Something You Should Know - Why Do We Experience Déjà Vu? & How Your Emotions Drive Your Actions

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Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, what having a brother or sister does to your character and personality. Then, Deja Vu. What is it? Have you had it? Most people have had the experience. Now, an interesting aspect regarding Deja Vu. What is it? Have you had it? Most people have had the experience. Now, an interesting aspect regarding Deja Vu's incidents,

Starting point is 00:00:49 the most common elicitor is scenes. So places followed by conversations with people. Also, how your dental health can affect your mental health and how emotions drive your actions and has driven everyone's actions throughout all of history. The point is that emotions have a history and most history when it's done, it's done mostly free from emotions.

Starting point is 00:01:15 It's done as this event made that happen or that person did that and then this happened. But actually, all of that is seeped in emotions. People do things because of how they feel. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times,

Starting point is 00:01:52 relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know i grew up in a family of five kids four boys and a, and I'm the second oldest. And there's some interesting research about how siblings affect other siblings as they grow up. It turns out that having a brother is really good for girls. Women who grew up with a brother tend to end up more confident in social situations, especially with the opposite sex. Those sisters are also more likely to take on roles traditionally dominated by men and are a lot less intimidated by careers and hobbies that are stereotypically male.

Starting point is 00:02:55 And if you've got a sister, well, consider yourself lucky. Researcher Tony Cassidy says that his studies have found that families with sisters have deeper bonds and better communication skills. And that is something you should know. There's a pretty good chance that you have experienced déjà vu. That feeling that you've been here before or that you've said this before or that you're experiencing something now that has already happened in the past. So what is that? Some say it's paranormal, or it's a clue to your psychic abilities, and others say that's nonsense. Anne Cleary is someone who studies déjà vu. She is a professor at Colorado State University,

Starting point is 00:03:45 and she has a great TED Talk on this subject that you can see online. There's a link to it in the show notes. And she is author of a book called The Déjà Vu Experience. Hi, Anne. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks. So you've been studying this phenomenon of deja vu. What do you think is going on? What is it that gives us that sense that I've done this before or I've been here before?

Starting point is 00:04:13 Well, the definition of deja vu is the experience of having experienced something before while simultaneously also feeling that that's impossible because this is the first time that you're experiencing it. From my perspective, what causes it is likely memory. It's likely that you have experienced something, either this situation or something very much like it at some point in your past, and you have simply forgotten that prior experience. And so you're unable to recall the source of the familiarity that you're experiencing with it. What is the history of deja vu in the sense of, you know, when was it first identified? How long has it been studied? So deja vu began to appear in literature in around the late 1800s or so.

Starting point is 00:05:11 Philosophers and thinkers began writing about it and speculating as to its cause. currently still some debate over when the phrase déjà vu first began appearing in the literature and in intellectual circles. But it's clear that by about the mid-20th century or so, the phrase had caught on, and that became the single-use phrase in English for describing the experience itself. Well, we use it in English, but it is a French word. So why do we continue to use a French word? It first started in France among intellectuals and philosophers. I believe that the reason we're still using the French phrase in English is because there simply isn't a better term in English. And interestingly, some colleagues and I have been examining, well, are there words in other languages for this same experience? And in some other languages, it's actually the French phrase

Starting point is 00:06:19 as well. So I believe in Spanish, for example, people also use the French phrase déjà vu. And it's an interesting question. Does every language have a phrase for this? Because it's such an odd, unusual experience. of who's had it, when does it happen in life and during the day and time of year? And are there any similarities or it just pops up whenever? Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint when exactly it's going to occur for someone in daily life. But most people have had the experience at some point or other. So according to survey research, about two thirds of the population reports having had deja vu at some point in their life. Now, an interesting aspect and a complete mystery regarding deja vu's incidence is that it tends to decrease with age. And so it peaks in young adulthood, the frequency with which people report experiencing it, that is. It peaks in around the early 20s or so and then starts to decline from there, becoming lesser and lesser as people

