The Nature of Tears, Part 2

almost too much. Because sometimes we look into things and we're like, okay, what is the what's the mythological ramifications of this? Are there any treatments of this and mythology or religion? And with something like tears, the answer is is yes, every religion, every mythology pretty much, you know. Um, so it's easy to get lost sort of just trade, you know, chasing some of these ideas down and then trying to figure out what which ones are worth talking

about which ones are not. And then of course from the scientific point of view there uh, we've already rolled through I think some of the science of tears, and we have a bit more to cover today. Well, We've got a lot more to cover on the science of tears. In the last episode, we talked some about some of the basic, uncontroversial biological facts about tears, you know, like basal tears and reflex tears, what they're made of and and how how they're secreted from the lacrimal glands, and

what they normally do. But the big question, the big sort of mystery about tears, is this question of human emotional tears. Humans appear to be the only animal that sheds tears as a response to emotional states, and so one of the huge questions is why, what is the biological purpose and thus what is the evolutionary justification unique to our species of liquid coming out of your eyes in response to feeling emotions. As we talked about in

the last episode. You know, because this is not a settled question, there are just there tons of hypotheses that have been put forward over the years. We talked in the last episode about several very unlikely ones, for example, tears being a byproduct of an alleged aquatic ape past

for human beings. This is almost certainly not correct because we don't put much stock in the aquatic ap hypothesis Another one is this idea that maybe tears are somehow derived from a conditioned response of our ancient ancestors to getting smoke in their eyes at funeral pyres after they started controlling fire. There are several reasons we talked about in the last episode by that that's probably not correct either.

So over the next couple of episodes, we're going to be exploring a bunch more of the existing hypotheses about the evolutionary purpose of emotional tears. And I think you can sort these into three broad categories. The first being there there is no purpose, maybe they're just some kind of byproduct, the second being the purpose is intra personal, meaning internal to the body of the person who's crying. And then the third would be that the purpose is interpersonal,

meaning that tears serve some kind of external or relational function. Now, on the score of no purpose explanations, here's the kind of surprising fact. Apparently, Charles Darwin actually believed that emotional tears served no purpose of their own, but rather were a byproduct of other purposeful adaptations, notably facial expressions and

vocal expressions. In his eighteen seventy two book The Expression of Emotions, in Man and Animals, uh Darwin wrote, quote, the shedding of tears appears to have originated through reflex action from the spasmodic contraction of the eyelids, together perhaps with the eyeballs becoming gorged with blood during the act of screaming. Therefore, weeping probably came on rather late in

the line of our descent. And this conclusion agrees with the fact that our nearest allies, the nthropomorphous apes, do not weep. So the second observation there being that that the other apes that were most closely related to they do produce tears, of course basal tears in their eyes and irritant tears, but they don't produce emotional tears. So that observation is correct. But I think Darwin's influenced in the in the first half of that paragraph there is

almost definitely wrong. His idea is that, well, when we get upset, we cry out with our voices, and this makes like blood rushed to the face because you're screaming, and maybe all the blood sort of makes your eyes swell, and then they're Also when you're upset, there are facial muscle contractions like involuntary reflexive contractions of things like the eyelids, and this just sort of squeezes tears out as an accidental byproduct. I don't think I can go with Darwin

on this one. This sounds really wrong. Yeah, I mean, I mean, on one hand, we've already talked about the various sounds and screaming type uh effects that you see with with other primates. I mean, if you've been to a zoo or you've been to a natural environment where primates make their home, you may have heard this. So that they are there, they can create the kind of screaming that I guess could theoretically cause the eyeballs to become gorged with blood. So that doesn't seem to have

much weight to it. Yeah, it's not that it would be impossible for contractions of the facial muscles to cause tears. I do think this may even be an explanation. I've seen this invoked as an explanation for why sometimes your eyes get teary when you yawn. Like when you yawn, that may put some kind of pressure on the lachrymal glands that causes some excessive tearing, which you know it leads to blurring of the vision. After you're done yawning, and then you might need to wipe your eyes, maybe

a similar thing with coughing. So it's it's not impossible that contractions of the facial muscles could cause some tearing. It just seems like the tears being produced by the lachrymal glands during an emotional episode or something that exceeds this, this kind of tearing. Um and uh And I don't know, most researchers who focus on this area really do think

