October 10, 2022 • 29 mins
There is nothing hotter than Puckerbutt Farm’s Carolina Reaper Hot Sauce... and author Leigh Cowart gargles it for FUN!!! Why do we sometimes get a happiness high from painful and scary things? And what if we want to experience the fun of discomfort and danger... but without the risk of coming to real harm?
With the help of Leigh, psychology professor Paul Bloom and the Yale philosopher Tamar Gendler, Dr Laurie Santos finds out how we can fool ourselves into reaping all the benefits of danger without actually being in peril.
For further reading:
Leigh Cowart - Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose.
Paul Bloom - The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, I can tell I already have like the nervous giggle.
This is author Lee Coward. There's definitely like a danger
smell to it that I come to recognize. Lee is
holding an open bottle of puckabut Barms Carolina Reaverer hot sauce,
(00:38):
thought to be the most extreme hot sauce ever created.
The sauce is made of ninety percent pure Carolina Reaver pepper,
the hottest hot pepper in the world. The heat levels
of hot peppers are measured in scopul units. An average jalapeno,
which a spice was like me can barely tolerate, will
run you around three thousand scope units, but a Carolina
(00:59):
Reaper can be up to eight hundred times hotter. Reapers
are measured in the millions of scobles. When people ask
me if a Reaper pepper might be for them, I say,
you are the kind of person that wants to fight
God and then feel like one this might be a
fun event for you, And apparently fighting a deity seems
(01:20):
like a fun time to Lee, because Lee is going
to gargle Reaper hot sauce right now. Okay, do you
want to want to count me? Down, three, two, one. Wow,
that is a large swig. Oh my god, it feels
more like a color color. Yeah. Um, it kind of
(01:44):
tastes like I a solar flare watching that's hot for real? Ah,
very truly. I would say on a scale one to ten,
it's like a boat horn on a scale of one
to ten. I know that in five minutes I'm gonna
(02:08):
feel but I also know that right now I feel bad.
But I also feel silly because I chose this. Much
of the time, experiencing pain feels kind of crappy. We
rarely seek out opportunities to stub our toes or burn
our tongues or head to the dentist for root. Now,
(02:29):
these are not experiences that we tend to describe as
happiness inducing, but there are some cases in which we
willingly choose to take part in situations that we know
ahead of time are going to feel negative. Now, you
may not have willingly gargled the hottest hot sauce on
the planet, but it's likely that you or someone you
know has tried a bath so scalding that it kind
of hurt, or paid money for an agonizing deep tissue massage,
(02:52):
and pain isn't the only negative feeling we sometimes seek
out voluntarily. We also get pleasure from sad songs that
make us cry and heart pounding roller coasters that make
us queasy. We actually enjoy watching scary slasher films and
visiting terrifying haunted houses. How can emotions like fear or
sadness or pain become something we choose to experience? Why
(03:16):
do painful feelings sometimes make us happier? The answer involves
two of my favorite cognitive quirks, ones that are fundamental
parts of being human. We're going to take a deep
dive into these biases of the mind and learn how
they can help us get a big happiness boost from pain, fear,
and anguish. And I'll also let you in on the
secret of throwing a kick ass movie party. Our minds
(03:42):
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness
Lab on Doctor Laurie Santos. Oh, Oh that's fun. Yeah,
(04:10):
I struck good. Now, about ten minutes into gargling the
hottest hot sauce in existence, Lee Howard has now switched
from experiencing extreme discomfort to a feeling they describe as
far more pleasurable. So I'm still in a lot of pain,
but I also feel exceptional. I feel like I've just
run five miles. I feel like I love my job.
(04:32):
What's this job that Lee loves so much? I am
not a pepperhead. I am just an idiot. Lee is
a science journalist an author of Hurt So Good, The
Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. But the book
is about masochism, and I think reading the book is
a little bit of a masochistic act. Unto itself, Lee
(04:52):
wanted to understand why people engage in all manner of
painful behaviors, from chili pepper eating to polar plunges to
painful b d SM sex play. So they decided to
run a little experiment and try out all these behaviors personally.
The result is a book that is not for the
faint of heart. I mean, there are sex scenes, it's
a lot, But Lee engaged in these activities not just
(05:15):
as some journalistic exercise. Please actually kinda into pain. Oh yes, yes,
I am a big fan and that was really interesting
to me, Like, why do we like pains sometimes? What
are we getting out of it? And what does that
say about us as people? When it comes to bodily sensations,
we often assume that some are good whereas others are bad.
(05:36):
Eating a sweet ice cream cone good. Eating a pepper
so hot that it burns the inside of your solar
plexus bad. But the science shows that whether a given
experience winds up feeling good or bad is much more complicated.
It's based on memory, It's based on where you are,
Are you expecting it? Are you safe? Do you want this?
Are you aroused? All of these factors come together and
(05:59):
you get a fresh sensory experience every time. And Lee
is quick to point out that there is one necessary
factor for any sensation to feel good. Pain on purpose
requires consent. You have to be able to opt into
it and opt out. But why would we willingly opt
into experiencing pain and other negative emotions? Why does pain
(06:20):
sometimes make us happier? The first reason involves how pain
works biologically. Experiencing physical harm quite literally drugs us up.
You know what we call endorphins is short for endogenous morphine.
Whenever we get hurt, our body releases natural opiates akin
to morphine, OxyContin and heroine. Natural versions of these chemicals
(06:41):
quickly flought our brain and bind to neural receptors that
would normally make us experience a negative sensation, and just
like taking a hit of actual heroin, our natural endorphins
make us feel very good pretty quickly. But endorphins are
only the first of our bodies two biological systems for
soothing us when we get hurt. We also get a
bong hit from pain because the endorphin system works alongside
(07:04):
another set of analgesics known as the endocannabinoid system. It's
just kind of like the weed version in Layman's terms.
