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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Sarah Pasco.

And once again, we have gathered around around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first man to use an umbrella in London was pelted with rubbish for doing so.

Wow, but fortunately, he had an umbrella.

Yeah.

Was that why he took it out?

He didn't, although, according to his biographer, when one person threw rubbish at him, he used his umbrella to give the man a right good thrashing.

Oh, really?

Yeah,

wow, so he he turned that's that should be the fact.

The first ever outing of an umbrella was used to beat a man.

Oh, yeah, that's quite cool.

You should redo it.

Yeah, no, so what, um, so yeah, so this is a guy called Jonas Hanway, uh, and he had been to France, he was a bit of a traveller, and he came back from France.

And in France, they'd all been using umbrellas for quite a long time, but in England, they were seen as kind of either effeminate or a weakness of character that you would have it, or just French, which was a bad thing at the time.

So, when you say it's the first person seen publicly with an umbrella, it just means the first man.

Yeah.

Like, the women had them every day, they were beating each other.

Did I not say

you did say men?

Did I say man?

Yeah.

Oh, so women, women were using, so he was the first person.

Yeah, so women were using them, and men were using them all over Europe.

Go on, Andy.

Well, I think also priests were using them because there's a lot of people.

They're basically women

in their girly clothes,

always singing songs,

smelling perfume everywhere.

But basically, they I think they had them at funerals, but they had these huge heavy things at funerals, which would maybe they'd have an assistant because it would they'd be outside and it'd be raining, so they wanted to keep dry like that.

But yeah, no, proper lads,

as Sarah rightly points out, did not have them, I think.

Yeah, you're right.

And so, what happened was if it was raining in London, this was in the 1750s, you would probably hire down a handsome cab or someone carrying a sedan chair or something like that, and that would help you get out of the rain.

And so it was the people who were driving these cabs who didn't like the guy, and so they started throwing things at him because they thought that he might put them out of business.

Yes, I knew it was the hackney kind of carriage men that had pelted him with rubbish, but I just thought it's because he wasn't very popular.

No, so but it was because actually their competition.

So also, did you know that he was anti-tipping this Joseph?

Was he?

Yeah, this man.

What do you mean by tipping?

Well, tipping people.

So again, another reason why the hackney cab drivers might have been like, shut your mouth, haven't we?

And he was anti-tea drinking.

Okay.

Why was he anti-tea drinking?

I don't know.

It's just Wikipedia says he was, right?

No, I do know.

Oh, you do know.

Oh, Andy knows.

So he wrote this whole essay about tea because he thought it would be, he, again, thought it was French, and that was a bad thing at the time.

And he said, men seem to have lost their stature and comeliness, and women their beauty.

Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose, by sipping tea.

Oh, so he just thought it was bad for people.

Yeah.

Well, it's a good job that me, Sarah, and Dan are all drinking wine and you're drinking tea together.

Like an ugly chambermaid.

It's weird, isn't it?

Because actually, umbrellas and tea both Chinese originally.

Yeah.

So actually, it feels like he kept saying French, but it was a different kind of racist.

It was less acceptable.

But also now very English, right?

Yes.

Carrying an umbrella like a businessman, like a

child.

Apparently, most umbrellas are still made in China.

Are they?

Yeah.

But actually, they found that the terracotta army is one of the chariots that has a giant umbrella that's attached to it.

That must have been an amazing discovery when they saw that.

But you would think you'd invent the umbrella before the house.

Like you'd think that in terms of people, they were like, they'd get like a rough kind of covering.

And hang on, we could add walls to this.

It would be that way round.

So you think that the house is just a very advanced umbrella?

Umbrella.

It is.

It really is.

If they were to look at it, oh my gosh, look what they've done.

They've got toilets in their umbrellas.

This was the 1700s that this happened in.

But do you know the first time that an umbrella was mentioned in the UK was in the 1600s?

Okay.

And it was in a book by Thomas Coriot.

He was a court jester for the son of King James I.

And he wrote this amazing book, which came out in the same year as the King James Bible, which was called Coriot's Crudities, Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months Travel.

And he went from London to Venice in the same pair of shoes and he came back and oh god it sounds like someone who needs an Edinburgh show

doesn't it sound like a third year scraping the barrel just I'm gonna walk to Venice and I'm not gonna change my shoes

yeah so he came back and he put he put his supposedly put his shoes into a church hung them up he was like this is the one pair I wore and he was quite famous in his day so in his book he mentions umbrellas for the first time because as he was passing through Europe he saw them he also mentions the fact that everyone was eating using this forked device.

And that supposedly as well is how we started using forks.

That's interesting because actually, I think the first people to use forks were kind of ridiculed, weren't they?

Yes.

Again, effeminate, I think.

Were they?

Yeah.

There was one famous guy, I can't remember who it was, who used a fork and was known as fork user, and that was supposed to be an insult.

They were like, you fork user.

Is that because it sounded exactly like fork user?

Is that where we got it from?

Maybe.

Do you know what early umbrellas were nicknamed in England?

No.

They were called Robinsons.

Because in the book, Robinson Crusoe, he makes himself an umbrella.

Before he makes a house.

It's all coming together.

It really makes sense.

Do you know who had the first umbrella covered with Kevlar to make it bulletproof?

No.

No.

Nicholas Sarkozy.

Did he?

Wow.

He's a husky, isn't he?

