Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know
Speaker 1: from House stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryant is
Speaker 1: looking deeply into the eyes of Nicola Tesla right now.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I never noticed that he literally is
Speaker 1: staring at me the whole time. You know, I once
Speaker 1: wrote an article for how stuff Works dot Com about
Speaker 1: why the eyes and some paintings follow you. Oh really, Yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: why didn't you tell me about that? I don't know.
Speaker 1: We've never a podcast about it because it would literally
Speaker 1: be like a five minute podcast. Well, maybe we can
Speaker 1: bring it up, but yeah, your podcast. Maybe it's worth reading, though.
Speaker 1: I think if you typed in eyes and painting or
Speaker 1: something like that in the search bar how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com, it would bring it up. I figured it
Speaker 1: was because the eyes were cut out and there was
Speaker 1: a psychopathic killer behind. It's a painting, that's to the
Speaker 1: second paget. Also, while we're just doing pluggyness, right, why
Speaker 1: don't you follow us on Twitter? It's a it's a
Speaker 1: party over there, right. Our handle sometimes not what you
Speaker 1: think right off the top of your head. But it
Speaker 1: makes sense when you hear it s Y s K podcast, right,
Speaker 1: And there's no like We're not like um Justin Bieber
Speaker 1: or Lady Gaga. We don't say stupid stuff about being backstage.
Speaker 1: We're actually a cool news aggregator, right, okay? Uh? And
Speaker 1: then also we're on Facebook. We have a stuff you
Speaker 1: should know Facebook page, Chuck and Chuck. You kill it
Speaker 1: on that interacting with people coming out, shaking hands in
Speaker 1: your robe and you know, with a little shrimp in
Speaker 1: your mouth from being in the green room. You know, Hey,
Speaker 1: how's it going, good to meet you? Thanks for coming out.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine any were disgusting any coming at someone
Speaker 1: with a robe and shrimp in my well. It happens
Speaker 1: every day on Facebook, right, Um. And then I guess
Speaker 1: now are you ready for the intro? Yes? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: want I want you to go back with me to
Speaker 1: uh alright, freshman in college. Baby, I'm a freshman in
Speaker 1: high school. And um, I am in my room in
Speaker 1: uh Kennesaw, Georgia, in my parents house, and it's nighttime
Speaker 1: and I'm reading I don't remember what I'm reading, but
Speaker 1: I'm like sitting on my bed reading. I'm actually laying
Speaker 1: with my elbows up on my bed reading right. Um,
Speaker 1: And I look over and notice that my closet door
Speaker 1: is cracked slightly. This is abnormal. Usually my closet door
Speaker 1: is shut tightly. Still. Uh yeah, even still, even still
Speaker 1: to this day, I don't see any reason to leave
Speaker 1: it open. It's funny how this little thing stick around.
Speaker 1: So I remember making this little comment to myself, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's weird. It's probably somebody in there, right,
Speaker 1: But I go back to reading, and uh, I get this,
Speaker 1: this annoying sensation. That's like getting my attention out of
Speaker 1: the corner of my eye. And I look over and
Speaker 1: now the door is correct by about three times more
Speaker 1: than it was before. Well, I have tremendous amounts of sense.
Speaker 1: So I throw my book down and start running towards
Speaker 1: the door of my room. Right as I get to
Speaker 1: my to the handle, my hands on the door knob
Speaker 1: and starting to turn it, the closet door is thrown open.
Speaker 1: And my dad, because I'm going I'm not kidding, this
Speaker 1: is a true story. I went from a standing position
Speaker 1: with my hand on the door knob to completely flat
Speaker 1: on my back and like maybe a half of a motion.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even one full motion, right, I was on
Speaker 1: my back, screaming, staring at my dad, screaming in terror,
Speaker 1: looking at him like you were looking at Nikola Tesla.
Speaker 1: I see that it's my dad, but I'm so afraid
Speaker 1: that I can't stop screaming. My mom has time to
Speaker 1: make it up the stairs into my room and start
Speaker 1: yelling at my dad, asking what did you do to Josh?
Speaker 1: And I'm sitting there looking at them having this argument,
Speaker 1: still screaming, going back and forth. Character. He is a character.
Speaker 1: He looked so sad and so remorseful, realized. But I
Speaker 1: I don't think I was wrong in in in noticing
Speaker 1: a little glimmer of disappointment in his eye, like what
Speaker 1: happened to you? Kid? Did you get to be such
Speaker 1: a panny waist? So there is my fear story, Chuck,
Speaker 1: that's my great fear story. We used to antagonize Eddie,
Speaker 1: my friend Eddie in college. He was his roommates to
Speaker 1: Eddy for years and we scare him all the time,
Speaker 1: so awful, like coming home from the movie what was
Speaker 1: the one with the author the James con Oh Misery misery,
Speaker 1: came home from misery and like mate Bouten, literally unsto
Speaker 1: screwed lightbulbs all over the apartment like hid in closets.
