Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Ben's here too, and that makes this a good old rousing edition of Stuff you Should Know. Philosophy Now edition.
Yeah, I mean, I apologize to Josh off here. I might as well say it now. I may be a little rough in this one because my brain breaks a little bit when we have these philosophy subjects. And even though I made an A and the only philosophy class I took in college, which I've said before, huh, it's only because I was so frustrated by it. I worked really really hard to try and understand it and ended up getting an A. But it breaks my brain a lot of times.
Oh now, okay, boy, you didn't end that sentence under normal circumstance. No, but good for you. Power for powering through that that uh, that class and not just being like, well, I guess I'll take a zero in this one again.
Or drop it in that first week. I did a lot of that.
I did that once in astronomy. I was like, wait, why are you using like the Greek symbol for epsilon and sigma in this like I thought we were going to talk about Mars and stuff and no, right, I got rid of that really quick.
Yeah, good, good job.
All right, So I kind of I think have a bit of a grasp on the the philosophy of it. What I had trouble with with some of the studies, like the actual research on it. So we'll just muddle through. It will be fun. Sometimes those are our most enjoyable episodes. Sometimes there are worst. Let's find out which way this one goes.
Yeah, what we're talking talking about is something we've talked about on the show before. I wish I could remember which episode, but we've definitely talked about the call of the void what what the French call lapel do or high place phenomenon, And that is the idea that and it's not just the desire to maybe hurl your yourself off the top of a building if you're standing, or a bridge, if you're standing atop of high structure. Yeah,
that's the one we're going to concentrate on. But it can also mean and I know this is what we talked about before, because I talked about like grabbing the cops gun or driving into oncoming traffic, right that very amazing scene from Christopher Walking and Annie Hall where he's talking about, you know, swerving into oncoming traffic is so good, and they smash cut, you know, to him driving Woody and Annie home. It's just one of the great movie jokes.
But you know, that's the idea, is this weird urge? I know it was an episode of Louis as well, and I'm trying to think if I could think of any more canceled filmmakers.
Right exactly. He did a short on it once.
You know, it was in both of those things, And yeah, it's this weird desire to be like standing at top of a tall structure and be like, I could just jump right now and see what's out there.
Yeah, so that's a I think that's the most common phenomenon of the call of the void, just it occurring to you that you could do this. It can get worse, though, too, because some people not only experience that notion occurring to them, they've experienced something akin to an urge, so much so that sometimes people will like push themselves away from the edge that they might like go back into whatever stairwell they just came out of because they don't want to
accidentally or inadvertently. They don't trust themselves not to follow that urge. That's when it gets really scary. And if you think about it, we humans have a real tendency towards self preservation, like we fight to live, sometimes to degrees that surprise ourselves afterward, you know. So that makes
the call of the void completely nonsensical. It makes zero sense whatsoever that you would have an urge to just end it all for no reason, just because it's there, just because there's a huge void there, jumping into it because it occurred to you. So the fact that this is a fairly common phenomenon, it bears investigating. And so psychologists have gotten into it. Philosophers have gotten into it, like you said, Woody Allen's gotten into it. It's a
thing for sure. And I love the fact that it's a mystery because no one's actually successfully explained it, and I don't know if we ever will. And for my money, I don't really want to what understand it. Yes, because I throw I cast my lot with the philosophers. I think kerker Garden start nailed it, but it's still I mean, you don't prove things with philosophy it's just like, what about.
This, Yeah, yeah, I mean we'll get to statistics and how they align with you know, legitimate suicidal ideation later, probably in the last part, but just among the two of us. I know, I know I said this before with when we talked about it before, but I have felt the call of the void many many times. And for me, it's not I could just end it all, but it's more like, uh, it's hard to And maybe that's one of the frustrating things. It's really hard to
explain what's going through my head. It's it's sort of like no one can stop me from doing this, and I could, I could know what that feels like to fall. Part of it is I had a very tragically had a friend fall off a building to his death, and oh yeah, so there there's a little bit of that, like I would want to know what Aaron felt like and like how scary that was as a as an empathetic thing. So there's a lot of things in my head.
None of that explains why I want to grab the cops because I was about to ask that I've never really felt the driving into the other lane thing, but I just I don't know, it's really fascinating to have these thoughts pop into your head when normally, you know, you're the kind of person that would never entertain anything like that.