that this is not a plausible explanation. It seems pretty clear that tears are a true adaptive trait that serve their own functions and function independently from just the contractions of the facial muscles. Because another question would be like, well, okay, if this is true for humans, how come other like apes that were closely related to don't also cry when they contract their facial muscles in in emotional episodes. Yeah. Like I said, it seems like we just have we

have more evidence to the contrary at this point. Yeah, so it seems like tears are probably purposeful, a true adaptive trait of some kind. So the next category would be, well, maybe tears have some kind of intra personal purpose. They do something within the body, within the self, uh. And there are many ways of approaching this, but to cite a characteristic example of this type of explanation, I wanted

to look at the detoxification hypothesis. This is one that used to be pretty popular but has really fallen out of favor historically. I think this is one of the most popular hypotheses for for explaining the function of tears.

It was advanced by the American biochemist William Fry in the nineteen eighties, I think first published in nineteen eighty five, I believe and Fry's reasoning went like this, Okay, when humans are under stress, you're having some intense emotional you know about of emotion, there is a build up of potentially toxic substances in the blood. So you know, think about all the different uh stress effects of stress you learned about. You know, when when you're really distressed, your

your bloodstream floods with cortisol. You're you're freaked out. You can almost kind of like feel it moving through your body, or at least maybe it's an illusion, but I feel like I can, like when I'm having a stressful experience, there's almost a sematic sensation of the spreading of this kind of like uh, aggravating numbness and fry positive that when this happens, when your body fills up with all these potentially toxic contaminants or horn stress hormones, things like that,

the body cleanses these excess contaminants by purging them through the tear response, with the lachrymal glands acting like kidneys do for the urinary system. So under this hypothesis, you are you are peeing out your eyes when you are really stressed. Yeah, and I can I can understand why this idea, you know, had had some support behind it because I mean, on one level, yes, we can look to the kidneys in the urinary system and we can see, uh,

we can see something like this. But to your point, the feeling of all this welling up inside of us and then the what often feels like a release. And I have to stress though that when when you get it, look at different accounts of weeping, and depending on the circumstances of the weeping, such as like solitary weeping versus public weeping, and then that's going to depend on the culture in the scenario in which is taking place. Um, you do see a lot of accounts where people say, Okay,

I felt better after or I wept after. You know, all this built up and then was released. Uh, so we can under we could we can imagine where like looking at this idea of what the urinary system is doing, thinking about how we feel before and after an emotional outburst, we could easily fall in line with thinking like, yeah, yeah, those that that was the top the toxins building up in my body, and I am letting the toxins out.

Weeping is just the body releasing the poison. Yeah. Yeah, this is having a sort of like chemical read on the feeling of catharsis people uh sometimes experience from weeping. Uh. Now, of course I should say before I move on that this hypothesis does not have much support among any modern tear response researchers. I was reading it seems like the evidence for it is not good. It has been strongly

pushed back against. But like you're saying, it does have this intuitive appeal because there is a widespread belief in the healing power of tears. I actually I came across

the stat that I found astounding. So I was reading an article in Time magazine by Mandy Oaklander from sixteen that was about interviewed several different researchers who work on the subject of tears, and it's cited one analysis that looked at a bunch of articles about crying in the media over a period of more than a hundred years, so going way back, and it found that nine four percent of them described crying as in some way good for the mind and body, and or described holding back

tears as bad for the mind and body. And yet despite this gut feeling that people seem to have, I mean, I feel this way too. It's it's a common belief. This this this gut feeling that tears bring catharsis and relief and they heal you. They're good for you, they heal the mind and body. Evidence for this is apparently

pretty scarce on the ground. The same article by Oaklander in Times cites a researcher named Jonathan Rottenberg, who is a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who studies emotion and is on work with tears, and Rodenberg says that these claims about the healing power of tears are basically a fable there's just not much evidence that crying has strong measurable benefits to health, mental or physical, or that it predictably brings relief or catharsis. I mean,

obviously it does bring a feeling of relief sometimes. I think we all know that from experience, but maybe not as consistently as we tend to infer. Yeah, one example, because some some of us might be you know, you might wonder, well, okay, what's an example of tears not