Speaker 1: Eddie was smart enough to turn on the television for
Speaker 1: light that we didn't count on that next time we
Speaker 1: unplug the TV. It's tough to give him past that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was always fun and he got to kick out
Speaker 1: of it too, you could tell, which we'll get too later.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're gonna get to a lot in this one. Right,
Speaker 1: This is how fear works. This is gonna be a
Speaker 1: good one. I think. I think it already is. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: thanks to your story. So, Chuck, I think we should
Speaker 1: start out by basically defining fear. Webster's Dictionary defines fear
Speaker 1: as such river in high school, and that was just
Speaker 1: the way to start your You thought you were so smart. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: it defines it. It doesn't, but we define it as
Speaker 1: a chain reaction in the brain starts with a stimuli
Speaker 1: can be many different things, and it ends up with
Speaker 1: the fight or flight response in the end, exactly which
Speaker 1: we know that you know about the fireflight response. Having
Speaker 1: listened to this podcast faithfully since two thousand eight, yes, right. Um,
Speaker 1: So we're not gonna go into too much detail about
Speaker 1: the fireflight response because you already know this, but suffice
Speaker 1: to say that fear is an autonomic response, which so
Speaker 1: the autonomic nervous system. We've never mentioned this before. It's
Speaker 1: really nervous. It is the nervous system that responds to stress,
Speaker 1: and it's made up of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic
Speaker 1: nervous systems. I don't think we have talked about that happened, no,
Speaker 1: but it's like the umbrella nervous system that's like whoa,
Speaker 1: okay and then calm down right right, And autonomic I
Speaker 1: mean it almost means automatic in this case because it's
Speaker 1: just triggered. We don't plan it. That just happens. That
Speaker 1: pointer Sister's song could have been called autonomic. It's so interchangeable,
Speaker 1: you know. Um so, yeah, well, there's not a lot
Speaker 1: we can do, and we don't necessarily know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Like um, analysis of the situation isn't necessarily a part
Speaker 1: of being afraid. It's more like get out of there, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll find yeah, we'll find that there's other ways that
Speaker 1: that can happen right, coming soon as in a few minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's let's just go over what parts of the
Speaker 1: brain are responsible for fear, right, Yeah, and this will
Speaker 1: come up in in a in a minute here when
Speaker 1: we describe how the paths go, there's just ended it.
Speaker 1: But the thalamus um picks up on things that you
Speaker 1: hear and see and smell um and in the way
Speaker 1: of sensory data. Uh, sensory cortex interprets this. You got.
Speaker 1: The hippocampus its stores the sea horse. Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's stores and receives conscious memories and starts to establish
Speaker 1: like a context for what's going on. In this case,
Speaker 1: fear amygdala plays a big part. It decodes the emotions
Speaker 1: and determines the threat and stores old fear memories, fear
Speaker 1: memories like if if something really bad happens to you
Speaker 1: and you have to create like a real fear memory.
Speaker 1: The amygdalas where that sits, okay, And then finally the
Speaker 1: hypothalamus is where it always ends up no matter which
Speaker 1: path it takes. People talk about those paths. The hypothalamus
Speaker 1: is the on off switch for the fight or flight response.
Speaker 1: It makes it's go time, and the only part of
Speaker 1: your brain that can tell the hypothalamus whether it's go
Speaker 1: time or whether go time is past. Is the right
Speaker 1: It's the gate keeper to the autonomic nervous system. I'm
Speaker 1: still just as thrilled about the brain as I was
Speaker 1: when we first started studying this stuff. I know, I
Speaker 1: think I'm more thrills. Yeah, so, Chuck, Josh. There is
Speaker 1: a guy named Joseph Ledo. Have you heard of him?
Speaker 1: He is a nervoscientist at n y U. And he
Speaker 1: came up with two categories for our fear response. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they happened simultaneously. But there is what he's dubbed
Speaker 1: a low road and a high road. And like I said,
Speaker 1: both of them happened at the same time. Um. But
Speaker 1: the low road is basically like the quick, nasty, dirty
Speaker 1: response to fear, right, like, holy crap. Right, So um,
Speaker 1: let's say there's a pretty good example in this article
Speaker 1: by Julia Layton. Yeah, actually, both of the ones who
Speaker 1: are recording today or Julia Layne's Yeah, way to go Layton,
Speaker 1: She's good. Um. So, uh, let's say that you're sitting
Speaker 1: at home, right and your underwear with a beer perched
Speaker 1: on your stomach, and you're just watching some wrestling have
Speaker 1: you been watching me have webcams set up in your house?
Speaker 1: You do a lot of stuff because I encourage you
Speaker 1: too without you know it. Okay, um uh, So you're
Speaker 1: sitting at home as such, and um, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: your door just starts rattling, right, yeah, Okay, there's something
Speaker 1: that's going to happen called the low road for your response,
Speaker 1: and that is the sound and the sight of your
Speaker 1: door rattling is the century data that suddenly goes into
Speaker 1: what the thalamus, which sorts it and says, hey, um, amygdala,
Speaker 1: I need your help. It's like forwarding the email. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like there is a potential threat here and we need
Speaker 1: to respond. And the amigellas says, you know what, you're right, thalamus,
Speaker 1: I'm going to contact the hypocampus now, the hypothalamus right
Speaker 1: and and basically get the fear fight or flight response going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like just in case, let's go ahead and turn
Speaker 1: it on. Right. So you are now your beer is
Speaker 1: spilled all over the floor because you left up out
Speaker 1: of your your easy chair. Okay. At the same time
Speaker 1: this is going on, um, the high road response is
Speaker 1: taking place, thankfully. Yes, So the high road responses, uh
Speaker 1: it takes longer, but it gives you a much more
Speaker 1: thoughtful analysis of what's going on. There's a couple of
Speaker 1: extra stops along the way. Uh, that leads to reason
Speaker 1: and context and that kind of thing. So this time
Speaker 1: it goes to the century cortex first, and the century
Speaker 1: cortex says, you know, what, this has happened before or no,
Speaker 1: it's it says like there's more than one interpretation. Has
Speaker 1: it happened before? And the hippocampus says, you know, and
Speaker 1: remember that time in that big windstorm the tree fell
Speaker 1: outside and he thought of the boogeman was coming to
Speaker 1: get you, So remember that, right, Like, the hippocampus goes
Speaker 1: and gets your memories to to analyze them for context.
