From the Vault: The Doppelganger Network

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss Doppelgangers, fairy imposters, the brain basis for the feeling of familiarity, and a unique way of understanding the impact of social media and modern communications technology. (originally published 5/28/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it's Saturday. Time to dive into the vault. This time
we're bringing you an episode that originally aired on May nineteen.
This one was called The Doppelganger Network. Yeah, this one's
pretty fun because, you know, obviously we're going to get
into the idea of a doppel Ganga and what it

(00:26):
is and fairy impostures and so forth. But but then
we're getting into something a lot deeper, something that that
that really is going to play into a lot of
our every day online interactions. So let's jump right in here.
Then I repeat and some up. During the Endless train journey,
which took me from Eisenach to Berlin, across the Thuringia

(00:50):
and Saxony in Ruins, I noticed for the first time,
and I don't know how long that man whom I
call my double to simplify matters, or else my twin
or again unless theatrically the traveler. Welcome to Stuff to

(01:14):
Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios has
to works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, And
today I thought we might have a discussion bringing together
the seemingly disparate topics of familiarity, doppelgangers or doubles, cap

(01:38):
gross syndrome, and social media. And I got the idea
to talk about this today because a few weeks ago
I read this interesting article that had a very intriguing
central comparison or image it was. It was a thought
provoking essay by the Stanford neuro endo chronologist Robert Sapulski.
It was originally published a few years ago in Nautilus,

(01:58):
and it was an article pairing the effects of social
media and and sort of the digital world like Facebook
and you know, all that to a psychological condition known
as cap gross syndrome. And so today I thought, maybe
we should start by explaining and discussing Sepulsky's comparison and
argument in that article and just see where we go

(02:20):
from there. Now, capgrass syndrome has definitely come up on
the show before. I don't know that we've done like
a designated show on the topic, but it'd certainly come up.
But either way, we we we do need to, you know,
provide a brief refresher on its history for our listeners right.
One of the important cases and which Sapulsky discusses in

(02:40):
his article is the case of Madam im This. This
was a woman who lived in France in the early
twentieth century who had this persistent idea. She was fixated
on the idea that her loved ones, including her husband
and family members, people she knew, had been replaced by

(03:01):
doubles or doppel gangers who looked exactly like them. So
she would say, my husband is not really my husband.
He's a man who looks exactly like my husband used
to and I don't know what happened to my real husband.
And this wasn't her only symptoms. She had a number
of symptoms. She believed that all kinds of things were
happening to UH, to her children. I mean, it's a
tragic story, but the underlying UH, the underlying cause of

(03:25):
what would lead someone to believe that people around them
were being replaced by doppel gangers or doubles is is
interesting to consider. And so the way Sepulsky in this
article characterizes the ultimate disconnect under lyon cap Grass syndrome
is that when the module of the brain used in
recognition of faces, specifically involving the fusiform gyrus in the

(03:48):
brain does cognitively recognize someone, but at the same time,
the different module of the brain that normally responds to
this recognition with the emotion that we call familiarity does
not kick in. And this brain function responsible for generating
the emotion of familiarity is what Sopolski calls the extended

(04:09):
face processing system. It's quote a diffuse network including a
variety of cortical and limbic regions. And apparently, when we
recognize someone but we don't feel the necessary familiarity emotion
that follows when we normally recognize somebody, what the brain
often does when faced with this contradiction is to conclude

(04:31):
that someone has been replaced by a double. It looks
like them, but this person doesn't feel familiar to me,
thus they must be a physically identical impostor. In the past,
I looked at a two thousand four paper from the
Canadian Journal of Psychiatry titled Capgras Syndrome. A Review of
the neuro physiological correlates and presenting clinical features in cases

(04:55):
involving physical violence and uh In this that when the
delusional identification syndrome generally involves right brain. Anomally is linked
to a number of illnesses and neurological disorders, ranging from
UH schizo effective disorder and Alzheimer's disease to severe head injuries,
pituitary tumors, and migraines. Even alcoholism can play a role.

(05:16):
You know, basically, each each of us has a visual
system and olympic system, and the ladder helps us to
generate and process emotions. Damage or disrupt communication between these
two systems, and suddenly a familiar face can suspire, can
inspire suspicion instead of comfort. Now, Fortunately, kept grass syndrome
usually subsides with the successful treatment of the underlying medical condition.

(05:37):
You know, the tumor goes away, and thankfully so does this. Uh. This,
you know, suspicion that people are not what they seem
to be. Uh. And in some cases doctors can prescribe
antipsychotic drugs to also achieve the same effect. But you
can easily see why the idea of someone being replaced
by a double or doppelganger would be such a captivating one.

(05:58):
I mean, it's something that it's something that feels very perverted,
you know, it plays on our great vulnerabilities. And I
think it is not a coincidence that this kind of
thing has featured into some of the horror folklore of
the world. I mean, you think about the idea of
the changeling uh in in fairy folklore, where there was
this idea that where the fairy folk would come in

(06:18):
and replace someone you knew, often a child, but sometimes
like a husband or wife, or you know, someone you
knew with a fairy double who looked like them but
wasn't familiar to you, didn't act like them. And now
this is often described as something that people would use
to explain you know, maybe when somebody's behavior changed and
they didn't seem themselves, they think, oh, maybe they've been

(06:39):
replaced with a changeling, or used to explain why people
might feel that their children weren't their own, or something
like that. But then also you have to wonder if
some kinds of neurological issues maybe at work here in
the minds of the people making the accusation that someone
is is a fairy. Yeah, and this is obviously this
idea in and not itself has played into some so

(07:01):
many myths throughout history and also continues to just resound
in our our popular media. Um. This is slightly older work,
of course, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I
mean that plays heavily on this trope, right, that people
are being replaced by something else, People that we think
we know we're not are not actually those individuals anymore.
It's been a huge You often find it also not

(07:24):
only in speculative fiction, but in literary fiction as well. Um.
The quote that a right at the top of this
episode is from a two thousand and four novel titled
Repetition by one of my favorite French authors, Alan robue Gerle,
who often this is one of This is a trope
that he often threw into his books, like the idea
of a double or some sort of an alter ego,

(07:46):
and this book in particular been in particular like starts
off with a character on a train having glimpsed his
double once more. Yeah, it's a very unsettling image. Yeah,
the plurality of self right. Um, well, and because so
they are double way so that it can be unsettling.
There's the idea that someone you know is replaced by
a double. Obviously, if you were to come to believe

(08:06):
that through you know, whether you had like a brain
injury or a neurological condition that caused you to believe that,
or I don't know, if you just believed in fairies
and thought maybe that this was happening because your cultural conditioning.
Either way, that would be a terrifying thing. It's another
thing entirely to see it, to believe that you see
another version of yourself, you know, to think that you
had your own double or there was a doppelganger of you.

