Supernormal Stimuli

that is why that thing exists. Yeah, it's some core sceptable your mind content. So if you enjoy it the first time, enjoy it again if not prepared to have your mind on it. Today is an episode of where we can call out a particular listener for suggesting it. Yeah, listener, Serena. She sent us this excellent life Hacker article about why we feel the need to fill our pie holes in

our eye holes with exaggerated versions of stimuli every day. Yeah, and at the startup because you think life Hacker, do you think I am? I'm reading a life Hacker article and I'm going to be a better equipped to sort of make the best out of my day. You know,

there's kind of an uplifting aspect to that. And so I don't know about you, but I entered into this topic with that sort of idea in mind, like, oh, it's just a little quirky inside into how we go about our daily lives and maybe how you might improve it a little bit. But I found this topic to be one of the more ultimately disturbing topics that we've looked at, like this condemning of of of human nature and sort of makes you want to crawl into a

cave to a certain extent. Yeah, because you're right. The premise was like, hey, we all love cheesecake, right, it's delicious, it's patty, it's got tons of sugar. But this happens to be something called a super normal stimuli. Um. This is a term evolutionary biologist used to describe any simulus that a listits a response stronger than the stimulus for which it evolved, even if it's artificial. So, in other words, we like sugar because that's a quick hit of energy.

We needed that back in the day. Um, but we don't need a slice of cheesecake. Yeah, sugar is probably the easiest example to to just call out and and and generally a well not even really a harmless one, but a less harmful version of some of the things we're gonna look at here, because the basic ideas, how much raw sugar can you find in the natural environment

if you're a you know, a prehistoric hunter gatherer. Maybe you'll find some berries, maybe you'll find some sort of a carrot, uh, but you're not gonna find, you know, a big sucker, a big dumb, dumb of a whole field of TUTSI rolls to feast on. That is super normal stimuli. That is a a version of the stimuli that we seek as a as an organism, except it is it is blown out of proportion. It is the crack cocaine of sugar, and certainly crack and heroin, methamphetamines.

These are these are other examples of of super normal stimuli that have had a huge effect on humans. Yeah, in my mind, there's a whole class of desserts called porn desserts, you know what I'm talking about. Like there's like sixteen layer caramel cakes that are just so huge and big and with you know, red frosting, and it's so over the top. And we'll be talking about porn by the way later on. But it's like such a good example, another great example, um of the sort of

supernormal stimuli, giant eyed dolls or even anime character. I was thinking about this cute. Yes, we've we've we've recorded at least one podcast in the in the past on the power of cute and and how cute really taps into our our primal instincts to want to care for like a small child. And so we end up seeing that smash small child's face in a cat in a

cartoon character. But you look at some of these just super cute, hypercute, dangerously cute anime characters or the or the or certainly the avatar of this Hello kitty, and uh, and it's overpowering. It's cuteness almost beyond our human ability

to take it in right. And as Dedra Bartlett of, a Harvard psychologist and the author of super Normal Stimuli, how primal urges overran the revolutionary purposes says, this human instinct for food, sex, or even territorial protection, all of that is rooted in our instincts evolved, as you say,

for hunting and gathering. An early man and she says that evolution has been unable to keep up with the pace of change, this rapid change in the modern life, in which a taco bell, Dorito's Loco taco, you know, day glo orange in your hand suddenly arrives. Um Our bodies, in our minds aren't really unable to water down that instinct, that response to that food or that stimulus. Yeah. I mean, because that on a basic level, what does the human creature need in order to survive? It needs to mate

and uh and and and report use. It needs to take in food, um, it needs to find uh these various tastes that please it. It needs protection. It doesn't need a lot of things. But then we layer on all the complexities of human civilization, our technology, our art, our ability to find all the stimuli that we crave, and then just just pump them up to an unbelievable degree. Yeah.

Bartlett says that as a result, we have a glut of larger than life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic bombs, that cater to outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results. Indeed, now, in order to fully understand this, we have to go to the roots of the term supernormal stimuli, which are based in some rather uh simple biological principles, which is nice because again, all these these human layers of human civilization technology, it complicates the issue.

