Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Human Emotion

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear... we all know what these emotions feel like, right?But what is emotion? Do we all feel the same things? And do we have the same feelings as people who lived five-hundred years ago?Today Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by Richard Firth-Godbehere to find out about the origins of emotions, and what they have to do with witchcraft and desire.You can find out more about Richard's work here.Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Siobhan Dale.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds and an archive clip from Prelinger Archives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. The three bitrixsters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Kate, what is a fair do's warning? Well, it's the warning that we give at the top of each show to let you know that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things

and you need to be an adult too. So, if you continue listening to this adult podcast and you get offended, upset, traumatised, triggered, etc, then you'll just have to say to yourself, well, fair do's, she did tell us. Your emotions can be your own greatest enemy. Or under control, your emotions can make you healthier and happier, and improve the lives of people around you. Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear, lust.

We all know what these emotions feel like, right? Right, I know happiness might be a bit thin on the ground right now, but generally we've got an idea. Or do we? What if I told you that there's no such thing as emotions? Does that make you feel cross, which is actually an emotion, which then I'd tell you might not actually be a thing. Oh, it's very confusing.

What am I? Confusion! Is that an emotion? Is that just a state? I don't know. But what if I told you that emotion, the thing that makes you laugh and cry and cry, laugh or cringe, is just a construction. Hmm.

It is confusing, isn't it? But are you ready to have everything that you think you know challenged? Well, today, Bertwicks the sheets, we are going to get introspective. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy. does make a difference. Goodness, what's beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets,

the History of Sex Scandal in Society. With me, Kate Lister. What is emotion? Do we all feel the same things as each other? Is what I think of as love? What you think of as love? When I feel happy,

do you feel like that as well? Do we feel the same things as people who lived 100, 500,000, 1,000 years ago, feel. Did happy mean the same thing to the Romans that it means to us today? These are perplexing questions indeed. And today I am joined by Richard Firth Godbe here to find out about the origins and the history of emotions and what they have to do with witchcraft and the history of desire.

So, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Richard Firth Godbe here. How are you? I'm really good. Yeah, glad to be here. How are you? I'm so excited. to talk to you about what we're going to talk about today because it's confused me already. I like being confused because people can explain things to me. You are an expert in research around disgust, which is a fascinating emotion. Yeah. And we're going to talk about that one in a minute. But the history of emotions, and I think what completely blindsided me reading about your work,

was this idea that people haven't always experienced emotions the way that we think, we do today that we think that that's a constant right that people have always experienced emotions as they do now yeah and then you come along and go nope yeah some people assume that emotions have always unchanging they're always the same one level that may be correct at the base feeling level the thing we feel but how we understand that feeling what we do with it how it matters how we describe it all of that has a huge cultural weight on it and of course if you've got a cultural weight then it changes through history as well. It's not as obvious as it seems. It's like, ah, my head. Because we think of emotions as being, it's a really primitive part of ourselves. And emotions are often things that

you can't articulate. And there are real base level ones like fear and desire and all those things. You would argue that those things are not constant. They're not necessarily constant. No, there's a big debate amongst researchers right now. There's always a debate amongst researchers in psychology and things, but particularly in emotions. And one is, there's a bunch of people who think these core feelings, these things we feel, that's sometimes called core effects, sometimes called emotion, depends which paper you're reading, to be quite honest, they are unchanging. And you can actually map them onto certain pathways. That's the fear pathway. The famous amygdala causes flight and fight responses. And there's other pathways. There's the anger pathway. There's

something called the amygdra hypoglyphytical, I think that's the word grey, which is all to do with anger. And yeah, every day for tea. And these things can apparently always, that's how it happens. Your brain has these pathways and then you're angry or you're frightened and that's it. But there's another group that say, well, no, actually.