(08:27):
So I think most of us are probably familiar with this,
the the the idea of a doppelganger. Um. I you know,
I would love to say that I learned about doppelgangers
for the first time by either consulting a nice, you know,
book on Germanic mythology, and certainly I I read a
lot of different mythology books and as a kid. Also,
I would love to say that my first encounter with

(08:48):
doppelgangers was a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual, because it's
another huge place that they're highly visible, as they've long
been a staple of Dungeons and Dragons, so they're in there.
Oh yeah, I mean, it's a great way to introduce
a little um, suspense and chaos into a campaign, Right,
somebody you know an MPC that the character's trust has
been replaced, or a doppelganger is trying to or even

(09:10):
successfully replaces a member of the party. Uh. So you know,
there's a lot of fun to be had with a doppelganger. Um,
but I have to admit that neither of these cases
is true. I heard about them initially in the ninety
via the Drew Barrymore movie that aired on the Sci
Fi Channel back when this is the old days, back
when before there were wise in sci Fi Wise inside.

(09:32):
Ohh Siffy you mean Siffy Yeah, Siffy Channel. Yes. Um,
I remember next to nothing about this film, but it
was heavily promoted on the channel, and it introduced the
idea to me initially, and then I you know, followed
up by you know, asking around, Hey, Dad, what's a doppelganger?
And then I looked it up, etcetera. Well, wait a minute,
so it was called Doppelgangers the name of the movie.

(09:54):
That was at least that was the title if the film,
as was promoted on Sci Fi Channel at the time.
So of course it often the case, with films of
this caliber, they may have had multiple titles, and who knows,
they may have been promoted elsewhere under a different title.
I just looked it up. It's also known as doppelgang
or colon the evil within. Just to be clear, that
was for the people who didn't know what a doppel
ganger was. Always got to have a colon, real title.

(10:17):
So but here here's an interesting thing that I didn't
realize until I was researching this episode. I just kind
of assumed, you know, obviously, the doppel ganger itself, the
term is Germanic origins, and I figured this is a
creature that emerges from German folk traditions, you know, uh,
you know, and in the same way that that crampus
came down from the mountains and uh an alpine traditions.

(10:38):
I just figured the doppelganger was just a standard and
because the again, the idea of a mysterious double, either
of self or other, is long established, but this does
not seem to be the case. Apparently, the word doppelganger
wasn't coined to know the eighteenth century, and it was
coined by German novelist Jean Paul in his seventeen nine

(10:58):
novel Uh Seben Cos, in which the main character encounters
his own doppel ganger or double goer uh in the
In this case, the doupel ganger convinces him to fake
his own death and start a new life. Uh. And
I had to I had to look in closer on this.
It's it's not as straightforward as I would like it

(11:19):
to be, where he's just like, hey, this is the doppelganger.
Apparently he invents two similar words in this book. He
invinced the word doppeled ganger. Um, so this would be
the name for people who see themselves. But then he
also talks about doppel ganger as a as a word
for the second course when the second course of a

(11:39):
meal arrives alongside the first course, because gang or all
means both you know, go or walker as well as
course in a meal. So technically doppeled ganger would be
the mysterious double idea that he introduces. And doppelganger itself
is just a weird mishap of ordering a multi course

(12:01):
meal at a restaurant. But nobody's gonna say doubled ganger,
not anymore, No duffeld ganger. But this is this is
a good idea. Next time someone introduces the daffel ganger
in your dn D campaign, remind the d M that
that's a culinary term sort of. Uh. But anyway, the
termines up resonating in German literature, and it became popular

(12:22):
in romantic horror literature in general by the mid eighteen hundreds.
So I think originally the the this idea was always
something scary or dangerous, right, Well, yeah, they're not as much.
It's seemingly in the original And I didn't read the
original German novel This is Stress, so you know, feel
free to correct me if anyone out there is more

(12:43):
familiar with the with the literature we're talking about here.
But it certainly took on sinister connotations within the literary tradition.
But then I was reading about the term on websters
and the sinister connotations have apparently dropped off somewhat in
its English language usage, which is surprising to me. But
then again, I'm coming from the standpoint of knowing them

(13:04):
mostly through Dungeons and Dragons and Horrible Drew Barrymore movies,
so I'm probably not like the the key candidate here. Um,
I guess the other thing, too, is I really don't
use the term outside of a fantasy context. Like if
I encounter someone who looks a lot like someone I know,
I don't say, oh, hey, I saw your doppelganger today.

(13:27):
I'm more like, hey I saw your Maybe I'll say
evil twin, which is, you know, another variation on this trope.
Or I'll say, oh, I just I saw someone who
looked just about like you, Or I I'm in another city,
I might say, oh I saw your Chicago you or whatever.
You know. So that's the other thing. I just don't
use doppelganger outside of fantastic settings myself. I think most

(13:47):
people just use it to me and they look alike. Now, Yeah,
but I guess I don't even use it that way.
Like for me, I just if I think of doppelganger,
I think of something like that creature and Kroll which
pretends to be the Wizard, you know. I think something
that when you reveal it, it's a horrible, pallid creature
with jet black eyes. So if I'm not specifically talking

(14:07):
about like a monstrous scenario, I'm not gonna use a doppelganger. Okay,
that's just me. I also think that part of but
I think part of this whole idea of the sinister
connotations fading away, It might have to do with the
fact that if it is used by and large for
just somebody's double Like if someone is to say, hey,
I saw your doppelganger today at Showny's, they're not gonna