Speaker 1: Compared to this, the sensory cortex is saying, like, what
Speaker 1: else is going on here right there? At exactly? Is
Speaker 1: their patio furniture moving? Are their trees scraping on the window?
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden you're like, okay, it is
Speaker 1: wind right, that's right. But let's say that your um,
Speaker 1: your your your brain, your sensory cortex said, um, no,
Speaker 1: what I hear is a guy shouting like I'm coming
Speaker 1: in right and your hippocampus is like, well, last time
Speaker 1: that happened, like guy came in a ski mask and
Speaker 1: I was hog type for three days before anybody around me. Right,
Speaker 1: it was not the wind. So that leap up out
Speaker 1: of the easy chair is your low road response and
Speaker 1: standing there while your brain is interpreting the rest of
Speaker 1: the data and then coming to the conclusion that yeah,
Speaker 1: there's somebody coming through the door and then running out
Speaker 1: your back door. That's the result of the high road response. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or if you determine or inside the brain that hey,
Speaker 1: this is just a windstorm, then it sends the message
Speaker 1: to the amygdala saying, hey, go tell the hypothalamus just
Speaker 1: shut down the whole system. Not the whole system, because
Speaker 1: you'd be dead, but shut down the fight or flight response.
Speaker 1: It's just trees. And Emily is on the ceiling still
Speaker 1: at this point because her high road is probably longer
Speaker 1: than mine and the low road very very quick. Yes,
Speaker 1: we heard gun shots one time in l A and
Speaker 1: Emily literally it was like on the floor. I turned around,
Speaker 1: like did you hear that? And she was on the
Speaker 1: ground like in prone position. Wow. But you know I
Speaker 1: grew up rough tumble, so I heard gun shots a
Speaker 1: lot more than she did. Did you have a hard
Speaker 1: scrapple youth, I did. I don't even know that, not
Speaker 1: like the the streets of acron Rare, Emily grew the
Speaker 1: tender streets of acron Ohio. Yeah, they were very tender,
Speaker 1: all right, Josh. So you pointed out, which is very important,
Speaker 1: that both of these things are happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: And that is why, even if you realize very quickly
Speaker 1: that there is no imminent danger, you're still going me
Speaker 1: coming down from that fight or flight response for a
Speaker 1: little bit, because your low road has also already been triggered, right,
Speaker 1: and it all ends on hypothal in the hypothalmus either way. Yes,
Speaker 1: are we done? I guess? So that was really rapid, man.
Speaker 1: Now we're not done, because we gotta talk about emotions,
Speaker 1: right and why we get scared. Well, yeah, there's very
Speaker 1: little um argument about what emotions are for, and basically
Speaker 1: they are motivators, right, yep, they are survival based motivators. Specifically, um,
Speaker 1: the basic ones there's uh, let's see, anger, fear, surprised discussed, joy,
Speaker 1: and sadness. Those are the six basic emotions that an
Speaker 1: anthropologist named Paul Ekman identified in the nineteen seventies. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you see that's sick. Um, and uh, you know we're
Speaker 1: talking about fear right now, but you could make the
Speaker 1: this is the this is the case for all of
Speaker 1: at least those basic, if not all, the emotions that
Speaker 1: a human can experience. Is that their motivators. They're saying
Speaker 1: there's something in going on with you, specifically right now
Speaker 1: in your environment or in your life, and a kind
Speaker 1: of a medicine or both. Right yeah, Um, with fear,
Speaker 1: it's normally something's in your environment. Yeah, and it's clearly
Speaker 1: a motivator to survive. Right. So um, let's say that, Um,
Speaker 1: you're you're a caveman. Okay, So I'm back on the
Speaker 1: couch with my bigger and um, you're sitting there, Uh
Speaker 1: you see a snake. You just don't don't have a
Speaker 1: very good feeling about it, so you don't go up
Speaker 1: and touch it. But your friend Erg sitting next to you,
Speaker 1: is like, well what is this? And Erg gets bit
Speaker 1: and dies a horrible nasty death right in front of
Speaker 1: your eyes. What happened to tuktok? Know you're tuktok Okay,
Speaker 1: so um, you tuktok have just formed possibly the fear memory, uh,
Speaker 1: in response to snakes. You are doing a very crude
Speaker 1: interpretation of natural selection and evolution. You are going to
Speaker 1: be able to go mate, and mayhaps that fear memory
Speaker 1: will somehow epigenetically be passed on to your offspring and
Speaker 1: then it's a trait eventually. Yes, So, um, fear is
Speaker 1: a survival based motivator, right, Yeah, And Caveman is an
Speaker 1: apt description because if you feared the right things back
Speaker 1: in the day, like snakes and tigers and lightning, then
Speaker 1: you had a good chance of surviving and procreating, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you had a stronger, uh, smarter,
Speaker 1: wiser population exactly. But all those is going on, you know,
Speaker 1: long long, long ago, and a lot of people argue
Speaker 1: long before we were humans, but you know, back when
Speaker 1: we were still prey to snakes like primates, that's still
Speaker 1: stuck around and that's probably where they first started. But um,
Speaker 1: we didn't have any idea that this was evolution at work.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't until like the late nineteenth century that
Speaker 1: Darwin really kind of got the attention of the world
Speaker 1: and said, hey, these are inherent traits that are passed
Speaker 1: down like fear is not something that's necessarily learned. It's
Speaker 1: something we have instinctively. And he conducted this pretty cool
Speaker 1: little experiment that he wrote about in um his book
Speaker 1: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which
Speaker 1: is published in eighteen seventy two, And he went to
Speaker 1: the zoo right well, yeah, he was um specifically there.