Because there may be things. But firstly, that word fear, well, that's an English word. If you're looking at other languages, the word they use might not be quite how we understand fear. It might be something else. Disgust is a classic one in that

Echel, a German word, which these days in German means disgust, just like it does in English, sort of nauseated and feeling yucky, about 150 years ago Echel meant that feeling you get when someone's tickling that moving away that oh good get off me

so it's a more unpleasant thing that makes you want to get away from it and it's something you want to avoid than a yuck the noise yeah I think so these words don't exactly map they don't perfectly map so who are we to say that's the fear pathway just because psychology is mostly English we get to use our English word when actually these people come over and say well is that fear

is it this other thing we don't understand And then there's this whole cultural layer on top when you're frightened what you're supposed to do. Are you supposed to scream and shout with the arms raised in the air? Are you supposed to keep it all in and pretend you're not frightened? And different parts of the world of emotion science, let's say, look at different bits of this whole bundle of stuff. And they all think their bits the important bit and everything else is rubbish. So they're always rowing at each other. No, the cultural bit matters.

No, no, it's the bit in the brain. No, no. And so, yeah, I'm saying in the middle. you're all saying the same thing, just talk to each other. I think that's fascinating is that the idea that we think that we feel something, but then because we give a name to it, we think that that's a constant and immediate, but it might not be. I mean, there are lots of different types of what we call fear.

There's anxiety and there's disgust and there's nervousness and there's sheer terror and all of these things. They change. And honestly, I'm confusing myself now. It's confusion and emotion. It can be, yeah. Again, depends on you're talking to. Let's talk about the one that you're a specialist in, disgust.

Because this is one that absolutely fascinates me. Because disgust is often, again, depending on who you talk to, it's one of the really primal reactions that we have. And it's something that we need, and it needs to override a lot of other emotions. So if you're really hungry and something is wrong, you need the disgust reflex to go, fuck it out. I don't want it.

had for me. And it can actually be utilised in other ways. I read an article that Donald Trump was elected in part because he triggered the disgust reflex in his fan base. Not him personally. Well, disgust at its most basic is thought of as what's known as the pathogen avoidance mechanism, in that we evolved to, if something's got something that's going to kill us, bacteria or a worm in it, we've evolved that the look and the smell and the taste of that thing makes us want to avoid it. Go, oh, no, no. That's obvious because if that hadn't happened, we'd have all eaten rotten fruit and died a long time ago and there'd be no human race. So that's a really good evolutionary thing.

So this is an example what I'm talking about. That's the basic thing, really simple. In the brain, it's no one's quite sure, but it's got something to do with the part called the insular in the middle, which seems to regulate things. The interesting thing is those bits of the brain that are triggered when you are, say, giving a picture of a Scandinavian delicacy, let's say, and you see it and you go, they eat that, yeah, I've eaten all of it, don't ask me, it's, some of it's actually surprisingly nice. Is this the wrong fish?

Once you get past your nose and into the mouth and go, oh, yeah, yeah, you've got to get past the nose and in the mouth, and then when it's in the mouth, you go, past the disgust reflex. Well, that's actually really nice. Yes. I've come to the conclusion if a culture says something's a delicacy, that means it's probably horrible to everybody else. But, anyway, the same parts of the brain light up seem to light up when, you someone does a morally disgusting act as well as a physically disgusting one. And there have been studies by a guy called Jonathan Haight, who's surname I always pronounced wrong. Sorry, Jonathan.

He's done studies to show that people who are more prone to physical disgust tend to be more politically extreme. Originally found that they were generally right wing, that if you found everything had to be tied and you didn't like yoke and someone, you tended to be more extreme. Because there's kind of a purity element of it. So anyone's not got the same politics of you. You push them away. Indiscust. Like a social contamination. In disgust.

