April 3, 2012 • 37 mins
Wrath: Where does wrath arise from in the human brain and why do we malign it as one of the seven deadly sins? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie continue the buffet of vice in an examination of human anger. Painting by Jacques de Backer (Luciano Pedicini/© Alinari Archives/CORBIS)
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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. Once again,
we are waiting through the tournaments of Hell. Here, yes
we are. We are what six into our seven Sin
(00:25):
tour we are, and this time we're going to talk
about something called wrath. Oh yeah, you know it. Ye
maybe you all have already felt it today. Were for
the most part, we're pretty wrathful people. I mean, not
just us. I've been talking about in general, we're wrathing
in general. Um, well, we're just talking about this is
why we we were both d Yogata lamp it down. Yeah,
(00:48):
humans are pretty rap. I mean the thing about all
these senses that they are pretty intense in everybody. I
mean there, That's why there's seven Deadly Sins, because they're
part of who we are, and from a religious perspective
that there are things that we want to suppress us
From just an every day point of view, they're the
kind of things we want to limit in our daily
lives because when they get out of whack, they can
really wreck things up. But then also there's there with
(01:09):
all of them. There's the question of worth of what
extent is this actually a virtuous is actually a good
thing and a necessary part of who we are? Right?
Is there an upside to anger? Really? Right? But um,
I suspect that Dante would looked at Wrath with a
very unkind eye because I was thinking about all these sins.
This is one that you can, as you pointed out,
(01:30):
can be really destructive. Yes, And is one is moving
through Dante's Inferno. And then again this is the medieval
classic Italian a um writer Dante. And in the tale,
he's guided by his hero Virgil, who is a spirit
at this point because Virgil died long before in the
Divine Comedy, in the Divine Comedy, leading him through hell
(01:50):
because he has to travel through hell to understand it,
and then he has to travel through purgatory, and then
he has to and then he's going to experience heaven.
But this all starts coming together for Wrath in circle
five of the Inferno. Interestingly, this is right outside the
gates of dis okay, the gates of disc Like if
you think of Dante's Inferno, it's like a big pit.
(02:11):
At the bottom of the pit is the devil and
then scaling up the sides of this pit are all
these various circles, and it's like dis like to somebody.
And the walls of discs are imagine a circular wall
that is about you know, maybe not quite halfway but
maybe a third of the way down into this pit
that in theory would I guess keep everything else from
(02:33):
coming back up. This is like the bureaucracy of Hell,
and it separates the upper hell from the lower hells.
Know that there's bureaucracy in Hell. Yeah, you know what's
telling those is that Dante positions wrath just outside those gates.
You go in the gates, you're gonna start getting into
what was in Dante's mind and in many medieval commentator's
minds more grievous sins such as such as violence. That's
(02:55):
worth noting, and violence may stem from from wrath in
many cases, but violence is dealt with in the lower hells,
as are the more terrible things such as treachery, heresy.
So wrath is on the cusp of you know, abstraction
and then actual action. Right. And what's interesting too about
the way that Dante deals with wrath is in this
circle he includes both wrath and sullenness. Okay, okay, so
(03:19):
you might imagine, just stereotypically, you might have drunken jocks
picking fights and bars like those guys are here, as
are the sullen goths who just felt sorry for themselves. Okay,
you know, um, he views it as to these is
two forms of the same sin. Okay, just the great
unifier to apparently, right, Like, it all comes down to anger,
and in wrath, anger is expressed. It's like I'm feeling angry,
(03:42):
I'm gonna punch something, right, I'm feeling angry, I'm gonna
yell at something and feel like angry, I'm gonna smoke
a cliff cigarette. Yes, well, well that's that's the other side. Yeah,
because that is the sullenness. That's where anger is repressed. Um.
Some scholars argue that that that really Dante is dealing
with sloth to a certain extent in the sullenness. But overall,
this is a circle in which the passions of sorrow
(04:04):
and grief end up ruling the soul. All right, So
what does it look like when we visit this particular circle.
We find ourselves encountering a muddy swamp Okay, this is
the river sticks, and there's stick fog rolling across the surface,
and Dante and and Virgil are road across this by flegus,
not to be confused with Charon or to your own,
who rode them across the acorn on the very outskirts
(04:26):
of help. Okay, so there's a different dude. So they're
only rolling across this mucky, slimy, awful swamp like I
can't help it, think the bogga maternal stink from from labyrinth,
you know. And as you look down into the swamp,
first of all, you see bubbles rising up. And the
bubbles are rising from the sullen. They are sunken down
all the way to the bottom of the They're just
(04:48):
buried in the slime at the bottom of the river,
the bottom of the swamp. They're chanting their sticks of
singing mock hymns down there. So that's where the sullen are.
Like that sulfuric bubbles are like bubbling up from from
all of their pouting right right there. They're drowning down there,
Bubbles rising up for the slight in life. They refuse
to welcome the light of God, the light of sun.
(05:08):
Spiritual awakenness into their life. So in death they're buried forever,
gargling and endless hymn. So that's the sulent more of
interest to us, and are the purely wrathful and they
they'll you'll find them at the surface of the water
wrestling with each other. So just imagine these naked forms
driving in the slime like pigs and filth. They're punching
each other, they're gouging, their clawing, they're biting, and not
(05:31):
just each other, but some of them are biting themselves.
They're carrying at their own flesh like a really dark
Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. Yeah, I guess, I guess. Imagine
their shirtless. Yeah, they tend to be naked in the
artistic interpretations, then this is This is also interesting because
Dante ends up seeing somebody he knows, this guy named
Felippo Argentie, and Dante ends up encountering various people that
(05:54):
he knew in life. That's what a recurring theme and inferno,
and it's also a means by which he typical pay
either show some sympathy for the center or some understanding
of the scent, and also identifies it in himself. There
are various debates on who Argentie actually was. There's one
account that it because Dante was banned from Florence at
one point, lost his property, and spent the rest of
(06:14):
his life wishing he could return to Florence. And so
one idea is that Argentie was somebody who ended up
purchasing land that had belonged to Dante's family after he
was driven out, So he, you know, he may have
had a personal acts to grind here with this individual,
because Dante sees him, He's like, yeah, I hate that dude.
I really would like to see him dunked under these
waters before we're done here, in verticals like yeah, just wait,
(06:35):
it will happen. And and then the guy like he
sort of crawls up onto the boat and talks to
Dante a little bit, but then the other people in
the swamp end up tearing him apart to this Argentine character.
So do you not cross Dante's what I'm hearing? Yeah,
but see, but Dante was feeling wrath himself, and so
this is how he he summons the emotion inside himself.
He's even as he's seeing in this in the torments
(06:57):
around him. So, so that's pretty much the inferno version
of wrath. In purgatory, the souls purge themselves of wrath
and in a slightly different manner. And again purgatory, this
is the amount of purgatory that rises from Earth to heaven,
that connects Earth to heaven, and it's when Dante eventually
emerges from Hell. He has to climb this mountain up
to the terrestrial paradise and then into Heaven. So if
(07:19):
you find yourself on the terrace where wrath is dealt with,
you'll find that these individuals walking through bick smoke that's
darker than the night, and they can't see the outside world.
They're experiencing hallucinatory visions in which they see examples of meekness,
which is the virtue that is opposite wrath. So you
see this idea of in purgatory working through wrath. Is
(07:39):
wrath is this thing that clouds our judgment and clouds
our views of the world. And I think that's such
an apt description because when you lose yourself to anger,
that is exactly what it feels like, right. You cannot
think clearly. All of a sudden you have trapped yourself
into a corner in the situation and you're trying to
get out of it. Yeah, it's especially obvious after the
(08:00):
fact with with you know, the little things that inspire
our rat you know, we're like, oh, well, this totally
messed with my schedule today, and now I'm mad, you know.
And then and then you feel afterwards, you're you know, hopefully,
if you have any amount of self consciousness about what
you're doing and how your mind works, you look back
and you're like, wow, that was that was ridiculous? Why
was that upset? But of course in the worst cases,
(08:20):
you know, it just completely. I mean, we end up
polking out right, we end up harming things in the
world around us, exactly. Let me hit Buddhism real quick
before we move into the science though. I mentioned before
how you have the wheel of stam Sara. This is
the wheel of life though that you see especially in
too Betan Buddhism, which shows all the various realms of
existence in which a life may be born, which you
can think of in terms of one life to the next,
(08:43):
like I was bad in this life, so in my
next life, I'm occupying a harsher existence, or oh I
was good in this life next life is going to
be better, or you can think of it in terms
of my emotional state right now is this, and based
on this emotional state, my next emotional state will be
something else, you know. So it's like one state and
form and the other are to were consciousness evolves. But
at the very center of this wheel you find these
(09:05):
three poisons which I touched on before. You have a snake,
a pig, and a cock. The snake represents hate wrath,
the other the pig is like delusion and ignorance, and
the cock is greed that sometimes less, but the snake
is hate. And that's where we find the center of
wrath that's moving the whole wheel. That's just full of suffering.