These two inner pain killer systems mean that we experience
a literal high whenever we're in pain. But there's also
a second reason that chosen pain can feel good. Pain
can be a shortcut to a happiness inducing practice that
we talk about a lot on this podcast, Mindfulness. There's
(07:27):
tons of evidence suggesting that being in the present moment
feels great, and at least one nice thing about anguish
is that it's cognitively all consuming. It is very, very
hard to think about your grocery list when your whole
faces are on fire. I mean that is such a
draw for me personally, I have one of those just
like hamster reel braids. There's just like forty hamsters up
(07:49):
there and none of them are cooperating. So for me,
the quiet of one thought in the brain is something
that I chase, and masochism is absolutely a shortcut to
that piece. But there's a third reason that pain and
other negative sensations feel good. Bad feelings create a please
in contrast effect. Brief moments of anguish or fear allow
(08:12):
us to go from a sucky state to a much
nicer baseline state, and the contrast between these two sensations
makes our status quo, our norm which probably seemed boring
or unremarkable before, now feel like absolute heaven. Negative states
also induce pleasure because they make us feel kind of badass.
When our body senses danger or incoming pain, our usual
(08:33):
response is to get the heck away from whatever situation
we're in. When we push through fear and pain, we
can get a sort of mind over matter hit of pride.
Watch a bunny that gets away from a hawk right,
they bounced away. There's a discharge, there's a celebration. The
badass feeling that comes from making it through something awful
is one reason Lee has long been drawn to voluntary suffering.
(08:55):
I like to push it. I like to see how
much I can take. I definitely have a resilience fetish.
But it's worth noting that the positive hit we can
get from chosen pain doesn't require putting ourselves in actual
physical danger. We just need to do something that our
brain will falsely interpret as perilous. It's what the psychologist
Paul Rosen christened benign massochism. Benign masochism is a mental
(09:17):
trick in which our brain's natural danger systems get fooled
by harmless stuff that mimics what we might experience if
we went through a real physical ordeal. Benign massochism allows
us to get all the psychological benefits that come from
bodily harm without the bodily harm, which is pretty cool.
But a word of warning, benign masochism isn't something to
(09:38):
be entered into lightly. You don't want to embark on
an experience that's too painfully intense or that is genuinely dangerous.
Take chili eating. For example, you may have noticed that
Lee chose to gargle rather than swallow that Carolina Reaper
hot sauce. It is a different animal them. Lee made
that rookie mistake early on in their chili tasting experiments,
(10:00):
and their digestive system paid the price. Oh it's awful.
I was like nude on a bathroom floor, weeping and
just chastising myself. Why did you do this? You know, honestly,
it felt like labor. And you do have all of
those TRPV one receptors in your anus, so you're going
(10:20):
to have the reaper pepper experience in your own little
ring of fire. I actually spend a lot of time
trying to warn people about it, just so you know
this is a very possible outcome for a hypochondriact like me.
This felt like a deal breaker. I'll definitely leave the
hot sauce tasting to Lee. So what if you're curious
about the emotional benefits of negative experiences but you're a
(10:43):
huge voice. What if you'd like to get the mindfulness
that a Carolina Reaper provides, but you've got a sensitive constitution, Well,
I'll tell you when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
(11:04):
You want to live a rich, fun life. There's a
whole lot of emotions to play with, and I aren't
necessarily what you think they are. This is my good friend.
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto an author of The Sweet Spot The Pleasures are
Suffering in the search for meeting. Like Journalistly Coward, Paul
is interested in why we sometimes get pleasure from pain.
(11:27):
Some pleasures are we could talk a lot about them,
but it's not so mysterious why people enjoy good food
and good drink and sex. But if a smart alien
came down to Earth, what they would see is they
see us spending hours and hours watching movies and reading
novels that make us cry. That's scare us. They see
us going to saunaus. They see us engaging in BDSM
(11:49):
and Alians say, what's up of that? It seems so paradoxical,
and as paradox is what I'm really interested in. But
in contrast, Elite Paul has taken a more academic approach
to this paradox. We cover the same topics, and I
have a lot of admiration for what they've written. But
there's a kind of different register. I'm a little bit
more bourgeois and state in my lifestyle. But Paul's book
(12:13):
argues that the bourgeois and wooses among us aren't totally
out of luck when it comes to the pleasure of
negative emotions. It turns out that the human mind has
figured out an enterprising way to get all the emotional
benefits of bad sensations without any of the real life risk.
We simply experience negative events as simulations inside our heads.
We avitabilities or to play movies to ourselves and tell
(12:35):
stories to ourselves and appreciate these stories that other people
telling and immerse ourselves in worlds we know aren't real.
And our capacity for imagination doesn't just allow us to
experience stuff that we come up with in our own
private simulations. We also participate in entire shared fictional emotional
worlds think movies, books, or video games, and these worlds
(12:56):
give us a really wide range of negative emotions, from
fear to grief, to disgust to anger, all without any
danger of personal harm. No burning gums from chili peppers,
no queasy stomach from a roller coaster ride for self
proclaimed was like me, this version of negative experiences is way,
way better, and Paul argues that the suffering we experience
(13:16):
in our imagination has lots of unique benefits that go
beyond those that come from in real life forms of
benign masochism. One is the emotional control we have over
what happens in fantasy. If the hot pepper you just
date is too much, you're kind of stuck with it
until it passes through your entire digestive tract and pass
those Anis receptors. But if a fictional experience starts to
(13:36):
feel like it's too much, you can stop immediately. Your
novel's feeling too sad, put it down, too freaked out
by that slasher film, shut it off. And thanks to
reviews and ratings in word of mouth, we usually know
exactly what we're getting ourselves into. There's a feature on
Slate which goes through different horror movies. Is how scary
is this? And they have sort of how gory is?
