transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Welcome to Stuff To Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeartRadio.

Speaker 2:
[00:13] Hey, welcome to Stuff To Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the third, and I think for now, final episode in our series about fishes of gold, where we've been talking about orange, yellow, and golden varieties of fish in the carp family, like the goldfish and the koi fish. In the past two episodes, we talked about the selective breeding of goldfish, which goes back more than a thousand years in China and was historically linked to the practices of Chinese royalty. We also talked about how even though the orange and golden colors of goldfish today are mostly the result of artificial selection by humans, there are some interesting evolutionary reasons that animals sometimes develop similar colors in nature, and we talked about what those reasons are. We also discussed adaptations in goldfish and close relatives, like the crucian carp, to the adaptations that make them able to survive extremely low oxygen conditions that would kill most other vertebrates. In the last episode, we talked about the history of koi fish, which are a much younger project than goldfish being bred from wild species of carp beginning in 19th century Japan. We talked about claims of extreme longevity in koi fish and why the evidence for some of the most amazing claims is a little thin. And then we also got into some carp legends, such as stories about carp that transform into dragons, carp-human hybrid creatures like the Ningyo, and carp that can be ridden like a horse, at least if you are a Daoist immortal. And we're back today to talk about more.

Speaker 2:
[01:54] That's right. And I'm pretty excited about this episode because we're going to get into a large extent, some of the weirder topics in our Goldfish series.

Speaker 1:
[02:04] Riding the carp and brewing alcohol in their muscles and stuff, that wasn't weird enough for you?

Speaker 2:
[02:08] I mean, that was plenty weird, but I don't know. We're getting into a stranger scientific territory in these two episodes. The sorts of science experience, we teased this out in the last episode, mentioning that Goldfish in particular have been studied quite a lot. We know a lot about them. And they have popped up in so many different scientific experiments. And I think we were able to zero in on a couple of different areas of Goldfish research that are pretty weird, and in some ways maybe a little weirder than what we had been previously talking about.

Speaker 1:
[02:42] They pop up in a lot of experiments that are not so much about Goldfish, not really geared towards scientists trying to understand the particulars of Goldfish as a species, but they are used often as a model organism to try to extract generalities about animal capabilities and learning, and even things like we talked about in the first episode, like the effects of alcohol on learning abilities across the animal kingdom.

Speaker 2:
[03:08] Yeah. And while they're useful in this role, it does make it fascinating to then look at all these studies. And we all have this sort of relationship with the Goldfish. We think of it as being either mundane or dainty, and or maybe royal and regal depending on what your view is. And then the idea that that is going to be in some sort of weird science experiment. That makes everything maybe a little more ridiculous seeming, which is pretty fun.

Speaker 1:
[03:35] So I've got a weird one for you. One avenue of research I've been wanting to talk about in this series is a story some of you out there might remember from a few years back. It made some like weird science news headlines. It was the study where a bunch of scientists successfully taught a bunch of goldfish to drive a car. Not exactly a car. I'll describe the vehicle in a second, but the paper was by Given et al. And it was called From Fish Out of Water to New Insights on Navigation Mechanisms in Animals published in 2022 in the journal Behavioral Brain Research. Rob, I've got a picture in the outline that you can look at here of this fish-operated vehicle. It was so-called the FOV. And I don't know, maybe you can tell me how it fits in your car buying style. I guess neither of us are really car guys. So we don't know what's cool in a car other than in the most superficial sense.

Speaker 2:
[04:35] But it looks inexpensive, which is generally my vehicle range.

Speaker 1:
[04:39] Economy Sedan. So yeah, so this was research conducted on goldfish, the species Carassius auratus, like we've been talking about. And again, the question they're looking at was, can a goldfish be trained to drive a wheeled vehicle? It was not exactly a car, but a tank full of water mounted on motorized wheels, which the goldfish could control with its movements inside the tank. And so the question is, can a goldfish learn to drive one of these things across land? The authors designate a name for this type of experiment. They call it a domain transfer methodology, quote, where one species is embedded in another species' environment and must cope with an otherwise familiar, in our case, navigation task. So they're trying to transfer skills into an unfamiliar domain, taking familiar skills but to an unfamiliar place or application. And so the question is, can a goldfish re-apply existing water-based navigation skills on to land in this wheeled vehicle? Now, you might have a lot of questions. One is like goldfish, they don't have hands to grip a steering wheel. They don't have feet to operate a pedal system. So how would they drive this car? Again, this was called the Fish Operated Vehicle, or FOV, and it uses a combination of a few things. It has a camera system, and it uses LIDAR, which is laser-based range-finding technology that sends out pulses of light, pulses of laser light, to measure distance to objects. And so it uses the LIDAR and the camera system paired together with some special software to interpret the information from these sensors to detect the movement and body orientation of the fish. And the way it works is, when the fish orients its head toward one of the outer walls of the tank and then swims forward, the drive system detects this and makes the tank roll in the direction the fish is swimming. So it can move around in there, but when it points its face to one of the outer walls and goes forward, the lidar and the camera say, okay, time to move, and it moves the car in that direction.

