Hidden Brain - Crickets and Cannibals

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Imagine seeing a cockroach skitter across your kitchen counter. Does that thought gross you out? This week, we take an unflinching look at the things that make us say "ewww." Plus, why disgust isn't as instinctive as we might assume.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantantham. What comes to your mind when I say the words, holophame? Maybe the rock and roll holophame and Cleveland, Ohio? Or the NASCAR holophame and Charlotte North Carolina? Music, sports, these make sense. For today's show, I want to take you to an unusual holophame. It's a New York City.

It pops up only once a year, and it's the kind of attraction you might smell before you see it. And this year what you're looking at with all the danger tape all over it is the Hall of Fumes. The Hall of Fumes is located in the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Times Square. To be honest, it's not really a hall. It's a metal rack holding up dozens of tattered, stinky sneakers. And these are the winners from all the past 42 years up until now. This is Rachel Hurst.

Then I'm here judging the 43rd Rotten Sneaker contest as the odor judge because for the past 11 years I have been the celebrity knows who gets to smell the stinkiest feet in the country. Contestants have to be between the ages of 8 and 15. Let's bring up our free season 7! Come on up! The six finalists are the 2018 competition qualified after winning similar contests at State Ferris. Rachel is here to judge only the Creme de la Creme.

The kids have to actually hand me their sneaker. I pick it up with a pair of tongs because it's, you know, I wouldn't really want to touch it. Even though I'm wearing rubber gloves, I really don't want to touch it. Can you tell everyone just how you've got this shoe, so dirty and run? So I've waited a lot. I wore them over the summer without any socks. So then I take it and I stick my nose as close to it as I possibly can, which is I try not to get right in there because I can smell it usually from quite far away and then I sniff and then I rate it on a scorching. You might be wondering how Rachel landed this coveted gig.

She's a psychologist affiliated with Brown University and Boston College and she's extensively researched the human senses of smell and taste and the emotion of disgust. Who doesn't have a freeze that forward please? I will take this but you sneak her on the tray? Oh, that's horrible. That's horrible. I have to go out of my mouth. Now I don't even have to smell the shoe to feel disgusted.

The thought repulses me. That's how Rachel fell too before she judged her first contest 11 years ago. I had really, really psyched myself up to think, okay, this is going to be the worst thing that you could imagine. Just don't worry, it's going to be over soon. And when I went to smell the sneakers, they actually, I mean, they weren't good by any means. But they were not as bad as my mind had prepared me to assume that they would be. What I realized is that it's our minds that have so much control over what we think is disgusting and how we approach something as disgusting. Today on Hidden Brain, we know it's around the topic of disgust.

Why do some things like smelly sneakers disgust us, while other things, like smelly pieces of cheese, delight us. And we learn why Rachel calls disgust. The instinct that has to be learned. There's a simple explanation for why we have the emotion of disgust. It's a defense mechanism against things that could contaminate us. But we often have flawed intuitions about how disgust works, starting with what's clean and what's dirty. In her book, that's disgusting, Rachel Hearst talks about how the cleanliness of toilet

seats compares to buttons on an ATM. Things that we actually touched a lot and have no idea or don't really think about how disgusting they are, things like ATM buttons actually are cell phones, are just petri dishes of pathogens and germs. And most of us do not clean our cell phones very often. And yet we have this idea because of the associations that we know very specifically between toilets and waste from the human body that toilets are really really filthy. And yet we don't give a second thought to things like keyboards or cell phones and other sorts of things that people are touching all

the time and could be very dirty and contagious. I want to talk about a certain quality that disgusting things have Rachel, which is that they tend to almost infect the things around them. As the psychologist Paul Rosen, who's done a lot of work on disgust, says, a single cockroach will destroy the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a single cherry doesn't make a bowl of cockroaches appealing. Why do disgusting things infect the things around them? Well, first I want to make a sort of fleshed out a point there that I think is really interesting and that is that good does not overpower evil. The way evil can overpower good. And so in fact, in other experiments by Paul Ross and he found that the idea, for instance, of how could you purify something like Hitler's

