May 29, 2014 • 33 mins
No longer limited by the constrains of their environment or biology, humans have remade their world. Why walk when you can soar? Why shout when you can whisper in the ear of a listener halfway round the world? And why limit yourself to normal stimuli when you can condense the sensory world into nuggets of superstimuli. Join Robert and Julie as they discuss junk food, gaming, pornography, the Internet and beauty itself all in the framework of natural biology.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
today is an episode of where we can call out
a particular listener for suggesting it. Yeah, listener Serena. She
(00:24):
sent us this excellent life Hacker article about why we
feel the need to fill our pie holes in our
eye holes with exaggerated versions of stimuli every day. Yeah,
and just start up because you think Lifehacker, you think
I am. I'm reading a life Packer article and I'm
going to be a better equipped to sort of make
the best out of my day. You know, this kind
(00:45):
of an uplifting name aspect to that. And so I
don't know about you, but I entered into this topic
with that sort of idea in mind, like, oh, it's
just a little quirky insight into how we go about
our daily lives and maybe how you might improve it
a little bit. But I found this topic to be
one of the more or ultimately disturbing topics that we've
looked at, like this condemning of of of human nature
(01:07):
and sort of makes you want to crawl into a
cave to a certain extent, Yeah, because you're right. The
premise was like, hey, we all love cheesecake, right, it's delicious,
it's fatty, it's got tons of sugar. But this happens
to be something called a super normal stimuli. Um. This
is a term evolutionary biologist used to describe any stimulus
that elicits a response stronger than the stimulus for which
(01:30):
it evolved, even if it's artificial. So, in other words,
we like sugar because that's a quick hit of energy.
We needed that back in the day. Um, but we
don't need a slice of cheesecake. Yeah. Sugar is probably
the easiest example to to just call out and and
and generally a not even really a harmless one, but
(01:50):
a less harmful version of some of the things we're
gonna look at here, because the basic idea is how
much raw sugar can you find in the natural environment.
If you're a you know, a prehistoric hunter gather. Maybe
you'll find some berries, maybe you'll find some sort of
a carrot, uh, but you're not going to find you know,
a big sucker, a big dumb dumb a health field
of TUTSI rolls to feast on. That is supernormal stimuli.
(02:12):
That is a a version of the stimuli that we
seek as a as an organism, except it is it
is blown out of proportion. It is the crack cocaine
of sugar and certainly crack and heroin methamphetamines. These are
these are other examples of of super normal stimuli that
have had a huge effect on humans. Yeah, in my mind,
(02:33):
there's a whole class of desserts called porn desserts. Yeah,
you know what I'm talking about. Like there's like sixteen
layer caramel cakes that are just so huge and big
and with you know, red frosting, and it's so over
the top. And we'll be talking about porn by the
way later on, but it's like such a good example.
Another great example um of this sort of supernormal stimuli
(02:56):
giant eyed dolls or even handime hare. I was thinking
about this key ute. Yes, we've we've We've recorded at
least one podcast in the in the past on the
power of cute and and how cutely taps into our
our primal instincts to want to care for like a
small child, and so we end up seeing that smash
small child's face in a cat in a cartoon character.
(03:19):
But you look at some of these just super cute, hypercute,
dangerously cute animate characters or the or the or certainly
the avatar of this Hello Kitty, and uh, and it's overpowering.
It's cuteness, almost beyond our human ability to take it
in right. And as Dedra Bartlett of, a Harvard psychologist
(03:40):
and the author of super Normal Stimuli, how primal urges
overran the revolutionary purposes says, this human instinct for food, sex,
or even territorial protection, all of that is rooted in
our instincts, evolved, as you say, for hunting and gathering
an early man. And she says that evolution has been
unable to keep up with the pace of chain, this
rapid change in the modern life in which a taco bell,
(04:03):
Dorito's Loco taco, you know, daglo orange in your hand
suddenly arrives. Um our bodies in our minds aren't really
unable to water down that instinct, that response to that
food or that stimulus. Yeah, I mean, because on a
basic level, what does the human creature need in order
to survive? It needs to mate and uh and and
(04:25):
and reproduce. It needs to take in food. Um, it
needs to find these various tastes that please it. It
needs protection, It doesn't need a lot of things. But
then we layer on all the complexities of human civilization,
our technology, our art, our ability to find all the
stimuli that we crave, and then just just pump them
up to an unbelievable degree. Yeah, Bartlett says that as
(04:48):
a result, we have a glut of larger than like
objects from candy to pornography to atomic bombs, that cater
to outmoded that persistent drives with dangerous results. Indeed, now,
in order to fully understand this, we have to go
to the roots of the term supernormal stimuli, which are
based in some rather uh simple biological principles, which is
(05:09):
nice because again, all these these human layers of human civilization, technology,
it complicates the issue. But when we look to the
animal world we can find a far simpler model, and
we we find that back in the nineteen thirties with
the work of Dutch noble laureate Nico Tinbergen. That's right,
he is the person who coined the term super normal
stimuli to describe these these uh sort of imitations that
(05:33):
appeal to primitive instincts and exert stronger attraction and the
real thing. So this biologist he set about isolating traits
that trigger certain instincts in animals and insects, and he
manipulated these traits in nature to see what would happen.
So this next bit is from the Life Hacker article
by Daniel Jody or Geoty. I suppose it says that
(05:57):
he constructed plaster eggs to see which one a bird
would prefer to sit on, finding that they would select
those that were larger, had more defined markings or more
saturated color. A day glow bright egg with black polka dots,
for instance, would be selected over the bird's own pale
(06:18):
dappled eggs, and in fact that perd would keep slipping
off the huge one, but it couldn't help it. It
was drawn to that super stimuli of the colors in
the markings, because the colors in the markings in the
natural world, in the in the in the natural course
of events, would indicate the healthier eggs, which ones have
the highest grade of survival, and therefore that's where the
(06:39):
bird is going to focus his attention. This artificial egg, though,
just pumps that completely out of proportion, and the bird
cannot help but respond by setting on this lifeless but beautiful,
gaudy egg and in riding that egg to the detriment
of its actual biological offspring in the surrounding eggs, which
are which are okay but less amazing. Yeah. This is actually,
(07:02):
to me the really depressing part when you see this
in nature, because it really does bear out this idea
that a lot of this is sort of hardwired in
us and all organisms. He also found that territorial male
stickleback fish would attack a wooden fish model more vigorously
than a real male if it's underside was redder, so
again pumping up those signs to it that would make
(07:25):
it say, oh that that's a competitor. Look how red
that underbelly is. And this is interesting too. I want
to make sure everyone sort of bookmarking this for later. Uh.
Here we have supernormal stimuli that is in kind of
in the negative realm as opposed to the positive, something
that's based in fear as opposed to desire. That's a
really good point, the aggressive part of it, right, Okay.
