The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Fun of Eating a Pepper Hotter Than the Sun

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

There is nothing hotter than Puckerbutt Farm’s Carolina Reaper Hot Sauce... and author Leigh Cowart gargles it for FUN!!! Why do we sometimes get a happiness high from painful and scary things? And what if we want to experience the fun of discomfort and danger... but without the risk of coming to real harm?  With the help of Leigh, psychology professor Paul Bloom and the Yale philosopher Tamar Gendler, Dr Laurie Santos finds out how we can fool ourselves into reaping all the benefits of danger without actually being in peril.  For further reading: Leigh Cowart - Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. Paul Bloom - The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I can tell I already have like the nervous giggles. This is author Leigh Cowart. There's definitely like a danger smell to it that I come to recognize. Leigh is holding an open bottle of Puckerbutt Farms Carolina Reaper hot sauce, thought to be the most extreme hot sauce ever created. The sauce is made of 90% pure Carolina Reaper pepper, the hottest hot pepper in the world. The heat levels of hot peppers are measured in Scoville units. An average jalapeno, which a spicewist like me can barely tolerate, will run you around 3 measured in Scoville units. An average jalapeno, which a spicewist like me can barely tolerate,

will run you around 3,000 Scoville units. But a Carolina Reaper can be up to 800 times hotter. Reapers are measured in the millions of Scovilles. When people ask me if a Reaper pepper might be for them, I say, you are the kind of person that wants to fight God and then feel like one. This might be a fun event for you. And apparently fighting a deity seems like a fun time to Leigh, because Leigh is going to gargle Reaper hot sauce right now. Okay, do you want to count me down? Three, two, one. Wow, that is a large swig.

Oh my God. It feels more like a color. It kind of tastes like, I don't know, a solar flare. Your glasses are fogging up. My glasses are fogging up. This is hot for real. Very drooly. I would say on a scale of one to 10,

it's like a boat horn on a scale of one to 10. I know that in five minutes, I'm going to feel good. But I also know that right now I feel bad. But I also feel silly because I chose this. Much of the time experiencing pain feels kind of crappy. We rarely seek out opportunities to stub our toes or burn our tongues or head to the dentist for a root canal. These are not experiences that we tend to describe as happiness-inducing. But there are some cases in which we willingly choose to take part in situations that we know ahead of time are going to feel negative.

Now, you may not have willingly gargled the hottest hot sauce on the planet, but it's likely that you or someone you know has tried a bath so scalding that it kind of hurt, or paid money for an agonizing deep tissue massage. And pain isn't the only negative feeling we sometimes seek out voluntarily. We also get pleasure from sad songs that make us cry and heart-pounding roller coasters that make us queasy. We actually enjoy watching scary slasher films and visiting terrifying haunted houses. How can emotions like fear or sadness or pain

become something we choose to experience? Why do painful feelings sometimes make us happier? The answer involves two of my favorite cognitive quirks, ones that are fundamental parts of being human. We're going to take a deep dive into these biases of the mind and learn how they can help us get a big happiness boost from pain, fear, and anguish. And I'll also let you in on the secret of throwing a kick-ass movie party. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of

the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, I feel good now. About 10 minutes into gargling the hottest hot sauce in existence, Leigh Cowart has now switched from experiencing extreme discomfort to a feeling they describe as far more pleasurable. So I'm still in a lot of pain, but I also feel exceptional. I feel like I've just run five miles. I feel like I love my job.

What's this job that Leigh loves so much? I am not a pepperhead. I am just an idiot. Leigh is a science journalist and author of Hurt So Good, the science and culture of pain on purpose. The book is about masochism, and I think reading the book is a little bit of a masochistic act unto itself. Lee wanted to understand why people engage in all manner of painful behaviors, from chili pepper eating to polar plunges to painful BDSM sex play. So they decided to run a little experiment and try out all these behaviors personally. The result is a book that is not for the faint of heart. I mean, there are sex scenes. It's a lot.

But Lee engaged in these activities, not just as some journalistic exercise. Leigh is actually kind of into pain. Oh, yes. Yes, I am a big fan. And that was really interesting to me. Like, why do we like pain sometimes? What are we getting out of it? And what does that say about us as people?

