March 30, 2020 • 44 mins
It’s hard to imagine how anyone looked cool before the invention of sunglasses, but just when did humans pop their first pair of shades? In this episode of Invention, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss everything from the blinding white hell of arctic wastes to the blood-soaked spectacle of gladiatorial combat. (Originally published 1/7/2019)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you a classic
episode of Invention. This one originally published on January seven, nineteen,
and it's about sunglasses. That's right. Yeah, this is a
pretty fun one because sunglasses are one of those inventions
that it's easy to take for granted, and it's easy
to assume that it's tied pretty much to the modern age.
(00:29):
But y as we get into here, that's not quite
the case. Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert, what kind of sunglasses
do you wear? Well? Currently, uh, my son is six
(00:51):
years old, so I've been going through a spell here
where I can really only wear whatever kind of semi
garbage swag sunglasses has come my way, you know, with
various brand names plastered to the side of them, because inevitably,
especially when he was younger, my son would have to
get his hands on whatever kind of sunglasses I had
in the car. So the sunglasses get smudged, sunglasses get
(01:15):
scratched up, sunglasses get broken or just lost. And I
was pretty good at losing sunglasses even before he came
into my life. Uh So, I'm hoping that I'm working
up to very soon reaching that point where I can
actually buy a decent pair of sunglasses that will protect
my eyes. Did you ever actually wear those company sunglasses
we got? I have, like them like fold in half
(01:39):
at the nose. Yeah, I I got those immediately. Mainly
I I thought to myself, this is a great decoy
brand because my son is gonna love like the Transformer
s qualities of these sunglasses here break that one. Yeah,
But I've ended up wearing them around anyway. So that's
my story. Hopefully, by the time I'm ready to actually
get some decent sunglasses, we'll have some like Back to
(01:59):
the Future two sunglasses, you know, like the ones that
you've got as a prize uh Pizza Hut back in
the day when that film first came out. Except now
these will be legit future sunglasses. You know. I was
trying to think before we decided to do this episode,
our sunglasses an invention or not? Did they count? Yeah?
They count? I guess everything is an invention. Were we
(02:20):
born with sunglasses? Well we'll get into that, but yeah,
it is difficult for us to imagine a time before sunglasses.
How did Corey Hart keep track of the visions in
his eyes? I don't know. How did rowdy Roddy Piper
see through the alien conspiracy? I guess I don't know.
He didn't how to terminate or cover up his eye damage.
That's a good point, bro, Really, how did anyone ever
(02:42):
in the history of Earth managed to look cool at
any given moment, much less shade their eyes from the
vicious light of day. It's already telling that all the
examples you point to our cultural ones you're pointing, You're
pointing to movies and stuff, rather than talking about how
would I get through my life without sunglasses? Well, that
this is to be an important part of just the
iconography of the sunglasses, and that will be more important
(03:04):
later on in our discussion, but in their their psychological
effects example in that, but initially here you know, we're
we're we're complicating the purpose of the sunglasses, babe by Basically,
the whole deal is the sun is bright. I disagree,
And while our eyelids do give us the ability to
manipulate the amount of sunlight hitting our eyeballs, it also
(03:25):
pays to have other options and certainly we have the
ability to look away from the sun, to hide from
the sun, or to raise a hand or a forearm
to block it. But that's dependent largely on say your environment.
Like some environments are much brighter than others. What if
you live in a place where, say it's springtime, and
you're in a place with snow cover. The sun can
(03:48):
be so bright in those cases because it's not only
coming from above, but reflecting off of the snow, that
you essentially cannot use your eyes in the environment, right,
because otherwise you can't just shade where hat you need
to wear like a hat with two bills right, one
on top, one at the bottom. Um, it's coming from
all directions, and you need to use your hands for
other things. You're an individual, will need to to hunt
(04:10):
or fish or craft, etcetera. You can't just go around
with your hands up all the time. Um. When I
when I think about the challenges of dealing with sunlight,
and I'm always forced to just think about how amazing
our eyelids are though for manipulating light well, and our
iris is of course they our pupils contract when there's
(04:31):
too much light, but there's a point at which they
can't contract anymore, and you have to depend on the eyelids.
One of one example I always go to is there's
a character in Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon and he
he winds up tortured by bandit flares and they slice
his eyelids off. They leave him for for dead in
(04:54):
the sun, and he's you know, half driven mad by
the whole whole ordeal but sick eyelids. Oh yeah, it
is a It is a sick, weird book. Um, I
love it. It's my favorite McMurtry book. But afterwards, this
character ends up constructing a pair of special sunglasses for
himself with these varying, um varying levels of darkness, so
(05:16):
that he can just click through them as he needs them,
depending on where he is, if he's a you know,
indoors outdoors, bright day, uh, you know, cloudy day, etcetera.
But I always come back to that because it's like, yeah,
have you had to recreate the functionality of your eyelids?
What kind of invention would you have to have to build?
You've got so many parts of your body that you
really don't appreciate but would if they were gone, right,
(05:39):
But enough about Larry McMurtry's cyborg westerns. Uh, let's let's
just get down to sunglasses. What is essential to a
modern pair of sunglasses? What do you what do you need?
Is we're sort of deconstructing the the invention. Well, you
need a frame to hold them over the eyes, and
you need lenses that will, in one way or another
filter the incoming line. They obviously can't be completely okay
(06:02):
if you need to be able to see through them,
but they also need to stop some amount of bad
stuff from getting in right. So, like from from a
material level, it seems pretty straightforward. Um, you know, glass
itself is a rather old invention. We could and we
can really revisit glass at some point in future episode.
But you find examples of this in ancient Mesopotamia. Uh.
(06:23):
Certainly crystals and other substances or were known to to
ancient people. So just the materials of say building something
out of six, we can all imagine the sort of
flint stones style uh, spectacles or sunglasses that one could
conceivably have. But invention is always about that moment where
someone actually puts materials together and and create something that
(06:46):
has not existed before. So we're forced to just to
ask that question, Well, where do we really see the
earliest indications of uh to all to a certain extent, spectacles.
We can't talk about sunglasses without talking about spectacles a
little bit. But we're mostly concerned with sunglasses in this
episode because they look cooler right focusing lenses. That that's
(07:06):
the story for another time, where I think we're dealing
with a somewhat simpler story right now. Yes, even though
sunglasses might not have become extremely popular around the world
until after spectacles were widely used. But it's really too
bad because they're they're they're sunglasses esfecially, there are modern
usage of them. They're they're they're really important. They really
protect us. Well, think about the sunglasses you wear as
(07:28):
a kind of radiation suit for your eyes. I think
on that one for a second. Try try to actually
cognize the fact that good old fashioned sunlight is literally
radiation from a star. That's a phrase that always echoes
in my mind when it's really beaten down on my head.
Um and a good pair of sunglasses should do multiple
things right. They should decrease the intensity of the light
(07:50):
reaching your eyes. So if it's a bright, shining day,
or there's glare off of water or off of a
reflective surface or something. You need light to reach your
eyes in order to see, but you don't need so
much of it. And when the number of lumens in
your surroundings exceed what your eyes need in order to see,
your iris muscles contract. They shrink your pupil the shutter
(08:10):
of your eye, and that admits less in. But eventually
your pupils can't contract anymore, and then you have to
try to limit more light by squinting your eyelids, but
eventually you run into problems there. Right, sometimes it's so
bright that squinting becomes difficult, or you know you you
you're squinting so much you want to completely close your eyes. Now.
The other thing that's important for sunglasses to do is
(08:33):
decrease or eliminate ultra violet radiation when when that's coming
at your eyes now, there's really no benefit to getting
ultra violet radiation in your eyes. Whereas you need the
visible light that comes in from the sun in order
to see your surroundings, you don't really need UV light
at all. And so if sunglasses can reduce or even
completely eliminate U V exposure to your eyes. That's a
(08:55):
good thing, because your eyes can be injured by u
V exposure. But as we were saying earlier, also let's
not ignore the fact that sunglasses are a very profound
style choice and play a psychological and cultural role as well.
I think people often wear sunglasses as much for style
and psychological reasons as they do for uh, for reducing
glare and reducing UV exposure. In any event, you're gonna
(09:17):
want a good pair of sunglasses before you go out to, say,
a sporting event, right for a number of reasons, because
it's you're you're outdoors and it may be very bright. Uh.
And then it's also a social engagement. You know, you
wanna look cool, uh to the other fans or their
friends and family that have traveled there with you. In
the case of the dude, you can't go bowling without
(09:38):
sunglasses exactly. Uh. So, for our first historical journey, in
our attempt to understand sunglasses of old, let's go back
to the ancient Romans, Let's go to the Colosseum. Now,
this I think is actually going to be a false example,
but it's something that's interesting that sometimes gets cited in
(09:58):
this context. So we're gonna to our old friend Plenty
of the Elder first century CE Roman writer in his
Natural History translated by John Bostock. Plenty is discussing in
in book thirty seven of his Natural History, quote the
natural history of precious stones, and he comes to a
section on what he calls Smaragdes. I could have sworn
(10:19):
that was one of the one of the raith kings
in the Lord of the Rings the saga. But I
don't think so. Which anniversary gift is smar Agnes? I
can never remember. It's like it's like wood, but ivory Smaragdes. Right,
So samur agnes appears to be a term used for
green precious stones, for barrel stones like emerald, or for
(10:40):
jasper stones. Uh. And he so he seems to be
talking about emeralds. I think that's the way it's most
often translated. And Plenty dwells for a while on how
beautiful the emerald is and how RESTful to the eye,
how soothing to look upon quote. Even when the vision
has been fatigued with intently viewing other objects, it is
refreshed by being turned upon this stone. And lapidaries know
(11:03):
of nothing that is more gratefully soothing to the eyes.