(07:47):
Another experiment was that he constructed a cardboard dummy butterfly
with more defined markings. Uh, that male butterflies would actually
try to mate with in preference to actual real female butterflies.
And that's another one to to definitely remember for later
when we can start getting into the human versions of
(08:07):
these same principles. Yeah, because if you think about um,
and we'll get into this later, but you know, I
always talk about gender performance. And Okay, if you take
a female and a male and you don't do really
much to them in terms of grooming them and clothing
them in ways that are coded for their gender, there's
not a ton of difference between them. But if you
slap on a bunch of makeup on a female plug
(08:31):
her eyebrows, she's really performing that gender. And I think
about it that with these butterflies like this must have
been like the Marylyn mon row of that butterfly. Yes,
and all the other male butterflies are like, yes, that
one even though she's wooden, looks great. Yes, the butterfly
becomes this a little closer to this, this ideal butterfly. Right,
(08:52):
And that's what really gets me about the topic of
super normal stimuli. Um My mind, in reading this get
kept returning to a Plato's theory of forms Plato's in
The Philosopher of Course, um he proposed that we live
in this material realm, right, okay, and beyond our plane
of existence, there's an immaterial realm of ideal forms, all right,
(09:13):
you can you can think of these ideal forms is
the absolute perfection of a given thing, a truth that
cannot be manifested in the material world. All we can
do is echo it. Okay. So in this world there's
no true beauty, but we have an innate understanding and
longing for the true form of beauty as as it
exists beyond the limits of the material world. In a
similar sense, see would argue that there's no true justice here,
(09:35):
but we all have a sense of justice because there's
an unreachable ideal that exists beyond our realm, okay, out
there in the realm of forms. And you can apply
this to just about any anything like the one argument
is often made as a chair, Like every chair in
our world is just to take an attempt to capture
the perfect chairness that we would find in the world
(09:55):
of forms beyond our material world. Every pretty face, every feeling,
every world of art, it's just a take on the ideal.
And so it's tempting to view a supernormal stimuli in
the same way we innately long for the true forms,
forms that simply do not occur in the natural world.
We do it through our art and our technology, and
(10:16):
in doing this we're able to inch a little closer
and a little closer to this awesome and terrible perfection
that we crave. And so so we end up engine
closer and closer and in creating an artificial thing that
just cannot exist in this world, and we're craving nothing
but but shadows of that and imitations of that. And
(10:37):
we're taking to your point that, I mean, the makeup
argument is perfect because we're taking real versions of beauty
and in a sense of defacing them and trying to
carve them into uh, into avatars of this true form,
this this perfect form that just cannot be achieved. Yeah,
this is essentially the Platonic ideal, right, this idea that
(10:59):
you're trying to get to this ideal as close to
perfection as possible. Other would Plato would say, there's no
perfection because we are mere copies of what God intended. Right,
So there's this obsession with, as you say, uh, perfection
and idealism and that this supernormal stimuli is really a
(11:19):
stand in for it. It's such an intriguing idea, especially
when we get to another section in which we talk
about porn and and other things that other types of
media that we consume. Um. But before we do that,
let's take a break, and when we get back, we're
going to talk about why humans are essentially like feagel
chicks when it comes to art. Alright, we're back. We
(11:50):
are going to revisit this topic art and why we're
drawn to it um because we need to podcast on this.
I believe it was like the Science of beauty or
along so lines, and we talked about vs. Roma Gendren,
who has some really great and interesting ideas about art.
He says that are hardwired to the way that we
respond to our environments, and particularly he says, um, we
(12:12):
evolved in a camouflage environment, and we are rewarded when
we identify objects and patterns, and that's why we like
to seek them out so often in this idea called grouping.
So he says that when you are looking at an artwork,
you can't help but be pleased on some level if
you can detect those patterns. Now, he says, to really
understand why we are drawn to certain works of art,
(12:35):
you have to look at seagull chicks because when they hatch,
they start pecking at the mother's beak for food, and
the mother seagulls beak is a long yellow thing with
a red spot on the end. So for those chicks,
that red spot is that kind of stimuli that they
know if they tap it they get food. So action, reaction,
(12:58):
and reward. The archers quickly found is that you have okay,
so you have the beak with the markings, but you
can you can have just a beak. You don't need
the mother because the because nature takes shortcuts in our
associations here or and certainly in the associations of birds,
so you can take the mother out of the equation.
You can just put a beak on a stick and
(13:19):
they will respond to that. So that's that's kind of
the has to have the spot, has has to have
the appropriate markings. But where it gets even crazier is
that you turn those markings into super stimuli. You you
put three red lines on there, and then that just
makes it irresistible to the chick, like it just it
(13:41):
just overflows the circuitry overloads the circuitry, and they have
to go to that beak. Now, yeah, and actually you're
on chound and says that the chick prefers the fetishize
highly abstract representation of a beak to the real beak. Again,
will depressing here because the mother is attached to the
real beak. And yet here are these three stripes that
(14:01):
are very strong. Um, they're they're exhibiting a crazy reaction
to And this was researched done by mythologist Tim Burton,
by the way, Yeah, not to be confused with the
Tim Burton. Yeah, I was trying to because I was
reading the interview with the Ramashan Brennager for it to
Tim Burton. So I started doing all these searches for
Tim Burton birds, Tim Burton biologists, and it was still
(14:23):
getting nothing but information on the director Tim Burton. That's
bad because I would love to see some sort of
mash up like him directing a film about super normal stimuli. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I feel I want to see nothing but
films about super normal stimula. Now, um, super stimuli about
super stimuli indeed, But Ramaon says that this is the
(14:43):
same reason that we humans gravitate towards art, that these abstractions,
these metaphors and unusual combinations of elements play to instincts
wired deep in our reptilian brains, instincts that really don't
have any bounds, because, again Bartlett says, everything that's available
to us today and the supersized fashion is not something
(15:07):
that was available, you know, ten thousand years ago, and
so our brains and our bodies just have not been
able to be conscious enough really to tamp this down. Yeah,
and I love how he referred to the artificial beak
for the bird as as a fetish, because it instantly
brings to mind some of these these ancient fetishes that
you see the venus figurines right where it's during like
(15:30):
almost a headless woman, bosoms and valley and uh. And
in a sense, even in a in a very primitive sense,
this is an idealized female form. And of course, through
the history of art you see lots of idealized versions
of the of the female form. I mean, the Venus
de Milo, for example, is just another venus in a
very long tradition of venus is well, yeah, I mean
(15:52):
the code of those pieces of art is basically that
your genetic material is going to survive better in this person,
maybe because perhaps there there would be um stronger offspring
or more of a chance to copulate with this person,
or you know. I mean, those are all the signs
that are coming from that particular piece of art. And
Rom Trndon says that artists are tapping into the figural
(16:14):
primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultra normal stimuli
that are more powerfully exciting certain visual neurons in our
brains as opposed to realistic looking images. Yeah, like when
we did our podcast in the art Savannahs came up
landscapes that there are certain artistic interpretations of landscapes that arguably,
uh get into our brain more, that are more pleasing,
(16:37):
more pleasing, but essentially get their claws into us because
on a very primitive level, we see it and we
know that this would be a good place to live.
