The Rest Is Science - This One's a Tear Jerker

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Are humans the only creatures that shed emotional tears? If we are, what purpose do these tears really serve? If crying is so natural, why do we so often try to hide it? A single sob sends Hannah and Michael into an unexpected journey through the science and mystery of emotional crying, from the first tearful moments of infancy to the complex social signals behind adult weeping. Why do babies cry before they can speak? How do tears strengthen - or strain - our relationships? And what is the hormonal cocktail that makes “a good cry” feel so strangely comforting? Join Professor Hannah Fry and YouTube educator Michael Stevens as they uncover the strange, revealing story of the human tear: why we cry, what our tears communicate, and how this uniquely human response shapes the way we connect. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience ⁠⁠Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisscience Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam ThorntonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Imee MarriottProducer: Becki HillsSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Imagine this. Inside all of us, billions of cells follow millions of instructions written in microscopic code. And when a new cell grows, it copies those instructions, but the smallest error can lead cancer to develop. Right. And this is the reason why there isn't a single cure for cancer, because, you know, there are more than 200 different types. Each of them have got different distinct characteristics, you know, different challenges, different mysteries. And that means that trying to cure cancer isn't like following a single path. It's like trying to map out an entire

forest. That's right. And Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. I mean, their work spans more than 20 countries with over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses pushing knowledge forward to save and improve lives worldwide. You know, over the last 50 years, the work that this charity has done has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. And you have to think about that is more parents at the dinner table, right? That is more friends at their birthday parties. That is more people who are living longer, better lives. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearch.uk.org forward slash rest of science.

This episode is brought to you by an espresso. Hear that. That's your next obsession. Every coffee, a new world. Every sip, a new taste. This is the new Nespresso. One touch, endless possibilities. Iceed, flavored, long, short, because some days call for that espresso kick and sometimes a smooth, silky latte just wins. It's exceptional but effortless. Like actually effortless. Simply press, brew, and explore. Nispresso, what else? Keep exploring at nispresso.com.

This episode is brought to you by Defender With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a weighting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Some gifts say, I thought of you. The best ones help you discover more. This Mother's Day, give her something personal with ancestry DNA. Now, up to $75 off.

Explore her origins and discover the journeys that made her who she is. Save today. Give her something unforgettable. thoughtful, meaningful, uniquely hers. Give more than a gift for less. Give AncestryDNA. Visit Ancestry.ca. Today offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. Welcome to the rest of science with me, Hannah Frye. And we thought we were talking about crying today, specifically. Why do humans cry? Why do you cry, Michael? I don't want to go into it right now. But I want to know why, because there's only one. animal on this planet that cries emotional tears.

Are you sure? I know that there's some debate. There's some stories that camels have cried in emotional moments, like when they're reunited with their babies. One camel, by the way, not camels. A single camel. But what is your feeling here? Do you think it's uniquely human to cry emotional tears?

Because as we all know, anything with wet eyeballs is going to have tears. Yeah, of course. We produce a bunch when we're emotional. And we have not seen that in other mammals or birds. Because I mean, wet eyes, there's three reasons why you have wet eyes. There's like the sort of lubricating tears that just stop your eyeballs from... Drying out. Turning into, you know, brazenes.

There's the reflex. If you get something in your eye, it needs to water and flush it out. And then the third one is the emotional tears, which supposedly has all kinds of hormones inside of it. which would make it chemically distinct from the previous two. And that's the one that we're saying is... Yeah, we just don't see it in other animals and maybe we haven't looked closely enough, but you don't have to look very close at humans

to see emotional tears. Yeah. Weeping and sobbing. So why? Who was the first person to weep? At some point in evolution, we went from being hominids that didn't cry tears to suddenly,

there was a first person who was like, overwhelmed, maybe it was a baby, and tears came out. And they were like probably freaking out. Their parents were like, the baby's leaking. What is this? And now the tears are just a thing. Maybe actually the distinction between not crying and crying is slightly fuzzier than you're describing because you could still have tears running down your cheek, but it's like the cause of it, the kind of the thing that caused you to cry or caused the tears. to leak from your face. That's the thing that slowly changed over time. Yeah. Okay. So let's start there. What was the last thing that caused you to cry? Um, so my, my, my, well, mine's,

that's going to be a bit of a downer, but my dad died this year. So, uh, I cried very much at his funeral. I was really good at the morning. Yeah. There's a lot you just said there. You were really good at the morning. What do you mean by good? Like I was the, a sight to behold. I was the picture. I was the picture of morning. And that's just it. I, I think. I, I think. And I think we'll get here through the talk that I think it's about the picture. It's about signaling something. Okay, that's so interesting.