Starting point is 00:07:40 grow older. Another interesting aspect is that if you look at survey research regarding what people feel prompts it when it does happen to them, it seems that the most common elicitor is scenes. So places tend to be the most common elicitor of the experience, followed by conversations with people. Does it normally happen in the morning, in the evening? It doesn't matter? Yeah, there have been some survey studies about that. I'm not sure I would make too much of it other than it tends to be correlated with fatigue. And so from that perspective, it may have a slightly greater likelihood of occurring later in the day when people are more likely to be tired and also later in the week for some reason. So here's the thing that I really don't understand about deja vu, because you had said that, you know, it's probably related to memory.

Starting point is 00:08:42 You're having an experience of something that you've never experienced before, but seems like you have. I have a lot of experiences that I have experienced before. I don't get that magical feeling when I remember things I've experienced before, and I'm experiencing them again. So there's something else going on. It isn't just a memory. Even a memory that I haven't experienced for years, I can walk into an old house and go, oh, I've been here before. It's not deja vu because I know I've been there before.

Starting point is 00:09:19 But when I have deja vu, it's a very kind of mystical, wow. So what's the difference? Yes. And this is exactly why I am so interested in deja vu as a memory researcher, because I think it is providing us with a unique window into how our memory systems might operate. So as you describe, most of the time, our experiences are familiar to us, and we have experienced something related to the situation, but it doesn't elicit this very mysterious sensation of simultaneously feeling like it's intensely familiar, but yet that's impossible. And so the key question is, what is going on in those situations? And it seems as if it's likely that something in memory's normal operation

Starting point is 00:10:11 is being disrupted or has gone awry in some way, and it's now drawing our attention to that. But to really get at your question, this is something that we've been aiming to investigate in our laboratory. And one of the key hypotheses that we have had for what might cause that very unique type of experience that is deja vu is when there's a juxtaposition between an intense sense of familiarity on the one hand, and yet a recognition of novelty or newness on the other hand. And so it may be that when you have this juxtaposition, that that is what really leads to this strange sensation. And it may be that that juxtaposition doesn't happen very often. Usually things either are very obviously familiar and they're not novel,

Starting point is 00:11:11 or they're very obviously new and they're not familiar. And it's when you have this juxtaposition of both at the same time that perhaps you have this strange, eerie sensation that we call deja vu. So it's a feeling of, I've never been here before, but it seems like I've been here before, versus, oh, I remember this. Yes. And the experience of deja vu, I know you talk in your TED Talk that a lot of people report that not only do they experience something that they think they've experienced before that they don't remember having ever done that, but that they also think they know what's going to happen next. Yes, this is one of the most interesting aspects

Starting point is 00:11:59 of Deja Vu from my perspective. So I've been studying déjà vu for over a decade now from the perspective that it is probably a window onto how our memory systems work. And in the process of studying it, I have come to the realization that for many, many people, déjà vu doesn't just feel like a strong sense of familiarity juxtaposed with newness. It doesn't just feel like a memory. Many, many people have the experience of feeling as if they know exactly what is going to happen next when they're in the midst of a deja vu experience. And years ago, I was kind of dismissive about this as a scientist. I thought, oh, you know, that there can't possibly be anything to that. That must just be people's beliefs about what deja vu actually is and people's associating it with the paranormal.

