This week we present stories from people who found themselves in sticky situations in the midst of doing research.
Part 1: Erik Vance's first job reporting on scientific research doesn't smell as much like success as it smells like manure.
Erik Vance is an award-winning science journalist based in Boulder, CO who works as an editor for the NY Times. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. He graduated in 2006 from UC Santa Cruz science writing program and became a freelancer as soon as possible. His work focuses on the human element of science — the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. His first book, Suggestible You, is about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities. While researching the book he was poked, prodded, burned, electrocuted, hypnotized and even cursed by a witchdoctor, all in the name of science.
Part 2: Liz Neeley observes hypnosis from the inside when she becomes the subject of the experiment.
Liz Neeley is the Executive Director of The Story Collider, and the cohost of our weekly podcast. She is not a naturally gifted storyteller, but came into the field the hard way: reading research papers on narrative and science communication. She started her career as a marine biologist, and her first job was to support community-based projects in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Learning first-hand that science belongs to everyone changed everything. She misses the ocean these days, but loves getting to think about all different kinds of science now. Her biggest challenge is turning down new projects. Find her on twitter at @LizNeeley.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Erik Vance
So my first assignment, my first research freelance story was kind of shitty. And I don't mean like I did a bad job or that it wasn't a very good topic. There was literally a lot of fecal matter in the story. Let me tell you about it.
So after like months and months of trying to convince an editor to give me a story, I finally got a major magazine to offer me a story that would send me out to do the reporting. I was so excited, but I was also really, really nervous.
The story was about a guy named Jacek Koziel who studies volatile components of complex fermentation matrices. In other words, he smells pig shit for a living. And I was really excited because this was going to take me to Ames, Iowa. Everyone loves Ames, Iowa. And this is the first time that I was going to go into a place and try to get the story and then come out for like three days. I was really nervous because I didn't know if I could just go in and get the story. Like how do you even do that?
And I was especially excited because I had just proposed to my girlfriend who had really supported me emotionally and financially through this whole process of going after this dream of becoming a science writer and that was going to happen.
So I book a flight to Omaha, Nebraska and I fly out there. It was only really when I landed that I learned that Nebraska and Iowa are actually two different states. So I rented a car and drove to Iowa.
As soon as I got out in Iowa, I smelled this chemical. It's actually a phenol. It's a low vapor pressure chemical that basically sticks to anything it touches and it's often called ‘barnyard’ or even ‘band-aid’. Basically, it sticks to dust and then it floats for miles and it's the first thing you smell when you come to a farm. It's this sort of sweet smell.
That's basically what Jacek Koziel studies. That's his jam. It's these chemicals that he can sort of break out and figure out what's in them, and he's really good at it. He has this amazing nose. He could have been designing perfumes for Christian Dior or one of the best vintners in the country. He can smell these really complex chemicals.
But he doesn't make perfumes and he's not a vintner. He smells pig shit. And how good is he? He's so good that when you fart he can tell you what you ate. That's how good he is.
Erik Vance shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Bier Baron Tavern in Washington, DC in August 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
So we met and he brings me in his lab and he has the most amazing lab I've ever seen. It's this incredible place. It's like all based around smell. So all of the markers are of course little smelly markers and the students can practice and see if they can figure out what smell it is, which is actually kind of hard if you ever try to do it. It's like grape, maybe? Lime? I don't know.
And then he's got these like fume hoods like in a normal lab, but these have like a little tube coming out of them and they're emitting this smell that smells like farts, because he's trying to reverse engineer farts. Because, why not? It's awesome.
It's just this wonderful, all these little surprises around every corner. My favorite was this one little cabinet that you basically open up and inside is all of the worst smelling things that he has ever isolated. And I don't know if you guys know this but like in Atlanta, the CDC has this vault of all the worst like viruses and diseases on earth and stuff like that. This is like that, except for what? Like stank? This is like the Fort Knox of I guess ass. It's the worst thing you can ever imagine.
So this is an undergraduate campus. This is an unlocked cabinet. How is this even still here, you know? You get 30 things like right up my head. There's like, “Oh, that'd be great.” There were so many great pranks.
And in the back of this little cabinet there's one little bottle. And all these bottles are sealed but one of them is a sealed bottle inside another sealed bottle inside another sealed bottle. I was like, “Oh, my God. What is that one?”
I go to, of course, I go to reach out and grab it and he's like, “You know, don't even touch that one.”
I was like, “Oh, my gosh. What is this?’
