Matty Patty...
Yes Papa...
Writing theories?
Yes Papa!
Telling lies
No papa..?
Ehhhhhhhhh...
This taste is the taste of a liar Matty Patty
Hello Internet
Welcome to Film Theory!
Where even
Speedwagon is afraid of today's episode because today we're covering
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Now in case you're not familiar with Jojo
It's a classic shonen in battle series in the vein of Dragon Ball Z and My Hero Academia, except well
It's a bit more bizarre
Which is saying a lot saying a lot since my hero has a guy who shoots tape out of his elbows and Dragon Ball starrs
Gorilla people from space anyway to give you just the smallest taste of what this series is all about
The first main arc starts in the Victorian era where we follow Jonathan Joestar, a rich British martial artist who uses
Rhythmic breathing to channel the energy signature of the Sun into his fists so he can explode punch vampires
Vampires mind you who can flash freeze anything they touch just by dropping their own body temperature
BECAUSE YOU KNOW vampires can do that in this world by part three of the series
It's almost a totally different show, about people using psychic
Projections cold stands to beat the tar out of other psychics sometimes psychic babies
Psychic animals too, BECAUSE IT'S ANIME. On the manga side Jojo is one of the most successful
series in history with OVER A HUNDRED MILLION copies in print, and it's starting to really take off in the U.S.
not only because it's just a really fun off-the-wall show, but because it is a WALKING MEME
*Cue the memes!*
Yes, you saw that scene right it's a man freezing time to drop a steamroller
Onto his opponent, BUT OH NO FRIENDS
THAT'S NOT JUST ANY MAN.
Now for as much as I'd love to analyse how no one is able to deflect the emerald splash, because seriously,
No one has ever been able to do it. NO ONE. Are you sure about that?
Today I have my sights set on a different moment
You see each part of JJBA stars a new cast of characters and today
I want to cover a meme from its most recent anime season
Covering one of the best arcs that the show has seen so far
Golden Wind, where the JoJo story moves away from
Vampires in Victorian England and instead moves to Italy to fight against some mob bosses, to set the stage
We meet Giorno Giovanna, a petty crook who's living in Italy and has hair that looks like a plate of pasta
Specifically manicotti when he accidentally kills a gangster named Leaky Eye Luca, who's leaning on him for some protection money
Our hero ends up over his head riding the trolley later that day
He's confronted by Bruno, a mafia lieutenant in charge of investigating Luca's death, Bruno here has two pretty impressive
Abilities first, he can create zippers on any surface in order to travel through space and tear objects apart
OH YEAH and secondly and more importantly for our purposes today
He has a remarkable sense of taste that might not seem as impressive as interdimensional zippers
But just wait it leads us to one of the show's most
Enduring memes he claims to be able to tell whether or not Giordano is lying simply by licking his sweat
And in that one moment
The internet lost its collective minds
Licking politicians, licking animals, licking cake since we all know the cake is a lie, licking Nintendo's switch cartridges
ANYTHING THAT BRUNO COULD LICK WAS LICKED,
All of it to see who or what was lying to us, and all of that got me thinking
Is Bruno's power possible?
Is it possible to tell whether someone is lying simply by the flavor of their sweat and if so
What does a liar taste like? Strap-in theorists because it's all on today's episode of MatPat's Bizzare Theory!
To answer those questions. We first need to figure out what happens to our bodies when we lie
Lying actually takes a lot more effort than telling the truth.
When you lie, you're not just recalling something that really happened to you
You're remembering that information. You're then concocting a believable alternative to it
And then you're making a conscious effort to sell that you're telling the truth
Concocting tracking and sustaining lies puts a lot of pressure on people and generally speaking that pressure
Results in stress, now when you experience stress your brain releases three hormones, adrenaline
cortisol and norepinephrine, which collectively cause various changes to happen in your body.
Your heartbeat accelerates, your focus increases, your reflexes sharpen
All of it is to help you deal with whatever threat you might be dealing within the moment
And yes, you are also gonna sweat here
But it's not sweat in the same way that you do when it's hot or when you're exerting yourself
That spike of adrenaline
actually activates special sweat glands, your apocrine glands
Which produce a special kind of sweat, a sweat that actually gets you to smell
noticeably worse than your regular sweat,
and so it would only make sense that sweat with a different smell would also come with a different taste.
