Hollywood, more of us now have access to medications that could transform the health of our nation. What do we gain by treating obesity like a chronic disease? On the next Notes from America. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_14: Heads up, today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go. SPEAKER_04: Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. SPEAKER_16: Okay. Alright. SPEAKER_08: You're listening to Radio Lab. Lab. SPEAKER_16: Radio Lab. From... WNYC. C. C? Yeah. SPEAKER_00: C. SPEAKER_14: This is Radio Lab, I'm Lulu Miller. And I'm Latif Nasser. SPEAKER_14: And today we have a very special thing, because all year long, we collect what we call stupid questions. There are no stupid questions, maybe, but actually I think there are. You know, questions we... SPEAKER_17: What? There are not. That's the official position of this show is there are no such thing as stupid questions. SPEAKER_14: I'm not sure I agree, but it doesn't matter because as a show that is largely about curiosity, people send us questions all the time. Listeners, we get tweets, we get emails. My kid asked this, or my cousin. SPEAKER_14: And then also on staff, we have a little place where we collect stupid questions throughout the year. That's right. I get the literally dozens of my own questions. Throw some out. Okay. When you cut skin, do you cut through cells or do the cells always get out of the way of the blade like Chuck E. Cheese balls in a ball pit? SPEAKER_17: Great question. SPEAKER_14: Number two, is your brain a pint of liquid more or less? SPEAKER_17: That's an easy one to answer, I'm sure. SPEAKER_14: I don't know. Okay. If you squished the quote 60% of water out of me that is apparently inside every human, could you drink it? Or is there a part of it you could drink? SPEAKER_17: You really want to drink people, Lulu? Why is that? SPEAKER_14: I don't know. That's another question. But anyway, the point is we look at all these questions and then we see which ones have legs to kind of rise up to the level where we actually want to report them out. None of mine this year, by the way. I made it. SPEAKER_17: Okay. We'll have that conversation at another time. But what happened was that at some point we noticed a group of these questions that all had a kind of a shared energy. Like you know the show The Magic School Bus? SPEAKER_17: Classic PBS cartoon. Of course, led by Ms. Frizzle, the teacher who gets all the kids onto the Magic School SPEAKER_14: Bus and they shrink it down and go into drainpipes, up kids noses into space to answer questions and understand our world a little more. SPEAKER_17: But our stories today and our Ms. Frizzle reporters, they had vibrating anxious energy. I would say that they have more Ms. Frazzle energy rather than Ms. Frizzle energy. SPEAKER_14: That is totally accurate. And they also tend to like take things a little further than your average PBS kids cartoon. SPEAKER_17: So we've got three angsty magical journeys today and it just so happens that they all take us inside the human body. That's right. SPEAKER_14: Stupid questions about our stupid bodies. SPEAKER_17: They're not stupid questions. They are good, honest questions. SPEAKER_14: All right. First trip courtesy of senior correspondent Molly Webster. Okay, so to get to my question, we're actually going to start with a conversation that I SPEAKER_10: had with reporter and former Radiolab intern Sachi Mulki. I'm just going to play a bit of that for you. SPEAKER_22: Oh, okay. SPEAKER_10: And it begins like all good things do at the New Year. SPEAKER_22: New Year's is kind of like a daytime phenomenon in Japan. Like we don't do a New Year's Eve thing. The day of New Year's you do your first temple visit in the morning and then you come back home and you have this traditional New Year's soup called ozoni. And it's like a mochi cake in a bowl of like pretty clear, almost flavorless broth. And what is mochi? It's a pounded rice flour mixed with water and kind of turned into this chewy, chewy rice cake. SPEAKER_00: And you just plop it into a soup. SPEAKER_22: It kind of softens in the water. It gets this like very like gooey edge and it's like chewy, right? Like it stretches out. Like it'll stretch inches. Really? Yeah. SPEAKER_22: Wow. So what happens is a lot of older people will have their ozoni and fail to be able to chew it fully or it will kind of cool down and harden in their mouths. And then they choke on it. Like I just I was looking at this crazy chart that said something. I just want to look at it to make sure I don't give you a wrong number. And then you fill it up. SPEAKER_22: Almost 800 people between 2006 and 2016 died in Japan from food choking deaths right on New Year's. It's just the spike. Like they choke to death. SPEAKER_10: It's not like a choke and a cough out. It's like people are actually dying from this. SPEAKER_22: Yeah. People die from this. It used to be a lot higher before the PSAs. SPEAKER_12: They have PSAs just about this soup? SPEAKER_22: Oh yeah. SPEAKER_22: All over the news, like NHK news, Japanese like household news around New Year's, they're like don't forget to chop it up into small pieces. SPEAKER_22: Here's how to do the Heimlich maneuver. Like don't use a vacuum to get it out. There's all sorts of news around this. Like be careful. Make sure they're eating the soup responsibly. SPEAKER_10: Okay, so that was part of my conversation with Sachi. And maybe sadistically, Sachi told me this story because she knows that I am terrified of choking. I would say that at least once a day, I think about the fact that as I swallow, I am pushing like a mashed ball of food past the one opening that is keeping me alive. And so my question is, why in the world are we designed this way where we can die of choking? Why? SPEAKER_17: But this works way more than it doesn't. SPEAKER_10: No, no, but it should never not work, Latif. Like evolution has given us so much crazy stuff. We have brains and opposable thumbs and like other weird shit. And you're telling me that it couldn't figure out how to breathe in one place and then eat in another? Yeah, I'm with it. SPEAKER_17: Okay, okay, okay. I am with you. SPEAKER_10: Okay, so I went to scientists asking them why do we have one blockable breath hole. Do they laugh at you? Yes, of course. But they also told me stuff, including the original culprit of all of this is fish. Huh, okay. SPEAKER_10: And so fish have one tube for food, which runs from the mouth to the butt. And