Speaker 2:
[07:06] So sort of like a technologically advanced version of the same principles in a hamster ball.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] Oh, kind of, yeah. Yeah, a little bit like a hamster ball, yeah, except it's full of water, of course. So the fish-operated vehicle, it extends the locomotion activity of swimming so that it is no longer just moving the fish's body through the water, but moving the body of water through outside space. And this 2022 study by Given and co-authors tested six goldfish in the vehicle to see how well they could learn to drive and steer. And they were trained with a form of positive reinforcement learning. So if the fish successfully navigated the aquarium car toward a pink target on the wall, it was like a pink board mounted on the wall that the fish would try to pilot toward and then hit. If it could hit the pink board, it would get a food reward. It would get one single pellet of fish food. By the way, I read in a piece of reporting about this study, I think this was in a Guardian article that I read, that the authors named the fish in the experiment after characters from Pride and Prejudice. I don't know if there's any significance to that. But so the way it worked out is that they did these reinforcement learning tasks and at first, the movements of the fish in the cars were very random. But the authors found that after about a dozen 30-minute sessions of training over the course of a few days, the goldfish could pilot their tanks well enough on average to drive into the target more than 17 times in 30 minutes. And this was a huge improvement from the first sessions where they managed to hit the target an average of only two or three times in 30 minutes. And the fish, they showed adaptability when the authors tried to introduce new problems for them. So they could chase the pink target around to different locations in the car if it was moved. You know, initially it's on this wall, they learned to get to that wall. Then the researchers moved the pink target to the opposite wall. Can the fish figure out how to get there also? Yes, they could. They got to the new target. They also learned how to navigate to the target even if there were walls or obstacles in the way, how to go around things or distraction objects mounted nearby, like other colored boards put up on different parts of the wall.

Speaker 2:
[09:33] Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:
[09:35] So the authors found that as training went on, the fish also took less meandering, more direct pathways to the target to get their food. So I'm imagining they're sort of turning the fish into terminators. They're becoming laser focused on getting that food reward and operating this piece of, you know, they're essentially there. It's a marine version of a mech, as we were just discussing. Yeah. So they're piloting their mechs to the pink board to get the pellet. A couple of the fish adapted to the training especially well. Again, I was reading one write up of this research in The Guardian. This was by Natalie Parletta. And the article quotes one of the study's authors mentioning that the fish named Mr. Darcy and the one named Mr. Bingley. I think these are two of the main suitors in Pride and Prejudice. They were especially quick to pick up driving skills.

Speaker 2:
[10:27] Amazing.

Speaker 1:
[10:28] The purpose of the study had to do with the question, are animals' navigation abilities fundamentally tied to the environments that they evolved to live in? Or can animals apply spatial concepts like distance, movement, orientation, and proximity to a type of space or medium that is totally alien to their natural habitat? We know that humans can do this with training, of course. Like we can pilot airplanes and submarines. But is this only because there's something special about our brains? Like our intelligence and our cognitive flexibility is so high that we can adapt our movement capabilities to these strange scenarios? Or is this something more general that animal brains can do? So the interesting thing here is that it shows even some animals we think of as pretty cognitively limited, like goldfish, can adapt their navigation skills to a setting they have absolutely no ancestral experience with. There is no situation in nature where a goldfish needs to pilot a car across land. There's no situation that I can think of in nature where a goldfish would be even able to understand the idea of not moving itself through water, but moving the body of water that it's in through an outer spatial container. But if given the opportunity to learn, they can learn. And the findings can be interpreted in a universal way or in a specific way. So the universal implication is that in animals, it may just be that across many or most species, navigational skills are generalizable to any type of movement through space, and they don't depend on specific adaptations or instincts related to the medium or the environment or the method of locomotion. So it's not just that a fish's brain sees something it wants, and that goes directly to swimming movements in the body, that it's able to learn new ways to use its body to come closer to objects that it needs. And then, so that's a possibility. The more specific possible interpretation is that maybe just goldfish are much smarter and better at learning than you might guess. Of course, both could be true. Could be generally true about animals, but also that goldfish are smarter than we give them credit for. And in fact, this comes up in one of the things I was reading, the authors say they hope it disproves the myth that the goldfish has a three-second memory. You've heard this before. Or just the common cliche or insult, you have the memory of a goldfish. Goldfish probably don't have as rich and detailed a capacity for memory as we do, but clearly their memory is a lot better than they're often given credit for.