sweater. So people are told that Hitler owned the sweater, and would you be willing to wear it under varying conditions? Or would you be, how when could it become okay? And no form of cleaning could make it okay. Mother Teresa, wearing it, could make it a little bit okay. But in the case of Hitler's sweater, it had to be totally destroyed and burned in order for it to be okay. So good does not sanctify bad in the way

that bad can sanctify good. Whereas just one spot of something bad, like a cockroach, for instance, in a glass of water or milk or anything else, has the capacity to destroy the whole thing. Because negativity is much more pervasive and powerful from the way that we are built. And this is in fact adaptive because it's better to be worried about things that can harm

us than overly excited about things such as, might be benevolent. I remember doing a story some years ago Rachel that looked at a slightly related idea. This was worked by the sociologist Anne Bow's and she was studying the market for used wedding rings. And she found that people were really reluctant to buy a wedding ring when they learned that the couple who had previously owned that wedding ring had gotten divorced. And people tended to want wedding rings where they had been some tragic love story, but the couple had been very happy together. So I'm not sure if it's exactly the same concept, but it really feels as if inanimate objects can sometimes carry with them the spirit, if you will.

It's an unscientific idea, the spirit of living things. Well, actually it is very much the same concept, Shankar, and what you're talking about is something called sympathetic magic, which definitely plays a role in discussed and what we're disg about is something called sympathetic magic, which definitely plays a role in discussed and what we're disgusted by through association. The idea of once in contact, always in contact. So for example, the ring that was on the finger of the woman who had a terrible marriage and ended up getting divorced, somehow even though that ring is now in a jewelry shop, has nothing to do with that original couple whatsoever. The essence of that bad marriage is somehow still in the ring.

And therefore, wearing that ring will therefore impart the bad marriage onto the new wearer. And somehow this spirit, as you said, will transcend and infect the new marriage. So it's again, it's a form of infection. You have a very simple and interesting thought experiment in your book, which is, I'm not disgusted at the thought that when I drink a glass of water, that there is saliva in my mouth. But if I spit in a glass of water,

and then I drink that glass of water, that seems disgusting. And of course, in both cases, it's exactly the same outcome. I have water in my mouth with saliva in my mouth. Why does it feel more disgusting in one case and not the other? So that's exactly a great point about the idea that disgust is about the outside coming in and contaminating our inside. So while the saliva and the water is in our mouth it's inside of us and even just take water out of the equation just the fact that you have saliva in your mouth right now we're all okay with that. But

as soon as we spit that exact same saliva that's in our mouth into the glass, and then look at that, and then I'm telling you, now you should drink that, it all of a sudden, even though it's only been out in the air for seconds, has become contaminated by the outside and bringing it back into our body is now an entirely different proposition. And the fact, also, I think in this case that even though I know it's my saliva, it could be your saliva, it could be anybody else's saliva. Suddenly, it becomes equalized with all the saliva that I know is out there, that I definitely do not want in my mouth.

So if someone, for instance, is talking at you and spitting while they're talking enthusiastically, we're disgusted by the fact that some spit could touch us. Just like once our spit is outside of our mouth it becomes much less pleasant to think about taking it back in. There was a really interesting study done about sharing your toothbrush and this study found that so again the idea that you know you're having to have something in your mouth that somebody else had in their mouth and it was found that the person that one would least like to share your toothbrush with is the boss that you don't like. Followed by... so if you don't like your boss, you definitely do not

want to show your toothbrush with him or her. However, the anchor person on your local news station, if they were attractive, was pretty fine to share a toothbrush with. And people in your direct family or your best friends were also okay to share a toothbrush with. And so this speaks to two things. One, familiarity and emotional connection. So people in your family or your best friends, you feel positively towards them. You're very familiar with them.

