Peripersonal Space: Humans’ Got Talent

was actually really worried about. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, like, um, that's what I used as my job when I was like, well, you know, if I've got like my septum pressed all the way up against one side of my face, how does that make my voice sound, and what will it sound like with you know out that happening. But I can breathe through both nostrils for the first time in memory. I I literally can't remember the last time. I think

I'm probably was sixth grade. Again. My friend saw me punched me in the face, and I'm almost positive that's that's the only thing I can come up with that would have deviated my septem But I've been in such a good mood since those stints got pulled out. Man, I'm I'm just on air, dude. I love it. So happy to hear that. Thank you. I bet those stints

being in there was not fun. No, it wasn't. In um My doctor guy named Capelle Segal was really really good, as was Alicia the p A too, and he said that he was I don't think he said it was the most deviated septum ever, but I'm just gonna go ahead and say that's essentially what he was saying, that it was really really deviated septem and so he got it straight and everything's going bully right now. Did you

shave any off any anywhere here and there? No, he said, you know that bump is still going to be there, right, We're not doing a rhino plastic And I was like, yeah, I've made peace with my nose is fine nose. So he's like, great, okay, I love it. I can't wait. I can't wait to breathe my breath into your nostrils and have you. I can't accept it for the first time. Here, do it now, and we'll see if I can smell it over the microphone. Mom, Yeah, that's nice, Chuck, it

smells like seagulls. Uh, it's funny. People listening to this might be thinking, why did Chuck almost shout the word big at the beginning of this episode. Oh yeah, because I was going to say big, props and thanks to you for picking this subject. Okay, great, because I thought I thought it was endlessly fascinating and had so many potential little ten drils that weren't even in the great

thing that Livia put together for us. Uh. It just it really got my brain kind of thinking about a lot of different ways that pair of personal space and how our brains are wired, and how that how many things that has impacted in will impact and can't impact. I loved it. Yeah, it is that's I mean, that's why I was like, we gotta do one on this.

I don't remember how I stumbled across. I think I actually was like, I remember hearing that every human needs like one point seven meters square meters of personal space or something, or actual physical space, and I was like, is that true? And I went and looked it up and I stumbled upon pair of personal space, which is different. There's personal space, there's pair of personal space. And this this science even though we've been like kind of picking

at the edges of it since the seventies. UM, it's still so new that we're not quite sure if we're talking about the same thing or these overlapping systems. But the upshot of a pair of personal space while we're talking about is the area around you that you can reach, like as far as your arm extends, and that if you stop and think about it, this is the way that we physically interact with the world. This is the space and it changes because we move around the world.

We sit down, we stand up, we hands, we just we do stuff, so it moves with us. It's locked into our body, but it is it's the space where where we interface with reality essentially UM in any physical way. Yeah, and it's UM. And by the way, Teaser, there are two other kinds of spaces that you didn't even mention that we're going to talk about. Okay, so just you know,

put that under your lid. Let's smoke listening, audience. Uh. It's sort of related to what's called body schema, and we'll talk about sort of the history and all this and all these cool studies, but body schema is just the understanding that we have of how we're built. Like you know, Uh, it's like if you put on one of those big sumo wrestling suits, you're gonna be knocking stuff over, like Nathan for you episode in a China in a China shop. Um, because you're your your brain

is wired to be used to how big you are. Uh, Like when we squeeze through a sideways thing, like we know, like I've got to turn sideways when I get to this thing because I know how big I am and I know how wide I am, And like, you can't overstate the massive importance this had evolutionarily speaking, I think, because that relates to everything from along with pps pair of personal space, everything from like can I reach from this limb out to get that piece of fruit without

falling and killing myself too? Can I use this club and we'll get into some really interesting stuff about extensions of your own space. Can I use this club to hit that guy before he gets to me? All of this stuff matter, Like even fruit flies have a version of body schema, which is can I make it from here to there? Essentially with my little fruit fly body? Can I get through that gap? Is it too small? Um? As that. Yeah, that reveals that body schema is a

really really ancient um mechanism. It's a really ancient system among life, right that if you stop and think about it, anything that moves through the world probably has some form of body schema because otherwise they'd be running into stuff, they would be um, they wouldn't be able to feed themselves, they would miss the prey that they were running after. UM. It would like it's really basically impossible to overstate how constantly we use these this this um process, and how

constant it's updated. And the most remarkable thing about it is we do all this without even giving it a thought. It just happens. And it's not just body schema we're talking about. And this is where we kind of get into um what I was talking about earlier that we're still not quite sure is is body scheme up part

of it? Are we talking about body schema? We're just accidentally using a different a different term, Like that's where the field is right now, But like neurology has definitely taken up a pair of personal space and is investigating it with full gusto. So it probably won't be too terribly long before we understand it much more and have like a much more precise definition that all of the

scientific community agrees on. Yeah, and you know that's basically where we're studying here and talking about today is neurology. Because it's very easy to say, well, of course, you know, you can't squeeze through a certain area if it's too small for your body. But it's not instinct. It is neurons firing on an unconscious level that is telling you to do or to not attempt this thing. Basically, it's

very cool. Yeah, and again it's it's a It's how we do just about everything with our bodies, like from dancing, um, playing sports, um, making a crewdriver, making love, um, what some people called doing it. Um. How if somebody shoots an arrow at your face and you catch the arrow right before it hits your face without even thinking about it. It's how we catch flies out of the air with chopsticks. Anything that we do physically moving has to do with this.

