Managing Disgust Through Compassion

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shanarveved Dantem Imagine you arere an architect But instead of drawing up a plan for a skyscraper or a bridge You've been asked to design the most sophisticated edifice in the universe the human brain Getting to work at your drafting table You'd likely prioritize accuracy You want this brain to perceive the world exactly as it is perfect mirror of reality In your blueprint, the good and the bad The rewarding and the threatening all would be treated the same every event. every experience would be assigned equal weight given the same attention and remembered equally But as any architect will tell you There is a vast gulf between a design that works on paper and one that actually survives the elements The same is true. of our own minds The architect of evolution wasn't interested in making us objective observers or serene philosophers It wasn't trying to design a brain that took a fair and balanced view of the world It was building a survival machine To survive in a world filled with menacing predators scarce resources and social traps The brain had to be designed with a series of built in biases Those are the same brains we have inside our heads today It's why we focus more intently on some flavors of experience. rather than others in toon. These biases shape what we perceive How we respond and even the course of our most intimate relationships This week on Hidden Brain And in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus The lopsided ledgers in our minds and how we can bring them into balance Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to twenty years before noticing symptoms Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. and ask for a cognitive assessment Visit brainhealthmatters. com for more information and resources. Support for Hidden Brain comes from the Grey Ech, presented by Brookdale Senror Living What should you want to find in a good senior living community? 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Let's say you're a music critic attending a symphony For two hours, eighty musicians play in perfect breathtaking harmony The strings are soaring, the brass is precise, and the conducting is fluid But in the final minute of the performance, a single violinist hits a flat note It lasts for less than a second Tiny discordance in an otherwise flawless evening. When you sit down to write your review What do you remember If your brain were a perfect recording device, that one second error would be a mere blip buried under two hours of beauty But for a critic, And that means all of us That one flat note can become the entire story It lingers in our minds and shapes how we remember the evening At the University of California Davis, psychologist Allison Ledgerwood studies how and why this happens Aison Ledgerwood, welcome to Hidd Brain. Thank you so much for having me Alison a few years ago, you noticed something peculiar about the way you responded to developments in your work life What did you notice I noticed that I could have A big success or a small success, one day, an academic paper gets accepted or I meet a new work colleague who I'm really excited to become friends with And that would be lovely. but then the next day or later that day. somethingomet negative would happen paper would get rejected. Somebody would snap at me in the hallway or not look happy to see me and couldn't get that negative out of my head. And this would happen even if the good thing was way more important Then the bad thing when I took a step back Negatives seem to stick with me all day, all week You observed a similar dynamic when reading over your student evaluations. Some forms of feedback stick in your head So I teach these big classes, two hundred students, three hundred students, and at the end of each quarter, you get teaching evaluations that are passed out by the university and ask some questions about the class and the professor so that you can get feedback on what's going well and what you could do better And often I would get a lot of glowing comments, right? I'm flipping through them and it's like, this is the best class I've taken so far at UC Davis. And this was one of the best professors I've ever had and everything seems rosy. And then I would come across a single neegative comment Right? someomebody says Yeah, I could have found all of this online And' I'm devastated I'm counter arguing in my head. I'm thinking about the hours and hours and hours of work I put into pulling together these sources from different places so that the students wouldn't have to just have everything canned from a textbook Then I start thinking they don't appreciate this, as if it's the whole class None of them want to be in this class They would just rather be finding this information on YouTube. Why am I even here instead of contextualizing that as one comment out of the hundreds that I had gotten, right Now I think many people have experienced what you've experienced, Alison. And of course, it doesn't just happen in work settings. You were driving recently when you noticed the same thing at work. Exactly. So A few weeks ago I had this perfectly lovely day and I was driving to pick up my kid from school, and I slowed down and stopped for somebody who was jaywalking across the street. And instead of saying, thank you or even just ignoring me, she yelled at me. I think because it actually took her longer to wait and figure out if I was going or not than to just cross the street. But for whatever reason, she yells at me And it takes me like an hour to stop feeling bad about it and perseverating on it. wondering, should I have done something different? What did I do wrong Let's talk a moment about how this tendency to focus on the negative shows up not just in our personal lives, but also in the way we respond to the news. betweenween two thousand one and two thousand four NASA directed the voyage of a space probe called Genesis It was a truly extraordinary piece of engineering designed to capture particles ejected from the suun For the very first time, truly an incredible feat of science What happened on this voyage, Alison? and how do we remember it You know, you could argue that the Genesis sppace mission was ninety nine percent an amazing success. This was the first NASA space probe to go out and collect material beyond the Mon's orbit and bring it back to Earth The mission had three major scientific objectives and all of them were met that's not what the headlines reported at the time or what many people remember about Genesis because at the very end, after all of the successes because of a tiny mistake in how some sensors were installed, the probe crash landed in the Utah desesert And that made the whole thing feel like a failure Mj manager eight miles look for an impact. You see negative growth, negative sho act impacted five, eight, five, five as they imp impacted vehicle on the surface. Now the probe had traveled something like a billion miles, that's billion with a B. And in fact, Much of the scientific information that the probe was sent to collect was in fact collected and Fr a scientific point of view, the mission was a success, but that's not how we remember it Exactly. We focused on that one little thing that went wrong. I mean crrushing is not tiny, crashing is a big crash. But in terms of exactly as you said, the scientific objectives of the mission was a small blip, the scientists were able to recover the information they needed, and yet we think of it as a failure Let's talk a moment about how our tendency to harp with the negative can shape even geopolitical conflict and war Some years ago, Allison, researchers produced an in depth analysis of how Germany ended up in World War one, notot because necessarily it was under threat, but because it believed that it was under threat from its neighbors Right. So if you're a country and you are looking for possible problems, possible threats to address, it makes sense, right? that the possibility of a threat would grab your attention Um, and it could lead you to make some Bad choices because you kind of overestimate the strength of that threat I mean, this was probably true even when it came to something like the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union greatly overestimated how belligerent and dangerous the other side was and effectively brought the whole world to the brink of annihilation Right. Each side is focusing on what could go wrong They're focusing on the possibility of that threat and focusing so much on the possibility of something going wrong without also focusing on the possibility that it could go right, right that things could deescalate