Hey there Shankar here. I'm Chris Crossing the Country for a series of live shows this summer. I'll be sharing seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain. These ideas have made my life better. I think they'll do the same for you. Stops on what I'm calling the perceptions tour include Clearwater and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, Portland and Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago, Austin and Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Phoenix and more. To see if I'm coming to a city near you, please visit HiddenBrain.org/tour. If you've heard my voice for years, it's going to be fun to come see me in person. Again, that's HiddenBrain.org/tour. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Some years ago, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard put people in an empty room. They gave the volunteers a simple task. Sit quietly for a few minutes without distractions. No phone, no books, nothing to do but think. Before the session, the study participants were also given a device. It could deliver a mild electric shock. Using it was not necessary. It was completely optional. The results were, well, shocking. The majority of men and a quarter of the women chose to shock themselves rather than sit in silence. This held true even after they raided the shock as painful. We are led to believe in everything we hear and read that suffering is unpleasant, something to be avoided. Every ounce of common sense tells us we should avoid something as unpleasant as an electric shock. So what would compound people to voluntarily hurt themselves? Today, we begin a two-part mini-series about the upside of discomfort and the curious pleasure human being take in seeking out some forms of suffering. When pain becomes pleasure, this week on Hidden Brain. The year was 1974. Chinatown and Blazing Saddles were in movie theaters around the country. Queen and David Bowie on the radio. James was a high school senior in Toledo, Ohio. He requested that we not use his full name. I was one of those 18-year-old impulsive adrenaline-filled guys who just love being social-ran-track, but also is on the high school newspaper. And lots of good close friends, but just kind of bouncing off the wall kind of guys. There was an unusual fad making it to way across the United States at the time, streaking. Streaking was basically people would run without any clothes through populated areas, which just ten issues on typically. And it was sporting events. There was even a song called "They Call Me The Streak." It was a country song and it was like a number one song. The song was catchy. James couldn't get it out of his head. Inspired by the growing trend, the 18-year-old gathered up a few friends. Together, they came up with a plan. I think a couple of the guys at my church, I think we talked to them initially, and then I think we had another guy from another high school, actually. I remember. And then a third guy was from my school. So I think we started just talking about it and the small group gathered and we said, let's do this. And so we're going to go to this local mall, very large mall in Toledo, and just run through the center part of the mall, which is a very big area. So the center part of the mall, we were going to enter in one specific entrance and exit at another exit. So we knew where the getaway car needed to be, where he needed to drop us off and where he needed to pick us up. James and his friends planned the whole thing like a bank robbery. But as their excitement grew, they let their plans slip out. Very quickly, word got around. On the big day, James and his friends bundled into the car with a getaway driver. And we arrived at the mall and we all went in with Holy Clothes just to case the joint. When we came into the mall, it was extremely busy, crowded. We actually recognized some people from our school, for my church, and we noticed a lot of security guards. So when you walk through the mall initially and you see people whom you know, and you see people from your church, and you see people who are security guards, did a thought cross your mind that perhaps this was not the best idea? You think? You would think that would happen, but no, it did not. I think it was more of a challenge. Okay, let's do this. We've got an audience here. Yeah, let's hit this. James and his four fellow streetcars had what they felt was a foolproof plan to protect their anonymity. They would wear masks. We definitely wanted to cover our faces. So we come out of the mall, get into the car. We get into our sneakers and our masks. That was it. And we go in and the entrance was kind of like a fire exit, I believe. So we got in that way. I can't remember how we actually got into that door. And we were going down this long hallway. And I remember thinking, this hallway is really long. We really want to just get this done. At this point, you are all completely naked. Yes, sir. You're good. Sneakers and the masks. And we got up to the double doors. I still remember this, the double doors. It has the push bar on it. And we all kind of looked each other and said, okay, one, two, three. And we just burst out. Just burst out of those doors into the crowd, running the pell-mel into the crowd. The next moments was Shia, Adrenaline and Pandemonium. Total panic. Just wanting to get out of there as fast as I can. And I know, I knew which direction we had to run because we had walked through it earlier. And so we're