And he's, “It's ladybug taint.”
I see some of you guys are thinking the same thing I was, right? Whatever you think of ladybug taint, you're thinking… the only thing taint I know of is, you know, area between the genitals and the asshole. It's the taint, you know. I didn’t know ladybugs had that.
I was like, “That's really cool.”
He says, “No, no. That's not what ladybug taint is.”
Turns out that ladybugs, anytime you see an animal that's red and black, it's a signal. “Don't eat me. I will mess you up.” And in the case of ladybugs, it's this one chemical that basically is so strong if you took a teaspoon of it and put it in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, you'd still be able to taste it. That's how strong it is. It's brutal.
Basically, when this chemical gets into a grape crush, it tastes like—if one ladybug gets in the grape crush, it tastes a little bit like bell pepper. But if like two or three get in there, it's ruined or tainted. So really interesting.
Erik Vance shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Bier Baron Tavern in Washington, DC in August 2018. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.
Then he takes me to the pride and joy of his lab. Now, this is the machine that basically allowed him to find ladybug taint and everything else that he's done in his laboratory. It's called a multidimensional gas chromatography mass spectroscopy olfactometer. And we've all seen it. You've got two of them in your basement right now.
This is an amazing device. It basically takes a chemical, breaks it up into pieces then puts down one of two little tubes. One goes into a mass spec which tells you what's in it, and the other one goes to a little cup over your nose and so you can sort of like smell every little piece.
What's interesting about this is that when it comes to smell, we don't really have a lot of words to describe the smells that are around us. Think about like we got lots of words for shapes and sounds but how many words do we have for smells? The only one I can come up with is musty. But like everything else, it smells like something. So there's this whole wheel of different things that he uses with smells like taco shell or wet cardboard or mushrooms.
So the first thing he puts in there is wine. He puts like a wine sample in there. And we all have that friend who drinks wine and goes like, “Oh, is that summer squash? Hmm, I'm getting a little bit of aged, wet leather. Are you getting that?”
And I'm not sure. We hate that guy. But turns out he's right. All of those chemicals—oh, come on. There's a few of you out there.
It turns out that he's right. Actually, though, he or she is right. There are these chemicals in the wine that you can actually break up and you can smell them one at a time. That's what the olfactometer does is it lets you smell them.
But I don't really have the words for that so what I'm smelling is, “Oh, sixth grade camp. My first girlfriend. Oh, the house I grew up in!” Because the part of your brain that processes smells is right next to the part of the brain that processes memory, and so I'm having these great moments. It’s wonderful.
If you guys ever get a chance to use an olfactometer like this, I highly recommend it. It's amazing.
So then he puts in the star of the show which is pig shit. And he was a little worried that I wouldn't get all the nuances of the pig shit. So rather than putting it in for 10 minutes the way you normally would over the pig shit, he puts it in overnight so you can get the full brunt of his favorite matrices.
Well, the first few smells actually are kind of like wine. You still get that sort of mushroom and you get a little bit of wet cardboard or whatever, because they're both fermentation processes. One is organized, the other one is not, but I mean they're kind of the same. And then you get to the business end of pig shit. And if you've never experienced the business end of pig shit, it's the sulfates.
How do I describe this? It's a little like having a manure truck drive over you and then back up over you again to see if you're okay and then drive up over you again and then back again and over again, just sort of over and over. It's a little like if you've ever been on the Metro and you see that there's that one person who's like you can smell them from the other side of the car, imagine taking his underwear, putting them over your head and then sticking your head inside one of those campground toilets and just letting the experience flow over you wave after wave. That's what it's like. Just shoving these smells right up into your brain.
The worst thing about the whole thing is, like I said, these things have low vape pressure that's why they stick to dust and you can smell them far away. It also sticks the inside of your nose so that everything you eat for three days or everything you smell tastes like pig shit.
I step out from this thing and I'm a little scarred. I sit down with Jacek, and the great thing about Jacek is that the whole time I'm there, he can't figure out why I'm writing about him because he thinks he has the most boring job in the world. I've talked to him for a while and I get on the plane and I have a shit-tasting meatloaf and a shit-tasting cocktail to sort of wash it down.
It occurs to me that I've done it. That in order to do this job right you have to completely immerse yourself in the story. I realized that I had literally gone up to my nose in this story in order to find the narrative that I wanted. That I could do this and that this was something that… I'd reached my goal. This is my dream.
