November 10, 2011 • 33 mins
We've all seen images of saints and martyrs rising above their torments, but is it really possible to find transcendence on the rack? In this episode, Robert and Julie look into the connections between physical pain and religious experience.
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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 Lamp and I'm Julie Tuglass. Julie,
what would it take to be a martyr? Like, like,
what what are the qualities that one needs? Um? You see, Uh, well,
(00:25):
you wouldn't want to be someone who's too and I
mean a real martyr, not I mean like like just
dripping off the page, um stained glass window kind of
a thing y gory pages of a history book. Okay,
all right, I'm not just talking like, oh, he's a
martyr because he refuses to use the new coffee machine,
right right. You're not gonna get off the cross. Someone
(00:46):
needs the wood. Yeah, it's not one of those martyrs. Okay.
First of all, you probably don't want to be too
concerned with materialism. I'm gonna say, you don't want to
be a big shopper, right right, yeah, yeah, I mean
you'd be willing to wear a potato sack, kind of
be a little bit smelly, uh, sit in one position
for a long time, sort of meditating on the world
in your purpose. Right, Um, what would make like if
(01:07):
this was a want ad what else will we stick
in there? M m, well, really, you have to be
extremely committed to an idea or belief something let's have
high ideals, yes, yes, so something that again is stronger
than oh, I have to play this new video game
when it comes out next month, and stronger even than
one's own natural affinity for life itself, okay. UM must
(01:33):
be able to withstand extreme pain in various forms impossible death. Yes,
And I think this is this is the the aspect
of it that interests me the most at this moment anyway,
and it is certainly what we're going to spend the
most time within this podcast because growing up I was
I've always been fascinated by these these images of martyrs um,
(01:54):
especially in the Catholic tradition. With someone in the Western world,
you just kind of grow up seeing these things, you know,
be it in actual like church literature or studying like
just the history of Western civilization. Used to see all
these discry images. It probably pays to to just quickly
also just to define where we get the word martyr.
(02:15):
It comes from the Late Greek term mar tour, which
comes from martas witness. And uh, the ideas that you're
you're witnessing something, you're bearing testimony to some fact or
faith with your blood, with your blood. I think that's
the crux of it right there, because at the end
game of being a martyr is not necessarily to die, right.
(02:36):
But I think one of the things that is so
anybody can die. Everybody dies, well exactly, but to to
to actually try to do it so that you're you know,
immortalized and celebrated. I mean, it's just it's just sort
of a byproduct like oops, I might die, and so
I think. But this is one of the most intriguing
things about a martyr at least captures our attention, and
why it's so dramatic is that these are people who
(02:56):
are so committed to something that they are willing to
withstand such pain. It also turns the typical social and
just even evolutionary contract on its head, you know, because
it's it's suddenly like, here's the person that that when
the authority said, hey, you need to do this or
we'll kill you, he said, go ahead. I believe more
(03:18):
in the idea that that that I should have this freedom,
or that I should be able to say this that
or the other, or live this that or the other.
I believe in this more than I believe in, uh,
the importance of my own skin, oh yeah. Or that
Joan of Arcs, for instance, she had such a strong
vision from God that King Charles the seventh should be,
you know, put on the throne, that she was willing
to um to to suffer death, and you know, of
(03:41):
course was burned at the stakes. So this is this
is pretty heavy stuff in that respect, um. And it
really is very interesting from a psychological perspective of pain,
because we know that psychological factors play a huge role
in the perception of pain. Right now, but before we
break down some of the the psycho the psychology in
the science of this, UM, let's run through a few examples.
(04:03):
And and it's important to note that that's so much
in martyrdom and in the history of martyrs, in in
any culture, in any religious tradition or secular tradition. We're
talking about something that has to do with the politics
of memory. I mean, these are these are ultimately they
may have been people at one point or another, but
they become stories, and stories are told by individuals with
(04:27):
a bias of some sorts. So a person may die
truly believing in something. They may die a martyr, and
but if no one's going to tell the story, then
they're not really a markin right. So in other words,
we're going to talk about a couple of martyr stists
as examples, but that doesn't mean that these people necessarily
actually perform certain tasks or maybe we're even um that suffered.
(04:48):
I mean, there's I guess what we're trying to say
here is that there there could be some fictionalization of
things that are not that well documented in the past.
And we're not celebrating martyrism. We just think it's or martyrdom.
We just think it's fascinating. Yeah, I mean it is
pretty cool in a very morbid way to me too.
That's my personal opinion. But all right, you have like
Saint anti Pass of Peragammum roasted to death and a
(05:11):
bronze bull in n D. A bronze bowl, yeah, which
is like a big bronze bowl, and when you put
somebody in it, and then apparently as they're shrieking and
dying inside the bull um, it makes this echoed sound,
so that the bronze bull sounds like an actual bowl.
This makes sense because way back in the day. This
is big pageantry, right, Like you wanted you want to
go to acoustics on this well, and this is key
(05:32):
to pageantry. Most of your martyr deaths, especially the big
ones out of medieval tradition, they tend to be pretty
dramatic because there's a lot of drama caught up in
the whole martyrdom idea. Isaiah is pretty interesting. This was
an eighth century DC prophet in the Kingdom of Judea.
This is Old Testament stuff, but he was rebranded in
the Middle Ages as this martyr that was solid in
(05:53):
half right down the middle with this big kind of
tooth saw. And what's really fascinating about this, dude is
if you look at some of these medieval texts the
way that he has depicted, they make a kind of
cruciform image with like the saw going across in his body,
up and down, so it ends up looking like a cross.
So he's he's rebranded as this Christian saint, which is
which is interesting and tells us a lot about the
(06:14):
idea of martyrdom. Again as politics, that marketing existed way
back then, but yeah, apparently right, and then uh oh,
and then another couple of examples from or another example
from the medieval tradition especially would be St. Bartholomew. This
guy is said to have been martyred in Armenia, and
according to accounts very on exactly what was done. In
(06:35):
one he was beheaded, uh, and then others he's crucified
upside down. But the most popular tradition holds that he
was flayed alive, that he was skinned. Yeah. So in
in various works of art, and in in one really
stunning statue that was made in fifty two, you see
him depicted as this skinless man like something out of
(06:57):
out of Hell raizor or that Robbie Williams video that
I said to the other day where he's stripping and
then he strips off his skin and he's dancing around. Also,
I'm prepared for that Loneliness Sita submission there. What do
you think was gonna happen? Because he's already down to
his underwears, right, and then I guess it was just
like the beat and then a d J. I just
(07:18):
didn't think it was gonna be like, Okay, he's gonna
self flay himself. Yeah, so, so he he tends to
be depicted like that with a flame knife in one
hand and his own skin thrown over his shoulder. This
is barth all of me, not Robbie will um and so.
And he tends to have this look on his face,
especially in that statue. It's like a serene look like
it look like, hey, I'm this doesn't hurt. Yeah, So
(07:41):
I skinned myself, big deal, yeah, which which again comes
down to that whole like the idea of the martyr
is turning the typical rules of pain and suffering on
their head. Um. You see accounts among the various Native
American people's where there's a there's a certain amount of
torture that ends up but playing into some of these
tribal groups, uh, and it becomes part of this culture.
