August 22, 2013 • 44 mins
Symbols on the Brain:A symbol can instantly convey an abstract idea that would require paragraphs of traditional language to relate. So what are they all about? In this episode, Robert and Julie explore the manner in which symbols take hold of our brain - and how they constantly influence our unconscious mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
we were surrounded by symbols, like even right now, care
are symbols in our midst, on the recording equipment, on
(00:25):
on our shirt center clothing. We're not yours symbol cree
is about design. Well, I'm wearing black and you could
say that, Um, I'm sort of trying to communicate some
sort of message here. Yes, some absence of symbols, but
that's in itself is kind of a symbol exactly. You know,
I embraced the void and that's what I'm trying to
tell people with this. You have your Boards of Canada
(00:46):
shirt on, yeah, which kind of has a logo symbol
thing going on for sure, And just going through a
daily life, just think of how many symbols we encounter,
I mean, corporate logos, um, religious iconography, basic like male bathroom,
female bathroom, no parking, wheelchair accessible. I mean, the symbols
just completely crowd our world. And even though we don't
(01:08):
think about it, those symbols are constantly communicating with us,
our brain is in sync with all of them and uh.
And so in this episode, we'd like to really step
back and think about symbols, about what they are, how
they work, how our brain interfaces with them, and uh
and and really to what extent they control us? Yeah,
because we're essentially talking about the conceptual life of a
(01:31):
stand in for something else. It's how we make meaning
of our world. So even something as simple as say
me working on my computer and seeing a spinning rainbow
that looks like a mint, uh, this means something to me.
It means that I'm now in the dull droom dull
drooms of uncertainty here, and I'm going to get frustrated
pretty soon because an application isn't working. Right, of course,
(01:51):
I'm talking about the mac um hick No wheel of doom. Well,
the wheel as a symbol of endless cycle and of frustration.
I mean, that's all I mean. The Buddhist smol of
the wheel is about, uh, you know, being being trapped
in a cycle that won't end. And so so the
frustration on the wheel, even that is an old symbol
that takes on new meaning and our technological age, right,
(02:11):
that's that's really powerful. Right that this thing can communicate
this test um. So signs, as you say, they can
take all sorts of forms that can take or excuse me,
symbols can take all sorts of forms like signs, uh, words, letters, odors,
even flavors. All these things are a stand in for
some sort of experience or some sort of idea, and
(02:33):
they have no meaning unless we invest them with meaning
and they have context. In fact, some Otians generally say
that there are no pure icons. So you mentioned the
bathroom icons of the male and the female, the stick
figures one is wearing a skirt, one is not. But
if you are coming from a culture where say that
(02:54):
the men wear skirts or some sort of clothing mean
like a kilted culture, like I'm not so much Scotland
because I feel like they're they're in the now in
the West. About what those sort of icons mean. But
maybe let's say, uh, you were in an undiscovered tribe
and then all of a sudden, for some reason, you
were discovered and ferried into a um area where there
(03:17):
was a Western bathroom. Well, there's a lot that's gonna
there's gonna be so much that you're trying to take
in there. But those symbols aren't necessarily going to mean
something to you, particularly if the males wear a clothing
item that resemble a skirt, right, I mean, clearly that's
a person on that sign that one sign. Is it
a male? Is it female? I don't know. It must
mean humans go in here or this is where humans
(03:39):
come from. And then likewise there's another sort of mouth
shaped human. Yeah, and what is that supposed to mean?
Is it a human? Is it a monster of some
kind hybrid form? Yeah? And what is what is this
plumbing thing? This this machine I'm supposed to poop in? Yeah,
with the clean water, the drinking water in it, exactly.
So Yeah, there are a lot of different issues there,
(04:01):
but yeah, all these things are stand ins for experience.
And I wanted to bring up the Marble Man because
I feel like in the West, particularly during a certain
historical era, the marble Man was big. I mean, he
was like the symbol of rugged individualism reality. Um, just
like the male dominance. Yeah, he was, he was, he
(04:23):
was virile, he was, he was macho. He's a cowboy,
he's smoking, he's not Karen, He's he's he's everything he
would want to be. He's living off the land, and
of course now we see that and we think a
little bit more like a black and lung. It doesn't
quite have the same power that it used to. So
the symbol all the Marlboro Man has has kind of shifted,
(04:44):
at least for my interpretation, I think for a lot
of people's interpretation, based on the shift in our culture
right now. I don't think that's a surprise to say
that symbols are not static and that they change because
our language changes all of the time. It has to
be fluid, um. It has to in order to you
deliver those memes that we talked about, right these ideas
that rise to the surface and carry the symbol with
(05:05):
them to the greater culture out there. Yeah. Another big
example of a symbol that's meaning has changed is the swastika.
Swastikas of course is a very old image, and there
are various forms of the swastika, you know, and kind
of the there's of course the more modern um German
swastika that was used during the Second World War by
the Nazis that you have you have Hindu swastick as,
(05:28):
you have Buddhi swastikas. Uh. The dates back all the
way to the Indus Valley civilization and the if you
look back at Zoroastrian religion of Persia, uh, the swastick
was more symbol of a revolving son of Infinity, of
continuing creation. And if you weren't exposed to the twentieth century,
the swastika might still inspire that in your mind, because
(05:48):
I mean, that's the basic form of the thing, the
motif of the thing. There's a sense of of cycle
to it us and in a very sunlike imagery in it.
But we come into it with our knowledge of the
twentieth century, with our knowledge of the Natzi, these of
all the transpired during the Second World War and the Holocaust,
and so all of that gets factored into the image.
So an image that for the longest time just stood
(06:10):
for basic basically very positive ideas and powerful ideas becomes
this dark image of hatred. All right, it was appropriated
and it's now what is the stand in for what
it formerly was. So again this idea that it can change,
that it's fluid. And this made me think of the
Pioneer plaque, because this this is a great example of
(06:32):
not just um the changing ideas we have of what
the human species is or should be represented, but also
a great example of how powerful symbols are, because how
do you try to um to communicate with the universe.
You try to boil down the Earth and the human
(06:55):
experience with a couple of symbols, which is exactly what
happened when the Pioneer was put on the Pioneer probe
that was launched in nineteen seventy two. Yeah, I think
the idea here was, let's sum up who we are
where we are in an attempt to possibly communicate with
an extraterrestrial species, or at the very least to serve
as kind of a time capsule. To say, it's kind
(07:16):
of like, uh, the humans, the human race as a
pair of lovers carving their name into a tree. That's
kind of yea. And ultimately that's kind of how Sagan
solid too. The more of a time capsule and less
of an actual communication. But still it was created in
the name of communicating with another species. Yeah, and we're
talking about simple line drawings that are engraved in this plaque.
(07:36):
So it has diagrams of the Earth's location and drawings
of a nude man and a nude woman. Now very
simple and straightforward, right, But If you look at this
a little bit closer, you notice that the man has
his hand up as if he's waving, or as if
he has a question there's something he doesn't understand, yeah,
or if he's just checking the wind direction yeah yeah,
(07:58):
or he's uh, he's he's he's hailing a cab, or
he's stretching, or he's stretching yeah, or he's got some
sort of like a weird limb thing where his arm
just rises. Oh, alien hands syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. So he's
got his hand up and the female does not. And
if you look at this, you can start to say, Okay,
I can infer here that this man, he is this
(08:19):
signifier the form that an idea takes, and what is
being signified is the concept. So the concept here is
that the man is the representative for the human species,
that he is the person who is trying to communicate.
And if you really really start to look at this closely,
then you from the perspective of humans, of course, because
(08:41):
we can occupy no other perspective, you begin to understand
that there is a hierarchy involved here, even though we're
talking about very simple line drawings. Now, is this representative
of the culture right now because we were close now
like we did back then. Well, there might be a
different kind of plaque that is sent out to try
(09:02):
to communicate what we are who we are. I think
maybe the male and female would be a little more
equal in that now. Of course, the plaque involves some
other stuff to it. It showed the hyperfine transition of
neutral hydrogen. It showed a relative position of the Sun
to the center of the galaxy, and fourteen pulsars solar
systems spacecraft. You know. But but certainly the depictions of
(09:23):
us are central there. And uh, and there are a
number of criticisms to make. Obviously they're they're the the
cultural implications of the whole raising of the hand? What
does that mean? But would but would another culture understand that?
Would then would extraterrestrials who don't have arms, who say,
have tentacles instead, What would they make of this? Would they?
Would they understand the hand signified, or even if they
(09:44):
had hands, perhaps in their culture it's more of a
they might say, Oh, well, look, the man is clearly
the subservient of these two because he has to rush
forward and eat the food that the other creature is
going to eat later. You know, they might have some
sort of weird connotation that totally excuse it. Well, of course,
and that's where the context is everything, right, Like what
(10:04):
if raising your hand to another culture is the extent
is the equivalent of putting up the middle finger, Like
imagine the Pioneer plaque if he was if he was
flipping off the other other species. I mean, then you
can also into things like, for the error, arrows are
used on that on that plaque, and would the arrow
as a symbol makes sense to a species that never
(10:26):
used a bow and arrow, never used a javelin, they
didn't have some sort of hunter gatherer ancestry, or as
we were talking about earlier, you you said should we
should they have had a child on there? And that
made me think of the fossil record where we were
always running into these situations when we're looking at dinosaur bones,
where we say, now, is this a different creature or
is this the female of the species? Is this a
(10:50):
is this merely an infant of the species. So you
can imagine a situation where they might look and not
realize that they're dealing with two with two genders, because
what if the what if the aliens looking as blaque
did not have genders. What if they had five genders?