As far as the realms into which one may be reincarnated,
and these are also in the realms that are in
(09:26):
touch with the way humans feel in the state of
our own souls. You have the Nakara realm, and this
is the hell realm, the realm that's more typical of
something you would see in Dante, full of hatred and
torment and demons. The hell being was ripping people apart,
that kind of thing, and that's in the lower realms
but then in the higher realms you see the Ashera realm,
and this is the room of the Demi gods, powerful beings,
(09:47):
but despite their power, despite their freedom, they're not in
the chains of Nakara. They're living it up. They're just
one step below the gods. But they're defined by anger,
They're defined by jealousy and war, and they end up
wasting all this freedom and opportunity being on the pursuit
of power. So when they ultimately die, they live long lives,
but they eventually do die. Then they're born down into
the lower realms. So you see this interesting extaposition of
(10:10):
the two states of being. And then of course there's
the human realm in there, which is a balance of
all these various realms, so you've also have plenty of
wrath there as well. Yeah. I think it's interesting that
the snake is the symbol of that because it is
sort of you know that you think about the snake
swallowing itself. I think actually there's a medieval name for this.
It has various names. I can't remember the one you're
thinking of off hand, where the snake is biting its
(10:32):
own tail, consuming his own tail. Yeah, yeah, and you
get into you know, ideas of the world serpent, the
exactly the organmender. But you know, there's this idea that
you're inflicting hurt upon yourself, right, and so I think
it's interesting now to take that knowledge and turn it
over to what's happening in your brain. Yes, when you're
suffering about of anger, I guess you could say, oddly enough,
(10:53):
I want to point out that eld dope does not
show up on the scene here. Yeah, it's been with
us for so long that I thought for sure that
it would be prominent in this, but it is not.
It is really a story about the amygdala. Well, I
mean it's it's probably it's there in the cocktail somewhere,
but it's not playing. No, you're right, you're right. It's
just it's a it's a base note, or maybe I
should say it's a top note. It's a fruity top
(11:14):
note for some people. And we'll talk about that a
little bit. But yeah, it's a story about the amygdala,
which helps us to process emotion. We've talked about this
quite a bit before, and in the case of anger,
it works in tandem with a number of biological responses,
including the release of adrenaline. So it kind of makes
sense for it because whenever you've experienced anger wrath, I'm
sure that you've had a moment where you just felt
(11:34):
a surge of energy. Is that tension energy? That's because
when we get angry within a quarter of a second,
and magdala can serve up an action inspired by wrath
if if it weren't for the frontal lobe, because this
is sort of our seat of reason in this area
of our brain also experiences a flow of blood and
(11:54):
attempt to sit there and kind of way the situation
and the response and altogether this process can take just
two seconds, right, So if there's a trigger that makes
you angry, just within two seconds, you could be serving
up a punch or you could be trying to restrain yourself.
And this is really why people often say, you know,
count to ten if you're angry, Yeah, because it gives
(12:15):
you a chance to kind of pull your adrenaline addled
self together. Yeah. Or if you're one thing that I've
practiced in the past and also told other people, it's like,
if you if you have that angry email you really
want to send a go ahead and write the the email.
Don't put the two in the field though, Yeah, don't
put the two in the field. Maybe just write it
in the text document, then shut it down and let
it sit for a while. Industry, Like the next day
(12:36):
you could go back to that and be like, oh man,
that was just a fool's errand right there. Yeah, well
what was I What was I doing with that? Yeah? Yeah,
I can't help but think of it in terms of
like the amigdala in the frontal lobe is like that.
The amigoala is kind of like the you know, you
know the classic image of the devil on one shoulder
and the angel on the other. Instead, they'll imagine like
a pro wrestler on one shoulder and a and like
a Buddhist monk on the other, and the pro wrestler
(12:58):
is the end of the emotional amigdola, and it's it's like,
go out there, do it, do it, get angry, don't
take this stuff off anybody, punch right, angry emails, stop around,
huff and puff. And then on the other side you
you have the Buddhist monk, and the Bodhist monk is like,
let's chill it out, Let's think a lot ofically. Let's
think calmly about this. But you have to depend on
that monk having enough energy to put up with the enigdolla,
(13:20):
because sometimes the enigola is going to be all right,
let's do it, let's crack some heads, and then the
monks like, you know, I'm done, I'm gonna beat here. Well,
you know what, And there's a there's a couple of
things that could actually weaken your inner monk response. By
the way, I really like this idea of both of them,
that the monk of the wrestlers are both wearing robes
in my version that I see on your on your
shoulders right now. But a couple of circumstances. One is
(13:42):
you could have sustained damage to your frontal lobe, like
our poor friend Phineas Gauge. Right, this is a guy
who in nineteen was working on the railroad and when
he was excavating rock, and he was tamping gunpowder down
in its drill hole, and there was an ax a
little explosion which caused the tamping iron he was using
to thrust itself through his left cheek and out his skull, yeah,
(14:06):
like out his like completely through his head and then
in the air on the other side they basically gave
him the frontal of botomy. Yeah. Yeah, and he survived it.
But what happens he became childlike and became bullying, and
he started to use profanity. Again. This is so this
guy went from mild manner to like crazy town and
in a very short amount of time. And they didn't
(14:27):
understand enough about the brain at the time to really
attribute that to his accident. Yeah. And by the way,
if you want to hear more about gauge and and
other things of this nature, we did a podcast to
Change your Mind the Hard Way where we dealt with
some of some of these things. Another circumstance is sarotonin.
You serotonin levels. There was a study conducted by the
University of Cambridge and this was actually reported in a
(14:48):
Science Daily article. They talked about healthy volunteers and what
they did is they took these healthy volunteers and altered
their serotonin levels by manip pulating their diet. Because we
know that your diet can affect the serotonin levels in
your brain and make you, you know, really sort of
regulate your mood. Yeah, there's certain foods are gonna behind serotonin.
(15:10):
And if you've ever been to a health food store
and look around it supplements. There obviously a lot of
serotonin supplements that are aimed at helping you out with
your serotonin level. And you know, we've talked about this
in the past two especially with our podcast on decision fatigue.
Just make sure that you're good enough to eat, you know,
throughout the day, because that really does affect your ability
to regulate your moods. You are what you eat video,
(15:31):
so are what you think. So the two come together.
That's right, mind to think. That's on my bumper sticker
on my car. So okay. What they did they manipulate
their diets. On the serotonin depletion day, the volunteers were
given a mixture of amino acids that lacked tripped a fin,
the building block for serotonin, and on the placebo day,
(15:52):
they were given the same mixture but with a normal
amount of tripped de fan okay okay. And then the
researchers scan the volunteers brains using fmr I and as
the volunteers viewed faces with angry, sad, and neutral expressions,
and then they were able to measure how different regions
reacted and communicated with one another. When the volunteers viewed
the angry faces as supposed to the sad or neutral faces.
(16:14):
So the research revealed that low brain serotonin and make
communications between specific brain regions. We're talking again about the
magdala and frontal lobe much weaker. And the finding exactly
suggest that when our serotonin levels are low and maybe
really much more difficult for the prefrontal cortex to control
emotional responses to anger. I mean, this is this is
(16:36):
a this kind of a dumb moment. But at the
same time, it's like, yeah, you know what, when I
was angry, I was really hungry, and I was tired,
and I was hungry. Uh, so it makes sense that
the serotonal levels could affect our mood like that. So
to put it back in terms of the pro wrestler
and the monk on your shoulders, in the case of
Phineas Gauge, the monk was just completely taken out, yeah yeah,
(17:01):
by by a rod. In the case of the serotonin issue,
the individual hasn't had enough to eat or for whatever reason,
the serotonin level has dropped and so has the communication
between the two. So the pro wrestlers on one shoulder
saying let's do it, let's go out there and let's
kick some butt. I'm not gonna take this anymore. How
dare they do this to me? And the monk is
is like yelling across a chasm here um and saying saying, hey,
(17:22):
calm down, calm down, and the pross was like, what
what's he talking about? And then launches back and well,
here's the thing too. Let's say that you are a
person who has two pro wrestlers on your shoulder. In
other awards, you are prone to be more aggressive and
therefore more prone to anger. Your communications between your MICHAELA
in your preferntial cortex are going to be weekend regardless.
(17:44):
So when you have the depletion, it's much more pronounced.