And therefore you sort of feel safe around their saliva. The good-looking person on the television beauty equals health equals okay. But the person that you dislike or the person who's a stranger is a lot likely to be either more contaminating or because you don't like them purely because you don't like them. They could be good-looking and you could know they're very healthy but if you don't like them then They could be good looking and you could know they're very healthy, but if you don't like them, then you don't want anything about them coming into you as in their toothbrush. Contacts is key when it comes to disgust. In October 1972, a plane crashed in an isolated region of the Andes mountain range.

There were 45 people on board, most of them rugby players traveling to Chile for a competition. Many passengers died upon impact, more died in the coming days because of the freezing cold and dwindling food supply. In the end, 16 people had to survive more than two months in the mountains, and their story has inspired movies, books, and documentaries like this one from the History Channel. I said Nando, there isn't anything left in the storage compartments where we kept the chocolates and the can of sardines that we had. And Nando of me in the eye and said, Carlitos, I want to eat the pilot.

The people that had this idea and wanted to convince the other members that this was the only way they were going to survive did two things. One, they told the people to think of this as what you're doing is eating just meat. So don't think about this as a person, kind of connected to we don't think about eating cows and pigs, so much as we think of eating pork and beef. So this is just meat. And the second thing is that they try to justify this in another kind of a moral way by saying that the death of their compatriots was would have been sort of a complete waste if it couldn't be used in this way to potentially aid in their survival.

And so, reluctantly at first, but then everybody joined in, ate the dead remains of the people that were around them and another thing they did. We made a pact. And we did what people do now. People give blood to friends, to family members. They make organ transplants, you know? And we made a pact, we said, okay, hand in hand. If I die, please use my body.

So at least one of us can get out of here. So the fact that this is about cannibalism and that the people willingly resorted to this is something which has really caught our imagination because it really leads to this question of of what would you do in that circumstance? Would you also traverse the line into this worst taboo? One of the things that I find interesting is that when I personally think about their behavior, I don't necessarily feel disgusted by what they did. In the same way that if you told me that someone was munching on their neighbors' arm,

there's something about essentially having your hand forced by circumstances, you're acting in a way that is the only way you can possibly survive that changes the way I think about whether this is disgusting. Exactly. It's only really disgusting when it's a willful, unnecessary behavior. So like you said, you kill your neighbor and then decide to eat them.

But someone who is forced into this situation and the only way that they can survive is by resorting to an opportunistic situation that the person's already dead. That's a lot different. But the act itself, eating someone who's dead, eating another dead human being, is the same. This is how our mind changes the behavior from being okay to something completely abhorrent.

Rachel, you describe a case that took place in the 1990s. A man was stomp to death after propositioning another man, and when the case was taken to court, the defendant successfully used something known as the gay panic defense. You say this idea is rooted in a misconception about disgust? So this idea that, in this sense, using the gay panic defense,

so in this case, someone was able to convince the jury that the idea of this man, someone was able to convince the jury that the idea of this man making a homosexual advance to him was so repugnant that being motivated to kill this person was somehow justified. And like you said, it actually was successful in the trial. Now the concept that I think, so this is sort of, this is moralizing and this is getting people to become less judgmental towards the act of murder Because of the fact that they felt a kind of a sympathy towards the feeling of a version that this person must have had and therefore this sort of Outburst of rage is somehow justified

The thing that's different about this and I think this is an interesting point about Disgust in what makes it different from anger, which I think it's often confused with, is that disgust is about recoiling from, moving away from, avoiding the stimulus that's making you disgust it. And if someone were truly disgusted by somebody else, they would not want to get all over them and beat them to get death and get their blood and everything else all over them because that would be even more disgusting if you're already disgusted. Instead, if I'm really angry, if I'm enraged by something, then I attack, then I approach, then I can demolish you and get all covered in you and it doesn't matter because I'm just in a rage. So really, the idea about this being discussed is wrong and

what it was, is this person was affronted, you know, somehow morally, personally, whatever the case might be, and incited into such a rage that then he wanted to is this person was affronted, you know, somehow morally, personally, whatever the case might be, and incited into such a rage that then he wanted to murder this person. So the idea of using disgust in this way is actually flawed. So that example of homophobia, Rachel, makes me think about an idea. In almost every society you go to, you see patterns of disgust that are modeled on social hierarchies. In many countries you have the rich who are disgusted by the poor or upper caste who are