You know what, what would they make of this? How
would they interpret it? Right? So, I mean it's kind
of hard to try to to make something that would
really make sense unless you have an understanding of how
(11:12):
another culture or civilization or species would conceive of it.
So uh, but still it's a really it's a really
fine attempt to boil down a lot of information into
a very concise package. And that's ultimately what's so amazing symbols. Well,
but I also think that the Pioneer plaque is largely
for us as humans. Is the excitement of saying, guess what,
(11:34):
we're humans, We're we're cool. Here's our name written on
the on the tree. Here's our coordinates, right, here's some
of the stuff that's in our atmosphere. But yeah, that's
what I love about symbols is that a symbol can
be something very simple, like the at symbol or the
proposed the symbol, which looks like a ten an h
that where all you have is okay, you have some
letters that are symbols, and those symbols make a word
(11:55):
that is a symbol for something and then we have
a slightly smaller, more concise symbol just to represent that
word or that or in that concept. But then you
have again things like the swastika, things like the Marlboro man,
things like the Pioneer plaque, where the symbol instantly conveys
a lot of data. And if you had to to
describe even to even to to like in modern terms,
(12:17):
what a swastika means, what a crucifix means, what a
Marlboro Man means, you're talking like a whole essay. You
have to sit there and write it out. You have
to sit there and and use a verbal language to
describe it for you know, five minutes or so. Whereas
the symbol instantly, that's right, because you get it coded
in your brain and then you just bring it up
and up again. We'll talk about that a little bit
more when we talk about how our brain works on symbols.
(12:40):
Side note, Do we really need a symbol for the
that's th h? I mean, are we that lazy? We
just I mean it's one letter, well, just the It
would make tweets easier and texting easier. But but there
are a lot of people that argue that it is
unnecessary but but you're losing one letter. That's that's it.
(13:01):
We'll see, I mean, and we can really go we
could go ahead and just reduce it to thh to
cut out one letter, or just reduce it to duh
d A. Okay, I have an idea about that, but
I want to save it until we talk about the brain. Okay, okay, alright,
So to make this case, we also wanted to talk
about Neanderthals and crows because they figure into this symbolic
(13:22):
representation as well. Yes, so Neanderthals of course, um our
hominid brethren who are no longer with us people before people.
We did an entire podcast episode about these ladies and
gentlemen uh and uh. And they're they're always endlessly fascinating
because they are before us. They are different from us.
(13:42):
They are in a sense as close as we can
get to an extraterrestrial being, you know, I mean, they're
terrestrial obviously, but they are like us, but unlike us. Well,
and we have some of their DNA we know this.
So we were looking at this particular study where archaeologist
gals How of being Verity of Bristol in England and
his colleagues found a fifty thousand year old uh perforated
(14:05):
painted seashells and pigment containers on the Iberian Peninsula in
southwestern Europe. And this was a region that was inhabited
solely by any der dolls at the time. Modern humans
who lived in Africa at the time these similar objects
as jewelry and for body painting, to symbolizing under various
social standing, etcetera. But this particular study, the particular to
find suggests that the brains of the common ancestor of
(14:28):
both species must have already had the biological basis for
symbolic thought. Uh So, way back then there are easingly shells,
there reason pigments as as a way to signify roles
and positions within their society. Yeah, I mean, Zelho is
saying that they had the biological basis for symbolic thought
(14:48):
dating back about half a million years ago, because he
says assigning specific meanings to arbitrary words and sounds is
symbolic thinking by definition. Yeah. So it really makes you
think about how this was the pre assessor for actual language. Yeah,
and it boils down to one of the hallmarks of
the human species. And and and to their point, some
(15:09):
some predecessors of humans as well about what makes us
so successful, and that's our ability to externalize internal processes
such as cooking of course is externalizing internal digestion, and
symbolic thought is essentially externalizing aspects of our thinking. That
that that free up our cognitive abilities so that we
(15:32):
can maximize what we're doing internally. Of course, all of
this is predicated on the idea that we have to survive.
In order to survive, we've got to be able to
suss out these symbols and figure out our universe. And
you have to look at crows as a as a
really good example of this. We're talking about crows capable
of distinguishing symbols. This was from a study led by
(15:52):
Choice Sugita who used eight jungle crows, relatives of the
American crow. By the way and the job In scientists
also found that the jungle crows were able to determine
which container that they had in front of The crows
held food in which did not, based on a symbol system. Yeah,
one of the content containers would have either two or
(16:13):
five Yeah. And they had a pretty like success rate.
And they did about twenty different experiments with food and symbols,
and eventually that the crows clocked in about seventy success
rate as they did this more and more matching food
the symbol. So we know that this is just a
very basic, uh rudimentary skill that all animals have, including humans,
(16:40):
in order to suss out how to get to what
we need. All right, Well, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss language. We're going to discuss symbols
some more, and we're gonna discuss how symbols interact with
our brain. All right, we're back, and let's talk a
(17:02):
little bit about language. What what is language and uh
and and how it releases symbols. I mean, ultimately, as
we're talking about earlier, we're talking about externalizing internal processes,
we're talking about using them as h as kind of
footholds as we ascend it to uh more complicated topics. Uh.
I mean basically the use of words verbal were written
(17:23):
signifiers and symbols. They represent ideas and when they're combined
they allow us to build more complicated ideas. That's right. So, um,
it is basically the way that we navigate the world.
But just do not think of it that way, because language,
each letter is a symbol of right, each word, each phrase,
each paragraph has more and more meaning that's built upon it,
(17:46):
more and more symbols that become these shorthands. And you
begin to look around, you know, widen your scope a
little bit, and you see that the traffic signals that
direct you, um whether or not you're taking a train
or you're driving a car, there are all sorts of
navigational signals. They're telling you how to order your world. Yeah,
and we've discussed before the idea to that language is
(18:06):
essentially the operating system for the human brain that we
have all the hardware, and then language is what we
use to actually think about things and to actually tackle concepts. Yeah,
it's something like the periodic table of elements, right, This
is this is a good example of symbols and us
trying to make the invisible world visible to us, albeit
(18:28):
in this form where we can try to figure out
the properties of each element. Yeah, because at the periodic table,
obviously it's not a true map, it's not a place.
It's summing up a lot of things that are invisible
or are a lot more complicated and taking that boiling
it down into a version of reality that makes sense
even at a quick glance. You look at it the
(18:49):
periodic table, and you realize this is the scientific underpinning
of the substances that that to make up physical reality. Yeah.
Even the coordinates on it have a meaning to them, right,
So if you'rely can at a certain vertical column, then
you know that they all share similar properties. Yeah. And
even even though it's not a true map, it is
a map of sorts. So and so that's just an
(19:09):
example of our outer universe that we are ordering, but
we also are ordering our inner universe. And I can't
help but bring up Karl Hung. Yes, of course, the
Swiss psychoanalysts, because you're a union. I don't know that.
I mean, I'm I appreciate Young and I have the
Red Book, which is a bunch of his drawings of
(19:33):
the unconscious via symbols, and it's fascinating and beautiful and
and also kind of horrific too, because he's using this
these archetypes, these symbols to try to delve into the mind,
into the unconscious. And so what he was doing is
trying to use this universality of symbols to suss out
(19:53):
the human experience the inner world. Yeah, and we've all
looked at like dream interpretation guides before, whether talk about
what these different symbols mean, what these like, what does
it mean if you're falling, And if you're falling in
a dream, then it means that that bad stuff may
happen during the daylight. If you're being chased through streets,
the same thing if you're if you're turning, if your
flesh is turning into a tree roots, then it means
(20:15):
you're gonna get disease. You know, people look for all
sorts of portance in in this kind of imagery. But
but but it boils down to the idea that symbols
are that powerful. They connect with the subconscious and if
you want to apply supernatural thinking to it, you might
think that that symbols also connect us to hidden knowledge
outside of ourselves. And you should also look at it
(20:36):
like dreams, they don't come to you in a highly
realistic way. They come to you fully symbolically packaged. Right.
You don't necessarily read a book in your dream, right,
Or I've tried to actually in my dreams, but it's
always blurry or something. Um. You know, you you get
pounded over the head with all these different archetypes, and
so it's very clear that this is important to the
(20:59):
operating system of our brains in a way, it's to
try to figure out what's been going on. I mean,
I think it's fascinating that's represented to us in that way. Ye. Now,
another area of symbolic use that has always fascinating me,
and going back to the idea of adding supernatural elements
to it, is the use of sickles uh symbolic representations
of demons or a wizard's desired outcome, and then you
(21:22):
also have hyper sickles uh such as this is popularized
by Grant Morrison, the writer of graphic novels who saw
a hypercyle is an extended work of art with magical
meaning and willpower. So like a comic book or a
novel or a movie where it's a bunch of symbols
that are put together in a way to where the
symbols kind of overlap to form some greater symbol uh.
(21:46):
So I always find that interesting as well. In a sense,
a really crazy dream is the kind of hypercycle and
is and if you want to check out some of
some of the archetypes that have been collected by eras.
