Invention Classic: Sun Glasses

the case. Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert, what kind of sunglasses do you wear? Well? Currently, uh, my son is six years old, so I've been going through a spell here where I can really only wear whatever kind of semi garbage swag sunglasses has come my way, you know, with various brand names plastered to the side of them, because inevitably, especially when he was younger, my son would have to get his hands on whatever kind of sunglasses I had

in the car. So the sunglasses get smudged, sunglasses get scratched up, sunglasses get broken or just lost. And I was pretty good at losing sunglasses even before he came into my life. Uh So, I'm hoping that I'm working up to very soon reaching that point where I can actually buy a decent pair of sunglasses that will protect my eyes. Did you ever actually wear those company sunglasses we got? I have, like them like fold in half

at the nose. Yeah, I I got those immediately. Mainly I I thought to myself, this is a great decoy brand because my son is gonna love like the Transformer s qualities of these sunglasses here break that one. Yeah, But I've ended up wearing them around anyway. So that's my story. Hopefully, by the time I'm ready to actually get some decent sunglasses, we'll have some like Back to the Future two sunglasses, you know, like the ones that you've got as a prize uh Pizza Hut back in

the day when that film first came out. Except now these will be legit future sunglasses. You know. I was trying to think before we decided to do this episode, our sunglasses an invention or not? Did they count? Yeah? They count? I guess everything is an invention. Were we born with sunglasses? Well we'll get into that, but yeah, it is difficult for us to imagine a time before sunglasses. How did Corey Hart keep track of the visions in his eyes? I don't know. How did rowdy Roddy Piper

see through the alien conspiracy? I guess I don't know. He didn't how to terminate or cover up his eye damage. That's a good point, bro, Really, how did anyone ever in the history of Earth managed to look cool at any given moment, much less shade their eyes from the vicious light of day. It's already telling that all the examples you point to our cultural ones you're pointing, You're pointing to movies and stuff, rather than talking about how

would I get through my life without sunglasses? Well, that this is to be an important part of just the iconography of the sunglasses, and that will be more important later on in our discussion, but in their their psychological effects example in that, but initially here you know, we're we're we're complicating the purpose of the sunglasses, babe by Basically,

the whole deal is the sun is bright. I disagree, And while our eyelids do give us the ability to manipulate the amount of sunlight hitting our eyeballs, it also pays to have other options and certainly we have the ability to look away from the sun, to hide from the sun, or to raise a hand or a forearm to block it. But that's dependent largely on say your environment. Like some environments are much brighter than others. What if you live in a place where, say it's springtime, and

you're in a place with snow cover. The sun can be so bright in those cases because it's not only coming from above, but reflecting off of the snow, that you essentially cannot use your eyes in the environment, right, because otherwise you can't just shade where hat you need to wear like a hat with two bills right, one on top, one at the bottom. Um, it's coming from all directions, and you need to use your hands for other things. You're an individual, will need to to hunt

or fish or craft, etcetera. You can't just go around with your hands up all the time. Um. When I when I think about the challenges of dealing with sunlight, and I'm always forced to just think about how amazing our eyelids are though for manipulating light well, and our iris is of course they our pupils contract when there's too much light, but there's a point at which they can't contract anymore, and you have to depend on the eyelids.

One of one example I always go to is there's a character in Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon and he he winds up tortured by bandit flares and they slice his eyelids off. They leave him for for dead in the sun, and he's you know, half driven mad by the whole whole ordeal but sick eyelids. Oh yeah, it is a It is a sick, weird book. Um, I

love it. It's my favorite McMurtry book. But afterwards, this character ends up constructing a pair of special sunglasses for himself with these varying, um varying levels of darkness, so that he can just click through them as he needs them, depending on where he is, if he's a you know, indoors outdoors, bright day, uh, you know, cloudy day, etcetera. But I always come back to that because it's like, yeah, have you had to recreate the functionality of your eyelids?

