The Nature of Tears, Part 3

What are tears? Are humans indeed the only animal that wraps and what purpose do they serve? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of tears from a scientific and even religious standpoint.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
here we are with Part three of Tears. I think
we have an interruption between parts two and three, but

(00:23):
but here we are to conclude the series. That's right. So, uh,
as with our past episodes where we've kind of just
we've done part one in part two and then a
part three and maybe more, Uh, this one is gonna
there's gonna be a lot of catching up on things
that we we've discussed a little bit on previous episodes.
There's gonna be some new stuff. It's uh, I'm not

(00:45):
saying it's disorganized, but it's gonna be. Um. Just what
are you getting at, Rob, It's it's more or it's
more organic. It's like we we are we're exploring and
reporting back almost in real time. Okay, it's so um.
You know. On one area I wanted to start with,
I just wanted to share this little bit that I

(01:05):
read in Adult Crying from two thousand and one by
Nico Van Harringen, and and in it, the author here
is just sharing just a couple of tidbits about how
ancient society has thought about tears. Quote. In antique science,
it was believed that tears came from the heart Egyptians
about fifteen hundred BC, the brain, and this they attribute

(01:28):
to Hippocrates from the fifth and fourth centuries b C.
Or glands at the punka lachrymalice uh attributed to Galen
in the second century. See. However, after Stinson described the
tear ducks and the main lachrymal gland in sixteen sixty two,
it was accepted that tears originated there. Yeah, there are

(01:49):
a ton of great beliefs from the ancient world about
the the anatomical origins of tears. Ideas about like when
you're feeling a swelling of emotion that makes a bunch
of vapors condensed in your heart and then they rise
up to your head and have to leak out through
your eyes. That's a good one, um. But I particularly
like the idea of Galen that the tears come from

(02:10):
the punk toa in the eyelids, these little holes uh,
which are actually the holes through which tears drain out
of the eyes, Because this is the same misconception that
I had before I started reading about the anatomy of
the eye and the tear ducks. Remember in part one
we talked about how the tears are actually secreted by
the lachrymal gland, which is above the eye, sort of
above the eye, into the outside and then they drain

(02:33):
away through these punkeda eventually into the lachrymal sack and
the and the tear ducks in the nasal cavity through
those are located on the inside of the eyes. And
apparently I haven't tried to look in my own eyes,
but I have seen images of this. Apparently you can
actually see your own punk to laccry malice, the little
holes in your eyelids that tears drain away through, if

(02:56):
you look really close. I believe I've I've I've spotted
mind before. Yeah, But but looking at them and thinking
this is where the tears come from. It's like if
you were to look at a bathtub and say, oh,
this hole in the bottom, this is from which the
waters rise and fill the tub for my bath But
of course, if that is how you're filling your bathtub,
something is wrong. You should not get into that tub. Oh.

(03:19):
Revisiting our theme of the tear ducks being the sewer
of the eye. Yeah. Now, as far as tears emerging
from the brain, I really love that idea too, because because,
on one hand, it is it's kind of correct in
a sense when you're talking about emotional tears, especially, But
the idea that's like tears are in some level like

(03:41):
brain juice, I think that's lovely, especially when we're talking
about how tears are generally seen as a as a
kind of pure immission of the body. But if we
were to think of them as is the leakings of
of an emotional brain or an enraged brain or what
have you, Uh, it paints a different picture. Now, one
interesting thing we have heard back from a couple of

(04:04):
listeners about is, uh, we we've gotten some resistance to
the idea we discussed in previous episodes that humans are
the only animals that are known to cry tears as
an emotional response to shed liquid out of their lachrymal
glands in response to emotions, which we want to be
very clear, is not the same as saying that other

(04:25):
animals don't feel emotions. It's just that tears are a
particular behavioral anatomical response to emotions that appears to only
be present in Homo sapiens. Other animals can have all
kinds of complex emotions that we maybe couldn't even begin
to fathom. They just don't particularly seem to have this
response to liquid coming out of the eyes as a result.

(04:47):
Um And and it turns out that this conviction that
animals must shed emotional tears of some kind does seem
to be It does seem to go pretty pretty far
back with people making case reports here and there. I
was reading an article that I'm definitely gonna return to
in this episode that was by uh by ad Finger Hoots,

(05:08):
who is a Dutch psychologist who's a researcher on tears,
who we've mentioned in the previous episodes and we'll come
back to again today and Lauren em Bilsma in Emotion
Review in TwixT and they discussed the idea of emotional
tears in non human animals. They say that there have
been reports of emotional tearfulness in horses and lions. This

(05:29):
goes back to plenty of the Elder Uh in crocodiles.
This goes back to Alien, who was a who wrote
in the second centuries. I think UH too like Shakespeare's
talking about how dear can weep emotionally. Of course, reports
of elephants crying emotional tears, this is something we can
come back to in a minute, uh, guerrillas and so forth.

(05:52):
But despite these case reports, they say that the best
systematic studies that that involved surveys of veterinarians, zookeepers, and
other professionals who work with animals on a regular basis
or in a scientific capacity, has essentially yielded no evidence
at all of emotional tears in any animal species other
than humans. So it really does seem to be a

(06:13):
uniquely human trade. But it is fun to look in
to it to to to answer the question why have
we come to believe or or say that certain animals
shed tears? Right, So let's start with the idea of
of crocodile tears, because yeah, this is this is a
fun one because it touches on croc biology, folk belief,

(06:35):
and of course alligator persons in the bog and fog um.
I also wonder if part of it comes from from
a Western bias against non spontaneous weeping, which I'll get
into a little bit later, and I think I've touched
on in previous episodes um a Western bias against it
in their own culture, but also how it is utilized

(06:57):
in other cultures. The idea that tears on purpose cannot
be real tears. Um and And as well discuss this
does not seem to be the case. But anyway, the
idea of the crocodile here is that a crocodile sheds
false tears for the prey it has just killed. And
this tends to depict something sinister about the crocodile and
something dubliquitous about the human you're talking about, because generally

(07:20):
that's what we're talking about, like, oh, that politicians shedding
crocodile tears, this person shedding crocodile tears, which is to say,
they're putting on a false face of emotion, they're intentionally
being emotional, or even if maybe in some literal cases
they're literally shedding tears, and you doubt the authenticity of
those tears. Yeah, And the idea of crocodile tears as

(07:43):
something that's sort of like called out by the peep
by the writers of natural histories and regarded in some
way as evil or suspect does go back further than
the idea of crocodile tears as a specific case of hypocrisy.
I was real. There's a section about the history of
the concept of crocodile tears in at fingerhoots book Why

(08:04):
Only Humans Weep, Unraveling the Mysteries of Tears. This is
from Oxford University Press. So Fingerhoots is tracing this idea
and he mentions a writer, a bishop, a Christian bishop
named sat Asterius, who is writing around the r. Four hundred,
who wrote that quote crocodiles mourn over the human heads
they devour and weep not from repentance, but because heads

(08:28):
have no edible flesh. Uh. And so I like that.
That's not quite yet to the idea of hypocrisy, but
it is saying something about like the I don't know,
the crocodile is so greedy and so cruel that even
when it's got a human head in its mouth, it's
not satisfied. It's just like this is not good enough meat.
This is just so depressing. This head is is garbage.

