The Seven Deadlies: Wrath

just us. I've been talking about in general, we're wrathing in general. Um, well, we're just talking about this is why we we were both d Yogata lamp it down. Yeah, humans are pretty rap. I mean the thing about all

these senses that they are pretty intense in everybody. I mean there, That's why there's seven Deadly Sins, because they're part of who we are, and from a religious perspective that there are things that we want to suppress us From just an every day point of view, they're the kind of things we want to limit in our daily lives because when they get out of whack, they can really wreck things up. But then also there's there with

all of them. There's the question of worth of what extent is this actually a virtuous is actually a good thing and a necessary part of who we are? Right? Is there an upside to anger? Really? Right? But um, I suspect that Dante would looked at Wrath with a very unkind eye because I was thinking about all these sins. This is one that you can, as you pointed out, can be really destructive. Yes, And is one is moving through Dante's Inferno. And then again this is the medieval

classic Italian a um writer Dante. And in the tale, he's guided by his hero Virgil, who is a spirit at this point because Virgil died long before in the Divine Comedy, in the Divine Comedy, leading him through hell because he has to travel through hell to understand it, and then he has to travel through purgatory, and then he has to and then he's going to experience heaven. But this all starts coming together for Wrath in circle

five of the Inferno. Interestingly, this is right outside the gates of dis okay, the gates of disc Like if you think of Dante's Inferno, it's like a big pit. At the bottom of the pit is the devil and then scaling up the sides of this pit are all these various circles, and it's like dis like to somebody.

And the walls of discs are imagine a circular wall that is about you know, maybe not quite halfway but maybe a third of the way down into this pit that in theory would I guess keep everything else from coming back up. This is like the bureaucracy of Hell, and it separates the upper hell from the lower hells. Know that there's bureaucracy in Hell. Yeah, you know what's telling those is that Dante positions wrath just outside those gates.

You go in the gates, you're gonna start getting into what was in Dante's mind and in many medieval commentator's minds more grievous sins such as such as violence. That's worth noting, and violence may stem from from wrath in many cases, but violence is dealt with in the lower hells, as are the more terrible things such as treachery, heresy. So wrath is on the cusp of you know, abstraction

and then actual action. Right. And what's interesting too about the way that Dante deals with wrath is in this circle he includes both wrath and sullenness. Okay, okay, so you might imagine, just stereotypically, you might have drunken jocks picking fights and bars like those guys are here, as are the sullen goths who just felt sorry for themselves. Okay, you know, um, he views it as to these is

two forms of the same sin. Okay, just the great unifier to apparently, right, Like, it all comes down to anger, and in wrath, anger is expressed. It's like I'm feeling angry, I'm gonna punch something, right, I'm feeling angry, I'm gonna yell at something and feel like angry, I'm gonna smoke a cliff cigarette. Yes, well, well that's that's the other side. Yeah, because that is the sullenness. That's where anger is repressed. Um. Some scholars argue that that that really Dante is dealing

with sloth to a certain extent in the sullenness. But overall, this is a circle in which the passions of sorrow and grief end up ruling the soul. All right, So what does it look like when we visit this particular circle.

We find ourselves encountering a muddy swamp Okay, this is the river sticks, and there's stick fog rolling across the surface, and Dante and and Virgil are road across this by flegus, not to be confused with Charon or to your own, who rode them across the acorn on the very outskirts of help. Okay, so there's a different dude. So they're only rolling across this mucky, slimy, awful swamp like I can't help it, think the bogga maternal stink from from labyrinth,

you know. And as you look down into the swamp, first of all, you see bubbles rising up. And the bubbles are rising from the sullen. They are sunken down all the way to the bottom of the They're just buried in the slime at the bottom of the river, the bottom of the swamp. They're chanting their sticks of singing mock hymns down there. So that's where the sullen are. Like that sulfuric bubbles are like bubbling up from from all of their pouting right right there. They're drowning down there,