What kind of invention would you have to have to build? You've got so many parts of your body that you really don't appreciate but would if they were gone, right, But enough about Larry McMurtry's cyborg westerns. Uh, let's let's just get down to sunglasses. What is essential to a modern pair of sunglasses? What do you what do you need? Is we're sort of deconstructing the the invention. Well, you need a frame to hold them over the eyes, and you need lenses that will, in one way or another

filter the incoming line. They obviously can't be completely okay if you need to be able to see through them, but they also need to stop some amount of bad stuff from getting in right. So, like from from a material level, it seems pretty straightforward. Um, you know, glass itself is a rather old invention. We could and we can really revisit glass at some point in future episode. But you find examples of this in ancient Mesopotamia. Uh. Certainly crystals and other substances or were known to to

ancient people. So just the materials of say building something out of six, we can all imagine the sort of flint stones style uh, spectacles or sunglasses that one could conceivably have. But invention is always about that moment where someone actually puts materials together and and create something that has not existed before. So we're forced to just to ask that question, Well, where do we really see the earliest indications of uh to all to a certain extent, spectacles.

We can't talk about sunglasses without talking about spectacles a little bit. But we're mostly concerned with sunglasses in this episode because they look cooler right focusing lenses. That that's the story for another time, where I think we're dealing with a somewhat simpler story right now. Yes, even though sunglasses might not have become extremely popular around the world

until after spectacles were widely used. But it's really too bad because they're they're they're sunglasses esfecially, there are modern usage of them. They're they're they're really important. They really protect us. Well, think about the sunglasses you wear as a kind of radiation suit for your eyes. I think on that one for a second. Try try to actually cognize the fact that good old fashioned sunlight is literally

radiation from a star. That's a phrase that always echoes in my mind when it's really beaten down on my head. Um and a good pair of sunglasses should do multiple things right. They should decrease the intensity of the light reaching your eyes. So if it's a bright, shining day, or there's glare off of water or off of a reflective surface or something. You need light to reach your eyes in order to see, but you don't need so

much of it. And when the number of lumens in your surroundings exceed what your eyes need in order to see, your iris muscles contract. They shrink your pupil the shutter of your eye, and that admits less in. But eventually your pupils can't contract anymore, and then you have to try to limit more light by squinting your eyelids, but eventually you run into problems there. Right, sometimes it's so bright that squinting becomes difficult, or you know you you

you're squinting so much you want to completely close your eyes. Now. The other thing that's important for sunglasses to do is decrease or eliminate ultra violet radiation when when that's coming at your eyes now, there's really no benefit to getting ultra violet radiation in your eyes. Whereas you need the visible light that comes in from the sun in order to see your surroundings, you don't really need UV light at all. And so if sunglasses can reduce or even

completely eliminate U V exposure to your eyes. That's a good thing, because your eyes can be injured by u V exposure. But as we were saying earlier, also let's not ignore the fact that sunglasses are a very profound style choice and play a psychological and cultural role as well. I think people often wear sunglasses as much for style and psychological reasons as they do for uh, for reducing

glare and reducing UV exposure. In any event, you're gonna want a good pair of sunglasses before you go out to, say, a sporting event, right for a number of reasons, because it's you're you're outdoors and it may be very bright. Uh. And then it's also a social engagement. You know, you wanna look cool, uh to the other fans or their friends and family that have traveled there with you. In the case of the dude, you can't go bowling without

sunglasses exactly. Uh. So, for our first historical journey, in our attempt to understand sunglasses of old, let's go back to the ancient Romans, Let's go to the Colosseum. Now, this I think is actually going to be a false example, but it's something that's interesting that sometimes gets cited in this context. So we're gonna to our old friend Plenty of the Elder first century CE Roman writer in his

Natural History translated by John Bostock. Plenty is discussing in in book thirty seven of his Natural History, quote the natural history of precious stones, and he comes to a section on what he calls Smaragdes. I could have sworn that was one of the one of the raith kings in the Lord of the Rings the saga. But I don't think so. Which anniversary gift is smar Agnes? I

can never remember. It's like it's like wood, but ivory Smaragdes. Right, So samur agnes appears to be a term used for green precious stones, for barrel stones like emerald, or for jasper stones. Uh. And he so he seems to be talking about emeralds. I think that's the way it's most often translated. And Plenty dwells for a while on how beautiful the emerald is and how RESTful to the eye,

how soothing to look upon quote. Even when the vision has been fatigued with intently viewing other objects, it is refreshed by being turned upon this stone. And lapidaries know of nothing that is more gratefully soothing to the eyes. It's soft green tints being wonderfully adapted for assuaging lassitude when felt in those organs. By those organs, I think

he means eyes. But anyway, getting to to the part that's often cited as as emerald sunglasses, but actually it appears to not be, he writes, quote, when the surface of the sami agnus is flat, it reflects the image of objects in the same manner as a mirror. The Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators upon a Smaragdus upon a Smaragdus ban key here perhaps right. So this would have been the first century CE, and it's been cited as an early use of tinted transparencies

in the sun. The idea that Nero was maybe watching the net fighters and the pursuers the secutors through Gym's like lenses. So just I guess try to imagine he's holding him rolds over his eyes and looking through them like lenses to fill alter out some of the glare.