It's soft green tints being wonderfully adapted for assuaging lassitude
when felt in those organs. By those organs, I think
he means eyes. But anyway, getting to to the part
that's often cited as as emerald sunglasses, but actually it
appears to not be, he writes, quote, when the surface
(11:25):
of the sami agnus is flat, it reflects the image
of objects in the same manner as a mirror. The
Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators
upon a Smaragdus upon a Smaragdus ban key here perhaps right.
So this would have been the first century CE, and
it's been cited as an early use of tinted transparencies
(11:46):
in the sun. The idea that Nero was maybe watching
the net fighters and the pursuers the secutors through Gym's
like lenses. So just I guess try to imagine he's
holding him rolds over his eyes and looking through them
like lenses to fill alter out some of the glare.
I think I also saw an artistic interpretation of this,
where you see the you know, the the portly emperor,
(12:08):
they're all in his finery, and he's holding up something
that looks like it's almost like opera uh binoculars, you know,
except it's just one emerald that he's holding up to
his eye. I'm thinking, with the green and that image
you're describing, this has got to be the inspiration for
David Lynch's depiction of Baron Harkonen in his adaptation of Dune.
(12:30):
Oh does he have an emerald? Well, everything's green around.
It's like his his rooms are green. He's got this
green environment. He's kind of a Nero like figure. But anyway,
the reason I said this was a false choice is
because it sounds to me like in the context Plenty
meant that Nero if this story is even true. Watched
the fights as reflected in the surface of the sami
(12:50):
agnous like a mirror, because he was just talking about
how it reflects like a mirror, and this would still
have probably some some like sun dampening effect. Right, just
tried imagine something reflected an emerald. It's not going to
be reflected in a blinding way. But so he's looking
at that since the emerald reflects less light than the
source provides. I was looking at a text titled the
(13:12):
Origin and Development of Spectacles by C. J. S. Thompson,
and this is an older Texas is from N seven,
but he also mentions the Nero story and he definitely
argued too that it was probably a case where Nero
just liked to watch the festivities colored green um which
you know via the Emerald, and that he gained no
sun shading from it. And yeah, I think my suspicion
(13:34):
here is that based on some recent research we did
for stuff to build your mind about gladiatorial combat for
our episode on the trident Um, you know there there
was if you're a fan of both the sort of
the sporting combat of of the gladiatorial spectacle as well
as like the drama and all these other ridiculous aspects
(13:56):
of it, you're gonna be you might you might gain
something from looking out at this combat between men dressed
as fish men using nautical weapons and then adding a
green overlay on that. UM. I could see where where
the green tent could perhaps be be helpful in that
that particular mode of entertainment. What you're saying is taking
(14:17):
on a decidedly Lynchian vibe. I I think I think
the connection is there now Thompson also points out that
while the Romans certainly suffered from eye problems and had
their own treatments for those ailments, there's no mention in
the work of say Celsus of artificial site aids. He
mentions that in writings prior to the thirteenth century, one
(14:39):
finds only occasional mentions of magnifying classes. So the use
of some sort of a lens to uh look at
finder details or perhaps you know, holding it up to
a text. But uh, you don't see mention of spectacles,
by the way. He also wrote that there was no
evidence that lenses were known to the ancient Egyptians or
the Hebrews. However, we do have a very early magnifying glass,
(15:03):
or depending on who you ask, perhaps a fire starting glass,
something that you used to refract the rays of the sun,
you know, to start a small fire. Uh, you know,
the kind of thing that children may sometimes do when
trying to burn ants, hopefully not to ants, hopefully not.
I mean, and you know one has to be careful,
but at any rate, this particular lens, the Nimrod lens,
(15:26):
is a three thousand year old crystal unearthed in eighteen
fifty by Austin Henry layered in the Syrian Palace of Nimrod. However,
we were also not sure. It might have simply been
a decorative element. It might not have been used. Uh.
And in any rate, it's not tinted. Okay, so we're
not talking about sunglasses, right, but we are talking about
like a crystal that may have been that people may
(15:48):
have looked through. And now you have to ask you
the question, like to what extent did they just look
through it because it was cool? Like what's more mystical
than holding up some sort of you know, gleaming crystal,
even if it's clear, and watching how the world is
distorted ever so slightly. Now, another thing that's worth noting
is that we've been talking about lenses and tinted lenses.
(16:10):
But obviously people came up with ways of protecting their
eyes from the sun, uh, having accessories beyond just their
hands and their eyelids and stuff to protect their eyes
from the sun long before there were there were tinted
glass or plastic lenses or anything, for example, hats and umbrellas.
That's obvious, yeah, But a much more ingenious and much
(16:32):
more interesting one is what I want to mention the Inuit,
and you pick people's of the northern circumpolar regions today Canada, Alaska,
Greenland and Russia have for centuries made these ingenious devices
known as snow goggles. Yes, and and I want to
come back to what we said earlier about lumens before
we get into this, because I think this really drives
home the necessity that led to the invention. Uh. So,
(16:57):
in an indoor environment, a humanist typically typically going to
encounter four hundred, six hundred lumens. That's the intensity of
the light um and our comfortable level four loomens, it's's
gonna go up to round thirty five hundred. If you're
in the shade on a sunny day, you're probably encountering
around a thousand lumens sunny day out on say a
(17:17):
highway or other reflective surface. You know, we all know
what it's like to drive on like a really sunny day.
You almost have to have shades. Uh, you're probably gonna
do with something like six thousand or more lumens. Uh.
Ten thousand lumens is the danger zone where you really
have to start worrying about the health of your eyes.
But a snow field on a sunny day, you're talking
twelve thousand plus lumens. And this is where you enter
(17:40):
the domain of potential snow blindness. Right and this is
of course because of the reflective power of white snow. Right. Uh,
you can create almost kind of double sun effects, sun
above and sun below being reflected back up. Whereas you know,
a normal patch of ground that's got say grass or
just open soil, might reflect about ten percent of the
(18:00):
UV ray is coming from the sun. Snow can reflect
not quite a hundred percent, but something like close to
a of it, nearly doubling your UV exposure. And so
if you are, say living in in northern regions where
there's a lot of snow cover, one thing that works
in your favor is that for much of the year,
the sun doesn't get super bright, right, it doesn't get
super high in the sky, doesn't get super direct, but
(18:23):
it will in certain parts of the year where there
is still a lot of snow cover on the ground.
So when you've got those things working together, say bright sun,
heavy snow cover, maybe in the springtime when the sun
is out high in the sky, proper eye protection is
incredibly important, and not just because it's difficult to hunt
or see where you're going when the sun's reflecting off
the white snow and there's blinding glare and everything. But
(18:45):
it's what you mentioned, there's this risk of snow blindness,
which is also known as a photocrotitis. So, as we
mentioned earlier, part of natural sunlight is ultra violet radiation,
and ultra violet radiation can damage the cornea. It can
damage the conjunctiva, the outer surfaces of the eye, just
like it can damage the skin. And this is why
photocharrotitis is often described as something like quote sunburn of
(19:07):
the eye. Symptoms include pain and feeling of having like
irritans or foreign bodies lodged in the eye, tearing up,
swelling and redness, light sensitivity, and sometimes even truly temporary
loss of vision. That's where the blindness comes from. And
so if you need to be doing stuff out in
the snow where the sun is bright, this this is
(19:28):
going to be a problem. And snow goggles fight this
problem with a very smart design. They're typically a carved frame,
usually made from animal bone or walrus tusks, sometimes from driftwood,
or sometimes even from like strange materials like I saw
one that I think was from baleen from a whale.
And uh, this frame fits tight over the eyes so
(19:49):
that light doesn't get in on the sides or the top,
and then light is allowed to enter through two very wide,
very narrow slots carved in the middle of the goggles,
which are sometimes darkened on the inside with a material
like soot. And these narrow slits allow the person wearing
them to see without exposing their eyes to too much
glare or UV radiation. And some alternate versions also have
(20:13):
have multiple slits more like like shutter shades or Venetian
blinds or something. They're not unlike the sort of novelty
plastic nineteen eighties sunglasses you know where there where you
just had you had no glass, no lens, shutters, these slits, yes,
so shutter shapes, which yeah, you look at the especially
the nineteen eighties versions of these, and it's easy to
(20:34):
just think, this is ridiculous. This is the this is
the sunglasses, this is eye wear. Is a purely decorative element,
and to a certain extent is true. But they do
have a certain functionality as well. Yeah, and in many
ways a highly effective functionality. I mean this, if you
don't have tinted glass to work with. This is a
genius design. Yeah, and and the necessity that led to
(20:56):
it like like this would this would be the kind
of environment that would necessitate sunglasses, UM in a way
that other parts of the world did not. All right, Well,
on that note, let's take a quick break, and when
we come back, we'll discuss some more curios from the
UH the history of invention UH in regards to the sunglasses.
(21:21):
All right, we're back now. Another frequently sided example of
of sunglasses or early sunglasses used UH involved them not
being used to protect against the sun or perhaps in
any way affect vision, but that they were allegedly used
just to hide your eyes from others. This is this
is a crucially important part of sunglasses. Could not ignore it.
(21:44):
I mean, think of all the times you've worn sunglasses.
