The Doppelganger Network

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here, then I repeat and sum up. During the endless
train journey which took me from Eisenach to Berlin, across
the Thuringia and Saxony in Ruins, I noticed for the
first time, and I don't know how long that man
whom I call my double to simplify matters, or else
my twin, or again and less theatrically the traveler. Welcome

(00:33):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm
Joe McCormick. And today I thought we might have a
discussion bringing together the seemingly disparate topics of familiarity, doppelgangers

(00:55):
or doubles, cap gross syndrome, and social media. And I
got the idea to talk about this today because a
few weeks ago I read this interesting article that had
a very intriguing central comparison or image. It was. It
was a thought provoking essay by the Stanford Nero Endo
chronologist Robert Sapulsky. It was originally published a few years

(01:15):
ago in Nautilus, and it was an article comparing the
effects of social media and and sort of the digital
world like Facebook, and you know, all that to a
psychological condition known as Capgrass syndrome. And so today I thought,
maybe we should start by explaining and discussing Sepulsky's comparison

(01:35):
and argument in that article and just see where we
go from there. Now, capgrass syndrome has definitely come up
on the show before. I don't know that we've done
like a designated show on the topic, but it'd certainly
come up. But either way, we we we do need to,
you know, provide a brief refresher on its history for
our listeners. Right. One of the important cases and which

(01:57):
Sapulsky discusses in his article, is the case of Madam
im This. This was a woman who lived in France
in the early twentieth century who had this persistent idea.
She was fixated on the idea that her loved ones,
including her husband, family members, people she knew, had been

(02:18):
replaced by doubles or doppel gangers who looked exactly like them.
So she would say, my husband is not really my husband.
He's a man who looks exactly like my husband used
to and I don't know what happened to my real husband.
And this wasn't her only symptoms. She had a number
of symptoms. She believed that all kinds of things were
happening to UH, to her children. I mean, it's a

(02:39):
tragic story, but the underlying UH, the underlying cause of
what would lead someone to believe that people around them
were being replaced by doppel gangers or doubles is is
interesting to consider. And so the way Sepulsky in this
article characterizes the ultimate disconnect under lyon cap Grass syndrome
is that when the module of the brain used in

(03:02):
recognition of faces, specifically involving the fusiform gyrus in the brain,
does cognitively recognize someone, but at the same time, the
different module of the brain that normally responds to this
recognition with the emotion that we call familiarity does not
kick in. And this brain function responsible for generating the

(03:23):
emotion of familiarity is what Sopolsky calls the extended face
processing system. It's quote a diffuse network including a variety
of cortical and limbic regions. And apparently, when we recognize
someone but we don't feel the necessary familiarity emotion that
follows when we normally recognize somebody, What the brain often

(03:46):
does when faced with this contradiction is to conclude that
someone has been replaced by a double. It looks like them,
but this person doesn't feel familiar to me, thus they
must be a physically identical impostor. In the past, I
looked at a two thousand four paper from the Canadian
Journal of Psychiatry titled cap Grass Syndrome. A Review of

(04:09):
the neuro physiological correlates and presenting clinical features in cases
involving physical violence and UH. In this point out that
the delusional identification syndrome generally involves right brain anomalies linked
to a number of illnesses and neurological disorders, ranging from
UH schizo effective disorder and Alzheimer's disease to severe head injuries,

(04:30):
pituitary tumors and migraines. Even alcoholism can play a role.
You know, basically, each each of us has a visual
system and olympic system, and the ladder helps us to
generate and process emotions. Damage or disrupt communication between these
two systems, and suddenly a familiar face can in suspire,
can inspire suspicion instead of comfort. Now, Fortunately, kept Grass
syndrome usually subsides with the successful treatment of the underlying

(04:54):
medical condition. You know, the tumor goes away, and thankfully
so does this. Uh. This, you know, suspicion and that
people are not what they seem to be. Uh. And
in some cases doctors can prescribe antipsychotic drugs to also
achieve the same effect. But you can easily see why
the idea of someone being replaced by a double or
a doppelganger would be such a captivating one. I mean,

(05:17):
it's something that, um, it's something that feels very perverted.
You know, it plays on our great vulnerabilities. And I
think it is not a coincidence that this kind of
thing has featured into some of the horror folklore of
the world. I mean, you think about the idea of
the changeling uh in in fairy folklore, where there was
this idea that where the fairy folk would come in

(05:37):
and replace someone you knew, often a child, but sometimes
like a husband or wife, or you know, someone you
knew with a fairy double who looked like them but
wasn't familiar to you, didn't act like them. And now
this is often described as something that people would use
to explain you know, maybe when somebody's behavior changed and
they didn't seem themselves. They think, oh, maybe they've been

(05:58):
replaced with a changeling uh or used to explain why
people might feel that their children weren't their own, or
something like that. But then also you have to wonder
if some kinds of neurological issues maybe at work here
in the minds of the people making the accusation that
someone is is a fairy. Yeah. And and this obviously,
this idea in and of itself has played into some

(06:19):
so many myths throughout history and also continues to just
resound in our our popular media. Um. This is slightly
older work, of course, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
I mean that plays heavily on this trope, right, that
people are being replaced by something else, People that we
think we know we're not are not actually those individuals anymore.
It's been a huge yet you often find it also

(06:43):
not only in speculative fiction, but in literary fiction as well. Um.
The quote that a right at the top of this
episode is from a two thousand and four novel UH
titled Repetition by one of my favorite French authors, Alan
Robe Guerrilla, who often this is one of This is
a trope that he often rule into his books, like
the idea of a double or some sort of an

(07:03):
alter ego. And this book in particularly been in particular
like starts off with a character on a train having
glimpsed his double once more. Yeah, it's a very unsettling image. Yeah,
the plurality of self. Right. Um well, and because so
there are double ways that it can be unsettling. There's
the idea that someone you know is replaced by a double. Obviously,

(07:24):
if you were to come to believe that through you know,
whether you had like a brain injury or a neurological
condition that caused you to believe that, or I don't know,
if you just believed in fairies and thought maybe that
this was happening because your cultural conditioning. Either way, that
would be a terrifying thing. It's another thing entirely to
see it, to believe that you see another version of yourself,
you know, to think that you had your own double,

