Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Tuglass. Julie,
Speaker 1: what would it take to be a martyr? Like, like,
Speaker 1: what what are the qualities that one needs? Um? You see, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to be someone who's too and I
Speaker 1: mean a real martyr, not I mean like like just
Speaker 1: dripping off the page, um stained glass window kind of
Speaker 1: a thing y gory pages of a history book. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm not just talking like, oh, he's a
Speaker 1: martyr because he refuses to use the new coffee machine,
Speaker 1: right right. You're not gonna get off the cross. Someone
Speaker 1: needs the wood. Yeah, it's not one of those martyrs. Okay.
Speaker 1: First of all, you probably don't want to be too
Speaker 1: concerned with materialism. I'm gonna say, you don't want to
Speaker 1: be a big shopper, right right, yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you'd be willing to wear a potato sack, kind of
Speaker 1: be a little bit smelly, uh, sit in one position
Speaker 1: for a long time, sort of meditating on the world
Speaker 1: in your purpose. Right, Um, what would make like if
Speaker 1: this was a want ad what else will we stick
Speaker 1: in there? M m, well, really, you have to be
Speaker 1: extremely committed to an idea or belief something let's have
Speaker 1: high ideals, yes, yes, so something that again is stronger
Speaker 1: than oh, I have to play this new video game
Speaker 1: when it comes out next month, and stronger even than
Speaker 1: one's own natural affinity for life itself, okay. UM must
Speaker 1: be able to withstand extreme pain in various forms impossible death. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I think this is this is the the aspect
Speaker 1: of it that interests me the most at this moment anyway,
Speaker 1: and it is certainly what we're going to spend the
Speaker 1: most time within this podcast because growing up I was
Speaker 1: I've always been fascinated by these these images of martyrs um,
Speaker 1: especially in the Catholic tradition. With someone in the Western world,
Speaker 1: you just kind of grow up seeing these things, you know,
Speaker 1: be it in actual like church literature or studying like
Speaker 1: just the history of Western civilization. Used to see all
Speaker 1: these discry images. It probably pays to to just quickly
Speaker 1: also just to define where we get the word martyr.
Speaker 1: It comes from the Late Greek term mar tour, which
Speaker 1: comes from martas witness. And uh, the ideas that you're
Speaker 1: you're witnessing something, you're bearing testimony to some fact or
Speaker 1: faith with your blood, with your blood. I think that's
Speaker 1: the crux of it right there, because at the end
Speaker 1: game of being a martyr is not necessarily to die, right.
Speaker 1: But I think one of the things that is so
Speaker 1: anybody can die. Everybody dies, well exactly, but to to
Speaker 1: to actually try to do it so that you're you know,
Speaker 1: immortalized and celebrated. I mean, it's just it's just sort
Speaker 1: of a byproduct like oops, I might die, and so
Speaker 1: I think. But this is one of the most intriguing
Speaker 1: things about a martyr at least captures our attention, and
Speaker 1: why it's so dramatic is that these are people who
Speaker 1: are so committed to something that they are willing to
Speaker 1: withstand such pain. It also turns the typical social and
Speaker 1: just even evolutionary contract on its head, you know, because
Speaker 1: it's it's suddenly like, here's the person that that when
Speaker 1: the authority said, hey, you need to do this or
Speaker 1: we'll kill you, he said, go ahead. I believe more
Speaker 1: in the idea that that that I should have this freedom,
Speaker 1: or that I should be able to say this that
Speaker 1: or the other, or live this that or the other.
Speaker 1: I believe in this more than I believe in, uh,
Speaker 1: the importance of my own skin, oh yeah. Or that
Speaker 1: Joan of Arcs, for instance, she had such a strong
Speaker 1: vision from God that King Charles the seventh should be,
Speaker 1: you know, put on the throne, that she was willing
Speaker 1: to um to to suffer death, and you know, of
Speaker 1: course was burned at the stakes. So this is this
Speaker 1: is pretty heavy stuff in that respect, um. And it
Speaker 1: really is very interesting from a psychological perspective of pain,
Speaker 1: because we know that psychological factors play a huge role
Speaker 1: in the perception of pain. Right now, but before we
Speaker 1: break down some of the the psycho the psychology in
Speaker 1: the science of this, UM, let's run through a few examples.
Speaker 1: And and it's important to note that that's so much
Speaker 1: in martyrdom and in the history of martyrs, in in
Speaker 1: any culture, in any religious tradition or secular tradition. We're
Speaker 1: talking about something that has to do with the politics
Speaker 1: of memory. I mean, these are these are ultimately they
Speaker 1: may have been people at one point or another, but
Speaker 1: they become stories, and stories are told by individuals with
Speaker 1: a bias of some sorts. So a person may die
Speaker 1: truly believing in something. They may die a martyr, and
Speaker 1: but if no one's going to tell the story, then
Speaker 1: they're not really a markin right. So in other words,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a couple of martyr stists
Speaker 1: as examples, but that doesn't mean that these people necessarily
Speaker 1: actually perform certain tasks or maybe we're even um that suffered.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's I guess what we're trying to say
Speaker 1: here is that there there could be some fictionalization of
Speaker 1: things that are not that well documented in the past.
