Stuff You Should Know - Mirror Neurons: Are there people who feel others' pain?

Episode Date: April 22, 2010

People with a condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia literally feel the pain of others -- but why? Josh and Chuck trace the cause of this condition to one culprit: the mirror neuron. Tune in to learn more about mirror neurons and neuroscience. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, which makes this... Stuff You Should Know. Very nice. How you doing?

Oh, I'm great. You look like you're doing great, Chuck. You look like you're doing great, Josh. Jerry looks like she's doing about like we were doing. Yes. We're all doing the same. Yep. That's what we're doing.

So, Chuckers, I got, as I said, right before we started recording, I've got no intro for this. But this is a listener request times infinity or so. Yeah, I got an intro. Oh, okay, let's hear it. Just came to me. Okay.

Josh, remember years ago when you were a young child watching NFL football and the quarterback for the Washington Redskins, Joe Thysman, horrifically broke his leg? Lawrence Taylor broke his leg? It's one of the great tragedies of my life that I missed that. Oh, you did?

I never saw it. You know, when you were watching any sporting event and you see a knee go in a direction it shouldn't go in. Willis McGayhee. Okay, there you go, exactly. Yeah. When it was flopping around. Yeah.

Did you feel a pain in your leg when that happened? Yeah, yeah. I felt some sort of discomfort. Okay, I feel a shooting pain when I see, it's usually a bone or a leg going away. It's not supposed to go. Like a knife wound wouldn't bother me. It wouldn't make me grab my chest.

Right. But that always sends a shooting pain through my leg. Really? And that, buddy, may be a mild form of synesthesia. Yes, it might be. It's my first intro. That's very good, Chuck. I think we should appropriately clap for that, Jerry.

Yes. I clapped for myself so it would just be a two-person lame, slow clap. It was a good clap. It was a good intro, Chuck. And this is news to me. I had no idea that you were a synesthete. Well, I don't know if that really counts.

I kind of thought everyone felt a shooting pain when that kind of thing happened. Well, you know, buddy, you sound like a developmental synesthete. Born with it? Yeah, people who were born with synesthesia tend to think that this is a very normal occurrence that everybody feels this way.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the only time it happens, though. It's just with leg injuries. Well, breaks and things like that. When limbs just do things that aren't supposed to, they're not supposed to do it. Yeah, I don't see the number three is orange.

We'll get to that later, but... We definitely will. But what you're talking about is mirror touch synesthesia. Yeah, the first one. Yeah. Yes. Okay. You want to go into it?

Yeah, why not? What are you waiting for? That's one of the options I did the intro. I thought that's usually when you hand it over, so I'm handing it over. Yeah, this is all reversed. I know. And it's not like mirror reversed.

It's all just confusing. All right, well, mirror touch synesthesia is a, I don't know if you could call it a disorder, maybe a condition. We'll say condition. Yeah, condition. It's a condition where a person actually experiences a touch or an injury that they're observing on someone else.

Right. And because it's mirror touch, if say I'm facing you, right? Which you are. Right. And your left arm gets touched. I would feel it in my right arm. Yeah.

Right? And if I were standing next to you and your left arm were touched, I would feel it in my left arm too. Right. This is not supposed to happen normally. No, no. It's pretty weird.

It is. And apparently for the, I guess, truly advanced mirror touch synesthetes, like you can't watch a horror movie because the empathy involved is so extreme. It's unbearable. It's unbearable to watch. Like you feel like these things are happening to you.

And there's no, there's a lot of stuff we need to point out, but chief among them is there's no confusion here. These people aren't confused. They don't think they're really, you know. No, no, no. Jack Nicholson getting hit in the head with a baseball bat by Shelley Duvall. Right.

Yeah. They don't think that's happening to them, but they still experience this. Right? Yeah. That's number one. Number two is this is not imagination. Right?