Speaker 2:
[13:27] Yeah. I mean, part of it is the domesticated and unnaturally selected, artificially selected form that they're in now. Like, we can easily forget that still this is a creature with wild origins that evolved like all the other carp to thrive in a dangerous world with the tools that they need to thrive in that world. And those tools, via domestication, sometimes those tools can be blunted a little bit. Sure. But they're also still there. There's still some of the survival instinct. These are still organisms that can fin for themselves. And we didn't really get into this too much, but they can also do quite well, a little too well in the wild if they're reintroduced somewhere they shouldn't be.

Speaker 1:
[14:14] Right. As introduced species, they can kind of take over sometimes. So, Carpher Hardy, Carpher Tough. One of the authors, Shashar Given, was quoted in that article in The Guardian saying, Since on the evolutionary scale, our commonest ancestor is very, very far back. Finding that fish share navigational skills similar to our own, really speaks volumes to the importance of these skills in the animal kingdom. And I think that's a good point. It is a characteristic feature of the animal kingdom movement. It's sort of one of the main things that makes animals different from plants or fungi. Now, of course, not all animals move around in all stages of their life. You can think of animals that are mostly sort of sessile or attached to something. But most animals do, at least in some stage of their life, move around and navigate through their environment. And it is, yeah, it's a key characteristic of the animal kingdom. And for movement to be useful, we need navigation. Your body is what allows you to move, but navigational skills determine where it should move, what type of movement is beneficial to it. It does make me wonder really like what the ultimate limits of this universality are. Could starfish be trained to drive cars around, or can we have rats piloting submarines? How truly universal across the animal kingdom is the ability to adapt and learn new associations between movements of the body and navigation or movement through space to get things you want?

Speaker 2:
[15:57] Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[16:10] I wanted to mention another study. There was another paper on this subject published just last year, sharing some of the same authors as the previous paper. It was called Whole Body Motor Adaptation in Goldfish Using Fish-Operated Vehicle. This was by Zhouxin Liu et al. in the European Journal of Neuroscience 2025. And so this one extended the idea. Once again, they had Goldfish who were trained to use fish-operated vehicles, just like in the last experiment, but they introduced new variables. One was, what if the steering in the vehicle is screwed up? How does the fish adapt to that? And then also they were looking into the learning capabilities of fish and the persistence of previously learned lessons. So I'm gonna read a selection from this paper that addresses the key questions, and then I'll comment some as I go. So the authors write, quote, Our study aims to address the following questions. Can goldfish learn from error while operating the vehicle with constant perturbation? So this perturbation was essentially a steering malfunction where the movement would always be tilted 45 degrees to the right of the fish's intended movement, of the fish's, well, not necessarily intended, because eventually it would adjust, but of the fish's initial training. So first, it's going to be, you know, the thing goes straight in the direction that the fish is pointing its face. When it's swimming towards an outer wall, they say, okay, you initially train them like that, and then you introduce a malfunction where it's always pulling to the right, 45 degrees from wherever the fish is going.

Speaker 2:
[17:56] Video gamers are used to this sort of thing, because like you'll have something that will cause your controls to go screwy, say in a bomber man game or a mortal combat game, and then it's like, oh, up is down now and down is up, and can you adapt while this spell is taking place? Sure.