Yeah. And Donald Trump is an example of tapping into that. He's not the first by any measure. And it's disgust is used as a mechanism for othering people throughout history. The Nazis are particularly famous for it. They did this awful thing where they'd show films likening Jewish people and others to rats and things to try and other them and make them their disgusting thing to make what they did supposedly easy on the population. It's been used a long time. It was the in the Iran and the Civil War, the people were described as cockroaches, this kind of using disgust to alienate a people, a group of people so that you can do bad things to them. Sadly, goes back a long way. It seems to be really effective as well. Yes, very effective because it's a very old part of makeup. There are some people who are looking to disgust a bit more extreme than me and they say the very first early microorganisms in order to know what to, that started eating other microorganisms. In order to know what to eat, must have had something that's like proto-taste,

and then the organisms that made themselves taste horrible means there must have been some kind of proto-disgust. I mean, I don't know if it goes back that far, but certainly insects have a sort of disgust mechanism. Cockroachs apparently think we're revolting, that's why they run away. So we'd no idea the feeling was mutual. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you know, we should get together around the coffee, feels in the cockroaches and hammer out our differences, I think. We're just taken over by disgust and this othering mechanism. Just misunderstood. Yeah, misunderstood. They want food. We want food. We'll share.

If you can trigger the disgust mechanism in a group of people, and the disgust mechanism is as powerful as wanting to get away from rotten food and something diseased and something that will, that same, very primitive, rotten milk type of thing. And you can trigger that reflex in somebody, but you can attribute it to some. something else. Yeah.

What you're doing is you're firing up that exact same reaction, but like linking it to a group of people. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's happened all throughout history. Wow. One particularly bad example is witches.

This is something actually researched a long time ago, but there's an old passion called abomination. Abomination is this, it's disgust, but it's a disgust of things that are sinful. And if you read the Latin version of the Bible, every single sin is an abomination to God. In other words, it makes God, sins make God disgusted with you. And you've got to do an offering to get him back in your God graces, yeah? Right, yes. There used to be, in the Hebrew Bible, there were about six or seven different words for this abomination,

but Jerome went, oh, can't be bothered with that. Here, I'll use one, and just used abominatio all the way through the Bible. So we've got this one emotion for all of them, which is another example of how emotions change over time. One language takes another languages and simplifies it or complicates it or whatever. But when the witchcraft started, when you ever you see abomination, in texts in sort of the 16th 17th century. It's always near God or sin or idolatry or another word like that. It's always in a sentence about religion. Or it's in a sentence about witches quite often. And so the way witches were portrayed were as these abominable creatures, these sinful creatures,

these things that went against God. Women being judged on how they look goes back a long, long way. So if you looked wrong, in other words, you were too old or whatever, or you acted wrong, then you might be considered abomination or causing abomination and so you'd be on the list of possible witches. And so that's how it was used then and particularly. And we're in a climate of fear in the 17th century. Everyone thinks the world's going to end because America's discovered and the printing press has told everyone about it and there's disease and famine and everyone's at war and all that kind of stuff. So that didn't help. But yeah, it can be very, very powerful discussed, very powerful.

Is there any way of overriding it? I mean, you said there that eating Swedish delicacy, that seems to be a perfect example of it because the rotting fish, that triggers all of your disgust reflexes, even if you're thinking about it, will probably have people going, oh, can't do it, can't do it, that's the disgust reflex.

Can you override it? Oh, yeah, desensitization is given a bad press. We always think about people playing computer games and going out and really, which doesn't happen. If it wasn't for desensitization, no nurse could do their job, no doctor could do their job, no fishmonger, I guess, could do their job.

You know, and so you can be desensitized to it. And a lot of therapy for people who have phobias, because a lot of phobias are more disgust-based and fear-based, like arachnophobia and so on, will look at desensitizing you to the thing that is making you feel that reaction. And so it's a case of desensitizing. You can get over it,

which sometimes means pushing yourself over something like holding your nose and eating the fish or trying the Kazumazu cheese with live maggots in it or something like that, you know. Yeah, I know. A third of the world eats insects every day. They do. I mean, that's a perfect example of the disgustre reflex in action is what animals we feel okay eating

and what animals we don't feel okay eating and there's nothing in it other than like a gut reaction to it really. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've eaten insects quite a lot. Sometimes when I do talks, I will shock people by eating mealworms and I look at the calf of the audience that go, who can I try one?

the other half that recoil. And it's quite an interesting thing to see. I quite like them. Quite a bit crunchy. Good protein. Would you argue that disgust is, is that part of anger? Is it an anger reflex? What is that?