Right. Like these people aren't deluded. No, no, no. They're normal. Any more than say a person with mirror touch synesthesia feeling themselves being pinched when they watch someone else being pinched. That's no more a delusion than you or I being pinched.

That experience, right? Yeah. They're considered neurologically normal, quote unquote. Right. And we also know that they are having these real experiences because of our friend, the Wonder Machine. Yeah. Yeah.

Which has been employed to investigate synesthesia in all forms. And it shows that the, for example, I know I can't come up with one for mirror touch neurons, but we'll use the color graphing. No. We'll use the sound color synesthesia, OK? Yeah.

There's all different types. And this is another one. Sound color is when you associate sound with color. Right. So if you have somebody who has sound color synesthesia in the MRI and you play a musical note for them, the region of the brain that experiences or governs our understanding of musical notes is activated,

as is the region of the brain that's associated with colors. So these people are experiencing both. There's no way to separate them. And it's not an association like you were wearing a blue, evil, carnival jumpsuit. The first time you heard a particular Bach concerto, right? Although it was. You were.

And you may associate that. So you may have a visual image in your mind of that blue jumpsuit or even that shade of blue whenever you hear that concerto. This is not what we're talking about. This is a mixture of the senses in its most definitive form. Yeah, oftentimes they say there will even be a projection of that color, a literal projection that they see.

And it sounds kooky if you've never experienced it, but to them it seems completely normal. Yeah, I think once they realize that they're synesthetes and that this isn't normal, it becomes tiresome from what I understand. I was reading an interview with Dr. Oliver Sacks, the Awakening's guy. He's been hanging with synesthetes for many decades now.

So he's something of an authority on it. And he was saying that a lot of them get kind of tired of it. Like, I really wish I could just listen to music without seeing all the colors. Well, a lot of people use it, too, though. Well, yeah, creatively. Sure, sure. Famous synesthetes have remarked that it has helped them

with their memory. I got to study on that, which we'll get to later. But we're talking about Duke Ellington? Yeah. No slouch? No. Franz List? Yeah.

Composer, Nabokov, writer? Actually, Nabokov, in his autobiography, he talks about how he started to realize that he was synesthetic when he was a little kid. He was pointing to these, I guess, the alphabet. And they were just colorless letters. But he was talking about the colors of the letters. And his mother came over and agreed with him

that the letters were indeed colored. But she disagreed with what colors the letters were. So he came to realize, as he grew older, that he and his mother were synesthetic. And actually, strangely enough, his wife turned out to be a synesthe, too. Really? Well, they do think it's hereditary, for sure.

But get this, he also couldn't hear music. Like, he could hear the sound, but he couldn't hear music. So he couldn't hear a high or a low pitch. Really? He couldn't hear discordant tones. Would he see it? No. He was a color graphy of synesthe.

All right, so that's two. We'll go ahead and say the other two, word, taste. Words associated with taste. And taste touch. And there's all kinds of groupings of these. It's not just those. Apparently, they can be paired in all sorts of ways. And I think they said it's rare, but some people even

have involved three or more of their senses, which is, I mean, crazy. Right, and besides color graphy of synesthesia, it's not like you just have that. You can have different types of synesthesia. And you can also have them to different degrees. So much so that researchers are coming to believe that one out of every 100 or 200 people

have synesthesia to some degree, like you. Right, and it's also specific to the person. So everyone's is their own. Right, which is why. Three isn't always blue for every synesthesia. Which is why Nabokov and his mother were arguing about what colors were what. There's another one I found, too, called Time Space Synesthesia.

Did you see this? No. They kind of referenced it in the article as far as some people even see certain months and days as shapes. But there's a psychologist named David Brang, who his theory is that people can literally see time as a spatial construct. So he found this one woman in a study

who was able to see the year as a circular ring surrounding her body. And it rotated clockwise throughout the year. And the current month resided inside of her chest. And the past month resided on the front of her chest. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy, yeah. And when I say crazy, I'm not being derogatory.

