Speaker 1: Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: it's Saturday. Time to dive into the vault. This time
Speaker 1: we're bringing you an episode that originally aired on May nineteen.
Speaker 1: This one was called The Doppelganger Network. Yeah, this one's
Speaker 1: pretty fun because, you know, obviously we're going to get
Speaker 1: into the idea of a doppel Ganga and what it
Speaker 1: is and fairy impostures and so forth. But but then
Speaker 1: we're getting into something a lot deeper, something that that
Speaker 1: that really is going to play into a lot of
Speaker 1: our every day online interactions. So let's jump right in here.
Speaker 1: Then I repeat and some up. During the Endless train journey,
Speaker 1: which took me from Eisenach to Berlin, across the Thuringia
Speaker 1: and Saxony in Ruins, I noticed for the first time,
Speaker 1: and I don't know how long that man whom I
Speaker 1: call my double to simplify matters, or else my twin
Speaker 1: or again unless theatrically the traveler. Welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios has
Speaker 1: to works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, And
Speaker 1: today I thought we might have a discussion bringing together
Speaker 1: the seemingly disparate topics of familiarity, doppelgangers or doubles, cap
Speaker 1: gross syndrome, and social media. And I got the idea
Speaker 1: to talk about this today because a few weeks ago
Speaker 1: I read this interesting article that had a very intriguing
Speaker 1: central comparison or image it was. It was a thought
Speaker 1: provoking essay by the Stanford neuro endo chronologist Robert Sapulski.
Speaker 1: It was originally published a few years ago in Nautilus,
Speaker 1: and it was an article pairing the effects of social
Speaker 1: media and and sort of the digital world like Facebook
Speaker 1: and you know, all that to a psychological condition known
Speaker 1: as cap gross syndrome. And so today I thought, maybe
Speaker 1: we should start by explaining and discussing Sepulsky's comparison and
Speaker 1: argument in that article and just see where we go
Speaker 1: from there. Now, capgrass syndrome has definitely come up on
Speaker 1: the show before. I don't know that we've done like
Speaker 1: a designated show on the topic, but it'd certainly come up.
Speaker 1: But either way, we we we do need to, you know,
Speaker 1: provide a brief refresher on its history for our listeners right.
Speaker 1: One of the important cases and which Sapulsky discusses in
Speaker 1: his article is the case of Madam im This. This
Speaker 1: was a woman who lived in France in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century who had this persistent idea. She was fixated
Speaker 1: on the idea that her loved ones, including her husband
Speaker 1: and family members, people she knew, had been replaced by
Speaker 1: doubles or doppel gangers who looked exactly like them. So
Speaker 1: she would say, my husband is not really my husband.
Speaker 1: He's a man who looks exactly like my husband used
Speaker 1: to and I don't know what happened to my real husband.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't her only symptoms. She had a number
Speaker 1: of symptoms. She believed that all kinds of things were
Speaker 1: happening to UH, to her children. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: tragic story, but the underlying UH, the underlying cause of
Speaker 1: what would lead someone to believe that people around them
Speaker 1: were being replaced by doppel gangers or doubles is is
Speaker 1: interesting to consider. And so the way Sepulsky in this
Speaker 1: article characterizes the ultimate disconnect under lyon cap Grass syndrome
Speaker 1: is that when the module of the brain used in
Speaker 1: recognition of faces, specifically involving the fusiform gyrus in the
Speaker 1: brain does cognitively recognize someone, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: the different module of the brain that normally responds to
Speaker 1: this recognition with the emotion that we call familiarity does
Speaker 1: not kick in. And this brain function responsible for generating
Speaker 1: the emotion of familiarity is what Sopolski calls the extended
Speaker 1: face processing system. It's quote a diffuse network including a
Speaker 1: variety of cortical and limbic regions. And apparently, when we
Speaker 1: recognize someone but we don't feel the necessary familiarity emotion
Speaker 1: that follows when we normally recognize somebody, what the brain
Speaker 1: often does when faced with this contradiction is to conclude
Speaker 1: that someone has been replaced by a double. It looks
Speaker 1: like them, but this person doesn't feel familiar to me,
Speaker 1: thus they must be a physically identical impostor. In the past,
Speaker 1: I looked at a two thousand four paper from the
Speaker 1: Canadian Journal of Psychiatry titled Capgras Syndrome. A Review of
Speaker 1: the neuro physiological correlates and presenting clinical features in cases
Speaker 1: involving physical violence and uh In this that when the
Speaker 1: delusional identification syndrome generally involves right brain. Anomally is linked
Speaker 1: to a number of illnesses and neurological disorders, ranging from
Speaker 1: UH schizo effective disorder and Alzheimer's disease to severe head injuries,
Speaker 1: pituitary tumors, and migraines. Even alcoholism can play a role.
Speaker 1: You know, basically, each each of us has a visual
Speaker 1: system and olympic system, and the ladder helps us to
Speaker 1: generate and process emotions. Damage or disrupt communication between these
Speaker 1: two systems, and suddenly a familiar face can suspire, can
Speaker 1: inspire suspicion instead of comfort. Now, Fortunately, kept grass syndrome
Speaker 1: usually subsides with the successful treatment of the underlying medical condition.
Speaker 1: You know, the tumor goes away, and thankfully so does this. Uh. This,
Speaker 1: you know, suspicion that people are not what they seem
Speaker 1: to be. Uh. And in some cases doctors can prescribe
Speaker 1: antipsychotic drugs to also achieve the same effect. But you
Speaker 1: can easily see why the idea of someone being replaced
Speaker 1: by a double or doppelganger would be such a captivating one.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's something that it's something that feels very perverted,
Speaker 1: you know, it plays on our great vulnerabilities. And I
Speaker 1: think it is not a coincidence that this kind of
Speaker 1: thing has featured into some of the horror folklore of
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, you think about the idea of
Speaker 1: the changeling uh in in fairy folklore, where there was
Speaker 1: this idea that where the fairy folk would come in
Speaker 1: and replace someone you knew, often a child, but sometimes
Speaker 1: like a husband or wife, or you know, someone you
Speaker 1: knew with a fairy double who looked like them but
Speaker 1: wasn't familiar to you, didn't act like them. And now
Speaker 1: this is often described as something that people would use
Speaker 1: to explain you know, maybe when somebody's behavior changed and
Speaker 1: they didn't seem themselves, they think, oh, maybe they've been
Speaker 1: replaced with a changeling, or used to explain why people
Speaker 1: might feel that their children weren't their own, or something
Speaker 1: like that. But then also you have to wonder if
Speaker 1: some kinds of neurological issues maybe at work here in
Speaker 1: the minds of the people making the accusation that someone
Speaker 1: is is a fairy. Yeah, and this is obviously this
Speaker 1: idea in and not itself has played into some so
Speaker 1: many myths throughout history and also continues to just resound
Speaker 1: in our our popular media. Um. This is slightly older work,
Speaker 1: of course, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I
Speaker 1: mean that plays heavily on this trope, right, that people
Speaker 1: are being replaced by something else, People that we think
Speaker 1: we know we're not are not actually those individuals anymore.
Speaker 1: It's been a huge You often find it also not
Speaker 1: only in speculative fiction, but in literary fiction as well. Um.
Speaker 1: The quote that a right at the top of this
Speaker 1: episode is from a two thousand and four novel titled
Speaker 1: Repetition by one of my favorite French authors, Alan robue Gerle,
Speaker 1: who often this is one of This is a trope
Speaker 1: that he often threw into his books, like the idea
Speaker 1: of a double or some sort of an alter ego,
Speaker 1: and this book in particular been in particular like starts
Speaker 1: off with a character on a train having glimpsed his
Speaker 1: double once more. Yeah, it's a very unsettling image. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the plurality of self right. Um, well, and because so
Speaker 1: they are double way so that it can be unsettling.