Speaker 1:
[18:11] Or just drivers of cars, like a lot of times a car that has misaligned wheels will pull, it will pull in one direction, and you have to correct for that. People learn to adapt pretty quick, but you have to correct your steering. If you just let it go straight, it's going to pull and run off the road, so you have to keep correcting. So the researchers were asking, can fish learn to overcome a problem like this when they are driving the car? So then the quote continues to the second question they addressed, would fish in the fish operated vehicle show an after effect in a washout session? In other words, would the fish continue to try to correct for the steering problem after the problem was removed? And the term washout that they use there refers to in the author's words, quote, the gradual decay or elimination of motor adaptation when the perturbation is removed. Right. So the idea is you get them to learn to correct for the steering that's off kilter. Then you set the steering back to normal. How long do they keep trying to compensate for the error that is no longer there? So they do that initially, and then they adapt once again to the steering being correct. That's the decay period, the washout time. How long does it take to wash out the effects of the compensation from the steering problem? Then on to the next question, they ask, quote, would fish relearn faster after the first adaptation? So you take away the pulling to the right problem, let the steering go back to normal, then introduce the same steering problem again, have it start pulling to the right. Well, the fish adapt to it more quickly the second time, like I've had this problem before, I know how to compensate now. Then the final question, quote, can we observe persistent effects on fish swimming after the first adaptation? They say, as we showed, the answers to these questions are yes, yes, no, and yes, essentially. Establishing the goldfish adapt to perturbations in fish-operated vehicle control, but raising the possibility that they do so with mechanisms that are different from classical adaptation in mammals. So that's interesting about the one answer that's no there. The fish did learn how to compensate. So once again, of course, they did learn how to use the fish-operated vehicle. The training worked. They did learn how to compensate for steering problems. They could drive it even when the steering was off-kilter. After some training, they could. But unlike in most mammals that have been tested with this sort of thing, the fish did not initially relearn how to compensate for the steering problem significantly faster the second time they encountered it. Though their overall performance in the perturbation task was better the second time, it's just that they didn't improve on it any faster than they did the first time. So maybe it just could be that their initial performance on it the second time was a little bit better. But that's kind of interesting. So they do show this adaptability, but they don't show exactly the same kind of patterns of learning and adaptation to motor problems that mammals usually do. There's something a little, they can learn, but there's something a little bit different going on with fish.

Speaker 2:
[21:36] Fascinating. So tell me this, these driverless cars that I see around town, are they actually being driven by goldfish, do you think?

Speaker 1:
[21:44] That's a really good question. Yes. Do they have goldfish somewhere out there in like a remote operation base for piloting these things? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:53] A technician has to come out, they come out with a little bag with a fresh goldfish in it, and they switch it out with the tired goldfish that has to be taken off duty.

Speaker 1:
[22:03] Yeah. Or you can see, when they stop, they've got to refill with gas, but they've also got to get more food pellets. That's what keeps the fish going.

Speaker 2:
[22:14] Yeah. Well, this is amazing. Just the idea of a goldfish navigating essentially like what a land submarine, moving around our environments and achieving goals. Pretty amazing. Even if they do have this, they're not as great about resolving the problem a second time, I'm still very impressed.

Speaker 1:
[22:34] My brain was going a strange place with this, which was like, I wonder what this says about truly alien scenarios, really alien scenarios and say the human being's ability to adapt to higher dimensional spaces, like navigating geometries that don't make any sense to us now. I don't know if it actually has any relevance to that. Because of course, there's something that the fishes environment of the water and the air environment that the fish operated vehicle is driving around through. There's something those have in common, which is at least there are like straight lines that you can follow to get to something. Basic geometry and movement through the 3D space is preserved in a way that's familiar to us. So I don't know how far the ability to adapt to new types of space and movement go. But I don't know. Maybe the limits are even further out than we would think. Maybe animals could, with some training, adapt to moving through hyperspheres and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:
[23:44] Wow. Well, I think this is a great jumping off point to talk about the final frontier for goldfish, goldfish in outer space. You may be already wondering about this. We're already talking about them driving cars. You might well question, do goldfish have the right stuff? And are we fully prepared for the reality of goldfish in outer space? Real goldfish in outer space, not... I was doing some image searches related to something later on in this section, and I kept finding images of the goldfish snack item, the children's favorite little cheddar goldfish. They have some sort of space variety, and I think I've encountered them before. But I can't imagine what they... I think they just taste like normal cheddary goldfish. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:30] Yeah, it seems like the Mickey Mouse shaped ones. I can't tell that those taste any different.