Um leads to this kind of escalating Oh no, wed better be prepared for the worst possible case. and then, oh no, we'd better be prepared for the worst possible case and on and on. And it's so interesting, I think when we think about geopolitical conflict or the ways that nations interact with each other I think we often forget that there are human beings who are basically involved in these negotiations. These are human beings who are making judgments. And so in some ways, it ought to be unsurprising that the way our minds think should shape these major, major events I couldn't agree more. And and I think you see this in all kinds of settings, right? We think of historical forces as somehow not being Biased by human psychology, and in all of these cases, right, we're squishy humans, we're fallible. We have all kinds of biases in our minds that influence how we think and how we make sometimes very consequential decisions The human brain operates like a very curious kind of magnet It remains indifferent to shavings of silver and gold but it's drawn to heavy, jagged shards of lead and iron. when we come back Why our minds are irresistibly drawn to the negative You're listening to hidden Bra I'm Sanank Kar Vved Dant Support for Hidden Brain comes from Lily On this show, it's fascinating to discuss the unseen forces shaping the human brain. Consider conditions like Alzheimer's disease, where changes in the brain may develop up to twenty years before noticing symptoms Talk to your doctor to understand your potential risk factors for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. and ask for a cognitive assessment Visit brainhealthmatters. com for more information and resources. Support for hidden Bnd comes from cash up. Bitcoin is often talked about as an investment, but it was built to be used With cash app, you can actually do that Snd Bitcoin instantly. be at local square businesses that accept it or move it to your own wallet whenever you want It works more like real money and less like something locked in an account For a limited time, new customers can get ten dollars added to their balance. Just use code cash up ten when you sign up. And don't forget this part, send at least five dollars to a friend in the first two weeks Charms apply CashApp is a financial services platform, not a bank Banking services provided by Cash apppp's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Inc brands. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash. app slash legal slash podcast. This Hidden Brain. I'm Shankarved Danta. In seventeen seventy seven, the English writer Samuel Johnson was talking with his friend and biographer, James Boswell about the case of an Anglican clergyman who had been sentenced to death for forgery Samuel Johnson remarked to his companion Depend on it, sir When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates his mind wonderfully. Even when the fate we are facing is far less severe than an execution Bad news tends to concentrate the mind It crowds out the happy aspects of our existence At the University of California Davis, psychologist Allison Ledgerwood studies why this happens in the brain Alison, we've been talking about the effects of what psychologists call the negativity bias. What is this bias Simply put, the negativity bias is the tendency for our brains to look for negative information and then hold ono it once we find it shows up in a lot of different ways. and the version that I study is that once we think about something in negative terms, that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our minds and resist subsequent attempts to change it. Why would our brains be designed this way, Alison You know, we can tell an evolutionary story. I like to remind myself that we can't go back in time and like experimentally test that this is what happened. But it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to think that when you're wandering along the plane in our ancestral past and you Encounter a tiger. You really want a brain in that moment that's going to say, Ohh, hey, there's a tiger and that's not going to forget about the tiger because you happen to glance at a tree and it looks pretty in the afternoon light, right? You want a brain that's going to say Tiger, tiger, tiger and not stop saying Tiger for a while after that So in some ways, the idea is that in our evolutionary past at least There was survival value in being very focused on negative or threatening information Exactly. You want your mind to focus on potential threats. You also want your mind to focus on mistakes When we make a mistake Our mind fixates on it, Our body might feel bad, right? guilty or upset or disappointed. And that's our brain and our body saying, hey That didn't go the way that we wanted it to go. Next time, maybe we could do something different But of course, now that translates into a professor teaching her students, getting one hundred and ninety nine positive reviews and then getting one negative review and saying, oh my God, let me focus on the negative review, the negative review, the negative review Absolutely. So sometimes the negativity bias in our minds is really functional. It helps us learn from mistakes. It helps us identify problems that we need to fix often in collaboration with other people. And sometimes it just gets you stuck on something that doesn't seem to have any use that you would rather not be thinking about. Now the brain's tendency to react more strongly to negative information has been demonstrated even in brain imaging studies. What do these show us, Alison Some of my favorite work on this comes from Tiffany Edo, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder And in some of her work, she showed participants a series of pictures that were positive or negative, or neutral. And she measured event related brain potentials or ERPs, which basically just capture how the brain is responding to a stimulus She found that participants' brains responded more strongly to negative images than to positive images, suggesting that the negative motivational system responds more intensely than the positive motivational system Now I suppose we can notice our tendency to overweight the negative and we might wish that our brains didn't do this But if we could wave a magic wand and make this happen, if we could remove our tendency to focus on the negative Would that be a good thing, Alison I don't think so at all, Sankkar. And the reason is because of this function of negativity bias that we talked about earlier It is useful. to pay attention to real threats. It is useful to pay attention to real mistakes that we can learn and grow from and do better next time. And it's useful to pay attention to real problems in our environment in society and the situation around us that we can address by working together with other people So in some ways, it's a dilemma because we have what is arguably a very useful feature of our minds But that useful feature also produces a lot of unhappiness because we are so so focused on the negative rather than the positive Exactly I've been particularly interested in the idea of framing. Things in the world aren't necessarily inherently positive or negative. We can feel differently about the same person or object or event deepending on how it's described Why is framing so significant, Adison There's tons of research across many different disciplines political science, psychology, economics focused on this idea of framing, that the way that we feel about a person or an event is going to change depending on how it's described or framed And at its heart, at the most basic level, this is just that proverbial glass that can be seen as half full or half empty, it matters how somebody describes the glass to you. If somebody says, Hey, look at this half full glass, you think This is great There's water in there If somebody says, hey, look at this half empty glass, you think, oh no, it's half empty. The psychologists Daniel Kanneman and Amos Tersky once conducted an influential study on the effects of framing Can you describe the study for me and what it found Connoman and Diversky conducted early work showing that seemingly trivial changes in wording could produce really striking changes in people's preferences. in their nineteen eighty one research They told participants, Imagine that there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and six hundred lives are at stake And then they randomly assigned people on their study to one of two groups For the first group, they went on to describe some possible response options in terms of how many lives would be saved right? If you go in this direction, this many lives would be saved. If you go in