Yeah, so you just said a mouthful. Essentially, the call of the void can be can come from it can come out of nowhere, which makes it an intrusive thought in a lot of situations. Other Times it can be triggered by the situation, like you're not going to think about driving into oncoming traffic while you're you know, in your chemistry class, Like it's while you're driving, right, So
there's some that are triggered by circumstances. And then you also said that you're like, you're basically you're horrified by the idea you're even having this thought. It's just totally out.
Of character for you.
So you put all that together, you have what essentially is the call of the void. And I say we go up to the tee and put the little baseball or whiffle ball on top of the tee and knock it out of the park. With the philosophers first, all.
Right, I will say this that the carecer guard stuff really spoke to me me too. We're talking about Danish philosopher Surin, I guess I don't know what the null sign means.
So it's like an umlaut okay, so Surin, basically, I guess.
He talked about this idea that the callovoid call of the void illustrates anxiety and in his case, and this is the part that really spoke to me. He argued that, and I think he's dead right. Actually, is that fear is when outside forces are scaring you something that could harm you from the outside. Anxiety is when that's turned inward and that's emerging from your The threat is coming from within their inside the house basically, and that house
is your brain. So the freedom to the freedom of choice in life to move about the world, just to choose what you do from moment to moment, you're constantly making choices without knowing necessarily what the right thing to do was. So when an anxiety can come from what he called the dizziness of freedom, of that freedom specifically.
Yeah, exactly, And just the basis of anxiety is having those choices, not knowing what's right, like you said, and that because our lives are filled from moment to moment with making a choice, not making a choice, which stills a choice, just as Gedty Lee that, of course it's going to create anxiety, which means anxiety is the human condition. It's almost the basis of the human condition, is what
he was saying. So he kind of used that, or used the call of the void to kind of demonstrate that, essentially saying that you when you're up there on a precipice, you're aware that you have the choice to just throw yourself over, and just realizing that that is a choice of that you can make right then, like you said,
no one's going to stop you having that freedom. Is it's too much we like to think that, you know, we don't have choices that we have metal, we have a self preservation drive, we have all this stuff that would prevent us from even ever considering that. And yet whenever we experience the call of the void, it is by definition experience experiencing that urge, like the realization that we can choose that. And that's what kure Kaguard kind of kicked the whole thing off with, I think in
the eighteen fifties. When you use that to illustrate anxiety in humans.
Can we have a quick side chat?
Yeah, what do they call them?
Not diversions tangents.
Yeah, yeah, one of our tangents about rush Okay, did you hear me very quickly say Neil Pert, No, I didn't, you said Getty Lee. Okay, Well Neil Pert wrote that. Oh so I just quickly pointed that out. But that's not what I was trying to point out. Okay, on that record, and I remember this specifically. My brother and I were listening to and looking over that LP which you do.
What is that spirit of radio?
Yeah, on the record is the lyric and if you choose not to decide, Well, first of all, if you're not a rushman. The lyric that they recorded was, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
I feel like you have to say it like Geddy Lee still out made a choice beautiful.
Uh So they recorded it like that. Neil Purt was their lyricist. But on the record, my brother and I notice it says if you choose not to decide, you cannot have made a choice.
Oh well, they got that wrong.
They it was like on the album and he my brother looked at me and laughed and like mimicked to Gedty Lee, like crossing it out with a pencil like, well, Neil Purt wasn't looking.
And that is just always stood out to me.
Did Neil part write most of their lyrics or was it.
Just yeah, he was their lyricists.
I didn't know that. Okay, wasn't that crazy, But yeah, he got that wrong big time.
Uh So back to it from Kuerker Guard, along those same lines you talked about, is it Start.
That's what I've always said, Yeah, he doesn't.
Jean Jean Paul SARTs another philosopher, he talked about that as the vertigo of possibility, basically the same idea as Carekerguard, of like a literal dizziness of possibilities, and he kind of leaned more into the you know, the freedom about questions of our human experience, and he went down a different road than Carekerguard ultimately did. But they both sort of referred to it as a literal dizziness.
Yeah, for sure, because a lot of people do experience something akin to vertigo when they're looking down from a high place, even if they're not afraid lights.
Right, Oh, I for sure do. Yeah, So it.
