Boo_ep013

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:34]:
Well, I gotta say, this has been the most exciting week of the podcast so far. We want to thank you. We're very grateful that the box of oddities has been consistently in the top 10 on the iTunes comedy charts.

Kat [00:00:47]:
Right, and we've been peeking in on the all categories charts as well. Plus new and noteworthy.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:54]:
Yeah, we ended up in new and.

Kat [00:00:55]:
Noteworthy, plus cast Box has us on the recommended podcasts. Also West Virginia. West Virginia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:04]:
Yeah, that's right. West Virginia was the one holdout state we didn't have any downloads from, and now we do. So we've got downloads from every single state.

Kat [00:01:12]:
And in doing research on West Virginia, I discovered that we have to try pepperoni rolls.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:17]:
Okay, That's a thing.

Kat [00:01:18]:
Do they make vegetarian pepperoni also, it's.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:20]:
Not just people from West Virginia and around the world that are listening. Arthur, the gruff but lovable convenience store worker, apparently listens. It's a little corner store in our neighborhood in Maine. Oh, and he's a typical Mainer, Sure. He goes, geezum crow there, bub. Is it true the missus is a cannibal? And I said, no, no, she's not a cannibal. We did the Ancestry.com DNA thing, and she has ancestors from Papua New guinea that were cannibals, not cat. She's a vegetarian. It's just, I find that ironic and amusing that, you know, she's a vegetarian cannibal ancestor. So I just want to, you know, first of all, I want to make clear that you are not currently a cannibal.

Kat [00:02:05]:
I am not currently a cannibal.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:07]:
That story seems to have been twisted around a little bit.

Kat [00:02:10]:
Well, you keep mentioning it, like, over and over again, and I can see how it would get confusing for people because you're all like, mm, cannibal. All right, that's not.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:18]:
Well, I think I've set the record straight now.

Kat [00:02:19]:
Okay, good.

Kat [00:02:20]:
All right.

Kat [00:02:21]:
Also, I love you, West Virginia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:23]:
Almost heaven. West Virginia. Blue Ridge Mountain, Shenandoah River. The gospel according to John Denver, everyone.

Kat [00:02:29]:
John Denver.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:31]:
Yes. Rest in peace.

Kat [00:02:33]:
How is corner store guy doing, anyway? Didn't he have, like, a knee replaced or something?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:39]:
Yeah, yes, he did.

Kat [00:02:40]:
Yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:41]:
You know, I think it was a hip.

Kat [00:02:42]:
Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:44]:
He. He said he Was his new rapper name was going to be Bust A Hip only said it like that. Bob.

Kat [00:02:51]:
Oh, Arthur.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:52]:
Arthur.

Kat [00:02:52]:
Yeah. He works at the convenience store just on the way. In Bangor, Maine, which is where we reside. Home of Stephen King, Green Mile. Best adaptation booked movie I've ever seen.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:05]:
We're just gonna keep shamelessly plugging Stephen King until he gives us a shout out. In fact, I think we should do our show from outside the gate of his house until he comes out. I think that's great because, yeah, he doesn't live far from where we live. He lives in a much nicer house than we do.

Kat [00:03:22]:
That's true. Oh, my gosh. Speaking of which, if you are not familiar with Stephen King's house in Bangor, Maine, check out pictures of it. He has the most beautiful wrought iron gate. It's got bats on it, bats sitting atop the post. And it's just. It's so beautiful. And every time I see pictures of it, I'm like, I love that gate.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:42]:
There was a period of time throughout the 80s when that was the destination to go on Halloween. He did up Halloween in a big, big way. But it became just so out of control. People were flying in from all over the world to trick or treat at Stephen King's house. So now he closes the gates and turns off the lights and goes to Florida or someplace during October.

Kat [00:04:04]:
It's Maine in October. You should go to Florida.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:06]:
Yeah, you should. Anyway, the boxofoddities.com is our website. If you have an idea for a podcast topic or if you just want to communicate with us, you can do so by sending. Sending an email to curator. The boxofoddities.com.

Kat [00:04:23]:
Hold on a second. I've got to turn my heater off.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:25]:
Has that been on the whole time?

Kat [00:04:27]:
Yeah, sorry about that. We got cold feet.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:30]:
We are in Maine. Okay. Sorry about that. The quality of our audio just went up considerably. Now she's turned off the heater.