Bubbles rising up for the slight in life. They refuse to welcome the light of God, the light of sun. Spiritual awakenness into their life. So in death they're buried forever, gargling and endless hymn. So that's the sulent more of interest to us, and are the purely wrathful and they they'll you'll find them at the surface of the water wrestling with each other. So just imagine these naked forms

driving in the slime like pigs and filth. They're punching each other, they're gouging, their clawing, they're biting, and not just each other, but some of them are biting themselves. They're carrying at their own flesh like a really dark Abercrombie and Fitch commercial. Yeah, I guess, I guess. Imagine

their shirtless. Yeah, they tend to be naked in the artistic interpretations, then this is This is also interesting because Dante ends up seeing somebody he knows, this guy named Felippo Argentie, and Dante ends up encountering various people that he knew in life. That's what a recurring theme and inferno, and it's also a means by which he typical pay either show some sympathy for the center or some understanding of the scent, and also identifies it in himself. There

are various debates on who Argentie actually was. There's one account that it because Dante was banned from Florence at one point, lost his property, and spent the rest of his life wishing he could return to Florence. And so one idea is that Argentie was somebody who ended up purchasing land that had belonged to Dante's family after he was driven out, So he, you know, he may have had a personal acts to grind here with this individual, because Dante sees him, He's like, yeah, I hate that dude.

I really would like to see him dunked under these waters before we're done here, in verticals like yeah, just wait, it will happen. And and then the guy like he sort of crawls up onto the boat and talks to Dante a little bit, but then the other people in the swamp end up tearing him apart to this Argentine character. So do you not cross Dante's what I'm hearing? Yeah, but see, but Dante was feeling wrath himself, and so this is how he he summons the emotion inside himself.

He's even as he's seeing in this in the torments around him. So, so that's pretty much the inferno version of wrath. In purgatory, the souls purge themselves of wrath and in a slightly different manner. And again purgatory, this is the amount of purgatory that rises from Earth to heaven, that connects Earth to heaven, and it's when Dante eventually emerges from Hell. He has to climb this mountain up

to the terrestrial paradise and then into Heaven. So if you find yourself on the terrace where wrath is dealt with, you'll find that these individuals walking through bick smoke that's darker than the night, and they can't see the outside world. They're experiencing hallucinatory visions in which they see examples of meekness, which is the virtue that is opposite wrath. So you see this idea of in purgatory working through wrath. Is wrath is this thing that clouds our judgment and clouds

our views of the world. And I think that's such an apt description because when you lose yourself to anger, that is exactly what it feels like, right. You cannot think clearly. All of a sudden you have trapped yourself into a corner in the situation and you're trying to get out of it. Yeah, it's especially obvious after the fact with with you know, the little things that inspire our rat you know, we're like, oh, well, this totally messed with my schedule today, and now I'm mad, you know.

And then and then you feel afterwards, you're you know, hopefully, if you have any amount of self consciousness about what you're doing and how your mind works, you look back and you're like, wow, that was that was ridiculous? Why was that upset? But of course in the worst cases, you know, it just completely. I mean, we end up polking out right, we end up harming things in the world around us, exactly. Let me hit Buddhism real quick before we move into the science though. I mentioned before

how you have the wheel of stam Sara. This is the wheel of life though that you see especially in too Betan Buddhism, which shows all the various realms of existence in which a life may be born, which you can think of in terms of one life to the next, like I was bad in this life, so in my next life, I'm occupying a harsher existence, or oh I was good in this life next life is going to be better, or you can think of it in terms of my emotional state right now is this, and based

on this emotional state, my next emotional state will be something else, you know. So it's like one state and form and the other are to were consciousness evolves. But at the very center of this wheel you find these three poisons which I touched on before. You have a snake, a pig, and a cock. The snake represents hate wrath, the other the pig is like delusion and ignorance, and the cock is greed that sometimes less, but the snake is hate. And that's where we find the center of

wrath that's moving the whole wheel. That's just full of suffering. As far as the realms into which one may be reincarnated, and these are also in the realms that are in touch with the way humans feel in the state of our own souls. You have the Nakara realm, and this is the hell realm, the realm that's more typical of something you would see in Dante, full of hatred and

