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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How StuffWorks.com.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Julie Douglas.

And in our last episode, we dealt with mazes. We actually started in a maze and steadily worked our way out of it.

And now we have escaped from the maze. We are outside of this confusing, confining, perplexing, stressful environment of enclosing walls.

And we have now escaped into the realm of the

labyrinth.

Now, as we mentioned in the previous podcast, and we're going to rehash here, there's a difference

between a maze and a labyrinth. These terms are often used interchangeably. To a certain extent,

it's kind of an elegant variation where you use a word

to describe something that is similar but is not quite the same. They're often used interchangeably,

so you can't get two up in arms over the distinction. But certainly for modern users,

there is a distinction between labyrinths and mazes. The maze is a path of, it's not even a path, it's just the space of walls that

are confining you in and you're trying to find your way out. There are dead ends, there are

corners, there may or may not be a minotaur wandering around after you. It is the stuff of the

hedge maze in the shining. It is the stuff of everything you see in the movie Labyrinth, despite the name

Labyrinth. It is a movie in which the individual roams through mazes. Yeah, it's a spatial

puzzle, and I really think about Labyrinth as more of the antidote to a maze. Yes. Because you're not

engaging the hippocampus as you would in a maze because in a labyrinth,

you don't have to really worry about the path or your memory or even trying to stake out a blueprint.

Because really the blueprint is in front of you.

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