disgusted by lower caste or people who are native citizens being disgusted by foreigners. What do you think explains this? It has to do with something more insidious and that's related to our feelings about our social environment and the people that are in it. And the idea that foreigners and strangers and so forth are threats to our social normal order, and that that then becomes somehow connected to our ideas about contamination and protecting us somehow. And the idea is that this somehow justifies and rationalizes racial prejudices and other kinds of prejudices, because if we stay away from the unfamiliar

and the foreign, because we don't know what those immigrants, you know, they could be diseased. And in fact, disease was often used as a way of anti-immigrant propaganda. This somehow justifies negative attitude towards them when there is no relationship between their ability to actually make a sick or not. In much of our life, disgust feels instinctive. When we see a cockroach and a kitchen counter or smell rotten food in the trash can,

our revulsion feels hardwired. But Rachel says it's not. Our sense of disgust is learned. We explore that idea next. Psychologist Rachel Hurr says the things that disgust us not only reveal a lot about our culture, they reveal a great deal about our minds. She remembers an instructive episode from her own childhood. As we were driving in the car and it was a beautiful sunny summer day and the windows were rolled down and there were you know we were going by fields and everything was very pretty. My mother from the front seat said oh I love that smell and so as I

was smelling the same thing and all kinds of nice things were in my visual scene and my mother who I love said I love that smell I thought okay this is a great smell and I then learned a few years later that saying that in response that smell was a very big mistake. So the smell turned out to be skunk. So when I said, I love that smell on the playground with all bunch of little kids around me

and they went, ew, disgusting, that skunk. Oh, you're so gross and so forth and ran away from me. Again, so I become now the skunk, because they all ran away from me. I realized that was not the socially appropriate thing to say and so I kept that to myself for quite a while. But it turns out I'm not alone. There are actually people who like the smell of skunk and that also leads into something interesting about our sense of smell. In fact, we don't all smell skunk in the same way. So both are minds and the way our noses in fact react to the chemical that makes up skunk is different.

So unless you have an identical twin, your receptors in your nose are actually only yours and nobody else shares them, even though there's a lot of overlap. So by the idea that we're all not smelling the same thing when we smell skunk, that the receptors in our noses and the way our brains work. You know, we might be smelling different things, but it's also what I find really fascinating

about the story is that there is so much about disgust that is actually learned. You heard your mother, you have an association between your mother and the beautiful scenery around you, and you learn in some ways whether something that's a strong smell is a positive smell or a negative smell. And in many ways, this runs counter to the way most of us think, think about disgust. We think of it as being this innate drive that if I find something disgusting, you're going to smell it and you're going to find a disgusting as well. So I think that brings up a great way to think about the idea of disgust, and it is that it is the instinct that has to be learned.

So once we learn what something disgusting is, we then feel disgusted by it, like, for instance, bodily products and toilet training and poop and so forth. We don't have a question about whether or not it's disgusting, especially if it's from somebody else, where also is where meaning and context come into play. But we did not think it was disgusting from the get go. So that is to say we were not hardwired or born thinking that poop was gross. In fact, many infants both like to play with poop. They like the smell of poop.

They don't have any reactions to things. For instance, that adults in the same community think of as positive or negative. In fact, a great demonstration I like to do is showing these facial expressions of babies getting either the smell of sort of sweaty socks and vomit versus the smell of vanilla. And some babies' faces to the sweaty socks and vomit are making big smiley faces. And others to the smell of vanilla are making

what we would call disgust faces. So there's nothing hardwired about the reaction either to smells or to things that are disgusting. But once we learn what the meaning is, we then stick to it, except for when the context can make it very confusing or the context changes the way we perceive something. I love this idea that in many ways our notions of disgust are constructed. I understand that Americans like winter green flavor chewing gum, but people in Britain not so much. So in the UK, winter green mint is used exclusively in toilet cleaning products and in some medicinal bombs, like things you would rub on your skin if you're in pain.