And there are times where you wear them to protect
your eyes. There are times when you wear them to
to see better than high a light intensive environment. There
are times when you do it to look cool. But
there are times when say I've I've warned them, for instance,
on the train before UH, even when the train is underground,
(22:07):
because it kind of makes me a little invisible if
I have my sunglasses on, my my earbuds in, then
I am like less visibly present. Well, you, it means
you can look around the world around you without ever
unequivocally being caught looking at someone or something. It's a
(22:27):
natural human tendency to want to look around and see
who's around you. Like, if you get caught looking at somebody,
that's always awkward, especially if you've got some kind of
social anxiety. You don't you don't want to like make
that eye contact and be like, oh, we just both
looked at each other at the same time, right, And
if you're on the train, sometimes you need to look
at the weird person on the train. And if you're
not wearing sunglasses and you're doing this, that weird person
(22:49):
might be you. It's just a great solution for everybody involved.
So multiple sources report that Chinese judges wore smokey courtz
glass is to hide their eye expressions from the court
during the thirteenth century, So this would have been during
the Song Dynasty through twelve seventy nine. So it's looking
(23:11):
around a little bit about this, and Harvard's came in
to wrote the following in nineteen thirty six in the
introduction of spectacles into China, which which deals um, you know,
in large part was just spectacles in general. And if
we come back and discuss spectacles on the show specifically,
will probably return to this and and other sources. But
(23:34):
he cites Chinese writings that indicated that quote. Under the song,
dynasty judges in deciding cases in the court used rock
crystal or courts to read illegible legal documents in the sun.
So here the idea seems to be that they were
using them for magnification instead, or perhaps in addition to um,
(23:55):
shielding their eyes from other people at the court. Well,
it's specific fis in the sun, so that would seem
to make it sound like they were trying to shield
their eyes from from glare perhaps. So yeah, this one
this leaves me confused though as to like what was
actually going on or was it a case where, for instance,
these spectacles were arranged for reading in the sun or
(24:18):
for some sort of magnification purpose, but then they realized,
oh wait, these also shield our eyes and it makes
a judging a little easier, right, Well, you can absolutely
see how sunglasses would and we'll get more into the
psychological effects later on, but you can see how sunglasses
would be helpful if you were trying to give the
appearance of impartiality. You know, right, if you're a judge,
(24:40):
you want to hide any sign of your face showing
emotion and reaction to arguments or something like that. I'm
not sure that's the reasoning here, but you can see
how it could be right, and you still remain you
still retain a portion of your humanity in a way
that you wouldn't if you were wearing, say a hood
or an iron mask or some other um covering for
(25:02):
your face. Now, I looked at another text, Old Chinese
Spectacles by Auto Durham Rasmussen, and there's a discussion of
methods used to grind quote crystal smoky courts in a
variety of rose courts into lenses. And apparently Marco Polo
reported Chinese lenses in twelve seventy, stating that people used
(25:22):
lenses of quarts or semi precious stones to aid their site. Okay,
but here we're still talking about not just like casual
usage among the people, not fashion usage, but like specialized
cases and in some cases seeming to be some kind
of magnifier or site aid. Right, Yeah, And definitely like
a premium item that would be used by a specialist,
(25:45):
and in fact it does seem that also in like Europe,
in the United States, tinted glasses did exist some in
the past few centuries, but they were not widely used
and certainly not outside some kind of corrective or medical
content xtore specialized research context until the twentieth century. Right, Yeah,
I mean some classes have become such a a fashion
(26:08):
symbol it is easy to forget the necessity of them,
even if we're not dealing with just the basic ideas
of ooh, it's like a super bright day or you're
in the middle of a of a snow field. Um,
because tinted lenses can assist people with low vision, and
they're often prescribed to people with ocular diseases such as
age related macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, cataract retinopathy, cone dystrophy,
(26:34):
and oculo cutaneous albinism. Yeah, I've also seen references to
tinted lenses being recommended for, say, people who were undergoing
some of the symptoms of syphilis or something like that,
which makes me wonder if there's a connection with I
have to go to a movie in in Francis Ford
Coppola's Dracula, where Gary Oldman is Dracula. Where's those tinted
(26:56):
lenses in the I guess that's supposed to be the
nineteenth century in England. Yeah, well, I mean, as I've
I've ever read before. There are theories, and this is
again just a theory that that brom Stoker could have
had syphilis and that might have on some level informed
his writing of Dracula. I don't remember him mentioning tinted
(27:17):
spectacles in the book, did he? I do not recall
that being a detail of the book, but it's definitely
there in that movie anyway. It's it's interesting, it's an
interesting choice. Whyever Coppola did it? Um. But for modern sunglasses,
it's hard to say that they were actually exactly invented
at any particular time, because we as we mentioned, various
(27:37):
kinds of shaded or tinted lenses had existed for a
while for various specialized uses. It wasn't until the nineteen
twenties I think, really when commercial sunglasses and tinted goggles
for driving often really became popular. And then especially it
seems in the nineteen thirties when commercially produced sunglasses became
popular in the in the United States due to their
(27:59):
being a fashion item worn by the rich and the glamorous. Now,
if we want to focus briefly on the idea of
how sunglasses actually work, I feel like you can. You
can take a couple of approaches here. You can go
the very simple route, or you can go the incredibly
tedious route. Right, And how do we how do we
avoid those two? Well? We can. I think what we'll
(28:20):
do is we'll try to we'll try and hit the
high notes here and and just remind everybody, if you
want a more in depth discussion of how sunglasses work,
there's actually a how stuff works article, How sunglasses work.
Oddly enough, that's the title of the article. That's a
pretty good one. Yeah, and it's it's a pretty It
is a pretty good one. It takes you through a
lot of the more optical details, like essentially, to really
understand how sunglasses work, you needed like a full refresher
(28:43):
on how light works. And that's what this article provides.
And that's what we do not have time to provide
here today. But we talked about lumens already, and we've
talked about just basically how sunglasses modify incoming light to
your eyes. Now, there are different ways that different types
of sunglasses do that, right, modern sunglasses, especially depending on
(29:03):
a number of different methods. There's tinting, polarization, photochromic lenses,
there's mirror mirroring, scratch resistant coading, anti reflective coding, and
UV coding. Tinting, though, is largely what we're talking about here, uh,
and it's certainly key to the older methods of LEMBS
based shades. Gray tint is generally popular because gray tint
(29:24):
reduces the overall amount of brightness with the least amount
of color distortion. Because this is this is actually a
really interesting thing to to read up on, because when
you think about the color of shades, it's easy to
just think that it's just purely, you know, a fashion choice.
Am I gonna have brown? Am I gonna maybe a
mood choice? Like are you nero? And you want to
see the gladiator fights in green? Because you like green? Yeah?
(29:48):
Maybe I like rose rose tinted glasses. There's actually now
I'm remembering that I have been into various New Age
stores where they sell um glass is that are tinted
within and they come with like documentation to tell you
about how this particular tinant will affect your mood. Oh,
like in a like a magic stone power kind of way,
(30:09):
Like it has the powers of the supposed powers of
these crystals embedded in the glass. Oh. Yes, there's definitely
a new age crystal vibe to it. But also I
think maybe maybe there's a they were incorporating a little
bit of color theory as well. How do I get
diamond sunglasses? I just want to look through dark diamonds.
I want to say that, um, the dark crystal McDuck
(30:30):
had those real maybe, but well, I want to say
that there is like a like, apart from the cartoon
that showed when it played all the clips at the beginning,
that he had like diamonds stuck in his eyes. That's
what I'm thinking of, Okay, but I think, yeah, you
wouldn't want diamonds stuck in your eyes. That'd be pointy. Um.
But anyway, that the tacom here is that uh different color.
(30:50):
Different tinted lenses do different things. They interact with light
in different ways. So again gray um is not going
to really distort color all that much. Meanwhile, yellow or
gold tints reduced the amount of blue light while allowing
a larger percentage of other frequencies through. But they can
also create a kind of glare known as blue haze.
(31:11):
The yellow tint virtually eliminates the blue part of the
spectrum and has the effect of making everything bright and sharp.
Amber and brownish tints reduced glare, and they have molecules
that absorb higher frequency colors such as blue. In addition
to UV rays, Green tints on lenses filter some blue
light in reduced glare, and they offer the highest contrast
(31:34):
and greatest visual acuity. I guess that's the thing we
hadn't mentioned much already, is that certain types of light
filtering could actually sharpen images and reduced blur, such as
at the gladiatorial uh combat. You know, I don't know
if that worked well. No, that makes me think. You know,
there are these stories from the past of people going
(31:56):
to the movie theaters with sunglasses on. Right, you'd go
sit in the movies and watch through sunglasses. I wonder
if some people were trying to see a sharper image somehow. Now,
the oldest method of tinting depends on constant density, and
what does that mean? So this is a uniform tinting
throughout the lens. Nowadays, we'd have to wear those shades
over the uncomfortable three D glasses that were already wearing. Right,
(32:18):
let's say you're heading up a chain gang. That's that's
got Luke in it. Oh yeah, you're talking about old
cool hand Luke and the man with no eyes that
that chain gang guard where he's always wearing those those
perfectly mirrored shades and just seems to have no soul exactly.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, let's say
you're just trying to look super cool. I mean, there
(32:39):
are so many reasons people wear sunglasses that don't have
that much to do with blocking out the sunlight. Sunglasses,
I think have a profound psychological and cultural impact, and
we should talk about that when we come back. All right,
we're back, So we're talking about the legacy of sunglasses
(33:00):
of what are they doing psychologically and culturally. Now, one
thing is that human behavior and self image pretty clearly
are influenced by some interplay between our ongoing senses of
seeing and being seen. Right at any given time, you're
potentially seeing something and you're potentially being seen, and how
you feel about those things is going to affect your confidence,
(33:23):
your relation to other people, maybe your generosity. As just
one strange example, just just think about all the ways
that things feel different if you're viewing them simply through
some kind of barrier or screen, Like the way that
your relationship to the world changes when you're looking at
that world through a car windshield, You know what I mean?