torment and demons. The hell being was ripping people apart, that kind of thing, and that's in the lower realms but then in the higher realms you see the Ashera realm, and this is the room of the Demi gods, powerful beings, but despite their power, despite their freedom, they're not in the chains of Nakara. They're living it up. They're just

one step below the gods. But they're defined by anger, They're defined by jealousy and war, and they end up wasting all this freedom and opportunity being on the pursuit of power. So when they ultimately die, they live long lives, but they eventually do die. Then they're born down into the lower realms. So you see this interesting extaposition of

the two states of being. And then of course there's the human realm in there, which is a balance of all these various realms, so you've also have plenty of wrath there as well. Yeah. I think it's interesting that the snake is the symbol of that because it is sort of you know that you think about the snake swallowing itself. I think actually there's a medieval name for this. It has various names. I can't remember the one you're thinking of off hand, where the snake is biting its

own tail, consuming his own tail. Yeah, yeah, and you get into you know, ideas of the world serpent, the exactly the organmender. But you know, there's this idea that you're inflicting hurt upon yourself, right, and so I think it's interesting now to take that knowledge and turn it over to what's happening in your brain. Yes, when you're suffering about of anger, I guess you could say, oddly enough, I want to point out that eld dope does not

show up on the scene here. Yeah, it's been with us for so long that I thought for sure that it would be prominent in this, but it is not. It is really a story about the amygdala. Well, I mean it's it's probably it's there in the cocktail somewhere, but it's not playing. No, you're right, you're right. It's just it's a it's a base note, or maybe I should say it's a top note. It's a fruity top note for some people. And we'll talk about that a little bit. But yeah, it's a story about the amygdala,

which helps us to process emotion. We've talked about this quite a bit before, and in the case of anger, it works in tandem with a number of biological responses, including the release of adrenaline. So it kind of makes sense for it because whenever you've experienced anger wrath, I'm sure that you've had a moment where you just felt

a surge of energy. Is that tension energy? That's because when we get angry within a quarter of a second, and magdala can serve up an action inspired by wrath if if it weren't for the frontal lobe, because this is sort of our seat of reason in this area of our brain also experiences a flow of blood and attempt to sit there and kind of way the situation and the response and altogether this process can take just two seconds, right, So if there's a trigger that makes

you angry, just within two seconds, you could be serving up a punch or you could be trying to restrain yourself. And this is really why people often say, you know, count to ten if you're angry, Yeah, because it gives you a chance to kind of pull your adrenaline addled self together. Yeah. Or if you're one thing that I've practiced in the past and also told other people, it's like, if you if you have that angry email you really want to send a go ahead and write the the email.

Don't put the two in the field though, Yeah, don't put the two in the field. Maybe just write it in the text document, then shut it down and let it sit for a while. Industry, Like the next day you could go back to that and be like, oh man, that was just a fool's errand right there. Yeah, well what was I What was I doing with that? Yeah? Yeah, I can't help but think of it in terms of like the amigdala in the frontal lobe is like that.

The amigoala is kind of like the you know, you know the classic image of the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. Instead, they'll imagine like a pro wrestler on one shoulder and a and like a Buddhist monk on the other, and the pro wrestler is the end of the emotional amigdola, and it's it's like, go out there, do it, do it, get angry, don't take this stuff off anybody, punch right, angry emails, stop around,

huff and puff. And then on the other side you you have the Buddhist monk, and the Bodhist monk is like, let's chill it out, Let's think a lot ofically. Let's think calmly about this. But you have to depend on that monk having enough energy to put up with the enigdolla, because sometimes the enigola is going to be all right, let's do it, let's crack some heads, and then the monks like, you know, I'm done, I'm gonna beat here. Well, you know what, And there's a there's a couple of

things that could actually weaken your inner monk response. By the way, I really like this idea of both of them, that the monk of the wrestlers are both wearing robes in my version that I see on your on your shoulders right now. But a couple of circumstances. One is you could have sustained damage to your frontal lobe, like

our poor friend Phineas Gauge. Right, this is a guy who in nineteen was working on the railroad and when he was excavating rock, and he was tamping gunpowder down in its drill hole, and there was an ax a little explosion which caused the tamping iron he was using to thrust itself through his left cheek and out his skull, yeah, like out his like completely through his head and then in the air on the other side they basically gave him the frontal of botomy. Yeah. Yeah, and he survived it.

