SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to A Fresh Face in Hell. I'm your host, Jonathan Evan. Every week we talk to someone new and interesting, somebody intellectually curious, somebody who will hopefully renew our faith in this cold, cool world we live in. A Fresh Face in Hell. We like to be frightened, uh, whether it's jump scares or psychological terror. As humans, we're drawn to the sensation of fear. Um, my kids are all crazy for horror films. As the genre horror is more popular than ever, I'm a realist, so the realer the horror, the less fantastical, the more I'm likely to be unsettled by it. But that's not the case for everybody. I guess maybe different people process fear in different ways. Um, I I don't know how it works. Well, today, today's Fresh Face in Hell, neuroscientist and PhD Austin Limb has recently released an exploration on this very subject called Horror on the Brain. Uh, I've got a bunch of questions for him. So uh, Austin, thanks for being our Fresh Face in Hell this week.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Thrilled to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

So, did did you decide to tackle this subject as a horror and science fiction fan or as a neuroscientist?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

My my angle into this is through neuroscience. Uh, I'm always trying to not let my career or my job define my identity. But I think this is something I see in a lot of in common with a lot of academics is that they that was their identity. They're just so driven by a thing that they're just absolutely obsessed with. For me, it just happens to be the brain and how it processes things. So I just thought what's kind of a natural crossover between my interest there and pop culture and other things. And that's kind of how I got into this whole this whole thing. I'm always looking for kind of pop culture references to work into my lectures, into my classes. So I think people are interested in horror, they're interested in science fiction. Why don't I talk about how the brain does that stuff? How does it care about those things? Why does it care about those things?

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Yeah, I think there's a lot of assumptions. I'm interested to dig into this because you go very deep on this. And that makes sense about look, when when you have an area of expertise or something, it's pretty hard not to view the the world through that lens. I look at the world as a fiction writer. Every single experience I have, I I view it also through kind of a fictional lens and like looking for like looking for the actual essence of it, you know, instead of the, you know, every dialogue, every transactional dialogue between people and stuff like that. Um, so this is more than just about fight or flight. I I mean, it's more than just some primordial adrenaline thing. I mean, let's start delving into this, how how fear really works.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

Yeah, sure thing. Uh, I like the the use of the phrase fight or flight, but I'm just gonna drop this as sort of this uh super trained neuroscientist. I like the phrase battle or skedaddle um just as well. But the the other thing that sometimes people call it a sympathetic nervous system response, but that's whatever it is. Um, this battle or skedaddle response, just as you're mentioning, it is this ancient drive for survival, essentially, right? And the way the process works is that we have these circuits upstream somewhere in our brain that then communicate downstream to the rest of our body, telling us to be ready for some kind of high energy situation, right? And so we see things like elevated heart rate, elevated blood pressure, dilation of the bronchioles, which lets us get more oxygen to our muscles, which lets us do the things. And the sort of upstream initial site for where this all takes place, this little brain structure called the amygdala. There's a lot of debate about exactly which part of the amygdala, right? We like to categorize things as humans. And so we like to sort of lump things all together, but it's probably made up of a bunch of different parts. Um, some of the early one really fascinating case study that demonstrated why this fear response happens was from this very, very rare individual. Um, this is a person who was born with this unusual condition where there was a very rapid degeneration of her amygdala. So by the time she was a teenager, her amygdala, you know, you take a look at these brain scans and you see these two giant gaping holes where the amygdala would be in a in a in a typical person. They were completely missing in her.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

So it's like the physical, the physical structure of the amygdala actually deteriorating, or just the nervous responses of the amygdala?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, it was the actual amygdala.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

So for the Oh wow, so almost like muscle, uh, like like uh uh what do you call it when your muscles uh atrophy?

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Yeah, it was kind of like an atrophy. It's this buildup of this calcification that was neurotoxic, and it ended up just basically destroying the amygdala in this person. For whatever reason, it's very specific to this brain region. I'm not sure what the mechanism is behind that, but it's unusual because by the time she was in her 20s, she's reported never having experienced fear ever. And so it was really interesting. You know, you bring this person to the laboratory, you show her a bunch of video clips from all kinds of different media designed to provoke emotions. So they showed her clips from the ring, like where that creepy girl climbs out of the well. They showed her clips from arachnophobia, where the spider is descending on her in the shower, and then you show a bunch of control clips designed to provoke different emotions, like happiness, sadness, anger, and so on. And when they compared her responses to everyone else, she said that those other stimuli, yeah, they provoked sadness, happiness, and anger. But when it came to those fearful stimuli, she reported it was a zero. She experienced no fear in those moments.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

That's interesting. So she could even be startled, like a jump scare.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Yeah, yeah. She was pretty much immune to those things. She recognized what the word meant. She realized what it meant from a sort of uh high order conscious level that yeah, I know what fear is, I know why people are afraid of it. So it wasn't a matter of putting herself into other people's shoes, but it was just a matter of her experiencing those fears, and she just didn't. They they brought her, they sort of, you know, these scientists are always trying to like push boundaries. So they brought her to a pet shop and they said, Okay, here's a snake. Hold this snake. You know, snakes are one of the most common fear-provoking stimuli, and so she was just like, Okay, sure. And then here's a cage with a tarantula in it. Now put your hand in the cage, let the tarantula crawl on you. She was willing to do that.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