It's kind of different. There's similarity in that disgust can be what's called a social emotion. In other words, an emotion that is targeted at someone or something. But it can also be a very personal thing. You can see something and just keep it to yourself. Whereas anger is always always. There is something. Angus caused by either somebody stopping you getting what you want or somebody harming you in some way. It's always got this target. And so sort of, they both have this target thing,

but not always, but anger is primarily and purely a social emotion. You don't get angry at nothing. What do you mean that it's a social emotion? A social emotion is a motion where a lot of emotions, happiness, sadness, that kind of internal, what you feel and I feel this way because I feel like this, whereas anger is always directed at some thing or someone. It has an impact on society. You are going to react in some way to that person. And disgust is a social emotion, but not always. Anger is always social.

Shame is another social emotion. You feel shame because of how people around you are going to react if they find out something about you. It's not something you can just necessarily internalize if you could just tell her that you wouldn't care. You're worried about society. So there are quite a few emotions known as the social emotions that do that kind of thing. Shame and embarrassment seem to be incredibly powerful emotions when it comes to us as a social species,

in that people have ended their lives or would rather die than experience a feeling of shame. Like you said about the witch trials there. I mean, in Salem, for example, people were given the option of if you confess, then we'll let you live. And there were people that would rather say, no, fuck off, I'd rather die. So shame is really powerful. too. Yeah, there are people who rather not have the shame. The thing about shame is it was powerful enough that it would affect how you might die because it would affect your honour. So if you did this shameful crime and you were poor, you might get hung by this earthly rope stuff. But if you did a massive crime

like treason but happened to be a queen, mentioning their names, Ambelin, you'd get a fine French swordsman to take your head in one stroke with the finest steel. So the honour, shame thing was and is very powerful. Part of the world like Japan, And shame is a huge driver in their society. It's kind of the emotional regime of China, which is how you're supposed to act and the emotions that power your culture is quite powerfully shame-based. It's based on if I'm the first one to leave the office, then I feel shame, and so I can't be, I've got to be the last one to leave the office.

And this whole shame engine that drives Japanese and some Chinese cultures. What's the purpose of shame from an anthropological point of view? It can't be just so we won't leave the office early. Because like a species, what is the point of, oh, I feel really bad about myself? Oh, it's terrible. Shame. Generally, I mean, we're a group animal, aren't we? We're a herd.

Humans heard. And it's one of the social emotions seem to keep the herd together. So, you know, anger is at somebody in the herd doing wrong or someone outside our herd wanting to take something from us, from which we get things known as enemy ship and war. We get this othering of there different to us. so they can make us angry if they behave differently. Disgust as well. Disgust is social elements are very much about keeping, you see somebody acting.

The whole pathogen avoidance idea is that if somebody is behaving incorrectly within your culture, a criminal act in a so way, you feel disgust to them because they are a social pathogen who might infect the rest of culture if you don't. So that's what the social emotions do. They keep a herd together. And shame, again, it's I have done something. If I do that and I'll feel this feeling, which. means the herd will say you've done wrong,

and I'll be the object of their disgust. I'll be the person who they're upset with. So I don't want to do that. I'm going to not have the shame. Yeah. I'll be back with Richard and a whole bunch of emotions after this short break. I'm a spy, doing whatever spies do. But what am I going to whip out of my pocket next?

Careful. In this special month of patented, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of James Bond by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage. From gadgets and their creators to the cars and cocktails that make Bond look oh so effortlessly cool. Join me, Campbell, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a History of Inventions, where I will have my can on a string up against the walls of some of the best historians in this field. Look forward to your company.