Speaker 2:
[24:36] Kids love them. All right. So yeah, goldfish in outer space. We're going to get into this, and it's actually going to connect quite nicely with some of the things we were talking about in our episodes on the upside down, particularly about organisms in a low-gravity, microgravity, zero-gravity environment. So I'm going to refer to some of those terms. So if you skipped those episodes entirely, wouldn't be a bad idea to go back and check those out before we get into the rest of this episode, but I don't know, we'll get you up to speed one way or another.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[25:10] We're also going to talk about cyborgs, which is the topic we've touched on on the show in the past, and recently came up on an episode of Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 1:
[25:18] Oh, were there some cyborgs in Nemesis? Did that movie concern cyborgs?

Speaker 2:
[25:22] Well, yes, Nemesis definitely had cyborgs, but in the most recent, Mechagodzilla is a cyborg, at least in the same way that the T-800 is a cyborg. I don't know that Mechagodzilla has any organic interior parts, but it at least had perhaps a living organic exterior like the Terminator.

Speaker 1:
[25:41] Yeah. Hair, sweat, bad breath, everything.

Speaker 2:
[25:47] All right. Well, we'll back up here. Obviously, humans have sent or taken various animal species into orbit before, including fish. And as discussed in David Samuel Johnson's, The First Fish in Orbit, Scientific American 2016, NASA scientists in the 1970s were eager to see how fish would adapt to a low-gravity orbital environment. Given that they, of course, would thrive in the three-dimensional environment of water. Goldfish were apparently considered for this role as, again, they're hardy fish. We keep talking about how tough they are. But apparently, they were not quite hardy enough. They were not tough enough for NASA back in the 70s. They ended up going with a different fish altogether. The type of minnow called the mummichog, also known as the killifish, this is fundulus heteroclitus. Fundulus that, if it sounds like Bay of Fundy, that's one of the places where you'll find this particular species. Apparently, kind of an obscure fish, because humans don't favor it as food or bait, but it was deemed tough enough for space. Two juvenile fish and 50 eggs traveled aboard the 1973 Skylab 3 mission to the U.S.'s first space station. Again, these were not goldfish, but the fish in this experiment did play an important role, and it all ties back into something we were talking about in our upside down episodes. So this is how the experiment with these minnows went down. And don't worry, this will come back. We will come back around to goldfish. So basically, at first, the two fish just swam in elongated loops. Johnson describes it, quote, as though they were the spinning hands of a Salvador Dali created clock.

Speaker 1:
[27:41] That's expressive. Yeah, he's correct.

Speaker 2:
[27:44] And it was apparently due to the disruption of the fish's understanding of up and down, specifically disrupting the vestibular writing response in the inner ear.

Speaker 1:
[27:55] Okay. So even though fish don't stand on the ground, they do depend somewhat on a gravitational directional sense.

Speaker 2:
[28:03] Right. Yeah. And lining up with what we discussed previously on the upside down episodes, on the third day, the fish ended up assuming normal swimming patterns, or at least they were deemed to be normal in this experiment, keeping their back to the main interior lights aboard the space station. So without a functional vestibular writing response, they adapted to a light source, to visual stimuli, with the light apparently sort of standing in for the sun. Because what direction would light come from in the natural watery environment, it would come from above. And so they adapted and they were like, okay, I can't feel which way is up and down anymore, but I can see the primary light source in my universe. It must be the sun, that's up.

Speaker 1:
[28:50] Oh, so this reminds me of what we talked about in those upside down episodes, where when you are deprived of your vestibular cues about up and down, the body tries to source a lot of its sense of up and down, when it's still trying to preserve a subjective vertical, a sense of up and down, and it gets a lot from visual information.

Speaker 2:
[29:09] Yeah, I was actually thinking about this a lot. I did a yoga class earlier today before this recording. And, you know, as is often the case in yoga classes, you'll do some sort of a standing routine where you're balancing, like on one foot or something. And if you really think about it during those moments, you can feel yourself aligning with what's up and down, but also you have the visual data as well. And so you often are told to focus on a drishti, focus on some sort of a spot on the wall, a stain, or what works particularly well for me, that was recommended, is some sort of a vertical line, like the corner of something or the exact corner of a room. You can focus on that and that can help you stay more stable. But anyway, that's humans. We're talking about fish. Johnson writes that the fish and the humans as well aboard the spaceship here, basically acclimatized to low gravity at the same rate. Johnson writes, as the movement shogs looped, the astronauts vomited. As the urge to vomit subsided in the astronauts, so too did the urge to loop in fish.