Not by choice, though. Well, that's one thing that I think is interesting because I was giving the eulogy and there was a moment in the eulogy where I caught to myself and I knew that I had the instinct to cry and was desperately trying to repress it. My voice went high.

I had the lump in my throat. Like all of the kind of physiological responses that you have to trying to suppress this crime. And that I think does tell you that these things aren't necessarily, you don't necessarily have agency when it comes to crying. That's right. This matters to me because I'm, I think probably shouldn't be, but I'm obsessed with figuring out what it is that describes humanity as simply as possible. And so looking at the things that differentiate us from other animals on this planet is a place to begin. And emotional crying is one of them.

Michael, when did you last cry? Hannah, I'm glad you asked. because did you like my Hannah impression? That was really good. It was good. I think I'm a bit more cockney than that, but sure. Aye, governor, wouldn't you? I don't really know English accents.

When did you last cry? The last time I cried was very different than yours because I was completely alone. I was watching about Schmidt. Right. And I guess this is a spoiler, but I'm going to say it anyway, because you can go and find your own sad movie.

But at the end, this child that he has been, that he adopted, the main character, Schmidt. He gets a drawing from the child, and it's a drawing of him and the child holding hands. And I just got so wet in my eyes. I didn't sob. It was a quiet cry, but I was just so overwhelmed

at the sort of patheticness of how small this event was and yet how powerful and how much meaning it had. Was it that you were overwhelmed by the emotion of the scene in the film, or was it that it was tapping into something that you felt about your own family, your own, you know, your own child, your own experience? I don't know.

I didn't even have a child at this point. Oh, wait, hang on. How, your child's like many years old. Look. Is that a little, I wouldn't, have you cried this decade? All right, you got me. I cried more recently.

I'll just, I don't, I don't want this to become a political discussion. Sure. But I cried after watching a politician speak. And the politician said something that was just so humble. Yeah. I also, when I need a good cry, I do late at night turn on military funerals. Yeah.

The circumstance and pomp of these ceremonies with the other soldiers there doing the 21 gun salute, who may have not even known the deceased, the flyover with the empty man form. It's just so big. The funeral procession going down the freeway and just people have come out onto the street just so their kids can see, to see what? It's so human. It's so weak and humble,

but yet so significant at the same time. It's like the bigness and the smallest of the entire world. The specific moment that triggered me when I was speaking of my dad's eulogy. I'd written this eulogy and I'd talked about all the funny things that we'd done together, these amazing things.

And I'd written that I remembered the feeling of holding his hand when I was a young girl. And that was the thing that got me. It was that connection of knowing that I'd held his hand that morning when he was in the casket. And then that very visceral sensation of being a child and looking down at your dad's hands when they're covered in dirt from work.

And I think that's it. It's like it's the bigness and smallness simultaneously of those moments that can be overwhelming. Isn't it? Yeah. I saw my father's body as well. They had a room that his body was in and they said, yeah, well, you guys can go and, you know, say last things to him. And it didn't really hit me until that moment when they asked me to go first that I was like his son.

It was like really, yeah. See, and this is starting to make me feel. Yeah. Like my eyes have a little bit more fluid in them. Yeah. But it's not because you're here or these people are here because I've cried mainly. alone. I'm always alone and I've been alone in those circumstances and yet I still did this. Still got watery eyed. It is strange, isn't it? It is strange the things that trigger you.

But it's also not strange. Like these stories all make complete sense, right? No one's going to go, you cried when you watched a funeral, but to put it in the context of no other animal has been definitively observed crying emotional tears. That's when I think we need to say what are humans up to? I'm still feeling very emotional. I want to, I want to now just shift to something that I think will make you cry for a very different reason. As I was looking into theories of emotional tears, I found a equation out of some research from Alabama. And I think, oh, you're going to love this. All right, you're ready? Here's the equation. Crying equals Oh, God.