Speaker 1: And we're not celebrating martyrism. We just think it's or martyrdom.
Speaker 1: We just think it's fascinating. Yeah, I mean it is
Speaker 1: pretty cool in a very morbid way to me too.
Speaker 1: That's my personal opinion. But all right, you have like
Speaker 1: Saint anti Pass of Peragammum roasted to death and a
Speaker 1: bronze bull in n D. A bronze bowl, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is like a big bronze bowl, and when you put
Speaker 1: somebody in it, and then apparently as they're shrieking and
Speaker 1: dying inside the bull um, it makes this echoed sound,
Speaker 1: so that the bronze bull sounds like an actual bowl.
Speaker 1: This makes sense because way back in the day. This
Speaker 1: is big pageantry, right, Like you wanted you want to
Speaker 1: go to acoustics on this well, and this is key
Speaker 1: to pageantry. Most of your martyr deaths, especially the big
Speaker 1: ones out of medieval tradition, they tend to be pretty
Speaker 1: dramatic because there's a lot of drama caught up in
Speaker 1: the whole martyrdom idea. Isaiah is pretty interesting. This was
Speaker 1: an eighth century DC prophet in the Kingdom of Judea.
Speaker 1: This is Old Testament stuff, but he was rebranded in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages as this martyr that was solid in
Speaker 1: half right down the middle with this big kind of
Speaker 1: tooth saw. And what's really fascinating about this, dude is
Speaker 1: if you look at some of these medieval texts the
Speaker 1: way that he has depicted, they make a kind of
Speaker 1: cruciform image with like the saw going across in his body,
Speaker 1: up and down, so it ends up looking like a cross.
Speaker 1: So he's he's rebranded as this Christian saint, which is
Speaker 1: which is interesting and tells us a lot about the
Speaker 1: idea of martyrdom. Again as politics, that marketing existed way
Speaker 1: back then, but yeah, apparently right, and then uh oh,
Speaker 1: and then another couple of examples from or another example
Speaker 1: from the medieval tradition especially would be St. Bartholomew. This
Speaker 1: guy is said to have been martyred in Armenia, and
Speaker 1: according to accounts very on exactly what was done. In
Speaker 1: one he was beheaded, uh, and then others he's crucified
Speaker 1: upside down. But the most popular tradition holds that he
Speaker 1: was flayed alive, that he was skinned. Yeah. So in
Speaker 1: in various works of art, and in in one really
Speaker 1: stunning statue that was made in fifty two, you see
Speaker 1: him depicted as this skinless man like something out of
Speaker 1: out of Hell raizor or that Robbie Williams video that
Speaker 1: I said to the other day where he's stripping and
Speaker 1: then he strips off his skin and he's dancing around. Also,
Speaker 1: I'm prepared for that Loneliness Sita submission there. What do
Speaker 1: you think was gonna happen? Because he's already down to
Speaker 1: his underwears, right, and then I guess it was just
Speaker 1: like the beat and then a d J. I just
Speaker 1: didn't think it was gonna be like, Okay, he's gonna
Speaker 1: self flay himself. Yeah, so, so he he tends to
Speaker 1: be depicted like that with a flame knife in one
Speaker 1: hand and his own skin thrown over his shoulder. This
Speaker 1: is barth all of me, not Robbie will um and so.
Speaker 1: And he tends to have this look on his face,
Speaker 1: especially in that statue. It's like a serene look like
Speaker 1: it look like, hey, I'm this doesn't hurt. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I skinned myself, big deal, yeah, which which again comes
Speaker 1: down to that whole like the idea of the martyr
Speaker 1: is turning the typical rules of pain and suffering on
Speaker 1: their head. Um. You see accounts among the various Native
Speaker 1: American people's where there's a there's a certain amount of
Speaker 1: torture that ends up but playing into some of these
Speaker 1: tribal groups, uh, and it becomes part of this culture.
Speaker 1: And so you so you have these, uh, the stories
Speaker 1: of individuals who were captured, individuals from from rival groups
Speaker 1: and when they were tortured, they didn't cry out or
Speaker 1: they didn't say anything, and in doing so shamed their tormentors.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk a little bit about that too, like
Speaker 1: how we actually have some cases of this are are documented.
Speaker 1: But let's just talk about a couple of modern martyr
Speaker 1: examples of what some people think of as martyrs. Yes.