So they brought her to interesting because it like another part of her brain has to be able to reason the danger. Right? I mean, she could logically see why you wouldn't want to put your hand in with the tarantula it's confusing.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Yeah, that's totally true. So there is that ro that rational logical component, and a lot of those, the the the sort of intellectual side to fear would normally be modulating the amygdala, sending signals to the amygdala saying, you know, this is something you should be afraid of. But in her case, because that interconnection site between the origin of the fear response and those higher order processes wasn't present, she didn't process that component of it. So she was willing to do all these scary things, including walking through a haunted house exhibit. So they brought her to a haunted house exhibit. You know, things you see on the screen, you can distance yourself from them pretty well in some cases. But when it comes to walking through and experiencing firsthand the jump scares of a haunted house, she was ready to do it. She led everyone in her group through. There's this funny little twist of irony where she actually reached out and touched one of the scare actors' faces and scared him, which I think is kind of funny in its own. And then they also went on to do these interviews with her about what about instances in your life when you imagine you could have experienced fear? And she described something that they went on to call the knife incident, where she was coming home from work late one night. She took a shortcut through a park that she'd never crossed through before, and in the park on the bench, there was some stranger. And as she walked past him, he just randomly jumped up, grabbed her by the shirt, and put a knife to her neck and said, I'm going to cut you. For whatever reason, he just randomly let her go, and she displayed no instance, no trace of fear. She reported walking home. She didn't didn't call the police or anything. And the next day, she actually took that same shortcut through the park.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

That's interesting. Well, in prison, I've heard, you know, the people that aren't scared are the scariest people, right? Like anybody who's just sort of flatlining in a confrontational situation, those are the sort of cool customers you don't want to fuck with. I keep asking myself as I go through your book and all these big ideas, like, why do we like to be scared? Like to be scared. I mean, it makes sense to me. I mean, neurologically, it's a hard idea to resolve because we're hardwired to avoid danger. That makes sense. Is that something to do with metabolizing danger at a safe distance, as you just mentioned? And you describe fear as one of your our oldest and most powerful emotional systems. Well, why do you think horror remains so effective at triggering these primordial neurological responses, even when we know what we're watching isn't real?

SPEAKER_02 10:04

Yeah, that's a great question. It's it's totally a paradox, right? We know that fear is a negative emotional state. We don't like to feel it, but yet so many people are out there watching horror films. Um, there's a couple of reasons why. There's one possible idea behind it is that it has to do with uh um uh this reaffirmation of our own sort of sense of morality. Because in a lot of the films, you see something bad ends up happening to the evildoer, right? Until you get that, you know, the little teaser at the end where it's like, oh, maybe he's still alive kind of thing. Right. So maybe we like knowing, we like we just enjoy knowing that, okay, our sense of what is wrong and right has been reaffirmed by this work of fiction. And then you get what I find to be the really compelling argument, the one that comes from the evolutionary perspective, and that is we we have seen that through evolution we we are sort of designed or we've been honed to recognize fear, and maybe we're supposed to feel fear every so often. So throughout all of you know human existence, we were faced with threats that occasionally cause these spikes in our nervous system, right? That cause that battle or skedaddle reflex. And one of the things that we know we have in today's world, we don't often think about it, but we're actually living in the safest time that any people have ever lived before. And we don't experience those sudden spikes in fear as often as we're maybe supposed to, right? And so maybe the idea being that because we don't get those spikes, we still have a body that's designed that that came about because of these occasional changes to our nervous system. And so we probably see more cases of things like anxiety now than we ever have before because our body is trying to ramp up that emotional state. We're trying to see high blood pressure every so often, but instead of getting those spikes like our evolutionary ancestors did, we're getting this long, slow elevation that persists over the course of weeks, months, years instead of the sudden shock from fear that you would ideally want to get as an early evolutionary um proto-human.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

And yet at the same time, I look at for me personally, I feel like for most of the country, let's just talk about America now, the past eight or so years, I've had more reason to be terror, terrified than ever. I mean, like uh financially, civil liberties-wise, uh potential violence-wise. You would think that that, and then in the meanwhile, horror just seems to be getting more and more popular. So it's sort of it sort of contradicts what you're saying about like the calmer the environment, the more we need to spike that up, just as sort of some sort of evolutionary impulse. Now I feel like horror, we shouldn't. It's kind of like uh it's a this is a weird equivocation, but you know how uh the crooners died with World War II. You know, it used to be all about Tommy Dorsey's band and young Sinatra crooning and these slow love songs. And then when the war came around and everyone was anxious, nobody wanted these slow crooning songs anymore. They wanted these big swinging, you know, happier arrangements. Am I making any sense? Like that equivocation. It just seems like now, and the same thing with dystopian, like dystopian narratives seem to be more popular than ever. And it seems like we're getting closer and closer to living in a dystopia. So you you would think we would want sort of the other response.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yeah, that's possibly true. There's also the the outlet element, right? So you know there's going to be a resolution to whatever media you're engaged with, right? The book's gonna end, the movie's gonna be finished, and then you know, hope maybe things are gonna turn out well in the end. Um, the other element is that we have a lot more control over the media that we're watching. As in, we are at any moment we could just put down the book, we could stop reading it, we could walk out of the theater, we could hit pause, we could turn on the lights. And it's nice to be able to exert that level of control over the horror, and that could possibly be why. Um, there's the other angle that, oh, well, maybe everything's bad, but it could always be worse. And it's just this relativity kind of situation where you're just imagining the the the worst possible outcome of things.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Well, we're getting close. Uh personally, I don't find slasher films very scary. Like something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't quite suspend my disbelief or terrify me. What are the differences in fears, like, say, like that sort of visceral fear versus psychological fear in terms of like the functioning of the brain?