I think I also saw an artistic interpretation of this, where you see the you know, the the portly emperor, they're all in his finery, and he's holding up something that looks like it's almost like opera uh binoculars, you know, except it's just one emerald that he's holding up to his eye. I'm thinking, with the green and that image you're describing, this has got to be the inspiration for David Lynch's depiction of Baron Harkonen in his adaptation of Dune.

Oh does he have an emerald? Well, everything's green around. It's like his his rooms are green. He's got this green environment. He's kind of a Nero like figure. But anyway, the reason I said this was a false choice is because it sounds to me like in the context Plenty meant that Nero if this story is even true. Watched the fights as reflected in the surface of the sami agnous like a mirror, because he was just talking about how it reflects like a mirror, and this would still

have probably some some like sun dampening effect. Right, just tried imagine something reflected an emerald. It's not going to be reflected in a blinding way. But so he's looking at that since the emerald reflects less light than the

source provides. I was looking at a text titled the Origin and Development of Spectacles by C. J. S. Thompson, and this is an older Texas is from N seven, but he also mentions the Nero story and he definitely argued too that it was probably a case where Nero just liked to watch the festivities colored green um which you know via the Emerald, and that he gained no

sun shading from it. And yeah, I think my suspicion here is that based on some recent research we did for stuff to build your mind about gladiatorial combat for our episode on the trident Um, you know there there was if you're a fan of both the sort of the sporting combat of of the gladiatorial spectacle as well as like the drama and all these other ridiculous aspects of it, you're gonna be you might you might gain something from looking out at this combat between men dressed

as fish men using nautical weapons and then adding a green overlay on that. UM. I could see where where the green tent could perhaps be be helpful in that that particular mode of entertainment. What you're saying is taking on a decidedly Lynchian vibe. I I think I think the connection is there now Thompson also points out that while the Romans certainly suffered from eye problems and had their own treatments for those ailments, there's no mention in

the work of say Celsus of artificial site aids. He mentions that in writings prior to the thirteenth century, one finds only occasional mentions of magnifying classes. So the use of some sort of a lens to uh look at finder details or perhaps you know, holding it up to a text. But uh, you don't see mention of spectacles, by the way. He also wrote that there was no evidence that lenses were known to the ancient Egyptians or

the Hebrews. However, we do have a very early magnifying glass, or depending on who you ask, perhaps a fire starting glass, something that you used to refract the rays of the sun, you know, to start a small fire. Uh, you know, the kind of thing that children may sometimes do when trying to burn ants, hopefully not to ants, hopefully not. I mean, and you know one has to be careful, but at any rate, this particular lens, the Nimrod lens, is a three thousand year old crystal unearthed in eighteen

fifty by Austin Henry layered in the Syrian Palace of Nimrod. However, we were also not sure. It might have simply been a decorative element. It might not have been used. Uh. And in any rate, it's not tinted. Okay, so we're not talking about sunglasses, right, but we are talking about like a crystal that may have been that people may have looked through. And now you have to ask you the question, like to what extent did they just look

through it because it was cool? Like what's more mystical than holding up some sort of you know, gleaming crystal, even if it's clear, and watching how the world is distorted ever so slightly. Now, another thing that's worth noting is that we've been talking about lenses and tinted lenses.

But obviously people came up with ways of protecting their eyes from the sun, uh, having accessories beyond just their hands and their eyelids and stuff to protect their eyes from the sun long before there were there were tinted glass or plastic lenses or anything, for example, hats and umbrellas.