But what happens he became childlike and became bullying, and he started to use profanity. Again. This is so this guy went from mild manner to like crazy town and in a very short amount of time. And they didn't understand enough about the brain at the time to really attribute that to his accident. Yeah. And by the way, if you want to hear more about gauge and and other things of this nature, we did a podcast to Change your Mind the Hard Way where we dealt with

some of some of these things. Another circumstance is sarotonin. You serotonin levels. There was a study conducted by the University of Cambridge and this was actually reported in a Science Daily article. They talked about healthy volunteers and what they did is they took these healthy volunteers and altered their serotonin levels by manip pulating their diet. Because we know that your diet can affect the serotonin levels in your brain and make you, you know, really sort of

regulate your mood. Yeah, there's certain foods are gonna behind serotonin. And if you've ever been to a health food store and look around it supplements. There obviously a lot of serotonin supplements that are aimed at helping you out with your serotonin level. And you know, we've talked about this in the past two especially with our podcast on decision fatigue. Just make sure that you're good enough to eat, you know, throughout the day, because that really does affect your ability

to regulate your moods. You are what you eat video, so are what you think. So the two come together. That's right, mind to think. That's on my bumper sticker on my car. So okay. What they did they manipulate their diets. On the serotonin depletion day, the volunteers were given a mixture of amino acids that lacked tripped a fin, the building block for serotonin, and on the placebo day, they were given the same mixture but with a normal

amount of tripped de fan okay okay. And then the researchers scan the volunteers brains using fmr I and as the volunteers viewed faces with angry, sad, and neutral expressions, and then they were able to measure how different regions reacted and communicated with one another. When the volunteers viewed the angry faces as supposed to the sad or neutral faces. So the research revealed that low brain serotonin and make communications between specific brain regions. We're talking again about the

magdala and frontal lobe much weaker. And the finding exactly suggest that when our serotonin levels are low and maybe really much more difficult for the prefrontal cortex to control emotional responses to anger. I mean, this is this is a this kind of a dumb moment. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, you know what, when I was angry, I was really hungry, and I was tired, and I was hungry. Uh, so it makes sense that

the serotonal levels could affect our mood like that. So to put it back in terms of the pro wrestler and the monk on your shoulders, in the case of Phineas Gauge, the monk was just completely taken out, yeah yeah, by by a rod. In the case of the serotonin issue, the individual hasn't had enough to eat or for whatever reason, the serotonin level has dropped and so has the communication between the two. So the pro wrestlers on one shoulder saying let's do it, let's go out there and let's

kick some butt. I'm not gonna take this anymore. How dare they do this to me? And the monk is is like yelling across a chasm here um and saying saying, hey, calm down, calm down, and the pross was like, what what's he talking about? And then launches back and well, here's the thing too. Let's say that you are a person who has two pro wrestlers on your shoulder. In other awards, you are prone to be more aggressive and

therefore more prone to anger. Your communications between your MICHAELA in your preferntial cortex are going to be weekend regardless. So when you have the depletion, it's much more pronounced. What's interesting about this and I was reading this experiment as well, where they then they referred to them as short fusers and the Brewders. So the short fusers, that's the guy was like, Oh, you took me off. I'm

gonna punch somebody in the face. Yeah, And then you have the brooders who are like, oh, that person really made me mad. I'm gonna pretty much be musable the rest of the day, which brings me back to thinking

about Dante with the sullen and the wrathful. So I wonder if you could, if you could look at the short fusers are the ones tearing each other up and punching everyone in the face on the surface of sticks the river sticks, And then the brooders are the sullen buried in the muck at the bottom, gargling their hymns into the flying Yeah, the powders just need to meditate, and the short fusers just need a sandwich because really there, yes, absolutely, but really, if you are a short fused person, you