And again it has to do with how incredibly advanced our brains are. That's what we're finding out. That's what this this whole thing reveals, is this thing that we've just taken for granted, we finally reached the point in our like understanding of the universe and us and how things work, um, sorry, how stuff works, um, that we're now investigating things that we've just totally taken for granted.

And what we're finding is like, oh my god, our brains are so ridiculously powerful that it's this is just fun to even talk about. And that's why we're talking about it today. A couple of the first neurologists to sort of start poking around this, uh pair of personal space was in nineteen eleven, uh do name, Henry Head good name, as Libya points out, and Gordon Holmes put out a paper um that talked about body schema, and they were looking at it in terms of like people

that had brain damage. They noticed that certain kinds of brain damage would render odd ways that they might position a limb, or that they might have a sensation and a limb or something like that. So that's how they kind of, uh started kind of launched the field of studying this body scheme of thing neurologically speaking. And they also and this is super cool, this is just one

of like a million cool things. They're the first ones that came up with this idea that if if something is attached to your body in a way that it's moving with your body, then your brain accepts that neurologically and factors that in. So if you're wearing a tin gallon hat, uh, You're you're gonna duck a little more readily because you know you're wearing that hat unless you know, unless you're just really dense and you just keep knocking

that hat off. But eventually you're not going to be a cartoon character and you're going to realize this large hat or this whatever I'm wearing. Like and I remember, I think I've talked about it before and college. One of the greatest h Halloween costumes ever saw in downtown

Athens was Uh. I kind of knew him. His name was Blake, but he was Surface Area man one year and he just had these huge foam disks that he made a suit out of around his arms and legs in his body that he took up like, you know, maybe fifteen square feet and he would just walk around Athens bumping into things saying, I'm surface area man. But it's it sort of ties in with this and that. Uh. He went against the idea like neurologically speaking, he would have known he can't go into the bar and not

knock people over. And I'm sure he did know this, it was part of the gag. But uh, if it's attached to you and moves with you, your brain factors at in. Yeah, Like if you stop and think about that for a second, your body schema, if you put a hat on your body schema enlarges and changes shape to include that hat. Now, that's astounding. That's an amazing

thing that we just again don't even think about. So Head and Homes were the ones who were really first kind of bringing this up, like, hey, guys, we're taking

some stuff for granted, we need to investigate this. And it was followed up in UM by W. R. Brain, another neurologists UM, and he said, hey, you know what we kind of think of space around us is like, um, you know this, the door is just three ft in front of me, or the ceiling is a six ft ceiling, And we think of it in Cartesian terms like things can be mapped out as if on a graph. And he said that's not actually how our brain encoades things.

It encoades things much more simply basically what's in grasping distance and what's in walking distance. And he kind of prefigured all the way back in one this idea of pair of personal space grasping distance, and then other types of space. And it seems to be the case that that is kind of how our brain divides things. And it's not binary like that. It's not like a straight line like either it's in walking distance or it's in

grasping distance. There's gradients of it. But he he was pretty smart for having come up with this kind of seeing things differently. Yeah, and there were there were a couple of philosophers. Uh, I'm sure many people have put this forward, but uh common Kline and Frederick they Vanimon uh kind of throw out that, Hey, I think this evolved originally out of self defense, and that makes a

lot of sense. I think even though we're so far removed from took took In and our ancestors like that, Uh, I think many people still in a place where they maybe even not feel threatened, maybe even when they're sitting in their own living room. No, like all right, the fire pokers, you know, within grasping distance, just in case some and bust in that door. Yeah, Like I remember being a kid and like and I wasn't a paranoid worried kid at all, but I used to go into

places and all, right, where's where's the defense weapon? Like in this room? What would I grab if some maybe I was a paranoid where he could Now, Yeah, I was gonna say I walk into the room and be like, where's the cookies? I would think I could throw the cookie jar at someone's head? But I think that's the evolutionary sort of remnant still sticking around, which is like, what can I grasp to defend myself? And your brain

is sort of wired that way. Uh, not only with us, but you know animals they found out kind of do the same thing, right, Yeah, and like that we that we would have taken this initial thing that's self defense. So there's a bubble of of like protection around us that when something starts to come into it, we're like, okay, alarms are going off. And that over time our brain was like, we can do a lot more with this.

