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 Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: it is holiday time. It's Christmas time. I mean it
Speaker 1: kind of doesn't matter even what you celebrate or don't celebrate,
Speaker 1: because Christmas is thrust upon everyone, at least here in
Speaker 1: the US. Yeah, it is a juggernaut. Which is kind
Speaker 1: of why we want to sit here and look at
Speaker 1: a couple of classic Christmas stories this season and plumb
Speaker 1: the depths of Christmas and see if there's a bit
Speaker 1: more to it. So we thought we'd start with Old Scrooge.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the eighteen three Charles Dickens classic Christmas Carol. Yes,
Speaker 1: a Christmas Carol, which, if you like me, you've you know,
Speaker 1: you've encountered this story more than just about any other story.
Speaker 1: It's you end up reliving at every Christmas as you
Speaker 1: grow up. Different film adaptations, maybe you have to go
Speaker 1: to a play version of it. Um Like, for my part,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever actually read it, Like I
Speaker 1: have no desire to read it because I've I've I've
Speaker 1: suffered through enough of it on the screen. I mean,
Speaker 1: and that's not to say I don't appreciate some of
Speaker 1: the adaptations. I love the musical Scrooge um and and
Speaker 1: could easily belt out some tunes from it right now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's my go to Scrooge by the way.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's just you. You can't avoid. It's just
Speaker 1: nailed into your head, it is, And uh so probably
Speaker 1: for for a lot of you guys out there listening
Speaker 1: to this, this is all gonna sound familiar, but we're
Speaker 1: gonna go through it anyway. We're talking about a miserly
Speaker 1: old geezer named Ebeneezer Scrooge, and he is visited by
Speaker 1: myriad ghosts on the eve of Christmas, including his dear
Speaker 1: friend who's now a ghost, Jacob Marley, and then the
Speaker 1: ghost of past present in the future. And these visitations
Speaker 1: cost Scrooge to rethink his relationship and behavior to those
Speaker 1: around him, particularly his employee Bob Cratchet, and his family,
Speaker 1: including his infirmed son Tiny Tim. Yes, God blesses everyone's
Speaker 1: it's the catchphrase that resonates with everyone. Um it's uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like you said, it's a story of spirits of time. Travel. Uh,
Speaker 1: you could you could say that this is an early
Speaker 1: time travel story. I mean, you wouldn't be wrong, because
Speaker 1: each of these traumatic spirits takes Scrooge, and the first
Speaker 1: one says, hey, let me take you into the past.
Speaker 1: This is how screwed up your past is. And then
Speaker 1: the ghost of Christmas Present says, hey, let me take
Speaker 1: you out into the present. This is how screwed up
Speaker 1: your life is right now. And then the ghost of
Speaker 1: Christmas Future says, We'll just wait till what I have
Speaker 1: to show you. This is how bad it's gonna get.
Speaker 1: And uh, and of course the the ghost of Christmas
Speaker 1: Future is also generally wrapped up in a personification of
Speaker 1: death as well, because that's the icing on the cake.
Speaker 1: This is how bad the future is gonna get. Oh,
Speaker 1: and you're going to die and nobody's gonna care. You
Speaker 1: know what. This is such a bleak story when you
Speaker 1: get down to it. Yes, But you know what, I
Speaker 1: think all Christmas stories should be bleak because even when
Speaker 1: you when you strip away all the consumerism and the
Speaker 1: nonsense and the and the fake happiness, like any winter
Speaker 1: like Deep Winter Festival is ultimately about hey, everything's getting colder.