Does make sense that they would both use that. But Start was definitely doing a big yes a and to carecreguard, and I think he even calls out Careguard in the section of being a nothingness. Right, But his whole jam that he kind of took, the point that he took it to was not only are you realizing, like you have this freedom of choice, you also realize that your
future self has that same freedom of choice. And you, the one who's making this choice right now not to leap over this precipice for no good reason, has zero control over whether you in the future future you is going to make that same choice or not. And that is a reason to be terrified of being alive. Essentially, is what Sart said.
Right, Yeah, I mean not quite multiverse stuff, but it's sort of along the same lines, like almost future future multiverse maybe.
Yeah, But what he was saying also is a lot like kerky Guard, Like life is made up of choices moment to moment to moment, And his whole thing is like,
there's no solid self, there's no you that exists. You know, when you're born or even after you develop a little bit, to the time you die, you are constantly you have to constantly keep the self going by making essentially the same decisions over and over again, and if you don't have the same experience, say like terror when you're up on a precipice and decide not to jump, If the next time you're up there and you're not terrified, you feel like, what's it like to fly, you might make
the same decision, even though it's out of character with how you were before that. The self is that fluid essentially, is what he was saying.
Yeah, and he sort of related that to gambling or the gambler who you know, like an addictive gambler who quits gambling and you know, let's say years later they walk by a gambling table and instead of seeing the gambling table and immediately thinking like, God, that's the worst thing that ever happened to me, the reaction is, well, that was sort of a memory of a feeling that I had, and in order to get back that true feeling of I shouldn't do this, I can only do that by doing it again.
Sort of like a not quite like rose colored glasses.
But I think everyone's sort of had that same feeling about an X.
Before years later, where you're like.
Yeah, I was so bad about that, should I give them a call? When in fact it was a terrible situation and like to give them the call and try. I mean, John Cusack made a whole movie about it to go back to and revisit, like the ex girlfriends, And it's just constantly reminded, like the Gambler would be of, like, no, this was a bad idea twenty years ago, it's not a good idea now still.
Right, And the same thing holds you for like smoking or something like that, Like when you decided to quit smoking quick gambling, break up, Like you're in a certain experience right then that you don't necessarily feel or experience a year later, so you have to remind yourself like to make that same decision again. Your future self could make a different decision than you did right then and you have no control over it. I know.
Pretty awesome, Right, Should we break or should we talk about Gary Cox?
Let's finish with Gary Cox real quick, because I like this guy's jib.
The cint of his jib. He's a British philosopher. We can pronounce his name, so that's a plus. And he looks at more as an existentialist kind of thing, where we have these psychological defenses that we construct against thing, but they're basically just all an illusion. It's things that we make up to fool ourselves into thinking we have an instinct for self preservation.
Yeah, and he's saying that. What Kierka Garden Sart are both saying is essentially that we when we experience the call of the void, that what's called bad faith as far as existentialists are concerned. Anytime we delude ourselves, it's a bad faith illusion essentially, that all of those are just essentially us deluding ourselves, and it's laid bare by
the call of the void. Like, the only reason you're not jumping right now is not because you have this self preservation instinct, is not because you don't want to do that to your family or anything like that. It's because you are choosing right then not to jump. That's it. It's the only thing that's preventing you from jumping right then.
And that scares the but Jesus out of anybody who has a brain in their head when they experience the call the void, especially when it's accompanied by the urge to jump, not just the thought of jumping.
Yeah, so shall we break now.
Yes, look at that with the ball, go, we knocked it out of the park.
We'll come back and we'll talk about these intrusive thoughts that people are having right after this.
All right, Tuck, I feel like I should start with a confession. I've been talking a lot of macho talk about te balls and hitting it out of the park. I used to strike out at T ball pretty often, and they give you a lot more than just three strikes before they tell you to go sit down, like maybe seven eight, sometimes depending on the coach, and I would still strike out and it happened more than once.
Yeah, what was happening there?
What's happening there is? I was a terrible T ball player.
I didn't play T ball, so you know I didn't have that experience.
But you know what t ball is, right.
Yeah, you set a ball on a tee, it's not moving, not going anywhere, and you've got a baseball bat in your hand.
Yeah. I thought i'd feel better after admitting that, I feel much worse.
Actually, well, you've told me that before, so I was pre I felt bad for you back then.
It's funny.
Have I talked about it on the podcast or was in private?
No, I was on the show, but that's okay. It was years ago, Okay, Yeah, we've been doing this for sixteen years. That's gonna happen what.
We promised.