I'm going to break a few hearts now because I think we have to talk about the big one, the love as an emotion. Oh yeah. Because you could look at human history and say, love's always been here, that intense impassion and desire. What's your take on that? What's love all about? What's love got to do with it? Yeah, love is an interesting one. In some ways it has kind of always been around.

It's thought of very differently at different times. Sometimes it's mechanical, process. where you, that person and that person will be put together and it will grow because it must, because she's rich and we want some of their money for the family, or we want the political union. One of the main emotions back in the days of the Greek thought, Plato, was love. There was love and hate with the sort of the two primary emotions, again, social emotions, that held things together. But the love was more an attraction towards something, a pull towards something.

So Aristotle speaks of the reason we are attached to the earth, that fly off into space is because of love pulling us towards the center of the earth. And it's that kind of attraction, that pulling, if you like. But then you get to the early Christians who split loving two. So you've got self-love, which is being rich, loving, being powerful, loving being, whatever, you know, the kind of love that drives capitalism, that kind of them. And then you've got the true love, the correct love, the love of the finis, the love of God, the love of not sinning, the love of finally getting to heaven, which is supposed to drive everything. This is the one that caused trouble for certain reasons.

And the main reason when I talk about it is the Crusades. Because one of the great classic papers about the Crusades is called Crusading as an act of love by John Riley Smith. It's absolutely fantastic. And in it he points out that when Pope Urban started talking about the Crusades and made his great speech, Chartres, he used the word caritas, which is a form of love, a charity love, quite a lot. to say this is the Holy Land.

Fellow Christians who we love are being harmed. Our Holy Land is being harmed. We love this place. We love it so much. So we must go and murder a lot of people to get it back because of our love for it. And there are even accounts from the other side, from the Islamic side that say,

these guys really love this place. I mean, it's all right, in it. But they love it. It's weird how much they love it. So it's sort of, you know, it can have a dark side, can love. Again, like in evolutionary biological terms, just as us as a species, what function does it play? Because when you kind of look at it, it is a bit weird that you'll just go up to another human being eventually and then be, oh, I love you.

You like, hang out and we'll buy a house together. And that's like, what is that? Yeah, it's bonny. I mean, really, it boils down to something that's known as belongingness. People talk about oxytocin a lot. Oxytocin the love drug in the brain. And what it really is is it's a part of the brain that it's a neuropeptide that creates belonging this sort of a feeling of kinship and closeness to people. And the closer you are to

people, the closer you are to your family or your close friends, the more of this oxytocin you'll have. Dogs have it and cats have it as well. It's been measured that if you go away and come back again, your dog will have a burst of oxytocin. Cat will have a little burst of oxytocin. They don't really care to be honest, but they still have it. They're sort of, oh, food. No, okay, and off they go. They have a little bit. But, There is this burst of oxytocin when someone's close to you. And when it's a huge one, that's what this thing we call love. It's this huge burst of oxytocin with familiarity with good old-fashioned,

lost the drive to have babies. And you have this period at the beginning that's known as limerence, which is that hot, sweaty area at the beginning of a relationship when you can't think of anything else. Oh, you don't want to go out of year. And then at the end of that becomes sort of attraction and other things. that's where you'll break up or you won't generally when that bit stops and it lowers a bit and you've either got so used to each other you can't imagine not being in each other's lives

or you got so fed up with each other you can't imagine being in each other's lives one of the other what happens so you're oxytocin drops right down no it's not very romantic when you talk about no that's the problem the thing is yeah you got to be careful with looking at the sciencey side because you're like oh is it all it is it chemical no it's not that hot and they're not going to put that in a Valentine's card, are there? No, but that early hot sweaty bit can be a lot of fun as well, so let's not forget that. Oh, it can be amazing. But like, when you think about it, it's quite another primal human thing that, because when you

experience rejection in that limerence fits, oh my God, that, like, it feels like the world's going to end. It's awful. People, like, you know, murders happen because people feel rejected by somebody that they are attracted to. Because you have this massive, powerful body. feeling of belonging. Your whole body is wanting that person to belong to you and you to belong to them. It's this urge. And when it doesn't happen, your oxytocin's up here, there's a down there and