Let's figure out unique and novel ways, and that that eventually evolved into being able to grasp the hot poker. And they point out the two philosophers you mentioned that um it's not an adaptation. That's called an exaptation. And we talked about it in a Human Intelligence episode UM, where the ability to remember where you set your baby down on that rock eventually evolved into wayfinding, like our ability to create mental maps and find our way around

or find our way back from something. But yeah, you said something about the animals, and there was a Swiss zoo director. I'm just gonna take his name. Okay, I'm usually pretty generous, but I want to take this one. Okay, heine Headagar. It's pretty straightforward. It's a great name. Heinie Hedagar, Swiss Zoo director UM started studying animals because he wanted to figure out at what like, how can you put animals into the same enclosure but they're from different species

without scaring one another to death? And so he started studying how close you could get the animals and came up with this whole um kind of con tribution to the eventual pair of personal understanding of space. That's right. So what happened was Heinie Hettegar. You gotta say both names. It's really hard not to, uh said. I want to

figure out a few different things. I want to figure out um, how far like a predator species can be from a prey before uh, we'll call it the flight distance before one of the prey runs away or maybe fights back. We'll call that the defense distance or plays dead. That's critical distance. And found out that there was just a lot of consistency among different individuals within a species, which a was interesting, but also created the definition of what a tame animal is, which is kind of cool.

Which is a flight distance of zero when it comes to humans. So you can go up and pet, pet that thing, basically give it a scritch again, and and heinie hettagar um. You can kind of take him and

set him to the side for a little bit. Because his findings really kind of come to pass in proxemics, which is the personal spaces most people understand it um, which eventually, you know, we'll talk about overlaps with pair of personal space, but but pair of personal spaces we understand it today was termed I think around and there's gonna be a lot of Chuck's Italian imitations because the Italians, really they did a lot of studying of para personal space.

I don't know, I don't know, but they just they just are into that kind of thing. But from the seventies to the nineties there was a lot of sad monkey experiments. Um so said, I'm like, when are we going to stop doing that? We have to figure out a different way because it's just so ghastly if you stop and think about what they're doing through these poor monkeys. Um. But essentially what they figured out is, yeah, w R

brain was right. Our brains basically say that's near, that's far, And yes, there's you know, variations on the theme, but essentially that's how we see the world. And the stuff that's near is the really hot action stuff because that's the stuff we can interact with. Right. But also there was an Italian UH neuro physiologist name do you say

Giacomo or Jacomo? Oh? I don't know, I'm gonna say Giacomo, Okay, Giacomo riz A Latti um basically found out that as far as the neurons of this macaque monkey goes, and as sensibly humans obviously that's why they're studying these monkeys to begin with, uh, their neurons would fire if the monkey was touched, like literally touched on the skin, or the same thing would happen if a flash of light

went off near its body. So it you know, we're talking about pair of personal space versus extra personal space. That was one of the two types that we didn't mention extra personalist out of your reach grasp, right, yes, So basically found out that certain neurons react to that extra personal space exclusively visually. But when it came to these pair of personal neurons, they were responding to both

tactile or visual stimulus in the same way. Right, So as long as something was happening in this in this pair of personal space, that neuron could be stimulated by different kinds of input. Right. That's right, That's that's kinda that's gonna become big in a second. Um. There's another researcher named Michael Graziano, Chuck Graziana. Actually he's Americans, all bet, it's just Michael Graziano. UM. And he studied macaques too with electrical currents, and this one, this is the one

that gets me. He implanted electrodes into these neurons that m Risolotti had discovered, UM, and said, what happens if I like stimulate this, And when he stimulated the neurons that were activated within the peri personal space, the monkeys would like flinch, they would like throw their hands up

defensively in front of their faces. Um, they would they would respond like there was a predator that was about to attack them, like it had just invaded their pair of personal space, or as Henny Heideger would say, their um defense distance, right, yeah, which I mean that leads to the you know, that really backs up the whole original defense mechanism thing right exactly. Um that that that's

probably what it evolved from. And then when he did the opposite, if he if he prevented those neurons for firing, he could get as close as you wanted and the monkey wouldn't flinch, essentially all right. And then nineties seven rise a lotty. I believe this is where the first sort of big book around this came out. He and his colleagues put out a book called The Space Around Us, where they basically gathered up, you know, a couple of decades worth of research and said here's what we've got

so far. Right. One of the big things that they said in that was that, hey, what we thought before is that there's all this different sensories information coming in tactile information audio, visual, all that stuff, and the brain is kind of bringing it all together and analyzing it and then telling the motor nerves what to do to respond. That's not right. It turns out that there are neurons that can be stimulated by by visual input, by tactile input,