What's interesting about this and I was reading this experiment
as well, where they then they referred to them as
short fusers and the Brewders. So the short fusers, that's
the guy was like, Oh, you took me off. I'm
gonna punch somebody in the face. Yeah, And then you
have the brooders who are like, oh, that person really
made me mad. I'm gonna pretty much be musable the
(18:04):
rest of the day, which brings me back to thinking
about Dante with the sullen and the wrathful. So I
wonder if you could, if you could look at the
short fusers are the ones tearing each other up and
punching everyone in the face on the surface of sticks
the river sticks, And then the brooders are the sullen
buried in the muck at the bottom, gargling their hymns
into the flying Yeah, the powders just need to meditate,
(18:25):
and the short fusers just need a sandwich because really there, yes, absolutely,
but really, if you are a short fused person, you
really are much more sensitive to your serotonin levels, is
what this is spelling out. So it is very important
to try to get that sandwich in your belly. Really again,
to simplify it. In fact, they've been experiments where if
(18:46):
you actually look at the brain and you you scan
it and and you see what's lighting up during these moments
of wrath or when there's some sort of stimuli that
provokes wrath, you can see that the difference between short
fusers and brooders and seconds. The medial prefrontal cortex associated
with self awareness and emotional regulation quickly lights up with
the broods, and so does the hippocampus involved in memory.
(19:06):
So as they fume, people repeatedly relive the events in
their minds. It's like they're chewing over that thing that
made them mad. They're continually tweaking that story in their
head about that thing that happened to them that was
sucky and now they're mad. So anger can be so fleeting, right,
it can be such a flash, like how long is
this taking? This whole process, this just taking seconds. They
(19:28):
found in this experience that the degree of hippocampal activation
predicted how much people tended to ruminate. So you can
actually see, depending on what the hippocampus is doing, you
can tell how much they're brooding on the anger. I'm
imagining a little sign on the fMRI I that shows
need sandwich, and it's just like flashing over the prefrontal cortex. Okay,
so we're gonna take a quick break, but when we
(19:48):
come back, we're going to talk about whether or not
you could be attracted to anger. All right, we're back,
so wrap to what extent is it? Is it attractive?
I mean it's I mean not so much. Usually people
go out of their way to avoid people who are angry, right,
I mean it's often referred to as as showing ones.
But you know, more or less they're like, I really
(20:10):
showed his butt on that one, right, but they did
not have to say Bobby, you know what I mean.
It's generally like they let wrath take control of them
and they really kind of look like a fool for it.
You know, no their emotional address, you knew where they live. Yeah,
but then you think of wrath, and you think of
so many there's so many things in our culture where
wrath is celebrated. It generally it involves creating a fictional
(20:31):
or just creating even real world circumstances that allow the
wrath to manifest in a way that is either acceptable
or relatable. Um for instance, Incredible Hulk. You know, this
is an example where a mild manner, Bruce Banner, he's
getting kicked around and then the rage gets ahold of him, right,
and he turns into Holk and starts kicking. But or
just any masculine testosterone fueled action flick where the baddies
(20:54):
are bad and so our hero is even badder and
starts just wailing on people, you know, Bruce Lee type stuff.
We do get something out of that. There's something appealing
about that I'm on various levels. I mean, you can
break it down to the viewer of some of some
sort of film like this. They have issues in their
life that they would on some level like to be
able to deal with in a direct manner. And so
I'm going to watch something or play a game in
(21:16):
which somebody deals with their problems with direct violence. Well, right,
And there are some people who do bait other people
in order to raise their hackles, right and get a
little charge of anger, because they're interested in provocation, right
and getting into a fight. Yeah, And I feel like
this is interesting because I think we've all done this,
or maybe not all, but most of us. I feel
(21:37):
like I've felt this at one point or another where
you're not necessarily like a complete bully or anything like that,
like nothing like really heinous, But were you just sort
of poking at somebody just to get like, you know,
the little things that might annoy your significant other, and
if the mood is right, you might just prime a
little to see of it. Okay. So could it be
(21:58):
that on that day you war, testosterone levels were higher
than they usually were, right, This is for both men
and women. University of Michigan Psychology study found that some
people find angry expressions rewarding well, and they they actually
interpreted as rewarding. Tesascer and levels were actually measured in
(22:19):
a group via saliva samples. And then this group was
asked to work on a learning task that involved a
flash of images, some with angry faces, some with neutral faces,
and some images containing absolutely no faces, and the images
flashed by so quickly that the participants weren't really able
to detect a pattern. In fact, though this task if
they were working on, was really to gauge whether or
(22:40):
not they could subliminally work out a pattern, and it
was found that men and women with high testosterone levels
learned the sequence of keypresses better when the sequence was
followed by an angry face. And the conclusion is that
the anger expressions were rewarding to the brain and that's
why they had a better memory of this. That's interesting.
That finds me of this article we're looking at from
(23:01):
Wired that was talking about the Steve Jobs. Yeah, it
was like the mobile meat portions of the original the
first iPhone came out. iPhone comes out, everyone loves it,
but mobile meat doesn't work. I mean, they's supposed to
be you know, on par with blackberries applications, and you
know it's supposed to actually fill that need. It was
an important part of the product. And Jobs was notoriously perfectionist.
(23:24):
He had a certain vision. He wanted to see that
that vision brought to life. And he was known for
having steam coming out of all the time. Right, and
interestingly enough, he practiced Buddhism. I know, I was just
thinking about that too. Yeah, but I mean he probably
realized that, hey, I need to I mean he I
understand he did realize, and maybe his anger needs to
be be treated in some parts of my life, but
maybe not when it came to mobile meat not working,
because he got he lined everybody up, got him into
(23:46):
the theater there and just continued to like lay into
him for I think for like a solid hour, just
thrashed them, I mean not physically, but just let him
have it. Told them that they should all hate each
other for for what had happened and they had brought
dishonor to the brand, like basically telling them that they
are the beings and the river sticks and the should
(24:06):
just tear each other apart because they well and they
should commit you know, mental Harry carry you know, but yeah,
I mean here's a good example of I mean, it's
the ultimately, it's the kind of like negative feedback that
we all rail against whenever we encounter even like a
little bit of it, you know, I mean, nobody likes
to be in trouble. Nobody likes a working environment where
somebody's on your case for something. It makes you angry,
(24:29):
It makes you, you know, it makes you so, it
makes you kind of hate your job. But some of
the evidence lines up to support the idea that it
also inspires you on some level. But it did it
Actually you're angry, sure, but then you're you're committed to
to getting it done. Okay. So to that end, I
have to read this quote from the co author of
the University of Michigan Angry Faces study because I think
of Steve Jobs now. He says, quote, it's kind of
(24:51):
striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as
a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a
nonconscious level and be like a tasty morsel that some
people will vigorously work for. So I don't know, maybe
there were people on jobs as team who actually responded
to that well, I mean, the thing could be he
(25:11):
knew his team, well yeah, and he knew that these
are guys that will respond and got yeah, well I'm
am using guys in the gender news. These are guys
who who realized, see, now you're irritated about that. I saw.
I'm not irritated. I'm I'm actually amused. Okay, But maybe yeah,
he realized that this is a crowd that is stimulated
by that, and a wired writer or somebody commenting on
(25:34):
the outside or they're not a part of that group,
and maybe they're more of a positive reinforcement environment. Like like,
it's easy for us to comment on that because because
I feel like you're at house. Stuff works. Aside from
the days where Jerry comes to the halls with a
bull like physically with a bullphip and and hits everybody.
Aside from those days, Matt just gives us the occasional
dressing down just for fun. Aside from that, it's a
(25:55):
pretty prett pretty positive place to work. It's more about
positively enforcement brainstorming that kind of thing. Brainstorming, of course,
well in our mother environment where they're no wrong answers,
there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Though I have
heard a few. Yeah, and in our mother company, Discovery,
I mean it's it's all about you know, everybody wearing
the lovey dovey pants. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I mean
to get some more love pants because I I split
(26:17):
them the other day. Yeah. In fact, didn't we got
something about a flash momb here occurrence happening because anyway,
I wasn't sure if that was actually happening or that
was an example. I think that's an example of things
that can happen during a brainstorm. Um So anyway, that
is another story for another time. But let's talk about
when you are in a chronic state of anger. Okay,
(26:38):
so you're in jobs as team and let's just assume
that all the time it's all anger, because it's not
going to be, of course, but you do encounter people
like this. We're like, man, they are angry all the time.
They're just constantly fuming over every little or big thing
in their life. Yeah, well, there's the state of response
can start to take a toll and you obviously, chronically
angry people may not produce enough actal col hopefully I've
(27:01):
said that right, a hormone which tempers the more severe
effects of adrenaline. And their nervous system is constantly working
and can eventually become over taxed, leading to a weakened
heart and stiffer arteries. Yeah. This incidentally was the first
neurotransmitter discovered, isolated one by a German biologists Atto Loewie,
who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work. Yeah,
(27:22):
and it's really important because there's all sorts of potential
for damage not just the heart, but the liver and
the kidney as well as having high cholesterol. Yeah, it's
responsible for much of the stimulation of muscles, including muscles
in the gas from intestinal set system. And it's also
found in sensory neurons and in the autonomic nervous system.
So it's a it's a part of scheduling even rim sleep.