When it comes to bodily sensations, we often assume that some are good, whereas others are bad. Eating a sweet ice cream cone, good. Eating a pepper so hot that it burns the inside of your solar plexus, bad. But the science shows that whether a given experience winds up feeling good or bad is much more complicated. It's based on memory. It's based on where you are. Are you expecting it? Are you safe? Do you want this? Are you aroused? All of these factors come together and you get a fresh sensory experience every time. And Lee is quick to point out that there is one necessary factor for any sensation to feel good. Pain on purpose requires consent. You have to be able to opt into it and opt out.

But why would we willingly opt into experiencing pain and other negative emotions? Why does pain sometimes make us happier? The first reason involves how pain works biologically. Experiencing physical harm quite literally drugs us up. What we call endorphins is short for endogenous morphine. You know, what we call endorphins is short for endogenous morphine. Whenever we get hurt, our body releases natural opiates akin to morphine, oxycontin, and heroin. Natural versions of these chemicals quickly flood our brain and bind to neural receptors that would normally make us experience a negative sensation.

And just like taking a hit of actual heroin, our natural endorphins make us feel very good pretty quickly. But endorphins are only the first of our body's two biological systems for soothing us when we get hurt. We also get a bong hit from pain because the endorphin system works alongside another set of analgesics known as the endocannabinoid system. It's just kind of like the weed version in layman's terms. These two inner painkiller systems mean that we experience a literal high whenever we're in pain. But there's also a second reason that chosen pain can feel good. Pain can be a shortcut to a happiness-inducing practice

that we talk about a lot on this podcast, mindfulness. There's tons of evidence suggesting that being in the present moment feels great. And at least one nice thing about anguish is that it's cognitively all-consuming. It is very, very hard to think about your grocery list when your whole face is on fire. I mean, that is such a draw for me personally. I have one of those just like hamster wheel brains.

There's just like 40 hamsters up there and none of them are cooperating. So for me, the quiet of one thought in the brain is something that I chase. And masochism is absolutely a shortcut to that peace. But there's a third reason that pain and other negative sensations feel good. Bad feelings create a pleasing contrast effect. Brief moments of anguish or fear allow us to go from a sucky state to a much nicer baseline state. And the contrast between these two sensations makes our status quo, our norm,

which probably seemed boring or unremarkable before, now feel like absolute heaven. Negative states also induce pleasure because they make us feel kind of badass. When our body senses danger or incoming pain, our usual response is to get the heck away from whatever situation we're in. When we push through fear and pain, we can get a sort of mind-over-matter hit of pride. Watch a bunny that gets away from a hawk, right? They bounce away. There's a discharge. There's a celebration. The badass feeling that comes from making it through something awful is one reason Leigh has long been drawn to voluntary suffering. I like to push it. I like to see how much I can take.

I definitely have a resilience fetish. But it's worth noting that the positive hit we can get from chosen pain doesn't require putting ourselves in actual physical danger. We just need to do something that our brain will falsely interpret as perilous. It's what the psychologist Paul Rosden christened benign masochism. Benign masochism is a mental trick in which our brain's natural danger systems get fooled by harmless stuff that mimics what we might experience if we went through a real physical ordeal.

Benign masochism allows us to get all the psychological benefits that come from bodily harm without the bodily harm. Which is pretty cool. But a word of warning. Benign masochism isn't something to be entered into lightly. You don't want to embark on an experience that's too painfully intense or that is genuinely dangerous. Take chili eating, for example.

You may have noticed that Lee chose to gargle rather than swallow that Carolina Reaper hot sauce. It is a different animal if you swallow them. Lee made that rookie mistake early on in their chili tasting experiments. And their digestive system paid the price. Oh, it was awful. I was like nude on a bathroom floor,

weeping and just chastising myself. Why did you do this? You know, honestly, it felt like labor. And you do have all of those TRPV1 receptors in your anus. So you're going to have the Reaper Pepper experience and your own little ring of fire. I actually spend a lot of time trying to warn people about it. Just so you know, this is a very possible outcome. For a hypochondriac like me, this felt like a deal breaker. I'll definitely leave the hot sauce tasting to Lee.

So what if you're curious about the emotional benefits of negative experiences, but you're a huge wuss? What if you'd like to get the mindfulness that a Carolina Reaper provides, but you've got a sensitive constitution? Well, I'll tell you when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Well, I'll tell you when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them.

More of you dating with intention is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

If you want to live a rich, fun life, there's a whole lot of emotions to play with. And they aren't necessarily what you think they are. This is my good friend Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and author of The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering in the Search for Meaning. Like journalist Lee Cowart, Paul is interested in why we sometimes get pleasure from pain. Some pleasures are, you know, we could talk a lot about them, but it's not so mysterious why people enjoy good food and good drink and sex. But if a smart alien came down to Earth, what they would see is, they see us spending hours and hours watching movies and reading novels that make us cry, that scare us.