by audio input, the same neuron it will respond. The point isn't what kind of stimulus it is, it's where it's happening. So like, if something's happening in the pair of personal space, a neuron that's responsible for the pair of personal space around your right elbow, if you see something around your right elbow coming at it, like an arrow, or if an arrow is actually touching now your elbow, that same neuron is going to fire in just the same way. Um. That that was a big thing. It's

not stimulus specific, it's location specific. And so that kind of changed our entire understanding of how the brain kind

of processes all this stuff. It's it's um Rather than redundancy having all these different regions taking in stuff and then I put it together, it's you know, specific neurons are are dedicated to specific regions no matter how that that sensory input is coming in well, and even in the cool little Cherry on this Sunday was they also found out that it's not just where something is located, but their neurons start firing on, you know, if it's a bow and arrow or a rake, or a club

or a baseball bat or a coffee cup. Your your brains fires on like how you're going to physically engage with that thing because of its locate, you know, and and coordination with its physical location. So that comes up a little bit later at the end with the mirror neurons experiment. Uh, and maybe we'll just say that that will be a nice little teaser, Okay. Cool. Another thing that they figured out to um, I'm not sure what the year was, but Andreas Areno at the MySpace Lab

pretty great name. Um. She found out that the size of your PPS varies depending on what part of the body is being studied. So, um, it's different sizes around that your torso or your face or your hands. And what I found just monumentally astounding, Chuck, is that the

size of your PPS altars size and shape. I believe as you bring one PPS area into another PPS area, so like your face comes up or your hand comes to touch your face, and they think that this is to prevent your hand from getting captured by your PPS, your faces pair of personal space, and then who knows what sort of crazy cognitive sensation that would create. So you actually there's a mechanism to prevent that from happening, to prevent your hands PPS from merging accidentally with your

faces PPS. Right. But one thing that they kind of got wrong that they realized later on, and I think, Uh, this paper came out just a few years ago. In was that Uh, And I believe let's shout out who it was researchers Rory Uh, Buffacci, Man, what is going on here? I love it? Rory doesn't doesn't make you do?

You're not expecting Buffon, Rory J. Buffacci and gian Domenico Ionetti. Um. They put forth the argument that it's like, it's not like a switch though it's a it's a sort of like a a gradient range basically based on the distance something is from you. So it's not like is it within my grasping distance or is it not? Neurons can fire if it like it might be like if they move something a little bit closer, the way your neurons

fire change. Yeah, They've also found that it depends on if the thing is moving or if it's stationary, and if it's moving, isn't moving towards you as am moving away? Like there are a lot of nuance to it, rather than it's either in my extra personal space or it's in my pair of personal space, which was kind of like the the general model for years or finding like, no, it's it's much more nuanced than that. Um So, Chuck, I we just realized off camera, off Mike, we have

not we haven't taken a break yet. Now. See this is so fascinating. It's like we're having a good old fashioned conversation. Okay, well, let's let's take that break now then and come back. Okay, yeah, like people do in good old fashioned conversations. All right, so we're back. Uh. I know everyone else takes add breaks when they have great conversations with people. So that's what we did. Sure, Uh where are we now? We are? We had tools? Can we talk about tools? Yeah? This is where it

really starts to get mind blowing. Yeah, this is super cool because not only does your pair of personal space change automatically if you wear a tin gallon hat, but your pair of personal space will change according to what kind of tool you're using. Yeah, and this is sort

of what I was talking about with Took. Took all of a sudden has a as a four ft club in his hand, and he now knows that that uh, that animal he wants to kill or that person coming at him, that the neurons are firing basically as if his arm is three and a half feet longer. Yes,

it includes that. And this I think is just like if you just think about the development of weapons over the years, you and weapons, I think, well, I mean some of this stuff was actually in our book on the chapter on the first gun, but it really I don't know, it never occurred to me that all weapons development since the beginning of time has just been to get further and further away from your enemy. Oh yeah,

that's a good point. Like you have a club that you can hit some with or a sword, and then you're backing up a little bit more and your pair of personal space is automatically reading this in. But I'm curious about like when you start shooting arrows and then guns and then eventually long range missiles, like neurologically speaking, what that does you know? Right? Um? But also with tools, not just weapons, but any like the fact that you can use a screwdriver, um or hit a baseball with

a bat. It's not about sometimes I'm like co on, let's chill out, Chuck, let's get a more Richard scary than actually scary. Um. So. Uh. The fact that you can use a screwdriver is not because your hand is pres cisely guiding that screwdriver. It seems to be because the pair of personal space of your hand is now being extended to the tip of that screwdriver. So it's almost like if you could turn screws with your finger.

