Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And of course it's October, so we are still doing
Speaker 1: some of our favorite stuff of the year. Monster content.
Speaker 1: That's right, God, did I just say content. I'm the monster.
Speaker 1: I'm the content creating monster. Let's think of it as
Speaker 1: its monster cargo. Let's kress cargo. I think that we
Speaker 1: are delivering to the listeners years, yeah, to create a
Speaker 1: cargo cult of our listeners. So I was wondering just recently,
Speaker 1: you know what is the oldest monster, Because as you
Speaker 1: go back in time, monsters become, in a way, they
Speaker 1: become less uniquely scary, and they become more elementally scary.
Speaker 1: They become less like, I don't know, the girl in
Speaker 1: the Ring and all that kind of recent popular monster
Speaker 1: fad stuff, and they become more like a dragon or
Speaker 1: a beast with a bull's head or something. And so
Speaker 1: I was wondering, like, you know what, what's the earliest
Speaker 1: thing in recorded history? There there are some things in
Speaker 1: ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian texts. I just wanted to read
Speaker 1: one sort of monster passage I came across from an
Speaker 1: ancient Assyrian text called the Seven Evil Spirits. This is
Speaker 1: translated into English by R. C. Thompson in nineteen o three,
Speaker 1: and it's this ancient Assyrian poem. It goes, raging storms,
Speaker 1: evil gods. Are they ruthless demons who in Heaven's vault
Speaker 1: were created? Are they workers of evil? Are they they
Speaker 1: lift up the head to evil every day, to evil destruction,
Speaker 1: to work of the seven? The first is the south Wind.
Speaker 1: The second is a dragon whose mouth is opened that
Speaker 1: none can measure. The third is a grim leopard, which
Speaker 1: carries off the young. The four is a terrible shibou.
Speaker 1: The fifth is a furious wolf who knoweth not to flee.
Speaker 1: The sixth is a rampant thing. This is the illusion
Speaker 1: which marches against God and King. The seventh is a storm,
Speaker 1: an evil wind, which takes vengeance. Well, that those that
Speaker 1: al sounds remarkable, But I'm instantly thinking some of those
Speaker 1: are just animals. Like the wolf is just like a
Speaker 1: dumb wolf, Like it's just not smart enough to run away, right.
Speaker 1: I wonder about the grim leopard. The grim leopard sounds
Speaker 1: kind of monstrous because it carries off the young grim.
Speaker 1: Seems to that that implies some kind of human affect. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess you get into definitions of monster. Right.
Speaker 1: Is a monster something that is a combination of things?
Speaker 1: Is it something that is entirely unreal or is it
Speaker 1: just something real that is exaggerated in size. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's a an evil creature that works
Speaker 1: destruction upon the earth and marches against God and King,
Speaker 1: I'd say that's probably a monster or people. But I
Speaker 1: feel like we're actually already too late, because we're muddling
Speaker 1: around in recorded history and you can go much deeper.
Speaker 1: So in August of nineteen thirty nine, a group of
Speaker 1: archaeologists were doing field work at a Stone Age cave
Speaker 1: site in southern Germany, and the cave was called Stottlehole,
Speaker 1: which means stable cave, and it was at Hollenstein near
Speaker 1: vogel Herd. At this cave site, the researchers uncovered this
Speaker 1: massive collection of ivory fragments, broken pieces made from the tusks.
Speaker 1: Tusks of a Pleistocene mammoth and now it's Ice Age
Speaker 1: mammoth of Europe. Wooly mammoth. Unfortunately, something happened. Just a
Speaker 1: matter of days after this initial discovery. World War two
Speaker 1: broke out, not a great time to be digging in
Speaker 1: southern Germany, and so the dig had to be quickly
Speaker 1: abandoned and the dig was filled in and the broken
Speaker 1: pieces of the mammoth ivory were laid in storage for decades,
Speaker 1: and then about thirty years or a German archaeologist named
Speaker 1: Joachim Han started trying to fit the ivory shards together
Speaker 1: playing this. You know, if you've ever seen these games,
Speaker 1: the three D jigsaw puzzle game of Artifactor Reconstruction, it
Speaker 1: looks like a nightmare of trying to see how all
Speaker 1: these things because obviously some pieces are missing. It's like
Speaker 1: trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with half half the puzzle. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so we had more than two hundred fragments, and
Speaker 1: he discovered that the pieces of ivory were originally part
Speaker 1: of the same Paleolithic figurine. It was a statuette about
Speaker 1: thirty one centimeters long, which is just over a foot,
Speaker 1: and it was carbon fourteen dated to somewhere between thirty
Speaker 1: five and forty thousand years old. And once the pieces
Speaker 1: were put together, it became clear that you could still
Speaker 1: make out representative features, features that appeared to be both
Speaker 1: human and non human. And this is the central image
Speaker 1: I want to talk about in today's episode. This is
Speaker 1: the figure that would come to be non and as
Speaker 1: the Lowan Lynch, which is German for the lion man.
Speaker 1: And if you want to see an image of the
Speaker 1: Loan Ninch, we will have a picture of it on
Speaker 1: the landing page of this episode at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: you behind dot com. It Uh, it's it's rather regal looking. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I would say it's regal like it's it's got this
Speaker 1: upright posture, and it does look very stately, but also
Speaker 1: in the spirit of the grim leopard of Assyria. It's
Speaker 1: kind of grim. It's got this kind of like there
Speaker 1: is no pity in the Lionman's face. No, no pity.
Speaker 1: I just looked in closer at it, and I don't
Speaker 1: see I don't see a shred of pity, Like it
Speaker 1: would pass your sentence and and not not heed your tears.
Speaker 1: So after this original reconstruction and the following decades, there
Speaker 1: was this long, multi stage process that led to the
Speaker 1: final reconstruction of the artifact in fuller and fuller detail.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen eighties there was a paleontologist named
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Schmidt who added more pieces from additional re excavations
Speaker 1: of the site, and she corrected some errors and previous reconstructions,
Speaker 1: and the clearer pression of this feline head began to emerge.
Speaker 1: And then in the two thousands and other archaeologist named
Speaker 1: Klaus Joachim Kind returned to the Stytle Cave to uncover
Speaker 1: more original pieces and it led to this amazing version
Speaker 1: of the artifact that you can go see today. I
Speaker 1: think it's usually at the Oom Museum in Germany, but
Speaker 1: I believe it is currently on loan at the British Museum.
Speaker 1: In fact, I believe it was the British Museum tweeting
Speaker 1: about the acquisition that or acquisition the loan that made
Speaker 1: me think about doing this episode. So the lion man,
Speaker 1: he stands like a human in this two footed, bipedal posture,
Speaker 1: back straight with human arms straped down to the side,
Speaker 1: human torso maybe lion ish kinds of legs, but this proud,
Speaker 1: menacing head of a big cat, and you've got to wonder.
Speaker 1: So this is thirty five to forty thousand years ago there,
Speaker 1: long before recorded history, nobody was writing down what they
Speaker 1: were thinking. There apparently was no written language. So what
Speaker 1: did this figure mean to the Stone Age people who
Speaker 1: made it? Yeah, I mean, for the most part, we
Speaker 1: can only we can only guess. We can certainly look
Speaker 1: to more to increasingly more complex ideals that came afterwards.
Speaker 1: But you look at it and you think, was this
Speaker 1: Is this a deity? Is this a punishing creature? Is
Speaker 1: this a I've seen the term master of animals thrown
Speaker 1: around in interpreting similar alleged figures from cave paintings, and
Speaker 1: another ancient remains. Yeah, there is a sort of intuitive
Speaker 1: sense in which you could see an ancient person seeing
Speaker 1: an apex predator like a lion or any any kind
Speaker 1: of big cat as some sort of god of the
Speaker 1: wilderness that would have power over other animals because it
Speaker 1: is at the top of the food chain. But it's
Speaker 1: a serious question to imagine why people would make this artifact,
Speaker 1: because making an artifact like this would have been an
Speaker 1: extreme sacrifice. Uh. These would have been people, I think
Speaker 1: very likely living not always very far from the edge
Speaker 1: of starvation. Uh. And an artifact like this took resources
Speaker 1: it took time, it took energy, It wore down your
Speaker 1: sharp flint tools and the carving process. In fact, there
Speaker 1: was a in recent years, there was an experiment by
Speaker 1: a guy named wolf Heine that I watched a video
Speaker 1: of online. And this guy specializes in replicating ancient artifacts
Speaker 1: using the methods and tools that would have been available
Speaker 1: to the people who made them. And his reconstruction of
Speaker 1: the low and minch using these flint carving tools, he
Speaker 1: says it took more than three hundred and seventy hours.
Speaker 1: And in this video, if you sit and watch it,
Speaker 1: like the unbelievable laborious nous of the project begins to
Speaker 1: sink in. You just watch him going over and over
Speaker 1: this ivory tusk with this piece of flint. And when
Speaker 1: you look at the guy's hands, I started to feel
Speaker 1: how working this flint rock over the ivory for hours
Speaker 1: and hours would just turn your fingers into hot ground beef.
Speaker 1: Just terrible. Yeah. And and to your point, these were
Speaker 1: people that lived on the edge. They were they were wanderers.
Speaker 1: They had not reach the point in the ascension of
Speaker 1: human civilization where you had specialists who could set aside
Speaker 1: time to create something like this. Uh, and if they
Speaker 1: created something like this, it obviously wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: just a toy for a child to play with. It
Speaker 1: was something important, right, And there are signs in the
Speaker 1: artifact itself that seemed to signify that it had cultural importance. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The surface of the original artifacts seems to have been
Speaker 1: smoothed from excessive handling, as if it were passed around
Speaker 1: in a ritual for instance. Right. So, yeah, so it
Speaker 1: looks like this is something that was handled a lot.
