The Seven Deadlies: Pride Cometh Before the Brain

I'm all over that. Well, well there's more than just glatton. Yeah, that's there's there's a loss, there's gluttony, there's greed, there's sloped, there's rat there's envy, and then that the queen of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, the queen so called by Pope St. Gregory, right, yeah, who largely popularized this, this list of seven deadly sins, drawing on older did traditions. Uh, I mean you look back to like the Book of Proverbs. You have King Solomon dealing with like seven deadly is

in a sense. Uh so there's an older tradition there. But Gregory is really the popular really popularized these these seven deadly sins. So we're thinking, hey, let's examine these. We're all into talking about science meets human experience, philosophy and science kind of duke it out. What's going on with various parts of the human experience. So let's uh, we've decided we're gonna tackle each of these seven deadly sins, and uh, just in case we get slothful and don't finish,

we figured, let's let's start with a big one. Let's go and tackle the the mother of of sins, Pride, which I have to say, I was a little bit surprised that this is considered the mother pride. I mean that doesn't you know, pride coming before the fall? Though? Right's? I mean, I I instantly think back to uh to to the divine comedy, uh, Dante's Inferno at all. And uh, it's interesting. There's you know, you have all these these various circles and uh bulges in um in in Dante's

Hell that they did shot various punishments. So there's like, you know, like the lustful or punished in one way and then their heretics in another, and and it goes all the way down to where at the very bottom you have say himself and various betrayers and deceivers. They're frozen in this lake. So but but it's what's interesting is that there's not really a particular circle in hell that's devoted to the prideful, because there's there's a lot of pride going on in hell. Do you encounter prideful

individuals at various levels? For instance, there's Farranata. Uh, it's a pretty proud heretic that you encount. There's a thief by the name of Vanni of Fusie. There's this really awesome part where he is essentially so prideful. Uh. He's in Hell and he's basically giving God the finger. But it's not the finger. It's this Italian thing called the figs where oh is this this modern thing too? Uh,

there's just a Italian term that I know. Well, it's where you you take your thumb, you make a fist and then stick your thumb up through your middle and the index finger, and then you kind of and then with the with your knuckles facing out, you kind of like shake your fist and then ideally you do this on both hands, like like like our friend the thief in Dante's Inferno and he has shakes them at the

heaven doing this right now. Yeah, So, um, I'm always mindful that there's there's actually apparently in Um in twelve, the citizens of the Storia Um fixed two of these figs on on this marble tower and aim them at Florence. So you had like whole buildings making figs at other cities. It's pretty amazing. If if memory starts right, I believe that figs have a phallic Yes, it's a very phallic thing.

It's you know, masculine female. You know, you know, you don't really have to use your imagination all that much to see if you're looking down, if you've done this and you're looking down at your hands right now, and you're gonna be like, that's a little creepy looking. Yeah, um so uh so you have various prideful individuals, and pride is a part of all these other sins and

and Dante sell though. If you travel up to the Mount of Purgatory, which is the focus of the second volume in the Divine Comedy, in Purgatory, you have the Mount of Purgatory, which is this mountain that connects Earth to Heaven. And if you are not you're not bad enough, say to wind up in hell, but you still have some work to do. You still got some some rough corners to buff out before you can actually walk through the pearly gates. Then you need to go through purgatory.

And purgatory is this mountain with these various terraces, and on each terrace, if you start out at the bottom, you have seven ps um on your forehead, these seven marks, and as you travel through each terrace, you work off one of these marks until you're you're pure enough to actually enter the earthly paradise and ascent. So the first level that you have to go through on the amount

of purgatory deals with pride. And so you have you have individuals walking around on this terrace carrying heavy rocks in their backs, so the weights forcing them to walk slowly, their bodies are bent low to the ground. So that is probably the most direct way that pride itself is dealt with in the divine con me though it it pops up time and time again as a as part and parcel to other major sins like I mean, Satan himself, the great Deceiver, the great center. Uh you know, it's

his fall is all about pride. Well, yeah, and from what I read to you about la Viathan, the snake is the spirit of pride right and actually is masquerading as the Holy Ghost and might enter someone and displace This is my interpretation God is the center, right, so

you're replacing God with yourself as the center. Is that perhaps this is why it's the queen of all sins and and certainly outside of the Christian tradition, you see pride show up the major downfall in human nature, for instance the wheel of life and Tibetan beauty Buddhism the wheel of sensara. You see these various realms in which the human may become reincarnated, the various states of being.

