The Doppelganger Network

Joe McCormick. And today I thought we might have a discussion bringing together the seemingly disparate topics of familiarity, doppelgangers or doubles, cap gross syndrome, and social media. And I got the idea to talk about this today because a few weeks ago I read this interesting article that had a very intriguing central comparison or image. It was. It was a thought provoking essay by the Stanford Nero Endo

chronologist Robert Sapulsky. It was originally published a few years ago in Nautilus, and it was an article comparing the effects of social media and and sort of the digital world like Facebook, and you know, all that to a psychological condition known as Capgrass syndrome. And so today I thought, maybe we should start by explaining and discussing Sepulsky's comparison and argument in that article and just see where we go from there. Now, capgrass syndrome has definitely come up

on the show before. I don't know that we've done like a designated show on the topic, but it'd certainly come up. But either way, we we we do need to, you know, provide a brief refresher on its history for our listeners. Right. One of the important cases and which Sapulsky discusses in his article, is the case of Madam im This. This was a woman who lived in France in the early twentieth century who had this persistent idea.

She was fixated on the idea that her loved ones, including her husband, family members, people she knew, had been replaced by doubles or doppel gangers who looked exactly like them. So she would say, my husband is not really my husband. He's a man who looks exactly like my husband used to and I don't know what happened to my real husband. And this wasn't her only symptoms. She had a number of symptoms. She believed that all kinds of things were

happening to UH, to her children. I mean, it's a tragic story, but the underlying UH, the underlying cause of what would lead someone to believe that people around them were being replaced by doppel gangers or doubles is is

interesting to consider. And so the way Sepulsky in this article characterizes the ultimate disconnect under lyon cap Grass syndrome is that when the module of the brain used in recognition of faces, specifically involving the fusiform gyrus in the brain, does cognitively recognize someone, but at the same time, the different module of the brain that normally responds to this recognition with the emotion that we call familiarity does not

kick in. And this brain function responsible for generating the emotion of familiarity is what Sopolsky calls the extended face processing system. It's quote a diffuse network including a variety of cortical and limbic regions. And apparently, when we recognize someone but we don't feel the necessary familiarity emotion that follows when we normally recognize somebody, What the brain often does when faced with this contradiction is to conclude that

someone has been replaced by a double. It looks like them, but this person doesn't feel familiar to me, thus they must be a physically identical impostor. In the past, I looked at a two thousand four paper from the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry titled cap Grass Syndrome. A Review of the neuro physiological correlates and presenting clinical features in cases

involving physical violence and UH. In this point out that the delusional identification syndrome generally involves right brain anomalies linked to a number of illnesses and neurological disorders, ranging from UH schizo effective disorder and Alzheimer's disease to severe head injuries, pituitary tumors and migraines. Even alcoholism can play a role. You know, basically, each each of us has a visual system and olympic system, and the ladder helps us to

generate and process emotions. Damage or disrupt communication between these two systems, and suddenly a familiar face can in suspire, can inspire suspicion instead of comfort. Now, Fortunately, kept Grass syndrome usually subsides with the successful treatment of the underlying medical condition. You know, the tumor goes away, and thankfully so does this. Uh. This, you know, suspicion and that

people are not what they seem to be. Uh. And in some cases doctors can prescribe antipsychotic drugs to also achieve the same effect. But you can easily see why the idea of someone being replaced by a double or a doppelganger would be such a captivating one. I mean, it's something that, um, it's something that feels very perverted. You know, it plays on our great vulnerabilities. And I think it is not a coincidence that this kind of thing has featured into some of the horror folklore of

the world. I mean, you think about the idea of the changeling uh in in fairy folklore, where there was this idea that where the fairy folk would come in and replace someone you knew, often a child, but sometimes like a husband or wife, or you know, someone you knew with a fairy double who looked like them but wasn't familiar to you, didn't act like them. And now this is often described as something that people would use to explain you know, maybe when somebody's behavior changed and

they didn't seem themselves. They think, oh, maybe they've been replaced with a changeling uh or used to explain why people might feel that their children weren't their own, or something like that. But then also you have to wonder if some kinds of neurological issues maybe at work here in the minds of the people making the accusation that