(07:44):
or there was a doppelganger of you. So I think
most of us are probably familiar with this, the the
the the idea of a doppelganger. Um. I you know,
I would love to say that I learned about doppelgangers
for the first time by either consulting a nice, you
know book on Germanic mythology, and certainly I read a
lot of different mythology books when I as a kid. Also,

(08:04):
I would love to say that my first encounter with
doppel gangers was a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual, because
there's another huge place that they're highly visible, as they've
long been a staple of Dungeons and Dragons, So they're
in there. Oh yeah, I mean it's a great way
to introduce a little uh, suspense and chaos into a campaign,
right somebody you know an MPC that the character's trust

(08:26):
has been replaced, or adoppel gangers trying to or even
successfully replaces a member of the party. Uh. So you know,
there's a lot of fun to be had with a doppelganger. Um,
but I have to admit that neither of these cases
is true. I heard about them initially in the nineties
via the Drew Barrymore movie that aired on the Sci
Fi Channel back when this is the old days, back

(08:48):
when before there were wise in sci Fi Wise inside
Oh Siffy you mean Siffy Yeah, Ciffy Channel. Yes, Um,
I remember next to nothing about this film, but it
was heavily promoted on the channel, and it introduced the
idea to me initially, and then I you know, followed
up by you know, asking around, Hey, Dad, what's a Doppelganger?
And then I looked it up, etcetera. Well, wait a minute,

(09:10):
so it was called Doppelganger the name of the movie.
That was, at least that was the title of the film,
as was promoted on Sci Fi Channel at the time.
Of course, it's often the case with films of this caliber.
They may have had multiple titles, and who knows, they
may have been promoted elsewhere under a different title. I
just looked it up. It's also known as Doppelganger colon
the Evil Within. Just to be clear, that was for

(09:30):
the people who didn't know what a doppel ganger was.
Always got to have a colon, real title. So but here,
here's an interesting thing that I didn't realize until I
was researching this episode. I just kind of assumed, you know, obviously,
the doppelganger itself, the term is Germanic origins, and I
figured this is a creature that emerges from German folk traditions,

(09:51):
you know, Uh, you know, and in the same way
that that crampus came down from the mountains and uh
and alpine traditions. I just figured the doppelganger was just
a standard because the again, the idea of a mysterious double,
either of self or other, is long established, but this
does not seem to be the case. Apparently, the word
doppelganger wasn't coined to know the eighteenth century, and it

(10:13):
was coined by German novelist Jean Paul in his seventeen
nine novel uh Sebenkas, in which the main character encounters
his own doppel ganger or double goer uh in the
the In this case, the dopel ganger convinces him to
fake his own death and start a new life. Uh.
And I had to I had to look in closer

(10:34):
on this. It's it's not as straightforward as I would
like it to be, where he's just like, hey, this
is the doppelganger. Apparently he invinced two similar words in
this book. He invinced the word doppeled ganger. Um, so
this would be the name for people who see themselves.
But then he also talks about doppel ganger as a

(10:55):
as a word for the second court when the second
course of a meal arrives along side the first course,
because ganga all means both you know, go or walker
as well as course in a meal, so technically doppelt
Ganger would be the mysterious double idea that he introduces.
And doppelganger itself is just a weird mishap of ordering

(11:19):
a multi course meal at a restaurant. But nobody's gonna
say doubled ganger, not anymore, no dafeld ganger. But this
is this is a good idea. Next time someone introduces
the dappel ganger in your dn D campaign, remind the
d M that that's a culinary term sort of. Uh.
But anyway, the termines up resonating in German literature, and

(11:40):
it became popular in romantic horror literature in general by
the mid eighteen hundreds. So I think originally the the
this idea was always something scary or dangerous, right, Well, yeah,
they're not as much. It's seemingly in the original and
I didn't read the original German novel This is stress,
so you know, feel free to correct me if anyone

(12:01):
out there is more familiar with the with the literature
we're talking about here, but it certainly took on sinister
connotations within the literary tradition. But then I was reading
about the term on websters and the sinister connotations have
apparently dropped off somewhat in its English language usage, which
is surprising to me. But then again, I'm coming from

(12:21):
the standpoint of knowing them mostly through Dungeons and Dragons
and Horrible Drew Barrymore movies, so I'm probably not like
the the key candidate here. Um. I guess the other thing, too,
is I really don't use the term outside of a
fantasy context. Like if I encounter someone who looks a
lot like someone I know, I don't say, oh, hey,

(12:44):
I saw your doppelganger today. I'm more like, hey, I
saw your Maybe I'll say evil twin, which is, you know,
another variation on this trope. Or I'll say oh, I
just I saw someone who looked just about like you,
or I I'm in another city, I might say oh
I saw your Chicago you or whatever you know. So
that's the other thing. I just don't use doppelganger outside
of fantastic settings. Myself. I think most people just use

(13:06):
it to me and the look alike. Now, yeah, but
I guess I don't even use it that way. Like
for me, I just if I think of Doppelganger, I
think of something like that creature and Kroll which pretends
to be the Wizard, you know. I think something that
when you reveal it, it's a horrible, pallid creature with
jet black eyes. So if I'm not specifically talking about
like a monstrous scenario, I'm not gonna use Doppelganger. Okay,

(13:30):
that's just me. I also think that part of but
I think part of this whole idea of the sinister
connotations fading away, it might have to do with the
fact that if it is used by and large for
just somebody's double Like if someone is to say, hey,
I saw your doppelganger today at Showney's, they're not gonna,
you know, there's there's not gonna be a creepy connotation
to that that sighting. We're not gonna say, oh my god,

(13:52):
I saw your doppelganger at Showny's and I was super
creeped out. I think we need to call somebody. No,
you're you're just gonna it's just gonna be a point
whimsy And the other thing is that more than likely
it was a first glance situation, Like at first glance,
I thought it was you. At second glance, I saw
that it was clearly another person and nothing to freak