Speaker 1: We can't grow food anymore. Things are dying. Is the
Speaker 1: Is the sun going to come back? Is the spring
Speaker 1: gonna come back? Are we going to survive? And it's
Speaker 1: about finding some reasons to survive and the pit of despair,
Speaker 1: like even the Christmas story with the Birth of Jesus
Speaker 1: and all. I mean, you could say that that all
Speaker 1: boils down to the idea off you have this dark
Speaker 1: world that's really doomed, and then there's this one light
Speaker 1: that kind of emerges to ultimately redeem everything. But it
Speaker 1: comes out of a dark night. You're right, And we
Speaker 1: talked about this in the episode That Dark in which
Speaker 1: there is the sort of inward move into the dark,
Speaker 1: into ourselves and exploring this terrain. So it really is
Speaker 1: kind of perfect Christmas Fair in a way. I wanted
Speaker 1: to mention that Dickens wrote the novella in record time,
Speaker 1: just six weeks, financing and arranging for the publishing, because
Speaker 1: nobody else would publish it and um and the reason
Speaker 1: why he could tear through it so quickly is because
Speaker 1: Christmas Carol is actually a territory that he had covered before.
Speaker 1: There's a story based on Gabriel Grub, a character in
Speaker 1: the story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton, which
Speaker 1: appeared in Dickens's first published novel, The Pickwick Papers, and
Speaker 1: in the story a grave digger determined not to make
Speaker 1: merry at Christmas is kidnapped by goblins and convinced to
Speaker 1: change his ways. That sounds amazing. I want to see
Speaker 1: that in this Christmas. I thought that would have publish.
Speaker 1: But um, ultimately we're dying might. Here is a tale
Speaker 1: of greed and generosity, personal gain versus humanitarian gain. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna try to cover a little ground today. Using
Speaker 1: Scrooge as our basis. We're gonna look at something called
Speaker 1: post traumatic embitterment disorder. Uh, the unconscious like a fair
Speaker 1: rap and epiphanies, yes, and and the little drugs at
Speaker 1: the end, just a little drugs perhaps part of the epiphany. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but let's start with post traumatic embitterment disorder because this
Speaker 1: may be a thing with a capital T. Indeed, um,
Speaker 1: you know to you already mentioned some of the misery
Speaker 1: of Scrooge, but it does It is important to point
Speaker 1: out that he was orphaned as a child. His mom
Speaker 1: died giving birth to him, and his distraught father abandoned him. Um,
Speaker 1: so that is you already have like an ample scar
Speaker 1: loaded into the psyche of the young Scrooge. And then
Speaker 1: he ends up falling in love with this woman, uh,
Speaker 1: and then abandons her in the name of financial game
Speaker 1: because he doesn't have enough money, didn't have it, have
Speaker 1: have that portion of his life squared away enough to
Speaker 1: continue on with the the particulars of this romance, so
Speaker 1: he just lets it go. That's right. So when we
Speaker 1: meet Scrooge on the stage, his pain has intensified, This
Speaker 1: bitterness has intensified, and intensifies particularly each Christmas Eve because
Speaker 1: at this point it's been seven years since Jacob Marley,
Speaker 1: his only friend, has passed, and this really ushers in
Speaker 1: these ideas of bitterness and death and um, you could
Speaker 1: say that that Scritches really grappling with this at this
Speaker 1: point when we see him, this this end game of
Speaker 1: just embitterment that he's put himself into. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: as you as you watch any adaptation of this or
Speaker 1: or read it, it's easy to just take it taken
Speaker 1: these different examples of his awfulness and take those A
Speaker 1: is just you know, fleshing out his characters. Is this
Speaker 1: is what Froude is like. He yells at people who
Speaker 1: are own money. He you know, he chases children away,
Speaker 1: He refuses very very nastily to give any money to charity,
Speaker 1: all these different things, you know, impolite and and rude
Speaker 1: or down a rude to relatives and employees and all this.
Speaker 1: But you could also see this as like this is
Speaker 1: the apex of his his misery and bitterness towards others.
Speaker 1: You could say that like that that he has has
Speaker 1: just this is the nastiest scrooge has ever been, and
Speaker 1: he has really isolated himself as a result. So what
Speaker 1: if he became so stressed out about your losses that
Speaker 1: you could barely function and you became obsessed with those
Speaker 1: perceived losses, which is a lot of what he's doing right.
Speaker 1: He's going over old terrain and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what happened to him and feeling very bitter about that. Now.