this with this response instead That many lives will be saved For the second group, they describbe those same options in terms of how many lives would be lost So for example, out of six hundred lives, you're thinking in one case about the four hundred that will be saved or in the other case, the two hundred that will be lost What Daniel Coneman and Amos Tuersky found was that simply framing outcomes in positive or negative terms dramatically altered people's preferences When choices were framed in terms of lives saved, people tended to avoid risk. When those same choices were framed in terms of lives lost People became more willing to gamble I asked Alison to tell me about other work that also looks at how we describe the successes or failures of groups and how we then come to see those groups So in one of these studies, professionals were asked to evaluate a work team based on some information about that team's past performance. half of the participants in the study randomly assigned, were told that thirty out of fifty of the team's past projects had been successful O half of the participants were told that twenty out of fifty of the team's past projects had been unsuccessful So mathematically, it's the same identical information, right Some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was full. Some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was empty And then the question was, do you fund the work team? Like how likely are they to succeed And participants wanted to fund the team more when its past performance had been described in terms of successes than when its past performance had been described in terms of failure. I understand the same phenomenon is sometimes at work in medical settings when patients are deciding whether to go forward with a surgery. How the surgery is described can change whether we decide it's a good idea or a bad idea So imagine, I tell you, a national panel is evaluating a recently developed surgical procedure that involves new robotic technology In a three year study on the procedure just concluded, based on the data, experts agree that it has a survival rate of seventy percent or I tell you, it has a mortality rate thirty percent Same information again Participants in a study like this are much more favorable towards the procedure when it's described in terms of the survival rate than when it's described in terms of the mortality rate. Now, on its surface, these framing effects might not seem like they're about the negativity bias Or at least they are not about the negativity bias alone When you tell people the surgical procedure has a seventy percent survival rate People do focus on that positive news But here is how the negativity bias kicks in Allison has run studies where people are presented either the positive or the negative information Then She presents people with the other side of the coin. The people who got the positive framing first Now get the negative framing The people who got the negative framing about the mortality rate of the procedure I now presented the same information with the positive framing The survival rate In our research, we start out the same way that all these framing studies have in the past. Half the participants see A person, a politician, an event, a surgical procedure, framed in positive terms. half of them see that same thing framed in negative terms Unlike in past research, we don't stop there. We keep going So people in our studies who see let's say a surgical procedure framed in terms of its survival rate at time one then see it reframed in terms of its mortality rate at time too peoplee who originally see the surgical procedure framed in terms of his mortality rate, then later see it reframed in terms of its survival rate And our question is, can people just follow along with this as the vast literature on framing seemed to suggest, right? People just react to the frame that's right in front of them. I like the half full glass. I dislike the half empty glass, so maybe I can bounce back and forth easily between them. It's not what we found. or it's only what we find half the time When people see a positive frame first And then it switches to a negative frame, sururvival rate switches to mortality rate They follow right along. They like the procedure at first. When you reframe it, they don't like it anymore. But when we move in the opposite direction, when we start out with negatives and reframe as positives Participants tend to get stuck in the initial negative framing. They don't like the procedure when it's described in terms of mortality. And then when we say, hey, you can think of this in terms of survival rate, They still don't like it So in other words, if you tell me the procedure has a seventy percent survival rate and I like it. but then you tell me It has a thirty percent mortality rate. I changed my mind and I now stop liking it. But if you start out telling me it has a thirty percent mortality rate, I don't like it And now if you tell me it has a seventy percent survival rate, I still don't like it Yes, that initial negative frame seems to stick in your head and resist subsequent attempts to change it Wh does this tell you that in some ways things seem to drift almost toward the negative side of the equation that O brains have a tendency to tilt towards the negative, right? That just fundamental negativity bias Our minds look for negative information and then hold on to it once we find it and I think this is one way that our brains do that, that our brains are holding on to the initial conceptualization of something as negative. And it's really hard to switch things around and start thinking of it as positive When you see these framing effects and you see that we tend to go from a positive frame to a negative frame fairly easily, but not so easily from a negative frame to a positive frame Do you have any understanding of how this is actually happening in the brain Alison Yeah, so this was a question that we were really curious about and we've looked at it in a few different ways. but Probably my favorite is that we gave people a very simple math problem We I told them I imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease and six hundred lives are at stake so that Classic condiment Fsky frraming, study And then we just ask them if a hundred lives are saved how many will be lost or If a hundred lives are lost, how many will be saved Everyone just has to calculate six hundred minus one hundred and come up with the answer of five hundred. But whereas some people have to convert from positives to negatives to get that answer. The second group, the other people have to convert from negatives to positives Can you unpack that last part just a little bit more Sir So some people to solve the problem of six hundred minus one hundred have to convert from lives saved to lives lost, right? If one hundred lives are saved how many will be lost Other people are doing the same math problem But they're calculating if a hundred lives are lost How many will be saved And then we timed how long it took them to solve the problem. Everyone can do it in a few seconds people significantly longer When the math problem involves converting from negatives to positives, than when it involves converting from positives to negatives. So it's almost as if you have a You know, if the brain was a freeway system or a road system, then the negativity information flows on the highways Positivity information flows on the back streets I love that analogy. Yeah Minds tend to focus on things that are threatening or distressing Often, what this means is that we walk around with an excessively negative view of our lives and the world But there are ways to manage our tendency to focus on the negative and even ways to turn this bias to our advantage When we come back Rebalancing bad with good 're listening toiden Bra I'm Shankar Vedanta Support for Hidden Brain comes from Defender. 