(14:13):
out about. Well, I would be shocked though, if people
didn't still interpret this kind of thing is some kind
of weird omen or demon or whatever. Oh yeah, And
I was glancing around on the internet and there's still
plenty of that um And I think a large part
of that is, you know, as with all paranormal UH
experiences or supernatural explanations for mundane UH encounters, the supernatural

(14:39):
explanation is going to be more appealing. It's going you know,
it makes us feel more important, Like you want to
feel like you're in an Alan Rogue Relay novel and
you saw your mysterious double and it, you know, reveals
something about your you know, your your inner subconscious nature
or something, or that you you saw a ghost that
looked like you. I mean, all these are four more
interesting then, yeah, they're you know, there are a whole

(14:59):
bunch of people in the world, and it was bound
to happen sooner or later. But I saw somebody that
kind of looked like me, and had some more facial hair.
The way that you look isn't all that unique. That's
like the worst news of all. Yeah, that's that's just
nothing exciting about that that story. You don't run rush
home to tell that to your significant other. But it
does bring up the question what are your chances of
running into your own unrelated double, or for that matter,

(15:22):
running into an unrelated double with someone you know well.
According to ananimous Dr Tiggan Lucas quoted in the BBC
Future article, you're surprisingly likely to have a doppel game,
which I think is slightly confusing title given the contents
of the article, but still uh said that the chances
of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less

(15:43):
than one in a trillion, and with a seven point
four billion people on the planet, it was only there
was only a one in one five chants that there's
a single pair of true doppel gagers. No, wait, what
are these dimensions you're talking about? Like eight facial dimensions?
Like if you you take you take facial features and
you divide them up into eight mentions and go to
match those up. So yeah, not like a spatial dimensions.

(16:05):
I'm not sure how that would work. Basically, the eight
sliders on your character creator right now. Most of the time,
though again we're not talking about exact doubles. You know, generally,
these are just faces that are similar to our own
or similar to someone we know. When we focus on
the familiarity in a way that may be tied to
a means of identifying close kin uh, you know, in

(16:27):
early human history, like that's what this recognition system is,
perhaps four um and you know, think again about how
generally how you know, generally, doubles are kind of a
first glance thing. The similarities may be jarring, but the
differences will be pronounced as well. Now, the thing is,
there are so many humans on the planet now, and

(16:48):
we live in you know, closer confines. In many situations,
seeing familiar features, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's any
shared genetic heritage between two given individuals, you know, except
in the sense that all humans share most in the
grander yeah, and the grander scheme, yes, but yeah, if
you just if you're in another city you see someone
who looks kind of like you, or looks kind of
like a friend, it doesn't mean they're your long last

(17:10):
cousin or their long last cousin. Of an of your friend.
But it's a situation where we kind of broke the
system through population growth in the birth of cities and
and self facial recognition and facial recognition abilities. They're also
going to vary from person to person, so your doppelganger
alarms just may not be as easy to set off

(17:32):
as someone else's. So anyway, that's that's doppel gangers in
a nutshell, both the origin of the term, but then
a little bit about the science and the potent that
the potentiality of seeing a double or near double uh
somewhere in the world. But thinking about what is at
work with the the erroneous detection of doubles in cop

(17:53):
cross syndrome, uh is I guess maybe what we should
get back to when we come back after a break. Alright,
we're back and it's really us. We weren't replaced by
strange creatures from the Monster Manual over the course of
the advertisement. No, we're here, it's really us and we're
going to continue our exploration. You know, I wanted to
answer that with the body snatchers noise, but I don't

(18:15):
know if I can make it exactly from the Donald
Sutherland version, Yeah, which is a great version by I
still haven't seen that. I've only seen the old black
and white original. Oh, the Donald Sutherland one is great.
He's got Lambert from Alien, it's got Jeff Goldblum, He's
he's feisty. It's got oh and it's got from another
sci fi classic. It's got what's his name who played

(18:36):
spok Leonard n Yeah, Leonard Nimoy is fantastic in it.
I think it's his it's his great performance. Well, that's
a great cast. But the nineteen fifty six original had
had had Kevin McCarthy in the lead role. It was terrific.
You also had Carol and Jones, who had played more
Tisha on The Adams Family. Cool. Yeah, but also it
was it was just black and white, and it just

(18:58):
it really, at least the version I saw of it,
like the darkness felt just so murky and uh and
dirty somehow, Like it was just a very nightmare inducing
film when I saw it as a kid. Yeah, the
paranoid visual vibe, it's got a it's got a kind
of a communist infiltration thing. Oh, definitely, definitely. That's a
that's a very strong element of it, which just goes

(19:19):
to show like the ideas of like why this concept
of of doubles resonates so because you can apply it
to all these other scenarios social and political. Well, yeah,
I mean it's a common thing for people to say
when they don't literally think that someone they know has
been physically bodily replaced by a by a supernatural double,
they might often think, I don't know this person anymore.

(19:41):
I mean it's a similar like, you know, they've been
replaced with somebody, somebody replaced you with a different person. Yeah,
Like it just would. Really, you just found out you're
getting to know them better, You found out something about
them you didn't know before, and now you think that
they're like a different being entirely. And now it's just
because yeah, it turns out that they were maybe communists

(20:02):
or like a different football team. Well, to be fair, also,
it could be a case of um, you know, people
over emphasizing disposition all traits, thinking that people thinking that
they should expect their loved ones to be incredibly consistent
and trait predictable, when in fact people are inconsistent. That
it depends on the circumstances how they behave. Maybe sometimes

(20:23):
you are used to seeing someone only in one type
of context, maybe used to only seeing them at work,
and then when you see them in a different context,
when you see them, you know, out with their friends
or with their family, they seem like a totally different
person to you. It can be jarring when you see
those differences, and yet they're there for almost all of us,
almost none of us, like really behave the same way
in all contexts. Well, let's talk about the about those contexts,

(20:46):
especially those social contexts. Yeah, so I want to come
back to So we've talked about doppelgangers a bit and
the idea of doubles and and familiarity and recognition, But
I want to come back to uh that article I
mentioned at the beginning where Robert sapulse Key makes this
comparison between what is made clear about the brain basis
of familiarity with cop Cross syndrome and the ways that