It's like, oh, there's some trees, I can seek some cover. There,
there's some water I can drink. Everything that Bob Ross
describes when he's painting a landscape like those are all
things that are those are all aspects of of a
landscape that would be pleasing to the human organism. Yeah,
(17:00):
but from that too, that um, the vantage point was
really important that you would want to be up on
a hill in those landscape um paintings so that you
would be able to see out not just you know,
over your kingdom, but be able to see any intruders
coming upon your al Right. So that's art. That's one.
It's one thing to think about the aesthetic world. But
but how do we take this and apply it to
(17:21):
the the less aesthetic worlds of say, fast food? Well,
as we had mentioned before, you mean, especially with sugar,
our bodies need a little bit of it, and so
we have those big crazy anime eyes looking at that
and taking all of that in and thinking I want
the entire thing. Um. So you know, for me, I
(17:43):
think this topic is really very large in junk food
because food is energy. We gravitate to it, um, But
we don't necessarily know when to stop, right, That's the
whole boundary thing with our instincts. So if you look
at a giant jar of peanut butter on on a shelf,
you know, I'm talking about Costco or any of those
(18:05):
other like super crazy places where they've got just giant
oversized cans of all types of food. On some level,
that's tapping into the primal brain in somewhere. I mean,
you know, some evolutionary bioto just might say that jar
of peanut butter is a promise to you that you're
not going to have to leave your cave very often
for food and you won't encounter as much danger. Yeah,
(18:26):
because your body is saying that stuff is great. That
is what I create. I want as much as that
as we can possibly get, so that I can stockpilot
and have it whenever I want. I will not have
to leave my apartment for three months with that jar
of peanut butter. But you know, of course, there's an
idea here that we live so much in the symbolic world.
So some of these meetings can't help but drill down
(18:47):
into us. No, I can't help but think of French
fries um in terms of super normal stimuli, because what
our French fries. Your average order of French fries, you know,
covered with ketchup, and that's and that's not counting if
you're adding bacon or chili or nacho cheese or whatever.
The latest s t g I Fridays sort of twist
on it happens to be. But in one plate, you're
(19:08):
you're you're satisfying your cravings for fat, for crispiness, that
you're that you're on on a on a on one level,
associating with fresh vegetables. You're getting sweetness, you're getting salt,
maybe you're getting a hit of hint of meat if
you have some sort of weird topping on it. And
all of this in one big blasphem is serving. You know.
What's really interesting about that is there is an article
(19:28):
out there somewhere about the physics of a potato chip
and why it's so appealing to us. And if I'm
remembering this correctly, the kind of crunch, that popping sound
that the chips make is the exact same that a
fresh fruit or vegetable might feel like in your mouth.
And this is something that our brains have been tagging for,
(19:49):
you know, tens of thousands of years, and so that
chip is really just riding into the circuitry of your
brain saying fresh, fresh, this is good, this is healthy.
Let's we cannot just eat just one eat the whole bag.
Yeah yeah, yeah, all right. In another area that uh again,
there's some there's a level of aesthetics involved in this
(20:10):
as well. But the world of gaming, video gaming everything
from you know, playing what is it candy corn candy
crush on your phone to some sort of deep MMO
immersion experience, because what do you get with video games?
You get an instant entry into a world of goal
achievement UM neurological award for that goal achievement, empowerment in
(20:33):
some cases graphic violence exploration. UM. The goal achievement is
something I often think about as when I find time
these days to to play like a quick video game,
like I think, well, this is clearly what's happening here
is my brain is adjusting to this false environment and saying, oh, well,
we just achieved something there, We just achieved something there,
(20:55):
even if in the course of the day maybe I
didn't actually close any loops, you know, or I am
closing loop after loop and just say fifteen minutes of gameplay.
So this reminds me of two things. One is the
stickleback fish, right, because you've got that the red underside
of the wooden fish, that more aggression towards that and
via games are so beautiful if I may say that, UM,
the way that they're rendered in the colors and the
(21:16):
sa creation. All of that is very intriguing and it's
kind of like hyper realism. So that's one thing I
think that people fall into. The other is this is
really playing into for me is an episode of It's
Always Sunny in Philadelphia And are you familiar with it?
I've watched the number of episodes. It's great. And when
the characters is D and she's kind of always shoved
(21:38):
around by the other guys in this gang of theirs,
so to speak, um, and she turns to the virtual
world with avatars to try to vanquish them in a sense,
because in real life she has not much power or
control over the situation. But she creates these characters and
everybody in the town gets to know the virtual reality
(22:02):
players in this game get to know that gang, and
they know what how D is describing them in this
other world. It is probably my favorite It's Always Funny
in Philadelphia episode, and there's this great idea behind it
all that um, they're just all in a turtle stream
and outer space. Oh, that's pretty awesome. I'll have to
check that episode out. Yes, I love the mention of
(22:23):
the word avatar because certainly, avatar in the gaming world
is one thing. It's the version of us that goes
into this lesser world. And in the the world of
cosmology and religion, an avatar is a version of a
God that we as humans can interact with, or at
least some aspect of a God uh that we can
comprehend and uh. And in thinking about the ideal forms
(22:45):
of Plato, I can't help but think of those forms
in that in that ideal realm as being kind of
like God's, kind of like a pantheon of God's, where
each deity is again an idealized version of something that
we want out of life. And in the gaming world,
this adversary that you're you're you know, you're shooting in
(23:05):
this uh this fifteen minutes of game play in the evening,
that is the ideal version of an adversary, kind of
an avatar of some uh, of some ideal enemy, and
you're vanquishing it. In the same way that h this uh,
this artificial version of a beautiful woman in a magazine
is again an avatar of of ideal beauty that we've created,
(23:28):
some version of the unimaginable perfection beyond our realm that
we have made, we've cobbled together in our realm. Well,
let's jump off on that because I think the beautiful
woman thing that really plays into this idea of porn
and again gender performance. And when we talked about lust
uh an episode of one of Our Seven Sins, we
(23:50):
talked about this article called the Internet is for porn.
So let's talk about it. And I just wanted to
reference it real quick in light of why we seek
super normal stimuli. Before um yield Internet, I'm supposed by now,
there were fewer than ninety porn magazines published in the US. Today,
(24:10):
more than two point five million porn sites are blocked
by CYBERsitter. That's not all of them, but that's as
many as CYBERsitter has comed through. So now, consider that
porn is tapping into the reward circuitry of your brain
with the release of dopamine. And dopamine is really that neurotransmitter,
that chemical that keeps you seeking out that experience again
(24:33):
and again. It's what helps form habits. So porn is
this kind of really interesting aspect of supernormal stimuli because
you know, you could have a person in the other
room who is more than willing to have sex with you.