This is the archive for research and our type of symbolism.
Go to airrors dot org. You can kind of browse
a little bit. You do have to become a member
to check out the full catalog, but it is an
(22:09):
amazing amount of symbolic, mythological, ritualistic images that you can
search and then it actually give you not just the
accompanying um information about what it means, but will tell
you during what periods of history that it was in
popular use and what regions of the world. So it's fascinating.
(22:29):
So we've plopped through what symbols are, why they're important
to us, How powerful their their their communication is. How
about how a symbol can instantly convey something that we
take you paragraphs and paragraphs to uh to to completely
spell out that they can sum up things that are
impossible even to completely relate with language. But how do
(22:51):
they interact with the brain itself? All right, So the
brain is going to try to visualize a symbol in
three different ways. This is according to information designer Ted Whushak,
who has a Ted talk on this, and he says
that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is,
but instead creates a series of mental models. And we've
talked about this before too, to get to those ah
(23:13):
ha moments, and David Eagleman talks about this a lot too,
that the unconscious usually kind of burps up an idea
and you have that aha moment that you don't realize
that it's been uh, that that idea has been worked
on for months, maybe even years before it served up.
Nobody's view of the real world is actually the real world.
It is just a worldview that we take on. It's
(23:34):
a simulation in a sense. So what happens, what what?
What happens before this symbol emblazons itself in our minds. Well,
of course it begins with the eyes. You have light
entering hitting the back of the retina, and it's circulated
mostly to the back of the brain to the primary
visual cortex. But then, according to Wushack, it acts like
(23:56):
a relay station that reradiates and redirects information to other
parts of the brain. So we're talking about thirty different
person of the brain that get in on this, but
there are three really important ones. The first one is
the ventral stream, and this is the part of the
brain that recognizes what something is so if I look
at my hand, that's the what that's my hand, that's
a book, that's a remote control. The second one is
(24:18):
the dorsal stream, and what this does it locates the
object and it creates a mental map in your mind.
The third one is the limbic system, which we've talked
about a lot in terms of processing emotions. So that's
the part that feels like the ah ha, the the
emotional response to what that symbol begins to mean that
the form that it's taking as an abstract, And this
(24:42):
combination of these processing centers help us to make meaning
in a bunch of different ways. So one way to
understand how symbols interact with the mind is to look
at how children learn language and uh, some of the
materials we're looking at there talking about how when children
are learning language, simple use in the prefrontal vortex that's
where all the activities taking place. But then as they
(25:04):
become accustomed to what these symbols mean, to what language means,
the paratical region takes over the job. The association has
become more automatic. So it comes back to this idea
of symbols as a place holder for for more complex
thought in a sense, it's kind of like we figure
out what that basic idea is, We form an idea
(25:24):
of what this is about, and then we assign it
that symbol, and then that symbol squared away in the
same way that we might circle a paragraph in a
book we're reading and then market with a signal like
maybe just a star. That star signifies this is an
important passage and it's a passage that I need to
come back to. And so in a sense, we we
do the same thing with our symbolic understanding of the world. Yeah,
(25:46):
and it's interesting that you see that in kids, right,
that they began to shorthand that knowledge so that it
can be mapped out in their brains so they can
recall it later. And it reminds me of another study
that we saw that talked about how expectations speed up
conscious perception. So those archetypes that you learn, turns out
that when you're taking in a bunch of stimuli, if
(26:07):
you recognize that symbol, well, then we're talking about your
ability to speed up your processing by something like a
hundred milliseconds. Now that doesn't sound huge, but just consider
that when you're taking in data, it usually takes about
three hundred milliseconds for it to get perceived. So if
you can cut that down by about by those archetypes,
(26:28):
that's when the the th h E to the th
H sort of makes sense, right, Yeah, because it's kind
of like, how do you win a war? You want
to You can win a war with overwhelming force, but
a lot of times if the if the two sides
are more equal, you win a war. You win a
battle with a lot of petty advantages that stack up.
So all that that lost time, I mean, all that
game time, a hundred milliseconds here, a hundred milliseconds there,
(26:52):
it's it's eventually gonna potentially make the difference when you're
having to think on your feet really fast and uh
and and choose that, you know, make that savor tooth
tie related decision in your modern life. Yeah. So, I mean,
if you are saving a hundreds of millisecond every single
time that you're taking in a new piece of data,
then you are conserving a lot more energy. And now
I'm not a fan of cutting down th E to
(27:14):
th H, but it's prevalence in the language. I do
understand that there is a conservation of energy in the act. Yeah, well,
you don't want to you don't want to boil it
down so much that you don't think. And I think
that's one of the problems that sometimes occur with with symbols,
is that they are so powerful that they are cutting
out our reasoning and depending on existing um thought that
(27:37):
they're they're kind of they're kind of viral. There's a
viral power to symbols, especially within certain cultures, you know, uh,
depending how how resonant it is. Like again, I come
back to the swastica about how powerful the swastika becomes
as the symbol of hate in modern society, to the
point where it's, for instance, you know, it's outlawed in Germany.
(27:57):
You can't go around publishing a swastika on things, even
if it's a historic, historically accurate and model airplane. Then
if you're buying the kit in Germany, you need to
see about acquiring your slastikas separately. Now, So we were
talking about this on our commute full of signs this
morning about how this this sort of short shorthand placement
(28:20):
stand in and our brains is really really helpful, right
because it does it's like it's shortening the th e
to th h but it can be a problem because
what you're talking about is unconscious stereotyping, and we don't
necessarily know that we're always doing this, but when we're
taking in data and we're thin slicing, as Malcolm glad
Law might say, am blink, we're trying to get that
really quick perception and most of the time that helps
(28:43):
us out a lot, but it can really actually show
up as errors in our thinking. And it made me
think about this study that came up about foreign languages
and people using a second language to consider high risk scenarios.
The study is called the Foreign Language Effect Thinking in
a fog and tongue reduces decision biases, which documents a
(29:03):
series of experiments on more than three people from the
US and Korea. And this is from a Wired article
by Brian King, who says that human reasoning is shaped
by two distinct modes of thought. One that's systematic, analytical,
and cognition intensive, and the other that's fast, unconscious, and
emotionally charged. Right, that's the feelings that we get, that
(29:23):
Olympic system coming into play. So the idea is that
the cognitive demands of thinking in a non native language
would leave people with a little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately
increasing the reliance on quick and dirty cogitation right, just
that quick analytical and they did. They found that in
the study that people were able to make better, more
(29:47):
rational decisions when working in their second language as opposed
to their mother tongue, which was freighted with emotion, because
you're stepping outside of culture, you're stepping outside of self,
stepping outside of symbol to a certain degree, because if
that symbol I mean that simple will mean something to you,
but it's going to mean something different in a second language,
(30:08):
which has a distance from from what was ingrained in
your brain when you were being brought up in this
one language. It comes back to that idea of language
is as an operating system. One language is MAC, one
language is is PC, and certain things are going to
travel from one to the next, but some aren't. Um
In Neil Stevenson's book Snow Crash, which is one of
(30:30):
his earlier novels, a cyberpunk classic UH these days, rather
different from some of his more recent work. But there's
a great deal in that book that has to do
UH with a trend toward towards divergence in language and
about how the fact that we have various languages in
the world actually prevents and protects from widespread harm. Uh.
(30:50):
So you know, we all know the story of a
farmer grows only one crop, then his entire farm is
susceptible to devastation by a single parasite. So Stevenson draws
draws in the eye that say, Nazism is a cultural virus.
And uh, and if you have a universal language, then
that cultural virus is more has more potential to spread
(31:11):
to everyone. So the kind of factors into what you're
saying there. Well, let's talk a little bit more about
how our behaviors altered and our ideas are altered by simples.
And I'm thinking specifically about Adam Alter, the psychologist. Yeah,
this is the guy wh wrote a book on drunk
pink pink Um, which feels also a lot with color theory.
(31:33):
And hopefully we'll come back and do an episode on
color theory of there's interests out there in us covering
that topic. But he pointed out that Christians tend to
behave more honestly when they're exposed to an image of
a crucifix, even when they have no conscious memory of
having seen it. So there's just across and crosses a
lot like the swastick, and in a sense of prost
(31:55):
and a swastika are are at at very base level
the same thing, and both are cruciform up and there
are a lot of different crucifixes out there, depending on
which you created your adhering to. But the idea that
just in the background, just this, this one image that's
heavily charged with meaning and religious purpose that even if
(32:15):
you see it, uh, and you're not even consciously processing it,
it's jumping over your conscious thought into the unconscious and
affecting the way you're feeling, the way you're thinking, really
hacking your entire mindset. What about Pope John Paul the Second? Yes,
this was experiment from the University of Michigan and they
this one found that Christians felt less virtuous after subliminal
(32:39):
exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second.
I mean that, I mean it's because he has well
the ideas that there are impossible high standards to live
up to. Right, So some of our younger listeners may
not remember John Paul all that much, but he had
more of a you know, a peaceful grandfather, really kind
of demeanor for a lot of people. Well, and in
terms of popularity, isn't he more like a bit of
(33:00):
a rock star in terms and that the popetum? Yeah yeah, yeah, definitely,
so so people. So he was a very charged he
himself became a symbol and and merely glancing around and
catching it was influencing the way people thought about themselves. Now,
what about a computer lego? You think that could make
(33:20):
you feel more creative? Well, I don't. I don't know
about me because I'm not as much of a of
a Mac person. I mean, I think they make some
great products, but I'm not one of you. I don't
have the bumper sticker on my car or anything. But
the studies have found that when people are exposed to
that Mac symbol, they are more likely to think creatively.