having a beneficial effect. One example was brought up, I think this was in Holy Tears, was that some people, when queried on this, they mentioned that if they are weeping out of a feeling of loneliness and they are doing so in a solitary setting, that they may feel worse afterwards, which which I think is interesting and I think that can potentially shed light on some other theories or potentially provide um some possible evidence for supporting other

hypotheses concerning the reason that we have tears, the function of tears and human in the human condition. Right, Well, I'm going to get to this in a minute, but I think this would be one of the many things that I would interpret as as possibly pointing to tears serving a primarily interpersonal function in communication and signaling between

people exactly. Yeah, yeah, you can interpret it as meaning, well, you know that you did not feel better, because the the act of weeping is supposed to be communicating something to another human being. Yeah, and it is supposed to elicit a response from some But okay, so, so that addresses the question of like subjective feelings of relief. You know, sometimes people feel feelings of relief after crying, sometimes people don't.

But the other half of this, this intra personal interpretation, you know it does does crying do something for you, make to make your body better in some way, to give you some kind of internal benefit. The other question would be like, are there measurable ways that crying can be found to improve well being apart from just the the sort of immediate aftermath where you might feel a feeling of relief or not. What about other types of

measures of physical and mental well being? Well, there was one study I came across that looked into this question,

and it was by Hez Door for Vinger Hoots. That's that's add Vingerhoots, So I mentioned in the previous episode, and who will come up several more times in this and Michael R. Tremble in eighteen called social and psychological consequences of not crying possible associations with psychopathology and therapeutic relevance, And basically, the authors were trying to look into the question of okay, so that, um, what if you find people who report that they essentially never cried after a

certain period in their life, they feel like they either lost the ability to cry or just at some point in their life they just stopped crying and just don't cry anymore. Um, can we compare their out comes in terms of standard measures of well being and social functioning compared to people who do cry on a regular basis. So they interviewed Auzy Hausborne because no more tears, that would have been good, But now so they say quote.

Study participants included four hundred and seventy five people who reportedly lost the capacity to cry and a hundred and seventy nine normal control criers. Applied measures assessed crying, well being, empathy, attachment, social support, and connection with others, and the authors had hypothesized that people who don't cry would have lower well being and poor social functioning compared to people who do cry. Uh, and actually that's not exactly what they found. So they

did find some differences. So people who did not cry, on average had fewer social connections and less social support, and also had somewhat less empathy, though of course that's not going to apply to everybody, and it's worth noting that those things I just mentioned aren't necessarily a result of not crying, but could maybe be causes of not crying, or could maybe be correlates with similar underlying causes. Um. But what they did what they did not find was

indications of lower well being. In turns, it actually found that people who cry and people who don't cry were about the same in terms of psychological measures of well being, so you know, no more measurable depression, anxiety, and so forth. Thank thank now. Studies like this don't mean that we can be sure tears serve no intra personal purposes. You

certainly can't rule it out. Tears may well serve some kind of purpose within the self, within the body, But personally, I've become pretty well convinced while researching for these episodes that the primary adaptive purpose of emotional tears is interpersonal, meaning it's external, it's social, and relational and that tears are prime merely for communicating something too and affecting the

behavior of other members of our species other people. Yeah, I I after reading through Holy Tears, I I also feel like this is a very strong hypothesis, uh, in how they discuss the role of tears and religious rights and rituals. But but one area that I do have questions about would be, uh, the weeping during media um, like during a film or something. You know. Uh, I wonder if that is the same like when we weep during motion pictures. Is that a communal experience or is

that a personal experience? Are we actually trying to communicate something to other people viewing the film? Oh? Well, I mean it wouldn't have to be It wouldn't have to be intentional on your part. I mean, weeping is often involuntary. It's usually involuntary, So weeping at a movie I think could very well be not something you're trying to do because you are in penstionally communicating with say the movie,

or with other people you're watching the movie with. But instead it's a standard kind of response to um empathetic connection with drama you are seeing unfold and your brain can't really tell the difference between drama in media versus drama that would be going on with people in your life. So an adaptation that arises because it's useful with some some kind of social signaling function for other people also gets hijacked when you're watching a movie about people. That's true.