Speaker 1: One in particular especially would be Um Tick Kwan Duke,
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at
Speaker 1: a busy on a busy Saigon intersection on June eleventh, nineteen.
Speaker 1: Everyone has probably seen an image of this before because
Speaker 1: one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Brown want to Pulitzer Prize for the photo. And
Speaker 1: it's you know, this black and white, stark image of
Speaker 1: this this figure seated in uh like a meditative position
Speaker 1: and legs folded and just engulfed in flames, right And
Speaker 1: and reports h E witnesses say that he never screamed.
Speaker 1: There was some flinching, of course, but that's you know,
Speaker 1: of course it's going to happen with your muscles, uh
Speaker 1: in your skin reacting to that. But he practiced a
Speaker 1: very severe ascetic lifestyle and he had of course of
Speaker 1: extreme meditation. Practice was considered about about his vata because
Speaker 1: I know what I'm saying that wrong, um, But at
Speaker 1: the time of his death and that essentially that he
Speaker 1: was enlightened. So um again here's an example of withstanding
Speaker 1: extreme pain, right, And that one's more interesting than it
Speaker 1: is a more contemporary example, because because again and often
Speaker 1: you can imagine like somebody dying horribly for a cause,
Speaker 1: and then the people who carry that cause, of course
Speaker 1: they're going to say, oh, but he was he was
Speaker 1: he or she was bigger than the pain, because the
Speaker 1: cause is that important. This is one of the themes
Speaker 1: that's explored in Umberto Echoes the name of the Rose,
Speaker 1: that I I've always found really interesting. There's a there's
Speaker 1: a martyred heretic that is not a character in the book,
Speaker 1: but is referred to a lot of this fraud Delcino,
Speaker 1: who is into like a thirteenth century poverty heretic, believed
Speaker 1: that that everyone should that the church would be poor,
Speaker 1: that everyone should be poor and uh and should renounce
Speaker 1: all material possessions. And so the young young character in
Speaker 1: the book encounters one telling of the tale in which
Speaker 1: he rises above the pain and is serene through all
Speaker 1: these savage things that are done to him. And then
Speaker 1: in another account that is supposedly the true account, we
Speaker 1: learned that the individual died just stay really horrible death
Speaker 1: and responded in the what typical way one might so.
Speaker 1: But we have one, of of course, one one more
Speaker 1: modern martyr to to mention, right, yeah, Mohamma Gandhi. Now
Speaker 1: some people might say, well, I don't know that I
Speaker 1: consider Mohamma Gandhi a true martyr, while other people say, actually,
Speaker 1: this is a really good example of a martyr because
Speaker 1: this is someone who campaigned for home rule in India
Speaker 1: and helped to defeat colonialism and did that as in
Speaker 1: a similar way that you had talked about, which was
Speaker 1: kind of shaming the government and doing that through hunger strikes. Um.
Speaker 1: He was in prison several times, UM, and he was
Speaker 1: whittled down to the bone. I mean we're not talking
Speaker 1: like he just denied himself a piece of cheesecake. I
Speaker 1: mean this, this is this is another form of pain
Speaker 1: to endure UM. And you'll actually see this is really interesting.
Speaker 1: They've seen studies before that people who are interrexic actually
Speaker 1: have um less susceptibility to pain because you do sort
Speaker 1: of get in this this mindset where you're denying your
Speaker 1: body um, and you're you're living in this kind of
Speaker 1: extreme situation. But you know, it's interesting to look at
Speaker 1: Mohamma Gandhi and although he um, he did die uh
Speaker 1: and he was actually murdered by a fellow Hindu who
Speaker 1: was disappointed that Gandhi could not stop the partitioning between
Speaker 1: Pakistan and India. Essentially, we're talking about hear is Hindu's
Speaker 1: versus Muslims. Right, he was martyred in a in a
Speaker 1: certain way. I guess some people could perceive that because
Speaker 1: his commitment to sort of think that in an ecumenical,
Speaker 1: uh way of embracing all cultures and all religions. So
Speaker 1: again another example, you know, he wasn't We're not talking
Speaker 1: about skin flaying here, but these are you know, extreme
Speaker 1: acts done by people. So we're gonna take a quick
Speaker 1: break and when we come back, we're gonna really head
Speaker 1: into the science of all this and to what some
Speaker 1: of the various neuroscientists and psychologists have to say about
Speaker 1: the way that we experience pain and how various martyrs
Speaker 1: in the past may have overcome this suffering. This podcast
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow
Speaker 1: and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is
Speaker 1: the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot
Speaker 1: com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, and Julie, you have something to share about
Speaker 1: the Shalon monks. Yeah, I want to talk kung fu
Speaker 1: like we're talking real Shalon monks, not the film Shalong monks.