And likewise, if they're exposed to a symbol of an
(33:41):
incandescent light bulb, the whole oh, I've got an idea
and then the light bulb lights up, that they're exposed
to that they're likely to think creative because these are
both symbols that are charged with ideas of creative endeavor.
And so just by glimpsing them, where were they hook
into our subconscious and make us think about that. Now,
that's a two thousand and eight study back fit Simmons
at all. So you have to wonder if two thousand
(34:03):
and thirteen does Apple have the same staying power. Again,
we're talking about fluidity of symbols and their meanings. Yeah,
because you know, a lot of stuff has happened that
the product itself is arguably taken a dive, and some
people's maybe not to die, but let's say I decline. Uh.
But then on the other hand, Steve Jobs passing the
results that made everyone really uh, you know, nostalgic for
(34:25):
Apple and really really you know, celebrate his contributions to
our technological life. And then of course you also have
had had varying bits of scandal about how our Apple
devices are made, which may also add new uh nuance
to the symbol itself. So again, these symbols become um
(34:47):
dependent on all the cultural things feeding into and they're
kind of like they're kind of like a tree growing
out of the ground. And the roots system runs throughout
our culture and and even into our history, and it
depends on how far those roots are going and what
they're sucking in, what kind of nutrients they're drawing from
our culture to depend on what the form of that
treat is. Yeah, it's interesting that that one symbol can
(35:07):
bring up so many different threads of thought because you
have the biography, if you have jobs, you have um
nations in their economics being powered or not powered by Apple.
You have people who are being affected just the level
of not only pay, but what they're exposed to in
terms of the technologies that they're using. And then you
(35:30):
have this idea of creativity all wrapped up into one
tiny logo. Yeah. So, so it's important to think about
these experience, not because we want to make a definite
point about crosses and Christians and Apple fans, but bear
in mind at all symbols are interacting with us to
varying levels like this, So we encounter them subconsciously or
(35:53):
even mind a little bit consciously, and they're having some
sort of an impact on us. If it's the McDonald's
golden arches, if it's the Coca cola or the pepsi symbol,
if it's a cross, if it is UH, if it
is the Star of David, if it's a swastika, whatever, Like,
we encounter these and they convey something to us. And
then if you start combining them, if you say, slap
(36:14):
a swastika on Ronald McDonald, then it's instantly going to
create some sort of new, unsteady symbol and convey that
to your mind. He just gave someone a really great
art project. Well, I'm sure it's probably already been. I
was somewhere, uh Paris on Potts and they have a
Ronald McDonald there that's made out of something. What is
(36:34):
it made out? Oh? Yeah, no, I know, it's a
corporate logo. Yeah, it's like an eight foot tall I mean,
Ronald McDonald in my eyes, has always been menacing, but
this one is particularly menacing. But yeah, not a corporate logos. Yeah.
So so in a way, it becomes kind of a
hyper sickle itself because you're combining these these various symbols
that stand for things into another symbol. And but then
(36:55):
you get into situations too if you combine too many symbols,
does it is it kind of like combining all about
the Crayo crayons where you end up with just a blur.
You end up with things like uh, well like the
rose right Zamburdo echo points out the roses symbolized so
many different things, and it pretty much becomes a devoid
of meaning. It's kind of that the symbol has been
completely worn out to the point where it cannot convey
(37:15):
any true message anymore. One of the lines of philosophy
that I really like about this is from Louise alf Tusar.
Flave said that correctly, and he described our existence as
being tied to something called the ideology state apparatus and um,
it's this idea that we're always ready, we're always already,
(37:36):
and by always already, what he means is that we
are even before we're born. We're born into this expectation,
in this um embodiment of symbols. And so even when
you are just stating in your mother's uterus, you are
the symbol of whatever it is that the society has
going to put upon you. So if you're a girl,
(37:56):
you're going to be wrapped in pink and all sorts
of expectations. And it's a very interesting idea. Um. He
says that it's the way that we're defined, that we
are walking symbols, and essentially that allows us or I
shouldn't say allows, but those expectations give us a roadmap
on how to behave. So it's it's this idea of
(38:20):
being both objectified but also subjected as um as a
placeholder in language. You know, it reminds me too of execution, torture,
and even imagined execution and torture as as we encountered
in our study of hell various sins or punished varying ways.
(38:40):
And there's a strong argument that any form of real
life torture or execution uh and any kind of imagined
form like those are all symbols that the idea of
executing somebody in a certain fashion, it's loaded with symbolic meaning,
especially when you deal with public executions, because you are
creating a symbol to to try and uh and illustrate
(39:01):
a point and convey a message to the popular. That's interesting.
So a hanging would be very different from having your
head cut off right with the guillotine. So yeah, what
does what does it mean? What does being drawn and
quartered mean? What is being thrown into a sack with
live animals mean? Like all of these bare certain symbolic
messages for the intended audience to be absorbed, right yeah,
(39:22):
And and I mean I could go on on this
kind of thing too. But it also reminds me of
the works of bosh Uh. You know all those uh,
those hellish apocalyptic sceneries where you have all these strange
monsters doing strange things and tormenting people and all that. Like,
even a scene like that, we don't understand a lot
of it. But to the the individuals who would be
who would have viewed that work of art at the time,
(39:43):
loaded with symbols known symbols uh and and so in
a sense that painting is speaking a language of symbols
to the viewer. And if you would like to actually
experience these symbols firsthand in the form of a Buddhist
hell theme park. We actually find out yesterday that there
is one in Singapore where you can go and look
(40:04):
at all these visual representations of what Buddhist hell might be. Yeah,
it looks amazing. And I know we have listeners all over.
So if any of you are in Singapore or end
up traveling there, or have traveled there and have visited
that place, do let us know all about it? Symbolic
rich that one? All? Right? Well, there you go, a
crash course in symbols. Uh. Like I said, if nothing else,
(40:25):
I just hope that this makes you a little more
alert to the power of symbols and how loaded our
lives are with symbols, how they're very they're they're very
useful to us. There are footholds in the mountain of
understanding that allows us to ascend and learn new things
and grapple with concepts that are really too much for
our our puny minds to to deal with without the
the the advantage of language. But then also about how
(40:48):
all these symbols around us are constantly influencing us and
arguably controlling us on that word, let's call over the robot,
all right, So this is an interesting when this comes
to us for Isabell von Finkelstein. She writes in about
our Sideshow Secrets episode, she says, hello listening to the
Sideshow Secrets episode. My grandma on my mom's side, was
(41:08):
apparently one of the headless women in Blackpool in England.
She also swallowed swords and red tarot. Apparently my great
grandpa ended up joining the circus at fourteen after stabbing
someone in the leg and running away. He ended up
with tuberculosis and then somehow was picked up by the carneys.
So my grandma was brought up with them. Given that
my family sways to the theatrical and creative side of life,
(41:31):
we weren't at all surprised that she had circus in
the jeans. It explained a lot. Ha ha. I just
wish I knew more of the history. I have a
copy of a newspaper cutting somewhere. If I can find it,
I'll forward it onto you again. Another great podcast. I
need to finish listening to it now, Thanks guys. Isabelle. Wow.
And I thought that my family's history was colorful. I
(41:52):
know that's that's amazing. And of course Blackpool, England is
um it's kind of a historically like a vacation area,
like a little bit of a of a Carney town
in of itself. And I know that professional wrestler Stephen
Regal hails from there. Yeah, and so you know there's
the wrestling that is a part of the carname. Yeah,
that's part of the whole tradition. Um. That also reminded
(42:13):
me of the book Geek Love. Did we bring that
up in the in the last podcast. Sometimes there's a
reference that's so key that we actually forget to bring
it up when we do the podcast And we're like, OK,
I believe we didn't mention that. Geek Love by Katherine
Dunn amazing fictionalized account of the carnival world and a
(42:34):
fictional family that um is created essentially by the parents
by messing with jeans to create sideshow kids. It sounds good.
I have not read it. I hear great things. I
know they locally did a production of it years ago.
It was like six months long, six hours. Yeah. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to go ahead and uh
(42:56):
and leave you. But in the meantime, if you have
something you would like to share with us, uh, go
for it. Particularly related to symbols. What is your experience
with symbols, How do they how do you interact with them?
Are you conscious of what symbols are doing to you?
Is there a symbol that is particularly important to you
let us know about. I was talking earlier about how
a symbol instantly conveys something that would take you a
(43:18):
little a little more time to actually to explain in words.
So explain in words to us why a symbol is
important to you and what it means to you when
you look at it. We'd love to hear that kind
of thing and you can find us in all the
normal places. Our main website, of course, is stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. We're also on Facebook and
tumbler at stuff to Blow your Mind, and on Twitter
we go by the handle blow the Mind and then
(43:39):
oh YouTube mind stuff Show. That's where we are there. Okay,
And there are two things I'm interested in in hearing
from you guys about yea or nay on the th
H e versus th H. The second thing. Today there
was a story about Mattel and NASA creating a barbie
that's a Mars barbie who's clad in pink progress or no.