Speaker 1: According to Dr Michael Lyndon, a German psychiatrist, this is
Speaker 1: a concept named post traumatic environment disorder or pte D,
Speaker 1: and in his two thousand three paper, Dr Lindon noted
Speaker 1: that pt e D is similar to post traumatic stress
Speaker 1: disorder PTSD, except that those with PTSD suffer intense fear
Speaker 1: and anxiety after experiencing a life threatening event. But those
Speaker 1: with pt e D who are bitter, he says that
Speaker 1: they were hard working and mentally healthy people until a
Speaker 1: true ring event destroyed their core values and shattered their
Speaker 1: basic beliefs. So in a sense, you could say that,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know. I would say that Scrooge
Speaker 1: was mentally healthy, but perhaps the breaking point for him
Speaker 1: was when he did lose Jacob Marley, who might have
Speaker 1: been sort of his last real connection too to what
Speaker 1: it felt like to have a good working relationship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and probably a model too of what he should be
Speaker 1: doing with his life and and what is the correct
Speaker 1: path to take now. Lyndon first began to piece together
Speaker 1: this idea of post traumatic embitterment disorder when he observed
Speaker 1: it in disillusioned and embittered patients after German reunification. And uh,
Speaker 1: and it's it's worth noting that it's we're talking about
Speaker 1: a mixture of depression, helplessness, hopelessness, all all sort of
Speaker 1: swirled up into one. It's easy to to just think
Speaker 1: of bitterness as uh, to just dismiss it. It's just
Speaker 1: kind of an easy negative character, a trade like oh
Speaker 1: something something crappy happened to this person. They're just bitter.
Speaker 1: They're just bitter, Like it's a choice that you make,
Speaker 1: you know, to to be bitter instead of be happy
Speaker 1: about something. But in one of the articles we were
Speaker 1: looking at, psychologist A Stephen A. Diamond, I thought he
Speaker 1: had a really nice, like just robust explanation of bitterness itself,
Speaker 1: not even getting into post traumatic embitterment disorder. But he
Speaker 1: said that it is a kind of morbid characterological hostility
Speaker 1: towards someone something, or towards life itself, resulting from the
Speaker 1: constant repression of anger, rage, or resentment regarding how one
Speaker 1: really has or perceives to have been treated, a pro
Speaker 1: longed resentful feeling of dis empowered and devalued. Victimization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: victimization is key here because there's a lot of blame
Speaker 1: on other people. Are circumstances. Yeah, yeah, So scrooges in
Speaker 1: this situation where yeah, he's looking at all these institutions
Speaker 1: around him, he's looking at the culture around him, and
Speaker 1: to him, he's not the you know, he's not the
Speaker 1: the nasty guy that's just not going with the Oh.
Speaker 1: He has been pushed into this corner by the circumstances
Speaker 1: in his life. Uh, and and and here he is,
Speaker 1: you know, looking up at it as if you know,
Speaker 1: from a pit. Now, the core criteria pt D are
Speaker 1: one a single exceptional negative life event which precipitates the
Speaker 1: onset of the illness. So again, perhaps Jacob Marley to
Speaker 1: the present negative state developed in the direct context of
Speaker 1: the event. Three the emotional response is embitterment and feelings
Speaker 1: of injustice. And four repeated intrusive memories of the event,
Speaker 1: so again obsessing about it. Five emotional modulation is unimpaired.
Speaker 1: Patients can even smile when engaged in thoughts of revenge.
Speaker 1: And six no obvious other mental disorder that can explain
Speaker 1: the reaction. So that's where it gets a little bit
Speaker 1: murky because Lyndon found that pte D patients also suffered
Speaker 1: from a suite of other emotional complaints. Um, some of
Speaker 1: them just had general adjustment disorders, some of them had
Speaker 1: general depression or something called this just by mia, and
Speaker 1: then there were anxiety disorders as well. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a poop poop platter here. Yeah, And therefore it's
Speaker 1: also easy to misdiagnose it then, to say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this person is just suffering from from a generalized anxiety disorder,
Speaker 1: and you're not necessarily treating the root cause of of
Speaker 1: what's going on. But what definitely some of the hallmarks
Speaker 1: here are isolations like you get you become so obsessed
Speaker 1: with how you feel that you have been wronged in
Speaker 1: life that you began to think about these details and
Speaker 1: blame people and and really cut off your social connections.