Speaker 1: There's the idea that someone you know is replaced by
Speaker 1: a double. Obviously, if you were to come to believe
Speaker 1: that through you know, whether you had like a brain
Speaker 1: injury or a neurological condition that caused you to believe that,
Speaker 1: or I don't know, if you just believed in fairies
Speaker 1: and thought maybe that this was happening because your cultural conditioning.
Speaker 1: Either way, that would be a terrifying thing. It's another
Speaker 1: thing entirely to see it, to believe that you see
Speaker 1: another version of yourself, you know, to think that you
Speaker 1: had your own double or there was a doppelganger of you.
Speaker 1: So I think most of us are probably familiar with this,
Speaker 1: the the the idea of a doppelganger. Um. I you know,
Speaker 1: I would love to say that I learned about doppelgangers
Speaker 1: for the first time by either consulting a nice, you know,
Speaker 1: book on Germanic mythology, and certainly I I read a
Speaker 1: lot of different mythology books and as a kid. Also,
Speaker 1: I would love to say that my first encounter with
Speaker 1: doppelgangers was a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual, because it's
Speaker 1: another huge place that they're highly visible, as they've long
Speaker 1: been a staple of Dungeons and Dragons, so they're in there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, it's a great way to introduce
Speaker 1: a little um, suspense and chaos into a campaign, Right,
Speaker 1: somebody you know an MPC that the character's trust has
Speaker 1: been replaced, or a doppelganger is trying to or even
Speaker 1: successfully replaces a member of the party. Uh. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of fun to be had with a doppelganger. Um,
Speaker 1: but I have to admit that neither of these cases
Speaker 1: is true. I heard about them initially in the ninety
Speaker 1: via the Drew Barrymore movie that aired on the Sci
Speaker 1: Fi Channel back when this is the old days, back
Speaker 1: when before there were wise in sci Fi Wise inside.
Speaker 1: Ohh Siffy you mean Siffy Yeah, Siffy Channel. Yes. Um,
Speaker 1: I remember next to nothing about this film, but it
Speaker 1: was heavily promoted on the channel, and it introduced the
Speaker 1: idea to me initially, and then I you know, followed
Speaker 1: up by you know, asking around, Hey, Dad, what's a doppelganger?
Speaker 1: And then I looked it up, etcetera. Well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: so it was called Doppelgangers the name of the movie.
Speaker 1: That was at least that was the title if the film,
Speaker 1: as was promoted on Sci Fi Channel at the time.
Speaker 1: So of course it often the case, with films of
Speaker 1: this caliber, they may have had multiple titles, and who knows,
Speaker 1: they may have been promoted elsewhere under a different title.
Speaker 1: I just looked it up. It's also known as doppelgang
Speaker 1: or colon the evil within. Just to be clear, that
Speaker 1: was for the people who didn't know what a doppel
Speaker 1: ganger was. Always got to have a colon, real title.
Speaker 1: So but here here's an interesting thing that I didn't
Speaker 1: realize until I was researching this episode. I just kind
Speaker 1: of assumed, you know, obviously, the doppel ganger itself, the
Speaker 1: term is Germanic origins, and I figured this is a
Speaker 1: creature that emerges from German folk traditions, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and in the same way that that crampus
Speaker 1: came down from the mountains and uh an alpine traditions.
Speaker 1: I just figured the doppelganger was just a standard and
Speaker 1: because the again, the idea of a mysterious double, either
Speaker 1: of self or other, is long established, but this does
Speaker 1: not seem to be the case. Apparently, the word doppelganger
Speaker 1: wasn't coined to know the eighteenth century, and it was
Speaker 1: coined by German novelist Jean Paul in his seventeen nine
Speaker 1: novel Uh Seben Cos, in which the main character encounters
Speaker 1: his own doppel ganger or double goer uh in the
Speaker 1: In this case, the doupel ganger convinces him to fake
Speaker 1: his own death and start a new life. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I had to I had to look in closer on this.
Speaker 1: It's it's not as straightforward as I would like it
Speaker 1: to be, where he's just like, hey, this is the doppelganger.
Speaker 1: Apparently he invents two similar words in this book. He
Speaker 1: invinced the word doppeled ganger. Um, so this would be
Speaker 1: the name for people who see themselves. But then he
Speaker 1: also talks about doppel ganger as a as a word
Speaker 1: for the second course when the second course of a
Speaker 1: meal arrives alongside the first course, because gang or all
Speaker 1: means both you know, go or walker as well as
Speaker 1: course in a meal. So technically doppeled ganger would be
Speaker 1: the mysterious double idea that he introduces. And doppelganger itself
Speaker 1: is just a weird mishap of ordering a multi course
Speaker 1: meal at a restaurant. But nobody's gonna say doubled ganger,
Speaker 1: not anymore, No duffeld ganger. But this is this is
Speaker 1: a good idea. Next time someone introduces the daffel ganger
Speaker 1: in your dn D campaign, remind the d M that
Speaker 1: that's a culinary term sort of. Uh. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: termines up resonating in German literature, and it became popular
Speaker 1: in romantic horror literature in general by the mid eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: So I think originally the the this idea was always
Speaker 1: something scary or dangerous, right, Well, yeah, they're not as much.
Speaker 1: It's seemingly in the original And I didn't read the
Speaker 1: original German novel This is Stress, so you know, feel
Speaker 1: free to correct me if anyone out there is more
Speaker 1: familiar with the with the literature we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: But it certainly took on sinister connotations within the literary tradition.
Speaker 1: But then I was reading about the term on websters
Speaker 1: and the sinister connotations have apparently dropped off somewhat in
Speaker 1: its English language usage, which is surprising to me. But
Speaker 1: then again, I'm coming from the standpoint of knowing them
Speaker 1: mostly through Dungeons and Dragons and Horrible Drew Barrymore movies,
Speaker 1: so I'm probably not like the the key candidate here. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess the other thing, too, is I really don't
Speaker 1: use the term outside of a fantasy context. Like if
Speaker 1: I encounter someone who looks a lot like someone I know,
Speaker 1: I don't say, oh, hey, I saw your doppelganger today.
Speaker 1: I'm more like, hey I saw your Maybe I'll say
Speaker 1: evil twin, which is, you know, another variation on this trope.
Speaker 1: Or I'll say, oh, I just I saw someone who
Speaker 1: looked just about like you, Or I I'm in another city,
Speaker 1: I might say, oh I saw your Chicago you or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know. So that's the other thing. I just don't
Speaker 1: use doppelganger outside of fantastic settings myself. I think most
Speaker 1: people just use it to me and they look alike. Now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I guess I don't even use it that way.
Speaker 1: Like for me, I just if I think of doppelganger,
Speaker 1: I think of something like that creature and Kroll which
Speaker 1: pretends to be the Wizard, you know. I think something
Speaker 1: that when you reveal it, it's a horrible, pallid creature
Speaker 1: with jet black eyes. So if I'm not specifically talking
Speaker 1: about like a monstrous scenario, I'm not gonna use a doppelganger. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's just me. I also think that part of but
Speaker 1: I think part of this whole idea of the sinister
Speaker 1: connotations fading away, It might have to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that if it is used by and large for
Speaker 1: just somebody's double Like if someone is to say, hey,
Speaker 1: I saw your doppelganger today at Showny's, they're not gonna
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's not gonna be a creepy connotation
Speaker 1: to that that sighting. We're not gonna say, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I saw your doppelganger at Showny's and I was super
Speaker 1: creeped out. I think we need to call somebody. No,
Speaker 1: you're You're just gonna it's just gonna be a point
Speaker 1: of whimsy. And the other thing is that more than
Speaker 1: likely it was a first glance situation, like at first glance,
Speaker 1: I thought it was you. At second glance, I saw
Speaker 1: that it was clearly another person and nothing to freak
Speaker 1: out about. Well, I would be shocked though, if people
Speaker 1: didn't still interpret this kind of thing is some kind
Speaker 1: a weird omen or demon or whatever. Oh yeah, And
Speaker 1: I was glancing around on the internet and there's still
Speaker 1: plenty of that. Um And I think a large part
Speaker 1: of that is, you know, as with all paranormal UH
Speaker 1: experiences or supernatural explanations for mundane UH encounters, the supernatural
Speaker 1: explanation is going to be more appealing. It's going, you know,
Speaker 1: it makes us feel more important, Like you want to
Speaker 1: feel like you're in an island rogue relea novel and
Speaker 1: you saw your mysterious double and it, you know, reveals
Speaker 1: something about your you know, your your inner subconscious nature
Speaker 1: or something, or that you you saw a ghost that
Speaker 1: looked like you. I mean, all these are four more
Speaker 1: interesting than Yeah, they're you know, there are a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of people in the world, and it was bound
Speaker 1: to happen sooner or later. But I saw somebody that
Speaker 1: kind of looked like me and had some more facial hair.