(43:59):
Let us know, and you can do so by sending
us an email at blow the Mind at discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
we were surrounded by symbols, like even right now, care
are symbols in our midst, on the recording equipment, on
(00:25):
on our shirt center clothing. We're not yours symbol cree
is about design. Well, I'm wearing black and you could
say that, Um, I'm sort of trying to communicate some
sort of message here. Yes, some absence of symbols, but
that's in itself is kind of a symbol exactly. You know,
I embraced the void and that's what I'm trying to
tell people with this. You have your Boards of Canada
(00:46):
shirt on, yeah, which kind of has a logo symbol
thing going on for sure, And just going through a
daily life, just think of how many symbols we encounter,
I mean, corporate logos, um, religious iconography, basic like male bathroom,
female bathroom, no parking, wheelchair accessible. I mean, the symbols
just completely crowd our world. And even though we don't
(01:08):
think about it, those symbols are constantly communicating with us,
our brain is in sync with all of them and uh.
And so in this episode, we'd like to really step
back and think about symbols, about what they are, how
they work, how our brain interfaces with them, and uh
and and really to what extent they control us? Yeah,
because we're essentially talking about the conceptual life of a
(01:31):
stand in for something else. It's how we make meaning
of our world. So even something as simple as say
me working on my computer and seeing a spinning rainbow
that looks like a mint, uh, this means something to me.
It means that I'm now in the dull droom dull
drooms of uncertainty here, and I'm going to get frustrated
pretty soon because an application isn't working. Right, of course,
(01:51):
I'm talking about the mac um hick No wheel of doom. Well,
the wheel as a symbol of endless cycle and of frustration.
I mean, that's all I mean. The Buddhist smol of
the wheel is about, uh, you know, being being trapped
in a cycle that won't end. And so so the
frustration on the wheel, even that is an old symbol
that takes on new meaning and our technological age, right,
(02:11):
that's that's really powerful. Right that this thing can communicate
this test um. So signs, as you say, they can
take all sorts of forms that can take or excuse me,
symbols can take all sorts of forms like signs, uh, words, letters, odors,
even flavors. All these things are a stand in for
some sort of experience or some sort of idea, and
(02:33):
they have no meaning unless we invest them with meaning
and they have context. In fact, some Otians generally say
that there are no pure icons. So you mentioned the
bathroom icons of the male and the female, the stick
figures one is wearing a skirt, one is not. But
if you are coming from a culture where say that
(02:54):
the men wear skirts or some sort of clothing mean
like a kilted culture, like I'm not so much Scotland
because I feel like they're they're in the now in
the West. About what those sort of icons mean. But
maybe let's say, uh, you were in an undiscovered tribe
and then all of a sudden, for some reason, you
were discovered and ferried into a um area where there
(03:17):
was a Western bathroom. Well, there's a lot that's gonna
there's gonna be so much that you're trying to take
in there. But those symbols aren't necessarily going to mean
something to you, particularly if the males wear a clothing
item that resemble a skirt, right, I mean, clearly that's
a person on that sign that one sign. Is it
a male? Is it female? I don't know. It must
mean humans go in here or this is where humans
(03:39):
come from. And then likewise there's another sort of mouth
shaped human. Yeah, and what is that supposed to mean?
Is it a human? Is it a monster of some
kind hybrid form? Yeah? And what is what is this
plumbing thing? This this machine I'm supposed to poop in? Yeah,
with the clean water, the drinking water in it, exactly.
So Yeah, there are a lot of different issues there,
(04:01):
but yeah, all these things are stand ins for experience.
And I wanted to bring up the Marble Man because
I feel like in the West, particularly during a certain
historical era, the marble Man was big. I mean, he
was like the symbol of rugged individualism reality. Um, just
like the male dominance. Yeah, he was, he was, he
(04:23):
was virile, he was, he was macho. He's a cowboy,
he's smoking, he's not Karen, He's he's he's everything he
would want to be. He's living off the land, and
of course now we see that and we think a
little bit more like a black and lung. It doesn't
quite have the same power that it used to. So
the symbol all the Marlboro Man has has kind of shifted,
(04:44):
at least for my interpretation, I think for a lot
of people's interpretation, based on the shift in our culture
right now. I don't think that's a surprise to say
that symbols are not static and that they change because
our language changes all of the time. It has to
be fluid, um. It has to in order to you
deliver those memes that we talked about, right these ideas
that rise to the surface and carry the symbol with
(05:05):
them to the greater culture out there. Yeah. Another big
example of a symbol that's meaning has changed is the swastika.
Swastikas of course is a very old image, and there
are various forms of the swastika, you know, and kind
of the there's of course the more modern um German
swastika that was used during the Second World War by
the Nazis that you have you have Hindu swastick as,
(05:28):
you have Buddhi swastikas. Uh. The dates back all the
way to the Indus Valley civilization and the if you
look back at Zoroastrian religion of Persia, uh, the swastick
was more symbol of a revolving son of Infinity, of
continuing creation. And if you weren't exposed to the twentieth century,
the swastika might still inspire that in your mind, because
(05:48):
I mean, that's the basic form of the thing, the
motif of the thing. There's a sense of of cycle
to it us and in a very sunlike imagery in it.
But we come into it with our knowledge of the
twentieth century, with our knowledge of the Natzi, these of
all the transpired during the Second World War and the Holocaust,
and so all of that gets factored into the image.
So an image that for the longest time just stood
(06:10):
for basic basically very positive ideas and powerful ideas becomes
this dark image of hatred. All right, it was appropriated
and it's now what is the stand in for what
it formerly was. So again this idea that it can change,
that it's fluid. And this made me think of the
Pioneer plaque, because this this is a great example of
(06:32):
not just um the changing ideas we have of what
the human species is or should be represented, but also
a great example of how powerful symbols are, because how
do you try to um to communicate with the universe.
You try to boil down the Earth and the human
(06:55):
experience with a couple of symbols, which is exactly what
happened when the Pioneer was put on the Pioneer probe
that was launched in nineteen seventy two. Yeah, I think
the idea here was, let's sum up who we are
where we are in an attempt to possibly communicate with
an extraterrestrial species, or at the very least to serve
as kind of a time capsule. To say, it's kind
(07:16):
of like, uh, the humans, the human race as a
pair of lovers carving their name into a tree. That's
kind of yea. And ultimately that's kind of how Sagan
solid too. The more of a time capsule and less
of an actual communication. But still it was created in
the name of communicating with another species. Yeah, and we're
talking about simple line drawings that are engraved in this plaque.
(07:36):
So it has diagrams of the Earth's location and drawings
of a nude man and a nude woman. Now very
simple and straightforward, right, But If you look at this
a little bit closer, you notice that the man has
his hand up as if he's waving, or as if
he has a question there's something he doesn't understand, yeah,
or if he's just checking the wind direction yeah yeah,
(07:58):
or he's uh, he's he's he's hailing a cab, or
he's stretching, or he's stretching yeah, or he's got some
sort of like a weird limb thing where his arm
just rises. Oh, alien hands syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. So he's
got his hand up and the female does not. And
if you look at this, you can start to say, Okay,
I can infer here that this man, he is this
(08:19):
signifier the form that an idea takes, and what is
being signified is the concept. So the concept here is
that the man is the representative for the human species,
that he is the person who is trying to communicate.
And if you really really start to look at this closely,
then you from the perspective of humans, of course, because
(08:41):
we can occupy no other perspective, you begin to understand
that there is a hierarchy involved here, even though we're
talking about very simple line drawings. Now, is this representative
of the culture right now because we were close now
like we did back then. Well, there might be a
different kind of plaque that is sent out to try
(09:02):
to communicate what we are who we are. I think
maybe the male and female would be a little more
equal in that now. Of course, the plaque involves some
other stuff to it. It showed the hyperfine transition of
neutral hydrogen. It showed a relative position of the Sun
to the center of the galaxy, and fourteen pulsars solar
systems spacecraft. You know. But but certainly the depictions of
(09:23):
us are central there. And uh, and there are a
number of criticisms to make. Obviously they're they're the the
cultural implications of the whole raising of the hand? What
does that mean? But would but would another culture understand that?
Would then would extraterrestrials who don't have arms, who say,
have tentacles instead, What would they make of this? Would they?
Would they understand the hand signified, or even if they
(09:44):
had hands, perhaps in their culture it's more of a
they might say, Oh, well, look, the man is clearly
the subservient of these two because he has to rush
forward and eat the food that the other creature is
going to eat later. You know, they might have some
sort of weird connotation that totally excuse it. Well, of course,
and that's where the context is everything, right, Like what
(10:04):
if raising your hand to another culture is the extent
is the equivalent of putting up the middle finger, Like
imagine the Pioneer plaque if he was if he was
flipping off the other other species. I mean, then you
can also into things like, for the error, arrows are
used on that on that plaque, and would the arrow
as a symbol makes sense to a species that never
(10:26):
used a bow and arrow, never used a javelin, they
didn't have some sort of hunter gatherer ancestry, or as
we were talking about earlier, you you said should we
should they have had a child on there? And that
made me think of the fossil record where we were
always running into these situations when we're looking at dinosaur bones,
where we say, now, is this a different creature or
is this the female of the species? Is this a
(10:50):
is this merely an infant of the species. So you
can imagine a situation where they might look and not
realize that they're dealing with two with two genders, because
what if the what if the aliens looking as blaque
did not have genders. What if they had five genders?