(08:02):
And so you so you have these, uh, the stories
of individuals who were captured, individuals from from rival groups
and when they were tortured, they didn't cry out or
they didn't say anything, and in doing so shamed their tormentors.
And we'll talk a little bit about that too, like
how we actually have some cases of this are are documented.
(08:22):
But let's just talk about a couple of modern martyr
examples of what some people think of as martyrs. Yes.
One in particular especially would be Um Tick Kwan Duke,
the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at
a busy on a busy Saigon intersection on June eleventh, nineteen.
(08:45):
Everyone has probably seen an image of this before because
one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.
Malcolm Brown want to Pulitzer Prize for the photo. And
it's you know, this black and white, stark image of
this this figure seated in uh like a meditative position
and legs folded and just engulfed in flames, right And
and reports h E witnesses say that he never screamed.
(09:07):
There was some flinching, of course, but that's you know,
of course it's going to happen with your muscles, uh
in your skin reacting to that. But he practiced a
very severe ascetic lifestyle and he had of course of
extreme meditation. Practice was considered about about his vata because
I know what I'm saying that wrong, um, But at
the time of his death and that essentially that he
(09:29):
was enlightened. So um again here's an example of withstanding
extreme pain, right, And that one's more interesting than it
is a more contemporary example, because because again and often
you can imagine like somebody dying horribly for a cause,
and then the people who carry that cause, of course
they're going to say, oh, but he was he was
he or she was bigger than the pain, because the
(09:50):
cause is that important. This is one of the themes
that's explored in Umberto Echoes the name of the Rose,
that I I've always found really interesting. There's a there's
a martyred heretic that is not a character in the book,
but is referred to a lot of this fraud Delcino,
who is into like a thirteenth century poverty heretic, believed
that that everyone should that the church would be poor,
(10:11):
that everyone should be poor and uh and should renounce
all material possessions. And so the young young character in
the book encounters one telling of the tale in which
he rises above the pain and is serene through all
these savage things that are done to him. And then
in another account that is supposedly the true account, we
learned that the individual died just stay really horrible death
(10:33):
and responded in the what typical way one might so.
But we have one, of of course, one one more
modern martyr to to mention, right, yeah, Mohamma Gandhi. Now
some people might say, well, I don't know that I
consider Mohamma Gandhi a true martyr, while other people say, actually,
this is a really good example of a martyr because
this is someone who campaigned for home rule in India
(10:54):
and helped to defeat colonialism and did that as in
a similar way that you had talked about, which was
kind of shaming the government and doing that through hunger strikes. Um.
He was in prison several times, UM, and he was
whittled down to the bone. I mean we're not talking
like he just denied himself a piece of cheesecake. I
mean this, this is this is another form of pain
(11:15):
to endure UM. And you'll actually see this is really interesting.
They've seen studies before that people who are interrexic actually
have um less susceptibility to pain because you do sort
of get in this this mindset where you're denying your
body um, and you're you're living in this kind of
extreme situation. But you know, it's interesting to look at
(11:37):
Mohamma Gandhi and although he um, he did die uh
and he was actually murdered by a fellow Hindu who
was disappointed that Gandhi could not stop the partitioning between
Pakistan and India. Essentially, we're talking about hear is Hindu's
versus Muslims. Right, he was martyred in a in a
certain way. I guess some people could perceive that because
(12:00):
his commitment to sort of think that in an ecumenical,
uh way of embracing all cultures and all religions. So
again another example, you know, he wasn't We're not talking
about skin flaying here, but these are you know, extreme
acts done by people. So we're gonna take a quick
(12:22):
break and when we come back, we're gonna really head
into the science of all this and to what some
of the various neuroscientists and psychologists have to say about
the way that we experience pain and how various martyrs
in the past may have overcome this suffering. This podcast
is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow
(12:44):
and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is
the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot
com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,
we're back, and Julie, you have something to share about
the Shalon monks. Yeah, I want to talk kung fu
like we're talking real Shalon monks, not the film Shalong monks.
(13:08):
No now, and we're talking the really the ones that
inspire martial arts movies, really Shalon monks. Uh. It's actually
there are a sect of Mayahana Buddhism monks and they're
concerned with meditation and martial arts and just just a
couple of facts if they're out there to give you
some contexts about this. Kung Fu has been practiced in
China since two BC, and it was always thought of
(13:28):
as a practice of devotion. Okay, so that's really important here.
And the leading Shalon kuang Fu school was actually established
years ago, believe it or not. Um. But these guys
developed extraordinary physical skills through training over many, many years,
and the basis of this is pain control or pain
(13:49):
management UM. And that then they really acclimate themselves to
be able to withstand this kind of pain. And some
of it's through meditation, but a lot of it is
actually through the kung fu. I mean we're talking about
this is going to sound kind of silly, almost like
a Chinese water torture in some respects, but you know,
punching a huge vat of beams for hours and hours
(14:10):
because they know that that, you know, the hands are
so sensitive. The idea is to desensitize the nerves in
your hands. So it's about you feel enough pain that
it de sensitizes the nerves in the same in a
similar way that, say, of one abuses a substance, you
end up frying the pathways. Yeah, but it's still pretty
(14:31):
much like you know, mind over matter. Um. There's a
nineteen thirty four book by Jing Jing Song entitled Training
Methods of the seventy two Arts of the Shallon, and
it documents a range of skills that can be acquired,
such as causing internal damage to an opponent using a
one fingered punching, being able to perform handstands on two fingers,
(14:51):
and being able to break solid objects with the heel
of the palm. But they also like just just for fun,
they'll just take like, you know, don't stack of like
five on their head, and some will like karate chop
them on their heads for fun. For fun. Is that
I don't know if that sounds very Buddhist that they're
doing it. I say that for fun, because you know,
I was looking at some great video of them, and
essentially these are a bunch of ten year old kids,
(15:13):
and some of them start younger, and you know, at
the age of ten, they're they're getting up at four
o'clock in the morning and they're running up this hill
in twenty minutes, actually a mountain that takes about an
hour and a half for the average adult to scale.
And then they're walking down hands and knees. Okay, this
doesn't sound like fun, but still, I mean this is
you know that age, you have tons of energy, right, yeah,
(15:35):
so walk up some mountains, breaks and breaks and there
there's so much more well behaved when they get back
to the exactly exactly. But it is fascinating to see
this because they also have a yoga tradition and there
so they're doing martial arts. They're doing these yoga moves
and they are so well disciplined, and I mean they're
doing these for hours and hours and these drills, uh,
these combat moves that they're essentially just imprinting in their
(15:56):
brains and their bodies so that it becomes second nature.
And one of the personal is two is che gong.
I'm sure you've heard about this too. I believe it's
a type of martial arts, since the idea that fire
energy can actually emanate from your abdomen and you can
just kind of yeah yeah, and that you can actually
direct it to uh susceptible parts of your body or
(16:17):
sensitive parts of your body, like your neck. So you
could direct this energy to your neck and then someone
could punch the the holiness out of your neck and
you'd be completely fine. And they do this like these
are these are the the sort of tasks that they
do on for hours. It's pretty amazing. But I mean,
does it sort of makes sense because that they could
(16:38):
be able to do this because of that practice, the
repetitive nature and meditation. If you think about meditation, your
heart slows, you're pumping less blood, the muscles relax, and
when you relax the muscles, this is really key because
it means less tension, and less tension means less pain.