Meaning plus vulnerability divided by sensory threshold. Okay. This is one of the fake equations that exist in the world. I knew you'd call it. And I've got to be honest with you. I have a severe allergic reaction to them. Tell me why. They make me actively angry.

There's a multitude of reasons. For one thing, how are you measuring vulnerability? What's the unit of vulnerability that we're doing? It's the metric unit. One pathetic. Well, I don't know. But I see, yeah, I see what I agree with you. Okay, also, what was it, sensory threshold?

Yeah. Okay, so what happens when your sensory threshold is zero? That means you're infinitely crying? Ooh, yeah. The spacetime continuum is destroyed by your crying. Oh, what about if you've got a very high threshold, crying? I mean, what about if you've got a negative sensory threshold? Do you go to negative crying?

Negative crying. You suck moisture into your eyeballs. Absorbing water from your eye. You need to stop negatively crying. I'm just drying up over here. Also, me. Sorry, what is the meaning of meaning? Mm-hmm.

I mean, I think I'm not saying that there's, you know, there's some, some ideas behind that, right? It's like the value of an idea to you, how vulnerable you're feeling, you know, your own personal threshold. But this is like, I mean, putting it into an equation gives it this false sense of precision, which is a false sense of precision and correctness. Yes. I think what's being said here is that there's something called meaning and there's something called our vulnerability to it. but then it's all mediated by just how, where our threshold is for crime. The lower it is, the bigger that ratio gets and the more crying there is. But yeah, you're right, these are such soft terms.

I'm okay with that idea. What you've just described is, I think that's good. I mean, the two situations that we've described about us crying definitely fit into that category, right? But also, this idea of the threshold that you as an individual have, that some people are more sensitive to crying than others. I think I'm okay with that broadly as a rough idea. I think that's good.

It's just don't make up equations. Yeah, fair enough. Not in my presence. So then let's look at the data. Let's look at how crying begins in the life stages of a human. In a baby. In a baby. Yeah.

Okay, they're famous criers. Yes, they are mega-criers. I mean, the thing is, is that crying in babies, there's different versions of this, right? Because there's crying as a sound for different reasons. So whether they're hungry, whether they're uncomfortable, whether they've got gas, whatever it might be. But that, there's a really clear evolutionary purpose for that, which is in order to signal for attention to the carer to sort of fix a situation.

Right. To get nurturing, to get attention. It's a distress call. And you're right. We see this in all kinds of animals. Absolutely. There is some work. I don't know whether you've come across this. This is by a nurse called Priscilla Dunstan.

And she has a theory, right, that there's actually. actually the different reasons why babies cry changes the sound that they make purely because there is some reflex that starts the sound. So, for instance, when a baby is hungry, like, and we're talking really, really young here, right? Like first three months of life, when they would be suckling, the tongue in the mouth goes into a certain position that makes a like, n-it sound. Or there's a few others, there's like a, if they're really uncomfortable from trapped

twinned, it makes more of like, eh, eh, eh, sound. Or there's like a, you know, one beginning with a more of a her sound, that kind of thing. Now, I should tell you that there have been like some small scale studies on this, and it's really difficult to definitively pin down that this is what babies are doing, but there are lots of parents who say that this is actually a really useful rule of thumb rather than a hard and fast scientific rule. You can kind of figure out what the baby is trying to say more specifically than just look at me, give me a Exactly, exactly right. Okay, that's making me think, I don't know if you know the answer to this, but when a child is extremely young, it's still breastfeeding, the sound of its tears can cause the milk to, does that depend on how the cry sounds? Oh my gosh. It's actually makes your boobs hurt. Yeah. Like, it's unbelievable. Any cry, or is there, does the hunger cry cause it more? Well, it's specifically your baby as well. Only your baby. So the thing is that the hormone that, the hormone that, the, the, the hormone that, the, the, that, the, the creates letdown that essentially allows the milk to run,

there are a few different ways that it can be signalled. And one of them is an auditory cue. And within 48 hours of your baby being born, your body essentially learns your baby's cry, and it triggers the production and letdown of milk when it hears that signal. And I think it is, I'm talking personal experience now rather than scientific stuff,

but I think it is specific. cry because there's a different cry when your baby is hurt. Right. And that doesn't signal the milk. And these all sound like really deep evolutionary mechanisms. But what these two-day-old babies don't do is cry with emotional tears. They're not watching military funerals. They aren't.