Yeah, he was like, I'm going to be dry and safe.

Any of those sky assassins.

Wow.

Did he carry the umbrella or is that a bodyguard item he he he held it himself it must have been very heavy apparently other people have them now yeah is it heavy kevlar uh i imagine

i assume so but maybe not i mean i'm sure he had you know special light as stuff as light as possible i'll be making houses out of kevlar next

um i found some famous umbrellas that i thought

is there a wikipedia list of famous umbrellas there should be and there also should be an umbrella museum where they keep them because i would definitely go there's not i haven't found an umbrella museum i have found an umbrella cover museum.

Huh?

What, you mean the thing that slips over it?

The little, you know, when you buy a short umbrella and it's got that little sort of slip of material, that little pouch that you lose within about 20 seconds?

Yeah.

There's a museum in Maine devoted to those.

You're kidding.

Nope.

The website says people flocked by the tens to see the museum.

People were thrilled to donate their old umbrella sheets and the international press went bonkers.

So.

So the umbrellas that I would put into the museum, if I had a couple of entries, would be the first one is Mary Kingsley's umbrella.

Oh, yeah.

Very important umbrella.

And I'm surprised that it's not in the RGS.

I'm surprised that I couldn't find if anyone's actually got it because it was the umbrella that she used to ward off the animals.

Famously, she smacked a hippopotamus away while she was in her canoe.

So she was an explorer in Africa, wasn't she?

Yeah, she was.

And she went out at a time when she was still, she didn't even wear trousers.

She still wore...

full Victorian garb, the dress, like it was insane.

She sounds like such a bitch.

She was amazing.

She was whacking hippos of umbrellas, they're in my way.

You went to Africa, lovely, didn't put any trousers on, for God's sake.

Who's in the wrong habitat here?

That's true.

I'm being unfair on her.

She tickled the behind the veneer of a hippopotamus in order to get it away.

Nice when you said that.

Yeah, and I think she like kicked a crocodile in the face or something.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

But yeah, and she, so that's one umbrella because she was an incredible explorer.

And the second one is the umbrella that was thought to have assassinated JFK.

Do you know about this story?

I've heard about Umbrella Man.

Is that the Umbrella Man?

So, Umbrella Man, I hadn't heard of this.

So, in the famous footage of

the JFK assassination, there's famously this shot when people are analyzing it and not knowing where the shot might have come from.

Out of nowhere, as the car is passing a bunch of people on the side, there's just this one guy standing there holding an umbrella.

Oh.

And it's a sunny day, there's no reason.

Yeah, and they thought, how is this possible?

It was a parasol.

It could have been a parasol, that's true.

It was an umbrella though, it was a dark umbrella.

It turned out that it was a guy who was actually protesting Kennedy's father because Kennedy's father was a sympathiser with Neville Chamberlain, who was quite nice to the Nazis during his time, and he was just protesting that.

It was a very...

Okay, that doesn't make any sense.

Like, if his father was a rain cloud, great protest.

Well,

because apparently a trademark accessory of Chamberlain's was to carry an umbrella.

Okay, there's still like six removed.

You had to explain to everyone what your protest means.

It's like going to a fancy dress party where you look nothing like what you're supposed to be and you have to explain to everyone.

Well being an impressionist who goes, oh, hello, Winston Churchill.

That was uncanny.

Well except that while Kennedy was at Harvard he wrote a thesis and it kind of, that was very much a part of that.

So he thought Kennedy would get the little nod.

And so everyone was going, who's the umbrella man?

He turned himself in, he brought the umbrella in and basically explained this convoluted reason why he was protesting.

And this is the quote from me.

He said, I think if the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing, I would be number one in that position.

Wow.

Because he was there two seconds or so before Kennedy was shot.

So there is a website which claims that in 1797 there was only one umbrella in Cambridge and that you could hire it out

for an hour at a time.

Sorry.

1797.

I think as soon as it starts raining there's going to be a rush, isn't there?

But I don't know whether there was only one there, but it's true that in Paris it was common practice, as in you could hire them out by the hour and they had that they were all clearly recognisable They had a number painted on so they couldn't be nicked.

Yeah, so it was like the Boris bike.

Oh, yeah, like the bike system.

Yeah, except obviously they could be nicked.

I don't know how you would legislate against that or

in France because they had the bike system before us then and they weren't getting stolen there.

It's really interesting culturally that in Paris they left them all and in Amsterdam they all got stolen instantly.

I don't know what we're doing.

Really?

What are we doing in London?

I think they're too heavy and shit, aren't they?

Yeah, very.

Yeah, I think if you're kind of riding that around, someone's going to know that it's not your actual bike.

You reckon?

Yeah.

People are like detectives like that sometimes.

Just we were talking about ancient China before and the umbrella.

Something I thought I'd show you guys, which obviously doesn't translate too well, but people can Google this.

The Chinese character for umbrella, San, it was designed to look just like an umbrella.

So part of the.

It looks like a house.

It does, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's it there.

Yeah.

It's beautiful.

It's a nice little bit of how Chinese words often often work is that you actually designed it initially to look like that.

Do they look like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if I was to read Chinese, might I get a clue of what the words are by looking at what they look like?

Well, in its origin, so when I was taught Mandarin as a kid, you would start with the super simplified pictorial versions of it, and it would show you that the turtle image would look exactly like a turtle, and it slowly became hardened and edged and so on.