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Yeah, totally. I'm in the same boat with you. The slasher films don't quite do it for me either. Um, it's really quite interesting that the slasher films bring into play another really powerful protective mechanism, which is the disgust mechanism. Right? We think about things that have kept us safe in the past, and it's not just things like I should be scared of this big scary thing or whatever, but also blood and guts and dismemberment, right? The the s concept of disgust has also been very helpful for keeping our proto-humans alive and healthy, right? We want to stay away from blood, and it's not just, you know, the the humans back then didn't care about blood-borne diseases too much, right? They cared more about, oh, there's a creature nearby that could do that same thing to me, right? And that disgust is probably wired more in that vein of uh that's why we're we're uh scared of those kinds of things. There's this really neat brain structure related to the concept of disgust, and that's the insula, um, sometimes thought of as the fifth lobe of the brain. So if you take the brain, you kind of just gently lift the frontal and the temporal lobes to the side. There's another structure underneath that's responsible for doing a lot of the processing with disgust. Um, disgust is really vague. This brain structure has been shown in all kinds of fMRI scans to look at changes in in in in blood flow to brain areas to be activated under two disgust-related conditions that seem different but have a lot in common. It's activated very strongly, or at least you see traces of activation very strongly in physical disgust, so things like seeing blood, seeing dismemberment. But then also moral uh moral disgust is processed by these same brain circuits. When you think about things that violate social norms, when you think about things like incest, for instance, that also tends to activate some of these circuits within the insula. And so it's it's neat that there's this overlap between physical disgust and conceptual disgust that we see for for this uh for the structure to process.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

So well then you you share my I I again back to the slasher films, they don't really scare me that much, but I think you just said something. I mean, maybe this uh relates to sort of the disgust and and this uh this uh breaking of these these uh accepted rules of interaction. But why why is Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Mascore so terrifying to so many folks? I find it kind of campy and uh unbelievable, but he seems to be terrifying to so many people. What what is it about Leatherface?

SPEAKER_02 18:01

Yeah, totally. Uh the fun thing about watching some of the older films is the the special effects weren't all quite up to modern viewers' standards, so it's pretty easy to kind of look back and say, oh, that's super kind of cheesy. Um the thing that makes Leatherface in particular so interesting is probably related to this phenomenon that was described in robotics initially. Um it's the concept of the uncanny valley, where at the very uh the beginning with early robotics, they were trying to design these human-looking robots to interface with people. But then they found that as the robots got closer and closer to looking human without showing all the true signs of humanness, people were actually more scared of them than they were of metallic clanking gears and joints.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, that was my next question. Is we have this particular fear things that look human, but they're just off a little bit, like their mouths are too big or their eyes are too big or their digits are too long. Keep unpacking this in particular fear to me, this because this is fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Yeah, it's really interesting. So, in addition to Leatherface, you also think about other masked killers, right? We think about Michael Myers who's wearing that mask over his face, and then it also extends even beyond that. So not only are those masks kind of fears, but also clowns. This is a thing that's popped up quite a bit, like a fear of clowns. Um, I think that also goes back to Uncanny Valley phenomena where you see kind of this distortion of proportions or something, like right, their makeup makes it so their mouths are bigger, their eyes are highlighted, their cheeks are more flushed than usual, or something like that. The thing that makes the Uncanny Valley so interesting is that it probably reminds us at an unconscious level of our own mortality. As in, you're seeing these things with these beings with these rigid faces, right? Their skin doesn't move the way we expect it to. Potentially, this is related to this uh phenomenon of mortality salience. We're now more aware that something bad might happen to us outside of the chainsaw or the the knife or whatever, right? That we are getting older, maybe, maybe it reminds us a little bit about Parkinson's, right? We're seeing that the body is moving in this jerky, unpredictable way. Um, maybe it's something like that, and that's kind of increasing that that awareness of our of our own death.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

What uh what about Neanderthal? I mean, you know, we we competed with the Neanderthal, and they were so close to us as human. I mean, 99.9% of the same DNA and everything, but they looked a little different. A little more hair, a little larger, and and like they were they were truly a menace.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

Yeah, it's possible that we're processing that as them being an outsider, right? So they're more like a them, they're we're less likely to trust them, we're more likely to protect our own. And that all goes along with the mortality salience um literature, where you're you're becoming more you're you're willing to invest more time in people who are more similar to you and more energy for those people. And and that seems to be uh a thing that that pops up in that in that in that literature. You're strengthening your worldview. You want to unconsciously punish those without that worldview. Maybe, you know, way back when, in evolutionary time, the idea was who could you trust? You don't want to know who you could trust when when uh people are hairier in the face than they are now or something. I'm I'm not sure. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

In in one of your chapters you explore several things. Theories about why we dream. Um, this is another fascinating thing, but from from Freud's idea of the unconscious desires to more modern theories involving memory, neuroplasticity, and creativity. Do we actually know why we dream? Or are dreams still one of neuroscience's great mysteries?

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Yeah, it's a huge mystery. It's something that I'm gonna that I am willing to talk about. Consciousness is the other one, and that's the one that I dodge. I completely avoid those questions about why consciousness happens because we are so far from getting there. With dreams, there's a lot of there they're for one, they're super tricky to study. We have these really neat brain imaging tools that are out there for trying to study dreams, but time distorts in our dreams a lot. And so, you know, you could have this entire backstory with rich characters and everything, but that could have taken place over the course of seconds or 10 seconds. So it's it it they're very, very hard to study, um, which makes it this this really tricky place in what we can learn from it. Um, there was this really cool theory that I stumbled across about, you know, we were you mentioning neuroplasticity, right? The idea that our brains are capable of change in these really, really subtle ways at the microscopic scale, but they turn to these, transpire into these much bigger consciousness level type changes. Uh the theory goes that sometimes when brain structures don't get enough activity, they like to just activate. And the theory behind this is that we have these dreams to protect the visual circuits in our brain from being basically overridden by other brain circuits. So, in the absence of any inputs, like when we close our eyes to go to sleep, it's healthier for the brain to be firing off these visual signals, which manifest as dreams, which are basically hallucinations, right? We want to have that happen so that nearby brain structures don't accidentally exert their plastic will over the visual circuits.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

So what you're talking about is kind of like neural pathways. Is that kind of similar? Like if these neural pathways that aren't being used that much, then sleep is kind of a way of exercising those?