And so the smell is connected to either being in pain or cleaning the toilet. So not good. In the U.S., however, the scent is used in candies and in gums. It's connected to the taste of sweet and sweet actually is innately positive. So tasting sweet plus smelling something that's going to be good. And we don't have any connection to cleaning the bathroom or being in pain when we smell this odor. And so as a function of the connections that we have learned to it and what the meaning is, this odor which in and of itself is totally, you know, agnostic, it doesn't have meaning one way or the other becomes good or becomes bad as a function of that.

So the British and the Americans are divided on the subject of Wintergreen. But I'm absolutely sure they'd come together when it comes to eating... bugs. Eating happened. My heart's pounding, oh my god. They look like crickets. There's no sugar coating. I'm about to throw up if I stay here. Oh, I don't want to do it. Those are reactions from a couple of our NPR co-workers when we presented them with a

plate of dried crickets and asked them to take a bite. Can I get the whole of my water bottle, can I have a chaser? I'm cool bugs as long as they're outside. I'm not sure how cool I am with them being my mouth. It's disgusting. It's insects. Look at it. There's exoskeletons everywhere, pieces of legs.

This is gross. People eat this. There's a couplekeletons everywhere, pieces of legs. This is gross. People eat this. There's a couple of things which disgust us about bugs. One of them is that we don't consider them to be food. Now, there are cultures, especially in Southeast Asia, that do consider all kinds of bugs as food. And if you were to go to Thailand, you'd see Madagascar hissing cockroaches on display

in the market where people are actually buying them to eat them up for meals and prepare them in all kinds of ways, which apparently, although I don't know personally, can be quite delicious. But the idea of what food is is a really interesting concept because this again speaks to how disgust is learned and when we decide that something is edible, then it's okay to eat and other cultures think differently about that. The other thing about bugs is that they move in a way that seems to be related to one of the aspects of discussing underlying why we don't like them, and this is actually somewhat

connected to bodily fluids. So bugs move in a kind of a jerky or a slithery or a slimy kind of way. And those kinds of things actually have a similarity to body products that we are also disgusted by. So being disgusted by slugs, for instance, is to do the fact that slugs are similar, visually, to feces. So there is this kind of continuum about our association between what bugs are and what bodily fluids are that were disgusted by. So there's a variety of reasons what bugs are and what bodily fluids are that were

disgusted by. So there's a variety of reasons why bugs are disgusting. One of the things in your book that caught my eye was even in the same country in different periods of time, our attitudes about what's disgusting have changed or can change enormously. I understand that a few centuries ago lobster was not quite seen the way that it was in few centuries ago, lobster was not quite seen the way that it was in Massachusetts. No, lobster was actually considered vermin of the sea and only suitable for slaves. And in fact, there was this slave uprising against the idea that it was completely cruel and unusual punishment to give people lobster to eat more than three times a week.

And today, we might say, oh, how lucky to be able to afford to have lobster three times a week. So it's conceivable then maybe in a few decades or maybe in a couple of centuries from now, we will think of eating cockroaches and crickets very differently than we do today. In fact, there are some people who would argue that insects are a very efficient source of protein and they're plentiful and in some ways consuming insects might actually be good for the environment in all kinds of different ways. I'm personally a vegetarian so I don't know if I'll ever subscribe to eating crickets and

cockroaches but presumably our attitudes towards eating insects could change. Absolutely. So the idea also, one of the things that made lobster disgusting and unappealing is that it was slave food, it was prisoner food. So these people, these are, these are bad people in the kind of the hierarchy of humans. And therefore it's okay for them to eat things that are possibly, that we would consider disgusting, but not okay for me, you know, the elevated person, whatever I think of myself as being. And right now, the way we think about insects is similar to that. So people who are not like us, people who have to resort to the last measure as possible for survival, they're going to debase themselves to eat insects.