Speaker 1:
[30:17] Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[30:18] And I read elsewhere in the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Apollo Soyuz Test Project Report, that while some of the fish died, the ones that made it back resumed normal swimming positions without issue. Which again, if they are adapting and readapting in the same way that human beings adapt and readapt, this makes perfect sense.

Speaker 1:
[30:38] So that's interesting. Yeah. I think I would have expected the adaptations to be similar for terrestrial mammals, but I would have had more questions about how space adaptation would affect aquatic animals. And that's interesting that there are all these similarities.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] Yeah. Yeah. And more fish related experiments followed with different space missions from different countries. Again, this was not a goldfish or even a carp. So when did goldfish finally go up? Well, let's dig a little deeper. In 76, the Russian Soyuz 21 mission aboard the Salyut 5 space station included experiments with aquarium fish. I found at least one passing reference to these as maybe being goldfish, but most sources seem to indicate they were maybe zebrafish. So I don't think the goldfish got to go up on this mission. So when did the goldfish go up? Well, I found an excellent online National Geographic article titled Animals in Space by Taylor Magicomo and Alexander Stegmeier. According to this article, it points out that in 1985, the US and the USSR both experimented with killer fish again, with guppies, and in both of these countries, as well as the ESA, experimented with guppies in 1989. Then according to Nat Geo, the Common Carp finally made it up in 1992. This was like a joint US-Japan experiment. These were apparently two carp of 26 centimeters in size. One was intact, had not been surgically altered, and one had its autoliths removed. The autoliths, remember these are calcium carbonate structures in the vertebrate inner ear that detect linear acceleration, gravity, and head tilt, and they're essential for balance and spatial orientation. And so they spent eight days aboard Spacelab J. Up next, there was another mission in 1992. This was STS-65, Spacelab IML-2. Year again, 92, Goldfish missed the call again. Instead, Japanese rice fish go up. And these were used to study mating behavior in microgravity. But then finally, 94, this is when Goldfish finally get the call. As part of a joint U.S.-Japanese mission that was to feature Japan's first female astronaut, Chiaki Mukai, born 1952. She was also the first Asian woman in space. And this experiment consisted of six red and white Goldfish. There's a picture here I included for you, Joe. They look pretty orange and white to me, but I think the breed, this variety is referred to as red and white. They were bred in Japan. And then they were sent up to study space sickness and how the low-gravity environment affects the way that the animal moves in their environment and how they react to light and so forth. Basically, similar stuff to the very first killifish experiment that we highlighted earlier.

Speaker 1:
[33:48] With similar results or different?

Speaker 2:
[33:50] Well, it seems to have been a much more focused study. So, there's a little more to discuss here. So, this would have been SDS65 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. And this also featured other aquatic organisms as part of its payload, including newts and jellies. Crabs?

Speaker 1:
[34:11] Crabs in space?

Speaker 2:
[34:13] No crabs on this one. Crabs in space, we'll have to wait for our next crab episode. I don't have any data here in front of me on crabs in space. But the goldfish were definitely there. And yeah, there's a photo of them on the NASA website. If you look, I would recommend looking up like SDS 65, or look up the year 94, goldfish in space, NASA, and you will find the image. It's still there on NASA's website. And it looks really cool. It looks like something out of alien, if alien were expressly concerned with goldfish.

Speaker 1:
[34:49] It does look like that. Yeah. So we have a very metal panel with a glass bubble, and you can see all the fish inside looking out at you like, help me, I hate this. And then just greebles everywhere. It's a greebled up surface.

Speaker 2:
[35:03] Yeah. So the focus of this study was really on balance and brain plasticity. And I read more about it in Mechanism of Vestibular Adaptation of Fish Under Microgravity by Takabayashi et al. Published in 1997, so a few years later, in Biological Sciences in Space. So here are some key details pulled directly from that paper. So again, six goldfish, and they included one normal goldfish fish, so this fish had no changes made to it. There was one with the otoliths removed from both sides, and then four with the otoliths removed from only one side. Okay. Then as they started studying the way these fish responded, they also point out that the dorsal light responses, or DLRs, of fish with otoliths removed were recorded after operation until launch and after landing. So this is how it ends up going down. On day 00, this is a mission elapsed time, day 00, two fish with otoliths removed on one side showed flexion of body toward the operated side. These fish also showed rolling behavior toward the operated side. Okay. This is going to make more sense as we roll along. The body flexion disappeared on MET day 5 or MET day 8. No rolling behaviors were observed after that time. Then five fish showed backward looping behaviors during the mission, although the frequency of looping episodes decreased after MET day 8, five fish still showed looping behavior in MET day 12, final day of recording. So in microgravity, the visual system of the fish did not seem to provide sufficient cues to prevent them from looping and rolling. After landing, no looping or rolling behavior was observed. However, they stress that the tilt angle of the DLR increased in the fish with the otolith removed, five months before launch, but not in normal fish and those with otoliths removed two weeks before the launch. And these results, they say, suggest that the behavioral dysfunction and the adaptational process in space is dependent on vestibular inputs.