SPEAKER_02 24:20

Yeah, that's another possible theory behind dreams. Um the big uh another the other big theory is related to the the keyword that you mentioned, exercise, right? We get to practice our imagination. And that's something that we don't get to do very much anymore. Imagination is, and at least has been, one of the biggest advantages that human brains have, right? It allowed us to escape predators in very unique ways. It allowed us to hunt for prey in creative, novel ways, and that was one of our big advantages. So when we get to use those circuits and engage that activity, that lets us exert our uh lets us practice these these skills that have kind of gone gone uh in the same.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

And who's the c where is the command center in the brain for this saying, hey, look, we got to exercise? Is that the amygdala saying, hey, look, these structures, this pathways, this this type of thinking isn't happening enough. I'm going to trigger it in the sleep. I mean, where is where is the command center for that that that you know prompts that response in the dream?

SPEAKER_02 25:29

Yeah, there may or may not be one. Um it could just be widely distributed across cortex. It's kind of been the shift towards understanding brain as more of a unit rather than individual parts. And that's likely what's happening with that. That's just these circuits are just inactive and they want something to do. We see that in people who have lost limbs, for instance. You're seeing a rewriting of the cortical areas, the outside of the brain, that normally processes the input from those limbs. They start doing this plasticity where nearby areas will bleed into that space. And it happens over the course of just days. They've done stuff with blindfolding.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Phantom limbs, is that what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_02 26:12

Phantom limbs, yeah, yeah. Um, so they've done stuff with blindfolding people, sighted individuals, and they've seen this rewriting of cortex on the order of days where it happens that quickly.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Yeah, I find I could go on about dreams forever. I'm gonna, I'm going to resist going all the way down to the rabbit hole because it to me it all turns into a quantum conversation in a way. But I don't want to go down there. I want to, I'm gonna keep kind of talking about the neuroscience. Um let's talk about how we process pain. Um, when my kids, I've always wondered about this. When my kids like have a boo-boo, you know, or they're hurt or something like that, and they're just like, oh gosh, it hurts so bad. I tell them, try not to think about it. Because that's always work for me. Like if something hurts, like something like a hangnail, you know how painful a hangnail can be? It's really not that big of a deal, but it can just, it just like just it it's painful to distraction. So I guess what I'm wondering is, is there any science to that? We tend to think of pain as a direct measurement of physical damage, but but how much does the brain actually determine how much something hurts? Like how much can our thoughts like so? Does that work? If I say don't think about your pain, does that trigger less nerve responses or anything like that? You do you see what I'm groping at here?

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Yeah, yeah. Pain is really cool because it's just as you mentioned, it's another protective system that we have in place. It teaches us to avoid, you know, paying attention to this wound. The more you pick at it, the less likely it is to heal, and so on. There's, you know, just to be really annoying and pedantic, there's kind of two different mechanisms that are at play here. Uh, we think about no susception, the detection of pain, as the pure sensory elements, as in, yes, there is a there is an injury in my body, and I need to be wary to not touch with not not touch it, not use my hand if it has a splinter or whatever. Though that is driven by no susception, and that's just do not make this wound any worse. Pain is this emotional higher order thing that we're draping on top of no susception. There's all kinds of instances where pain is basically shut off in response to, you know, attention, just like you're mentioning. Another thing that sometimes works, and I do this with my kids when they also get a boo-boo or whatever. Um, I always just like rub my hands and go heel, and then put my hands on whatever's been injured. And then I also do a little vibration kind of thing with my hands. This has to do with this other really influential theory behind how pain or at least no susception is processed, is that it happens from a bottom-up and a top-down ankle. There's sort of two directions where this pain is happening. And if you can interfere with the pain signal from that bottom-up direction. So, like a placebo. A placebo, yeah. Um, there's it's partially placebo. But the placebo saying, I will now heal you. That's the placebo element where you're it's this top-down kind of thing. The bottom-up thing where I'm vibrating my hands, the nerve fibers that carry pain sensations also carry vibration sensations. So we can actually interfere with the processing of pain from those two levels. I don't know if it's worked, but you know, toddlers are invincible in in lots of ways. So whenever I vibrate my hands, I'm actually interfering with how those pain signals are processed from outside in.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

That's interesting. Another thing that I found fascinating was that this idea that horror gives us a certain pleasure, but that pleasure is not happiness. We tend to think of happ pleasure as you know, a happy feeling. You make a distinction between pleasure and happiness.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

Yeah, I think um pleasure is kind of just the same way as pain and no susception are vaguely two different things with a lot of overlapping circuits. Pleasure and happiness is kind of the same way. Pleasure is more of an evolutionary um uh safeguard for this is how I should get sugar into my body. This is how I get protein and fats into my body. That's the immediate sort of pleasure kick that I get. But then happiness has also this top-down blanket that falls on top of pleasure, and that we can derive happiness from pleasure, yes, but you can also derive it from a kind of higher order thing, um, higher order level, as you're uh thinking. Yeah, so thinking about long-term goals, right? I'm achieving a long-term goal by not eating this donut, right? I really want the donut. It will absolutely give me pleasure, but I'm putting off that short-term pleasure for a long-term happiness. I want to live healthier. I want to, even if you don't immediately feel those benefits, you're sort of thinking about it from that intellectual higher process, saying, I want to achieve a fitness goal, for instance. And I can do that by measuring the number of good calories and good fats that I'm getting in my body, for instance.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

So I you may not be able to answer this for me, and it may seem like I'm coming out of left field with this, but when we're talking about these principles of pleasure and and and how they work within the brain. Neuroty scientifically speaking, how does an orgasm work? I mean, you know what I mean? That intense pleasure of the org guy is is that come from the amygdala, or like it seems like there's not one thing in the body that controls, you know. I mean, clearly the the orgasm is this reward to, you know, uh to to to you know incentivize procreation or whatever, but like within the brain, what do we know about? I know this is a long way from whore, but I've always wondered about this. And I'm not gonna have too many neuroscientists to bounce the idea off. How how do we know how to how the orgasm works?

