Today's Wisdom - The Tritone, Ice Baths and the Flood

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. Thanks to everyone who is sharing and supporting the newsletter. We've been listening, and some of the features you've asked for most are almost ready to go live. We're also giving our referral program a major overhaul, with better rewards for sharing A Little Wiser with the people in your life! Today's wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

There is a musical sound so unsettling that legend claims the medieval Church banned it outright and threatened to excommunicate any musician who dared play it. Known in Latin as diabolus in musica, "the devil in music," and today more commonly as the tritone, it is the interval spanning exactly three whole tones, such as the distance from F to B on a piano. You already know how it sounds even if you have never heard its name. It is the jarring, ominous clash that opens the theme to The Simpsons' Halloween specials and the shrieking dissonance behind Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Pleasant, consonant intervals are built on simple ratios between the frequencies of two notes, which the brain reads as stable and restful. The tritone is built on a complex ratio, so the sound waves refuse to settle into any tidy pattern. This leaves the brain with a nagging sense of tension that begs to be resolved.

The dramatic tale of a Church ban is, sadly, mostly a myth. The tritone certainly earned its dark reputation, yet the phrase diabolus in musica does not appear in any surviving document until the 18th century, hundreds of years after the medieval period. More tellingly, the interval was sung quite openly in sacred music of the era, including the choral works of the celebrated 13th-century composer Pérotin. Medieval musicians did tend to avoid the tritone as it was difficult to sing accurately and clashed with the ordered harmony that church music prized. The likeliest origin of the whole legend is a teaching phrase, "mi against fa is the devil in music." This was a colorful way of warning student composers away from an ugly-sounding combination.

The interval's true golden age came once composers stopped fearing it and started weaponizing it. Romantic composers reached for the tritone to conjure dread, most famously Camille Saint-Saëns, who used it to open his ghoulish Danse Macabre. Its most influential moment arrived in 1970, when the British band Black Sabbath opened their very first album with a doom-laden riff built on the interval. Guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler had stumbled onto the sound partly through Gustav Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War," and in doing so they wrote the genetic code for heavy metal, a genre that has treasured the "forbidden" sound ever since. What the medieval mind heard as an unsingable nuisance, and later ages dressed up as satanic, turned out to be one of the most powerful tools in music for creating unease. The same three tones that supposedly summoned the devil now sell horror films, power guitar solos, and make a cartoon family's Halloween feel spooky.

Few recovery rituals have gone as thoroughly mainstream as the ice bath, championed by everyone from elite footballers to podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman. Plunging into cold water causes blood vessels to constrict sharply, which reduces blood flow to tired muscles and tamps down the inflammation and swelling that follow hard exercise. The result, backed by a good body of research, is a genuine reduction in muscle soreness and a feeling of freshness in the 24 hours after a punishing session. Cold immersion before exercise in extreme heat can also lower core body temperature enough to improve endurance performance.

The twist, and it is a significant one, is that the very mechanism making ice baths good for recovery may make them bad for building muscle. A landmark 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis, pooling eight studies of resistance training programs lasting several weeks, concluded that cold water immersion taken immediately after lifting weights measurably blunts muscle growth. When you train, your body mounts an inflammatory response, and that inflammation is the very signal that tells muscles to repair and grow bigger and stronger. By dampening inflammation and reducing blood flow, the ice bath quiets the anabolic signaling and muscle protein synthesis that drive those gains. Crucially, this does not erase your progress. The people who took cold plunges still gained muscle, just less of it than those who skipped the ice, and timing appears to be everything, since the harm shows up almost entirely when the plunge comes within fifteen minutes of the final rep.

This leaves a practical trade-off that depends entirely on your goal. If you are chasing maximum size and strength, the evidence now points clearly toward avoiding cold immersion straight after lifting. If you are an athlete deep in a competitive season who needs to recover fast and manage fatigue, the short-term boost may be well worth a small dent in long-term muscle building. There are also real safety considerations, since the cold shock places sudden stress on the heart, and anyone with cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure, or conditions like Raynaud's should seek medical advice before taking the plunge. The fashionable ice bath, it turns out, is neither miracle nor menace, but a precise tool that helps or hinders depending entirely on what you are asking your body to do.

The story is one of the most familiar in Western culture. A wrathful God, disgusted by human wickedness, sends a world-drowning flood, sparing one righteous man who builds a great boat to carry his family and the animals to safety. What most people do not realize is that the tale of Noah was old long before the Bible was written, and that a strikingly similar flood appears in the myths of nearly every ancient civilization on Earth. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, carved into clay tablets around 2100 BCE and predating the Genesis account by well over a thousand years, tells of a man named Utnapishtim who is warned by a god to build a vast ship. The parallels are so exact that when the Gilgamesh flood tablet was first translated in 1872, it caused a sensation. Beyond Mesopotamia, the same essential story surfaces in Hindu scripture, in the Greek myth of Deucalion, and among peoples as far-flung as the Hopi and the Inca of the Americas.

The obvious question is why. One answer, unromantic but plausible, is that catastrophic floods were simply a universal human experience, since early civilizations clustered along great rivers and coastlines, and a devastating local flood would feel to its survivors like the end of the entire world. A far more tantalizing idea emerged in the late 1990s, when the Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed that a single real event might have seeded them all. Their Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis argued that around 5600 BCE, as the last Ice Age melted and global seas rose, the swelling Mediterranean burst through the natural dam at the Bosporus Strait and thundered into the basin below with more than two hundred times the force of Niagara Falls. The saltwater flood raised its surface by as much as six inches a day, swallowing tens of thousands of square miles of inhabited land within a year and scattering traumatized survivors across the ancient world.

It is a spellbinding theory, and it was embraced eagerly by the public, but the science has grown more skeptical over time. Later teams that drilled into the seabed found evidence of a gentler transition, with the Black Sea likely already connected to the Mediterranean before 5600 BCE and turning salty gradually rather than in one violent surge. Even if a real flood did reshape the Black Sea, the timing sits awkwardly, since the oldest written flood stories come from Mesopotamia, hundreds of miles to the south. The likeliest truth is a blend of the two explanations. There was probably no single great flood that every culture remembers, but rather a deep and recurring human trauma, the drowning of homes and fields by water, that different peoples independently wove into myth.

Enjoyed today’s edition?

If you found it valuable, the single best thing you can do is share it with one person who would enjoy it. Every referral helps us grow and keeps the lessons coming.

— Share A Little Wiser —

Until next time — stay curious.
The A Little Wiser Team