Kat [00:04:38]:
I have delicate digits, poor circulation.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:41]:
That's okay. I've got another freaky story for you today. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Well, you know the story, when I.

Kat [00:04:47]:
Think freaky, I think like R. Kelly, you know, peeing on people.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:50]:
No, no, it's not an R. Kelly peeing on people story.

Kat [00:04:55]:
Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:55]:
Although I'm jotting that down for a future episode. Today I'm going to tell you about Tarra Terrell. Terrell. It's a French word. I'm trying to pronounce it authentically.

Kat [00:05:06]:
Terrare.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:06]:
Terre.

Kat [00:05:07]:
So terror. I'm guessing it's got something to do with earth ground?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:10]:
Well, no, it's T A R R A R E terrair. It's the name of a French showman and soldier from the late 1700s who had incredibly unusual eating habits.

Kat [00:05:27]:
I've heard of this guy.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:29]:
You have?

Kat [00:05:29]:
Yeah. He was the guy that couldn't stop eating. Right? I mean, he ate like. I mean. Okay, tell me, tell. Tell me the story.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:35]:
All right.

Kat [00:05:36]:
This is so good. I'm so excited.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:38]:
This guy was able to eat vast amounts of meat to the point where it just got ridiculous. In fact, he could eat one quarter of a cow carcass in a day. He traveled France in the company of a band of thieves. According to Wikipedia, thieves and prostitutes. Before becoming the warm up act to a traveling charlatan, he'd swallow corks, stones, live animals, and a whole basket full of apples.

Kat [00:06:07]:
You can't just throw in live animals. Like, it's not the worst thing you've ever heard in your life. That's horrendous. Like, would he swallow them whole or did he chew.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:17]:
It sounds like he swallowed them whole. One time he ate a live eel. No, just swallowed it live.

Kat [00:06:24]:
Oh.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:25]:
He was born in rural France in 1772. As a child, he had this insatiable appetite. And by his teens, that's when he was able to eat a quarter of a cow in a single day. About this time, his parents, they decided, you know what? We can't afford this.

Kat [00:06:43]:
Yeah, get out.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:44]:
Get the heck out of here. So he had to leave home. And for years he toured the country with a roaming band of thieves and prostitutes, begging and stealing food. And then he gained his.

Kat [00:06:54]:
His weight?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:55]:
No, he never gained weight. He weighed 80 pounds.

Kat [00:06:59]:
That doesn't make any sense.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:00]:
80 to 100 pounds. He toured the country with, you know, that traveling charlatan that I mentioned. Crowds would be drawn by him eating corks and anything he could find lying in the gut. Then he thought he should be, like, the star of the show, not the warm up act. So he moved to Paris and he worked as a street entertainer.

Kat [00:07:19]:
Just eating things?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:20]:
Yeah, just out of the gutter. His appearance was just kind of creepy. He had an abnormally wide mouth in which his teeth were heavily stained. He didn't appear to have any lips. And when he had not eaten, the skin hung so loosely around his stomach that he could wrap it around his waist. And when he was full, his abdomen was distended like a huge balloon.

Kat [00:07:44]:
But he didn't feel full or.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:46]:
Yeah, I guess not. His body was also Hot to the touch. And he sweated heavily.

Kat [00:07:51]:
That must have been how he didn't gain weight. He must have had like a crazy metabolism or something.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:56]:
That's an interesting hypothesis. He also suffered from extremely foul body odor.

Kat [00:08:04]:
I would imagine he's eating garbage out of the gutter.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:07]:
In the late 1700s, France, he was described as stinking. Quote, to such a degree it could not be endured within the distance of 20 paces. And it would get noticeably worse after he ate. His eyes and cheeks would become bloodshot and you could actually see a physical vapor coming off of him.

Kat [00:08:30]:
What?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:31]:
Yeah, after he would eat, he'd become extremely lethargic.

Kat [00:08:35]:
Well, I mean, I get that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:36]:
Eating a cow will do.

Kat [00:08:38]:
Yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:39]:
And again, despite the large intake of food, he never seemed to vomit or gain weight. He did have diarrhea his entire life, constantly. Which probably also added to the.