(08:50):
Now in terms of of actually observing crocodiles, and you know,
and the eyes of the crocodile. Uh. So, yes, crocodiles
do have non emotional tears because they do have to
keep their eyes lubricated, and apparently if they've been out
of the water for a spell, these tears may be
more noticeable and may uh you know, and maybe and

(09:12):
may be observed while the animal is feeding, if it
is then feeding or messing around with with some sort
of a carcass on the shore. I was looking around
in a two thousand six study at the University of
Florida found that there does seem to be something to
these observations and it but into by that, I mean
that people may have observed crocodiles appearing to shed tears that,

(09:34):
to be clear, are not emotional tears. But it may
be just due to warm air forced through the sinuses
during feeding pushing out more liquid. Okay, so this would
just be like a to the extent that this could
actually be something you would observe. It's just a sort
of coincidental byproduct of what the animal is doing with
its head while it's eating. Yeah, it's like if you're

(09:56):
observing certain varieties of of of the iguanas that that
swim in in salt water and then they're blasting salt
out of their face when they're on the as they
do when they're on the shore, Like that is not
emotional crying. It's it's it's you can also say that's
not even crying, that's a step beyond. But yeah, we
we can't take this, uh anatomical process and say that

(10:19):
this is this might be some sort of an emotional outpouring,
that it has anything to do with what's going on
with human emotional tears. Though many years later this did
develop into the idea that that is the origin of
the expression crocodile tears. Now that the crocodile will will
sort of weep false tears as a way of eliciting
sympathy from a victim or like luring someone close to

(10:42):
them and then uh, and then it will bite them
and weep while it's eating them. Imagine if that was
an adaptive trait. I don't think that would work. We
see a crocodile crying and we're like, oh ah, a
little buddy, he's sad about it. Clearly we can't lash out, um,
but you you know, don't lash out at crocodiles anyway.

(11:03):
But the other major animal that you sometimes see discussions
about regarding their their potential tears, uh, these involve the elephant,
and we actually heard from at least one listener I
think more than one who wrote in on the topic
of elephants allegedly shedding emotional tears. And the thing is,
you do see this still make the rounds on say

(11:23):
social media. And part of this is, you know, elephants
are sometimes in in tough situations and they do, uh,
they do seem to have have, you know, fairly complex
emotional lives. So we're not denying that that elephants have emotions. Uh.
And and when we're looking at some of these scenarios,
you know, we want elephants to be able to cry

(11:44):
to a certain extent, like we we knowing that they
have emotions, we want to give them human tears. And
you have various accounts that make the rounds on the
internet about them shedding emotional tears, like look at this
baby elephant. It's in a tough spot, it's shedding tears.
Look at this mother elephant. Uh, something horrible happened. She
is she is shedding tears. She is a displaying emotion

(12:05):
and we can connect with it. Well. I mean again,
I think this might be actually illustrative of something about
the importance of tears as a social signal between humans
that we we have this instinct that says, if if
an animal is experiencing real important emotions, they must be
capable of shedding tears, which again, it that does not

(12:27):
follow at all, Like, you know, an animal could have
perfect it could have stronger emotions than humans do and
just not have this behavioral response to them. Absolutely, so
we are not denying elephants complex emotional states, but we
will denied in tear ducts because that's exactly what evolution
has denied them. Uh And and this is where it
gets really fascinating. I was not familiar with this or

(12:50):
I had, you know, one of these things I maybe
read in the past, and it didn't really like, you know,
strike to strike a chord with me. But facts are facts.
Not only do they lack tear ducts, they actually lack
all of the plumbing associated with mammalian tears. So no glands,
no ducks, no canals, nothing interesting. Yeah, they retain mucus glands,
but nothing else. So one theory as to why why

(13:12):
this is the case is that they seem to have
evolved through a semi aquatic past and lost their tier
systems during that time, much like modern pinnipeds lacked tear
glands and tier ducts. Oh, this is funny. So there
may sort of be an aquatic ape equivalent of the
the elephant. Uh, the elephants evolutionary ancestor the sort of

(13:34):
a life more based in waiting around in the water, right, Okay,
but it's doing the opposite of what you know, we
got to do that in the previous episode about the
hypothesis that that human tears and our ability to shed
emotional tears are somehow connected to a supposed aquatic eight past. Well,
here's a creature, uh with with what seems to be

(13:56):
at least semi aquatic past, and it lost the ability
to shed years like other mammals do during the transformation. Interesting,
this is, so what is going on with elephant eyes? Okay?
So with the elephants. So the thing is you still
your eyes still need to be moist That's that's the
important thing here. You can't know you can't do without it.
So with the elephant, other glands around the eye were

(14:17):
essentially repurposed through evolution to provide moisture to the eye.
So there's a third eyelid gland um we've talked about
third eyelids before. You know, this is like you have
the eyelid one and two are the ones that we
have the top and the bottom, But then a lot
of animals have a have a third as well that
is involved. So the third island gland was an accessory

(14:39):
gland repurpose. The third eyelid gland is found on other
animals as well, but in the elephant it's extremely well
developed to make up what for what was lost. And
there are also some other tier cocktail differences with the
elephant tiers as well due to these changes. So you
can so scientists have been able to like look at
the substance of the of of the the moisture the

(15:01):
liquid in an elephant's eye, and they can they can
see that while the actual chemical makeup of it is
a little different from what you would find in in
you know, typical mammalian tears. Okay, so despite their different
ocular anatomy, they've got some kind of liquid, uh combination
of like mucus and and and oils and some kind
of liquid that maybe on and around the eye and

(15:22):
that's just sort of hanging out there now. If they
don't have tear ducks through which these things would be
draining away. Where does the liquid go ah, And that
is where a lot of these observations of elephant tears
come from. Um they end up look like they're crying
because of the Again, their eyes don't have drainage canals.
Their eyes just fill up and then it streams down
the face. Sometimes there's even a foam due to the

(15:44):
accumulation of sivum and mucus. And this is fascinating too,
because this reminds me of of my son's issues with
his tear ducks. Having like that was that was the
reason his his eyes would well up with tears so easily,
not because he was emotional or or anything. It's just
the drainage was was messed up, uh, so he would
his eyes would well with tears just by virtue of

(16:06):
not having a good drainage system in place until it
was corrected with a tube. So if it's just common
for elephants to have sort of liquid mucus, various things
sort of dripping out of their eyes as a standard
feature of of what's going on with their ocular anatomy.
And then you pair that with elephants sometimes being in
situations where they appear to be experiencing emotions, probably are

(16:27):
experiencing something that you could call emotions, and you you
pair those two things together and you think, oh, the
elephant is weeping because of its situation. Absolutely yeah, So
it's it's fascinating. I love how this, how this turns
what we think about regarding the million tears on its head,
And of course it plays into our our our tendency

(16:48):
to want to see human emotions, not only human emotions,
but but human anatomy and other creatures. Uh. And if
anyone wants to learn more about this, I have to
say that Rachel Warner has a great post on this
at why Animals Do the Thing dot com. It's it's
well sided and well written. I highly recommended all right