They're crying by creating a vocalization, but they're dry on the face. They are. Now, I've read that it's around four to eight weeks of age that they might, you know, you might start to see tears. Physical tears. But are they emotional tears at that stage? You know, Darwin, I don't know if you've heard you. Met him a few times.

It's kind of a big deal. Yeah. He wrote this book. It's, you know, as well as the origin of the species and descent of man and Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets, sort of his important books. He also wrote this book,

which was called The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. And this is, it's a stonking read, Michael. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone. All right. He's got an entire chapter on blushing. He's got an entire chapter on weeping. He goes around just observing all kinds of animals and all kinds of humans in all kinds of situations. He's got a sweaty hippo who's very cross in labour, been there.

He's got an impatient horse. He's got an orangutan who desperately wants some apple. It's like, honestly, it's absolutely delightful. But he also, this is, I think, the first book to have ever included printed photographs inside of it. and he has within it a study of upset babies. Oh, my goodness. Isn't that amazing? So what you have here is a page of six images of very upset children.

Yes, and they look like they're Victorian-aged children with their black and white photos. The kids look like they're in distress. Yeah. I mean, I think that they're, well, one's in a sort of high chair. They're all wearing like really cute Victorian clothes. They're all very chubby. They're all just absolutely gorgeous little kids, but they're all crying. And they've got faces that are immediately recognizable as crying.

The eyes are closed quite shut and the grimaces on the face. They're very sad. They're very cute and as normal children are when they're upset. But Darwin made a study, I mean, both of which muscles were being contracted in their faces as they were crying. But he also made a study of his own infatural. And he noted that one of his children, one of his babies, at 77 days old, he accidentally brushed the cuff of his coat across their open eye. Accidentally.

Yeah. He says. And that caused tears to stream down their face. Okay. At 77 days. 77 days. But he was pretty sure that they weren't crying emotional tears. It was reflex.

Yeah. It wasn't until 139 days that he felt that they were weeping emotional tears. Okay. So it took 100. 139 days for Darwin's child to finally start shedding emotional tears. What is that? 4.56986 months. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, 200,160 minutes, if you like. If you're rounding. Yeah. If you want that. Now, a theory I've heard about that transition, which to me feels like a kind of metamorphosis.

From not crying to crying. Yeah. Is that at first this distress call, just like you'll find in birds and other mammals, gets the attention that you need for all kinds of reasons, just to get it to stop because it's annoying, to get it to stop because it could alert predators of your position, but also maybe just a reflex like the milk let down,

going, oh, my body, my DNA tells me what to do here. But also that danger, the danger of alerting predators to where you are and aggravating the parents eventually needs to disappear. But the helplessness and the need for care never does in our species because we have such extended adolescence, pretty much our whole lives, I think we're always childlike in ways that no other animal is. In the sense that we play, for example. In the sense that we play, in the sense that we're always like learning new things and

always can learn new things. So instead of making a racket, a vocal racket, when we want to signal this, we can do it with the way our face looks and with tears coming out of our eyes. physical signal rather than an auditory one. That's right. So, okay, interesting idea. But then, I don't know if you've ever met a two-year-old. They are very noisy.

Yeah. And they cry very loudly. Yeah. So what's that about? Well, okay. Yeah, right. I guess they're not done with the metamorphosis yet. They're still in their cocoon jelling into a tear-crier

and not so much of a loud, sobber, wailer. Sure, but then also, I mean, there's sort of like loud, sobbing, wailing that you get from a young child, which is genuinely, I'm hurt, I'm in pain, or I'm hungry, I'm tired, I need something, and I can't quite articulate what it might be. That is different from watching military funerals. Yeah, it is. It's certainly different that a child will cry when they physically hurt themselves, when they fall over. But I don't.

I will cry when I hear a speech, but if I broke my arm, I probably wouldn't cry. Oh, I would. I would not feel good. Oh, I would. My lip would be so stiff. You guys would be like... Excuse me, I'm the British one here. Thank you very much.

I know, but I'm just saying you've got competition. No, but you see where I'm getting with this? Like, as we age, the things that make us cry are very different than the things that made us cry when we were even more helpless and helpless in a different way. When you're hungry, you don't always cry the way you did when you were two or one or less. Agree. And yeah, I don't think anyone's saying that babies are going to watch a funeral and be able to understand and feel overwhelmed. They might be overwhelmed just because the sensations. I mean, about Schmidt is 12 plus. They're not even allowed.