then for breathing, they have gills. Right. SPEAKER_10: So no choking. The fish that eventually flopped onto land and became the ancestor of us, it couldn't do that without a pair of lungs. But the thing with evolution is it doesn't just make new things out of nothing. It builds them off of existing systems. And so it actually built the lungs out of the digestive tract. And the way that that works is the digestive system was already pulling nutrients out of food. So it was like, all right, why don't I just use this to get some oxygen out of air? SPEAKER_10: And slowly, slowly, slowly, what happened over time is a pair of lungs balloon off of the digestive tract. Wow. SPEAKER_17: Huh, that's amazing. SPEAKER_10: No, it's not amazing because this is the essential design flaw. This is how you get an eating system and a breathing system that are overlapped. And this is why we choke. SPEAKER_17: But wait, so does that mean other animals choke? Like Jane Goodall is out there watching the chimpanzees and stuff. Did any of them ever, they were like eating a banana and started coughing and choking kind of thing? SPEAKER_10: Yes, other animals can choke. There's not really any reports of it. If you search the internet or something, it's not like we're going out into the wild and autopsy-ing animals. But we do seem to be a little different than other animals. SPEAKER_18: We have become the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. SPEAKER_10: Really? Yes. When I was looking for answers to this question, I ended up talking to this science writer. I'm James Nestor. SPEAKER_10: He wrote this amazing book about breathing and how we breathe. And when I asked him about choking, he said, Well, it sounds like your problem isn't with this air tube, this breath tube. SPEAKER_18: It's with the larynx. SPEAKER_10: It's not just our one tubiness that is to blame. It has to do with the shape of that tube and how we humans use it and how it has evolved differently than even in our closest ancestors. SPEAKER_18: Our larynx have sunk. OK. SPEAKER_10: The larynx is the spot in our throat where the esophagus, which takes food to the stomach, and the trachea, which takes air to the lungs, split off. And it's made of like cartilage and muscle and stuff. What does sinking mean? Where was it? SPEAKER_18: It lowered. It lowered. SPEAKER_10: It moved down from the back of our mouths to a couple of inches down into our neck, pushing the meeting place of the esophagus and the trachea into a narrower part of our throat. SPEAKER_18: Because now the esophagus and the trachea are too close together. So that larynx can shift food that is supposed to be going to our stomachs into that breath hole. SPEAKER_10: And as a result, we started to choke more and more. SPEAKER_10: James said, SPEAKER_18: That's the whole point is by having more space at the back of our mouths. SPEAKER_10: We created more space for something else. SPEAKER_18: Yes, yes. SPEAKER_10: Which is while other animals sound like this. As our larynx lowered, it opened up our oral cavity and along with some developments in the brain, that allowed us to make more and more sophisticated sounds. And we use these sounds to warn and teach and share our feelings. We use these sounds to change the world. I mean, I do like talking. It sounds like such a ridiculous thing to say, but I just still wish it wasn't an all-in-one tube. And kissing? What about kissing? What do you mean kissing? SPEAKER_14: Kissing is kind of random, but like maybe what's so special about it is that it's like all the things. It's like you're eating, breathing. Drinking. It's like sustenance on every level. SPEAKER_14: Let me put my crucial mouth hole near your crucial mouth hole. SPEAKER_10: And to be clear, I'm all for like all these things, obviously. Kissing, talking, whatever. I'm not looking to change it. I just wish there was another backup. SPEAKER_10: So I did ask one of the scientists about backup systems, and he was like, well, people do do tracheostomies for medical reasons, putting another hole in your throat. SPEAKER_10: Is that hole below? The vocal cord? It is. SPEAKER_00: Oh. SPEAKER_10: That hole bypasses the log jam of the throat, and then it just lets air straight into the lungs. Oh, so that's what you want. SPEAKER_17: That's exactly what you want. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it kind of is. But I don't really want like, is there a more pleasant way? SPEAKER_10: And then James was like, well... SPEAKER_18: I didn't think I was going to be going here, but you asked. SPEAKER_10: There could be one thing. SPEAKER_18: So we can ingest oxygen through our butts. No fucking way. SPEAKER_10: Butt breathing. What? SPEAKER_17: Yes. Butt breathing is a real thing? SPEAKER_10: Goodbye. SPEAKER_10: Literally head pulled them out. SPEAKER_17: Oh my God. Lulu, it doesn't have to do with farting. SPEAKER_14: Okay, I can't hear you if you're talking because I took off my headphones. I'm coming back. Wait, Lulu, it doesn't have to do with farting. SPEAKER_10: So don't worry. I don't like farting either. It is breath through the butt, and I feel like every Media Lab story ends here. SPEAKER_14: No, it doesn't have to do with farting. SPEAKER_10: So take a deep breath and absolve yourself of that. We're not going to talk about it. SPEAKER_17: Take a deep breath through your butt hole. SPEAKER_10: Just anyway. Okay, fine. SPEAKER_10: Whatever. Okay, so he's saying in a real way you can breathe. Yeah, well, he pointed me to this paper. Come on, science. Okay. Yeah, so this paper came from this researcher. SPEAKER_05: Takata Kebu from Cincinnati Children's Hospital and also Tokyo Medical and Dental University. SPEAKER_10: Japanese researcher, and he splits his time between Japan and Ohio. I'm traveling back and forth every month for the past seven years. SPEAKER_10: Every month? The reason that he did this study was his dad ended up having to go on a ventilator. SPEAKER_05: Maybe six years ago, I think he has pneumonia conditions and actually hospitalized in ICU situation. SPEAKER_10: And dad is fine. Dad came off the ventilator. But then COVID happened and everybody was getting slammed on ventilators and Takata was like, this does not seem sustainable. I also realized, you know, so we do the same thing as in the past, found 200 years ago. SPEAKER_05: Really? SPEAKER_10: It was 200 years ago that we developed ventilation? Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_10: So he's like, is there another way to get oxygen into the body? So he starts looking at how other animals might do it. And he comes across a fish that is actually taking up the oxygen from the bowel or from SPEAKER_05: the anus, the butt. SPEAKER_10: And he thinks, hmm, maybe that's another way. And so what he does is he takes some mice and pigs and he puts them in low oxygen conditions, what's called hypoxic. And he pumps O2 into a tube that is stuck up into their butt. SPEAKER_10: This doesn't work so well. Their oxygen levels stay about the same. But then he's like, what if I take oxygen that's like dissolved in a fluid? So he does it again, tube up the butt, oxygen in a fluid. And what they see is that for these mice and pigs, color and warmth return to their skin and to their extremities in minutes. Wow. So think of the butt respiration as like an enema that gives you oxygen. SPEAKER_14: Wow. I know. SPEAKER_10: I was thinking about the fact that we did like evolve from fish and you're in a way tapping into some sort of evolutionary history that lets oxygen exchange in the gut be possible. It's almost like going back to a prior way of being. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. SPEAKER_10: I so wish my skin respirated. SPEAKER_14: On to our next question. Great. SPEAKER_14: So we actually put a call out, an intentional call out to listeners at one point and we got a bunch and the one that ended up haunting like a bunch of us here on staff came from a listener named Logan Shannon. She lives in New Hampshire. And all right, here is her question. I don't understand where lotion goes after we apply it to our skin. SPEAKER_13: It gets absorbed through our pores, sure. But where does it go? Where does it go? SPEAKER_17: It never occurred to me. SPEAKER_13: So I buy these bottles of lotion and then the contents of these bottles just disappear into my body and it freaks me out. SPEAKER_14: She says she sometimes just lies in bed wondering like, is the lotion traveling down into her spleen and just with her forever. SPEAKER_14: So we sent producer Alan Gafinsky to try to find out the answer. SPEAKER_17: Alan the song bud Gafinsky, if you've heard Terrestrials. SPEAKER_14: Yep. He creates original songs for our kids podcast, Terrestrials. And anyway, so he did a bunch of reporting and delivered it directly to Logan in song form. SPEAKER_16: Logan is up late on Twitter. Watch her scroll and scroll and scroll. Her tweeting thumbs are dry and cracking. She feels the dryness in her soul. She longs for the relief of lotion. Smooth hydration, healthy glow. Her hands are dry, but her mind is racing. She doesn't know where does the lotion go? SPEAKER_19: Where does the lotion go? Hey, hello. Hello. SPEAKER_08: How are you? SPEAKER_15: We have questions. Oh boy. And you seem like the type of person who might have answers. Okay. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, sure thing. I am Dr. Adeline Kiekam. I'm a board certified dermatologist, all things skincare. SPEAKER_16: Logan's question freaked me out. So I asked the doc just what goes down each time we slob that lotion on. Here's a bit of what I found. SPEAKER_08: Logan is talking about a skincare product to keep her skin moisturized. The good thing is cosmetic products are formulated in a way that they don't get absorbed into the bloodstream. The particles in lotion are designed to not seep in. SPEAKER_19: The molecules are formulated to rest atop your skin. This is your lotion lullaby. Go on Logan, moisturize. The lotion should not get inside. The molecules are too large in size. SPEAKER_08: But there are different components of it. I knew it, despite intentions being good. SPEAKER_08: The traces that we've seen in blood. All molecules don't have an issue. SPEAKER_16: They squeeze through interstitial tissue. It's all about the formulation. SPEAKER_08: Particle size, concentration. Some particles do end up in the bloodstream. Particles from chemical sunscreen. Like avominzone and octocrylene, parabens and phthalates will sink right down into your SPEAKER_16: blood and all around. Where does the lotion go? Sometimes your skin just can't resist them. SPEAKER_08: Of course, the body has a filtration system. The liver and the renal system are how the skin detoxifies and clears anything that it doesn't want. SPEAKER_19: The renal system flushes them out. So maybe there's not so much to worry about. SPEAKER_16: Uh oh. Then the doctor shared how not all particles seep into you. Some just sit on your skin cells until those skin cells bid adieu. You're telling me I'm not contained? My skin cells just disintegrate? Where do I end and I begin? I am not confined within. Half a billion cells of skin slip off your body every day. Dust the air or down the drain into the ocean and far away. Then your biomagnetic field extends beyond your mortal flesh. Your flesh is loose electron clouds, a fuzzy subatomic mess. The cosmic shift with every breath, your every thought and word expressed. Who you are is not contained. Existence is one big exchange. Your self spills out throughout the universe. SPEAKER_25: Contamination is inescapable and absolute and corruption is your god and nothing can save you from the existential calamity of all the encompassing and vigorous cosmic anarchy. So now I guess you kind of know. SPEAKER_16: Where does the lotion go? Where does the lotion go? SPEAKER_13: It was so demented. I love it. SPEAKER_15: I honestly did not expect this question to result in pondering thermodynamics and the laws of conservation of mass and energy. I think maybe I took things too far. I don't think you took it too far. SPEAKER_13: I think it's like, obviously I don't think you took it too far. I'm the one who obsesses about lotion and where it goes. But like, you know, is it Sagan who said we're all star stuff? Right. So I was thinking about it. I kind of want to think about it from a cosmological cosmology. SPEAKER_13: No, cosmetic. No, that if we're all made of star stuff and everything is made of star stuff, then so is lotion. So that's like kind of like you're just in the soup of being a human on a planet with all these molecules. Like oxygen is like bombarding you all the time. And so you're putting lotion on and some of it does go down. Some of it stays on top. Some of it gets left off. Yeah. SPEAKER_13: It's also nice to know that it's not bad. Yeah, it's comforting. SPEAKER_14: I don't know if I'm as comforted as Logan, but anyway, that is where the lotion goes. It is time now for a break. Okay. SPEAKER_17: Should we do like a more da da da after the break? Yeah. SPEAKER_14: We've got a question that really got under the skin of our producer, Becca Bressler. Okay. You're going to hear that after a short break. SPEAKER_20: Tis the season for fad dieting, but new weight loss medications are making room at the table for longer term solutions, providing effective options for people with obesity and for wealthy celebrities without it. On Kyrite, this week on Notes from America, we take your questions live and ask what do we gain and what are the risks when we treat obesity like a chronic disease? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_14: Oh God. Didn't see that one coming, did you? I didn't. I think so. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I think I do. I actually have them on the line here. How did you know? That's what we're doing. No, but we are here. I am here to tell you about my nemesis. Okay. SPEAKER_03: Oh my God. Or nemeses rather. Okay. Which are... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. SPEAKER_03: Mosquitoes. Okay. Mosquitoes. So this I thought we were going to get some like juicy tea, but you're just like a bug SPEAKER_14: that generally sucks for humans. No, it doesn't just generally suck for me because when I get a bite, I get these fat SPEAKER_03: hot welts that at times are like the size of a tennis ball. Whoa. Wait, honestly, tennis ball? It's not like spherical in the same way, but the circumference of a tennis ball and they itch for days and nothing has ever helped. After bite? After bite, no. Benadryl doesn't work. The only thing that sometimes works is when I boil water and then take a washcloth and burn my bites. Oh my God, Bex. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's awful. It's been this way since I was a kid, but recently I stumbled across this device, this like as seen on TV kind of device. It was on Shark Tank. I've never actually seen Shark Tank, but is it like dun dun dun? SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I can picture it. Anyways, so it's a tube with handles on the sides, kind of like a syringe without the needle. And it's like a little plastic plunger that claims to suck out mosquito saliva, which is apparently what causes the itchy whelp. And it's called bug bite thing. SPEAKER_03: I like the specificity of that. The bug bite thing. I have mixed feelings about the name, but whatever. It was $10, so I bought it. Did you like run into a wet woods where you like, I want to test it. SPEAKER_14: SPEAKER_03: Kind of, because a few weeks later I went camping. Oh. And so I brought it with me and I remember the first time that I used it, a mosquito bit me on my leg and I whipped it out, pressed it against my bite, pulled back. SPEAKER_00: One, two, three, four, five, six. SPEAKER_03: I think I did it a couple more times for good measure. It didn't tell me I needed to. Really plunge it. Okay. And the whelp flattened, the redness slowly dissipated and then it was gone. Hmm. Okay. And I couldn't believe that I finally found something that worked. And did like juice come out? So I didn't see anything come out. Are you giggling? Well, I'm, I mean, I'm a little skeptical. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Basically you and everybody else. Come on, Becca. SPEAKER_00: Anytime I would talk about this like little miracle that had entered my life. SPEAKER_03: So you're telling me this little plunger. My best friends. Stopped your body from having a reaction. Some of my coworkers. What? All of them said, no, no way. No, no, no. There's no way this works. Absolutely not. It can't possibly do anything. Do anything physically. Come on, Becca. I don't know. There's no way that works. And like, no, no. I really started asking myself. I just refuse to believe. What the fuck is wrong with my friends? SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_17: SPEAKER_17: SPEAKER_03: Like they don't know anything about this product or mosquitoes. Like I use this thing all the time and they just insist this is all in my head. Why don't they believe me? SPEAKER_03: Okay, wait. So your question is what? I don't have a question. Oh, not a real one. Okay. You just, so what are we doing here? We are here because I set out to prove to you and everyone else that this thing really does work. Okay. SPEAKER_14: So you turned your back on the rules of the profession, which is like have open-ended questions. Don't try to prove a thesis statement. SPEAKER_03: Okay. Yes. But I went looking for scientific evidence. So like, I want to actually convince you. Okay. And first thing I have for you is I found a study that's been done on the product. Okay. All right. I like that. Okay. SPEAKER_03: So there were 40 people in the study and they stick both arms into a box of mosquitoes until they get a bite on each arm. SPEAKER_03: Okay. I know. And they use Bug Bite Thing on only one of the bites. Okay. And so the bite that got the device, the itch went away within 10 minutes and the swell mostly went away within 30 minutes. Okay. And then the bite that didn't get Bug Bite Thing, the itch lasted for an hour and the SPEAKER_03: swelling lasted for one to two hours. Huh. Okay. Which is like very significant. I mean, 40 people is a pretty small group. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it is. SPEAKER_03: It is. SPEAKER_14: Was it published? Was it like peer reviewed? SPEAKER_03: No, it wasn't. It was commissioned by the company for potential retailers. Okay. Because I'm not a scientist. I don't want to misspeak on the science. I did ask this woman, Kelly Higney, about the scientific evidence. She's the CEO and founder of Bug Bite Thing. SPEAKER_26: At least my point of view is we see pictures, right? We see the beginning of the well or the beginning of the video and then we can see how it looks after. SPEAKER_14: I mean, pictures and videos are great. Did they do a placebo group? No. So there's no one getting a placebo device that's not doing anything? No. Okay. Okay, yeah. So... Okay. Okay. Okay. So we're throwing out these results, right? I mean... Are we though? Yes! How is that not so compelling? Well, if you can't show that the Bug Bite Thing does more for a bite than some fake nothing device, you aren't really showing that it does anything. SPEAKER_03: Sure. I will concede the study doesn't prove that it's sucking out the saliva or that that would even make the bite go away if it did. Right. But so... So let me add to the spit story a little bit, which was what you just said. I decided to call up a mosquito scientist to see if it could be doing something. Yeah. So this is Lyric Bartholome. She studies mosquitoes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The mosquitoes, like, it's amazing, Becca. She told me she enjoys getting bit. Because it's fascinating to me. SPEAKER_11: Oh my goodness. It's just this peaceful moment of being a little awestruck. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: But I gotta say, as Lyric described it, it is pretty amazing. Okay. Mosquitoes have this needle on their head called the proboscis. And the females... They're really just trying to feed their babies. SPEAKER_11: They use that proboscis to break through your skin. SPEAKER_11: Dig around underneath your skin. And poke around for a blood vessel. I mean, she's got to be moving cells apart in order to find a capillary that she can break into. And once she finds that blood vessel, she saws it apart, sticks her proboscis into the blood and starts... Sucking the blood into her body. And the whole time she's dancing around with her proboscis under your skin, she's salivating. And so these proteins and other things are coming out of her salivary glands. SPEAKER_14: Is it leaving saliva behind just because, like, yeah, it's hungry and it's, like, drooling? SPEAKER_11: Yep. Just like you and I when we're hungry for a meal. She's salivating. SPEAKER_03: Huh. And that saliva that she leaves behind triggers an immune response. So your body sends histamines to the site of the bite. And you get this raised red welt on your skin. The itchy, itchy ow. The itchy, itchy ow. Okay. So then I... Wait, what do male mosquitoes eat? SPEAKER_03: Okay, fantastic question. They feed on plant nectar. Mm. I know. I actually didn't know before that our blood feeds her eggs. When I learned that I was like, oh, man, I feel a little more sympathetic. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Anyways, so I asked Lyric about bug bites. Does this ring a bell to you? SPEAKER_11: Yes. It's funny. I took a picture of it recently and said, is this thing real? What'd you say? Well, I guess, I mean, if you were to use a suction device almost immediately, it could be that you actually pull out some of the spit that the mosquito has left behind. Right? That's like what you're responding to. Huh? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right. SPEAKER_11: So... SPEAKER_03: So and I'm sorry to drill down on this so specifically, but if I were to pull out the mosquito saliva, should I be able to really see it in the suction device? No, it's such a minuscule amount. SPEAKER_11: It's like, of course I haven't fucking seen the saliva. SPEAKER_03: Do you know how big a mosquito is? But if it's, I mean, the hole's gonna close where she's fed really pretty quickly. SPEAKER_11: And... Lyric says in the meantime... Spit has disseminated under your skin in a way that it's unreachable by a suction device. But isn't the skin pretty permeable? Could you not suck it back up through your pores? Well, her salivary proteins are actually going into your blood vessels as well. So they're long gone. SPEAKER_11: Okay. The suction device no way would get it all. And I'm skeptical that it would get any. Gotcha. SPEAKER_11: But, you know, maybe there's some science that's been done to show what oozes out when you use it quickly enough. I just haven't seen that science. Which is like quite, quite reasonable. SPEAKER_14: Is there anything in the device purporting to suck the bad stuff out? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah. Um, the company hasn't shown that there is. Okay. My heart lapped and now it's sinking again for you. SPEAKER_03: Is it? Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, I will say she didn't outright deny that it could work. Okay. SPEAKER_14: So she cracked a little corner of possibility. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right. And I hear that it's probably not the most convincing thing in the world. Uh-huh. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. But I think it works. I think if it, I think if you did a study with the placebo group and if you did look in the device, I believe that it would work. I don't know. I just. SPEAKER_14: I mean, you just, I feel like you just, you can't just let it be. You just don't want it to be the placebo effect. SPEAKER_03: I just, it makes no sense to me that I could have this fat mosquito bite on my leg and because of my mind, it just goes away. Like that's what you're all saying when you say this is in my head and it just, I like, I just can't, I can't, it doesn't make sense. And the study, it didn't prove that it was the placebo effect. Right, right. Right? It didn't prove that I could do that. Yeah, fair. And so I wanted to go see in this increasingly desperate journey if I could discount the SPEAKER_03: placebo effect. SPEAKER_14: Okay. So you're not, you're not going in like saying, huh, is this the placebo effect? You're saying, can I strike it off the list? Yeah. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. SPEAKER_03: So I think it's a very interesting question. And I even managed to find a scientist who studies the placebo effect on itchy welts. Ooh, nice. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: So what we, should I go into the concrete details? Well, before we get there, so this is Lauren Howe. She's an assistant professor at the University of Zurich. And back in 2016, as I was wrapping up my PhD at Stanford, Lauren and a team of scientists brought a bunch of people into this room. This is what we kind of lovingly call our mocktor's office in the Department of Psychology. And they each had their arm pricked with a tiny amount of histamine to give them this itchy welt. Exactly. But then a seemingly competent and friendly doctor or mocktor came into the room and put unscented hand lotion on that reaction, rubbed a placebo cream on their welt, which means it shouldn't do anything. Okay. And for half the patients, the mocktor said, this cream is an antihistamine. SPEAKER_07: It's going to reduce the welt and reduce itching. And in the other condition, they were told this cream is an histamine agonist. It's going to make your welt bigger and increase itching. Okay. We measured them, I think every three minutes or so in the study. And over time, the people who were told this is going to make it worse, their welt got SPEAKER_03: bigger. Whoa. And I guess more to the point, the people