They see us going to saunas. They see us engaging in BDSM. And aliens say, what's up with that? It seems so paradoxical. And this paradox is what I'm really interested in. But in contrast, Ali, Paul has taken a more academic approach to this paradox. We cover the same topics, and I have a lot of admiration for what they've written, to this paradox. We cover the same topics and I have a lot of admiration for what they've written, but there's a kind of different register. I'm a little bit more bourgeois and staid in my lifestyle. But Paul's book argues that the bourgeois and wusses among us aren't totally out of luck when it comes to the pleasure of negative emotions. It turns out that the human mind has figured out

an enterprising way to get all the emotional benefits of bad sensations without any of the real-life risk. We simply experience negative events as simulations inside our heads. We have the ability to play movies to ourselves and tell stories to ourselves and appreciate the stories that other people tell and immerse ourselves in worlds we know aren't real. And our capacity for imagination

doesn't just allow us to experience stuff that we come up with in our own private simulations. We also participate in entire shared fictional emotional worlds. Think movies, books, or video games. And these worlds give us a really wide range of negative emotions, from fear to grief to disgust to anger, all without any danger of personal harm. No burning gums from chili peppers, no queasy stomach from a roller coaster ride. For self-proclaimed wuss like me, this version of negative experiences is way, way better. And Paul argues that the suffering we experience in our imagination has lots of unique benefits that go beyond those that come from in

real life forms of benign masochism. One is the emotional control we have over what happens in fantasy. If the hot pepper you just ate is too much, you're kind of stuck with it until it passes through your entire digestive tract and past those anus receptors. But if a fictional experience starts to feel like it's too much, you can stop immediately. Your novel's feeling too sad? Put it down. Too freaked out by that slasher film? Shut it off. And thanks to reviews and ratings and word of mouth, we usually know exactly what we're getting ourselves into. There's a feature on Slate, which goes through different horror movies, is how scary is this? And they have sort of how gory is it and so on. And somebody like me, who's surprisingly a little

bit of a wimp when it comes to gore, likes these things. I don't want to be too grossed out. Simulated negative experiences, like watching a tense car chase or a scary disaster movie, can also be incredible teachers. Imagining negative events is the human equivalent of what animals do when they learn to fight. One way to be good at fighting is to practice fighting. But the problem with getting a lot of fights is you could get killed, or you could kill somebody else. So evolution came up with this brilliant trick. Young animals engage in a milder pretend version of aggression, which researchers call play fighting.

They try out all their aggressive moves while playing with their friends, but they never take it to the level where anyone gets hurt. They get all the benefits of practicing with none of the dangers. Human kids do the same thing when they're little. Think plastic army toys battling it out, or Barbie dolls pretending to be part of real-life social interactions. But we don't entirely leave this behind in childhood. Adults do this in their own heads.

I think what a lot of imaginative play is, particularly the sort of more negative stuff we're talking about, is a form of planning and preparation and practice for the future. Paul uses the analogy of learning how to fly a plane. The best way to become a good pilot is to guide a real plane through lots of real-world situations of varying difficulty. But it's extremely dangerous, so we've invented flight simulators. Flight simulators allow us to sit in a pretend cockpit and practice all the controls needed for a real flight, but without any of the real danger.

And when you're programming a flight simulator, you don't program it always for a smooth flight. You program it for trouble. And I think imagination is like a flight simulator. And just as flight simulators actively seek out trouble, so too do we seek out negative imaginary experiences and the emotions that go with them. This logic can explain even the seemingly oddest

of negative fantasies that we in the modern world seek out all the time. Take zombie movies. Do we like zombie movies because we have to prepare for the zombie apocalypse? That sounds stupid. But anybody who's seen zombie movies knows that the real danger in these movies isn't the zombies. Zombie movies are just a very imaginative recreation of what happens when the world goes to hell. The real dangers in zombie movies are always other people. And so we enjoy these things in the same way kids enjoy play fighting, because it's kind of aversive, but it's good stuff to get good at. But the fact that our minds get so much pleasure from fictional worlds like these

also poses a bit of a cognitive puzzle. It makes sense that our brains fall for in-real-life forms of benign masochism, that the pain of a hot chili pepper or the fear of a racing roller coaster fools our minds into thinking that we're in danger. But how do we fall for situations that we know are completely fake, things like novels and movies and video games? To get the answer, we'll meet a philosopher and happiness lab regular who's not only figured it out, but can share some tips on how applying this knowledge can give us a way bigger happiness hit, even from a totally phony-looking mechanical shark. That's not the Jaws sound.