Kat [00:08:52]:
The smell.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:53]:
The smell. And the lack of weight gain.

Kat [00:08:55]:
I mean, he's got some sort of irritable bowel syndrome he's probably dealing with, which is understandable. I suffer from it as well, but you can get within 20 paces of me. I wonder if maybe. I wonder if, like, what came first because maybe something happened or was going on inside his bits and he didn't digest right. Like maybe he had a blockage or something. Maybe something. And so maybe the two things kind of fed off of each other maybe. Yeah, it could be, I don't know. Fed off each other.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:28]:
He did have an intestinal blockage at one point. We'll get to that. He then enlisted in the military service. Yeah. As a spy. And they used him. They used him to smuggle notes across the front. He would, of course, swallow them and then he'd get to the front and then he'd fish them out of his stool and hand them to the general in charge. Here you go, sir. Here's a feces laden note.

Kat [00:09:57]:
No. And you know, he always had diarrhea, so I mean, it's not like.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:00]:
And they didn't have plastic bags back then, so.

Kat [00:10:03]:
Yeah, that's not sanitary.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:06]:
No. I guess what they did because they didn't have plastic bags is they would put it in a little wooden box and he'd swallow the whole box. After about 30 hours, the box would emerge and the box would emerge. The general who received him was, quote, furious when the documents had been delivered because they contained vital intelligence. And apparently pieces of corn. No. And, you know, just so badly stained and just.

Kat [00:10:38]:
Yeah, I mean. Yeah, yeah. It's very upsetting. I also feel like maybe spies should be A bit more inconspicuous.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:49]:
So here's. Yeah, I would agree with that. There was one time where he was captured before he was able to excrete the wooden box and he did after it within capture. And in order to keep the. No. Yeah.

Kat [00:11:05]:
No.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:05]:
Yep. He ate his stool. No. And the box so that it couldn't be, you know. It was vital information, sweetie.

Kat [00:11:12]:
He did what he had to do, I guess.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:14]:
Yep.

Kat [00:11:15]:
Oh geez. That's.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:18]:
Following that incident, Terea was desperate to avoid further military service, understandably. And returned to the hospital. He wanted to be cured from this. So they treated him with laudanum without success. Further treatments they used.

Kat [00:11:35]:
I thought that was the solution for everything.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:37]:
For everything.

Kat [00:11:38]:
Oh, you eat so much. Try some laudanum. Headaches. Laudanum.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:41]:
Laudanum addiction. Laudanum. They tried white wine and. White wine vinegar rather. And tobacco pills. That was unsuccessful. And then they would feed him soft boiled eggs and that didn't work either.

Kat [00:11:55]:
Okay. I'm sorry. If he didn't have diarrhea before. White wine vinegar and tobacco pills and soft boiled eggs. I mean.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:02]:
Yep. Like a fire hose. Efforts to keep him on any kind of controlled diet failed because he would sneak out of the hospital and scavenge Awful. Outside of butcher shops. And awful, of course, animal entrails and organs and waste leftover. Yeah. Stuff that's in hot dogs. Yeah.

Kat [00:12:23]:
Basically.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:23]:
He would actually fight stray dogs for the food in the gutters, in the alleys, in the rubbish heaps.

Kat [00:12:29]:
Not cool.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:30]:
He was caught several times within the hospital drinking from patients undergoing bloodletting. He would drink the blood while he was on this diet imposed by the hospital. He was so hungry. He was chased out of the morgue several times because he was trying to eat the cadavers.

Kat [00:12:49]:
Well, I mean, you're done with that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:12:50]:
I suppose, but Good lord. What's amazing to me is they found him in there eating dead people and they still kept him there.

Kat [00:12:58]:
Sure. Well, he had some stuff going on with the ibs Dedicated to their craft. Healing.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:06]:
Sure.

Kat [00:13:06]:
Healing, craft.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:08]:
So what did it take for them to kick him out of the hospital? A little bit after the cadaver incident, a 14 month old child went missing. They never found him. Terea seemed incredibly satisfied gastronomically. There was a big bulge in his.

Kat [00:13:24]:
Stomach and like a 14 month old bulge.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:27]:
Yep. But apparently he ate a baby.

Kat [00:13:30]:
That's just rumor though. They don't know that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:33]:
They don't. They never proved it. But they chased him from the hospital.