So basically what we're talking about here would be it's like the old example of the train coming at the screen and early movie go where it's like freaking out, like ah, this the train is approaching. You jump because it is uh, it is something that it is stimuli that should cause you to jump and run away. But the tearful scene, the emotional scene in an emotion picture, that is something that is uh, that is more subtle, and we're just going to respond to it as if

it is something that we should perhaps communally be responding to. Yeah. I think the same way that a scary movie partially simulates the feeling of real danger, or that a romantic movie can cause some kind of romantic arousal. I mean, it's all like, uh, there's a vicarious uh interaction with what's going on in the media as if it were

taking place in real life. For a moment, I'd like to come back to something we were talking about earlier, the uh, the the hypothesis that there is a purging of toxins going on during weeping, because this reminds me of another topic we've discussed in the show before sweating. Uh. You also see some of this, um, some of this line of thinking being employed with sweating, sometimes with exercise, but I've seen it particularly with with sauna traditions. Why

do people feel better after a sauna? What is a sauna doing? And you do see this sometimes there is this argument, well, when you're sweating, you're in the sauna, you release toxins. Uh. But I, if memory serves the situation is though when you look at like how much is shed via sweating versus how much is truly shed

via urination? Um, there's just a huge gulf between those numbers. Uh. So it doesn't really match up, but it but it becomes difficult to untangle uh this not you know, concerning how much is purge via sweating, how much is how much would need to be purged to make a meaningful impact on your physiology, and how much we feel or believe we have purged having gone through the experience. Yeah, it's funny. I'm also skeptical of the idea that this is why people feel a relief and after sweating or

being in the song. I would expect probably it has more to do with I don't know, the pleasurable hormones that people get after, you know, exercise or something like that, maybe endorphins or something of that nature. Um, I don't know. I'm just spitballing there. But but yeah, I would be

skeptical of that. And it's funny that what you say is um parallel to some arguments that are made against the detoxification hypothesis of tears, because um, much like with your sweating example, there's probably just not enough of the stuff in the tears to really make a major difference in the body. But but but in the next episode, I think we're going to get more into the direct formulations of some of the main contending hypotheses for for

explaining the biological evolution of tears. That that will be more in the next episode. But I did want to talk about some some broad observations in the idea of tears as an external or interpersonal adaptation, something that is that serves a relational function and one piece of evidence that seemed somewhat convincing to me that tears serve an external and communicative purpose is that people just automatically, when they observed tears, interpret them as conveying information about the

emotional states of the person who's crying. And it's not just that you look at a person who's who's crying and you say that person is sad. The tears themselves seem to convey very important information. And this was illustrated in some research I was reading about in a two thousand ten NPR article by Alison Aubrey called Teary Eyed Evolution, Crying serves a Purpose, and this featured an interview with the researcher named Randolph Cornelius, who was a professor of

psychology at Vassar College. Uh. I'm citing this research in particular because it came with what I thought was a very useful visual aid. Um so so Cornelius, the psychologist he he, he is arguing that tears are useful because they convey information, and his research did something pretty clever. It took photographs of people who were crying and then

digitally manipulated them to remove the tears. So you'd have the same face with the same expression when the person is crying, except without any tears visible in the eyes or on the cheeks. And what the study found is that people rated the same faces without tears as much more ambiguous. People consistently interpret tearful faces as sad, and they interpret them as having stronger emotional value. But people have a lot more difficulty inferring the feelings of those

same faces without the tears. And so, to quote from Cornelius as as cited in this article, he says, quote, tears also narrow the range of emotions people think the models are experiencing. Tearful people are mostly seen as experiencing emotions in the sadness family, sadness, grief, morning, and so forth. And Robert, I really, once I looked at these images, it really hit home for me, because, yeah, so it

will have two faces side by side. One is a crying face and the other is the same exact face, but photoshop to have the tears removed and the faces without tears. Whereas there's like one in the middle of a man crying with tears rolling down his cheeks and he looks very sad. And in the picture right next to him, without the tears, the same expression looks possibly kind of like smug or defiant. Yeah, I thought, kind

of menacing. Like without the tears the tears removed, he kind of looks like I like he thinking I might just beat you up. But in the first one, it's it's clear this man has been watching a sad football movie and weeping openly. Uh. There's one that you shared above this of a child or I think it's a child looking up um, and with the tears are removed, it seems like they're perhaps just looking at a bird flying through the air, but with the tears, it's like

they are looking up at a crucifixion. Yeah. Yeah, The same face without the tears could be interpreted is kind of like, um, I don't know, maybe concerned, but also displaying a possibly creepy kind of interest in something. Uh So, yeah, at least to me, I immediately from these images can see the informational value of tears. They radically reduce the ambiguity in interpreting somebody else's facial expression, and and and suddenly you're not wondering like what is this person thinking?