So okay. Yeah, and if you think we're kidding about this,
(27:44):
just pull out one more stat um. And the two
thousand and one study of thirteen thousand subjects, people with
the highest levels of anger had twice the risk of
coronary artery disease and three times the risk of heart
attack as compared to the subjects with the lowest levels
of anger. See this makes it even harder for me
to watch Lewis Black these days, you know. Really the
whole stick is like I'm so angry at these things
(28:06):
in the world that you're not right. It's a great bit.
He's a great talented comedian, but as he gets older
for me to watch him on the Daily Show, because
I'm like, this is not good for your health, Lewis,
you gotta you gotta chill out, Like I mean, maybe too.
I don't know a lot about Louis Black, so so
maybe to a large extent, is an act. I mean,
he said he's a professional, but I feel like he
(28:27):
is summoning some real anger when performing, and I would
just I don't want to watch him keel over. Okay, So,
assuming he's not in that state all the time, he's
just kind of doing it as part of his stick,
it actually could be an upside for him, Okay, okay,
So and actually for all of us there could be
an upside for anger. Again, assuming that this is not
something that we're playing into and playing into the destructive
(28:48):
violent forces. I mean, there's a way to actually be
constructively angry. Yes, yeah, what they found some folks who
like to poke around and studies actually researchers, mathish bos
Carsten did Drew, and Bernard nishtad Uh. They publish the
results in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that
participants who are made to feel angry and then we're
(29:09):
asked to brainstorm exhibited key hallmarks of creative brainstorming, including
unstructured thinking, and in a comparison to their counterparts identified
as sad or neutral people, the very angry participants came
up with more ideas as well as more original ideas.
And now this was a short lived window, right liked
(29:29):
they couldn't sustain this. Obviously, they couldn't sustain their anger
as well, which was a good thing. But right after
they were made to feel a bit of wrath, their
brain was basically kind of unfettered and not thinking systematically.
And this is where people think that anger could be
really helpful, because you are getting that surge of adrenaline
and you do become laser focused in the way that
(29:50):
you want to remove an obstacle, or you're sitting there
saying how could this be? How can I make this better?
And if you actually point that anger the solution rather
than say the person or the thing, you could make
some headway and be really productive I believe the same
study or maybe this is a different one that was
talking about how sadness sullenness if you will, can also
(30:11):
have you know, it's bad in the short term, but
in the long term it can also it also leads
to increased creativity, increased drive in your work. Yeah, with
some of this too that people who may be depressed,
although um, and we've talked about this, it can hamper
creativity at points, but there's some of this is tied
to self actualization or being able to see yourself in
(30:34):
a realistic light and then be able to deal with
obstacles in a long term way because you're not at
that that very moment sort of fooling yourself into like
I can do this, right, I don't know. It's a
little bit of depressing way to put it, but well,
it reminds me of most guys anyway, really love the
first one or two Batman movies, right, the films not
(30:56):
based some of the ladies, some of the ladies, my
wife doesn't like them. But but these are very much
a product of a time during which in the United
States have the Bush administration, which, being a conservative administration,
was generally by and large and not as popular with
the with liberal artistic types. Um. And then you have
you have war, you have economic downturn. Well that economic
(31:18):
downturn really comes after the Bush administration. But but the
same area, you have a lot of negative things going on.
But if you see the art that rises up out
of these these issues, out of this paint, I guess
it's kind of like a nice Well, it sucks that
there was a big war, it sucks that it lasted forever,
but but hey, we got some cool art about out
of it. Right Well, I think what you're saying is
that anger. Anger is mobilizing forces to get out there,
(31:41):
think creatively and say something. Well, and I was thinking
about that in terms of protests too. I mean, there's
a point where protests are really productive, right, and then
there's a point where they can become very destructive for
you know, devolve. So you're saying you don't have high
hopes for the third Batman movie from Christopher Nolan. No,
I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, done well,
(32:02):
anger can be really helpful, right Well, but again you
have to bring a bit of mental energy to it
to say, how am I reacting to this at this
very moment. And that's where that ten second cooling off
period is really important, because if you just let that
two seconds rule you, you you know, you can get a
hammer to the head. Yeah, I mean, if you look
back and just think about it evolutionary, you can imagine
this primitive human out on the prehistoric planes. He's killed
(32:23):
a deer or something, right, and then there's this other
dude coming along. It's gonna try and eat his deer.
That raises his hackles. He's like, who's this guy think?
He is trying to steal my dear flank out from underneath.
And then that anger can be used to mobilize him
to fight for and keep what he's his and what
his survival depends on. And although he's not quite that
sophisticated yet, one day he will use that wonderful neo
(32:44):
cortex and he'll work out his problems via communication words
um in a way that he can say, let's not
fight about this, let's let's come to the logical conclusion
about whose flesh this is? Okay? Right? That person will
redirect his anger into a productive way. You know, you
look like you're not buying No, No, I'm buying it.
(33:04):
I'm buying it completely. I mean, I think the interesting
thing about Rath, like all of these sins, really is
that there is a level where it makes sense and
in the motivating force in life, and then there's that
tipping point where it becomes something horrible and to be avoided.
I don't know, but it maybe it seems like with
Wrath that the tipping point occurs a little sooner. Yes
it does. Yeah, I mean there are levels of Vancor
right now. So there you have it. Again. This is
(33:25):
just one episode in a series, so as you're listening
to this, feel free to go back and explore our
previous five episodes. And there's also a good chance that
you're listening to this in the future. Well you're obviously
listening to it in the future, so the final episode
on Sloth may also be out as well by the
time you hear this. All right, let's call the robot
over and read a quick listener mail. What have you
(33:46):
got for us? All right? This one comes to us
from Michael. Michael writes in in response to our episode
Stindall Syndrome kicked in the brain by Art, He says,
I had no idea this was a thing. A few
years ago. When I was in college studying design, my
art history class went to the TUT exhibit. I was
walking through, rousing at the pieces, disappointed that Tut wasn't
(34:08):
even there, when suddenly I felt the stamp that is
gonna be And then suddenly I felt a hand shoulder
h When suddenly I felt the need to stop and
look up. I saw the crook and flail on display.
I lost my breath. The room's fun and all of
the commotion disappeared. It felt like I was hallucinating. I
(34:28):
swear that I was looking up at the at a
pharaoh holding them uh and these, of course those two instruments.
At a pharaoh mummified, they hold the crossocrounds their chest.
I was completely paralyzed for what seemed to be hours,
until someone bumped into me. It was really crowded. It
was then that I realized how old and beautiful the
crook and flail were that I was looking at. It
was so very overwhelming. I had forgotten about my childhood
(34:50):
love of all things Egyptian. I didn't want to leave
the room. I wanted to get closer, but there were
too many people. I nearly cried at the side of it.
And I am not the overly emotive type wild stuff.
Thanks for the great episode I listened to each and everyone. Cool. Yeah,
that's that's an awesome description of what Stenhell syndrome is, right. Yeah. Yeah,
we discussed that podcast how they are a number of
different things informing. It's not something where it's like, oh,
(35:11):
there's something broken in my brain and makes art pound
me whenever I look at it, but like, here's a
great example of someone who came into the exhibit with
certain expectations, certain expectations, but also this hast, this emotional,
emotional past with the subject matter, and then they're standing
in front of it. This thing that maybe existed only
in their mind before is manifest before them and it's
ancient and it's beautiful, and it just overwhelms them. So,
(35:33):
you know, I was just thinking that this reminds me
of an article that was recently published in New York
Times called The Thin Places, or I think that's an
approximation of the title, but it talks about how when
we go on vacations, we go it doesn't have to
be a vacation, be a park, it could be a
special place, but it's perspective changing and they call it
the thin place because it occupies a place between earth
(35:54):
and heaven. So it's like the places where reality grows
at them and yes, pushes in on yes, and it
takes you outside of yourself. Yeah uh so, yeah, that's
that's just one of the things that a museum can
do to your brain, right, Yeah, Well, it reminds me
in our Scott Baker's fantasy. It looks there are these
places that are basically the thin places. But the other
thing about that is that madness can set them from
(36:14):
the outside. So well it seems to fall right in. Yeah,
we encount of these thin places where art can effect
us and can maybe drive us a little temporarily. Matt, Well,
it's like Jill Bolt Taylor who had the stroke and
she started to see her own molecules melding with with
her environment. You know, I mean not it's not fed extreme,
but that's sort of a metaphor for what's happening. But anyway,
(36:38):
you know, Yeah, but that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that
with a Sydney. Maybe it was the emails from Michael,
but it's signs Sydney, So Michael Slash Sydney, thanks for sharing,
and we loved here from anyone else who's had an
experience like that, with something with art, with history, et
cetera that they've encountered, and likewise, let us know what
you're experienced with wrath is, how do you deal with
it in your daily lives, how do you experience it
(36:58):
in other people? And how do you mitigate it? To
what extent does wrath actually inspire you to great things?
And to what extent does it seem to hold you back?