The numbers, one, two, three, they're just

lines.

Yeah.

For one, and then add a two and a three.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Chinese.

I kind of of believe you, but then also I think maybe you went to special classes that make Mandarin easy for Dan.

You get the turtle drawing up.

Fingle up, Dan.

We know what you mean.

Just draw an umbrella.

We'll just accept it.

That's what it is.

Some stuff about throwing rubbish at things.

Oh, sure.

Okay.

Well, so when Black Friars Bridge was opened, so it was a replacement bridge and Queen Victoria opened it and there's a statue of her at the end, and she'd been in mourning for ages, like for Albert.

So the crowd really hated her by then, so they pelted her with vegetables, apparently.

Really?

Yeah.

Why did they hate her?

Because she hadn't been to see them for such a long time, like decades.

Why?

So they threw vegetables at her.

Did anyone get vegetables?

Trouble for that.

Presumably they did.

Maybe they all said it was the wrong place at the wrong time, and everybody protested came for it.

We're just protesting Lord Liverpool.

Don't you remember?

He used to like cut.

Yes.

Yes.

We don't want to go to the Crimean War.

Umbrella inventions is one of the main inventions that people try.

Like, I think mousetraps is one of them, and umbrellas is the other one.

I invented a mousetrap, did you?

And it was for pickpockets.

So you put a mousetrap in your pocket, and then when someone tries to get into your pocket, it traps their fingers, and then you have to take them two miles away and release them

in a fiat.

That's good, but it makes your pockets unusable, doesn't it?

Yes, you mustn't forget and put your hands in your pockets.

There's a museum in the UK, and I wish I could remember which one it is, but they have one of the oldest examples of a mouse trap inside a glass box.

And the curator came back one morning and found a mouse trapped in it because it managed to get inside the box.

Leather mouse.

Clearly set.

And so, yeah, an ancient mousetrap that was never meant to be used caught a modern-day mouse, like time travel.

I once went to a museum in Bhutan, and it was run by monks, and they had a mouse problem that they discovered on that day when I was there and they're Buddhist monks so they didn't want to kill the mouse or even hurt it in any way so they were just running after it, chasing after it, all these monks running in and out of rooms like an old farce.

I love how they think that that's not stressful for mice.

I don't want to stress them out.

It's just going to be like a hundred times bigger than them chasing the kill into the room.

A lot of them have, so you know about toxoplasma.

Have you talked about it before?

Toxoplasma Donji.

Yes, yeah.

So loads of mice have it and it means that they're not scared of cats and they're not scared of humans when they have it.

Is it humans as well?

Yeah, with humans as well.

But so the theory is the people who really like worship cats is because so lots of people are carried it's only really dangerous for babies to get it.

But most most lots of human beings have it and they the theory is that that's why there's humans who just love cats.

Not just like, oh, hey, I've got a cat, but like, this cat is my secret wife.

My wife's like that.

My real wife, not my secret wife.

My wife's like that, a cat.

Ginger, she uh

She always comes home at night.

You have to go into the neighbour's house.

Fingers be like a mouse.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Sarah.

Okay, so my fact is about men, and it's about how the male brain changes when his partner is pregnant.

Okay, how does it change?

Well, this is all very early research, and a lot of the studies I've looked into have a very small amount of subjects.

But it seems like things happen from literally four to six weeks of finding out his partner is pregnant.

No matter when that is, the testosterone starts to drop and he starts to produce prolactin, which is a hormone that creates milk production in female mammals, but in male mammals makes them less aggressive.

So it's what's really, really interesting is it seems like, I mean, cortisol changes as well.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, but in men and women, it also causes you to put on weight because you're storing energy.

So, for a long time, there's been a theory about, and they've kind of called it like sympathetic male pregnancies, or I think it's called Cuvard syndrome, which is when the men start to get nauseous and get morning sickness and they get they put on weight as well.

There's now a theory that, actually, in terms of resources, the man putting on weight is quite sensible in terms of storing energy because he's going to have to do a lot more and give a lot more resources once there's a baby.

So, it's really fascinating.

Wait, what does what does the male give in terms of that more body on a male?

If you think about it, like if you have more body fat, then you don't have to eat as much, you work harder and also give your food away.

Yeah, exactly.

So, if you think about times of sort of fast and famine, any kind of stored energy is the difference between living and dying.

Yeah, the cortisol thing is interesting.

So, another thing I found out when I was looking into this is that the more stressed the mother is, the more cortisol she produces, and obviously, having a new baby is very, very stressful, the faster the baby grows through her breast milk.

So, cortisol

does make you more likely to be a little bit more likely.

As a child, it's better to make your mother more stressed.

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

Thank you for interpreting it.

They've done rat studies, and I hate animal studies, and I don't think they're applicable, but they did, they do obviously awful things to animals.

But with rats, if they really, really stressed the mother out,

then her children would come out much, much tougher with higher levels of cortisol and testosterone, things like that already, as if they're prepared for a horrible world.

It's a funny theory, which is really interesting that whatever you do to the mother, especially through breast milk, she's telling, she's programming her children, you need to be ready for this.

Do you have to be aware that your wife is pregnant or does your body this is the thing?

I have so many questions about it.

And number one, this is such a heteronormative study as well.

So the first one will show that adoptive parents, people who go through IVF.

What about gay parents?

Does this all say?

You have all these questions.