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Is that again, is that the amygdala or it's probably driven by a circuit called the septal region. In humans, there's uh there's two major, or there's at least two major reward pathway circuits. So the septal region and the ventral tegmental area, they're two major structures that are strongly associated with this pleasure component. Um, what's what's interesting about the septal region, there's some there's been some really unusual experiments done in humans in this. And this is one of the reasons why there are so many safeguards against doing human experimentation. But there was a study done where they would implant these stimulating electrodes in different parts of people's brains. So, you know, when you people get uh epilepsy surgery, sometimes the only way to treat it is to just remove the offending area, right? And that process is already risky to begin with. The thought being if we're gonna do this for epilepsy, could we also implant stimulating electrodes into these reward circuits and let people stimulate their their own brains for reward? And that's actually what they found. So one particular person who was a part of the study had three electrodes implanted. One of them was in the septal region. The other two I don't specifically remember, but one of them was highly, highly aversive, the complete opposite of the reward. They didn't like that stimulation. And so they actually jerry-rigged this little stimulator box so that they wouldn't accidentally push that aversion circuit stimulator. The goal for this study, and you know, this was unethical at the time, this was done in the 70s or so, was to rewire a person's sexual preference. So it sounds super weird now, but they brought in a guy who self-identified as homosexual. They also brought into the laboratory a prostitute, a woman, and they said that every time you are going to engage in relations with her, we are going to stimulate your septal region, fire up your reward circuitry. And the idea was they were trying to rewire this person's desire to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

He's having sex with electrodes on?

SPEAKER_02 34:47

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

I mean, just trying to get a bit- I mean, so okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Well, yeah, it's funny. In the in the publication, they have a little diagram of the the room that they had. They have an outline of where the bed would be, they have an outline of where the scientists would be watching this whole process, and he's having sex with this woman prostitute, and they're stimulating his septal region every time that that he does. And did it work? He said that he had that it had kind of worked. Um, from what I remember, he had gone back to his initial sexual preference whenever he needed money. So this is kind of a um, you know, it's a it's an interview type situation. So it's it's hard to really get uh an honest, you don't really know exactly what what what what truly happened.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Yeah, that that's pretty murky, but interesting. You you talk about something called the Kotard delusion, which leads patients to believe they are dead. Um and even going to such extremes as burying themselves alive, is this a real thing?

SPEAKER_02 35:52

Yeah, exceedingly rare psychotic delusion. So, you know, with delusions that you might see from schizophrenia, they tend to present in a bunch of different ways. Some of them are much more common. You tend to see the delusion of persecution a lot, delusion of grandeur. Uh, persecution is like, oh, I'm I'm the only one who doesn't know something. Delusion of grandeur is like, I am the reincarnation of a deity, I am royalty, everyone should bow down to me, things like that. Um, some of the more rare forms of these delusions, which can happen in schizophrenia, or they can happen on their own following some kind of injury, the guitar delusion, right, where a person believes they are dead. And these are very, very rare cases. There are instances of people saying, Um, I set my alarm early in the morning, I slept past it, and I panicked. And when you ask them why they set their alarm, they said, Well, it's because I'm supposed to go to my funeral.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

And then you'll see things about people with this delusion saying This isn't the dream life uh sort of uh melding with the with, you know, quotidian reality?

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Yeah, I don't I don't believe it is. I mean, it's it's hard to really know in psychosis precisely what's what's happening. Um, these beliefs are so strong and so unshakable that people with them will override some of their more basic things that they need to survive, like food. So the first instance of the Qatar delusion that was described in the literature was of a person who claimed that she had no internal organs and that didn't she did not need to eat because of that. And she died from malnutrition.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

This sounds like we had a guy on about cults. There was the air breathers, these people that thought they could live on just air, and there was something. But then they found the guy, they caught him like coming out of a uh they caught him coming out of a McDonald's with a couple of happy meals or something.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

A buffet with a full plate of of steak, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

So what we're talking about horror, and in the book you concentrate a lot about sci-fi, and the the let's talk about the intersection of horror and sci-fi for a minute. Like neurologically, do we process these genres differently? I know that not all horror readers, for instance, are sci-fi readers and vice versa, but yeah, they they can be pretty distinct.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Um, there's there's only a few really pronounced overlaps of sci-fi and horror. Um, you think about like The Thing, for instance, was vaguely science fiction, and then Get Out is the most recent, really Alien?

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Would that fit in there too?

SPEAKER_02 38:37

Alien, my absolute favorite franchise of all time. Um, yeah, it it fits really well. Um, I think that with science fiction versus horror, it's it it kind of sits on a spectrum of fiction. You know, as a writer, you probably think about this too. Where where does science fiction and horror, where does it really overlap? Um, you might think about the other end of the spectrum with like fantasy worlds, right? A fantasy setting like something from Sanderson or Tolkien or whoever. They're they're a lot more speculative in nature. And I think that it's easy to kind of distinguish that from a horror that, oh, this could be happening. Um and I think science fiction might fall somewhere in the middle. It's one of the reasons why I think that Alien is so good as a as a science fiction piece that plays into horror. Because at the same time, the way the characters are depicted in Alien, you know, they're they're space truckers, right? They're just ordinary people. They just happen to also have interstellar travel and they come across terrible things in whatever's out there. So it's kind of in that middle space where it's a little bit, you don't have to suspend your disbelief as much, right? You can relate to the characters. You can say, oh yeah, sometimes I just have to do a job, and sometimes bad things happen on my job, right? No chestbursters at my work, but you could imagine in a uh with just a little bit of the what's out there question that that could overlap really easily.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

You you mentioned fantasy, and I I mean again, I at the top I said I'm a realist. I mean, I you know, but uh the publishing would have me writing more speculative or uh high concept novels, and the more they push at me to do that, the more I just want to write about a novel about a guy sitting in a room. You know what I mean? I just you know what I mean. I just it's just my nature as a contrarian or something. Like I don't I don't understand the appeal of fantasy. I just it's not mean, I'm not judging it, but like Game of Thrones, zero interest to watch, even like five minutes. I don't is there a certain um do you think is this more uh culturally mandated or or or culturally constructed? The sort of people that are I don't want to be mean. I mean, I is it because they live in their mom's basement? I'm not trying to say that, but like, I mean, is it more culturally or is there something in the brain function that that would make fantasy more attractive to one person than the other? Like, I just have zero interest. It's just like, I mean, even to like kids' movies, like I don't, I mean, I've I've had to walk the you know the never-ending story a million times. I I just you know, I I love it. I watch it with my kids, but like I just have no impulse. And I I want to know, is that could that be neurological, or do you think that that's more culturally or personally mandated?