Speaker 1: The way that you look isn't all that unique. That's
Speaker 1: like the worst news of all. Yeah, that's that's just
Speaker 1: nothing exciting about that. That story. You don't run rush
Speaker 1: home to tell that to your significant other. But it
Speaker 1: does bring up the question, what are your chance is
Speaker 1: of running into your own unrelated double, or for that matter,
Speaker 1: running into an unrelated double with someone you know well.
Speaker 1: According to ananimous Dr Tiggan Lucas quoted in the BBC
Speaker 1: future article, you're surprisingly likely to have a doppel game,
Speaker 1: which I think is slightly confusing title given the contents
Speaker 1: of the article, but still uh said that the chances
Speaker 1: of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less
Speaker 1: than one in a trillion, and with a seven point
Speaker 1: four billion people on the planet, it was only there
Speaker 1: was only a one in on five chants that there's
Speaker 1: a single pair of true doppel gangers. The wait, what
Speaker 1: are these dimensions you're talking about? Like eight facial dimensions?
Speaker 1: Like if you take you take facial features and you
Speaker 1: divide them up into eight dimensions and go to mac
Speaker 1: match those up. So yeah, not like eight spatial dimensions.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how that would work. Okay, basically the
Speaker 1: eight sliders on your character creator right now most of
Speaker 1: the time, though again we're not talking about exact doubles.
Speaker 1: You know, generally, these are just faces that are similar
Speaker 1: to our own or similar to someone we know when
Speaker 1: we focus on the familiarity in a way that may
Speaker 1: be tied to a means of identifying close skin. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in early human history, like that's what this
Speaker 1: recognition system is perhaps four um and you know, think
Speaker 1: again about how generally, how you know, generally doubles are
Speaker 1: kind of a first glance thing. The similarities may be jarring,
Speaker 1: but the differences will be pronounced as well. Now, the
Speaker 1: thing is, there are so many humans on the planet
Speaker 1: now and we live in you know, closer confines in
Speaker 1: many situations, seeing familiar features, it doesn't necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: there's any shared genetic heritage between two given individuals, you know,
Speaker 1: except in the sense that all humans share mostly in
Speaker 1: the grander yeah, and the grander scheme. Yes, but yeah,
Speaker 1: if you just if you're in another city you see
Speaker 1: someone who looks kind of like you or looks kind
Speaker 1: of like a friend, it doesn't mean their your long
Speaker 1: last cousin or their long last cousin of an your friend.
Speaker 1: But it's a situation where we kind of broke the
Speaker 1: system through population growth in the birth of cities and
Speaker 1: and self facial recognition and facial recognition abilities. They're also
Speaker 1: going to vary from person to person, so your doppel
Speaker 1: ganger alarms just may not be as easy to set
Speaker 1: off as someone else's. So anyway, that's that's doppel ganger's
Speaker 1: in a nutshell, both the origin of the term, but
Speaker 1: then a little bit about the the science and the
Speaker 1: potent that the potentiality of seeing a double or near
Speaker 1: double uh somewhere in the world. But thinking about what
Speaker 1: is at work with the the erroneous detection of doubles
Speaker 1: in cop Cross syndrome, UH is I guess maybe what
Speaker 1: we should get back to when we come back after
Speaker 1: a break. All Right, we're back and it's really us.
Speaker 1: We weren't replaced by strange creatures from the Monster Manual
Speaker 1: over the course of the advertisement. Now we're here, it's
Speaker 1: really us and we're going to continue our exploration. You know.
Speaker 1: I wanted to answer that with the body snatchers noise,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if I can make it exactly
Speaker 1: from the Donald Sutherland version, which is a great version
Speaker 1: by ill haven't seen that. I've only seen the old
Speaker 1: black and white original. Oh, the Donald Sutherland one is great.
Speaker 1: He's got Lambert from Alien, it's got Jeff Goldblum, He's
Speaker 1: he's feisty. It's got oh and it's got from another
Speaker 1: sci fi classic. It's got what's his name who played
Speaker 1: spok Literary, Yeah, Literary. Nimoy is fantastic in it. I
Speaker 1: think it's his it's his great performance. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: great cast, but the nineteen fifty six original had had
Speaker 1: had Kevin McCarthy in the lead role. He was terrific.
Speaker 1: You also had Carol and Jones, who had played more
Speaker 1: Tisha on The Adams Family. Oh cool. Yeah, But also
Speaker 1: it was just black and white and it just it really,
Speaker 1: at least the version I saw of it, like the
Speaker 1: darkness felt just so murky and uh and dirty somehow,
Speaker 1: Like it was just a very nightmare inducing film when
Speaker 1: I saw it as a kid. You know, the paranoid
Speaker 1: visual vibe. It's got a it's got a kind of
Speaker 1: a communist infiltration thing. Oh, definitely, definitely, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a very strong element of it, which just goes to
Speaker 1: show like the ideas of like why this concept of
Speaker 1: of doubles resonates so because you're can apply it to
Speaker 1: all these other scenarios social and political. Well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a common thing for people to say when
Speaker 1: they don't literally think that someone they know has been
Speaker 1: physically bodily replaced by a by a supernatural double, they
Speaker 1: might often think, I don't know this person anymore. I
Speaker 1: mean it's a similar like, you know, they've been replaced
Speaker 1: with somebody, somebody replaced you with a different person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like so just would really you just found out you're
Speaker 1: getting to know them better, You found not something about
Speaker 1: them you didn't know before, and now you think that
Speaker 1: they're like a different being entirely, and now it's just
Speaker 1: because it turns out that they were maybe communists or
Speaker 1: like a different football team. Well, to be fair, also,
Speaker 1: it could be a case of um, you know, people
Speaker 1: over emphasizing disposition a traits thinking that people thinking that
Speaker 1: they should expect their loved ones to be incredibly consistent
Speaker 1: and trait predictable, when in fact people inconsistent that it
Speaker 1: depends on the circumstances how they behave. Maybe sometimes you
Speaker 1: are used to seeing someone only in one type of context,
Speaker 1: maybe used to only seeing them at work, and then
Speaker 1: when you see them in a different context, when you
Speaker 1: see them, you know, out with their friends or with
Speaker 1: their family, they seem like a totally different person to you.
Speaker 1: It can be jarring when you see those differences, and
Speaker 1: yet they're there for almost all of us, almost none
Speaker 1: of us, like really behave the same way in all contexts. Well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the about those contexts, especially the social contexts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I want to come back to So we've talked
Speaker 1: about doppelgangers a bit and the idea of doubles and
Speaker 1: and familiarity and recognition. But I want to come back
Speaker 1: to uh that article I mentioned at the beginning where
Speaker 1: Robert Sapolski makes this comparison between what is made clear
Speaker 1: about the brain basis of familiarity with cop Cross syndrome
Speaker 1: and the ways that technology is changing our social relationships.