running very fast and security guards are trying to get through the crowd. So having a large crowd actually helped us keep the security guards away. But there was one point where I was running and the security guard was coming toward me. And I had to use a couple of innocent bystanders that's kind of a basketball pick. So they caught the security guard and I was able to run around and keep going. And I didn't have any idea for people. I just don't know what I had. But that actually saved me. And I was able to keep going and get out of there as fast as we could. But in any group of antelopes being chased by lions, there is always the slow one who gets caught. The guards captured one of the naked runners. I still remember the one gentleman who got tackled and caught was yelling at us. And I remember kept saying, "Come back here. Come back and help me." And we were like, "Sorry, sorry, our friend. We're out of here." He was marched back through the crowd to the security office, which was up some stairs. So he was kind of the quintessential walk of shame. Totally naked. I mean, he just sneakers his mask. But I think he actually had his mask off by then, too. So everyone knew who he was. What was your feeling as you were running through the mall, James? Was it a sense of just panic and embarrassment? What was going through your head? I think just more panic and just focused on the goal of getting out of there. Just wanting to not get caught. I mean, that was a don't get caught. Get out of there. Try to find your way as best you can. That was really it. I wasn't thinking about any repercussions or consequences, of course. Just pure adrenaline. Go, go, go, don't get caught. Don't get tackled, etc. So the three of you, though, who are remaining sort of burst through the mall doors on the other side, was the getaway car waiting for you? Yes, exact. Thank goodness. Everyone was and we just we literally dove into the back seat and just told him to hit it. And what I remember is he then to end up taking us back to our own homes while we were getting dressed in the car. So our clothes were still in the car. So we're getting our clothes on in the car and just, you know, you know, you can, you know, hide adrenaline, just, you know, very verbal with each other. Can't believe we did this. Oh my gosh. I can't, you know, the juicy, how many people were there and so and so he got tackled and all, you know, and just going, just, you know, that kind of kind of vibe in the car. Were there any consequences that came from this? Yeah, I guess we could say that. So when I got home, you know, I was pretty adrenaline was up and just kind of thinking, wow, what have I done? But that was crazy. And it was interesting and went to bed and the next day in the kitchen, you know, you know, I'm just going to go to the back seat.
was getting ready for school and my mother came into the room and she was very angry because I thought I'd kind of gotten away with this that my parents would know about it. Well, she had gotten a call from one of her from the women that she went to church with who had actually had been there the night before and witnessed this witnessed everyone running through including me. So she yeah, she saw saw me all of me and my mom just could not believe it. Let me take you back for a second. You said you were wearing a mask. So how did anyone spot you? I think several of the other guys have gotten the word out a little bit. So that's why I think we had a lot of people there who knew us including this woman because I think her daughter went to one of the high schools and I think the daughter heard it so she passed it on to this woman from the church and somehow identified me. I think she it's a good question. Oh, she identified me. She found out how tall I was. Let's put it down. We'll leave it at that. And did you try and deny it when your mom brought it up at the table? No, she obviously had a witness, an impeccable witness. And so I just I had to admit it and I apologize profusely and I don't remember any consequences necessarily. I don't know if I was grounded or anything like that. But yeah. What happened when you got to school? Because of course, if word of this had gotten out and more lots of people actually had gone to the mall, essentially not to go to the mall, but to basically see this, they see the spectacle, they must have known that it was you who was running through the mall. What did your friends think? Yeah, I think there was some buzz in high school. If I remember it afterwards and you know, I got a couple of high fives and maybe a couple of your your an idiot. You know, there was a mix of that kind of thing. So yeah, the word had gotten out a little bit in the school. When you look back on the incident now, James, do you look back at it fondly? Do you look back at it with regret? Do you look back at it with embarrassment? Maybe a little bit of both all of those. I think it was again, the mindset of the 18 year old at the time who wanted just to take a chance. Maybe it's just the allure of I got to try this. It's way out of my comfort zone. It's that's unknowable actually until it's a testing, you know, of oneself to see if this really could get away with it. If you know, how would that feel? You know, all those kind of things went into this as well. And probably, I don't know, I won't speak for everybody, but probably not thinking, thinking less of consequences and more of what's this experience going to be like? What could