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

not only in speculative fiction, but in literary fiction as well. Um. The quote that a right at the top of this episode is from a two thousand and four novel UH titled Repetition by one of my favorite French authors, Alan Robe Guerrilla, who often this is one of This is a trope that he often rule into his books, like the idea of a double or some sort of an alter ego. And this book in particularly been in particular like starts off with a character on a train having

glimpsed his double once more. Yeah, it's a very unsettling image. Yeah, the plurality of self. Right. Um well, and because so there are double ways that it can be unsettling. There's the idea that someone you know is replaced by a double. Obviously, if you were to come to believe that through you know, whether you had like a brain injury or a neurological condition that caused you to believe that, or I don't know, if you just believed in fairies and thought maybe that

this was happening because your cultural conditioning. Either way, that would be a terrifying thing. It's another thing entirely to see it, to believe that you see another version of yourself, you know, to think that you had your own double, or there was a doppelganger of you. So I think most of us are probably familiar with this, the the

the the idea of a doppelganger. Um. I you know, I would love to say that I learned about doppelgangers for the first time by either consulting a nice, you know book on Germanic mythology, and certainly I read a

lot of different mythology books when I as a kid. Also, I would love to say that my first encounter with doppel gangers was a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual, because there's another huge place that they're highly visible, as they've long been a staple of Dungeons and Dragons, So they're

in there. Oh yeah, I mean it's a great way to introduce a little uh, suspense and chaos into a campaign, right somebody you know an MPC that the character's trust has been replaced, or adoppel gangers trying to or even successfully replaces a member of the party. Uh. So you know, there's a lot of fun to be had with a doppelganger. Um, but I have to admit that neither of these cases

is true. I heard about them initially in the nineties via the Drew Barrymore movie that aired on the Sci Fi Channel back when this is the old days, back when before there were wise in sci Fi Wise inside Oh Siffy you mean Siffy Yeah, Ciffy Channel. Yes, Um, I remember next to nothing about this film, but it was heavily promoted on the channel, and it introduced the idea to me initially, and then I you know, followed up by you know, asking around, Hey, Dad, what's a Doppelganger?

And then I looked it up, etcetera. Well, wait a minute, so it was called Doppelganger the name of the movie. That was, at least that was the title of the film, as was promoted on Sci Fi Channel at the time. Of course, it's often the case with films of this caliber. They may have had multiple titles, and who knows, they may have been promoted elsewhere under a different title. I just looked it up. It's also known as Doppelganger colon

the Evil Within. Just to be clear, that was for the people who didn't know what a doppel ganger was. Always got to have a colon, real title. So but here, here's an interesting thing that I didn't realize until I

was researching this episode. I just kind of assumed, you know, obviously, the doppelganger itself, the term is Germanic origins, and I figured this is a creature that emerges from German folk traditions, you know, Uh, you know, and in the same way that that crampus came down from the mountains and uh and alpine traditions. I just figured the doppelganger was just a standard because the again, the idea of a mysterious double, either of self or other, is long established, but this

does not seem to be the case. Apparently, the word doppelganger wasn't coined to know the eighteenth century, and it was coined by German novelist Jean Paul in his seventeen nine novel uh Sebenkas, in which the main character encounters his own doppel ganger or double goer uh in the the In this case, the dopel ganger convinces him to fake his own death and start a new life. Uh. And I had to I had to look in closer

on this. It's it's not as straightforward as I would like it to be, where he's just like, hey, this is the doppelganger. Apparently he invinced two similar words in this book. He invinced the word doppeled ganger. Um, so this would be the name for people who see themselves.

But then he also talks about doppel ganger as a as a word for the second court when the second course of a meal arrives along side the first course, because ganga all means both you know, go or walker as well as course in a meal, so technically doppelt Ganger would be the mysterious double idea that he introduces. And doppelganger itself is just a weird mishap of ordering a multi course meal at a restaurant. But nobody's gonna say doubled ganger, not anymore, no dafeld ganger. But this

is this is a good idea. Next time someone introduces the dappel ganger in your dn D campaign, remind the d M that that's a culinary term sort of. Uh. But anyway, the termines up resonating in German literature, and it became popular in romantic horror literature in general by the mid eighteen hundreds. So I think originally the the this idea was always something scary or dangerous, right, Well, yeah,

they're not as much. It's seemingly in the original and I didn't read the original German novel This is stress, so you know, feel free to correct me if anyone out there is more familiar with the with the literature we're talking about here, but it certainly took on sinister connotations within the literary tradition. But then I was reading about the term on websters and the sinister connotations have apparently dropped off somewhat in its English language usage, which

is surprising to me. But then again, I'm coming from the standpoint of knowing them mostly through Dungeons and Dragons and Horrible Drew Barrymore movies, so I'm probably not like the the key candidate here. Um. I guess the other thing, too, is I really don't use the term outside of a fantasy context. Like if I encounter someone who looks a lot like someone I know, I don't say, oh, hey, I saw your doppelganger today. I'm more like, hey, I saw your Maybe I'll say evil twin, which is, you know,

another variation on this trope. Or I'll say oh, I just I saw someone who looked just about like you, or I I'm in another city, I might say oh I saw your Chicago you or whatever you know. So that's the other thing. I just don't use doppelganger outside of fantastic settings. Myself. I think most people just use it to me and the look alike. Now, yeah, but