everything else that's going on. And you go, oh, I still want the person, because my brain still telling me, I still want the person. And it, again, can lead to bad things. And you can have it for parts of the world like Jerusalem, if you've got a very clever pope who's got very pretty words, which is what happened with the Crusades, you know. We want that. It doesn't. It doesn't want you really. And so they needed to go and get that back. Their love back. I read a paper about limerence and it made a very compelling case that when you are in that point and we've all done it, like you've got the intense crush. You can't stop thinking about a person. When you get text from them, you get the butterflies and you get like, you're boring all your friends by endlessly

talking about them. And the paper said that there's such a riot of hormones in your brain that in that period, you are actually addicted to that person. You're addicted to them and you need that. Yeah, it's not just oxytocin. You get your dopamine as well. Good old dopamine is a friend and it kicks in when you've enjoyed yourself and lots of other things happen as well. There's a collection. Some people actually think love isn't a thing. It's a collection of things. There's a lost and attractiveness and togetherness and lots of other little bits that come together to make this one thing. And you've got to have all of them for it to really kick off. But yeah, it's a big one when you're really in there. And if you can whip up a crowd, you're doing a similar thing. You can make them feel like they're part of this wonderful thing. And they can go and vote for you or die for you or drink the Kool-Aid for you or any sorts of things, you know. So is that like disgust?

Limerants can be transferred to other things? You can make other people feel it. Yes, you can make other people feel it if you're very good at doing that. Similarly, on the opposite side, disgust. is also a great way of doing that. Discuss is actually, oxytocin is actually oppressed in the brain when you're disgusted by something.

It's one of those things we've seen that it goes down. So you see something, the oxytocin goes down, and other bits of the brain, do other things, which are not entirely sure about, and you go, yeah, no, I don't really don't want that,

you reject it. And if you can say those over there, they're different tools. But we're brilliant, you're kind of using both. It's using love and hate together as a tool. Again, is I've got a lot of, historical president.

During the Cold Wars, America and Russia are at it. America spent loads of money trying to research how to make people love America and hate Russia. Probably where modern psychology came from the amount of money that was pumped into looking at that question in the 50s and 60s. Do we have any way of knowing if animals do this? They'd probably experience something. Whenever I'm asked what are emotions. My answer is they're the way that a living thing navigates the world when they don't have

language. So if you can imagine your cat and your dog doesn't speak English, what my cat might do a little bit, but that's a whole of the story. But they don't know English. They don't know language very much. Yeah. So they can't, if they're going into a room, they can't think I need to go that way. And they can't think I'm hungry now. And they can't think, this is really nice. I'm going to go and sit on her knee and get my chin rubbed. They do that through feelings. They feel that they need to do that. They feel the need to do this. They feel like they should go there because then they'll have a good feeling, a pleasant feeling at the end of it. So they The whole way that most animals navigate the world is through feelings.

A subset of feelings is emotions, though that's its own thorny topic. What are emotions? What aren't emotions? Depends where you're from. Again, we humans have this extra bit, this bit of the brain here, with language and our Brox area, and Vernix area, and all this things make it complicated. So we don't just have the feelings. We have the ability to think.

We have this thing we'd like to think of as cognition. Some people think it's separate to the emotions. Of course, it isn't. They all work together. and almost every decision we make is an emotional one from where we sit on the bus to what our favourite food is, to you name it,

why did you buy X car? Well, you didn't do it very often. Well, you might have gone, well, it's got better mileage or it's electric and I'm green, but why that electric car?

It's a woman in your budget. Well, there's another 10 in your budget, and why that colour? I wanted to feel pretty in the car. Yes, yeah. My favourite is recently, somebody said to me,

I don't think you can put cognition and emotion together. I think logic is the ultimate thing. I really love calculus. I said, you do what now with calculus? It took him a minute. Oh, oh, yeah. So there you go. There's an example of how emotion drives these things.