Speaker 1: So in in Sapolski's words, Capcross syndrome makes clear the
Speaker 1: brain basis for quote, the offerences between the thoughts that
Speaker 1: give rise to recognition. Remember recognition as cognitive. You see
Speaker 1: somebody and you cognitively know who they are, and the
Speaker 1: feelings that give rise to familiarity. That's the emotion that says, yes,
Speaker 1: I know this person. They're different things. And Sapolski's main
Speaker 1: point is quote, these functional fault lines in the social brain,
Speaker 1: when coupled with advances in the online world, have given
Speaker 1: rise to the contemporary Facebook generation. They have made cop
Speaker 1: Gross syndrome a window on our culture and minds today
Speaker 1: where nothing is quite recognizable but everything seems familiar. And
Speaker 1: I would actually go further than that and say I
Speaker 1: think that's an interesting point. But the the inverse is
Speaker 1: true as well, that the online world creates these situations
Speaker 1: where you have familiarity without recognition and recognition without familiarity.
Speaker 1: So to further explore the point, he makes a little
Speaker 1: bit so he points out that, you know, essentially, for
Speaker 1: all of our evolutionary story are only social relationships have
Speaker 1: been face to face ones. And I'm struggling to think
Speaker 1: of a counter example. I can't really think of a
Speaker 1: counter example for relationships with real people. But for tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of years, of course we have had language,
Speaker 1: and we could have felt as if we had relationships
Speaker 1: with people we only heard about in stories for example. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously we do eventually reach the point where we have
Speaker 1: the ability to engage in activities like having a pin pal,
Speaker 1: and that may. You know, that's a case where you
Speaker 1: can have certainly a non face to face example. But
Speaker 1: prior to uh, you know, the advent of the necessary um,
Speaker 1: you know, systems and technology. Yeah, I struggle to think
Speaker 1: of an example as well. I mean, even sort of
Speaker 1: semi imagined situations such as speaking to the spirit of
Speaker 1: a dead ancestor or dead relative, like you're still depending
Speaker 1: upon a previous face to face relationship. Yes, and even
Speaker 1: even with pin pals, I mean even the oldest versions
Speaker 1: of this, the non digital communications just writing to people
Speaker 1: with letters, even if you've never met them before, that
Speaker 1: that is anatomically recent. I mean, the vast majority of
Speaker 1: the time our species has been around, we didn't have writing.
Speaker 1: We couldn't do that. The only relationships we had were
Speaker 1: face to face relationships. And so it's entirely clear that
Speaker 1: our bodies and our brains have been shaped by an
Speaker 1: evolutionary niche and when in which all relationships were face
Speaker 1: to face ones. Right, Even our history is a symbolic uh.
Speaker 1: Species is mostly based on almost exclusively based on face
Speaker 1: to face communication. Yeah, And so when our only social
Speaker 1: relationships were face to face relationships, it was natural for
Speaker 1: facial recognition and familiarity at an in person body sensing
Speaker 1: level to be one of our main mediators of how
Speaker 1: we conceptualized, evaluated, and formed beliefs about our relationships. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you live in this non technological world where your
Speaker 1: only relationships are face to face, it totally makes sense
Speaker 1: for you to use moment to moment, face to face
Speaker 1: a visual and touch data and things like that. To
Speaker 1: get the best idea of what your relationships are and
Speaker 1: how you should feel about them, right, I mean some
Speaker 1: of that goes back to the you know we're discussing
Speaker 1: earlier about uh, you know, can identification being able to
Speaker 1: tell like this, this is a relative, I can see
Speaker 1: it in their face exactly. But of course there have
Speaker 1: been these technological changes that now allow relationships to exist
Speaker 1: and persist under circumstances other than face to face interaction.
Speaker 1: Of course, we already mentioned writing in literacy. Now this
Speaker 1: allows you to maybe send letters, though I'd say even
Speaker 1: for most of the time that's been around, that has
Speaker 1: been something that is limited to a small percent of humans,
Speaker 1: you know, because for most of human history most people
Speaker 1: have not been literate, That's true. And then and then
Speaker 1: of course again I feel I feel like the pinpal,
Speaker 1: like the the pinpal situation in which there is never
Speaker 1: a face to face meeting. Like that's as a slim
Speaker 1: slice of the overall pie. Most of the other um
Speaker 1: written communications are going to be carried out with individuals
Speaker 1: um in which there was at least a previous face
Speaker 1: to face communication. Yeah, but then think about how hard
Speaker 1: this kind of thing can make relationships. I bet every
Speaker 1: single person listening has had the experience of relationships strife
Speaker 1: caused by a feeling by a misunderstanding, or some kind
Speaker 1: of feeling of emotional estrangement brought on by the media
Speaker 1: through which you communicate. A lot of us don't feel
Speaker 1: very comfortable talking to people on the phone. A lot
Speaker 1: of us, don't you know, we have the experience of
Speaker 1: sending emails and being misunderstood, having people not read your
Speaker 1: tone correctly, or getting worried about the way somebody punctuated
Speaker 1: a sentence and an email. I mean, I bet you've
Speaker 1: had this experience. Oh yeah, absolutely, and I think we
Speaker 1: all have both in personal contacts and work contacts. You know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, says I guess you know. Hopefully if you have,
Speaker 1: if you're dealing a lot uh via email with someone,
Speaker 1: you'll kind of get a feel for their tone and
Speaker 1: how they tend to speak. But even then there's so
Speaker 1: much room for miscommunication, Like even when you you feel
Speaker 1: like you you really uh you know, or or up
Speaker 1: to speed on how they present themselves in a textual manner. Robert,
Speaker 1: if you don't mind me saying you're kind of a
Speaker 1: terse emailer, am I I can see people getting worried
Speaker 1: when they get an email from you that maybe you're
Speaker 1: mad at them or something. I don't think that's necessarily
Speaker 1: always the king. Maybe sometimes you're mad at me, But
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you just tend to not spend
Speaker 1: a whole lot of time, you know, worrying about how
Speaker 1: to phrase stuff on email. You just kind of bang
Speaker 1: it out, and which I admire because you know, I
Speaker 1: it is, you know, the amount of time that people
Speaker 1: waste trying to phrase stuff on email is is it's
Speaker 1: a horror. The thing is I used I remember when
Speaker 1: I was younger, I would have these these long email
Speaker 1: correspondence is we're going on with friends where we would
Speaker 1: respond like like sometimes ence by sentence or atleast paragraph
Speaker 1: by care paragraph where we'd respond to specific points and
Speaker 1: uh and and right at length in response. And at
Speaker 1: some point this just faded away. I haven't really I
Speaker 1: haven't really thought about it too much to to try
Speaker 1: and figure out exactly like at what point, like which
Speaker 1: like technological or communications change altered that or and or
Speaker 1: what life changes led to that occurring. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, you know, it used to have of, you know,
Speaker 1: long phone conversations with people and now it's really it's
Speaker 1: it's extremely rare for me to have a long phone conversation.