And then it's like, we studied 29 heterosexual couples and did some salivary hormone tests also, I have to say.

So there'll be one test that will find, oh my God, men have this amount of testosterone then when their partners are pregnant and then it'll be replicated and they don't find it, but they'll find something else.

So it seems like, and and also with the brain, because of neuroplasticity, it's so different from lots of people anyway, that there's never an absolutely 100% all people do this.

I was kind of thinking if you had a one-night stand with someone, you're looking at your body going, you've been a bit away.

You go home, and your girlfriend's like, hang on,

did really nothing happen in Amifa

because you've got morning sickness.

Yeah, so morning sickness,

in these studies, they were saying that men get morning sickness as well.

Yeah, Yeah, they can do, yeah.

And the sympathy cramps and everything.

Yeah, which is really interesting.

We didn't notice it for ages because most of the experiments done were on, as you say, rats.

And rat fathers, as it were, don't look after their offspring.

So it's when they started experimenting on marmosets, where the males do look after their offspring, that they notice these hormonal changes in marmoset breasts.

Yeah.

So it's one of those things where there are some things that are kind of hardwired because physically we can do them, but it's very, very unpopular to say because it looks like you're reinforcing all these things we're trying to get away from, which is like gender binary and things like being biologically different between men and women, which actually it's a really, really complex

area.

And it's not popular, but they don't want to study it.

People don't want to do it.

So is that considered controversial?

Kind of.

Right.

So if you were to stand up at a feminist meeting

and be like, guys, it's not your fault.

Like, you evolved to make babies.

And until very recently, that's what happened if you had sex.

See you later, enjoy your

Yeah, okay.

And it's the same with the brain.

The same with the studies of the brain.

They try and say really complementary things about both genders rather than negative.

So rather than going, like, oh, women maybe are less spatially aware.

And it's not ever true in terms of it's just like, oh, they'll do a study and it seems like, oh, men are using their brain this way or this way.

And then you look at people who are brought up differently and it's not true.

But the brain is so elastic in terms of how it's used.

People who do loads of maths are better at maths.

And that kind of seems to be the thing.

It's really difficult not to be reductive in telling people.

And it's the same with men, like obviously, 90% of criminals are male, 90% of crimes.

And there's this theory that's because the amygdala is much bigger and the prefrontal cortex develops much later.

So you have this emotional, instinctual brain that isn't very good at controlling itself.

And that's very sexist.

To say to men, like, you're just crazy.

You're just much closer to monkeys.

Right.

I read a really good article.

It was a study from 2015 at Tel Aviv University.

And they were saying, okay, well, if you look at men's brains and women's brains, if you look at them generally, you can say, Okay, generally, a men's brain will be a bit like this, and generally, a woman's brain will be a bit like this.

But actually, 98% of people they studied didn't fit a clear-cut profile.

So, you can kind of say, generally speaking, it's like this, but if you take an individual,

it won't be.

It's really fascinating.

So, this obviously men's brains are about 10% bigger, which combinates the body size, really.

But what's really fascinating is that there's a lot of

so dyslexia, ADHD, things like that are all much, much more prevalent than in men than women, and they don't know why.

And sort of the genetic basis for that, but there's certain kind of brain disorders which are just you're much more likely and autism as well is more male.

Yeah, and the testosterone, the crime thing.

But I didn't realise as well, testosterone doesn't actually get into the brain.

There's a kind of

something in the brainstem that turns it into a different hormone because of how it would actually change the structure.

Yeah.

There was a just on the men and pregnancy thing, the physiological changes to the man in pregnancy, they did do a load of surveys of men about the symptoms that they'd experienced physically when their partners were pregnant.

I bet their wives were like, What for me, Flina?

How this affected you, darling?

Well, a lot of them complained of stomach cramps, basically, but there were a few

kind of illustrative lines.

One man

said,

My stomach pains were very much like a build-up of a woman's contraction as she's giving birth.

They started mild and then got stronger and stronger and stronger.

Another man claimed, I think I was in more pain than she was.

Right.

Well, the cramps thing's interesting.

The cramps thing's interesting because oxytocin, which is a hormone that does make you bond, which does raise for men, especially in the last trimester of pregnancy, and obviously it's what a woman releases when she breastfeeds, it also causes muscle contractions.

So it's what causes an orgasm in everyone.

And so, actually, if you had raised oxytocin, that would absolutely make sense about cramping.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

So my reading out that line for a cheap laugh at this man saying, I think I was in more pain than she was, may have had a point behind it.

Also, do you know what?

I think people say stuff like that with a wink that we don't hear.

Yeah, and that's the problem with the internet.

Very true.

I think so many things that people say are joking.

And then we write it down and go, what a bastard.

I'm going to send him a turd in the post.

And I think it's today they were talking about, so women's grey matter actually decreases in certain parts of her brain, and that's so she can become obsessed with a baby.

Whoa, really?

She has to be obsessed with it or it'll die.

And it's caused by hormones, but you have to have a baby and then just want to stare at it constantly otherwise someone else is going to eat it yeah I miss someone else like a wolf or something like Roger from next door

but I think when they first found that out they saw that the emotion part of your brain shrunk a little bit and everyone thought that doesn't make any sense at all and then they realized actually you're just decluttering like getting rid of all the not important yeah like pruning they call it and this is the thing with the brain they say these things like oh that's the emotional part of your brain or that's the drive and it's always so much more complicated than that like so the amygdala which is like this emotional centre, really, really ancient brain, also is connected to terms of what you remember in terms of trauma and really like animal instincts.