(33:45):
How being being inside a car looking out at the
world fundamentally changes how you think about that world as
opposed to being in the exact same place but not
looking through the glass of a windshield. Yeah, Like, it's
an entirely different scenario if you're just, say, you know,
at a summer camp, just walking through the woods. But
then if you're wearing a hockey mask while doing so,
(34:05):
it changes everything. Well, no, it really does, I mean,
And it's not just the act of say, stalking through
the woods or the act of driving. It also seems
to be something about that barrier. And likewise, sunglasses can
be a kind of shield or barrier or blind that
has psychological effects on the person wearing them in the
person they interact with. Think again of the Chinese courtroom example.
(34:27):
You could see in a maybe in a maybe well
meaning or benevolent way that a judge hiding their face
could be a way to try to show impartiality or neutrality,
not show emotional reactions to arguments or statements or evidence.
On the other hand, you could say that a judge
covering their face could be some kind of power move, right.
(34:48):
You know, the judge says you will not have access
to my humanity. I will look upon you, but you
will not look upon me. And even though they're not
technically the judge that you know, we do see this
with our enforcement figures, right, and those chain gang figures
like the man with no eyes or the clearly the
cool hand Luke inspired character in the Cohen Brothers. Oh brother,
(35:09):
where art thou? Where you often see like fire reflected
in his dark shades, but never his eyes. And there
is actually research on the effects of sunglasses on human behavior. Yeah,
I was looking at a two thousand ten University of
Toronto study that found that people wearing sunglasses were less generous. Now,
this was via a very small experiment in which participants
(35:30):
were given a small amount of money to divvy up
between themselves and another individual, and um and and yeah,
they found that if you were wearing the sunglasses. You
were a little sting ere with the money. In a way,
It's like they could see less of you, and therefore
there was less to be lost in uh in in
in dishing out less money. Well, it's this feeling of
(35:51):
being inside and being disconnected. I think that has something
to do with that. I mean, it's the same way
that you are much. I mean, maybe not you, but
I would suspect you, like most people are just less
generous when thinking about the people around you when you're
in a car. You ever notice how like if you
if you were walking past somebody on the sidewalk and
(36:12):
they got in your way, you wouldn't You wouldn't be like,
what's wrong with you? You? You know, get out of
my way. But people in cars say stuff like that
all the time. I think it has something to do
with like looking out through that screen on the world.
It creates this barrier that undercuts your generosity and connection
with other people outside as humans and turns them more
into like obstacle stimuli. Yeah. Now, And another thing which
(36:37):
you mention is that this study does follow in the
tradition of Philippa Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. Which show
it's easy to forget because this is like the less
powerful detail of that study. But I mean, I think
I have read that there there are a lot of
people who look back on that study and think, you know,
we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. I think
(36:58):
I don't remember exactly what the critics sisms are now,
but I think it it is. It has been critically reappraised, right,
it is. It is a study that was that it
certainly has a has a long legacy onto itself. A
lot of people have revisited it that in cases have
had issues with it. But it did entail the use
of mirrored sunglasses. Those assigned to play the roles of
guards in that experiment were given sticks and sunglasses. And
(37:22):
basically the issue is that in that experiment, some people
were assigned to play the role of prisoners and some
people were assigned to play the role of guards, and
they found that even just being given these fake roles,
supposedly the people really took on their roles and like
the guards, became brutal. Well, you know, no matter what
we think about the Stanford Prison experiment, we do have
plenty of studies and clothed cognition in the ways that
(37:45):
various cultural uniforms change the way we think about ourselves.
Our own abilities are roles, and typically those experiments include
things like giving somebody a doctor's coat and a clipboard
but preases their sense of authority. Yeah, but in this
but you can back at Stanford prison experiment and say, well,
a stick and some sunglasses. This is kind of to
a certain extent that the uniform of the guard. That
(38:09):
is so how many how many cases are sunglasses a
part of a uniform official or unofficial that have certain
attributes that we perhaps take on when we wear them,
and we're thinking about that particular archetype. For instance, it
could be something like just the cool cat who's wearing shades. Uh,
you know, maybe we're just thinking about David Caruso putting
(38:30):
those those those deal with It shades on and saying
something cool. Well, that's another good question. Why are sunglasses
so generally perceived as cool? I've read about this, and
you know, one of the ideas out there is that
sunglasses are perceived as cool because, as we've been talking about,
they limit people's access to your emotions and to your reactions. Right,
(38:51):
they make you appear more static. When other people can't
read your expressions, you appear more you know, impassive, more confident,
and more cool. Yeah, more stoic. I mean, you know,
the old saying is whether the eyes that are mirror
into the soul. You know, the eyes. Our eyes are
an important part of how we communicate with people, and
they can there can be a certain vulnerability. Uh. There,
(39:15):
there are various ways that we can We can just
have like dumb staring eyes and if you're wearing shades,
nobody can see that confused look in your eyes. It's
a type of social psychological armor. Yeah, in some ways,
quite literally, right, Yeah, I mean they're a way to hide.
I was also looking at a two thousand thirteen article
published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
(39:36):
Psychological Science, and in this researchers from the Chinese University
of Hong Kong found that the participants who relived an
embarrassing experience tended to prefer large, dark tinted sunglasses, and
they also found that embarrassed participants expressed greater interest in
sunglasses as well as restorative face creams. So again, they're
(39:57):
like both exercises and covering your face with some thing. Um. Now,
the study was conducted with only Chinese participants, so the
authors pointed out, you know, they're they're very likely going
to be certain cultural elements to to these test subjects
that wouldn't be president and other test subjects. Of course,
that's always the case. I mean a lot of studies
studies are just done on American college studies. There might
(40:17):
be cultural issues there as well, exactly. But but I
do feel like this in general, it does I think
it matches up with a lot of our experiences. Uh,
if if you're going on in public and you've been crying,
wearing sunglasses is the way to go. I mean, we've
all had situations too where you're just feeling maybe you're
just feeling a little shy or emotionally vulnerable. Putting on sunglasses,
(40:39):
even if your eyes are not puffy from tears, it's
a way of like disconnecting and feeling a little safer
and being just a little less up in the face
of the world. It's putting the screen up. Yeah. Now
I could be wrong about this, but I also feel
like that there's perhaps some interesting connection between our preference
for sunglasses and the way that we experience so much
(41:00):
of our lives through screen devices. Now you know that
that the sunglasses introduced this idea of looking at the
world through a kind of barrier or screen, and we're
constantly doing now social interactions on phones, on computers, on
devices where we're also interacting with the world through a screen.
I don't know if there's anything interesting to tease out there,
(41:21):
but it feels it feels right to me. Huh, you know,
I was just thinking of another thing. Have you ever
encountered somebody internally? We're talking about people we don't know
that well, or even celebrities, but people who never see
without their shades, And then when you finally do, it's
a little unnerving because you're like, oh, is that what
your eyes look like? It's like seeing kiss without their makeup. Yeah, exactly.
(41:42):
Becomes such a part of their identity, you know, um,
but it also, you're their identity becomes this slightly less
human thing. You know. There's like the stoic eyed, dark
eyed U country music star. And then if you remove them,
you're like, who's that guy? Who is the one who
always wore sunglasses? Was it Roy or person? Did he
always have sunglasses on? Yes? I believe he did. Another
(42:04):
one is Hank Williams Jr. Oh No of sunglasses. But
I believe that was, if i'm if I'm if memory
serves me correctly, part of that was due to an
injury he's sustained as well. Yeah. Well, I think another
way that sunglasses lend a sense of coolness and maybe
even celebrity or glamor to people is that they increase
a sense of mystery, Right, that's sort of what you're
(42:25):
getting at here. Well, yeah, because of the other side,
what do their eyes look like? What is it like
to have a personal connection with this person? I don't
even I don't even know who dare stares into the
eyes of Bosephis. It's like Medusa. Yeah, um. I Speaking
of psychology and sunglasses, I also read a two fourteen
University of Sienna study Sienna in Italy, and they made
(42:47):
a connection between panic attacks, specifically panic disorders in fear
of bright lights. And so people who experience uh, panic
attacks and and and and have a panic disorder, they said,
off and find come for in the use of sunglasses.
That's interesting. I wonder what the wonder what the causal
ordering there is? Is it like they find comfort in
(43:08):
sunglasses because they're afraid of bright lights, or they're afraid
of bright lights because they find comfort in sunglasses. Yeah,
that's a good point because yeah, there's so many, now
that we've discussed all these various, uh, just psychological elements
that could be in play, from the unclothed cognition to
even just personal identity. Like if you wear sunglasses so
much that they are just a part of who you are,
(43:30):
then it makes sense that you would feel naked without them.
Maybe you end up just wearing your sunglasses at night,
much like Corey Hart did. Are you lonely just like me? Mercy?