Starting point is 00:12:58 But enough people kept coming forward and contacting me or telling me their deja vu stories that with this element involved, this feeling of prediction or knowing what's going to happen next, that I began to wonder if there might be something to this and something that might be able to be studied scientifically. So years ago, I came up with the hypothesis that perhaps there is a memory explanation for the feeling of prediction. That is maybe if it is the case that deja vu can be driven by an unrecalled memory for something very similar to the current situation, then perhaps that unrecalled memory could also lead a person to have a sense of knowing what's going to happen next based on

Starting point is 00:13:51 how the situation happened in the past. I'm not sure why, but you know what this kind of reminds me of? If you ask somebody, what are the lyrics to a specific song? They'll often have trouble remembering the lyrics off the top of their head. But if you play the song, if they're kind of singing along with the song, the lyrics just come. You know them, but you need that prompt. It's interesting that you mentioned that, because there is an auditory form of déjà vu. The phrase for that is déjà entendu. And we have actually used music in our lab to try to investigate that. And what we did in that study was to try to create an auditory analog to the spatial type of scene similarity that I mentioned was to use what are called piano puzzlers. So there's a musical composer named

Starting point is 00:14:47 Bruce Adolph, who every week for a radio show produces what he calls a piano puzzler, which is a unique combination of the genre of a particular musician and some popular sort of nursery rhyme or pop song. He combines them in a unique way that has this tendency to elicit a feeling of familiarity. So when you hear a piano puzzler, very often it feels familiar and you can't pinpoint why, yet it's also recognizably new at the same time because it doesn't sound like a piece that you've exactly heard before. And so we've used these in the past, these piano puzzlers, to examine Deja Entendu. And interestingly, over the years, in some of our research, taking this approach to examining the feeling of Deja Entendu, so the feeling of having heard something before, even though

Starting point is 00:15:43 you're pretty sure this is also a new song that you've never exactly heard before. People also have feelings of prediction during déjà entendu. So if we ask people if they feel like they can predict whether the next note upon stopping the musical piece is going to be high or low, people feel very strongly that they can make that prediction even when they can't. And when we ask people if they feel like they can predict whether the next sound is going to come from the left or from the right, they feel very strongly when they have that sense of Deja Entendu for a musical piece, they feel very strongly that they can predict where the next song is, where the next note is going to come from. Is it going to be from the left or the right? We're talking about déjà vu. And my guest is Anne Cleary, who researches déjà vu. She is a professor at

Starting point is 00:16:35 Colorado State University and author of the book, The Déjà Vu Experience. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So, I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to, called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

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Starting point is 00:18:07 Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

Starting point is 00:18:24 it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Anne, I imagine the history of déjà vu is filled with explanations of the paranormal, that this must mean all kinds of things and who knows what. What are some of the other non-scientific explanations for déjà vu that you find intriguing?

Starting point is 00:19:13 So there are a number of non-scientific explanations of déjà vu that fall into the paranormal realm. And one of them concerns past lives. So one explanation that has existed in the paranormal literature for probably over 100 years or so, is that the explanation might be that when you have this sensation, it is because it's alerting you to a very similar experience that you lived through in a past life. Now, I suspect that this is just a way that people have come up with for trying to explain the bizarre experience that is deja vu. We have an inherent need to explain to ourselves why we're experiencing certain things. And when we have a sensation like that, like deja vu, that's jarring and maybe even a little bit eerie or alarming, it can be comforting to come up with an explanation to kind of explain it away.

Starting point is 00:20:18 Another paranormal explanation that has come up in various literatures over the past hundred years is the idea that deja vu is somehow a psychic phenomenon. And in fact, you'll see that explanation even today. If you were to type into a search engine, signs your psychic, very often one of the factors that will come up in a list on a number of different websites is deja vu, or the idea that you experience deja vu very often, that may be a sign that you're psychic. And I suspect that one of the reasons why deja vu tends to be associated with this idea of being psychic or able to predict the future is its very association with the sense of prediction.

Starting point is 00:21:08 So we've now been able to document in a scientific way that there actually is a subjective association. It's illusory, but there is a subjective association between the sensation of deja vu and the sensation of being able to predict what's going to happen next. Another question I wanted to ask is, so when you experience deja vu and you realize it's deja vu, is it kind of like when you're dreaming and you realize you're dreaming, you kind of pop out of it, you wake up? When you're in deja vu, does the same thing happen? That's a very interesting question.