Talk about intrusive thoughts and intrusive thought is defined base as a thought that is not in character for you, that you're thinking it. It's pretty bothersome and it's a hard thing for you to control, and if you start really digging in and worrying about it and looking for meaning behind it, they can be very, very disruptive to someone's life.
Yeah, they're really a problem for people who have clinical obsessive compulsive disorder.
Yeah.
The reason why there's such a problem is, I mean, intrusive thoughts can affect anybody. You don't have to have OCD. The problem that a companies OCD is that people will try to find a way of coping with that intrusive thought. And the classic example is being a germa feeling like your hands are dirty, so you go wash your hands. By washing your hands, you're coping with the sensation that your hands are dirty, you have germs on your hands,
and you alleviate that by washing your hands. Well, if you have an intrusive thought and the idea that your hands are dirty is essentially constant, you're gonna spend a lot of your time washing your hands, and it's going to actually impact your life. That's a classic example of somebody suffering from OCD. But if you take away the you know, washing your hands to alleviate that stress from the intrusive thought, you have what happens to basically anybody,
this thought that kind of comes out of nowhere. It's often very, very troubling. There's a whole variety called morbid obsessions, which is, you know, I could pick up that axe and kill my whole family right now. And then you're like, wait a minute, why am I thinking that? And you feel horrible for that even crossing your mind because what loving you know, husband, wife, child, would ever think of something like that. And you start to go down that road and you're too afraid to even bring it up
to anybody. You'll want to be like, hey, I just thought of killing all of you guys with an axe. Let's talk that out. So the more you keep it to yourself and ruminate on it, the more terrifying it becomes. And that is essentially the cycle of intrusive thought that can only be broken by essentially saying that was an intrusive thought. I accept as an intrusive thought. I don't actually want to kill my family with an axe. And this kind of thing happens to everybody.
Yeah, and you know, Lyvia pointed out she did a great job with the school, by the way.
She knocked the cheek all out of the part she did.
Lyvia pointed out that this has led to a lot of bad stuff, especially with people with OCD in the past, with like the court system and like having children taken away or something. Because the old idea, as far as psychiatry is concerned or psycho analysis is concerned, was if you're having these ideations, it's really a manifestation of your
unconscious desire. So if you have a thought about, you know, drowning your children, and then all of a sudden, you're going down this rabbit hole of like, oh my god, how could I think that? And what is that all about?
Now?
And then you're just really drilling down into that because you're horrified by it. You have now an analyst saying, oh, well, that's really your unconscious desire, your honor or, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And so you get your children taken away, and now they're saying like that's not true at all, Like it's not an unconscious desire. It's someone who's horrified by these thoughts that are obsessing about them because they're horrified about it exactly.
And I think the very fact that you're horrified by it shows you just how far you are from actually committing that act. So, yeah, the idea that people used to get their children it happened at least twice. I could find two cases that happened fairly recently where mothers in both cases confided in either their psychiatrist or their obgyn, who both just turned around and called child protective Services
or the cops, you know. And just the idea that they had it so backwards and that this happens everybody, but they lost their kids because they sought help for it. That's just that's terrible. So I'm glad we figured out that that's not the case, and the fact that it can be treated pretty easily. You can even self treat if you learn the steps to identifying an intrusive thought. Saying it to yourself is just an intrusive thought. Like I said, you don't want to do this, and that
this happens to everybody. If it's really bad and you feel like you can't self treat, there are treatments you can go seek that are also very effective. One of
them is exposure and response prevention. And one of the examples I've seen is if you think about killing your family with a butcher knife, your therapist will come to your house and give you the butcher knife and sit you on the couch next to your family and basically be like, do you really want to kill your family, because now's your time to do it if you want. And I've seen that they actually will have say like a father look at their son and be like, please
don't kill me son as part of this therapy. And it works because you see firsthand like you could do it right then, and you're just you don't want to, You're not going, you're not moved to doing that. You have control over your behavior, and you see it firsthand right there, and that tends to actually help quite a bit. And so the fact that that helps and you can self treat shows that it is just a weird fluke of human psychology and that it happens to everybody, including
really violent, terrible stuff that you can think about. Everyone happens to everyone.
Yeah, And if we uncomfortably giggled during that part, it's not because we don't think that that must be the hardest thing in the world would be to sit down and have a therapy session like that right with your family. Like, I can't even imagine what that's like to sit down and have to do something like that, so or what it costs.