So, that's the thing they used to call it like the lizard brain, didn't they?

And it was the thing which kind of attaches you to when we were living in the sea or whatever, and it's just instinct.

But, of course, like you say, it's

all really oversimplistic, but then also in terms of, I mean, I think all of us included, we're lay people.

How else are you supposed to understand this really complicated science?

Unless someone goes, That's the really old bit, like when you were a fish.

This bit, that's monkey bit.

Remember when you were a monkey?

It is interesting, though, that the brain can't understand itself.

Yeah, that is interesting.

Yeah, you have what's that theory of yours?

That, um, well, I think it's the only thing that's ever named itself.

Yes, that's so cool.

I tried to write stand-up about how, you know, when you go, like, oh my god, the brain's amazing, how arrogant it is that it's your brain telling you that.

You're like, shut up, brain!

It's the most complex thing we know of in the galaxy.

Nothing will ever understand the brain.

Excuse me?

Bragging about yourself up there.

You know what you're saying about the grey matter shrinking.

So if you were to do a list of every animal species on Earth in terms of how, let's say, loved a newborn is, where would we appear on that list?

Very, very high.

But the sad thing, if anyone watches Blackfish, the documentary, which is

that like Black Mirror for fish.

Oh, yes, it's blackfish.

People don't even talk about how clever fish are, they're nicked their idea.

So blackfish is, and it's really interesting.

So orcas, orcas also have menopause like us.

Grandparents never stop caring for their young.

Young never leave their parents.

The part of their brain, which again, very crudely would say is to do with familial love, is like two and a half times bigger than ours.

And when their children are taken away from them in the wild to go to aquariums, they cry for the rest of their lives.

Whoa!

Yeah.

Does that mean Queen Victoria was an orca?

What?

Oh, because she was sad for the rest of her life.

Guys, I think I've blown this thing white.

I've never seen her without a big dress on, which might have been nice.

Exactly.

And the massive tail.

She was a human head on an orca.

That's why they threw things at her.

Because she was a weird orchid orca.

Oh, my God.

This is the...

Yeah, they saw her emerge from the Thames to open Blackfire's Bridge again.

This is Splash the Sequel.

Yeah, because I read the Giraffes When They're Born.

This is quite separate, but just thinking how

the human body just is very much, everyone's around, takes the baby out, cuts a cord.

It so needs us to be there, basically.

With giraffes, they're born with slippers.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they're born with slippers, and their horns are bendy.

What do you mean, slippers?

They have this odd thing around their hooves.

Yeah, and they shed after about like three months after they're born, or maybe three days, three days or three months.

Every other species other than us gives birth to young that are ready to live, and we don't.

So we give birth and then the baby continues growing.

And that's the thing to always remember in terms of the brain.

And us as a species, our whole society, all of our personal interactions are because we can't just yeah have a baby and look after it on our own because the brain is so big yeah yeah massive yeah oh that means stop it with your brain

every time we talk about the brain on this show I get blown away by the oddness of what we are constantly learning about it.

Because it just completely flips.

It's just such big knowledge every time we learn something new.

So this is this is not new, but this blew my mind today when I read it.

It blew my brain today.

So my brain is being blown by its own abilities.

Yeah, I bet literally in a cider skull, when you learn brain facts, your brain is like walking up and down.

Doing the moon walk, like, I know it.

So it's if you sleep in a new place, let's say a new house, a new hotel, anywhere you've gone to, that's not your regular place, half of your brain stays in a kind of alert position so that it can just wake up for new sounds.

Yes, like a dolphin.

Like Queen Victoria.

So neuroplasticity, which is the really exciting thing, the books that have been written about it are so amazing in terms of the brain, the way it prunes itself.

That thing about, if you go to new places all the time, people who travel and get new stimuli, they build neurons all of the time because they have to, and that benefits all of the brain.

But so, there's things that are so fascinating.

And Dick Swab's book,

he talks about how, so your brain, if it doesn't use certain parts, it prunes them as a child.

So, it's so incredible.

But people who grew up in the East, who don't have certain sounds, like the R sound, their brain prunes them, and then when they learn English later on, they can't pronounce words properly because their brain physically has got rid of that part.

Yeah, same with us and other languages as well.

Yeah, your baby can do,

has the ability in theory to be able to do every single sound that's known to man, but then you just lose it at a certain age.

Which is the brain going, and it's not because you it's not a detriment, it's going, I'm going to use this for stuff I do need.

Yeah,

right.

Should we move on to the next fact?

You said that guy's name is Dick Swab.

I know, yeah.

He's it, and he wrote, and he's one of the best things you see.

Andy, she

was so.

There's like three amazing brain books at the moment, and his is one of them.

Yeah, and that's his name.

But the thing is, once you've said it three times, you get used to saying it.

You do.

And when you.

I think if I was friends with Dick Swab, I would never get used to that.

You'd think that when his, like, he handed the book in, he said to the editor or the publisher, any changes?

They went, actually, yeah,

but that Mr.

R swab.

Oh, R swab is even worse.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that a fifth of all the species of coral on the planet have been named by the same man.

Yeah.

What's his name?