Speaker 1: It's got that worn down feeling to it. Um And
Speaker 1: this is one reason that the lowan mench is often
Speaker 1: cited is perhaps the earliest evidence that exists of religious beliefs. Now,
Speaker 1: who would the people that made this artifact have been, Well,
Speaker 1: it was almost certainly modern humans living in the area
Speaker 1: at the time. But but it's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: modern humans and neander dolls um lived in this area
Speaker 1: at this at the same time the coexist. This did
Speaker 1: And uh I did find a quote from Jeffrey Brantingham,
Speaker 1: an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and
Speaker 1: he says that he doesn't think it's far fetched to
Speaker 1: think that Neanderthals. Uh you know, could have made similar items.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, everyone seems to be on
Speaker 1: board with the idea that these were modern Homo sapiens
Speaker 1: that created these artifacts. Anatomically modern, yes, except not quite
Speaker 1: so hunched over from watching YouTube all day, right, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: But there may be reasons to think that other members
Speaker 1: of this this ancient culture or this you know, ancient
Speaker 1: what would you call it, sort of a loose idea
Speaker 1: of a culture if it was mostly small bands of
Speaker 1: people rather than cities or nations, But that whatever, the
Speaker 1: people of this time period were made artifacts like this
Speaker 1: in general, because this isn't the only one, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. In two thousand three, another line was discovered
Speaker 1: in southwestern Germany or what is now southwestern Germany, and
Speaker 1: this one was carbon day to do around the same
Speaker 1: time period. So by by by some estimates, it kind
Speaker 1: of depends who's doing the math and who's you know,
Speaker 1: doing the figure in but by some estimates these are
Speaker 1: the oldest statues and the oldest examples of figurative art. However,
Speaker 1: we do have the venus of the whole fells and
Speaker 1: uh and by some estimates this takes the title. But
Speaker 1: the estimates here like thirty five thousand and forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, so we're kind of placing it in basically
Speaker 1: the same time period. They were just discoveries, key discoveries
Speaker 1: made in two thousand and two thousand and sixteen. If
Speaker 1: you've if you've looked at a lot of like really
Speaker 1: ancient human artifacts, you've probably seen images of these. Uh.
Speaker 1: The venous images are essentially a feminine figure, like you know, uh,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of a round feminine figure with without
Speaker 1: a head or or or very little detail provided outside
Speaker 1: of like breasts and belly. Yeah. Yeah. It's often seen
Speaker 1: as having the what we're perceived us the feminine figures exaggerated,
Speaker 1: so it would be in large spreads, in large tips
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And for that reason, people often
Speaker 1: look at this and say that they think it had
Speaker 1: some kind of fertility significance. Now you know where, depending
Speaker 1: you can go back and forth over which one could
Speaker 1: be older than the other, it seems like they likely
Speaker 1: existed at the same time. But the key difference here
Speaker 1: is that while the venus is a depiction essentially of
Speaker 1: the feminine form of something that exists of a human being, right, uh,
Speaker 1: that exists in the real world, the loan mention is
Speaker 1: the human feuged with the beast. And in the words
Speaker 1: of Clive Gamble, and archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK,
Speaker 1: as quoted in Nature quote, they depict the animal world
Speaker 1: in a semi realistic way. It shows early man moving
Speaker 1: from his immediate world to an imaginative world. Now this
Speaker 1: is interesting because, yeah, you have to imagine that, I
Speaker 1: don't know, there's no way to get inside say a
Speaker 1: chimpanzees head or a dog's head, is some other mammal.
Speaker 1: But if these animals have any kind of imaginative capacity,
Speaker 1: and there's no proof, really, I guess that they have
Speaker 1: any kind of ability to picture objects that are not
Speaker 1: in front of them. If they do, you kind of
Speaker 1: have to assume that they're sort of literal right that
Speaker 1: they'd be, that they would be putting together ideas of
Speaker 1: images that are from their direct experience. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: so in this case. I mean one example that comes
Speaker 1: to mind, One possible and perhaps nitpicking idea, is that
Speaker 1: what if say thag, the member of your tribe. What
Speaker 1: a fag likes to take a deer head or a
Speaker 1: or a big cat head, and he likes to just
Speaker 1: kind of houllow that sucker out or get the skin,
Speaker 1: and they just put it over his own head. And
Speaker 1: he's famous for this, and he's so famous for this
Speaker 1: that one decides to create a statue of it. Like,
Speaker 1: that's the only scenario I think in which you could
Speaker 1: you could make the argument. I don't see anybody making
Speaker 1: that argument, but I feel like that's the only example
Speaker 1: you can make an argument for this being an image
Speaker 1: of a thing that was as opposed to an image
Speaker 1: of a thing that was not. Let me throw a
Speaker 1: twist on your example, though, So maybe Thag does put
Speaker 1: on the headdress or you know, the remains of some
Speaker 1: other predator, and to simulate that in that sense, would
Speaker 1: that not be becoming another kind of creature at least
Speaker 1: in symbol? That's true? Yeah, I mean you can certainly
Speaker 1: make the argument that that if Thag did that and
Speaker 1: bothered to put the beast's skin over his head, that
Speaker 1: you know, he is pretending to be something else or
Speaker 1: or participating in an experience that makes him feel as
Speaker 1: if he has something else. So yeah, it all kind
Speaker 1: of amounts to the same thing, doesn't it. Right, So,
Speaker 1: whether it's Thag inspiring this, this lionman carving, or whoever
Speaker 1: carved it, depicting some kind of being that they had
Speaker 1: never seen in nature. What's going on is a kind
Speaker 1: of fusion into unreal creatures. And according to Jill Cook,
Speaker 1: a curator at the British Museum who has a good
Speaker 1: blog post about the Loan Mench for the British Museum's acquisition,
Speaker 1: the loan Mench is the oldest known representation of a
Speaker 1: creature that does not exist in nature, not necessarily the
Speaker 1: oldest piece of art, but the oldest evidence of fantasy.
Speaker 1: Quite literally, the world's oldest monster. Now by monster, of course,
Speaker 1: we've got to clarify the way we use the term.
Speaker 1: I mean an imaginary creature that does not occur in nature,
Speaker 1: not necessarily a bad or evil creature. So this isn't
Speaker 1: to say that the people who imagine the Loewen men
Speaker 1: should necessarily would have thought of it as antagonistic. Though
Speaker 1: I feel pretty strongly that even if whatever this being
Speaker 1: was was treated with reverence, I suspect it would have
Speaker 1: been the kind of awe in the classic sense of awe,
Speaker 1: not like oh here's my friend the lionman, but like
Speaker 1: a solemn blend of wonder and fear. Well, if you're
Speaker 1: try and imagine what life was like at the time,
Speaker 1: I mean, every every day would have a certain amount
Speaker 1: of uncertainty. You're you're depending upon your ability to find
Speaker 1: the food, to follow the patterns that lead to food,
Speaker 1: to to hunt prey that will fee eat and can
Speaker 1: clothe you through the harsh winter months especially, So there's
Speaker 1: a certain amount of uncertainty, there's a certain amount of chaos,
Speaker 1: and therefore we you know, you might expect to find
Speaker 1: those elements in imagine beings. Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1: So let's look at the ingredients of this imagine being.
Speaker 1: Obviously it is one part human. We know about the
Speaker 1: the upright bipedal human pretty well. But what is the
Speaker 1: head of this creature and possibly the inspiration for the
Speaker 1: muscily legs. Yeah, this is This is a great question
Speaker 1: because I imagine a lot of people are thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: Southern Germany lions. Lions are in Africa and and or India,
Speaker 1: so what are they doing in Europe. Well, given the
Speaker 1: time frame in the location, experts believe that we're we're
Speaker 1: seeing a human or humanoid body with the with the
Speaker 1: head of a now extinct cave lion cave lion. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I think that's that's interesting, isn't it though, because you
Speaker 1: have a partial likeness of one extinct animal in the
Speaker 1: very tusk of another. Yeah, and it's created by a
Speaker 1: species that probably played a role in the extinction of
Speaker 1: both species. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's actually there's not a lot of evidence for lion hunting.
Speaker 1: But a two thousand sixteen Spanish study published in p
Speaker 1: Los one they looked at fossilized cave lion toe bones
Speaker 1: and they found human modifications, possibly made with stone tools
Speaker 1: that were made for skinning. So they think that, uh,
Speaker 1: that ancient peoples might have hunted them for their pelts.
Speaker 1: But of course we know even if they didn't directly
Speaker 1: hunt these lions, they could have contributed to their extinction
Speaker 1: by encroaching on their habitats, by competition for large fauna
Speaker 1: and food sources. Now, there were different varieties of cave lion.
Speaker 1: One was found in America and there were two in Eurasia.
Speaker 1: There was Panthera leo fossilus, and this was first. This
Speaker 1: one first appeared in Europe seven hundred thousand years ago
Speaker 1: and evolved into Panthera leo spellia, and this cave lion
Speaker 1: is the one that continued on. That's the one we're
Speaker 1: seeing here, and this is the one that went on
Speaker 1: to go extinct, probably by fourteen thousand years ago. But
Speaker 1: so thirty five to forty thousand years ago when this
Speaker 1: thing was made, they were still around. Yes. Now I've
Speaker 1: also read I don't know how much stock we can
Speaker 1: put in this, but I've also read in the past
Speaker 1: that some people think it may have survived in the
Speaker 1: Balkans up to two thousand years ago. But again I
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent we should buy into that
Speaker 1: that may get into cryptic territory, the grim leopard of
Speaker 1: the Balkan. Yeah, but to be clear, Panthera leo spellia
Speaker 1: was probably the largest cat that ever lived. It was
Speaker 1: probably twenty larger than modern lions, and also bigger than
Speaker 1: today's largest tigers. So we're talking up to eleven feet
Speaker 1: six inches or three point five meters in length. That
Speaker 1: is a crazy thing, because something you might not have
Speaker 1: experienced if you haven't been to a zoo. Recently, I
Speaker 1: noticed that I don't really have a correct vision in
Speaker 1: my head of how large the big cats are like
Speaker 1: a lion or a tieer. I think of them as
Speaker 1: I don't know, like maybe large the size of a
Speaker 1: great Dane or a little bit larger really, But if
Speaker 1: if you go to a to a zoo and you
Speaker 1: get like right up against the glass where these things are,
Speaker 1: you realize like, oh, oh man, this is like as
Speaker 1: big as a horse. These things are gigantic. Well they're
Speaker 1: they're I mean, they're smaller than a horse, but but
Speaker 1: it seems like a horse. But it does seem that
Speaker 1: big if you're in the right position to observe them.