Speaker 1: No now, and we're talking the really the ones that
Speaker 1: inspire martial arts movies, really Shalon monks. Uh. It's actually
Speaker 1: there are a sect of Mayahana Buddhism monks and they're
Speaker 1: concerned with meditation and martial arts and just just a
Speaker 1: couple of facts if they're out there to give you
Speaker 1: some contexts about this. Kung Fu has been practiced in
Speaker 1: China since two BC, and it was always thought of
Speaker 1: as a practice of devotion. Okay, so that's really important here.
Speaker 1: And the leading Shalon kuang Fu school was actually established
Speaker 1: years ago, believe it or not. Um. But these guys
Speaker 1: developed extraordinary physical skills through training over many, many years,
Speaker 1: and the basis of this is pain control or pain
Speaker 1: management UM. And that then they really acclimate themselves to
Speaker 1: be able to withstand this kind of pain. And some
Speaker 1: of it's through meditation, but a lot of it is
Speaker 1: actually through the kung fu. I mean we're talking about
Speaker 1: this is going to sound kind of silly, almost like
Speaker 1: a Chinese water torture in some respects, but you know,
Speaker 1: punching a huge vat of beams for hours and hours
Speaker 1: because they know that that, you know, the hands are
Speaker 1: so sensitive. The idea is to desensitize the nerves in
Speaker 1: your hands. So it's about you feel enough pain that
Speaker 1: it de sensitizes the nerves in the same in a
Speaker 1: similar way that, say, of one abuses a substance, you
Speaker 1: end up frying the pathways. Yeah, but it's still pretty
Speaker 1: much like you know, mind over matter. Um. There's a
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four book by Jing Jing Song entitled Training
Speaker 1: Methods of the seventy two Arts of the Shallon, and
Speaker 1: it documents a range of skills that can be acquired,
Speaker 1: such as causing internal damage to an opponent using a
Speaker 1: one fingered punching, being able to perform handstands on two fingers,
Speaker 1: and being able to break solid objects with the heel
Speaker 1: of the palm. But they also like just just for fun,
Speaker 1: they'll just take like, you know, don't stack of like
Speaker 1: five on their head, and some will like karate chop
Speaker 1: them on their heads for fun. For fun. Is that
Speaker 1: I don't know if that sounds very Buddhist that they're
Speaker 1: doing it. I say that for fun, because you know,
Speaker 1: I was looking at some great video of them, and
Speaker 1: essentially these are a bunch of ten year old kids,
Speaker 1: and some of them start younger, and you know, at
Speaker 1: the age of ten, they're they're getting up at four
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning and they're running up this hill
Speaker 1: in twenty minutes, actually a mountain that takes about an
Speaker 1: hour and a half for the average adult to scale.
Speaker 1: And then they're walking down hands and knees. Okay, this
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like fun, but still, I mean this is
Speaker 1: you know that age, you have tons of energy, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: so walk up some mountains, breaks and breaks and there
Speaker 1: there's so much more well behaved when they get back
Speaker 1: to the exactly exactly. But it is fascinating to see
Speaker 1: this because they also have a yoga tradition and there
Speaker 1: so they're doing martial arts. They're doing these yoga moves
Speaker 1: and they are so well disciplined, and I mean they're
Speaker 1: doing these for hours and hours and these drills, uh,
Speaker 1: these combat moves that they're essentially just imprinting in their
Speaker 1: brains and their bodies so that it becomes second nature.
Speaker 1: And one of the personal is two is che gong.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've heard about this too. I believe it's
Speaker 1: a type of martial arts, since the idea that fire
Speaker 1: energy can actually emanate from your abdomen and you can
Speaker 1: just kind of yeah yeah, and that you can actually
Speaker 1: direct it to uh susceptible parts of your body or
Speaker 1: sensitive parts of your body, like your neck. So you
Speaker 1: could direct this energy to your neck and then someone
Speaker 1: could punch the the holiness out of your neck and
Speaker 1: you'd be completely fine. And they do this like these
Speaker 1: are these are the the sort of tasks that they
Speaker 1: do on for hours. It's pretty amazing. But I mean,
Speaker 1: does it sort of makes sense because that they could
Speaker 1: be able to do this because of that practice, the
Speaker 1: repetitive nature and meditation. If you think about meditation, your
Speaker 1: heart slows, you're pumping less blood, the muscles relax, and
Speaker 1: when you relax the muscles, this is really key because
Speaker 1: it means less tension, and less tension means less pain.
Speaker 1: And I was just thinking about when we were doing
Speaker 1: some research on lightning strikes, and I remember we came
Speaker 1: across something about a guy who was in the thralls
Speaker 1: of a tornado um and he was struck by a lamp.