His name is John Veron.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

His nickname is Charlie, which doesn't sound like a nickname, but actually it was in school.

A teacher said, hey, Charles Darwin, stop doing that because he was doing some cool experiment with animals.

So the Galapagos.

Collecting finches again.

So he's a marine biologist, and he's been nicknamed the godfather of coral.

He's 71 years old now, but he has done so much in the world of looking at coral, exploring it, studying it, categorizing it.

So in 1972, he was made the first full-time researcher on the Great Barrier Reef, and he's spent more hours diving down there than anybody else in the world.

He's studied more of it than any other human alive.

And he's just

interviewed in the FT last weekend, and he's an extraordinary guy so I thought he is when he comes over to the UK David Attenborough will introduce him onto stage and introduce him by saying that this is one of the most important scientists in our time he's a huge huge deal really exciting character has he done a TED talk so he's not that big a deal actually that I think about it

no have you done one no oh okay no it wasn't like about the top channel

I did a TED talk about coral right okay so I just get a bit jealous

has he ever been on QI

yeah has he?

God, I'd love it if they just occasionally.

Just because of quotas, they had to have a deep sea diver.

Sarah Pasco and Dick Swan.

Yeah, so go on, Andy.

So generally, well, you get kind of soft corals and hard corals, but hard corals are the ones which live in colonies with lots of little individual animals and they excrete this skeleton of calcium carbonate, which becomes the reef and grows.

So So that's what the.

Yeah, that's not the animal, that's the kind of shell, isn't it?

Exactly, yeah.

And they have tentacles around their mouth, and they can catch things, they can catch little bits of prey, even some small fish they can catch and eat them.

And they're very, very cool.

Do you know that they kiss?

No, I didn't know that.

What?

Oh, James.

Really sexy gap here.

My wife is a coral, actually.

Yeah, they've got this new little camera.

It's a new kind of camera.

It's called the Benthic Underwater Microscope or BUM.

Yeah, unfortunately.

But it lets you see what's happening at very, very close up.

And they found that these polyps, which is what makes the coral, they get the food and then they pass on nutrients to each other by kind of kissing each other.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

It's amazing.

Is there benefit to an individual from passing on nutrients to another nearby?

Well, I think generally speaking that's true in a lot of animals.

When you all benefit from the kind of the ecosystem, don't you?

So there's a thing about altruism they now understand that you all kind of survive together.

That's great.

They all made at the full moon as well.

Do they?

Yeah, because of the light.

Once a year.

It might be the light, or it might be them sensing something else, or it might be the tide, I don't know.

But

yeah, they...

Oh, yeah, because they have higher tides.

Yeah.

They do this thing called broadcast spawning, where they all release this blizzard of

bundles into the ocean.

They're really brightly coloured.

Who knew it was so sexy?

It is by moonlight.

It's sexy down on the reef.

It is.

Yeah.

Wow.

I get really confused by coral.

I don't understand what it is exactly in terms of there's no brain,

but there is some kind of system that means they know how to reproduce.

What kind of intelligence level are they at?

Is it nothing and it's just a kind of system that...

I think it's like, if you think of everything as a tube, we are a tube, from stomach to anus, and you have a nervous system.

So they just have a more simplistic version of what we've got.

Okay.

Well, corals are not tubes, in fact, because they don't have an anus.

Well, their mouth functions as an anus and they have to excrete via the mouth because they're attached to the reef and they're facing outwards into the world.

So that's a wind sock.

The wind sock of the sea.

We're getting less sexy as we go along.

I think the phrase like a wind sock is quite sexy.

Do you?

No.

Andy's his chat up lines at most.

What was it?

Kent Livingston chatted someone up with

like a broom handle in the morning.

That was his chat up line.

I'm nice.

I'm like a broom handle in the morning.

In the covers, in cover the covered website.

Yeah, but no, you're right, Dan, because they are confusing, as in they were thought to be plants, corals, until the 18th century.

Because you would think so from looking at them yeah

but they're hugely important and also they are they're dying out so the Great Barrier Reef has been what they call it bleaching where

they rely on little algae living inside the coral which photosynthesize sunlight and provide the coral with loads of its energy.

When the temperature changes those algae produce too much oxygen, that stresses the coral out and damages it so they expel the algae and then that's the coral bleached because those algae are very brightly coloured.

So actually if you you look at coral it's very brightly coloured but actually it's the algae which is colourful and coral is just white.

So a white coral is like a dead coral.

Basically

if they don't get the algae back in time when the temperature returns to normal then that coral is dead.

It's interesting isn't it because we would probably think of algae as a bad thing for living.

Like if you're covered in algae like yeah for people it's really bad.

For them yeah it's really really vital.

So coral is dying at the moment.

In the northwest coast of Bali they've been doing this thing.

There's a beach that if you walk along, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, but it's Pematuran.

If you walk along this beach, you'll see power cables going into the ocean.

So literally, you'll be walking over power cables.

And what they've been doing is they've been attaching low-voltage power cables to corals to stimulate them from all the bleaching that's going on.

So they're giving a little electric shocks into these coral.

And for some reason, and again,

they're slightly, yeah, they're into it, but it's slightly like we haven't shown in any study that they're better than any of the other methods that we're doing.

And I think it's still a bit new research, but that's what they're doing at the moment.

They're putting electric cables onto coral.

Basically, the whole problem is the sea temperature rising, which is not something that can be counteracted large scale.