(14:28):
you know, there's there's not gonna be a creepy connotation
to that that sighting. We're not gonna say, oh my god,
I saw your doppelganger at Showny's and I was super
creeped out. I think we need to call somebody. No,
you're You're just gonna it's just gonna be a point
of whimsy. And the other thing is that more than
likely it was a first glance situation, like at first glance,

(14:49):
I thought it was you. At second glance, I saw
that it was clearly another person and nothing to freak
out about. Well, I would be shocked though, if people
didn't still interpret this kind of thing is some kind
a weird omen or demon or whatever. Oh yeah, And
I was glancing around on the internet and there's still
plenty of that. Um And I think a large part
of that is, you know, as with all paranormal UH

(15:12):
experiences or supernatural explanations for mundane UH encounters, the supernatural
explanation is going to be more appealing. It's going, you know,
it makes us feel more important, Like you want to
feel like you're in an island rogue relea novel and
you saw your mysterious double and it, you know, reveals
something about your you know, your your inner subconscious nature

(15:34):
or something, or that you you saw a ghost that
looked like you. I mean, all these are four more
interesting than Yeah, they're you know, there are a whole
bunch of people in the world, and it was bound
to happen sooner or later. But I saw somebody that
kind of looked like me and had some more facial hair.
The way that you look isn't all that unique. That's
like the worst news of all. Yeah, that's that's just
nothing exciting about that. That story. You don't run rush

(15:55):
home to tell that to your significant other. But it
does bring up the question, what are your chance is
of running into your own unrelated double, or for that matter,
running into an unrelated double with someone you know well.
According to ananimous Dr Tiggan Lucas quoted in the BBC
future article, you're surprisingly likely to have a doppel game,
which I think is slightly confusing title given the contents

(16:18):
of the article, but still uh said that the chances
of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less
than one in a trillion, and with a seven point
four billion people on the planet, it was only there
was only a one in on five chants that there's
a single pair of true doppel gangers. The wait, what
are these dimensions you're talking about? Like eight facial dimensions?
Like if you take you take facial features and you

(16:40):
divide them up into eight dimensions and go to mac
match those up. So yeah, not like eight spatial dimensions.
I'm not sure how that would work. Okay, basically the
eight sliders on your character creator right now most of
the time, though again we're not talking about exact doubles.
You know, generally, these are just faces that are similar
to our own or similar to someone we know when

(17:02):
we focus on the familiarity in a way that may
be tied to a means of identifying close skin. Uh,
you know, in early human history, like that's what this
recognition system is perhaps four um and you know, think
again about how generally, how you know, generally doubles are
kind of a first glance thing. The similarities may be jarring,
but the differences will be pronounced as well. Now, the

(17:26):
thing is, there are so many humans on the planet
now and we live in you know, closer confines in
many situations, seeing familiar features, it doesn't necessarily mean that
there's any shared genetic heritage between two given individuals, you know,
except in the sense that all humans share mostly in
the grander yeah, and the grander scheme. Yes, but yeah,
if you just if you're in another city you see

(17:47):
someone who looks kind of like you or looks kind
of like a friend, it doesn't mean their your long
last cousin or their long last cousin of an your friend.
But it's a situation where we kind of broke the
system through population growth in the birth of cities and
and self facial recognition and facial recognition abilities. They're also
going to vary from person to person, so your doppel

(18:10):
ganger alarms just may not be as easy to set
off as someone else's. So anyway, that's that's doppel ganger's
in a nutshell, both the origin of the term, but
then a little bit about the the science and the
potent that the potentiality of seeing a double or near
double uh somewhere in the world. But thinking about what

(18:30):
is at work with the the erroneous detection of doubles
in cop Cross syndrome, UH is I guess maybe what
we should get back to when we come back after
a break. All Right, we're back and it's really us.
We weren't replaced by strange creatures from the Monster Manual
over the course of the advertisement. Now we're here, it's

(18:50):
really us and we're going to continue our exploration. You know.
I wanted to answer that with the body snatchers noise,
but I don't know if I can make it exactly
from the Donald Sutherland version, which is a great version
by ill haven't seen that. I've only seen the old
black and white original. Oh, the Donald Sutherland one is great.
He's got Lambert from Alien, it's got Jeff Goldblum, He's

(19:11):
he's feisty. It's got oh and it's got from another
sci fi classic. It's got what's his name who played
spok Literary, Yeah, Literary. Nimoy is fantastic in it. I
think it's his it's his great performance. Well, that's a
great cast, but the nineteen fifty six original had had
had Kevin McCarthy in the lead role. He was terrific.

(19:31):
You also had Carol and Jones, who had played more
Tisha on The Adams Family. Oh cool. Yeah, But also
it was just black and white and it just it really,
at least the version I saw of it, like the
darkness felt just so murky and uh and dirty somehow,
Like it was just a very nightmare inducing film when
I saw it as a kid. You know, the paranoid

(19:52):
visual vibe. It's got a it's got a kind of
a communist infiltration thing. Oh, definitely, definitely, that's a that's
a very strong element of it, which just goes to
show like the ideas of like why this concept of
of doubles resonates so because you're can apply it to
all these other scenarios social and political. Well yeah, I
mean it's a common thing for people to say when

(20:13):
they don't literally think that someone they know has been
physically bodily replaced by a by a supernatural double, they
might often think, I don't know this person anymore. I
mean it's a similar like, you know, they've been replaced
with somebody, somebody replaced you with a different person. Yeah,
like so just would really you just found out you're
getting to know them better, You found not something about

(20:35):
them you didn't know before, and now you think that
they're like a different being entirely, and now it's just
because it turns out that they were maybe communists or
like a different football team. Well, to be fair, also,
it could be a case of um, you know, people
over emphasizing disposition a traits thinking that people thinking that
they should expect their loved ones to be incredibly consistent

(20:57):
and trait predictable, when in fact people inconsistent that it
depends on the circumstances how they behave. Maybe sometimes you
are used to seeing someone only in one type of context,
maybe used to only seeing them at work, and then
when you see them in a different context, when you
see them, you know, out with their friends or with
their family, they seem like a totally different person to you.