But when we look to the animal world we can find a far simpler model, and we we find that back in the nineteen thirties with the work of Dutch Noble laureate Nico Tinbergen. That's right, he is the person who coined the term super normal stimuli to describe these these uh sort of imitations that appeal to primitive instincts

and exert stronger attraction than the real thing. So this biologist, he set about isolating traits that trigger certain instincts in animals and insects, and he manipulated these traits in nature to see what would happen. So this next bit is from the Live Hacker article by Daniel Jodi or Giotty. I suppose it says that he constructed plaster eggs to see which one a bird would prefer to sit on, finding that they would select those that were larger, had

more defined markings or more saturated color. A day glow bright egg with black polka dots, for instance, would be selected over the bird's own pale, dappled eggs, and in fact that bert would keep slipping off the huge one,

but it couldn't help it. It was drawn to that super stimuli of the colors in the markings, because the colors in the markings in the natural world, in the in the in the natural course of events, would indicate the healthier eggs, which ones have the highest graded survival, and therefore that's where the bird is going to focus

his attention. This artificial egg, though, just pumps that completely out of proportion, and the bird cannot help but respond by setting on this lifeless but beautiful, gaudy egg and in riding that egg to the detriment of its actual biological offspring in the surrounding eggs, which are which are

okay but less amazing. Yeah, this is actually, to me the really depressing part when you see this in nature, Yes, because it really does bear out this idea that a lot of this is sort of hardwired in us and all organisms. He also found that territorial male stickleback fish would attack a wooden fish model more vigorously than a real male if it's underside was redder, so again, pumping up those signs to it that would make it say, oh that that's a competitor. Look how red that underbelly is.

And this is interesting too. I want to make sure everyone sort of bookmark this for later. Uh. Here we have supernormal stimuli that is in kind of in the negative realm as opposed to the positive, something that's based in fear as opposed to desire. That's a really good point, the aggressive part of it, right. Okay. Another experiment was that he constructed a cardboard dummy butterfly with more defined markings that male butterflies would actually try to mate with

in preference to actual real female butterflies. And that's another one to to definitely remember for later when we can start getting into the human versions of these same principles. Yeah, because if you think about, um, we'll get into this later.

But you know, I always talk about gender performance. And Okay, if you take a female and a male and you don't do really much to them in terms of grooming them and clothing them in ways that are coded for their gender, there's not a ton of difference between them. But if you slap on a bunch of makeup on a female, plug her eyebrows. She's really performing that gender. And I think about it that with these butterflies like

this must have been like the Marilyn Monroe of that butterfly. Yes, and all the other male butterflies are like, Yes, that one, even though she's wooden, looks great. Yes, the butterfly becomes this a little closer to this, this ideal butterfly. Right, And that's what really gives me about the topic of supernormal stimuli. Um My mind in reading this get kept returning to a Plato's theory of forms. Plato's in The

Philosopher of Course, Um. He proposed that we live in this material realm, right, okay, and beyond our plane of existence, there's an immaterial realm of ideal forms, all right, you can you can think of these ideal forms is the absolute perfection of a given thing, a truth that cannot be manifested in the material world. All we can do is echo it. Okay. So in this world there's no true beauty, but we have in an understanding and longing for the true form of beauty as as it exists

beyond the limits of the material world. In a similar sense, see would argue that there's no true justice here. But we all have a sense of justice because there's an unreachable ideal that exists beyond our realm okay out there in the realm of forms. And you can apply this to just about any anything like a one argument is often made as a chair, Like every chair in our world is just a take, an attempt to capture the perfect chairness, uh that we would find in the world

of forms, beyond our material world. Every pretty face, every feeling, every work of art, it's just a take on the ideal. And so it's tempting to view a supernormal stimuli in the same way we innately long for the true forms, forms that simply do not occur in the natural world. We do it through our art and our technology, and in doing this we're able to inch a little closer and a little closer to this awesome and terrible perfection