You can always find us on Facebook and Twitter. Check
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On Facebook, we are Stuff to Blow your Mind and
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always send us your thoughts via email at blow the
(37:18):
Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How
Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Once again,
we are waiting through the tournaments of Hell. Here, yes
we are. We are what six into our seven Sin
(00:25):
tour we are, and this time we're going to talk
about something called wrath. Oh yeah, you know it. Ye
maybe you all have already felt it today. Were for
the most part, we're pretty wrathful people. I mean, not
just us. I've been talking about in general, we're wrathing
in general. Um, well, we're just talking about this is
why we we were both d Yogata lamp it down. Yeah,
(00:48):
humans are pretty rap. I mean the thing about all
these senses that they are pretty intense in everybody. I
mean there, That's why there's seven Deadly Sins, because they're
part of who we are, and from a religious perspective
that there are things that we want to suppress us
From just an every day point of view, they're the
kind of things we want to limit in our daily
lives because when they get out of whack, they can
really wreck things up. But then also there's there with
(01:09):
all of them. There's the question of worth of what
extent is this actually a virtuous is actually a good
thing and a necessary part of who we are? Right?
Is there an upside to anger? Really? Right? But um,
I suspect that Dante would looked at Wrath with a
very unkind eye because I was thinking about all these sins.
This is one that you can, as you pointed out,
(01:30):
can be really destructive. Yes, And is one is moving
through Dante's Inferno. And then again this is the medieval
classic Italian a um writer Dante. And in the tale,
he's guided by his hero Virgil, who is a spirit
at this point because Virgil died long before in the
Divine Comedy, in the Divine Comedy, leading him through hell
(01:50):
because he has to travel through hell to understand it,
and then he has to travel through purgatory, and then
he has to and then he's going to experience heaven.
But this all starts coming together for Wrath in circle
five of the Inferno. Interestingly, this is right outside the
gates of dis okay, the gates of disc Like if
you think of Dante's Inferno, it's like a big pit.
(02:11):
At the bottom of the pit is the devil and
then scaling up the sides of this pit are all
these various circles, and it's like dis like to somebody.
And the walls of discs are imagine a circular wall
that is about you know, maybe not quite halfway but
maybe a third of the way down into this pit
that in theory would I guess keep everything else from
(02:33):
coming back up. This is like the bureaucracy of Hell,
and it separates the upper hell from the lower hells.
Know that there's bureaucracy in Hell. Yeah, you know what's
telling those is that Dante positions wrath just outside those gates.
You go in the gates, you're gonna start getting into
what was in Dante's mind and in many medieval commentator's
minds more grievous sins such as such as violence. That's
(02:55):
worth noting, and violence may stem from from wrath in
many cases, but violence is dealt with in the lower hells,
as are the more terrible things such as treachery, heresy.
So wrath is on the cusp of you know, abstraction
and then actual action. Right. And what's interesting too about
the way that Dante deals with wrath is in this
circle he includes both wrath and sullenness. Okay, okay, so
(03:19):
you might imagine, just stereotypically, you might have drunken jocks
picking fights and bars like those guys are here, as
are the sullen goths who just felt sorry for themselves. Okay,
you know, um, he views it as to these is
two forms of the same sin. Okay, just the great
unifier to apparently, right, Like, it all comes down to anger,
and in wrath, anger is expressed. It's like I'm feeling angry,
(03:42):
I'm gonna punch something, right, I'm feeling angry, I'm gonna
yell at something and feel like angry, I'm gonna smoke
a cliff cigarette. Yes, well, well that's that's the other side. Yeah,
because that is the sullenness. That's where anger is repressed. Um.
Some scholars argue that that that really Dante is dealing
with sloth to a certain extent in the sullenness. But overall,
this is a circle in which the passions of sorrow
(04:04):
and grief end up ruling the soul. All right, So
what does it look like when we visit this particular circle.
We find ourselves encountering a muddy swamp Okay, this is
the river sticks, and there's stick fog rolling across the surface,
and Dante and and Virgil are road across this by flegus,
not to be confused with Charon or to your own,
who rode them across the acorn on the very outskirts
(04:26):
of help. Okay, so there's a different dude. So they're
only rolling across this mucky, slimy, awful swamp like I
can't help it, think the bogga maternal stink from from labyrinth,
you know. And as you look down into the swamp,
first of all, you see bubbles rising up. And the
bubbles are rising from the sullen. They are sunken down
all the way to the bottom of the They're just
(04:48):
buried in the slime at the bottom of the river,
the bottom of the swamp. They're chanting their sticks of
singing mock hymns down there. So that's where the sullen are.
Like that sulfuric bubbles are like bubbling up from from
all of their pouting right right there. They're drowning down there,
Bubbles rising up for the slight in life. They refuse
to welcome the light of God, the light of sun.
(05:08):
Spiritual awakenness into their life. So in death they're buried forever,
gargling and endless hymn. So that's the sulent more of
interest to us, and are the purely wrathful and they
they'll you'll find them at the surface of the water
wrestling with each other. So just imagine these naked forms
driving in the slime like pigs and filth. They're punching
each other, they're gouging, their clawing, they're biting, and not
(05:31):
just each other, but some of them are biting themselves.
They're carrying at their own flesh like a really dark
Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. Yeah, I guess, I guess. Imagine
their shirtless. Yeah, they tend to be naked in the
artistic interpretations, then this is This is also interesting because
Dante ends up seeing somebody he knows, this guy named
Felippo Argentie, and Dante ends up encountering various people that
(05:54):
he knew in life. That's what a recurring theme and inferno,
and it's also a means by which he typical pay
either show some sympathy for the center or some understanding
of the scent, and also identifies it in himself. There
are various debates on who Argentie actually was. There's one
account that it because Dante was banned from Florence at
one point, lost his property, and spent the rest of
(06:14):
his life wishing he could return to Florence. And so
one idea is that Argentie was somebody who ended up
purchasing land that had belonged to Dante's family after he
was driven out, So he, you know, he may have
had a personal acts to grind here with this individual,
because Dante sees him, He's like, yeah, I hate that dude.
I really would like to see him dunked under these
waters before we're done here, in verticals like yeah, just wait,
(06:35):
it will happen. And and then the guy like he
sort of crawls up onto the boat and talks to
Dante a little bit, but then the other people in
the swamp end up tearing him apart to this Argentine character.
So do you not cross Dante's what I'm hearing? Yeah,
but see, but Dante was feeling wrath himself, and so
this is how he he summons the emotion inside himself.
He's even as he's seeing in this in the torments
(06:57):
around him. So, so that's pretty much the inferno version
of wrath. In purgatory, the souls purge themselves of wrath
and in a slightly different manner. And again purgatory, this
is the amount of purgatory that rises from Earth to heaven,
that connects Earth to heaven, and it's when Dante eventually
emerges from Hell. He has to climb this mountain up
to the terrestrial paradise and then into Heaven. So if
(07:19):
you find yourself on the terrace where wrath is dealt with,
you'll find that these individuals walking through bick smoke that's
darker than the night, and they can't see the outside world.
They're experiencing hallucinatory visions in which they see examples of meekness,
which is the virtue that is opposite wrath. So you
see this idea of in purgatory working through wrath. Is
(07:39):
wrath is this thing that clouds our judgment and clouds
our views of the world. And I think that's such
an apt description because when you lose yourself to anger,
that is exactly what it feels like, right. You cannot
think clearly. All of a sudden you have trapped yourself
into a corner in the situation and you're trying to
get out of it. Yeah, it's especially obvious after the
(08:00):
fact with with you know, the little things that inspire
our rat you know, we're like, oh, well, this totally
messed with my schedule today, and now I'm mad, you know.
And then and then you feel afterwards, you're you know, hopefully,
if you have any amount of self consciousness about what
you're doing and how your mind works, you look back
and you're like, wow, that was that was ridiculous? Why
was that upset? But of course in the worst cases,
(08:20):
you know, it just completely. I mean, we end up
polking out right, we end up harming things in the
world around us, exactly. Let me hit Buddhism real quick
before we move into the science though. I mentioned before
how you have the wheel of stam Sara. This is
the wheel of life though that you see especially in
too Betan Buddhism, which shows all the various realms of
existence in which a life may be born, which you
can think of in terms of one life to the next,
(08:43):
like I was bad in this life, so in my
next life, I'm occupying a harsher existence, or oh I
was good in this life next life is going to
be better, or you can think of it in terms
of my emotional state right now is this, and based
on this emotional state, my next emotional state will be
something else, you know. So it's like one state and
form and the other are to were consciousness evolves. But
at the very center of this wheel you find these
(09:05):
three poisons which I touched on before. You have a snake,
a pig, and a cock. The snake represents hate wrath,
the other the pig is like delusion and ignorance, and
the cock is greed that sometimes less, but the snake
is hate. And that's where we find the center of
wrath that's moving the whole wheel. That's just full of suffering.