They're not even allowed. They should not be watching it. Okay, so there's definitely lots of evidence of other animals crying for pain or crying for hunger, all of that kind of thing. I think that there is evidence of other animals making auditory and like behavioral cues in an emotional way. So elephants is the classic example here. Lots of people have reported that they've seen elephants engaging in mourning behavior. There's one particular incredible story about an experiment that went wrong. So I don't know if you know this, but elephants have names that they give each other. How do they

They rumble It's an auditory thing They use their trunks To kind of call out names It looks like elephants Actually have a vocabulary of lots of different words They have a word for bees They have a word for human

They have a word for bad human It's like actually quite a lot of complexity To animal language Anyway, what you can do is you can turn up With a truck And a loudspeaker And play out a recording

Of an elephant Calling another elephant's name And if that elephant is within that herd, just that one elephant will turn around. You'd be like, Billy! And the elephant would be like, yes. Wow. Which is amazing. That is really amazing. You have to be really, really careful when you do this experiment. It's called a playback experiment. And the reason why is that a group of researchers went out into the savannah, played a sound of an elephant shouting another elephant's name. But what they hadn't realized was that the elephant they'd recorded had since died. Oh no. And so the

heard who she used to belong to suddenly got extremely distressed at hearing this voice effectively from the past. From a ghost. From a ghost. And her daughter, the deceased elephant's daughter in particular, was going through the bush like for days and days and days looking for her lost mother. So this kind of idea of like mourning behavior that you see in animals, we know that it exists, not just in an observational way, but in those kind of slightly unfortunate situations where it's

actually been an outside intervention, a human intervention that has created this morning behaviour. You get this with whales too, right? Like whales will carry the carcass of their dead children, often for days. They'll form a hub around a whale that's dying. You know, there's lots of like extremely complex mourning behavior that you see in animals. And over the years, we've had lots and lots of reports of people who've worked closely with elephants, people, fishermen who have worked closely alongside whales, who claim that they have seen emotional tears in these situations. Really?

But it's just really difficult to prove, right? It's really difficult to prove. How do you know that it's not dust that's got in the eye? How do you know, I mean, it's a whale, for goodness sake, it's in the water. But also, if you decided to do an observational study of a human, right, you could follow you around since 2020 and have very little evidence of you crying a door. Yeah, that's true. It's a really rare event.

That's true. So I'm willing to admit that we don't know conclusively that only humans cry emotional tears. But we don't have any hard evidence that any other animals do. We don't have hard evidence. And like personally, I think that these other animals, who knows what they're feeling. But I'd like to believe. And I think we almost have an obligation to believe that they're feeling things quite deeply. They're expressing it differently, though.

They're not contorting up their facial muscles in a way that creates this redness, this puffiness, this wetness that is almost hard to hide. Maybe they're doing something that we can't quite pick up on, but their other cons specifics immediately go, they're crying. And that, I think, gets us to what a crying person causes us to think about them, which maybe we should do after a break. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. VPNs are an incredible invention. Short for virtual private network, a VPN, it works to shield your IP address it. It virtually connects you to any network in the world and protects your information from prying eyes. Yeah, no more worrying that that public network you joined that, like, did me,

require a password will end in disaster. No, just fire up NordVPN and its encryption software will keep your data safe. And NordVPN's unique threat protection pro, it blocks malicious links, it scans downloads for viruses for up to 10 devices for your whole house when attached to your router. NordVPN even protects your wallet. How? Great question. You see, some online retailers will charge you a different price depending on where you are. That's a great way to ruin Christmas. Fortunately, using NordVPN means you will never be subjected to algorithmic pricing again. To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com forward slash rest is science. And our link will also give you four extra months on their two-year plan.

There is no risk either with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs.

Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot the... signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit Cancer Researchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free

skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. All right, welcome back. We are talking about crying. And I want to move on to whether or not crying is a choice. How much voluntary control do we have over our emotional tears? I mean, sometimes none at all, right? I mean, I don't know. Have you given that you've only cried once a century? No, come on. I cry. I cried just the right amount. Just the right amount. Yeah. But definitely I've had this experience numerous times. where you get that feeling in your throat, the lump in your throat.