But some people will actually opt to say, just look
at porn instead and um interact with that image in
(24:56):
their mind. And that is fascinating because here you might
have the real thing, but you know, just like the beak,
the fake beak with the three stripes on it, you
keep sort of going towards that fake thing, or even
more to the point, like the gaudy golden egg in
the bird's nest. It's not going to produce anything. It
has no substance, it's it's just a just a gateway
(25:19):
to the abyss that you're going to choose that over
over actual human interaction or at least even the you know,
if not, you know, because certainly not everyone's in a
position where they can as easily find human interaction and
ultimately some sort of sexual experience. But still to choose
that over the even the attempt at it, the attempt
at human interaction. And think about that egg again, you know,
(25:41):
the big giant egg with US spots on it, the
polka dots and it's day glow yellow. And then think
about the women that are represented in porn and their dimensions.
Quite often you have I mean, I don't know that
there's even any um porn that features women that aren't
augmented or at least approaching certain dimensions with their bodies. Well,
(26:08):
there are a lot of different types of pornography. Well,
I mean, obviously seventies porn. I'll tell you what. Paton Oswald,
the stand up comedian, he um he did did a
bit and I imagined still does a bit, uh, pointing
out that no matter what ones like, whatever a person's
particular individual fetishes, no matter you know, this dark thing
(26:29):
that they haven't told anybody somewhere out there in the world.
There there's like a team of people who have a
magazine devoted to that, and they're just so bored with it.
It's just so every day. Now. It's an older bil
that he did imagines you could basically extrapolate this to
websites and pornography in general. So but every corner of
(26:49):
of of of sexuality, within limits or maybe not even
within limits, is represented out there, and that's part of
the supernormal stimuli of it. Like you could you could
just go out there and just fall down the whole
of pornography and almost never reached the bottom. And again,
(27:10):
dopamine would be really helping to carve out those neural
pathways to keep you going again and again. So obviously
we are conscious of our behavior. We humans. We have
that beautiful prefrontal cortex which is helping us manage all
these different things about our lives and helping us to
be conscious. Um, so how do we want to look
(27:30):
at this? Because I mean, you can look at this
in a light of like, uh positive light supernormals to
be in general, or just pornography basically, um, super normal
in in general, because with pornography we could certainly got
a lot deeper into that topic and just discussing like,
because you have super normal stimuli, and then how does
that affect just everything in life? How does that affect uh,
(27:53):
you know, underlying currents of misogyny and culture. How does
that affect your personal interactions, your expectations from real world sexuality?
How does it change real world sexuality? But for other
for another podcast. I guess what I'm saying is there
are two different ways to look at this. So you
want to take good copp or bad cop? Um, I
guess I'll take a bad cop it. Okay, Okay, Well,
(28:15):
I mean the bad cop version of of looking at
the super normal stimuli is that. I mean, we're kind
of we're kind of boned, and we always have been.
We're tied to these these cravings and these desires for
these ideal forms, and we thanks to our technology, thank
to our thanks to our art, we're able to craft.
We're able to sort of scratch away at that layer
(28:35):
between us and the ideal to create these artificial versions
of the things we want. And then we were kind
of powerless to resist them, you know that we we
we end up not leaving our apartments because the Internet
provides us just instant access to whatever our whim might be,
instant access to just you know, an endless stream of
(28:56):
whatever kind of sexuality we want to immerse our selves in.
We can we can order any kind of tantalizing junk
food we want and have it delivered right to our
home and whatever quantities we want. And so we end
up just setting on that big golden egg, just riding
it into extinction, like the like the atomic bomb at
the at the end of Doctor Strange Lots, And indeed
(29:17):
the atomic bomb is an example aggression of aggression of
just of of super stimuli in the world of of
protection and the desire to be protected against aggression from
these uh outsider forces. Okay, I'll have one thing to
that before I go to a good cop. All right,
um see, because you're a bad cop too, that's the thing. Well,
(29:40):
I can be a good cop. Yeah. Do you remember
we're talking about our episode on habits and we were
talking about like something like forty five percent of the
decisions that we make on a daily basis are rooted
inhabit And if habits are driven by reward systems, then
that means that that's not stig thing right, Like, it
(30:01):
would be very hard for us to overcome these sort
of routinized neural pathways that are happening every single day,
Like you might have to be as zen as a
monk and as conscious of your behaviors. But now I
will go to DJ Bartlett. She's really a good cup here,
and she says humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen's birds.
(30:27):
That's Nicolas Tinbergen. Um. She says, we have a giant brain,
and this would give us the unique ability to exercise
self control and override instincts that lead us astray and
extricate ourselves from civilizations gaudy traps. Do you think, so
I think we can do it. Maybe, I mean it's
it's kind of a colossal idea because again, I I
(30:50):
kind of like to look at these super stimuli entities
as kind of dark gods from beyond our universe, and
then what standing, what do we have to combat them?
We have, we have a nice brain, we have some
willpower that we can summon, we have some self knowledge
of our relationship with super stimuli. We can conceivably stop
(31:10):
and realize, oh that, even without getting into porn, to
go back to just just beauty, you know, to realize, oh,
well that that version of Scarlett Johansson that's on the
front of that magazine is actually she's wearing makeup. She
has probably been photoshopped, Like even though that is a
real woman, that is an idealized version of a real woman.
(31:33):
So we can we can be self aware, we can
exert willpower. So yeah, I will. I will agree with
the good Cops to a certain extent on that. But
I feel like we're we're up against some pretty overwhelming odds. No, No,
we like to rely on our lazy blueprint that we've
created for ourselves. At least I do. Because back to willpower,
we've done, of course, uh podcasts on willpower, and we
(31:54):
know that willpower is at a pleadable resource. So when
we're we're most of command, most in command of ourselves,
when we're most awake and aware of ourselves, then maybe
we're the equal of this of these forces. But we
can't stay awake all the time. We can't stay uh
you know, completely tanked up on willpower all the time
unless we have a third eye that we can open
(32:16):
to consciousness. But I think that kind of concludes where
we are with this topic. Um, you know, there are
a couple of bright spots in this world and which
symbolic meaning is underpinning everything that we do. Indeed, we
have that we have the equipment to fight the good fights.
So so just keep that in mind. Suit up, yeah,
the next time cheesy fries come out. All right, Obviously
(32:40):
this is a topic that everyone is going to have
experience with on multiple levels, so we would love to
hear from just about everybody on it. Um, you can
get in touch with us a number of ways. Of course,
as always, go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership, that is where you will find
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(33:02):
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stimiline makes you go, I will go, you know, with
the big cartoon eyes that come out of your head.