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

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

creeped out. I think we need to call somebody. No, you're you're just gonna it's just gonna be a point whimsy And the other thing is that more than likely it was a first glance situation, Like at first glance, I thought it was you. At second glance, I saw that it was clearly another person and nothing to freak out about. Well, I would be shocked though, if people didn't still interpret this kind of thing is some kind

of weird omen or demon or whatever. Oh yeah, And I was glancing around on the internet and there's still plenty of that um And I think a large part of that is, you know, as with all paranormal UH experiences or supernatural explanations for mundane UH encounters, the supernatural

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

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

According to ananimous Dr Tiggan Lucas quoted in the BBC Future article, you're surprisingly likely to have a doppel game, which I think is slightly confusing title given the contents of the article, but still uh said that the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion, and with a seven point four billion people on the planet, it was only there was only a one in one five chants that there's a single pair of true doppel gagers. No, wait, what

are these dimensions you're talking about? Like eight facial dimensions? Like if you you take you take facial features and you divide them up into eight mentions and go to match those up. So yeah, not like a spatial dimensions. I'm not sure how that would work. Basically, the eight sliders on your character creator right now. Most of the time, though again we're not talking about exact doubles. You know, generally, these are just faces that are similar to our own

or similar to someone we know. When we focus on the familiarity in a way that may be tied to a means of identifying close kin uh, you know, in early human history, like that's what this recognition system is, perhaps four um and you know, think again about how generally how you know, generally, doubles are kind of a first glance thing. The similarities may be jarring, but the differences will be pronounced as well. Now, the thing is, there are so many humans on the planet now, and

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

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

as someone else's. So anyway, that's that's doppel gangers in a nutshell, both the origin of the term, but then a little bit about the science and the potent that the potentiality of seeing a double or near double uh somewhere in the world. But thinking about what is at work with the the erroneous detection of doubles in cop cross syndrome, uh is I guess maybe what we should get back to when we come back after a break. Alright,

we're back and it's really us. We weren't replaced by strange creatures from the Monster Manual over the course of the advertisement. No, we're here, it's really us and we're going to continue our exploration. You know, I wanted to answer that with the body snatchers noise, but I don't know if I can make it exactly from the Donald Sutherland version, Yeah, which is a great version by I still haven't seen that. I've only seen the old black

and white original. Oh, the Donald Sutherland one is great. He's got Lambert from Alien, it's got Jeff Goldblum, He's he's feisty. It's got oh and it's got from another sci fi classic. It's got what's his name who played spok Leonard n Yeah, Leonard Nimoy is fantastic in it. I think it's his it's his great performance. Well, that's a great cast. But the nineteen fifty six original had had had Kevin McCarthy in the lead role. It was terrific. You also had Carol and Jones, who had played more

Tisha on The Adams Family. Cool. Yeah, but also it was it was just black and white, and it just it really, at least the version I saw of it, like the darkness felt just so murky and uh and dirty somehow, Like it was just a very nightmare inducing film when I saw it as a kid. Yeah, the paranoid visual vibe, it's got a it's got a kind

of a communist infiltration thing. Oh, definitely, definitely. That's a that's a very strong element of it, which just goes to show like the ideas of like why this concept of of doubles resonates so because you can apply it

to all these other scenarios social and political. Well, yeah, I mean it's a common thing for people to say when they don't literally think that someone they know has been physically bodily replaced by a by a supernatural double, they might often think, I don't know this person anymore. I mean it's a similar like, you know, they've been replaced with somebody, somebody replaced you with a different person. Yeah,

Like it just would. Really, you just found out you're getting to know them better, You found out something about them you didn't know before, and now you think that they're like a different being entirely. And now it's just because yeah, it turns out that they were maybe communists

or like a different football team. Well, to be fair, also, it could be a case of um, you know, people over emphasizing disposition all traits, thinking that people thinking that they should expect their loved ones to be incredibly consistent and trait predictable, when in fact people are inconsistent. That

it depends on the circumstances how they behave. Maybe sometimes you are used to seeing someone only in one type of context, maybe used to only seeing them at work, and then when you see them in a different context, when you see them, you know, out with their friends or with their family, they seem like a totally different person to you. It can be jarring when you see those differences, and yet they're there for almost all of us, almost none of us, like really behave the same way

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

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

they're different things. And Sapolsky's main point is quote, these functional fault lines in the social brain, when coupled with advances in the online world, have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation. They have made cop cross syndrome a window on our culture and minds today where nothing is