really are much more sensitive to your serotonin levels, is what this is spelling out. So it is very important to try to get that sandwich in your belly. Really again, to simplify it. In fact, they've been experiments where if you actually look at the brain and you you scan it and and you see what's lighting up during these moments of wrath or when there's some sort of stimuli that provokes wrath, you can see that the difference between short

fusers and brooders and seconds. The medial prefrontal cortex associated with self awareness and emotional regulation quickly lights up with the broods, and so does the hippocampus involved in memory. So as they fume, people repeatedly relive the events in their minds. It's like they're chewing over that thing that made them mad. They're continually tweaking that story in their head about that thing that happened to them that was

sucky and now they're mad. So anger can be so fleeting, right, it can be such a flash, like how long is this taking? This whole process, this just taking seconds. They found in this experience that the degree of hippocampal activation predicted how much people tended to ruminate. So you can actually see, depending on what the hippocampus is doing, you can tell how much they're brooding on the anger. I'm imagining a little sign on the fMRI I that shows

need sandwich, and it's just like flashing over the prefrontal cortex. Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about whether or not you could be attracted to anger. All right, we're back, so wrap to what extent is it? Is it attractive? I mean it's I mean not so much. Usually people go out of their way to avoid people who are angry, right, I mean it's often referred to as as showing ones.

But you know, more or less they're like, I really showed his butt on that one, right, but they did not have to say Bobby, you know what I mean. It's generally like they let wrath take control of them and they really kind of look like a fool for it. You know, no their emotional address, you knew where they live. Yeah, but then you think of wrath, and you think of so many there's so many things in our culture where

wrath is celebrated. It generally it involves creating a fictional or just creating even real world circumstances that allow the wrath to manifest in a way that is either acceptable or relatable. Um for instance, Incredible Hulk. You know, this is an example where a mild manner, Bruce Banner, he's getting kicked around and then the rage gets ahold of him, right,

and he turns into Holk and starts kicking. But or just any masculine testosterone fueled action flick where the baddies are bad and so our hero is even badder and starts just wailing on people, you know, Bruce Lee type stuff. We do get something out of that. There's something appealing about that I'm on various levels. I mean, you can break it down to the viewer of some of some sort of film like this. They have issues in their life that they would on some level like to be

able to deal with in a direct manner. And so I'm going to watch something or play a game in which somebody deals with their problems with direct violence. Well, right, And there are some people who do bait other people in order to raise their hackles, right and get a little charge of anger, because they're interested in provocation, right and getting into a fight. Yeah, And I feel like this is interesting because I think we've all done this,

or maybe not all, but most of us. I feel like I've felt this at one point or another where you're not necessarily like a complete bully or anything like that, like nothing like really heinous, But were you just sort of poking at somebody just to get like, you know, the little things that might annoy your significant other, and if the mood is right, you might just prime a

little to see of it. Okay. So could it be that on that day you war, testosterone levels were higher than they usually were, right, This is for both men and women. University of Michigan Psychology study found that some people find angry expressions rewarding well, and they they actually interpreted as rewarding. Tesascer and levels were actually measured in

a group via saliva samples. And then this group was asked to work on a learning task that involved a flash of images, some with angry faces, some with neutral faces, and some images containing absolutely no faces, and the images flashed by so quickly that the participants weren't really able

to detect a pattern. In fact, though this task if they were working on, was really to gauge whether or not they could subliminally work out a pattern, and it was found that men and women with high testosterone levels learned the sequence of keypresses better when the sequence was followed by an angry face. And the conclusion is that the anger expressions were rewarding to the brain and that's why they had a better memory of this. That's interesting.

That finds me of this article we're looking at from Wired that was talking about the Steve Jobs. Yeah, it was like the mobile meat portions of the original the first iPhone came out. iPhone comes out, everyone loves it, but mobile meat doesn't work. I mean, they's supposed to be you know, on par with blackberries applications, and you know it's supposed to actually fill that need. It was an important part of the product. And Jobs was notoriously perfectionist.