Kat [00:13:36]:
He ate that baby.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:37]:
He did. I think he did. I think he ate that toddler.

Kat [00:13:41]:
That's horrendous.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:41]:
He ate a toddler. He disappeared. He never returned to the hospital. He disappeared for years. Nobody knew where he was. He showed up years later at the hospital, and he contacted the surgeon that had treated him or the doctor and said he wished to see him. He was now very bedridden and weak because he had tuberculosis. He had developed tuberculosis. Now, Terer told the surgeon that he thought he wasn't feeling well because he swallowed a golden fork that he found in the gutter, and he believed it was lodged somewhere inside of him, causing the weakness. He hoped that Percy could find some way, Percy being the surgeon, to remove the golden fork. Percy, however, recognized him suffering from advanced tuberculosis a month later began to suffer from continuous extruded diarrhea. Look it up. I'm not going to tell you what it is. And then he died. Afterwards, the corpse decomposed quickly. Most of the surgeons in the hospital said, no, we're not going to. We're not going to do an autopsy. It's. However, his surgeon wanted to find out if, in fact, he did have a fork in him and if it was gold, he wanted it. So he cut.

Kat [00:14:52]:
You have to do an autopsy on a man like that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:55]:
Yeah. So they did. They did an autopsy. They determined that his gullet was abnormally wide. When the jaws were open, the surgeon could see down a broad canal right into his stomach. The body was filled with infection. His liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was covered with enormous ulcers. Also, it filled most of his abdominal cavity. Well, yeah, the fork was never found.

Kat [00:15:21]:
By the way, excretive diarrhea occurs with the presence of blood and pus in the stool. This occurs with inflammatory bowel diseases. I told you he had ibs.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:30]:
I didn't want to say that.

Kat [00:15:31]:
Such as Crohn's ulcerative colitis and other severe infections such as E. Coli or other forms of blood. Food poisoning. Well, I mean, how could he not have had food poisoning? Well, he had to all the time.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:42]:
Probably at one point during his treatment, he was boasting that he could eat everything and anything. And he told the surgeon. He offered to eat the surgeon's gold watch and chain. And the surgeon declined.

Kat [00:15:55]:
Sure. Thank you.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:57]:
If you do, I'm going to cut you open to get it back, is what he told him.

Kat [00:16:00]:
That's a good plan, I think. But he wouldn't go in after that fork.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:03]:
No, he did go after the fork.

Kat [00:16:04]:
He just waited until it's easier. I guess. That is. That's upsetting. That's upsetting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:11]:
That's the story of Terrer the French showman, baby eater.

Kat [00:16:15]:
Well, yeah, he had a lot going on there. There was. There was a lot. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think about. There's all these rules and I mean I don't. I'm not up to date on the.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:24]:
Current baby eating ordinances. Because you're not supposed to.

Kat [00:16:30]:
No, I mean I'm just thinking about like salmonella and stuff. You know, undercooked meats. You gotta be real careful and I. Can you get salmonella from baby.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:39]:
I imagine.

Kat [00:16:40]:
I don't know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:41]:
I don't know.

Kat [00:16:42]:
Awful. That is horrible. Like a baby disappeared. There's no way to make that good. No, it's awful. No, regardless of. It's just. It's so bizarre.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:53]:
Did he swallow the baby whole? He couldn't. He couldn't have done that. I mean, he swallowed that eel whole.

Kat [00:16:58]:
The Ziggy Zaggy guy from the man show who used to just like drink the beer because he had one of those. Open.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:05]:
The Fox.

Kat [00:17:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if that's the same kind of condition do you think the Fox man had?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:11]:
I don't think he ever ate a baby. No, but he is dead now.

Kat [00:17:15]:
That's true. Well, that was upsetting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:18]:
I told you it would be delightful.

Kat [00:17:20]:
But terribly upsetting. That's.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:23]:
No, probably not.

Kat [00:17:24]:
This is the box of oddities. I said box.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:29]:
Alright, time for that thing in the middle. Odd, bizarre but totally real news headlines. With all the discussion of fake news, it's sometimes comforting to see headlines that beyond a shadow of a doubt, you know are Obviously true. Number five. Headline no NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars.