But animals, therefore, will have feelings, lots and lots of feelings. And it comes down to labelling again. Should we label them with English words that are very particular to English? Or should we give them their own words? what should we do? But, you know, I know when my cat Zazzy is angry with me and when she isn't, she makes that very plain. So I'm going to call it anger and love.

Love usually involves, you're in the kitchen, there's me food. And anger usually evolves, you're not in the kitchen, where's me food? But it's still, you know, it's there. And emotions seem to be incredibly important for our, well, they are just very important for our society. But what's your thoughts on something like, so I'm going to go big now, like, psychopathic personality disorder, or antisocial personality disorder, because they seem to be linked quite strongly to not being able to process emotions the way that other people can.

People with psychopathic personality disorder, they generally, to varying degrees, are unable to process the emotions in others. They can't see other people's feelings. Well, they can't feel other people's feelings. There's an idea of mirror neurons that when somebody hurts, your brain lights up and you feel what they feel. They don't have that. They don't feel it at all. They can work out what you're feeling, but they can't necessarily feel it. They don't have that empathy.

So they sort of lack all empathy for other things. That's not, although I am a big outspoken recently. Loads of things, particularly in Spain, have come out where I've said, oh, psychopaths get a bad rap. Most of them are fine, you know. There's the old one that does bad things, but the rest of them, the rest of them, there are a lot of psychopaths living happy, healthy lives as lawyers, bankers and politicians and surgeons. They're the four main things where you'll find a high number of psychopaths.

And personally, if I'm an operating table and something goes wrong, I want my surgeon to be a psychopath who doesn't freak out and panic that he's going to kill me. Just does his job, calmly, puts me back together and I live. So, you know, they're not all bad. There's this terrible thing. Just because you have psychopathic personality disorder does not mean that you're going to murder people. But it's interesting that the fear around them is often because they can't feel, allegedly can't feel emotions. Yeah.

I mean, they themselves, I think a lot of the time can feel emotions. They can get angry in themselves. They just can't empathize with it in others. But what they can do is learn to recognize it in others and think that means they're angry. What they're doing means they're angry. So I'm going to behave this way to diffuse the situation. So that's how a lot of them, that's why so many of them are really good barristers,

because they can read people and adjust themselves accordingly to a jury, for example. One of the traits of a psychopath is being manipulative, and that's an example of that. They might not feel it, but they can see it and they can process it. And they can do it. I mean, it's obviously, like, you know, psychopaths do have a bad reputation. But then I often think that, like, I'm held back by having colossal levels of empathy in my life, to the point where I don't want to upset people and I'm a terrible people pleaser. And just, if I could give away a little bit of that,

and just have like a little pinch of psychopathy, I think that I'd be an improvement. Well, yeah, I've often thought myself that if I could just not be, not feel things, I'd probably be a billionaire by now. Do you reckon? I'd have probably started some kind of humoral medicine, brought it back and made the Gwyneth Paltrow sorts

really buy into it and pay me a fortune for a bloodletting. You know, something like that, I think, by now. Be glad you're because of the guilt. That's not an idea of the guilt. No, you're aware. that it's bullshit, it's hurting people, so you can't do it. Whereas if you could... Exactly.

Oh, honestly. Because you know the go for it. I know the go for it. You have been amazing to talk to about this. This is absolutely fascinating. Thank you. What do you think that as we go forward as a species, especially with something like artificial intelligence,

how is that going to play into our emotions, do you think? Well, there's a big question. A while ago gave a little bit of talk to some philosophers in this. if you want to make some money, get yourself into whether AI has emotions or just acts like it has emotions and how we might know the difference. Because there's a gravy train to ride on there, books and lectures and everything. Because they're already, I forgot what it's called, but there's a robot dog that was sent to some journalists.