Speaker 1: And bitterness can have some severe physiological ramifications as well,
Speaker 1: it seems, um, and of course that's kind of forecast
Speaker 1: by the third ghost who points out, hey, you keep
Speaker 1: down this path, it's going to kill you. Right. According
Speaker 1: to Carston Wash, a professor in Corcodia Sor, a professor
Speaker 1: in the Concordia University Department of PSI Cology and a
Speaker 1: member of the Center for Research and Human Development, quote,
Speaker 1: bitterness may forecast patterns of biological disregulation, a physiological impairment
Speaker 1: that can affect metabolism, immune response, or organ function and
Speaker 1: physical disease. It's kind of a downer, yeah, but this
Speaker 1: is Christmas. If you if you engage in cognitive behavioral therapy,
Speaker 1: it could be really helpful. That's what Lyndon had found. Um,
Speaker 1: the problem is that a lot of people don't seek
Speaker 1: help when they're in a situations, especially if you have
Speaker 1: cut yourself off from almost everyone around you. Because I again,
Speaker 1: look at Scrooge, who's reaching out to him like a
Speaker 1: few people. Basically his nephew is the main one who's saying, hey,
Speaker 1: come have some human companionship. Uh, you know, be be
Speaker 1: a decent person. Uh you know, I'm I'm here. And
Speaker 1: that's like the one of the few remaining lifelines that's
Speaker 1: still being thrown to him. So, yeah, you're in a
Speaker 1: situation like that, You're you're not getting a lot of
Speaker 1: lifelines anymore. It's true. All right, let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we get we're gonna take a quick detour
Speaker 1: into the unconscious. All right, we're back. Yeah, let's discuss
Speaker 1: the unconsciousness of heaven user Scrooge, right because as we know,
Speaker 1: again he has had all these different life events stacked
Speaker 1: up one after the other, and so obviously that's going
Speaker 1: to not just color his worldview, but that is going
Speaker 1: to color his unconscious And we'll dip right back into that.
Speaker 1: I know we've talked about it before, but David Eagleman
Speaker 1: in his book Incognito, the secret life of the brain.
Speaker 1: He claims that the brain is running the show incognito
Speaker 1: and that this consciousness, this I feeling, is just kind
Speaker 1: of this bit player that is on the sidelines of
Speaker 1: this vast network of circuitry. And so he says, we're
Speaker 1: not at the center of ourselves. Instead, we're like the
Speaker 1: Earth in the Milky Way and the Milky Way in
Speaker 1: the universe, and we're far out on that distant hearing
Speaker 1: little of what's actually transpiring. Yeah. Philosopher and cognitive scientists
Speaker 1: Dan denn It puts it this way. A person is
Speaker 1: approximately one trillion little cellular robots, an army. We emerge
Speaker 1: from that. Consciousness emerged from that. So the Scrooge that
Speaker 1: we encounter is is due to uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of storms raging underneath the surface, and where he
Speaker 1: himself is only encountering surface level Scrooge. So what's interesting
Speaker 1: about this is that along comes this tour through his past,
Speaker 1: present in future, which you could say would be it
Speaker 1: might be a dream, or it might actually be ghosts
Speaker 1: that are visiting him. In any case, there has been
Speaker 1: this idea put out there that it is a kind
Speaker 1: of psychotherapy of the unconscious that is uncovering all of
Speaker 1: these things for Scrooge. Okay, so these are manifest manifestations.