Fascinating. Yes, right. Well, yeah, of course, we use those interchangeably around here, don't we? Well, we tend to. That woman can probably tell you exactly what happened on a certain day of a given year. Because one of the benefits that researchers believe

synesthetes are bestowed with is better working memory. There's different associations. It's not just one association. You're using two regions of the brain to form memories or that are elicited as a response to music or letters or something like that. Well, he did two studies. You want to hear that?

I do. He took the same people, the time, space. Is it synesthetes? Synesthetes. Synesthetes, yeah. He took the time, space, synesthetes. And he asked him to memorize an unfamiliar spatial calendar and then reproduce it.

And then he got normal people to do it. And the results showed that they could recall events in time like light years beyond the non-synesthetes. And they found on average that the synesthetes have about 123 different facts that they can call up about a specific event in their life compared to 39 for your average Joe. Really?

So it's definitely doubling your pleasure with the memory. Double your fun with synesthesia. Chuck, you were talking about studies and tests. Dr. Sacks mentioned a pretty simple test for somebody with color grapheme synesthesia. And it's brilliant in its simplicity. But you just put a piece of paper in front of them with a scattering, a random scattering of fives and s's

and say, pick out fives and s's as fast as you can. And for a synesthete, because remember, this isn't an association. Like they literally five looks red. S looks three. Are they mixed in with other numbers and letters? No, just fives and s's because they look similar. So the synesthete should be able to pick out the fives and s's

in no time flat. Oh, like, because blue and red, let's say. Right, because it's not just a black printed number or letter that looks similar to one another. It will clearly look like this one's red, this one's green, this one's red, this one's green, green, green, red. You're like a human highlighter. Pretty much, you know?

That's why you use a highlighter, so it stands out. But think about this. Can you imagine trying to study if, do you remember back in like seventh grade, those fat pens that have four different color inks in them? Sure, and the girls would send you love notes with one letter for each color. And when they really, really liked you,

like each letter would be a different color. And it was just a headache, a nightmare. And you're like, I don't like you, you know? You with that puffy bang thing that's all hairspray going on. Yeah, see that was much later for me. Seventh grade for me was that was still early 80s. Joan Jett. Everybody was keeping on truckin'.

Spikey Joan Jett hair. That was what was going on. Nice. Chuck, this appears to be genetic in origin. Yeah, that's what they think, because usually more than one person in your family has it at a time. Yeah, old Jacob Silverman, not to be confused with old Kurt Christensen.

He wrote about a researcher named Sarah Jane Blakemore, who was delivering a lecture and mentioned that she had heard of people who confused other people's touches for their own. She's talking about mirror touch synesthetes. And a woman in the audience, I guess, during the Q&A session said, wait, I thought everybody felt that.

And was like, what is going on here? Sarah Jane Blakemore is like, let's go to your home. And they did. And she found out that 11 of her family members had some form of synesthesia. So they think it does have a genetic basis. Chuck, I'm writing an article on a skin condition called epidermolysis balosa.

Basically, you get blisters really easy. Researchers have determined that 10 genes are in order, are in play, are mutated to have epidermolysis balosa. And that's just for a blister. Can you imagine the number of genes that have to be mutated in the specific combinations to form synesthesia? Crazy amounts.

It is crazy. And we mean fascinating. Where should we go here? Can we go to mirror neurons? Well, hold on. Let's talk about one other thing first. OK. With synesthesia, there's two types.

We talked about developmental synesthesia who think that everybody experiences this. Yeah, because they're born with it. Sure. And then there's acquired synesthesia. And this is most predominantly seen in people who lose their sight after a certain age. Right.