Speaker 1: For instance, here at Zoo Atlanta, I go to the
Speaker 1: zoo a lot with my son, and sometimes we get
Speaker 1: there early. And when you get there early, sometimes you're
Speaker 1: the only person close to the lion enclosure and they're
Speaker 1: still kind of active because it's the morning. And I've
Speaker 1: had some really creepy experiences walking up there with my
Speaker 1: you know, small snack size child next to me. Delicious, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the way the lion looks at you, you just
Speaker 1: feel this this primal feeling and you get a sense
Speaker 1: of what this this beast is and how I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to view this beast outside of the artificial confines of
Speaker 1: the zoo environment. Isn't it funny that we've got spider
Speaker 1: fear but we don't have lion fear. Well, it might
Speaker 1: be very different if you live in proximity to lions.
Speaker 1: But I feel no natural fear about lions in the
Speaker 1: same way I do when I see the image of
Speaker 1: like a spider crawling towards my face. Well, I usually don't,
Speaker 1: but I feel like in these moments, I'm willing to
Speaker 1: buy that there's something they're like, like there's something situationally
Speaker 1: and environmentally that has to be in place and such.
Speaker 1: It's so standing, you know, beside a small child in
Speaker 1: in a situation where the lions attention is on me,
Speaker 1: it's very creepy, and I can I can buy into
Speaker 1: an idea that that there's something ingrained in me to
Speaker 1: to fear them. It is terrifying itself to fear the
Speaker 1: predatory gaze, like when you when you just see the
Speaker 1: eyes of the creature that's large enough to eat you
Speaker 1: and maybe wants to. That comes through a lot in
Speaker 1: one of our favorite books to talk about in here
Speaker 1: in Blind Site by Peter Watts, where he talks about
Speaker 1: the vampires gaze. Uh, you know, they usually keep their
Speaker 1: eyes cover because people like they wear the sunglasses because
Speaker 1: if they don't, people can just constantly feel themselves being
Speaker 1: looked at as prey. So it's it's easy for I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's relatively easy for us to lock eyes with
Speaker 1: a predator like the lion, if you go to zoos
Speaker 1: and whatnot. But but try to imagine living in this
Speaker 1: ancient time, like the rare situations where you would make
Speaker 1: eye contact with this creature and lift to tell about
Speaker 1: and how powerful that would be, like that that would
Speaker 1: have to play a role in the creation of of
Speaker 1: this lion man. You can imagine it was a religious experience,
Speaker 1: like if you came face to face with a cave
Speaker 1: lion and did not die, that this would make you
Speaker 1: feel like you had entered a higher plane of existence,
Speaker 1: you had communed with some with the grim leopard of
Speaker 1: the skies. Yeah. Now, of course, it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: this this may have been, this may well have been
Speaker 1: the first lion man lion humanoid hybrid in human beliefs,
Speaker 1: but we would go on to have many more. Oh
Speaker 1: of course, some of the some of the key examples
Speaker 1: of the Egyptians had several or at least four may
Speaker 1: Hee's pequette segment and tef nut and then in Hinduism
Speaker 1: you have Nara Sima, which literally means manline in Sanskrit.
Speaker 1: I've seen people online commenting that they believe that the
Speaker 1: loan mention is and is a depiction of Nara sema. H. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's essentially like visually the same idea.
Speaker 1: It is that it is a humanoid with the lions head,
Speaker 1: and this is in Hinduism, it's an avatar of Vishnu
Speaker 1: and it's often seen it's often depicted slaying the demon
Speaker 1: Haran yak a shippo, and it's always a grizzly scene
Speaker 1: in which the lion avatar with its multiple arms is eviscerating,
Speaker 1: like ripping this this human oid demon apart at the stomach.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at an image right now. It is it
Speaker 1: is rough, yeah, in trails flailing and you know their
Speaker 1: intrails wrapped around the god's head. It's it's it's wonderful. Now.
Speaker 1: The vision of the lion headed man in the loan
Speaker 1: bench is as we said, it's kind of stately, it's
Speaker 1: kind of serene, it's kind of pitiless, but it's not
Speaker 1: doing anything overtly threatening. It's more like that that distant
Speaker 1: predatory gaze that makes you uneasy. This depiction is roaring,
Speaker 1: it's got the teeth beard, it's ready to bite you
Speaker 1: in half. Now, there of course creatures in the myth
Speaker 1: and legend that are the reverse of the lion man.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, how about the sphinx, Right, it's the exact
Speaker 1: opposite body of a lion with the head of a human. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you have you also have similar scenarios with of course,
Speaker 1: the manticore, the chimera, and some depictions of of dragons
Speaker 1: are are essentially lion headed intoities. Now another creature that
Speaker 1: came up for me in my research, and this is
Speaker 1: one I didn't I didn't know much about, and luckily
Speaker 1: this is one that actually nobody knows a whole lot about.
Speaker 1: It's still rather enigmatic. But the Lee onto Cephaline a
Speaker 1: creature of Mythriyism, which is a mystery religion centered around
Speaker 1: the god Mithrists in the Roman Empire from around the
Speaker 1: first of the fourth centuries. Ce Mithraism is great because
Speaker 1: it's got all these intriguing artifacts and artistic descriptions, but
Speaker 1: people are not descriptions depictions from the ancient world, but
Speaker 1: we don't know that much about it, where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of mystery about what the content of this religion was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is a great example of because you have
Speaker 1: a naked man with a lion's head. He's winged, has
Speaker 1: like four wings. It looks like there's a serpent entwined
Speaker 1: around him, much like a caduceus. And it's yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 1: It's also also the lion's head seems like it might
Speaker 1: be screaming or crying aloud in anguish. It's it's been
Speaker 1: their additional cryptic details in the image as well, but uh,
Speaker 1: it's very poorly understood. Well, whatever it's, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of its secrets have have been lost to time. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine if that happened to existing religions today. So
Speaker 1: like imagine you are an archaeologist of the future and
Speaker 1: you're digging through our artifacts of the twentieth century and
Speaker 1: you can find some religious art, some religious art, I guess,
Speaker 1: and some various depictions and descriptions of what's going on
Speaker 1: and say Catholicism or modern Hinduism or something like that,
Speaker 1: but you're mostly unable to discern what the like textual
Speaker 1: contents of the religion were. Wouldn't that be fascinating, like
Speaker 1: trying to piece it together? Yeah? Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: could probably are probably various examples of just fashion shoots
Speaker 1: and popular imagery from today. And if you didn't know
Speaker 1: what the various icons were, I mean, how would you
Speaker 1: figure it out? What's this hand sign that jay Z
Speaker 1: is making in this image? What does it mean? You know,
Speaker 1: it must have some kind of religious significance. Now, speaking
Speaker 1: of now, earlier you mentioned what happens when Thag puts
Speaker 1: on the the like lion head on top of his head,
Speaker 1: And does that represent itself as some kind of alternate
Speaker 1: creature or are we just looking at Thag wearing his clothes.
Speaker 1: There is some debate about whether other ancient depictions of
Speaker 1: hybrid creatures are in fact hybrids, or whether we're looking
Speaker 1: at somebody wearing an animal garment, right, yeah, yeah, Like
Speaker 1: what instantly comes to mind is is something that is
Speaker 1: at times referred to as the hornet God, which of
Speaker 1: course I like, but also known as the Sorcerer. Nice,
Speaker 1: So this one is from the Sorcerer. The most famous
Speaker 1: sorcerer here is from a cavern known is the Sanctuary,
Speaker 1: and this is from a cave in France, the Cave
Speaker 1: of Troy fresh ri Age, and this is from around
Speaker 1: estimates thirteen thousand BC E. Now the cave itself we discovered,
Speaker 1: was discovered in nineteen fourteen, so it's it's interesting how
Speaker 1: a lot of these discoveries are occurring in the early
Speaker 1: part of the twentieth century. And the cave was found
Speaker 1: to feature mostly cave art of animals, but also a
Speaker 1: couple of these half human half animal figures. And the
Speaker 1: dominant figure is the small humanoid again that is known
Speaker 1: as the Horned God or the Sorcerer, and it's this
Speaker 1: humanoid figure loosely with with with the head of a
Speaker 1: of an animal. It's like with it with the handlers
Speaker 1: with the head of a stagg or an elk or
Speaker 1: something like that. Rob yeah and uh. And the interpretations vary.
Speaker 1: Sometimes again there's this masters of animal argument or that
Speaker 1: it's a divine figure. Priest and archaeologist Henry Bruel drew
Speaker 1: and the sketch of the figure, and I have to
Speaker 1: say it looks a little bit more elaborate than the
Speaker 1: the actual photographs. So I think sometimes you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of it falls to interpretation, you know, how do
Speaker 1: you make sense of this image? And I've also read
Speaker 1: some some criticism of of interpretations of the Sorcerer saying
Speaker 1: that look what we could be looking at here just
Speaker 1: just it's just the result of overlaps between depicted forms
Speaker 1: or cases where one image was pain it over by another.
Speaker 1: Now that being said, you can you can make those
Speaker 1: kind of criticisms regarding some of these cave paintings. But
Speaker 1: the lion Man is most definitely a line, right. There's
Speaker 1: no room for like, oh goodness, I went to just
Speaker 1: carve this image, to painstakingly spend four hours making this
Speaker 1: image of a fag here, and then I accidentally gave
Speaker 1: him a lion's head. It's just not gonna happen, right.