Speaker 1: These are like yung Gian figures that are emerging from
Speaker 1: his subconscious h and he's forced to to to actually
Speaker 1: confront them. Yeah, especially if you consider that every Christmas
Speaker 1: Eve for the past seven years he's had this crisis,
Speaker 1: and for those seven years, perhaps um all these things
Speaker 1: have been going under the cover of his consciousness and
Speaker 1: they now show up in this kind of form. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is that these spirits goes aliens immune,
Speaker 1: and the manifestations, whatever you want to call them, uh,
Speaker 1: that they are providing a form of psychotherapy. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: American Psychological Association says there's several approaches to psychotherapy, including
Speaker 1: cognitive behavioral which we already mentioned, interpersonal and other kinds
Speaker 1: of talk therapy, and that helps people sort of work
Speaker 1: through their problems. It's grounded in dialogue, a lot of talking. Again,
Speaker 1: it provides a supportive environment that allows you to talk
Speaker 1: openly with someone who's objective, neutral and non judgmental. And
Speaker 1: I don't know that you would say all the spirits
Speaker 1: are non judgmental, but I remember them being a bit
Speaker 1: dispassionate and being sort of like here, here's this, here's that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially the last one is rather dispassionate. Uh
Speaker 1: but but yeah, Well, it's easy to think back on
Speaker 1: those three spirits and just focus on the fact that
Speaker 1: they are showing him things and showing him these visions
Speaker 1: of things that have been and things to come and
Speaker 1: things that are. But there is a lot of talking.
Speaker 1: There's especially with the first two spirits. So the last
Speaker 1: one doesn't really say much, but with the first two especially,
Speaker 1: there's a dialogue going on between Scrooge and the ghost,
Speaker 1: and you could you could easily say that that is
Speaker 1: a kind of psychotherapy. They're saying, look at these look
Speaker 1: at these events, look at what happened here. How do
Speaker 1: you feel about that? Now? This is interesting. Psychiatrist Stephen E.
Speaker 1: Wars has presented on this particular topic a number of times,
Speaker 1: and he goes so far as to suggest that Jacob
Speaker 1: Marley is Scrooge's primary physician, referring Scrooge to psychological spirit guides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he does. He does have the interaction with him where
Speaker 1: he's like, Scrooge, yeah, it's terrible, you don't want this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's saying I screwed up, my path ended up being
Speaker 1: the wrong one. I can't really help you, but here
Speaker 1: are three specialists they can Yeah, and you had mentioned
Speaker 1: Stephen Diamond. He says that in UNGI in terms, we
Speaker 1: could say that his unconscious self scrooges, unconscious self starts
Speaker 1: speaking to him on that cold and lonely Christmas Eve
Speaker 1: via his dreams. Dreams, as Freud found, are the via
Speaker 1: riggia or regal road to the unconscious and can be
Speaker 1: understood as forms of communication from the unconscious. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think that's a solid interpretation. I like that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you could make the case, yes, that these uh, these
Speaker 1: spirit guides were taking him through an accelerated pace of
Speaker 1: psychotherapy and order for him to arrive at an epiphany.
Speaker 1: And as we all know, epiphanies are. They're kind of
Speaker 1: weird things. They seem again like those sort of aha moments,
Speaker 1: when in fact they have been bubbling under the surface.
Speaker 1: On that note, let's take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come backphanies and we're gonna hit rock bottom here, Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, we're back. Epiphany's epiphanies are the stuff of
Speaker 1: great stories. Um, well, at least there's the stuff of stories. Um,
Speaker 1: you're in a constantly encountering characters who have that just
Speaker 1: extreme aha moment, right, um and uh, and you do
Speaker 1: see that in Scrooge. Right, he wakes up from all
Speaker 1: of this and he realizes I had it all wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm changing my life. And you see this in an
Speaker 1: other Christmas stories to um, um, you see this in
Speaker 1: It's a Wonderful Life too, Right, he has that epiphany
Speaker 1: where he realizes, hey, life is worth while living. It's
Speaker 1: worth climbing out of the pit. Four. I am going
Speaker 1: to survive this horrible season. But the pit that's the
Speaker 1: important part. That's the rock bottom that you usually have
Speaker 1: to hit in order for you to be able to
Speaker 1: get a handle on what it is you need to confront.
Speaker 1: And you know he's another fictional character, uh, semi fictional
Speaker 1: character who hit rock bottom before before everything got rolling.
Speaker 1: Dante Dante. Okay, you know he reaches this this dark point.
Speaker 1: That's why he has to go through hell and then
Speaker 1: purgatory and finally haven't all right. So you see there's
Speaker 1: a rich literary tradition here. John Skalski and Brigham Young
Speaker 1: University psychology professor Sam Hardy conducted an in depth study
Speaker 1: of fourteen people who experienced profound, sudden and lasting change.