(13:57):
And so on? And somebody like me, who's surprising a
little bit of a whimp when it comes to gore,
likes these things. I don't want to be too grossed out.
Simulated negative experiences like watching a tense car chase or
a scary disaster movie can also be incredible teachers. Imagining
negative events is the human equivalent of what animals do
when they learn to fight. One way to be good
at fighting is to practice fighting. But the problem of
(14:20):
getting a lot of fights is you can get killed.
Are you going to kill somebody else? So evolution came
up this brilliant trick. Young animals engage in a milder,
pretend version of aggression, which researchers call play fighting. They
try out all their aggressive moves while playing with their friends,
but they never take it to the level where anyone
gets hurt. They get all the benefits of practicing with
none of the dangers. Human kids do the same thing
(14:43):
when they're little. Think plastic army toys battling it out
or barbie dolls pretending to be part of real life
social interactions. But we don't entirely leave this behind in childhood.
Adults do this in our own heads. I think what
a lot of imaginative play is, particularly the sort of
more negative stuff we're talking about, is a form of
planning and preparation and practice for the future. Paul uses
(15:06):
the analogy of learning how to fly a plane. The
best way to become a good pilot is to guide
a real plane through lots of real world situations of
varying difficulty. But it's extremely dangerous, so we've invented flight simulators.
Flight simulators allow us to sit in a pretend cockpit
and practice all the controls needed for a real flight,
but without any of the real danger. And when you're
(15:28):
programming a flight simulator, you don't program it always for
a flight. Your program it for trouble. And I think
imaginations like a flight simulator. And just as flight simulators
actively seek out trouble, so too do we seek out
negative imaginary experiences and the emotions that go with them.
This logic can explain even the seemingly oddest of negative
fantasies that we in the modern world seek out all
(15:49):
the time. Take zombie movies. Do wel like zombie movies
because we have to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, And
that sounds stupid, But anybody who see zombie movies knows
that the real dangerneys movies is in a zombie. Zombie
movies are just a very imaginative recreation of what happens
when world goes down. The real dangers in the doombie
(16:11):
movie is always other people, and so we enjoy these
things in the same way kids enjoy playfighting because it's
kind of verse of it. It's good stuff to get
good at. But the fact that our minds get so
much pleasure from fictional worlds like these also poses a
bit of a cognitive puzzle. It makes sense that our
brains fall for in real life forms of benign masochism,
that the pain of a hot chili pepper or the
(16:32):
fear of a racing roller coaster fools our minds into
thinking that we're in danger. But how do we fall
for situations that we know are completely fake things like
novels and movies and video games. To get the answer,
will meet a philosopher and Happiness Lab regular who's not
only figured it out, but can share some tips on
how applying this knowledge can give us a way bigger
(16:54):
happiness hit, even from a totally phony looking mechanical shark.
That's the sound? What's that one? Do? I think it's
both just that I can't carry it. Dune, dune, Dune.
That was what I meant. The Happiness Lab will be
(17:14):
right back. It's July twenty twenty one, Tokyo, Japan and
the Summer Olympics are finally underway. Today's matchup, the US
women's soccer team is taking on their rivals Sweden. Dear Things,
(17:38):
The Olympic announcer booms, Welcome to the Tokyo Stadium. The
announcer introduces the two teams. As the players take the field,
the hype music begins to play, and the crowd goes wild,
or perhaps more accurately, what sounded like a crowd goes wild.
The Olympic athletes who heard that roar, we're hearing a recording.
(18:01):
There was no one else in the stadium with them.
The Tokyo Games had already been delayed by a year
because of COVID nineteen, but with infections still surging in
the summer of twenty twenty one, no spectators were allowed
into the venues. But the organizers still wanted to bring
the vibe of the world to the stadium, as they
put it, so they commissioned a virtual soundscape experience for
(18:23):
their athletes. They piped the sounds of a screaming crowd
into the empty stadium. Audio engineers spent three months clipping
together screams and applause from past Olympics in Rio and London.
They worked to find just the right balance of different
crowd sounds, from cheering to chatting to screaming. But the
decision to spent all this time and effort to fake
(18:44):
the sounds of adoring fans should seem, at least with
some reflection, kind of weird. So you're an athlete, which
means you're super sensitive to the reality of the environment
around you. They knew that the stadium was empty, They
knew it was the middle of COVID. They knew they
were the only ones in this place, that there wasn't
an audience of tens of thousands of people. Yet even so,
(19:09):
the sound of the roaring crowd somehow managed to inspire them,
even though they knew that it wasn't recording. This is
my good friend and colleague, the Yale philosopher to Mark Gendler.
Tomorrow's philosophical work has explored cases like these situations in
which pretend things like the roar of a recorded crowd
affect how we feel and behave. It's really funny to
(19:32):
think that you can simultaneously know that something is fake
and respond to it as if it were real. But
when you start to realize that that's a possibility, you
realize that it happens all the time. Take horror movies.
The last time you sat down with your popcorn in
a dark movie theater, you definitely knew that the two
D images of zombies and monster attacks you saw on
(19:54):
screen were fake, but you nonetheless responded as if that
thing kind of were really happening, even though you knew
that it wasn't. And that happens all the time. Think
about how you cry during movie these how you laugh
during movies. You know that those things aren't happening, and
even as you know those things aren't happening, you respond
(20:19):
as if they were. So the thing that was going
on with the athletes actually turns out to be a
really common experience in our interactions with fiction, and that
common experience stems from the second cognitive quirk I wanted
to explore in this episode, which is that, surprisingly, our
mind seemed to work on two different and completely separate
tracks when it comes to processing information. The first track,
(20:42):
the belief track, is pretty rational. The belief track can say, yeah,
I know, it sounds like there's a crowd screaming, But
the seats are empty, and therefore I believe that no
one is in the stadium. Beliefs go and take into
consideration the full array of information, so they might say, oh,
I'm sad, but in fact that was just a fictional character.