this possibly be like? This compels us to do embarrassing things, like run naked through a crowded mall of people we know. And what is streaking having common with horror movies, spicy food and mild electric shocks? The answers when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. We generally think of pain and suffering as something to be avoided. See a sharp thorn on a bush? Don't touch it. Scary movie on TV? Change the channel. A menu item with five peppers in front of it? No, thank you. At the University of Toronto, psychologist Paul Bloom says that as much as we are wired to avoid these experiences, we may also be wired to seek them out. Paul Bloom, welcome to Hidden Brain. It's great to be here, Shunger, looking forward to talking. Paul, we just heard from a man named James who, against all better judgment, decided to run naked through a mall with his buddies when he was in high school. Now, I'm assuming you've never gone streaking yourself, but you have engaged sometimes in doing things that were unpleasant. Like Watpo. I have and I bet you have too. I eat spicy food, I eat food so hot, it makes me sweat and makes me uncomfortable. I go on social media, I think this is going to make me upset. I read it, it makes me upset. And then I do it over and over again. I watch movies that frighten me. I look at things that rip hell me. Even in little examples, like a lot of people, I don't like the feeling of velvet. It's a scrunch up and some people with C.M.E. they'd see a camel scrunch. And yet, when I see velvet furniture, I can't resist running my hand over it. Oh man. My wife looks at me and I'm laughing. And so I find this fascinating. You know, a very simple story of human nature is that we seek out pleasure and avoid pain. And I'm interested in counter examples where we sometimes avoid pleasure and seek out pain. You know, some time ago, one of my friends was growing some peppers in their backyard. And it turned out these were called ghost peppers. These are one of the spiciest peppers that you that have ever been grown on the planet. And I just couldn't resist, you know, cooking something with it and trying it out. And in fact, just cooking it was so difficult and so unpleasant because I was in these intense coughing spasms. You know, I could barely breathe. It was so spicy. And yet there was a part of me that said, I have to try this. We're drawn to that sort of thing. So, so there are limits. Some people won't go near spicy foods. Even somebody like you will try ghost peppers. You probably have a limit into what you'll try. So we like some degree of control. And I think the control is really important to keep in mind when we talk about these things. We like to know what we're doing. But with this control in place, we then seek out experiences that push us to the limits. They push our tolerance for pain as in the ghost pepper. They push our tolerance for embarrassment and shame as in your speaker. And in some cases, they they they push us in moral directions to doing doing things that that that trouble us morally. They push us with regard to sort of psychological pain. You you you listen to a song like I listen to Adele, love Adele. But but it makes me sad. And you know, if I'm if I'm sad anyway, if they tear up a little bit. So so essentially puzzle why we do these things. So when you start to look, you see versions of this phenomenon everywhere, you know, traffic slows down when there's a car crash because people want to robber neck and get a glimpse of something awful. Here's a clip of the mixed martial arts fighter, Kerry Stellar, interviewing another MMA fighter, Josh Rosenblatt. Definitely takes a special kind of human being to punch people in the face and to enjoy being punched because at the end of the day, not that you like love it, but I mean, there has to be some kind of enjoyment factor out of it to be able to get there to get in there. I mean, if you take a beating, you take a beating. Yeah, no, you got to kind of like it. You have to kind of like getting punched in the face. Do you think he's exaggerating when he says you have to kind of like getting punched in the Facebook? I don't. I think I think it's complicated. So it'd be very, very bad MMA fighter. If he likes it, if he liked it too much, he really should get in the head of liking punching other people in the face. But there's something to it. I read a passage, which he and another interview where he talks about, you know, when you start off getting punched in the face is the worst thing. Yes. And then you sort of start to feed off of it. And here's one thing which is really important, which, you know, this interview you just played really illustrates, which is for a lot of these things. I think for just about all of the suffering that I'm interested, we're going to talk about it. It has to be voluntary. I don't doubt that when he's in a ring and gets hit in a face, he says, this is the real thing. This is what I'm here for. And it fuels him. But if he's standing in line into movies and somebody runs up to him and pumps him in a face, there's nothing like that at all. You know, if you're cooking the ghost feppers and you're eating and you're eating and you're you're tearing up, you're sweating and everything, but you put that in there. That's one thing. And that's a source of pleasure and challenge and anticipation. On the other hand, if you, you know, wanted to sit down for your morning oatmeal, somebody stuck some ghost peppers in her as a