And I was just thinking about when we were doing
some research on lightning strikes, and I remember we came
(16:59):
across something about a guy who was in the thralls
of a tornado um and he was struck by a lamp.
So he was rendered unconscious, but his body was thrown
across the field and he was perfectly fine, and they
think that's because he wasn't able to tense his body
and react. This is this is kind of like how
you hear accounts of individuals and rex where if they
(17:21):
were intoxicated, individuals end up surviving a wreck because they're
not they're enough to tense up, right, right. So imagine
if you're this monk and you have gone through this
incredible training mind and body, then you could slow your
heart rate and you have like these mad skills where
you know, you could defend yourselves or you defend yourself,
(17:41):
and then if you were to be struck, you could
negate that strike, could negate that pain. Yeah, dude, Well,
speaking of meditation, I ran across some stuff here by
American psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who did a lot of work
looking at like holicaust cost survivors and all Yale and
Harvard guy big medicine in the in the field, he
(18:01):
described the survivors of brainwashing and other psychological deprivation techniques
supplied by the child Andese government against captive missionaries, and
he attributed their mental survival to practicing meditation to recalling
and reciting poetry, uh, scripture, other literature. Essentially they end
up living living in this imaginal process to expand a
very limited, restricted physical environment, which cost to mind. We
(18:23):
we did a previous episode about isolation about how when
you're in an isolated environment, it begins to rather quickly
play tricks on the mind. The mind is starved with
stimuli and ends up having to to grasp onto other
things to get by, right, And that some of these
people had actually a cognitive deficiencies after having been isolated
(18:45):
for years. Yeah, and uh in anyway, um, Lifton found
that people who were able to in these uh, these
situations of isolation and uh, and this is you know
what isolation is a form of torment. We're able to
reach out and and just say cling to this bit
of scripture, cling to this prayer, cling to like create
some imagined reality to make up for what's lacking in
(19:06):
the physical environment. Um, which which I found pretty interesting.
Which is a distraction for your mind, right, which we
we always have talked about how the mind needs a
bone to chew on. Right. And then of course there's
self hypnosis as well, which is uh, which is an
area that is less um, I mean hypnosis itself and
exactly how it works is is less understood than than
other aspects of hay management for sure. But there there
(19:29):
have been studies into how IBS patients can use self hypnosis,
and this is of course the irritable balance syndrome. Uh.
They found they can reduce contractions in the bowl, something
that's not normally possible under conscious control, and their their
bow lining also becomes less sensitive to pain. And I actually,
when I was in college, I had a I had
an abnormal psychology professor. I mean he was he was well,
(19:53):
he was teaching abnormal. Well he was also a little
abnormal like guess, but but he mentioned that he was
really into the idea of self hypnosis. And he he
said that he had worked with a former student who
was having to go in and have this technique performed
where they take the little camera and they stick it
up the urethra into the bladder. Yeah, and they were
having to do it on a regular basis, and it
was extremely painful with for this guy, and they couldn't
(20:15):
just put him under each time. A bit much to
go for on such a regular basis to be knocked
out for this procedure. So he would freak out with
the pain and they would have to hold him down
and stuff, and it was just an ugly situation for
everybody concerned. Uh, So they taught him. He began learning
self hypnosis, and supposedly by the end of the training
he was able to calm himself enough that that he
(20:36):
only felt the tip of the camera poking through into
his bladder towards the end of the Well, you know,
I was thinking about this too, even with the placebo effect,
We've talked about this, that this promise sometimes that um,
the pain will be alleviated will automatically, uh, make the
endorphins in your body kick in and opiates kick in.
(20:59):
So sometimes it really is mind over matter. Um. This
is from a Scientific American article Daring to Die. They
were talking actually talking about the psychology of suicide, but
this is certainly related. It says it is not enough
to want to die to intentionally end their own life,
people need the will to carry out their plans. This
resolve depends on factors such as fearlessness and being able
(21:20):
to tolerate pain and to act impulsively. The latest research
shows that such fearlessness can be conditioned. Those who gain
experience with pain, whether from abuse by others or by
their own hands, gradually improve their ability to tolerate discomfort.
They also get used to the idea of harming themselves,
which kind of plays into this question that we has
(21:40):
come up before. We've talked about this. Uh, you know,
is someone a masochist or a martyr? At what point?
You know? And um, another really interesting uh study came up.
It's a two thousand and nine study and Neticis Mashi
Siff of McGill University and his colleagues showed childhood abuse
(22:01):
appears to produce specific patterns of so called epigenetic marks
on the DNA of brain cells and people who later
killed themselves. So uh it kind of again there's this
relationship between pain and psychology and the body. Well, speaking
of masochism, which you mentioned. Uh there, I did run
across some stuff from Don Richard Rizzo, who wrote a
(22:22):
book called Personality Types using the Nagram for Self Discovery,
and uh he he wrote about the mesochistic personality disorders
is defined by the American Psychiatric Association and there are
very like various levels of it. But in in one
case we're talking about an unhealthy level of messochistic personality
disorder so that it can it can manifest as manipulative
(22:46):
and self serving, instilling guilt, putting others in debt uh
self to self, deceptive about one's own motives and behavior,
domineering and coercive feelings, entitled to anything uh they want
and others and then having this like victim and martyr,
tips of scales of power in a relationship, like I've
suffered so greatly that therefore you should feel sorry for me,
(23:08):
and yeah, and it give me a candy bar now, yeah, exactly.
And then there's the there's sort of the opposite, the
idea of people that are immune to pain. Oh, yes, okay,
So I am watching when the Steve Larson movies. I
this is the girl who kicked the hornets nest, the
girl who touched the cat on the belly, the girl
who a sandwich and its rapper, yes, and uh and
(23:32):
and I'm not gonna um spoil any pots here, but
that came up and I thought that was really fascinating. Huh.
My my dad was the dentist, and I remember him
talking about having having one patient to come. You know,
he would regularly you know, if somebody comes in for
a dental procedure, obviously you end up having to apply
a topical and esthetic or even injecting something. You know,
doing something to deal with the pain. Pain and management
(23:54):
comes with the territory of dentistry. But he had, like,
on one occasion in his um, you know, in decades
of experience, had one guy come in and they were
preparing to to do a fairly uh um painful procedure.
I forget exactly what it was, but it was. It
was not just a cleaning by any stretch of the imagination.
There was some actual digging around involved, right, And and
(24:18):
my my dad was like, all right, well, you know,
time to to numb me up. And because I was
like I'm good, and and my dad was like, I
don't think you are, because I really need to numb
me up for this, because this is what's about to happen.
And the guy's like, no, I never I never take
any kind of a medicine when I when I come
into the dentist. And so my dad was like, all right,
you know, he's kind of begrudgingly agreed to to at
(24:41):
least start. And it ended up the guy didn't take
any pain medic medication for the entire procedure, and and
my dad would talk about it was like he said,
I just felt weird doing and I felt it felt
like you're you're tormenting somebody but they're not feeling any pain.
And um, And as it turns out, this was not
just this one dude. There are it's rare, but there
(25:03):
are individuals who who don't feel pain. Uh, there was.
I was reading a study from Dr Geoff woods Camp
from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and they ended
up bringing together a number of children. Uh, well they
had been show some of them had grown up or
you know, or teenagers by the time the study came around,
but uh, growing up they reported to never have felt pain.