What's that one? I think it's mostly just that I can't carry a dune. That's not the jazz sound. What's that one? Dun-dun. Do-dun. Do-dun. I think it's mostly just that I can't carry a dune. Do-dun. That was what I meant. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you.

Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. It's July 2021, Tokyo, Japan, and the Summer Olympics are finally underway. Today's matchup, the U.S. women's soccer team is taking on their rival Sweden. Dear fans, the Olympic announcer booms. Welcome to the Tokyo Stadium. The announcer introduces the two teams as the players take the field. The hype music begins to play and the crowd goes wild. Or perhaps more accurately, what sounded like a crowd goes wild. The Olympic athletes who heard that roar were hearing a recording.

There was no one else in the stadium with them. The Tokyo Games had already been delayed by a year because of COVID-19. But with infections still surging in the summer of 2021, no spectators were allowed into the venues. But the organizers still wanted to bring the vibe of the world to the stadium, as they put it. So they commissioned a virtual soundscape experience for their athletes. They piped the sounds of a screaming crowd into the empty stadium. Audio engineers spent three months clipping together screams and applause from past Olympics in Rio and London. They worked to find just the right balance of different crowd sounds,

from cheering to chatting to screaming. But the decision to spend all this time and effort to fake the sounds of adoring fans should seem, at least with some reflection, kind of weird. So you're an athlete, which means you're super sensitive to the reality of the environment around you.

They knew that the stadium was empty. They knew it was the middle of COVID. They knew they were the only ones in this place, that there wasn't an audience of tens of thousands of people. Yet even so, the sound of the roaring crowd somehow managed to inspire them, even though they knew that it was a recording. This is my good friend and colleague, the Yale philosopher, Tamar Gendler. Tamar's philosophical work has explored cases like these, situations in which pretend things, like the roar of a recorded crowd, affect how we feel and behave.

It's really funny to think that you can simultaneously know that something is fake and respond to it as if it were real. But when you start to realize that that's a possibility, you realize that it happens all the time. Take horror movies. The last time you sat down with your popcorn in a dark movie theater, you definitely knew that the 2D images of zombies and monster attacks you saw on screen were fake. zombies and monster attacks you saw on screen were fake. But you nonetheless responded as if that thing kind of were really happening, even though you knew that it wasn't. And that happens all the time. Think about how you cry during movies, how you laugh during movies. You know that those things aren't happening. And even as you know those things aren't happening, you respond as if they

were. So the thing that was going on with the athletes actually turns out to be a really common experience in our interactions with fiction. And that common experience stems from the second cognitive quirk I wanted to explore in this episode, which is that surprisingly, our minds seem to work on two different and completely separate tracks when it comes to processing information. The first track, the belief track, is pretty rational. The belief track can say, yeah, I know it sounds like there's a crowd screaming, but the seats are empty, and therefore I believe that no one is in the stadium. Beliefs go and take into consideration the full array of information. So they might say,

oh, I'm sad, but in fact, that was just a fictional character. I don't believe that somebody I love has died. I've just read a book in which that happened. But we also have a second track that Tamar christened the A-leaf track. The A A in ALEAF stands for automatic, affective, and ancient. Our ALEAF track is a much more primitive system. Our ALEAFs just assume whatever sensory information you happen to be experiencing reflects the real-world thing that that sensory experience is normally associated with. They just give a quick response. They don't do a huge amount of processing, and they're very emotional. Ooh, scary music, scary sound, feel scared. The Aleve system is what allowed those Olympic athletes to get an emotional boost from crowd noise,

even though they were totally aware that the stadium was empty. They knew it wasn't a real crowd of screaming fans. But they have a whole set of associations that got activated as the result of their hearing this sound that in all other circumstances is associated with genuinely being in that environment. So it wasn't so much as they got fooled as it was that they responded in the way they would have if it were real, even though they knew it wasn't real. But the coolest thing about this two-track cognitive quirk is that the two tracks are totally separate.