Starting point is 00:21:45 I haven't thought about that before, but I can say that when I personally experience deja vu, which is quite rare these days, it seems to be a brief fleeting experience. And so, as a memory researcher who studies deja vu, I love having the experience and would like to be able to analyze it when it happens to me. And I do feel, as you describe, that when it happens, it's so brief and fleeting that by the time I start to analyze it, it's gone. And maybe it's because I'm trying to analyze it, now it's gone and I can't analyze it in real time. You mentioned that most of the experiences that people have with deja vu are places. When you look at the experiences, are there any other common

Starting point is 00:22:32 threads in terms of people not being in them or in them, they're perceived as negative experiences or benign experiences or positive experiences, or they remind you of positive? Is there any, are there any common threads? The most common seems to be places with followed by next common elicitor of deja vu. If you look across people's survey reports, conversations with people. So things that other people said. So when you're in the midst of a conversation, something someone is saying to you can be a common elicitor. And then followed by infrequency of people's reports across survey studies, the feeling of you having said something

Starting point is 00:23:23 to someone else before. So the feeling that you have said something to someone else before. So the feeling that you have said this exact thing before that you're saying right now in the midst of a conversation. Yeah, I've had all of that. But you know what I've never really felt I've had is where I felt like I knew what was going to happen next. I can't remember a time when I felt like I knew what was going to happen. It was just like a fleeting, I've been here before, I've done this before, I've said this before, and then it's gone. And I share your experience. I don't think that I have ever had the feeling of prediction before myself.

Starting point is 00:24:01 And like you, for me, it's very fleeting. And I kind of wish I could have that experience so I could try to analyze it, but I don't think that I ever have. I hear it from many, many people though, which is what has piqued my interest in trying to study it. It definitely happens to a lot of people. How would you categorize, I mean, is this a flaw in the brain? highly similar to something that you've experienced in your past and you're failing to recall the source of that familiarity. But yet at the same time, you're also noticing the newness of the situation that you're in and that it's probably that rare occurrence in the environment around you of newness and oldness, which probably doesn't happen very often.

Starting point is 00:25:05 And so it causes this sort of brief hang up of, wait, is this new? Is this old? What is driving this? And it captures your attention and prompts you to really try to search your memory. I think what most of us do when we're in the midst of that type of experience is search our memory. We start looking in our memory for what's relevant here. Is there something that this is reminding me of? Why is this feeling so familiar? And so I

Starting point is 00:25:31 think for most people, it's this rare environmental situation that's eliciting it. And it's probably just indicating the normal operation of our memories. There are some cases, though, where it really can be indicative of a glitch in the system, if you will. So very frequent deja vu can be an indicator of certain types of seizure activity. And that has been known in the medical community for some time now. So if you're experiencing deja vu, say four times a week, or maybe even more than that, there are people who will experience deja vu several times a day. If it's happening that often, it could be an indication that there are some minor seizures taking place in the brain. So why do you study it? What's the hope? What's the potential outcome of understanding deja vu better? So I think that if we understood deja vu better, it would give us

Starting point is 00:26:35 a good glimpse into more fully understanding human memory as a whole. So I suspect that when deja vu happens, it's providing us this window into how our cognitive processes are working in a way that they're probably usually working under the surface. So you had mentioned earlier that in most situations, things are familiar, and yet we don't have this striking sensation of deja vu. One hypothesis that I have is that perhaps familiarity detection, this ability of our minds to process whether something's familiar versus novel, is usually something that's just rapidly occurring sort of underneath the surface and it's not really grabbing our attention. Do people in all cultures report déjà vu? That is a big question that I currently have. And in fact, I have been collaborating with some colleagues to try