Yeah, oh, I got a snort for that one.
Oh wow, you sure did. I don't do that much.
I guess we should talk about the studies. And when I say study, I mean studies kind of one too. There haven't been a ton of them. Lyvia dug up a couple in twenty eleven, there was a psychologist named Jennifer Haymes from Florida State. Along with her colleagues are at Florida State. They're the people who coin the HPP term high Places phenomenon. And they asked four hundred and thirty one FSU students.
I guess, yeah, go fighting elione, I no, come.
On, seminoles, you know that. Yeah? Sure.
They asked four hundred and thirty one of their students about their experiences with high place phenomenon. More than thirty percent had experience that urged to jump, and among those who had never experienced suicidal ideation, because you know, when they study something like this, they're trying to separate those things out of just the call of the void and someone who actually has thought about taking their own lives.
Yeah, because Freud led everybody down a blind alley by basically saying, oh, actually, this this is our innate drive to want to kill ourselves. That's really at play, And it turned out it's just not true at all.
Yeah, So among those who had never experienced suicidal ideation, there were still seventeen percent who had the urge to jump at least one time.
And I believe.
Half of the people who had suicidal feelings said the same. It was about the same number.
Right, And the researchers are like, this not quite track, Like, let's reframe the question. And they asked the same people, have you ever thought about jumping from a bridge or a building? And they're like, oh, yeah, I've thought about that for sure. That's what I'm saying. There's a difference between just being up there and thinking like what would happen if I did this the thought pops in your head, right, or the urge where you have to push yourself away
from the balcony. Those are two slightly separate experiences, and the just the thought popping in people's heads seemed as to be the more common one. So when they reframed the question like that seventy four percent of people who had gone through suicidal ideation said yeah, I've done that. Forty three percent of non suicidal ideators just say the
general population said that that happened to them. So almost half of people walking around are like said like, yeah, it's occurred to me to throw myself off the top of a tall building. One I've been up there. And even then Hames and her colleagues were like, I still think that's a little small. And they've come up with little ways to essentially say, like, some people are forgetting that this actually happened to them.
Yeah, and mine is always a thought. It's never a true urge. But they you know, after this study, one of the things that they talked about was sort of like what you said with Freud, where they said, like, no, this is not a manifestation of the death drive, of the urge to take your own life, And they looked at actual, you know, real cases of suicide. They looked at previous research and all the data, and their argument was, you know, when someone takes their own life, it's rarely
a truly truly impulsive act, right. It's usually something that has happened over time, and it's in a big sort of accumulation of these ideations. And while the exact moment may have some impulsivity to it, it's rarely just a completely impulsive.
Act, right. And usually it's characterized by resolution more than impulsiveness too, you know.
If the person is this is something I'm gonna.
Do, yes, exactly. So they basically said, Okay, Freud was totally wrong, but still we think that some people don't really remember that this happened. We think that more people than say, forty three percent of the population have experienced this. And one of the explanations they had was that one thing we left out. They've found a huge correlation between people who experience anxiety and people who have experienced the high place phenomenon or the call of the void. Right.
And so what Hames and her colleague said was, all right, what we think happened is when you're anxious. When you're an anxious person, you're more attuned to like internal signals yea, and so you are experiencing those like more acutely, like all the symptoms associated with it, like just being nervous and just having like your stomach kind of topsy turvy, Like those symptoms stand out to you more. And so those people remember having experienced to call the void more,
so they're more likely to report it. And that everybody, most people probably experience this. It's just some people it just so fleeting or whatever to them that they don't remember it later on. I find that questionable, but that's kind of how they explained it.
Yeah, and they also sort of wrap their heads around the idea that the call of the void is as.
A survival instinct.
It's kind of the opposite of what people, especially Freud, had previously thought of it, is that it reflects a survival instinct that we have to, you know, sort of think about that in terms of framing it of how they are appreciating being alive and not doing that.
Yeah. So the scientific explanation O Koran, which means current, is that when you're up there on a tall building and you're looking over the edge or something like that, your innate instinct, like say your lizard brain is like jump back jack, and so it sends a fear signal, and your rational brain, which is a little bit slower, catches up and is like, hey, why am I feeling fear? There's no danger here whatsoever. There's like a sturdy railing and I've got like a solid floor beneath my feet.