(21:04):
I don't believe that somebody I love has died. I've
just read a book in which that happened. But we
also have a second track that Tamar christened the A
leaf track. The A and A leaf stands for automatic,
affective and ancient our. A leaf track is a much
more primitive system our. A leaves just assume whatever sensory
(21:24):
information you happen to be experiencing reflects the real world
thing that that sensory experience is normally associated with. They
just give a quick response. They don't do a huge
amount of processing, and they're very emotional. Oh, scary music,
scary sound, feels scared. The A leaf system is what
allowed those Olympic athletes to get an emotional boost from
crowd noise, even though they were totally aware that the
(21:47):
stadium was empty. They knew it wasn't a real crowd
of screaming fans. But they have a whole set of
associations that got activated as the result of their hearing
this sound that, in all other circumstances is associated with
genuinely being in that environment. So it wasn't so much
as they got fooled, as it was that they responded
(22:10):
in the way they would have if it were real,
even though they knew it wasn't real. But the coolest
thing about this two track cognitive quirk is that the
two tracks are totally separate. Your rational beliefs simply cannot
interfere with your overly emotional A leafs, And if you
start thinking about it, you realize that there's time after
(22:31):
time after time where you have a beliaf that goes
one way and an A leaf that goes another. Let's
take horror movies again. When you watch a slasher flick
and a plush seat in some suburban movie theater, your
belief track knows that you're not going to get chainsaw
to death by some fake monster, But your A leaf track,
which controls your automatic emotional responses, can't talk to the
(22:52):
belief track. Your A leafs are going to continuously make
your body react as if you were in a dangerous situation.
And it's not just with regard to danger that a
leaf can do this as we read fiction or watch
a movie, or listen to a story, or a leaf
system is totally indifferent to whether the source of the
(23:12):
input is actual or imaginary. The quirk of having a
mind that runs on two tracks means that we have
an a leaf system that allows us to get benign masochism.
Happiness benefits from all kinds of situations that our belief
system knows are imaginary or totally fake. So these are
safe spaces in which to experience really powerful emotions without
(23:36):
having to have the actual world consequences. And one of
the really amazing things is that we can playfully engage
with the multiplicity in our mind, so we can simultaneously
be sitting comfortably on a sofa and physically believe ourselves
(23:57):
to be completely safe, and then indulge imaginatively these more
primitive parts of our system. We can also carefully tailor
the way our a leaf track reacts, adjust it up
or down depending on the degree of emotions we'd most
enjoy experiencing. For example, Tamarrow, like me, isn't a fan
of intense negative emotions. I'm a total scared to get,
(24:20):
which means that she wants to indulge in negative emotions
like fear, but she only wants a teeny dose. So
when I watch a horror movie, I actually tend to
keep the light on in the room and make the
screen quite small, so that even as I'm indulging the
a leaf, I have lots of bee leaf pushing in
the opposite direction in the background. And that is a
(24:41):
tactic you can use if you're somebody who's hyper sensitive
to the ways in which imaginative emotion affects you. But
of course, if your friends who are notices and kind
of into horror movies are coming over and you want
to give them a happiness boost that comes with a
particularly epic scare. That also means that if we understand
(25:02):
our a leafs the right way, we can do the opposite,
which is we can make something really really scary. Right,
we could make something believably scary if we know if,
for example, we take away almost all of the clues
that make you realize there's a differentiation between your automatic
response to what seems to be the case and what
(25:23):
is actually the case, we can make something really really scary,
which got me thinking, what if instead of just hosting
the usual scary movie party from my friends. What have
I decided to up the benign masochism A Leaf stakes
a bit? What if I put my horror movie loving
friends into a fully immersive, real world situation that activated
(25:46):
every single one of their senses to fully and completely
whig out their A Leaf track. And so Laurie's epic
extreme A Leaf movie experience was born, or what I
like to call more simply Jaws in the Pool. Instead
of inviting my friends to watch that classic shark film
on a couch and my living I forced each friend
to watch Jaws and my friend Hetty's Backyard on a
(26:09):
big screen at night as they sat in an inflatable
inner tube floating in Hetty's pool, dark wet legs dangling
helplessly in the water. So I threw my Jaws in
the Pool party for my birthday, and as predicted, it
was epic, a huge, terrifying, benign masochism benefit filled success. Oh,
(26:40):
it was so much scarier watching it on the water.
Even though many of my friends had seen the movie before,
their experience with Jaws in the pool was way way
more intense. Added to the experience, like you really can't
see through the water that wall at night and we're
in it. My friends agreed that those big on screen
shark teeth seemed way more dangerous when your toes are
(27:00):
submerged in a dark pool of water. I had my
legs in the water, and every time the shark came,
I pulled them out and pick up. Our a leaf
track to epic levels made the normal negative experience of
Jaws way way more fun, And there's an important lesson there.
Using the quirks of our mind to hack our negative
experiences can give us a lot more joy and happiness.
(27:24):
Human emotional life is complicated. We often get more pleasure
from seemingly yucky sensations like fear or pain or sadness
than we might expect, and that means that it's a
good happiness practice to play with your negative emotions a bit,
to safely test out feelings of anguish or grief or terror.
For some thrill seekers, this might include chasing the unique
(27:44):
emotional high of a Carolina Reaper pepper. That's fun. But
for the wosses among us, there's our a leaf track,
which allows us to get pleasure without any real pain,
from completely imagined negative experiences. So how will you as
Tomar Gendler put it, playfully engage with the multiplicity of
your own mind. What new benign pains or imagine situations
(28:08):
or scary fictional world will you try out to get
the happiness perks that come from experiencing a more complete
range of human emotions. Personally, I highly recommend experiences involve
extreme fear and swimming pools and inflatable sharks if at
all possible, But you know, to each his own. I
hope you'll return soon for another episode of The Happiness Lab.