Starting point is 00:27:38 to answer that question because it's unknown. I can say that there are a number of research papers in different cultures and languages on the topic of deja vu. And so it's not limited to, say, English-speaking or French-speaking Western types of cultures. When I was visiting some colleagues in China several years ago, I began speaking about some of my research on deja vu and asking if these colleagues were familiar with what I was talking about. And they began arguing with one another in Mandarin about what the appropriate term would be. And so they all knew what I was talking about. But it wasn't clear that there was a single term that would be used in Mandarin to describe the experience. So I think there's reason to suspect that it may be

Starting point is 00:28:32 a culturally universal experience, but there has not been a good research study yet that has fully explored that. Well, I have always liked that experience of deja vu. And I know that there will always be people like you who, you know, try to explain it scientifically and understand what it is from a scientific point of view. But I like the magical and mystical sense that I have of deja vu. And I think most people do. Anne Cleary has been my guest. She's a professor at Colorado State University. She researches deja vu, and she is author of the book, The Deja Vu Experience. And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:29:17 Thank you, Anne. Thanks, Mike. This was fun. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice.

Starting point is 00:29:34 Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and

Starting point is 00:30:11 family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. We all like to think that our actions and our decisions are all well thought out and reasonable, at least most of the time. But truly, so much of what we do is driven by our emotions. It is true now, it has been true throughout history, that what we do and what

Starting point is 00:30:52 other people do, we do because of how we feel. And that turns out to be a rather important and fascinating part of who we are, according to Richard Firth Godby here. Richard is one of the world's leading experts on emotions, particularly the emotion of disgust. And he is author of a book called A Human History of Emotion, How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know. Hey Richard, so explain why this is such an important topic, the history of emotions and how they drive our actions. The point is that emotions have a history and most history when it's done, it's done mostly free from emotions. It's done as this event made that happen or that

Starting point is 00:31:39 person did that and then this happened. But actually all of that is seeped in emotions. People do things because of how they feel. And there is a whole field called the history of emotions that studies this, of which I am part. I love that when you think about that sentence, that people do things because of their emotions. When you think about that, I mean, that is so true. And yet it's such a stupid reason to do things much of the time. It is. But there have been studies that suggest you can't make a decision without feelings, that feelings are very important. This idea that there is a thing called feelings or emotions, a thing called reason, and they are separate isn't really real.

Starting point is 00:32:23 We do something. We sit where we sit on the bus because we enjoy sitting in that position. Everything is feeling at some level. That's really interesting when you think about it, because so much of everything we do is driven by feelings, and yet we like to think that we're very sensible, reasonable people, and that we're making decisions in a very objective way. And we're not. The thing is, though, it doesn't mean that the decision's wrong. There's this idea

Starting point is 00:32:52 if you make an emotional decision, it's wrong. Usually the emotion is what teaches you it's right. When you do something, when you're younger and things go well, you have a pleasant sensation because things go well, or because your parents said, said do that and you weren't punished for it so you go the right way um it doesn't mean you're making a bad decision because you're using your feelings for it how people feel the emotions that people hold inside it changes right over the year i mean the the way that i'm feeling now and the things i like and the things that i feel are not the same things that somebody you know 10 000 years ago felt absolutely emotions do change over time some emotions are unrecognizable today even other cultures now have some emotions that westerners wouldn't recognize but um like what even if they even if they think they

Starting point is 00:33:46 do uh there's a german emotion called echo which is often translated as disgust that's what it is but it isn't really it's slightly different it's not so much about feeling nauseous it's more about avoiding harm it's more about not having something that overwhelms you that's too much, which kind of sounds like disgust. But on the other hand, there's no it or you involved in echo. So the translation is quite right. And most cultures have something like that. So the story you tell about the Crusades, which we all learned about in school and how emotions played a role in that is really interesting. So talk about the Crusades, which we all learned about in school, and how emotions played a role in that is really interesting. So talk about the Crusades. Why did people go on the Crusades? For the longest time,