That's obvious, yeah, But a much more ingenious and much more interesting one is what I want to mention the Inuit, and you pick people's of the northern circumpolar regions today Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia have for centuries made these ingenious devices known as snow goggles. Yes, and and I want to come back to what we said earlier about lumens before we get into this, because I think this really drives

home the necessity that led to the invention. Uh. So, in an indoor environment, a humanist typically typically going to encounter four hundred, six hundred lumens. That's the intensity of the light um and our comfortable level four loomens, it's's gonna go up to round thirty five hundred. If you're in the shade on a sunny day, you're probably encountering around a thousand lumens sunny day out on say a

highway or other reflective surface. You know, we all know what it's like to drive on like a really sunny day. You almost have to have shades. Uh, you're probably gonna do with something like six thousand or more lumens. Uh. Ten thousand lumens is the danger zone where you really have to start worrying about the health of your eyes. But a snow field on a sunny day, you're talking twelve thousand plus lumens. And this is where you enter the domain of potential snow blindness. Right and this is

of course because of the reflective power of white snow. Right. Uh, you can create almost kind of double sun effects, sun above and sun below being reflected back up. Whereas you know, a normal patch of ground that's got say grass or just open soil, might reflect about ten percent of the UV ray is coming from the sun. Snow can reflect not quite a hundred percent, but something like close to

a of it, nearly doubling your UV exposure. And so if you are, say living in in northern regions where there's a lot of snow cover, one thing that works in your favor is that for much of the year, the sun doesn't get super bright, right, it doesn't get super high in the sky, doesn't get super direct, but it will in certain parts of the year where there is still a lot of snow cover on the ground.

So when you've got those things working together, say bright sun, heavy snow cover, maybe in the springtime when the sun is out high in the sky, proper eye protection is incredibly important, and not just because it's difficult to hunt or see where you're going when the sun's reflecting off the white snow and there's blinding glare and everything. But it's what you mentioned, there's this risk of snow blindness,

which is also known as a photocrotitis. So, as we mentioned earlier, part of natural sunlight is ultra violet radiation, and ultra violet radiation can damage the cornea. It can damage the conjunctiva, the outer surfaces of the eye, just like it can damage the skin. And this is why photocharrotitis is often described as something like quote sunburn of

the eye. Symptoms include pain and feeling of having like irritans or foreign bodies lodged in the eye, tearing up, swelling and redness, light sensitivity, and sometimes even truly temporary loss of vision. That's where the blindness comes from. And so if you need to be doing stuff out in the snow where the sun is bright, this this is going to be a problem. And snow goggles fight this

problem with a very smart design. They're typically a carved frame, usually made from animal bone or walrus tusks, sometimes from driftwood, or sometimes even from like strange materials like I saw one that I think was from baleen from a whale.

And uh, this frame fits tight over the eyes so that light doesn't get in on the sides or the top, and then light is allowed to enter through two very wide, very narrow slots carved in the middle of the goggles, which are sometimes darkened on the inside with a material like soot. And these narrow slits allow the person wearing them to see without exposing their eyes to too much

glare or UV radiation. And some alternate versions also have have multiple slits more like like shutter shades or Venetian blinds or something. They're not unlike the sort of novelty plastic nineteen eighties sunglasses you know where there where you just had you had no glass, no lens, shutters, these slits, yes, so shutter shapes, which yeah, you look at the especially the nineteen eighties versions of these, and it's easy to just think, this is ridiculous. This is the this is

the sunglasses, this is eye wear. Is a purely decorative element, and to a certain extent is true. But they do have a certain functionality as well. Yeah, and in many ways a highly effective functionality. I mean this, if you don't have tinted glass to work with. This is a genius design. Yeah, and and the necessity that led to it like like this would this would be the kind of environment that would necessitate sunglasses, UM in a way

that other parts of the world did not. All right, Well, on that note, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll discuss some more curios from the UH the history of invention UH in regards to the sunglasses. All right, we're back now. Another frequently sided example of of sunglasses or early sunglasses used UH involved them not being used to protect against the sun or perhaps in any way affect vision, but that they were allegedly used just to hide your eyes from others. This is this

is a crucially important part of sunglasses. Could not ignore it. I mean, think of all the times you've worn sunglasses. And there are times where you wear them to protect your eyes. There are times when you wear them to to see better than high a light intensive environment. There

are times when you do it to look cool. But there are times when say I've I've warned them, for instance, on the train before UH, even when the train is underground, because it kind of makes me a little invisible if I have my sunglasses on, my my earbuds in, then I am like less visibly present. Well, you, it means you can look around the world around you without ever unequivocally being caught looking at someone or something. It's a natural human tendency to want to look around and see