You know what, what would they make of this? How
would they interpret it? Right? So, I mean it's kind
of hard to try to to make something that would
really make sense unless you have an understanding of how
(11:12):
another culture or civilization or species would conceive of it.
So uh, but still it's a really it's a really
fine attempt to boil down a lot of information into
a very concise package. And that's ultimately what's so amazing symbols. Well,
but I also think that the Pioneer plaque is largely
for us as humans. Is the excitement of saying, guess what,
(11:34):
we're humans, We're we're cool. Here's our name written on
the on the tree. Here's our coordinates, right, here's some
of the stuff that's in our atmosphere. But yeah, that's
what I love about symbols is that a symbol can
be something very simple, like the at symbol or the
proposed the symbol, which looks like a ten an h
that where all you have is okay, you have some
letters that are symbols, and those symbols make a word
(11:55):
that is a symbol for something and then we have
a slightly smaller, more concise symbol just to represent that
word or that or in that concept. But then you
have again things like the swastika, things like the Marlboro man,
things like the Pioneer plaque, where the symbol instantly conveys
a lot of data. And if you had to to
describe even to even to to like in modern terms,
(12:17):
what a swastika means, what a crucifix means, what a
Marlboro Man means, you're talking like a whole essay. You
have to sit there and write it out. You have
to sit there and and use a verbal language to
describe it for you know, five minutes or so. Whereas
the symbol instantly, that's right, because you get it coded
in your brain and then you just bring it up
and up again. We'll talk about that a little bit
more when we talk about how our brain works on symbols.
(12:40):
Side note, Do we really need a symbol for the
that's th h? I mean, are we that lazy? We
just I mean it's one letter, well, just the It
would make tweets easier and texting easier. But but there
are a lot of people that argue that it is
unnecessary but but you're losing one letter. That's that's it.
(13:01):
We'll see, I mean, and we can really go we
could go ahead and just reduce it to thh to
cut out one letter, or just reduce it to duh
d A. Okay, I have an idea about that, but
I want to save it until we talk about the brain. Okay, okay, alright,
So to make this case, we also wanted to talk
about Neanderthals and crows because they figure into this symbolic
(13:22):
representation as well. Yes, so Neanderthals of course, um our
hominid brethren who are no longer with us people before people.
We did an entire podcast episode about these ladies and
gentlemen uh and uh. And they're they're always endlessly fascinating
because they are before us. They are different from us.
(13:42):
They are in a sense as close as we can
get to an extraterrestrial being, you know, I mean, they're
terrestrial obviously, but they are like us, but unlike us. Well,
and we have some of their DNA we know this.
So we were looking at this particular study where archaeologist
gals How of being Verity of Bristol in England and
his colleagues found a fifty thousand year old uh perforated
(14:05):
painted seashells and pigment containers on the Iberian Peninsula in
southwestern Europe. And this was a region that was inhabited
solely by any der dolls at the time. Modern humans
who lived in Africa at the time these similar objects
as jewelry and for body painting, to symbolizing under various
social standing, etcetera. But this particular study, the particular to
find suggests that the brains of the common ancestor of
(14:28):
both species must have already had the biological basis for
symbolic thought. Uh So, way back then there are easingly shells,
there reason pigments as as a way to signify roles
and positions within their society. Yeah, I mean, Zelho is
saying that they had the biological basis for symbolic thought
(14:48):
dating back about half a million years ago, because he
says assigning specific meanings to arbitrary words and sounds is
symbolic thinking by definition. Yeah. So it really makes you
think about how this was the pre assessor for actual language. Yeah,
and it boils down to one of the hallmarks of
the human species. And and and to their point, some
(15:09):
some predecessors of humans as well about what makes us
so successful, and that's our ability to externalize internal processes
such as cooking of course is externalizing internal digestion, and
symbolic thought is essentially externalizing aspects of our thinking. That
that that free up our cognitive abilities so that we
(15:32):
can maximize what we're doing internally. Of course, all of
this is predicated on the idea that we have to survive.
In order to survive, we've got to be able to
suss out these symbols and figure out our universe. And
you have to look at crows as a as a
really good example of this. We're talking about crows capable
of distinguishing symbols. This was from a study led by
(15:52):
Choice Sugita who used eight jungle crows, relatives of the
American crow. By the way and the job In scientists
also found that the jungle crows were able to determine
which container that they had in front of The crows
held food in which did not, based on a symbol system. Yeah,
one of the content containers would have either two or
(16:13):
five Yeah. And they had a pretty like success rate.
And they did about twenty different experiments with food and symbols,
and eventually that the crows clocked in about seventy success
rate as they did this more and more matching food
the symbol. So we know that this is just a
very basic, uh rudimentary skill that all animals have, including humans,
(16:40):
in order to suss out how to get to what
we need. All right, Well, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss language. We're going to discuss symbols
some more, and we're gonna discuss how symbols interact with
our brain. All right, we're back, and let's talk a
(17:02):
little bit about language. What what is language and uh
and and how it releases symbols. I mean, ultimately, as
we're talking about earlier, we're talking about externalizing internal processes,
we're talking about using them as h as kind of
footholds as we ascend it to uh more complicated topics. Uh.
I mean basically the use of words verbal were written
(17:23):
signifiers and symbols. They represent ideas and when they're combined
they allow us to build more complicated ideas. That's right. So, um,
it is basically the way that we navigate the world.
But just do not think of it that way, because language,
each letter is a symbol of right, each word, each phrase,
each paragraph has more and more meaning that's built upon it,
(17:46):
more and more symbols that become these shorthands. And you
begin to look around, you know, widen your scope a
little bit, and you see that the traffic signals that
direct you, um whether or not you're taking a train
or you're driving a car, there are all sorts of
navigational signals. They're telling you how to order your world. Yeah,
and we've discussed before the idea to that language is
(18:06):
essentially the operating system for the human brain that we
have all the hardware, and then language is what we
use to actually think about things and to actually tackle concepts. Yeah,
it's something like the periodic table of elements, right, This
is this is a good example of symbols and us
trying to make the invisible world visible to us, albeit
(18:28):
in this form where we can try to figure out
the properties of each element. Yeah, because at the periodic table,
obviously it's not a true map, it's not a place.
It's summing up a lot of things that are invisible
or are a lot more complicated and taking that boiling
it down into a version of reality that makes sense
even at a quick glance. You look at it the
(18:49):
periodic table, and you realize this is the scientific underpinning
of the substances that that to make up physical reality. Yeah.
Even the coordinates on it have a meaning to them, right,
So if you'rely can at a certain vertical column, then
you know that they all share similar properties. Yeah. And
even even though it's not a true map, it is
a map of sorts. So and so that's just an
(19:09):
example of our outer universe that we are ordering, but
we also are ordering our inner universe. And I can't
help but bring up Karl Hung. Yes, of course, the
Swiss psychoanalysts, because you're a union. I don't know that.
I mean, I'm I appreciate Young and I have the
Red Book, which is a bunch of his drawings of
(19:33):
the unconscious via symbols, and it's fascinating and beautiful and
and also kind of horrific too, because he's using this
these archetypes, these symbols to try to delve into the mind,
into the unconscious. And so what he was doing is
trying to use this universality of symbols to suss out
(19:53):
the human experience the inner world. Yeah, and we've all
looked at like dream interpretation guides before, whether talk about
what these different symbols mean, what these like, what does
it mean if you're falling, And if you're falling in
a dream, then it means that that bad stuff may
happen during the daylight. If you're being chased through streets,
the same thing if you're if you're turning, if your
flesh is turning into a tree roots, then it means
(20:15):
you're gonna get disease. You know, people look for all
sorts of portance in in this kind of imagery. But
but but it boils down to the idea that symbols
are that powerful. They connect with the subconscious and if
you want to apply supernatural thinking to it, you might
think that that symbols also connect us to hidden knowledge
outside of ourselves. And you should also look at it
(20:36):
like dreams, they don't come to you in a highly
realistic way. They come to you fully symbolically packaged. Right.
You don't necessarily read a book in your dream, right,
Or I've tried to actually in my dreams, but it's
always blurry or something. Um. You know, you you get
pounded over the head with all these different archetypes, and
so it's very clear that this is important to the
(20:59):
operating system of our brains in a way, it's to
try to figure out what's been going on. I mean,
I think it's fascinating that's represented to us in that way. Ye. Now,
another area of symbolic use that has always fascinating me,
and going back to the idea of adding supernatural elements
to it, is the use of sickles uh symbolic representations
of demons or a wizard's desired outcome, and then you
(21:22):
also have hyper sickles uh such as this is popularized
by Grant Morrison, the writer of graphic novels who saw
a hypercyle is an extended work of art with magical
meaning and willpower. So like a comic book or a
novel or a movie where it's a bunch of symbols
that are put together in a way to where the
symbols kind of overlap to form some greater symbol uh.
(21:46):
So I always find that interesting as well. In a sense,
a really crazy dream is the kind of hypercycle and
is and if you want to check out some of
some of the archetypes that have been collected by eras.
This is the archive for research and our type of symbolism.