that were told this is going to make it better, SPEAKER_03: their welt actually shrunk. Even though they were given like a big fat dollop of nothing on their welt. Wow. SPEAKER_14: That is like beliefs on the skin. SPEAKER_14: I mean, that is just kind of breathtaking that the body, like just how the mechanisms of our body works. Like you are seeing a belief imprinted on the skin. Okay. Well, hold up for a second because... SPEAKER_03: We actually didn't see any effects in itchiness? The people in the study did not experience less itch. You're saying that with some degree of pride or hope. Why? Because when I use bug bite thing, my itch goes away. SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay. Although I'll say for full transparency here, there was a different study at Stanford that was similar and they did show the placebo effect on the itch. SPEAKER_03: Oh. However... And it goes down? Yeah, it does. However, I did talk to a third scientist. I can't wait to hear how you're going to... SPEAKER_03: Well, wait, wait. Well, so she told me that there's a third possibility here, which is that it's a conditioned response. Okay. Meaning? Meaning if it is a placebo, your body's responding to it because it has experienced the real thing. So like Pavlov's dog, the dog salivates with the bell because the bell was paired with the food. Initially. Right. Okay. So if it was a dog for me repeatedly, then it must have like actually pulled something out at some point. SPEAKER_14: Okay. So can I just take a sort of recap of what we have learned? Go for it. Okay. So you have found this shred of a chance that it could pull something out if you used it right away. Yeah. And you're combining that with a shred of a chance that it's not placebo, but instead a conditioning response. Like I'd be willing to give you a slice of maybe, maybe. But why, like, why are you so hostile to the placebo effect? SPEAKER_14: I mean, the reactions in your body, this flood of chemicals, like the diminished wealth, those things are real. Does it, does it, even if a placebo effect set that chain off, does it, does it have to cheapen it for you? SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I feel like so uncomfortable with that possibility. Why? I feel like deeply shaken by it. SPEAKER_03: I just feels like this like house of cards where if you tug away at this thing that I believe it has a scientific basis for like why it works for me. I just feel like you start unraveling a lot of other things too. Hmm. Like what? You know, I'm sure we probably won't air something like this for an episode about a silly little bug bite thing. There is like a lot of resonance for me between this experience of like wanting to validate this bodily reaction with an experience I had a few years ago. You know, I was violated by someone and that person kind of denied that a violation took place and it shook me up really, really badly. Like I stepped away from work for weeks to try and deal with it. I felt like I was in this constant state of panic. My chest was on fire. I felt like I had no control over these sensations in my body. And in this really weird way, opening up the potential that this mosquito plunger isn't really working, that it is me, Becca, my mind having such a visceral effect on my body. It resurfaces this fear that I had and that I thought I put to bed a long time ago that all of those feelings of pain and panic were really just like caused by me, that it was just in my head. SPEAKER_14: I think what I'm understanding is that like you just didn't want to let in the possibility SPEAKER_14: that your mind could make your body feel such things. You didn't want to be any part of that. You wanted your body to be a pure signal about something that happened in the outside world. And if you were a part of it, what, then you're somehow to blame? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's about blame, but it's really about being believed, actually. SPEAKER_03: When people question my experience or say that this is in my head, fundamentally, they don't believe me. And that's really what I want here. I just want people to believe me. SPEAKER_14: Your journey has convinced me that maybe you should have never had to take the journey. I guess let's just say that, like, we don't, I don't need science to believe you. Well, thank you for saying that. SPEAKER_03: But I got to tell you, one of the only people who said that to me from the start was the actual scientist, Lyric Bartholomé. SPEAKER_11: You know what, like I said, I think if it works for you and it makes you less uncomfortable, then you've got to do it. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: It isn't really working. Like, I mean, I've just been sitting here kind of like obsessively plunging the bites and they're not going down. At this point, I don't even know why I keep fucking plunging it. It's like, what am I thinking is going to happen if it hasn't already happened? SPEAKER_03: If this stupid fucking story is the reason why this stupid fucking plunger will not work SPEAKER_03: for me anymore. If this thing stops, if this, if this, if I cannot rely on this thing moving forward, I truly will curse this show. SPEAKER_14: Biggest thanks and apologies, I guess, to our producer, Becca Bressler. And that'll do it for our show of stupid questions about our stupid bodies. SPEAKER_17: Not quite. What? What? We have three acts. I know we said we'd do three, but I got one more little magic bus ride journey here. Your little brain, your little brain can't rest. SPEAKER_14: No. And this is from actually an even littler brain than mine. SPEAKER_17: This is from my son, my older son. SPEAKER_24: My name is F-I-V-E-L. SPEAKER_17: His name is Fievel. SPEAKER_24: I work at a Fievel factory where we make five of the littler files to the babies. SPEAKER_17: So a while back. I have a question. SPEAKER_17: He asked me this question that just completely stopped me in my tracks. SPEAKER_24: Is there anything in our bodies that we have three of? SPEAKER_17: We have one nose, we have two eyes, we have four limbs, we have five fingers on a hand. We have like 12 ribs. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Are there any threes? SPEAKER_17: Are there any threes in our bodies? Are there? Well, just in that initial moment, like when he asked me that, I was like, oh my God, I have no idea. And then I started talking to a bunch of people. I started talking to friends and doctors. One of the first answers that I got from people, like one of my friends was like, I have three nipples or like, you know, some people are born with three kidneys or something like that. SPEAKER_14: Oh really? SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Some people have three kidneys. My uncle has three nipples. Okay. That's, that's not the normal way things go. SPEAKER_14: So there's, you're saying there's accidental, there's sort of accidental threes, but then SPEAKER_17: the thing I was looking for is kind of most or all of us should, should have three of this thing. Okay. And at that point I was just like, I can't think of anything. SPEAKER_04: Okay. Three of. Well, let me think about that. SPEAKER_17: So I called up a few friends at the show. It's a great question. SPEAKER_04: ER doctor and reporter, Avir Mitra. SPEAKER_17: And um, it's. SPEAKER_17: Or fact checker, Diane Kelly, who also happens to have a PhD in comparative anatomy. SPEAKER_06: Almost everything comes in twos. SPEAKER_04: Because we're so symmetrical, you know. SPEAKER_06: Or you have one thing. SPEAKER_04: But not completely symmetrical. I mean, I'm struggling here, but. SPEAKER_17: But I was like, there's gotta be something. There's gotta be a trio somewhere. Right? SPEAKER_14: It really does feel like, like, I feel like there's one on the tip of my tongue, but I'm not talking about taste buds, but like. SPEAKER_04: I gotta keep thinking. SPEAKER_14: Ah. Well, female mammals have three exits to their reproductive and waste systems. SPEAKER_17: Okay. Okay. But only females. Only females, right? SPEAKER_06: In mammals, in ears, the inside of each ear has three bones. SPEAKER_17: But then that's tricky because it doesn't quite. SPEAKER_06: They're each different. They're each a different bone. It's a chain of three bones there, but they're each a different bone. SPEAKER_17: Oh, that's a cheat. It feels like a cheat. Those three are different from each other. Yes, that's a cheat. They're not the same. SPEAKER_06: They are not the same. They're not the same. No, they are not the same. SPEAKER_17: What I want is I want three discrete, three of the same thing. No, you want a set. SPEAKER_14: Three little eyeballs. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. SPEAKER_14: You want three. I feel you. Three hearts. You want that. SPEAKER_04: Three same things. Right. Um. Ooh, I got a good one that's three, but it's kind of gross. Okay, go for it. There's three spongy parts that make up the sponginess of the penis. You know, that fill up with blood. SPEAKER_06: Yes. So there's three erectile bodies in the penis. SPEAKER_04: Two of them are called the corpus cavernosum, and then one is called the corpus spongiosum. SPEAKER_06: Which is underneath the two of them, and then it flares out at the far end of the penis and forms the glands tissue. SPEAKER_04: So there's three. SPEAKER_06: But they're different. There's one pair of one kind of erectile body, and then there's a third of another type of erectile body. Okay. SPEAKER_17: Okay, so that's not going to cut it. It's kind of a non-starter. SPEAKER_17: Also, that's only half the population anyway. SPEAKER_04: Okay, ooh, okay, I got another one. Do you know that we have a third eye? Tell me, where's our third eye? It's actually like when you look at like religious drawings, you know, and like, it's like where they're talking about. It's kind of in the center of your head. SPEAKER_23: Okay. SPEAKER_04: Most likely that was a very old, old eye back when we didn't even have skulls and we weren't even human. SPEAKER_17: Really? So it's like a vestigial eye kind of thing? I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say yes. SPEAKER_04: Okay. SPEAKER_06: He's thinking of the pineal gland. It's in us, it's like way deep in the brain, but it's not like our eyes. So you call BS on that one. SPEAKER_06: I don't think it matches your parameters. Nah, that doesn't count. That doesn't count. SPEAKER_17: Right. And I just kept asking more and more people like body that we have three of. SPEAKER_17: Like I was in an interview, completely unrelated interview with Danielle Reed. She's an expert on senses and the brain. I can't think of a thing. SPEAKER_12: And I asked her the question. SPEAKER_17: No, I can't think of anything. SPEAKER_17: She was stumped. And then I went to Kat Bohannon. I'm Kat Bohannon. SPEAKER_09: I'm a researcher and an author. Just finished my PhD at Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Okay. SPEAKER_17: Just wrote a book called Eve, how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution. SPEAKER_09: Neat. I was just hearing about this book. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: So I asked her a question that had nothing to do with the book. Oh, I thought you were going to ask me something about genitals. SPEAKER_09: Oh, yeah. Because like half of my life right now is answering those. SPEAKER_17: So when I asked her the three body part question, she said, you're, um, you're very unlikely SPEAKER_09: to arrive at a three. So actually very good question. SPEAKER_17: But but why is it so hard to find threes in the body? Because I mean, like I've found a four, I found a five, I found a six. It feels easier to find every other number besides three. In part that is because bodies are things which are built actually. SPEAKER_17: So according to Kat, because bodies are built, they need a building plan and that plan needs to be effective, but it also needs to be efficient. SPEAKER_09: If you're thinking about how this body plan is building out, um, you, you can simply think of each half of the body essentially doing the same thing in a mirror function. SPEAKER_17: Which means that for basically all animals, symmetry is the baseline move. It's efficient because you have to just plan half of something and then you say double it. Um, it's good for moving around, right? Think of walking, crawling, being symmetrical really helps. And also because it gives you a backup. SPEAKER_09: The central reason that most of us have two testicles, two ovaries, two things is also that well, if one fails, we're still good. SPEAKER_17: Now, of course, there are times when you want to break the pattern, but it's often a shrinking SPEAKER_09: from two to one. There may be something about having two hearts that would be deeply stupid. You know, this is simply better to build as a single unit, a single pump as it were to just push this through the system then to try to maintain two because then you'd have to coordinate the two. It'd be like this weird waltz all, well, maybe not a waltz, it'd probably be a four four, but you know what I mean? Right. SPEAKER_17: And the other reason you might want to go from two to one is running the thing, the SPEAKER_17: simple matter of the cost. SPEAKER_09: You know, how much energy is it going to take to maintain this thing, to run this thing, to use this thing? Yeah. SPEAKER_09: I'm not at all surprised. We don't have two brains. That is the most metabolically expensive tissue in our body. SPEAKER_17: It feels like over the evolution of the human body, it's like the number one and the number two sort of arm wrestled over every part of the body to be like, should we have one of these? Should we have two of these? Should we have one of these? SPEAKER_09: Should we have two of these? SPEAKER_17: Effectively. Effectively. And then number three is not even at the table. Number three is like, hey, I got a great idea. We could do three. And everyone's like, no, no. SPEAKER_06: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Three is not a magic number when it comes to animal bodies. Um. SPEAKER_14: Hmm. But then, whew, I just like ran home so I could set this up. SPEAKER_04: Vere called me back. SPEAKER_14: I can picture this getting so under his skin. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_17: Oh, it really bugged him. SPEAKER_04: I was just in bed at night and it just like the answer just came to me. So what is it? Okay. So basically the aortic valve, which is the only way to get blood from your heart to the rest of your body. You got to go through a valve. It's called the aortic valve and that valve, the best design is for it to have three cusps. SPEAKER_17: The design that makes sure blood goes one way out the heart and not the other way back in because that would be very bad. SPEAKER_04: They're triangle doors that like open up when you want the blood to go out and then just flop back down when you want it to close. But actually what it is is like three leaflets. What is that? What do you mean by leaflets? It's like three triangular doors that add up to being a circle. Like if you saw a Mercedes Benz symbol, it would be those three, the up left, almost like a peace sign, you know, like, like that type of thing. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So that's, that's a possibility because there's three cusps and they're all the, they're all the same. That's true. That's a good, that's a good option, but there's more than one of them. SPEAKER_04: Okay. So, but yeah, this is where my whole thing may break down. You have more valves. Oh no, this is where, no way, no way. SPEAKER_17: It doesn't count. Listen, listen, listen, you have four chambers of the heart. SPEAKER_17: Four chambers each have a valve, four valves. And so then I was like, oh, but that kind of means we have 12 cusps, not three. SPEAKER_17: And then it got even weirder because he was like, no, no, no. Cause one of those valves is not a tricuspid valve. It's a bicuspid valve. So we have two. So I was like, you 11, like we found an 11 and we still haven't found a three. Like I'm looking for a three. I don't, that's an 11. Damn it. But I, but I did, I, but I did end up deciding to take it to Kat anyway, to see what she thought. SPEAKER_04: SPEAKER_09: I forgot about that. SPEAKER_17: Feel like that does that cut it for you? Does that feel like, does that feel good? You know, it had, I got a little tingle. SPEAKER_09: I got a little something. I got a little something to think about it, but keep going. Cause you were about to tell me why not. Cause there are, and explain my whole thing to her. SPEAKER_17: Like isn't this actually like, it looks like a three, but this is actually an 11, right? SPEAKER_09: Technically 11 cusps. However, three would share the property of having the three cusps. SPEAKER_17: If you don't count the cusps, if you count instead the tri-cuspid valves. Oh, there's three tri-cuspid valves? SPEAKER_09: There are three tri-cuspid valves. SPEAKER_17: Three sets of three, which feels satisfying and vaguely mystical. SPEAKER_17: Three threes literally in your beating heart. SPEAKER_14: Oh, that's beautiful. Okay. All right. SPEAKER_17: All right. There we go. There we go. SPEAKER_14: Three threes. Did you, did you tell Fievel? Is he excited? SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Yeah. I got him on mic. I explained the whole thing. Okay. My buddy, my buddy. There are these little doors in your heart. They're shaped like a little pizza with three slices. I laid it out for him. So this, there's this special door in your heart. SPEAKER_17: Three heart things. SPEAKER_24: Three heart doors. SPEAKER_17: And then in the door. Yeah. SPEAKER_24: There's three of them and three threes, which make nine of them. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Three of the, of these kinds of doors with three flaps in each of them. So you think that doesn't count? But there's three of them. SPEAKER_24: Uh, okay, fine. I found you a three in the box. SPEAKER_17: Okay. Okay. That, that actually was our last magic school bus trip. SPEAKER_14: So you know, go back to your, go back to your life. SPEAKER_17: Your desk, buses parked. You can go back to your normal school or work day, you know, go learn about the Krebs cycle, SPEAKER_14: but don't worry because we actually have another wild ride coming up in just two weeks. Uh, Latif, this is a story of yours that has captured your heart and sent you basically put jet jet, uh, jet engines on the school bus and launched you all the way into space. So, uh, we are all going to get to hear that. I'm very excited for it. SPEAKER_17: In the meantime, this episode was reported by myself as well as Molly Webster, Alan Gafinsky and Becca Bressler and is produced by Sindhu Nyanasambhandan, Molly Webster and Becca Bressler SPEAKER_14: with help from Matt Kielty, Aketi Foster-Keys and Alyssa Jung Perry with music and sound SPEAKER_17: design from Jeremy Loom and mixing help from Ari Ann Wack. SPEAKER_14: Original song by Alan Gafinsky with backups by his wife, Alita Gafinsky. Special thanks to Mark Krasnow, Carrie Leibowitz and Andrea Evers. Thank you for listening. SPEAKER_17: Bye. SPEAKER_21: Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambhandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Alyssa Jung Perry, Sarah Sandbeck, Ari Ann Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Erica Inyankers. Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.