Or if you have a brain injury or do lots of drugs, you said drug use. Yeah, drug use can lead to, I guess, a kind of temporary synesthesia from what I've read. But if you go blind, apparently your brain's visual center, after it's been trained to take in visual information, it's still hungry for it. So apparently your synesthesia can just

come in like gangbusters after you lose your sight, even when you didn't have it before. And you remember that movie Mask? Who could forget? Of course. You remember the part where Rocky Dennis is teaching his blind girlfriend colors? Yeah, cold as blue, hot as red.

Right, he puts her hand under some cold water and he's like, this is blue. And he heated like a rock up in a campfire and gave it to her to teach her red and teach her a lesson. And he smacked her in the face and said, that's orange. Get it right. Orange is pain. Yeah, I think that's, I can't tell,

and I don't know that a neurologist could tell you whether that was actually developing synesthesia. Right, that was Laura Dern, wasn't it? I think it was, yeah. A young Laura Dern. Yeah, and Rocky Dennis was Eric Stoltz. Yeah. And Cher was Cher.

Eric Stoltz in a lot of prosthetic makeup. Yeah, good movie. Great movie, I love that. Sam Elliott too. Everybody was in that. John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Beck. Beck was in it. Yeah.

Well, and who can forget the cameo by Liberace. I know, it was, it blew me away. He was the mask. Yeah. That was the big reveal. He turned out to be, not even metaphorically. No. Like Rocky Dennis took his mask off and it was Liberace, yeah.

God, what a classic. Are we a mirror neuron? We definitely are a mirror neuron. If we're not, we're in big trouble, buddy. Oh, wait. So no, really? Yeah. OK.

Another pop culture reference is Fantasia is commonly pointed to as about the closest a non-synesthetic could come to experiencing synesthesia short of hallucinating. Interesting. Yeah, because almost every motion and color and change in lighting is associated with a musical note. Yeah, I can't get through that thing anymore.

I can't either. I think when I was a little kid, I thought it was neat, but. No, it's just unsettling. Yeah, it's boring. All right, Chuck. I believe we have arrived at mirror neurons. So mirror neurons, Josh, I didn't realize this, but they were discovered only in 1996.

In macaque monkeys. By accident. Yeah. There were these dudes in Italy, the neuroscientists at the University of Parma. And I will read their names because I love Italians. It was Giacomo Risolati was the first one. Nice.

And Vittorio Galesi was the second one. And the third one was Leonardo Fagasi. I like the last guy's name the most. Leonardo Fagasi? Yeah. He's good. So they make a meme pasta sauce, too. I hope that.

So they were doing a little study on the premotor neuron dynamics. So they ran some electrodes into a macaque monkey, like you said, to the premotor cortex to monitor neural activity when the monkey would reach for something. All going fine. They were learning whatever they were learning,

eating some spaghetti. And all of a sudden, one of the guys, this is how the story goes at least, came into the room and reached for a raisin, I think they said it was. And the monkey was still hooked up. And they saw that his brain started firing the same as it did when he had actually reached for it. And they all went, torshtogatze.

It's a puncy. Nice. And all of a sudden, they had stumbled upon what one of them calls the biggest neuroscientific discovery of the decade. And he went on to say that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA has done for biology. That's very funny.

You know, provide a unifying framework. That's funny that he said that, because that's a lot of foresight for that one single guy, because that's exactly what it's done. Oh yeah, big time. I mean, basically, mirror neurons are how we learn to do everything. Right, think about swinging a baseball bat.

You don't just walk up and go, oh, there you go. You learn it by observing other people. At the same time, you can make the case that culture, other kinds of acquired learning, aside from swinging a baseball bat, the theory of the mind where we can put ourselves in other people's situations to predict their behavior, all of this is accounted for by mirror neurons.

A biological basis for empathy. Yes, crazy. It is crazy. And I think also, empaths, people who have severe empathy, real empathy, tend to have more active mirror neurons. And people with autism tend to not display any mirror neuron activity.

You understand one, and you might explain the other, is what they're thinking. Sure. Pretty cool. Also Chuck, that was just, mirror neurons were just observed in humans for the first time this year. Yeah. UCLA?