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

face ones. And I'm struggling to think of a counter example. I can't really think of a counter example for relationships with real people. But for tens of thousands of years, of course, we have had language, and we could have felt as if we had relationships with people we only heard about in stories for example. Now, obviously we do eventually reach the point where we have the ability to engage in activities like having a pinpal and that maybe you know, that's a case where you can have certainly

a non face to face example. But but prior to uh, you know, the advent of the necessary um, you know, systems and technology. Yeah, I struggle to think of an example as well. I mean even sort of semi imagined situations such as speaking to the spirit of a dead ancestor or dead relative, like you're still depending upon a previous face to face relationship. Yes, and even even with pin pals, I mean even the oldest versions of this, the non digital communications, just writing to people with letters

even if you've never met them before. That that is anatomically recent. I mean, the vast majority of the time our species has been around, we didn't have writing. We couldn't do that. The only relationships we had were face to face relationships. And so it's entirely clear that our bodies and our brains have been shaped by an evolutionary niche and when in which all relationships were face to face ones. Right, even our history is a symbolic Uh.

Species is mostly based on, almost exclusively based on face to face communication. Yeah, and so when our only social relationships were face to face relationships, it was natural for face facial recognition and familiarity at an in person body sensing level to be one of our main mediators of how we conceptualized, evaluated, and formed beliefs about our relationships.

I mean, if you live in this non technological world where your only relationships are face to face, it totally makes sense for you to use moment to moment, face to face, say, visual and touch data and things like that to get the best idea of what your relationships are and how you should feel about them, right. I mean, some of that goes back to the you know we're discussing earlier about uh, you know, can identification being able to tell like this, this is a relative, I can

see it in their face exactly. But of course there have been these technological changes that now allow relationships to exist and persist under circumstances other than face to face interaction. Of course, we already mentioned writing in literacy. Now this allows you to maybe send letters, though I'd say even for most of the time that's been around, that has been something that is limited to a small percent of humans, you know, because for most of human history. Most people

have not been literate, that's true. And then and then, of course again, I feel I feel like the pinpal, like the the the pinpal situation in which there is never a face to face meeting. Like that's a slim slice of the overall pie. Most of the other um written communications are going to be carried out with individuals um in which there was at least a previous face to face communication. Yeah, but then think about how hard

this kind of thing can make relationships. I bet every single person listening has had the experience of relationships strife caused by a feeling by a misunderstanding or some kind of feeling of emotional estrangement brought on by the media through which you communicate. A lot of us don't feel

very comfortable talking to people on the phone. A lot of us, don't you know, we have the experience of sending email else and being misunderstood, having people not read your tone correctly, or getting worried about the way somebody punctuated a sentence and an email. I mean, I bet you've had this experience. Oh yeah, absolutely, And I think we all have both in personal contacts and work contacts.

You know, um says, I guess, you know, hopefully if you have, if you're dealing a lot via email with someone, you'll kind of get a feel for their tone and how they tend to speak. But even then there's so much room for miscommunication, like even when you feel like you really uh you know, or or up to speed

on how they present themselves in a textual manner. Robert, if you don't mind me saying you're kind of a terse emailer, am I I can see people getting worried when they get an email from you that maybe you're mad at them or something. I don't think that's necessarily always the king. Maybe sometimes you're mad at me, But I mean, I think you just tend to not spend a whole lot of time, you know, worrying about how

to phrase stuff on email. You just kind of bang it out, and which I admire because you know, I it is, you know, the amount of time that people waste trying to phrase stuff on email is is it's

a horror. The thing is I used I remember when I was younger, I would have these these long email correspondence is going on with friends where we would respond like like sometimes sentence by sentence or atleast paragraph by paragraph where we'd respond to specific points and uh and and right at length in response, and at some point

this just faded away. I haven't really I haven't really thought about it too much to to try and figure out exactly like at what point, like which like technological or communications change altered that or and or what life changes led to that occurring. But at the same time, you know, it used to have of, you know, long phone conversations with people, and now it's really it's it's extremely rare for me to have a long phone conversation.

It's there's basically like two people in the world that I have phone conversations within a regular basis, and once my wife and once with my mother, and that's pretty much it. Do you think maybe these changes have been brought on by other technological changes, like the rise of

social media. I suspect they have. Yeah, Like instead of having this this more, this longer, more thoughtful stream of communication with somebody that you know now lives in another city, you just have a continual trickle, you know, so again we just have that familiarity, like a tripical familiarity going on instead of like an actual stream of communication well, and it also I think that the way that technology has changed our communication sometimes forces us to become a

version of ourselves that we don't recognize. I mean, I was talking about how we write work emails. I actually don't love the way that I write work emails. I feel like often I have to I overuse like exclamation points and smiley faces and all that. And it's mainly just because I don't ever want to accidentally make somebody feel bad over email, or make them get the wrong idea that I'm ad at them or something like that.