Speaker 1: It's basically like two people in the world that I
Speaker 1: have phone conversations within a regular basis and once my
Speaker 1: wife and once and my mother, and then that's pretty
Speaker 1: much it. Do you think maybe these changes have been
Speaker 1: brought on by other technological changes, like the rise of
Speaker 1: social media. I suspect they have. Yeah, Like instead of
Speaker 1: having this this more, this longer, more thoughtful stream of
Speaker 1: communication with some body that you know now lives in
Speaker 1: another city, you just have a continual trickle, you know,
Speaker 1: so again we just have that familiarity, like a tripical
Speaker 1: familiarity going on instead of like an actual stream of communication. Well,
Speaker 1: and it also I think that the way that technology
Speaker 1: has changed our communication sometimes forces us to become a
Speaker 1: version of ourselves that we don't recognize. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was talking about how we write work emails. I actually
Speaker 1: don't love the way that I write work emails. I
Speaker 1: feel like often I have to I overuse like exclamation
Speaker 1: points and smiley faces and all that. And it's mainly
Speaker 1: just because I don't ever want to accidentally make somebody
Speaker 1: feel bad over email or make them get the wrong
Speaker 1: idea that I'm at them or something like that. On
Speaker 1: the emotional intention, Yeah, and the statement I hate it
Speaker 1: because I can feel myself feeling insipid and feeling not
Speaker 1: like myself as I type it. But I would rather
Speaker 1: feel like that then worry that I'm giving people the
Speaker 1: wrong idea or letting them think I'm mad at them
Speaker 1: or something like that. You know, Yeah, I mean, but
Speaker 1: I totally understand it. Yeah, sometimes you feel like you
Speaker 1: have to really make it clear. And I do find
Speaker 1: myself doing more and more of that with texts when
Speaker 1: I'm sending a text, you know, via my tiny pocket computer.
Speaker 1: Oh your pocket god, yes, tiny pocket guy. Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so we've got to obviously, you know, all the
Speaker 1: stuff we're talking about email, phone, uh, text messages and
Speaker 1: internet communications. The photograph in a way kind of kind
Speaker 1: of a modern communication method sort of, Yeah, is it's become,
Speaker 1: you know, increasingly easy to to take digital photographs and
Speaker 1: send them to other people. It becomes a form of
Speaker 1: communication as does you know. You mentioned emoticons as being
Speaker 1: like a way of of of tweaking textual content, but
Speaker 1: in many cases like they're the prime uh language that
Speaker 1: is used in communicating to say nothing of memes. Oh
Speaker 1: I shudder at this thought. Memes or there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a day in which the English language is replaced by memes.
Speaker 1: It's just like, instead of an alphabet, you have a meme,
Speaker 1: a bet and you just like put you paste the
Speaker 1: memes together to form ideas. Yeah, I mean I already
Speaker 1: feel um, you know, and maybe this is just me
Speaker 1: feeling old, but um, I feel we we've already reached
Speaker 1: the point where there'll be a threat about something sound
Speaker 1: Reddit and there'll be a meme and I have to
Speaker 1: I have to research what the meme means, Like it's
Speaker 1: a new meme, and I have to figure out like
Speaker 1: where it came from, how it's used, and how it's
Speaker 1: potentially being misused, and how it's like evolving out of
Speaker 1: that misuse to understand like what the prevailing idea is
Speaker 1: that is being um expressed. Memes as a whole are
Speaker 1: exactly like words in the sense that you can try
Speaker 1: to write down a definition for a word, but where
Speaker 1: uses changes over time. I mean, words don't actually have
Speaker 1: fixed definitions. You can't control how people use them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of like the whole like literally, right, um,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, sorry, you lost that battle, that words changed.
Speaker 1: You can cling to the past, but sorry, it was
Speaker 1: just misused into a new usage. So I try not
Speaker 1: to correct people on that one, but that does it
Speaker 1: still gets me. My blood was literally boiling and it
Speaker 1: literally took his head off. Yes, but yeah, So we're
Speaker 1: talking about the you know, the technological media on which
Speaker 1: our relationships happened. And I think many of our relationships,
Speaker 1: especially in the last you know, ten years now, happened
Speaker 1: primarily on these media. And on one hand, that can
Speaker 1: be a good thing because it allows us to maintain
Speaker 1: relationships with people who we want to have relationships with,
Speaker 1: but can't, you know, people we can't practically arrange to
Speaker 1: see in person as often as we'd like to. Several
Speaker 1: of my best friends live in different cities and we've
Speaker 1: been friends for years and I'm only able to maintain
Speaker 1: friendships with them because of this technology. So I would
Speaker 1: hate to lose those friendships. But also I wonder about
Speaker 1: the fact that what is it doing to our culture
Speaker 1: when there's a substantial number of people who, like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe seventy percent of their friendly social interactions
Speaker 1: happen over a machine. Yeah. I mean even people like
Speaker 1: flesh and blood friends that I have in the city
Speaker 1: with me, Like, we still have to do like a
Speaker 1: like a you know, a thirty email chain to plan
Speaker 1: to meet each other in real life. Like even if
Speaker 1: it's like a semi regular thing, like we know where
Speaker 1: we're gonna go, we know when we're going to do it,
Speaker 1: but we still have to coordinate all of these things.
Speaker 1: So how much of the relationship is truly face to
Speaker 1: face versus digital? Yeah? And so, Sapolsky says in this
Speaker 1: article that this technological reality has conditioned us in a
Speaker 1: way to dissociate our traditional pathways of recognition and familiarity.
Speaker 1: Uh so, he writes, quote, Thus, not only has modern
Speaker 1: life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity, but it has impoverished
Speaker 1: the latter in the process. So impoverished familiarity this is
Speaker 1: worsened buy our frantic skill at multitasking, especially social multitasking.
Speaker 1: A recent Pew study parted that eighty nine percent of
Speaker 1: cell phone owners use their phones during the most recent
Speaker 1: social gathering. That sounds low to me. Um, we reduce
Speaker 1: our social connotations to mere threads so that we can
Speaker 1: maintain as many of them as possible. This leaves us
Speaker 1: with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants of the
Speaker 1: real thing. And I think he's really onto something there
Speaker 1: about the idea of um maintaining it's almost like putting
Speaker 1: up the scarecrows of things like these technological stand ins
Speaker 1: for relationships that are not really functioning biologically and psychologically
Speaker 1: for us the way relationships should. But we'd rather maintain
Speaker 1: as many of those as we can rather than have
Speaker 1: fewer relationships but more face to face interaction, you know,
Speaker 1: quality time and all that. Yeah, so we we end
Speaker 1: up maintaining these trickles of of of actual social connections
Speaker 1: as opposed to streams of social connection. So he's saying
Speaker 1: there that we essentially degrade our sensitivity to the familiarity
Speaker 1: aspect of of what knowing somebody is a social interaction.
Speaker 1: It's recognition and familiarity. And when we degrade the familiarity thing,
Speaker 1: he says, quote, uh, that we become increasingly vulnerable to imposts.