(21:11):
technology is changing our social relationships. So in in Sapolski's words,
Capcross syndrome makes clear the brain basis for quote, the
differences between the thoughts that give rise to recognition. Remember
recognition as cognitive You see somebody and you cognitively know
who they are, and the feelings that give rise to familiarity.
That's the emotion that says, yes, I know this person,

(21:34):
they're different things. And Sapolsky's main point is quote, these
functional fault lines in the social brain, when coupled with
advances in the online world, have given rise to the
contemporary Facebook generation. They have made cop cross syndrome a
window on our culture and minds today where nothing is
quite recognizable but everything seems familiar. And I would actually

(21:58):
go further than that and say, I think that's an
interesting point, but the the inverse is true as well,
that the online world creates these situations where you have
familiarity without recognition and recognition without familiarity. So to further
explore the point, he makes a little bit so he
points out that you know, essentially, for all of our
evolutionary history, are only social relationships have been face to

(22:21):
face ones. And I'm struggling to think of a counter example.
I can't really think of a counter example for relationships
with real people. But for tens of thousands of years,
of course, we have had language, and we could have
felt as if we had relationships with people we only
heard about in stories for example. Now, obviously we do
eventually reach the point where we have the ability to

(22:43):
engage in activities like having a pinpal and that maybe
you know, that's a case where you can have certainly
a non face to face example. But but prior to uh,
you know, the advent of the necessary um, you know,
systems and technology. Yeah, I struggle to think of an
example as well. I mean even sort of semi imagined
situations such as speaking to the spirit of a dead

(23:07):
ancestor or dead relative, like you're still depending upon a
previous face to face relationship. Yes, and even even with
pin pals, I mean even the oldest versions of this,
the non digital communications, just writing to people with letters
even if you've never met them before. That that is
anatomically recent. I mean, the vast majority of the time

(23:28):
our species has been around, we didn't have writing. We
couldn't do that. The only relationships we had were face
to face relationships. And so it's entirely clear that our
bodies and our brains have been shaped by an evolutionary
niche and when in which all relationships were face to
face ones. Right, even our history is a symbolic Uh.
Species is mostly based on, almost exclusively based on face

(23:51):
to face communication. Yeah, and so when our only social
relationships were face to face relationships, it was natural for
face facial recognition and familiarity at an in person body
sensing level to be one of our main mediators of
how we conceptualized, evaluated, and formed beliefs about our relationships.

(24:13):
I mean, if you live in this non technological world
where your only relationships are face to face, it totally
makes sense for you to use moment to moment, face
to face, say, visual and touch data and things like
that to get the best idea of what your relationships
are and how you should feel about them, right. I mean,
some of that goes back to the you know we're

(24:33):
discussing earlier about uh, you know, can identification being able
to tell like this, this is a relative, I can
see it in their face exactly. But of course there
have been these technological changes that now allow relationships to
exist and persist under circumstances other than face to face interaction.
Of course, we already mentioned writing in literacy. Now this

(24:54):
allows you to maybe send letters, though I'd say even
for most of the time that's been around, that has
been something that is limited to a small percent of humans,
you know, because for most of human history. Most people
have not been literate, that's true. And then and then,
of course again, I feel I feel like the pinpal,
like the the the pinpal situation in which there is

(25:16):
never a face to face meeting. Like that's a slim
slice of the overall pie. Most of the other um
written communications are going to be carried out with individuals
um in which there was at least a previous face
to face communication. Yeah, but then think about how hard
this kind of thing can make relationships. I bet every

(25:36):
single person listening has had the experience of relationships strife
caused by a feeling by a misunderstanding or some kind
of feeling of emotional estrangement brought on by the media
through which you communicate. A lot of us don't feel
very comfortable talking to people on the phone. A lot

(25:56):
of us, don't you know, we have the experience of
sending email else and being misunderstood, having people not read
your tone correctly, or getting worried about the way somebody
punctuated a sentence and an email. I mean, I bet
you've had this experience. Oh yeah, absolutely, And I think
we all have both in personal contacts and work contacts.
You know, um says, I guess, you know, hopefully if

(26:18):
you have, if you're dealing a lot via email with someone,
you'll kind of get a feel for their tone and
how they tend to speak. But even then there's so
much room for miscommunication, like even when you feel like
you really uh you know, or or up to speed
on how they present themselves in a textual manner. Robert,
if you don't mind me saying you're kind of a

(26:39):
terse emailer, am I I can see people getting worried
when they get an email from you that maybe you're
mad at them or something. I don't think that's necessarily
always the king. Maybe sometimes you're mad at me, But
I mean, I think you just tend to not spend
a whole lot of time, you know, worrying about how
to phrase stuff on email. You just kind of bang
it out, and which I admire because you know, I

(26:59):
it is, you know, the amount of time that people
waste trying to phrase stuff on email is is it's
a horror. The thing is I used I remember when
I was younger, I would have these these long email
correspondence is going on with friends where we would respond
like like sometimes sentence by sentence or atleast paragraph by

(27:20):
paragraph where we'd respond to specific points and uh and
and right at length in response, and at some point
this just faded away. I haven't really I haven't really
thought about it too much to to try and figure
out exactly like at what point, like which like technological
or communications change altered that or and or what life

(27:42):
changes led to that occurring. But at the same time,
you know, it used to have of, you know, long
phone conversations with people, and now it's really it's it's
extremely rare for me to have a long phone conversation.
It's there's basically like two people in the world that
I have phone conversations within a regular basis, and once
my wife and once with my mother, and that's pretty

(28:02):
much it. Do you think maybe these changes have been
brought on by other technological changes, like the rise of
social media. I suspect they have. Yeah, Like instead of
having this this more, this longer, more thoughtful stream of
communication with somebody that you know now lives in another city,
you just have a continual trickle, you know, so again

(28:24):
we just have that familiarity, like a tripical familiarity going
on instead of like an actual stream of communication well,
and it also I think that the way that technology
has changed our communication sometimes forces us to become a
version of ourselves that we don't recognize. I mean, I
was talking about how we write work emails. I actually