that we crave. And so so we end up engine closer and closer and in creating an artificial thing that just cannot exist in this world, and we're craving nothing but but shadows of that and imitations of that. And we're taking to your point that, I mean, the makeup argument is perfect because we're taking real versions of beauty and in a sense of defacing them and trying to carve them into into avatars of this true form. This

this perfect form that just cannot be achieved. Yeah, this is essentially the Platonic ideal, right, this idea that you're trying to get to this ideal as close to perfection as possible. Other Plato would say there's no perfection because we are mere copies of what God intended. Right, So there's this obsession with, as you say, uh, perfection and idealism, and that this supernormal stimuli is really a stand in

for it. It's such an intriguing idea, especially when we get to another section in which we talk about poor and and other things that other types of media that we consume. Um. But before we do that, let's take a break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about why humans are essentially like sea gold chicks when it comes to art. Alright, we're back. We are going to revisit this topic art and why we're drawn to it, um because we need to podcast on this.

I believe it was like the science of beauty or along there's lines, and we talked about vs. Roma Tendren, who has some really great and interesting ideas about art that he says that are hardwired to the way that we respond to our environments. And particularly he says, um, we evolved in a camouflage environment, and we are rewarded when we identify objects and patterns, and that's why we like to seek them out so often in this idea

called grouping. So he says that when you are looking at an artwork, you can't help but be please on some level if you can detect those patterns. Now, he's just to really understand why we are drawn to certain works of art, you have to look at seagull chicks because when they hatch, they start pecking at the mother's beak for food. And the mother seagulls beak is a long yellow thing with a red spot on the end.

So for those chicks, that red spot is that kind of stimuli that they know if they tap it they get food. So action, reaction, and reward. But the researchers quickly found is that you have okay, so you have the beak with the markings, but you can you can have just a beak. You don't need the mother because the because nature takes shortcuts in our associations here or and certainly in the associations of birds. So you can

take the mother out of the equation. You can just put a beak on a stick and they will respond to that. So that's that's kind of the spot has to have the spot has has to the the appropriate markings. But where it gets even crazier is that you turn those markings into super stimuli. You you put three red lines on there, and then that just makes it irresistible to the chick, like it just it just overflows the circuitry,

overloads the circuitry, and they have to go to that beak. Now. Yeah, And actually Ron Chandon says that the chick prefers the fetishized, highly abstract representation of a beak to the real beak. Again, little depressing here because the mother is attached to the real beak. And yet here are these three stripes that are very strong. Um, they're that they're exhibiting a crazy reaction to. And this was researched done by athologist Tim Burton, by the way, Yeah, not to be confused with the

Tim Burton. Yeah, I was trying to because I was reading the interview with the Rama shandren Nafer it to Tim Burton. So I started doing all these searches for Tim Burton Birds, Tim Burton Biologist, and it was still getting nothing but information on the director Tim Burton, because I would love to see some sort of mash up like him directing a film about super normal stimuli. Yeah, yeah, I mean I feel I want to see nothing but films about super normal stimuli now, um super stimuli about

super stimuli. Indeed, but rum Children says that this is the same reason that we humans gravitate towards art, that these abstractions, these metaphors and unusual combinations of elements play to instincts wired deep in our reptilian brains, instincts that really don't have any bounds because, again, as Bartlett says, everything that's available to us today and the super sized fashion is not something that was available, you know, ten thousand years ago, and so our brains and our bodies

just have not been able to be conscious enough really to tamp this down. Yeah. And I love how he referred to the artificial beak for the bird as as a fetish, because it instantly brings to mind some of these these ancient fetishes that you see the the venous figurines right where it's during like almost a headless woman bosoms and valley and uh. And in a sense, even in a in a very primitive sense, this is an

idealized female form. And of course through the history of art you see lots of idealized versions of the of the female forming the venus de Milo, for example, is just another venus in a very long tradition of venus is well, yeah, I mean the code of those pieces of art is basically that your genetic material is going to survive better in this person, maybe because perhaps there would there would be um stronger offspring or more of a chance to copulate with this person, or you know.