Speaker 1: So when I was reading about this whole thing the
Speaker 1: other day, about the loan manch, I thought, Okay, he
Speaker 1: might be the oldest known evidence of a monster on Earth,
Speaker 1: but it's probably not the first monster that ever existed
Speaker 1: in somebody's imagination. And then it hit me, at some
Speaker 1: point in time, there had to be a first monster.
Speaker 1: There had to be the first time a human or
Speaker 1: maybe some other previous animal human ancestor was able to
Speaker 1: form a mental picture of a horrifying creature that was
Speaker 1: not some known predator or even some known predator made
Speaker 1: a little bit bigger, but an unholy being that did
Speaker 1: not exist in nature, you know, the clause of a
Speaker 1: crab on the body of a lion or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a there's a cognitive step involved here.
Speaker 1: This is there's a cognitive first step that is that
Speaker 1: you can't just gloss over, you know, because even you know,
Speaker 1: if you were to drag in say that you know
Speaker 1: the content of the bicameral mind episodes that we did.
Speaker 1: You know, even in that case where you have have
Speaker 1: you know, something drastically different taking place with the human mind,
Speaker 1: it would still need to draw that image from somewhere
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, they would have to get put together somehow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So at some point the bicameral mind would have to stop.
Speaker 1: Suddenly it's not just speaking through humans or animals, but
Speaker 1: it is speaking through a human animal hybrid. And what
Speaker 1: is causing that? Where does that come from? As much
Speaker 1: as I love it, we we can't keep coming back
Speaker 1: to the bi cameral mind because people are going to
Speaker 1: start to think, yeah, they are. But but I know people, people, listeners,
Speaker 1: minds are going there, so I I had to dip
Speaker 1: in for a second. Well, I appreciate you doing that, Robert,
Speaker 1: but I still hold out my skepticism on the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I want to come back to this
Speaker 1: question for the rest of today's episode. Are there any
Speaker 1: clues about where this first monster came from? Obviously it's
Speaker 1: lost to prehistory. We can know when that happened and
Speaker 1: what the monster consisted of, but we might be able
Speaker 1: to look at, or at least suppose some things about
Speaker 1: human monster creation, monster fear that we give us ideas
Speaker 1: about the circumstances in which this monster might have arisen.
Speaker 1: And I guess we'll start on that journey when we
Speaker 1: come back from a break. All right, we're back. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: what is a monster? Well? You know, I love this
Speaker 1: question because the answers tend to vary depending on who's
Speaker 1: thinking hard about monsters. Give me Jessup's answer first, and
Speaker 1: jessep has a more literal interpretation of these things. But uh,
Speaker 1: one example that I love is that the idea that
Speaker 1: the word monstrosity originates from the Latin uh monsterr ary
Speaker 1: which means to show or illustrate a point. This is
Speaker 1: a good point. I mean very often if you think
Speaker 1: about monster legends, they come with the moral, don't they. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Or there's some idea wrapped up in it, like I'm
Speaker 1: afraid of this, but why this thing exists? But why?
Speaker 1: And he can vary, you know, it can involve various symbolism,
Speaker 1: it can involved just very simple metaphorical extrapolations. But yeah,
Speaker 1: very often there is a there's a message, there's an
Speaker 1: idea there, and you know, I think this falls in
Speaker 1: line with what St. Augustine had to say about monsters.
Speaker 1: He said that monster is part of God's plan, an
Speaker 1: adornment of the universe that can also teach us about
Speaker 1: the dangers of sin. But other medieval commentators also they
Speaker 1: just defined a monster is a thing that's against nature. Now,
Speaker 1: for people who believe that nature was thoroughly populated with monsters,
Speaker 1: what gave them the like? What made the distinction? Right?
Speaker 1: It's against nature? But nature is full of them? Where
Speaker 1: did that come from? Well? I mean the other thing,
Speaker 1: of course, is that even how can it be if
Speaker 1: it's it's if it's against nature, but it's also it's
Speaker 1: made of nature. I mean, that's one of the whole
Speaker 1: things we've been hitting so far, is it's a cave
Speaker 1: lion plus a man. It's a combination of things that exists.
Speaker 1: So it's not just whole cloth, you know, because I
Speaker 1: mean virtually no monster out there is completely removed from
Speaker 1: our biological world. Most of them have some analog in
Speaker 1: in the natural world, and there's there's something to be
Speaker 1: said there about our connection with nature. I mean, even
Speaker 1: when people try to come up with monsters from the
Speaker 1: outer dark, some kind of you know, the cosmic kind
Speaker 1: of monsters, there's still it's like, well, it's a human
Speaker 1: with a squid head and it's really big. Yeah, Or
Speaker 1: you're just struggling to come up with something that doesn't
Speaker 1: have an analogy in nature, right, Or if you think
Speaker 1: you've created something that has no analogy in nature, you're
Speaker 1: just recreating like a Cambrian era organism that you just
Speaker 1: didn't know about. Hey, if you haven't listened to our
Speaker 1: Cambrian Monsters episode, you should go back to the I
Speaker 1: guess it was last week or whenever this airs. Check
Speaker 1: out the Cambrian Monster mash. Those were some monster with monsters. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of of monsters, particularly sea monsters. Thirteenth century theologian
Speaker 1: Thomas of contemporary he devoted an entire book to see
Speaker 1: monsters and another to the fish of the sea. So
Speaker 1: his dividing line here, But you know what goes in
Speaker 1: which book? This is answering my question. Right, nature is
Speaker 1: full of monsters. How can you tell what the monsters are? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: his answer would be, what it all comes down to,
Speaker 1: rarity inside, that's what's mad. That's what makes a C monster.
Speaker 1: Um so, so like blue whales would be C monsters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're just so big. It's I mean, it's quite
Speaker 1: literally monstrous, and it's it's essentially rare, especially I guess
Speaker 1: if it's yeah, if it's like an apex predator, so
Speaker 1: like a megalodon would have been a CE monster. They
Speaker 1: didn't exist at the time, right, Or you know, we're
Speaker 1: saying a horse is a rather large creature, but it's
Speaker 1: not a rarity, so you know it's not a monster.
Speaker 1: But if you had a dog the side of a
Speaker 1: size of a horse, that would be a rarity, that
Speaker 1: would be a monster. I feel like this is a
Speaker 1: really dumb and unimaginative I don't think that's good at all. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really help us out here. But regardless of
Speaker 1: how you define monsters, we of course have countless monsters,
Speaker 1: and not just of course the ones that we've dreamt
Speaker 1: up to, you know, recently to entertain this though, I
Speaker 1: think that in many cases we're we're not simply entertaining
Speaker 1: ourselves with monsters. We are we are creating something that
Speaker 1: speaks to two deeper fears, that speaks to, you know,
Speaker 1: some level of anxiety about our lives or the modern world.
Speaker 1: And of course religion and myth and legend folklore are
Speaker 1: just just totally populated with creatures that are that are
Speaker 1: hybrids of various forms. Yeah, I like what you said
Speaker 1: that we I think I've said this on the show before,
Speaker 1: but one reason times people ask me, like, what, what
Speaker 1: do you like about horror movies? I mean, they're so dumb.
Speaker 1: It's true that the horror genre has a lot of
Speaker 1: really really bad movies in it, But I think horror
Speaker 1: movies are interesting because even when they're bad, they sort
Speaker 1: of show you something. They're instructive about the anxieties of
Speaker 1: the age in which they're produced, and they they tap
Speaker 1: into something primal about what our what our deepest fears
Speaker 1: are what's occupying, occupying our minds when we're in the
Speaker 1: dark alone. And I like that about them. I like
Speaker 1: even when they're not good stories and they're not told well,
Speaker 1: they're still instructive about the society and the people that
Speaker 1: made them. Well. A lot of it comes down to symbols, Right.
Speaker 1: If you can have somebody who has no clue what
Speaker 1: they're doing, and if you're taking existing symbols and you're
Speaker 1: combining them one way or another, you're going to inevitably
Speaker 1: make a statement. You may be completely deaf to that statement,
Speaker 1: completely blind to that statement, but that's often when it's
Speaker 1: the most interesting. Yeah, like, oh my goodness, you accidentally
Speaker 1: created something brilliant. Uh. Like you made that the killer's mask,
Speaker 1: and you you didn't even think about all of the
Speaker 1: ramifications of of that symbol. Yeah, what does it mean
Speaker 1: that the killer wears a hockey mask? Yeah? Or a
Speaker 1: baby mask or a or a you know, an obviously
Speaker 1: store bought ghost face mask. I mean, you can you
Speaker 1: can kind of go wild with any of these these examples,
Speaker 1: and uh and and try and tease out a big
Speaker 1: academic paper on what the what the meaning of the
Speaker 1: film is obviously it's the hockey will kill us all
Speaker 1: in the end, fear of Canadians. I think, yeah, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: to keep chasing this question about where the first monster
Speaker 1: might have come from, I think maybe we should take
Speaker 1: a detour and look at this one paper that I
Speaker 1: found that that I thought was really interesting. It doesn't
Speaker 1: directly answer the question we're talking about, but it comes
Speaker 1: really close. It goes along similar pathways of thinking. And
Speaker 1: it's a paper by a scholar called Stephen T. Asthma,
Speaker 1: and the paper is titled Monsters on the Brain and
Speaker 1: Evolutionary epistem all Legy of Horror published in Social Research
Speaker 1: and International Quarterly, And that's a social science journal that
Speaker 1: has a lot of different social science genres in it.
Speaker 1: And basically, what Asthma is trying to do in this
Speaker 1: article is trace what the biological origins of the experience
Speaker 1: of horror are. And I think if we look at that,
Speaker 1: that might provide some insights about where monsters could emerge
Speaker 1: in our anthropological history. And Asthma starts with an interesting question,
Speaker 1: one that's very common with all kinds of studies about behavior.
Speaker 1: Our fear responses modular or conditioned. In other words, are
Speaker 1: our fear responses and our monster fears instinctual born into
Speaker 1: us or they just learned and conditioned by culture and experience.