I get off the plane and there to meet me is my girlfriend-now-wife who's there to pick me up. I've had this amazing experience and I walk up to her and she says, “How was the trip?”
And I said, “It was… you know, you smell a little like shit.”
Thank you.
Part 2: Liz Neeley
It turns out that the hypnosis lab it's not really a lab at all. It's an office. It has a comfy chair and the blinds are drawn, but that's pretty much it.
I'm here because my friend Erik is writing a book about pseudoscience and false memories, placebos. And he's been running around having adventures because that's the kind of person he is. He's even managed to get himself cursed by a brujo.
I'm the research assistant so I'm doing what I'm good at which is reading papers. I'm digging into the scientific literature to understand is there any research behind all these incredible claims of how the brain works and how powerful it is.
But I've spent at this point like six hours at the UW Regional Trauma Center watching Erik go through a series of tests he's getting experimented on and nothing has happened. I'm bored. Like it's important. I should be excited to be here because I've heard reports about how clinical hypnosis can do incredible things, like burn victims who are just screaming in agonizing pain they get hypnotized and, boom, like no pain. They can scrub their wounds out.
But there's no patients here. It's just me watching Erik and I'm watching him struggle and fidget and fail. And all I can think is I could do so much better. Like strap me in. Measure my brain. I want the electrodes. Like measure… science me up. But that's not my job. I don't get to participate in this trip. I am just supposed to be observing, recording and it's boring.
Liz Neeley shares her story with the Story Collider online audience during one of our live Story Hour’s in April 2020.
So we've been in this hypnosis session for more than half an hour at this point. Dr. Patterson brings the session to a close, brings Erik out of the hypnotic trance he'd put him into and kind of just says like, “Well, that really… nothing happened.”
Erik agrees. He didn't feel anything. And I'm thinking, yeah, I know nothing happened. I have half an hour of the world's most boring videotape that I've been filming this whole time and my arm hurts. I'm disappointed because like I'm here to see extraordinary things I had hoped.
And I feel like a deeper sense of disappointment too. Like I had worried that this was pseudoscience, that it was bullshit, and maybe it was. Science doesn't happen if the experiments don't work while you're watching them.
So I'm packing up and thinking, “Oh, well, this was a waste of a day,” but then Dr. Patterson pauses and he looks at me and goes, “Well, what if we tried on Liz?”
And I'm like, “I'm so ready. This is my moment. Here we go. Finally.”
So Erik and I swap places. I sit in the comfy chair. Dr. Patterson starts talking to me in his very soothing hypnotic voice, and I'm jazzed because he's a serious researcher. He's a big shot, right? He's faculty both in surgery and psychology. I want to impress him and I also feel like I'm well‑equipped to impress him because I'm thinking about the time like I was bragging that I can drop my heart rate on demand.
And the guy at the bar was like, “No, you can't.”
I was like, “Yes, I can.”
And he slapped his eye watch on me and then I dropped my heart rate on demand and got a gin and tonic out of that, so…
So science. So Dr. Patterson begins by saying that he's going to induce a hypnotic trance in me and that I may not notice anything at all. That I might just… it may feel like nothing at all is happening. What's important is that I feel relaxed, but he doubts that I will notice anything.
But what he would like me to do is to notice if anything changes for me. And I'm thinking I'm alert. I'm ready to notice. I'm a scientist. This is what I do. I notice things. Let's go.
So Dr. Patterson asks me to imagine a staircase and he says, “As I count down the stairs, you'll step down that staircase in your mind, and it will be easy. And just notice yourself and how you're feeling.”
I'm thinking, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a sleep app that does exactly this. Like I've done my homework. Let's go.”
And So Dr. Patterson starts the count. And he says, “I'm going to begin. One. One step down. You're feeling relaxed. Two. Two steps down. Three. Three steps down. Notice that you feel calm and relaxed. That's good.”
And I'm playing along like, okay, cool. Waiting for something to happen. I'm very relaxed and I don't want to interfere with this experiment so I'm not trying to judge it. But I'm just checking in like can I… are my sensory systems working? I can hear the scratching of Eric's pen on the notebook so I'm like, cool. Everything's good.
And Dr. Patterson leads me deeper four, four steps. Five, five steps, deeper and deeper. At this point he asks me to take my right hand and raise it, just to lift it off the arm of the chair and let it hover an inch in space.
I'm not supposed to do anything with it. I'm not supposed to voluntarily control it but he asks me to imagine a string connected to my wrist that attaches to a helium balloon and that my arm will feel perhaps very light as I relax.