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Get the good times going with made in house chicken or pork sausages and ready to cook kebabs for hassle free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries and peaches at their peak and stock up on bug sprays and suncare must haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedant Can you think of a time in your life when something negative crowded out all the positive things Did this have consequences for the way you behaved and the opportunities you were able to see If you have a personal story you will be willing to share with the hidden brain audience. Please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone twow or three minutes of plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain. org using the subject line Negative. Again, that's feedback at hidenbrain. org. Alison Ledgerwood is a psychologist at the University of California Davis She studies the tendency of the brain to focus on the negative and how different frames can change the way we see events in a positive light or a negative l Andison, as we've discussed, the goal here is not to eliminate our tendency to focus on the negative. It can be real value and benefit in noticing things that are dangerous or threatening or wrong However, it is the case that the bias that we have toward the negative It causes many of us to walk around feeling like our lives are much worse than they actually R. You say one way to combat this problem is to make an effort to notice things about our lives that are positive You know, what I take away from this research for my own life in part is that our brains have this fundamental tendency to tilt toward the negative But exactly as you say, it doesn't work to suppress negativity. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that when you try to suppress negative emotions, it makes the negativity rebound stronger than ever. So we have to acknowledge the negatives And as you pointed out, we can often use that to our advantage to work to change problems in our environment We can also try to Even out, our brains try to make it a little bit easier for our brains to also notice the positives. And we can just do that through practice, the same way that we learn any kind of cognitive or behavioral habit, right? Think about the first time you're driving in a new route to work. You have to pay a lot of attention. It's kind of hard, mayaybe you make a wrong turn. But the seventy third time you are driving or walking or biking that same route, you can just do it automatically. It's easy the same thing happens with new way of thinking as a new way of behaving, we can practice Thinking of positives and use that to not counteract or replace, but to complement our brains strength of focusing on negatives. I understand that your colleague, Robert Emms has found that we can spend just a couple of minutes every day and that can help us retrieve the positive things in our lives Yeahes. so in his research, he had participants write for just a few minutes a day about things that they felt grateful. thankful for and found that it substantially boosted their wellbeing over the course of the study There's O research by my colleague, Tomika Unita showing that sharing positives with other people can have a real boost for your health. So she looked at older couples sharing positive emotions during their day or having those positive emotions on their own. And she found that when they shared the positive emotions, that was uniquely good for health. It lowered their cortisol and actually had a lasting effect throughout the day Talk about why this might happen, Alis and why is it important for us to express our positive emotions, not just feel them I think that when we express emotions to other people Part of what happens is that we're creating a shared reality about them, right? We are not just experiencing them by ourselves but experperiencing them with other people, and that can make them feel more real And I think it's also the case that sometimes as we go through our lives, you know we take the people around us a bit for granted and we feel like, you I can tell them all the negative things that are happening, all the things that I'm unhappy about in my life, and we forget to tell them about things that are positive that are going on in our lives. And of course, that's not a good way to spread positivity or to increase the net positivity in the relationship Yes. and there's actually research showing that palizing That's what researchers call it. So celebrating positives with friends and people who are close to us is also very important. So we think about like our friends are so important for supporting us when something goes wrong It's also really important that we have people around us who can get excited for us when things go well Wondering whether you follow this advice yourself, do you take a couple of minutes every day to write down the great things that are happening in your life or to share positive things that are happening with other people, Allison As with probably everyone, I'm much better at giving advice than following it myself. But I have tried at various points in my life to do the the gratitude journaling and sharing positives with other people. So Um So there was one period of time that I was feeling just really down about everything and realized that I was looking on the negative side of things very habitually. And I decided to try writing for a few minutes every evening about things that were positive, things that I appreciated, that I felt grateful for And at first it was very difficult. I would just stare at this blank sheet of paper for like three minutes or however long I set the timer on my phone. And then the timer would ring and I would be all grumpy and I'd write down dog, right? I guess. As in you're grateful for your dog. That was the one thing you could think of. It was the one but it wasn't accompanied, I want to be clear, it was not accompanied by feelings of gratitude. I was mad at myself for making myself do the task I was basically saying like technically My dog's not bad, I guess. But after a few days of that, it was definitely multiple days, right? I think I thought of a second example and started feeling slightly more appreciative of the dog. I mean, the dog was great throughout, right. The dog's a dog, the dog is happy to see me. The dog's lovely It's not her fault But I started thinking like, oh, the dog and the way the dog smiles when I come home. And then a few days after that It starts getting even easier and I have maybe several sentences of things that I feel appreciation for And then what I noticed over the course of a couple weeks is that I started thinking of those little things during the day, not just when I sat down in the evening to do it intentionally, right? but it had become a more habitual style of thinking So in some ways, you're starting to notice things because in some ways you're making yourself notice things Right, it starts out intentional. It starts out I'm walking in a new way to work and I have to pay attention and turn right on this street and think of how my dog is actually a positive thing in my life. And then with practice, it gets easier. With practice, it becomes almost effortless and automatic in other parts of your day. Please tell me that you have thought positive thoughts not just about your dog, but there are other things in your life that you also think are positive This is true. There are other things in my life that I also think are positive It reminds me, Alison that the way you're describing this, this feels so much like the way exercise works. You know, the first day we do it, we're groaning and we're just really reluctant and we're like, do I have to do this? And you don't like doing this and you don't do very much of it. But of course, if you do it for a week and you do it for two weeks and you do it for a month, It starts to get progressively easier and then you start to find new things that you'd like to do, new forms of exercise and they just sort of build on one another. Yes, so you're exercising a new thought pattern instead of like a physical muscle And as you do it, it gets easier and easier. So Allison, I understand that people in your life sometimes point out that you don't always practice what you preach in terms of focusing on the positive Plenty of people call me out when I am when I am hypocritical about something, which I appreciate very much. My partner actually had this lovely practice when we first got together of celebrating successes when R? We're both academics. So this is probably not. unique to academia We're both academics and Every success that we have Parcel a little step words. towards the ultimate goal. You don't get a paper accepted, you W write the paper and you submit it and then it gets rejected and then you revise it and you submit it again. and then you get requests for revision. and then you make the revision right. it's this long process My partner had this delightful habit when we got together of celebrating each stage in the process. Each time you take a little step towards your goal with a special dinner I submitted the paper I got a special dinner I submitted a revision of the paper. I got a special dinner I got feedback I got a special dinner And we've adopted this together because both helps keep your attention on the positive, right inststead of it getting lost in your day. because Annoyingly, we never get to have a day that's