(25:26):
And they analyze them and they found there was nothing
wrong with their nervous system. And it wasn't wasn't a
situation where they had some sort of you know, you know,
some sort of like leprosy type of condition. Um. They
had normal intelligence, they had normal nerves, and the nerves
seemed to conduct signals normally, and their brains seemed to
be put together normally. So it didn't make any sense
based on their current theories of pain but they were
(25:46):
able to isolate a gene called sc in nine A
uh that is very highly expressed in the pain sensing nerves.
And so there's been a number of research just and
we're continuing to try and understand exactly how this gene
play into it. But but they found that people who
who don't feel pain as well or at all, they
also may not be able to detect certain odors. And
(26:10):
they've also found that this is from another study the
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. They found that people who
suffer from osteoarthritis, patients that reported higher levels of pain
were more likely to carry a particular DNA base at
certain locations in this same gene as seen in nine A.
So we we see the opposite there where it sort
(26:30):
of tweaked another direction and it creates a higher sensitivity
for pain. So you know, there's like there's to buil
it down to like the most basic it's like there's
a connection missing between that perception of pain not nerve. Right,
It's highly possible that some martyrs in the past may
have just been in a particular situation genetically to where
they did not feel pain as strongly or at all,
(26:52):
which would certainly help you if you were, say to
be uh, you know, boiled alive, that's just cheating. Well,
I guess it is. But then believing in something strong
enough to escape from your torments, that's kind of cheating too.
That's the whole thing. Martyrs are cheating the system, sticking
it to the man. These days, though instead of like
being uh, well, I guess you. You You can still obviously
(27:13):
be a martyr in many different ways, but maybe you
would just do like a sideshow act with like the
gym rose. Yes, but but then you're not You're you know,
it's like you said to be a martyr at the
top of the podcast. To be a martyr, you can't
be that concerned with material possessions. But if you're cashing
in on your your your inability to to feel pain,
then you just clearly weren't set out for martyrdom. Even
if you have some very cool key skills there to implement,
(27:36):
it's not your bag. Yeah, you mentioned endorphins earlier. Endorphins
are of course, it's natural pain killer. They're that's released
in the brain, and there have been studies that shown
that practices such as prayer and meditation actually can help
for the release these endorphins and in theory the pain threshold. Yeah,
and this was interesting. This is from the lab researchers
at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and u c l
(27:58):
A has shown that rats don't fall into painful stimuli
in the presence of a predator or when the rats
are in an environment that provokes fear because say they
have previously experienced a painful stimulus in it and the
experience released opiots again natural pain killers from their cells.
So it's almost like it was hard coded once they
(28:18):
had the experience. And you know, if it's a sense
of danger, could actually squelch pain in rats. But you know,
certainly you can take that information and apply to humans
and um, you know, possibly the same sort of conditions
could be met. And also there's something to be be said,
um about this. When you feel the endorphins released by pain,
(28:40):
you can sort of feel like a rush, Say if
you're getting a tattoo or something. Um, there's a certain
like high you end up getting just from the discomfort
of the procedure that I can't help but think on
some level might play into into some of this transcendence
of pain. You know, I'm granted of getting a tattooed
rather differ from being boiled alive or roasted in a
(29:02):
brazen bull. But it is all psychological, right because um
and I've read something about that too. That again, it's
sort of that that high, that reward that it depends
on if you're you know, you know what it is
you're holding out for or enduring. Maybe it is to
be you know, immortalized. Um And again, the endorphins are
hitting and it feels like, okay, well, yes I'm or
(29:25):
you're an athlete. This is a good example. You're running
through the pain because you're motivated to do what you're
motivated to win. Yeah, field burn and uh, and you're
also getting a bit of a high. So yeah, it
sort of depends on on what's on the other side.
I suppose. I've also heard some athletes, um and we
you know, sort of hobby athletes who have discussed the
(29:48):
how when they are pushing themselves really hard, they also
feel like they're kind of punishing themselves. So I can
see that also kind of playing into so it's sort
of like a transcendence in a weird way of their physicality.
But maybe some sort of I don't know a psychological
spiritual level. Yeah, it brings to mind this. Uh this
quick quote from Roomi, the thirteenth century Persian Muslim poet.
(30:08):
He said, pain is an alchemy that renovates. Where is
indifference when pain intercedes? Beware, do not sigh coldly and
your indifference. Seek pain, Seek pain, pain pain. I love
that because I always think of Roumi as being this
incredibly romantic poet. Most of what you hear from Roomy
is very romantic, certainly not pain pain pain. Yeah, but
(30:28):
it is interesting. I mean, we are so hotly motivated
by pain, and it certainly helps us learn, right, I
mean that we so much of our experiences of becoming
a human are all about avoiding pain, and uh in
our actions are certainly derived from that motivation. Yeah. Indeed. So,
now that we've wrapped up martyrs and pain, let's let's
(30:50):
see what sort of non painful stuff has come through
the main from the non painful listener mail, pop I did,
now we have a painful one. We do have a
painful folder. Yeah, it's luckily it's not very big, but
but we have a few pain full emails in there now.
But this is from the good pile. We heard from Gabriel.
(31:11):
Gabriel writes in and says dynamic duo Robert and Julie. Hey,
that's that's That's says greetings from Iraq. I am writing
you today from the Center of Civilization a k. The
Fertile Crescent, Iraq. I am a combat engineer in the U. S. Army.
On my second combat tour. I have had the opportunity
to have wireless Internet and have been able to download
many of your podcasts, and I listen to each evening
(31:34):
during the day. While on patrol in m WRAP that's
Mine Resistant armored patrol vehicle, I replay the podcast I
listened to the night before over the headset. It is
great for breaking up the monotony of looking for I e.
D s and talking about the usual army related stories.
My soldiers have learned about many interesting things, including waspond's
(31:55):
brain wiping and micro drones. They especially like the episode
on nightmares killing people. After spending almost an entire year
in the southern southern part of Iraq near the Iranian border,
I've often wondered what made this region of the world
such a good spot for the beginning of civilization. I
read recently that this part of Iraq, the Fertile Crescent,
has changed significantly since the days of Mesopotamia, and that
its present environmental condition did not support the civilizations that
(32:18):
existed long ago. Have you ever considered a podcast discussing
this fact? In summary, on behalf of myself and my soldiers,
I just wanted to extend our thanks to the both
of you. Sitting in a convoy of vehicles with the
with the same guys for almost twelve hours a day's
kind of like taking a year long road trip, but
on the same roads, almost like a Twilight Zone episode
in your own way. You were both doing great things
(32:38):
for your country. Oh man, that was really nice. That's wow.
And what a description too. I had never thought about that.
It's like this this uh sort of like road trip analogy.
Yeah indeed. Yeah. Um, and I think that the Fertile
Crescent is fascinating. That that's definitely one that we're gonna
need to to cover because I'm and we can talk
(33:00):
about that from so many different perspectives archaeological, cultural, and
so on. Um. So thanks, yeah, and and by all
means thank you for your service to our country. All
you guys. If you happen to be listening right now,
so if if anyone would like to share anything with us,
there are many ways to get in touch with us.
