Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Science

Episode: “You (Don’t) Know Where You Are”

Host: Michael Stevens (Vsauce), Professor Hannah Fry
Date: February 24, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the surprisingly complicated question: “Where are you?” They break it into two layers—the practical side of knowing your physical orientation in the world, and the deeper, philosophical side about where you actually “are” inside your body or conscious experience. Through scientific anecdotes, neurological experiments, and thought-provoking tangents, the hosts reveal just how fragile and strange our sense of self and space can be.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The “Point To Yourself” Experiment

• Opening Interactive Test: Michael initiates an experiment: listeners and Hannah are told to point at themselves (00:03–00:36).
  • Most point to their chest; the show explores what this says about our mental “seat” of self.

Quote:
“Where is the unique seat of yourself? Where are you? Where am I? How do we know any of this stuff?”
— Michael Stevens (00:36)

2. Basic Orientation: How Do You Know Which Way is Up?

• Losing Sense of Orientation: Scenarios like avalanches and surfing wipeouts create real confusion about which way is up if visual cues are absent.
• Survival Tips: Drooling or blowing bubbles lets you determine "down" by gravity (04:57–05:54).

Quote:
“The real trick is to spit and see which way the saliva goes… and then you know which way down is.”
— Hannah Fry (05:01)

• Microgravity & Space:
  • The inner ear, especially the vestibular system, helps us orient ourselves but fails in space, leading to “space sickness” (06:33–08:19).
  • Jake Garn, a US senator-astronaut, vomited so much in space that NASA jokingly created “the Garn scale” for space sickness severity (09:39–10:13).

Quote:
“Your body is going to lie to you.”
— Hannah Fry (12:25)

3. Human Orientation & Navigation: The Role of the Body and Brain

• Vestibular Issues: Michael shares his “top shelf vertigo”—he gets dizzy looking up, attributed to fluid sloshing in the inner ear (12:42–15:24).
• Proprioception:
  • Ian Waterman’s case: Lost touch and proprioceptive nerves, became a “floating head” with no intrinsic sense of body—needed to relearn movement visually (16:30–18:48).

Quote:
“He describes how he woke up one day and he literally felt like he was a head floating on a pillow.”
— Hannah Fry (17:04)

4. Cognitive Maps: Place Cells & Grid Cells

• Discovery of Place Cells:
  • John O’Keefe’s rat experiments—“place cells” in the hippocampus fired only when the rat occupied a specific room location. Even if the room shape changed, cell “fields” stretched accordingly (19:44–23:04).

Quote:
“Stretch the room and you’ve stretched the mental map.”
— Michael Stevens (22:56)

• Grid Cells:
  • Later research found “grid cells” (in the entorhinal cortex) fire in regular spatial intervals, essentially forming a “hexagonal” map (28:40–29:29).
  • Combining place cells (landmarks) and grid cells (distances) allows for sophisticated navigation in both real and virtual spaces.

5. Brain Adaptation: The London Taxi Driver “Knowledge”

• Hippocampus Growth:
  • Navigators of physical and virtual spaces (like London cabbies or video game players) grow their hippocampus (30:07–30:51).
• Taxi Game: Hannah’s friend, a London cab driver, identifies a street from a random photo, demonstrating human navigation expertise (33:25–35:22).

6. Cultural & Linguistic Influences on Spatial Cognition

• Language Shapes Thought:
  • Dutch vs. Namibian children—experiment showed children using relative (left/right) vs. absolute (north/south) spatial orientation, based on language (39:04–42:01).

Quote:
“To the Dutch children, what mattered was who was to the left and the right of a target toy. But to the Namibian children, what mattered was which way the animals had been facing the entire time.”
— Michael Stevens (41:36)

7. Where Is the Self in the Body? “Ego Center”

• Probing where people locate themselves in their bodies:
  • Experiment with an arrow on a pole shows context impacts if people point at face or chest (46:13–46:17).
  • Eye dominance—most people’s “seat of self” is between and just behind the eyes, but people blind from birth tend to place it farther back (47:36–48:03).