Speaker 1: Our social media lives are rife with simulations and simulations
Speaker 1: of simulations of reality, and so of course you know
Speaker 1: that's uh, you know, one example there is people who
Speaker 1: claim to know you, but they're not. They're uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a friends email account gets hacked, some hacker contacts you
Speaker 1: and tries to get you to open some malware. That's
Speaker 1: one example. But there's a million versions of this thing
Speaker 1: where where are sort of like low resolution familiarity detectors
Speaker 1: in this digital world are being exploited by people who
Speaker 1: are not actually our real friends. So and basically our
Speaker 1: online their online version of ourselves is essentially as a lazy,
Speaker 1: low resolution simulation, and so if someone comes along to
Speaker 1: hijack that simulation, it's all the easier to do. So
Speaker 1: you don't have to be a high level magic user
Speaker 1: to to to take on the likeness of another individual
Speaker 1: when the threshold for duplication is so low. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then here here's the turn. So Sapolsky says, by any
Speaker 1: logic quote, this should induce us all to have cap
Speaker 1: craw delusions to find it plausible that everyone we encounter
Speaker 1: is an impostor. After all, how can one's faith in
Speaker 1: the veracity of people not be shaken when you sent
Speaker 1: all that money to the guy who claimed he was
Speaker 1: from the I R. S. And I think there is
Speaker 1: something going on here. It didn't start with this, but
Speaker 1: this this impostor kind of thing that the doppelganger effect
Speaker 1: of the online world and the fact that it's easy
Speaker 1: to be tricked by an online doppelganger does help contribute,
Speaker 1: I think to this concept. I'm sure you've encountered this, Robert,
Speaker 1: that the Internet is not real life. People always say this, right,
Speaker 1: It's like I talked about somebody being a friend in
Speaker 1: real life, in real life versus on the Internet. But
Speaker 1: if most of your social interactions are happening on the Internet,
Speaker 1: in what sense is that not real life? I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, the Internet is real life. It is It
Speaker 1: is a it's like a technology. The stuff you're doing
Speaker 1: on it is actually happening. It's not like something that
Speaker 1: didn't happen. But you are making a distinction there people
Speaker 1: in some way or or seeing these interactions as derealized
Speaker 1: or as not having uh, you know, not material in
Speaker 1: the way that other interactions are. And yet there where
Speaker 1: we're doing most increasingly all of our stuff. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I wonder if part of that, you know, I would
Speaker 1: I wonder how this plays out generation to generation, because
Speaker 1: I feel like for me, I probably maybe I had
Speaker 1: had a sense of the Internet is being not real life,
Speaker 1: more so early on, because the Internet was in some
Speaker 1: respectfully kind of an escape. I mean at the same time, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I remember having a union to use a
Speaker 1: like a college email address and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, So you're still you're still doing in real
Speaker 1: real life stuff via the Internet. But then a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff is is about escaping either just in general,
Speaker 1: like escaping into the into fantasy, or like escaping geographical boundaries,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh in you know, being able to
Speaker 1: connect with people in other cities. Well, I think there's
Speaker 1: another way in which there are multiple ways in which
Speaker 1: people came to see the Internet is not real life,
Speaker 1: and one of them is is anonymity. You know that
Speaker 1: if you could go around invisible all day. What's that
Speaker 1: Harry Potter cloak that makes you invisible? Oh the what
Speaker 1: was the type? I mean, it's a new cloak of invisibility,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember if it had any particular name. Well,
Speaker 1: whatever that is, you could be invisible in a way
Speaker 1: that would feel not real, right because if nobody can
Speaker 1: see you and nobody knows who you are wherever you are,
Speaker 1: then there are no consequences, and consequences are kind of
Speaker 1: what gives us the feeling of reality. So that's part
Speaker 1: of it. But I think also Spolski is onto something
Speaker 1: here and that like that this estrangement of the sense
Speaker 1: of recognition and familiarity is it makes the Internet start
Speaker 1: to feel like this world of social delusion, this sort
Speaker 1: of like always cap grav or a bold type landscape
Speaker 1: where nothing is really real and you can't trust anything,
Speaker 1: and yet at the same time we're we're constantly forced
Speaker 1: to put our trust in it as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: because that's where we're doing everything. But then, of course,
Speaker 1: back to the idea of like all these you know,
Speaker 1: threads that people maintain and sort of mistake for meaningful
Speaker 1: relationships online. Uh. He comes back and on that and says, actually,
Speaker 1: you know, it seems more the opposite has happened than
Speaker 1: than inducing us to all have cap grad delusions where
Speaker 1: we see people we knew and we think of them,
Speaker 1: see people we know and we think of them as
Speaker 1: as you know, being a doppelganger or not familiar. Instead,
Speaker 1: we go the other way and we see people we
Speaker 1: don't really know very well, but we just have to
Speaker 1: attach this feeling of familiarity to them. It allows all
Speaker 1: of this false familiarity. And this really comes up in
Speaker 1: I don't know, how have you read about the the
Speaker 1: idea of you know, paras social interactions on social media?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't think prior to this episode, I
Speaker 1: I knew it by that term, but of course you
Speaker 1: do see it all the time. Yeah, it's It's just
Speaker 1: it's ubiquitous on the Internet. It's the idea, you know,
Speaker 1: it's an asymmetrical relationship, the way like you follow a
Speaker 1: public figure who doesn't know who you are. But there
Speaker 1: are all of these indications that many people think of
Speaker 1: these para social asymmetrical relationships as relationships. It's like they
Speaker 1: almost view this Instagram influencer that they follow as like
Speaker 1: an acquaint somebody they know, but of course that person
Speaker 1: doesn't know them. Yeah. I really started thinking about this
Speaker 1: classification though, of para social relationships, uh, and in wondering
Speaker 1: like to what extent it can or could have existed
Speaker 1: in previous times, Like what is the earliest possible example
Speaker 1: of a para social relationship, Like maybe it could be
Speaker 1: a situation where you have like a h an, like
Speaker 1: a leader um in a given community, and then you
Speaker 1: have like a very low level person in that community
Speaker 1: that that the you know, the tribal leader just has
Speaker 1: no uh you know, real idea of who they are.
Speaker 1: But of course you know who the leader is. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess that's you know, sort of the the in
Speaker 1: real life version of this. But we see it seems
Speaker 1: like we see far more of it, uh in in
Speaker 1: in modern civilization. Um in certainly an Internet age, but
Speaker 1: even pre Internet, like the idea of celebrity just enables
Speaker 1: this sort of relationship to be possible, celebrities and leaders.
Speaker 1: And of course I would say that social media, of
Speaker 1: course did not invent the idea of celebrities, and so
Speaker 1: so it didn't invent these relationships like you're talking about.
Speaker 1: You know, you've always had leaders, You've always had public
Speaker 1: figures in some way or another. Social media, I think
Speaker 1: has increased the day to day relevance of these types
Speaker 1: of relationships. You know, where you can like check in
Speaker 1: on on the accounts of the people that you follow
Speaker 1: every day and they don't know you, but you know you.
Speaker 1: Especially I feel like Instagram, especially of all the platforms
Speaker 1: I can think of as is really rife with this
Speaker 1: um of like these influencers and people who lead kind
Speaker 1: of glamorous lives and allow you to see into their
Speaker 1: lives by showing you their house and their pets and
Speaker 1: their lunch, and you know, you get all these interior
Speaker 1: views and it's very visceral because it's visual and often
Speaker 1: you know, visual, even in a way that's edited to
Speaker 1: make it more colorful and exciting with the post processing
Speaker 1: filters and all that. Right, And of course, at the
Speaker 1: same time, like like all social media representations like this,
Speaker 1: they are they're incomplete. We're crafted, and they're crafted their uh,
Speaker 1: they're they're maintain in a very strategic way usually, so
Speaker 1: you don't even have like a full vision of what
Speaker 1: you know, random celebrities life actually is. You just have
Speaker 1: this idealized version of it. So I just want to
Speaker 1: read one last quote from Sapulski's article before we move on.
Speaker 1: So he says, um uh. He ends by saying, quote,
Speaker 1: Throughout history, cap Cross syndrome has been a cultural mirror
Speaker 1: of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings
Speaker 1: of intimacy have been sundered. It's still that mirror today.
Speaker 1: We think that what is false and artificial in the
Speaker 1: world around us is substantive and meaningful. It's not that
Speaker 1: loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that
Speaker 1: simulations are mistaken for them. I think I kind of
Speaker 1: disagree with them a little bit because I think it's
Speaker 1: actually both of those things. It's like that that the
Speaker 1: dissociation goes two ways in either case. Though we we
Speaker 1: do typically we often find ourselves in situations though where
Speaker 1: we are we are distracted from from real life um
Speaker 1: relationships and real life socialization, and instead we have to
Speaker 1: check in on these little streams on our phone to
Speaker 1: just these uh, these simulated relationships that we have on
Speaker 1: social media. Do you ever have the sort of direct
Speaker 1: doppelganger experience, like with the fairy change links or the
Speaker 1: doppelganger for a friend on the internet, Like you have
Speaker 1: a family member, you have a friend who you love
Speaker 1: in real life, but when you see the way they
Speaker 1: are on the internet, I don't know what it. You know,
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff they post on social media or whatever,
Speaker 1: you don't feel like you recognize them and you don't
Speaker 1: really like them. I've definitely known people who are like that.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna name any names who are like that
Speaker 1: on say Twitter, Like I think, like I love this person.