All right? So there you have it. Uh, that is
the episode of Invention for this week. We do hope
that you will check out Invention pod dot com. That
(43:52):
is where you'll find uh the existing episodes of the
Invention Podcast. You'll also find links out to our social
media accounts, and if you want to talk about this
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is where we are known to hang out and discuss
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But we're also
(44:12):
happy to talk about episodes of Invention. Huge Thanks as
always to Scott Benjamin for research assistance on this show,
and to our excellent audio producer Tory Harrison. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you a classic
episode of Invention. This one originally published on January seven, nineteen,
and it's about sunglasses. That's right. Yeah, this is a
pretty fun one because sunglasses are one of those inventions
that it's easy to take for granted, and it's easy
to assume that it's tied pretty much to the modern age.
(00:29):
But y as we get into here, that's not quite
the case. Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert, what kind of sunglasses
do you wear? Well? Currently, uh, my son is six
(00:51):
years old, so I've been going through a spell here
where I can really only wear whatever kind of semi
garbage swag sunglasses has come my way, you know, with
various brand names plastered to the side of them, because inevitably,
especially when he was younger, my son would have to
get his hands on whatever kind of sunglasses I had
in the car. So the sunglasses get smudged, sunglasses get
(01:15):
scratched up, sunglasses get broken or just lost. And I
was pretty good at losing sunglasses even before he came
into my life. Uh So, I'm hoping that I'm working
up to very soon reaching that point where I can
actually buy a decent pair of sunglasses that will protect
my eyes. Did you ever actually wear those company sunglasses
we got? I have, like them like fold in half
(01:39):
at the nose. Yeah, I I got those immediately. Mainly
I I thought to myself, this is a great decoy
brand because my son is gonna love like the Transformer
s qualities of these sunglasses here break that one. Yeah,
But I've ended up wearing them around anyway. So that's
my story. Hopefully, by the time I'm ready to actually
get some decent sunglasses, we'll have some like Back to
(01:59):
the Future two sunglasses, you know, like the ones that
you've got as a prize uh Pizza Hut back in
the day when that film first came out. Except now
these will be legit future sunglasses. You know. I was
trying to think before we decided to do this episode,
our sunglasses an invention or not? Did they count? Yeah?
They count? I guess everything is an invention. Were we
(02:20):
born with sunglasses? Well we'll get into that, but yeah,
it is difficult for us to imagine a time before sunglasses.
How did Corey Hart keep track of the visions in
his eyes? I don't know. How did rowdy Roddy Piper
see through the alien conspiracy? I guess I don't know.
He didn't how to terminate or cover up his eye damage.
That's a good point, bro, Really, how did anyone ever
(02:42):
in the history of Earth managed to look cool at
any given moment, much less shade their eyes from the
vicious light of day. It's already telling that all the
examples you point to our cultural ones you're pointing, You're
pointing to movies and stuff, rather than talking about how
would I get through my life without sunglasses? Well, that
this is to be an important part of just the
iconography of the sunglasses, and that will be more important
(03:04):
later on in our discussion, but in their their psychological
effects example in that, but initially here you know, we're
we're we're complicating the purpose of the sunglasses, babe by Basically,
the whole deal is the sun is bright. I disagree,
And while our eyelids do give us the ability to
manipulate the amount of sunlight hitting our eyeballs, it also
(03:25):
pays to have other options and certainly we have the
ability to look away from the sun, to hide from
the sun, or to raise a hand or a forearm
to block it. But that's dependent largely on say your environment.
Like some environments are much brighter than others. What if
you live in a place where, say it's springtime, and
you're in a place with snow cover. The sun can
(03:48):
be so bright in those cases because it's not only
coming from above, but reflecting off of the snow, that
you essentially cannot use your eyes in the environment, right,
because otherwise you can't just shade where hat you need
to wear like a hat with two bills right, one
on top, one at the bottom. Um, it's coming from
all directions, and you need to use your hands for
other things. You're an individual, will need to to hunt
(04:10):
or fish or craft, etcetera. You can't just go around
with your hands up all the time. Um. When I
when I think about the challenges of dealing with sunlight,
and I'm always forced to just think about how amazing
our eyelids are though for manipulating light well, and our
iris is of course they our pupils contract when there's
(04:31):
too much light, but there's a point at which they
can't contract anymore, and you have to depend on the eyelids.
One of one example I always go to is there's
a character in Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon and he
he winds up tortured by bandit flares and they slice
his eyelids off. They leave him for for dead in
(04:54):
the sun, and he's you know, half driven mad by
the whole whole ordeal but sick eyelids. Oh yeah, it
is a It is a sick, weird book. Um, I
love it. It's my favorite McMurtry book. But afterwards, this
character ends up constructing a pair of special sunglasses for
himself with these varying, um varying levels of darkness, so
(05:16):
that he can just click through them as he needs them,
depending on where he is, if he's a you know,
indoors outdoors, bright day, uh, you know, cloudy day, etcetera.
But I always come back to that because it's like, yeah,
have you had to recreate the functionality of your eyelids?
What kind of invention would you have to have to build?
You've got so many parts of your body that you
really don't appreciate but would if they were gone, right,
(05:39):
But enough about Larry McMurtry's cyborg westerns. Uh, let's let's
just get down to sunglasses. What is essential to a
modern pair of sunglasses? What do you what do you need?
Is we're sort of deconstructing the the invention. Well, you
need a frame to hold them over the eyes, and
you need lenses that will, in one way or another
filter the incoming line. They obviously can't be completely okay
(06:02):
if you need to be able to see through them,
but they also need to stop some amount of bad
stuff from getting in right. So, like from from a
material level, it seems pretty straightforward. Um, you know, glass
itself is a rather old invention. We could and we
can really revisit glass at some point in future episode.
But you find examples of this in ancient Mesopotamia. Uh.
(06:23):
Certainly crystals and other substances or were known to to
ancient people. So just the materials of say building something
out of six, we can all imagine the sort of
flint stones style uh, spectacles or sunglasses that one could
conceivably have. But invention is always about that moment where
someone actually puts materials together and and create something that
(06:46):
has not existed before. So we're forced to just to
ask that question, Well, where do we really see the
earliest indications of uh to all to a certain extent, spectacles.
We can't talk about sunglasses without talking about spectacles a
little bit. But we're mostly concerned with sunglasses in this
episode because they look cooler right focusing lenses. That that's
(07:06):
the story for another time, where I think we're dealing
with a somewhat simpler story right now. Yes, even though
sunglasses might not have become extremely popular around the world
until after spectacles were widely used. But it's really too
bad because they're they're they're sunglasses esfecially, there are modern
usage of them. They're they're they're really important. They really
protect us. Well, think about the sunglasses you wear as
(07:28):
a kind of radiation suit for your eyes. I think
on that one for a second. Try try to actually
cognize the fact that good old fashioned sunlight is literally
radiation from a star. That's a phrase that always echoes
in my mind when it's really beaten down on my head.
Um and a good pair of sunglasses should do multiple
things right. They should decrease the intensity of the light
(07:50):
reaching your eyes. So if it's a bright, shining day,
or there's glare off of water or off of a
reflective surface or something. You need light to reach your
eyes in order to see, but you don't need so
much of it. And when the number of lumens in
your surroundings exceed what your eyes need in order to see,
your iris muscles contract. They shrink your pupil the shutter
(08:10):
of your eye, and that admits less in. But eventually
your pupils can't contract anymore, and then you have to
try to limit more light by squinting your eyelids, but
eventually you run into problems there. Right, sometimes it's so
bright that squinting becomes difficult, or you know you you
you're squinting so much you want to completely close your eyes. Now.
The other thing that's important for sunglasses to do is
(08:33):
decrease or eliminate ultra violet radiation when when that's coming
at your eyes now, there's really no benefit to getting
ultra violet radiation in your eyes. Whereas you need the
visible light that comes in from the sun in order
to see your surroundings, you don't really need UV light
at all. And so if sunglasses can reduce or even
completely eliminate U V exposure to your eyes. That's a
(08:55):
good thing, because your eyes can be injured by u
V exposure. But as we were saying earlier, also let's
not ignore the fact that sunglasses are a very profound
style choice and play a psychological and cultural role as well.
I think people often wear sunglasses as much for style
and psychological reasons as they do for uh, for reducing
glare and reducing UV exposure. In any event, you're gonna
(09:17):
want a good pair of sunglasses before you go out to, say,
a sporting event, right for a number of reasons, because
it's you're you're outdoors and it may be very bright. Uh.
And then it's also a social engagement. You know, you
wanna look cool, uh to the other fans or their
friends and family that have traveled there with you. In
the case of the dude, you can't go bowling without
(09:38):
sunglasses exactly. Uh. So, for our first historical journey, in
our attempt to understand sunglasses of old, let's go back
to the ancient Romans, Let's go to the Colosseum. Now,
this I think is actually going to be a false example,
but it's something that's interesting that sometimes gets cited in
(09:58):
this context. So we're gonna to our old friend Plenty
of the Elder first century CE Roman writer in his
Natural History translated by John Bostock. Plenty is discussing in
in book thirty seven of his Natural History, quote the
natural history of precious stones, and he comes to a
section on what he calls Smaragdes. I could have sworn
(10:19):
that was one of the one of the raith kings
in the Lord of the Rings the saga. But I
don't think so. Which anniversary gift is smar Agnes? I
can never remember. It's like it's like wood, but ivory Smaragdes. Right,
So samur agnes appears to be a term used for
green precious stones, for barrel stones like emerald, or for
(10:40):
jasper stones. Uh. And he so he seems to be
talking about emeralds. I think that's the way it's most
often translated. And Plenty dwells for a while on how
beautiful the emerald is and how RESTful to the eye,
how soothing to look upon quote. Even when the vision
has been fatigued with intently viewing other objects, it is
refreshed by being turned upon this stone. And lapidaries know
(11:03):
of nothing that is more gratefully soothing to the eyes.