Speaker 1: So he was rendered unconscious, but his body was thrown
Speaker 1: across the field and he was perfectly fine, and they
Speaker 1: think that's because he wasn't able to tense his body
Speaker 1: and react. This is this is kind of like how
Speaker 1: you hear accounts of individuals and rex where if they
Speaker 1: were intoxicated, individuals end up surviving a wreck because they're
Speaker 1: not they're enough to tense up, right, right. So imagine
Speaker 1: if you're this monk and you have gone through this
Speaker 1: incredible training mind and body, then you could slow your
Speaker 1: heart rate and you have like these mad skills where
Speaker 1: you know, you could defend yourselves or you defend yourself,
Speaker 1: and then if you were to be struck, you could
Speaker 1: negate that strike, could negate that pain. Yeah, dude, Well,
Speaker 1: speaking of meditation, I ran across some stuff here by
Speaker 1: American psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who did a lot of work
Speaker 1: looking at like holicaust cost survivors and all Yale and
Speaker 1: Harvard guy big medicine in the in the field, he
Speaker 1: described the survivors of brainwashing and other psychological deprivation techniques
Speaker 1: supplied by the child Andese government against captive missionaries, and
Speaker 1: he attributed their mental survival to practicing meditation to recalling
Speaker 1: and reciting poetry, uh, scripture, other literature. Essentially they end
Speaker 1: up living living in this imaginal process to expand a
Speaker 1: very limited, restricted physical environment, which cost to mind. We
Speaker 1: we did a previous episode about isolation about how when
Speaker 1: you're in an isolated environment, it begins to rather quickly
Speaker 1: play tricks on the mind. The mind is starved with
Speaker 1: stimuli and ends up having to to grasp onto other
Speaker 1: things to get by, right, And that some of these
Speaker 1: people had actually a cognitive deficiencies after having been isolated
Speaker 1: for years. Yeah, and uh in anyway, um, Lifton found
Speaker 1: that people who were able to in these uh, these
Speaker 1: situations of isolation and uh, and this is you know
Speaker 1: what isolation is a form of torment. We're able to
Speaker 1: reach out and and just say cling to this bit
Speaker 1: of scripture, cling to this prayer, cling to like create
Speaker 1: some imagined reality to make up for what's lacking in
Speaker 1: the physical environment. Um, which which I found pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: Which is a distraction for your mind, right, which we
Speaker 1: we always have talked about how the mind needs a
Speaker 1: bone to chew on. Right. And then of course there's
Speaker 1: self hypnosis as well, which is uh, which is an
Speaker 1: area that is less um, I mean hypnosis itself and
Speaker 1: exactly how it works is is less understood than than
Speaker 1: other aspects of hay management for sure. But there there
Speaker 1: have been studies into how IBS patients can use self hypnosis,
Speaker 1: and this is of course the irritable balance syndrome. Uh.
Speaker 1: They found they can reduce contractions in the bowl, something
Speaker 1: that's not normally possible under conscious control, and their their
Speaker 1: bow lining also becomes less sensitive to pain. And I actually,
Speaker 1: when I was in college, I had a I had
Speaker 1: an abnormal psychology professor. I mean he was he was well,
Speaker 1: he was teaching abnormal. Well he was also a little
Speaker 1: abnormal like guess, but but he mentioned that he was
Speaker 1: really into the idea of self hypnosis. And he he
Speaker 1: said that he had worked with a former student who
Speaker 1: was having to go in and have this technique performed
Speaker 1: where they take the little camera and they stick it
Speaker 1: up the urethra into the bladder. Yeah, and they were
Speaker 1: having to do it on a regular basis, and it
Speaker 1: was extremely painful with for this guy, and they couldn't
Speaker 1: just put him under each time. A bit much to
Speaker 1: go for on such a regular basis to be knocked
Speaker 1: out for this procedure. So he would freak out with
Speaker 1: the pain and they would have to hold him down
Speaker 1: and stuff, and it was just an ugly situation for
Speaker 1: everybody concerned. Uh, So they taught him. He began learning
Speaker 1: self hypnosis, and supposedly by the end of the training
Speaker 1: he was able to calm himself enough that that he
Speaker 1: only felt the tip of the camera poking through into
Speaker 1: his bladder towards the end of the Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this too, even with the placebo effect,
Speaker 1: We've talked about this, that this promise sometimes that um,
Speaker 1: the pain will be alleviated will automatically, uh, make the
Speaker 1: endorphins in your body kick in and opiates kick in.