Uh We're on Facebook and we're on Twitter. We're blow
(33:21):
the Mind on both of those and you can also
drop us an email at blow the Mind at House
to works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow.
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 Lamp and I'm Julie Tuglass. Julie,
what would it take to be a martyr? Like, like,
what what are the qualities that one needs? Um? You see, Uh, well,
(00:25):
you wouldn't want to be someone who's too and I
mean a real martyr, not I mean like like just
dripping off the page, um stained glass window kind of
a thing y gory pages of a history book. Okay,
all right, I'm not just talking like, oh, he's a
martyr because he refuses to use the new coffee machine,
right right. You're not gonna get off the cross. Someone
(00:46):
needs the wood. Yeah, it's not one of those martyrs. Okay.
First of all, you probably don't want to be too
concerned with materialism. I'm gonna say, you don't want to
be a big shopper, right right, yeah, yeah, I mean
you'd be willing to wear a potato sack, kind of
be a little bit smelly, uh, sit in one position
for a long time, sort of meditating on the world
in your purpose. Right, Um, what would make like if
(01:07):
this was a want ad what else will we stick
in there? M m, well, really, you have to be
extremely committed to an idea or belief something let's have
high ideals, yes, yes, so something that again is stronger
than oh, I have to play this new video game
when it comes out next month, and stronger even than
one's own natural affinity for life itself, okay. UM must
(01:33):
be able to withstand extreme pain in various forms impossible death. Yes,
And I think this is this is the the aspect
of it that interests me the most at this moment anyway,
and it is certainly what we're going to spend the
most time within this podcast because growing up I was
I've always been fascinated by these these images of martyrs um,
(01:54):
especially in the Catholic tradition. With someone in the Western world,
you just kind of grow up seeing these things, you know,
be it in actual like church literature or studying like
just the history of Western civilization. Used to see all
these discry images. It probably pays to to just quickly
also just to define where we get the word martyr.
(02:15):
It comes from the Late Greek term mar tour, which
comes from martas witness. And uh, the ideas that you're
you're witnessing something, you're bearing testimony to some fact or
faith with your blood, with your blood. I think that's
the crux of it right there, because at the end
game of being a martyr is not necessarily to die, right.
(02:36):
But I think one of the things that is so
anybody can die. Everybody dies, well exactly, but to to
to actually try to do it so that you're you know,
immortalized and celebrated. I mean, it's just it's just sort
of a byproduct like oops, I might die, and so
I think. But this is one of the most intriguing
things about a martyr at least captures our attention, and
why it's so dramatic is that these are people who
(02:56):
are so committed to something that they are willing to
withstand such pain. It also turns the typical social and
just even evolutionary contract on its head, you know, because
it's it's suddenly like, here's the person that that when
the authority said, hey, you need to do this or
we'll kill you, he said, go ahead. I believe more
(03:18):
in the idea that that that I should have this freedom,
or that I should be able to say this that
or the other, or live this that or the other.
I believe in this more than I believe in, uh,
the importance of my own skin, oh yeah. Or that
Joan of Arcs, for instance, she had such a strong
vision from God that King Charles the seventh should be,
you know, put on the throne, that she was willing
to um to to suffer death, and you know, of
(03:41):
course was burned at the stakes. So this is this
is pretty heavy stuff in that respect, um. And it
really is very interesting from a psychological perspective of pain,
because we know that psychological factors play a huge role
in the perception of pain. Right now, but before we
break down some of the the psycho the psychology in
the science of this, UM, let's run through a few examples.
(04:03):
And and it's important to note that that's so much
in martyrdom and in the history of martyrs, in in
any culture, in any religious tradition or secular tradition. We're
talking about something that has to do with the politics
of memory. I mean, these are these are ultimately they
may have been people at one point or another, but
they become stories, and stories are told by individuals with
(04:27):
a bias of some sorts. So a person may die
truly believing in something. They may die a martyr, and
but if no one's going to tell the story, then
they're not really a markin right. So in other words,
we're going to talk about a couple of martyr stists
as examples, but that doesn't mean that these people necessarily
actually perform certain tasks or maybe we're even um that suffered.
(04:48):
I mean, there's I guess what we're trying to say
here is that there there could be some fictionalization of
things that are not that well documented in the past.
And we're not celebrating martyrism. We just think it's or martyrdom.
We just think it's fascinating. Yeah, I mean it is
pretty cool in a very morbid way to me too.
That's my personal opinion. But all right, you have like
Saint anti Pass of Peragammum roasted to death and a
(05:11):
bronze bull in n D. A bronze bowl, yeah, which
is like a big bronze bowl, and when you put
somebody in it, and then apparently as they're shrieking and
dying inside the bull um, it makes this echoed sound,
so that the bronze bull sounds like an actual bowl.
This makes sense because way back in the day. This
is big pageantry, right, Like you wanted you want to
go to acoustics on this well, and this is key
(05:32):
to pageantry. Most of your martyr deaths, especially the big
ones out of medieval tradition, they tend to be pretty
dramatic because there's a lot of drama caught up in
the whole martyrdom idea. Isaiah is pretty interesting. This was
an eighth century DC prophet in the Kingdom of Judea.
This is Old Testament stuff, but he was rebranded in
the Middle Ages as this martyr that was solid in
(05:53):
half right down the middle with this big kind of
tooth saw. And what's really fascinating about this, dude is
if you look at some of these medieval texts the
way that he has depicted, they make a kind of
cruciform image with like the saw going across in his body,
up and down, so it ends up looking like a cross.
So he's he's rebranded as this Christian saint, which is
which is interesting and tells us a lot about the
(06:14):
idea of martyrdom. Again as politics, that marketing existed way
back then, but yeah, apparently right, and then uh oh,
and then another couple of examples from or another example
from the medieval tradition especially would be St. Bartholomew. This
guy is said to have been martyred in Armenia, and
according to accounts very on exactly what was done. In
(06:35):
one he was beheaded, uh, and then others he's crucified
upside down. But the most popular tradition holds that he
was flayed alive, that he was skinned. Yeah. So in
in various works of art, and in in one really
stunning statue that was made in fifty two, you see
him depicted as this skinless man like something out of
(06:57):
out of Hell raizor or that Robbie Williams video that
I said to the other day where he's stripping and
then he strips off his skin and he's dancing around. Also,
I'm prepared for that Loneliness Sita submission there. What do
you think was gonna happen? Because he's already down to
his underwears, right, and then I guess it was just
like the beat and then a d J. I just
(07:18):
didn't think it was gonna be like, Okay, he's gonna
self flay himself. Yeah, so, so he he tends to
be depicted like that with a flame knife in one
hand and his own skin thrown over his shoulder. This
is barth all of me, not Robbie will um and so.
And he tends to have this look on his face,
especially in that statue. It's like a serene look like
it look like, hey, I'm this doesn't hurt. Yeah, So
(07:41):
I skinned myself, big deal, yeah, which which again comes
down to that whole like the idea of the martyr
is turning the typical rules of pain and suffering on
their head. Um. You see accounts among the various Native
American people's where there's a there's a certain amount of
torture that ends up but playing into some of these
tribal groups, uh, and it becomes part of this culture.
(08:02):
And so you so you have these, uh, the stories
of individuals who were captured, individuals from from rival groups
and when they were tortured, they didn't cry out or
they didn't say anything, and in doing so shamed their tormentors.