(28:31):
Until next time, stay safe, stay scared, and stay happy.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley,
Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Friedman checked our facts.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
(28:53):
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle
Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Deserved, Jacob Weisberg, and my
agent Ben Davis. That Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find
(29:14):
more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Pushkin, I can tell I already have like the nervous giggle.
This is author Lee Coward. There's definitely like a danger
smell to it that I come to recognize. Lee is
holding an open bottle of puckabut Barms Carolina Reaverer hot sauce,
(00:38):
thought to be the most extreme hot sauce ever created.
The sauce is made of ninety percent pure Carolina Reaver pepper,
the hottest hot pepper in the world. The heat levels
of hot peppers are measured in scopul units. An average jalapeno,
which a spice was like me can barely tolerate, will
run you around three thousand scope units, but a Carolina
(00:59):
Reaper can be up to eight hundred times hotter. Reapers
are measured in the millions of scobles. When people ask
me if a Reaper pepper might be for them, I say,
you are the kind of person that wants to fight
God and then feel like one this might be a
fun event for you, And apparently fighting a deity seems
(01:20):
like a fun time to Lee, because Lee is going
to gargle Reaper hot sauce right now. Okay, do you
want to want to count me? Down, three, two, one. Wow,
that is a large swig. Oh my god, it feels
more like a color color. Yeah. Um, it kind of
(01:44):
tastes like I a solar flare watching that's hot for real? Ah,
very truly. I would say on a scale one to ten,
it's like a boat horn on a scale of one
to ten. I know that in five minutes I'm gonna
(02:08):
feel but I also know that right now I feel bad.
But I also feel silly because I chose this. Much
of the time, experiencing pain feels kind of crappy. We
rarely seek out opportunities to stub our toes or burn
our tongues or head to the dentist for root. Now,
(02:29):
these are not experiences that we tend to describe as
happiness inducing, but there are some cases in which we
willingly choose to take part in situations that we know
ahead of time are going to feel negative. Now, you
may not have willingly gargled the hottest hot sauce on
the planet, but it's likely that you or someone you
know has tried a bath so scalding that it kind
of hurt, or paid money for an agonizing deep tissue massage,
(02:52):
and pain isn't the only negative feeling we sometimes seek
out voluntarily. We also get pleasure from sad songs that
make us cry and heart pounding roller coasters that make
us queasy. We actually enjoy watching scary slasher films and
visiting terrifying haunted houses. How can emotions like fear or
sadness or pain become something we choose to experience? Why
(03:16):
do painful feelings sometimes make us happier? The answer involves
two of my favorite cognitive quirks, ones that are fundamental
parts of being human. We're going to take a deep
dive into these biases of the mind and learn how
they can help us get a big happiness boost from pain, fear,
and anguish. And I'll also let you in on the
secret of throwing a kick ass movie party. Our minds
(03:42):
are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness
Lab on Doctor Laurie Santos. Oh, Oh that's fun. Yeah,
(04:10):
I struck good. Now, about ten minutes into gargling the
hottest hot sauce in existence, Lee Howard has now switched
from experiencing extreme discomfort to a feeling they describe as
far more pleasurable. So I'm still in a lot of pain,
but I also feel exceptional. I feel like I've just
run five miles. I feel like I love my job.
(04:32):
What's this job that Lee loves so much? I am
not a pepperhead. I am just an idiot. Lee is
a science journalist an author of Hurt So Good, The
Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. But the book
is about masochism, and I think reading the book is
a little bit of a masochistic act. Unto itself, Lee
(04:52):
wanted to understand why people engage in all manner of
painful behaviors, from chili pepper eating to polar plunges to
painful b d SM sex play. So they decided to
run a little experiment and try out all these behaviors personally.
The result is a book that is not for the
faint of heart. I mean, there are sex scenes, it's
a lot, But Lee engaged in these activities not just
(05:15):
as some journalistic exercise. Please actually kinda into pain. Oh yes, yes,
I am a big fan and that was really interesting
to me, Like, why do we like pains sometimes? What
are we getting out of it? And what does that
say about us as people? When it comes to bodily sensations,
we often assume that some are good whereas others are bad.
(05:36):
Eating a sweet ice cream cone good. Eating a pepper
so hot that it burns the inside of your solar
plexus bad. But the science shows that whether a given
experience winds up feeling good or bad is much more complicated.
It's based on memory, It's based on where you are,
Are you expecting it? Are you safe? Do you want this?
Are you aroused? All of these factors come together and
(05:59):
you get a fresh sensory experience every time. And Lee
is quick to point out that there is one necessary
factor for any sensation to feel good. Pain on purpose
requires consent. You have to be able to opt into
it and opt out. But why would we willingly opt
into experiencing pain and other negative emotions? Why does pain
(06:20):
sometimes make us happier? The first reason involves how pain
works biologically. Experiencing physical harm quite literally drugs us up.
You know what we call endorphins is short for endogenous morphine.
Whenever we get hurt, our body releases natural opiates akin
to morphine, OxyContin and heroine. Natural versions of these chemicals
(06:41):
quickly flought our brain and bind to neural receptors that
would normally make us experience a negative sensation, and just
like taking a hit of actual heroin, our natural endorphins
make us feel very good pretty quickly. But endorphins are
only the first of our bodies two biological systems for
soothing us when we get hurt. We also get a
bong hit from pain because the endorphin system works alongside
(07:04):
another set of analgesics known as the endocannabinoid system. It's
just kind of like the weed version in Layman's terms.