It's soft green tints being wonderfully adapted for assuaging lassitude
when felt in those organs. By those organs, I think
he means eyes. But anyway, getting to to the part
that's often cited as as emerald sunglasses, but actually it
appears to not be, he writes, quote, when the surface
(11:25):
of the sami agnus is flat, it reflects the image
of objects in the same manner as a mirror. The
Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators
upon a Smaragdus upon a Smaragdus ban key here perhaps right.
So this would have been the first century CE, and
it's been cited as an early use of tinted transparencies
(11:46):
in the sun. The idea that Nero was maybe watching
the net fighters and the pursuers the secutors through Gym's
like lenses. So just I guess try to imagine he's
holding him rolds over his eyes and looking through them
like lenses to fill alter out some of the glare.
I think I also saw an artistic interpretation of this,
where you see the you know, the the portly emperor,
(12:08):
they're all in his finery, and he's holding up something
that looks like it's almost like opera uh binoculars, you know,
except it's just one emerald that he's holding up to
his eye. I'm thinking, with the green and that image
you're describing, this has got to be the inspiration for
David Lynch's depiction of Baron Harkonen in his adaptation of Dune.
(12:30):
Oh does he have an emerald? Well, everything's green around.
It's like his his rooms are green. He's got this
green environment. He's kind of a Nero like figure. But anyway,
the reason I said this was a false choice is
because it sounds to me like in the context Plenty
meant that Nero if this story is even true. Watched
the fights as reflected in the surface of the sami
(12:50):
agnous like a mirror, because he was just talking about
how it reflects like a mirror, and this would still
have probably some some like sun dampening effect. Right, just
tried imagine something reflected an emerald. It's not going to
be reflected in a blinding way. But so he's looking
at that since the emerald reflects less light than the
source provides. I was looking at a text titled the
(13:12):
Origin and Development of Spectacles by C. J. S. Thompson,
and this is an older Texas is from N seven,
but he also mentions the Nero story and he definitely
argued too that it was probably a case where Nero
just liked to watch the festivities colored green um which
you know via the Emerald, and that he gained no
sun shading from it. And yeah, I think my suspicion
(13:34):
here is that based on some recent research we did
for stuff to build your mind about gladiatorial combat for
our episode on the trident Um, you know there there
was if you're a fan of both the sort of
the sporting combat of of the gladiatorial spectacle as well
as like the drama and all these other ridiculous aspects
(13:56):
of it, you're gonna be you might you might gain
something from looking out at this combat between men dressed
as fish men using nautical weapons and then adding a
green overlay on that. UM. I could see where where
the green tent could perhaps be be helpful in that
that particular mode of entertainment. What you're saying is taking
(14:17):
on a decidedly Lynchian vibe. I I think I think
the connection is there now Thompson also points out that
while the Romans certainly suffered from eye problems and had
their own treatments for those ailments, there's no mention in
the work of say Celsus of artificial site aids. He
mentions that in writings prior to the thirteenth century, one
(14:39):
finds only occasional mentions of magnifying classes. So the use
of some sort of a lens to uh look at
finder details or perhaps you know, holding it up to
a text. But uh, you don't see mention of spectacles,
by the way. He also wrote that there was no
evidence that lenses were known to the ancient Egyptians or
the Hebrews. However, we do have a very early magnifying glass,
(15:03):
or depending on who you ask, perhaps a fire starting glass,
something that you used to refract the rays of the sun,
you know, to start a small fire. Uh, you know,
the kind of thing that children may sometimes do when
trying to burn ants, hopefully not to ants, hopefully not.
I mean, and you know one has to be careful,
but at any rate, this particular lens, the Nimrod lens,
(15:26):
is a three thousand year old crystal unearthed in eighteen
fifty by Austin Henry layered in the Syrian Palace of Nimrod. However,
we were also not sure. It might have simply been
a decorative element. It might not have been used. Uh.
And in any rate, it's not tinted. Okay, so we're
not talking about sunglasses, right, but we are talking about
like a crystal that may have been that people may
(15:48):
have looked through. And now you have to ask you
the question, like to what extent did they just look
through it because it was cool? Like what's more mystical
than holding up some sort of you know, gleaming crystal,
even if it's clear, and watching how the world is
distorted ever so slightly. Now, another thing that's worth noting
is that we've been talking about lenses and tinted lenses.
(16:10):
But obviously people came up with ways of protecting their
eyes from the sun, uh, having accessories beyond just their
hands and their eyelids and stuff to protect their eyes
from the sun long before there were there were tinted
glass or plastic lenses or anything, for example, hats and umbrellas.
That's obvious, yeah, But a much more ingenious and much
(16:32):
more interesting one is what I want to mention the Inuit,
and you pick people's of the northern circumpolar regions today Canada, Alaska,
Greenland and Russia have for centuries made these ingenious devices
known as snow goggles. Yes, and and I want to
come back to what we said earlier about lumens before
we get into this, because I think this really drives
home the necessity that led to the invention. Uh. So,
(16:57):
in an indoor environment, a humanist typically typically going to
encounter four hundred, six hundred lumens. That's the intensity of
the light um and our comfortable level four loomens, it's's
gonna go up to round thirty five hundred. If you're
in the shade on a sunny day, you're probably encountering
around a thousand lumens sunny day out on say a
(17:17):
highway or other reflective surface. You know, we all know
what it's like to drive on like a really sunny day.
You almost have to have shades. Uh, you're probably gonna
do with something like six thousand or more lumens. Uh.
Ten thousand lumens is the danger zone where you really
have to start worrying about the health of your eyes.
But a snow field on a sunny day, you're talking
twelve thousand plus lumens. And this is where you enter
(17:40):
the domain of potential snow blindness. Right and this is
of course because of the reflective power of white snow. Right. Uh,
you can create almost kind of double sun effects, sun
above and sun below being reflected back up. Whereas you know,
a normal patch of ground that's got say grass or
just open soil, might reflect about ten percent of the
(18:00):
UV ray is coming from the sun. Snow can reflect
not quite a hundred percent, but something like close to
a of it, nearly doubling your UV exposure. And so
if you are, say living in in northern regions where
there's a lot of snow cover, one thing that works
in your favor is that for much of the year,
the sun doesn't get super bright, right, it doesn't get
super high in the sky, doesn't get super direct, but
(18:23):
it will in certain parts of the year where there
is still a lot of snow cover on the ground.
So when you've got those things working together, say bright sun,
heavy snow cover, maybe in the springtime when the sun
is out high in the sky, proper eye protection is
incredibly important, and not just because it's difficult to hunt
or see where you're going when the sun's reflecting off
the white snow and there's blinding glare and everything. But
(18:45):
it's what you mentioned, there's this risk of snow blindness,
which is also known as a photocrotitis. So, as we
mentioned earlier, part of natural sunlight is ultra violet radiation,
and ultra violet radiation can damage the cornea. It can
damage the conjunctiva, the outer surfaces of the eye, just
like it can damage the skin. And this is why
photocharrotitis is often described as something like quote sunburn of
(19:07):
the eye. Symptoms include pain and feeling of having like
irritans or foreign bodies lodged in the eye, tearing up,
swelling and redness, light sensitivity, and sometimes even truly temporary
loss of vision. That's where the blindness comes from. And
so if you need to be doing stuff out in
the snow where the sun is bright, this this is
(19:28):
going to be a problem. And snow goggles fight this
problem with a very smart design. They're typically a carved frame,
usually made from animal bone or walrus tusks, sometimes from driftwood,
or sometimes even from like strange materials like I saw
one that I think was from baleen from a whale.
And uh, this frame fits tight over the eyes so
(19:49):
that light doesn't get in on the sides or the top,
and then light is allowed to enter through two very wide,
very narrow slots carved in the middle of the goggles,
which are sometimes darkened on the inside with a material
like soot. And these narrow slits allow the person wearing
them to see without exposing their eyes to too much
glare or UV radiation. And some alternate versions also have
(20:13):
have multiple slits more like like shutter shades or Venetian
blinds or something. They're not unlike the sort of novelty
plastic nineteen eighties sunglasses you know where there where you
just had you had no glass, no lens, shutters, these slits, yes,
so shutter shapes, which yeah, you look at the especially
the nineteen eighties versions of these, and it's easy to
(20:34):
just think, this is ridiculous. This is the this is
the sunglasses, this is eye wear. Is a purely decorative element,
and to a certain extent is true. But they do
have a certain functionality as well. Yeah, and in many
ways a highly effective functionality. I mean this, if you
don't have tinted glass to work with. This is a
genius design. Yeah, and and the necessity that led to
(20:56):
it like like this would this would be the kind
of environment that would necessitate sunglasses, UM in a way
that other parts of the world did not. All right, Well,
on that note, let's take a quick break, and when
we come back, we'll discuss some more curios from the
UH the history of invention UH in regards to the sunglasses.
(21:21):
All right, we're back now. Another frequently sided example of
of sunglasses or early sunglasses used UH involved them not
being used to protect against the sun or perhaps in
any way affect vision, but that they were allegedly used
just to hide your eyes from others. This is this
is a crucially important part of sunglasses. Could not ignore it.
(21:44):
I mean, think of all the times you've worn sunglasses.