And we'll talk a little bit about that too, like
how we actually have some cases of this are are documented.
(08:22):
But let's just talk about a couple of modern martyr
examples of what some people think of as martyrs. Yes.
One in particular especially would be Um Tick Kwan Duke,
the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at
a busy on a busy Saigon intersection on June eleventh, nineteen.
(08:45):
Everyone has probably seen an image of this before because
one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.
Malcolm Brown want to Pulitzer Prize for the photo. And
it's you know, this black and white, stark image of
this this figure seated in uh like a meditative position
and legs folded and just engulfed in flames, right And
and reports h E witnesses say that he never screamed.
(09:07):
There was some flinching, of course, but that's you know,
of course it's going to happen with your muscles, uh
in your skin reacting to that. But he practiced a
very severe ascetic lifestyle and he had of course of
extreme meditation. Practice was considered about about his vata because
I know what I'm saying that wrong, um, But at
the time of his death and that essentially that he
(09:29):
was enlightened. So um again here's an example of withstanding
extreme pain, right, And that one's more interesting than it
is a more contemporary example, because because again and often
you can imagine like somebody dying horribly for a cause,
and then the people who carry that cause, of course
they're going to say, oh, but he was he was
he or she was bigger than the pain, because the
(09:50):
cause is that important. This is one of the themes
that's explored in Umberto Echoes the name of the Rose,
that I I've always found really interesting. There's a there's
a martyred heretic that is not a character in the book,
but is referred to a lot of this fraud Delcino,
who is into like a thirteenth century poverty heretic, believed
that that everyone should that the church would be poor,
(10:11):
that everyone should be poor and uh and should renounce
all material possessions. And so the young young character in
the book encounters one telling of the tale in which
he rises above the pain and is serene through all
these savage things that are done to him. And then
in another account that is supposedly the true account, we
learned that the individual died just stay really horrible death
(10:33):
and responded in the what typical way one might so.
But we have one, of of course, one one more
modern martyr to to mention, right, yeah, Mohamma Gandhi. Now
some people might say, well, I don't know that I
consider Mohamma Gandhi a true martyr, while other people say, actually,
this is a really good example of a martyr because
this is someone who campaigned for home rule in India
(10:54):
and helped to defeat colonialism and did that as in
a similar way that you had talked about, which was
kind of shaming the government and doing that through hunger strikes. Um.
He was in prison several times, UM, and he was
whittled down to the bone. I mean we're not talking
like he just denied himself a piece of cheesecake. I
mean this, this is this is another form of pain
(11:15):
to endure UM. And you'll actually see this is really interesting.
They've seen studies before that people who are interrexic actually
have um less susceptibility to pain because you do sort
of get in this this mindset where you're denying your
body um, and you're you're living in this kind of
extreme situation. But you know, it's interesting to look at
(11:37):
Mohamma Gandhi and although he um, he did die uh
and he was actually murdered by a fellow Hindu who
was disappointed that Gandhi could not stop the partitioning between
Pakistan and India. Essentially, we're talking about hear is Hindu's
versus Muslims. Right, he was martyred in a in a
certain way. I guess some people could perceive that because
(12:00):
his commitment to sort of think that in an ecumenical,
uh way of embracing all cultures and all religions. So
again another example, you know, he wasn't We're not talking
about skin flaying here, but these are you know, extreme
acts done by people. So we're gonna take a quick
(12:22):
break and when we come back, we're gonna really head
into the science of all this and to what some
of the various neuroscientists and psychologists have to say about
the way that we experience pain and how various martyrs
in the past may have overcome this suffering. This podcast
is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow
(12:44):
and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is
the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot
com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,
we're back, and Julie, you have something to share about
the Shalon monks. Yeah, I want to talk kung fu
like we're talking real Shalon monks, not the film Shalong monks.
(13:08):
No now, and we're talking the really the ones that
inspire martial arts movies, really Shalon monks. Uh. It's actually
there are a sect of Mayahana Buddhism monks and they're
concerned with meditation and martial arts and just just a
couple of facts if they're out there to give you
some contexts about this. Kung Fu has been practiced in
China since two BC, and it was always thought of
(13:28):
as a practice of devotion. Okay, so that's really important here.
And the leading Shalon kuang Fu school was actually established
years ago, believe it or not. Um. But these guys
developed extraordinary physical skills through training over many, many years,
and the basis of this is pain control or pain
(13:49):
management UM. And that then they really acclimate themselves to
be able to withstand this kind of pain. And some
of it's through meditation, but a lot of it is
actually through the kung fu. I mean we're talking about
this is going to sound kind of silly, almost like
a Chinese water torture in some respects, but you know,
punching a huge vat of beams for hours and hours
(14:10):
because they know that that, you know, the hands are
so sensitive. The idea is to desensitize the nerves in
your hands. So it's about you feel enough pain that
it de sensitizes the nerves in the same in a
similar way that, say, of one abuses a substance, you
end up frying the pathways. Yeah, but it's still pretty
(14:31):
much like you know, mind over matter. Um. There's a
nineteen thirty four book by Jing Jing Song entitled Training
Methods of the seventy two Arts of the Shallon, and
it documents a range of skills that can be acquired,
such as causing internal damage to an opponent using a
one fingered punching, being able to perform handstands on two fingers,
(14:51):
and being able to break solid objects with the heel
of the palm. But they also like just just for fun,
they'll just take like, you know, don't stack of like
five on their head, and some will like karate chop
them on their heads for fun. For fun. Is that
I don't know if that sounds very Buddhist that they're
doing it. I say that for fun, because you know,
I was looking at some great video of them, and
essentially these are a bunch of ten year old kids,
(15:13):
and some of them start younger, and you know, at
the age of ten, they're they're getting up at four
o'clock in the morning and they're running up this hill
in twenty minutes, actually a mountain that takes about an
hour and a half for the average adult to scale.
And then they're walking down hands and knees. Okay, this
doesn't sound like fun, but still, I mean this is
you know that age, you have tons of energy, right, yeah,
(15:35):
so walk up some mountains, breaks and breaks and there
there's so much more well behaved when they get back
to the exactly exactly. But it is fascinating to see
this because they also have a yoga tradition and there
so they're doing martial arts. They're doing these yoga moves
and they are so well disciplined, and I mean they're
doing these for hours and hours and these drills, uh,
these combat moves that they're essentially just imprinting in their
(15:56):
brains and their bodies so that it becomes second nature.
And one of the personal is two is che gong.
I'm sure you've heard about this too. I believe it's
a type of martial arts, since the idea that fire
energy can actually emanate from your abdomen and you can
just kind of yeah yeah, and that you can actually
direct it to uh susceptible parts of your body or
(16:17):
sensitive parts of your body, like your neck. So you
could direct this energy to your neck and then someone
could punch the the holiness out of your neck and
you'd be completely fine. And they do this like these
are these are the the sort of tasks that they
do on for hours. It's pretty amazing. But I mean,
does it sort of makes sense because that they could
(16:38):
be able to do this because of that practice, the
repetitive nature and meditation. If you think about meditation, your
heart slows, you're pumping less blood, the muscles relax, and
when you relax the muscles, this is really key because
it means less tension, and less tension means less pain.