just one success and nothing else happens, right? There's always something So if you return to it in the evening, then it helps kind of pull that part of your day out for you and highlight it. And once again, you're sharing it with somebody else. creating this shared reality about it and celebrating it together Another approach you advise people to take is to engage in what you call gain framing What is gain framing Aison? Dain framing is just what we've been calling positive framing So, u One thing I like to do is when I make a mistake, It usually feels bad. I perseverate on it. I think of all the things I wish had happened so that I wouldn't have made the mistake But then if I can reframe the mistake in my mind as a learning opportunity It doesn't get rid of all the bad feelings, right? But it focuses my attention on, okay, what can I do differently next time And I'm kind of putting that energy into creating a new plan for the future Adison, you have a co author, a political scientist with whom you have collaborated on a number of projects And at one point recently, the two of you felt like you had become disipins in your own research. Tell me what happened So my colleague, Amber Boydston here in the political science department at UC Davis was working with me on just starting this research and we applied for a grant. to fund it. So we write the grant proposal, which is long and hard We submit it, we wait for months and months to hear back. And finally one day we get an email back with a decision. So we hold our breath and cross all our fingers and pose and anything else we can find. and we open it up and it says, our grant has been funded and we get maybe two seconds of unadulterated joy. until we read the next sentence, which says, unfortunately, we had to cut your funding by half We're so disappointed that we lost half of our funding. And we're just sitting there feeling so bad about it And then we go Wait Wait, but we got half of our funding. Wait, we are we participants in our own study here Yeah becausecause the pleasure of having the grant was stolen almost immediately by the fact that the grant was not what you expected. But of course, It hasn't stolen the entire pleasure or at least it shouldn't It shouldn't at all. We were still able to do a large portion of the research with the half of the grant that we got. And two minutes before that, right, we hadn't had a grant at all So we almost literally got a half full glass immediately focused on the part that was empty. That makes me think about one thing that I think happens to a lot of people, which is that when good things happen to us, we tend to absorb them fairly quickly. and then they become part of the background. They become part of the wallpaper, if you will. And so you know, a second before you open this the news to discover that you got the grant, you would have given a lot to know that you got the grant. It would have made you so happy. But the moment you know that you got the grant That sort of slips away into the background and everything else, including the fact that the grant was cut in half, that comes into the foreground Yes. And you know there's this really interesting research on how easily we adapt to our current circumstances, Um, so we Level set to whatever current reality is the current status quo. And I think This is one of those cases where we can adapt very quickly to a positive and maybe not quite so quickly to a negative You recently had an experience where you made an effort to celebrate the positive I understand it made a real difference. Can you tell me what happened So in our house, we put everyone's successes on the fridge so that we can celebrate each other's positives and feel better about them ourselves. So a couple weeks ago, my kid got an award at school Of course that goes on the fridge. I guess that's pretty normal to put it on the fridge, but we also try to notice it and mention it to each other when we walk by. And in our house, grownup successes go up on the fridge too. so that when I have a success or when my partner has a success, that goes up there too. And so for example, my partner comes home yesterday And so he has written a book on relationships that's coming out soon. and yesterday he came home from recording the audioobook And he tells me that the director there said that it was one of the best readings he had ever heard And then my partner turns away to go on with his day and do the other sixty three things that he has to do, right? And I'm like, noope, stop First of all, that's amazing. That's an amazing thing for somebody to tell you. And second, go write that down. right now. Print it out. We're putting it up on the fridge and we're going to talk about it every time I walk by Let's talk a moment about the role that we play in bringing positivity or negivity into the lives of other people, Allison. Very often, I think when someone is rude to us, when we arere having a bad day We may have a tendency to pass on this negativity to others. So in some ways, you know negativity begets more negativity Are there ways to interrupt this cascade I think so. you know, every now and then, I manage to do this in the middle of a fight with my partner or my kid. I see a way to be silly or make a joke And then suddenly we can laugh together instead of being stuck in this negative spiral. A few weeks ago, we were having a family dinner and we had just washed the tablecloth And my kid kept spilling little things on the table. She'd spill like a little bit of a sauce or One noodle, right and My partner and I would rush to clean it up, and we're all getting kind of more and more stressed about trying to keep a tablecloth clean so that we don't have to do laundry again and suuddenly had this impulse. So I picked up a big handful of what we were having for dinner and I just slapped it down on the tableclock So there's this huge mess everywhere. And I'm like, I guess we're doing laundry and we all get to laugh about it, right? instead of being kind of sniping at each other and stuck in this negative space. Yeah I think it's sometimes hard when people treat us badly, when we are the recipients of negativity to respond with something that is not negativity. You know psychologists have long talked about the norm of reciprocity. You know we are kind when we're treated kindly, we are rude when we're treated rudely But really I think what you're pointing to or what you're recommending is that we are kind when we're treated rudely. That's not easy to do It's not easy at all, and to be clear, I usually don't But I think we can try, right? And then every now and then there's this little window of opportunity that we get to interrupt that negative cycle. I'm wondering after having done all of this work on the negativity bias Do you feel like you yourself are able to be less negative as you go through your life, Alison The answer to that probably depends on the day. Some days I'm doing it pretty well and some days I'm not, and that's okay. Um but really What helps me is to think about these two pieces together. There's what is the negative focus tellelling me how can I use anger or negativity to fuel me I try to thinkink about bad mood as information. It's a messenger. It's saying something is wrong And then also How can I balance out that negativity some positives in my own life Rebalancing negative emotions with positive emotions can be powerful Paying attention to the good things in our lives can help us remember what we have stopped noticing It can remind us that there are silver linings to life's problems But there are certain situations where the intensity of a negative emotion can make it very hard to see anything positive Dark clloud hides the silver lining Let me tell you a story we received from a listener named Chris Chris used to spend her days working in one of the most beautiful all inspiring places in the world I used to work as a river guide in the Grand Canyon for a long time. and We used to do kind of team building, group building fun things all day long After planing the waters of the canyon all day, the group would gather around the campfire for one last bonding activity before they went to sleep As the stars twinkled above them in the inky night sky we would floss our teeth together They would floss their teeth Tet And that's not all Perhaps you're picturing twenty people standing around and simultaneously flossing their teeth Mh. That's not what happened I mean, everybody can have up to twenty people flossing their teeth with the same piece of dental floss The same piece of dental floss Be you lose your lunch or call the dental police on Chris. There's an asterisk that makes the story less unsettling slightly less