You immediately read them as like as kind of sad and vulnerable and helpless and not dangerous, whereas the same face without the tears is like, I don't know what's

up with this person? Now? Of course this is all this, this all becomes more complicated when we we we think about some of the exceptions to this this rule that pop up, you know, regarding quinted person could be uh, a teary eyed you know, perhaps they have some sort of a tear gland situation going on, or perhaps there is some sort of irritant in the air, um, something of that nature. Perhaps they're their sinuses are are bothering them,

or they just yawned. But if you're just looking at them, you're you're going to instantly go to that something something powerful or bad has happened and this person may need comfort in you know. This got me thinking about, um, another way that tears might work. This is not something that I found advocated in in any research, though somebody might have put this forward and I haven't read about it yet. Um, but this would be uh the idea that what if tears are you useful as an honest

signal of emotions? That could have evolved as a response to the evolution of deceit so uh so, So what I'm imagining here is, you know, humans are are complex social animals managing complex social relationships, and human brains are complex enough that humans can lie about what they feel, and they can lie about who and what they care about.

But because tears are difficult to fake, I wonder if maybe tears evolved as an honest signal of our true, motivating feelings, who and what we actually care about and how we feel about things. And thus I wonder if, possibly in that way, they could be adaptive because they make us more trustworthy. A person who cries about something is less likely to be lying about what their feelings about that thing are. This, of course makes my mind

instantly go to actor. But that I mean, that's kind of a whole discussion in and of itself, because you get into how is the actor summoning the tears? Are they engaging with with actual tearful memories, or you know, a deep reading of the script and so forth. But ultimately the result is when you watch a film and the actor is summoning tears, it it makes anything that's going on on the screen more believable, no matter how

poor the screenplay, no matter how weird the lighting. If the actor is is summoning actual tears in their performance like that, that gives it a leg up. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that like most people, like some people can cry on command, but most people would have a hard time doing that, Like it's not easy to do unless you have that that chunk of onion in your in your handkerchief. Right, Is that the older actor's trick? Yeah, I guess so. So, yeah, maybe it

has something to do with the evolution of deceit. But anyway, that's just sort of like a weird thought that popped into my head. Maybe that'll connect to some of the hypotheses that we that we discussing more detail in the next part. But I wanted to talk about another study that was interesting about ways that tears might be useful

for interpersonal signaling and behavior manipulation. And this would be something that's not focused on conveying information that's perceived consciously, like what we were talking about with looking at tears on people's faces a minute ago. This would be operating at a subconscious level on the basis of chemical signaling or chemo signaling. This next example is also good because from what I can tell, this is a study that led to some maybe very misleading headlines in popular coverage.

But anyway, so some studies in mice have found that behaviorally relevant chemo signals in tears. So these would not be emotional tears because mice don't shed emotional tears. These

would just be regular basil or reflex tears. These chemo signals in mice include pheromones that uh, for example, can do things like make male mice more attractive as mates, or there can be chemo signals in juvenile mice that prevent adults from attempting unwanted mating behaviors with with those mice, so that they can have kind of uh, discouraging unwanted

behaviors and other mice. And picking up on that research, there were some scientists who in your two thousand eleven looked into whether there could be similar chemo signals in human tears, and so this led to a study by Shanny Gelstein at All published in Science called human tears contain a chemo signal. Now, I want to be clear that I'm often kind of skeptical about I'm not quite sure why this is, but I think maybe because Uh. There have been a few studies along these lines that

have later turned out to be not well founded. But I'm kind of skeptical about studies finding big macro behavioral effects of imperceptible smells and stuff in humans, so I would definitely want this verified by a good bit of

independent replication. But if this the finding of the study is correct, what it found is that emotional tears in humans tend to contain chemicals that change the behavior of adults, especially adult men, possibly making them less aggressive and less likely to experience sexual arousal, maybe making them more likely to, say,