Speaker 1: And just to rephrase from the beginning, I think one
Speaker 1: thing we can eliminate is that it's quite obvious that
Speaker 1: at least some of our fears are conditioned or learned. Like,
Speaker 1: there is no way you were born with a fear
Speaker 1: of airplanes. That's not part of your revolutionary heritage. So
Speaker 1: though you might have, you know, you might have an
Speaker 1: inborn fear of heights, you could see that could be
Speaker 1: part of evolutionary here, but not like silver machines filled
Speaker 1: with other humans or barreling through the sky. Right, So
Speaker 1: there might be instinctual elements that go into that fear,
Speaker 1: but the fear itself, the content there, is clearly conditioned
Speaker 1: or learned. But the real question is are any of
Speaker 1: our fears modular or instinctual or are they all conditioned
Speaker 1: or learned. So Asthma kicks off this favor by by
Speaker 1: pretty much stating the obvious fear exists in our bodies
Speaker 1: and minds. Fearful stimulized stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, so
Speaker 1: perhaps you'll freeze in the face of fear, maybe you'll flee,
Speaker 1: maybe you'll you'll suddenly have this burst of bravery, you'll
Speaker 1: turn around and fight. But the object of terror gives
Speaker 1: us a physical jolt, and it demands reaction. And he
Speaker 1: also points out that there's a strong hormonal component entailing
Speaker 1: the cortico trope in releasing hormone or c r H,
Speaker 1: cortisol and adrenaline. Asthma points to a study in fact
Speaker 1: in which scientists inserted a gene in mice that makes CRH,
Speaker 1: resulting in more fearful mice, or removing it to make
Speaker 1: quote an extremely fearless mouse. I would I would venture
Speaker 1: to say that both prospects are horrifying. So Asthma argues
Speaker 1: that these are all old brain systems. So this is
Speaker 1: the basement of horror, and we advanced organisms. Well, we
Speaker 1: have an entire haunted house built atop these ancient brain
Speaker 1: stem ruins. Like this analogy you're going with, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have all the limbic emotional circuits here. You can think
Speaker 1: of this neural mammalian haunted house containing seven key rooms.
Speaker 1: You got your fear room, your care room, your lust room,
Speaker 1: your rage room, your panic room, your your seeking room
Speaker 1: in your playroom, and each room commands specific neural pathways
Speaker 1: through the brain pipes wriggling around and diving down into
Speaker 1: the haunted ruins beneath. So we'd be thing that when
Speaker 1: you have these different types of affective reactions, say like
Speaker 1: you're engaged in play behaviors or you're engaged in lust
Speaker 1: behaviors or fear behaviors, they don't look the same in
Speaker 1: the brain. They take different avenues through your different brain
Speaker 1: regions and excite different types of tissue. Right now, the
Speaker 1: million fear is rooted in the amigdola. And we can
Speaker 1: talk about some direct evidence of this later, but this
Speaker 1: is a pretty well evidenced proposition, right, And we can
Speaker 1: think of this is a haunted laboratory, and it's probably
Speaker 1: right next to the memory late and haunted library of
Speaker 1: the hippocampus, and they worked together to enable conditioned learning. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the amygdala is what regulates fear, and the hippocampus supplies
Speaker 1: the information content of the fear uh and the and
Speaker 1: this is conditioned learning. So the simple version is, let's
Speaker 1: say somebody puts you in a lab and they keep
Speaker 1: showing you episodes of TV shows and every time they
Speaker 1: show you an episode of Seinfeld, you get an electric
Speaker 1: shock and it goes for the duration of the episode.
Speaker 1: You will probably develop a conditioned seinfeld phobia, which is
Speaker 1: an avoidance or aversion reaction to Jerry Seinfeld's face. And
Speaker 1: this is this is a standard accounting of how conditioned
Speaker 1: fears are developed. Alright, so we have our haunted house here.
Speaker 1: What's a haunted house without a few ghosts? And the
Speaker 1: ghosts come to us via evolution. This is what ASMA
Speaker 1: refers to as the heritable dispositional levels of fear or timidity. Now,
Speaker 1: refer back to what you mentioned a minute ago, which
Speaker 1: those mice, right, you can you can inherit different levels
Speaker 1: of fear disposition, So you can have these really brave
Speaker 1: mice that you artificially select for, or these really scared
Speaker 1: mice that you artificially select for. But also, could the
Speaker 1: contents of our fears be heritable? That's sort of part
Speaker 1: of the question. We're asking not just how likely you
Speaker 1: are to become afraid, but what you're afraid of? Can
Speaker 1: you get that from your parents through your genes? Well,
Speaker 1: there's some there's some interesting supporting evidence for this, and
Speaker 1: I imagine a number of you have encountered videos online
Speaker 1: of cats reacting to cucumbers. You know, they turn around,
Speaker 1: they see a cucumber, they freak out. The ideas that
Speaker 1: they have this this uh, this ingrained response to something
Speaker 1: that is snake like, and they have been experienced experiments
Speaker 1: to show similar reactions in chimps as well. Uh. We
Speaker 1: also see this along with spider fears in humans. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One example showing this was in the nineteen forties, the
Speaker 1: psychologist Donald Hebb found that even infant chimpanzees were terrified
Speaker 1: of images of snakes, even if they'd never been exposed
Speaker 1: to images of snakes before. Now there's an interesting update
Speaker 1: to that, which is that have found that chimps weren't
Speaker 1: just afraid of snakes, but of any quote. And this
Speaker 1: is Asthma's wording extremely varied morphology, as they encountered so
Speaker 1: like really odd shapes that weren't part of their normal
Speaker 1: day to day life. But for more evidence of of
Speaker 1: the brains conditioning towards reaction to snakes, I found one
Speaker 1: recent study. It was about neural pathways for evolution of
Speaker 1: rapid detection of snakes and it was by uh vanle
Speaker 1: quant at All and it's called pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological
Speaker 1: evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes in
Speaker 1: p n A S. And basically it found that there
Speaker 1: are neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar that
Speaker 1: responds selectively to snakes, seeming to indicate that there's something
Speaker 1: hardwired in the primate brain to cause this rapid detection
Speaker 1: of snakelike shapes as opposed to images of other things
Speaker 1: like monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometric shapes, and so
Speaker 1: Asthma in his paper, he wonders, quote if some of
Speaker 1: our deep seated monster fears may be rooted in real
Speaker 1: predators or environmental threats from our prehistory. So we're talking
Speaker 1: about cognitive model shaped in the Plistocene era, genetically engraved
Speaker 1: archetypes that continue to resonate, uh, you know on up
Speaker 1: into modern times. Now, you can totally see why that
Speaker 1: would the case. Right, It's clear that some types of
Speaker 1: fears could be adaptive. If you are born with a
Speaker 1: natural fear of lion shaped things, you're probably gonna survive
Speaker 1: more often than people not born with the fear of
Speaker 1: lion shaped things, Right, And so The question is, is
Speaker 1: the image of a snake or a spider, or anything
Speaker 1: that conforms to a to a common part of monster
Speaker 1: imagery somehow encoded deeply in your biology. Is it an
Speaker 1: inherited fear response that you get from threats faced by
Speaker 1: your ancestors, or are these all things we learned to
Speaker 1: fear from culture and experience. So Asthma sites some lines
Speaker 1: of thinking against heritable fear content, Like, one thing he
Speaker 1: asks is how does the content itself get transmitted? You know, like,
Speaker 1: if you're afraid of snakes, how could that image of
Speaker 1: a snake literally come down through the generations. Now I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I buy that objection so much, because I
Speaker 1: do think it seems likely that we can inherit some
Speaker 1: types of image re recognition. I mean, here's one example.
Speaker 1: If you can't inherit any kind of image re recognition
Speaker 1: from your parents, how would animals know what visual cues
Speaker 1: to look for in mating? You could say with humans,
Speaker 1: you could say, well, maybe it's all culturally conditioned and
Speaker 1: that's how But what about non human animals, what about
Speaker 1: non social non human animals? There seem to be I
Speaker 1: would think that you can transmit some types of imagery
Speaker 1: across generations through heritable predispositions, and of course it's important
Speaker 1: to wonder what kind of content is actually getting transmitted here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's one objection that Asthma doesn't really go into
Speaker 1: is deeply, but I think actually does matter why snakes
Speaker 1: and spiders, Like I can think of animals that are
Speaker 1: generally much much more dangerous and probably much more dangerous
Speaker 1: to our direct ancestors on the African savannah than spiders
Speaker 1: and snakes, and yet they don't inspire nearly the same
Speaker 1: visual revulsion. Like a hippopotamus is ten thousand times more
Speaker 1: dangerous than the average snake or spider, and yet it
Speaker 1: does not present as a universal phobia. You don't see
Speaker 1: humans all over the world being terrified of hippopotami. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: or at least certainly not outside of a direct contact
Speaker 1: with them, like environmental contact with them. Yeah, unless you've
Speaker 1: learned to be afraid of them because they're actually dangerous. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: I think we all have that point growing up where
Speaker 1: we're told, oh, actually hippos are exceedingly dangerous and they're
Speaker 1: more dangerous than the crocodiles. Yeah, as always take that
Speaker 1: with the caveat that we don't want to demonize animals
Speaker 1: that are wonderful, right, don't go kill in hippos. I
Speaker 1: can't watch enough hippo videos on life of their of
Speaker 1: what of their their viral explosive defecation. No, well that
Speaker 1: I think that's a fabulous topic as well. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to that actually, Um, I've read papers about the
Speaker 1: way that they spin their tails to distribute the fecal
Speaker 1: matter h and the different theories as to why. I
Speaker 1: mean it gets into parricide and leeches. It's fabulous stuff.
Speaker 1: But their babies are super cute, That's what I'm getting at.
Speaker 1: You ever watched the obi with their their their mom's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll grow up to bite your legs off, but they're
Speaker 1: they're very cute as babies. But yeah, no demonization of hippos.