(28:47):
don't love the way that I write work emails. I
feel like often I have to I overuse like exclamation
points and smiley faces and all that. And it's mainly
just because I don't ever want to accidentally make somebody
feel bad over email, or make them get the wrong
idea that I'm ad at them or something like that.
On the emotional intention, yeah, and of the statement, I

(29:09):
hate it because I can feel myself feeling insipid and
feeling not like myself as I type it. But I
would rather feel like that than worry that I'm giving
people the wrong idea or letting them think I'm mad
at them or something like that. You know, Yeah, I mean,
but I totally understand it. Yeah, sometimes you feel like
you have to really make it clear. And I do

(29:31):
find myself doing more and more of that with texts
when I'm sending a text, you know, via my tiny
pocket computer. Oh your pocket god, yes, pocket guy. Yes. Yeah.
And so we've got to obviously, you know, all the
stuff we're talking about email, phone, uh, text messages and
internet communications. The photograph in a way kind of kind
of a modern communication method sort of. Yeah, as it's become,

(29:54):
you know, increasingly easy to to take digital photographs and
send them to other people, it'd be comes a form
of communication as does you know you mentioned emoticons as
being like a way of of of tweaking textual content,
but in many cases, like they're the prime uh language
that is used in communicating to say nothing of memes. Oh,

(30:16):
I shudder at this thought. Memes or there's gonna be
a day in which the English language is replaced by memes.
It's just like instead of an alphabet, you have a meme,
a bet and you just like put you paste the
memes together to form ideas. Yeah, I mean I already feel, um,
you know, and maybe this is just me feeling old,
but um, I feel we we've already reached the point
where there'll be a threat about something sound Reddit and

(30:41):
there'll be a meme and I have to I have
to research what the meme means, Like it's a new
meme and I have to figure out like where it
came from how it's used and how it's potentially being misused,
and how it's like evolving out of that misuse to
understand like what the prevailing idea is that is being
expressed memes as a whole or exactly like words in

(31:01):
the sense that you can try to write down a
definition for a word, but where do uses changes over time?
I mean, words don't actually have fixed definitions. You can't
control how people use them. Yeah, it kind of like
the whole like literally right, yeah, um, it's like, yeah,
sorry you lost that battle that words changed. You can
cling to the past, but sorry, it was just misused
into a new usage. So I try not to correct

(31:23):
people on that one, but that does it still gets me.
My blood was literally boiling and it literally took his
head off. Yes, but yeah, So we're talking about the
you know, the technological media on which our relationships happened.
And I think many of our relationships, especially in the
last you know, ten years now, happened primarily on these media.

(31:48):
And on one hand, that can be a good thing
because it allows us to maintain relationships with people who
we want to have relationships with, but can't you know,
people we can't practically arrange to see in person as
often as we'd like to. Several of my best friends
live in different cities, and we've been friends for years,
and I'm only able to maintain friendships with them because

(32:08):
of this technology. So I would hate to lose those friendships.
But also I wonder about the fact that what is
it doing to our culture when there's a substantial number
of people who, like, I don't know, maybe seventy percent
of their friendly social interactions happen over a machine. Yeah,
I mean even people like flesh and blood friends that
I have in the city with me, Like, we still

(32:31):
have to do like a like a you know, a
thirty email chain to plan to meet each other in
real life. Like even if it's like a semi regular thing,
like we know where we're gonna go, we know when
we're going to do it, but we still have to
coordinate all of these things. So how much of the
relationship is truly face to face versus digital? Yeah? And
so Sapolsky says in this article that this technological reality

(32:53):
has conditioned us in a way to dissociate our traditional
pathways of recognition and familiarity. Uh So, he writes, quote thus,
not only has modern life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity,
but it has impoverished the latter in the process. So
impoverished familiarity. This is worsened by our frantic skill at multitasking,

(33:15):
especially social multitasking. A recent Pew study reported that eighty
nine percent of cell phone owners use their phones during
the most recent social gathering. That sounds low to me. Um,
we reduce our social connotations to mere threads so that
we can maintain as many of them as possible. This
leaves us with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants

(33:37):
of the real thing. And I think he's really onto
something there about the idea of um maintaining it's almost
like putting up the scarecrows of things like these technological
stand ins for relationships that are not really functioning biologically
and psychologically for us the way relationships should. But we'd

(33:58):
rather maintain as any of those as we can rather
than have fewer relationships but more face to face interaction,
you know, quality time and all that. Yeah, So we
we end up maintaining these trickles of of of actual
social connections as opposed to streams of social connection. So
he's saying there that we essentially degrade our sensitivity to

(34:19):
the familiarity aspect of of what knowing somebody is a
social interaction, it's recognition and familiarity. And when we degrade
the familiarity thing, he says, quote uh, that we become
increasingly vulnerable to imposts. Our social media lives are rife
with simulations and simulations of simulations of reality, and so

(34:40):
of course you know that's uh, you know, one example
there is people who claim to know you, but they're not.
They're uh, you know, a friends email account gets hacked,
some hacker contacts you and tries to get you to
open some malware. That's one example. But there's a million
versions of this thing where where are sort of like
a low resolution familiar already detectors than this digital world

(35:02):
are being exploited by people who are not actually our
real friends. So and basically, our online our online version
of ourselves is essentially as a lay low resolution simulation,
and so if someone comes along to hijack that simulation,
it's all the easier to do. So you don't have
to be a high level magic user to to to

(35:23):
take on the likeness of another individual. When the threshold
for duplication is so low. Yeah, but then here here's
the turn. So Sapolsky says, by any logic quote, this
should induce us all to have cap craw delusions, to
find it plausible that everyone we encounter is an impostor.
After all, how can one's faith in the veracity of

(35:43):
people not be shaken when you sent all that money
to the guy who claimed he was from the I R. S.
And I think there is something going on here. It
didn't start with this, but this this impostor kind of
thing that the doppelgang or effect of the online world
and the fact that it's easy to be tricked by
an online doppel gang or does help contribute, I think
to this concept. I'm sure you've encountered this, Robert, that