joke, you're not going to be very happy. I've written about this and I've talked about this and some people say, if we're going to agree and they say, look, I live a life of chronic pain or this terrible thing happened. Who are you to tell me? This is fantastic. And my answer is I'm not telling it's fantastic. If you don't choose it, suffering that's unchosen, it's typically terrible. We're interested now in the chosen stuff. So on the surface, these different things might seem like they have nothing in common with each other. You know, streaking or touching a velvet sofa, doom scrolling, rubber necking, getting punched in the face. But you see, they all illustrate the idea of benign masochism. We've talked about this on the show before when we featured the great psychologist Paul Rosen. But can you explain what benign masochism is, Paul? Yes. So this turn comes from Paul and
who's a brilliant psychologist. And benign massacism is when we seek out pain and suffering and limited controlled extents. So, Roz and his not talking about people who seriously damaged their body or set themselves on fire. He's talking about everyday stuff. So, he gives examples of spicy foods, really hot bass. So hot, you're just kind of cringing as you get in. You know, sonas, cold bass. Various things like that. Exertion. Running until you could barely run anymore. Your heart's pounding out of your chest. You're breathing in gasps. That's benign massacism. Seeking low levels of pain in ways that don't damage your body permanently. But ways that that shake you up. And Roz and his interest and so on, I, and why we do this. And what it tells us about human motivation. - So, I want to understand how our brains are why to seek out things like this. And to answer that question, you say we might first have to look at why we might be wired to seek out unpleasant experiences. You once knew a grad student who told you about an unusual game that people play in Mexico City. It's called Tokas. What is Tokas Paul? - So, Tokas, he wrote to me and told me about it, is people go out in the parting, they're with their friends, they're with their family. And these are these tubes. And you put your hands in the tubes, and you get an electric shock. And I gather you could, you could turn a dial to determine what kind of electric shocks you get. And people compete into how much they could take it. And this to me is a super interesting case of benign masochism. It has some features that not all benign masochism has. It's public, it's social, it's fun. And I think in this case, not all cases, but in this case, we see the social effects of benign masochism in different ways. So one way is it's a way to show off. You know, my son, I talk about my son Zachary when he was a teenager, and he would have, he'd get in his friends, and they'd be arguing, he'd be trying to stick with sobby up their nose, and see who can get the most with sobby there. They'd have slapping competitions. They would, as a way to sort of in a friendly social way, see who's the toughest, who can take the most. But another thing which is super interesting is that sometimes when you and I experience a painful event together, we're both in a sauna together. We both dive into the ice cold water. We both zap ourselves. It brings us together. And there's actually a lot of studies suggesting, doing this in the laboratory, looking at a world that's shared pain, more than shared pleasure. Shared pain brings people together. (gentle music) - I'm thinking about a time when a friend and I went, you know, swimming in the ocean in New England, it was still winter, and the water was very, very, very cold. I could barely stand there, and it was so painful. But yet I remember that so vividly now, as you are talking, Paul, because the memory of standing there with my friend was, in fact, a bonding moment. - I tell the story in my book of this friend of mine who was hiking in England with a friend, and they got lost. And they got lost and it was getting dark, and they were cold, and didn't have any food, they didn't have any water, getting really worried. And then they ended up pumping right in the middle of a small town of a pub. And like an hour later, sitting outside and a pub did drinking beer, eating fish and chips, to her laughing. And this isn't an experience. She told me this, this happened 20 years ago. She told me, "Man, that was a great experience." Well, if they just had a normal afternoon, had a lot of fun, saw some sites, and then went to the pub, it wouldn't have this force. Shared suffering just really connects us. - I'm wondering if this might also be connected to the story that James told us about streaking through the mall. Not only was he doing it for the edification, I suppose, of the people in the mall, but he was doing this with four other buddies. They were running through the mall together. This was a bonding experience for them. - I think streaking alone is probably no fun at all. (laughing) You wanna streak with your buddies. And this sort of thing shows up in other ways, it shows up in religious rituals. So my friend, Demitri Igaladas, talks about studies rituals that involve pain. He talks about this Hindu festival they have in Mauritius, where people walk over hot coals, and they have skewers plunge through their cheek and their tongues. They have hooks dug into their body, and the hooks are attached to chariots, and the men will spend hours in the afternoon dragging these chariots up to the top of a hill. And this all sounds, it sounds, you know, barely, something like make it barely listen to it. But it has all of these effects. It brings people together for the young men who do it. It increases their standing in the community. It increases how attractive they are to the women. And he has done research finding that if you watch this, with a community, you see people suffer for your religion, for your community. You become more willing to give money to the community. You care more about it. It brings people together. - We had Demitri's on Hidden Brain some months ago, and I remember him telling me to the end of our conversation that at one point, I don't think this was in the Mauritius. I think it was in another location, but he had spent a lot of time in this place and gotten to know the people, and they also had a fire walking ritual. And on the big night, you know, someone turned to him and basically said, okay, it's now your turn. And he had to actually walk across these coals. And of course, there was a voice inside in that said, you know, this is not a smart thing for, you know, an anthropologist to be doing, but there was also all of this social pressure around them. And he says that once he did it, it transformed the way he felt and his connections with the people around him. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a different anthropologist in a psychologist. I'll sit in my office and I'll read about it. And I think I'm very brave for reading this heavy-duty stuff. Demitri goes and he does it. - So one reason to do painful or embarrassing things is they make us look tough for the connectors to others. Another reason might have to do with the idea of contrast. Tell me about your experience, shoveling snow as a child in Quebec. - Oh, this is a fun childhood memory. And it's actually very simple. I bet everybody listening has done something like this, but I'd go out and we would get snow. I'll tell you the stories. Really? And I'd shovel a walk and I'd shovel the driveway and I'd get nice and cold. And then I'd come in and my mom would make me some hot cocoa and she'd make me a bath and I'd say, no, that, and I would be so happy. And there's a logic to this, which is that sometimes we suffer, and this might sound really strange, but sometimes we suffer because the end of suffering, the contrast where we get at a cold and into the bath, it feels so good. It's this dumb joke, my father, dumb joke he tells, about the guy who's banging his head against the lamp post. And when asked why he does it, he says, it feels so good when I stop. (laughing) And I'm glad you liked it. Are you being nice and pretending to like it? You've seen the human, my father, if he's dumb jokes, but in some way, I think we often seek out unpleasantness because the release from unpleasantness feels so good. There's nothing like a hot bath after you, a hot shower after you've been hiking or camping for three days. There's nothing like jumping into the cool, finished lake after you've been roasting an hot sauna. And so some of it is contrast. And there's laboratory studies finding that you could feel a neutral experience, I mean, which normally be neutral, feels good if it was preceded by a painful experience. That our minds work on contrast. Everything we experience is sort of relative. Whether or not a bath, water feels hot or cold, depends on how it felt before and so too for pain and pleasure. You know, I've sometimes heard people who go to a chiropractor or a massage therapist who subjects them to really intense pain, but when you talk to them afterwards, they'll tell you that the experience may have been painful, but afterwards they felt bliss. I mean, that's the same contrast theory here. - That's right, that's right. And a lot of, now you have to be willing to go through the pain and you have to in some way do the math. And I think we do this unconsciously, figure it is to pain worth the relief at the end. You know, my daughter recently started her freshman year at college and right before the term started, they went on this hiking trip, which was really in fairly primitive circumstances. They were very few showers, they were sleeping outdoors, it was uncomfortable, and they spent three days, and of course they went through this period of suffering, they bonded with each other tremendously. But then they show up back on campus now, as soon as the semester starts, and they're moving into their dorms, which I really, you know, not that great, but compared to what they had just dealt with, the previous three days, the dorms felt like the four seasons. And so they all move in and they say, "My God, these dorms are the best things ever." And I thought this was kind of genius on the part of the school to basically put the kids through a period of suffering before introducing them to campus housing. - It is fairly clever. It is really, you brought a cafeteria food taste better, too, if you were living off the food you had to kill in the woods for some reason. (gentle music) - There's a study related to this idea that looked at how people spend their time over the course of a month, often trying to balance out their feelings, depending on whether they're feeling good or feeling bad. Can you talk about this work that's being done? - It's been a really interesting research. It's been with tens of thousands of people, and use a smartphone app to record people's activities, and how happy they were when they were doing these things.