Let us know. You can send us an email at
(33:23):
below the mind at discovery dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff
Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas, and
today is an episode of where we can call out
a particular listener for suggesting it. Yeah, listener Serena. She
(00:24):
sent us this excellent life Hacker article about why we
feel the need to fill our pie holes in our
eye holes with exaggerated versions of stimuli every day. Yeah,
and just start up because you think Lifehacker, you think
I am. I'm reading a life Packer article and I'm
going to be a better equipped to sort of make
the best out of my day. You know, this kind
(00:45):
of an uplifting name aspect to that. And so I
don't know about you, but I entered into this topic
with that sort of idea in mind, like, oh, it's
just a little quirky insight into how we go about
our daily lives and maybe how you might improve it
a little bit. But I found this topic to be
one of the more or ultimately disturbing topics that we've
looked at, like this condemning of of of human nature
(01:07):
and sort of makes you want to crawl into a
cave to a certain extent, Yeah, because you're right. The
premise was like, hey, we all love cheesecake, right, it's delicious,
it's fatty, it's got tons of sugar. But this happens
to be something called a super normal stimuli. Um. This
is a term evolutionary biologist used to describe any stimulus
that elicits a response stronger than the stimulus for which
(01:30):
it evolved, even if it's artificial. So, in other words,
we like sugar because that's a quick hit of energy.
We needed that back in the day. Um, but we
don't need a slice of cheesecake. Yeah. Sugar is probably
the easiest example to to just call out and and
and generally a not even really a harmless one, but
(01:50):
a less harmful version of some of the things we're
gonna look at here, because the basic idea is how
much raw sugar can you find in the natural environment.
If you're a you know, a prehistoric hunter gather. Maybe
you'll find some berries, maybe you'll find some sort of
a carrot, uh, but you're not going to find you know,
a big sucker, a big dumb dumb a health field
of TUTSI rolls to feast on. That is supernormal stimuli.
(02:12):
That is a a version of the stimuli that we
seek as a as an organism, except it is it
is blown out of proportion. It is the crack cocaine
of sugar and certainly crack and heroin methamphetamines. These are
these are other examples of of super normal stimuli that
have had a huge effect on humans. Yeah, in my mind,
(02:33):
there's a whole class of desserts called porn desserts. Yeah,
you know what I'm talking about. Like there's like sixteen
layer caramel cakes that are just so huge and big
and with you know, red frosting, and it's so over
the top. And we'll be talking about porn by the
way later on, but it's like such a good example.
Another great example um of this sort of supernormal stimuli
(02:56):
giant eyed dolls or even handime hare. I was thinking
about this key ute. Yes, we've we've We've recorded at
least one podcast in the in the past on the
power of cute and and how cutely taps into our
our primal instincts to want to care for like a
small child, and so we end up seeing that smash
small child's face in a cat in a cartoon character.
(03:19):
But you look at some of these just super cute, hypercute,
dangerously cute animate characters or the or the or certainly
the avatar of this Hello Kitty, and uh, and it's overpowering.
It's cuteness, almost beyond our human ability to take it
in right. And as Dedra Bartlett of, a Harvard psychologist
(03:40):
and the author of super Normal Stimuli, how primal urges
overran the revolutionary purposes says, this human instinct for food, sex,
or even territorial protection, all of that is rooted in
our instincts, evolved, as you say, for hunting and gathering
an early man. And she says that evolution has been
unable to keep up with the pace of chain, this
rapid change in the modern life in which a taco bell,
(04:03):
Dorito's Loco taco, you know, daglo orange in your hand
suddenly arrives. Um our bodies in our minds aren't really
unable to water down that instinct, that response to that
food or that stimulus. Yeah, I mean, because on a
basic level, what does the human creature need in order
to survive? It needs to mate and uh and and
(04:25):
and reproduce. It needs to take in food. Um, it
needs to find these various tastes that please it. It
needs protection, It doesn't need a lot of things. But
then we layer on all the complexities of human civilization,
our technology, our art, our ability to find all the
stimuli that we crave, and then just just pump them
up to an unbelievable degree. Yeah, Bartlett says that as
(04:48):
a result, we have a glut of larger than like
objects from candy to pornography to atomic bombs, that cater
to outmoded that persistent drives with dangerous results. Indeed, now,
in order to fully understand this, we have to go
to the roots of the term supernormal stimuli, which are
based in some rather uh simple biological principles, which is
(05:09):
nice because again, all these these human layers of human civilization, technology,
it complicates the issue. But when we look to the
animal world we can find a far simpler model, and
we we find that back in the nineteen thirties with
the work of Dutch noble laureate Nico Tinbergen. That's right,
he is the person who coined the term super normal
stimuli to describe these these uh sort of imitations that
(05:33):
appeal to primitive instincts and exert stronger attraction and the
real thing. So this biologist he set about isolating traits
that trigger certain instincts in animals and insects, and he
manipulated these traits in nature to see what would happen.
So this next bit is from the Life Hacker article
by Daniel Jody or Geoty. I suppose it says that
(05:57):
he constructed plaster eggs to see which one a bird
would prefer to sit on, finding that they would select
those that were larger, had more defined markings or more
saturated color. A day glow bright egg with black polka dots,
for instance, would be selected over the bird's own pale
(06:18):
dappled eggs, and in fact that perd would keep slipping
off the huge one, but it couldn't help it. It
was drawn to that super stimuli of the colors in
the markings, because the colors in the markings in the
natural world, in the in the in the natural course
of events, would indicate the healthier eggs, which ones have
the highest grade of survival, and therefore that's where the
(06:39):
bird is going to focus his attention. This artificial egg, though,
just pumps that completely out of proportion, and the bird
cannot help but respond by setting on this lifeless but beautiful,
gaudy egg and in riding that egg to the detriment
of its actual biological offspring in the surrounding eggs, which
are which are okay but less amazing. Yeah. This is actually,
(07:02):
to me the really depressing part when you see this
in nature, because it really does bear out this idea
that a lot of this is sort of hardwired in
us and all organisms. He also found that territorial male
stickleback fish would attack a wooden fish model more vigorously
than a real male if it's underside was redder, so
again pumping up those signs to it that would make
(07:25):
it say, oh that that's a competitor. Look how red
that underbelly is. And this is interesting too. I want
to make sure everyone sort of bookmarking this for later. Uh.
Here we have supernormal stimuli that is in kind of
in the negative realm as opposed to the positive, something
that's based in fear as opposed to desire. That's a
really good point, the aggressive part of it, right, Okay.
(07:47):
Another experiment was that he constructed a cardboard dummy butterfly
with more defined markings. Uh, that male butterflies would actually
try to mate with in preference to actual real female butterflies.