Kat [00:17:52]:
Number four. Snake blamed for burning down home.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:56]:
Number three. Concentration camp themed escape room. A bad idea. Yeah.

Kat [00:18:04]:
No. 2 court rules that cops need to be sober if they want to shoot anyone. Good rule. Good rule.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:14]:
Good rule. And the number one strange, bizarre, odd headline that is totally real. Don't put ground up wasp nests in.

Kat [00:18:21]:
Your vagina no matter what Gwyneth Paltrow tells you to do.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:25]:
That is just sound advice.

Kat [00:18:28]:
I approve.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:28]:
Or any orifice. I approve for that matter.

Kat [00:18:31]:
The box of oddities with cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth.

Kat [00:18:38]:
Oh, man. Oh man.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:41]:
Our email address is curator the boxofoddities.com. we'd love to hear from you. And our website is the boxofodddedies.com. what do you got for me this week?

Kat [00:18:53]:
All right. Okay. Imagine driving down the street and with Each person that you see, each building that you pass, you experience a different taste in your mouth. It happens. And today, what is that called? We're gonna talk about synesthesia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:12]:
Okay. Yeah. Synesthesia.

Kat [00:19:14]:
I'm so excited.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:16]:
I thought for a while that I might have had a mild form of that, because as a child, I always thought of the days of the week as colors.

Kat [00:19:23]:
Yeah, no, I think that there are a lot of people that I think have just a little bit, and it's. We'll get into it.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:32]:
Okay.

Kat [00:19:33]:
Okay. So synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. So there are many types of synesthesia, the most common being color graphemic, meaning that letters or numbers appear to have colors or patterns associated with them. You know, you see a five, you. You see red, you see a six, you think stripes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:20:09]:
I saw an article about this where. Where a woman would not write the number nine because she said it was just an angry, angry number.

Kat [00:20:19]:
Yeah. It's amazing how much it can impact someone's life. A lot of people that I read about kind of kept it a secret because they felt like it was really weird and shameful. But it can really. It can change the entire course of your life if you decide that, you know, Main street tastes like garbage and you can't drive down it. Another form of synesthesia is the association of sounds with colors. For some, everyday sounds, such as doors opening, cars honking, or people talking, can trigger seeing colors. For others, colors are triggered when musical notes or keys are played. People with synesthesia related to music may have perfect pitch because their ability to see or hear color aids them in identifying keys.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:10]:
Wow.

Kat [00:21:11]:
And this is something that I thought was really interesting. The. The percentage of people with synesthesia, it shows up more often in those with autism, and they believe that certain things are amplified. Your ability to remember phone numbers or passcodes are amplified because of your multiple sensory association with those things.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:37]:
That makes sense.

Kat [00:21:37]:
Yeah. So you're recalling it from more than one place, which absolutely makes sense. In an article in Psychology Today by Maureen Seaberg, she talks about hearing the song from Pocahontas, Colors of the Wind. You remember? And she was listening to the lyrics and thought it sounded too literal. So she actually reached out to the composer of the song, who is lyricist Stephen Schwartz, and then she wrote this. To my delight, he confirmed his synesthesia for me. In an email response, he wrote, certain keys definitely have a color identity for me. For instance, to me, D flat major, by far my favorite key for the richness on piano, which is the instrument on which I usually compose, is a deep orange. The other flat keys also tend to suggest warmer colors, lower in the spectrum. Whereas the sharp keys, such as A or E, feel both brighter and cooler, blue or greenish. And B major seems sort of bright purple to me. C major, for whatever reason, seems yellow, which I guess makes it both more neutral and less emotionally nuanced.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:51]:
That is fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. You know, because I can imagine. I can see this condition being challenging to deal with and maybe has the potential of holding one back in some areas.

Kat [00:23:05]:
Absolutely.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:06]:
But in this case, and I'm sure in many others, it's helped him excel for sure, as an artist.

Kat [00:23:12]:
Yeah. In theory, there could be as many different types of synesthesia as there are possible combinations of senses. One who has synesthesia can either have been born with it or have acquired it by way of some sort of brain incident, like seizure or head trauma. And we've talked about acquired savantism, and it's similar kind of reaction where all of a sudden you have this new.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:39]:
Thing, an ability that you never had before.