On the emotional intention, yeah, and of the statement, I hate it because I can feel myself feeling insipid and feeling not like myself as I type it. But I would rather feel like that than worry that I'm giving people the wrong idea or letting them think I'm mad at them or something like that. You know, Yeah, I mean, but I totally understand it. Yeah, sometimes you feel like

you have to really make it clear. And I do find myself doing more and more of that with texts when I'm sending a text, you know, via my tiny pocket computer. Oh your pocket god, yes, pocket guy. Yes. Yeah. And so we've got to obviously, you know, all the stuff we're talking about email, phone, uh, text messages and internet communications. The photograph in a way kind of kind

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

I shudder at this thought. Memes or there's gonna be a day in which the English language is replaced by memes. It's just like instead of an alphabet, you have a meme, a bet and you just like put you paste the

memes together to form ideas. Yeah, I mean I already feel, um, you know, and maybe this is just me feeling old, but um, I feel we we've already reached the point where there'll be a threat about something sound Reddit and there'll be a meme and I have to I have to research what the meme means, Like it's a new meme and I have to figure out like where it came from how it's used and how it's potentially being misused, and how it's like evolving out of that misuse to

understand like what the prevailing idea is that is being expressed memes as a whole or exactly like words in the sense that you can try to write down a definition for a word, but where do uses changes over time? I mean, words don't actually have fixed definitions. You can't control how people use them. Yeah, it kind of like the whole like literally right, yeah, um, it's like, yeah, sorry you lost that battle that words changed. You can cling to the past, but sorry, it was just misused

into a new usage. So I try not to correct people on that one, but that does it still gets me. My blood was literally boiling and it literally took his head off. Yes, but yeah, So we're talking about the you know, the technological media on which our relationships happened. And I think many of our relationships, especially in the last you know, ten years now, happened primarily on these media.

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

But also I wonder about the fact that what is it doing to our culture when there's a substantial number of people who, like, I don't know, maybe seventy percent of their friendly social interactions happen over a machine. Yeah, I mean even people like flesh and blood friends that I have in the city with me, Like, we still have to do like a like a you know, a thirty email chain to plan to meet each other in

real life. Like even if it's like a semi regular thing, like we know where we're gonna go, we know when we're going to do it, but we still have to coordinate all of these things. So how much of the relationship is truly face to face versus digital? Yeah? And so Sapolsky says in this article that this technological reality has conditioned us in a way to dissociate our traditional

pathways of recognition and familiarity. Uh So, he writes, quote thus, not only has modern life increasingly dissociated recognition and familiarity, but it has impoverished the latter in the process. So impoverished familiarity. This is worsened by our frantic skill at multitasking, especially social multitasking. A recent Pew study reported that eighty nine percent of cell phone owners use their phones during

the most recent social gathering. That sounds low to me. Um, we reduce our social connotations to mere threads so that we can maintain as many of them as possible. This leaves us with signposts of familiarity that are frail remnants of the real thing. And I think he's really onto something there about the idea of um maintaining it's almost like putting up the scarecrows of things like these technological stand ins for relationships that are not really functioning biologically

and psychologically for us the way relationships should. But we'd rather maintain as any of those as we can rather than have fewer relationships but more face to face interaction, you know, quality time and all that. Yeah, So we we end up maintaining these trickles of of of actual social connections as opposed to streams of social connection. So he's saying there that we essentially degrade our sensitivity to the familiarity aspect of of what knowing somebody is a

social interaction, it's recognition and familiarity. And when we degrade the familiarity thing, he says, quote uh, that we become increasingly vulnerable to imposts. Our social media lives are rife with simulations and simulations of simulations of reality, and so of course you know that's uh, you know, one example there is people who claim to know you, but they're not. They're uh, you know, a friends email account gets hacked, some hacker contacts you and tries to get you to

open some malware. That's one example. But there's a million versions of this thing where where are sort of like a low resolution familiar already detectors than this digital world are being exploited by people who are not actually our real friends. So and basically, our online our online version of ourselves is essentially as a lay low resolution simulation, and so if someone comes along to hijack that simulation,

it's all the easier to do. So you don't have to be a high level magic user to to to take on the likeness of another individual. When the threshold for duplication is so low. Yeah, but then here here's the turn. So Sapolsky says, by any logic quote, this should induce us all to have cap craw delusions, to find it plausible that everyone we encounter is an impostor.