And what they found was that people tended to work on a principle of "chidonic balance," which is that once they did something that was fun, they would then do something that was less fun. They would then choose, well, now it's time to to clean the bathroom or work on it, Texas. And when it is something unpleasant, that would be the time to go to go for a nice walk or have a whiskey, watch a fun TV show, or something like that. They would hold their life in balance. And I think the sort of "chidonic contrast" is really interesting. It says that we often seek out these contrasting experiences. It might be that after a difficult experience, a pleasurable experience is all the more pleasurable. And that might push them in that direction. But isn't it interesting, Paul, that it's not just that we do something difficult, and then we seek a reward or we seek a treat. But sometimes if we've had a lot of treats and a lot of rewards, we actually might be interested in saying, "Okay, let me try my hand at doing something difficult," so the scales balance in both directions. I think so. And I think there's a few different things going on here. One is what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill, which is after a while having a good time, you get bored of it. You know, you obituate as a term we use. And so you need to switch off and do something else. Now one thing you could do is find a different pleasurable activity that scratches a different itch. But it might be time then to recognize I'm getting diminishing returns from my pleasurable experiences or taxes to be done. Now it's the time to do them. When we come back, how we sometimes seek out unpleasant things in order to punish ourselves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. [Music] This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Psychologist Paul Bloom is the author of the sweet spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning. He says there are many reasons we seek out perverse pleasures. We seek attention. We wish to experience the contrast between pain and pleasure. And sometimes we just like the challenge of it. [Music] Paul, you told me about your son Zachary when he was a teenager, but when he was four years old, he was watching a cartoon one day and it had a violent chase scene in it. How did he respond to this? So he began and I should tell you, I have his consent to use these stories. He's in his 20s now and he's still. He rolls his eyes a bit, but I could tell these stories. He was different cartoon characters chasing each other. The sort of thing you and I would watch and be fine, but he was a kid. And he got scared. He started to cry a little bit, shake a little bit, get him really upset. And he said, "Hey Zach, don't worry man, I'll turn it off." So I reached to shut it off and he yells at me, say, "Don't turn it off, leave it on." And then he stares at it and he's that kind of crying and being upset. And I think there's something very human in that, where, you know, if you and I were watching a horror movie together or a thriller and we're just like, "Oh, this is extreme, heart pounding, very stressed." And then he said, "Oh, don't worry guys, I'm gonna shut it off." We'd say, "What do you do?" "Why are you doing that? What are you doing? We're enjoying this." And maybe we pay you to see it. And that's a sort of paradox. Why are experiences that are normally negative, like being afraid? Become pleasurable in the context of fiction. You know, if you're sitting in your house alone and it's the middle of night, you think you're alone and all of a sudden you hear footsteps, that'd be the worst thing you could imagine. Your heart would be pounding out of your chest and that would not be fun. But you're watching a movie where that happens to another character and maybe your heart's pounding a bit. Anyway, but this is fantastic, this is great. What's gonna happen next? And I think fiction is an extremely clever invention. There's a lot of reasons why we like stories. But one of the reasons, which is what we're zooming in now, what connects to our theme, is that it offers us tension and fear, but it's entirely safe. I'm wondering if there's also an element of predictability about it. There are some forms of fiction and some, you know, movies that have sequels to them that, in fact, are very predictable. If you watch the die-hard movie sequence, for example, what happens in die-hard and die-hard two and die-hard three, fundamentally the plot is not changing. What does that do for us as we're watching things that are very dramatic and perhaps even stressful or thrilling, but we kind of know where it's all going to end up. That's right. And you've had kids. You know, one of the agonies of having kids is reading Go-Dog Go for the 10,000's time. Because at first, the kids are a sensitive creature. And at first, they hear a story and it's often going to be too tense for them to sort of cope with. So they say, "Read it again, read it again, read it again, tell me the part again." And there's a tremendous safety and no one's going to have them. And the bad parts of the excitement fade away and the good parts are intact. I mean, in some ways, it's almost as you're describing this. It's almost like a form of, you know, exposure therapy. I mean, kids are not quite psychiatrists, but that's kind of what they're doing, right? When they're basically saying, "Expose me to this scary thing over and over and over again." And after some time, it starts to just become a thing I can enjoy rather than something that terrifies me. You know, I never thought of it that way. I think that's a deep point. I've always been interested in the idea that for Adal, at least, our love of fiction is motivated by a desire to experience worst-case scenarios. Which is why we don't just appreciate happy fiction. We appreciate fiction where everything goes to hell. Zombie movies and war movies and movies of relationships that end up, you know, in pieces. And you wonder why? Why don't we just watch happy things? And one answer is because we want to prepare ourselves for bad things. And one way to do so is to go over it in our head as a sort of simulation. Just like you might use a flight simulator to simulate what's going to happen if you're flying in one of your engines' fails. The idea of that exposure could be part of this process is a good one. Maybe there are things in your life which you're going to experience sooner or later. And fiction toughens you up. It gives you a little