As far as the realms into which one may be reincarnated,
and these are also in the realms that are in
(09:26):
touch with the way humans feel in the state of
our own souls. You have the Nakara realm, and this
is the hell realm, the realm that's more typical of
something you would see in Dante, full of hatred and
torment and demons. The hell being was ripping people apart,
that kind of thing, and that's in the lower realms
but then in the higher realms you see the Ashera realm,
and this is the room of the Demi gods, powerful beings,
(09:47):
but despite their power, despite their freedom, they're not in
the chains of Nakara. They're living it up. They're just
one step below the gods. But they're defined by anger,
They're defined by jealousy and war, and they end up
wasting all this freedom and opportunity being on the pursuit
of power. So when they ultimately die, they live long lives,
but they eventually do die. Then they're born down into
the lower realms. So you see this interesting extaposition of
(10:10):
the two states of being. And then of course there's
the human realm in there, which is a balance of
all these various realms, so you've also have plenty of
wrath there as well. Yeah. I think it's interesting that
the snake is the symbol of that because it is
sort of you know that you think about the snake
swallowing itself. I think actually there's a medieval name for this.
It has various names. I can't remember the one you're
thinking of off hand, where the snake is biting its
(10:32):
own tail, consuming his own tail. Yeah, yeah, and you
get into you know, ideas of the world serpent, the
exactly the organmender. But you know, there's this idea that
you're inflicting hurt upon yourself, right, and so I think
it's interesting now to take that knowledge and turn it
over to what's happening in your brain. Yes, when you're
suffering about of anger, I guess you could say, oddly enough,
(10:53):
I want to point out that eld dope does not
show up on the scene here. Yeah, it's been with
us for so long that I thought for sure that
it would be prominent in this, but it is not.
It is really a story about the amygdala. Well, I
mean it's it's probably it's there in the cocktail somewhere,
but it's not playing. No, you're right, you're right. It's
just it's a it's a base note, or maybe I
should say it's a top note. It's a fruity top
(11:14):
note for some people. And we'll talk about that a
little bit. But yeah, it's a story about the amygdala,
which helps us to process emotion. We've talked about this
quite a bit before, and in the case of anger,
it works in tandem with a number of biological responses,
including the release of adrenaline. So it kind of makes
sense for it because whenever you've experienced anger wrath, I'm
sure that you've had a moment where you just felt
(11:34):
a surge of energy. Is that tension energy? That's because
when we get angry within a quarter of a second,
and magdala can serve up an action inspired by wrath
if if it weren't for the frontal lobe, because this
is sort of our seat of reason in this area
of our brain also experiences a flow of blood and
(11:54):
attempt to sit there and kind of way the situation
and the response and altogether this process can take just
two seconds, right, So if there's a trigger that makes
you angry, just within two seconds, you could be serving
up a punch or you could be trying to restrain yourself.
And this is really why people often say, you know,
count to ten if you're angry, Yeah, because it gives
(12:15):
you a chance to kind of pull your adrenaline addled
self together. Yeah. Or if you're one thing that I've
practiced in the past and also told other people, it's like,
if you if you have that angry email you really
want to send a go ahead and write the the email.
Don't put the two in the field though, Yeah, don't
put the two in the field. Maybe just write it
in the text document, then shut it down and let
it sit for a while. Industry, Like the next day
(12:36):
you could go back to that and be like, oh man,
that was just a fool's errand right there. Yeah, well
what was I What was I doing with that? Yeah? Yeah,
I can't help but think of it in terms of
like the amigdala in the frontal lobe is like that.
The amigoala is kind of like the you know, you
know the classic image of the devil on one shoulder
and the angel on the other. Instead, they'll imagine like
a pro wrestler on one shoulder and a and like
a Buddhist monk on the other, and the pro wrestler
(12:58):
is the end of the emotional amigdola, and it's it's like,
go out there, do it, do it, get angry, don't
take this stuff off anybody, punch right, angry emails, stop around,
huff and puff. And then on the other side you
you have the Buddhist monk, and the Bodhist monk is like,
let's chill it out, Let's think a lot ofically. Let's
think calmly about this. But you have to depend on
that monk having enough energy to put up with the enigdolla,
(13:20):
because sometimes the enigola is going to be all right,
let's do it, let's crack some heads, and then the
monks like, you know, I'm done, I'm gonna beat here. Well,
you know what, And there's a there's a couple of
things that could actually weaken your inner monk response. By
the way, I really like this idea of both of them,
that the monk of the wrestlers are both wearing robes
in my version that I see on your on your
shoulders right now. But a couple of circumstances. One is
(13:42):
you could have sustained damage to your frontal lobe, like
our poor friend Phineas Gauge. Right, this is a guy
who in nineteen was working on the railroad and when
he was excavating rock, and he was tamping gunpowder down
in its drill hole, and there was an ax a
little explosion which caused the tamping iron he was using
to thrust itself through his left cheek and out his skull, yeah,
(14:06):
like out his like completely through his head and then
in the air on the other side they basically gave
him the frontal of botomy. Yeah. Yeah, and he survived it.
But what happens he became childlike and became bullying, and
he started to use profanity. Again. This is so this
guy went from mild manner to like crazy town and
in a very short amount of time. And they didn't
(14:27):
understand enough about the brain at the time to really
attribute that to his accident. Yeah. And by the way,
if you want to hear more about gauge and and
other things of this nature, we did a podcast to
Change your Mind the Hard Way where we dealt with
some of some of these things. Another circumstance is sarotonin.
You serotonin levels. There was a study conducted by the
University of Cambridge and this was actually reported in a
(14:48):
Science Daily article. They talked about healthy volunteers and what
they did is they took these healthy volunteers and altered
their serotonin levels by manip pulating their diet. Because we
know that your diet can affect the serotonin levels in
your brain and make you, you know, really sort of
regulate your mood. Yeah, there's certain foods are gonna behind serotonin.
(15:10):
And if you've ever been to a health food store
and look around it supplements. There obviously a lot of
serotonin supplements that are aimed at helping you out with
your serotonin level. And you know, we've talked about this
in the past two especially with our podcast on decision fatigue.
Just make sure that you're good enough to eat, you know,
throughout the day, because that really does affect your ability
to regulate your moods. You are what you eat video,
(15:31):
so are what you think. So the two come together.
That's right, mind to think. That's on my bumper sticker
on my car. So okay. What they did they manipulate
their diets. On the serotonin depletion day, the volunteers were
given a mixture of amino acids that lacked tripped a fin,
the building block for serotonin, and on the placebo day,
(15:52):
they were given the same mixture but with a normal
amount of tripped de fan okay okay. And then the
researchers scan the volunteers brains using fmr I and as
the volunteers viewed faces with angry, sad, and neutral expressions,
and then they were able to measure how different regions
reacted and communicated with one another. When the volunteers viewed
the angry faces as supposed to the sad or neutral faces.
(16:14):
So the research revealed that low brain serotonin and make
communications between specific brain regions. We're talking again about the
magdala and frontal lobe much weaker. And the finding exactly
suggest that when our serotonin levels are low and maybe
really much more difficult for the prefrontal cortex to control
emotional responses to anger. I mean, this is this is
(16:36):
a this kind of a dumb moment. But at the
same time, it's like, yeah, you know what, when I
was angry, I was really hungry, and I was tired,
and I was hungry. Uh, so it makes sense that
the serotonal levels could affect our mood like that. So
to put it back in terms of the pro wrestler
and the monk on your shoulders, in the case of
Phineas Gauge, the monk was just completely taken out, yeah yeah,
(17:01):
by by a rod. In the case of the serotonin issue,
the individual hasn't had enough to eat or for whatever reason,
the serotonin level has dropped and so has the communication
between the two. So the pro wrestlers on one shoulder
saying let's do it, let's go out there and let's
kick some butt. I'm not gonna take this anymore. How
dare they do this to me? And the monk is
is like yelling across a chasm here um and saying saying, hey,
(17:22):
calm down, calm down, and the pross was like, what
what's he talking about? And then launches back and well,
here's the thing too. Let's say that you are a
person who has two pro wrestlers on your shoulder. In
other awards, you are prone to be more aggressive and
therefore more prone to anger. Your communications between your MICHAELA
in your preferntial cortex are going to be weekend regardless.
(17:44):
So when you have the depletion, it's much more pronounced.