Quote:
“Like if you’re some kind of little rat driving your body around, we think that we are that rat sitting right behind the eyes.”
— Michael Stevens (47:39)

• Cultural & historical notes:
  • Many ancient cultures (Greeks/Egyptians) put the self in the heart/chest, believing the brain was unimportant.
  • Bodily gestures (pointing to chest when referring to self, knocking at face height on doors) might be “anchored” in physical or communicative norms.

Quote:
“So where you think you are in your body isn’t just about your sensory holes. It’s also about your culture and what you know.”
— Hannah Fry (50:55)

8. The Cyclops Effect & How Children See Themselves

• Young children, before age 3, believe vision is centered between their eyes (“Cyclops effect”) and try to look through tubes placed right at the bridge of their nose (53:07–54:02).
• Later, as understanding matures, they use one eye appropriately when looking through narrow objects.

9. Facial Identity vs. Bodily Identity

• When people refer to themselves in conversation, gestures target the chest; in photos, identity becomes the face (59:09–59:33).
• Kinsey Cooperrider’s explanation: chest-point is emphasis without visual distraction, face-pointing is too attention-grabbing in conversation.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Where is the unique seat of yourself? Where are you? Where am I? How do we know any of this stuff? Where am I in my body? Where am I in the universe? Well, that's what we're talking about today.” — Michael Stevens (00:36)

• “Your body almost never lies to you, but when … trapped into a hunk of metal and flying through the sky at crazy altitudes … your body is going to lie to you.” — Hannah Fry (12:25)

• (On spatial cells) “It’s like we didn’t mean for this to happen. But life forms already are prepared to travel through spacetime with all of its curvatures and stretching.” — Michael Stevens (23:15)

• “I call this the proximity paradox. It seems like the closer something is, the harder it is to really look at it and understand it.” — Michael Stevens (61:54)

Important Timestamps

• 00:03: Start of “point to yourself” experiment and main question
• 04:38 – 06:10: Orientation tricks (spitting, bubbles) for survival
• 06:33 – 11:46: Vestibular system, space sickness, “the Garn” and plane graveyard spins
• 12:42 – 16:11: Michael’s vertigo & proprioception overview
• 17:04 – 18:48: Ian Waterman’s “floating head” case
• 19:26 – 25:13: Place cells and grid cells; animal and human studies
• 30:07 – 35:22: The London “Knowledge”—real-world navigational expertise
• 39:04 – 42:01: Language shapes spatial cognition—directional experiment
• 43:59 – 47:36: Where is “yourself” in the body? Ego center studies
• 53:07 – 54:40: The Cyclops effect—how young children perceive their vision
• 59:09 – 59:51: Why we gesture to chest, not face, when talking about ourselves
• 61:54: The “proximity paradox”—we know less about ourselves than distant places

Structure & Flow of the Conversation

• The episode progresses from simple, bodily orientation to the very tricky subject of consciousness and self-location.
• Michael and Hannah use playful banter, real science experiments, pop culture references (e.g., “Minefield” and London cabbies), as well as listener-friendly analogies.
• Key studies and famous cases are referenced throughout, linking hard neuroscience to everyday experience.
• The hosts highlight unsolved mysteries: even as we scientifically map our brains, we remain uncertain about where “the self” resides—leaving listeners with more questions than answers.

Takeaways

• Our ability to orient ourselves relies on a delicate, multimodal interplay of visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive cues—all of which can malfunction in strange environments.
• The human brain possesses specialized map-like neurons (place cells/grid cells), whose organization explains much of our navigation skill but also reveals the brain’s odd flexibility.
• Cultural, linguistic, and historical norms shape where we “feel” we exist—whether in our heads, our hearts, or somewhere in between.
• The paradox: the closer and more familiar a subject (the self), the more elusive and mysterious scientifically it becomes.

“You’re not gonna leave going, ‘oh, that’s where I am.’ You’re gonna leave going, ‘what does where mean? And who am I?’” — Michael Stevens (62:33)

Listener Challenge:
If you have videos of children demonstrating the Cyclops effect, or insights about where you “feel” your self is located, the hosts invite you to join in the experiment and discussion!