Starting point is 00:34:34 nobody had any idea. It was the idea it was a religious pilgrimage. Well, maybe it was the idea that people wanted to invade somewhere and get the land, maybe. But one of the driving forces behind the Crusades, bizarre as it sounds, was love. And it was a love for the Holy Land, a love for their religion, a love for their belief system, and a need to express that love with terrible violence, sadly. They took the people who are they were supposed they thought they were defending who are fellow christians and they said we love that they're fellow christians we need to go and help them or we need to defend them or the whole process was pushed by love and when pope urban who made the first speech that kicked off what is often

Starting point is 00:35:22 called the first crusade he peppered his speech with phrases about charity and love and loving your fellow man. And it's all throughout it. He doesn't really talk about attacking and invading at all. He talks about, let's go and do this act of love. And so that decision, that strange decision, seems to have been a very emotional one. Since you are considered an expert on the emotion of disgust, talk about disgust and why that's an important emotion. Disgust is fairly a recent idea in the West, as we understand it now. If you go back, we can go back right to the old Hebrew Bible. the hebrew bible when it was translated into latin

Starting point is 00:36:05 they came up with this word abomination and everything that you did that offended god was an abomination no matter what it was it could be using slightly dodgy weights and measures or it could be murdering someone all these things are abominations but even then there was abomination which was very religious and then there were other things like aversion, which wasn't very religious. Similar thing. You're trying to avoid something that might harm you, like bad food or getting punched. Abomination is the kind of thing they felt for witches because they were sinful and bad. And then around the middle of the 17th century, some taste theorists needed and concept that was the opposite

Starting point is 00:36:47 of taste and there was this old word that had been lurking around disgust sort of borrowed from the italians and the french that meant bad taste and so they start to use disgust to describe things that were done in bad taste morally and aesthetically if you like um and it caught on it became this new thing that was about anything yucky and horrid and any action that was immoral it over the line that kind of thing so that discusses an example of something that deep down inside going rotten fruit is probably evolved almost certainly an evolved response to stop us getting disease. But how we understand it has changed over time, several times, just in English. Throughout the history of emotions, are there any emotions that have more or less changed sides,

Starting point is 00:37:39 where once a good emotion is now a bad emotion, or a bad emotion is now considered a good emotion. Anything like that? Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, was one of the first people to really champion the idea that if something felt bad, it was bad. And if something felt good, it was good. Before him, the idea was that an emotion was judged on what it did. So if you felt fear because you're about to fall off a cliff then fear is a good emotion you know it stops you falling off the cliff it's a positive um if you felt happy because you just stolen something then that happiness was bad because you shouldn't feel

Starting point is 00:38:18 happy for stealing something so that itself has changed as for an emotion that's changed, probably desire. Desire for goods, for worldly goods, was for the longest time and still is in some places a big no. No, no, no. You do not desire things. A lot of religions are based on the idea that you suppress your desires for things. But now desire for things is kind of what makes the world go round. Without desire for goods, we wouldn't have capitalism. So that is now seen as much more of a positive thing than it ever was. My sense is that we focus a lot more today on emotions than in the past.

Starting point is 00:38:58 But as you look at the history of emotions, where do you see us today? How do we, compared to the past, how do we handle emotions differently? There's this thing that psychologists are starting to call toxic happiness. And it's the idea that if you're not happy all the time, there's something wrong. And we can use history in looking at how other ways of feeling have been understood to say actually that's not the case sometimes it's okay to be down in fact it's a good thing to be down sometimes sometimes it's okay to feel sad sometimes it's okay to feel angry sometimes it's great to be happy sometimes happiness isn't appropriate you might want to think about that and history is a great way to see that perceptions of feelings change over time and that we are in

Starting point is 00:39:48 a little pocket of this is how we're supposed to feel now. What's known as an emotional regime, which is where you have rules that you're supposed to follow for how you express and feel your emotions. When I think about this, and obviously I'm certainly no expert, but my sense is that, as you said, we live in, you know, where everything's emotional now. Everybody's offended by every little thing and everybody's so touchy and you can't say this and you can't say that because you might offend somebody. And that it wasn't that long ago, and maybe it was also a long time ago, or that none of this was even discussed, that, you know, if your feelings got hurt, too bad. Yeah, I mean, when I was young, there was the old phrase, sticks and stones may