I guess I'm afraid, or I guess I got a fear signal because I had the urge to jump, And that that's the call of the void. That it's a miscommunication or misunderstanding of your physiology and your rational mind essentially, and that that's what the called void is. I guess.
I mean that's certainly certainly jibes to a certain extent, but I don't it still doesn't quite stand out to me, like like carecer guards and SARTs explanations, Like I think they just completely nailed it, I like like five whiffle balls at once out of the park.
Yeah, I mean they did the study and they had data and stuff, but then there's a lot of just philosophical extrapolation, right that you may not fully be on board with. Yeah, there was another study, I think maybe only the other the only other study I couldn't find any other ones. No, huh, Tobias Ticeman and his other coworkers there at ruher Univastett Boucham, this is in Germany.
That's the fighting ruh jers.
In twenty twenty, and they looked at a couple of different samples of two hundred and seventy six people who did an online survey, about half of them had experienced suicidal ideation at some point. And then ninety four patients who were being treated for flight phobia, like you know, fear of flying in a plane, which used to have pretty solidly but seemed to have gotten over pretty well.
Yeah, I did you know you.
Don't cover your head with a blanket anymore when you fly, which is great.
No, it is, it's very nice, because that was tortuous.
Of course.
And along the lines of the Ham study, eighty percent of the people who had experienced suicidal ideation had experienced HPP. Forty five percent of those experienced HPP who hadn't experienced or who hadn't gone through suicidal ideas.
Yeah, it's almost like exactly the same numbers, which is crazy. And then it's crazy who was that it was supposed to be walking but it's that was so bad. I'm going to say, Colonel Sanders.
No no, no, no no. I got walking after you said it, so, just like every great impression.
After I explained it. So, Tobias Tiesman, is that how you pronounced his name earlier?
I think it's Tysman. I think it's the second letter for Germany.
Okay, Tobias Ticsman at all. The same study also used a different group, looked at a different group people who suffer from clinical fear of heights acrophobia, and they found that only forty five percent of them had ever experienced high place phenomenon, which is basically tracking exactly with the general population. So that shows that it really is not it doesn't stem from a fear of heights, even though there's other people that say that's exactly what it stems from.
And so then they the people that they were reporting to and getting their funding from, said so, what'd you learn about the fear of flying? And they said nothing, right.
Sorry, exactly, And Delta was like, man, yeah, you got to stop funding these terrible studies.
Have you heard of this call of avoid thing? They're like, oh jeez, we're only the second study.
So right, we'll get it someday, I say, we take our second break and then come back and do more speculating.
All right, so Lyvia dug up some more, some more speculation, which is what she called this section.
Actually what did she call this article? It was great. I don't have my title page.
The Call of the Void. Don't pick it up?
Yeah, I promised Lyvia, We're going to use that as the actual title one day.
Yep.
Is it going to be this one?
I think this might be. This might be a yeah, that's a good one.
I think so.
And I added in it it's don't pick.
Up, don't pick up, yeah, which is even funnier. Actually for sure.
There's a psychology professor from Britain, or researcher rather, named Paul Salkovski who basically said, the thoughts of doing these, you know, inappropriate things or dangerous things like the Call of the Void are a result of our problem solving process within the brain. So our subconscious just throwing something out there, and then our rational brain getting an opportunity to say, like, no, that's of course I'm not going to jump off or jump off a bridge.
That's a terrible idea. And then your unconscious is like, but you could.
Yeah, I'm down with that one. I'm not down with that one.
Rather, Okay, I got one. So and I guess when we're going back and forth like this, everybody should just imagine us like we're going to break off and now like you've backed off, like you did a little dance to back out, and now I did a little dance to back in or jump in.
Okay, So cardboards on the Pavement.
There's a really great article and Nautilus about this too. I was a researcher named Adam Anderson who as a cognitive neuroscientist at Cornell. I like this guy's idea. He basically says that when we're on a tall building, we're so just not designed to experience heights that it's not exactly new. I mean, cliffs have been around for a long time, but our experience of being high up is far more frequent than it ever was in the past,
just even a few hundred years ago. Right, So when we're up there, that lizard brain again is like, oh, we're in danger. We're in danger, and that same lizard brain says, let's get to safety as soon as possible. Hey, there's the ground, it's safe to be on the ground. Let's just jump and be on the ground. And luckily our rational brain catches up in time and is like, no, I get what you're saying, Like, yes, this is kind of dangerous, but jumping to the ground is a really
terrible idea, and we're not going to do that. But that that is the call of the void, that that's what gives us that urge to jump. It's our dumb, dumb on content his mind's seeking safety.