unsettling I don't mean everybody sharing that from one person to the next, but you take a new spool of dental floss and stretch it out as far as it will go. So you each get your own clean, untouched little section, but everybody's flossing with the same piece at the same time So imagine a long string of floss maybe thirty feet long, your section of the dental floss is clean and unspoiled. You can see that in from you is someone else pulling on the same string, getting inside their gums Would you grab your piece of string and flops away with Gusto When I think about that now or when I tell somebody else about that now, they are disgusted even though you know that nobody else has touched your piece of dental floss, it's pretty funny how it's clean But it's still disgusting I'm guessing that if you find the story disgusting Thinking about all the beautiful stars in the night sky over the Grand Canyon will not help In the early days of Hidden Brain, I often described myself as a card carrying rationalist Since then, however, I've learned the endless ways in which humans can be anything but rational Our visceral response to things we perceive as disgusting is a prime example Logic and our own eyes may tell us that something is safe and clean But our emotions can tell us a very different story When we come back, remarkable stories of revulsion We'll delve into the icky and endlessly fascinating science of disgust. You're listening to hidden Bra I'm Shan Karvvedat Toast unforgettable backackyard barbecues with savings from Who Foods Market. Get the good times going with made in house chicken or pork sausages and ready to cook kebabs for hassle free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries, and peaches at their peak and stock up on bug sprays and suncare must haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market Adobe Firefly is the all in one creative studio with AI powered image and video editing for today's creative process Bilt for creators of every kind Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast Because the asks aren't getting smaller budgets aren't getting bigger, and the timelines, oh yeah, still tight With all the best creative AI models in one place, Firefly brings your ideas to life. Unlock a better way to make with Adobe Firefly This Hidden brain. I'm Shankar Reedant What do you find disgusting Raches. Morly food Your kids' stinky gym socks We each have our own lists of things that revolt us and our own internal barometers for how easily we are disgusted by things that are rotten, smelly, or diseased That's part of what makes disgust so fascinating It's driven by a combination of emotions, reflexes, and cultural cues We recently talked about all this with David Pizaro. He's a psychologist at Cornell University And he joined us for an episode titled Yuck The science of disgust Listeners had many stories and questions that they shared in response to that conversation David returns to the show today to discuss them. David Pizaro, welcome back to Hidden Brain Thank you. Thank you for having me again David, one of the striking things about disgust is that it spreads. It contaminates other things. The fly that is sitting on the slice of toast makes the toast inedible Why do disgusting things seem to infect other things It's a great question and it's often been observed about discuss that you know, one fly on your toast ruins the toast, but One piece of toast on a group of flies, does not somehow cleanse the flies. And the thought is that because disgust, it is widely believed, is an emotion that evolved to keep us from getting sick long before humans had any sort of germ theory of disease, disgust nonetheless was tracking contagion And so disgust seems to be the one emotion that works via this kind of contagion process Many listeners wanted to learn more about why some of us tolerate things better than others Here's Veronica from Michigan Please Tell me more about why I'm able to go pick up roadkill on the side of the road and complete weirdo things like taxidermy projects or bone articulation projects Whereas my peers just sort of recoil in horror and probably judgment when I tell them about this hobby Thanks so much So David, is there something special about people like Veronica Well, there is something different about people like Veronica, but there might be one of two things that's different. Veronica might be overall less likely to be disgusted in general at a whole bunch of different things or Veronica might have gotten used to specifically those projects that she referred to. So so we can get used to doing things. Anybody who's had to clean toilets, you know knows that it might be the grossest thing you do the first time you do it, but after a while, you just have to get used to it And so we can develop very domain specific adaptation to discusust. Veronica might be one of those people who is just on that end of the distribution who just isn't bothered in general by lots of disgusting H. We talked in our earlier discussion about how love and lust can temporarily mute our disgust responses. So you might find another child's soil diaper disgusting, but you don't find your own baby's soil diaper disgusting You might not want to share someone's dental floss, but you're willing to lock your mouth on someone else's mouth if you're in love Why is this David? Well, you know, this is speculation. Whenever we talk about evolved mechanisms, we can't go back in evolutionary time and look But it is thought that If there is one time where it is important to not feel too much disgusted at what you're doing, it would be during that time when we engage in reproductive activities. becausecause as I say sometimes to my students, if you thought about what you were doing in the moment, you probably wouldn't want to do it. And so it's important to be able to turn off that little switch. And I think that the same goes for having to take care of people we love We received an interesting question from listener Lauri about people who are more sensitive to disgust. I just listened to your episode on disgust And I found it really interesting. and couldn't help but maybe compare those who display discususted to also being individuals that demonstrate I preferences on everything from toilet paper to how a spouse looks or beyond. So u Yeah, I was interested to know if there is a correlation and what that might be. I appreciate your show so much. What do you think, David? Is there any research showing that people who are highly sensitive to disgust are also more particular or even more controlling in other dimensions of their lives It's a great question that Lauri asks and the answer is a little bit unclear and I'll say why It depends on what kind of discusust you're talking about. So some people do distinguish between moral disgust, sexual disgust, or what they call pathogen disgust the thing that I've been talking about the most, the thing that keeps you. away from disease And when you look at other personality traits It seems as if there is not a whole lot of correlation between the tendency to feel grossed out pathogen discussed way and personality traits that might be similar to controllingness Im There is a little bit of an effect such that people who are High in machiavellianism, which is a trait that you might consider an extreme form of controlling, that is a desire to control others for your own gain And that actually shows a negative although small correlation with disgust. And so so there's not a whole lot that is, I would say, is demonstrating a strong relationship between discusust sensitivity and some of these other personality variables. And when you say there's an inverse correlation between Machiavellianism and disgust, you're saying that people who are Low in disgust are high in macia valley int tendencies That's right, That's right. or people, yes, you could say people who are easily discususted are less likely to be metical. We talked in our earlier conversation about the role of smell in eliciting feelings of disgust Listener Emily had a question about a different sense and its impact on our experience of disgust App prepo of your show on disgust I would like to pose the question of visual disgust, not just smell, but there's sometimes when I see patterns of repeated shapes Um It could be a bunch of pebbles or a way things are put together, but more often resembles like a swarm, a swarm of bugs. U I just feel such a visceral sense of repulsion that I could throw up Any comments about that That is a great question, Emily There are quite a few people who report the kind of disgusted reaction that you're reporting. In fact, it has a name, tripophobia Tripophobia is a discussed response to Small