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