(17:14):
well to come back to the subject of human tears
and the evolutionary explanation for why liquid comes out of
our eyes when we're experiencing strong emotions. Why this unique
behavioral reaction that humans have to their own emotional states
and to the emotional states of others. I wanted to
come back to to this author I've mentioned several times now,

(17:35):
the Dutch psychologist add Finger hoots Um, and one thing
I wanted to start off with, was so there's a
paper I said it a few minutes ago as a
resource for the claim about other animals in the systematic
surveys of veterinarians and zookeepers and stuff, uh, not not
showing emotional tears. That same paper published an emotional review

(17:56):
in twenty sixteen by Vinger Hoots and Lauren in Bilsma.
That's a good or because they review a bunch of
the different sort of findings about human tears and and
their uniqueness all in the same place, and that they
argue that crying should be considered a unique human behavior
that quote obeys the laws of operant conditioning and is

(18:16):
under the influence of biological, psychological, and social factors. It
is not merely a reflex symptom. It is a complex
behavior that appears to have that have has some kind
of biological genetic precedent, and then is strongly influenced in
its expression by situational factors, both psychological and social. And

(18:39):
they point out some other interesting facts that sort of
helps solidify the question of the question we're looking at here. Uh.
And one of these goes like this, So, okay, acoustical
crying the sound of baby makes is obviously an attachment
behavior that maintains the proximity of the parent. I think
this is pretty clear that this is the main function
of a baby crying, that the crying of a baby

(19:01):
draws the parent near to provide care, protection, and feeding.
And this kind of thing is necessary for helpless human
infants because human infants can do essentially nothing for themselves.
They are uh, they are all. They're exceptionally helpless as
far as young animals go. Now, at some point we

(19:22):
know that newborn babies cannot yet shed tears. But at
a certain point point, tears leaking out of the eyes
become a standard part of the crying repertoire. So when
when babies are displaying this attachment behavior, this uh, this
acoustical crying in order to summon the care of a parent,
it starts incorporating tears as part of that behavioral repertoire.

(19:45):
And then the interesting fact is that as people get older,
tears could be seen too in some ways replace acoustical crying.
So as we age, as we get older, people tend
to cry less frequently, and when they do cry, they
don't display the acoustical wailing properties of crying as much

(20:06):
as babies do. Instead, they just shed the tears, And
that's an interesting fact as well. Why are tears retained
into adulthood in a way that the wailing of a
baby is usually not. Another interesting developmental fact about the
role of crying is the effect of physical pain on
the tear response. So the authors here right that quote.

(20:28):
Until adolescence, physical pain is a very important trigger of tears,
but for adults and the elderly it no longer plays
a significant role. However, feelings of loss and powerlessness seem
to remain important for crying throughout the lifespan. So when
when children get physically hurt, when they're feeling physical pain

(20:48):
they scuffed their knee or something, crying is a very
common response that mostly goes away in adulthood. Adults rarely
cry as a result of physical pain and instead maintain
specifically emotional pain feelings of loss and powerlessness or helplessness
as the primary triggers of emotional tears. It's this interesting.

(21:10):
I thinking about about times that I've been hurt, uh
physically hurt as a as a as an adult. Like
the one example that I can remember where I was
hurt and I really had to choke back tears. Was
when um, I was with my my son at the
time was very young, and he was he was looking
into a cooler full of ice cream at a store,

(21:32):
you know, in public place, and I leaned over to
look in as well, right above him, and then he
excitedly hopped up and like did a like a leaping
head butt into my lower jaw, like just like a
like a child upper cut and uh and and and
it really really hurt for a seconds, like you know,
it's like being punched, um with with an uppercut and uh.

(21:53):
And I like I had to walk away for just
a second, like not out of the store, but just
a few feet away, and I felt like I felt
like tears of of of associated with the pain. But
of course that's a more complex situation there, because it's
like you're you're there with your son, you're in a
public place. I'm guessing there might be some level of
like like maybe I'm trying to you know, on some level,

(22:16):
it's like my pain needs to be related to the child,
who otherwise is not going to understand what happened, because
I think, you know, I don't think he'd really even
picked up as much language at that point. Uh so, yeah,
that's that's the only time I can think of where
it's like a physical pain plus uh something that that
provoked tears. Yeah, and it's not the adults never cry

(22:38):
tears in a response to physical pain. It's just dramatically
less frequent than it is for children. Yeah. Yeah, with
with young children, Oh, it's like it's everything, you know,
it's the skin, knee, it's the uh, the bump toe
or but then weirdly, the thing I always found amazing
is that it was it was it wasn't like clockwork
like a child would also just like sometimes they would

(23:00):
would slightly fall over, you know, they were in the
in the wrong mood, then the tears would flow and
they need to be comforted. But other times they'd be
into playing something and they'll take a fall that would
just just lay out an adult for the rest of
the day, and they just pop right back up and
there they don't care. There's no emotional response in those situations. Well,
I kind of can't help but immediately go to thoughts

(23:22):
about um, helplessness versus agency in those different situations and
and where the situations where as a kid, I remember
sort of like popping right back up after an injury,
or the times when I'm sort of like really engaged
in a task and I can continue it, you know,
like I don't feel like I've got to stop. But

(23:43):
when you feel like you're hurt in a way that
makes you want to stop doing what you're doing, that's
when the tears would come on. It would seem yeh.
But and and that may tie into the idea of like, Okay,
now that I'm no longer in activation mode, but I'm
in sort of like receiving career mode. Okay, it's time
to cry because I need I need a parent, I
need comfort, I need help. So I guess here is

(24:06):
a good place to come back and briefly describe a
few more of the hypotheses that have been offered over
the years about possible evolutionary explanations for emotional tears in
humans um In previous episodes, we discussed a handful of
these that were probably we we judged on the wrong track,
like the smoke from Funeral pyres Idea, which which seemed

(24:29):
to lack a lack of coherent mechanism for how that
would become a genetic behavior or um or talking about
the detoxification hypothesis, which had a number of strong arguments
against it. In the previous episode, we at least concluded,
or at least I remember saying, I'm pretty well convinced
that whatever the intra personal function of crying, maybe and

(24:52):
it may have some functions like that, I think I
think I'm probably convinced that the primary evolutionary justification for
a adult crying of emotional tears is interpersonal. Is A
is a social signal of some kind that is supposed
to have an effect on other people around you, maybe
too illicit caregiving from them, uh, to get them to

(25:12):
help you, maybe to neutralize aggression, things like that. But anyway,
I wanted to sketch a few more of these, uh,
these hypotheses, uh and uh. A note that most of
what I'm about to say here comes from summaries of
these views that are that are in that book by
ad vingerhoods Why Only Humans Weep? So, so this is
his take on these different hypotheses, including some of his

(25:34):
criticisms of them. So one idea that this one was
actually kind of interesting, even though there are pretty strong
arguments against it, is the idea of crying as a
mucous defense. So around the year nineteen sixty, the British
American anthropologist Ashley Montague argued that tears began as a
mechanism to protect against the dehydration of an infant's airways

(25:59):
during stress vocalizations. And it would go something like this,
a baby needs something. The baby begins to scream and
wail for help. It wants a parent, and this causes
a lot of rapid inhalation and exhalation through the nose
and mouth, and this rapid airflow could potentially dry out
the protective layers of mucus that are present in places

(26:20):
like the nasal cavity. Now, we don't often stop to
appreciate our mucus, but your nasal mucus is a wonderful,
beautiful thing. It is a wonderful biological adaptation that is
extremely important. It protects the body against you know, irritating
contaminants like dust and things. But it also very importantly
protects the body against infection. That the mucus in your

(26:41):
nose is a major first line of defense against pathogens
entering the body and infecting you. And so under montague hypothesis,
the tears that drain into the nasal passage through the
tear ducts help keep this passage from drying out, especially
during times of heightened air flow like the scream and
whaling that would accompany a child's vocal distress signals. UH.