Your rational beliefs simply cannot interfere with your overly emotional A-leafs. And if you start thinking about it, you realize that there's time after time after time where you have a B-leaf that goes one way and an A-leaf that goes another. Let's take horror movies again. When you watch a slasher flick in a plush seat in some suburban movie theater, your belief track knows that you're not going to get chainsawed to death by some fake monster. But your alief track, which controls your automatic emotional responses, can't talk to the belief track. Your aliefs are going to

continuously make your body react as if you were in a dangerous situation. And it's not just with regard to danger that alief can do this. As we read fiction or watch a movie or listen to a story, our alief system is totally indifferent to whether the source of the input is actual or imaginary. The quirk of having a mind that runs on two tracks means that we have an alief system that allows us to get benign masochism happiness benefits from all kinds of situations

that our belief system knows are imaginary or totally fake. So these are safe spaces in which to experience really powerful emotions without having to have the actual world consequences. And one of the really amazing things is that we can playfully engage with the multiplicity in our mind. So we can simultaneously be sitting comfortably on a sofa and physically believe ourselves to be completely safe and then indulge imaginatively these more primitive parts of our system. We can also carefully tailor the way our A-leaf track reacts, adjusting it up or down depending on the degree of emotions we'd most

enjoy experiencing. For example, Tamar, like me, isn't a fan of intense negative emotions. I'm a total scaredy cat. Which means that she wants to indulge in negative emotions like fear. But she only wants a teeny dose. So when I watch a horror movie, I actually tend to keep the light on in the room and make the screen quite small. So that even as I'm indulging the leaf, Iaf, I have lots of B-leaf pushing in the opposite direction in the background. And that is a tactic you can use if you're somebody who's hypersensitive to the ways in which imaginative emotion affects you.

But of course, if your friends who are not wusses and kind of into horror movies are coming over and you want to give them the happiness boost that comes with a particularly epic scare. That also means that if we understand our A-leafs the right way, we can do the opposite, which is we can make something really, really scary, right? We could make something unbelievably scary if we know, if, for example, we take away almost all of the clues that make you realize there's a differentiation between your automatic response to what seems to be the case and what is actually the case. We can make something really, really scary. Which got me thinking, what if instead of just hosting the usual scary movie party for my friends, what if I decided to up the benign masochism A-Leaf stakes a bit?

What if I put my horror movie loving friends into a fully immersive real world situation that activated every single one of their senses to fully and completely wig out their A-Leaf track? And so Lori's epic extreme A-Leaf movie experience was born, or what I like to call more simply, Jaws in the pool. Instead of inviting my friends to watch that classic shark film on a couch in my living room, I forced each friend to watch Jaws in my friend Hedy's backyard, on a big screen, at night, as they sat in an inflatable inner tube floating in Hedy's pool. Dark, wet, legs dangling helplessly in the water.

So I threw my jaws in the pool party for my birthday. And as predicted, it was epic. A huge, terrifying, benign masochism benefit-filled success. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It was so much scarier watching it on the water. Even though many of my friends had seen the movie before, their experience with Jaws in the pool was way, way more intense. Added to the experience, like, you really can't see through the water that well at night, and we're in it.

My friends agreed that those big, on-screen shark teeth seem way more dangerous when your toes are submerged in a dark pool of water. I had my legs in the water and every time the shark came, I pulled them out. Bumping up our A-leaf track to epic levels made the normal negative experience of Jaws way, way more fun. And there's an important lesson there.

Using the quirks of our mind to hack our negative experiences can give us a lot more joy and happiness. Human emotional life is complicated. We often get more pleasure from seemingly yucky sensations like fear or pain or sadness than we might expect. And that means that it's a good happiness practice to play with your negative emotions a bit, to safely test out feelings of anguish or grief or terror.

For some thrill-seekers, this might include chasing the unique emotional high of a Carolina Reaper pepper. Oh, that's fun. But for the wusses among us, there's our A-Leaf track, which allows us to get pleasure without any real pain from completely imagined negative experiences. So how will you, as Tamar Gendler put it, playfully engage with the multiplicity of your own mind? What new benign pains or imagined situations or scary fictional worlds will you try out to get the happiness perks that come from experiencing a more complete range of human emotions? a more complete range of human emotions. Personally, I highly recommend experiences that involve extreme fear and swimming pools and inflatable sharks,

if at all possible. But you know, to each his own. I hope you'll return soon for another episode of The Happiness Lab. Until next time, stay safe, stay scared, and stay happy. Stay scared and stay happy. scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane,

John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.