Speaker 1: The debate at the time was about the face of
Speaker 1: fear the Edward monk, like, holy crap, face that everyone
Speaker 1: gets when they're scared. You took it as being scared.
Speaker 1: I thought that was a scream of joy, the face
Speaker 1: of fear, Yeah, our monk. Oh really, I thought he
Speaker 1: was like I just got the best deal on this muffler.
Speaker 1: It looked more to me like home alone. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that was joy. Though at the time he
Speaker 1: was glad his parents were gone. Right, No, no no, he was.
Speaker 1: He couldn't believe it. That was I think surprised, and
Speaker 1: then later joy and then later sadness. Yeah, when he
Speaker 1: learned what we all know eventually, the family is important,
Speaker 1: and don't fear the creepy old man in your neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Actually you probably should, probably should. I think Chris Colemus
Speaker 1: did a great disservice to children by by making that
Speaker 1: a moral Alright, So yeah, I always interpreted monks because
Speaker 1: it was called the scream as as terror, regardless that
Speaker 1: face we all make when we're scared, you know, out
Speaker 1: of our pants. Uh. He went and Darwin went and
Speaker 1: stood in front of a clear uh PLEXI I guess
Speaker 1: it was quite glass at the time, I would think
Speaker 1: it was, and had a puff adder jump, you know,
Speaker 1: leaped towards his face. Even though he knew he was protected,
Speaker 1: he still reacted with that fear face and jumped back.
Speaker 1: And he said basically that, uh, my will and reason
Speaker 1: were powerless against the imagination of danger, even though he's
Speaker 1: never experienced it. So like I've never been bitten by
Speaker 1: a snake, but or actually they said that people that
Speaker 1: have never even Yeah, So he came to this conclusion
Speaker 1: that that fear and you know, likely all of our
Speaker 1: basic emotions are very much passed down through the generations, right,
Speaker 1: And uh, he came to that conclusion because he couldn't
Speaker 1: control himself when the snake, which you'd never been bitten by,
Speaker 1: um lunged at the glass which was safely in between them.
Speaker 1: He still couldn't control it. So he concluded, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot more going onto this than you know.
Speaker 1: This is something I've learned because why would I be
Speaker 1: afraid of a snake? And I know rationally that there's
Speaker 1: glass there, So that this stuff is so ancient. Are
Speaker 1: modern trappings of civilization e g. A glass and a
Speaker 1: zoo can't subdue it? Yeah? Yeah, the same at baseball
Speaker 1: games when Pete they fouled the ball back and they know,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a screen right in front of you,
Speaker 1: and you will never get hit by a baseball, but
Speaker 1: people still jump back and that bay maybe more that
Speaker 1: may be less fear and more just an autonomic reaction
Speaker 1: to something coming at you. That was Darwin's point. Really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. Yeah, because if we didn't experience fear,
Speaker 1: like a baseball coming out would be like and then boom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: same same with anything that we we moved to get
Speaker 1: away from. You always feel like a goober too at
Speaker 1: the game when that happens. Well, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: higher um emotion that supposedly are specific to humans and
Speaker 1: a couple of other higher primates, which is embarrassment that
Speaker 1: only exists in relation to other people. Right, I don't
Speaker 1: think I said the word goober in like a decade.
Speaker 1: It's a good one, just flew out of my mouth.
Speaker 1: I love goober's. I've said, can I have another goober?
Speaker 1: But what was that? The peanut and chopped Yeah? Um,
Speaker 1: so Chuck Darwin basically said, I'm right, you're wrong, you're idiots.
Speaker 1: Um and uh. Fear is now seen as a a
Speaker 1: basic emotional response, that's an inherited one. Yeah. And it's
Speaker 1: the same as it was in the caveman days, except
Speaker 1: it's not lines and tigers now it's people breaking into
Speaker 1: your house, home invasion, terrorist attack. Well put um. And
Speaker 1: then there's another point that Darwin made. I don't know
Speaker 1: if he hammered at home, but um, we can anticipate things, right,
Speaker 1: Like we don't have to see a snake by erg
Speaker 1: to be afraid of a specific snake, right or have
Speaker 1: it experienced right or um? And it doesn't go away
Speaker 1: with each snake, like each new snake doesn't necessarily not
Speaker 1: represent a new threat. Snakes in general do right. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's because we can anticipate things right. That's another
Speaker 1: survival mode that um, that fear triggers or that I
Speaker 1: guess the centered around fear. We can anticipate being afraid,
Speaker 1: and apparently studies have shown that we can become physiologically
Speaker 1: and psychologically just does afraid when we anticipate being afraid
Speaker 1: of something, then when we're actually confronted with that thing
Speaker 1: we're afraid of. Yeah, well, which is like a fear
Speaker 1: of flying would be a perfect example of that, Yes,
Speaker 1: it would. You can be just as scared, probably as
Speaker 1: if you have actually been in a plane crash, if
Speaker 1: you have a really really intense phobia flying, dude, I
Speaker 1: can tell you that even if you've ever been on
Speaker 1: a even a remotely scary flight, you can very much
Speaker 1: be afraid anticipatoryally of a plane crash. It's very scary.
Speaker 1: You've gotten pretty good though, right, dude. I am great.
Speaker 1: I slept through the last takeoff I was on. Really
Speaker 1: I could not believe it. You mean, was like, who
Speaker 1: are you checking your bolts? Yeah? Yeah, and nothing. I
Speaker 1: was on no scotch, no pills, no nothing. You weren't
Speaker 1: on scotch, no scotch. Well that's called fear extinction, and
Speaker 1: we'll get to that. Yeah, more foreshadowing other precursor. That
Speaker 1: was very anticipatory. So speaking of conditioning, which we were not.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about a very cruel experiment in the night
Speaker 1: twenties by Mr John Watson Little Albert. Little Albert was
Speaker 1: an eleven month old baby. I think they call Albert
Speaker 1: a toddler. They call him an infant, and that's a
Speaker 1: baby starting to toddle, just starting the title, So a
Speaker 1: little Albert. They wanted to teach Albert fear of white rats.