He had a certain vision. He wanted to see that that vision brought to life. And he was known for having steam coming out of all the time. Right, and interestingly enough, he practiced Buddhism. I know, I was just

thinking about that too. Yeah, but I mean he probably realized that, hey, I need to I mean he I understand he did realize, and maybe his anger needs to be be treated in some parts of my life, but maybe not when it came to mobile meat not working, because he got he lined everybody up, got him into the theater there and just continued to like lay into him for I think for like a solid hour, just thrashed them, I mean not physically, but just let him

have it. Told them that they should all hate each other for for what had happened and they had brought dishonor to the brand, like basically telling them that they are the beings and the river sticks and the should just tear each other apart because they well and they should commit you know, mental Harry carry you know, but yeah, I mean here's a good example of I mean, it's the ultimately, it's the kind of like negative feedback that we all rail against whenever we encounter even like a

little bit of it, you know, I mean, nobody likes to be in trouble. Nobody likes a working environment where somebody's on your case for something. It makes you angry, It makes you, you know, it makes you so, it makes you kind of hate your job. But some of the evidence lines up to support the idea that it also inspires you on some level. But it did it Actually you're angry, sure, but then you're you're committed to

to getting it done. Okay. So to that end, I have to read this quote from the co author of the University of Michigan Angry Faces study because I think of Steve Jobs now. He says, quote, it's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a nonconscious level and be like a tasty morsel that some

people will vigorously work for. So I don't know, maybe there were people on jobs as team who actually responded to that well, I mean, the thing could be he knew his team, well yeah, and he knew that these are guys that will respond and got yeah, well I'm am using guys in the gender news. These are guys who who realized, see, now you're irritated about that. I saw.

I'm not irritated. I'm I'm actually amused. Okay, But maybe yeah, he realized that this is a crowd that is stimulated by that, and a wired writer or somebody commenting on the outside or they're not a part of that group, and maybe they're more of a positive reinforcement environment. Like like, it's easy for us to comment on that because because

I feel like you're at house. Stuff works. Aside from the days where Jerry comes to the halls with a bull like physically with a bullphip and and hits everybody. Aside from those days, Matt just gives us the occasional dressing down just for fun. Aside from that, it's a pretty prett pretty positive place to work. It's more about positively enforcement brainstorming that kind of thing. Brainstorming, of course, well in our mother environment where they're no wrong answers,

there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Though I have heard a few. Yeah, and in our mother company, Discovery, I mean it's it's all about you know, everybody wearing the lovey dovey pants. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I mean to get some more love pants because I I split them the other day. Yeah. In fact, didn't we got something about a flash momb here occurrence happening because anyway, I wasn't sure if that was actually happening or that was an example. I think that's an example of things

that can happen during a brainstorm. Um So anyway, that is another story for another time. But let's talk about when you are in a chronic state of anger. Okay, so you're in jobs as team and let's just assume that all the time it's all anger, because it's not going to be, of course, but you do encounter people like this. We're like, man, they are angry all the time. They're just constantly fuming over every little or big thing

in their life. Yeah, well, there's the state of response can start to take a toll and you obviously, chronically angry people may not produce enough actal col hopefully I've said that right, a hormone which tempers the more severe effects of adrenaline. And their nervous system is constantly working and can eventually become over taxed, leading to a weakened

heart and stiffer arteries. Yeah. This incidentally was the first neurotransmitter discovered, isolated one by a German biologists Atto Loewie, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work. Yeah, and it's really important because there's all sorts of potential for damage not just the heart, but the liver and the kidney as well as having high cholesterol. Yeah, it's responsible for much of the stimulation of muscles, including muscles

in the gas from intestinal set system. And it's also found in sensory neurons and in the autonomic nervous system. So it's a it's a part of scheduling even rim sleep. So okay. Yeah, and if you think we're kidding about this, just pull out one more stat um. And the two thousand and one study of thirteen thousand subjects, people with the highest levels of anger had twice the risk of coronary artery disease and three times the risk of heart attack as compared to the subjects with the lowest levels