And what that is is there's a competition in your throat, right, for what the muscle should be doing. Part of you, your reflex is to help you breathe. And the other part of you is your reflex is to try and suppress the cry. And so what you end up with is this tension in your muscle that feels like a lump in your throat. But also what happens is when you've got this tension, you lose the fine motor control that your throat normally has,

which is why your voice starts to go really squeaky. Wow. Yeah. That's fascinating. Isn't it? The fact that we even are concerned about, should I allow this to happen or try to resist it, says so much about the cultural and psychological importance of crime and what it means to us. The thing is we suppress a lot of emotions.

We'll suppress laughter because it's inappropriate to laugh right now. We will be really tired but try to look really alive. It's what I'm doing right now. Right. Boy, I could tell you some stories about how I feel right now. But I choose not to because it's all about the image. It's all about the look, right? Absolutely.

And so what do sad people look like? I'll tell you. According to some research I was reading, people look at criers as being more sincere and honest, warmer, friendlier, but also probably more emotionally unstable. possibly incompetent and also possibly manipulative. Wow. Okay? Some of these are opposites here. You're more sincere and honest if I see you crying.

Or maybe you're just really manipulative, right? It says a lot of both good and bad things, positive and negative. It's a big indicator of stuff. And whether you think someone's tears make them seem more honest or less honest depends a lot on the context, who the person is, whether you know them or not, it's a major signal that can mean a lot. It can be arousing, it can be soothing to the crier and to others watching. That point about whether or not you're choosing to cry, I don't know.

I've definitely had the experience numerous times in my life where I really haven't been able to control the fact that I was feeling like super emotional. There was once I was in a meeting. I'd just been appointed to faculty at university. I was in a very important meeting. and I'd been very, very stressed. I was very tired. I think I was possibly also pregnant

or at the very least had a very young baby and the meeting progressed. Something happened in the meeting and I just immediately burst into tears and it was international women's day as well. Can you imagine? And I knew that my colleagues were losing respect for me in that moment but I just couldn't do anything about it.

Couldn't do anything about it. But the thing is, is that I do think that there's lots of evidence that the hormones that you have in your body change how likely you are to cry. So I have a very good friend who has testicular cancer. He's taking some hormones as part of his treatment that suppress the androgens in his body. Androgens is a, I mean, people call them male and female hormones. It's a rubbish way to think of it because everybody has both.

But what happens as you suppress the androgen in your body, the presence of prolactin can increase. Now, prolactin is the hormone that your body creates when it comes to breast cancer. feeding. Pro lactin. Exactly. Anyway, so he said that like during his treatment, everything's broadly been fine. He's taking these hormones. He kind of feels normal, except that he's really emotional and he cries all the time now. Like he'll watch, you know, like a puppy commercial or something and there'll be a puppy on the screen and he'll just start crying. And I do think that the threshold, you don't necessarily have control over where that threshold is. That's right. So hormones affect that threshold. And in your story too, being tired affects it. Affects it.

lot. And that brings up a thing I've noticed before. It sounds true to me, which is that people are more likely to cry watching movies on airplanes. Oh, right. Which I think it's one, maybe you're more tired, but also you're captive. Okay, you can't shift your attention to other things because you've just got that seat front in front of you. I don't know, you're just kind of like more alone. There's like more social anonymity as well there, right? Like, you know, if you're, especially if you're tucked into, tucked into a window seat. Right. Like, I think you can sort of get away with crying and no one's seeing it.

You can get away with it. Yeah, there's less of a feeling of, oh, hold on, this is an inappropriate time to do it. It's an appropriate time. You don't have any meetings. You're not in a meeting. You're just waiting. And so the tears flow. I also wonder whether there's something to do with the amount of oxygen that you have.