Speaker 1: The problem was, I guess it wouldn't have problem is
Speaker 1: probably pretty good for the sake of the experiment, was
Speaker 1: that he loved white rats, and when the white rats
Speaker 1: would come around, little Albert would even reach for them,
Speaker 1: and guests try to pet them, and until they started
Speaker 1: playing this loud booming noise. No you know what they did.
Speaker 1: They took a claw hammer and a piece of metal
Speaker 1: and burned it right behind his head every time he
Speaker 1: went to go. That was the loud booming noise. So uh,
Speaker 1: it didn't take long before Albert was crying and moving
Speaker 1: away from the white rats as expected. And not just
Speaker 1: white rats, chuck rabbits, really for coats, cotton balls. They
Speaker 1: showed that fear isn't just think that we in hear it.
Speaker 1: It can be conditioned, and little Albert became sick fried Fishbocker.
Speaker 1: Here's the worst part. You ready for it. That's not true,
Speaker 1: you're ready. Well, no one knows who little Albert is. Well,
Speaker 1: he wasn't sick freed Fishbocker. Well you so, John Watson
Speaker 1: UM was planning on reversing this fear conditioning, but was
Speaker 1: caught having an affair with an assistant and was fired
Speaker 1: before he could so exactly, and Um Watson went on
Speaker 1: to UM get into the advertising game, and uh it
Speaker 1: was successful and actually married I think the lady he
Speaker 1: was having an affair with UM, but burned all of
Speaker 1: his notes and I think before he died in so
Speaker 1: no one to this day has any idea who what
Speaker 1: when was this the nineteen twenties, so little Albert would
Speaker 1: be old or dead, would be like probably dead, probably
Speaker 1: died of fright at a young age. And that horrible.
Speaker 1: That was pretty horrible. But out of this horrible old
Speaker 1: time experiment, which if you're interested, I like top five
Speaker 1: horrific psychological experiments for the blogs, this is one of them. Um.
Speaker 1: The what came out of it was an understanding that
Speaker 1: fear is conditioned, right, and if you can condition somebody.
Speaker 1: If you can teach somebody to fear, you can teach
Speaker 1: people to unfear. Yeah. Right, But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: chuck more precursors. I think we should, um, I think
Speaker 1: we should talk about some of the most common fears. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that phobia is there are only three
Speaker 1: main types, and I guess it's sort of a loose
Speaker 1: A lot of them fall under these umbrellas, So that
Speaker 1: must be the deal. Because a gooraphobia fear of places
Speaker 1: where escape might not be be easy or help may
Speaker 1: not be available. Oh, that's like a fear of big
Speaker 1: open places. Yeah, but I think in a broader sense
Speaker 1: it's just fear of of I may not be able
Speaker 1: to get help in case I need it. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the characteristics of agoraphobia in some cases is
Speaker 1: like being afraid. You're like if you're out on the beach,
Speaker 1: being afraid you won't have anything to grab onto and
Speaker 1: just flying off the earth. Really yeah, yeah, like you
Speaker 1: can't go into big open spaces. It's like the opposite
Speaker 1: of claustrophobia. Joan Cusack on that show that awesome Showtime
Speaker 1: show has a goora phobia. You can't lead the house.
Speaker 1: And it's like really kind of heartbreaking, maybe because it's
Speaker 1: Joan Cusack, you know, and you have like you want
Speaker 1: good things for her, you want good things for the
Speaker 1: whole Cusack family. Yeah, that's true. Uh. Social phobias obviously
Speaker 1: have anything to do with people. And then specific phobias
Speaker 1: is the third category, which is a bit of a
Speaker 1: cop out because that's like everything else that you're afraid of,
Speaker 1: including you're ready, phobophobia, fear a phobias, fear of fear,
Speaker 1: fear of fear, that's everybody. No, this is like debilitating
Speaker 1: phobia that you don't like that you're afraid of becoming
Speaker 1: afraid at some point. So what do you just set
Speaker 1: your life up very safely, like don't watch horror movies,
Speaker 1: don't Okay, well should we read this gallop pole? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find a more recent one. No, this
Speaker 1: is probably fairly accurate. Still though with two thousand five
Speaker 1: and sort of sad they pulled teenagers in the United
Speaker 1: States and their top ten things they were afraid of
Speaker 1: terrorist attacks was number one. I wonder if that's still
Speaker 1: the case. I bet it's not. Maybe Spider's death failure,
Speaker 1: war heights, crime, being alone in the future, and nuclear war.
Speaker 1: And I made my own top five as a teenager,
Speaker 1: as a Baptist teenager, like back then, you did, No,
Speaker 1: I did it, but this is what little Chuck was
Speaker 1: afraid of. And this isn't a joke. In order, sex Satan,
Speaker 1: alcohol and drugs. Sex in Satan was my top five
Speaker 1: And honestly, I even took notes and scribbled things out,
Speaker 1: and that was about as accurate as I could get it. Huh.