And I think, “I know what's happening.”
This is a tool in hypnosis. It's a dissociative tool. The idea is that both by suggesting to me that my hand's not under my own control but that some other force is lifting it that that will deepen my own hypnotic trance, but also it's a cue for the doctor so he can tell if my hand is lifting that I'm deeper in the trance.
So I'm sitting there feeling good, and I remember that this thing is called an ideomotor reflex. I'm like if I can remember the word ideomotor reflex, clearly, I am not hypnotized. So we're fine.
So I play along. I notice. And we just keep going down the steps. And six, seven, eight steps down, nine steps, ten steps. It's soothing. It's relaxing. I'm noticing, but I'm also… personally I don't have a busy little monkey brain. I'm not judging and I definitely don't want my brain to interrupt the experiment.
So I'm just noticing. Dr. Patterson talks to me about like remembering and forgetting. He says that nothing really matters in this experiment except how relaxed and comfortable I feel.
Then we don't have that much time. We've already been in this experiment for a long time. It's time to turn around and go back up the stairs, and we start doing. So he's counting up now and he says, “Ten, nine, eight, you know there's no rush. There's plenty of time.”
I'm still noticing. Nothing is happening.
“Seven, six,” and his voice is getting louder. I notice his voice getting louder.
And he says that when I awaken from my hypnotic trance that I will feel alert and refreshed. Sounds nice. And he says that I also might feel surprised that when I come to I might feel ready to be surprised.
I'm just thinking like, “Well, no. I'd be surprised if I'm surprised by anything because I have been noticing and observing this whole time and I'm very relaxed but nothing's happened.”
Then so he's saying, “Four, five. Liz, you can put your hand down,” and I do.
Then there's this pause, and he says, “Liz, you can put your hand all the way down.”
I think, “What?” Here's my hand. It's hovering just an inch over the arm of the chair and I put it down, and then all of a sudden it hits me. My hand is up. It's up here. It's been up here the whole time. What the hell? How did I not notice this?
But my eyes are still closed and I'm not all the way awake yet and so I force my hand all the way down. But because I think there's like this split second where it feels like I'm going to put my hand through my leg, and I'm thinking, “What the hell?”
And he says, “Three, two, one. You're awake. You're awake and you're alert and you're relaxed and happy.”
And I'm thinking, “I'm awake and I'm alert. I am not happy. What just happened? What is this?”
He laughs and he congratulates me and he says, “Congratulations. You are highly suggestible.”
And this is the word he uses ‘suggestible’. And I'm just like, “What?”
He tells me I'm part of the 10% of the population that is highly suggestible, which means it's really easy to hypnotize me.
And I'm backpedaling really quickly because while I was in the trance, I was thinking, “Woohoo, I have such a powerful brain, I can't be hypnotized.” Now, I'm thinking, “Haha, I'm so good at meditation that maybe I'm really easy to hypnotize.”
And I try and tell him this, like this is my hypothesis. He listens, he's like, “Well, yeah, yeah. That's interesting.” This idea that mindfulness and hypnosis might be somehow related, but, yeah, that's not… it doesn't work like that at all.
And he goes on to tell me that I shouldn't feel bad that we say ‘suggestible’ but that sounds like gullible, like it's something you wouldn't want to be. But he says he thinks of it more as like a strength or a skill. It turns out it's really handy to have this particular skill. I can hypnotize myself so I don't feel pain and managed to do things like get an IUD or get all four of my wisdom teeth pulled out with no pain medication no problem, which is awesome. It's amazing.
But here's the thing. He also tells me that with this remarkable skill I have that I still should not go to any circuses or stage performances where professional hypnotists are doing like stage work because, get this. He says that they will be able to see me. That they will recognize me in the crowd and that I'm susceptible to them.
And I'm like, “Wait. They can see me?”
He says something maybe about how much white shows around my eyes when I look up. And I'm just thinking, well, I can't see them. I can't identify a hypnotist. This feels unfair. Really, I think when it when it all comes down to it, I prided myself on being a science person rigorously. And I had wanted to see something remarkable, something that science struggles to explain. But in terms of like being the thing that science struggles to understand, I don't like that as much for real.
But if I ever have the opportunity to go in and get tested, like be a part of experiments again, I am so ready for that. Like science this brain of mine. I want to understand. Give me all the tests, because if you give me a test, I'm pretty sure I'm going to ace it. Thanks.