Because, I mean, when you're in the air, it's basically like mild hypoxia. Yeah, it is. Like mild oxygen starvation, which I think. think completely changes your ability to handle stress, you know, lowers your mood, makes you more vulnerable to about Schmidt. Yeah, I watch this alone in my apartment in New York. That's all it took for me. Is it a very high apartment, though? It was on the top floor, actually. And I felt better afterwards, which, like, is a very famous, well-known thing about crying. He's having a good cry. Yeah. And I think there's a lot going on there. But we have found oxytocin being released,

endorphins being released because of crying. So there's a reward for crying. Some evidence that you physically feel better afterwards. Correct. You know, in Japan, this sort of trend started where hotels would have crying rooms. Oh, really? Where you could go and watch a sad movie

and just enjoy a good old cry. Oh, so it was full of things that would make you cry if you needed to just have that release. Exactly. And that gets to what I'm saying about how people can be soothed by their own crime. Absolutely. But crying can also be arousing.

It can make your heart rate go up, but it could also make it go down. Definitely. In my experience, I've only ever felt better after crying. I've only ever felt better while crying. I'm glad to be doing it. A good cry. I'm not saying, I'm sure you can feel aroused while crying. Not that kind of aroused.

Michael, whatever you enjoy is absolutely fine, right me. Thank you. That's, you do you. One of the reasons why people think that crime makes you feel better is because of the hormones that are contained within your tear. Within the tear. So they're leaving your body. Yeah. So andrino corticotropic hormones.

I've heard that before. It's like a really easy answer to like, oh, tears are great because they get rid of these hormones leaving you feeling better. And I guess I believe that. But I think hormones are not in the tears. psychologically something still happens when you've had that release. A lot of crying comes from, I believe, like evolutionarily the deep cry for help. In fact, we've seen like children will cry if they get hurt and no one's around. And as soon as someone arrives, they already start to feel better.

This happens to adults as well. You're no longer in the mode of help me, help me. You're being helped. The distress call can go away. Well, Darwin was thinking a lot about the evolution of this. And Darwin's conclusion, you know, looking at different animals and their sort of emotions, but also in humans and children, weeping and so on, his conclusion really was that he thought this was something that humans practiced and could suppress.

Right. So different cultures had different attitudes towards crying. But he also thought that this was just like some kind of adaptation that doesn't really do anything, you know, like sneezing when you look at a bright light. His idea was that it's like, okay, it's just sort of something, just kind of something. And actually there are some people who say this is actually maladaptive, right? Because your eyes are filling with tears, you're crunching up your face. You can't see as well as you were able to before.

Right. So crying as a sign of vulnerability is literal. When you're crying, you are more vulnerable. Your vision is compromised. You really do need other people's help. Definitely. when you're around somebody else who's crying, I think that seeing their vulnerability

sort of makes you want to appease them all. It's quite a good conflict de-escalator crying. It certainly communicates because it's possible for people to be revolted by a crying person. If they don't know the person, if it would be really awkward, they'll avoid the person.

Either way, whether a crier's tears make people come to them or flee them, it's a huge social signal. It is a huge social signal. And it may have. Maybe Darwin was right in terms of its very early emergence because we can also produce excess tears just when we yawn. Like the stretching of the muscles around the eyes

can cause the tear glands to put out more fluid. I think a lot about how, I mean, humans in terms of our niche, right, we're these like very intelligent, very social creatures. And I think once it comes down to it, maybe the sort of the beginning of crying, maybe the first human who cried was, it was just, it didn't really mean anything. But I think what it's come to mean

is something that's both of those things, both very social and intellectual, no? Yeah, I think so. I think that that cognitive social niche is where we belong. And so it's just so human to do a podcast about crying. Let's have a good talk about crying, but let's also overthink it.

Let's do some cognition and let's do some emoting and some socializing, which in other animals isn't the key to their survival. It's not the niche that they've worked out. Ours is very much about communing with others. We're not quite like honeybees or ants. They're almost like a superorganism in ways that human societies aren't. But yet, yeah, we do a lot of other things, which I don't know if animals do this, but when, you know, you're at a restaurant and the server brings you your food and says,

enjoy your meal, and you go, oh, you too. I mean, thanks. Right. Have a good flight. Thank you. Yeah. You don't, oh, damn it. The way we'll automatically respond to things like, oh, hey, how you doing? Fine. How are you? You know, and we don't answer the question literally. That's all, there's a name for that. It's called fatic communion. Love it. Where phatic means language, communion means coming together. And these ways that we just unconsciously respond to each other just kind of signal that like, hey, I'm a human too. I get it.

