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

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on the theme of being upside down.

In part one of this series, we talked about a scene in Dante's Inferno, in which the world suddenly seems to be upside down while the poet is crawling down the body of Satan.

And we talked about how different cosmological models apply to that scene.

After that, we talked about adaptations to upside down living in mammalian biology, particularly

in bats and tree slots.

And then in part two, we talked about inverted vampires and other beasts and monsters of folklore,

things that are said to hang from the ceiling or dwell upon the ceiling.

And then we talked about the physiology and psychology of spaceflight and how in microgravity,

astronauts sometimes,

they're subject to a number of cognitive and perceptual illusions

that can make them suddenly feel like they're hanging upside down

or can cause the astronauts' subjective sense of up and down to switch places.

And so we are back today to talk about more.

Yeah, and one place I want to start out with here is this kind of goes back to something we were talking about, I think maybe in the

first episode. We're talking about how sometimes the idea of an upside down world is not necessarily

a bad thing. You know, it's not necessarily the stranger things model where the upside down is a nightmare shadow realm or, you know, some sort of illogical world that is ruled by chaos. Turning things on their head can, of course, reveal truth. That's how we use the phrase. And it's actually one of the key ideas bound up in the tarot card, the hanged van.

I think most of you have probably seen some version of this, even if you're not familiar with

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