You're doing something very similar as far as your neurons are concerned, because they've now adopted the screwdriver as part of your hand and extended your pair of personal space around it. So your body schema has now adjusted and you look like you have an extra finger that's really thin and really long. Uh. There's a really cool study

again in Italy. Uh in two thousand, uh Anna Berti and Francisa Fressinetti looked at a woman who had a stroke on the right hemisphere of her brain and they did these experiments to you know, these near and far space experiments to see how her neurons fired when like reaching for something with a hand or reaching for something not really reaching, but using a laser pointer to you know,

extend your extra personal space really far out there. Uh. And I believe when she was asked to find the midpoint of a line within her pair of personal space, like with her finger, maybe she put the mark really far to the right because the right hemisphere of her brain had been damaged through the stroke. She was asked to do the same thing with this laser and she

did a really much better job. And then they gave her a stick, And I believe that she used the stick and did uh, worse than the laser, right, but better than her finger. Yeah, because her brain didn't adopt the laser dot as part of her body schema, but it did adopt the stick, so constantly remapping basically. Yeah. But it also showed that the brain treats these two places very much differently that they're they're they're not the

same as far as the brain is concerned. And it also showed that when you use a stick over a laser point in your brain is treating that stick like a tool. It was just really good early evidence that, Yeah, we definitely change our body scheme and to adopt tools

when we use them. Yeah, and it sort of made me think about along with this next study, this was UM not in Italy actually, this is in Japan around two thousand, where they took monkeys again and they gave them rakes, uh to see if they would treat a rake like an extension of their body neurologically speaking, and they did. They could get food that was you know, further away just using that rake, but they also were

able to use a video monitor. These monkeys would to see an area where there would be food that they couldn't see without looking at the video monitor, and they looked at this monitor basically to see where this food was hidden. And they still use this rake as an extension. Like it made me think of sort of like a surgeon using robotics basically the same thing must be happening in their brain when they're looking at a video screen and operating an extension of their you know, scalpel. Yeah.

I think more more recent tests UM using virtual reality headsets have found like that. Yeah, you like, that's exactly what's going on your You can adopt something on a video screen your brain can and be like this is what this is part of my body schema for the moment. And what I thought was even more interesting, or at least as interesting, is that the same researchers found that, um, when the monkeys were just holding the rake, their their pair of personal space just shrunk back down to normal.

But when they were yes and if they were using as a tool, then the pair of personal space extended around it. So it has to do with like what I can't remember. One of the researchers was saying, like, we interact with the world and objects, and we retreat objects based on what we can or can't or plan to do with those things when we interact with them in pair of personal space. And all of that, by the way, was in Japanese researchers at Sushi Riki's lab

with an Italian flare. It's got to be for this episode. The same thing happens. Like when you're in a car, if you're driving a small car as opposed to driving like a big box truck, your your neurons are gonna fire differently because you know, you know, you're constantly trying to figure out if you can squeeze in through a space with a larger vehicle. Dude, the very fact that we can drive a car is because of a pair

of personal space. Can you imagine like we could conceivably still drive, um it just knowing like if I turned the wheel this way or turn them um, But it would be the most harrowing experience. No one would drive. It would be so scary to drive because we we the reason why it's not as scary as we have. We've extended our pair of personal space to our car. Now. It's nuts what our brains are willing to do when

we throw technology at them. Well, and you know I've mentioned before when I drove in Australia opposite z steering wheel, opposite side of the road, I had to really concentrate, very very hard because you were so wired to just being in a car and driving and making turns in a certain way. Uh. It really shook shook me up. And I think stimulated. Uh I say stimulated me And it sounds dirty all of a sudden, I'm driving around Australia in a in an excited state, but that was

but it stimulated my brain. I just felt more. I felt so alive. Yeah with you, Yeah, because you zone out so easily when you drive. Sometimes when you're just taking off for granted driven that yeah, it is dangerous. Um. There was one other thing I saw that I thought

was just astounding about this. Um. It seems that your pair of personal space can basically merge with another person's under certain conditions to where you're doing, um, synchronized motions and movements that require coming into contact with one another, like synchronoz swimming. Let's say no, no, because you're not actually touching. This would be more like a bucket brigade, or if you're doing a baton run and you're handing off a baton at that moment when the baton is

being passed, that it's being manipulated. It's a part of two different people's pair of personal space at the same time, so you are connected to that person via a pair of personal space through the baton. Are you do people touch in senor nice swimming? I don't think I think you get disqualified for that. It's frowned on. Oh no, I thought you're saying they did touch. No, no, I'm saying not not synchronized swimming because they don't touch. Okay,

Oh man, I'm just confused now. Do they touch or not. They do not talk. They just swim around near each other in the same pattern. Right. Although I have a great story, Um, it's not synchronized swimming. But I was on a swimming team when I was a younger kid, and I was terrible, terrible. I now realized that the coaches put me in just for fun, just just to

get their their kicks watching me swim terribly. And um, one of the reasons why I know that is because they put me in a backstroke and I was the worst backstroke swimmer ever. Um, because I would cross at least one lane if not to and bump into another swimmer and we'd both be so surprised we'd stop and stand up, and I would accidentally disqualify both of us because if you stand up in the pool, if your feet touch the bottom, you're disqualified. So that was in

that case. It wasn't synchronized swimming, but we were touching. Young Josh being like, why would anyone swim backwards so dumb you can't see anything. Just let me do the breaststroke.