Speaker 1: And you overcame the first one with the second one
Speaker 1: with the aid of the third one, but they popped
Speaker 1: back in at four and five. Yeah, when you sobered up, Um,
Speaker 1: so common fears, Josh industry, What did you say, dentistry
Speaker 1: being or not? I thought that's what it's not becoming
Speaker 1: a dentist, but going to the dentist flying Speaking in
Speaker 1: public heights is a huge one. Yeah, we've gotten better
Speaker 1: at the speaking in public thing, but we still get
Speaker 1: very I still get terrified. Yeah, but we'll ever be
Speaker 1: okay with that. No, not like super like Tony Robbins,
Speaker 1: free and easy, because I imagine he's a cool customer
Speaker 1: before he goes on stage. He's not throwing up. Although
Speaker 1: you know, he might take beta blockers. Those are for
Speaker 1: stage right now, Is that right? Yeah, it's one of
Speaker 1: the you know how every drug on the planet says, well,
Speaker 1: we've also discovered it helps with this. So beta blockers
Speaker 1: evidently a lot of musicians use it. Well, we should
Speaker 1: start doing beta blockers. Okay, Chuck. We were just talking
Speaker 1: about universal fears, or what what a lot of people
Speaker 1: think are universal fears, and there's some behind um, there's
Speaker 1: some ideas behind universal fears, like snakes, spiders, that that
Speaker 1: they are incredibly ancient, that are our fear of them
Speaker 1: is probably pre human back when we were chimps who
Speaker 1: were getting eaten by snakes, right, or who interacted with
Speaker 1: spiders on a regular basis, and that's why we can
Speaker 1: fear them without ever having had a bad experience with one,
Speaker 1: or humans in the case of rats, because rats carried
Speaker 1: disease that killed large populations of people. They think that's
Speaker 1: why we're scared of rats today. That one is a
Speaker 1: little hinky to me, because we've only been aware of
Speaker 1: germ theory since like the nineteenth century. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't really buy that. No. I think maybe rats, like
Speaker 1: too many rats, like chew the eyeballs out of like
Speaker 1: a sleeping friend. That's why I think we're afraid of rats,
Speaker 1: not disease. I've never seen that happen in a movie. Um, really,
Speaker 1: the balls out of a sleeping friend. No, I'm saying
Speaker 1: like in real life and like life. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: saying years and years ago. Okay, do you understand? Really? No,
Speaker 1: I think I get it now. I think like way
Speaker 1: back in the day, back when we were living in
Speaker 1: caves or terrible shelter, would see the rats of the
Speaker 1: eyeballs out of well, out of erg while he was sleeping,
Speaker 1: and Tuck Tuck was like, whoa, I need to steer
Speaker 1: clear of those rats. Okay. But there are some that
Speaker 1: are not necessarily universal, that are actually culturally bound, right
Speaker 1: or at least regionally bound, like um. A good example
Speaker 1: in this article is, if you live on the coast,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to have a greater fear of hurricanes
Speaker 1: than somebody who lives in the Midwest, who's probably gonna
Speaker 1: have a greater fear of tornadoes, especially lately, for goodness sake, Yes, God,
Speaker 1: what is going on? It's tornadoes, man. Um. And then
Speaker 1: there's some that are like you literally have to live
Speaker 1: in this particular society to experience this fear kind of
Speaker 1: not necessarily because I sometimes experienced this fear. Um, there's
Speaker 1: one in Japan called taijien kiofusho kyofusio, right, which is
Speaker 1: basically a cult cultural bound Japanese fear of inadvertently um irritating,
Speaker 1: offending or offending somebody by being overly respectful or polite. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so not only are you afraid of, you know, offending
Speaker 1: somebody by being disrespectful or not polite enough, there's a
Speaker 1: threshold where you could be overly polite and an offensive one,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a fear of reaching that point. Right,
Speaker 1: Or if you're the president, you might now have a
Speaker 1: fear of giving a toast in England incorrectly, I have
Speaker 1: a fear of seeing that again. That was mortifying, It
Speaker 1: was it was so uncomfortable to watch. If you don't
Speaker 1: know that. The President Obama recently went to England for
Speaker 1: a state visit and apparently had a gaff or two
Speaker 1: in his toast in front of a lot of people,
Speaker 1: Like he raised his glass first, and the queen is
Speaker 1: supposed to do that first, and she kept he had
Speaker 1: his glass and did you see, she just kept looking
Speaker 1: down a well. He was giving a toast during the
Speaker 1: national anthem to her right, not realizing that everybody wasn't
Speaker 1: being quiet, not because they were listening to his tasted,
Speaker 1: because they were respectfully being quiet during the national anthem,
Speaker 1: which he was trying to talk over that. The aftermath
Speaker 1: was so awful because he looked around, he realized that
Speaker 1: no one else's glasses raised, and he just quietly put
Speaker 1: his glass. It was awful. So he also signed the
Speaker 1: Queen's guest Book and dated it like May eleven, two eight,
Speaker 1: So apparently Obahamas living in two thousand and eight. I
Speaker 1: think he was nervous. Does all get out in Ireland?
Speaker 1: He drank a pine of guinness at everybody. Well, that's
Speaker 1: because that's the only rule Ireland has. You go to
Speaker 1: England and they probably give him a dossier of like,
Speaker 1: don't do this. He was probably chicken in his boots.
Speaker 1: Well put, chuck, That's why we don't go in state
Speaker 1: visits to England much so chuck. Yes um. We have
Speaker 1: talked about fear, right, yes um. And we also talked about,
Speaker 1: well we foreshadowed I think fear extinction, right um. John
Speaker 1: Watson was planning on basically making a little all Albert's
Speaker 1: fears go away through a process called fear extinction, which
Speaker 1: is a type of conditioning. But it's like the reversal
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, we should point out the reason this
Speaker 1: is important is because fear is okay in doses because
Speaker 1: it is a survival tool. But it's not good to
Speaker 1: live in constant fear. It's not good for your body
Speaker 1: because it just reeks havoc on your internal systems because
Speaker 1: of fight or flight is so intense exactly, it lowers
Speaker 1: your immune system, you know, it raises the heart, blood pressure,
Speaker 1: all that stuff. I think we talked about that. And
Speaker 1: can you scare someone to death? Yes? Yeah, um, so
Speaker 1: fear extinction. Well, any kind of fear conditioning is say,
Speaker 1: hitting a claw hammer on a um on a piece
Speaker 1: of metal behind a baby's head whenever he touches a
Speaker 1: little white rat. Right. The opposite of that is having
Speaker 1: the baby touch a little white rat and not making
Speaker 1: that horrible sound. You can also say, um, condition rats
Speaker 1: to fear a sound like just the tone like a
Speaker 1: ding by giving them an electric shock in their change.