provide care behaviors. The study measured this by having people uh smell tears that were from from human donors, and they found that tears that were produced by women who were experiencing negative emotions, when men sniffed those tears, they had reduced levels of testosterone, and they had reduced self rated uh sexual arousal and reduced physiological measures of arousal. And so what some headlines did with this is basically they went with like the sexual angle and said that, oh, yeah,

tears will make you less attractive. Yeah, that feels like a very a specific misread of of what they're trying

to say here, right, right. So, actually I was reading there was a section that covered this in that article by Mandy Oaklander that I mentioned a minute ago, and it actually went back and interviewed one of the authors of that that study in Science, Noam Sobel, who said, Okay, yeah, it really generated some sort of misleading headlines that that had the wrong takeaway from it, because even though they did find that at least within this one studied emotional

tears lowered sexual arousal and men, he thinks that the real interpretation, the correct interpretation of this finding is that is that the chemo signals in this maybe reducing aggression, uh, and that that men's tears may also have the same effect as women's tears. And so the main takeaway would

not be that like tears are unattractive. It would be that, like tears, if this finding is correct, serve to sort of like put other biological draw vibes on hold and sort of put put the men who smell them into

a kind of uh, caregiving mode. Now, one thing that when possible issue that this raises for me though, is that tears are also shed in rage, you know, so one can easily imagine a scenario where if if one warrior is coming at another and one warrior, uh, their eyes are streaming with tears and their their faces snarling

like a beast, and they're coming at you with battle axe. Uh. Is does that mean the other warrior is going to suddenly let their guard down and and have this emotional outpouring for the other warrior because tears are present like that doesn't really match up for me? No, and it well, I mean sure if it does work this way, certainly wouldn't be that deterministic. It would just be an influence, not like a you know, overriding every other consideration a

person could have. Though, I mean I would say that, Uh, you can imagine even in a context of of people of you know, warriors and killers, it seems is harder to enact violence maybe on somebody who is crying like that. Crying does serve pretty often to sort of neutralize aggression. Yeah. But but then again, I guess we have to remember that it does not occur in a vacuum. Like we

have the human facial communication array, we have body posture. Uh, and you know that is also augmented by us or or or non use of tools and weapons, like there's there there are a number of other signals that would be in place in addition to the tears. Even if the tears had this ability to augment what's going on with the with the our facial features. Yeah, I mean, we're constantly processing all kinds of signals and information. Tears

would be one input among many. You know, they might have an influence in one way, but you know you might be able to ignore that influence if you've got strong motivations. Uh. In all this, like, I can't help but be reminded of an old Halloween Disney cartoon. Perhaps you've seen it, in which there is a paging gorilla and um and Donald Duck is there, and the Huey Dewy and Louis are there, and they're running around being chased by this gorilla. They're they're able to eventually subdue

the gorilla using tear gas. Tear gas, of course, has does not have an emotional context. It isn't It is an irritant. But in this cartoon, when the gas of the tear, when the tear gas reaches the eyes of both Duck and Ape, it produces tears that are then instantly emotional tears confusing the categories. Yeah, yeah, there's some

some some wonderful category confusion there. So anyway, I'm not sure what I think about the idea of tears as chemo signals, though I do feel pretty well convinced that there are some kind of signal, and it might be a signal of the more the more straightforward kind that we were talking about before we're observing them has some pretty reliable cognitive effects. People see the tears and react

in a certain way. And and there are some indications also that UM that tears, maybe emotional tears, may be specially designed to be seen. Like I was reading in one of these articles UM a finding that has alleged that emotional tears tend to contain higher protein content than um uh than just like basil or reflex tears. Though that I'm not sure how well that finding holds up, because I might have read that that had been that

had been contradicted as well. But if that is the case, UM, one hypothesized explanation for that is that the additional protein content of the tears causes them to be thicker, meaning that they take longer to roll down the cheek so emotional tears, if this is true, would be more visible than just say, like your eyes overflowing with tears because

they're irritated. Those thinner tears might just sort of wash away, whereas the emotion, the thicker emotional tears hang on the cheek and sort of stick to your skin and other people can see them more easily. Now this is very interesting because it brings to mind two different things. One, what happens when there is makeup of some sort in place on the face, uh, And you can see this, you know, across the spectrum any kind of uh makeup that might be worn on the face, especially for some