I can do that. Or you developed the first backstroke rear view mirror that just like sits on your chest Uh, so maybe we should talk a little bit about some of the other cool findings, like uh they have found that, um, it's not just tools, but like anxiety and your mood can change your pair of personal space whether or not you're interacting with someone from a different culture can uh.

They have found that, you know, if if you're interacting with someone from a different culture, generally, UM you might not feel as comfortable with them being close to you as you would someone from your own culture, which explains a lot. It definitely does. UM. They also found that spinal injuries can reduce the size of the um pps if the person is lost the ability to control their limb um and they you can actually simulate this if

you have ten hours to kill UM. You can just keep your leg immobilized for ten hours and it will temporarily shrink your personal space around your leg because your brain is basically like, oh, I guess that legs not in use any longer. Yeah, well, if you're pregnant, you're gonna grow that PPS because all of a sudden you have a a basketball under your shirt. So it's you know, people think that was obviously probably in a luctionary um

protection measure to protect that baby in the belly. People take a wider berth around people they deem important or high status or celebrity or famous or whatever. Uh. And it's not them saying, hey, I need space. It's it's you regarding their status and instinctively not going as close to them. No, that's true, but you're increasing your space. Um, because you're I guess, kind of anxious around them. Yeah, it's very interesting. Um, one that I saw that explains

a lot. I hadn't really thought about it. Um, it's claustrophobia. People who have claustrophobia have bigger pair of personal spaces. So it's like, if you're stuffed into a like a I don't know, drainage culvert or something that's narrower than your pair of personal spaces by a lot, you could have claustrophobia. I think that's fascinating. Or I'll give you a different example. If you're kidnapped and put into a coffin and buried alive, you may feel claustrophobic because your

pair of personal spaces being violated. We uh got pivoted away from Florida because of the hurricane for fall break, and so we went to last minute trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. And this sort of stuff is all in play if you're doing Rock City and Ruby Falls, because in Ruby Falls you're either ducking or avoiding things, or in Rock City there are quite a few places where you're squeezing through tight areas, uh and also ducking. So I wish i'd I mean, it's not like I was running into

things because I have my neurons are working fine. But um, if you have claustrophobia, imagine you have a hard time with places like that, or any sort of neurological condition that affects your PPS, than those places are not gonna be great for you. Yeah, we had a good talk, man. Yeah, I was gonna say there aren't that many roadside attractions from the thirties that still hold up to day, but those two definitely do. Both very cool. Um, Chuck, I say that we take a break and come back and

talk about personal space as most people understand it. How about that let's do it so like I was saying personal spaces as most people think of it, as like, Um, you're making me a little nervous, you're a little close talking to me or whatever. Who wasn't judge Reinhold the close talker and signfld um. That's called prox semics, and that got its name from an anthropologist, actually, a guy

named Edward Hall back in ninety six. And I don't know if he adapted Heinie heddagers um distances that he came up with for animals or if it was just like he made the same observations and came up with different labels, but he basically replicated headagers thing for the swing in sixties instead. Yeah, and you know, when it comes to proximics in personal space, obviously all of this

depends on who it is. Like they don't do studies on like if your if your boyfriend or girlfriend walks into the room, like you know, all those rules are kind of thrown out the window. They're talking about like,

you know, strangers who don't know each other generally. And the way they might research this is having a participant like stand there and have a um, you know, control walk into the room and say, hey, you just tell me when to stop, like right when you start feeling uncomfortable to how close I am, tell me when to stop, shout stop stop, Which this is gonna very wildly among people, I think, uh in general, but I think they did

find some commonalities among cultures when it comes to comfort distances. Uh, they're they're like I said, some people are gonna have their own uh uh like really good reasons, personal hang ups. Uh, some people have neurological conditions that are gonna kind of factor in. But if you're just generally talking about a person and a culture, they have found that. Weirdly, I was surprised that Americans are about average with um, what

do they call it, like average physical proximity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, We're we're a little more than average ly comfortable with that kind of that. Just it feels like Americans are more prone than other cultures to be like, hey, like do you mind backing off a little bit? Yeah, But

it makes sense. And there was a guy um who suggested I think it actually might have been Edward Hall who suggested that, um, different cities in different countries are laid out differently based on the personal space that that culture has, And it would make sense. In America, we're all about wide open spaces and don't fence me in and all that stuff. So I could totally see that being you know, American compared to like a European city

where buildings are just built on top of buildings. There's little narrow alleyways that lead to charming bookshops and stuff like that. I I could see that totally based on personal space, that that culture values without anyone having any

idea that's what's doing. Yeah, And I had to you know, I value my personal space and I had when I lived in l A. I had to reckon with um realizing that like, hey, in a town like Los Angeles, a melting pot like that, people are coming from all over the world and you're gonna be shopping, uh in close proximity to them and rubbing elbows and there lived

experienced wherever they came from. It's different than your bub and so like you can't you know, if if someone grew up in India and uh, like I'm trying to picture like a really crowded bazare or something where people are like packed in and trying to order things like, that's a whole different experience than growing up in the