You know, if it goes up by one degree, it's really bad for them.

And we're looking at one and a half or two degrees of rise in the ocean temperature.

So it looks...

And that's the kind of thing that's like, even if we stop now, that's the irreversible change, isn't it?

Yeah.

And

the really terrible thing is, well, that's the really terrible thing, but also, so shallow coral reefs, there are different kinds.

Shallow coral reefs are the tiny amount of the ocean surface, obviously,

but about 25% of marine species have a home, you know, in and around and on reefs.

And they're these huge

habitats of the plant of the oceans, but 25% of the

0.1% of the ocean surface is 25% of marine species that managed to find a home there.

So it's this huge knock-on effect that might happen if we lose coral reefs.

Yeah, but have you heard about the Twilight Zone?

No.

So the Twilight Zone is a deep reef and a deep reef is really interesting because it's far down enough that it would require extra scuba gear in a way that isn't affordable really, but it's not deep enough that you would send a submersible that was either manned by humans or done by remote.

So they haven't really studied it and only in the last 20 years have they been studying this Twilight Zone of reef where they found that all the fish that live in it are exactly the same as it appears they might have been for hundreds of millions of years.

As in, most coral higher up would be subject to, say, ice ages and so on, and they couldn't escape from it because they wouldn't know how to go deeper.

So, there's this whole level of new reef that they're studying.

They've had more stability.

They've had no change because they wouldn't need to escape the glaciers or they're that deep enough.

That's the thing with that statistic, and I'm not about to poo-poo it, the 25% thing, but obviously, there's so much of the ocean we haven't studied because it's too difficult to get to.

So, actually, that 25% of like the ones we can count, which are in the bright shallow bits.

I read something about the sea floor today.

This isn't really related apart from it's in the sea.

But there's a place called Octopolis

which is just off the coast of Australia.

Most ox pusses kind of live on their own

and this is a place where octopuses kind of come together and hang out and they kind of touch each other which ox pusses don't really like to do much

when they're not mating or fighting.

But it's a place where they kind of hang out.

It's like a swingers club.

Excellent.

Why did you drop your pen when I said something just

about to out you?

I knew I knew you from somewhere.

Octopus mistress.

Oh no.

Don't tell your cat wife.

She's a coral.

So here's the really interesting thing about that, right?

So octopuses are really, really smart.

Really smart.

But they're not quite as smart as things with a similar sized brain that live live out of the water.

And one of the reasons is they're not social, and they think that by being social, it helps your intelligence.

But they think that this kind of area of octopuses, because they're all kind of hanging out together, they might get smarter and smarter and smarter.

And if we were to leave them alone, they might get super smart.

So, you know, that's the tribal effect, is what it's called in human beings.

And Susan Pinker wrote a book about it, which I don't think she mentions animals at all, but that's the theory.

The more you interact with other beings, you have to learn to communicate, you become more intelligent.

And her theory is that men who communicate more and are more tribal live longer, and that it's you know, the whole there's all these theories about men talk a lot less, they have a smaller vocabulary, they talk less every day.

In tribes where they talk as much as women, they live as long as the women.

Oh, does that

work?

Yeah, there's a fish called file fish,

they eat coral and they gain the smell of the coral, so it means they can hide in the coral and no one can find them.

Oh, so it's like if you were to eat something and you got the smell of it, and then yeah, then you like hide in a pizza shop,

no one even knows you're not pizza

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the first female British playwright was called Joanna Lumley.

Yeah.

But it wasn't Joanna Lumley.

It was not the first British playwright.

As in absolutely fabulous.

Yes, so it's not the current living Joanna Lumley.

No, this is from the 1500s.

And the

thing is, is that her name in a lot of online and in books, she'll be presented as Jane Lumley.

But actually, so little is known about people from the 1500s, it's quite hard to establish if she was born Joanna or Jane, but definitely she was Joanna Lumley.

And I just thought that was kind of cool.

I hadn't heard that before.

But she was a translator rather than a playwright.

Yes, and it wasn't even published or finished.

God, I love the olden days.

Yeah.

Everyone's dreams could come true.

It has since been published in 1909, so it has made it to publication.

People do put it on in the UK as a play.

But she was a very interesting person.

Obviously, she couldn't publish stuff at the time because she was what is known as a woman.

And

they were not keen.

Thank you.

Not keen on them back then.

They didn't allow them to do stuff like put out plays.

So it's a shame because she was an extraordinary person.

And yeah, she did this translation of can i know

euripides yeah um yeah i just thought that was quite cool yeah it is cool so um because we were looking up jane or joanna lumley i looked up the first woman in the uk who wrote her own original play

and and her name was uh elizabeth carey and um i love it it's called the the tragedy of mariam do you know what it's about no is it robin hood it isn't it's about herod she was herod's second wife do you want to hear the synopsis of this play i mean he had a wife called doris didn't he yeah That would have been his first wife, I think.

Or maybe third.

Spoiler.

It does not end well for Mariam.

Okay, so this is full of spoilers.

But basically.

Spoilers for something written in 1613.

Yeah, I know.

If you haven't seen it so far, you're probably not going to see it now.

So basically, Herod the Great, his words.

Basically,

the first four acts, everyone thinks that he's dead, and Mariam's like working out how she feels about him because she's like, oh, he did love me.

He was a wonderful husband, but he also did kill my brother and granddad.