These two inner pain killer systems mean that we experience
a literal high whenever we're in pain. But there's also
a second reason that chosen pain can feel good. Pain
can be a shortcut to a happiness inducing practice that
we talk about a lot on this podcast, Mindfulness. There's
(07:27):
tons of evidence suggesting that being in the present moment
feels great, and at least one nice thing about anguish
is that it's cognitively all consuming. It is very, very
hard to think about your grocery list when your whole
faces are on fire. I mean that is such a
draw for me personally, I have one of those just
like hamster reel braids. There's just like forty hamsters up
(07:49):
there and none of them are cooperating. So for me,
the quiet of one thought in the brain is something
that I chase, and masochism is absolutely a shortcut to
that piece. But there's a third reason that pain and
other negative sensations feel good. Bad feelings create a please
in contrast effect. Brief moments of anguish or fear allow
(08:12):
us to go from a sucky state to a much
nicer baseline state, and the contrast between these two sensations
makes our status quo, our norm which probably seemed boring
or unremarkable before, now feel like absolute heaven. Negative states
also induce pleasure because they make us feel kind of badass.
When our body senses danger or incoming pain, our usual
(08:33):
response is to get the heck away from whatever situation
we're in. When we push through fear and pain, we
can get a sort of mind over matter hit of pride.
Watch a bunny that gets away from a hawk right,
they bounced away. There's a discharge, there's a celebration. The
badass feeling that comes from making it through something awful
is one reason Lee has long been drawn to voluntary suffering.
(08:55):
I like to push it. I like to see how
much I can take. I definitely have a resilience fetish.
But it's worth noting that the positive hit we can
get from chosen pain doesn't require putting ourselves in actual
physical danger. We just need to do something that our
brain will falsely interpret as perilous. It's what the psychologist
Paul Rosen christened benign massochism. Benign masochism is a mental
(09:17):
trick in which our brain's natural danger systems get fooled
by harmless stuff that mimics what we might experience if
we went through a real physical ordeal. Benign massochism allows
us to get all the psychological benefits that come from
bodily harm without the bodily harm, which is pretty cool.
But a word of warning, benign masochism isn't something to
(09:38):
be entered into lightly. You don't want to embark on
an experience that's too painfully intense or that is genuinely dangerous.
Take chili eating. For example, you may have noticed that
Lee chose to gargle rather than swallow that Carolina Reaper
hot sauce. It is a different animal them. Lee made
that rookie mistake early on in their chili tasting experiments,
(10:00):
and their digestive system paid the price. Oh it's awful.
I was like nude on a bathroom floor, weeping and
just chastising myself. Why did you do this? You know, honestly,
it felt like labor. And you do have all of
those TRPV one receptors in your anus, so you're going
(10:20):
to have the reaper pepper experience in your own little
ring of fire. I actually spend a lot of time
trying to warn people about it, just so you know
this is a very possible outcome for a hypochondriact like me.
This felt like a deal breaker. I'll definitely leave the
hot sauce tasting to Lee. So what if you're curious
about the emotional benefits of negative experiences but you're a
(10:43):
huge voice. What if you'd like to get the mindfulness
that a Carolina Reaper provides, but you've got a sensitive constitution, Well,
I'll tell you when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
(11:04):
You want to live a rich, fun life. There's a
whole lot of emotions to play with, and I aren't
necessarily what you think they are. This is my good friend.
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto an author of The Sweet Spot The Pleasures are
Suffering in the search for meeting. Like Journalistly Coward, Paul
is interested in why we sometimes get pleasure from pain.
(11:27):
Some pleasures are we could talk a lot about them,
but it's not so mysterious why people enjoy good food
and good drink and sex. But if a smart alien
came down to Earth, what they would see is they
see us spending hours and hours watching movies and reading
novels that make us cry. That's scare us. They see
us going to saunaus. They see us engaging in BDSM
(11:49):
and Alians say, what's up of that? It seems so paradoxical,
and as paradox is what I'm really interested in. But
in contrast, Elite Paul has taken a more academic approach
to this paradox. We cover the same topics, and I
have a lot of admiration for what they've written. But
there's a kind of different register. I'm a little bit
more bourgeois and state in my lifestyle. But Paul's book
(12:13):
argues that the bourgeois and wooses among us aren't totally
out of luck when it comes to the pleasure of
negative emotions. It turns out that the human mind has
figured out an enterprising way to get all the emotional
benefits of bad sensations without any of the real life risk.
We simply experience negative events as simulations inside our heads.
We avitabilities or to play movies to ourselves and tell
(12:35):
stories to ourselves and appreciate these stories that other people
telling and immerse ourselves in worlds we know aren't real.
And our capacity for imagination doesn't just allow us to
experience stuff that we come up with in our own
private simulations. We also participate in entire shared fictional emotional
worlds think movies, books, or video games, and these worlds
(12:56):
give us a really wide range of negative emotions, from
fear to grief, to disgust to anger, all without any
danger of personal harm. No burning gums from chili peppers,
no queasy stomach from a roller coaster ride for self
proclaimed was like me, this version of negative experiences is way,
way better, and Paul argues that the suffering we experience
(13:16):
in our imagination has lots of unique benefits that go
beyond those that come from in real life forms of
benign masochism. One is the emotional control we have over
what happens in fantasy. If the hot pepper you just
date is too much, you're kind of stuck with it
until it passes through your entire digestive tract and pass
those Anis receptors. But if a fictional experience starts to
(13:36):
feel like it's too much, you can stop immediately. Your
novel's feeling too sad, put it down, too freaked out
by that slasher film, shut it off. And thanks to
reviews and ratings in word of mouth, we usually know
exactly what we're getting ourselves into. There's a feature on
Slate which goes through different horror movies. Is how scary
is this? And they have sort of how gory is?
(13:57):
And so on? And somebody like me, who's surprising a
little bit of a whimp when it comes to gore,
likes these things. I don't want to be too grossed out.
Simulated negative experiences like watching a tense car chase or
a scary disaster movie can also be incredible teachers. Imagining
negative events is the human equivalent of what animals do
when they learn to fight. One way to be good
at fighting is to practice fighting. But the problem of
(14:20):
getting a lot of fights is you can get killed.