SPEAKER_02 41:35

Yeah, it could be a little bit of both. There's uh there's some literature out there about proneness to sort of enjoyment for imagination. And I think that there are certain kind of traits that, you know, you could be born with them, but they you could also be shaped by them, uh, shaped by environment to to make you more enjoy the the more fantastical things. And I think that that could be part of it too, yeah. I mean, it's a good it's a good question. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

Yeah, I mean, it seems to me to be a a little bit of it as escapist, too. Like even with like horror and even the the the speculative elements of science fiction, still there's still that word science, right? It's still within the realm of possibility, and the good science fiction always has to adhere to some sort of scientific principles. It can't just be totally obscure. I mean, you have to consider the time-space continuum, and even if you're gonna break the rules, you have to sort of understand them. But with fantasy, it just seems like kind of anything goes, like dragons and stuff like that. And that almost seems like more of a sort of escapism, like wanting a world that really hasn't. Or maybe, maybe I'm just talking from a place of somebody who's watched so little of it or read so little of it.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Yeah, there's a uh it's either Arthur Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov who said something about I think it's Arthur C. Clarke who said that um high fantasy is indistinguishable from technology. Success man, I'm butchering that quotation really badly. Um, but it's about, you know, if you have the right technology, it can look like fantasy. And I mean, when you think about the history of science fiction, if you go all the way back to Mary Shelley, right, 200-some years ago, she was directly inspired by scientists who were coming up with things about reanimation. People were playing around with delivering electrical current through frog legs, getting them to move. People were playing around with stimulating recently executed criminals to see if they will move. And when they got movement out of those people, Shelley said, Oh, well, what if I get a lot more than just movement? What if I get intellectual thought and then kind of taking that to the next level? And and and in many ways, that's what a lot of people think is the origin of science fiction.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

So so much of of of tear to me is uh again psychological. There's there's a story about how when they were making that movie, The Cat People in 1942, which was it was a studio movie. It was supposed to be a horror, like it was supposed to be scary. And the studio gave Jack Tournier, however you say his name, that French director, uh, these really hokey cat costumes and said, you know, go scare people. And I mean, these things were ridiculous. They looked like a kid's Halloween costume and they weren't scary at all. So so Tournier made the decision to never show the cats, to use shadows and sounds and suggestion, and actually made a really effective horror film out of it. So, neurologically speaking, how much of the equation is about suggestion and the unknown versus the sort of visceral actual seeing the stimulus?

SPEAKER_02 44:43

Yeah, that's a really fun question because you can kind of think about it from the cinematic cinematography perspective where it's just like, okay, well, I'm less likely to make an error if I don't actually show the thing, whatever the thing is. Right? You don't have to worry about the creature crawling out of the ooze and it's like, oh, where's where's the zipper kind of situation? Um, you don't have to address those issues at all. You just get to play with people's imagination, which I think is really fun. And it's it's neat to think about what books can do versus what a movie can do. And I think about this all the time. Where in a book you're relying on the reader to put their own fears, whatever they find scary, on top of the characters, on top of the villains or the monster or the demons or whatever. And that in many ways is probably even scarier. It's very hard to do a jump scare in a book, though. It's happened to me before, once, but that's something that you get to do in a film or in a TV series that is very, very tough to do in a book. So it's just one of those neat things you get to play with the media in in really, in really cool ways.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

It's uh to me, it's always scarier when you don't see it. In fact, I watched with my kids last night a horror film getting ready for you. I forgot what it was called. Some five British dudes go out like on a hike in the Scandinavian mountains and they've run into this cultish thing. And like you don't know what's terrorizing them, if it's a cult or it's whatever. Eventually you you figure out that something big because you see it too fast to like make it out, but you see branches up high moving, and it's pretty chilling until we finally see the thing. It's like it's almost like, ah man, you had me, and then I had to see this fucking thing that had it looked like a reindeer basically with hands instead of in it. It was like, I don't know. I could I guess at some point that the director feels like maybe look, I made a promise I'm gonna have to show, show, show the beast or whatever, but it it's almost always disappointing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 46:48

Yeah, I I feel the same way. It's it's better to have that unknown. You know, we think about um the writing of HP Lovecraft, how his I don't know if it's his favorite adjective, but unknowable was like a word that pops up so much, indescribable. Everything, everything horrible. I I don't have the words to put to it, right? And that lets us really create our own what's scary to us. Is it as I mean, that's what's scary about you know?

SPEAKER_00 47:16

I mean, you just you don't know what's out there. Um a big whore phenomenon right now is liminal spaces. Um, can you for those that may not know listeners talk about uh liminal spaces, what they are, and what what particularly makes them so scary for us?