(27:05):
This is further backed up by the idea that tears
also contain a natural enzyme called lysisyme, which has antibacterial properties,
which would seemingly provide further evidence that the shedding of
tears during distress vocalizations may be helping to protect the
body from infection. So interesting idea, But Fingerhoots has several
arguments against this hypothesis that that I think are worth considering. Uh.

(27:30):
First of all, he says, you know, well, babies don't
shed tears for the first several weeks of their life.
As we discussed in a previous episode, this would be
at a time when the would probably be the most vulnerable.
Another big strike against it is that we don't see
a tear response in in reaction to other activities, especially
like exercise that caused rapid inhalation and exhalation, which could

(27:54):
potentially dry out this mucus and sometimes does dry it
out if you go out, you know, running in the cold,
like your your airways can get very dry. Oh man,
can you imagine what tennis shoe commercials would be like
if if if the rapid tear shedding was part of exercise. Yeah,
that's hilarious. So well, I mean, one thing, Nike commercials
and all this, why is it that athletic shoe commercials

(28:14):
are always so wet? I mean, I understand it is
true that people sweat when they exercise, but like those
commercials really want to show you the moisture. They're always showing,
like like beads dripping off of people's elbows and things,
you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, I know
they want to drive home the physical exertion and uh,
I don't know, probably the sexiness of glistening bodies. Yeah maybe.

(28:35):
And I know, you know, water catches the light. It's
maybe it's just more interesting to shoot. Looks good in
slow motion. Yeah, I can see that. But anyway, I
think that's a pretty big strike against this hypothesis. You
would kind of think that if it worked like this,
other activities that could cause drying out of the mucus
membranes and the nose would also elicit tears, and it

(28:55):
just doesn't work that way. Also, why would other mammals
not have a similar addup take ation so interesting? But
I think some pretty strong strikes against it. Um. So
there's another hypothesis of fingerhoods talks about, which is the
idea of crying as a sort of a way for
adults to temporarily become a child. This one is attributed

(29:17):
to a Dutch ethologist named friends Um. Oh, I should
have looked up how to pronounce this r o e s.
That mightbe rose or russ maybe um. But it goes
like this. So most adult mammals seem to be born
with genetically determined instinctual tendencies to react to physical markers
of infancy with nurturing behaviors and with reduced aggression. You know,

(29:40):
why do we have such a deep biological reaction to
things that are cute? And why does cuteness almost perfectly
correspond to the characteristics of infancy? Uh. These are the
things that are sometimes called the infant schema, things like
having a large head, having a large, low lying eyes

(30:02):
on that head, having bulging cheeks. You can look for
this and everything from cute cartoon characters to stuffed animals
almost anything and everything that is supposed to be cute
in some way mimics babies or mimics infants of other
closely related mammal species. And this is even true of
like inanimate objects like um, inanimate objects that people find

(30:26):
cute tend to be small and tend too maybe in
some way look kind of helpless like a baby. Yeah, yeah,
this reminds me of how especially in inanimate but I
think you see this in Western animation as well. There's
this tendency when something is being super cute, sometimes the
the the eyes are made to just well with tears,
like they're just vibrating with moisture. Very good observation. And

(30:49):
I think that's uh some significant support for, at least
in part, this idea, because it seems that there is
so obviously there are these infant schema. Things that that
look like babies in one way or another tend to
just powerfully trigger us to reduce aggression, to increase care
and nurturing behaviors, to make us say all and want
to approach and take care of whatever that thing is,

(31:12):
even if it's like a like a little like inanimate
chair that's just kind of you know, cute and stubby
in some way incredibly powerful instinct. But anyway, so there
are elements of this infant schema that are based not
only on static physical appearance but in behavior. So here
I want to read directly from Fingerhoots as he describes
this quote. Juvenile birds and primates sometimes behave like helpless newborns,

(31:38):
particularly in begging situations. For example, a young hungry sparrow
with a well developed ability to fly, may, in the
presence of a parent, helplessly shake its wings, imitating the
poorly coordinated wing movements of newly hatched offspring to support
it's begging for food. And then he also writes uh quote.

(32:00):
In chimpanzees, the pout face, which is the typical expression
of youngsters when separated from their mother, can be observed
in older animals when they are begging. If juveniles that
behave in this way receive more food and support than
those that do not display such behavior, this imitation will
increase their fitness and thus has the potential to become

(32:22):
part of the behavioral repertoire of a species even beyond
its infancy. So in given all this, h Rose or
Russ argued that human crying, including the shedding of liquid
from the eyes was selected by evolution for this reason
because it made the faces of juveniles and then even
adults resemble more closely the faces of helpless newborn infants.

(32:48):
And we are we're just strongly programmed to react to
the faces of helpless newborn infants with nurturing, caring behaviors,
such as, say, giving things to them or not responding
to them with aggression, and so under this hypothesis, crying
even an adults is a way of triggering sort of
the neural cuteness alarm in our heads to turning us

(33:09):
into infant caregivers, even when the person crying is not
actually an infant um. And this is summarized with with
a number of different ways that that uh, the moistening
of the eyes with tears could make someone more closely
resemble a newborn. These points would include, and this is
from from Fingerhood summary here quote the moistening of the

(33:30):
face which may remind us of the faces of newborn's
wet with amniotic fluid, the uncoordinated, almost spasmodic respiration, which
is similar to the initial respiratory efforts of a newborn.
The correspondence of the acoustical aspects of human crying to
the separation or distress calls of other animals, the closed eyes,

(33:50):
the wrinkled skin around the eyes, the spotted coloration of
the facial skin, and the open mouth, all of which
are typical crying expressions shared with newborns. So this could
have some arguments against it. For example, it still wouldn't
explain why emotional tears would be unique to humans as
opposed to say, other primates, but it could be partially

(34:11):
on the right track. Now, I want to go lightly
over a couple more that he mentions. One is the
idea of crying as a symbolic representation of suffering. This
one has attributed to the Spanish optomologist one marube Uh,
though The Fingerhoots notes that the American neuroscientist Robert Provine

(34:31):
has offered a similar explanation. And here the idea is
that crying is a social signal of emotional pain that
is adapted from the reflex tear response that comes from
certain types of physical pain. And this would have some
precedent and animal behavior, because animals seem to have evolutionarily
developed social signals uh to one another that are based

(34:53):
on the appearance of behaviors that are originally not for signaling.
For example, the idea that the social signal of anger
represented by bared teeth maybe based on originally non communicative
eating behaviors. So maybe the idea is, you know, originally
an animal that looks like it is intently like gnawing