Southeast in a in a big, huge grocery store. And so if someone creeps up on you a little bit, you gotta keep that in mind as an American, and I can see you laying there thinking that with your elbows out to the side, your hands behind your head, and then your brain says, Okay, now get up and go squeeze some orange shoes because it's gonna be a beautiful day. I did have a little bit of I try to be understanding, but I got a little salty a couple of times in chatt a new personal space

really well. But the little statue elves my personal philosophy is is if I can't like reach behind myself and get like my wallet out of my pocket without elbowing someone, sure, that's way too close. Then you're too close. Especially in these days, that person is used an r F I D skimmer on you if they're that close to your wallet. Also had a kid behind me that was doing that, like let's let's kick the guy's feet when he walks and laugh about it with his brother, and I was like,

all right, they were kicking your feet. Yeah, yeah, one of the kids was kicking his feet and I heard him laughing to his brother and I was like, all right, just stay cool, chuck. This is a kid. Your kid annoys people too. And then the mom I didn't even

have to like give a dirty look. The mom was on it and was like, you need to back off of that guy, and I was like, oh, it's fine, but yeah, right, Oh, I hadn't even noticed anyway, A long way of saying that people come from different cultures where they have different levels of comfort with what Edward Hall called um intimate distance, which is hugging which is great, or whispering in someone's ear, which is the worst possible thing, putting your tongue in someone's here, Uh, that could be nice.

Um personal distance, which is comfortable with close friends but not acquaintances. Social distance, which is like the water cooler chat six ft, yes, six ft, or what they call public distance, what he called public distance, and that's I guess when you're like on a stage projecting and guesturing

largely and stuff like that. Yes, And it really does remarkably resemble Heinie Hettagar's um separation of zones for for animals species and that makes sense because we're still animals too, And so it seems like what the differences between personal space and para personal space and physically they overlap a lot, is that And this is just me editorializing, but I think personal space is that original defensive zone that evolved that animals have that Heinie Hettagar turned up, um, that

we still have again because we're animals, and that para personal space is that acceptation that came out of that personal space defensive zone and and that allows us to interact with the environment and all sorts of new and amazing and interesting ways. Yeah. I like that. Physically they occupy the same space, but mentally, um, neurologically they're they're distinct. Yeah. Super fascinating. Uh, I guess we can finish up on

the return of mirror neurons. Yeah, totally very excited. I feel like we used to talk about mirror neurons a lot, but we had I believe, a complete episode on them, right, and then talked about them a lot. But it's sort of the idea and this is a reductive way of looking at it, But like seeing a football player break their leg on the TV screen might send a weird pain sensation through your own leg or but it's the opposite side, and that what they figured out. I don't know,

I'm not sure, but who was it? Willis mcgahey, Uh, the Miami Hurricane guy who's knee all the way backwards. So I don't know. I was thinking thisman, there's been so many bad sort of incidences over the year, But this is the idea that you're these are mirror neurons and they're picking up what has happened to someone else and like literally physically affecting you in your body. Yeah.

And one of the reasons that this would relate to pair of personal spaces, they think that mirror neurons help us basically create a mental construct of what we're going to do with our body with our hands by watching

someone else doing it. And they say, well, this is obviously how like stone toolmaking was passed down from generation to generation because we had the ability to watch someone else do something and then do it ourselves because of this body schema and um mirror neurons, which are probably very much inter related to the point where mirror neurons and the pair of personal space or body schema neurons are one and the same in some cases. Yeah. And

they did a study again with the monkeys. Uh, and this had to do with kind of what I mentioned at the beginning about whether or not you're going to interact with something, where they watched monkeys watching a human grab an object. So the monkeys just watching a person like, let's they grab an apple, and about a quarter of the mirror neurons and these monkeys fired more rapidly if the person grabbing the apple was just simply closer to

the monkey. So, in other words, all of a sudden, the monkey says, all right, I might have be interacting with this thing. So different neurons are lighting up. And when they put up a barrier, and it was a clear barrier, this is what confused me a little bit. They put up a clear barrier between the person and the monkey, and it actually did reduce those neurons lighting up just because there was a barrier there. But it was was the monkey, I guess aware of the barrier.