Are you going to kill somebody else? So evolution came
up this brilliant trick. Young animals engage in a milder,
pretend version of aggression, which researchers call play fighting. They
try out all their aggressive moves while playing with their friends,
but they never take it to the level where anyone
gets hurt. They get all the benefits of practicing with
none of the dangers. Human kids do the same thing
(14:43):
when they're little. Think plastic army toys battling it out
or barbie dolls pretending to be part of real life
social interactions. But we don't entirely leave this behind in childhood.
Adults do this in our own heads. I think what
a lot of imaginative play is, particularly the sort of
more negative stuff we're talking about, is a form of
planning and preparation and practice for the future. Paul uses
(15:06):
the analogy of learning how to fly a plane. The
best way to become a good pilot is to guide
a real plane through lots of real world situations of
varying difficulty. But it's extremely dangerous, so we've invented flight simulators.
Flight simulators allow us to sit in a pretend cockpit
and practice all the controls needed for a real flight,
but without any of the real danger. And when you're
(15:28):
programming a flight simulator, you don't program it always for
a flight. Your program it for trouble. And I think
imaginations like a flight simulator. And just as flight simulators
actively seek out trouble, so too do we seek out
negative imaginary experiences and the emotions that go with them.
This logic can explain even the seemingly oddest of negative
fantasies that we in the modern world seek out all
(15:49):
the time. Take zombie movies. Do wel like zombie movies
because we have to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, And
that sounds stupid, But anybody who see zombie movies knows
that the real dangerneys movies is in a zombie. Zombie
movies are just a very imaginative recreation of what happens
when world goes down. The real dangers in the doombie
(16:11):
movie is always other people, and so we enjoy these
things in the same way kids enjoy playfighting because it's
kind of verse of it. It's good stuff to get
good at. But the fact that our minds get so
much pleasure from fictional worlds like these also poses a
bit of a cognitive puzzle. It makes sense that our
brains fall for in real life forms of benign masochism,
that the pain of a hot chili pepper or the
(16:32):
fear of a racing roller coaster fools our minds into
thinking that we're in danger. But how do we fall
for situations that we know are completely fake things like
novels and movies and video games. To get the answer,
will meet a philosopher and Happiness Lab regular who's not
only figured it out, but can share some tips on
how applying this knowledge can give us a way bigger
(16:54):
happiness hit, even from a totally phony looking mechanical shark.
That's the sound? What's that one? Do? I think it's
both just that I can't carry it. Dune, dune, Dune.
That was what I meant. The Happiness Lab will be
(17:14):
right back. It's July twenty twenty one, Tokyo, Japan and
the Summer Olympics are finally underway. Today's matchup, the US
women's soccer team is taking on their rivals Sweden. Dear Things,
(17:38):
The Olympic announcer booms, Welcome to the Tokyo Stadium. The
announcer introduces the two teams. As the players take the field,
the hype music begins to play, and the crowd goes wild,
or perhaps more accurately, what sounded like a crowd goes wild.
The Olympic athletes who heard that roar, we're hearing a recording.
(18:01):
There was no one else in the stadium with them.
The Tokyo Games had already been delayed by a year
because of COVID nineteen, but with infections still surging in
the summer of twenty twenty one, no spectators were allowed
into the venues. But the organizers still wanted to bring
the vibe of the world to the stadium, as they
put it, so they commissioned a virtual soundscape experience for
(18:23):
their athletes. They piped the sounds of a screaming crowd
into the empty stadium. Audio engineers spent three months clipping
together screams and applause from past Olympics in Rio and London.
They worked to find just the right balance of different
crowd sounds, from cheering to chatting to screaming. But the
decision to spent all this time and effort to fake
(18:44):
the sounds of adoring fans should seem, at least with
some reflection, kind of weird. So you're an athlete, which
means you're super sensitive to the reality of the environment
around you. They knew that the stadium was empty, They
knew it was the middle of COVID. They knew they
were the only ones in this place, that there wasn't
an audience of tens of thousands of people. Yet even so,
(19:09):
the sound of the roaring crowd somehow managed to inspire them,
even though they knew that it wasn't recording. This is
my good friend and colleague, the Yale philosopher to Mark Gendler.
Tomorrow's philosophical work has explored cases like these situations in
which pretend things like the roar of a recorded crowd
affect how we feel and behave. It's really funny to
(19:32):
think that you can simultaneously know that something is fake
and respond to it as if it were real. But
when you start to realize that that's a possibility, you
realize that it happens all the time. Take horror movies.
The last time you sat down with your popcorn in
a dark movie theater, you definitely knew that the two
D images of zombies and monster attacks you saw on
(19:54):
screen were fake, but you nonetheless responded as if that
thing kind of were really happening, even though you knew
that it wasn't. And that happens all the time. Think
about how you cry during movie these how you laugh
during movies. You know that those things aren't happening, and
even as you know those things aren't happening, you respond
(20:19):
as if they were. So the thing that was going
on with the athletes actually turns out to be a
really common experience in our interactions with fiction, and that
common experience stems from the second cognitive quirk I wanted
to explore in this episode, which is that, surprisingly, our
mind seemed to work on two different and completely separate
tracks when it comes to processing information. The first track,
(20:42):
the belief track, is pretty rational. The belief track can say, yeah,
I know, it sounds like there's a crowd screaming, But
the seats are empty, and therefore I believe that no
one is in the stadium. Beliefs go and take into
consideration the full array of information, so they might say, oh,
I'm sad, but in fact that was just a fictional character.