Speaker 1: But if all I knew about them was the way
Speaker 1: they act on Twitter, I would I wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to stand them well social media, especially as it pertains
Speaker 1: to you know, some topics, take politics, for instance, I
Speaker 1: think it does tend to bring out the worst in us. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that is a risky comment to make.
Speaker 1: I think we can all think too specific examples of
Speaker 1: that in all of our own lives. And yeah, that
Speaker 1: can lead you to a situation where you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I thought I knew that person, but I guess I
Speaker 1: don't because look at this name they just shared, you know,
Speaker 1: um and uh. But I think also though, when that happens,
Speaker 1: we're just not appropriately appreciating the way that circumstances and
Speaker 1: situations change change people's behavior. That we are the same way. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: All right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back. All right, we're back. You know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about what you said about about my emails,
Speaker 1: but I feel like, like sixty maybe my emails or
Speaker 1: me just saying um, cool sounds good. But I think
Speaker 1: that's my my standard, which I feel is sufficient. It's
Speaker 1: just me saying yes to whatever you just said. Uh,
Speaker 1: and I I'm cool with it. Do you have an
Speaker 1: Android phone? No? I don't. Okay, use Gmail? Yeah you
Speaker 1: use Gmail, Yeah, but I don't use the I know
Speaker 1: that you have the the sort of you know, the
Speaker 1: auto language feature starts telling you what to say. It's like,
Speaker 1: here's the email you could write. Man, when I saw
Speaker 1: that thing, I was like, get out, what the heck? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: well it's it's it's an easy jump to go from
Speaker 1: there to like authorized simulations yourself, you know, to just
Speaker 1: which I really I mean, that's not far off. That's
Speaker 1: it's basically already here where you just give your account
Speaker 1: of the authority to to make responses like this like
Speaker 1: cool sounds good. I'll get back to you. You know
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Well, it's not gonna. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, even if I would type exactly the words
Speaker 1: that's suggesting, I still don't want to let it do that.
Speaker 1: The fact that like Gmail is gonna is going to
Speaker 1: compose an email for me to my parents or my
Speaker 1: wife that no, no, no no, unacceptable. There's so much room
Speaker 1: for misunderstanding. Even if we're applying, um, you know, most
Speaker 1: or all of our attention to crafting an email. Uh,
Speaker 1: it feels like a machine, even a very like talented
Speaker 1: AI would have difficulty with that. There's just so much
Speaker 1: nuance in human communication and knowing who you're communicating to.
Speaker 1: Like sometimes it's a matter of knowing there are certain
Speaker 1: words you shouldn't use with another individual, like maybe you're
Speaker 1: aware of what you know maybe uh, you know some
Speaker 1: sort of a trigger for them, or or you know
Speaker 1: it may pertain to some sort of you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, incident from from from your personal past with
Speaker 1: that person. Like, there's so many potential h holes to
Speaker 1: fall into when composing written communication. Why trust that the
Speaker 1: to the machine? Or I don't know, maybe the reverse
Speaker 1: is true. Always trusted the machine as long as they
Speaker 1: have all those caveats in mind, you know. I think
Speaker 1: one thing that's interesting to me is about the psychological
Speaker 1: effects of heavy social media use. Um. I feel like
Speaker 1: we're still in the early days of getting a picture
Speaker 1: of what that's like, and that there appears to be
Speaker 1: a lot of conflicting evidence. I think. I think because
Speaker 1: we we haven't refined all our categories and ways of
Speaker 1: testing things yet. I do often say that I think
Speaker 1: in emerging this is just a prediction I could turn
Speaker 1: out to be totally wrong. But my guess is that
Speaker 1: in the coming years, there's going to be emerging consensus
Speaker 1: that heavy social media used, especially say among young people
Speaker 1: like teenagers and stuff, is correlated with a lot of
Speaker 1: negative psychological outcomes and uh, you know, the depression and
Speaker 1: things like that, and that there will be like a
Speaker 1: new cottage industry of like the lobbyists who deny the
Speaker 1: emerging science on on social media. But uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess that's still to be seen. I mean, we've
Speaker 1: only got a few years of data to work with
Speaker 1: so far. Yeah, when trying to imagine the future, it's
Speaker 1: difficult and also you know kind of you know, anxiety
Speaker 1: and do thing to try and think where where our
Speaker 1: social media usage is going. On one hand, I guess
Speaker 1: I'm I'm hopeful that more and more people will you know,
Speaker 1: choose to if if not opt out of social media,
Speaker 1: but or you know, at least rethink how they're using
Speaker 1: it step back from it. Even I kind of think
Speaker 1: of it. It's kind of like a hot tub. You know,
Speaker 1: when you first get into a hot tub, you just
Speaker 1: u just all in, you know, it's like, let me
Speaker 1: just go all the way up to my ears in
Speaker 1: this and uh on ill zone and zone out, and
Speaker 1: you know, that's good for a while, but then eventually realize,
Speaker 1: if I stay in here, um, I am going to die.
Speaker 1: So maybe I need to like only put half of
Speaker 1: my body in here. Maybe I should just sit on
Speaker 1: the side and get my feet in here, or maybe
Speaker 1: very yet, maybe I should go get in the pool
Speaker 1: for a while and do that. Or even maybe I
Speaker 1: should leave all together and go home and see my
Speaker 1: family that sort of thing. You know, it is nice
Speaker 1: at first. I remember thinking about when I very first
Speaker 1: got on Twitter, it seemed like it was nice for
Speaker 1: a while that I was mostly just seeing things that
Speaker 1: like learning and things that people were enthusiastic about. People
Speaker 1: were sharing their enthusiasms. Here's a great thing, and uh
Speaker 1: and over time, I'm not sure exactly what happened, but
Speaker 1: it seemed like it transformed into more like this, uh,
Speaker 1: this swamp of misery, where the primary emotions coming off
Speaker 1: of it was just that everybody hates everything. Of course,
Speaker 1: all of this, of course, is depending on on how
Speaker 1: exactly when used as a social media platform, who you
Speaker 1: follow um like for instance, like on Instagram. Obviously there's
Speaker 1: a lot of celebrity worship going on, a lot of
Speaker 1: para social relationships taking place there. As we already mentioned,
Speaker 1: I don't see as much of that. And part of
Speaker 1: that is just because I like only follow family and friends,
Speaker 1: and I only use it myself for family photos, and
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, it's a closed account. Well, I
Speaker 1: do think that there is some evidence I've seen so
Speaker 1: far that and I'm not sure I solid this is yet,
Speaker 1: but there's some evidence that there's a pretty big difference
Speaker 1: in the psychological effects of social media depending on whether
Speaker 1: you primarily use it too as a way of keeping
Speaker 1: up with family and friends versus as a way of
Speaker 1: interacting with public accounts. But I think but then again,
Speaker 1: one of the dangers in all of this is even
Speaker 1: if there is a preferred if there is a healthier
Speaker 1: way to use a given platform, you are still fighting
Speaker 1: against the intended usage of that platform, as engineered by
Speaker 1: the makers of that platform. The intended usage of the
Speaker 1: platform is to open it up and never get off.
Speaker 1: It's just and so like, it's difficult to compete with that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've talked about it this on the show before. Uh.
Speaker 1: In terms of gambling, technology and then social media technology.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're you're really up against a fearsome adversary
Speaker 1: in telling yourself, I'm only going to use this in
Speaker 1: a way that is mentally beneficial for me and not
Speaker 1: just purely economically beneficial for the masters of the medium.