(21:17):
It can be jarring when you see those differences, and
yet they're there for almost all of us, almost none
of us, like really behave the same way in all contexts. Well,
let's talk about the about those contexts, especially the social contexts. Yeah,
so I want to come back to So we've talked
about doppelgangers a bit and the idea of doubles and
and familiarity and recognition. But I want to come back

(21:37):
to uh that article I mentioned at the beginning where
Robert Sapolski makes this comparison between what is made clear
about the brain basis of familiarity with cop Cross syndrome
and the ways that technology is changing our social relationships.
So in in Sapolski's words, Capcross syndrome makes clear the

(21:58):
brain basis for quote, the offerences between the thoughts that
give rise to recognition. Remember recognition as cognitive. You see
somebody and you cognitively know who they are, and the
feelings that give rise to familiarity. That's the emotion that says, yes,
I know this person. They're different things. And Sapolski's main
point is quote, these functional fault lines in the social brain,

(22:22):
when coupled with advances in the online world, have given
rise to the contemporary Facebook generation. They have made cop
Gross syndrome a window on our culture and minds today
where nothing is quite recognizable but everything seems familiar. And
I would actually go further than that and say I
think that's an interesting point. But the the inverse is

(22:43):
true as well, that the online world creates these situations
where you have familiarity without recognition and recognition without familiarity.
So to further explore the point, he makes a little
bit so he points out that, you know, essentially, for
all of our evolutionary story are only social relationships have
been face to face ones. And I'm struggling to think

(23:05):
of a counter example. I can't really think of a
counter example for relationships with real people. But for tens
of thousands of years, of course we have had language,
and we could have felt as if we had relationships
with people we only heard about in stories for example. Now,
obviously we do eventually reach the point where we have
the ability to engage in activities like having a pin pal,

(23:27):
and that may. You know, that's a case where you
can have certainly a non face to face example. But
prior to uh, you know, the advent of the necessary um,
you know, systems and technology. Yeah, I struggle to think
of an example as well. I mean, even sort of
semi imagined situations such as speaking to the spirit of

(23:47):
a dead ancestor or dead relative, like you're still depending
upon a previous face to face relationship. Yes, and even
even with pin pals, I mean even the oldest versions
of this, the non digital communications just writing to people
with letters, even if you've never met them before, that
that is anatomically recent. I mean, the vast majority of

(24:09):
the time our species has been around, we didn't have writing.
We couldn't do that. The only relationships we had were
face to face relationships. And so it's entirely clear that
our bodies and our brains have been shaped by an
evolutionary niche and when in which all relationships were face
to face ones. Right, Even our history is a symbolic uh.
Species is mostly based on almost exclusively based on face

(24:32):
to face communication. Yeah, And so when our only social
relationships were face to face relationships, it was natural for
facial recognition and familiarity at an in person body sensing
level to be one of our main mediators of how
we conceptualized, evaluated, and formed beliefs about our relationships. I mean,

(24:55):
if you live in this non technological world where your
only relationships are face to face, it totally makes sense
for you to use moment to moment, face to face
a visual and touch data and things like that. To
get the best idea of what your relationships are and
how you should feel about them, right, I mean some
of that goes back to the you know we're discussing

(25:15):
earlier about uh, you know, can identification being able to
tell like this, this is a relative, I can see
it in their face exactly. But of course there have
been these technological changes that now allow relationships to exist
and persist under circumstances other than face to face interaction.
Of course, we already mentioned writing in literacy. Now this

(25:35):
allows you to maybe send letters, though I'd say even
for most of the time that's been around, that has
been something that is limited to a small percent of humans,
you know, because for most of human history most people
have not been literate, That's true. And then and then
of course again I feel I feel like the pinpal,
like the the pinpal situation in which there is never

(25:57):
a face to face meeting. Like that's as a slim
slice of the overall pie. Most of the other um
written communications are going to be carried out with individuals
um in which there was at least a previous face
to face communication. Yeah, but then think about how hard
this kind of thing can make relationships. I bet every

(26:17):
single person listening has had the experience of relationships strife
caused by a feeling by a misunderstanding, or some kind
of feeling of emotional estrangement brought on by the media
through which you communicate. A lot of us don't feel
very comfortable talking to people on the phone. A lot

(26:38):
of us, don't you know, we have the experience of
sending emails and being misunderstood, having people not read your
tone correctly, or getting worried about the way somebody punctuated
a sentence and an email. I mean, I bet you've
had this experience. Oh yeah, absolutely, and I think we
all have both in personal contacts and work contacts. You know, um,
you know, says I guess you know. Hopefully if you have,

(27:00):
if you're dealing a lot uh via email with someone,
you'll kind of get a feel for their tone and
how they tend to speak. But even then there's so
much room for miscommunication, Like even when you you feel
like you you really uh you know, or or up
to speed on how they present themselves in a textual manner. Robert,
if you don't mind me saying you're kind of a

(27:20):
terse emailer, am I I can see people getting worried
when they get an email from you that maybe you're
mad at them or something. I don't think that's necessarily
always the king. Maybe sometimes you're mad at me, But
I mean, I think you just tend to not spend
a whole lot of time, you know, worrying about how
to phrase stuff on email. You just kind of bang
it out, and which I admire because you know, I

(27:41):
it is, you know, the amount of time that people
waste trying to phrase stuff on email is is it's
a horror. The thing is I used I remember when
I was younger, I would have these these long email
correspondence is we're going on with friends where we would
respond like like sometimes ence by sentence or atleast paragraph

(28:01):
by care paragraph where we'd respond to specific points and
uh and and right at length in response. And at
some point this just faded away. I haven't really I
haven't really thought about it too much to to try
and figure out exactly like at what point, like which
like technological or communications change altered that or and or

(28:22):
what life changes led to that occurring. But at the
same time, you know, it used to have of, you know,
long phone conversations with people and now it's really it's
it's extremely rare for me to have a long phone conversation.
It's basically like two people in the world that I
have phone conversations within a regular basis and once my
wife and once and my mother, and then that's pretty

(28:43):
much it. Do you think maybe these changes have been
brought on by other technological changes, like the rise of
social media. I suspect they have. Yeah, Like instead of
having this this more, this longer, more thoughtful stream of
communication with some body that you know now lives in
another city, you just have a continual trickle, you know,