Yeah, and apparently, we have much more robust than even the monkeys do. Right, so are you talking about the study where they had brain electrodes already implanted in epilepsy patients awaiting surgery? I did not see that one. OK, these are the guys who showed it directly. Before it had been observed, its activity

had been observed in the MRI. But MRIs fall in a little out of favor these days, and rightly so. We just don't know how to use it yet. These guys had brain electrodes hooked up to the brains of epilepsy patients already, and they're like, hey, let's test this out. So they had people watch others do grasping motions.

Right. And then they had the people do grasping motions themselves. Sure. Some neurons were fired when the person did the grasping motion himself, and other neurons fired when they watched it. But 8% fired both times. Right.

Those are the mirror neurons. It was the first time they were ever directly observed in humans. Yeah, and those are the sinists. Sinisties. Sinists. No, they're just regular, everyday people. Oh, OK, I thought that meant.

Let's go back to that sports metaphor, OK? OK. All right. Chuck, have you ever seen somebody get hit by a pitch? Oh, yeah. And did you recoil in your chair? Even though you're in no way in the line of that pitch? Yeah, a little bit, sure.

But have you seen other people do it? It's like, oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, that's mirror neurons at work. You're anticipating that this other person is going to feel pain. Right. You don't necessarily have to be a sinisty

for to have mirror neurons. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, sure. Although in sinisties, it's just heightened. They're much more active. Right, and that's the theory. Right. They also found through the, and I love this.

This is like brand new stuff here in the past couple years, which I really love. They found that you don't actually even have to see it. You can hear it like a piece of paper being torn, and they'll start firing like that. And when a Galesian Risolati found that when they actually describe something happening in a sentence, the same mirror neurons are firing as if they are actually

performing the action. Wow. So that's, I don't know if that's getting through to people. The neurons that fire, if you would actually take out. A piece of paper? Yeah, a piece of paper happened when you hear it being torn. Crazy. It is crazy.

And you were talking about the, what was the Italian guy's name who made the prediction that it was going to be the biggest thing since the Beatles? Ravioli. OK, Ravioli. When he said that it was going to be huge, he was absolutely right, Chuck. Yes.

Mirror neurons are at the center of what's being called the fifth revolution in humanity. I believe it. Will you allow me? Will you indulge me a moment? Sure. So there's been four so far, and we're at the beginning of the fifth revolution.

The first revolution was Copernicus, saying Earth isn't at the center of the universe. The second revolution was Darwin, saying men are just clever monkeys. Even though he was 75 years after, what's his face? Yeah, what's his face? I know who you're talking about. Oh, Gerta.

Gerta. Yeah. And then the third revolution was Freudian, who suggested that we were nothing but a bunch of drives and desires that we were unconscious of and couldn't control. The fourth was the genetic revolution, the DNA, Crick and Watson, who showed, hey, we're actually a bunch of genes and all that that implies.

And Watson put it, there are only molecules, everything else is sociology. And his partner, Francis Crick, said, huh, that's really interesting that we came up with that. I'm going to go ahead and predict the fifth wave. And the fifth revolution is neuroscience. And that's where we're at now, that we are nothing but, this is how Crick put it in his book, Estonishing Hypothesis,

even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity. And mirror neurons are revealing that. Synesthesia reveals that. Because think about it, Chuck. If I watch you get pinched and I experience the pinching just like I'm being pinched, that's my reality. But it's not reality as everybody sees reality or agrees

that reality is, but it's still just as real. So it kind of underscores just how feeble reality actually is. And this is what neuroscience is, the fifth revolution is undermining our conceptions and our perceptions of reality. I have a question for you. Let's hear it. There's a neuroscientist named V.S. Ramachandran. Yeah, I saw that guy.

OK. He has a question that he likes to pose to people. It's not his, but he bandies it about a lot. Chuck. Yes. If a neuroscientist could keep your brain in a vat of liquid and maintain your consciousness, so you had no idea you were just a brain in a vat of liquid.