Starting point is 00:40:39 break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And these days, it seems that words can hurt you worse than any sticks and stones can. It's part of this difference of perception of how important feelings are that we've got now. There's a colleague of mine who believes that it's really, really started post 9-11. They began before that because you had things like, go back to Star Trek, they had an emotion-sensing counsellor

Starting point is 00:41:03 on the bridge of the enterprise, which is a clue that emotions are already starting to become important in culture. But 9-11 really, really brought it home. People start to think about how they feel and what feelings matter. It does seem though, when you look back throughout history and, and maybe this is partly because of the way history is portrayed in films and in the books that talk about history, that people were more stoic, that they sucked it up, that they didn't wear their emotions on their sleeve, that they really emotions were secondary yeah there's also been times of great emotional upheaval the early modern period from let's say 1500 to 17 1800 uh so many things changed in the world america was discovered suddenly people realized that um there's half of a planet that they didn't know about um the ottomans invaded and took over constantinople which meant suddenly goods were harder to come by and and

Starting point is 00:42:11 prices went up new diseases appeared everything that basically the book of revelation said was going to happen seemed to be happening so that period in history was really marked by an over overriding fear everybody was frightened of everything terrified of their own shit so that was quite an emotional period as well that's partly why things like the witch crazes happened and endless wars and revolutions started but it also got people thinking about things and thinking about feelings and people like thomas hobbes saying you know feelings are why we have disagreements we need people to make decisions at the end of this rather than everybody just killing each other all the time which led to things like the enlightenment and democracy and that sort of thing because if

Starting point is 00:42:57 you think about it democracy is a form of government in which people actually care what other people feel but yeah you have periods in history when areas and people are really emotional and really in tune with feelings. And right now it's kind of a sensitivity about identity, about who we are and what we are, and allowing that to run free rather than judging it and becoming quite offended when it is, I think. We almost live in an offense age rather than a fear age

Starting point is 00:43:28 Talk about because I I find this really interesting this idea of synthetic emotions that having emotions for things as opposed to people or animals or whatever It's known as effective computing and there's a lot of people trying to make machines feel things and recognize emotions. And they're not doing a brilliant job, to be honest, because it's a very difficult thing to do. And it's getting there. But it's things like having artificial counselors.

Starting point is 00:44:04 So if somebody is suffering from depression, they could go to their Alexa and say, can you help? And there's an artificial counsellor that could help them feel better by recognising the emotions in their voice and reacting appropriately and speaking. And also just robots that have feelings, which is kind of terrifying but people are working on it the idea of having a robot that can get angry and sad and amused how far have they gotten on that they have got to the point where you can have an online artificial counselor and people don't know in tests they don't know that they are speaking to an artificial artificially feeling an artificially intelligent counselor not in person the voices aren't good enough yet but with typing if they have a real counselor and an artificial one it's almost

Starting point is 00:44:59 impossible for people to know the difference so that's where they've gotten that uh recognizing emotions in people they don't do very well to be honest they they keep trying there's also some pets that are so lifelike in their responses these robot pets that people who have been demoing them have refused to switch them off wait wait these are robot pets that people get so attached to that they really think or they really interact as if they're real pets. They do all the things you would think a dog or a cat would do. They come and greet you. They snuggle up to you. They go off on their own sometimes.