(29:05):
so again we just have that familiarity, like a tripical
familiarity going on instead of like an actual stream of communication. Well,
and it also I think that the way that technology
has changed our communication sometimes forces us to become a
version of ourselves that we don't recognize. I mean, I
was talking about how we write work emails. I actually

(29:28):
don't love the way that I write work emails. I
feel like often I have to I overuse like exclamation
points and smiley faces and all that. And it's mainly
just because I don't ever want to accidentally make somebody
feel bad over email or make them get the wrong
idea that I'm at them or something like that. On
the emotional intention, Yeah, and the statement I hate it

(29:51):
because I can feel myself feeling insipid and feeling not
like myself as I type it. But I would rather
feel like that then worry that I'm giving people the
wrong idea or letting them think I'm mad at them
or something like that. You know, Yeah, I mean, but
I totally understand it. Yeah, sometimes you feel like you
have to really make it clear. And I do find

(30:12):
myself doing more and more of that with texts when
I'm sending a text, you know, via my tiny pocket computer.
Oh your pocket god, yes, tiny pocket guy. Yes. Yeah,
And so we've got to obviously, you know, all the
stuff we're talking about email, phone, uh, text messages and
internet communications. The photograph in a way kind of kind
of a modern communication method sort of, Yeah, is it's become,

(30:35):
you know, increasingly easy to to take digital photographs and
send them to other people. It becomes a form of
communication as does you know. You mentioned emoticons as being
like a way of of of tweaking textual content, but
in many cases like they're the prime uh language that
is used in communicating to say nothing of memes. Oh

(30:58):
I shudder at this thought. Memes or there's gonna be
a day in which the English language is replaced by memes.
It's just like, instead of an alphabet, you have a meme,
a bet and you just like put you paste the
memes together to form ideas. Yeah, I mean I already
feel um, you know, and maybe this is just me
feeling old, but um, I feel we we've already reached
the point where there'll be a threat about something sound

(31:20):
Reddit and there'll be a meme and I have to
I have to research what the meme means, Like it's
a new meme, and I have to figure out like
where it came from, how it's used, and how it's
potentially being misused, and how it's like evolving out of
that misuse to understand like what the prevailing idea is
that is being um expressed. Memes as a whole are

(31:41):
exactly like words in the sense that you can try
to write down a definition for a word, but where
uses changes over time. I mean, words don't actually have
fixed definitions. You can't control how people use them. Yeah,
it kind of like the whole like literally, right, um,
it's like, yeah, sorry, you lost that battle, that words changed.
You can cling to the past, but sorry, it was

(32:02):
just misused into a new usage. So I try not
to correct people on that one, but that does it
still gets me. My blood was literally boiling and it
literally took his head off. Yes, but yeah, So we're
talking about the you know, the technological media on which
our relationships happened. And I think many of our relationships,

(32:22):
especially in the last you know, ten years now, happened
primarily on these media. And on one hand, that can
be a good thing because it allows us to maintain
relationships with people who we want to have relationships with,
but can't, you know, people we can't practically arrange to
see in person as often as we'd like to. Several

(32:42):
of my best friends live in different cities and we've
been friends for years and I'm only able to maintain
friendships with them because of this technology. So I would
hate to lose those friendships. But also I wonder about
the fact that what is it doing to our culture
when there's a substantial number of people who, like, I
don't know, maybe seventy percent of their friendly social interactions

(33:04):
happen over a machine. Yeah. I mean even people like
flesh and blood friends that I have in the city
with me, Like, we still have to do like a
like a you know, a thirty email chain to plan
to meet each other in real life. Like even if
it's like a semi regular thing, like we know where
we're gonna go, we know when we're going to do it,
but we still have to coordinate all of these things.

(33:25):
So how much of the relationship is truly face to
face versus digital? Yeah? And so, Sapolsky says in this
article that this technological reality has conditioned us in a
way to dissociate our traditional pathways of recognition and familiarity.
Uh so, he writes, quote, Thus, not only has modern
life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity, but it has impoverished

(33:49):
the latter in the process. So impoverished familiarity this is
worsened buy our frantic skill at multitasking, especially social multitasking.
A recent Pew study parted that eighty nine percent of
cell phone owners use their phones during the most recent
social gathering. That sounds low to me. Um, we reduce
our social connotations to mere threads so that we can

(34:11):
maintain as many of them as possible. This leaves us
with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants of the
real thing. And I think he's really onto something there
about the idea of um maintaining it's almost like putting
up the scarecrows of things like these technological stand ins
for relationships that are not really functioning biologically and psychologically

(34:36):
for us the way relationships should. But we'd rather maintain
as many of those as we can rather than have
fewer relationships but more face to face interaction, you know,
quality time and all that. Yeah, so we we end
up maintaining these trickles of of of actual social connections
as opposed to streams of social connection. So he's saying

(34:56):
there that we essentially degrade our sensitivity to the familiarity
aspect of of what knowing somebody is a social interaction.
It's recognition and familiarity. And when we degrade the familiarity thing,
he says, quote, uh, that we become increasingly vulnerable to imposts.
Our social media lives are rife with simulations and simulations

(35:19):
of simulations of reality, and so of course you know
that's uh, you know, one example there is people who
claim to know you, but they're not. They're uh, you know,
a friends email account gets hacked, some hacker contacts you
and tries to get you to open some malware. That's
one example. But there's a million versions of this thing
where where are sort of like low resolution familiarity detectors

(35:42):
in this digital world are being exploited by people who
are not actually our real friends. So and basically our
online their online version of ourselves is essentially as a lazy,
low resolution simulation, and so if someone comes along to
hijack that simulation, it's all the easier to do. So
you don't have to be a high level magic user

(36:02):
to to to take on the likeness of another individual
when the threshold for duplication is so low. Yeah, but
then here here's the turn. So Sapolsky says, by any
logic quote, this should induce us all to have cap
craw delusions to find it plausible that everyone we encounter
is an impostor. After all, how can one's faith in