taste of what it is. So that when it really happens, you're in a better position to be worth it. Do you think the same thing as it work when it comes to the fantasies we have? Many of us, of course, have pleasurable and pleasant fantasies. But lots of us also report having unpleasant fantasies. Now, when it comes to a fantasy, you know, where the scriptwriter, where the director, that's a movie that we're making in our own heads, why do you think we come up with fantasies that are unpleasant or scary? Yeah, I think that's exactly the same sort of process. So you might be going for a walk. And instead of filling your head with happy thoughts or fantasies about awards and great riches and true love, you say, "Yeah, what if my wife left me? What if I got fired? What if something happened to my kids?" There are studies which sample what people think about day to day. So you're walking around and a beeper goes off on your phone. You're right down what you're thinking about. And to a surprising extent, over half the time, when you're free to think about anything you want in the world, people's minds go negative. And we think about bad things. And I think that this in some way makes our life less pleasurable. But it makes adaptive sense. There's no value in you imagining what you're going to do if you win a great prize. Because you stand up and accept a great prize. That's not good things typically. It's really easy to deal with. But what happens if your relationship is destroyed, if your government falls apart, if people attack you? That's the sort of thing we really pace and think about, even if it makes our life quite a bit less pleasant. The psychotherapist and podcast or Esther Porelle talks about the idea that sometimes the fantasies we have, including the sexual fantasies we have, are often at odds with our own values and proclivity. So in other words, we have fantasies about things that in fact are at odds with what we actually want to happen to us in real life. And I'm wondering if that's actually a manifestation of what you just talked about, which is when you're going for the walk and you imagine your child being kidnapped, you're not actually asking for your child to be kidnapped. You're just exploring what that would be like and trying to figure out what you would do in that circumstance. I think that's exactly right. There are studies on what people seek out in pornography and what they do with the fantasies that they have. And to a surprising extent, people and more often women have fantasies about violence and bad treatment. But what's really important to keep in mind is in some sense there are fantasies that you're thinking about them, but it's not what they want. In fact, they're having these things run through it. Exactly because it's what they don't want, but they have to worry about more than men have to worry about. So our mind will often reenact things that are our own worst case scenarios. Can you talk about the idea that some of our interest in playing with unpleasant experiences has to do with play? That when kids, for example, use their imaginations to come
up with games, they often involve horrific scenarios being chased by a monster, being eaten by a lion. They also include the possibility of injury. For example, kids play fight, for example. Talk about how games can sometimes be unpleasant and painful. It gets at the theory we've been talking about from a different direction. So, evolutionary biologists have long asked a question, why do animals, including humans, play? It seems like you spend your time learning about the world and establishing social relationships and accumulating resources. But instead, we chase each other with toy guns or we go watch football. So, what's the purpose of play? And I think there's an answer. I think there's actually a really good answer, which is play is a form of safe practice. The reason why young animals, including young humans, play fight, is because fighting is a useful skill. And one way to get good at a useful skill is to practice at it. And play is a very clever trick where you go through the practice of what you're trying to do, but in a safe way. And so, it's not just a lot of people, but like dogs, dogs play fight. They have a sort of signal what they call a play bow where they communicate to other. We're going to fight, but it's going to be for fun. We're not going to really hurt each other. And then they perceive it as a fighting. What makes humans unique, then, isn't play. A lot of animals play. It's that we play in our heads. And I think everything from video games to horror movies to rumination is a form of safe play. We re-enact these things that we want to get good at, like combat or planning or fighting. That sort of thing. I want to play you a clip from the TV show Fear Factor. You guys are each going to have to stick your head inside this box with these 50 tarantulas for three minutes. And if you don't think that you can remain absolutely emotionalist for three minutes, I want you guys to back out now. Because besides there are eight legs, each one of these tarantulas has two huge fangs in all of their venom. So this task involves covering yourself in tarantulas. Now, the participants are trying to win a prize poll. But as viewers, we are not trying to win anything. So what's the appeal? Fear Factor had millions of viewers. There must be some of the satisfaction to think, thank God it's not me. It's other people. But I think we have a vicarious interest in saying people push themselves to the limits. Just like we sometimes do it ourselves in both and in real world and in imagination. There's a fascination watching other people do it. There's a fascination watching other people compete in sports, compete in games and also put themselves at risk in interesting ways. And maybe it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction that I'm not them. Look what they're doing or maybe the sense of superiority. But I think the most important cause is just this fascination in seeing worst case scenarios, what happens when people are put to the limits. So in a more serious context, some people take the idea of pain and unpleasant experiences to an extreme and actively subject themselves to self-harm. Some people cut themselves, others subject themselves to intense pain. Some of these things can be extremely dangerous, even life threatening and they become medical problems, they become disorders. Can you talk about how this kind of self-harm might also be related to feelings of powerlessness but also feelings of control, Paul? So I know less about this. I know less about this sort of pathologies of math, not the manine massacres of many more, but the heavy duty massacres and where people will seriously harm themselves. Sometimes it's a byproduct of some form of mental illness, like schizophrenia, and falls very much outside the normal phenomena we're talking about. But there is a connection between these forms of self-harm and the sort of more benign forms of self-harm. One of the connections is they both maybe forms of signaling. In some way, an adolescent, say, cutting herself or harming herself in some other way, could be a signal to people, "I need help." I need help. And my need is so serious, you're not listening to my words and I get that. The words could be fake. The words could be dishonest. But I'm going to damage my body to persuade you that this is serious business. And so one explanation for cutting and other things like that is that it's a cry for help. Another explanation is that there is almost paradoxically a sort of anesthesia effect for certain sorts of self-harm. It takes you under your body. That takes the inflection of pain under right circumstances makes other pains go away. We should note that there are resources and support available for people struggling with cutting and other forms of self-harm. To access those resources, you can call or text 988 in the United States at any time of the day or night. So Paul, researchers of examined people's propensity to punish themselves after they've done something that violated their own values. Can you describe these studies and what they found? So it's an all-along observation that sometimes people hurt themselves because they believe you did something wrong and want to punish themselves. There's a story about Galen, the 20th century physician. He had a friend of his who beat up severely a slave and he felt horrible about her. So he went to Galen, went to his house, stripped himself naked, handed him a whip and say, "You have to flog me for my crime." Galen tried to laugh it off and said, "No, you don't have to do this." No, you have to flog me. It might seem like a strange example, but I think we see this impulse in ourselves where when we do something wrong, we're moralizing creatures. This is what I'm very interested in. I study this in children. I study this in adults. Our desire to punish wrong doers and the most obvious cases are when wrong doers are other people, but sometimes the wrong doers are ourselves. So there's now several studies of the form where since you give people some opportunity to hurt themselves in a mild way, give themselves painful shocks, stick their hand in freezing water, which is very unpleasant after a while. And what these studies find over and over again is that if you tell people ahead of time, I want you to think about something you did that was wrong. I want you to think of time when you hurt somebody. People will then inflict more pain on themselves. So the role of morality, the role of a desire to punish wrongness is I think one force that could explain something that goes on in asochistic pleasures. I'm wondering part of the same thing might happen on the sports field as well. We've all seen you know athletes who mess up or someone who plays a bat shot in tennis and they get so angry with themselves they want to punch themselves or actively hit themselves. You know again you're inflicting pain on yourself, but it's the same kind of thing. How could you have made this mistake? I'm punishing you for making this terrible mistake. It's exactly the same process I've seen it many times and once or twice you know I've kind of smacked myself and they say, dummy how did you do that? And I think it's almost a mystery why doesn't happen more often. I mean think of it how we want to punish people who mess up are a cruel or indifferent in real life. Doesn't it make sense that when we see that we ourselves are lazy or cruel or indifferent, we want to punish ourselves? We want to sort of treat ourselves badly the way we think we should be treated. Now as I'm saying this it doesn't sound like the most healthy thing in the world. I think in small doses I think it's fine. I don't think much badly about a tennis player who hits himself on a head to rack it after missing an easy shot. I think if it gets taken too far and you start thinking that you're worthless and you want to sort of destroy your own life that could be awful. But in small like a lot of things we're talking about in small doses I think it's part of a full life. In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus we examine how pain and pleasure can intertwine during sex and how at the extremes pain and pleasure can start to resemble one another. People who are intense in intense pleasure, intense happiness, your heart to tell apart from people whose faces are in intense pain. If you're already a subscriber that episode should be available in this podcast feed right now. It's titled The Zen of Pain. If you're not yet a subscriber please go to support.hiddenbrain.org to sign up. If you're using an Apple device you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Your subscription gives you access to exclusive episodes. It also helps us build a show. Again those links are support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain. Paul Bloom is a psychologist at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the sweet spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning. Paul thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you this was terrific. If you have follow up questions for Paul Bloom and you'd be willing to share those questions with the Hidden Brain audience please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at
[email protected]. Use the subject line.
pain. That email address again is
[email protected]. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbring. Tara Boy is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. This week in our two-part mini-series about the pain pleasure continuum, why we fantasize about living a life of leisure and why this might be an error. So definitely people, you know, when they think about a future that's desirable, that's fun, enjoyable, it's about relaxation, it's about being lazy, it's about being at the beach and just kind of sitting. So we see this all the time. That's next week on the show, I hope you'll join us. I'm Shankar Vedantum, see you soon.
PodcastTranscript AI