There are social rules. I'm here. I'm available, whatever. And I think that crying probably falls into that category a little bit, that it's a way of showing we do need each other. But in a way, humans don't need each other. Like an ant on its own cannot survive because it only has one role. but it needs all the different roles in its community. Can humans survive on their own?

I mean, like really, really on their own. You'd have to be very, very off-grid in order to not have any reliance on other. I'm thinking about the food chain here. I'm thinking about, like, I don't know, everything you buy, like, you sort of need other humans at some... Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. I've looked a lot into, like, hermits.

And it's almost always not totally independent. They would raid cabins nearby. for supplies and stuff. So, I mean, I think the best example is Juana Maria, which wasn't even her real name. She was christened that after death. But she was a native on one of the Channel Islands. I mean the ones off the coast of Alto, California.

I thought this was too exotic for the English Channel. Specifically, she lived on San Nichols Island. Her people were called the Nicolano people. And she was the last speaker of their language. I don't know the full history of the island, but there was like a Russian-American company that came in and they like massacred the indigenous people off of some rumors that there had been some violence against themselves and whatever.

And then eventually I think some of the missionaries said, let's get them all off this island for one reason or another. But they neglected to bring Juan Amaria. And there's all kinds of apocryphal stories about did she get left behind because bad weather meant the ship just said, leave her, or did she jump off the ship and swim back to the island? Wow. Well, all we know is that she remained there from 1835 to 1853 all by herself.

So for most of her late 20s and 30s, she was on this island all alone. She fashioned her clothes out of feathers. I mean, you wouldn't bother, really, would you? She did bother, though. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah. There's a rumor that her feather skirt was sent to the Vatican, but then lost.

after she was found, of course. Because people knew she was still there. So I guess there might be some truth to the story that she was left behind her escape. Right. They knew she was there all alone. And she just lived on her own. She caught seals. She made herself a tent and may have also lived in a cave nearby.

When she was picked up, she was really excited to be back around people. There were like three or four people in Santa Barbara in a mission there who still spoke her language that she was able to speak to. Some of her songs were recorded on wax cylinders. And we still have them. None of it's been translated. There are all these words that she said, we don't know what they mean. Oh, that's so cool. Now, she was, I kind of believe this part of it.

I think she was really excited to be back around humans. And she was apparently really excited to be eating fruits and corn and all the stuff she didn't have on the island. But she got dysentery just a few weeks after being rescued and died. Oh, no way. Yeah. And she wasn't, she wasn't that old, right? No. No, she was in her, by then she was probably like 40, 41, 42.

Wow. But she survived for a very long time on her own. So, you know, the old like, oh, you could only live a few months without food, a few days without water, but not a second without hope. Maybe. I've never heard that before, but I'm putting on a T-shirt immediately. Please do. I guess she doesn't have much to tell us about that because she may have retained hope, but she certainly lived without other people.

I wonder whether she cried in that time. I know. Because on the one hand, you know, she's got total social anonymity. Right. Also, quite a lot to cry about. Yeah, right? But on the other hand, no one to socially cue. I mean, because we know so little about her, maybe she, like, cried tears of joy.

Maybe she jumped off that ship and said, finally, the island all to myself, all that blubber. But probably not. I think that, yeah, we are a social species. So her story makes me wonder about the social niche of humans. Because no one ever seems content to say, well, we're the thinking ape or whatever. I guess we are literally called homo sapiens, the wise ape. But the social aspect of it, I think, is kind of explained through tears. What is its social role?

now that we've talked so much about it, how are you feeling about it? I think it is. I think you're right. I mean, look, this is definitely one of those questions, which is about what's the reason for this evolutionary trait, right? And it's like, actually sometimes there isn't an answer. And often the answer is we don't know for sure. So this is definitely in that category, right?

We cannot be absolutely sure. But I think that there's something in the idea of when you need to communicate vulnerability or when your body chooses to communicate vulnerability on your behalf. And this idea of like just bringing down the kind of de-escalating conflict, wanting to appease each other, I think it's ultimately about connection. Yeah. And we're connected to you, dear listener. How was that for an ending? Do you like that?

It's going to make me cry. Well, before the tears come flooding, please do like and subscribe on YouTube or. or rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. And if you'd like to send us your thoughts, your feelings, the rest is science at goalhanger.com. If you want to send us some tears, some prolactin, I don't know what our physical address is, but stay tuned. No, send them to me.