who's around you. Like, if you get caught looking at somebody, that's always awkward, especially if you've got some kind of social anxiety. You don't you don't want to like make that eye contact and be like, oh, we just both looked at each other at the same time, right, And if you're on the train, sometimes you need to look at the weird person on the train. And if you're not wearing sunglasses and you're doing this, that weird person

might be you. It's just a great solution for everybody involved. So multiple sources report that Chinese judges wore smokey courtz glass is to hide their eye expressions from the court during the thirteenth century, So this would have been during the Song Dynasty through twelve seventy nine. So it's looking around a little bit about this, and Harvard's came in to wrote the following in nineteen thirty six in the introduction of spectacles into China, which which deals um, you know,

in large part was just spectacles in general. And if we come back and discuss spectacles on the show specifically, will probably return to this and and other sources. But he cites Chinese writings that indicated that quote. Under the song, dynasty judges in deciding cases in the court used rock crystal or courts to read illegible legal documents in the sun. So here the idea seems to be that they were using them for magnification instead, or perhaps in addition to um,

shielding their eyes from other people at the court. Well, it's specific fis in the sun, so that would seem to make it sound like they were trying to shield

their eyes from from glare perhaps. So yeah, this one this leaves me confused though as to like what was actually going on or was it a case where, for instance, these spectacles were arranged for reading in the sun or for some sort of magnification purpose, but then they realized, oh wait, these also shield our eyes and it makes a judging a little easier, right, Well, you can absolutely see how sunglasses would and we'll get more into the

psychological effects later on, but you can see how sunglasses would be helpful if you were trying to give the appearance of impartiality. You know, right, if you're a judge, you want to hide any sign of your face showing

emotion and reaction to arguments or something like that. I'm not sure that's the reasoning here, but you can see how it could be right, and you still remain you still retain a portion of your humanity in a way that you wouldn't if you were wearing, say a hood or an iron mask or some other um covering for your face. Now, I looked at another text, Old Chinese Spectacles by Auto Durham Rasmussen, and there's a discussion of methods used to grind quote crystal smoky courts in a

variety of rose courts into lenses. And apparently Marco Polo reported Chinese lenses in twelve seventy, stating that people used lenses of quarts or semi precious stones to aid their site. Okay, but here we're still talking about not just like casual usage among the people, not fashion usage, but like specialized cases and in some cases seeming to be some kind

of magnifier or site aid. Right, Yeah, And definitely like a premium item that would be used by a specialist, and in fact it does seem that also in like Europe, in the United States, tinted glasses did exist some in the past few centuries, but they were not widely used and certainly not outside some kind of corrective or medical

content xtore specialized research context until the twentieth century. Right, Yeah, I mean some classes have become such a a fashion symbol it is easy to forget the necessity of them, even if we're not dealing with just the basic ideas of ooh, it's like a super bright day or you're

in the middle of a of a snow field. Um, because tinted lenses can assist people with low vision, and they're often prescribed to people with ocular diseases such as age related macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, cataract retinopathy, cone dystrophy,

and oculo cutaneous albinism. Yeah, I've also seen references to tinted lenses being recommended for, say, people who were undergoing some of the symptoms of syphilis or something like that, which makes me wonder if there's a connection with I have to go to a movie in in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, where Gary Oldman is Dracula. Where's those tinted lenses in the I guess that's supposed to be the nineteenth century in England. Yeah, well, I mean, as I've

I've ever read before. There are theories, and this is again just a theory that that brom Stoker could have had syphilis and that might have on some level informed his writing of Dracula. I don't remember him mentioning tinted spectacles in the book, did he? I do not recall that being a detail of the book, but it's definitely there in that movie anyway. It's it's interesting, it's an

interesting choice. Whyever Coppola did it? Um. But for modern sunglasses, it's hard to say that they were actually exactly invented at any particular time, because we as we mentioned, various kinds of shaded or tinted lenses had existed for a while for various specialized uses. It wasn't until the nineteen twenties I think, really when commercial sunglasses and tinted goggles

for driving often really became popular. And then especially it seems in the nineteen thirties when commercially produced sunglasses became popular in the in the United States due to their being a fashion item worn by the rich and the glamorous. Now, if we want to focus briefly on the idea of how sunglasses actually work, I feel like you can. You can take a couple of approaches here. You can go the very simple route, or you can go the incredibly tedious route. Right, And how do we how do we