Speaker 1: So sometimes it really is mind over matter. Um. This
Speaker 1: is from a Scientific American article Daring to Die. They
Speaker 1: were talking actually talking about the psychology of suicide, but
Speaker 1: this is certainly related. It says it is not enough
Speaker 1: to want to die to intentionally end their own life,
Speaker 1: people need the will to carry out their plans. This
Speaker 1: resolve depends on factors such as fearlessness and being able
Speaker 1: to tolerate pain and to act impulsively. The latest research
Speaker 1: shows that such fearlessness can be conditioned. Those who gain
Speaker 1: experience with pain, whether from abuse by others or by
Speaker 1: their own hands, gradually improve their ability to tolerate discomfort.
Speaker 1: They also get used to the idea of harming themselves,
Speaker 1: which kind of plays into this question that we has
Speaker 1: come up before. We've talked about this. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: is someone a masochist or a martyr? At what point?
Speaker 1: You know? And um, another really interesting uh study came up.
Speaker 1: It's a two thousand and nine study and Neticis Mashi
Speaker 1: Siff of McGill University and his colleagues showed childhood abuse
Speaker 1: appears to produce specific patterns of so called epigenetic marks
Speaker 1: on the DNA of brain cells and people who later
Speaker 1: killed themselves. So uh it kind of again there's this
Speaker 1: relationship between pain and psychology and the body. Well, speaking
Speaker 1: of masochism, which you mentioned. Uh there, I did run
Speaker 1: across some stuff from Don Richard Rizzo, who wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Personality Types using the Nagram for Self Discovery,
Speaker 1: and uh he he wrote about the mesochistic personality disorders
Speaker 1: is defined by the American Psychiatric Association and there are
Speaker 1: very like various levels of it. But in in one
Speaker 1: case we're talking about an unhealthy level of messochistic personality
Speaker 1: disorder so that it can it can manifest as manipulative
Speaker 1: and self serving, instilling guilt, putting others in debt uh
Speaker 1: self to self, deceptive about one's own motives and behavior,
Speaker 1: domineering and coercive feelings, entitled to anything uh they want
Speaker 1: and others and then having this like victim and martyr,
Speaker 1: tips of scales of power in a relationship, like I've
Speaker 1: suffered so greatly that therefore you should feel sorry for me,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and it give me a candy bar now, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And then there's the there's sort of the opposite, the
Speaker 1: idea of people that are immune to pain. Oh, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: So I am watching when the Steve Larson movies. I
Speaker 1: this is the girl who kicked the hornets nest, the
Speaker 1: girl who touched the cat on the belly, the girl
Speaker 1: who a sandwich and its rapper, yes, and uh and
Speaker 1: and I'm not gonna um spoil any pots here, but
Speaker 1: that came up and I thought that was really fascinating. Huh.
Speaker 1: My my dad was the dentist, and I remember him
Speaker 1: talking about having having one patient to come. You know,
Speaker 1: he would regularly you know, if somebody comes in for
Speaker 1: a dental procedure, obviously you end up having to apply
Speaker 1: a topical and esthetic or even injecting something. You know,
Speaker 1: doing something to deal with the pain. Pain and management
Speaker 1: comes with the territory of dentistry. But he had, like,
Speaker 1: on one occasion in his um, you know, in decades
Speaker 1: of experience, had one guy come in and they were
Speaker 1: preparing to to do a fairly uh um painful procedure.
Speaker 1: I forget exactly what it was, but it was. It
Speaker 1: was not just a cleaning by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 1: There was some actual digging around involved, right, And and
Speaker 1: my my dad was like, all right, well, you know,
Speaker 1: time to to numb me up. And because I was
Speaker 1: like I'm good, and and my dad was like, I
Speaker 1: don't think you are, because I really need to numb
Speaker 1: me up for this, because this is what's about to happen.
Speaker 1: And the guy's like, no, I never I never take
Speaker 1: any kind of a medicine when I when I come
Speaker 1: into the dentist. And so my dad was like, all right,
Speaker 1: you know, he's kind of begrudgingly agreed to to at
Speaker 1: least start. And it ended up the guy didn't take
Speaker 1: any pain medic medication for the entire procedure, and and
Speaker 1: my dad would talk about it was like he said,
Speaker 1: I just felt weird doing and I felt it felt
Speaker 1: like you're you're tormenting somebody but they're not feeling any pain.
Speaker 1: And um, And as it turns out, this was not
Speaker 1: just this one dude. There are it's rare, but there
Speaker 1: are individuals who who don't feel pain. Uh, there was.
Speaker 1: I was reading a study from Dr Geoff woods Camp
Speaker 1: from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and they ended
Speaker 1: up bringing together a number of children. Uh, well they
Speaker 1: had been show some of them had grown up or
Speaker 1: you know, or teenagers by the time the study came around,
Speaker 1: but uh, growing up they reported to never have felt pain.