And I was just thinking about when we were doing
some research on lightning strikes, and I remember we came
(16:59):
across something about a guy who was in the thralls
of a tornado um and he was struck by a lamp.
So he was rendered unconscious, but his body was thrown
across the field and he was perfectly fine, and they
think that's because he wasn't able to tense his body
and react. This is this is kind of like how
you hear accounts of individuals and rex where if they
(17:21):
were intoxicated, individuals end up surviving a wreck because they're
not they're enough to tense up, right, right. So imagine
if you're this monk and you have gone through this
incredible training mind and body, then you could slow your
heart rate and you have like these mad skills where
you know, you could defend yourselves or you defend yourself,
(17:41):
and then if you were to be struck, you could
negate that strike, could negate that pain. Yeah, dude, Well,
speaking of meditation, I ran across some stuff here by
American psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who did a lot of work
looking at like holicaust cost survivors and all Yale and
Harvard guy big medicine in the in the field, he
(18:01):
described the survivors of brainwashing and other psychological deprivation techniques
supplied by the child Andese government against captive missionaries, and
he attributed their mental survival to practicing meditation to recalling
and reciting poetry, uh, scripture, other literature. Essentially they end
up living living in this imaginal process to expand a
very limited, restricted physical environment, which cost to mind. We
(18:23):
we did a previous episode about isolation about how when
you're in an isolated environment, it begins to rather quickly
play tricks on the mind. The mind is starved with
stimuli and ends up having to to grasp onto other
things to get by, right, And that some of these
people had actually a cognitive deficiencies after having been isolated
(18:45):
for years. Yeah, and uh in anyway, um, Lifton found
that people who were able to in these uh, these
situations of isolation and uh, and this is you know
what isolation is a form of torment. We're able to
reach out and and just say cling to this bit
of scripture, cling to this prayer, cling to like create
some imagined reality to make up for what's lacking in
(19:06):
the physical environment. Um, which which I found pretty interesting.
Which is a distraction for your mind, right, which we
we always have talked about how the mind needs a
bone to chew on. Right. And then of course there's
self hypnosis as well, which is uh, which is an
area that is less um, I mean hypnosis itself and
exactly how it works is is less understood than than
other aspects of hay management for sure. But there there
(19:29):
have been studies into how IBS patients can use self hypnosis,
and this is of course the irritable balance syndrome. Uh.
They found they can reduce contractions in the bowl, something
that's not normally possible under conscious control, and their their
bow lining also becomes less sensitive to pain. And I actually,
when I was in college, I had a I had
an abnormal psychology professor. I mean he was he was well,
(19:53):
he was teaching abnormal. Well he was also a little
abnormal like guess, but but he mentioned that he was
really into the idea of self hypnosis. And he he
said that he had worked with a former student who
was having to go in and have this technique performed
where they take the little camera and they stick it
up the urethra into the bladder. Yeah, and they were
having to do it on a regular basis, and it
was extremely painful with for this guy, and they couldn't
(20:15):
just put him under each time. A bit much to
go for on such a regular basis to be knocked
out for this procedure. So he would freak out with
the pain and they would have to hold him down
and stuff, and it was just an ugly situation for
everybody concerned. Uh, So they taught him. He began learning
self hypnosis, and supposedly by the end of the training
he was able to calm himself enough that that he
(20:36):
only felt the tip of the camera poking through into
his bladder towards the end of the Well, you know,
I was thinking about this too, even with the placebo effect,
We've talked about this, that this promise sometimes that um,
the pain will be alleviated will automatically, uh, make the
endorphins in your body kick in and opiates kick in.
(20:59):
So sometimes it really is mind over matter. Um. This
is from a Scientific American article Daring to Die. They
were talking actually talking about the psychology of suicide, but
this is certainly related. It says it is not enough
to want to die to intentionally end their own life,
people need the will to carry out their plans. This
resolve depends on factors such as fearlessness and being able
(21:20):
to tolerate pain and to act impulsively. The latest research
shows that such fearlessness can be conditioned. Those who gain
experience with pain, whether from abuse by others or by
their own hands, gradually improve their ability to tolerate discomfort.
They also get used to the idea of harming themselves,
which kind of plays into this question that we has
(21:40):
come up before. We've talked about this. Uh, you know,
is someone a masochist or a martyr? At what point?
You know? And um, another really interesting uh study came up.
It's a two thousand and nine study and Neticis Mashi
Siff of McGill University and his colleagues showed childhood abuse
(22:01):
appears to produce specific patterns of so called epigenetic marks
on the DNA of brain cells and people who later
killed themselves. So uh it kind of again there's this
relationship between pain and psychology and the body. Well, speaking
of masochism, which you mentioned. Uh there, I did run
across some stuff from Don Richard Rizzo, who wrote a
(22:22):
book called Personality Types using the Nagram for Self Discovery,
and uh he he wrote about the mesochistic personality disorders
is defined by the American Psychiatric Association and there are
very like various levels of it. But in in one
case we're talking about an unhealthy level of messochistic personality
disorder so that it can it can manifest as manipulative
(22:46):
and self serving, instilling guilt, putting others in debt uh
self to self, deceptive about one's own motives and behavior,
domineering and coercive feelings, entitled to anything uh they want
and others and then having this like victim and martyr,
tips of scales of power in a relationship, like I've
suffered so greatly that therefore you should feel sorry for me,
(23:08):
and yeah, and it give me a candy bar now, yeah, exactly.
And then there's the there's sort of the opposite, the
idea of people that are immune to pain. Oh, yes, okay,
So I am watching when the Steve Larson movies. I
this is the girl who kicked the hornets nest, the
girl who touched the cat on the belly, the girl
who a sandwich and its rapper, yes, and uh and
(23:32):
and I'm not gonna um spoil any pots here, but
that came up and I thought that was really fascinating. Huh.
My my dad was the dentist, and I remember him
talking about having having one patient to come. You know,
he would regularly you know, if somebody comes in for
a dental procedure, obviously you end up having to apply
a topical and esthetic or even injecting something. You know,
doing something to deal with the pain. Pain and management
(23:54):
comes with the territory of dentistry. But he had, like,
on one occasion in his um, you know, in decades
of experience, had one guy come in and they were
preparing to to do a fairly uh um painful procedure.
I forget exactly what it was, but it was. It
was not just a cleaning by any stretch of the imagination.
There was some actual digging around involved, right, And and
(24:18):
my my dad was like, all right, well, you know,
time to to numb me up. And because I was
like I'm good, and and my dad was like, I
don't think you are, because I really need to numb
me up for this, because this is what's about to happen.
And the guy's like, no, I never I never take
any kind of a medicine when I when I come
into the dentist. And so my dad was like, all right,
you know, he's kind of begrudgingly agreed to to at
(24:41):
least start. And it ended up the guy didn't take
any pain medic medication for the entire procedure, and and
my dad would talk about it was like he said,
I just felt weird doing and I felt it felt
like you're you're tormenting somebody but they're not feeling any pain.
And um, And as it turns out, this was not
just this one dude. There are it's rare, but there
(25:03):
are individuals who who don't feel pain. Uh, there was.
I was reading a study from Dr Geoff woods Camp
from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and they ended
up bringing together a number of children. Uh, well they
had been show some of them had grown up or
you know, or teenagers by the time the study came around,
but uh, growing up they reported to never have felt pain.