SPEAKER_02 47:32

Yeah, absolutely. And liminal spaces are are really interesting. It was the word liminal comes from the anthropology literature. It was mostly about looking at a space in between, so between times, between physical places that has recently or uh fairly recently been adapted into this liminal space aesthetic. I think I think it might have come from the urban exploration subculture, people who would, you know, break into these old hospitals and take pictures of creepy-looking things. Um, the best way that I always describe a liminal space classically is imagine you're taking a late flight into an airport somewhere. Your flight got delayed. You're the only plane at this airport that's designed to house, you know, hold 500,000 people, but yet there's only 30 or 50 of you there, right? And everything's a little bit darker than usual. You feel like you don't belong in that area. I think that's one of the neat things that that liminal spaces evoke is this unsettled feeling, right? It's not quite dread, it's not quite fear. It's appropriately kind of somewhere in between. Um, the idea, you know, The Backrooms was the movie that just recently came out where they're taking advantage of this liminal space to provoke that sense of unease. Um, I actually just got a grant with a couple co-workers in um the communication and business schools to try to see if we can use liminal space imagery to change the way people think about public service announcements, or at least change the effectiveness of public service announcements. Our theory is that public service announcements can be either really, really boring and dry, like here are the facts, call this number. Right. And people tend to tune those out because they are just not interesting to look at. And on the other hand, there are some public service announcements that are just so shocking or frightening or scary that people turn tune those out as well. And we're thinking that a liminal space image is going to promote memory for these public service announcements because they're engaging these kind of higher order frontal circuits, saying, Oh, I'm looking at this empty classroom, why do I feel weird about this? And then promoting that or uh driving that sense of wonder almost. And that's going to be enough to enhance memory for that image or for that for the message that we're trying to convey.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

So when I think about liminal spaces and like how that works on psychologically or neurologically, I'm thinking that it feels like a trap. Like you described the airport and like, why is nobody here? Or why am I the only one here? It feels like you're being set up somehow. Like you've been lured there. This is a public space. This should be ho-hum every day. You've been here a million times. But the fact that you're there alone and these places are liminal spaces are never really populated. It just it feels like a trap.

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I wonder how much of that has been queued up from the horror genre. Like that's where the you get lured to a back alley or something, right? And that's where all the slashing happens, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

Uh so another kind of modern trope of horror, I feel like, is um, and maybe you can speak to this a little. I find it very interesting, having written a book about trauma and and and what what what trauma can do to our perception and and really telling our own story. Um trauma as the monster seems to be kind of uh it's it's the character, the protagonist, trauma that self is the monster. Is this for you know could these be unhealthy to our collective psychology? Are there perhaps some evolutionary reasons that we're drawn to this idea? I I don't know. I don't know exactly what my question is here.

SPEAKER_02 51:36

Yeah, uh are you thinking about the Babaduke? Or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 51:40

No, I don't know. Maybe it's just something I've observed uh in movies that I don't know or remember very well. We watch a million shitty movies on Netflix. Um and I honestly can't remember. I can't remember the one we watched last night, but you know.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

Um here's a good one for Netflix is Guilmo del Toro's remaking of um of Frankenstein. I thought it was really, really well done, and they are using, they're sort of playing, emphasizing trauma as being one of the uh reasons behind why Frankenstein did what he did. I think it's interesting as collectively, right, when you look back on it, at some point people were thinking that just reading books was harmful, like reading fiction was harmful. Um and and then you have the there was that um that old video that somebody made in the late uh late 1800s. And I think that part of this is is I don't know how much of it is real, but it was just a video of a train that was like coming at you. And the legend goes that people were so scared that the train was going to come out of the screen. Question mark. I don't know what 1890s psychology was like, but I'd imagine that you know, the first time you're seeing a train coming at you, maybe uh maybe that could be scary. Um the as far as horror films uh changing psychology, there was some um when The Exorcist came out in 70 something, 74, 72, 74, 73, 70, something like that. Yeah. Um, there were people who were so freaked out by it, right? Those images are scary for sure, right? And they still hold up pretty well, but people were so scared of some of those things that it was actually was given a name by a psychiatrist. He called it um cinematic neurosis, where these images, it's sort of like short-term PTSD, right? You're you're getting a scene or something that keeps replaying in your head over and over again, even though it's fiction and it just sticks with you, and it's changing, you know, your sleep habits, your eating habits, it's changing all these different factors about you. Um I don't know, it's pretty interesting there. Uh, I think there might be a really neat place for what horror can do to actually promote healthy psychology. I think one of the elements that uh so right, horror, fear, being scared of stuff, that's something that is evolutionarily important. But at the same time, we also see kids playing games like tag. We see babies who love the game where you peekaboo, where you like hide your face and then all of a sudden it's there, right? That's a jump scare that we're delivering. Yeah, it's I mean, it's like a jump scare that you're delivering to a three-month-old, essentially. But there's still a level of psychological safety, right? This is a caregiver, this is someone you trust. So maybe they're jump scared, but they also find comfort in it that the thing that's scaring them is someone who's good for them.

SPEAKER_00 54:50

I think they expect it might be somebody else, and it's like, oh, that's that friendly face again.

SPEAKER_02 54:55

Yeah, and then you play into the whole object permanence situation, right? Like, is is is dad still there when he covers his face? Right? I think it'd be really good. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 55:05

It'd be really I was gonna say it seems like we're starting to understand a little bit more about traumatic memories. There's been this long-held idea that traumatic memories, and they do, they replay themselves over and over again. That's sort of trauma's mo is to just keep repeating itself. But if I'm understanding the neuroscience, these memories are actually being reconstructed. They're not just replaying, it's just not a loop. They're actually being reconstructed. So does that mean they're being embellished? And if this is the case, how much confidence should we have in our own memories?

SPEAKER_02 55:37

Uh, not a lot. Um, just as you said, um, there is an element of re-firing those circuits that were created when that scary thing happened, whether it's the thing that led a PTSD trigger or something like that, we are reactivating those circuits. There is this theory that was developed um way before anyone had the tools to understand it. But the saying goes, cells that fire together wire together. And the more often you fire up a circuit, the more ingrained it is. But each time we revisit one of those memories, traumatic or not, we are adding new details to it. There's a lot of evidence about how memories can be rewritten, especially in the context of you're reliving something scary or something bad that happened to you. You're adding additional details. And if you're adding scarier details, that's harmful.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

Yeah, I've never I've witnessed the phenomenon personally, I mean, as a reader, and I've had other readers say this to me about having a memory that you think is yours, and then only after a great amount of investigation or uh contemplation do you realize that it was it never even happened to you. It was just something that you read or saw that was so real, but you have sort of adopted it as your own memory.

