When you look at medieval European art, why do the people look fine, but the lions look so strange?

And what does this have to do with Native American folklore, or eyewitness memory of a car accident,

or what a person remembers three years after watching the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center.

And what does any of this have to do with flashballed memories or misinformation

or the telephone game that you played as a child?

Welcome to Inter Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is part one of a two-parter

about memory and why it drifts. So I want to start with this fascinating observation that you can

notice if you look across visual painting in Europe all through the Middle Ages.

Painters got better and better through time at painting architecture and the human form and mountainscapes.

But they were absolutely terrible at painting lions.

If you look at lions in these medieval paintings, you'll see that they

generally look quite different from their real-life counterparts. They have exaggerated features

like overly large heads and bodies that are too long and tufted tails that aren't really

like actual lion tails. And they often look more like

large fierce dogs or mythical creatures. I'll put some pictures on eagelman.com slash podcast so you can

see how strange these lions are. But why is this? The answer is, the medieval European painters spent a lot of time with

architecture and with people and with mountainscapes, but almost none of them had ever been

to Africa and therefore seen a real lion, or for that matter, been to India and seen an

Asiatic lion. So they had the

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