Speaker 1: I will take issue with sudden though, right UM it
Speaker 1: says that the parallels they found with participants in Scrooge
Speaker 1: is that they all had hit rock bottom in their lives,
Speaker 1: and they all had a trusted friend like Marley who
Speaker 1: opened up their perspective on their perceived life tragedies, allowing
Speaker 1: them to recast and recover from them. Now I want
Speaker 1: to throw in here that rock bottom doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: I was in in a gutter or I was at
Speaker 1: the bottom of a grape. It can just mean like
Speaker 1: you've reached like maximum stress level, maximum emotional psychological angst
Speaker 1: over a particular thing. Yeah. Again, these are these are
Speaker 1: huge life events. A lot of them had to do
Speaker 1: with money. To write, like, people were uh pretty tied
Speaker 1: to their associations with money and their status with money,
Speaker 1: and then the kind of world we built for ourselves. Indeed,
Speaker 1: and when they were um, when that was taken away
Speaker 1: from them or they lost that fortune, than they had
Speaker 1: to confront what it meant to be that person that
Speaker 1: they were inhabiting. So that's what's interesting about this. UM.
Speaker 1: You can find more information out about it in the
Speaker 1: Humanistic Psychologists that the January issue. But we brought it
Speaker 1: up because we thought, well, Scrooge, he's definitely hit rock bottom. Indeed,
Speaker 1: now in that study that there's also something I like
Speaker 1: to think of as a Marley factor is that the
Speaker 1: most study participants described the presence of a living, trusted
Speaker 1: other person during their experience. So again the can sort
Speaker 1: of give that value to Marley. Yeah, and again that's
Speaker 1: that person who can provide that perspective shift because we
Speaker 1: all need that. Right when you're down in the dumps,
Speaker 1: you've hit rock bottom, you need someone to say it's
Speaker 1: okay like you, You're you're breathing right now. There's there's
Speaker 1: food available to you hopefully, So when you know someone
Speaker 1: to say, you can go on. Yeah, you can say
Speaker 1: Marley's a sponsor. I guess you know it could be.
Speaker 1: So he hasn't really kicked his condition, since he is
Speaker 1: presumably a denizen of Hell, right, doesn't have a motivation
Speaker 1: to anymore. He's just shackled, right, He shackled to his
Speaker 1: ledger book right something along to some sort of symbol
Speaker 1: symbols of his his preoccupation with money and book keeping.
Speaker 1: The chains he forged in life. And I do want
Speaker 1: to mention another reason that I love that Scrooge musical,
Speaker 1: the film Addictation with Albert Finney, is that Scrooge actually
Speaker 1: goes to Hell. In it, there's an actual hell with
Speaker 1: like big beefy demons walking around, big beefy demons. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's big, like muscular, red painted demons busking around.
Speaker 1: And there's a scene with ghosts flying through the air. Okay,
Speaker 1: So why didn't NBC air that instead of Peter Pam Live?
Speaker 1: As much as I like seeing Christopher walking like sort
Speaker 1: of oddly drunk dancing as a pirate, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe that could be the next one, because the whole
Speaker 1: thing is like they have to do live productions of
Speaker 1: musicals or plays, right, they could do Scrooge. It's a
Speaker 1: it's it's a musical, and it's got some wonderful numbers
Speaker 1: in it. So do that next year. Maybe I'll watch it.
Speaker 1: They could, and they should. Now there is something a
Speaker 1: little something called altruism that Scrooge was able to finally
Speaker 1: tap into when he had his epiphany. Tap into is
Speaker 1: putting it ladly, because he really he didn't just turn
Speaker 1: on the tap. He'd like hacks into the keg with
Speaker 1: an axe. He just goes crazy, given out stuff, right,
Speaker 1: and that's always the big scene where he's it's toys
Speaker 1: for everyone, it's giant turkeys for everyone. It's just because
Speaker 1: it's built up a right. He has all of this
Speaker 1: do gooderie. He could have been doing, all this altruism
Speaker 1: that that he that he could have been engaging with,
Speaker 1: and he hasn't for years and years, I mean for
Speaker 1: much of his life. And we've talked about this before.