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

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

didn't happen. But you are making a distinction there people in some way or seeing these interactions is derealized or as not having uh you know, not material in the way that other interactions are. And yet there where we're

doing most increasingly all of our stuff. Yeah, and I wonder if part of that, you know, I would I wonder how this plays out generation to generation, because I feel like from me, I maybe I had had a sense of the Internet is being real life more so early on, because the Internet was in some respectfully kind of an escape. I mean at the same time, yeah,

I was. I remember having a union, use a like a college email address, and all that kind of stuff, you know, So you're still you're still doing in real, real life stuff via the Internet. But then a lot of other stuff is is about escaping either just in general, like escaping into the into fantasy or like escaping geographical boundaries, you know, and uh in you know, being able to

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

particular name. Well, whatever that is, you could be invisible in a way that would feel not real, right, because if nobody can see you and nobody knows who you are wherever you are, then there are no consequence, and consequences are kind of what gives us the feeling of reality.

So that's part of it. But I think also Sopulski is onto something here and that like this estrangement of the sense of recognition and familiarity is it makes the Internet start to feel like this world of social delusion, this sort of like always cap Graw vulnerable type landscape where nothing is really real and you can't trust anything, and yet at the same time we're we're constantly forced to put our trust in it as a matter of fact,

because that's where we're doing everything. But then, of course, uh back to the idea of like all these you know, threads that people maintain and sort of mistake for meaningful relationships online. Uh. He comes back and on that and says, actually, you know, it seems more the opposite has happened than than inducing us to all have cap graw delusions where we see people we knew and we think of them see people we know and we think of them as

as you know, being a doppelganger or not familiar. Instead, we go the other way and we see, well, we don't really know very well, but we just have to attach this feeling of familiarity to them. It allows all of this false familiarity. And this really comes up in I don't know, how have you read about the the idea of you know, paras social interactions on social media. You know, I don't think prior to this episode I knew it by that term, but of course you do

see it all the time. Yeah, it's it's just it's ubiquitous on the Internet. It's the idea, you know, it's an asymmetrical relationship, the way like you follow a public figure who doesn't know who you are. But there are all of these indications that many people think of these para social asymmetrical relationships as relationships. It's like they almost view this Instagram influencer that they follow as like an acquaint somebody they know, but of course that person doesn't

know them. Yeah. I really started thinking about this classification though, para social relationships, uh and in wondering like to what extent it can or could have existed in previous times, Like what is the earliest possible example of a para

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

of this. But we see it seems like we see far more of it, uh in in in modern civilization, um in certainly an Internet age, but even pre Internet, like the idea of celebrity just enables this sort of relationship to be possible celebrities and leaders. And of course I would say that social media, of course did not invent the idea of celebrities and so so it didn't invent these relationships like you're talking about. You know, you've always had leaders, You've always had public figures in some

way or another. So media I think has increased the day to day relevance of these types of relationships, you know, where you can like check in on on the accounts of the people that you follow every day and they

don't know you, but you know you. Especially, I feel like Instagram, especially of all the platforms I can think of, is is really rife with this um of like these influencers and people who lead kind of glamorous lives and allow you to see into their lives by showing you their house and their pets and their lunch and you know, you get all these interior views and it's very visceral because it's visual and often you know, visual even in a way that's edited to make it more colorful and

exciting with the post processing filters and all that. Right, And of course, at the same time, like like all social media representations like this, they are they're incomplete. We're crafted, and they're crafted there, uh, they're they're maintain in a very strategic way usually so you don't even have like a full vision of what you know, random celebrities life actually is you just have this idealized version of it. So I just want to read one last quote from

Sapulski's article before we move on. So he says, um uh. He ends by saying quote. Throughout history, cap Cross syndrome has been a cultural mirror of a dissociative mind, where thoughts of recognition and feelings of intimacy have been sundered. It's still that mirror today. We think that what is false and artificial in the world around us is substantive and meaningful. It's not that loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them.

I think I kind of disagree with them a little bit because I think it's actually both of those things. It's like that that the dissociation goes two ways in either case, though we we do typically we often find ourselves in situations though where we are we are distracted from from real life um relationships and real life socialization, and instead we have to check in on these little streams on our phone. Did to these, uh, these simulated

relationships that we have on social media. Do you ever have the sort of direct doppelgang Er experience like with the fairy change links or the doppelganger for a friend on the internet, Like you have a family member, you have a friend who you love in real life, but when you see the way they are on the internet, I don't know what it. You know, the kind of stuff they post on social media or whatever, you don't feel like you recognize them and you don't really like them.