And there are times where you wear them to protect
your eyes. There are times when you wear them to
to see better than high a light intensive environment. There
are times when you do it to look cool. But
there are times when say I've I've warned them, for instance,
on the train before UH, even when the train is underground,
(22:07):
because it kind of makes me a little invisible if
I have my sunglasses on, my my earbuds in, then
I am like less visibly present. Well, you, it means
you can look around the world around you without ever
unequivocally being caught looking at someone or something. It's a
(22:27):
natural human tendency to want to look around and see
who's around you. Like, if you get caught looking at somebody,
that's always awkward, especially if you've got some kind of
social anxiety. You don't you don't want to like make
that eye contact and be like, oh, we just both
looked at each other at the same time, right, And
if you're on the train, sometimes you need to look
at the weird person on the train. And if you're
not wearing sunglasses and you're doing this, that weird person
(22:49):
might be you. It's just a great solution for everybody involved.
So multiple sources report that Chinese judges wore smokey courtz
glass is to hide their eye expressions from the court
during the thirteenth century, So this would have been during
the Song Dynasty through twelve seventy nine. So it's looking
(23:11):
around a little bit about this, and Harvard's came in
to wrote the following in nineteen thirty six in the
introduction of spectacles into China, which which deals um, you know,
in large part was just spectacles in general. And if
we come back and discuss spectacles on the show specifically,
will probably return to this and and other sources. But
(23:34):
he cites Chinese writings that indicated that quote. Under the song,
dynasty judges in deciding cases in the court used rock
crystal or courts to read illegible legal documents in the sun.
So here the idea seems to be that they were
using them for magnification instead, or perhaps in addition to um,
(23:55):
shielding their eyes from other people at the court. Well,
it's specific fis in the sun, so that would seem
to make it sound like they were trying to shield
their eyes from from glare perhaps. So yeah, this one
this leaves me confused though as to like what was
actually going on or was it a case where, for instance,
these spectacles were arranged for reading in the sun or
(24:18):
for some sort of magnification purpose, but then they realized,
oh wait, these also shield our eyes and it makes
a judging a little easier, right, Well, you can absolutely
see how sunglasses would and we'll get more into the
psychological effects later on, but you can see how sunglasses
would be helpful if you were trying to give the
appearance of impartiality. You know, right, if you're a judge,
(24:40):
you want to hide any sign of your face showing
emotion and reaction to arguments or something like that. I'm
not sure that's the reasoning here, but you can see
how it could be right, and you still remain you
still retain a portion of your humanity in a way
that you wouldn't if you were wearing, say a hood
or an iron mask or some other um covering for
(25:02):
your face. Now, I looked at another text, Old Chinese
Spectacles by Auto Durham Rasmussen, and there's a discussion of
methods used to grind quote crystal smoky courts in a
variety of rose courts into lenses. And apparently Marco Polo
reported Chinese lenses in twelve seventy, stating that people used
(25:22):
lenses of quarts or semi precious stones to aid their site. Okay,
but here we're still talking about not just like casual
usage among the people, not fashion usage, but like specialized
cases and in some cases seeming to be some kind
of magnifier or site aid. Right, Yeah, And definitely like
a premium item that would be used by a specialist,
(25:45):
and in fact it does seem that also in like Europe,
in the United States, tinted glasses did exist some in
the past few centuries, but they were not widely used
and certainly not outside some kind of corrective or medical
content xtore specialized research context until the twentieth century. Right, Yeah,
I mean some classes have become such a a fashion
(26:08):
symbol it is easy to forget the necessity of them,
even if we're not dealing with just the basic ideas
of ooh, it's like a super bright day or you're
in the middle of a of a snow field. Um,
because tinted lenses can assist people with low vision, and
they're often prescribed to people with ocular diseases such as
age related macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, cataract retinopathy, cone dystrophy,
(26:34):
and oculo cutaneous albinism. Yeah, I've also seen references to
tinted lenses being recommended for, say, people who were undergoing
some of the symptoms of syphilis or something like that,
which makes me wonder if there's a connection with I
have to go to a movie in in Francis Ford
Coppola's Dracula, where Gary Oldman is Dracula. Where's those tinted
(26:56):
lenses in the I guess that's supposed to be the
nineteenth century in England. Yeah, well, I mean, as I've
I've ever read before. There are theories, and this is
again just a theory that that brom Stoker could have
had syphilis and that might have on some level informed
his writing of Dracula. I don't remember him mentioning tinted
(27:17):
spectacles in the book, did he? I do not recall
that being a detail of the book, but it's definitely
there in that movie anyway. It's it's interesting, it's an
interesting choice. Whyever Coppola did it? Um. But for modern sunglasses,
it's hard to say that they were actually exactly invented
at any particular time, because we as we mentioned, various
(27:37):
kinds of shaded or tinted lenses had existed for a
while for various specialized uses. It wasn't until the nineteen
twenties I think, really when commercial sunglasses and tinted goggles
for driving often really became popular. And then especially it
seems in the nineteen thirties when commercially produced sunglasses became
popular in the in the United States due to their
(27:59):
being a fashion item worn by the rich and the glamorous. Now,
if we want to focus briefly on the idea of
how sunglasses actually work, I feel like you can. You
can take a couple of approaches here. You can go
the very simple route, or you can go the incredibly
tedious route. Right, And how do we how do we
avoid those two? Well? We can. I think what we'll
(28:20):
do is we'll try to we'll try and hit the
high notes here and and just remind everybody, if you
want a more in depth discussion of how sunglasses work,
there's actually a how stuff works article, How sunglasses work.
Oddly enough, that's the title of the article. That's a
pretty good one. Yeah, and it's it's a pretty It
is a pretty good one. It takes you through a
lot of the more optical details, like essentially, to really
understand how sunglasses work, you needed like a full refresher
(28:43):
on how light works. And that's what this article provides.
And that's what we do not have time to provide
here today. But we talked about lumens already, and we've
talked about just basically how sunglasses modify incoming light to
your eyes. Now, there are different ways that different types
of sunglasses do that, right, modern sunglasses, especially depending on
(29:03):
a number of different methods. There's tinting, polarization, photochromic lenses,
there's mirror mirroring, scratch resistant coading, anti reflective coding, and
UV coding. Tinting, though, is largely what we're talking about here, uh,
and it's certainly key to the older methods of LEMBS
based shades. Gray tint is generally popular because gray tint
(29:24):
reduces the overall amount of brightness with the least amount
of color distortion. Because this is this is actually a
really interesting thing to to read up on, because when
you think about the color of shades, it's easy to
just think that it's just purely, you know, a fashion choice.
Am I gonna have brown? Am I gonna maybe a
mood choice? Like are you nero? And you want to
see the gladiator fights in green? Because you like green? Yeah?
(29:48):
Maybe I like rose rose tinted glasses. There's actually now
I'm remembering that I have been into various New Age
stores where they sell um glass is that are tinted
within and they come with like documentation to tell you
about how this particular tinant will affect your mood. Oh,
like in a like a magic stone power kind of way,
(30:09):
Like it has the powers of the supposed powers of
these crystals embedded in the glass. Oh. Yes, there's definitely
a new age crystal vibe to it. But also I
think maybe maybe there's a they were incorporating a little
bit of color theory as well. How do I get
diamond sunglasses? I just want to look through dark diamonds.
I want to say that, um, the dark crystal McDuck
(30:30):
had those real maybe, but well, I want to say
that there is like a like, apart from the cartoon
that showed when it played all the clips at the beginning,
that he had like diamonds stuck in his eyes. That's
what I'm thinking of, Okay, but I think, yeah, you
wouldn't want diamonds stuck in your eyes. That'd be pointy. Um.
But anyway, that the tacom here is that uh different color.
(30:50):
Different tinted lenses do different things. They interact with light
in different ways. So again gray um is not going
to really distort color all that much. Meanwhile, yellow or
gold tints reduced the amount of blue light while allowing
a larger percentage of other frequencies through. But they can
also create a kind of glare known as blue haze.
(31:11):
The yellow tint virtually eliminates the blue part of the
spectrum and has the effect of making everything bright and sharp.
Amber and brownish tints reduced glare, and they have molecules
that absorb higher frequency colors such as blue. In addition
to UV rays, Green tints on lenses filter some blue
light in reduced glare, and they offer the highest contrast
(31:34):
and greatest visual acuity. I guess that's the thing we
hadn't mentioned much already, is that certain types of light
filtering could actually sharpen images and reduced blur, such as
at the gladiatorial uh combat. You know, I don't know
if that worked well. No, that makes me think. You know,
there are these stories from the past of people going
(31:56):
to the movie theaters with sunglasses on. Right, you'd go
sit in the movies and watch through sunglasses. I wonder
if some people were trying to see a sharper image somehow. Now,
the oldest method of tinting depends on constant density, and
what does that mean? So this is a uniform tinting
throughout the lens. Nowadays, we'd have to wear those shades
over the uncomfortable three D glasses that were already wearing. Right,
(32:18):
let's say you're heading up a chain gang. That's that's
got Luke in it. Oh yeah, you're talking about old
cool hand Luke and the man with no eyes that
that chain gang guard where he's always wearing those those
perfectly mirrored shades and just seems to have no soul exactly.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, let's say
you're just trying to look super cool. I mean, there
(32:39):
are so many reasons people wear sunglasses that don't have
that much to do with blocking out the sunlight. Sunglasses,
I think have a profound psychological and cultural impact, and
we should talk about that when we come back. All right,
we're back, So we're talking about the legacy of sunglasses
(33:00):
of what are they doing psychologically and culturally. Now, one
thing is that human behavior and self image pretty clearly
are influenced by some interplay between our ongoing senses of
seeing and being seen. Right at any given time, you're
potentially seeing something and you're potentially being seen, and how
you feel about those things is going to affect your confidence,
(33:23):
your relation to other people, maybe your generosity. As just
one strange example, just just think about all the ways
that things feel different if you're viewing them simply through
some kind of barrier or screen, Like the way that
your relationship to the world changes when you're looking at
that world through a car windshield, You know what I mean?