(36:05):
the Internet is not real life. People always say this, right,
It's like I talked about somebody being a friend in
real life, in real life versus on the Internet. But
if most of your social interactions are happening on the Internet,
in what sense is that not real life? I mean,
of course, the Internet is real life. It is It
is a it's like a technology. The stuff you're doing

(36:26):
on it is actually happening. It's not like something that
didn't happen. But you are making a distinction there people
in some way or seeing these interactions is derealized or
as not having uh you know, not material in the
way that other interactions are. And yet there where we're
doing most increasingly all of our stuff. Yeah, and I

(36:47):
wonder if part of that, you know, I would I
wonder how this plays out generation to generation, because I
feel like from me, I maybe I had had a
sense of the Internet is being real life more so
early on, because the Internet was in some respectfully kind
of an escape. I mean at the same time, yeah,
I was. I remember having a union, use a like

(37:08):
a college email address, and all that kind of stuff,
you know, So you're still you're still doing in real,
real life stuff via the Internet. But then a lot
of other stuff is is about escaping either just in general,
like escaping into the into fantasy or like escaping geographical boundaries,
you know, and uh in you know, being able to
connect with people in other cities. Well, I think there's

(37:29):
another way in which there are multiple ways in which
people came to see the Internet is not real life,
and one of them is is anonymity. You know that
if you could go around invisible all day, what's that
Harry Potter cloak that makes you invisible? Oh the the
what was the type? I mean, it's a new clak
of invisibility, but I don't remember if it had any
particular name. Well, whatever that is, you could be invisible

(37:52):
in a way that would feel not real, right, because
if nobody can see you and nobody knows who you
are wherever you are, then there are no consequence, and
consequences are kind of what gives us the feeling of reality.
So that's part of it. But I think also Sopulski
is onto something here and that like this estrangement of
the sense of recognition and familiarity is it makes the

(38:13):
Internet start to feel like this world of social delusion,
this sort of like always cap Graw vulnerable type landscape
where nothing is really real and you can't trust anything,
and yet at the same time we're we're constantly forced
to put our trust in it as a matter of fact,
because that's where we're doing everything. But then, of course,
uh back to the idea of like all these you know,

(38:35):
threads that people maintain and sort of mistake for meaningful
relationships online. Uh. He comes back and on that and says, actually,
you know, it seems more the opposite has happened than
than inducing us to all have cap graw delusions where
we see people we knew and we think of them
see people we know and we think of them as
as you know, being a doppelganger or not familiar. Instead,

(38:58):
we go the other way and we see, well, we
don't really know very well, but we just have to
attach this feeling of familiarity to them. It allows all
of this false familiarity. And this really comes up in
I don't know, how have you read about the the
idea of you know, paras social interactions on social media.
You know, I don't think prior to this episode I

(39:19):
knew it by that term, but of course you do
see it all the time. Yeah, it's it's just it's
ubiquitous on the Internet. It's the idea, you know, it's
an asymmetrical relationship, the way like you follow a public
figure who doesn't know who you are. But there are
all of these indications that many people think of these
para social asymmetrical relationships as relationships. It's like they almost

(39:41):
view this Instagram influencer that they follow as like an
acquaint somebody they know, but of course that person doesn't
know them. Yeah. I really started thinking about this classification though,
para social relationships, uh and in wondering like to what
extent it can or could have existed in previous times,
Like what is the earliest possible example of a para

(40:02):
social relationship? Like maybe it could be a situation where
you have like a h an like a leader um
in a given community, and then you have like a
very low level person in that community that that the
you know, the tribal leader just has no uh, you know,
real idea of who they are, but of course you
know who the leader is. I mean, I guess that's

(40:24):
you know, sort of the the in real life version
of this. But we see it seems like we see
far more of it, uh in in in modern civilization,
um in certainly an Internet age, but even pre Internet,
like the idea of celebrity just enables this sort of
relationship to be possible celebrities and leaders. And of course

(40:46):
I would say that social media, of course did not
invent the idea of celebrities and so so it didn't
invent these relationships like you're talking about. You know, you've
always had leaders, You've always had public figures in some
way or another. So media I think has increased the
day to day relevance of these types of relationships, you know,

(41:06):
where you can like check in on on the accounts
of the people that you follow every day and they
don't know you, but you know you. Especially, I feel
like Instagram, especially of all the platforms I can think of,
is is really rife with this um of like these
influencers and people who lead kind of glamorous lives and
allow you to see into their lives by showing you

(41:29):
their house and their pets and their lunch and you know,
you get all these interior views and it's very visceral
because it's visual and often you know, visual even in
a way that's edited to make it more colorful and
exciting with the post processing filters and all that. Right,
And of course, at the same time, like like all
social media representations like this, they are they're incomplete. We're crafted,

(41:51):
and they're crafted there, uh, they're they're maintain in a
very strategic way usually so you don't even have like
a full vision of what you know, random celebrities life
actually is you just have this idealized version of it.
So I just want to read one last quote from
Sapulski's article before we move on. So he says, um uh.
He ends by saying quote. Throughout history, cap Cross syndrome

(42:13):
has been a cultural mirror of a dissociative mind, where
thoughts of recognition and feelings of intimacy have been sundered.
It's still that mirror today. We think that what is
false and artificial in the world around us is substantive
and meaningful. It's not that loved ones and friends are
mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them.