Go to airrors dot org. You can kind of browse
a little bit. You do have to become a member
to check out the full catalog, but it is an
(22:09):
amazing amount of symbolic, mythological, ritualistic images that you can
search and then it actually give you not just the
accompanying um information about what it means, but will tell
you during what periods of history that it was in
popular use and what regions of the world. So it's fascinating.
(22:29):
So we've plopped through what symbols are, why they're important
to us, How powerful their their their communication is. How
about how a symbol can instantly convey something that we
take you paragraphs and paragraphs to uh to to completely
spell out that they can sum up things that are
impossible even to completely relate with language. But how do
(22:51):
they interact with the brain itself? All right, So the
brain is going to try to visualize a symbol in
three different ways. This is according to information designer Ted Whushak,
who has a Ted talk on this, and he says
that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is,
but instead creates a series of mental models. And we've
talked about this before too, to get to those ah
(23:13):
ha moments, and David Eagleman talks about this a lot too,
that the unconscious usually kind of burps up an idea
and you have that aha moment that you don't realize
that it's been uh, that that idea has been worked
on for months, maybe even years before it served up.
Nobody's view of the real world is actually the real world.
It is just a worldview that we take on. It's
(23:34):
a simulation in a sense. So what happens, what what?
What happens before this symbol emblazons itself in our minds. Well,
of course it begins with the eyes. You have light
entering hitting the back of the retina, and it's circulated
mostly to the back of the brain to the primary
visual cortex. But then, according to Wushack, it acts like
(23:56):
a relay station that reradiates and redirects information to other
parts of the brain. So we're talking about thirty different
person of the brain that get in on this, but
there are three really important ones. The first one is
the ventral stream, and this is the part of the
brain that recognizes what something is so if I look
at my hand, that's the what that's my hand, that's
a book, that's a remote control. The second one is
(24:18):
the dorsal stream, and what this does it locates the
object and it creates a mental map in your mind.
The third one is the limbic system, which we've talked
about a lot in terms of processing emotions. So that's
the part that feels like the ah ha, the the
emotional response to what that symbol begins to mean that
the form that it's taking as an abstract, And this
(24:42):
combination of these processing centers help us to make meaning
in a bunch of different ways. So one way to
understand how symbols interact with the mind is to look
at how children learn language and uh, some of the
materials we're looking at there talking about how when children
are learning language, simple use in the prefrontal vortex that's
where all the activities taking place. But then as they
(25:04):
become accustomed to what these symbols mean, to what language means,
the paratical region takes over the job. The association has
become more automatic. So it comes back to this idea
of symbols as a place holder for for more complex
thought in a sense, it's kind of like we figure
out what that basic idea is, We form an idea
(25:24):
of what this is about, and then we assign it
that symbol, and then that symbol squared away in the
same way that we might circle a paragraph in a
book we're reading and then market with a signal like
maybe just a star. That star signifies this is an
important passage and it's a passage that I need to
come back to. And so in a sense, we we
do the same thing with our symbolic understanding of the world. Yeah,
(25:46):
and it's interesting that you see that in kids, right,
that they began to shorthand that knowledge so that it
can be mapped out in their brains so they can
recall it later. And it reminds me of another study
that we saw that talked about how expectations speed up
conscious perception. So those archetypes that you learn, turns out
that when you're taking in a bunch of stimuli, if
(26:07):
you recognize that symbol, well, then we're talking about your
ability to speed up your processing by something like a
hundred milliseconds. Now that doesn't sound huge, but just consider
that when you're taking in data, it usually takes about
three hundred milliseconds for it to get perceived. So if
you can cut that down by about by those archetypes,
(26:28):
that's when the the th h E to the th
H sort of makes sense, right, Yeah, because it's kind
of like, how do you win a war? You want
to You can win a war with overwhelming force, but
a lot of times if the if the two sides
are more equal, you win a war. You win a
battle with a lot of petty advantages that stack up.
So all that that lost time, I mean, all that
game time, a hundred milliseconds here, a hundred milliseconds there,
(26:52):
it's it's eventually gonna potentially make the difference when you're
having to think on your feet really fast and uh
and and choose that, you know, make that savor tooth
tie related decision in your modern life. Yeah. So, I mean,
if you are saving a hundreds of millisecond every single
time that you're taking in a new piece of data,
then you are conserving a lot more energy. And now
I'm not a fan of cutting down th E to
(27:14):
th H, but it's prevalence in the language. I do
understand that there is a conservation of energy in the act. Yeah, well,
you don't want to you don't want to boil it
down so much that you don't think. And I think
that's one of the problems that sometimes occur with with symbols,
is that they are so powerful that they are cutting
out our reasoning and depending on existing um thought that
(27:37):
they're they're kind of they're kind of viral. There's a
viral power to symbols, especially within certain cultures, you know, uh,
depending how how resonant it is. Like again, I come
back to the swastica about how powerful the swastika becomes
as the symbol of hate in modern society, to the
point where it's, for instance, you know, it's outlawed in Germany.
(27:57):
You can't go around publishing a swastika on things, even
if it's a historic, historically accurate and model airplane. Then
if you're buying the kit in Germany, you need to
see about acquiring your slastikas separately. Now, So we were
talking about this on our commute full of signs this
morning about how this this sort of short shorthand placement
(28:20):
stand in and our brains is really really helpful, right
because it does it's like it's shortening the th e
to th h but it can be a problem because
what you're talking about is unconscious stereotyping, and we don't
necessarily know that we're always doing this, but when we're
taking in data and we're thin slicing, as Malcolm glad
Law might say, am blink, we're trying to get that
really quick perception and most of the time that helps
(28:43):
us out a lot, but it can really actually show
up as errors in our thinking. And it made me
think about this study that came up about foreign languages
and people using a second language to consider high risk scenarios.
The study is called the Foreign Language Effect Thinking in
a fog and tongue reduces decision biases, which documents a
(29:03):
series of experiments on more than three people from the
US and Korea. And this is from a Wired article
by Brian King, who says that human reasoning is shaped
by two distinct modes of thought. One that's systematic, analytical,
and cognition intensive, and the other that's fast, unconscious, and
emotionally charged. Right, that's the feelings that we get, that
(29:23):
Olympic system coming into play. So the idea is that
the cognitive demands of thinking in a non native language
would leave people with a little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately
increasing the reliance on quick and dirty cogitation right, just
that quick analytical and they did. They found that in
the study that people were able to make better, more
(29:47):
rational decisions when working in their second language as opposed
to their mother tongue, which was freighted with emotion, because
you're stepping outside of culture, you're stepping outside of self,
stepping outside of symbol to a certain degree, because if
that symbol I mean that simple will mean something to you,
but it's going to mean something different in a second language,
(30:08):
which has a distance from from what was ingrained in
your brain when you were being brought up in this
one language. It comes back to that idea of language
is as an operating system. One language is MAC, one
language is is PC, and certain things are going to
travel from one to the next, but some aren't. Um
In Neil Stevenson's book Snow Crash, which is one of
(30:30):
his earlier novels, a cyberpunk classic UH these days, rather
different from some of his more recent work. But there's
a great deal in that book that has to do
UH with a trend toward towards divergence in language and
about how the fact that we have various languages in
the world actually prevents and protects from widespread harm. Uh.
(30:50):
So you know, we all know the story of a
farmer grows only one crop, then his entire farm is
susceptible to devastation by a single parasite. So Stevenson draws
draws in the eye that say, Nazism is a cultural virus.
And uh, and if you have a universal language, then
that cultural virus is more has more potential to spread
(31:11):
to everyone. So the kind of factors into what you're
saying there. Well, let's talk a little bit more about
how our behaviors altered and our ideas are altered by simples.
And I'm thinking specifically about Adam Alter, the psychologist. Yeah,
this is the guy wh wrote a book on drunk
pink pink Um, which feels also a lot with color theory.
(31:33):
And hopefully we'll come back and do an episode on
color theory of there's interests out there in us covering
that topic. But he pointed out that Christians tend to
behave more honestly when they're exposed to an image of
a crucifix, even when they have no conscious memory of
having seen it. So there's just across and crosses a
lot like the swastick, and in a sense of prost
(31:55):
and a swastika are are at at very base level
the same thing, and both are cruciform up and there
are a lot of different crucifixes out there, depending on
which you created your adhering to. But the idea that
just in the background, just this, this one image that's
heavily charged with meaning and religious purpose that even if
(32:15):
you see it, uh, and you're not even consciously processing it,
it's jumping over your conscious thought into the unconscious and
affecting the way you're feeling, the way you're thinking, really
hacking your entire mindset. What about Pope John Paul the Second? Yes,
this was experiment from the University of Michigan and they
this one found that Christians felt less virtuous after subliminal
(32:39):
exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second.
I mean that, I mean it's because he has well
the ideas that there are impossible high standards to live
up to. Right, So some of our younger listeners may
not remember John Paul all that much, but he had
more of a you know, a peaceful grandfather, really kind
of demeanor for a lot of people. Well, and in
terms of popularity, isn't he more like a bit of
(33:00):
a rock star in terms and that the popetum? Yeah yeah, yeah, definitely,
so so people. So he was a very charged he
himself became a symbol and and merely glancing around and
catching it was influencing the way people thought about themselves. Now,
what about a computer lego? You think that could make
(33:20):
you feel more creative? Well, I don't. I don't know
about me because I'm not as much of a of
a Mac person. I mean, I think they make some
great products, but I'm not one of you. I don't
have the bumper sticker on my car or anything. But
the studies have found that when people are exposed to
that Mac symbol, they are more likely to think creatively.