(36:24):
the veracity of people not be shaken when you sent
all that money to the guy who claimed he was
from the I R. S. And I think there is
something going on here. It didn't start with this, but
this this impostor kind of thing that the doppelganger effect
of the online world and the fact that it's easy
to be tricked by an online doppelganger does help contribute,
I think to this concept. I'm sure you've encountered this, Robert,

(36:45):
that the Internet is not real life. People always say this, right,
It's like I talked about somebody being a friend in
real life, in real life versus on the Internet. But
if most of your social interactions are happening on the Internet,
in what sense is that not real life? I mean,
of course, the Internet is real life. It is It
is a it's like a technology. The stuff you're doing

(37:07):
on it is actually happening. It's not like something that
didn't happen. But you are making a distinction there people
in some way or or seeing these interactions as derealized
or as not having uh, you know, not material in
the way that other interactions are. And yet there where
we're doing most increasingly all of our stuff. Yeah, and

(37:28):
I wonder if part of that, you know, I would
I wonder how this plays out generation to generation, because
I feel like for me, I probably maybe I had
had a sense of the Internet is being not real life,
more so early on, because the Internet was in some
respectfully kind of an escape. I mean at the same time, yeah,
I was. I remember having a union to use a

(37:49):
like a college email address and all that kind of stuff.
You know, So you're still you're still doing in real
real life stuff via the Internet. But then a lot
of other stuff is is about escaping either just in general,
like escaping into the into fantasy, or like escaping geographical boundaries,
you know, and uh in you know, being able to
connect with people in other cities. Well, I think there's

(38:10):
another way in which there are multiple ways in which
people came to see the Internet is not real life,
and one of them is is anonymity. You know that
if you could go around invisible all day. What's that
Harry Potter cloak that makes you invisible? Oh the what
was the type? I mean, it's a new cloak of invisibility,
but I don't remember if it had any particular name. Well,

(38:32):
whatever that is, you could be invisible in a way
that would feel not real, right because if nobody can
see you and nobody knows who you are wherever you are,
then there are no consequences, and consequences are kind of
what gives us the feeling of reality. So that's part
of it. But I think also Spolski is onto something
here and that like that this estrangement of the sense
of recognition and familiarity is it makes the Internet start

(38:55):
to feel like this world of social delusion, this sort
of like always cap grav or a bold type landscape
where nothing is really real and you can't trust anything,
and yet at the same time we're we're constantly forced
to put our trust in it as a matter of fact,
because that's where we're doing everything. But then, of course,
back to the idea of like all these you know,

(39:16):
threads that people maintain and sort of mistake for meaningful
relationships online. Uh. He comes back and on that and says, actually,
you know, it seems more the opposite has happened than
than inducing us to all have cap grad delusions where
we see people we knew and we think of them,
see people we know and we think of them as
as you know, being a doppelganger or not familiar. Instead,

(39:39):
we go the other way and we see people we
don't really know very well, but we just have to
attach this feeling of familiarity to them. It allows all
of this false familiarity. And this really comes up in
I don't know, how have you read about the the
idea of you know, paras social interactions on social media?
You know, I don't think prior to this episode, I

(40:00):
I knew it by that term, but of course you
do see it all the time. Yeah, it's It's just
it's ubiquitous on the Internet. It's the idea, you know,
it's an asymmetrical relationship, the way like you follow a
public figure who doesn't know who you are. But there
are all of these indications that many people think of
these para social asymmetrical relationships as relationships. It's like they

(40:21):
almost view this Instagram influencer that they follow as like
an acquaint somebody they know, but of course that person
doesn't know them. Yeah. I really started thinking about this
classification though, of para social relationships, uh, and in wondering
like to what extent it can or could have existed
in previous times, Like what is the earliest possible example

(40:43):
of a para social relationship, Like maybe it could be
a situation where you have like a h an, like
a leader um in a given community, and then you
have like a very low level person in that community
that that the you know, the tribal leader just has
no uh you know, real idea of who they are.
But of course you know who the leader is. I mean,

(41:04):
I guess that's you know, sort of the the in
real life version of this. But we see it seems
like we see far more of it, uh in in
in modern civilization. Um in certainly an Internet age, but
even pre Internet, like the idea of celebrity just enables
this sort of relationship to be possible, celebrities and leaders.

(41:25):
And of course I would say that social media, of
course did not invent the idea of celebrities, and so
so it didn't invent these relationships like you're talking about.
You know, you've always had leaders, You've always had public
figures in some way or another. Social media, I think
has increased the day to day relevance of these types

(41:46):
of relationships. You know, where you can like check in
on on the accounts of the people that you follow
every day and they don't know you, but you know you.
Especially I feel like Instagram, especially of all the platforms
I can think of as is really rife with this
um of like these influencers and people who lead kind
of glamorous lives and allow you to see into their

(42:09):
lives by showing you their house and their pets and
their lunch, and you know, you get all these interior
views and it's very visceral because it's visual and often
you know, visual, even in a way that's edited to
make it more colorful and exciting with the post processing
filters and all that. Right, And of course, at the
same time, like like all social media representations like this,

(42:29):
they are they're incomplete. We're crafted, and they're crafted their uh,
they're they're maintain in a very strategic way usually, so
you don't even have like a full vision of what
you know, random celebrities life actually is. You just have
this idealized version of it. So I just want to
read one last quote from Sapulski's article before we move on.

(42:49):
So he says, um uh. He ends by saying, quote,
Throughout history, cap Cross syndrome has been a cultural mirror
of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings
of intimacy have been sundered. It's still that mirror today.
We think that what is false and artificial in the
world around us is substantive and meaningful. It's not that

(43:10):
loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that
simulations are mistaken for them. I think I kind of
disagree with them a little bit because I think it's
actually both of those things. It's like that that the
dissociation goes two ways in either case. Though we we
do typically we often find ourselves in situations though where
we are we are distracted from from real life um

(43:34):
relationships and real life socialization, and instead we have to
check in on these little streams on our phone to
just these uh, these simulated relationships that we have on
social media. Do you ever have the sort of direct
doppelganger experience, like with the fairy change links or the
doppelganger for a friend on the internet, Like you have

(43:55):
a family member, you have a friend who you love
in real life, but when you see the way they
are on the internet, I don't know what it. You know,
the kind of stuff they post on social media or whatever,
you don't feel like you recognize them and you don't
really like them. I've definitely known people who are like that.
I'm not gonna name any names who are like that

(44:16):
on say Twitter, Like I think, like I love this person.
But if all I knew about them was the way
they act on Twitter, I would I wouldn't be able
to stand them well social media, especially as it pertains
to you know, some topics, take politics, for instance, I
think it does tend to bring out the worst in us. Uh.