Yeah, that's interesting, I think.
Okay, you jumping in.
Yeah, I'll jump in. Okay, I'll pop in lock.
Even though we said that it's not related to acrophobia, there are people who think it is. There's an Oxford psychologist named Daniel Freeman who said, no, it actually is part of the trifecta of what you might experience if you have a fear of heights, fear of falling, fear that whatever you're on the bridge or whatever will collapse beneath you, and then the third one, which is a fear of jumping.
So he lumps it.
In there as part of the trio of things that what he thinks make up acrophobia.
Or the fear of jumping part of it. He's saying, like, is the call of the void or triggered by it?
I think, yeah, yeah, that's the call of the void. But he thinks it is a form of acrophobia.
Right exactly. I don't know. I didn't see much support for his but nah, yeah, there's a neuroscientists too, apparently as a real pedant, because psychologists have been seeking to basically discredit Freud's idea that the call of the void is actually a manifestation of our urge to destroy ourselves, you know, wrought large or writ large, right, And they
found like, no, that's not true. And Emil gabrielle Bruno, who again as a neuroscientist, who was like, actually, there's a there's a condition where you can actually have some sort of pre funnel cortex damage and you'll violate social norms left and right. They that person may actually follow the urge of the call of the void. It could actually result in somebody jumping, and everybody stopped inviting Emil Gabriel Bruno to their conferences.
Yeah, I'm with everybody there. Yeah, I don't need somebody pointing that out. All kinds of terrible things can happen when you have a damage to your.
Exactly do you want to end with Judith dan Koff, Yeah, I'm going to sit down and let you take it home.
Judith Dankoff as a novelist who described the urge to jump in Washington State from Deception Pass Bridge. I mean, just that name alone makes you want to do something weird. I think as not a frightening thing, but like an urge to fly. And that's sort of along the lines of what I was talking about, not necessarily urged to fly, but just sort of like to see what it's like, right, you know.
Yeah, and hers was serious enough, for significant enough that she just sat down in the middle of the bridge to make sure she didn't actually follow through on the urge. It was that strong.
Yeah, and she quit knitting her Macromey wings.
You got anything else, No, sir, That's the call of the void. Everybody don't feel weird if number one you experience it, and number two you feel like no one's actually fully explained what it is because they haven't. And since I said that, it's time for listener man.
This is just sort of a quick one that came in today because I think a lot of people don't know that this is the case, and we say it from time to time, but this is about our bumper music that we play between commercial and content. Yes, hey guys, I've been listening to the show for several years now. My hobby is woodworking, so I always listen with ear muffs and Bluetooth built in built in bluetooth to protect
my ears and still hear the show. I enjoy the very jingles that you play at the beginning and the end of the breaks. Even if I skip the ads, I always make sure to listen to the jingles, and I usually even sing along. Can you provide a collection of these, I'm not the only one who loves them.
Keep up with the great info and the entertaining tunes. That's from Rob and Rob.
We read this because, like I said, I don't think a lot of people realize that those are all one hundred percent of them are made by listeners. People send them in. We don't use every single one of them. Sometimes it's just you know, some.
Are better than others.
But we use most of them and we're always willing to listen to them. Keep under around twelve seconds long, and that's kind of been one of the very fun things of the show is hearing everyone's take on the Stuff you Should Know jingle theme.
Yeah, everybody has a favorite. Two. That's the coolest part is you talk to Stuff you Should Know listeners and everybody has their own favorite jingles.
Yeah.
And sometimes Jerry is invested enough in editing a particular episode to try and be a little cheeky with some particular style as it relates to topic. And sometimes that happens purely by happenstance, and has even happened to our disadvantage at times when people are like, Hey, why'd you play that kind of music in this one? That's really not too cool, and it's just like, oh, shoot, that was an accident.
Yeah, I remember the one you're talking about too, and I'm not going to name it either. Yeah, who was that from?
That's from Rob.
That was awesome, Rob, thank you for asking that setting us up like a d ball coach for that one. If you want to be like Rob and get in touch with us and ask us a question that we can answer, we love to answer questions. And if you're a listener who has a little bit of musical talent and you want to share a jingle, with us. We would love that too. Either way, you can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.