of anger. See this makes it even harder for me to watch Lewis Black these days, you know. Really the whole stick is like I'm so angry at these things in the world that you're not right. It's a great bit. He's a great talented comedian, but as he gets older for me to watch him on the Daily Show, because I'm like, this is not good for your health, Lewis, you gotta you gotta chill out, Like I mean, maybe too. I don't know a lot about Louis Black, so so

maybe to a large extent, is an act. I mean, he said he's a professional, but I feel like he is summoning some real anger when performing, and I would just I don't want to watch him keel over. Okay, So, assuming he's not in that state all the time, he's just kind of doing it as part of his stick, it actually could be an upside for him, Okay, okay, So and actually for all of us there could be

an upside for anger. Again, assuming that this is not something that we're playing into and playing into the destructive violent forces. I mean, there's a way to actually be constructively angry. Yes, yeah, what they found some folks who like to poke around and studies actually researchers, mathish bos

Carsten did Drew, and Bernard nishtad Uh. They publish the results in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that participants who are made to feel angry and then we're asked to brainstorm exhibited key hallmarks of creative brainstorming, including unstructured thinking, and in a comparison to their counterparts identified as sad or neutral people, the very angry participants came up with more ideas as well as more original ideas. And now this was a short lived window, right liked

they couldn't sustain this. Obviously, they couldn't sustain their anger as well, which was a good thing. But right after they were made to feel a bit of wrath, their brain was basically kind of unfettered and not thinking systematically. And this is where people think that anger could be really helpful, because you are getting that surge of adrenaline and you do become laser focused in the way that you want to remove an obstacle, or you're sitting there

saying how could this be? How can I make this better? And if you actually point that anger the solution rather than say the person or the thing, you could make some headway and be really productive I believe the same study or maybe this is a different one that was talking about how sadness sullenness if you will, can also have you know, it's bad in the short term, but in the long term it can also it also leads

to increased creativity, increased drive in your work. Yeah, with some of this too that people who may be depressed, although um, and we've talked about this, it can hamper creativity at points, but there's some of this is tied to self actualization or being able to see yourself in a realistic light and then be able to deal with obstacles in a long term way because you're not at that that very moment sort of fooling yourself into like

I can do this, right, I don't know. It's a little bit of depressing way to put it, but well, it reminds me of most guys anyway, really love the first one or two Batman movies, right, the films not based some of the ladies, some of the ladies, my wife doesn't like them. But but these are very much a product of a time during which in the United States have the Bush administration, which, being a conservative administration, was generally by and large and not as popular with

the with liberal artistic types. Um. And then you have you have war, you have economic downturn. Well that economic downturn really comes after the Bush administration. But but the same area, you have a lot of negative things going on. But if you see the art that rises up out of these these issues, out of this paint, I guess it's kind of like a nice Well, it sucks that there was a big war, it sucks that it lasted forever, but but hey, we got some cool art about out

of it. Right Well, I think what you're saying is that anger. Anger is mobilizing forces to get out there, think creatively and say something. Well, and I was thinking about that in terms of protests too. I mean, there's a point where protests are really productive, right, and then there's a point where they can become very destructive for you know, devolve. So you're saying you don't have high hopes for the third Batman movie from Christopher Nolan. No,

I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, done well, anger can be really helpful, right Well, but again you have to bring a bit of mental energy to it to say, how am I reacting to this at this very moment. And that's where that ten second cooling off period is really important, because if you just let that two seconds rule you, you you know, you can get a hammer to the head. Yeah, I mean, if you look back and just think about it evolutionary, you can imagine

this primitive human out on the prehistoric planes. He's killed a deer or something, right, and then there's this other dude coming along. It's gonna try and eat his deer. That raises his hackles. He's like, who's this guy think? He is trying to steal my dear flank out from underneath. And then that anger can be used to mobilize him to fight for and keep what he's his and what

his survival depends on. And although he's not quite that sophisticated yet, one day he will use that wonderful neo cortex and he'll work out his problems via communication words um in a way that he can say, let's not fight about this, let's let's come to the logical conclusion about whose flesh this is? Okay? Right? That person will redirect his anger into a productive way. You know, you look like you're not buying No, No, I'm buying it.