But if we think about it entirely differently, so if we remoralize the story, and instead make eating insects about saving the planet and Make it a virtuous thing to do rather than somehow a debase thing to do or a last resort thing to do We could in fact make it a very positive thing Well some of our co-workers shrank it first when they held the cricket in their hand The more you look in his eyes the the less you want to eat it. The looks of fear and disgust faded after the first crunch. Cheers. Cheers. It's just like chips kind of. It's good. It's a little earthy. It's like some flour seed or something. Yeah, like a basket of these

like before my little pung. Along with the whole crickets, we also provided samples of delectable protein bars made of cricket flour. I chose peanut butter and chocolate. If you didn't tell people this was a cricket, they wouldn't know. It's good. It's not like there's big chunks of cricket in it, so I like it. Not bad at all. I'm trying to not be so like... American, you know, because like everyone else eats crickets. It is a luxury to be able to be disgusted. From the very basic level that if you don't have anything else to eat other than someone

who's dead beside you or the cockroach on the floor, then you just do not get disgusted by that because you have to do it in order to survive. So it's a privilege to be able to say, no, I'd rather not have that dead person or that cockroach. I'd rather have that hamburger or the steak or that beautifully prepared dish of Portobello mushroom. You heard it here first. Crickets are the new lobster. ["The New Lobster"]

Disgust and so many realms of our lives is about our mindset. The things that repulse us in a different perspective can become attractive. And now, drum roll. Back at the rotten sneakers contest. The winner of this year's 2018 odor eaters run sneaker contest goes to Hunter! Hunter, come on up!

Stand right here! 8-year-old Hunter Ham from Eagle River, Alaska, takes home the title, and he adds a shoes to the Hall of Fumes. His mother Lauren says Hunter joins a family pantheon. I might not be cornered one last year from Alaska. I don't know if that's what you really want to be known for. Stinky feet, but we're having fun with it. Our celebrity judge Rachel Hers gives us the export analysis on the competition results.

So Alaska is almost always the worst in my experience every year because I think they have so much more outdoor play and they're usually fishing which is a really horrible smell when it's rotted and they're often more farm-based and so they usually have the worst sneakers of all. While the competition seems like pure silliness, the kids are actually learning something important. Hunter and the other finalists are getting a master class in what our culture deems to be disgusting.

So young children are not very good at recognizing disgust faces. In fact, they often mistake the face of disgust with the face of anger and actually adults do as well, but not to the same extent. And children actually, again, have to learn what disgust really means. And it's only once they're able to understand themselves, the different levels of disgust, are they then able to recognize disgust in somebody else? Because when they see disgust, let's say in the face of an adult, they also recognize that it's in response to something.

So just like your parent might make an angry face because you threw all your plate on the floor and banging your hands on the table or something like that. They may make a different face if you, you know, pee on the ground, for example. And the idea is that the child has to then make the association between, there is something that's just happened in the environment and I'm seeing this face and that's what that face means. And the connection between that and discussed takes a lot longer to develop than it does between other sorts of things like anger or fear or happiness.

Rachel Hers is the author of That's Disgusting and the Scent of Desire. She also had a book out at the end of 2017, why you eat, what you eat. Richard Hurts, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. It's been a pleasure, Sankar. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Parth Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Raina Cohen and Jenny Schmidt. Field production assistance this week by Monique Laborde. Arun Sanghiros today are the brave NPR colleagues who signed up to eat crickets for our show.

They are Ninjury Eaton, Michael King, Sam Hoysington, Kumari Devarajan, Dutran, Alex Curley, Alex McCall, Mayas Turn, CJ Rikulin, Ramteen Aralui, Adam Winters, and Kelly Jones. There was one other NPR staffer who partook of the delicacies we served in the creation of this episode, producer Paz Shah ate some of the crickets. What did you think, Paz? Not as grislobs, sir. But I mean it wasn't bad. I liked it.

Did you eat the legs and head and everything? Oh, I guess, yeah it's just one bite. Oh my god. If you like today's show, please share it with a friend. If you feel so inclined, like Parth, you can discuss the show over a cricket or two. I'm Shankar Vidantam, and this is NPR. you