Speaker 1:
[37:16] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[37:17] So in this focused study, the visual system alone wasn't enough to make up for what was lacking from the vestibular sense of gravity. And reading that, reading that he had this one fish that didn't show backward looping behavior, I was thinking, well, this must be the unaltered fish, right? Maybe that's what's going on here. That's the one for one. But this apparently is not the case. It was one of the bilateral fish, one that had otoliths removed on both sides, which apparently it didn't backward loop because it didn't get confusing signals from its otoliths. It was able to like just focus on vision. But the other bilateral fish, the other fish that had both otoliths removed, it was still looping but had less severe looping. And it may have been essentially confused by vestigial compensation response. So it gets rather complicated here. But this study apparently shined more light on just exactly how this interplay works, at least in the goldfish. And then we can extrapolate that out for other creatures as well. Like what happens when you have confusing signals coming from the otoliths, from the vestibular system, and then we're having to rely on vision instead? And what happens if you have completely removed key components of the vestibular system, and you're allowing the fish to just rely on vision alone?

Speaker 1:
[38:47] You need that for when you come back.

Speaker 2:
[38:49] That's the thing, yeah. The main point being, we can certainly create some sci-fi visions where it makes sense for a human space traveler to leave behind gravity entirely and say, okay, well, I'm only going to live in space now. I don't need to return home. But as far as near future of perceivable human space flight, it's just hard to imagine that sort of scenario, right? You'd have to be imagining some sort of like generational colony ship sort of a scenario or I don't know, some scenario that required people to just stay in a weightless or near weightless environment for the duration of their lives. It's pretty clear, however, there'd be some major downsides as well. I mean, for starters, if you ever had to return to top side, to the surface of a planet, you wouldn't be able to function properly. But on top of this, you'd be completely visually dependent as far as determining up and down. And you could still feel ill from angular acceleration, I'm to understand. So it's not like you would have a free ticket to get out of any kind of feelings of distortion. Now, obviously, this is an idea that is gonna factor into sci-fi quite a bit. There are a number of stories that have, and will continue to ask that question, like, okay, what could we, or what would we, or what should we change about the human form to create better astronauts? Like, what does that consist of? Do we need to just squirt a little xenomorph blood in there and see what happens? Do we need to become cyborgs? This is, of course, part and partial to the origin of the word cyborg in many ways, like, you know, thinking about changes that we could make. Instead of changing space and changing other worlds to make it to where humans can survive there, what if we made humans more hearty, or made humans more of a space-faring organism? And so changes to the vestibular system are sometimes employed in these sci-fi visions alongside many other alterations. So I was looking around for stories, sci-fi tales that concern this, and I found a really interesting one. This is a tale I was not familiar with. I think vaguely was aware of this author, but I hadn't read anything by him before. And it's called Scanners Live in Vain, written in 1945 and published in 1950. No connection to the Scanners movies or the Scanner cop movies. It refers to something different entirely.

Speaker 1:
[41:40] Who's this by?

Speaker 2:
[41:42] This is by Cord Wainer Smith. Yeah. Again, it's a name that I've seen, I think I'd seen pop up here and there, but I don't think I've ever read anything by him. But in the story setting, humans just cannot endure what is referred to as the great pain of space. And they can only travel while they are placed in a form of suspended animation. And as you might expect, somebody's got to tend to these sleepers while they're traveling from point A to point B. And so that's where the Habermans come into play. And then the scanners are the people that are in charge of the Habermans. Both of these are classifications of humans who have undergone a surgical procedure to sever almost all of their sensory nerves except vision.

Speaker 1:
[42:34] So, okay, so trying to imagine that. I would wonder how in a way would you like control your body? Like if you kind of can't feel or, I don't know. Well, I don't know. How much does the proprioceptive sense depend on nerve signals from the rest of the body? I'm not sure.