(35:13):
on a bone or eating or something, you don't want
to like approach that animal and try to mess with
it because you know you're getting in between it and
its food. Maybe you could sort of like re like
play on that instinct by showing your teeth to another
animal even while you're not eating this saying like I
am you know, don't mess with me right now. Or similarly,

(35:33):
like the the social signal of disgust maybe based on
originally non communicative rejection behaviors like vomiting or spitting out food.
Are are the faces we make that others can see
when we're disgusted by something kind of look like spitting
out faces or vomiting faces, And under this hypothesis, tears
could maybe be similar. Maybe what was originally a reflective

(35:56):
secretion of liquid in the eyes in response to physical
irritation of the eyes, some kind of pain or irritation
came to be a useful signal of pain to other
members of our species. It was it was useful in
a survival sense to know when somebody else was in
pain and may need help. And this could become abstracted
to types of pain other than physical irritation of the eyes,

(36:20):
specifically emotional pain. Than there's another hypothesis that fingerhoots mentions
that is attributed to a science writer named Chip Walter,
who argues that crying maybe a an important part of
social bonding development in the history of the human species.

(36:42):
It might be a sort of honest signal of genuine
need due to what could be called a handicapping principle. Basically,
the fact that, uh, you know that you would make
really loud noises of helplessness and risk drawing predators nearby
means you must really need help. Um. Honestly, I was
a little fuzzy on how this mechanism was was supposed

(37:04):
to work, But then the next one I found interesting,
and this ties into something we talked about in a
previous episode, the hypothesis that the emotional tears and adults
are an honest appeasement signal. Uh. And this is traced
back to the Israeli evolutionary biologist or In Hassan, who
argued that, hey, tears blur our vision, and by blurring

(37:26):
our vision, they make it difficult for us to be
at peak fighting fitness. And so if it's more difficult
to enact violence or aggression while your eyes are full
of tears, Hassan would argue that tears are adaptive because
they are an honest signal of decreased capacity for violence.
Kind of like a dog rolling on its back and

(37:48):
showing you its belly. It's like, Hey, I'm I'm putting
myself in a really vulnerable situation. Don't hurt me. It's
a kind of hard to fake white flag of surrender
signaling I am currently helpless and we'll not harm you.
Please help me, or at least please don't hurt me. So,
under this hypothesis, tears would be adaptive because they help
facilitate social trust. Now, whether or not this is truly

(38:11):
a primary factor in the evolutionary of tears, this Hassen
hassened white flag of surrender hypothesis, I do think it
picks up on something that we were talking about earlier
that I think seems almost undeniable, which is that tears
are strongly strongly linked with helplessness as a condition. Studies
that look into, you know, cases like when do adults

(38:33):
actually cry? These studies tend to find that the adults
often report the kinds of situations in which they're most
likely to cry are ones which, in some way or
other they feel helpless or feel a lack of control.
Of course, as we talked about earlier, the role of
crying in infants, both acoustical crying, you know, vocal crying
and tearful crying is quite literally a signal of helplessness.

(38:56):
It is because the infant is literally helpless and cannot
do anything for itself and is requesting that a parent
come to help them. And so I do feel like
this is probably a pretty strong factor to consider when
evaluating these different hypotheses, which you know, individual ones we've
just talked about may or may not be correct to
varying degrees, But I do think that in adults, tearful

(39:17):
crying is very strongly linked to helplessness and probably serves
some important social signal of helplessness. And and the signals
of helplessness could take multiple forms. They could elicit assistance
and social supports. You know, I am currently helpless and
need care, or they could neutralize aggression. I am currently
helpless and can't represent a threat to you. Please don't

(39:40):
hurt me. Uh And And I think this is interesting
because you can even see this in negative reactions to crying,
Like when are the situations when people are the least
tolerant of other people crying. It's in situations where you
would be the least tolerant of somebody being helpless. It's

(40:00):
when somebody is supposed to be useful and responsible and
say like the workplace or in the military or something that,
like people would react really negatively to seeing somebody else
burst into tears, which I mean, I do have to
mention I think that I think that's ultimately pretty crappy, Like,
no matter what the situation is, like, if if someone

(40:21):
is having emotional tears, like there's something going on, be
it be it actual feelings of helpful, helpful helplessness, or
or they are you know, they're engaging their mirror neurons,
uh with within with someone else's situation, or perhaps there's
some sort of you know, emotional imbalance going on there,

(40:42):
Like there's something something is occurring and to say like, oh,
you know, don't cry. You know, people don't cry in
this scenario. There's no crying in baseball or whatever the
trope happens to be. Um, I don't think that does
any good. Right, Well, it's in situations where people are
less concerned for others well being and more just concerned
with what can you do for me right now? I

(41:02):
need you to be like useful and functional? Right It's
it's when people are sort of looking at you in
a more transactional way and just saying like, hey, I
just need you to be on the ball. I don't
really care what you're dealing with, right which it reminds
me of an old Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. Uh. We've
probably mentioned this in the show before the Bucket of Truth?
Do you ever? Do you remember this from the The

(41:26):
idea was that if there's this bucket, and if you
look into the Bucket of Truth, you will you will
confront uh the unmitigated truth of the universe, and it
will overwhelm you and then you will be unable to
stop wailing and weeping. And this would occur to most
of the characters in the skit but then they have
these these uh, these bits where I think they were

(41:47):
going out in public and doing this like this uncontrolled
weeping and uh and and screaming, as if they had
looked into the bucket of truth. But at least in
one of the skits who was while carrying out some
other mundane task, which was always always struck me as
an interesting juxtaposition. And I couldn't really say why. And
perhaps this is that the idea that if you are
fully engaging in emotional tears, that this this is generally

(42:10):
the focus of what you're doing. You're generally not doing
something else. You're not like, you know, mailing envelopes or
whatever happens to be the case. Right, And you know,
I think we can probably all say from experience that
we're usually not at our most functional and and efficient
while we're crying. Yeah, unless unless you're composing poetry maybe,

(42:31):
or or a beautiful song. There's so many great songs
about crying. Oh no, I'd say even they're like, while
you're crying, you're not in composition mode. It's only reflecting
upon those feelings later that you're really good at writing
about them. Okay, if you try to write about if
you ever tried to write about strong emotions while you're
currently feeling them, I find it just doesn't work. Like

(42:53):
you can't really there's not much to say about them
while you're feeling them. It's only thinking back on them
later that you can talk out them. Well, that's true,
I mean, the best you know, if if you, I
guess it would would do you tend to defeat it
if you got into a good writing mode, because you
would get into the flow state, and then you're you're
kind of removed from whatever emotional state might have provoked it. Um,

(43:14):
at least moved from the experience of those emotions and
put in a place where you can reflect on them. Yeah,
but obviously looking into a truth bucket is a different matter.
I guess you just have to roll with it at
that point. Well, anyway to round out my thoughts about
helplessness as as a factor in tears, um, While I
am pretty strongly convinced that helplessness is a major part

(43:37):
of whatever would be the ultimate primary evolutionary explanation for them,
helplessness obviously doesn't explain every case of tears, or at
least it it seems difficult to like you can imagine
realistic crying scenarios where it is difficult to see how
helplessness is relevant. Not impossible, but difficult. Just to think