I've definitely known people who are like that. I'm not gonna name any names who are like that on say Twitter, Like, I think, like I love this person, but if all I knew about them was the way they act on Twitter, I would I wouldn't be able to stand them well. Social media, especially as it pertains to you know, some topics, take politics for instance, I think it does tend to bring out the worst in us. Uh. And I don't

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

situations change change people's behavior, that we are the same way. Yeah. Absolutely, all right on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank Alright, we're back. You know, I was thinking about what you said about about my emails, but I feel like like sixty maybe my emails or me just saying um, cool, sounds good. I think that's my my standard, which I feel is sufficient. It's just me saying yes to whatever you just said. Uh, and

I'm cool with it. Do you have an Android phone? No? I don't. Okay, use Gmail, Yeah, you use Gmail, but I don't use the I know you have the sort of you know, like the auto language feature starts telling you what to say. It's like, here's the email you could write. Man, when I saw that thing, I was like, get out, what the heck? No, no, no, well, it's it's a it's an easy jump to go from there to like authorized simulations of yourself, you know, just which

I really I mean, that's not far off. That's it's basically already here, where you just give your account the authority to to make responses like this. Like cool, sounds good, I'll get back to you, you know that sort of thing. Well, it's not gonna. I don't know. I mean, even if I would type exactly the words it's suggesting, I still don't want to let it do that. The fact that like Gmail is gonna is going to compose an email for me to my parents or my wife that no,

no, no no, unacceptable. There's so much room for misunderstanding. Even if we're applying um, you know, most or all of our attention to crafting an email. Uh, it feels like a machine, even a very like talent had Ai would have difficulty with that. There's just so much nuance in

human communication and knowing who you're communicating to. Like sometimes it's a matter of knowing there are certain words you shouldn't use with another individual, like maybe you're aware of what you know maybe uh you know some sort of a trigger for them, or or you know it may pertain to some sort of you know, um, you know, incident from from from your personal past with that person. Like there's so many potential uh holes to fall into

when composing written communication. Why trust that the to the machine or I don't know, maybe the reverse is true. Always trusted the machine as long as they have all those caveats in mind, you know. I think one thing that's interesting to me is about the psychological effects of heavy social media use. Um, I feel like we're still in the early days of getting a picture of what that's like, and that there appears to be a lot

of conflicting evidence. I think, I think because we we haven't refined all our categories and ways of testing things yet. I do often say that I think in emerging this is just a prediction. I could turn out to be

totally wrong. But my guess is that in the coming years there's going to be emerging consensus that heavy social media us, especially say among young people like teenagers and stuff, is correlated with a lot of negative psychological outcomes and uh, you know, depression and things like that, and that there will be like a new cottage industry of like the lobbyists who deny the emerging science on on social media. But uh, I mean, I guess that's still to be seen.

I mean, we've only got a few years of data to work with so far. Yeah, when trying to imagine the future, it's difficult. And also, you know, kind of you know, anxiety and docing to try and think where where our social media usages going. On one hand, I guess I'm I'm hopeful that more and more people will you choose to, if if not, opt out of social media, but or you know, at least rethink how they're using it, step back from it. Even I kind of think of it.

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

while and do that. Or even maybe I should leave all together and go home and see my family. That's sort of thing, you know, It is nice at first. I remember thinking about when I very first got on Twitter, it seemed like it was nice for a while that I was mostly just seeing things that like learning and

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

on Instagram. Obviously there's a lot of celebrity worship going on, a lot of para social relationships taking place there, as we already mentioned. I don't see as much of that, and part of that is just because I like only follow family and friends, and I only use it myself for family photos, and it's like, you know, it's a

closed account. Well, I do think that there is some evidence I've seen so far that and I'm not sure how solid this is yet, but there's some evidence that there's a pretty big difference in the psychological effects of social media depending on whether you primarily use it too as a way of keeping up with family and friends versus as a way of interacting with public accounts. Right

but I think. But then again, one of the dangers in all of this is even if there is a preferred if there is a healthier way to use a given platform, you are still fighting against the intended usage of that platform, as engineered by the makers of that platform. The intended usage of the platform is to open it up and never get off. It's just and so like, it's difficult to compete with that. I mean, we've talked about it this on the show before. Uh, in terms

of gambling technology and then social media technology. I mean, you're you're really up against a fearsome adversary in telling yourself, I'm only going to use this in a way that is mentally beneficial for me and not just purely economically beneficial for the masters of the medium. You know, Jared Lannier, who we've talked about on the show before, has written