Apply electrical impulses so that could make you the happiest form of yourself combined with Gandhi, Hugh Hefner, Einstein, and Bill Gates, and you were just as happy as you could be. And then one day the neuroscientist says to you, hey, I'm going to give you a choice. First of all, your brain in a vat of liquid and all of your experiences are just me applying electrical impulses. Like Futurama.

Or like The Matrix. Or like The Matrix. Which was actually based on this thought experiment. OK. So you can either remain this happy, deluded brain in this vat of liquid, or you can be your regular self, what you consider to be yourself, what you consider to be yourself right now.

Right. What would you choose? Blue pill or red pill, basically. I'd want to be myself. What's the difference? OK, Morpheus. No, but really, it's true. And this was around before the Warshinsky brothers

you know, whatever. Lebowski. Before they cinematized it as the basis for The Matrix. This was a philosophical experiment. Well, if you'd never know, you're right. What's the difference? Right, but it's not never knowing, Chuck. The point is, that's what's going on with us right now.

That's our conception of reality. It's a neurological response to external stimuli. But none of it's real. And mirror neurons are kind of pointing that out as a big flashing light. Like, buddy, if somebody can feel someone else being pinched and you can actually see the brain activity going, they're not imagining it, then reality isn't real.

Right. And we're here to show you. Wow. I know, I'm depressed. See, I'm inspired. What does that say about us? I don't know. That means we compliment each other.

You blew my mind, literally, into next Wednesday. I got a couple more things. I want to hear them. You know how I was talking about the biological basis for empathy? They're also thinking that this is why yons are contagious. Laughed are contagious and moods are contagious. Good and bad men.

We didn't do that one, is yawning contagious? Yeah, but. Does it make you empathetic? I don't think they knew as much, even when we recorded that, as they do now about mirror neurons. Yeah, like you were saying, this is cutting edge stuff. It's been advancing leaps and bounds like over the last two years, right?

Leaps and bounds. And I got one more thing for you. Speaking of that, have you seen that cute little lamb? Where's B, the confused little lamb on YouTube? No, but Jerry's nodding like a five-year-old. It's so adorable. You and me and I just sit there and watch it. You'll watch it 10 times.

Really? Yeah. Wow. If that, as long as little B, the lamb's around, I don't care what's real. Yeah. I don't know if I could ever watch anything as much as I watched the Surprise Cat kitten,

or the shocked gopher, groundhog, or whatever it is. It turns around, dramatic group. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. What about the weather guy? Pretty much everywhere. It's going to be hot. It's going to be hot. Arthur.

Arthur, yeah, he was good too. Yeah. Boy, that was a nice little sidebar. Have you seen Keyboard Kitty? We should just do a whole show on YouTube stuff. OK. Haven't seen Keyboard Kitty. Josh, here's one last thing.

The mirror neurons, they think a more complex mirror neuron system developed in humans about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Yeah, I remember. You know what else happened around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago? I've got everything I want to say. I can't say. It emerged roughly at the same time as modern communication and language.

Beauty. So they think the mirror neurons, once they developed, to that extent, an early man that crude, pantomime guesters became more elaborate gestures. Guesters? I like that. It's like a nod to gestalt. Right.

And then that became rudimentary language, and then it just snowballed from there. Well, Chuck, think about this. We've talked about Mesopotamia being the cradle of civilization. We started living in cities around that time, too. Yeah. And mirror neurons make us more empathetic, which is pretty much the glue that holds society together.

Truly the fifth revolution. So interesting. We should give a shout out just so we don't get 1,000 million emails about Richard Saitawak. He kind of says that he's the man when it comes to citizenship. He wrote a book in 93. Yeah, he's written a few. And I noticed Oliver Sacks nodding to this guy, too.