sort of ritual scenario. And then if there's weeping, it has the potential to make the tears all the more apparent. And this also reminds me of something I was reading

in Holy Tears. Apparently there have been accounts of of there are various accounts of weeping blood um in in in cultures, and there was there's this possibility that there there are some mourners that have been reported to have engaged in rituals in ancient Turkey where they would score their faces um during the ritual before the ritual and anyway, the result would be that you would have blood and

tears mixed together. Uh, thus sort augmenting the tears with blood and or or the reverse augmenting the blood with tears causing this this increased flow. Well, yeah, and playing on the intuition that tears are are meaningful, and they're meaningful if they are seen. They're meant to be visually seen, and of course the one way to hide them is you do you're crying in the rain, right like in

the Affily Brothers song. Okay, you know, there's one observation that I came across that struck me as really interesting. This was not from a scientific study. Actually just heard this in a video I was watching. So Vox has a video series called Glad You Asked that's hosted by somebody somebody named Joss Fong, and they had an episode on tears, and there was a part in the episode where somebody observed that tears are the only body fluid that doesn't tend to gross other people out. And that

struck me as really interesting. So the idea of getting somebody else's urine or feces, blood, sweat, spit, mucus, etcetera, any of that getting any of that on you most of the time people would find all of these options disgusting. The the suggestion here is that tears are the only fluid secreted by the body that doesn't usually provoke a disgust reaction in others. And I don't know of any empirical research to back up this observation. It might exist, but it does ring true to me, and it strikes

me as as notable. Yeah, yeah, um, I mean it's hard. It's hard to reflect on any actual experience with that. I feel like any time that I've gotten, say, my son's tears on me, it's almost always been their emotional tears. Then there's gonna be mucus as well, you know, so in that case it's like, yeah, I probably need to change shirts. But but but once you're apparent, you get all kinds of fluids on you, and that just I think, you know, oh yeah, yeah, from urine and everything else.

But I guess with you know, with the with the tears, I can I can unders understand that. Yeah, I can certainly match u, especially when I think about the time that he shot tears into my mouth. Um, by virtue of his tear Duck situation. At the time, I was not it was more interesting as opposed to to a

gross out moment um. I also was looking around because I was thinking, well, maybe there's some notable exception in human culture, and I thought I had some like some flag came up in my memory of some faint, faint example of something where maybe tears had some sort of a negative connotation, maybe involved with say like um, you know, the pershing of bodily energies or the imbalance of energies. But I couldn't find anything. Maybe I'll find something and

we'll share in the future. But it does seem to be pretty universal, and even then it would not I don't know if it would necessarily be that the tears themselves have any kind of unclean aspect to them. It would be something about like the deeper body or the or some sort of alleged energy system of the body.

In the same way, whereas if you if you might and I'm not saying this is fair, but if you were judgmental of somebody for crying during space jam, um adult crying during space jam, you might you might well argue that this that they shouldn't have done so, uh, that they didn't have proper emotional reason to do so, But you wouldn't think anything less with the actual substance of their tears, Like, keep those space Jam tears away

from me, do not let them soil my body. I wouldn't trust anybody who did not cry during Space Jam. You go, maybe they're the hole of these tears. All. Yeah, as long as we're off the subject and reaching the end of the podcast, what have you? What do you make of old Pinhead saying, um, you know, no, no tears. It's a waste of good suffering. I always felt that safe old tears. Yeah, I always felt like that was a bit off brand, Like what do you what are you?

What are you expecting to happen? Like I thought pain and suffering was your whole bag, but suddenly like crying is not allowed. Yeah, at what point does he think it's okay for the tears to begin? Yeah, it seems kind of closed minded pin it. Well, it is interesting that in the context of the movie, these would be uh, if it's hell Raiser, these would be anticipatory tears, right, tears that are in response to terror at the idea

of suffering yet to come. And yet there are some people who have put forward models of emotional tears that sort of say the opposite, that say tears are a sort of step down the signal. I'm not sure I'm convinced by this actually, but it at least has been alleged.