(44:36):
And I don't think that is a risky comment to make.
I think we can all think too specific examples of
that in all of our own lives. And yeah, that
can lead you to a situation where you're like, well,
I thought I knew that person, but I guess I
don't because look at this name they just shared, you know,
um and uh. But I think also though, when that happens,

(44:58):
we're just not appropriately appreciating the way that circumstances and
situations change change people's behavior. That we are the same way. Yeah. Absolutely,
All right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break,
but we'll be right back. All right, we're back. You know,
I was thinking about what you said about about my emails,

(45:20):
but I feel like, like sixty maybe my emails or
me just saying um, cool sounds good. But I think
that's my my standard, which I feel is sufficient. It's
just me saying yes to whatever you just said. Uh,
and I I'm cool with it. Do you have an
Android phone? No? I don't. Okay, use Gmail? Yeah you
use Gmail, Yeah, but I don't use the I know

(45:41):
that you have the the sort of you know, the
auto language feature starts telling you what to say. It's like,
here's the email you could write. Man, when I saw
that thing, I was like, get out, what the heck? No, no, no,
well it's it's it's an easy jump to go from
there to like authorized simulations yourself, you know, to just

(46:01):
which I really I mean, that's not far off. That's
it's basically already here where you just give your account
of the authority to to make responses like this like
cool sounds good. I'll get back to you. You know
that sort of thing. Well, it's not gonna. I don't know.
I mean, even if I would type exactly the words
that's suggesting, I still don't want to let it do that.
The fact that like Gmail is gonna is going to

(46:21):
compose an email for me to my parents or my
wife that no, no, no no, unacceptable. There's so much room
for misunderstanding. Even if we're applying, um, you know, most
or all of our attention to crafting an email. Uh,
it feels like a machine, even a very like talented

(46:42):
AI would have difficulty with that. There's just so much
nuance in human communication and knowing who you're communicating to.
Like sometimes it's a matter of knowing there are certain
words you shouldn't use with another individual, like maybe you're
aware of what you know maybe uh, you know some
sort of a trigger for them, or or you know
it may pertain to some sort of you know, um,
you know, incident from from from your personal past with

(47:04):
that person. Like, there's so many potential h holes to
fall into when composing written communication. Why trust that the
to the machine? Or I don't know, maybe the reverse
is true. Always trusted the machine as long as they
have all those caveats in mind, you know. I think
one thing that's interesting to me is about the psychological
effects of heavy social media use. Um. I feel like

(47:25):
we're still in the early days of getting a picture
of what that's like, and that there appears to be
a lot of conflicting evidence. I think. I think because
we we haven't refined all our categories and ways of
testing things yet. I do often say that I think
in emerging this is just a prediction I could turn
out to be totally wrong. But my guess is that
in the coming years, there's going to be emerging consensus

(47:48):
that heavy social media used, especially say among young people
like teenagers and stuff, is correlated with a lot of
negative psychological outcomes and uh, you know, the depression and
things like that, and that there will be like a
new cottage industry of like the lobbyists who deny the
emerging science on on social media. But uh, I mean,

(48:08):
I guess that's still to be seen. I mean, we've
only got a few years of data to work with
so far. Yeah, when trying to imagine the future, it's
difficult and also you know kind of you know, anxiety
and do thing to try and think where where our
social media usage is going. On one hand, I guess
I'm I'm hopeful that more and more people will you know,

(48:29):
choose to if if not opt out of social media,
but or you know, at least rethink how they're using
it step back from it. Even I kind of think
of it. It's kind of like a hot tub. You know,
when you first get into a hot tub, you just
u just all in, you know, it's like, let me
just go all the way up to my ears in
this and uh on ill zone and zone out, and
you know, that's good for a while, but then eventually realize,

(48:51):
if I stay in here, um, I am going to die.
So maybe I need to like only put half of
my body in here. Maybe I should just sit on
the side and get my feet in here, or maybe
very yet, maybe I should go get in the pool
for a while and do that. Or even maybe I
should leave all together and go home and see my
family that sort of thing. You know, it is nice

(49:12):
at first. I remember thinking about when I very first
got on Twitter, it seemed like it was nice for
a while that I was mostly just seeing things that
like learning and things that people were enthusiastic about. People
were sharing their enthusiasms. Here's a great thing, and uh
and over time, I'm not sure exactly what happened, but
it seemed like it transformed into more like this, uh,

(49:33):
this swamp of misery, where the primary emotions coming off
of it was just that everybody hates everything. Of course,
all of this, of course, is depending on on how
exactly when used as a social media platform, who you
follow um like for instance, like on Instagram. Obviously there's
a lot of celebrity worship going on, a lot of
para social relationships taking place there. As we already mentioned,

(49:57):
I don't see as much of that. And part of
that is just because I like only follow family and friends,
and I only use it myself for family photos, and
it's like, you know, it's a closed account. Well, I
do think that there is some evidence I've seen so
far that and I'm not sure I solid this is yet,
but there's some evidence that there's a pretty big difference
in the psychological effects of social media depending on whether

(50:17):
you primarily use it too as a way of keeping
up with family and friends versus as a way of
interacting with public accounts. But I think but then again,
one of the dangers in all of this is even
if there is a preferred if there is a healthier
way to use a given platform, you are still fighting
against the intended usage of that platform, as engineered by

(50:40):
the makers of that platform. The intended usage of the
platform is to open it up and never get off.
It's just and so like, it's difficult to compete with that.
I mean, we've talked about it this on the show before. Uh.
In terms of gambling, technology and then social media technology.
I mean, you're you're really up against a fearsome adversary

(51:00):
in telling yourself, I'm only going to use this in
a way that is mentally beneficial for me and not
just purely economically beneficial for the masters of the medium.
You know, Jared Lannier, who we've talked about on the
show before, has written a book about it. Basically, it's
saying everybody should delete their social media accounts, just get
off these platforms, and that will be it will make