Kat [00:23:42]:
It's also been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood, when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. So it's called semantic vacuum hypothesis. And that explains why the most common forms of. Of synesthesia are color spatial sequences and number formed, because they're usually the first concepts the kids are learning.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:24:08]:
Interesting.

Kat [00:24:08]:
Now, you start with letters, you start with colors in spatial sequence, or numbers form synesthesia. Numbers months of the year or days of the week elicit precise locations in space. You see 1980 as being further away than 1990.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:24:28]:
I do that.

Kat [00:24:29]:
You do that, of course, because it's the way you see it in time. But they might see A as closer than x. Some people with synesthesia associate space in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion. So if you picture the Alphabet, kind of like on. In a circle around your body. So A is at the top, and R is over here by your right hand. But, you know, it might not start with A at the top. It might start with L at the top. And each, you know, it's completely individualized. There's still so much question about how this works and why it works. They know that dedicated regions of the brain are specialized for given functions, obviously, and that increased crosstalk between those regions is how you get the effects of synesthesia. But they don't know exactly why you're getting the effects of synesthesia. Does that make sense? Like, they don't know why it's cross talking, but they know that that's what's happening.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:39]:
And they say that that's often the case too, with schizophrenia. You know that the left and the right side of the brain are crosswired somehow.

Kat [00:25:47]:
Yeah. And so you're hearing voices, you're having hallucinations. However, it might affect you individually. An alternative possibility is disinhibited feedback. So your brain, when it receives information about something you're touching or hearing or smelling, it has natural pathways that the information takes in its brain, and where it's going might bounce back a sense as well, whereas normally it kind of stops.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:26:19]:
Give me an example. I don't know if I'm following you here.

Kat [00:26:21]:
Okay, so red. You're taking in red.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:26:26]:
Okay.

Kat [00:26:26]:
So red is making its way from your eye parts to the part of your brain that actually sees, because, you know your eyes don't see. It's your brain that's seeing. So it needs to get from your eye parts to that part in your brain. So when it gets to that part in your brain, normally it goes red. But in this case, the theory is that it might be going red. Bloop dogs barking.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:26:55]:
Really?

Kat [00:26:56]:
So it might be taking something and giving something, whereas normally it just takes it.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:02]:
That is fascinating.

Kat [00:27:03]:
Now that's how I understand what. This article that I read did not have sound effects, so it never said bloop dogs barking.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:11]:
You live your entire life as a human sound effect machine that. And you sing almost everything. Almost everything.

Kat [00:27:18]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:19]:
I wonder if that's a form of synesthesia.

Kat [00:27:24]:
No. Though I do associate personalities with numbers six through nine. But that's okay. I don't know. I think that's just something that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:33]:
That's interesting.

Kat [00:27:34]:
I don't think it's got. I don't think it's technically synesthesia. I think that I just. For some reason, when I was young, I maybe I saw a picture of Six wearing a hat and I made him sporty.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:44]:
I don't know, like a jaunty driving cap on number six?

Kat [00:27:49]:
No, it's like a baseball cap. Six is this sporty, athletic kind of guy. There's nothing you can do to stop it. That's just how it works. Eight's the nicest. So estimates of synesthesia existing in the world have ranged widely. And I think the biggest problem is that the only way that you can gauge this kind of thing or count the number of people who, I don't want to say suffer from it, but experience it has to come from people saying, I experience it. And a lot of people are embarrassed by it. They don't want to talk about it. And a lot of people lie about. Became kind of fatty for a while there. And people were like, oh, yeah, I see colors when I hear people farting. And that's, you know, what color would.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:37]:
That be, I wonder. Yeah, I picture kind of a brown with some gray flecks.

Kat [00:28:44]:
So the interest in colored hearing goes back to Greek antiquity. When philosophers asked if the color of music was quantifiable, Isaac Newton actually proposed that musical tones and color tones shared common frequencies.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:00]:
Well, now, that's interesting you say that because I was listening to something. I don't know what it was. NPR? No, something about, you know, there are 88 keys on a piano and there are so many octaves that we can hear within our frequency range. But if you go 88 keys up and several more octaves up, the middle C is actually green or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. But that. That's amazing to me.

Kat [00:29:29]:
That is amazing and confusing. There are. Because of the way that this works with your brain, there are a lot of well known artists with synesthesia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:41]:
Does R. Kelly have it?