I could imagine a scenario. Okay, if you're gonna think long and hard about the cenobytes of of Clive Barker cell raiser, you could say, well, they're all about actual senses, actual senses of of pleasure and pain, and therefore the emotional context of pleasure and pain might be completely lost on them, because yeah, they're all about like stick and hooks and things and and so forth, and and the tightening of leather, not so much about anticipating the pain

or reflecting on the pain. So I don't know, now I'm back backtracking. Maybe it is totally on brand, but maybe maybe would have been more impactful if if ten had had been said something like just to express that he doesn't even understand what's happening. What are you doing? Why? Why is there liquid coming out of your face? Liquid shouldn't be coming out of your body unless it is a response to direct physical stimuli. Since I mentioned it, I figured I might as well explain the idea of

the sort of step down theory of tears. Um So.

I was reading about this in an article in The Washington Post from April sixteen by Mary Kim called the Science of a Good Cry, and this involved an interview with an emeritus professor of psychology at Temple University named J. E. Ron, who had advocated what was called in this article a two stage theory of emotional tears, which would be kind of similar to the two stage theory of laughter, which posits that maybe laughter functions when tension is first raised

by the setup of a joke and then suddenly lowered by the punch lines that stepped down to the lower level of tension. Under this theory, that causes the laughter as the result of a joke. Uh The idea here is that maybe crying works in a similar fashion. Uh So, I want to read a quote from this article that's explaining a friend's view here. Uh. Quote, people experience a crying fit when something happens to first spark high anxiety or distress, followed by a moment of recalibration or release.

For instance, a child that loses his mother at the grocery store. Begins by frantically searching for her, getting more and more worried as he scans the aisles. Suddenly he hears her call his name from behind, sees her comforting face, and promptly bursts into tears. And uh and uh. It goes on to explain how this could maybe also work

for things that appear to be tears of joy. Um, maybe like while you're planning a wedding for your child, you know they're there's sort of a high anxiety, high stress preparation stage, but then during the ceremony itself, it's kind of everything is culminated and then there's a release of tension and then you cry. So, according to this this hypothesis here, emotional tears would occur not really at the onset of distress, but at the onset of relief

from distress. I'm not sure how convinced I am by this. I'm not sure how well it lines up with actual instances of crying, but it does seem to be somewhat corroborated, at least by um what parts of the nervous system seem to be activated, like crying does seem to be more associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is what's usually associated with high stress conditions, fight

or flight, goose bumps, all that kind of thing. And then usually when you when you're done with a sympathetic nervous system response, you know, the the high stress is subsided, you shift back down into activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is often known as the relax and restore war system or the rest and digest system. It's the stuff that's uh normal, involuntary activities of the body that are happening when you're not in a state of heightened stress

or anxiety. And this is the system that crying seems to be more associated with. Uh So, so that would be an interesting indication in favor of this this two stage emotional tier theory. But still I'm not sure how correctly the theory rings. Just with experience of wind crying happens and how it happens. Yeah, I mean, it just it becomes so complex when you start trying to tease a part you know, emotional and physical responses to you know,

often you know complex stimuli. That is, you know, this is something kind of thing that you know, Pinhead's not gonna understand. It's just a it's a it's a tangled knot of human emotion. Oh we did, We did get set off on that whole thing, but Pinhead didn't. We we did, we did. Alright, Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out this part two of

our look at Tears. We are going to come back with part three, and I'm excited to get into some of the mythological and religious stuff a bit more in that one, but there will be a short gap. We have a special interview episode that we're excited about that's gonna air Tuesday, and then the following Thursday, we should be back with Tears Part three. If all goes according to plan. Yeah, if it doesn't, that means something changed. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, we'll

have to get into that. What's with all the teeth gnashing? I don't know. Maybe we'll get into that in part three. What does nash ing mean? What is it? What is it to nash to bite to like grind your teeth? I was just imagine that. Yeah, just kind of like weeping and just you know, um, so perhaps we should explore that, maybe maybe there there's some legs to that question.

Experts on gnashing right in. Yeah, all right. If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them all on the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can find wherever you get your podcast. We have core episodes in two season Thursdays, Artifact on Wednesday, listener Mail on Monday, Weird House set Him on Friday. That's when we just kick back and discuss a weird movie, and then on the

weekend we have a rerun of a core episode. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. 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, just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production

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