(33:45):
How being being inside a car looking out at the
world fundamentally changes how you think about that world as
opposed to being in the exact same place but not
looking through the glass of a windshield. Yeah, Like, it's
an entirely different scenario if you're just, say, you know,
at a summer camp, just walking through the woods. But
then if you're wearing a hockey mask while doing so,
(34:05):
it changes everything. Well, no, it really does, I mean,
And it's not just the act of say, stalking through
the woods or the act of driving. It also seems
to be something about that barrier. And likewise, sunglasses can
be a kind of shield or barrier or blind that
has psychological effects on the person wearing them in the
person they interact with. Think again of the Chinese courtroom example.
(34:27):
You could see in a maybe in a maybe well
meaning or benevolent way that a judge hiding their face
could be a way to try to show impartiality or neutrality,
not show emotional reactions to arguments or statements or evidence.
On the other hand, you could say that a judge
covering their face could be some kind of power move, right.
(34:48):
You know, the judge says you will not have access
to my humanity. I will look upon you, but you
will not look upon me. And even though they're not
technically the judge that you know, we do see this
with our enforcement figures, right, and those chain gang figures
like the man with no eyes or the clearly the
cool hand Luke inspired character in the Cohen Brothers. Oh brother,
(35:09):
where art thou? Where you often see like fire reflected
in his dark shades, but never his eyes. And there
is actually research on the effects of sunglasses on human behavior. Yeah,
I was looking at a two thousand ten University of
Toronto study that found that people wearing sunglasses were less generous. Now,
this was via a very small experiment in which participants
(35:30):
were given a small amount of money to divvy up
between themselves and another individual, and um and and yeah,
they found that if you were wearing the sunglasses. You
were a little sting ere with the money. In a way,
It's like they could see less of you, and therefore
there was less to be lost in uh in in
in dishing out less money. Well, it's this feeling of
(35:51):
being inside and being disconnected. I think that has something
to do with that. I mean, it's the same way
that you are much. I mean, maybe not you, but
I would suspect you, like most people are just less
generous when thinking about the people around you when you're
in a car. You ever notice how like if you
if you were walking past somebody on the sidewalk and
(36:12):
they got in your way, you wouldn't You wouldn't be like,
what's wrong with you? You? You know, get out of
my way. But people in cars say stuff like that
all the time. I think it has something to do
with like looking out through that screen on the world.
It creates this barrier that undercuts your generosity and connection
with other people outside as humans and turns them more
into like obstacle stimuli. Yeah. Now, And another thing which
(36:37):
you mention is that this study does follow in the
tradition of Philippa Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. Which show
it's easy to forget because this is like the less
powerful detail of that study. But I mean, I think
I have read that there there are a lot of
people who look back on that study and think, you know,
we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. I think
(36:58):
I don't remember exactly what the critics sisms are now,
but I think it it is. It has been critically reappraised, right,
it is. It is a study that was that it
certainly has a has a long legacy onto itself. A
lot of people have revisited it that in cases have
had issues with it. But it did entail the use
of mirrored sunglasses. Those assigned to play the roles of
guards in that experiment were given sticks and sunglasses. And
(37:22):
basically the issue is that in that experiment, some people
were assigned to play the role of prisoners and some
people were assigned to play the role of guards, and
they found that even just being given these fake roles,
supposedly the people really took on their roles and like
the guards, became brutal. Well, you know, no matter what
we think about the Stanford Prison experiment, we do have
plenty of studies and clothed cognition in the ways that
(37:45):
various cultural uniforms change the way we think about ourselves.
Our own abilities are roles, and typically those experiments include
things like giving somebody a doctor's coat and a clipboard
but preases their sense of authority. Yeah, but in this
but you can back at Stanford prison experiment and say, well,
a stick and some sunglasses. This is kind of to
a certain extent that the uniform of the guard. That
(38:09):
is so how many how many cases are sunglasses a
part of a uniform official or unofficial that have certain
attributes that we perhaps take on when we wear them,
and we're thinking about that particular archetype. For instance, it
could be something like just the cool cat who's wearing shades. Uh,
you know, maybe we're just thinking about David Caruso putting
(38:30):
those those those deal with It shades on and saying
something cool. Well, that's another good question. Why are sunglasses
so generally perceived as cool? I've read about this, and
you know, one of the ideas out there is that
sunglasses are perceived as cool because, as we've been talking about,
they limit people's access to your emotions and to your reactions. Right,
(38:51):
they make you appear more static. When other people can't
read your expressions, you appear more you know, impassive, more confident,
and more cool. Yeah, more stoic. I mean, you know,
the old saying is whether the eyes that are mirror
into the soul. You know, the eyes. Our eyes are
an important part of how we communicate with people, and
they can there can be a certain vulnerability. Uh. There,
(39:15):
there are various ways that we can We can just
have like dumb staring eyes and if you're wearing shades,
nobody can see that confused look in your eyes. It's
a type of social psychological armor. Yeah, in some ways,
quite literally, right, Yeah, I mean they're a way to hide.
I was also looking at a two thousand thirteen article
published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
(39:36):
Psychological Science, and in this researchers from the Chinese University
of Hong Kong found that the participants who relived an
embarrassing experience tended to prefer large, dark tinted sunglasses, and
they also found that embarrassed participants expressed greater interest in
sunglasses as well as restorative face creams. So again, they're
(39:57):
like both exercises and covering your face with some thing. Um. Now,
the study was conducted with only Chinese participants, so the
authors pointed out, you know, they're they're very likely going
to be certain cultural elements to to these test subjects
that wouldn't be president and other test subjects. Of course,
that's always the case. I mean a lot of studies
studies are just done on American college studies. There might
(40:17):
be cultural issues there as well, exactly. But but I
do feel like this in general, it does I think
it matches up with a lot of our experiences. Uh,
if if you're going on in public and you've been crying,
wearing sunglasses is the way to go. I mean, we've
all had situations too where you're just feeling maybe you're
just feeling a little shy or emotionally vulnerable. Putting on sunglasses,
(40:39):
even if your eyes are not puffy from tears, it's
a way of like disconnecting and feeling a little safer
and being just a little less up in the face
of the world. It's putting the screen up. Yeah. Now
I could be wrong about this, but I also feel
like that there's perhaps some interesting connection between our preference
for sunglasses and the way that we experience so much
(41:00):
of our lives through screen devices. Now you know that
that the sunglasses introduced this idea of looking at the
world through a kind of barrier or screen, and we're
constantly doing now social interactions on phones, on computers, on
devices where we're also interacting with the world through a screen.
I don't know if there's anything interesting to tease out there,
(41:21):
but it feels it feels right to me. Huh, you know,
I was just thinking of another thing. Have you ever
encountered somebody internally? We're talking about people we don't know
that well, or even celebrities, but people who never see
without their shades, And then when you finally do, it's
a little unnerving because you're like, oh, is that what
your eyes look like? It's like seeing kiss without their makeup. Yeah, exactly.
(41:42):
Becomes such a part of their identity, you know, um,
but it also, you're their identity becomes this slightly less
human thing. You know. There's like the stoic eyed, dark
eyed U country music star. And then if you remove them,
you're like, who's that guy? Who is the one who
always wore sunglasses? Was it Roy or person? Did he
always have sunglasses on? Yes? I believe he did. Another
(42:04):
one is Hank Williams Jr. Oh No of sunglasses. But
I believe that was, if i'm if I'm if memory
serves me correctly, part of that was due to an
injury he's sustained as well. Yeah. Well, I think another
way that sunglasses lend a sense of coolness and maybe
even celebrity or glamor to people is that they increase
a sense of mystery, Right, that's sort of what you're
(42:25):
getting at here. Well, yeah, because of the other side,
what do their eyes look like? What is it like
to have a personal connection with this person? I don't
even I don't even know who dare stares into the
eyes of Bosephis. It's like Medusa. Yeah, um. I Speaking
of psychology and sunglasses, I also read a two fourteen
University of Sienna study Sienna in Italy, and they made
(42:47):
a connection between panic attacks, specifically panic disorders in fear
of bright lights. And so people who experience uh, panic
attacks and and and and have a panic disorder, they said,
off and find come for in the use of sunglasses.
That's interesting. I wonder what the wonder what the causal
ordering there is? Is it like they find comfort in
(43:08):
sunglasses because they're afraid of bright lights, or they're afraid
of bright lights because they find comfort in sunglasses. Yeah,
that's a good point because yeah, there's so many, now
that we've discussed all these various, uh, just psychological elements
that could be in play, from the unclothed cognition to
even just personal identity. Like if you wear sunglasses so
much that they are just a part of who you are,
(43:30):
then it makes sense that you would feel naked without them.
Maybe you end up just wearing your sunglasses at night,
much like Corey Hart did. Are you lonely just like me? Mercy?
All right? So there you have it. Uh, that is
the episode of Invention for this week. We do hope
that you will check out Invention pod dot com. That
(43:52):
is where you'll find uh the existing episodes of the
Invention Podcast. You'll also find links out to our social
media accounts, and if you want to talk about this
episode inside of a Facebook group, you should go to
the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module because that
is where we are known to hang out and discuss
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But we're also
(44:12):
happy to talk about episodes of Invention. Huge Thanks as
always to Scott Benjamin for research assistance on this show,
and to our excellent audio producer Tory Harrison. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hi, you can
email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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