And that's another one to to definitely remember for later
when we can start getting into the human versions of
(08:07):
these same principles. Yeah, because if you think about um,
and we'll get into this later, but you know, I
always talk about gender performance. And Okay, if you take
a female and a male and you don't do really
much to them in terms of grooming them and clothing
them in ways that are coded for their gender, there's
not a ton of difference between them. But if you
slap on a bunch of makeup on a female plug
(08:31):
her eyebrows, she's really performing that gender. And I think
about it that with these butterflies like this must have
been like the Marylyn mon row of that butterfly. Yes,
and all the other male butterflies are like, yes, that
one even though she's wooden, looks great. Yes, the butterfly
becomes this a little closer to this, this ideal butterfly. Right,
(08:52):
And that's what really gets me about the topic of
super normal stimuli. Um My mind, in reading this get
kept returning to a Plato's theory of forms Plato's in
The Philosopher of Course, um he proposed that we live
in this material realm, right, okay, and beyond our plane
of existence, there's an immaterial realm of ideal forms, all right,
(09:13):
you can you can think of these ideal forms is
the absolute perfection of a given thing, a truth that
cannot be manifested in the material world. All we can
do is echo it. Okay. So in this world there's
no true beauty, but we have an innate understanding and
longing for the true form of beauty as as it
exists beyond the limits of the material world. In a
similar sense, see would argue that there's no true justice here,
(09:35):
but we all have a sense of justice because there's
an unreachable ideal that exists beyond our realm, okay, out
there in the realm of forms. And you can apply
this to just about any anything like the one argument
is often made as a chair, Like every chair in
our world is just to take an attempt to capture
the perfect chairness that we would find in the world
(09:55):
of forms beyond our material world. Every pretty face, every feeling,
every world of art, it's just a take on the ideal.
And so it's tempting to view a supernormal stimuli in
the same way we innately long for the true forms,
forms that simply do not occur in the natural world.
We do it through our art and our technology, and
(10:16):
in doing this we're able to inch a little closer
and a little closer to this awesome and terrible perfection
that we crave. And so so we end up engine
closer and closer and in creating an artificial thing that
just cannot exist in this world, and we're craving nothing
but but shadows of that and imitations of that. And
(10:37):
we're taking to your point that, I mean, the makeup
argument is perfect because we're taking real versions of beauty
and in a sense of defacing them and trying to
carve them into uh, into avatars of this true form,
this this perfect form that just cannot be achieved. Yeah,
this is essentially the Platonic ideal, right, this idea that
(10:59):
you're trying to get to this ideal as close to
perfection as possible. Other would Plato would say, there's no
perfection because we are mere copies of what God intended. Right,
So there's this obsession with, as you say, uh, perfection
and idealism and that this supernormal stimuli is really a
(11:19):
stand in for it. It's such an intriguing idea, especially
when we get to another section in which we talk
about porn and and other things that other types of
media that we consume. Um. But before we do that,
let's take a break, and when we get back, we're
going to talk about why humans are essentially like feagel
chicks when it comes to art. Alright, we're back. We
(11:50):
are going to revisit this topic art and why we're
drawn to it um because we need to podcast on this.
I believe it was like the Science of beauty or
along so lines, and we talked about vs. Roma Gendren,
who has some really great and interesting ideas about art.
He says that are hardwired to the way that we
respond to our environments, and particularly he says, um, we
(12:12):
evolved in a camouflage environment, and we are rewarded when
we identify objects and patterns, and that's why we like
to seek them out so often in this idea called grouping.
So he says that when you are looking at an artwork,
you can't help but be pleased on some level if
you can detect those patterns. Now, he says, to really
understand why we are drawn to certain works of art,
(12:35):
you have to look at seagull chicks because when they hatch,
they start pecking at the mother's beak for food, and
the mother seagulls beak is a long yellow thing with
a red spot on the end. So for those chicks,
that red spot is that kind of stimuli that they
know if they tap it they get food. So action, reaction,
(12:58):
and reward. The archers quickly found is that you have okay,
so you have the beak with the markings, but you
can you can have just a beak. You don't need
the mother because the because nature takes shortcuts in our
associations here or and certainly in the associations of birds,
so you can take the mother out of the equation.
You can just put a beak on a stick and
(13:19):
they will respond to that. So that's that's kind of
the has to have the spot, has has to have
the appropriate markings. But where it gets even crazier is
that you turn those markings into super stimuli. You you
put three red lines on there, and then that just
makes it irresistible to the chick, like it just it
(13:41):
just overflows the circuitry overloads the circuitry, and they have
to go to that beak. Now, yeah, and actually you're
on chound and says that the chick prefers the fetishize
highly abstract representation of a beak to the real beak. Again,
will depressing here because the mother is attached to the
real beak. And yet here are these three stripes that
(14:01):
are very strong. Um, they're they're exhibiting a crazy reaction
to And this was researched done by mythologist Tim Burton,
by the way, Yeah, not to be confused with the
Tim Burton. Yeah, I was trying to because I was
reading the interview with the Ramashan Brennager for it to
Tim Burton. So I started doing all these searches for
Tim Burton birds, Tim Burton biologists, and it was still
(14:23):
getting nothing but information on the director Tim Burton. That's
bad because I would love to see some sort of
mash up like him directing a film about super normal stimuli. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I feel I want to see nothing but
films about super normal stimula. Now, um, super stimuli about
super stimuli indeed, But Ramaon says that this is the
(14:43):
same reason that we humans gravitate towards art, that these abstractions,
these metaphors and unusual combinations of elements play to instincts
wired deep in our reptilian brains, instincts that really don't
have any bounds, because, again Bartlett says, everything that's available
to us today and the supersized fashion is not something
(15:07):
that was available, you know, ten thousand years ago, and
so our brains and our bodies just have not been
able to be conscious enough really to tamp this down. Yeah,
and I love how he referred to the artificial beak
for the bird as as a fetish, because it instantly
brings to mind some of these these ancient fetishes that
you see the venus figurines right where it's during like
(15:30):
almost a headless woman, bosoms and valley and uh. And
in a sense, even in a in a very primitive sense,
this is an idealized female form. And of course, through
the history of art you see lots of idealized versions
of the of the female form. I mean, the Venus
de Milo, for example, is just another venus in a
very long tradition of venus is well, yeah, I mean
(15:52):
the code of those pieces of art is basically that
your genetic material is going to survive better in this person,
maybe because perhaps there there would be um stronger offspring
or more of a chance to copulate with this person,
or you know. I mean, those are all the signs
that are coming from that particular piece of art. And
Rom Trndon says that artists are tapping into the figural
(16:14):
primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultra normal stimuli
that are more powerfully exciting certain visual neurons in our
brains as opposed to realistic looking images. Yeah, like when
we did our podcast in the art Savannahs came up
landscapes that there are certain artistic interpretations of landscapes that arguably,
uh get into our brain more, that are more pleasing,
(16:37):
more pleasing, but essentially get their claws into us because
on a very primitive level, we see it and we
know that this would be a good place to live.