Speaker 1: Every time that thing sounds, they're gonna come to fear.
Speaker 1: That sound if you make that ding without delivering the shock. Eventually,
Speaker 1: this fear memory, this conditioned fear, is going to be unlearned. Yes,
Speaker 1: And uh, one thing that they learned out of that
Speaker 1: that was pretty interesting is that they theorize that the
Speaker 1: extinction memories form in the amygdala, but instead of staying there,
Speaker 1: they're transferred to the medial prefinal cortex to be stored. So, uh,
Speaker 1: it's still triggered in the amygdala, but that's where the
Speaker 1: new learned non fear resides, right, they think that's what
Speaker 1: they think that because it's the brain, it's all of
Speaker 1: them to theory. The deal with the extinction too is exposure.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that they'll do is, um,
Speaker 1: let's say, if you're afraid of heights, they'll ench you
Speaker 1: closer and closer to the edge of the building until
Speaker 1: you realize, like, all right, nothing's happening in here. It's cool,
Speaker 1: I'm not falling off. And then eventually, if you're exposed
Speaker 1: to this enough, supposedly you can reverse some of these fears. Um.
Speaker 1: That's that's general like behavioral psychology, just little by little,
Speaker 1: because you're making smaller you're making memories every time I
Speaker 1: didn't get bitten this time. That's weird, So maybe I'll
Speaker 1: go a little further. I didn't get bitten again, and
Speaker 1: then ultimately you're like, I'm probably not gonna get bitten,
Speaker 1: so I don't need to be afraid. And that's when
Speaker 1: you get bitten, you're done. Have you ever did you
Speaker 1: used to watch the Bob Newhart show? Which old Yeah,
Speaker 1: the not the old one, that the old old one,
Speaker 1: the one from the seven Yes, um there was, Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a great one called um flying the Unfriendly Skies
Speaker 1: where he took like a group, one of his groups
Speaker 1: that was afraid of flying a plane. And it's hilarious.
Speaker 1: I was watching it today. Penny Marshall's the stewardess, said
Speaker 1: young young just starting out. Penny Marshall, Bob Newhart equals
Speaker 1: national treasure, agreed, I said it, So, Chuck, if the
Speaker 1: cognitive behavioral treatment is not working, how got some drugs? Man? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the deal with this? Well, there's a protein in
Speaker 1: our brains called n M D A and methyl d spirate, right,
Speaker 1: and it's in the a magdala and if you inhibit it,
Speaker 1: so this is a double negative. If you inhibit it,
Speaker 1: you also inhibit fear extinction. So science is reason if
Speaker 1: you promote UM an m d A, right, then you
Speaker 1: will also promote fear extinction. And they're finding that that's
Speaker 1: actually the case. There's a tuberculosis drug and antibiotic that
Speaker 1: promotes the production of the protein and m d A,
Speaker 1: and they give it to people um and then give
Speaker 1: them exposure therapy as well, right, because the whole deal
Speaker 1: is they don't want to try and replace it with
Speaker 1: a drug, but it just speeds up the classic conditioning
Speaker 1: experiment and the the I guess a trial with rats
Speaker 1: has proven this is possible. They condition them to to
Speaker 1: fear a sound or a light or something with electric
Speaker 1: shocks classical conditioning, and then said, well, here we're gonna
Speaker 1: inject you with this tuberculous of antibiotic and the rats
Speaker 1: that um uh, we're on the drug learned fear extinction
Speaker 1: faster than the ones that we're doing it without the drug. Right.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about one more experiment that we didn't cover,
Speaker 1: And this is neat but itself this just sort of
Speaker 1: hinky to me because you and we talked earlier about
Speaker 1: the thrill of being afraid. That's why people go to
Speaker 1: horror movies. That's why they get on roller coasters, and
Speaker 1: people say that it's it can be akin to uh
Speaker 1: sexual arousal. And this dude name Arthur Aaron did an
Speaker 1: experiment which I thought was a little odd. He had
Speaker 1: men walked across uh a suspension bridge, two different bridges,
Speaker 1: one and these were four fifty ft long over a
Speaker 1: two d and thirty ft gully. One bridge was very stable,
Speaker 1: one bridge was not and very shaky, and he had
Speaker 1: the men walk across this. At the other end of
Speaker 1: the bridge, he had his very attractive female assistant waiting,
Speaker 1: asked him some some red herring questions that didn't have
Speaker 1: anything to do with the experiment, and then said, oh,
Speaker 1: and here's my number if you have any questions. Apparently
Speaker 1: three of the men, who of the thirty three men,
Speaker 1: only two sorry called the woman afterward who walked across
Speaker 1: the stable bridge. The guys that walked on the shaky bridge,
Speaker 1: nine of the thirty three called her bam proven No.
Speaker 1: I guess they just were like I can do anything.
Speaker 1: What's your number? Or they're like, hey, I'm really turned
Speaker 1: on because I almost just died. What's your number? What's
Speaker 1: your number? Or I'm going to call you so choke?