I mean, those are all the signs that are coming from that particular piece of art. And rom Trondon says that artists are tapping into the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultra normal stimuli that are more powerfully exciting certain visual neurons in our brains as opposed

to realistic looking images. Yeah. Like when we did our podcast on the art, Savannahs came up landscapes that there are certain artistic interpretations of landscapes that arguably, uh get into our brain more that are more pleasing, more pleasing, but essentially get their claws into us because on a very primitive level, we see it and we know that this would be a good place to live. It's like, oh, there's some trees, I can seek some cover. There, there's

some water I can drink. Everything that Bob Roth describes when he's painting a landscape like, those are all things that are those are all aspects of of a landscape that would be pleasing to the human organism. Yeah, I remember from that too, that, um, the vantage point was really important that you would want to be up on a hill and those landscape painting so that you would be able to see out not just you know, over your kingdom, but be able to see any intruders coming

upon you. Right, all right, So that's art. That's one. It's one thing to think about the aesthetic world. But but how do we take this and apply it to the the less esthetic worlds of say fast food. Well, as we had mentioned before, you mean the especially with sugar. Our bodies need a little bit of it, and so we have those big crazy anime eyes looking at that and taking all of that in and thinking I want

the entire thing. Um. So you know, for me, I think this topic is really very large in junk food because food is energy. We gravitate to it, um, but we don't necessarily know when to stop, right. That's the whole boundary thing with our instincts. So if you look at a giant jar of peanut butter on on a shelf, you know, I'm talking about Costco or any of those other like super crazy places where they've got just giant, oversized cans of all types of food. On some level,

that's tapping into the primal brain in somewhere. I mean, you know, some evolutionary bottles just might say that jar of peanut butter is a promise to you that you're not going to have to leave your cave very often for food and you won't encounter as much danger. Yeah, because your body is saying that stuff is great, that is what I crave. I want as much of that as we can possibly get, so that I can stockpilot

and have it whenever I want. I will not have to leave my apartment for three months with that jar of peanut butter. But you know, of course there's an idea here that we live so much in the symbolic world, and so some of these meetings can't help but drill

down into us. Now, I can't help but think of French fries um in terms of super normal stimuli, because what our French fries, your average order of French fries, you know, covered with ketchup, and that's and that's not counting if you're adding bacon or chili or nacho cheese or whatever the latest t G. I. Friday's sort of twist on it happens to be. But in one plate, you're you're you're satisfying your cravings for fat, for crispiness, that you're that you're on on a on a on

one level, associating with fresh vegetables. You're getting sweetness, you're getting salt, maybe you're getting a hit of hint of meat if you have some sort of weird topping on it. And all of this in one big blasphem is serving. You know what's really interesting that is there is an article out there somewhere about the physics of a potato

chip and why it's so appealing to us. And if I'm remembering this correctly, the kind of crunch, That popping sound that the chips make is the exact same that a fresh fruit or vegetable might feel like in your mouth. And this is something that our brains have been tagging for, you know, tens of thousands of years, and so that chip is really just riding into the circuitry of your brain saying fresh fresh, this is good, this is healthy. Let's we cannot just eat just one eat the whole pag.

Yeah that's salty too. Yeah, alright, another area that again, there's some there's a level of aesthetics involved in this as well, but the world of gaming video gaming everything from you know, playing what is it candy corn candy crush on your phone to some sort of deep m emo immersion experience, because what do you get with video games? Do you get an instant entry into a world of goal achievement UM neurological award for that goal achievement, empowerment

in some cases graphic violence, exploration UM. The goal achievement is something I often think about as when I find time these days to to play like a quick video game, like, I think, well, this is clearly what's happening here is my brain is adjusting to this false environment and saying, oh, well,

we just achieved something there. We just achieved something there, even if in the course of the day maybe I didn't actually close any loops, you know, here I am closing loop after loop and just say fifteen minutes of gameplay. So this reminds me of two things. One is the stickleback fish, right, because you've got that the red underside

of the wooden fish. That more aggression towards that. And video games are so beautiful, if I may say that, Um, the way that they're rendered in the colors and the saturation, all of that is very intriguing and it's kind of like hyper realism. So that's one thing I think that people fall into. The other is this is really playing into for me, is an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia And are you familiar with us? I've watched