SPEAKER_02 57:05

There's this really cool work done by this researcher named Elizabeth Loftus. She's made a lot of enemies in the past. Um, she's a memory researcher. She's also been called as an expert witness for some really kind of bad people. But her work in psychology, one really famous study was something that she called the Lost in the Mall study, where they would get a child to come in and have trusted people like their parents or older siblings tell them stories from their past before that they didn't remember. One of them was, oh, you got lost in a mall, you cried, and some kindly stranger helped you out, helped you connect us with you, and then all was good in the end. And then later, when they went back, this never happened to them, by the way. So this is just implanting these memories in these in these people. Um, they went back, the people who were told these things, and they added new details. They were like, Oh, the person who helped me, yeah, he was wearing a blue sweater. He was an older man and he was bald.

SPEAKER_00 58:13

Suggestibility. So it's kind of like when they sway witnesses, like ch child witnesses, to try to fill in the blanks and ah wow.

SPEAKER_02 58:21

Yeah, totally. And that's why she gets called for being an expert witness in in these things, basically saying that this person's testimony is flawed because of or how you know the the council would always ask her stuff like, well, how likely it is that these memories were created or artificial or not real or created, uh uh just you know, um uh uh synthesized out of um questions that were asked to them. And so that's how she gets put on this uh in that position.

SPEAKER_00 58:55

The deeper we go into this conversation, the less faith I have in memory. I mean, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean it's sort of wondrous and and and you know, it's kind of thrilling, but like at the same time, it's like we take so much for granted, like what we know, like just we take so much for granted, and like what we call our reality is just so much more malleable, I think, than we're comfortable accepting. Um totally we're kind of getting oh go on.

SPEAKER_02 59:27

Yeah. Oh, there's a the when we're we're talking about PTSD, one of the things about it is that it is uh a sort of a heightened reaction to something that should be beneficial for us, right? We're associating certain cues with potential harms. And so that helps us avoid those things in the future. But in PTSD, something about those circuits are different. And it's kind of this big question mark, which is why it it still happens and why there's no treatment that's excellent for it. But you know, you're supposed to be afraid of certain things because they could lead to harm. It's just if that circuit gets heightened, if it gets elevated in some way, then it produces the harmful bodily response that that you see in PTSD. And the base state is forgetting, right? We forget more things than we remember. So remembering is actually the exception to how our brains work, which is funny to think about.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:25

And yet we probably remember way more than we have access to. Like somewhere back there, a lot of stuff is cash that we have no. I mean, you know, that's what hypnosis does, right? So like the whole thing's a fucking quagmire, dude. That's like it's amazing to me that we can wake up tomorrow morning and remember who we were today. Like who we were yesterday. I it just seems that reality is just so precarious, actually. We take it so for granted, even just down to again the whole quantum thing about how we're just like vibrating on a certain frequency. We could be something else than we are entirely if the atoms are you know vibrating at different frequencies. I don't know. It's as a rabbit hole. I gotta get a cosmologist in there to go down that one. We're running out of time, but I wanted to leave the listeners. I wanted to get back to a little pop culture here, and I thought maybe let's spend a couple of minutes talking about uh what you think are some great horror and science fiction uh films or books that are the ones that are scariest for you personally.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

Yeah, totally. Um, there's this Korean film that came out a couple decades ago called The Tale of Two Sisters. That's one that I remember being absolutely terrifying. It just plays into Dread so well. It's a great psychological thriller, one of my absolute favorites. The um, let's see, my comfort films, weird to say, in no particular order. Um, Alien and Aliens, Silence of the Lambs, not a true horror film, but scary on its own way. Seven. I don't know why those are my comfort films. Very, very weird to say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

Um, I also serial killer ones. I mean, I that's just naturally scary because it's just the randomness of it. You know what I mean? It's just like this idea that like these people are walking around out there. It's probably way easier to kill somebody with no motive, no connection than anybody really realizes. And you let that idea sink in, and it's just like it's just it leaves too much up to luck.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:20

Uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:20

You know what I mean? It's not serial killers aren't killers of passion. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I used to watch a lot of forensic files until I burned out on it, but it's like it's always the husband or the wife, right? But the serial killer, you just don't, there's no, you know, the only thing now that we have DNA, it it is the forensics that can tie them together. Um, what do you think of two two movies that really kind of two of the scariest movies for me are uh straw man? Is it called no the wicker man, the wicker man, that British one?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

That one creeps the fuck out of me. It's uh just plausible enough and just suffocating enough. And um I don't know, it's been a while since I saw it, but I remember the fourth kind really terrifying me. Because I kind of bought into the idea that it was true, because they kind of play it off like it's a documentary a documentary a little bit, like this really happened, these events really happen. And then and it it even seems realer because the lady that's supposed to be the psychologist is like this pretty Hollywood lady in the movie, but she doesn't look the same at all in the thing, which makes it even seem realer in a weird way. And this idea of the collective dream and everybody seeing the White Owl, that one freaked me the fuck out. Um what about science fiction? Well, Alien Cross is the give me a great science fiction film because I'm always looking for a good science fiction.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:41

I mean, get out, but you've probably already seen it. I think Get Out is one of those classics, modern classics, that's going to be a good thing. I have not seen Get Out, so there you go. It's yeah, it's worth a watch. It's worth a good two hours for that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:54

Well, thanks, buddy. He is neuroscientist Austin Limb. Um, like many before him, he's been very patient with my dumb questions. Uh, check out his numerous books. There's four, five, six of them. Uh, most recently, Horror on the Brain, the Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction. Austin, thanks for being our Fresh Face in Hell, man. So great chatting with you. A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison is brought to you by Fresh Face Pods and produced by Jason Botkin and yours truly. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, or at our website at FreshFacepods.tv. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates and special content. And if you love the podcast, by all means run it and buy all of Jonathan Evison's award winning novels wherever books are sold.