So there's like an animal realm, there's a human realm, there's their their hell realms, and then there are these these up realms of existence, including the data realm. And this is like the realm of the gods where these mighty beings do their thing. But they're so consumed by ego and they're so blind to the suffering of others that even though they're long lived, when they die, they're

often reincarnated into the lower realms. And to say that the hell realms, because their lives ended up having such nasty results and were so charmatically awful. So just for being a little bit puffed up, well they were more than a little bit puffed up. They were they had godlike pride and that was their their fault. And then of course the other thing is that the baton Buddhism especially,

it's all about finding that balance, that equanimity. Uh. And the human realm is the this, this desired realm, because this is the room from which you can actually achieve liberation and rise above all the other rooms, and a rise above the cycle of endless rebirth and death, where the individuals spiraling through all these different cycles of of outrageous pride and outrageous to spare, outrageous violence and just pure like animal existence eventually rises above all that through

liberation and the than the noble eightfold path. All right, So that's the way that you would achieve this, right right, Um. And that's the philosophical side. But let's look at the science side of pride, because it turns out there is a scientific part when you're talking about pride in the human being. So it turns out that pride is actually an adaptive virtue. Um. And this is from Discover Magazines

article I didn't send, it was my brain. Um. They say that most of us perceive ourselves is slightly smarter, smarter, funnier, more talented, and better looking than average. These rose colored glasses are apparently important to mental health, the psychological immune

system that protects us from despair. This is from Julian Paul Keenan, and he's the director of Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory and Professor of Psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey and um, So, apparently this is something that we need as social animals in order to bolster ourselves. And they actually have found that we start expressing pride as early as two and a half years old and by

age four able to recognize it. So we sort of points to something being hardwired in ourselves to be able to negotiate the social contract that we all um entered into. Yeah, I mean, because that's the thing about pride, it's it's you need to have pride in what you do. Like nobody wants to be around somebody who who doesn't believe in their own ability. Like like nobody wants to hire somebody who who isn't going to say, yeah, I'm great at what I do and you should hire me. I mean,

that's just well right, And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about how the in terms of group think, people are looking really as pride as a marker in someone, and not only that, humility isn't always what it's cracked up to be. And we'll talk about with that in a little bit um, but I did want to point out that there seems to be some sort of uni versality when it comes to pride. Um. It looks like this.

It's a slight smile ahead, tilt with hands on the hips or or your hands raised high and Dr Tracy and David Matsumoto, psychologists at San Francisco State, analyzed spontaneous responses to winning or losing a judo match during the two thousand and four Olympic and Paralympic Games, and they found that expressions of pride after a victory were similar for athletes from thirty seven nations, including for fifty three blind competitors, many of them who were blind from birth.

So the idea is that this isn't just a simple act of imitation. In other words, we see one another do it. It's not learned behavior. It's it's actually something that's emerging. Yeah, cue exactly, there's something going on in our brains that is pulling the puppet strings of expression for pride. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna get back to all of this, So hanging there for one second and back. Obviously, there

are two sort of branches of pride. There's the sort of authentic pride, uh, where yeah, you want to be prideful about stuff that you're good at, you want to believe in yourself, you want to have enough optimism to carry out your your daily life. But then there's this realm of hubris where you're just vain and prideful to an annoying or just destructive extent. Yeah, that's more in the category of narcissism and someone who is very arrogant,