(42:35):
I think I kind of disagree with them a little
bit because I think it's actually both of those things.
It's like that that the dissociation goes two ways in
either case, though we we do typically we often find
ourselves in situations though where we are we are distracted
from from real life um relationships and real life socialization,

(42:56):
and instead we have to check in on these little
streams on our phone. Did to these, uh, these simulated
relationships that we have on social media. Do you ever
have the sort of direct doppelgang Er experience like with
the fairy change links or the doppelganger for a friend
on the internet, Like you have a family member, you
have a friend who you love in real life, but

(43:19):
when you see the way they are on the internet,
I don't know what it. You know, the kind of
stuff they post on social media or whatever, you don't
feel like you recognize them and you don't really like them.
I've definitely known people who are like that. I'm not
gonna name any names who are like that on say Twitter, Like,
I think, like I love this person, but if all

(43:39):
I knew about them was the way they act on Twitter,
I would I wouldn't be able to stand them well.
Social media, especially as it pertains to you know, some topics,
take politics for instance, I think it does tend to
bring out the worst in us. Uh. And I don't
think that is a risky comment to make. I think

(43:59):
we can all think to specific examples of that in
all of our own lives. And yeah, that can lead
you to a situation where you're like, well, I thought
I knew that person, but I guess I don't because
look at this meme they just shared, you know, um
and uh. But I think also though, when that happens,
we're just not appropriately appreciating the way that circumstances and

(44:21):
situations change change people's behavior, that we are the same way. Yeah. Absolutely,
all right on that note, we're gonna take a quick break,
but we'll be right back. Thank Alright, we're back. You know,
I was thinking about what you said about about my emails,
but I feel like like sixty maybe my emails or

(44:43):
me just saying um, cool, sounds good. I think that's
my my standard, which I feel is sufficient. It's just
me saying yes to whatever you just said. Uh, and
I'm cool with it. Do you have an Android phone? No?
I don't. Okay, use Gmail, Yeah, you use Gmail, but
I don't use the I know you have the sort
of you know, like the auto language feature starts telling

(45:05):
you what to say. It's like, here's the email you
could write. Man, when I saw that thing, I was like,
get out, what the heck? No, no, no, well, it's
it's a it's an easy jump to go from there
to like authorized simulations of yourself, you know, just which
I really I mean, that's not far off. That's it's
basically already here, where you just give your account the

(45:25):
authority to to make responses like this. Like cool, sounds good,
I'll get back to you, you know that sort of thing. Well,
it's not gonna. I don't know. I mean, even if
I would type exactly the words it's suggesting, I still
don't want to let it do that. The fact that
like Gmail is gonna is going to compose an email
for me to my parents or my wife that no,
no, no no, unacceptable. There's so much room for misunderstanding. Even

(45:50):
if we're applying um, you know, most or all of
our attention to crafting an email. Uh, it feels like
a machine, even a very like talent had Ai would
have difficulty with that. There's just so much nuance in
human communication and knowing who you're communicating to. Like sometimes
it's a matter of knowing there are certain words you
shouldn't use with another individual, like maybe you're aware of

(46:13):
what you know maybe uh you know some sort of
a trigger for them, or or you know it may
pertain to some sort of you know, um, you know,
incident from from from your personal past with that person.
Like there's so many potential uh holes to fall into
when composing written communication. Why trust that the to the
machine or I don't know, maybe the reverse is true.
Always trusted the machine as long as they have all

(46:35):
those caveats in mind, you know. I think one thing
that's interesting to me is about the psychological effects of
heavy social media use. Um, I feel like we're still
in the early days of getting a picture of what
that's like, and that there appears to be a lot
of conflicting evidence. I think, I think because we we
haven't refined all our categories and ways of testing things yet.

(46:56):
I do often say that I think in emerging this
is just a prediction. I could turn out to be
totally wrong. But my guess is that in the coming
years there's going to be emerging consensus that heavy social
media us, especially say among young people like teenagers and stuff,
is correlated with a lot of negative psychological outcomes and uh,
you know, depression and things like that, and that there

(47:19):
will be like a new cottage industry of like the
lobbyists who deny the emerging science on on social media.
But uh, I mean, I guess that's still to be seen.
I mean, we've only got a few years of data
to work with so far. Yeah, when trying to imagine
the future, it's difficult. And also, you know, kind of
you know, anxiety and docing to try and think where

(47:39):
where our social media usages going. On one hand, I
guess I'm I'm hopeful that more and more people will
you choose to, if if not, opt out of social media,
but or you know, at least rethink how they're using it,
step back from it. Even I kind of think of it.
It's kind of like a hot tub. You know, when

(48:00):
you first get into a hot tub, you just juice
all in. You know, It's like, let me just go
all the way up to my ears in this, and uh,
I'll zone and zone out, and you know, that's good
for a while, but then eventually realize if I stay
in here, um, I am going to die. So maybe
I need to like only put half of my body
in here. Maybe I should just sit on the side

(48:20):
and get my feet in here, or maybe better yet,
maybe I should go get in the pool for a
while and do that. Or even maybe I should leave
all together and go home and see my family. That's
sort of thing, you know, It is nice at first.
I remember thinking about when I very first got on Twitter,
it seemed like it was nice for a while that
I was mostly just seeing things that like learning and
things that people were enthusiastic about. People were sharing their enthusiasms,

(48:43):
here's a great thing, and uh, and over time, I'm
not sure exactly what happened, but it seemed like it
transformed into more like this, uh, this swamp of misery,
where the primary emotions coming off of it was just
that everybody hates everything. Of course, all of this, of course,
is depending on on how exactly when uses a social
media platform, who you follow, um like for instance, like

(49:07):
on Instagram. Obviously there's a lot of celebrity worship going on,
a lot of para social relationships taking place there, as
we already mentioned. I don't see as much of that,
and part of that is just because I like only
follow family and friends, and I only use it myself
for family photos, and it's like, you know, it's a
closed account. Well, I do think that there is some
evidence I've seen so far that and I'm not sure

(49:29):
how solid this is yet, but there's some evidence that
there's a pretty big difference in the psychological effects of
social media depending on whether you primarily use it too
as a way of keeping up with family and friends
versus as a way of interacting with public accounts. Right
but I think. But then again, one of the dangers
in all of this is even if there is a
preferred if there is a healthier way to use a

(49:50):
given platform, you are still fighting against the intended usage
of that platform, as engineered by the makers of that platform.
The intended usage of the platform is to open it
up and never get off. It's just and so like,
it's difficult to compete with that. I mean, we've talked
about it this on the show before. Uh, in terms

(50:11):
of gambling technology and then social media technology. I mean,
you're you're really up against a fearsome adversary in telling yourself,
I'm only going to use this in a way that
is mentally beneficial for me and not just purely economically
beneficial for the masters of the medium. You know, Jared Lannier,