Starting point is 00:45:39 All these things. But it's interesting that you say they don't turn it off, and they clearly are forming some sort of emotional attachment to what is essentially a thing that has no real feeling, has no soul, has nothing. There's a concept within the field of emotion research called essences, which is basically the idea that we attribute essences to objects. Children do it all the time with their favorite teddy bears and things and their favorite dolls they'll say they'll treat it as if it's real they'll get very upset when it's not with them if you try and take it away they'll act as if it is a person being taken away and that we attribute that we do that

Starting point is 00:46:23 with animals as well and people are doing it with these objects too we do it with our favorite things to be quite honest some of us do it with cars or have done in the past yeah i have a car that i've had for you know almost 20 years that it's time to get rid of and i feel bad about it like i'm like i'm gonna have to say goodbye to an old friend. I had a car. I had a Toyota RAV4. Very, very old car. It just kept on going. Nothing would phase it. Then one day, 20 odd years into its life, it stopped working.

Starting point is 00:46:55 And I had to sell it to someone who wanted to take it away and turn it into an off-roader. And I actually cried when I sold it. And it's just a car. So this idea of essence is we give things life, we give things reality. Since we've been talking about this whole idea of how our actions and our decisions are driven by our feelings, I would imagine that when our feelings get hurt, that that can also drive decisions and actions. So is there a good example in history of how hurt feelings have really changed the game? Sometimes hurt feelings can change everything. In the late 19th century, Japan was just coming to the end of a long period when it closed all

Starting point is 00:47:43 its borders to the rest of the world. There was a small colony, a Dutch colony in Nagasaki, where they did a bit of trading. But other than that, it was actually illegal to study foreign ways and people got in trouble for it. And then one day, a fleet of American warships turned up. They had larger cannons than the Japanese could believe existed. And they said, we would like to trade with you because we know you've got some things we want. And by like, we mean we're going to whether you like it or not, because our cannons are bigger than yours. And this triggered a backlash in Japan based on the old samurai ideas of shame and the idea of being shamed and that shame at being so far behind

Starting point is 00:48:28 the rest of the world kind of give japan a bit of a kickstart they used it to press on to become bigger to become ultimately who they are now one of the richest countries in the world so that was a case of hurt feelings being used as an engine for change. You know what I'd be really curious to know? You were talking about people getting so attached to their artificial pets. So what happens when the artificial pet actually breaks and can't be fixed? When people mourn their artificial pet, is it like mourning a real pet? Yeah, and I sometimes wonder because no real studies have been done about this because it's very new.

Starting point is 00:49:11 I'm curious about that because I have my suspicions that it would be very similar. Because I don't think our brains know the difference. We don't know the difference between a real cat and a fake cat that appears to be a real cat. All we know is it's a pet and it seems to, it does things that seem to express emotions to us. Seems that they seem to love us. Well, it seems to me if your robot pet dies, you just change the battery. Or you take it to the artificial pet repair store and they fix it. Or you get another one. It's going to be the same. I don't know. It just seems very,

Starting point is 00:49:52 there's a thing. If you get another one, if the essence is with the one that you had is another one, just like getting a new cat when your cat passes away. Yeah. And, and while that sounds kind of crazy and silly, it really illustrates how important emotions are, and as you've been discussing, how important they have been throughout history and how important they are to pay attention to. Richard Firth Godby here has been my guest. He's one of the world's leading experts on emotions, and he is author of a book called A Human History of Emotion,

Starting point is 00:50:24 How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know. And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Richard. Thanks for being here today. No problem at all. It was great. Thanks. It turns out flossing your teeth isn't just good for your dental health, it's also good for your mental health. A group of dentists and psychiatrists teamed up on a study and determined that our oral health is directly connected to our cognitive health. It seems that gum inflammation can contribute to

Starting point is 00:50:58 brain inflammation, which impairs mental function and increases the odds of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life. Brushing and flossing for at least two minutes each day is the best defense to ward off periodontal disease, gingivitis, and inflammation. And that can keep your brain sharp. And that is something you should know. Your rating and review of this podcast would be most appreciated on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. And a five-star rating is really appreciated. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Starting point is 00:51:32 Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper in this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro,

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Starting point is 00:52:33 Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.

Something You Should Know - Why Do We Experience Déjà Vu? & How Your Emotions Drive Your Actions

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