What's interesting about this and I was reading this experiment
as well, where they then they referred to them as
short fusers and the Brewders. So the short fusers, that's
the guy was like, Oh, you took me off. I'm
gonna punch somebody in the face. Yeah, And then you
have the brooders who are like, oh, that person really
made me mad. I'm gonna pretty much be musable the
(18:04):
rest of the day, which brings me back to thinking
about Dante with the sullen and the wrathful. So I
wonder if you could, if you could look at the
short fusers are the ones tearing each other up and
punching everyone in the face on the surface of sticks
the river sticks, And then the brooders are the sullen
buried in the muck at the bottom, gargling their hymns
into the flying Yeah, the powders just need to meditate,
(18:25):
and the short fusers just need a sandwich because really there, yes, absolutely,
but really, if you are a short fused person, you
really are much more sensitive to your serotonin levels, is
what this is spelling out. So it is very important
to try to get that sandwich in your belly. Really again,
to simplify it. In fact, they've been experiments where if
(18:46):
you actually look at the brain and you you scan
it and and you see what's lighting up during these moments
of wrath or when there's some sort of stimuli that
provokes wrath, you can see that the difference between short
fusers and brooders and seconds. The medial prefrontal cortex associated
with self awareness and emotional regulation quickly lights up with
the broods, and so does the hippocampus involved in memory.
(19:06):
So as they fume, people repeatedly relive the events in
their minds. It's like they're chewing over that thing that
made them mad. They're continually tweaking that story in their
head about that thing that happened to them that was
sucky and now they're mad. So anger can be so fleeting, right,
it can be such a flash, like how long is
this taking? This whole process, this just taking seconds. They
(19:28):
found in this experience that the degree of hippocampal activation
predicted how much people tended to ruminate. So you can
actually see, depending on what the hippocampus is doing, you
can tell how much they're brooding on the anger. I'm
imagining a little sign on the fMRI I that shows
need sandwich, and it's just like flashing over the prefrontal cortex. Okay,
so we're gonna take a quick break, but when we
(19:48):
come back, we're going to talk about whether or not
you could be attracted to anger. All right, we're back,
so wrap to what extent is it? Is it attractive?
I mean it's I mean not so much. Usually people
go out of their way to avoid people who are angry, right,
I mean it's often referred to as as showing ones.
But you know, more or less they're like, I really
(20:10):
showed his butt on that one, right, but they did
not have to say Bobby, you know what I mean.
It's generally like they let wrath take control of them
and they really kind of look like a fool for it.
You know, no their emotional address, you knew where they live. Yeah,
but then you think of wrath, and you think of
so many there's so many things in our culture where
wrath is celebrated. It generally it involves creating a fictional
(20:31):
or just creating even real world circumstances that allow the
wrath to manifest in a way that is either acceptable
or relatable. Um for instance, Incredible Hulk. You know, this
is an example where a mild manner, Bruce Banner, he's
getting kicked around and then the rage gets ahold of him, right,
and he turns into Holk and starts kicking. But or
just any masculine testosterone fueled action flick where the baddies
(20:54):
are bad and so our hero is even badder and
starts just wailing on people, you know, Bruce Lee type stuff.
We do get something out of that. There's something appealing
about that I'm on various levels. I mean, you can
break it down to the viewer of some of some
sort of film like this. They have issues in their
life that they would on some level like to be
able to deal with in a direct manner. And so
I'm going to watch something or play a game in
(21:16):
which somebody deals with their problems with direct violence. Well, right,
And there are some people who do bait other people
in order to raise their hackles, right and get a
little charge of anger, because they're interested in provocation, right
and getting into a fight. Yeah, And I feel like
this is interesting because I think we've all done this,
or maybe not all, but most of us. I feel
(21:37):
like I've felt this at one point or another where
you're not necessarily like a complete bully or anything like that,
like nothing like really heinous, But were you just sort
of poking at somebody just to get like, you know,
the little things that might annoy your significant other, and
if the mood is right, you might just prime a
little to see of it. Okay. So could it be
(21:58):
that on that day you war, testosterone levels were higher
than they usually were, right, This is for both men
and women. University of Michigan Psychology study found that some
people find angry expressions rewarding well, and they they actually
interpreted as rewarding. Tesascer and levels were actually measured in
(22:19):
a group via saliva samples. And then this group was
asked to work on a learning task that involved a
flash of images, some with angry faces, some with neutral faces,
and some images containing absolutely no faces, and the images
flashed by so quickly that the participants weren't really able
to detect a pattern. In fact, though this task if
they were working on, was really to gauge whether or
(22:40):
not they could subliminally work out a pattern, and it
was found that men and women with high testosterone levels
learned the sequence of keypresses better when the sequence was
followed by an angry face. And the conclusion is that
the anger expressions were rewarding to the brain and that's
why they had a better memory of this. That's interesting.
That finds me of this article we're looking at from
(23:01):
Wired that was talking about the Steve Jobs. Yeah, it
was like the mobile meat portions of the original the
first iPhone came out. iPhone comes out, everyone loves it,
but mobile meat doesn't work. I mean, they's supposed to
be you know, on par with blackberries applications, and you
know it's supposed to actually fill that need. It was
an important part of the product. And Jobs was notoriously perfectionist.
(23:24):
He had a certain vision. He wanted to see that
that vision brought to life. And he was known for
having steam coming out of all the time. Right, and
interestingly enough, he practiced Buddhism. I know, I was just
thinking about that too. Yeah, but I mean he probably
realized that, hey, I need to I mean he I
understand he did realize, and maybe his anger needs to
be be treated in some parts of my life, but
maybe not when it came to mobile meat not working,
because he got he lined everybody up, got him into
(23:46):
the theater there and just continued to like lay into
him for I think for like a solid hour, just
thrashed them, I mean not physically, but just let him
have it. Told them that they should all hate each
other for for what had happened and they had brought
dishonor to the brand, like basically telling them that they
are the beings and the river sticks and the should
(24:06):
just tear each other apart because they well and they
should commit you know, mental Harry carry you know, but yeah,
I mean here's a good example of I mean, it's
the ultimately, it's the kind of like negative feedback that
we all rail against whenever we encounter even like a
little bit of it, you know, I mean, nobody likes
to be in trouble. Nobody likes a working environment where
somebody's on your case for something. It makes you angry,
(24:29):
It makes you, you know, it makes you so, it
makes you kind of hate your job. But some of
the evidence lines up to support the idea that it
also inspires you on some level. But it did it
Actually you're angry, sure, but then you're you're committed to
to getting it done. Okay. So to that end, I
have to read this quote from the co author of
the University of Michigan Angry Faces study because I think
of Steve Jobs now. He says, quote, it's kind of
(24:51):
striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as
a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a
nonconscious level and be like a tasty morsel that some
people will vigorously work for. So I don't know, maybe
there were people on jobs as team who actually responded
to that well, I mean, the thing could be he
(25:11):
knew his team, well yeah, and he knew that these
are guys that will respond and got yeah, well I'm
am using guys in the gender news. These are guys
who who realized, see, now you're irritated about that. I saw.
I'm not irritated. I'm I'm actually amused. Okay, But maybe yeah,
he realized that this is a crowd that is stimulated
by that, and a wired writer or somebody commenting on
(25:34):
the outside or they're not a part of that group,
and maybe they're more of a positive reinforcement environment. Like like,
it's easy for us to comment on that because because
I feel like you're at house. Stuff works. Aside from
the days where Jerry comes to the halls with a
bull like physically with a bullphip and and hits everybody.
Aside from those days, Matt just gives us the occasional
dressing down just for fun. Aside from that, it's a
(25:55):
pretty prett pretty positive place to work. It's more about
positively enforcement brainstorming that kind of thing. Brainstorming, of course,
well in our mother environment where they're no wrong answers,
there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Though I have
heard a few. Yeah, and in our mother company, Discovery,
I mean it's it's all about you know, everybody wearing
the lovey dovey pants. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I mean
to get some more love pants because I I split
(26:17):
them the other day. Yeah. In fact, didn't we got
something about a flash momb here occurrence happening because anyway,
I wasn't sure if that was actually happening or that
was an example. I think that's an example of things
that can happen during a brainstorm. Um So anyway, that
is another story for another time. But let's talk about
when you are in a chronic state of anger. Okay,
(26:38):
so you're in jobs as team and let's just assume
that all the time it's all anger, because it's not
going to be, of course, but you do encounter people
like this. We're like, man, they are angry all the time.
They're just constantly fuming over every little or big thing
in their life. Yeah, well, there's the state of response
can start to take a toll and you obviously, chronically
angry people may not produce enough actal col hopefully I've
(27:01):
said that right, a hormone which tempers the more severe
effects of adrenaline. And their nervous system is constantly working
and can eventually become over taxed, leading to a weakened
heart and stiffer arteries. Yeah. This incidentally was the first
neurotransmitter discovered, isolated one by a German biologists Atto Loewie,
who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work. Yeah,
(27:22):
and it's really important because there's all sorts of potential
for damage not just the heart, but the liver and
the kidney as well as having high cholesterol. Yeah, it's
responsible for much of the stimulation of muscles, including muscles
in the gas from intestinal set system. And it's also
found in sensory neurons and in the autonomic nervous system.
So it's a it's a part of scheduling even rim sleep.