And likewise, if they're exposed to a symbol of an
(33:41):
incandescent light bulb, the whole oh, I've got an idea
and then the light bulb lights up, that they're exposed
to that they're likely to think creative because these are
both symbols that are charged with ideas of creative endeavor.
And so just by glimpsing them, where were they hook
into our subconscious and make us think about that. Now,
that's a two thousand and eight study back fit Simmons
at all. So you have to wonder if two thousand
(34:03):
and thirteen does Apple have the same staying power. Again,
we're talking about fluidity of symbols and their meanings. Yeah,
because you know, a lot of stuff has happened that
the product itself is arguably taken a dive, and some
people's maybe not to die, but let's say I decline. Uh.
But then on the other hand, Steve Jobs passing the
results that made everyone really uh, you know, nostalgic for
(34:25):
Apple and really really you know, celebrate his contributions to
our technological life. And then of course you also have
had had varying bits of scandal about how our Apple
devices are made, which may also add new uh nuance
to the symbol itself. So again, these symbols become um
(34:47):
dependent on all the cultural things feeding into and they're
kind of like they're kind of like a tree growing
out of the ground. And the roots system runs throughout
our culture and and even into our history, and it
depends on how far those roots are going and what
they're sucking in, what kind of nutrients they're drawing from
our culture to depend on what the form of that
treat is. Yeah, it's interesting that that one symbol can
(35:07):
bring up so many different threads of thought because you
have the biography, if you have jobs, you have um
nations in their economics being powered or not powered by Apple.
You have people who are being affected just the level
of not only pay, but what they're exposed to in
terms of the technologies that they're using. And then you
(35:30):
have this idea of creativity all wrapped up into one
tiny logo. Yeah. So, so it's important to think about
these experience, not because we want to make a definite
point about crosses and Christians and Apple fans, but bear
in mind at all symbols are interacting with us to
varying levels like this, So we encounter them subconsciously or
(35:53):
even mind a little bit consciously, and they're having some
sort of an impact on us. If it's the McDonald's
golden arches, if it's the Coca cola or the pepsi symbol,
if it's a cross, if it is UH, if it
is the Star of David, if it's a swastika, whatever, Like,
we encounter these and they convey something to us. And
then if you start combining them, if you say, slap
(36:14):
a swastika on Ronald McDonald, then it's instantly going to
create some sort of new, unsteady symbol and convey that
to your mind. He just gave someone a really great
art project. Well, I'm sure it's probably already been. I
was somewhere, uh Paris on Potts and they have a
Ronald McDonald there that's made out of something. What is
(36:34):
it made out? Oh? Yeah, no, I know, it's a
corporate logo. Yeah, it's like an eight foot tall I mean,
Ronald McDonald in my eyes, has always been menacing, but
this one is particularly menacing. But yeah, not a corporate logos. Yeah.
So so in a way, it becomes kind of a
hyper sickle itself because you're combining these these various symbols
that stand for things into another symbol. And but then
(36:55):
you get into situations too if you combine too many symbols,
does it is it kind of like combining all about
the Crayo crayons where you end up with just a blur.
You end up with things like uh, well like the
rose right Zamburdo echo points out the roses symbolized so
many different things, and it pretty much becomes a devoid
of meaning. It's kind of that the symbol has been
completely worn out to the point where it cannot convey
(37:15):
any true message anymore. One of the lines of philosophy
that I really like about this is from Louise alf Tusar.
Flave said that correctly, and he described our existence as
being tied to something called the ideology state apparatus and um,
it's this idea that we're always ready, we're always already,
(37:36):
and by always already, what he means is that we
are even before we're born. We're born into this expectation,
in this um embodiment of symbols. And so even when
you are just stating in your mother's uterus, you are
the symbol of whatever it is that the society has
going to put upon you. So if you're a girl,
(37:56):
you're going to be wrapped in pink and all sorts
of expectations. And it's a very interesting idea. Um. He
says that it's the way that we're defined, that we
are walking symbols, and essentially that allows us or I
shouldn't say allows, but those expectations give us a roadmap
on how to behave. So it's it's this idea of
(38:20):
being both objectified but also subjected as um as a
placeholder in language. You know, it reminds me too of execution, torture,
and even imagined execution and torture as as we encountered
in our study of hell various sins or punished varying ways.
(38:40):
And there's a strong argument that any form of real
life torture or execution uh and any kind of imagined
form like those are all symbols that the idea of
executing somebody in a certain fashion, it's loaded with symbolic meaning,
especially when you deal with public executions, because you are
creating a symbol to to try and uh and illustrate
(39:01):
a point and convey a message to the popular. That's interesting.
So a hanging would be very different from having your
head cut off right with the guillotine. So yeah, what
does what does it mean? What does being drawn and
quartered mean? What is being thrown into a sack with
live animals mean? Like all of these bare certain symbolic
messages for the intended audience to be absorbed, right yeah,
(39:22):
And and I mean I could go on on this
kind of thing too. But it also reminds me of
the works of bosh Uh. You know all those uh,
those hellish apocalyptic sceneries where you have all these strange
monsters doing strange things and tormenting people and all that. Like,
even a scene like that, we don't understand a lot
of it. But to the the individuals who would be
who would have viewed that work of art at the time,
(39:43):
loaded with symbols known symbols uh and and so in
a sense that painting is speaking a language of symbols
to the viewer. And if you would like to actually
experience these symbols firsthand in the form of a Buddhist
hell theme park. We actually find out yesterday that there
is one in Singapore where you can go and look
(40:04):
at all these visual representations of what Buddhist hell might be. Yeah,
it looks amazing. And I know we have listeners all over.
So if any of you are in Singapore or end
up traveling there, or have traveled there and have visited
that place, do let us know all about it? Symbolic
rich that one? All? Right? Well, there you go, a
crash course in symbols. Uh. Like I said, if nothing else,
(40:25):
I just hope that this makes you a little more
alert to the power of symbols and how loaded our
lives are with symbols, how they're very they're they're very
useful to us. There are footholds in the mountain of
understanding that allows us to ascend and learn new things
and grapple with concepts that are really too much for
our our puny minds to to deal with without the
the the advantage of language. But then also about how
(40:48):
all these symbols around us are constantly influencing us and
arguably controlling us on that word, let's call over the robot,
all right, So this is an interesting when this comes
to us for Isabell von Finkelstein. She writes in about
our Sideshow Secrets episode, she says, hello listening to the
Sideshow Secrets episode. My grandma on my mom's side, was
(41:08):
apparently one of the headless women in Blackpool in England.
She also swallowed swords and red tarot. Apparently my great
grandpa ended up joining the circus at fourteen after stabbing
someone in the leg and running away. He ended up
with tuberculosis and then somehow was picked up by the carneys.
So my grandma was brought up with them. Given that
my family sways to the theatrical and creative side of life,
(41:31):
we weren't at all surprised that she had circus in
the jeans. It explained a lot. Ha ha. I just
wish I knew more of the history. I have a
copy of a newspaper cutting somewhere. If I can find it,
I'll forward it onto you again. Another great podcast. I
need to finish listening to it now, Thanks guys. Isabelle. Wow.
And I thought that my family's history was colorful. I
(41:52):
know that's that's amazing. And of course Blackpool, England is
um it's kind of a historically like a vacation area,
like a little bit of a of a Carney town
in of itself. And I know that professional wrestler Stephen
Regal hails from there. Yeah, and so you know there's
the wrestling that is a part of the carname. Yeah,
that's part of the whole tradition. Um. That also reminded
(42:13):
me of the book Geek Love. Did we bring that
up in the in the last podcast. Sometimes there's a
reference that's so key that we actually forget to bring
it up when we do the podcast And we're like, OK,
I believe we didn't mention that. Geek Love by Katherine
Dunn amazing fictionalized account of the carnival world and a
(42:34):
fictional family that um is created essentially by the parents
by messing with jeans to create sideshow kids. It sounds good.
I have not read it. I hear great things. I
know they locally did a production of it years ago.
It was like six months long, six hours. Yeah. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to go ahead and uh
(42:56):
and leave you. But in the meantime, if you have
something you would like to share with us, uh, go
for it. Particularly related to symbols. What is your experience
with symbols, How do they how do you interact with them?
Are you conscious of what symbols are doing to you?
Is there a symbol that is particularly important to you
let us know about. I was talking earlier about how
a symbol instantly conveys something that would take you a
(43:18):
little a little more time to actually to explain in words.
So explain in words to us why a symbol is
important to you and what it means to you when
you look at it. We'd love to hear that kind
of thing and you can find us in all the
normal places. Our main website, of course, is stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. We're also on Facebook and
tumbler at stuff to Blow your Mind, and on Twitter
we go by the handle blow the Mind and then
(43:39):
oh YouTube mind stuff Show. That's where we are there. Okay,
And there are two things I'm interested in in hearing
from you guys about yea or nay on the th
H e versus th H. The second thing. Today there
was a story about Mattel and NASA creating a barbie
that's a Mars barbie who's clad in pink progress or no.
(43:59):
Let us know, and you can do so by sending
us an email at blow the Mind at discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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