It had to be yeah, okay, yeah, but it could still see what they was doing. But it had shut down the possibility to the monkey's brain that it would be interacting with the apple. So a different, a different experience happened in the monkey's brain because it wasn't trying to interact with it wasn't going to interact with the apple. Super cool, very cool, me too, man, pair of personal space. I'm glad we did one on it. Um, you got anything else right now? No, just if you see me out,

give me a little room. Yeah, for sure. Don't kick Chuck's feet. It's weird though, because I do like a good hug, but like someone whispering to me, and I think I have like childhood triggers for that for certain reasons I won't get into. But like anybody whispering and my daughter whispering in my ear, I just can't handle. I cannot handle a whisper in my ear. I'm not sure I knew that. Man. Well, I don't mind your whisper. You're kind of the only one. Okay, how's gonna say?

I feel like the sweet Nothings really do it for me. Yeah, that Harvey's bombing episode was so good. Job. See, I don't mind hearing a whisper. It's got to be in my ear. Yeah, I understand that. I mean probably because it's not just um audio, it's tactile to the air pushing on your ear drum. Because I don't think we mentioned the final fourth type of space. Uh what was it called? That? Just something close to your skin paracutaneous paracutaneous space, Yes, where that sets off a whole different

set of neurons. They think too. That's kind of like the new leading edge of this um and that reminds me, Chuck, I cannot find this essay to save my life. But it was by a philosopher, and he was basically saying, like, where do you and and the rest of the world begin, And obviously most people say your skin, but then he

pointed out that there's molecular exchange. There's gas exchange through your skin, so at a point where like a air molecules moving into your body through your skin, Like, is there really any true barrier between you and the outside world. It just jogged my memory when when they were talking about paracutaneous space, and I was like, I wish I could find the essay. It was one of the cooler things I've ever read, or that cool uh thing you can do, like when you close your eyes and you

can feel when someone's hand gets close to your face. Yeah, you know, yeah, because they said it's not it's not you don't have to be touching. It can be up to like five centimeters away, and that paracutaneous space is still going to give your your brain information. It's our energy, bro it is man, Chakra, do you got anything else? I got nothing else. I wish we could just talk about this stuff all day. It's good stuff, I agree, and I think everybody listening agrees. And since Chuck said

good stuff, that means it's time for a listener. Man. But if you're like, you know, after we record, we can just keep chatting about it, that's okay. I'm not doing anything else. I gotta ticket nap you all right. I'm gonna call this license plate funny boy. You never know with this show what people are gonna respond to. Yeah, I know that one got so much license plates just people loved it. It was really we got a lot of email about it. I think the ubiquity of some

of these lend itself to that. But here we go. I love the episode of license Plate Guys, despite what Josh predicted at the beginning, because I think you said it was gonna be boring or something. How wrong I did. Sorry. I was surprised that you hadn't come across the lists of rejected vanity plates that you can find for different states. I'm seventeen, and when I got my license about a year ago, these state kept lists of vanity license plates.

Were almost legend in our driver's head. I don't know if Georgia keeps track, but Utah Shirt does. It's still very fun to delight in your inner six year old when you're reading these. My personal favorites are lilt toot poops with a Z and I can't believe this one. I know, I guess these are rejected huh uh I'm farting. Someone actually wanted a license weight that said I'm farting. I like that. I would love to see that in real life. I would too, highly recommend you try and

find the list for Georgia guys. The ones that aren't like super racists are pretty fun to read through. Much love from Elijah uh he him from Probo Utah awesome, Elijah, that's really cool. Thank you for that. We totally didn't run across this, so thanks for bringing it to our attention. Um. And speaking of Utah Chuck, it just reminded me. Have you seen Friend of the Family on Peacock No, I don't know anything about it. Uh. It is off the rails.

It's set in the seventies, true story, weirdo true crime in a way, but also just beyond nuts um and has the extra bonus of my niece Mila being in it. She's one of the daughters. Fantastic check it out. Though it's really it's really good with thro without Mila, but it's even better because Mela's in it, of course. And you know, while we're shouting now Peacock, I don't know if we ever shouted out our good friend Andy Sierra's show,

The Resort. Oh no, we don't know. Yeah, it's our old friend Andy Sierra, who uh we got to know through the band. He was in the Henry Clay People. He and his brother Joey long story short, they wrote the theme song to our TV show and we're also story editors as screenwriters for our show. Uh. Andy's the one that did the Hulu movie with Andy Sandberg called Palm Springs, and uh he has his very own TV show that is fully on Peacock now. It's called The Resort.

It is really good. Joey was a writer on it as well, and it's just a very cool, fun show. I highly recommended Emily and I loved it. Well. Congratulations Andy, that's enormous good stuff. Yeah, we're gonna check that out. Thanks for telling everybody about it too. Chuck Well, thanks for Elijah for that email. And if you want to be like Elijah and send an email at Jogs our Memory to talk about unrelated TV shows. We love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to

Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H