It's like, oh, there's some trees, I can seek some cover. There,
there's some water I can drink. Everything that Bob Ross
describes when he's painting a landscape like those are all
things that are those are all aspects of of a
landscape that would be pleasing to the human organism. Yeah,
(17:00):
but from that too, that um, the vantage point was
really important that you would want to be up on
a hill in those landscape um paintings so that you
would be able to see out not just you know,
over your kingdom, but be able to see any intruders
coming upon your al Right. So that's art. That's one.
It's one thing to think about the aesthetic world. But
but how do we take this and apply it to
(17:21):
the the less aesthetic worlds of say, fast food? Well,
as we had mentioned before, you mean, especially with sugar,
our bodies need a little bit of it, and so
we have those big crazy anime eyes looking at that
and taking all of that in and thinking I want
the entire thing. Um. So you know, for me, I
(17:43):
think this topic is really very large in junk food
because food is energy. We gravitate to it, um, But
we don't necessarily know when to stop, right, That's the
whole boundary thing with our instincts. So if you look
at a giant jar of peanut butter on on a shelf,
you know, I'm talking about Costco or any of those
(18:05):
other like super crazy places where they've got just giant
oversized cans of all types of food. On some level,
that's tapping into the primal brain in somewhere. I mean,
you know, some evolutionary bioto just might say that jar
of peanut butter is a promise to you that you're
not going to have to leave your cave very often
for food and you won't encounter as much danger. Yeah,
(18:26):
because your body is saying that stuff is great. That
is what I create. I want as much as that
as we can possibly get, so that I can stockpilot
and have it whenever I want. I will not have
to leave my apartment for three months with that jar
of peanut butter. But you know, of course, there's an
idea here that we live so much in the symbolic world.
So some of these meetings can't help but drill down
(18:47):
into us. No, I can't help but think of French
fries um in terms of super normal stimuli, because what
our French fries. Your average order of French fries, you know,
covered with ketchup, and that's and that's not counting if
you're adding bacon or chili or nacho cheese or whatever.
The latest s t g I Fridays sort of twist
on it happens to be. But in one plate, you're
(19:08):
you're you're satisfying your cravings for fat, for crispiness, that
you're that you're on on a on a on one level,
associating with fresh vegetables. You're getting sweetness, you're getting salt,
maybe you're getting a hit of hint of meat if
you have some sort of weird topping on it. And
all of this in one big blasphem is serving. You know.
What's really interesting about that is there is an article
(19:28):
out there somewhere about the physics of a potato chip
and why it's so appealing to us. And if I'm
remembering this correctly, the kind of crunch, that popping sound
that the chips make is the exact same that a
fresh fruit or vegetable might feel like in your mouth.
And this is something that our brains have been tagging for,
(19:49):
you know, tens of thousands of years, and so that
chip is really just riding into the circuitry of your
brain saying fresh, fresh, this is good, this is healthy.
Let's we cannot just eat just one eat the whole bag.
Yeah yeah, yeah, all right. In another area that uh again,
there's some there's a level of aesthetics involved in this
(20:10):
as well. But the world of gaming, video gaming everything
from you know, playing what is it candy corn candy
crush on your phone to some sort of deep MMO
immersion experience, because what do you get with video games?
You get an instant entry into a world of goal
achievement UM neurological award for that goal achievement, empowerment in
(20:33):
some cases graphic violence exploration. UM. The goal achievement is
something I often think about as when I find time
these days to to play like a quick video game,
like I think, well, this is clearly what's happening here
is my brain is adjusting to this false environment and saying, oh, well,
we just achieved something there, We just achieved something there,
(20:55):
even if in the course of the day maybe I
didn't actually close any loops, you know, or I am
closing loop after loop and just say fifteen minutes of gameplay.
So this reminds me of two things. One is the
stickleback fish, right, because you've got that the red underside
of the wooden fish, that more aggression towards that and
via games are so beautiful if I may say that, UM,
the way that they're rendered in the colors and the
(21:16):
sa creation. All of that is very intriguing and it's
kind of like hyper realism. So that's one thing I
think that people fall into. The other is this is
really playing into for me is an episode of It's
Always Sunny in Philadelphia And are you familiar with it?
I've watched the number of episodes. It's great. And when
the characters is D and she's kind of always shoved
(21:38):
around by the other guys in this gang of theirs,
so to speak, um, and she turns to the virtual
world with avatars to try to vanquish them in a sense,
because in real life she has not much power or
control over the situation. But she creates these characters and
everybody in the town gets to know the virtual reality
(22:02):
players in this game get to know that gang, and
they know what how D is describing them in this
other world. It is probably my favorite It's Always Funny
in Philadelphia episode, and there's this great idea behind it
all that um, they're just all in a turtle stream
and outer space. Oh, that's pretty awesome. I'll have to
check that episode out. Yes, I love the mention of
(22:23):
the word avatar because certainly, avatar in the gaming world
is one thing. It's the version of us that goes
into this lesser world. And in the the world of
cosmology and religion, an avatar is a version of a
God that we as humans can interact with, or at
least some aspect of a God uh that we can
comprehend and uh. And in thinking about the ideal forms
(22:45):
of Plato, I can't help but think of those forms
in that in that ideal realm as being kind of
like God's, kind of like a pantheon of God's, where
each deity is again an idealized version of something that
we want out of life. And in the gaming world,
this adversary that you're you're you know, you're shooting in
(23:05):
this uh this fifteen minutes of game play in the evening,
that is the ideal version of an adversary, kind of
an avatar of some uh, of some ideal enemy, and
you're vanquishing it. In the same way that h this uh,
this artificial version of a beautiful woman in a magazine
is again an avatar of of ideal beauty that we've created,
(23:28):
some version of the unimaginable perfection beyond our realm that
we have made, we've cobbled together in our realm. Well,
let's jump off on that because I think the beautiful
woman thing that really plays into this idea of porn
and again gender performance. And when we talked about lust
uh an episode of one of Our Seven Sins, we
(23:50):
talked about this article called the Internet is for porn.
So let's talk about it. And I just wanted to
reference it real quick in light of why we seek
super normal stimuli. Before um yield Internet, I'm supposed by now,
there were fewer than ninety porn magazines published in the US. Today,
(24:10):
more than two point five million porn sites are blocked
by CYBERsitter. That's not all of them, but that's as
many as CYBERsitter has comed through. So now, consider that
porn is tapping into the reward circuitry of your brain
with the release of dopamine. And dopamine is really that neurotransmitter,
that chemical that keeps you seeking out that experience again
(24:33):
and again. It's what helps form habits. So porn is
this kind of really interesting aspect of supernormal stimuli because
you know, you could have a person in the other
room who is more than willing to have sex with you.