Speaker 1: Don't go killing hippos or anything anyway. But back to Asthma. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we do have these potential pitfalls and the idea
Speaker 1: that our fears are predatory fears are inherited directly and
Speaker 1: biologically from our parents. But Asthma thinks he sort of
Speaker 1: has a solution to this dilemma, right, Yeah, he gets
Speaker 1: into this topic of specific versus generic pattern recognition systems.
Speaker 1: So he points to the universality of snake and spider
Speaker 1: phobias as we've been discussing, but also to studies by
Speaker 1: ethologists Wolfgang Schleet who he carried out these experiments where
Speaker 1: he took bird chicks and he exposed them to fly
Speaker 1: over silhouettes of both hawks and goose and geese. The
Speaker 1: caused fear, but seemingly not the goose. But if they
Speaker 1: were exposed to repeated hawk fly over shapes very earlier
Speaker 1: in the development, they feared the goose but not the hawk.
Speaker 1: So it it's it's curious. So you basically it was
Speaker 1: about what they were exposed to early on. And by
Speaker 1: the way, I have to add the fact these were
Speaker 1: turkey chicks, your your butterballs were being experimented on a
Speaker 1: little bit in infancy. By the way, I love that
Speaker 1: idea of of fearing the goose. I think we should
Speaker 1: we should incorporate that into our discussions of fear. If
Speaker 1: you have an unfounded fear, you can say, oh, you're
Speaker 1: really fearing the goose on that one. So that's like
Speaker 1: when you're afraid of something that isn't really dangerous, but
Speaker 1: it's because you had a bad experience with it as
Speaker 1: a child. Yeah, I mean, but you know, as we're
Speaker 1: discussing the development of fears, like, that's kind of that's
Speaker 1: how we work, That's how you survive in the wild.
Speaker 1: You the person who fears the lion that is not there,
Speaker 1: that has a better chance of surviving than the person
Speaker 1: who does not fear the lions that may be there.
Speaker 1: It's true, you'd rather have false positives than false negatives.
Speaker 1: I should correct myself there, because fearing the goose wouldn't
Speaker 1: be that you had a bad experience with the goose,
Speaker 1: would be that you never had an experience with a goose.
Speaker 1: Un Thus, you're afraid of them because they don't they
Speaker 1: don't fit into your your picture of the world. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a good expression for like when your kid won't
Speaker 1: try some new food or something's like, stop fearing the goose.
Speaker 1: Don't just go for it, baby, And oh I should
Speaker 1: stop laughing at my own jokes. Okay. Uh So. Slights
Speaker 1: work focused on replications of older experiments originally carried out
Speaker 1: by Lorenz and ten Bergen in the nineteen thirties, and
Speaker 1: to quote from Asthma, this is quote corroborating Hebb's idea.
Speaker 1: Remember Donald Hebb from earlier idea that some discrepancy between
Speaker 1: a new perception and previous background stored experiences causes the
Speaker 1: fearful response. Remember how the chimps were frightened by any
Speaker 1: unfamiliar morphology shapes they weren't familiar with. So, Asthma continues, quote,
Speaker 1: theoretically one could condition an animal to be unresponsive to
Speaker 1: snakes and hawks, but utterly terrified of fluffy bunnies. So
Speaker 1: this is Asthma's position. Um, he's sort of working towards
Speaker 1: this thing. Well, let's let's let's get there on our
Speaker 1: own time. Yeah. He says that all of this makes
Speaker 1: sense though if you look at it in the light
Speaker 1: of Darwin, Right, he's talking about the generic conditioning idea, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he talks about the quote fearful reaction to categorical mismatch. So,
Speaker 1: as Asthma puts it, quote, the local environment will condition
Speaker 1: the infant animal, and then the cognitive development will lock
Speaker 1: in the categories, creating a software program that recognizes some
Speaker 1: animals and mismatches novelties. So Asthma is sort of proposing
Speaker 1: a hybrid model of the origins of fear imagery. Not
Speaker 1: necessarily that it's that it's received imagery from your ancestors,
Speaker 1: and not necessarily that it's all learned in life. But
Speaker 1: it's one that combines elements that are automatic and instinctual
Speaker 1: along with elements that are modifiable and learned. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: calls it a quote content free recognition system. And so
Speaker 1: the basis of this is that we whatever we are
Speaker 1: exposed to an early childhood becomes part of our okay category,
Speaker 1: and whatever we're not exposed to become as part of
Speaker 1: the fear category. Exactly. And in fact, he points to
Speaker 1: a specific study. This is the studies, uh that we're
Speaker 1: conducted by Mary Ainsworth in the nineties seventies, the Strange
Speaker 1: situation experiments, and uh, these these backed up the notion
Speaker 1: that there's a window of opportunity for template formation and
Speaker 1: it closes after six months. This is great. This is
Speaker 1: part of the freaking out your children genre experiments. Everything
Speaker 1: is stored as normal in those first six months, the
Speaker 1: argument goes, and only after that are the new experiences
Speaker 1: initially stored a strange and novel and judged in light
Speaker 1: of existing templates. That's why if you encounter a child
Speaker 1: that is less than six months, they're looking at everything
Speaker 1: the same. You're not going to get those shifty baby
Speaker 1: eyes and a shifty toddler rized till later, you know,
Speaker 1: because we've all encountered those kids that like instantly distrust you.
Speaker 1: They look at you and you can tell they distrust you.
Speaker 1: You're like, what are you doing? Yeah, I just got here.
Speaker 1: What are you basing this on? And they're basing it
Speaker 1: on the template that they have. You were not in
Speaker 1: that template. So this would seem to back up his
Speaker 1: idea of the fact that there's a sort of content
Speaker 1: free recognition system. Uh. And it also would would help
Speaker 1: answer this question of how come infants, if this is
Speaker 1: the case, don't become terrified of every new image they
Speaker 1: encounter right right now. It's it's uh, it's worth noting asthma.
Speaker 1: In all this, he points out some of the obvious
Speaker 1: that many of our monsters or hybrids of threatening creatures,
Speaker 1: and specifically he points out the alien face hugger because
Speaker 1: this is essentially a spider and a snake fused together
Speaker 1: into one awful crab like entity. You know, it's the
Speaker 1: worst parts of the spider and the worst parts of
Speaker 1: a snake and the worst part of an oyster. Well yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: once you start cutting into it, for sure, but there's
Speaker 1: no worse part of an oyster. It's all good. Uh.
Speaker 1: So Asthma says that this what we have here is uh,
Speaker 1: the phylogenetic memory of ancient danger and monstrous hybrids allow
Speaker 1: us to to further strengthen, augment, and transmit those fears. Right,
Speaker 1: And that would seem to go to this like instinctual
Speaker 1: fear read But Asthma has this other interesting hypothesis. He
Speaker 1: discusses about what what contributes to what makes spiders and
Speaker 1: snakes specifically scary, and this might answer some of my
Speaker 1: problems with why them and not hippopotamus? Is uh, if
Speaker 1: you assume that babies are generally carried and kept off
Speaker 1: the ground outside for their first six months of life,
Speaker 1: they won't be seeing many spiders or snakes, but they
Speaker 1: will be able to see people and other larger, non
Speaker 1: threatening animals. So Asthma seems to think this sort of
Speaker 1: fits the category violation model. That would make sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't see a lot of ADU even today taking
Speaker 1: their baby. Well, I mean, un once you're taking to
Speaker 1: the zoo, I guess. But even then they're not they're
Speaker 1: encountering them in the zoo. And I've already talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about the differences between encountering an animal in
Speaker 1: the wild and encountering them in an artificial environment right now.
Speaker 1: Of course, another way to violate these categories is to
Speaker 1: present beings with totally nonsensical ontologies, creatures that could never
Speaker 1: be conditioned in a natural environment, or sorry, that you
Speaker 1: could never be conditioned to accept in a natural environment,
Speaker 1: because they don't exist in a natural environment. Here, maybe
Speaker 1: the origin of our hybrid monsters are lion headed humans
Speaker 1: and the grim sentient leopards and other beasts. All right, well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back we will return to our
Speaker 1: discussion of ancient monsters. Alright, we're back now. Asthma invokes
Speaker 1: a concept in his paper invented by the philosopher Nol Carol,
Speaker 1: which is called category jamming, and in his two thousand
Speaker 1: three book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart,
Speaker 1: Carol makes a distinction between what he calls the monsters
Speaker 1: of myth and the monsters of horror I thought this
Speaker 1: was pretty interesting. So he writes about how, you know,
Speaker 1: there might be fearsome creatures in the world of myths,
Speaker 1: but they are not quote unnatural, and they can be
Speaker 1: accommodated by the metaphysics of the cosmology that produced them.
Speaker 1: All right, So this idea is that, say, the Medusa,
Speaker 1: is that if you take them meduce and you put
Speaker 1: it in our real world, yeah, it's breaking all these
Speaker 1: laws of physics and nature. But the Medusa encountered within
Speaker 1: the world of Greek myth, Well, then she's just part
Speaker 1: of this world, Like, she's not breaking any laws exactly.
