Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin and Anichezinski.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphones this time with our four favorite winter

facts for our winter special as it's really cold and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Anichezinski.

My fact this week is that Socrates had a spirit who spoke to him through the medium of

sneezing.

And this is one of the great thinkers of Western civilization, just to be clear.

It was guided by sneezes.

Oh, Aristotle wrote about sneezing as well.

Did he?

Yeah.

So he said that sneezing was of divine origin, or he said that that was believed at the

time.

So coughing wasn't, and if your nose was running, that didn't mean anything.

But he said, why is it that we think sneezing is divine?

Is it because it arises from the most divine part of us, the head, from where reasoning comes?

But there's one other thing we know about Aristotle as well, which is that he was one of

the people who, when they look at a bright light, they sneeze.

Oh, did he?

Yeah.

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