kind of like jerk jerk pride. I guess you could say, yeah, very much like this sinful like I'm Satan, I'm great, uh kind of pride or the or the data pride, you know, where the where you have these beings that are just enormously powerful and just do not care about the suffering going around around them. Yeah. Right, So I mean that's that's the problem with pride, right. I think

there's the private empowers versus the private blinds, the private wounds. Yeah, and let's talk about some of the Psychology about pride in society. UM. There was a study on sixty two undergraduates who took tests that were supposedly measuring their spatial i Q, and really the patterns that were flashed before them were going way too fast that they couldn't actually

um perform on this test. That wasn't the point. The point is that afterwards the researchers took all of them aside or some of them not, and gave them feedback on how they did. And so they gave them They either didn't give them any feedback at all, or they said with little or no expression, you did very well, or they completely gushed and said you did great. Um. And of course again this they took this test and it was it wasn't really about the results of it,

because I couldn't really finish it. But they didn't know that.

The participants then sat down in a group to solve similar puzzles so that researchers could assess their behavior based on the feedback that they had given them, and they found that the puffed up, prideful students were perceived as being both more dominant and more likable than those who didn't get a seal of approval from the researchers, and they were really surp pries about that because they thought that the other students would be considered boastful or um,

just arrogant. They didn't realize that this was a big social component that those people were actually looked up to because they had pride and it also had there's something to stay here to about the power of positive reinforcement, you know, like build up. Uh, certainly the people that work for you and the people around you, you know, because that puts him in a better position to excel. Yeah, that's yeah, that's a sort of a sidebar on that experiment.

So that's psychology of pride in society. But let's talk about psychology of pride in your own self, Yes, in the individual. And this is where the research of Julian Paul Keenan is particularly interesting. Um. He's a director of Cognitive neuro Imagining Laboratory and professor of psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, New joycey uh And, and as his title implies, he's done a lot of work peering inside the brain and seeing what's actually happening in

moments of pride. Yeah, he did. He got into uh into people's brains because what he started to realize is that this is a quote for him, those who see themselves as they truly are not so funny, a bad driver, overweight have a greater chance of being diagnosed with clinical depression. So he wanted to take this premise of people who are a little bit more self aware and see what was going on in their brains right, and he found that it actually there's actually less mental energy typically involved

in puffing ourselves up then trrying ourselves down. Even though they're they're they're they're very similar on a neurological level, like they're both actions are tied to two more or less the same region of the brain. In particular, Keenan was interested in the m PFC and this is brain train just behind the forehead, and this is what helps shape awareness of self right. And he used a magnetic

field called transcreanial magnetic stimulation uh TMS. We've actually talked about this before, applied to this ALPA volunteers, and it temporarily scrambled the signals in this area of the brain, selectively shutting off this region of the brain which I neglected to say what mPFC stands for it is the medial prefrontal cortex. So he has this means to briefly shut off the mPFC and his volunteers, UH switches them off, and then he watches as the normal everyday arrogance melts

away from these individuals. And apparently it's not a pretty site. No. No, they see themselves as they really are, without glossing over negative characteristics. Um so. And I think it's fascinating that the whole TMS transcaranial magnetic stimulation, that you can sit there with a magnet and actually manipulate that part of the brain. Is just on a side note, very creepy

to me. Um But there's a study by Haidihikohikishi of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and researchers as volunteers to imagine themselves winning a prize or truncing an opponent while their brain things were being scanned, and they showed less activation and brain regions associated with introspection and self conscious thought than people induced to feel negative

emotions like shame or embarrassment. So the conclusion is that, as you had did before, we accept positive feedback about ourselves readily right, there's less energy. We just go okay me, except that rather than compared with something like guilt or embarrassment, which is the brain really contends to go over a little bit more. Another thing to come out of Keenan's work that I thought was interesting was that he pointed

out that self deprecation and self deceptive pride. Yeah, they're both located in the same region of the brain, Like it's that and they both serve the same purpose, and that is to advance in society, which makes it, you know,