holes, patterns, bumps u that occur sort of in a regular pattern as Emily was describing And it seems as if maybe there is an evolvedpl an evolutionary explanation for why we might have them because There's an association between those kinds of patterns and maybe some diseases that are visible on the skin That is speculation. but I want to tell Emily that she's definitely not alone and she definitely should not Google the word tripophobia It strikes me as you're describing this David, that it might be that it's not just that we differ from other people when it comes to disgust, it also might be that each of us has different sensitivities when it comes to our different senses. So some of us might be more prone to disgust that comes to us through our noses and others might be more disgusted by something that we touch. I think that's exactly right. And there is some research showing that women have a lower threshold for olfactory stimuli that might make them disgusted U, and there are ways to measure that threshold, you know, you give people sort of increasing doses of a smell. and you can chart them to see where they are on how sensitive they are to smells. And it seems as if women have a particular sensitivity to disgust smells There's another thing that's very interesting about smell specifically as compared to vision smmell is one of the senses that has a much more direct path to our emotions. It sort of bypasses a lot of the areas of the brain that other sensory inputs get processed through. And that's why some people you know will report that They get an immediate sense of nostalgia when they smell something or they're transported to a memory of an old girlfriend or boyfriend when they smell a perfume or cologne. And disgust is very strong in that olfactory sense as well The sight of feces does not do a as good a job as the smell of feces in inducing disgust H Listener, Lisa sent us a question highlighting how we can often have a different bar for what we consider disgusting based on whether it's us or someone else doing the thing in question I wonder why when I do certain personal things like Lick icing off my finger It's fine. I find it extremely disgusting So just thought I'd throw that into the hopper for your consideration So it seems like our capacity for disgust has a great deal of hypocrisy woven into it David. Yes, I think Lisa has discovered this very, very deep part of human psychology, which is when other people do things it's worse than when we do them There are things that are not disgusting because it is us, it is part of us. our bodily fluids, our bodily processes Another thing is that you can't see yourself doing it. Maybe if Lisa were to watch herself, you know, if someone took a video of her licking her ice cream in a weird way She would feel disgust for that. But when it's you doing it, then you know you're not likely to feel that disgust. Bea imagine Chunker how much disgust we would feel if we were constantly disgusted by the things that we do. Yeah, we would be paralyzed by disgust. Yes. When we come back, the social dimensions of disgust What we're signaling when we express disgust to another person You're listening to hidden brain I'm Sankar Vvedant Host unforgettable backackyard barbecues with savings from Who Foods Market. Get the good times going with made in house chicken or pork sausages and ready to cook kebabs for hassle free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries and peaches at their peak. And stock up on bug sprays and suncare must haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market. Adobe Firefly is the all in one creative studio with AI powered image and video editing for today's creative process buuilt for creators of every kind Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast Because the asks aren't getting smaller budgets aren't getting bigger, and the timelinees, oh yeah, still tight With all the best creative AI models in one place, Firefly brings your ideas to life. Unlock a better way to make with Adobe Firefly. This is Hidden brain. I'm Shankarvee Danta Cornell University, David Pizaro studies the science of disgust He returns to the show today for our recurring segment, Your Questions Answered What we find disgusting can be shaped by where we live It's also shaped by the moment in which we live We received an email about that from listener Mary, who writes People used to use the same toothpicks and pass it around the table after eating in the eighteen hundreds or just dumping waste right into the streets back in the Middle Ages Is our disgust ever evolving What do you think of Mary's question, David Mary makes a very good point, which is it's important to understand that social context influences all of our emotions and disgust is included in that. There are customs there are ways of behaving that in one time and place might seem very disgusting in another one don't. Sometimes that's out of sheer necessity. We didn't always have the ability to have very clean bathrooms that we could use every day. And so as you mentioned earlier, we might burn out if we had to consistently feel disgusted for just something that was a part of life context, social context does shape everything, and it's easy to lose sight of that when we talk about an emotion that seems so strong and to have such a strong evolutionary basis for it We often point to the similarities and how strong some of these disgsed elicitors are across cultures But the reality is What you find disgusting and what I find disgusting is going to be some sort of a result of our bringing our culture, our personal habits, and our individual sensitivity to disgusting things. Hm Is it possible David that You think we're living in a particularly disgusted, sensitive time right now I suspect that we are. I don't have any direct data on whether or not people have been getting more disgust sensitive and I'm certain this would vary across the world in the United States in this time and place, it's very easy go around not feeling disgusted because There are so many efforts made for cleanliness. There are billions and billions of dollars spent on cleaning products do not want to see disgusting things in our homes We get rid of them easily. I think it's easier than ever to live an antiseptic life We talked in our earlier discussion about how disgust has often been used to tarnish women in public life and in politics Remind me of some of that history, David The rhetoric of disgust is one of those very ugly pieces of human history, but it's strong. And so what you see very clearly is that certain groups are often tagged with the emotion of disgust. usually by pointing out something um, about them that perceived to be disgusting or people are trying to persuade others that they're disgusting. And so you get comments about Hillary going to the bathroom or menstruating. That's always been something that in the hands of men is low hanging fruit to try to to make women seem inferior In fact, if you look at some of the earliest codes. that we have from old civilizations A menstrating woman is a woman who had to be separated from the camp. In particular, women's dirt, women's bodily fluid disgusting aspects of one gender have been used against them in a very powerful way . Listener, Alan had a very interesting question about the relationship between disgust and gender stereotypes Once when I was a boy, I saw a group of other boys playing with a snail They dared me to touch it, but I refused because I was grossed out So they jeered me with statements like, what are you a girl? Even as an adult, I noticice people connecting the concept of masculinity with the bravery to withstand disgust, like eating raw meat or mud wrestling, or even the movie cliche of a man on a date placing his coat on a puddle so his girlfriend can cross without getting dirty On the other hand Masculinity is politically associated with conservatism which itself is associated with strong aversion to disgusting things. How would you explain this, paradox? I love this question, David. What do you think Oh, that is a really good question for Malan. I definitely agree about the masculinity. I don't know if this is a cultural universal, but it certainly is part of my experience. There was constant testing of the boundaries of how much you could deal with disgusting things. And it wasn't just discussed, at least in my experience, it was any sort of negative emotion as a man, you were supposed to be able to deal with it. So I remember tests of pain, you know you brought your friend in and you did something to them, see how long they could last before they complained. And if it was too fast, then they were you know, whses or whatever gendered insults