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

about this uh comparison. I still feel like there's a lot of stuff to work out, but I I sense that the Sopulski's comparison here about the the rift between the emotion of familiarity and the and the cognitive recognition function of the brain, uh, that that's at work in Capgrass syndrome. This is a really rich kind of comparison for for social media and media technology generally, and I

expect to keep having more thoughts about it. Yeah, I mean, I I don't want to just sound like I'm just saying like the people are awful and that technology makes us more awful. Uh. You know, I don't want that to be my ultimate argument. Ultimately, I would say that technology enables humans to do amazing things, and if we direct this power in the right way. Uh, you know, there's plenty that we can do. There's plenty we have done to connect people and and and build a better

world out of those connections. But obviously there's more that we could do. And I guess the worrisome thing with these platforms, the various platforms that we're talking about, is like, what is the the ultimate advantage, What is the ultimate intention of the masters of those given platforms. What do they want? And even in cases where they may say, no, we want to build something that brings people together, we

want to build something that empowers, you know, a better world. Like, is that impulse going to win out in the overall structure of this given social media platform or is it going to be profitability or engagement or some other metric that is ultimately more important to the corporate entity. It's always profitability, and of course that's always what's going to

win out. But I feel like there's I have to hold onto the possibility that that humans can do better though well, I mean, that does make me wonder if perhaps what you could do instead is have some kind of nonprofit, open source social media platform that would would compete and try to replace these for profit forms that are deranging our relationships and and causing this familiarity recognition rift and potentially having all these psychologically negative consequences on

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

these friend networks. Uh does does the even the most basic mechanic of something like Facebook encourage people to go through these mental processes where they sort of degrade their standards of what counts as a healthy relationship. I mean maybe ultimately that's where where AI can come in, you know, and we just need we need artificial intelligence to dictate where and how to maintain healthy relationships online. And that's that's the ultimate answer. I don't know, just hand it

off to an aidity. Why I'm not hopeful about that either. Again, this is back to like I'm worried about these l Ai squirrels, not the I'm not worried about the great basilisk. I'm worried about the minor dumb aies that that are

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

In those episodes, we also shared some some advice that experts have given about how to fight back, how to limit your use of social media and or your phone, and uh and so, I mean there and there are increasingly more tools out there. I believe you know, some of these these phones have ways, you know now, to to track how much you're using them, or even to

remind you not to use them in certain situations. Yeah. Yeah, um, I mean I I can't honestly and non hypocritically tell people to get entirely off of social media because one of the things is I have to maintain social media accounts because of my job at this podcast, where we've got to like promote stuff on social media, and you know, we've got to We've got a Facebook discussion module that

I really enjoy using. I probably would have deleted my Facebook account, but I enjoy our our discussion module with our fans there. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's probably one of the main reasons I go on Facebook these days. So discussion module, don't screw this up. Let's keep keep this positive relationship. But I mean, I will say that the reason it's on there, it's not any inherent strength of Facebook. It's on there because of audience inertia. I mean that

that's where the people are. Like, if you want to have a place where people already have accounts and they can join Facebook, is they tell us the place where you can do that? You know, I'd love a world where somebody created some kind of non destructive, open source, uh you know, nonprofit platform where you could do a similar thing if enough people could get on there. All right,

So so there you have it. Obviously, there are a lot of there's a lot of areas here we can call out to listeners on I mean, first of all, have you ever encountered a really um impressive double in your life, like someone that required uh, you know, not even just a first and second glance, maybe a third glance to realize that they were not your friend or perhaps not yourself. We'd love to hear from that all. I mean for to that. You know, so if you've

actually had any experience with cap gross syndrome. Um, you know, we would we would really appreciate any firsthand knowledge of experiences like that. Uh. And then beyond that when we get into the you know, the of course, the literary and the you know, the fictional and the mythological connotations. If you have a particular you know, favorite double you

want to share. But certainly we spent most of the time you're talking about this social media doppel gang or idea, and so I mean, you're pretty much all on social media at this point. We're really you're either on social media or you've made a very uh, you know, firm choice not to be. So whichever category you fall into, I feel like you probably have thoughts really added to this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Absolutely

get in touch. In the meantime, if you want to listen to more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's we'll find all the episodes. You'll find a link there to our little merchandise store. We can get some squirrel shirts. It's a fun way to support the show, but the best way to support the show is to simply rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. If you can

leave some stars, leave a nice review, do that. And best of all, tell somebody about the show. Yeah, tell them online, but even better if you see somebody in real life, tell him about the show in real life, because I feel like, uh, you know, it's gonna it's gonna impress people all the more. That's right, huge, thanks

as always to our excellent audio producer Terry Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with this direct Sorry, I'm laughing because Robert has got a little stress ball over here and he's squishing the guts out of it as we speak. Yeah, there's like some sort of white pus coming out of it. I had it for like two weeks and it's already squeezed out. So I'm not

going to name the brand because maybe I just haded tractically. Anyway. Sorry, If you want to get in touch with us directly, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows