Tiny Human Things

'I know the science, I know it's just light refracting, actually I might not know the science.' But to me, rainbows are just the purist bit of magic and I would rather just believe that they are a sprinkling of magic in the world and what I most love about them is when you see one and people in the streets, young, old, from every background, everyone wants to show each other that little bit of magic. What is it about rainbows? What's actually going on in the sky? And what's going on inside us as humans? For me, rainbows are a perfect example of tiny human things, those minuscule moments that somehow delight us all universally. Well, almost universally. I'm thinking about people watching, gazing into a fire, catching someone's eye, popping bubble wrap, sliding between crisp bedsheets, peeling an orange in one go, beholding a glorious peachy bum, hearing a perfect harmony, or dancing in step. I believe that taking the time to really put these tiny glimmers of joy and connection under the microscope can massively expand our understanding of what it means to be human. I'm Lily Cooper, a surgeon and performance coach by training and a human by experience. I've been fascinated by and lucky enough to study the human body in mind for over 20 years. In this series, I'll be seeking out surprising insights from scientists, scholars and wisdom keepers and gathering gorgeous, tiny stories in voice note form from listeners around the world too. My hope is that by siving for these glimmers in the everyday, we can find ways to connect with the best of our humanity at a time when many of us need it most. And where better to start than with a rainbow? Because we all love rainbows. Don't we? Have a kind of love, hate relationship with rainbows. I kind of find them so cliché that almost naff. They're like that person that turns up like on a Monday at work just looking really good. And you're like, oh my god, just give me a break. How did you manage that? How do you do that? Are you not real? Actually, you know, rainbows quite often strike me as something that just can't be real. It's too, they're too phenomenal. They're too amazing. I know what she means. For me, they're up there with planes getting off the ground. In terms of things, I understand in principle, but I don't in my heart. Like, actually, how does that massive lump of metal get off the ground and stay up there? As a scientist, I know that we see a rainbow when sunlight passes through something denser than air, like raindrops. Light contains different wavelengths, which both appear differently, as the different colours we can see, but also behave differently when they hit the water so the colours split. And because the raindrops occur, do you get the curving, arcing appearance of a rainbow? As a human, I know the wonder and awe that seeing a rainbow inspires, how it draws everyone's eye and gives you a moment's respite from your daily grind and worries, lifting you out of yourself. And Sissy, who you heard there, is right. They are everywhere. I challenge you not to see a rainbow in some form next time you leave your house, in fact. But I like a challenge. And I think I've found the least cliched rainbow possible. I've really always loved rainbows. I mean, who doesn't love rainbows? They're kind of like a universal, awesome thing that happens and it's a femoral and then it's gone. So even like at past workplaces, like people have called me like a rainbow hunter. I'll just look out the window and I'm like, oh, there's probably a rainbow happening and I'll go outside and show her not for rainbows forming. And you start getting a sense of when they'll happen, you know. And then what shifted for me, probably around ten years ago, I was hanging out with a friend. He lives on the volcano there in Maui. And he was telling me about the moon bow. He got to sea one and he was telling me, you know, it was like millenite and it was this big white arc in the sky and it was illuminated by the moon. My mind was blown. I'd never heard that anything like that existed before. I was like, I want to see one on my own. You know, now that I know they exist, like I'm going to start looking for them. And that was like over ten years ago. And I never saw one. I know I looked, I go out, especially I would, you know, wait for the moon to be in the right position and look, there's rain and it just didn't quite happen. Then last year, I moved to this town called Péonia where I live now. It's a little town in Colorado, a little rural mountain town with a lot of farms and stuff like that. But the night sky here is incredible. We have, you know, view of the Milky Way and just you can see the stars. There's not a lot of light pollution. Where I live, we're off the grid, quote unquote, we are running off batteries in a solar panel. And so at night, we just turn the lights off and it's dark. I started getting into night photography and I was taking pictures of the stars in the Milky Way and I started developing what I call my night sense. Your cones in your eye are meant for color but then your rods are more for night vision. You see more like gray and white colors and peripheral vision. It's like your vision kind of changes into this more subtle realm. That's when I saw my first moon bow. It was in the summer. There was probably like three or four in the morning. I was fast asleep. I woke up because I heard rain and I saw the moonlight streaming through the window and something in me clicked and it was like, oh, that's what you need for a moon bow. Rain and that moonlight streaming in and sure enough, looked out the window and I can see. Whoa, like full sky, full arc, just like, oh my god, like incredible. And it's telling my partner like, hey, check this out, my god. We run outside. She was psyched, you know, she was really happy that I woke her up and we kind of sat there by the back door for a minute and just marveled at it. I was so happy that she was there and I was able to share that with someone. You know, that wasn't just me seeing it. I noticed when things in the sky happen, like it feels like your brain's kind of like opening up a little like "Wah!" Then as I started to kind of calm down, the cool thing was to start to look at it more closely. At first, it just looks like a rainbow only. It's white. But when you start to look a little closer, there's actually variations in the shade of white and gray and you can actually see like just the faintest amount of color right on the edge of like perception. And I noticed with the camera, because you're gathering so much more light, it almost looks like the regular rainbow in the day and it is like the moon's just reflecting the sun. It's just like a dimmer rainbow you're getting. Last year, three months in a row, I witnessed a moon bow. It's showing me that like they probably happen more than we think. They're probably happening like all the time. It's just not many people are up at three in the morning to see it. So if you're on vacation and you're you know away from the city lights and it happens to be around a full moon and maybe there's some showers or some rain in the forecast, go take a look because you'll never know you might be able to catch a moon bow. It is now officially my mission to see a moon bow. But of course if you'd like to see one of the pictures Aaron who you just heard's taken just head to the show notes and I'll send you in the right direction. But his story has made me wonder, what's going on in our brains when we see a big bright rainbow. That's what I want to know. Once you work in colour for more than about six months, suddenly everything you own becomes rainbow cut. This is Alice Skeleton. I'm an assistant professor in developmental and visual science. My research is in visual perception. Specifically, I am interested in how nature impacts development. It's weird when you think about having a favourite colour because you're picking a favourite wavelength, which is a bizarre thing to do, but everyone does it, right? I love it. But we don't really understand why? Why do you like it? What is the feeling of liking colour is really, really hard and really complicated and really interesting. Some people with autism have particular sensitivities to specific colours which tells us that there's some kind of sensory, 'nus' how we react to colours and why we have particular versions or preferences for it. Humans have always been drawn to colour. At birth, if you show a baby, a very bright red light and a very bright white light, they'll look for longer at the red light than the white one. Humans are driven to seek out colour and the rainbow o gynnyddio'r greu sydd yw'r gweithio. of the grown-up version of that baby experiment. We are driven to look at the colorful thing, because the colorful thing might hold information for us in the real world. So the berry against the green leaves will be able to see that chromatic contrast is important and it's useful. Our visual system wants natural light and the brightness of a rainbow against the kind of gloominess of the diffuse grey skies is perhaps what draws us to seek it out. There's this thing called the bioethylia hypothesis, which is that we really like natural stuff and that we're drawn to natural stuff. Most often when we talk about bioethylia, people think of the plants and the objects being told to have plants and offices, because that will be better for you. Actually, it's all the way down to how your cells and your retina are picking up the light from outside. The way that sunlight and skylight varies the color of it goes from kind of orange-ish to bluish, what we call the daylight access. People prefer images that have a distribution that falls on this axis, for example. So there's this theory that's called detention restoration theory, and it's the idea that spending time in nature somehow restores depleted attentional networks. And one of the theories about why that might happen is because our visual system has evolved to expect a particular visual experience. It's expecting the planes of the savanna kind of thing, and it's getting something very different. And so the argument is that when you're in nature or experiencing these things of nature, that it's kind of like resetting your attentional resources. And it ties into this theory that's called the stress reduction theory, which is the idea that natural stuff is easier to process, and so it kind of puts less load on your processing system, so it's just easier. So there's the sensory component of it, and there is also the component of if you're having a terrible day and you're like, it's raining and your bus is late, and you've got so much to do and your emails are pinging, and then suddenly something different from the norm comes out. It kind of takes you out of that moment, and it breaks the remanation cycle, right? You're no longer stuck in remanating. You're now on a different pathway. So I am one of these people who does cold water swimming, and it's the same idea that you do cold water swimming because it completely takes you out of your current state and into a new state. It's good for your visual system. It's curved in a way, and it's like, the colours are highly saturated, but they're not abnormally so, because if you think about a screening time square, for example, and the saturatedness of that, it feels artificial in a way that the brightness of a rainbow doesn't. Humans do like the right amount of novelty. Like, we don't really like change that much, but just the right sort of novelty, like you're barista putting a slightly different shape in your coffee. It's exciting. It's a new, and it's a safe change, right? You know that a rainbow can't hurt you. When you see a rainbow, normally someone will be like, "Oh, please, I'll see you back." And you'll bring other people in to share it. And there's a little bit of evidence that shows people appreciate art more, for example, when you have, like, a group discussion about painting, versus when you're just viewing it by yourself. Humans are very sensory, but they're also very social. The number of times I've taken a photo of a rainbow, it's sent it to a friend, and rainbows are kind of like this nice, neat, and kind of like a combination of the two things. You can join in between those two things. Humans being social creatures. Synchronic is important, and you kind of see that even in infancy. Even babies will seek out a shared experience. There's like some fun studies where someone has a baby carrier, and they're bouncing up and down with a partner who's bouncing on the same beat as them or off the beat. The babies can prefer that person. You see that with studies that measure attention in babies as well, you can enjoy babies who look from object to face a lot. And that's because they want to know what you're doing. We're not that different to babies as we grow up. People think we are, but we're not. Like, it's all there in the under one. But all of these things are kind of coming together into this like single rainbow moment, which is pretty magic. It's a fun thing to talk about better than the marking I'm meant to be doing. We are social animals, and we are wired to connect. In our evolutionary past, we were much safer in a group. If we were cast out, life became a lot less efficient, gathering and cooking food, bringing up young, gathering firewood and keeping warm, but also much more dangerous through exposure to predators, enemies, and environmental risks. Our desire to be connected to each other, therefore, is hardwired into our brains. From the moment that we're born, physical and social contact releases oxytocin, a hormone which makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and trusting and connected. Famously, oxytocin is released by skin-to-skin contact, by smiling out or helping someone, but it can also be produced when we're connected by awe. Or is that feeling when we witness something fast or beautiful, or inexplicable, that stops us in our tracks, and makes us feel small in the very best way, both giving us perspective, but also a sense of collectively being part of something bigger? I feel like rainbow's are this like little gift from the universe. Well, they seem to have like no logical purpose, other than to look pretty, to remind people of the unexpected beauty of the world. When you have kids, or if you're close to kids, or whatever, and you see their response to it, that is infectious. And I think there's something really innocent and childlike, a bit sort of the touch from a lot of the stresses of the world when you see adults go. Oh, a rainbow. Just like they would have done years ago as a kid when they saw one. My perspective on rainbows shifted in adulthood, and Richard Dawkins in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, sums it up really nicely, and he starts by telling the reader that John Keats kind of admonished Sir Isaac Newton for breaking down the rainbow through splitting light through into its constituent colours through wavelengths, rather through the prism, and therefore kind of explaining it. And he admonishes him saying he's kind of destroyed the wonder, etc. And Richard Dawkins' whole argument within the book is that far from crushing beauty, and wonder, especially of the natural world, science, and an understanding of it, and the complexities of organisms in the living world, the natural world, elevates it to something far more spectacular and wondrous and beautiful. And I completely agree, of Douglas Adams' quote, along the lines of, is it not enough to admire the wonder and beauty of a garden that you have to imagine there are fairies living at the bottom of it. I kind of agree with that, you know, when you think of a rainbow, and you think of all these tiny prisms that are breaking light into constituent wavelength to then form this rainbow, I think it brings on a whole new level of awe and wonder. The William Blake lines resonate in a similar way, you know, to see a world in a grain of sand, or the heaven, in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour, you know, to have the knowledge of what's going on, rather than just, hey, it's a rainbow. Oh, no, what do I mean? Yes, so back in the 1660s, whilst in lockdown from the plague, Isaac Newton shone light through a prism and saw five colours. But because he was big on the number seven for mystical reasons, at the time it represented perfection in his part of the world. There were seven days, there were seven planets on people's radar discovered and so on. He added orange and indigo to make it feel more complete. Even today, most of us can't really tell indigo from violet. It just shows how personal and sometimes cultural our perception of colour and so rainbows can be, which sets things up nicely for our next human, who experiences the world in a very unusual way. They don't just see colours, they taste them. I was like a party trick for most of my friends, you know, oh, she can tell you what you taste like, but actually, there is a scientific method, there is something that's happening, this is a logical process. I just experience things differently than most people. Sinisthesia is a neurological phenomenon, where stimulation of one sense triggers experiences in another, like seeing colours when hearing music, or, in tarier kamerinos, case. I'm a kinesthetic gustatory synestete so what that means is that I feel the vibration of everything. Table, colors, emotions, music, people. I can't conjure up visual images, I don't conjure up sound. If I want you to understand it, I'm probably going to have to describe it to you through food because that's how the information then gets processed. In gustatory synestetes, I think make up 1% of synestetes. Some of them become sommelier. Choosing food may sense because of my synesthesia. I understand flavors and textures and temperatures and I don't know like a painter knows color or a composer knows sound. All of that's really mystical and lovely but functioning as a normal human is almost impossible because visually I can't remember anything. Technology is difficult. It all tastes like glass and metal. If I want anyone to understand what I'm getting, it usually always comes through as flavor technique. It should be cooked as it in a cake, as it in a bread, as it sauteed. Like I get all of that information. Nothing is ever one flavor except this one person was really weird. As a child, I grew up in not a pleasant environment, like really not pleasant at all. There was not a lot of food in our home and we were destitute. One entire year we ate nothing but parboiled rice and packaged brown gravy. We were hungry for everything. I wasn't just starving for nutrients. It was like there was no language around me. My mother took a job at the University and she was secretary in the African-Indian Languages Department and then all of a sudden I met people's homes and the whole table is filled with like a homemade Arabic food that was professors from China. I mean I'm eating food from all of the world and it saved my life because now there was a language that I could understand. I noticed pretty early on in my career I could create a dish that would make you feel whatever I wanted you to feel. I call it menu profiling. I did a 10 course dinner on the beginning, middle and end of a 10-year love affair. I did these little liquid vials. One was the flavor of disappointment. That one was an interesting night. Everyone was like why would I want to taste disappointment? And I was like oh my god disappointment is delicious. I found the flavor of perfection. Perfection is blood orange. That tartness from the citrus is almost perfect but it has no earth element. Uganda vanilla. Pools you into the ground caramelized sugar. The first flavor that we experience as an infant is sweet. That's what gives us that desire to eat and it surrounds all of those flavors and as it warms with the temperature and the mouth all of those flavors kind of move and dance along within that and as it falls cream is going to be the first thing to hit the palate holding it in place. So I took out the cream. The flavor that you're going to be left with is fleeting. Comes in and out. You're constantly looking for the solution. I don't experience rainbows in the same way other people do it all. I look at colors and they resonate a frequency that I can then translate into taste. Okay, I'm hoping that you'll be able to hear me. I'm driving so hopefully the sound of the road isn't going to be too obnoxious. Probably easier just to say red tastes like jerrys. With blue tastes like blueberries but that is it true. It tastes like the water in the air. It tastes like the minerals coming up from the ground. Fresh mint. It's crushed in your hand. The rust and the iron. The rain falling outside. Comfort that's found a cup of tea. It was made over the fire. The soil like sweets made by your grandmother's hands. A night sky where you can see Venus positioned perfectly next to the moon and your hope tongue is illuminated. Rainbows taste like hope. And I think that each individual rainbow is as unique as we are. It is as unique as life itself. But the big thing that happens to the space of this rainbow happening is that humans change. Every person who looks at a rainbow their entire energy shifts. They become different. It's less about colors themselves and more about the experience collectively when a rainbow is present. In that moment they are aware whether they're consciously thinking God or the universe or whatever. There is a part of them that becomes aware and receptive to magic, this intelligence that exists in everything. Rainbow it folks all. They change. In that emanates out. They become illuminated and so that just permeates through everything that's around them. And when we're talking about how could you make that into a dish? I have to admit that's a pretty tall order and I actually haven't attempted that before. It's funny. I experience it like that but I never really told anyone. I never actually said that out loud. I think what Tariya's experiencing here is another facet of all, self-transcendence. That sense of being lifted out of the individual experience and tapping into something much bigger than ourselves. As somebody who's question, they obviously have additional meaning for me because they're related to the story of Noah and New Life and New Beginnings. And so as a result of that, one of the things about rainbows that really sticks in my mind is when we were sort of coming out of the worst phase of the first lockdown, there was a huge rainbow across a huge amount of manhead. You could see it across the allotments in the distance. You could see it over our houses and lots of friends from all different parts of manhead were sharing pictures of this rainbow. And it just really kind of symbolised for lots of people I think that we were out of the worst of it and we could look forward to the future and sort of sort of shivers down my spine. And I know for a lot of people, they found it very emotional seeing that rainbow because it kind of stayed for a really long time. And obviously during lockdown, the rainbow symbol of all the amazing work that NHS had been doing and the rainbow symbol in general had been used a lot for all the incredible people like the doctors and nurses and post office workers and lots of other people on the front line. And so that rainbow just really resonated. As a healthcare worker myself, the new meaning that a rainbow took on during the height of the pandemic is one that will likely never fade. Like the pride flag before it, I appreciated the solidarity it represented for key workers. That symbol of having each other's backs made a massive difference in a really really difficult time. We were driving from Devon to Bath to see our friends and the drive was really difficult. There was adventure, rain, loads of spray on the motorway. We were probably took three hours together but we also had a very cranky toddler with us who skipped a nap over those on snacks. We arrived at this pub, quite hungry, sat down, see our friends, toddler didn't want to eat his dinner, there's that throwing food on the floor, screaming, sugar from the juice that we gave him without it to kick in. Quite the difficult situation where you can't really hear your thoughts, you're trying to catch up with your friends but then your attention fully focused on an overstimulated child. The anger at the time felt really uncontrollable. "I'm so jealous of all these parents who seemed to navigate through some of these moments but I also felt really guilty. Why am I feeling so angry? It must be damaged in my childhood. The trauma must be coming out. I felt pressure of not having to show how angry I was. The fake smile so that my son doesn't sense that I'm angry at him. I just remember walking over to the toilet and seeing this huge window facing this very beautiful valley. The rain has already moved away and the dark rainy clouds were sort of in the distance and this beam of beautiful sunlight just shone through and this rainbow just starts to appear in front of my eyes. It almost felt a bit surreal but I just sat there to watch the rainbow become bigger. It was really magical, very calming. Everything just stood still as if the clock had stopped. And I felt this huge sense of gratitude. Other people watching this rainbow might have really serious problems, a lot more serious than a toddler shouting in a car. It really made me think how small this moment of anger was. I have the chance to repair myself. If I've caused any damage to others, I can repair that too. I gave my son a big cuddle and tore to my love him and apologized to him if I shouted at him. Whenever I feel like my patience is running low, I'll just close my eyes, take deep breaths and take myself back to that moment. Often is that hardship. This is DACA-KELT, a world-renowned or expert, and psychologist. You know, the United States, 11 to 15, 20 percent of people are impoverished. There are a lot of barriers to the good life, if you will. But this is where experience and science are useful. Scientifically Paul Piffishone with Jake Moscoitz, "Provlage, wealth, resources negatively correlates with the regular experience of all. The more privilege I have, the less awe I feel on a regular basis. The less privilege, the less money I have, the more I feel awe regularly." That's remarkable. And I think in part it ties into this idea that it's about grappling with mystery and the end of life and struggle and trauma. So point one, that's a finding you can take to the bank. As the data suggests, you don't need money. You don't need to get into a car or plane. You don't need a special training to find awe. It's a very deep human instinct to find awe. One thing you can do is you can fill out self-apport measures. In the Shioda, created a dispositional positive emotion scale, check that out. David Yaden, one of the most important young awe scientists, has a measure of awe. Excuse the interruption, Dacca. I just want to say I'll link to every one of those studies in the show notes, as you were. But I would encourage a less measurement focused, personal inquiry alongside the measures. You know, when I bumped into those eight wonders of life that bring us awe around the world, right? Moral beauty, nature, collective effervescence, music, art, spirituality or contemplation, big ideas, life and death. I thought about those and I was actually going through a very hard time of my life grieving the loss of my younger brother, who was my companion in awe. I was anxious, panicky, not sleeping, probably. I don't get depressed because I'm wired up. I said, just in a tough state, as hard as I'd ever been, I did an audit and I said, I can't find awe in anything that used to bring awe to me. What I did is I did an awe audit, an audit. And what I was like, I was like, wow, who are the people who are people of moral beauty to me? And I spent time around them because I wasn't doing it. How do I get out in nature every day? I did it. I did it on walks. How do I find collective movement? I did things. I went to events. I, you know, I chanted. How do I find music? I went to unusual music events that were not my forte. I went to museums and just watched things and looked for visual design. I did some deeper meditation. I thought about life and death and I just reflected on it. I did the awe audit. I scored zero at the start and now it is very prominent in my life. It is something you can cultivate. The task of life and the task of human evolution and the task of individual well-being is to connect to things that are larger than the self. And I think that's what awe does is it opens your mind and it says, there are so many large systems around you. We have to connect to communities. We have to connect to ecosystems. We have to connect to cultural systems. Aw, is our pathway, our conduit to finding those things that really will bring us that kind of meaning. So find the larger things in life that give you goosebumps and go after those with force and you'll be okay. At the beginning of this episode and throughout it in fact, we've heard about the impulse so many of us have to point out a rainbow or take a picture and share it with someone we love. And so it feels right to complete this arc with this little treasure. A rainbow is so compelling that 51 million of us around the world have taken the time to pass it on. That's my brother, Paul, who many knew as the double giant rainbow guy or bear. His story is inspiring and most don't know the whole story. When that double giant rainbow hit, he was an empty nester very lonely. His kids had gone away to opt college. Double rainbow all the way across the sky. His weight had ballooned up to 436 pounds. Oh my God, it's so bright and vivid. He had broken an ankle, his back was fused from carrying all that weight and so he just lived in a lot of pain. That video sat for six months on YouTube and then Jimmy Kimmel tweeted it and it went super viral. So beautiful. And what happened after that was just pure magic. That double rainbow flipped his life on its head. He made a commercial with Jennifer Aniston, filmed something with Snoop Dogg. He traveled the world, was invited to parties. He was just treated like a rock star and people would recognize him and he just ate it up. He loved it. I'm grateful that all happened for him. He wanted to live again. When he finally passed, he was ready. I know he didn't want to leave the party, but he was in so much pain. He had made a recording for his children saying that he was tired and ready to go. He didn't want anyone knowing that he had passed and I think it was because he loved living so much. He loved living through his five senses and he savored it. A hell-dove coming onto the page after his passing because when this initially went viral, there were many, many negative comments and as a sister, it was really hard not to take it personal. Now I see only beautiful comments. It warms my heart to see he has such a positive impact on the world. It's comforting. Our experience of rainbows is unique. Literally actually, we all see our personal rainbow because of the exact position of where we're standing. Plus, we all interpret it differently. Yet our experience is underpinned by our biological and social makeup, by the emotions it can generate like awe and wonder. By the way, it engages us, drawing our eye, relaxing us and taking us out of our individual microcosms into a larger sense of connection. We're sure we're not alone. What is this? Oh my god. It's so bright. Oh my god. Thank you for choosing to give tiny human things your attention. It is after all these days one of our most precious assets. Head over to the link in our show notes to see photos from Erin, papers from Dacca and his colleagues in awe and of course, thank you to our tiny human community. Kate, Sissy, Polly, Bing, Chris, Verena and everyone else who sent in voice notes. And of course, thank you to Paul Vasquez for giving us the first viral rainbow and his sister angel for sharing his story. Thank you also to the John Templeton Foundation for sharing their Dacca Keltner interview with us. Their Templeton ideas podcast is so very good. And this is of course our pilot episode. So if you want to hear more, let us know in the ratings and review for pilot season. Your support, however it looks, will help us make more. Like our next episode, which will be all about people watching. role by stealing the mannerisms of this. I rate woman times watching it and I'll be so. In the meantime you can give your tiny human things a moment to sparkle under our little audio microscope. Just send them my way to Lily L.I. double L.I. at lilycouper.co.uk. Tiny human things was presented by me yeah you guessed it Lily Coofer and was produced by Scenery Studios. See you soon.