Right? Well, it's not quite that simple unlike the normal sweat produced by your eccrine glands
Which is made up mostly of water and salt ,this apocrine sweat is a milky looking substance that's made up of proteins
cholesterol and fat, all of which are food for the bacteria on your skin
It's the bacteria on your skin
consuming and digesting that sweat which causes it to smell bad, the sweat itself though is actually
Odorless and if you were to lick it up right when someone started to sweat it out, you wouldn't actually taste anything at all
So now Bruno wouldn't taste anything particular in the sweat produced by Giorno as he's lying,
but he would be able to notice the absence of normal sweats salty flavor.
Of course this scene is also taking place on a balmy Italian summer's day
right after Giorno climbed a whole dang building
So unless those cable cars have AMAZING AIR CONDITIONING
chances are that hormone sweat would be mixed in with a lot of regular old sweat and it'd probably be hard to tell the
difference, but even then that diluted sweat mixture would be slightly less salty and with a good enough
sense of taste Bruno would indeed probably be able to tell the difference
hauling out Giorno correctly as the liar that he is that said there is another problem here
the apocrine glands are mainly concentrated in the armpits and in the
genital region and Jojo for whatever this show is,
is not that sort of anime, so Bruno isn't exactly licking the right spots if you get what I mean
to get himself the best results.
Now there are some apocrine glands that are located on the face,
specifically on your eyelids and the wings of your nostrils,
so some apocrine sweat might have made its way onto Giorno's cheek
and if Bruno really does have super sensitive taste buds, he could theoretically pick up on that.
So well the show may be bizarre, the science at least in this ridiculous scenario.
Actually holds up, you can in fact
Taste a liar, the taste of a liar as it turns out is salty, but not too salty
Just like the perfect french fry. So case closed, myth confirmed
We can all go home now right?
WRONG, because well the sweat the body produces while lying is
different from the sweat produced in response to heat and exercise
It's identical to the sweat produced under literally any kind of stress
So you'd find that same flavor on someone who's running late to an appointment or waiting on
potentially bad news from a doctor or who's worried about an upcoming exam or just pick a random example here
Someone who's confronted with questions about a dead body by a violent mobster, that is going to be stressful
regardless of whether you're the killer or not.
So yeah Bruno's lie-detector test is gonna be extremely vulnerable to false positives
He's going to be wrong a high percentage of the time which seems
like it should be a big deal when he's deciding whether or not to kill you in retribution for your crimes
But false positives happen all the time in real world lie detection too
so Bruno's in good company, in real life we may not be licking people during interrogations to see if they're lying
But we are doing something that's pretty darn similar
You see the polygraph test or lie detector test works on similar properties to Bruno's taste test
Well, they don't measure the composition of sweat
They do measure factors like the amount of sweat, blood pressure, pulse, breathing
all to determine whether or not a subject is aroused when answering the questions
NOT THAT SORT OF AROUSAL, GROW UP
in essence the polygraph test looks for signs of stress in an examinee in order to determine whether they're stressed when answering questions
which in turn could lead
to the conclusion that they're lying
and in order to mitigate the possibility that sources of stress other than lying will mess with the results
They're actually strict procedures that must be followed in administering these sorts of exams
requiring that the exam happened in environments free from distraction and at times when the examinee isn't gonna be feeling
excessive levels of emotion and even then even when all of those factors are at play
still polygraphs according to the most favorable reports are right
Maybe like 85 percent of the time, but don't get too excited
Some say the accuracy is actually a whole lot lower
According to polygraph critic David liken polygraph tests have a
65% chance of actually catching a liar, which is uh, not a great accuracy rate
That is a low D on your report card, the National Research Council
found no evidence of the polygraphs validity and according to the Journal of forensic psychology practice
2/3 of the scientific community with the necessary experience to evaluate polygraph results actually considered the whole thing to be a
glorified pseudoscience. So here we have Bruno licking faces
Once again running his interrogation on a noisy crowded trolley
That doesn't exactly meet the requirements for a sterile distraction-free
testing environment and while some might disagree I would argue that
Giorno suddenly finding a dismembered human eyeball in his hand would qualify as an emotionally charged event
That might prompt some stressful sweating again increasing the chance for a false positive
even more, long story short here Bruno is working with fewer data points and is significantly
biasing his own results with bad testing methodology, the real question
we should be asking here isn't what does a liar taste like
it's more like how many innocent people has Bruno zipped in half as a result of bad?
interrogation techniques and shaky science
SOMEONE DO ME A FAVOUR and drop a steamroller on that guy's head
BUT HEY that's just a theory. A FILM THEORY