Speaker 1: What do you do if you have like if you
Speaker 1: don't really want the drugs, you're you're not um debilitated.
Speaker 1: And I should also say, the National Institutes of Health
Speaker 1: say about nineteen million people in the United States alone,
Speaker 1: so for from mental illnesses that involve irrational fear responses,
Speaker 1: so everything from like a phobia, panic disorder, post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress disorder, nineteen million people in the US alone. I
Speaker 1: wan't I thought more than that, really. Yeah, but let's
Speaker 1: say you're not one of these people where you're not
Speaker 1: clinically afraid, but you still don't like heights or you know,
Speaker 1: you can get on a plane, but you are not happy.
Speaker 1: What are the eight tips? Well, one, Josh, is that
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter why you're scared. So it's not like
Speaker 1: to develop a big understanding of your fear helps you
Speaker 1: overcome it actually delays that progress is what they say
Speaker 1: as what prevention magazines, because number two says learn about
Speaker 1: the thing you fear, right, I guess, not why you're scared,
Speaker 1: but to learn more about it, like maybe injecting rationality
Speaker 1: like this is how often plane actually goes down or
Speaker 1: something like that. Yes, take baby steps, train yourself to
Speaker 1: not be afraid hanging around someone who's not afraid of that. Like,
Speaker 1: if you're afraid of heights, hanging around with me, because
Speaker 1: I'm not afraid of heights. Talk about it, because sharing
Speaker 1: out loud makes things better. Uh, play mind games with
Speaker 1: yourself like that. And they used the classic example of
Speaker 1: picturing a crowd naked. If you're speaking in front of him.
Speaker 1: I've heard that you're that. That does not help, and
Speaker 1: it may actually make things worse. I could see that,
Speaker 1: and uh, don't look at the big picture, just look
Speaker 1: at each little one step at a time, and uh,
Speaker 1: seek help. If you have like really irrational fear, go
Speaker 1: talk to someone. Seek help. Indeed, and seek this article.
Speaker 1: You got anything else, So seek this article by typing
Speaker 1: fear f e A R, not f E r E
Speaker 1: into the search part. How stuff works dot com is
Speaker 1: gonna bring up this article and some other cool stuff, right, yes, um,
Speaker 1: And since I said that, Chuck, you know what time
Speaker 1: it is. That's right, you know what the real is.
Speaker 1: It's time for listener, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this
Speaker 1: Hellos from Kazakhstan. Yeah, I just read an article in
Speaker 1: the New Yorker about Kazakhstan and it's new capital. Um.
Speaker 1: I believe it's called like Astana. Um. Yeah, Astana, the
Speaker 1: the president of kazakh Stein like just has sunk billions
Speaker 1: into creating a new capital in the middle of the
Speaker 1: steps of the country. Good for him. And Kazakhstan is
Speaker 1: the ninth largest country in the world by land mass.
Speaker 1: It also shares the longest border in the world. Uh.
Speaker 1: It shares it with the Sobviet. Wow, you're just recalling
Speaker 1: all this too. It's very impressive. Uh. And I told
Speaker 1: this guy that I would make fun of his accent
Speaker 1: and read it as Borat and he said, I love it.
Speaker 1: Nice and he literally titled it Hellos from Kazakhstan. Uh.
Speaker 1: Your podcast is being played in Astana, Kazakhstan. That's the capital,
Speaker 1: all right, so he lives. I discovered your podcast when
Speaker 1: I once bought an iPod gizmo. I start did my
Speaker 1: discovery of American culture when I won scholarship to study
Speaker 1: my twelfth grade in American high school. That was an
Speaker 1: awesome year for a guy who has never been to
Speaker 1: McDonald's in his life and has never sat in nice
Speaker 1: single seat student desks. I guess they said on benches
Speaker 1: also include the traditional yellow school buses. I live with
Speaker 1: great host family who further showed me culture. After graduating
Speaker 1: high school, I want another scholarship to study at Canadian college.
Speaker 1: As you have guessed. In four years in Canada, my
Speaker 1: mentality got syncd with Northern American culture. Now I am
Speaker 1: back in Kazakhstan and got job in I T Field.
Speaker 1: I get stop that. Stop that, No, you gotta keep going,
Speaker 1: you gotta finish. I am writing all of this because
Speaker 1: every day on my way to work I listened to podcast,
Speaker 1: and you guys always bring back good memories of USA
Speaker 1: and Canada. For fifty minutes, I feel as if I
Speaker 1: am in USA in Canada. I hope this feeling never
Speaker 1: goes away. You also make me smile and laugh in uses,
Speaker 1: and I look like idiot to other gray faces and
Speaker 1: bus other what gray faces? I guess it just means
Speaker 1: stinky commuters in kindict time. But the last I wish
Speaker 1: everyone here understood English to listen to you guys, so
Speaker 1: they should start their day with smile. Thanks for great
Speaker 1: work and share of American culture is get and he
Speaker 1: had been, which means regards and that is from Gaza
Speaker 1: atte Gizatt he was thrilled that I would be making
Speaker 1: fun of his exit. That is awesome. Thank you, Zat.
Speaker 1: We are glad to keep you entertained and say hello
Speaker 1: to boor At for us. Yeah who is actually British?
Speaker 1: You know? Kay? Alright, just play and Freddie Mercury is
Speaker 1: he really? That'll be great? Yeah wait our guy? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: not not he's at Giza. We appreciate that. Um, if
Speaker 1: you are afraid of something weird, we want to hear
Speaker 1: about it. That includes you to Gazatte. We want to know. Um.
Speaker 1: Send us an email at Stuff Podcast at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
Speaker 1: video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work
Speaker 1: staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
Speaker 1: of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve camera. It's ready, are you