And she's trying to work out what to do because he's been murdering everyone.

But then in Act 4, Herod returns and he says to everyone, I'm not even dead.

And then Salome says that Mariam was unfaithful, even though she wasn't.

And then Herod kills her.

The end.

Oh, yeah.

It's a long lead-up of four acts of deliberation.

Even though it's named after Mariam, she's only in it 10% of the time.

There's a lot of chorus work.

Elizabeth Carey, very interesting person.

She was, she loved reading to the point where her parents had to ban anyone in the house giving her candles at night so that she would stay up by candlelight

reading books.

So they were like, you have to stop.

And they were very encouraging her parents of her reading.

Only in daylight.

Yeah, only in daylight.

You may just sleep.

Yeah.

And she was brilliant at languages.

She spoke a bunch of languages, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Transylvanian.

And this is my favorite fact.

It says that later on at the age of 10, so this is all before 10 years old, she learned these languages, she helped exonerate a woman who was accused of witchcraft after noticing that the accused lady was answering yes to every question she was asked without thinking about what she was being asked.

So at 10, she was like, she's just saying yes because you're asking her questions.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

And they said, you're right.

She's exonerated.

She's not a witch.

That's so interesting.

Yes.

So Afra Ben was a very influential.

This is later still.

This is the first time.

Yeah, and she's often who is attributed as well.

She never says she's the first.

She wasn't the first female playwright, but she was a very influential female playwright in the 17th century.

And she was doubly cool because she was also a spy.

Yeah.

Wow, one of the reasons that she wrote, or she wrote and then she gave it up for a while, and she took it up again, partly to make a living because the government had not paid her for doing all the spying work that she had done.

But her stuff is really good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

I only say that because she's the only one of these three that I've read stuff by, but

during my English studies.

Yeah, same same here.

And they said she was the first proper female playwright.

They lied and lied to us.

They lied to us.

Was it her own original play, though?

Yeah, they were.

And she was a professional as well, wasn't she?

Yeah, she made money.

In a way, I don't want to give shit to my own facts, but I think she, who you're just talking about, has more of a claim to first female playwright.

Well, hers is like an adapted screenplay.

Yeah, I think Kerry has claimed.

Oh, was that Carrie before?

Kerry is before Ben, yeah, yeah.

So I, well, because we were looking, I was looking up and I was interested in like female firsts as a thing.

Yeah.

And so I looked on the Wikipedia list of female firsts and I found out something so delightful.

So

Elizabeth Thiebel in 1784 was the first woman to ride in a hot air balloon.

Oh, how exciting.

But in 1805, only 19 years later, Sophie Blanchard was the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon.

So it took women 19 years to work out how to go and bring a passenger.

So then I thought, oh, this is so interesting.

This Sophie Blanchard, so basically, her husband was a hot air balloon pilot and he died.

So she carried on his business.

And so she became the special woman.

And Napoleon really liked her.

And he gave her this title, the Aeronaut of the Airfield Festival or something.

And then she died

because she set up some fireworks.

Hit her house and fell to the ground.

And that's why we shouldn't let women do shit.

They can't be trusted.

All of this, so

female playwrights and things, even up until the time of Afro Ben, which is, you know a long time after the first play written by a woman, women weren't allowed on stage.

Yeah,

so it was all boys.

But the reason that it was ended was because basically Charles II, when he was restored to the throne,

fancied actresses.

He fancied actresses and he he decreed, well what we have to do, actually, I think the public will be outraged about boys appearing on stage in women's roles, when actually no one really was outraged about it, but he said, No, it's completely outrageous we must you know legalize and make it compulsory for female roles to be played by women that's basically the only reason it happened how could he sorry if this is a very dumb comment how could he fancy actresses if the profession didn't exist because some things kind of happened I mean illegally

he fancied the idea of actresses right look at those boys imagine if those were real

so things happened illegally but also so in Shakespeare's time what some of the people who were credited writing were women like women did actually write things, it's just they didn't get their names on them.

Yeah, so I read actually in one article, I don't know if this is true, but by the late 17th century, about a third of plays staged in London were written by women, but it fell to around 7% in the early 18th century, and it stayed between 7 and 10% until the 1980s.

Wow.

And it's so related to economics.

Actually, when you look at the ups and downs, women who have space and time, it's the whole Virginia Woolf thing, created just as much as men.

Jane Austen thing, you know, writing on tiny bits of paper.

I went to see her desk the other day.

I did.

Oh, at the British Library.

Yeah, and you're just so amazed.

It's such a visual symbol of this woman in the corner, like, don't worry, I won't take up any room.

Yeah,

and it's really tiny.

It has her spectacles on it.

It's the size of an iPhone.

It's so small.

It's really small.

She was a mouse.

Yeah, she was a little mouse lady.

Queen Victoria was an awkward.

Jane Austen was a mouse.

My wife was a coral.

Are there any actual women, please?

It's been a trick the entire time.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shakespeare, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, and Sarah, at Sarah Pasco.

Yep, and you can also go to our group account, which is at QIPodcast, or go to our website, no suchthingasafish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

Also, there is another website, it's called no suchthingasthenews.com.

It has all of our previous topical TV show series that we have done.

It's not topical.

That was last year.

No, it's still going.

Trump is still happening.

If you want to learn about Trump, that's all we spoke about.

And it is on no such thingasthenews.com.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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