(51:22):
a much better world. And he's got a whole argument
for it in this book, which I haven't read yet,
but I planned to. In fact, we asked for some
review copies. But I think we should see if we
can try to get uh Jared Lannier on the podcast. Yes,
I think we should. I also wonder what he would
think about this UH comparison. I still feel like there's
a lot of stuff to work out, but I sense
that the Sopulski's comparison here about the the rift between

(51:45):
the emotion of familiarity and the and the cognitive recognition
function of the brain, UH, that that's at work in
cap Grass syndrome. This is a really rich kind of
comparison for for social media and media technology generally, and
I e to keep having more thoughts about it. Yeah,
I mean, I I don't want to just sound like

(52:06):
I'm just saying like the people are awful and that
technology makes us more awful. Uh, you know, I don't
want that to be my ultimate argument. And ultimately I
would say that technology enables humans to do amazing things.
And if we direct this power in the right way, Uh,
you know, there's plenty that we can do. There's plenty

(52:27):
we have done to connect people and and and build
a better world out of those connections. But obviously there's
more that we could do. And I guess the worrisome
thing with these platforms, the various platforms that we're talking about,
is like, what is the the ultimate advantage? What is
the ultimate intention of the masters of those given platforms.
What do they want? And even in cases where they

(52:49):
may say, no, we want to build something that brings
people together, we want to build something that empowers, you know,
a better world. Like is that impulse going to win
out in the overall structure of this given social media
platform or is it going to be profitability or engagement
or some other metric that is ultimately more important to

(53:10):
the corporate entity. It's always profitability, and of course that's
always what's went out. But I feel like there's I
have to hold onto the possibility that that humans can
do better though. Well, I mean, that does make me
wonder if perhaps what you could do instead is have
some kind of nonprofit, open source social media platform that
would that would compete and try to replace these for

(53:33):
profit forms that are deranging our relationships and and causing
this familiarity recognition rift and potentially having all these psychologically
negative consequences on our lives and on our culture broadly.
I'm not sure exactly what that would look like. I mean,
it would probably be a start if there was just
something that was like Facebook, but that did not manipulate

(53:54):
what people saw and prioritize you know, conflict and paid content.
But then again, I e. Even just with the you know,
the bare bones basics of Facebook, I wonder about you know,
having these friend networks. Uh, does does the even the
most basic mechanic of something like Facebook encourage people to
go through these mental processes where they sort of degrade

(54:16):
their standards of what counts as a healthy relationship I
mean maybe ultimately that's where where AI can come in,
you know, and we just need we need artificial intelligence
to dictate where and how to maintain healthy relationships online.
And that's that's the ultimate answer. I don't know, just
hand it off to an aidity. Why I'm not hopeful

(54:40):
about that either. Again, this is back to like I'm
worried about these l Ai squirrels, not the I'm not
worried about the great basilisk. I'm worried about the minor
dumb aies that that are running through our lives like
a pest infestation. Now, uh, you know, not not to
end things into a negative a place that I do
want to refer listeners back to our episod the Great Episodes,

(55:01):
the Great Eyeball Wars, where we went into a lot
of this, particularly about, you know, about how social media
and these platforms and our phones are gamed to capture
our attention and hold our attention. In those episodes, we
also shared some some advice that experts have given about
how to fight back, how to limit your use of
social media and or your phone, and uh, and so

(55:24):
I mean there and there are increasingly more tools out there,
I believe you know, some of these these phones have ways,
you know now, to to track how much you're using them,
or even to remind you not to use them in
certain situations. Yeah yeah, I mean I I can't honestly
and non hypocritically tell people to get entirely off of
social media because one of the things is I have
to maintain social media accounts because of my job at

(55:46):
this podcast, where we've got to like promote stuff on
social media, and you know, we've got to We've got
a Facebook discussion module that I really enjoy using. I
probably would have deleted my Facebook account, but I enjoy
our our discussion module with our fans there. Yeah. Yeah,
that's that's probably one of the main reasons I go
on Facebook these days. So discussion module, don't screw this up.
Let's keep keep this positive relationship. But I mean, I

(56:10):
will say that the reason it's on there's not any
inherent strength of Facebook. It's on there because of audience inertia.
I mean that that's where the people are. Like, if
you want to have a place where people already have
accounts and they can join Facebook, is they tell us
the place where you can do that? You know, I'd
love a world where somebody created some kind of non destructive,
open source uh you know, nonprofit platform where you could

(56:33):
do a similar thing if enough people could get on there.
All right, So, so there you have it. Obviously, there
are a lot of there's a lot of areas here
we can call out to listeners on. Uh. I mean,
first of all, have you ever encountered a really um
impressive double in your life, like someone that required uh,
you know, not even just a first and second glass,
maybe a third glance to realize that they were not

(56:53):
your friend or perhaps not yourself. We'd love to hear
from that all. I mean, for to that, you know,
soon if you've actually had any experience with cap gross syndrome. Um,
you know, we would like we would really appreciate any
firsthand knowledge of experiences like that. Uh. And then beyond that,
when we get into the you know, the of course,
the literary and the you know, the fictional and the

(57:15):
mythological connotations. If you have a particular you know, favorite
double you want to share. But certainly we spend most
of the time you're talking about this social media doppel
ganger idea, and so I mean, you're pretty much all
on social media. At this point, we're really you're either
on social media or you've made a very uh you know,
firm choice not to be so whichever category you fall into,

(57:39):
I feel like you probably have thoughts related to this
episode and we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely get
in touch. In the meantime. If you want to listen
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(57:59):
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(58:20):
gonna impress people all the more. That's right, huge, Thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer, Try Harrison. If
you would like to get in touch with this direct Sorry,
I'm laughing because Robert has got a little stress ball
over here and he's squishing the guts out of it
as we speak. Yeah, there's like some sort of white
pus coming out of it. I had it for like
two weeks and it's already squeezed out. So uh, I'm

(58:43):
not gonna name the brand because maybe I just had
a destructively anyway. Sorry. If you want to get in
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(59:04):
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