Speaker 1: You know, Jared Lannier, who we've talked about on the
Speaker 1: show before, has written a book about it. Basically, it's
Speaker 1: saying everybody should delete their social media accounts, just get
Speaker 1: off these platforms, and that will be it will make
Speaker 1: a much better world. And he's got a whole argument
Speaker 1: for it in this book, which I haven't read yet,
Speaker 1: but I planned to. In fact, we asked for some
Speaker 1: review copies. But I think we should see if we
Speaker 1: can try to get uh Jared Lannier on the podcast. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think we should. I also wonder what he would
Speaker 1: think about this UH comparison. I still feel like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff to work out, but I sense
Speaker 1: that the Sopulski's comparison here about the the rift between
Speaker 1: the emotion of familiarity and the and the cognitive recognition
Speaker 1: function of the brain, UH, that that's at work in
Speaker 1: cap Grass syndrome. This is a really rich kind of
Speaker 1: comparison for for social media and media technology generally, and
Speaker 1: I e to keep having more thoughts about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I don't want to just sound like
Speaker 1: I'm just saying like the people are awful and that
Speaker 1: technology makes us more awful. Uh, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: want that to be my ultimate argument. And ultimately I
Speaker 1: would say that technology enables humans to do amazing things.
Speaker 1: And if we direct this power in the right way, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's plenty that we can do. There's plenty
Speaker 1: we have done to connect people and and and build
Speaker 1: a better world out of those connections. But obviously there's
Speaker 1: more that we could do. And I guess the worrisome
Speaker 1: thing with these platforms, the various platforms that we're talking about,
Speaker 1: is like, what is the the ultimate advantage? What is
Speaker 1: the ultimate intention of the masters of those given platforms.
Speaker 1: What do they want? And even in cases where they
Speaker 1: may say, no, we want to build something that brings
Speaker 1: people together, we want to build something that empowers, you know,
Speaker 1: a better world. Like is that impulse going to win
Speaker 1: out in the overall structure of this given social media
Speaker 1: platform or is it going to be profitability or engagement
Speaker 1: or some other metric that is ultimately more important to
Speaker 1: the corporate entity. It's always profitability, and of course that's
Speaker 1: always what's went out. But I feel like there's I
Speaker 1: have to hold onto the possibility that that humans can
Speaker 1: do better though. Well, I mean, that does make me
Speaker 1: wonder if perhaps what you could do instead is have
Speaker 1: some kind of nonprofit, open source social media platform that
Speaker 1: would that would compete and try to replace these for
Speaker 1: profit forms that are deranging our relationships and and causing
Speaker 1: this familiarity recognition rift and potentially having all these psychologically
Speaker 1: negative consequences on our lives and on our culture broadly.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly what that would look like. I mean,
Speaker 1: it would probably be a start if there was just
Speaker 1: something that was like Facebook, but that did not manipulate
Speaker 1: what people saw and prioritize you know, conflict and paid content.
Speaker 1: But then again, I e. Even just with the you know,
Speaker 1: the bare bones basics of Facebook, I wonder about you know,
Speaker 1: having these friend networks. Uh, does does the even the
Speaker 1: most basic mechanic of something like Facebook encourage people to
Speaker 1: go through these mental processes where they sort of degrade
Speaker 1: their standards of what counts as a healthy relationship I
Speaker 1: mean maybe ultimately that's where where AI can come in,
Speaker 1: you know, and we just need we need artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: to dictate where and how to maintain healthy relationships online.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the ultimate answer. I don't know, just
Speaker 1: hand it off to an aidity. Why I'm not hopeful
Speaker 1: about that either. Again, this is back to like I'm
Speaker 1: worried about these l Ai squirrels, not the I'm not
Speaker 1: worried about the great basilisk. I'm worried about the minor
Speaker 1: dumb aies that that are running through our lives like
Speaker 1: a pest infestation. Now, uh, you know, not not to
Speaker 1: end things into a negative a place that I do
Speaker 1: want to refer listeners back to our episod the Great Episodes,
Speaker 1: the Great Eyeball Wars, where we went into a lot
Speaker 1: of this, particularly about, you know, about how social media
Speaker 1: and these platforms and our phones are gamed to capture
Speaker 1: our attention and hold our attention. In those episodes, we
Speaker 1: also shared some some advice that experts have given about
Speaker 1: how to fight back, how to limit your use of
Speaker 1: social media and or your phone, and uh, and so
Speaker 1: I mean there and there are increasingly more tools out there,
Speaker 1: I believe you know, some of these these phones have ways,
Speaker 1: you know now, to to track how much you're using them,
Speaker 1: or even to remind you not to use them in
Speaker 1: certain situations. Yeah yeah, I mean I I can't honestly
Speaker 1: and non hypocritically tell people to get entirely off of
Speaker 1: social media because one of the things is I have
Speaker 1: to maintain social media accounts because of my job at
Speaker 1: this podcast, where we've got to like promote stuff on
Speaker 1: social media, and you know, we've got to We've got
Speaker 1: a Facebook discussion module that I really enjoy using. I
Speaker 1: probably would have deleted my Facebook account, but I enjoy
Speaker 1: our our discussion module with our fans there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's probably one of the main reasons I go
Speaker 1: on Facebook these days. So discussion module, don't screw this up.
Speaker 1: Let's keep keep this positive relationship. But I mean, I
Speaker 1: will say that the reason it's on there's not any
Speaker 1: inherent strength of Facebook. It's on there because of audience inertia.
Speaker 1: I mean that that's where the people are. Like, if
Speaker 1: you want to have a place where people already have
Speaker 1: accounts and they can join Facebook, is they tell us
Speaker 1: the place where you can do that? You know, I'd
Speaker 1: love a world where somebody created some kind of non destructive,
Speaker 1: open source uh you know, nonprofit platform where you could
Speaker 1: do a similar thing if enough people could get on there.
Speaker 1: All right, So, so there you have it. Obviously, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of there's a lot of areas here
Speaker 1: we can call out to listeners on. Uh. I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, have you ever encountered a really um
Speaker 1: impressive double in your life, like someone that required uh,
Speaker 1: you know, not even just a first and second glass,
Speaker 1: maybe a third glance to realize that they were not
Speaker 1: your friend or perhaps not yourself. We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from that all. I mean, for to that, you know,
Speaker 1: soon if you've actually had any experience with cap gross syndrome. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we would like we would really appreciate any
Speaker 1: firsthand knowledge of experiences like that. Uh. And then beyond that,
Speaker 1: when we get into the you know, the of course,
Speaker 1: the literary and the you know, the fictional and the
Speaker 1: mythological connotations. If you have a particular you know, favorite
Speaker 1: double you want to share. But certainly we spend most
Speaker 1: of the time you're talking about this social media doppel
Speaker 1: ganger idea, and so I mean, you're pretty much all
Speaker 1: on social media. At this point, we're really you're either
Speaker 1: on social media or you've made a very uh you know,
Speaker 1: firm choice not to be so whichever category you fall into,
Speaker 1: I feel like you probably have thoughts related to this
Speaker 1: episode and we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely get
Speaker 1: in touch. In the meantime. If you want to listen
Speaker 1: to more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the mothership. That's we'll find all the episodes.
Speaker 1: You'll find a link there to our little merchandise store.
Speaker 1: We can get some squirrel shirts. It's a fun way
Speaker 1: to support the show. But the best way to support
Speaker 1: the show is to simply rate and review us wherever
Speaker 1: you have the power to do so. If you can
Speaker 1: leave some stars, leave a nice review, do that, and
Speaker 1: best of all, tell somebody about the show. Yeah, tell
Speaker 1: him online, but even better if you see somebody in
Speaker 1: real life, tell him about the show in real life,
Speaker 1: because I feel like, uh, you know, it's gonna it's
Speaker 1: gonna impress people all the more. That's right, huge, Thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer, Try Harrison. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with this direct Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm laughing because Robert has got a little stress ball
Speaker 1: over here and he's squishing the guts out of it
Speaker 1: as we speak. Yeah, there's like some sort of white
Speaker 1: pus coming out of it. I had it for like
Speaker 1: two weeks and it's already squeezed out. So uh, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna name the brand because maybe I just had
Speaker 1: a destructively anyway. Sorry. If you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us directly, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
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