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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener mail.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, on our listener

mail episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, what do you think we do? Can you guess? We re-

re-back messages. Yeah. We got to get into the old mailbag. Messages from the Stuff to Blow

your Mind email address. If you are a listener or a watcher on Netflix and you have never gotten in touch

before, it's always a great time for it to be the first time. You can reach us at contact at

stuff to blow your mind.com. Whatever type of message you want to send is fair game. We do our

best to read all of it. We often don't get a chance to reply to all of these

messages, but if you do send something into the show, there's a chance it could be featured in

a listener mail episode like this one. That's right. And since I think it's going to come up

pretty early in this episode, we'll also go ahead and mention that, yeah, we're on some of the

socials. We also have a Discord server for the show. To join that Discord server, you just need to email us, and we'll send you the link. Maybe it's not the most efficient way to do that, but it's the way we keep doing it. I don't know. It makes it feel a little more special when people actually join. Like, you've got to want it enough to actually email us and ask for the link. They actually have to have a handoff of information. Does that make it less likely that the Discord is infiltrated by bots? I don't know how Discord works. I guess so. I don't know. I don't know the current state of bots. It's possible they're all bots in there and they just all have me fooled, but they're nice bots on the whole. So I guess I'm not opposed to it.

Well, maybe we should start off with the message from Discord today. So this is our first message. It's going to be from Taylor and it is in response to our series from a few weeks back on the theme of being upside down. So this message, it actually relates to multiple things we got into in that series. One topic is what are called inversion illusions among astronauts in microgravity. So, you know, astronauts when they're in orbit around the Earth and the space station or on the way up, sometimes report these strange kind of sensations where they will be in microgravity and then suddenly just like their subjective vertical flips.

And they suddenly think, oh, I'm upside down.

I'm hanging upside down.

So we talked about that and some interesting effects of inversion illusions, like how it can, uh, it can like disrupt your perception of objects and things like that. The other idea from that series is the Thatcher illusion. That's, uh, this interesting psychology discovery about what happens when you make grotesque alterations to a picture of a human face. Like if you flip the eyes and the mouth upside down

relative to the rest of the head, the Thatcher illusion finding is that while these modifications

are immediately obvious and usually quite funny when

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