Speaker 1: We've talked about altruism and happiness and this idea that
Speaker 1: your brain is reward system is actually gonna light up
Speaker 1: when you engage in acts of altruism. Psychologist Lizabeth Dunn
Speaker 1: and Laura acne In, along with Michael Norton of Harvard
Speaker 1: Business School, conducted a two thousand and eight study in
Speaker 1: which participants were given either five dollars or twenty dollars
Speaker 1: to spend. By the end of the day, half were
Speaker 1: instructed to buy for themselves, the other for someone else,
Speaker 1: and that evening. People who had been assigned to spend
Speaker 1: money on someone else reported happier moods over the course
Speaker 1: of the day than did those people assigned to spend
Speaker 1: money on themselves, which I think makes sense. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean at the very base of it, like not even
Speaker 1: getting into the act of it, you're you're thinking about
Speaker 1: someone else. It's taking you out of your own uh
Speaker 1: you know, default mode network and in your thoughts of
Speaker 1: self and putting you into thoughts of another. And ultimately
Speaker 1: that's one of, in my opinion, one of one of
Speaker 1: the benefits, the one of the pros that comes with
Speaker 1: the holiday season is an emphasis on, at least to
Speaker 1: some extent, thinking about other people. Right, and you in
Speaker 1: a way you're empowered because you feel like you're making
Speaker 1: an impact or positive impact on someone else. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're able to get of them something that they need. Yeah,
Speaker 1: after the experience is done, you have the memory of
Speaker 1: the experience and the feeling that you did something, and
Speaker 1: also kind of the open ended question you can almost
Speaker 1: you almost end up sort of fantasizing about how they
Speaker 1: feel about what you did, just to bring it all
Speaker 1: back to kind of a selfish gene area, but as
Speaker 1: opposed to just buying something and then there you are
Speaker 1: with the thing you bought, and how does that feel?
Speaker 1: Feeling like an empty husk? Yeah, that's right. Now, there
Speaker 1: is an alternate take on how Scrooge achieved this epiphany. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh, this is one that I've I've blogged
Speaker 1: about before, and it really it all comes back to
Speaker 1: the saucepan, because after, you know, after he wakes up,
Speaker 1: he's had the epiphany. This is directly from Dickens a
Speaker 1: Christmas Carol. He says, there's the saucepan that the gruel
Speaker 1: was in, cried Scrooge, starting off again and frisking around
Speaker 1: the fireplace. There's the door by which the ghost of
Speaker 1: Jacob Marley entered. There's the corner where the ghost of
Speaker 1: Christmas Presents sat. There's the window where I saw wandering spirits.
Speaker 1: It's all right, it's true, it all happened. That's right.
Speaker 1: That's that's a Scrooge who is just having his epiphany
Speaker 1: and seems to be in a bit of an altered state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and so I have to ask what was in
Speaker 1: the saucepan? Why? Indeed does when Marley appears, he initially
Speaker 1: tries to just miss it by saying, oh, it's you're
Speaker 1: just something I ate, some bit of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a bad potato or whatever. Um, But perhaps it was
Speaker 1: something different. Than bad potato. Perhaps it was um a
Speaker 1: psychedelic substance, hallucogenic substance that gave him this experience. And
Speaker 1: if we refer back to some of our podcasts that
Speaker 1: we've done on let's see the scientists in the Shaman series. Uh,
Speaker 1: we did an episode about psychedelics UH being administered to
Speaker 1: prepare one for death and and the various research that
Speaker 1: has gone into the potential non recreational uses for these substances.