the number of episodes. It's great. And when the characters is d and she's kind of always shoved around by the other guys in this gang of theirs, so to speak, um, and she turns to the virtual world with avatars to try to vanquish them in a sense because in real life she has not much power or control over the situation, but she creates these characters, and everybody in the town gets to know the virtual reality players in this game get to know that gang, and they know how d

is describing them in this other world. It is probably my favorite It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode, and there's this great idea behind it all that they're just all in a turtle dream and outer space. Oh, that's pretty awesome. I'll have to check that episode out. Yes, I love the mention of the word avatar because certainly avatar in the gaming world is one thing. It's the version of

us that goes into this lesser world. And in the the world of cosmology and religion, an avatar is a version of a God that we as humans can interact with, or at least some aspect of a God uh that we can comprehend and uh. And in thinking about the ideal forms of Plato, I can't help but think of those forms in that in that ideal realm as being kind of like God's, kind of like a pantheon of God's where each deity is again an idealized version of

something that we want out of life. And in the gaming world, this adversary that you're you're you know, you're shooting in this uh this fifteen minutes of game play

in the evening. That is the ideal version of an adversary, kind of an avatar of some uh of some ideal enemy, and you're vanquishing it in the same way that uh, this, uh, this artificial version of a beautiful woman in a magazine is again an avatar of of ideal be that we've created some version of the unimaginable perfection beyond our realm

that we have made we've cobbled together in our realm. Well, let's jump off on that, because I think the beautiful woman thing that really plays into this idea of porn and again gender performance. And when we talked about lust uh in an episode of one of Our Seven Sins, we talked about this article called the Internet is for porn. So let's talk about it. And I just wanted to reference it real quick in light of why we seek

super normal stimuli before um yield Internet. I suppose by now there were fewer than ninety porn magazines published in the US. Today, more than two point five million porn sites are blocked by CYBERsitter. That's not all of them, but that's as many as CYBERsitter has comed through. So now consider that porn is tapping into the reward circuitry of your brain with the release of dopamine, and dopamine is really that neurotransmitter, that chemical that keeps you seeking

out that experience again and again. It's what helps form habits. So porn is this kind of really interesting aspect of supernormal stimuli because you know, you could have a person in the other room who is more than willing to have sex with you, but some people will actually opt to say, just look at porn instead and um interact

with that image in their mind. And that is fascinating because here you might have the real thing, but you know, just like the beak, the fake beak with the three stripes on it, you keep sort of going towards that fake thing, or even more to the point, like the gaudy golden egg in the bird's nest. It's not going to produce anything. It has no substance. It's it's just

a just a gateway to the abyss. But you're going to choose that over over actual human interaction or at least even the you know, if not, you know, certainly not everyone's in a position where they can as easily find human interaction and ultimately some sort of sexual experience, but still to choose that over the even the attempt at it, the attempt at human interaction. And think about that egg again, you know, with a big giant egg with US spots on it, the Polka dots and as

day glow yellow. And then think about the women that are represented in porn and their dimensions. Quite often you have I mean, I don't know that there's even any um porn that features women that aren't augmented or at least approaching certain dimensions with their bodies. Well, there are a lot of different types of pornography. Well, and you know,

obviously seventies porn. I'll tell you what. Paton Oswald, the stand up comedian he um, he did did a bit and I imagine still does a bit, uh pointing out that no matter what ones like, whatever a person's particular individual fetish is, no matter you know, this dark thing that they haven't told anybody somewhere out there in the world. There there's like a team of people who have a magazine devoted to that, and they're just so bored with it.