avoid those two? Well? We can. I think what we'll do is we'll try to we'll try and hit the high notes here and and just remind everybody, if you want a more in depth discussion of how sunglasses work, there's actually a how stuff works article, How sunglasses work. Oddly enough, that's the title of the article. That's a pretty good one. Yeah, and it's it's a pretty It

is a pretty good one. It takes you through a lot of the more optical details, like essentially, to really understand how sunglasses work, you needed like a full refresher on how light works. And that's what this article provides. And that's what we do not have time to provide here today. But we talked about lumens already, and we've talked about just basically how sunglasses modify incoming light to

your eyes. Now, there are different ways that different types of sunglasses do that, right, modern sunglasses, especially depending on a number of different methods. There's tinting, polarization, photochromic lenses, there's mirror mirroring, scratch resistant coading, anti reflective coding, and UV coding. Tinting, though, is largely what we're talking about here, uh, and it's certainly key to the older methods of LEMBS

based shades. Gray tint is generally popular because gray tint reduces the overall amount of brightness with the least amount of color distortion. Because this is this is actually a really interesting thing to to read up on, because when you think about the color of shades, it's easy to just think that it's just purely, you know, a fashion choice. Am I gonna have brown? Am I gonna maybe a mood choice? Like are you nero? And you want to

see the gladiator fights in green? Because you like green? Yeah? Maybe I like rose rose tinted glasses. There's actually now I'm remembering that I have been into various New Age stores where they sell um glass is that are tinted within and they come with like documentation to tell you about how this particular tinant will affect your mood. Oh, like in a like a magic stone power kind of way, Like it has the powers of the supposed powers of

these crystals embedded in the glass. Oh. Yes, there's definitely a new age crystal vibe to it. But also I think maybe maybe there's a they were incorporating a little bit of color theory as well. How do I get diamond sunglasses? I just want to look through dark diamonds. I want to say that, um, the dark crystal McDuck had those real maybe, but well, I want to say that there is like a like, apart from the cartoon that showed when it played all the clips at the beginning,

that he had like diamonds stuck in his eyes. That's what I'm thinking of, Okay, but I think, yeah, you wouldn't want diamonds stuck in your eyes. That'd be pointy. Um. But anyway, that the tacom here is that uh different color. Different tinted lenses do different things. They interact with light in different ways. So again gray um is not going to really distort color all that much. Meanwhile, yellow or gold tints reduced the amount of blue light while allowing

a larger percentage of other frequencies through. But they can also create a kind of glare known as blue haze. The yellow tint virtually eliminates the blue part of the spectrum and has the effect of making everything bright and sharp. Amber and brownish tints reduced glare, and they have molecules that absorb higher frequency colors such as blue. In addition to UV rays, Green tints on lenses filter some blue light in reduced glare, and they offer the highest contrast

and greatest visual acuity. I guess that's the thing we hadn't mentioned much already, is that certain types of light filtering could actually sharpen images and reduced blur, such as at the gladiatorial uh combat. You know, I don't know if that worked well. No, that makes me think. You know, there are these stories from the past of people going to the movie theaters with sunglasses on. Right, you'd go sit in the movies and watch through sunglasses. I wonder

if some people were trying to see a sharper image somehow. Now, the oldest method of tinting depends on constant density, and what does that mean? So this is a uniform tinting throughout the lens. Nowadays, we'd have to wear those shades over the uncomfortable three D glasses that were already wearing. Right, let's say you're heading up a chain gang. That's that's

got Luke in it. Oh yeah, you're talking about old cool hand Luke and the man with no eyes that that chain gang guard where he's always wearing those those perfectly mirrored shades and just seems to have no soul exactly. Or at the other end of the spectrum, let's say you're just trying to look super cool. I mean, there are so many reasons people wear sunglasses that don't have

that much to do with blocking out the sunlight. Sunglasses, I think have a profound psychological and cultural impact, and we should talk about that when we come back. All right, we're back, So we're talking about the legacy of sunglasses of what are they doing psychologically and culturally. Now, one thing is that human behavior and self image pretty clearly are influenced by some interplay between our ongoing senses of

seeing and being seen. Right at any given time, you're potentially seeing something and you're potentially being seen, and how you feel about those things is going to affect your confidence,

your relation to other people, maybe your generosity. As just one strange example, just just think about all the ways that things feel different if you're viewing them simply through some kind of barrier or screen, Like the way that your relationship to the world changes when you're looking at that world through a car windshield, You know what I mean?