(25:26):
And they analyze them and they found there was nothing
wrong with their nervous system. And it wasn't wasn't a
situation where they had some sort of you know, you know,
some sort of like leprosy type of condition. Um. They
had normal intelligence, they had normal nerves, and the nerves
seemed to conduct signals normally, and their brains seemed to
be put together normally. So it didn't make any sense
based on their current theories of pain but they were
(25:46):
able to isolate a gene called sc in nine A
uh that is very highly expressed in the pain sensing nerves.
And so there's been a number of research just and
we're continuing to try and understand exactly how this gene
play into it. But but they found that people who
who don't feel pain as well or at all, they
also may not be able to detect certain odors. And
(26:10):
they've also found that this is from another study the
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. They found that people who
suffer from osteoarthritis, patients that reported higher levels of pain
were more likely to carry a particular DNA base at
certain locations in this same gene as seen in nine A.
So we we see the opposite there where it sort
(26:30):
of tweaked another direction and it creates a higher sensitivity
for pain. So you know, there's like there's to buil
it down to like the most basic it's like there's
a connection missing between that perception of pain not nerve. Right,
It's highly possible that some martyrs in the past may
have just been in a particular situation genetically to where
they did not feel pain as strongly or at all,
(26:52):
which would certainly help you if you were, say to
be uh, you know, boiled alive, that's just cheating. Well,
I guess it is. But then believing in something strong
enough to escape from your torments, that's kind of cheating too.
That's the whole thing. Martyrs are cheating the system, sticking
it to the man. These days, though instead of like
being uh, well, I guess you. You You can still obviously
(27:13):
be a martyr in many different ways, but maybe you
would just do like a sideshow act with like the
gym rose. Yes, but but then you're not You're you know,
it's like you said to be a martyr at the
top of the podcast. To be a martyr, you can't
be that concerned with material possessions. But if you're cashing
in on your your your inability to to feel pain,
then you just clearly weren't set out for martyrdom. Even
if you have some very cool key skills there to implement,
(27:36):
it's not your bag. Yeah, you mentioned endorphins earlier. Endorphins
are of course, it's natural pain killer. They're that's released
in the brain, and there have been studies that shown
that practices such as prayer and meditation actually can help
for the release these endorphins and in theory the pain threshold. Yeah,
and this was interesting. This is from the lab researchers
at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and u c l
(27:58):
A has shown that rats don't fall into painful stimuli
in the presence of a predator or when the rats
are in an environment that provokes fear because say they
have previously experienced a painful stimulus in it and the
experience released opiots again natural pain killers from their cells.
So it's almost like it was hard coded once they
(28:18):
had the experience. And you know, if it's a sense
of danger, could actually squelch pain in rats. But you know,
certainly you can take that information and apply to humans
and um, you know, possibly the same sort of conditions
could be met. And also there's something to be be said,
um about this. When you feel the endorphins released by pain,
(28:40):
you can sort of feel like a rush, Say if
you're getting a tattoo or something. Um, there's a certain
like high you end up getting just from the discomfort
of the procedure that I can't help but think on
some level might play into into some of this transcendence
of pain. You know, I'm granted of getting a tattooed
rather differ from being boiled alive or roasted in a
(29:02):
brazen bull. But it is all psychological, right because um
and I've read something about that too. That again, it's
sort of that that high, that reward that it depends
on if you're you know, you know what it is
you're holding out for or enduring. Maybe it is to
be you know, immortalized. Um And again, the endorphins are
hitting and it feels like, okay, well, yes I'm or
(29:25):
you're an athlete. This is a good example. You're running
through the pain because you're motivated to do what you're
motivated to win. Yeah, field burn and uh, and you're
also getting a bit of a high. So yeah, it
sort of depends on on what's on the other side.
I suppose. I've also heard some athletes, um and we
you know, sort of hobby athletes who have discussed the
(29:48):
how when they are pushing themselves really hard, they also
feel like they're kind of punishing themselves. So I can
see that also kind of playing into so it's sort
of like a transcendence in a weird way of their physicality.
But maybe some sort of I don't know a psychological
spiritual level. Yeah, it brings to mind this. Uh this
quick quote from Roomi, the thirteenth century Persian Muslim poet.
(30:08):
He said, pain is an alchemy that renovates. Where is
indifference when pain intercedes? Beware, do not sigh coldly and
your indifference. Seek pain, Seek pain, pain pain. I love
that because I always think of Roumi as being this
incredibly romantic poet. Most of what you hear from Roomy
is very romantic, certainly not pain pain pain. Yeah, but
(30:28):
it is interesting. I mean, we are so hotly motivated
by pain, and it certainly helps us learn, right, I
mean that we so much of our experiences of becoming
a human are all about avoiding pain, and uh in
our actions are certainly derived from that motivation. Yeah. Indeed. So,
now that we've wrapped up martyrs and pain, let's let's
(30:50):
see what sort of non painful stuff has come through
the main from the non painful listener mail, pop I did,
now we have a painful one. We do have a
painful folder. Yeah, it's luckily it's not very big, but
but we have a few pain full emails in there now.
But this is from the good pile. We heard from Gabriel.
(31:11):
Gabriel writes in and says dynamic duo Robert and Julie. Hey,
that's that's That's says greetings from Iraq. I am writing
you today from the Center of Civilization a k. The
Fertile Crescent, Iraq. I am a combat engineer in the U. S. Army.
On my second combat tour. I have had the opportunity
to have wireless Internet and have been able to download
many of your podcasts, and I listen to each evening
(31:34):
during the day. While on patrol in m WRAP that's
Mine Resistant armored patrol vehicle, I replay the podcast I
listened to the night before over the headset. It is
great for breaking up the monotony of looking for I e.
D s and talking about the usual army related stories.
My soldiers have learned about many interesting things, including waspond's
(31:55):
brain wiping and micro drones. They especially like the episode
on nightmares killing people. After spending almost an entire year
in the southern southern part of Iraq near the Iranian border,
I've often wondered what made this region of the world
such a good spot for the beginning of civilization. I
read recently that this part of Iraq, the Fertile Crescent,
has changed significantly since the days of Mesopotamia, and that
its present environmental condition did not support the civilizations that
(32:18):
existed long ago. Have you ever considered a podcast discussing
this fact? In summary, on behalf of myself and my soldiers,
I just wanted to extend our thanks to the both
of you. Sitting in a convoy of vehicles with the
with the same guys for almost twelve hours a day's
kind of like taking a year long road trip, but
on the same roads, almost like a Twilight Zone episode
in your own way. You were both doing great things
(32:38):
for your country. Oh man, that was really nice. That's wow.
And what a description too. I had never thought about that.
It's like this this uh sort of like road trip analogy.
Yeah indeed. Yeah. Um, and I think that the Fertile
Crescent is fascinating. That that's definitely one that we're gonna
need to to cover because I'm and we can talk
(33:00):
about that from so many different perspectives archaeological, cultural, and
so on. Um. So thanks, yeah, and and by all
means thank you for your service to our country. All
you guys. If you happen to be listening right now,
so if if anyone would like to share anything with us,
there are many ways to get in touch with us.
Uh We're on Facebook and we're on Twitter. We're blow
(33:21):
the Mind on both of those and you can also
drop us an email at blow the Mind at House
to works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow.
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