(43:58):
of a very very light example, Um, you know, okay,
what's a comment? What's a moment in a movie that
often makes you cry? I think about like, some of
the moments in movies that made me cry the most
are when a character who you didn't know if you
could depend on in fact comes through. So for example,

(44:20):
at the end of Star Wars, when Han Solo appears
in the Millennium Falcon, you know, like that moment where
he you thought he's left and gone off on his own,
but he returns to to help his friends. That those
are like the moments that kind of like get the
tears welling up in my eyes, and it's hard to
see how that really relates to helplessness. Maybe you can
make a kind of very abstract argument has something to

(44:42):
do with like needing the help of others. I'm not
sure I when I think about it, it's often like
really tragic moments in films, or you know that the
death of a protagonist, uh, like you know, the death
of a key character in in the mission, uh, general
he opens up the water works for me, you know,

(45:04):
very you know these kind of these kind of moments
are Oh, I remember watching The Untouchables and uh and
the part where Sean Connery's character dies. I remember that
being like real emotional when I was young. Also, that
movie is super bloody. I don't know why I was
watching that as a kid. But oh, there there was
another one that came to Oh, what's the name, what's

(45:25):
the name of that actor who plays the who plays
the assassin for um for Capone in the Dragon Dragon
Billy Dragon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's in. He's in the
movie Vamp as well. He often played a very good lizard,
e kind of reptilian. Yeah, bad dude, bad dude in

(45:46):
that film. Um not the actor. I also remember as
a as a young child watching Romancing the Stone. Again,
I don't know why I was watching Romancing Stone. I
think it was probably too young for it, but I
remember crying when the villain died because it was like,
or appeared to die weirdly enough. I think it's got
his hand bit by by a crocodilian. Uh, a bit off,

(46:10):
you know, kind of a captain hook moment. And I
was and I think the part of that was it
was just it was sort of violent and and terrifying,
and therefore that was my emotional response to that. And
I remember an adult that was there comforted me and
it's like, no, look he's okay, he's back to ata
the heroes, um, And then I think he died again.
I mean, if you're willing to get really abstract and

(46:31):
stretch it around, I think you can come up with
helplessness or powerless explanations for a lot of these, even
so called tears of joy or things and movies and
so forth. Like I think about, you know, the tears
of joy, like a parent experiences observing their child do
something for the first time. I mean, you could argue
that maybe that has something to do with like feelings
of being overwhelmed by the unstoppable passage of time, right,

(46:54):
you know, time is just like beyond your control and
and you're seeing that development or or just general really
being overwhelmed by positive emotions. Maybe just the fact that
you are overwhelmed puts you in a in a sort
of strange state of powerlessness or helplessness, even though the
feelings are good. Yeah, yeah, I should say that as
far as uh, evolutionary hypotheses about crying. Go. I know

(47:17):
ad Fingerhoots himself has sort of advocated the idea that
maybe adult emotional tears serve a kind of purpose that
is similar to what would be done with vocal crying
by babies eliciting is the social signal trying to elicit
attachment behaviors and and care from others, but that there
may be a specific advantage for humans in the shedding

(47:39):
of tears instead of say, loud vocal wailing and situations
where you need to be more subtle and directed, maybe
you need to signal signal these strong emotional states in
the need for help with just say, like one closely
related person, instead of making loud noises and drawing the
attention of everyone and everything, maybe even local predators and stuff.

(48:02):
So I don't know what I think about that, But
also an interesting idea, maybe tearful crying is a is
a more targeted way of displaying this infantile helplessness that
that elicits care responses. So at this point I thought

(48:22):
we might take a lot of what we've discussed here
and take it into the realm of mythology and religion,
because it just gives us another vantage point from which
to try and figure all of this out. Now, in
past episodes, you know, when we get into the realm
of mythology and religion were often a lot more specific.
For instance, the idea of saying that dog carrying a

(48:45):
flaming stick. When you start looking for explanations to that,
you know, you don't have as many cultures to to
to go to you you who have perhaps more of
a riddle as to why this is a thing. But
when it comes to weeping in mythology and religion, when
it comes to God's weeping, humans weeping demi, gods and
heroes weeping like a lot of it. I guess it's

(49:06):
kind of obvious. You know, we are humans, we weep,
We create these uh these these these uh these beings
that are important to us, and of course they are
going to weep, and they keep the humans in our
story and the human like entities in our stories they
are going to weep as well. And um and on
a certain level, you know, it might not even seem
that fruitful to really examine the scenario much beyond that,

(49:28):
but but I still think it's interesting to to go
into at least some of it and also look at
some of the broader themes. So we've discussed the importance
of water in both life itself and then the sorts
of myth cycles that humans build up about themselves in
their origins. Life depends on the water. Life is water, uh.
And one of the key aspects of tears is that

(49:49):
they can They tend to run clear or clearer than
anything else that's gonna secrete from a human being. Uh.
They are like water. They are our body producing water.
And so in mythology especially, this is enough to connect
the tears of mortals, but especially the tears of demi
gods and gods, with the rain, with oceans, with rivers
and floods. All of these, of course are our bodies

(50:11):
of water that play heavily into myth cycles as well.
I was reading about some of this in Pangian Flood Myths,
Gondwana Myths and Beyond by Michael eve Vitzel, and the
author points out the various tropes one finds in various
religions concerning floods. Now. To be clear, there are floods
in myth that are connected to urine, to blood, to

(50:33):
the to the spilt belly contents of a monster to
whale vomit. But one also finds various accounts where tears
generate floodwaters or rains, and they might be the tears
of gods or monsters, or from atoms, tears of repentance,
this would be Adam, isn't Adam and Eve? And also

(50:54):
from the tears of grieving lovers, and there seem to
be just numerous examples of these. Going back to an
episode we did a long time ago, causes me to
think about the tears of Ray and Egyptian mythology, you know,
the tears of the sun god Ray sort of falling
to the ground and I believe becoming bees, the bees
that would be used for for bee keeping, the making
of wax and honey in ancient Egypt. Yeah. Yeah, And

(51:16):
indeed we do see life emerging from various bodily secretions
across the global mythic landscape, including blood certainly, but also
including tears. According to twentieth century folk loreist Stiff Thompson
in his book The Folk Tale, it's part of the
broader miraculous birth of the hero trope that one finds
just throughout and throughout North American tribal beliefs. They are

(51:38):
numerous examples of it, pregnancy caused by rain or caused
by food, emergence from a dead mother, from the ground,
or from a jug, but also the birth of a
child from a clot of blood, from a splinter wound,
quote from tears, or from other secretions of the body.
And then interestingly enough, he also mentions, uh that that

(51:59):
most frequently, uh, this is from mucus of the nose,
again in North American tribal beliefs. I found that interesting.
We often don't think about the divine nature of the mucus.
But oh man, I was just reading actually in um
Tales from a Chinese studio, there's a there's a wonderful
little story that pops up so suitably weird, in which

(52:22):
an individual's hanging out in his study and uh and he,
you know, some sort of a Chinese scholar, and he
sneezes three times. Each time he sneezes, he sneezes out
a small creature, and then one of the creature eats
the other eats another one and gets a little bigger,
and then that creature eats the remaining creature. Uh and