Speaker 1: And they analyze them and they found there was nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with their nervous system. And it wasn't wasn't a
Speaker 1: situation where they had some sort of you know, you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of like leprosy type of condition. Um. They
Speaker 1: had normal intelligence, they had normal nerves, and the nerves
Speaker 1: seemed to conduct signals normally, and their brains seemed to
Speaker 1: be put together normally. So it didn't make any sense
Speaker 1: based on their current theories of pain but they were
Speaker 1: able to isolate a gene called sc in nine A
Speaker 1: uh that is very highly expressed in the pain sensing nerves.
Speaker 1: And so there's been a number of research just and
Speaker 1: we're continuing to try and understand exactly how this gene
Speaker 1: play into it. But but they found that people who
Speaker 1: who don't feel pain as well or at all, they
Speaker 1: also may not be able to detect certain odors. And
Speaker 1: they've also found that this is from another study the
Speaker 1: Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. They found that people who
Speaker 1: suffer from osteoarthritis, patients that reported higher levels of pain
Speaker 1: were more likely to carry a particular DNA base at
Speaker 1: certain locations in this same gene as seen in nine A.
Speaker 1: So we we see the opposite there where it sort
Speaker 1: of tweaked another direction and it creates a higher sensitivity
Speaker 1: for pain. So you know, there's like there's to buil
Speaker 1: it down to like the most basic it's like there's
Speaker 1: a connection missing between that perception of pain not nerve. Right,
Speaker 1: It's highly possible that some martyrs in the past may
Speaker 1: have just been in a particular situation genetically to where
Speaker 1: they did not feel pain as strongly or at all,
Speaker 1: which would certainly help you if you were, say to
Speaker 1: be uh, you know, boiled alive, that's just cheating. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess it is. But then believing in something strong
Speaker 1: enough to escape from your torments, that's kind of cheating too.
Speaker 1: That's the whole thing. Martyrs are cheating the system, sticking
Speaker 1: it to the man. These days, though instead of like
Speaker 1: being uh, well, I guess you. You You can still obviously
Speaker 1: be a martyr in many different ways, but maybe you
Speaker 1: would just do like a sideshow act with like the
Speaker 1: gym rose. Yes, but but then you're not You're you know,
Speaker 1: it's like you said to be a martyr at the
Speaker 1: top of the podcast. To be a martyr, you can't
Speaker 1: be that concerned with material possessions. But if you're cashing
Speaker 1: in on your your your inability to to feel pain,
Speaker 1: then you just clearly weren't set out for martyrdom. Even
Speaker 1: if you have some very cool key skills there to implement,
Speaker 1: it's not your bag. Yeah, you mentioned endorphins earlier. Endorphins
Speaker 1: are of course, it's natural pain killer. They're that's released
Speaker 1: in the brain, and there have been studies that shown
Speaker 1: that practices such as prayer and meditation actually can help
Speaker 1: for the release these endorphins and in theory the pain threshold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this was interesting. This is from the lab researchers
Speaker 1: at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and u c l
Speaker 1: A has shown that rats don't fall into painful stimuli
Speaker 1: in the presence of a predator or when the rats
Speaker 1: are in an environment that provokes fear because say they
Speaker 1: have previously experienced a painful stimulus in it and the
Speaker 1: experience released opiots again natural pain killers from their cells.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like it was hard coded once they
Speaker 1: had the experience. And you know, if it's a sense
Speaker 1: of danger, could actually squelch pain in rats. But you know,
Speaker 1: certainly you can take that information and apply to humans
Speaker 1: and um, you know, possibly the same sort of conditions
Speaker 1: could be met. And also there's something to be be said,
Speaker 1: um about this. When you feel the endorphins released by pain,
Speaker 1: you can sort of feel like a rush, Say if
Speaker 1: you're getting a tattoo or something. Um, there's a certain
Speaker 1: like high you end up getting just from the discomfort
Speaker 1: of the procedure that I can't help but think on
Speaker 1: some level might play into into some of this transcendence
Speaker 1: of pain. You know, I'm granted of getting a tattooed
Speaker 1: rather differ from being boiled alive or roasted in a
Speaker 1: brazen bull. But it is all psychological, right because um
Speaker 1: and I've read something about that too. That again, it's
Speaker 1: sort of that that high, that reward that it depends
Speaker 1: on if you're you know, you know what it is
Speaker 1: you're holding out for or enduring. Maybe it is to
Speaker 1: be you know, immortalized. Um And again, the endorphins are
Speaker 1: hitting and it feels like, okay, well, yes I'm or
Speaker 1: you're an athlete. This is a good example. You're running
Speaker 1: through the pain because you're motivated to do what you're
Speaker 1: motivated to win. Yeah, field burn and uh, and you're
Speaker 1: also getting a bit of a high. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: sort of depends on on what's on the other side.