But some people will actually opt to say, just look
at porn instead and um interact with that image in
(24:56):
their mind. And that is fascinating because here you might
have the real thing, but you know, just like the beak,
the fake beak with the three stripes on it, you
keep sort of going towards that fake thing, or even
more to the point, like the gaudy golden egg in
the bird's nest. It's not going to produce anything. It
has no substance, it's it's just a just a gateway
(25:19):
to the abyss that you're going to choose that over
over actual human interaction or at least even the you know,
if not, you know, because certainly not everyone's in a
position where they can as easily find human interaction and
ultimately some sort of sexual experience. But still to choose
that over the even the attempt at it, the attempt
at human interaction. And think about that egg again, you know,
(25:41):
the big giant egg with US spots on it, the
polka dots and it's day glow yellow. And then think
about the women that are represented in porn and their dimensions.
Quite often you have I mean, I don't know that
there's even any um porn that features women that aren't
augmented or at least approaching certain dimensions with their bodies. Well,
(26:08):
there are a lot of different types of pornography. Well,
I mean, obviously seventies porn. I'll tell you what. Paton Oswald,
the stand up comedian, he um he did did a
bit and I imagined still does a bit, uh, pointing
out that no matter what ones like, whatever a person's
particular individual fetishes, no matter you know, this dark thing
(26:29):
that they haven't told anybody somewhere out there in the world.
There there's like a team of people who have a
magazine devoted to that, and they're just so bored with it.
It's just so every day. Now. It's an older bil
that he did imagines you could basically extrapolate this to
websites and pornography in general. So but every corner of
(26:49):
of of of sexuality, within limits or maybe not even
within limits, is represented out there, and that's part of
the supernormal stimuli of it. Like you could you could
just go out there and just fall down the whole
of pornography and almost never reached the bottom. And again,
(27:10):
dopamine would be really helping to carve out those neural
pathways to keep you going again and again. So obviously
we are conscious of our behavior. We humans. We have
that beautiful prefrontal cortex which is helping us manage all
these different things about our lives and helping us to
be conscious. Um, so how do we want to look
(27:30):
at this? Because I mean, you can look at this
in a light of like, uh positive light supernormals to
be in general, or just pornography basically, um, super normal
in in general, because with pornography we could certainly got
a lot deeper into that topic and just discussing like,
because you have super normal stimuli, and then how does
that affect just everything in life? How does that affect uh,
(27:53):
you know, underlying currents of misogyny and culture. How does
that affect your personal interactions, your expectations from real world sexuality?
How does it change real world sexuality? But for other
for another podcast. I guess what I'm saying is there
are two different ways to look at this. So you
want to take good copp or bad cop? Um, I
guess I'll take a bad cop it. Okay, Okay, Well,
(28:15):
I mean the bad cop version of of looking at
the super normal stimuli is that. I mean, we're kind
of we're kind of boned, and we always have been.
We're tied to these these cravings and these desires for
these ideal forms, and we thanks to our technology, thank
to our thanks to our art, we're able to craft.
We're able to sort of scratch away at that layer
(28:35):
between us and the ideal to create these artificial versions
of the things we want. And then we were kind
of powerless to resist them, you know that we we
we end up not leaving our apartments because the Internet
provides us just instant access to whatever our whim might be,
instant access to just you know, an endless stream of
(28:56):
whatever kind of sexuality we want to immerse our selves in.
We can we can order any kind of tantalizing junk
food we want and have it delivered right to our
home and whatever quantities we want. And so we end
up just setting on that big golden egg, just riding
it into extinction, like the like the atomic bomb at
the at the end of Doctor Strange Lots, And indeed
(29:17):
the atomic bomb is an example aggression of aggression of
just of of super stimuli in the world of of
protection and the desire to be protected against aggression from
these uh outsider forces. Okay, I'll have one thing to
that before I go to a good cop. All right,
um see, because you're a bad cop too, that's the thing. Well,
(29:40):
I can be a good cop. Yeah. Do you remember
we're talking about our episode on habits and we were
talking about like something like forty five percent of the
decisions that we make on a daily basis are rooted
inhabit And if habits are driven by reward systems, then
that means that that's not stig thing right, Like, it
(30:01):
would be very hard for us to overcome these sort
of routinized neural pathways that are happening every single day,
Like you might have to be as zen as a
monk and as conscious of your behaviors. But now I
will go to DJ Bartlett. She's really a good cup here,
and she says humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen's birds.
(30:27):
That's Nicolas Tinbergen. Um. She says, we have a giant brain,
and this would give us the unique ability to exercise
self control and override instincts that lead us astray and
extricate ourselves from civilizations gaudy traps. Do you think, so
I think we can do it. Maybe, I mean it's
it's kind of a colossal idea because again, I I
(30:50):
kind of like to look at these super stimuli entities
as kind of dark gods from beyond our universe, and
then what standing, what do we have to combat them?
We have, we have a nice brain, we have some
willpower that we can summon, we have some self knowledge
of our relationship with super stimuli. We can conceivably stop
(31:10):
and realize, oh that, even without getting into porn, to
go back to just just beauty, you know, to realize, oh,
well that that version of Scarlett Johansson that's on the
front of that magazine is actually she's wearing makeup. She
has probably been photoshopped, Like even though that is a
real woman, that is an idealized version of a real woman.
(31:33):
So we can we can be self aware, we can
exert willpower. So yeah, I will. I will agree with
the good Cops to a certain extent on that. But
I feel like we're we're up against some pretty overwhelming odds. No, No,
we like to rely on our lazy blueprint that we've
created for ourselves. At least I do. Because back to willpower,
we've done, of course, uh podcasts on willpower, and we
(31:54):
know that willpower is at a pleadable resource. So when
we're we're most of command, most in command of ourselves,
when we're most awake and aware of ourselves, then maybe
we're the equal of this of these forces. But we
can't stay awake all the time. We can't stay uh
you know, completely tanked up on willpower all the time
unless we have a third eye that we can open
(32:16):
to consciousness. But I think that kind of concludes where
we are with this topic. Um, you know, there are
a couple of bright spots in this world and which
symbolic meaning is underpinning everything that we do. Indeed, we
have that we have the equipment to fight the good fights.
So so just keep that in mind. Suit up, yeah,
the next time cheesy fries come out. All right, Obviously
(32:40):
this is a topic that everyone is going to have
experience with on multiple levels, so we would love to
hear from just about everybody on it. Um, you can
get in touch with us a number of ways. Of course,
as always, go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is the mothership, that is where you will find
all the podcast episodes and our latest blogs, videos links
out to the social media accounts that we use, and uh,
(33:02):
speaking of those, We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're
on Tumbler, we're on Google Plus. On YouTube we are
mind Stuff Show and you can subscribe there to stay
on top of our latest videos. Yep. And if you
have some storm feelings about like what sort of super
stimiline makes you go, I will go, you know, with
the big cartoon eyes that come out of your head.
Let us know. You can send us an email at
(33:23):
below the mind at discovery dot com. For more on
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