makes sense. One person may say they're being really self deprecating because they're they're sort of fishing for for boost me ups there, They're they're looking for sympathy or like, oh, no, you did fine, You're really not not that bad at this thing that you you know, you're you're harping about, versus the person who is, uh, who is just unrealistically pumping themselves up because they're they're trying to make others

believe in this boastful reality that they're puting forth. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting in that the unctious ingratiating behavior, this this humility is masquerading really like it's the difference. Like if one person was saying like, man, I am so beautiful, and people were like, yeah, okay, you are beautiful. You keep talking about it. I'm buying into it now. And then the other person is saying, oh, man, I'm so not beautiful, and then people are like, oh no,

you are beautiful. Like it's similar results of like in terms of other people's what other people are saying and or thinking about you, or I'm not as beautiful as

you are. You know what I'm saying, like ingratiating yourself in that way, which is really interesting and it's really I find that fascinating that using the same TMS he was able to detect that and effectively study something that, for the longest was was really not studied all that much because it was sort of considered in the same way that there's not a particular region and Andte's inferno, there's not a particular circle that's just devoted to pride.

It was just thought that it was too elusive, that it was just too it was too everywhere and nowhere to really succinctly study. Well, it's not as you know, sexy, as anger or fear people, right, they didn't think that there was much to it, but in fact it's really uh part and personal of the way that we interact

with one another and the way that we're perceived. And I do, I do really find it very interesting that um, you can see this taking place in the brain, you know, when he is um, when Keenan is manipulating that one area about self awareness and how all that just melts away and someone can see themselves for for who they are, which you know, we've brought this up before, but like wow, I mean that that makes me think about how again how much we constructed in reality and how much of

our brains really inform who we are, our personalities. So the science kind of falls in line with some of what we kind of already knew about pride in that there's there's both ay, a light and a dark side to pride. There is a there's a balanced level of pride that allows us to to to go about our daily lives and our professional lives and our personal lives

in a reasonable manner. And then there's a cases where there's there's not enough pride, where one is more prone to depression and uh, and then there's a there's overwhelming pride. There's just pure hubrist where the individual is just violently strutting forth like a peacock through life like a peacock

and a china shop. Yeah yeah, And I really like this idea of it being therapeutic too though, sort of a you know, fake it till you make it thing, Yeah, I mean, and and to think back, you know, to on these these example like you see writings of you know, individuals like Saint Didditict who compares the pride and humility to Jacob's ladder, this dream vision of this ladder that allows one to reach Heaven and God and the idea that um any like any kind of pride is a

step down the letter of the ladder, and then a humility step of humility is a step up the ladder. But then you have you know, you've had other people and out that pride is really kind of a it's almost kind of like a safety feature, uh with other sins Like if you were enjoying food and it it might it seem to be uh that you're going down the road to gluttony. Well, then pride should should cut in at some point and stop you and be like, whoa,

I should as as great as his food. Is I also I am kind of prideful about how I look, so I should maybe hold off so that I don't ruin that with excessive burger eating. I see a book in here like how to make a Seven Stans Work for You? Well by Lamb. Well no, well they're those books already exist. That they're one is called the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. But because then because the whole

thing I read it in like in high school. But like a lot of that is like him Anton LaVey arguing it's like all these seven deadly sins, they're really seven deadly virtues because they're all great and blah blah blah. And that's the thing. There's certainly an argument to be made for any of these sins, like at what point is it is it really something that hurts us? And at what point is it just a part of who we are? And is it more hurtful to ignore it? Um?

Which is I That's gonna be a topic that's gonna continue to come up as we examine each of these uh so called sins from the standpoint of science, just right in psychology and all that. Next up and the next wepisview I believe it, since that's the second look, all right, well, well tell us what you think. What do you think about pride, how it factors into your daily life, and how it factors into the various competing world views in the world around around us? Do you

do you agree with St Benedict? Do you agree with Anton LaVey? Let us know. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. On Facebook we are Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and on Twitter we are Below the Mind, and you can also drop us a note at Below the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuffwork staff as we explore the most promising and purple mixing possibilities of tomorrow.