Kat [00:29:44]:
I don't think so.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:45]:
Okay.

Kat [00:29:45]:
I don't think so. Tori Amos.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:48]:
Tori Amos. The Cornflake Girl.

Kat [00:29:50]:
Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:50]:
I love her.

Kat [00:29:51]:
Billy Joel. Lorde.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:53]:
Not so much about Billy Joel.

Kat [00:29:54]:
Vincent Van Gogh was thought to have synesthesia, which totally makes sense.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:59]:
Have you seen Loving Vincent?

Kat [00:30:00]:
Oh, my gosh, I didn't see it. I heard it because, you know, I was throwing up a lot.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:06]:
I was watching it in bed.

Kat [00:30:07]:
Duke Ellington, Pharrell Williams. Stevie Wonder has synesthesia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:12]:
Really?

Kat [00:30:13]:
Yeah.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:14]:
What kind of synesthesia?

Kat [00:30:15]:
I don't know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:16]:
Specifically because he's been blind his whole life, right?

Kat [00:30:19]:
I think so.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:20]:
So it can't be a color thing.

Kat [00:30:23]:
I don't know.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:23]:
Okay, that's interesting. It's fascinating.

Kat [00:30:25]:
It's totally fascinating. And that's something I think would be really interesting to learn a little bit more about is the individual people that we know. You know, I say no, but, you know, that we know of and see how, you know, we can see the effects of their synesthesia through their art. So that's something that I'm gonna do a little more research on. I think it could be a lot of fun. Plus, I love Stevie Wonder.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:49]:
Who doesn't?

Kat [00:30:50]:
So there you go. There's synesthesia. I mean, obviously a very light coating of synesthesia. There's so much more that we could get into and it's.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:59]:
I thought your podcast was very yellow.

Kat [00:31:02]:
Yeah, well, there was in one of the articles that I was reading, the guy that they were talking to who was really affected by sounds. And he would only date women whose names tasted good to him. It didn't matter much about their personality or what they looked like. But he dated a woman named Hannah for a while because her name tasted delicious. And then there was another girl that kind of had a thing for him that he stayed right away from because her name tasted awful. And she, like, was really nice and kind, but her name didn't taste good to him, so he couldn't be with her.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:50]:
That's got to be the kind of synesthesia that you want to keep to yourself, because you will never be able to carry on a relationship with somebody if on the first date, you know, you go, you know, your name tastes like SpaghettiOs. Might freak people out a little bit.

Kat [00:32:05]:
Well, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't like that. You know how I feel about SpaghettiOs. They're disgusting. But there was one girl he said that he had a thing for whose name tasted like warm gummy bears.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:16]:
Ooh, warm gummy bears.

Kat [00:32:17]:
Right. Marry that one.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:19]:
Yeah, marry the girl whose name tastes like warm gummy bears. That's just.

Kat [00:32:23]:
It's a good rule.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:24]:
It's just wisdom.

Kat [00:32:25]:
It's a good rule. I want to find that in a Fortune cookie.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:29]:
The boxofoddities.com that is our website. All of our Sochme links are there.

Kat [00:32:36]:
Soc. Mead links.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:38]:
Soc. Mead links are there. We would love to hear from you too, curator. The boxofoddities.com especially if you're from West.

Kat [00:32:48]:
Virginia, because I want to know what took so long.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:50]:
Yeah, and where can we get some.

Kat [00:32:52]:
Of those pepperoni rolls?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:54]:
Pepperoni rolls. You have a good week and we'll see you next Tuesday.

Kat [00:32:59]:
Keep flying that freak flag.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:33:01]:
Fly it high.

Kat [00:33:02]:
And so let it be known that the Box of Oddities belongs to you and its fate is in your hands. Therefore, it's been requested by those I report to to beseech you for assistance. The Box of Oddities is free. We ask but one thing of you to provide a five star rating and a positive review. True, that is two things. However, tis merely a five star rating and a positive review also. Subscribe to us. Ok, so three things is all we ask. Three things and three things only. Henceforth, the Box of Oddities commits to the telling of stories. Stories of the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected. We wish to offer our deeply felt great gratitude and appreciation for your patronage. The boxofodities.com Copyright 2018. All rights reserved.