How being being inside a car looking out at the world fundamentally changes how you think about that world as opposed to being in the exact same place but not looking through the glass of a windshield. Yeah, Like, it's an entirely different scenario if you're just, say, you know, at a summer camp, just walking through the woods. But then if you're wearing a hockey mask while doing so, it changes everything. Well, no, it really does, I mean, And it's not just the act of say, stalking through

the woods or the act of driving. It also seems to be something about that barrier. And likewise, sunglasses can be a kind of shield or barrier or blind that has psychological effects on the person wearing them in the person they interact with. Think again of the Chinese courtroom example.

You could see in a maybe in a maybe well meaning or benevolent way that a judge hiding their face could be a way to try to show impartiality or neutrality, not show emotional reactions to arguments or statements or evidence. On the other hand, you could say that a judge covering their face could be some kind of power move, right. You know, the judge says you will not have access to my humanity. I will look upon you, but you

will not look upon me. And even though they're not technically the judge that you know, we do see this with our enforcement figures, right, and those chain gang figures like the man with no eyes or the clearly the cool hand Luke inspired character in the Cohen Brothers. Oh brother, where art thou? Where you often see like fire reflected in his dark shades, but never his eyes. And there

is actually research on the effects of sunglasses on human behavior. Yeah, I was looking at a two thousand ten University of Toronto study that found that people wearing sunglasses were less generous. Now, this was via a very small experiment in which participants were given a small amount of money to divvy up between themselves and another individual, and um and and yeah, they found that if you were wearing the sunglasses. You

were a little sting ere with the money. In a way, It's like they could see less of you, and therefore there was less to be lost in uh in in in dishing out less money. Well, it's this feeling of being inside and being disconnected. I think that has something to do with that. I mean, it's the same way that you are much. I mean, maybe not you, but I would suspect you, like most people are just less generous when thinking about the people around you when you're

in a car. You ever notice how like if you if you were walking past somebody on the sidewalk and they got in your way, you wouldn't You wouldn't be like, what's wrong with you? You? You know, get out of my way. But people in cars say stuff like that all the time. I think it has something to do with like looking out through that screen on the world. It creates this barrier that undercuts your generosity and connection with other people outside as humans and turns them more

into like obstacle stimuli. Yeah. Now, And another thing which you mention is that this study does follow in the tradition of Philippa Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. Which show it's easy to forget because this is like the less powerful detail of that study. But I mean, I think I have read that there there are a lot of people who look back on that study and think, you know,

we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. I think I don't remember exactly what the critics sisms are now, but I think it it is. It has been critically reappraised, right, it is. It is a study that was that it certainly has a has a long legacy onto itself. A lot of people have revisited it that in cases have had issues with it. But it did entail the use of mirrored sunglasses. Those assigned to play the roles of

guards in that experiment were given sticks and sunglasses. And basically the issue is that in that experiment, some people were assigned to play the role of prisoners and some people were assigned to play the role of guards, and they found that even just being given these fake roles, supposedly the people really took on their roles and like

the guards, became brutal. Well, you know, no matter what we think about the Stanford Prison experiment, we do have plenty of studies and clothed cognition in the ways that various cultural uniforms change the way we think about ourselves. Our own abilities are roles, and typically those experiments include things like giving somebody a doctor's coat and a clipboard but preases their sense of authority. Yeah, but in this but you can back at Stanford prison experiment and say, well,

a stick and some sunglasses. This is kind of to a certain extent that the uniform of the guard. That is so how many how many cases are sunglasses a part of a uniform official or unofficial that have certain attributes that we perhaps take on when we wear them, and we're thinking about that particular archetype. For instance, it

could be something like just the cool cat who's wearing shades. Uh, you know, maybe we're just thinking about David Caruso putting those those those deal with It shades on and saying something cool. Well, that's another good question. Why are sunglasses so generally perceived as cool? I've read about this, and you know, one of the ideas out there is that sunglasses are perceived as cool because, as we've been talking about,

they limit people's access to your emotions and to your reactions. Right, they make you appear more static. When other people can't read your expressions, you appear more you know, impassive, more confident, and more cool. Yeah, more stoic. I mean, you know, the old saying is whether the eyes that are mirror into the soul. You know, the eyes. Our eyes are an important part of how we communicate with people, and

they can there can be a certain vulnerability. Uh. There, there are various ways that we can We can just have like dumb staring eyes and if you're wearing shades, nobody can see that confused look in your eyes. It's a type of social psychological armor. Yeah, in some ways, quite literally, right, Yeah, I mean they're a way to hide.