Yeah, I mean, he seems like the real deal. All of his website is crude. Well, it's just you go to it, and you're like, man, I thought you were all professional. It's not synesthete.org, is it? No, I can't remember. This is the synesthete battery. But no, I don't think so.

But he does have some books, one's called The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Yeah, I think that's the one from 93. And then Wednesday is Indigo Blue, Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. And he proposes that it's. Well, we should say there was another hypothesis that it's just crossed wires.

And that we're born like that with our neurons crossed. Yeah. And that almost all humans get it straightened out and becomes more complex. Around 12 months of age. Yeah, but that it's just, oh, it just wires across. That's why baby, if you stick your tongue out to baby, they might stick their tongue out back.

One other one. Yeah, we were talking about ecopraxia in the Tourette's episode. And that, apparently, it has to do with mirror neurons as well. And then one other school of thought for synesthesia is that synesthetes are picking up on something that's actually there. So like the wavelength of a piece of music

also has some sort of light wavelength. That only certain people say. Right. Interesting. I'm going with the mirror neurons. Well, I don't think we have any choice, man. It's like evolution, Freud. I don't know if I accept him as a revolution,

but it's like evolution, Copernicus. Yeah, Copernicus. The whole shebang, DNA. DNA. But don't you feel, Chuck, that we are at this point where all the information is on the table. But we're just now starting to be able to put it together. So it's a really depressing point right now,

because our place in the universe is as up in the air as it's ever been. We've never been less sure about our importance or the meaning of our lives. It's entirely possible that once we put it all together, the meaning will be even bleaker. The reality will be even bleaker. But then we'll be able to grow from there.

I think that we exist right now in one of the bleakest periods of humankind. Wow, that's a nice way to leave things. Well, that's it for synesthesia. I think we've got more than just this one article on site, but the one we were basing this off of is can people feel the pain of others? I think if you type synesthesia, S-Y-N-E-S-T-H-E-S-I-A

into the handysearchbar at HowStuffWorks.com, you're gonna get something, pal, something. Maybe D.L. Hugley, you never can tell. So check that means it's time for listener mail, right? Well, Josh, it would if there was listener mail. But I didn't prepare listener mail today because we have just some things to talk about. T-shirt submissions.

Yeah, we've already gotten some pretty cool ones. We've gotten some really cool ones and some that aren't so great. But we appreciate the effort. Yes, we do. But keep them coming. We don't have the details yet. We just wanted to say this.

We archive all emails. We archive all the emails. I have a little folder called T-shirts and I'm throwing all the ones in there that people send in. That's so crazy. I thought of making a folder called T-shirt. Leave it to me. We're really getting some great ones though.

Like I would want these T-shirts. Oh, there's one that I know we definitely can't produce that I really want. The Magnum PI one. Yeah, that was pretty dope. Oh my goodness. Pretty cool. All right, well, yeah.

So that's coming. And then we should plug Facebook and Twitter too. OK. Because we're up and running now. There's a social media site called Facebook that you should check out. And then there's another thing called Twitter that people should check out too.

And you can find us at Stuff You Should Know on the Facebook. You want to talk about our Facebook and Twitter site. And you can find us at SYSK podcast on Twitter. And follow us and sign up and become a fan. And I'm kind of digging and being involved. It's fun. We should put a subliminal obey right here. Despair.

Yeah. Yeah, oh yeah. Thanks for the despair, Pennant. You know who you are. Right. Thanks for everything we've gotten recently. Yeah, we got a six pack of microbrew from a guy that was really nice.

And the 911 people sent us things about the work at 911 call centers. We got like hats and T-shirts. Yes. Turns out 911 isn't a joke. No, it's not. Well, thank you everybody for listening at least. Those of you who send in emails, double thanks.

And those of you who send in actual physical stuff, triple thanks. If you want to contact Chuck, or me, or both of us, and Jerry too, you can send us an email, including T-shirt submissions, to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works?

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