Speaker 1: But then he says, quote, the monsters of horror breach
Speaker 1: the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the positive human
Speaker 1: characters in the story. That is, in examples of horror,
Speaker 1: it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character
Speaker 1: in our ordinary world. Yeah. I like this because this
Speaker 1: is a distinction. I feel very much like there are
Speaker 1: different kinds of monsters, and they even the same monster
Speaker 1: could be more or less terrifying given different context. And
Speaker 1: so it makes me think back to the Loan Mench,
Speaker 1: which one was the loan Mench? Was this a monster
Speaker 1: of myth? That existed within some kind of epic poem
Speaker 1: that these people you know, recited orally or something like that,
Speaker 1: something outside the world that could be accommodated by its
Speaker 1: own cosmology. Or was this the monster of horror, something
Speaker 1: that haunted the woods beyond the cave. Yeah. To glimpse
Speaker 1: this creature, or to imagine glimpsinginess creature, is it to
Speaker 1: see something broken in the world or something that is
Speaker 1: just part of its fabric and we have no way
Speaker 1: of knowing. Yeah, though clearly I think if it is
Speaker 1: part of that broken vision of the world, then there
Speaker 1: is a stronger fear element to it. It's not part
Speaker 1: of a fantasy. It is a fantastical deviation from your
Speaker 1: day to day life. But Carol also writes about this
Speaker 1: idea that monsters are jamming of categories. He says, quote
Speaker 1: monsters are repelling because they violate standing categories and another
Speaker 1: quote also elsewhere, um quote. If what is of primary
Speaker 1: importance about horrific creatures is that they're very impossibility visa
Speaker 1: v our conceptual categories is what makes them function so
Speaker 1: compelling lee in dramas of discovery and confirmation. Then their disclosure,
Speaker 1: insofar as they are categorical violations will be attached to
Speaker 1: some sense of disturbance, distress, and disgust. Consequently, the role
Speaker 1: of the horrific creature in such narratives where their disclosure
Speaker 1: captures our interest and delivers pleasure, will simultaneously mandate some
Speaker 1: probable revulsion. That is, in order to reward our interest
Speaker 1: by the disclosure of the putatively impossible beings of the plot.
Speaker 1: Said beings ought to be disturbing, distressing, and repulsive in
Speaker 1: the way that theorists like doug list and there's referring
Speaker 1: to Dame Mary Douglas predict phenomena that ill fit cultural
Speaker 1: classifications will be So the idea is that creatures that
Speaker 1: violate our culturally established categories of existence we will find
Speaker 1: repulsive and distressing. And this is definitely a very common
Speaker 1: way of explaining horrific creatures, right the category confusion model.
Speaker 1: There's a lion, there's a man, but a man with
Speaker 1: a lion's head that just that breaks all the rules.
Speaker 1: It's the thing that should not be exactly Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then again, I have so on one hand, I'm attracted
Speaker 1: to this theory, and I find that lots of horror
Speaker 1: creatures very much seemed to fit this theory. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, I wonder, is it really possible that
Speaker 1: our experience of monster horror could be so thoroughly cognitive,
Speaker 1: because like, comparing these categories like this established by culture,
Speaker 1: that really would seem to be like it takes some
Speaker 1: kind of thought. Right, Do you really have to think
Speaker 1: about a monster to find it scary? No? I mean,
Speaker 1: like we've been discussing with something like like Jason, say,
Speaker 1: Jason Varies from the Friday of their tenth series. You
Speaker 1: don't have to think very hard in those films to
Speaker 1: find Jason terrifying. Though there's there's plenty of stuff going
Speaker 1: on to make you feel terror, right down to the
Speaker 1: music and uh and and and other forms of priming. Uh.
Speaker 1: But if you if you tease it apart, you can say, yes,
Speaker 1: this is an unnatural thing. It's, depending on your interpretation,
Speaker 1: is either a dead person that's walking around killing people,
Speaker 1: or at the very least, it is an unrealistically relentless
Speaker 1: and unstoppable humanoid killer. And it's equally terrifying no matter
Speaker 1: how much thought you put into it. Right, And that
Speaker 1: whenever I feel monster fear, the initial pang of monster
Speaker 1: fear definitely feels deeper than cognitive category analysis, Like I
Speaker 1: don't feel like I'm comparing anything in my mind. It
Speaker 1: hits me on the same level as like, you know,
Speaker 1: being something flying at my face. Anyway, Well, we'll come
Speaker 1: back to the cognitive elements in a minute. I wanted
Speaker 1: to discuss one other tangent that's really interesting that Asthma
Speaker 1: goes on, that might provide some kind of light on this.
Speaker 1: I loved his section about horror blindness. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't think I'd ever read about this before. So here's
Speaker 1: how to get into it. A question that might help
Speaker 1: us understand the origin of monsters is why do we
Speaker 1: keep creating them? Like, why can't we stop making monsters
Speaker 1: even if they make us feel the putatively negative emotion
Speaker 1: of fear. Well, I think that they're kind of like cocktails, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's a there's a basic reason that humans consume alcohol,
Speaker 1: and there's a basic reason humans consume various other elements
Speaker 1: that have specific taste. But we can't stop coming up
Speaker 1: with new combinations, a new novel, combinations that will give
Speaker 1: us the same and then in increasingly varied experiences based
Speaker 1: on that original. We like to fear and so we're
Speaker 1: going to continue to to tweak what make says feel
Speaker 1: that that tear but do well. Okay, So that's one theory.
Speaker 1: You could say that we like to fear. I think
Speaker 1: there's another possibility, which is that we don't actually like
Speaker 1: to fear. We like something else that comes with fear.
Speaker 1: That fear has sort of a secret, hidden cousin. Whenever
Speaker 1: the fear pathways in the brain are ignited, there's something
Speaker 1: that happens along with that, and that's the thing we like,
Speaker 1: and we mistake it for its cousin, the fear the
Speaker 1: main emotion. So let's look at an example and see
Speaker 1: what we think. One way to study the biological roots
Speaker 1: of horror monster or of monster fear would be to
Speaker 1: look at the behavior of a person who's incapable of
Speaker 1: feeling that fear. And strangely enough, such a person does exist,
Speaker 1: Asthma points to the case of this person, known in
Speaker 1: the scientific literature only as s M, who is a
Speaker 1: woman with horror blindness. SM has a brain anomally. She
Speaker 1: has focal bilateral amygdala aleegions, and because the amygdala is
Speaker 1: so bound up so in horton and generating the brain's
Speaker 1: fear response. These lesions mean that SM has an extreme
Speaker 1: fear deficiency, sometimes characterized as the complete inability to fear,
Speaker 1: and researchers have tested her with all kinds of fear
Speaker 1: inducing stimuli like haunted houses, horror movies, snakes and spiders,
Speaker 1: and these experiments showed that for SM what would normally
Speaker 1: be horrifying stimuli were indeed attention grabbing, but did not
Speaker 1: cause avoidance behaviors. In fact, they found that this combination
Speaker 1: of attentional arousal, the attention grabbing nature of it, and
Speaker 1: the lack of fear response tended to manifest itself as
Speaker 1: something like an attraction. So this study was there's one
Speaker 1: study by Justin S. Feinstein at All called the Human
Speaker 1: Amygdala and the Induction UH and the Induction and Experience
Speaker 1: of Fear in Current Biology INN. And what they what
Speaker 1: the researchers did is they took SM to a haunted
Speaker 1: house put together at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which is
Speaker 1: an abandoned medical facility in Louisville, Kentucky. And I want
Speaker 1: to read a quote about what happened when they went
Speaker 1: with SM through this facility, which had people addressed as
Speaker 1: monsters jumping out and scaring, they said, quote, the hidden
Speaker 1: monsters attempted to scare sm numerous times, but to no avail.
Speaker 1: She reacted to the monsters by smiling, laughing, or trying
Speaker 1: to talk to them. In contrast, their scare tactics typically
Speaker 1: elicited loud screams of fright from the other members of
Speaker 1: the group. More than showing a lack of fear, sm
Speaker 1: exhibited an unusual inclination to approach and touch the monsters. Ironically,
Speaker 1: sm scared one of the monsters when she poked it
Speaker 1: in the head because she was quote curious as to
Speaker 1: what it would feel like. You're not supposed to touch
Speaker 1: the actors that are haunted attraction should have known that, well,
Speaker 1: apparently she didn't. Now I thought this was really interesting
Speaker 1: because what they're saying is that in this condition where
Speaker 1: you don't have the normal avoidance behaviors, because you've got
Speaker 1: a deficiency of fear, if you're amygdalas damaged and you
Speaker 1: can't feel fear, things that would normally make you fear
Speaker 1: aren't just neutral. It's not like I don't care about that.
Speaker 1: You you find yourself attracted to it. It's like you
Speaker 1: love it, you want to touch it. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: I totally buy into that, because I mean, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of examples, I think in our own lives where
Speaker 1: we see like a really cool monster design in a
Speaker 1: film or a book or some art, and yeah, we're
Speaker 1: not thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so afraid right now.
Speaker 1: We think, oh, man, that's pretty gnarly, that's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I think that maybe what's going on with
Speaker 1: fear now I I accepted that the opposite could be true.
Speaker 1: It could be true that in some way the fear
Speaker 1: itself is satisfying, is thrilling, is fun. Well, of course
Speaker 1: the after effect of the monster not killing you, you
Speaker 1: get that that surge of relief, the endorphin and the
Speaker 1: adrenaline rush. Yeah, there's that hormonal element to it as well.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I do think that part of what the
Speaker 1: appeal must be is what's happening with s M here.
Speaker 1: It that she's only getting the good half of the
Speaker 1: horror feeling. She's not feeling the fear. But when we
Speaker 1: experience horror in the good way and the pleasurable way
Speaker 1: that makes us keep returning to it, it's what's a
Speaker 1: Whatever is happening with her, they're except not tempered by
Speaker 1: by the normal kind of avoidance response we would have.
Speaker 1: So essentially what's being proposed is that is that fear
Speaker 1: and arousal are separate things, but they're deeply linked. And
Speaker 1: and in in SMS case, she is attracted to the
Speaker 1: novelty of it. It is the novelty of this thing
Speaker 1: that is a hybrid creation or just an unreal entity
Speaker 1: that doesn't match up with the existing expectations. Right, She's
Speaker 1: being excited by the neural pathway that says, look at this,
Speaker 1: this is worth your attention, You should pay attention to it.