So okay. Yeah, and if you think we're kidding about this,
(27:44):
just pull out one more stat um. And the two
thousand and one study of thirteen thousand subjects, people with
the highest levels of anger had twice the risk of
coronary artery disease and three times the risk of heart
attack as compared to the subjects with the lowest levels
of anger. See this makes it even harder for me
to watch Lewis Black these days, you know. Really the
whole stick is like I'm so angry at these things
(28:06):
in the world that you're not right. It's a great bit.
He's a great talented comedian, but as he gets older
for me to watch him on the Daily Show, because
I'm like, this is not good for your health, Lewis,
you gotta you gotta chill out, Like I mean, maybe too.
I don't know a lot about Louis Black, so so
maybe to a large extent, is an act. I mean,
he said he's a professional, but I feel like he
(28:27):
is summoning some real anger when performing, and I would
just I don't want to watch him keel over. Okay, So,
assuming he's not in that state all the time, he's
just kind of doing it as part of his stick,
it actually could be an upside for him, Okay, okay,
So and actually for all of us there could be
an upside for anger. Again, assuming that this is not
something that we're playing into and playing into the destructive
(28:48):
violent forces. I mean, there's a way to actually be
constructively angry. Yes, yeah, what they found some folks who
like to poke around and studies actually researchers, mathish bos
Carsten did Drew, and Bernard nishtad Uh. They publish the
results in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that
participants who are made to feel angry and then we're
(29:09):
asked to brainstorm exhibited key hallmarks of creative brainstorming, including
unstructured thinking, and in a comparison to their counterparts identified
as sad or neutral people, the very angry participants came
up with more ideas as well as more original ideas.
And now this was a short lived window, right liked
(29:29):
they couldn't sustain this. Obviously, they couldn't sustain their anger
as well, which was a good thing. But right after
they were made to feel a bit of wrath, their
brain was basically kind of unfettered and not thinking systematically.
And this is where people think that anger could be
really helpful, because you are getting that surge of adrenaline
and you do become laser focused in the way that
(29:50):
you want to remove an obstacle, or you're sitting there
saying how could this be? How can I make this better?
And if you actually point that anger the solution rather
than say the person or the thing, you could make
some headway and be really productive I believe the same
study or maybe this is a different one that was
talking about how sadness sullenness if you will, can also
(30:11):
have you know, it's bad in the short term, but
in the long term it can also it also leads
to increased creativity, increased drive in your work. Yeah, with
some of this too that people who may be depressed,
although um, and we've talked about this, it can hamper
creativity at points, but there's some of this is tied
to self actualization or being able to see yourself in
(30:34):
a realistic light and then be able to deal with
obstacles in a long term way because you're not at
that that very moment sort of fooling yourself into like
I can do this, right, I don't know. It's a
little bit of depressing way to put it, but well,
it reminds me of most guys anyway, really love the
first one or two Batman movies, right, the films not
(30:56):
based some of the ladies, some of the ladies, my
wife doesn't like them. But but these are very much
a product of a time during which in the United
States have the Bush administration, which, being a conservative administration,
was generally by and large and not as popular with
the with liberal artistic types. Um. And then you have
you have war, you have economic downturn. Well that economic
(31:18):
downturn really comes after the Bush administration. But but the
same area, you have a lot of negative things going on.
But if you see the art that rises up out
of these these issues, out of this paint, I guess
it's kind of like a nice Well, it sucks that
there was a big war, it sucks that it lasted forever,
but but hey, we got some cool art about out
of it. Right Well, I think what you're saying is
that anger. Anger is mobilizing forces to get out there,
(31:41):
think creatively and say something. Well, and I was thinking
about that in terms of protests too. I mean, there's
a point where protests are really productive, right, and then
there's a point where they can become very destructive for
you know, devolve. So you're saying you don't have high
hopes for the third Batman movie from Christopher Nolan. No,
I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, done well,
(32:02):
anger can be really helpful, right Well, but again you
have to bring a bit of mental energy to it
to say, how am I reacting to this at this
very moment. And that's where that ten second cooling off
period is really important, because if you just let that
two seconds rule you, you you know, you can get a
hammer to the head. Yeah, I mean, if you look
back and just think about it evolutionary, you can imagine
this primitive human out on the prehistoric planes. He's killed
(32:23):
a deer or something, right, and then there's this other
dude coming along. It's gonna try and eat his deer.
That raises his hackles. He's like, who's this guy think?
He is trying to steal my dear flank out from underneath.
And then that anger can be used to mobilize him
to fight for and keep what he's his and what
his survival depends on. And although he's not quite that
sophisticated yet, one day he will use that wonderful neo
(32:44):
cortex and he'll work out his problems via communication words
um in a way that he can say, let's not
fight about this, let's let's come to the logical conclusion
about whose flesh this is? Okay? Right? That person will
redirect his anger into a productive way. You know, you
look like you're not buying No, No, I'm buying it.
(33:04):
I'm buying it completely. I mean, I think the interesting
thing about Rath, like all of these sins, really is
that there is a level where it makes sense and
in the motivating force in life, and then there's that
tipping point where it becomes something horrible and to be avoided.
I don't know, but it maybe it seems like with
Wrath that the tipping point occurs a little sooner. Yes
it does. Yeah, I mean there are levels of Vancor
right now. So there you have it. Again. This is
(33:25):
just one episode in a series, so as you're listening
to this, feel free to go back and explore our
previous five episodes. And there's also a good chance that
you're listening to this in the future. Well you're obviously
listening to it in the future, so the final episode
on Sloth may also be out as well by the
time you hear this. All right, let's call the robot
over and read a quick listener mail. What have you
(33:46):
got for us? All right? This one comes to us
from Michael. Michael writes in in response to our episode
Stindall Syndrome kicked in the brain by Art, He says,
I had no idea this was a thing. A few
years ago. When I was in college studying design, my
art history class went to the TUT exhibit. I was
walking through, rousing at the pieces, disappointed that Tut wasn't
(34:08):
even there, when suddenly I felt the stamp that is
gonna be And then suddenly I felt a hand shoulder
h When suddenly I felt the need to stop and
look up. I saw the crook and flail on display.
I lost my breath. The room's fun and all of
the commotion disappeared. It felt like I was hallucinating. I
(34:28):
swear that I was looking up at the at a
pharaoh holding them uh and these, of course those two instruments.
At a pharaoh mummified, they hold the crossocrounds their chest.
I was completely paralyzed for what seemed to be hours,
until someone bumped into me. It was really crowded. It
was then that I realized how old and beautiful the
crook and flail were that I was looking at. It
was so very overwhelming. I had forgotten about my childhood
(34:50):
love of all things Egyptian. I didn't want to leave
the room. I wanted to get closer, but there were
too many people. I nearly cried at the side of it.
And I am not the overly emotive type wild stuff.
Thanks for the great episode I listened to each and everyone. Cool. Yeah,
that's that's an awesome description of what Stenhell syndrome is, right. Yeah. Yeah,
we discussed that podcast how they are a number of
different things informing. It's not something where it's like, oh,
(35:11):
there's something broken in my brain and makes art pound
me whenever I look at it, but like, here's a
great example of someone who came into the exhibit with
certain expectations, certain expectations, but also this hast, this emotional,
emotional past with the subject matter, and then they're standing
in front of it. This thing that maybe existed only
in their mind before is manifest before them and it's
ancient and it's beautiful, and it just overwhelms them. So,
(35:33):
you know, I was just thinking that this reminds me
of an article that was recently published in New York
Times called The Thin Places, or I think that's an
approximation of the title, but it talks about how when
we go on vacations, we go it doesn't have to
be a vacation, be a park, it could be a
special place, but it's perspective changing and they call it
the thin place because it occupies a place between earth
(35:54):
and heaven. So it's like the places where reality grows
at them and yes, pushes in on yes, and it
takes you outside of yourself. Yeah uh so, yeah, that's
that's just one of the things that a museum can
do to your brain, right, Yeah, Well, it reminds me
in our Scott Baker's fantasy. It looks there are these
places that are basically the thin places. But the other
thing about that is that madness can set them from
(36:14):
the outside. So well it seems to fall right in. Yeah,
we encount of these thin places where art can effect
us and can maybe drive us a little temporarily. Matt, Well,
it's like Jill Bolt Taylor who had the stroke and
she started to see her own molecules melding with with
her environment. You know, I mean not it's not fed extreme,
but that's sort of a metaphor for what's happening. But anyway,
(36:38):
you know, Yeah, but that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that
with a Sydney. Maybe it was the emails from Michael,
but it's signs Sydney, So Michael Slash Sydney, thanks for sharing,
and we loved here from anyone else who's had an
experience like that, with something with art, with history, et
cetera that they've encountered, and likewise, let us know what
you're experienced with wrath is, how do you deal with
it in your daily lives, how do you experience it
(36:58):
in other people? And how do you mitigate it? To
what extent does wrath actually inspire you to great things?
And to what extent does it seem to hold you back?
You can always find us on Facebook and Twitter. Check
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On Facebook, we are Stuff to Blow your Mind and
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(37:18):
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