I was also looking at a two thousand thirteen article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, and in this researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that the participants who relived an embarrassing experience tended to prefer large, dark tinted sunglasses, and they also found that embarrassed participants expressed greater interest in sunglasses as well as restorative face creams. So again, they're

like both exercises and covering your face with some thing. Um. Now, the study was conducted with only Chinese participants, so the authors pointed out, you know, they're they're very likely going to be certain cultural elements to to these test subjects that wouldn't be president and other test subjects. Of course, that's always the case. I mean a lot of studies studies are just done on American college studies. There might

be cultural issues there as well, exactly. But but I do feel like this in general, it does I think it matches up with a lot of our experiences. Uh, if if you're going on in public and you've been crying, wearing sunglasses is the way to go. I mean, we've all had situations too where you're just feeling maybe you're

just feeling a little shy or emotionally vulnerable. Putting on sunglasses, even if your eyes are not puffy from tears, it's a way of like disconnecting and feeling a little safer and being just a little less up in the face of the world. It's putting the screen up. Yeah. Now I could be wrong about this, but I also feel like that there's perhaps some interesting connection between our preference for sunglasses and the way that we experience so much

of our lives through screen devices. Now you know that that the sunglasses introduced this idea of looking at the world through a kind of barrier or screen, and we're constantly doing now social interactions on phones, on computers, on devices where we're also interacting with the world through a screen. I don't know if there's anything interesting to tease out there, but it feels it feels right to me. Huh, you know, I was just thinking of another thing. Have you ever

encountered somebody internally? We're talking about people we don't know that well, or even celebrities, but people who never see without their shades, And then when you finally do, it's a little unnerving because you're like, oh, is that what your eyes look like? It's like seeing kiss without their makeup. Yeah, exactly. Becomes such a part of their identity, you know, um, but it also, you're their identity becomes this slightly less human thing. You know. There's like the stoic eyed, dark

eyed U country music star. And then if you remove them, you're like, who's that guy? Who is the one who always wore sunglasses? Was it Roy or person? Did he always have sunglasses on? Yes? I believe he did. Another one is Hank Williams Jr. Oh No of sunglasses. But I believe that was, if i'm if I'm if memory serves me correctly, part of that was due to an

injury he's sustained as well. Yeah. Well, I think another way that sunglasses lend a sense of coolness and maybe even celebrity or glamor to people is that they increase a sense of mystery, Right, that's sort of what you're getting at here. Well, yeah, because of the other side, what do their eyes look like? What is it like to have a personal connection with this person? I don't even I don't even know who dare stares into the

eyes of Bosephis. It's like Medusa. Yeah, um. I Speaking of psychology and sunglasses, I also read a two fourteen University of Sienna study Sienna in Italy, and they made a connection between panic attacks, specifically panic disorders in fear of bright lights. And so people who experience uh, panic attacks and and and and have a panic disorder, they said, off and find come for in the use of sunglasses. That's interesting. I wonder what the wonder what the causal

ordering there is? Is it like they find comfort in sunglasses because they're afraid of bright lights, or they're afraid of bright lights because they find comfort in sunglasses. Yeah, that's a good point because yeah, there's so many, now that we've discussed all these various, uh, just psychological elements that could be in play, from the unclothed cognition to

even just personal identity. Like if you wear sunglasses so much that they are just a part of who you are, then it makes sense that you would feel naked without them. Maybe you end up just wearing your sunglasses at night, much like Corey Hart did. Are you lonely just like me? Mercy? All right? So there you have it. Uh, that is the episode of Invention for this week. We do hope that you will check out Invention pod dot com. That is where you'll find uh the existing episodes of the

Invention Podcast. You'll also find links out to our social media accounts, and if you want to talk about this episode inside of a Facebook group, you should go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module because that is where we are known to hang out and discuss episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But we're also happy to talk about episodes of Invention. Huge Thanks as always to Scott Benjamin for research assistance on this show,

and to our excellent audio producer Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.