(52:42):
and and finally you just have one like larger creature
that is formed of these different mucus beings, and then
it begins crawling up the individual's leg and then once
it gets to like the side of his torso it
like attaches to his body and becomes a part of
him and just mains there and you can sort of
see the remnants of its eyes and its mouth. Wow,

(53:04):
that's body horror. Yeah, yeah, it's really good. And then
of course it is the nature in those the stories.
It's kind of like, yep, that happened. Uh. At the end,
I love it, And the local governor made a report. Yes, yes, uh.
Now speaking of Chinese stories, Uh, there is a did

(53:24):
run across a very minor Chinese myth. I almost I
hesitated to include it because it's it's ultimately kind of mundane,
but I think it's also illustrative of how of how
tears and stories of tears can factor in. It is
just about every level of our explaining the world. So
there's the story in Chinese mythology related by Yang and
in Turner in the Handbook of Chinese Mythology, in which

(53:45):
the demi god Emperor Shoon dies and his wives grieve
for him by weeping and ripping out their hair, and
the tears splatter on the bamboo, giving rise to a
variety of speckled bamboo. Oh. Interesting natural ideological myth having
to do with tears. Yeah. Now, as far as h is,
tears as the tears of God's go uh you know,

(54:07):
God's being largely human and conception, of course they're going
to cry tears. And it's interesting how their tears are
basically just super natural amplifications of the roles that human
tears play in in many situations. For instance, in Greek tradition,
Eos weeps over the death of her son nm Non,
who dies of the hands of Achilles. In the Trojan War,

(54:30):
Zeus is moved by these tears and grants mem Non immortality,
and then the tears of Theos the dawn are also
associated with the morning. Do now, I thought we might
turn to Judeo Christian traditions here and consider the Book
of Jeremiah. Uh So, Jeremiah is often known as the
weeping Prophet, but some interpret these tears is not only

(54:52):
being the tears of Jeremiah, but also the tears of God.
And I was reading about this in the Tears of
God in the Book of Jeremiah by David A. Boss Worth.
This was published in the Journal Biblica in and the
author makes a connection between this weeping. This idea of
of one weeping uh with God to God and then

(55:13):
the tears of of God being part of this scenario
makes a connection between this and attachment theory, which we've
been we just discussed earlier. Um So in this the
desired response to tears is empathy and support. Quote. Prayers
often express a desire for proximity to the parent, like deity,
who provides a sense of security through superior power and wisdom.

(55:37):
In distress, the deity offers help and divine absence provokes anxiety.
Weeping enters into this relationship when people at prayer hope
that tears may motivate divine aid. Oh interesting, Yeah, So
the idea here is Jeremiah. It would follow is drawing
is is drawing on the parent child bond when he

(55:57):
is weeping. And you know this this ties in well
with the analysis of God beings in various religions and
myths as being a kind of sky parent. You know,
the idea of the parent extrapolated into the supernatural realm,
especially coming back to the helplessness theme. I mean, you
can think about multiple levels of helplessness. That you can
be in a situation where you are helpless on your own,

(56:21):
but maybe somebody else could intervene and alleviate the situation.
But there are also ways in which you could be
helpless in a way that cannot possibly be alleviated. Like
I say, when a loved one has died. It's not
like somebody can come and help you in order in
like bringing them back from the dead or something. They
might be off able to offer you comfort, but they

(56:42):
can't actually fix what you know, the cause of your pain.
And here though, if you think about the idea of
being able to appeal to a supernatural parent who's all powerful,
they could have the ability to actually fix things that
go even beyond the powers of other people to help you. Yeah. Yeah,
And so like when in Jeremiah we see this, for instance,

(57:04):
Jeremiah nine one. This is the King James version. Oh
that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain
of tears, that I might weep day and night for
the slain of the daughter of my people. Now, the
Hebrew God was not the first to weep, of course,
so the author points out that several laments from ancient
Mesopotamia depict deities weeping over their cities. He points to

(57:26):
the era Do lament, which describes the weeping of the
god Inky for the city of Aradu. This is in
modern day Iraq. Quote Aradus, a lord stayed outside his
city as if it were an alien city. He wept
bitter tears. Father Inky stayed outside his city as if
it were an alien city. He wept bitter tears for

(57:47):
the sake of his harmed city. He wept bitter tears.
Bosworth also shares a couple of other examples featuring female
deities weeping for their cities. But but Mesotamia and God's
also wept for each other. In the epic of Gilgamesh
we see examples of this. Ishtar weeps over the death
of the bowl of Heaven and in other epics to
gods weep over a great flood, and uh In Lil

(58:10):
weeps quote over the misery of the gods and then
makes humans do their work. I was still just thinking
about this. Uh this passage you read from the Eridu lament,
which is interesting because it it includes the idea of
weeping as a result of separation outside the city, as
if it were an alien city. Yeah. So again that

(58:30):
role of like the being unable to sort of bring
the parent and child together, like the separation causes the weeping. Yeah. Now.
Bosworth also touches on Egyptian weeping gods. Isis weeps for
her son Horace and her husband of Cyrus. So in short,
there there's just a plethora of weeping deities in the region,

(58:50):
predating the Hebrew god. So it stands to reason that
this god too would weep as part of its relationship
with its people, with its children or what have you.
Interestingly enough, he also points to an Yugurritic text from Yugurrit,
an ancient ports city in northern Syria, that discusses the
brain is the source of tears. Quote, son, do not cry,

(59:11):
Do not shed tears from me. Spend not the flow
of your eyes, nor the brains of your head with
your tears, the brains of your head. That's great. Yeah,
this is an interesting thing. Also that a lot of
sayings about tears talk about them as if there's a
kind of economy involved, Like spending tears is like spending money,
like you have a like you have a you know,

(59:33):
a sort of finite supply of them, and you shouldn't
spend them on this or that. Yeah, and I guess
you know a lot of that is connecting. I mean,
on one hand, uh, you know, there's the idea of
crying oneself out, that after an emotional outburst, there will become,
there will come and d do it. You'll at least
be exhausted with it for the time being. And also
the idea that you can only I mean, how much emotion,

(59:55):
how much empathy do we have to go around? How
much empathy can we have? Uh for you know, for
for those around us and those outside of our our
sort of sphere of community. Uh. You know, I guess
it ties into those various discussions, But it begins it
gets complicated, right, because again we have this strong connection
between this, this physical response and the idea of of

(01:00:18):
human emotion and human empathy and suffering. Uh. And you know,
all these these these ultimately kind of lofty human concepts
that are then further further complicated by by human culture,
human religion, human mythology, and and more. Well. Yeah, and
this raises another really interesting question about the purpose of tears,

(01:00:39):
because you can think about tears on the other side
of the equation, right, Like, it seems very clear that
tears have something to do with a person who is
helpless or feels themselves to be in some kind of
state of helplessness or powerlessness trying to elicit care from others.
But tears come on the other side to write, like,
you have empathetic tears when you witness somebody else in