It's just so every day. Now it's an older bit that he did imagines you could basically extrapolate this too websites and pornography in general, so that every corner of of of of sexuality within limits or maybe not even within limits, is represented out there, and that's part of

the supernormal stimuli of it. Like you could you could just go out there and just fall down the whole of pornography and almost never reached the bottom, and again dopamine would be really helping to carve out those neural pathways to keep you going again and again. So obviously we are conscious of our behavior. We humans. We have that beautiful prefrontal cortex which is helping us manage all these different things about our lives and helping us to

be conscious. Um, so how do we want to look at this, because I mean, you can look at this in a light of like uh, positively light super normal in general, or just pornography basically, um, supernormal in general, because with pornography we could certainly got a lot deeper into that topic and just discussing like because you have super normal stimuli, and then how does that affect just everything in life? How does that affect uh, you know,

underlying currents of misogyny and culture. How does that affect that, your personal interactions, your expectations from real world sexuality, How does it change real world sexuality? But for another podcast, I guess what I'm saying is there are two different ways to look at this. So you want to take good copper, bad cop um, I guess I'll take a bad cop knew it? Okay, Okay, Well, I mean the bad cop version of of looking at the super normal stimuli is that I mean, we're kind of we're kind

of boned, and we always have been. We're tied to these these cravings and these desires for these ideal form ms, and we, thanks to our technology, thank to our thanks to our art, we're able to craft. We're able to sort of scratch away at that layer between us and the ideal to create these artificial versions of the things we want. And then we were kind of powerless to

resist them. You know that we we we end up not leaving our apartments because the Internet provides us just instant access to whatever our whim might be, instant access to just you know, an endless stream of whatever kind of sexuality we want to immerse ourselves in. We can we can order any kind of tantalizing junk food we want and have it delivered right to our home and

whatever quantities we want. And so we end up just setting on that big golden egg, just writing it into extinction, like the like the atomic bomb at the at the end of Doctor Strange Luck. And indeed the atomic bomb is an example of aggression of just of of super stimuli in the world of of protection and the do ire to be protected against aggression from these uh outsider forces. Okay, I'll add one thing to that before I go to a good cop. All right, um, see, because you're a

bad cop too, that's the thing. Well, I can be a good copy. Do you remember we're talking about our episode on habits, and we were talking about like something like forty five percent of the decisions that we make on a daily basis are rooted in habit And if habits are driven by reward systems, then that means that that's not such a great thing, right, Like it would be very hard for us to overcome these sort of

routinized neural pathways that are happening every single day. Like you might have to be as zen as a monk and as conscious of your behaviors. But now I will go to DJ Bartlett. She's really a good cup here, and she says humans have one stupendous advantage over tim Bergen's bird, that Nicolas tinbergen Um. She says, we have a giant brain, and this would give us the unique ability to exercise self control and override instincts that lead

us astray and extricate ourselves from civilizations gaudy traps. You think, so I think we can do it. Maybe, I mean, it's it's kind of a colossal idea, because again, I'm I kind of like to look at these super stimuli entities as kind of dark gods from beyond our universe, and then what standing, what do we have to combat them? We have, we have a nice brain, we have some willpower that we can summon, we have some self knowledge

of our relationship with super stimuli. We can conceivably stop and realize oh that even without getting into the porn, to go back to just just beauty, you know, to realize, oh, well that that version of Scarlett Johansson it's on the front of that magazine is actually she's wearing makeup she has probably been photoshopped, like even though that is a real woman, that is an idealized version of a real woman. So we can, we can be self aware, we can

exert willpower. So yeah, I will. I will agree with the good Cops to a certain extent on that. But I feel like we're we're up against some pretty overwhelming odds. No, no, we like to rely on our lazy blueprint that we've created for ourselves, at least should say I do, because back to willpower. We've done, of course, the podcasts on willpower, and we know that willpower is at a pleadable resource.

So when we're most of command, most in command of ourselves, when we're most awake and aware of ourselves, then maybe we're the equal of this of these forces. But we can't stay awake all the time. We can't stay uh you know, completely tanked up on willpower all the time unless we have a third eye that we can open to consciousness. But I think that kind of concludes where we are with this topic. You know, there are a couple of bright spots in this world, and weren't symbolic

meaning is under pinning everything that we do. Indeed, we have the we have the equipment to fight with good fights, so so just keep that in mind. Suit up yeah the next time cheesy fries come inat so that you have it. Uh, one of our favorite episodes from the

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