Speaker 1: But she's not getting the part that says, get the
Speaker 1: hell away. Interesting. Now, on the other hand, if you
Speaker 1: think this condition of having a fear deficiency sounds great,
Speaker 1: like like you're like, I wish I had an amygdala religion, Uh,
Speaker 1: think again. ASTHMA reports that researchers have repeatedly had to
Speaker 1: prevent sm from putting herself in actual danger because the
Speaker 1: fear that would have prevented her from endangering herself was
Speaker 1: simply not operative. In the same way, you might not
Speaker 1: enjoy pain, but you wouldn't actually want to have the
Speaker 1: condition that prevents you from feeling pain. Because pain is
Speaker 1: very useful for survival. Well, I mean that matches up
Speaker 1: with touching the actors at a haunted attraction, like it
Speaker 1: shows like a lack of boundaries and understanding of those boundaries.
Speaker 1: I mean, not that the the actor is going to
Speaker 1: physically attack you, but you know she's she's breaking certain
Speaker 1: rules and expectations there. So yeah, I wonder what role
Speaker 1: these types of arousal play in what led somebody in
Speaker 1: the ice age to create a lionman figuring. I mean,
Speaker 1: assuming that this figure had some kind of fear or
Speaker 1: on inducing uh significance. We don't know that it did,
Speaker 1: but we think you know, monsters usually have some kind
Speaker 1: of fear on inducing properties. If that's what was part
Speaker 1: of the attitude towards this creature, Could it be that
Speaker 1: it was created for this attentional arousal, this feeling of
Speaker 1: like this isn't part of what I normally see, you know,
Speaker 1: the stimulation of the imagination. Yeah, I mean what if
Speaker 1: what if this thing was crafted and as it was passed,
Speaker 1: it passed around like they were just feeling the novelty
Speaker 1: of it. They were and maybe you know, engaging with
Speaker 1: with certain feelings of fear that came out of it,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have, say, a whole cosmology built up
Speaker 1: around it. Maybe it didn't have a name or a
Speaker 1: purpose in the in the magical world around them, but
Speaker 1: it was it was almost like like doing shots of espresso.
Speaker 1: You know, it's difficulse, it's simplifying here, it's but it's
Speaker 1: it is very difficult to try and put ourselves in
Speaker 1: in the mind of of of such people. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's worth considering. Like we tend
Speaker 1: to assume it had something like what we would think
Speaker 1: of as a sacred or religious significance right now, where
Speaker 1: you'd you'd ha paid in a ritual with it. But
Speaker 1: what if it was much more like us watching a
Speaker 1: horror movie or going to a haunted house. I think
Speaker 1: that's not impossible. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: say an image of of of the Hindu God that
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, Narasima, Like you can look
Speaker 1: at that image without knowing anything about Hinduism, anything about
Speaker 1: the story that's being told, anything about the you know,
Speaker 1: the various symbols that are at play here, and you
Speaker 1: can still have a very this or reaction to it.
Speaker 1: You can have a you feel something when you look
Speaker 1: at it, uh, and then you can you can feel
Speaker 1: something rather different when you have this additional information about it.
Speaker 1: So it could be that maybe the Lionman was part
Speaker 1: of a religious ritual or religious belief. But it could
Speaker 1: also just be that for some people who had a
Speaker 1: shallower engagement, it was just a thrill. It was just
Speaker 1: facing the monster again, because how many we have so
Speaker 1: many unreal things in our world. We have so many
Speaker 1: monsters to turn to. But imagine living in a world
Speaker 1: where there's one unreal thing. There's one unreal image, that's it,
Speaker 1: and you get to touch it once a week. That's
Speaker 1: given me the creeps Man. A world with only one monster.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I want to get on one more
Speaker 1: aspect of Asthma's paper before we finish out today. He
Speaker 1: actually talks about a bunch more stuff in his paper,
Speaker 1: like the second half of it is all about like
Speaker 1: xenophobia and the social implications of monster fear. And I
Speaker 1: want to talk about one more idea that he goes to,
Speaker 1: which is that monster horror is not just cognitive recognition
Speaker 1: but also an affective emotional state. So Asthma writes, quote
Speaker 1: the emotion slash cognition complex, and horror is a Yannis
Speaker 1: faced experience, partly imperative, as in I should run away,
Speaker 1: and partly indicative that creature is part man and part snake.
Speaker 1: According to some philosophers of mine, like Ruth Milliken, this
Speaker 1: yannis faced and representation is strongly coupled together in lower animals. Mice,
Speaker 1: for example, simultaneously recognize cats as a kind of thing
Speaker 1: in a category and as dangerous, so that's the fear
Speaker 1: affect I should run away. Humans, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: can decouple these two pathways indicative and imperative, and fear
Speaker 1: can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures and perceptions.
Speaker 1: So here's where he's getting into the monster generative capacity.
Speaker 1: It's like, we've got these monster recognition pathways in the brain,
Speaker 1: but they're made for natural predators, and once we've got
Speaker 1: the power to put imaginative content on them, they can
Speaker 1: still be used in the same way. And in this way,
Speaker 1: Asthma seems to think, monster fear is caused by a
Speaker 1: system of what's known as quote somatic markers. Essentially these
Speaker 1: trainable neural pathways that can be filled with emotional content
Speaker 1: based on experience. One more quote of his quote. The
Speaker 1: point is that these emotional responses are not instincts in
Speaker 1: the sense of prewired or genetically engraved responses. The affective
Speaker 1: systems are ancient in the sense that they have many
Speaker 1: homologies with non human animals, but in our individual lives
Speaker 1: their idiosyncratically assigned and have significant plasticity, so you can
Speaker 1: fill them up with whatever monsters happened to catch your fancy.
Speaker 1: And and the idea here is that imaginative monsters have
Speaker 1: this adaptive survival value. I mean, we talked in uh
Speaker 1: not to go again to the bi cameral mind episode,
Speaker 1: but one thing that apart from the whole bi cameral
Speaker 1: mind hypothesis just taking out the whole all of the
Speaker 1: bi camerality, one thing Julian Jaynes talked about was that
Speaker 1: he thought that the primary adaptive benefit of consciousness is
Speaker 1: that you could run simulations in your mind. When you've
Speaker 1: got conscious thought, you've got this mind space where you
Speaker 1: can experiment with things. And uh, Ultimately, Asthma talks about
Speaker 1: fear of monsters being a similar thing, monsters in your
Speaker 1: mind can provide a kind of mental training simulator, a
Speaker 1: place to work out emotional and behave yeal responses to
Speaker 1: danger within the safety of the imagination. But because horror
Speaker 1: images have such strong access to our emotional reactions, he says,
Speaker 1: and this is an an interesting bridge. They don't just
Speaker 1: train our behaviors, they train our values, which gives them
Speaker 1: great power for good and ill in conditioning our moral
Speaker 1: judgments and opinions. This takes us back to St. Augustine
Speaker 1: right that monsters instruct a point. Stories about monsters so
Speaker 1: often have a moral or they teach some virtue. They
Speaker 1: tell you what you should do in a certain situation
Speaker 1: and condition your responses to it. And they're much more
Speaker 1: effective than normal teaching and instruction because they get at
Speaker 1: you emotionally. They you know, you don't have to be
Speaker 1: lectured about what you should do. If you see an
Speaker 1: illustration within a monster story, you just feel emotionally what
Speaker 1: you should do. Yeah, Because on one hand, they're simply saying, hey,
Speaker 1: kids don't go swim in that creek without the adults around.
Speaker 1: And then there's hey, kids don't go in that creek
Speaker 1: without the adults around because there's electric turtle man, we
Speaker 1: will drown you, you know. And yet we see that,
Speaker 1: of course time and time again, in folklore's where there
Speaker 1: is some sort of foul creature who will drown you
Speaker 1: if you swim unattended. Yeah, and so I think this
Speaker 1: could be a very plausible explanation for the emergence of
Speaker 1: monsters in human history, that they could have emerged around
Speaker 1: the same time as language, as a social cohesion technique
Speaker 1: and as a social value instilling technique. They're they're there
Speaker 1: to get people to believe things that would be hard
Speaker 1: to convince them to believe just by telling them I
Speaker 1: like that, Yeah, I shouldn't go off the path, I
Speaker 1: shouldn't mess around with somebody else's spouse. I shouldn't you
Speaker 1: know all these things? Because why because a monster will
Speaker 1: get you if you do. Yeah. So many monsters are
Speaker 1: tied to boundaries. Cross the boundary and face the monster. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so, Yeah, I guess that's the end that we
Speaker 1: we don't have ultimately the answer about when the first
Speaker 1: monster rose, But I think it's very plausible that they
Speaker 1: could have their their roots in social teaching. Yeah, I think. So.
Speaker 1: I feel like we've given we've given everybody some tremendous
Speaker 1: food for thought in trying to unravel the meaning of
Speaker 1: that lion headed figure and what what it meant to
Speaker 1: people then and what the idea of monster of the
Speaker 1: monster has continued to mean for people in all subsequent generations.
Speaker 1: So what do you think, mab What what could the
Speaker 1: Lionman have been teaching? Was the loan mens uh a
Speaker 1: story about how don't go in strange caves? Or uh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I'm will based on things I've
Speaker 1: read in the past, I'm more inclined to give it
Speaker 1: sort of a chaotic vibe, you know, like thinking of
Speaker 1: it in terms of ancient gods of the hunt and whatnot,
Speaker 1: that that this is some sort of an entity that represented,
Speaker 1: to whatever extent they were able to really think about it,
Speaker 1: this is a figure that represented the uncertainty of the
Speaker 1: wild world they it in. Now, was it chaotic good,
Speaker 1: chaotic neutral, or chaotic evil? I think just chaotic neutral,
Speaker 1: Like the world has a certain amount of chaos in it,
Speaker 1: and some days you're gonna go into the cave and
Speaker 1: there's gonna be and you will face the Lionman and
Speaker 1: then you know, maybe you'll lock eyes with it and
Speaker 1: walk away, but maybe not. Some days you eat the
Speaker 1: loan mench, and some days the loan Mench it's you, amen, partner. Alright. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, hey, if you want to see an
Speaker 1: image of this fabulous statue and maybe some of these
Speaker 1: other critters we've talked about, head on over to stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode, along with all past
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