(01:01:00):
a state of in a state of helplessness or uh,
going through loss or something like that. So so clearly
there's this more complex response that's bound up in in
witnessing the pain or struggles of others, or even people
weeping when they're helping other people, a kind of mirroring
behavior there. Yeah, and in this I want to come

(01:01:21):
back to a book I mentioned, Holy Tears Weeping in
the Religious Imagination by Patton and Holly or edited by
Patton and Holly, which is another one of these books.
If you want more on this topic, Uh, this is
a good one to pick up. But it goes into
a great, great deal more detail than we're getting into here.
But but in that, uh, one thing that struck me

(01:01:41):
reading that is that, yeah, there's not just one way
of interpreting how weeping factors into religious tradition. Uh. And
and one of the big ones here is you can
roughly divide actual ritualized weeping by worshippers into two categories,
spontaneous weeping and non spontaneous weeping. The difference being that
certain religious settings might cause one, of course to be

(01:02:02):
overcome by grief or emotion and commenced to weep spontaneously.
But then there are plenty of cultures in which weeping
at say, a funeral is not merely okay, it's not
merely permitted as just this kind of random emotional or
even expected emotional outbursts that could occur, but it is
also right and proper and even in some cases expected. Plus,

(01:02:23):
While funerary weeping might largely feel like an individual experience
and many cultures, uh, both for us and all of us,
but there are plenty of cultures where it is seen
as a communal outpouring and one that is less about
us and more about the community or about the spirits
of the dead. Uh. You know it. It gets into

(01:02:44):
these ideas of of signaling that I'm i'm i'm I'm
communicating with my community, and I'm even perhaps attempting to
communicate with those who have passed on or to draw
in on some of these ideas of appealing to deities, uh,
speaking to them, speaking you know, cosmologically uh. And and
in that, you know, you get into this divide of

(01:03:05):
social versus existential protest. That's that's how the authors who
refer to it, well, yeah, that a crying could be
explicitly performative a performance in a way that you know,
sometimes people would hear that and say, oh, performative crying.
That means it's like fake or something. But I mean
it wouldn't be any more fake than say, getting up

(01:03:25):
in front of in front of a crowd and saying
something about your remembrances of a lost loved one would
be like because that is explicitly performing for other people
on purpose. Does that mean what you're saying isn't true
or that the feelings aren't real? Well, no, I mean
it's just a it's a way of viewing what you're
doing as a display for other people for them to

(01:03:47):
experience as well and also engage in its social bonding. Um,
the fact that someone would cry in order to be
seen crying and heard crying by other people around them
doesn't necessarily mean that the crying is in some way
manipulative or false. Right, Yeah, so we have this private
versus public divide, spontaneous versus non spontaneous um and so

(01:04:10):
so again coming back to the idea of like crocodile tears,
I feel like that uh is I mean not to say,
I guess there couldn't be a situation where someone's tears
are are are are inauthentic. But for the most part,
you know, it seems like if their tears going on,
there's some sort of an emotional response going on. There's
some there's some sort of emotional situation, you know, and

(01:04:32):
maybe it's an actor summoning some sort of uh you know,
past or or you know, somehow tapping into their their
their emotional catalog to reproduce the physical act of of
of weeping. Perhaps you know, if it's a paid more ner,
for example, at a at a funeral, then in that case,
you know, they are weeping for the dead, and they're
they're they're connecting with the expectations of of this religious

(01:04:55):
right and perhaps their own experiences. But it's not like
there is not an emotional core word of what's happening. Well,
I don't know that this may be a difference in
our experience of how the term is used. I mean,
I don't think I would ever applied the term crocodile
tears to somebody who was like mourning at a funeral,
even if they were doing so in a performative way.
It seems like I most often encounter that phrase used

(01:05:16):
to describe perceived false uh sort of weeping by someone
who has caused the very harm they are allegedly weeping over. Okay, Well,
I was just thinking imagining the same thing, like what
if Jack the Ripper went to a funeral, right, yeah, okay?
Or what if Jack the Ripper. What if Jack the

(01:05:36):
Ripper got caught and then cried in court saying like,
oh please don't punish me, I'm so remorseful for my actions. Uh,
And people would say like, yeah, how remorseful are you really?
Are you just trying to manipulate us by by crying. Well,
I mean, if you put me in a difficult position
of defending Jack the Ripper, if I'm gonna say say that, no,

(01:05:58):
their tears. Absolutely, And I don't know that's a more
complex situation right when we're getting into uh, you know,
to what degree do we afford uh these kind of
emotional states to UH, to two criminals, to convicted criminals,
and so forth. But I guess the counter question is,
is there a situation where the individual in that scenario

(01:06:20):
is absolutely feeling no emotional state to produce those tears, Like,
even if they're they're ultimately only feeling sorry for themselves,
it's still an emotional outpouring. Uh. It's not a situation
of like the crocodile has no emotion and therefore it's
tears or not to be trusted. Perhaps the emotions are misplaced,
or at least that is the argument. That's the argument

(01:06:40):
that could be made. I mean, ultimately, I guess who
knows what's going on within the mind of the accused
in this situation. But but it's certainly not a situation
of of the crocodile. Well, I wouldn't blame a crocodile
for reading heads, But but they're so they're so unsatisfying,
there's so little meat, so crunchy. I gotta say, Actually,

(01:07:01):
while we were reading about crocodile tears, I came across
the thing that really did make me feel super sad
for crocodiles. And it was. It was also in that
the Fingerhoots book with the section about the history of
of the concept of crocodile tears uh And he's talking
about a book called on the Nature of Animals by
a Roman author from the second and third century named

(01:07:23):
alien or Alienus, who does describe weeping in crocodiles, but
not in the context of of any kind of like
hypocrisy or anything like that. Instead, he talks about he
claims there is an Egyptian city called Edfou also known
as Appanopolis, where where people catch crocodiles out of the
river and then they hang them up on trees and

(01:07:46):
just beat them. They beat them with like whips and stuff,
and the crocodiles cry. And when I read that, I
was like, oh, buddy's that's that's yeah, that's not good.
Don't beat those crocodiles. If you take anything away from
this this pod Guest episode, it's don't be don't be
cruel to crocodilians, of course not yeah. Also don't be

(01:08:07):
like you know, I mean, don't be super nice as
in like feeding them, because that's also being mean to
crocodiles if you're you're feeding them. Human food and leading
them to associate humans with food, whether or not it
looks like they're crying. Just leave them alone, leave them alone,
let them do the their thing, You do your thing.
Let's keep the distance, all right, We're gonna go and
close this episode out here. Obviously we'd love to hear

(01:08:30):
from everyone out there about tears and uh, certainly the
various hypotheses that we discussed here today and the religious connotations,
and I know we've we've already heard from a lot
of people, so we're gonna be talking about some of
this in future listener Mail installments. I know we've already
heard from someone saying, Hey, how about done, how about
the frem and uh, what's their deal with crying? So, uh,

(01:08:53):
we'll talk about that specifically, probably on the next listener
Mail episode. In the meantime, if you would like to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Our core episodes air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed artifact on Wednesday,
rerun on the weekend listener Mail on Monday, and then
on Friday we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most of the serious contemplation and just

(01:09:16):
focus in on a weird move you. Thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, just to say hello, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(01:09:40):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
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