(21:04):
I don't believe that somebody I love has died. I've
just read a book in which that happened. But we
also have a second track that Tamar christened the A
leaf track. The A and A leaf stands for automatic,
affective and ancient our. A leaf track is a much
more primitive system our. A leaves just assume whatever sensory
(21:24):
information you happen to be experiencing reflects the real world
thing that that sensory experience is normally associated with. They
just give a quick response. They don't do a huge
amount of processing, and they're very emotional. Oh, scary music,
scary sound, feels scared. The A leaf system is what
allowed those Olympic athletes to get an emotional boost from
crowd noise, even though they were totally aware that the
(21:47):
stadium was empty. They knew it wasn't a real crowd
of screaming fans. But they have a whole set of
associations that got activated as the result of their hearing
this sound that, in all other circumstances is associated with
genuinely being in that environment. So it wasn't so much
as they got fooled, as it was that they responded
(22:10):
in the way they would have if it were real,
even though they knew it wasn't real. But the coolest
thing about this two track cognitive quirk is that the
two tracks are totally separate. Your rational beliefs simply cannot
interfere with your overly emotional A leafs, And if you
start thinking about it, you realize that there's time after
(22:31):
time after time where you have a beliaf that goes
one way and an A leaf that goes another. Let's
take horror movies again. When you watch a slasher flick
and a plush seat in some suburban movie theater, your
belief track knows that you're not going to get chainsaw
to death by some fake monster, But your A leaf track,
which controls your automatic emotional responses, can't talk to the
(22:52):
belief track. Your A leafs are going to continuously make
your body react as if you were in a dangerous situation.
And it's not just with regard to danger that a
leaf can do this as we read fiction or watch
a movie, or listen to a story, or a leaf
system is totally indifferent to whether the source of the
(23:12):
input is actual or imaginary. The quirk of having a
mind that runs on two tracks means that we have
an a leaf system that allows us to get benign masochism.
Happiness benefits from all kinds of situations that our belief
system knows are imaginary or totally fake. So these are
safe spaces in which to experience really powerful emotions without
(23:36):
having to have the actual world consequences. And one of
the really amazing things is that we can playfully engage
with the multiplicity in our mind, so we can simultaneously
be sitting comfortably on a sofa and physically believe ourselves
(23:57):
to be completely safe, and then indulge imaginatively these more
primitive parts of our system. We can also carefully tailor
the way our a leaf track reacts, adjust it up
or down depending on the degree of emotions we'd most
enjoy experiencing. For example, Tamarrow, like me, isn't a fan
of intense negative emotions. I'm a total scared to get,
(24:20):
which means that she wants to indulge in negative emotions
like fear, but she only wants a teeny dose. So
when I watch a horror movie, I actually tend to
keep the light on in the room and make the
screen quite small, so that even as I'm indulging the
a leaf, I have lots of bee leaf pushing in
the opposite direction in the background. And that is a
(24:41):
tactic you can use if you're somebody who's hyper sensitive
to the ways in which imaginative emotion affects you. But
of course, if your friends who are notices and kind
of into horror movies are coming over and you want
to give them a happiness boost that comes with a
particularly epic scare. That also means that if we understand
(25:02):
our a leafs the right way, we can do the opposite,
which is we can make something really really scary. Right,
we could make something believably scary if we know if,
for example, we take away almost all of the clues
that make you realize there's a differentiation between your automatic
response to what seems to be the case and what
(25:23):
is actually the case, we can make something really really scary,
which got me thinking, what if instead of just hosting
the usual scary movie party from my friends. What have
I decided to up the benign masochism A Leaf stakes
a bit? What if I put my horror movie loving
friends into a fully immersive, real world situation that activated
(25:46):
every single one of their senses to fully and completely
whig out their A Leaf track. And so Laurie's epic
extreme A Leaf movie experience was born, or what I
like to call more simply Jaws in the Pool. Instead
of inviting my friends to watch that classic shark film
on a couch and my living I forced each friend
to watch Jaws and my friend Hetty's Backyard on a
(26:09):
big screen at night as they sat in an inflatable
inner tube floating in Hetty's pool, dark wet legs dangling
helplessly in the water. So I threw my Jaws in
the Pool party for my birthday, and as predicted, it
was epic, a huge, terrifying, benign masochism benefit filled success. Oh,
(26:40):
it was so much scarier watching it on the water.
Even though many of my friends had seen the movie before,
their experience with Jaws in the pool was way way
more intense. Added to the experience, like you really can't
see through the water that wall at night and we're
in it. My friends agreed that those big on screen
shark teeth seemed way more dangerous when your toes are
(27:00):
submerged in a dark pool of water. I had my
legs in the water, and every time the shark came,
I pulled them out and pick up. Our a leaf
track to epic levels made the normal negative experience of
Jaws way way more fun, And there's an important lesson there.
Using the quirks of our mind to hack our negative
experiences can give us a lot more joy and happiness.
(27:24):
Human emotional life is complicated. We often get more pleasure
from seemingly yucky sensations like fear or pain or sadness
than we might expect, and that means that it's a
good happiness practice to play with your negative emotions a bit,
to safely test out feelings of anguish or grief or terror.
For some thrill seekers, this might include chasing the unique
(27:44):
emotional high of a Carolina Reaper pepper. That's fun. But
for the wosses among us, there's our a leaf track,
which allows us to get pleasure without any real pain,
from completely imagined negative experiences. So how will you as
Tomar Gendler put it, playfully engage with the multiplicity of
your own mind. What new benign pains or imagine situations
(28:08):
or scary fictional world will you try out to get
the happiness perks that come from experiencing a more complete
range of human emotions. Personally, I highly recommend experiences involve
extreme fear and swimming pools and inflatable sharks if at
all possible, But you know, to each his own. I
hope you'll return soon for another episode of The Happiness Lab.
(28:31):
Until next time, stay safe, stay scared, and stay happy.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley,
Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Friedman checked our facts.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
(28:53):
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle
Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Deserved, Jacob Weisberg, and my
agent Ben Davis. That Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find
(29:14):
more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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