And a few of the journalists refused to switch it off because it was so lifelight, it felt like they were killing it because of the way it expressed itself. And I think AI is going to do a similar thing. thing, that it will start to respond to as it already has. If you look at the way some people are reacting to chat, chat, GPT and Bing and the others, as if they are, oh, they've definitely got feelings. They wrote this message to me. You can see they've got feelings and the guy in Google had to quit. What he's doing is it's running an algorithm to pretend to have feelings at the moment. It's not feeling. There's a difference between those two things. So what I've got

to worry about is when they do feel things. And of course, that, they don't feel things yet because emotions are more than just an algorithm and a response. They are all this cultural stuff. Like I said at the beginning, all this cultural stuff and this learning about things. The best example of how an AI will get emotions is the film Blade Runner. Because the whole point of that film is that some robots escape that have fake emotions and they're not real and you can use a test to spot that they're fake. But give four years and because they'll be immersed in cool.

and immersed in the world, they all develop real emotions because they'll have all this input from the outside world, so it'll make them actually start to feel things. And I think that's how AI would do it. You'd have to immerse them in the world and get them. So let's not. But at the moment it's not going anywhere because the science is, yeah, I don't think it's going to be a while because they're still using 40-year-old science, to be honest, that says there are six emotions and all humans have only these six emotions. So all we've got to do is code for these six emotions. That's six. I'm doing five. Because I'm thinking of inside-out. not by Disney that you only use five of the six.

How many emotions do we have? Depends which language you're speaking. Loads. Very true. Infinite. A guy called Paul Ekman did an experiment in 71. There were six basic emotions, but he went into the middle of the jungle, found the Foray Tribe and ran some tests on them, and found that they had the same six. And so said it's universal.

The test wasn't great. The Fourier Tribe weren't distant to Westerners. They wore jeans. They had money. There's lots of things. So they had seen Western culture, and the translations were a bit leading and there's all sorts of it. But this is kind of stuck. That it's that I can never remember the six.

Let's see if I'm going to do it this time. Happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger. They're the six. I noticed only one of them's positive. One of them's a happy emotion, which itself was a big red flag for me. It's like, where's love, where's hate? It's because they six can be expressed on the face, and that's what he was looking for. He was looking for them, looking at pictures of face.

and saying, that face is a happy face, that faces, that faces. And they're all exaggerated faces, which is another problem with the experiment. And they only had the six to choose from, so there's another, and so on. It's been since shown to be not so good an experiment, but they still, the AI people, for their most part, not all of them, are still using that science to code the AI with emotions. Something called effective computing. And they're still trying to use those six quite a lot. And it doesn't work because we've got more than six, depending on your language, you've got as many as your language has. Wow. And this is why scientists and humanities people should work together. Yes. Yes, exactly. I get it,

though. I've talked to computer programmers and said you've got a choice. You've told to give a computer emotions. You can either go for column A, which is you've got to code six things and make it recognize those six things. Or you can go for column B where there are hundreds and possibly thousands in English and then you've got to go through every other language in the world and look at their hundreds and thousands. So one is going to take you the weekend and the one your children will be doing after you die. Which did you go for? I get it. Yeah, it's a bit easier, isn't it? But there are some people starting to do more complicated stuff, so. You've been amazing to talk to. Thank you so, so much. Honestly, I can talk to you all day about this. But if people want to know more about you and your

research, where can they find you? I have a book out. It's called A Human History of Emotion, available at most good bookstore, certainly on Amazon. You can read there, because that's where I try to write it without all the jargon that you. you get in the more, shall we say, academic books on the subject. So I'm trying to do it there. There's that. I do talks where I'll talk about the emotions of environmentalism and the future of our planet and how it affects our emotions.

I'm just round and about. I've got YouTube channels. I'm at Dr. Rich FG on just about everything, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. Thank you so much for joining me, Richard. You've been an absolute treat. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for listening.

And thank you so much to Rich. for joining me and if you like what you heard, although perhaps liking is an emotion which we now know doesn't actually exist, but whatever it was that you felt in that constructed space of voidal emptiness, but perhaps you could find the time to like, review and subscribe to us wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.