Speaker 2:
[42:52] I don't know. I mean, it's definitely a sci-fi situation here. And to be clear this whole day, the great pain of space is maybe a little broader and also a little bit vague. But it plays well within a sci-fi. It's like, okay, if space flight is painful, I just have to shut off everything except for vision. But it does line up rather nicely with some of these experiments we've been talking about with the vestibular system and vision. So within the context of the story, this all prevents them from feeling the great pain of space and it's a necessary sacrifice for space travel. But it also makes them entirely vision dependent. They even have to monitor readings on a cybernetic box on their chest to see what their body is doing, to figure out if they've injured themselves or not, if they have an elevated heart rate, various things that you would be able to feel out in your body, and just be part of your body awareness, they have to check a reading. So it's a fun little story. Basically, there's a murder plot that emerges when the scanners and the Habermans learn that a normal human will soon publicly reveal a method that allows normal humans to avoid the great pain of space without having to surgically sever themselves. And somebody's like, well, we should murder this person. And I won't spoil how it all works out. But there's some fun world building here. And again, it kind of lines up nicely with some of these experiments we've been discussing. But again, a lot of stories have gotten into this territory of changing people for space. There's a fun one, 1976 novel by Frederick Pohl, titled Man Plus, that features a cyborg adapted to colonize Mars. And I think there are various extreme changes that have taken place with the protagonist here. He's had his nervous system revised, all the major pathways connected through a computer backpack that is powered by jet black solar panels that are described as looking like bat wings.

Speaker 1:
[44:57] Whoa.

Speaker 2:
[44:58] And there are various fun paperback covers for this one. I included one here for you, Joe. This is one where the vision of humans adapted for life in space is like basically to turn humans into some sort of extreme alien like cyborg entity.

Speaker 1:
[45:13] Yeah, kind of a bipedal insect with solar panel wings and gigantic eyes. And looks also just like the chest kind of opens up to reveal the organs. Maybe that's for easy access if you need to do some maintenance.

Speaker 2:
[45:28] Yeah, you never know when you need to reach in there. We know how it is with cyborgs. They always have to pull stuff out, change stuff, put stuff back in. So you don't want it all sealed under flesh.

Speaker 1:
[45:37] Right. Didn't you watch Nemesis?

Speaker 2:
[45:39] Come on. All right. There's one more story I want to highlight here. And we'll go ahead and put out the general call that readers have space-faring cyborgs that they think are applicable here, especially if it ends up involving the vestibular system. I would love to hear about it. But I ended up running across mention of this story called Vestibular Man by Felix C. Gottschalk from 1985. It was later collected in the 1991 anthology Future on Fire, but it was originally published in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And so the title really, I knew that it had something to do with androids and then calling it Vestibular Man, I'm like, well, okay, I've got to find out what this is about. And it seems to basically, it does have a bionic drill sergeant in it. But the main character just seems to be unnaturally aware of what his inner ear is doing, and or the author is just fixated on the vestibular system. I can't honestly recommend this story to anyone, but it's full of just really loony sentences like this one. Quote, deep inside his vestibular nests, the eternal equalibitory fluid now lay 90 degrees from verticality. And it gave him to know both comfort as well as the ventral vulnerability of supinity. And there are numerous sentences as ludicrous as this story, that are directly tying in to the vestibular system and talking about what's going on in the protagonist's inner ear.

Speaker 1:
[47:23] I mean, that's a story where you get what the title says. Those are the thoughts of a vestibular man.

Speaker 2:
[47:28] Yeah. So again, I was disappointed that it doesn't really relate to vestibular changes in cybernetic space faring humanoids. It definitely has nothing to do with goldfish, but it was so weird I had to mention it here.

Speaker 1:
[47:43] Nice.

Speaker 2:
[47:44] But again, there may be better examples of cyborgs in sci-fi out there that folks may want to bring up. So definitely, right in, we would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1:
[47:55] Okay. Well, is that the end for now of our exploration of goldfish?

Speaker 2:
[48:00] I think so, but we'll just go ahead and re-enterate in general. If you have feedback, insight, experiences related to goldfish or any of the goldfish topics we've discussed here, or koi, or carp in general, right in, we would love to hear from you. If you just want to send us photographs of your beloved goldfish, of your beloved koi, or a carp you happen to see out in the world. Also send that along. We would love to look at it. Just a reminder to everyone out there, Stuff To Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we have a short form episode. And then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 1:
[48:42] Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Blow Your Mind is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.