I'm buying it completely. I mean, I think the interesting thing about Rath, like all of these sins, really is that there is a level where it makes sense and in the motivating force in life, and then there's that tipping point where it becomes something horrible and to be avoided. I don't know, but it maybe it seems like with Wrath that the tipping point occurs a little sooner. Yes it does. Yeah, I mean there are levels of Vancor

right now. So there you have it. Again. This is just one episode in a series, so as you're listening to this, feel free to go back and explore our previous five episodes. And there's also a good chance that you're listening to this in the future. Well you're obviously listening to it in the future, so the final episode on Sloth may also be out as well by the time you hear this. All right, let's call the robot over and read a quick listener mail. What have you

got for us? All right? This one comes to us from Michael. Michael writes in in response to our episode Stindall Syndrome kicked in the brain by Art, He says, I had no idea this was a thing. A few years ago. When I was in college studying design, my

art history class went to the TUT exhibit. I was walking through, rousing at the pieces, disappointed that Tut wasn't even there, when suddenly I felt the stamp that is gonna be And then suddenly I felt a hand shoulder h When suddenly I felt the need to stop and look up. I saw the crook and flail on display. I lost my breath. The room's fun and all of

the commotion disappeared. It felt like I was hallucinating. I swear that I was looking up at the at a pharaoh holding them uh and these, of course those two instruments. At a pharaoh mummified, they hold the crossocrounds their chest. I was completely paralyzed for what seemed to be hours, until someone bumped into me. It was really crowded. It was then that I realized how old and beautiful the crook and flail were that I was looking at. It

was so very overwhelming. I had forgotten about my childhood love of all things Egyptian. I didn't want to leave the room. I wanted to get closer, but there were too many people. I nearly cried at the side of it. And I am not the overly emotive type wild stuff. Thanks for the great episode I listened to each and everyone. Cool. Yeah, that's that's an awesome description of what Stenhell syndrome is, right. Yeah. Yeah, we discussed that podcast how they are a number of

different things informing. It's not something where it's like, oh, there's something broken in my brain and makes art pound me whenever I look at it, but like, here's a great example of someone who came into the exhibit with certain expectations, certain expectations, but also this hast, this emotional, emotional past with the subject matter, and then they're standing in front of it. This thing that maybe existed only in their mind before is manifest before them and it's

ancient and it's beautiful, and it just overwhelms them. So, you know, I was just thinking that this reminds me of an article that was recently published in New York Times called The Thin Places, or I think that's an approximation of the title, but it talks about how when we go on vacations, we go it doesn't have to be a vacation, be a park, it could be a special place, but it's perspective changing and they call it the thin place because it occupies a place between earth

and heaven. So it's like the places where reality grows at them and yes, pushes in on yes, and it takes you outside of yourself. Yeah uh so, yeah, that's that's just one of the things that a museum can do to your brain, right, Yeah, Well, it reminds me in our Scott Baker's fantasy. It looks there are these places that are basically the thin places. But the other thing about that is that madness can set them from

the outside. So well it seems to fall right in. Yeah, we encount of these thin places where art can effect us and can maybe drive us a little temporarily. Matt, Well, it's like Jill Bolt Taylor who had the stroke and she started to see her own molecules melding with with her environment. You know, I mean not it's not fed extreme, but that's sort of a metaphor for what's happening. But anyway, you know, Yeah, but that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that

with a Sydney. Maybe it was the emails from Michael, but it's signs Sydney, So Michael Slash Sydney, thanks for sharing, and we loved here from anyone else who's had an experience like that, with something with art, with history, et cetera that they've encountered, and likewise, let us know what you're experienced with wrath is, how do you deal with it in your daily lives, how do you experience it

in other people? And how do you mitigate it? To what extent does wrath actually inspire you to great things? And to what extent does it seem to hold you back? You can always find us on Facebook and Twitter. Check in with us that way, share stuff with us that way. On Facebook, we are Stuff to Blow your Mind and our Twitter handle is blow the Mind, and you can always send us your thoughts via email at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out

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