This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demayow.

One of my favorite subgenres of historical factory is made up of these moments when groups

of people, whole societies even, aren't kind of out of their heads.

They don't mean the way that people used to think that shoulder pads look really good.

I mean, actually altered perceptions. That man over there sees the world differently

because of a chemical imbalance or where this woman's heart breaks when she sees that

one commercial because of the hormones of pregnancy or that person's a lot hotter than

these do because you're not drunk. That's her thing, writ large.

So, back in the Middle Ages in Europe, the water was often undrinkable, which is the

sort of thing that you usually think of happening after the invention of factories and sewer run

off and oil spills and whatever, but a lot of places then had a lot of people living

in tight quarters, and they're dumping their chamber pots and their plague victims right

into the water. So, if they drink the water, they get super sick. So, they drink wine,

and that was pretty much it. So, you had a whole culture walking around perpetually a little

bit smashed. A little bit further north, a little bit later on, in the early 1500s, there

were a particularly wet and rainy few years in the already wet and rainy Netherlands.

In a lot of the wheat there got moldy. Now, this is when Heronymous Bosh was making his

incredible artistic leaders. He's the guy that painted the Garden of Earthly Delights.

That's that religious allegorical painting that's really surreal. There's the half-man,

half-fish creatures eating each other, and there's these little devils shoving sharp things

into the hellbound orifices of sinners. Well, it turns out that that moldy rye wheat,

which Dutch people use making their bread every day, was loose in the genus. In Bosh,

...