Speaker 1: And you see a couple of prime candidates as to
Speaker 1: what might have been that gruel, something that would have
Speaker 1: blown opened the doors of perception, right, and then something
Speaker 1: that might have made him feel as though he were
Speaker 1: one with fellow man. Yeah yeah, and and made and
Speaker 1: give him gave him a lasting or you know, change
Speaker 1: in personality. UM. So, one possibility here is that there
Speaker 1: was DMPT in the group. U. D MT, of course,
Speaker 1: is in naturally occurring psychedelic compounds that's found in plants
Speaker 1: such as Iowasa vines in South America, and as with
Speaker 1: all natural psychedelics of stuff has factored into shamanistic rituals
Speaker 1: for thousands of years. UM under shaman's guidance, individuals partook
Speaker 1: of these perception altering elements and endured intense and sometimes
Speaker 1: harrowing mental journeys through time and space. They encountered unreal entities,
Speaker 1: shades that departed loved ones, and they saw the world
Speaker 1: around them as if for the first time, and perceived
Speaker 1: deep truths about themselves and the cosmos. Uh. And finally,
Speaker 1: as the effects of d m T would wear off
Speaker 1: or the or the the iowassa, what have you, they
Speaker 1: immerge from their mental journey transformed. Now what does that sound? Right?
Speaker 1: That sounds like Scrooge after eating a little gruel? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, as we discussed in that in that
Speaker 1: podcast episode of the pair of podcast episodes, Scientists and
Speaker 1: the Shame and Research is A. John Hopkins Medical Center
Speaker 1: and other esteemed of medical research labs continue to study
Speaker 1: the effects of d MT and other psychedelics not only
Speaker 1: do it better understand how our minds work, but also
Speaker 1: to learn how these substances can help us treatmental illnesses, UH,
Speaker 1: deal with addictions, and maybe even find a bit of enlightenment.
Speaker 1: So I guess that that goes to future would be
Speaker 1: a bit of a bad trip. Part. Yes, you could
Speaker 1: say that, but I mean that's it's kind of a
Speaker 1: bad trip. I guess it's kind of kind of relative because, uh,
Speaker 1: everything we've we've read about, uh, the intense experiments, experiences
Speaker 1: of d M. T or Ayahuassa. You know, you're you're
Speaker 1: often dealing with really harrowing encounters. I mean, stuff that's
Speaker 1: gonna change you, stuff that should not be taken lightly
Speaker 1: at say a fish show yea indeed now. And the
Speaker 1: other possibility is that it could have been sold cybin
Speaker 1: magic mushrooms right. Two thousand eleven study of John Howkmins
Speaker 1: University gave high doses of psilocybin to fifty one test subjects,
Speaker 1: and thirty of these individuals experienced measurable personality changes that
Speaker 1: lasted more than a year and what changes will According
Speaker 1: to researcher Dr Katherine McLean uh in uh in an
Speaker 1: episode of the Secular Buddhist podcast, which I highly recommend
Speaker 1: everyone check that out, openness was affected out of all
Speaker 1: measurable personality traits. And again that's ultimately where we find Scrooge.
Speaker 1: Suddenly he is open to the world. He blasts up
Speaker 1: in those windows and talks to a random child. He's
Speaker 1: blasting open his own windows to let the world back
Speaker 1: in which allows him to finally listen to what Jacob
Speaker 1: Marley has to say. And I thought maybe we could
Speaker 1: walk ourselves out of this episode with this quote from
Speaker 1: uh from Marley. After Scrooge says what do you do?
Speaker 1: And why are you walking around like a ghost, he says,
Speaker 1: you're always a good man of business. Jacob and the
Speaker 1: ghost of Arley, his legs bound by a chain of
Speaker 1: ledger books and cash boxes, replies business mankind was my business.
Speaker 1: The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and
Speaker 1: benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade
Speaker 1: were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean
Speaker 1: of my business. Yeah, yeah, So there you have it
Speaker 1: at Christmas, Carol Scrooge. That's our take on the man
Speaker 1: and his condition, drawing in some some science here and there.
Speaker 1: But of course we'd love to hear from everyone else
Speaker 1: out there. What's your take on Scrooge in his predicament
Speaker 1: and how do you tie it into your own experience
Speaker 1: of the holidays. Indeed, and if you guys would like
Speaker 1: some more from us, you can visit stuff that blow
Speaker 1: your mind dot com. That's right, you'll find all the
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