(50:32):
who we've talked about on the show before, has written
a book about it. Basically, it's saying everybody should delete
their social media accounts, just get off these platforms, and
that will be it will make a much better world.
And he's got a whole argument for it in the
in this book, which I haven't read yet but I
planned to. In fact, we asked for some review copies,
but I think we should see if we can try
to get uh Jared Lannier on the podcast. Yes, I

(50:53):
think we should. I also wonder what he would think
about this uh comparison. I still feel like there's a
lot of stuff to work out, but I I sense
that the Sopulski's comparison here about the the rift between
the emotion of familiarity and the and the cognitive recognition
function of the brain, uh, that that's at work in
Capgrass syndrome. This is a really rich kind of comparison

(51:14):
for for social media and media technology generally, and I
expect to keep having more thoughts about it. Yeah, I mean,
I I don't want to just sound like I'm just
saying like the people are awful and that technology makes
us more awful. Uh. You know, I don't want that
to be my ultimate argument. Ultimately, I would say that

(51:34):
technology enables humans to do amazing things, and if we
direct this power in the right way. Uh, you know,
there's plenty that we can do. There's plenty we have
done to connect people and and and build a better
world out of those connections. But obviously there's more that
we could do. And I guess the worrisome thing with

(51:56):
these platforms, the various platforms that we're talking about, is like,
what is the the ultimate advantage, What is the ultimate
intention of the masters of those given platforms. What do
they want? And even in cases where they may say, no,
we want to build something that brings people together, we
want to build something that empowers, you know, a better world. Like,
is that impulse going to win out in the overall

(52:18):
structure of this given social media platform or is it
going to be profitability or engagement or some other metric
that is ultimately more important to the corporate entity. It's
always profitability, and of course that's always what's going to
win out. But I feel like there's I have to
hold onto the possibility that that humans can do better

(52:39):
though well, I mean, that does make me wonder if
perhaps what you could do instead is have some kind
of nonprofit, open source social media platform that would would
compete and try to replace these for profit forms that
are deranging our relationships and and causing this familiarity recognition
rift and potentially having all these psychologically negative consequences on

(53:02):
our lives and on our culture broadly. I'm not sure
exactly what that would look like. I mean, it would
probably be a start if there was just something that
was like Facebook, but that did not manipulate what people
saw and prioritize you know, conflict and paid content. But
then again, even just with the you know, the bare
bones basics of Facebook, I wonder about, you know, having

(53:22):
these friend networks. Uh does does the even the most
basic mechanic of something like Facebook encourage people to go
through these mental processes where they sort of degrade their
standards of what counts as a healthy relationship. I mean
maybe ultimately that's where where AI can come in, you know,
and we just need we need artificial intelligence to dictate

(53:47):
where and how to maintain healthy relationships online. And that's
that's the ultimate answer. I don't know, just hand it
off to an aidity. Why I'm not hopeful about that either. Again,
this is back to like I'm worried about these l
Ai squirrels, not the I'm not worried about the great basilisk.
I'm worried about the minor dumb aies that that are

(54:10):
running through our lives like a pest infestation. Now, uh,
you know, not not to end things into a negative
a place, I do want to refer listeners back to
our episode the Great Episodes, The Great Eyeball Wars, where
we went into a lot of this particularly about, you know,
about how social media and these platforms and our phones
are gamed to capture our attention and hold our attention.

(54:32):
In those episodes, we also shared some some advice that
experts have given about how to fight back, how to
limit your use of social media and or your phone,
and uh and so, I mean there and there are
increasingly more tools out there. I believe you know, some
of these these phones have ways, you know now, to
to track how much you're using them, or even to
remind you not to use them in certain situations. Yeah. Yeah, um,

(54:55):
I mean I I can't honestly and non hypocritically tell
people to get entirely off of social media because one
of the things is I have to maintain social media
accounts because of my job at this podcast, where we've
got to like promote stuff on social media, and you know,
we've got to We've got a Facebook discussion module that
I really enjoy using. I probably would have deleted my
Facebook account, but I enjoy our our discussion module with

(55:18):
our fans there. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's probably one of
the main reasons I go on Facebook these days. So
discussion module, don't screw this up. Let's keep keep this
positive relationship. But I mean, I will say that the
reason it's on there, it's not any inherent strength of Facebook.
It's on there because of audience inertia. I mean that
that's where the people are. Like, if you want to
have a place where people already have accounts and they

(55:39):
can join Facebook, is they tell us the place where
you can do that? You know, I'd love a world
where somebody created some kind of non destructive, open source,
uh you know, nonprofit platform where you could do a
similar thing if enough people could get on there. All right,
So so there you have it. Obviously, there are a
lot of there's a lot of areas here we can
call out to listeners on I mean, first of all,

(56:01):
have you ever encountered a really um impressive double in
your life, like someone that required uh, you know, not
even just a first and second glance, maybe a third
glance to realize that they were not your friend or
perhaps not yourself. We'd love to hear from that all.
I mean for to that. You know, so if you've
actually had any experience with cap gross syndrome. Um, you know,

(56:22):
we would we would really appreciate any firsthand knowledge of
experiences like that. Uh. And then beyond that when we
get into the you know, the of course, the literary
and the you know, the fictional and the mythological connotations.
If you have a particular you know, favorite double you
want to share. But certainly we spent most of the
time you're talking about this social media doppel gang or idea,

(56:44):
and so I mean, you're pretty much all on social
media at this point. We're really you're either on social
media or you've made a very uh, you know, firm
choice not to be. So whichever category you fall into,
I feel like you probably have thoughts really added to
this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely
get in touch. In the meantime, if you want to

(57:04):
listen to more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
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(57:25):
best of all, tell somebody about the show. Yeah, tell
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(57:45):
you would like to get in touch with this direct Sorry,
I'm laughing because Robert has got a little stress ball
over here and he's squishing the guts out of it
as we speak. Yeah, there's like some sort of white
pus coming out of it. I had it for like
two weeks and it's already squeezed out. So I'm not
going to name the brand because maybe I just haded tractically. Anyway. Sorry,

(58:06):
If you want to get in touch with us directly,
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(58:28):
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