Speaker 1: I suppose. I've also heard some athletes, um and we
Speaker 1: you know, sort of hobby athletes who have discussed the
Speaker 1: how when they are pushing themselves really hard, they also
Speaker 1: feel like they're kind of punishing themselves. So I can
Speaker 1: see that also kind of playing into so it's sort
Speaker 1: of like a transcendence in a weird way of their physicality.
Speaker 1: But maybe some sort of I don't know a psychological
Speaker 1: spiritual level. Yeah, it brings to mind this. Uh this
Speaker 1: quick quote from Roomi, the thirteenth century Persian Muslim poet.
Speaker 1: He said, pain is an alchemy that renovates. Where is
Speaker 1: indifference when pain intercedes? Beware, do not sigh coldly and
Speaker 1: your indifference. Seek pain, Seek pain, pain pain. I love
Speaker 1: that because I always think of Roumi as being this
Speaker 1: incredibly romantic poet. Most of what you hear from Roomy
Speaker 1: is very romantic, certainly not pain pain pain. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it is interesting. I mean, we are so hotly motivated
Speaker 1: by pain, and it certainly helps us learn, right, I
Speaker 1: mean that we so much of our experiences of becoming
Speaker 1: a human are all about avoiding pain, and uh in
Speaker 1: our actions are certainly derived from that motivation. Yeah. Indeed. So,
Speaker 1: now that we've wrapped up martyrs and pain, let's let's
Speaker 1: see what sort of non painful stuff has come through
Speaker 1: the main from the non painful listener mail, pop I did,
Speaker 1: now we have a painful one. We do have a
Speaker 1: painful folder. Yeah, it's luckily it's not very big, but
Speaker 1: but we have a few pain full emails in there now.
Speaker 1: But this is from the good pile. We heard from Gabriel.
Speaker 1: Gabriel writes in and says dynamic duo Robert and Julie. Hey,
Speaker 1: that's that's That's says greetings from Iraq. I am writing
Speaker 1: you today from the Center of Civilization a k. The
Speaker 1: Fertile Crescent, Iraq. I am a combat engineer in the U. S. Army.
Speaker 1: On my second combat tour. I have had the opportunity
Speaker 1: to have wireless Internet and have been able to download
Speaker 1: many of your podcasts, and I listen to each evening
Speaker 1: during the day. While on patrol in m WRAP that's
Speaker 1: Mine Resistant armored patrol vehicle, I replay the podcast I
Speaker 1: listened to the night before over the headset. It is
Speaker 1: great for breaking up the monotony of looking for I e.
Speaker 1: D s and talking about the usual army related stories.
Speaker 1: My soldiers have learned about many interesting things, including waspond's
Speaker 1: brain wiping and micro drones. They especially like the episode
Speaker 1: on nightmares killing people. After spending almost an entire year
Speaker 1: in the southern southern part of Iraq near the Iranian border,
Speaker 1: I've often wondered what made this region of the world
Speaker 1: such a good spot for the beginning of civilization. I
Speaker 1: read recently that this part of Iraq, the Fertile Crescent,
Speaker 1: has changed significantly since the days of Mesopotamia, and that
Speaker 1: its present environmental condition did not support the civilizations that
Speaker 1: existed long ago. Have you ever considered a podcast discussing
Speaker 1: this fact? In summary, on behalf of myself and my soldiers,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to extend our thanks to the both
Speaker 1: of you. Sitting in a convoy of vehicles with the
Speaker 1: with the same guys for almost twelve hours a day's
Speaker 1: kind of like taking a year long road trip, but
Speaker 1: on the same roads, almost like a Twilight Zone episode
Speaker 1: in your own way. You were both doing great things
Speaker 1: for your country. Oh man, that was really nice. That's wow.
Speaker 1: And what a description too. I had never thought about that.
Speaker 1: It's like this this uh sort of like road trip analogy.
Speaker 1: Yeah indeed. Yeah. Um, and I think that the Fertile
Speaker 1: Crescent is fascinating. That that's definitely one that we're gonna
Speaker 1: need to to cover because I'm and we can talk
Speaker 1: about that from so many different perspectives archaeological, cultural, and
Speaker 1: so on. Um. So thanks, yeah, and and by all
Speaker 1: means thank you for your service to our country. All
Speaker 1: you guys. If you happen to be listening right now,
Speaker 1: so if if anyone would like to share anything with us,
Speaker 1: there are many ways to get in touch with us.
Speaker 1: Uh We're on Facebook and we're on Twitter. We're blow
Speaker 1: the Mind on both of those and you can also
Speaker 1: drop us an email at blow the Mind at House
Speaker 1: to works dot com. Be sure to check out our
Speaker 1: new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to
Speaker 1: Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
Speaker 1: possibilities of tomorrow.