you could bring very much think that that is the case. I also think that ironically women in their life end up having to deal with a lot more disgusting things than men ever do. so this is believe largely performance on the part of men As for the conservative liberal finding I don't know what to make of this because this is not a gendered finding either. This is both men and women who report being more politically conservative report being more discuss sensitive. So You know, there are always multiple factors that are going to influence Um, how much disgust any given person feels and There's going to be something like culture, the individual difference, the male, female stereotypes and many other things. We received an email from listener Martin, who's interested in knowing more about the intersection between disgust and religious practices Martin rights There was no mention at all of such concepts as original sin and its cleansing through baptism holy communion and other rightites, nor was any mention made of dietary laws and unclean foods, animals or objects in Judaism and Islam. Are these concepts based on disgust So David, I know that you're not a scholar of religion, but what do you make of the role that disgust may play in religious practices and beliefs Well, I love this question, Martin because I have been increasingly interested in this aspect of Not just disgust, but I would say purity more broadly. In fact, I'm teaching a seminar on this topic and we've read a lot of literature from religious scholars and clinical psychologists, and there does seem to be this overlap me in, uh religious practices in some religions and cleanliness and purity Sometimes it's metaphorical, like cleansing your soul through confession Sometimes it's absolutely physical. You must do ablutions before prayer And I think that It runs deep in our religions I think that there is a power to purity and to being pure that has sort of metaphorically become associated with being a good person, being closer to God. And so absolutely, there is a link. And I think purity is deeper than disgusted So one of the questions Martin asks is are these rituals driven by disgust, and they don't need to be You don't need to be disgusted to wash your feet, you know or do ablutions or get baptized. But I believe that it is the same underlying mechanism that we all share, which is keeping clean helps keep us disease free. When we come back, listeners share their techniques for quieting disgust. You're listening to hidden bra Im San Carvey Dan Toast Unforgettable backackyard Barbecues with savings from Whole Foods Market. Get the good times going with made in house chicken or pork sausages and ready to cook kebabs for hassle free flavor. Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries and peaches at their peak And stock up on bug sprays and suncare must haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market Adobe Firefly is the all in one creative studio with AI powered image and video editing for today's creative process. built for creators of every kind Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast becausecause the asks aren't getting smaller The budgets aren't getting bigger, and the timelines, o yeah, still tight With all the best creative AI models in one place, Firefly brings your ideas to life. Unlock a better way to make with Adobe Firefly This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankarveved Danta By its very nature, disgust seems like one of the hardest emotions to control Our response to things that gross us out can be visceral But as we've discussed, what we find disgusting can vary from person to person and also across time and culture If we want to confront our own feelings of disgust, Where should we start Today, we're hearing listener suggestions and talking with psychologist David Pizaro at Cornell University He studies the science of disgust David, I'd like to start this conversation with a message we received from a listener named John. He's a minister in North Carolina And he had an interesting perspective on disgust. As a young pastor, part of my clinical training was to work as a chaplain at Allentown State Medal Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania Many of the situations I had to deal with in that setting evoked or Revulsion or discussed I had to learn to face those feelings and get them under control. Otherwise, they would dominate the interaction and I would have been powerless to help the patient It's always seemed to me that there are three ways of dealing with strong primitive emotions One is to conceal them. to simply hide our feelings from others without dealing with them at all. This leaves the emotions driving the bus We're just hiding it and we're not being honest about it with ourselves. The other is to control sort of like the Vunklins in Star Trek to manhandle the emotions and try not to let them direct our actions The best is to confront Honestly face the primitive emotions cknowledging them to ourselves and sometimes to others. also to understand them and set them aside realizing that they do not represent reality but simply an unhelpful emotional response David, I hadn't thought of this before, but if you're a pastor or a counsellor who is trying to help others You have to be able to listen to things that people do with compassion and not turn away in disgust. That's absolutely right. And I think John is making such an important point about How we deal with other humans that might be disgusting to us And it sounds like John is taking a very compassionate approach. do not think that it is always the case that these emotions are not in touch with reality. know We've made the case that Disgust is important, it's functional and sometimes it gives you a signal that you should avoid something But we have other goals. And if one of your goals is to show compassion and mercy to somebody some of the people who are worst off in society people who might not have the ability bathe regularly or who might be carrying disease It is one of the ultimate signs of, I think, compassion to be able Go about your business without letting that bother you because From the perspective of the person, they know that others are disgusted by them just to feel that somebody isn't showing disgust toward them, I think is an act of true kindness. And there are many stories of religious figures including Mother Tereresa who would purposefully make a show of handandling, touching, hugging kissing who would otherwise be viewed as so disgusting by others as a way to show that compassion can override that disgust I'm wondering if we're doing work that is mission driven or something we are deeply passionate about Are we less likely to experience disgust? I mean, we heard from a number of doctors and nurses, for example, who feel that they have a much higher threshold for dealing with disease and injuries that others might find disgusting Yes, I think that there are two things going on there. One is that people who might not be as easily disgusted go into those kinds of jobs. But that's not the whole story. There is research showing that first year of medical school pre and post or right when you get into medical school, your disgs sensitivity levels are pretty much the same as everybody else's. But after that year of having to do things like dissect cadavers, you adapt and you adapt specifically to human bodies and the kinds of things that you need to deal with as a medical doctor or other medical professional every day But I do think that you're pointing Shanker to something deeper that intersects with John's question, which is we talked about love and lust over wriding discuss. And it's easy when it's your child, you know, to be less grossed out by their diaper. It's easy when it's somebody that you're sexually attracted to But when it's somebody who is the worst of the worst in society Can you? allowed passassion. override the reflexive disgust that others feel. And I think this is just the part of discipline that might come from dedicating your life to that sort of thing We've talked on Hidden Brain in the past about the concept of aw and the many benefits it can have for our mental health and outlook Listener Catherine wrote a talk about how she uses beauty to help her grapple with things that she finds disgusting I've struggled with discussed sensitivity all of my life and believe it played an important role in a serious eating disorder I developed when I was twelve and a half In addition to using medication and therapy and other medical treatments, I've learned to use beauty and awe as a way to manage my disgust When I feel disgusted and I'm triggered, I think back on something I found beautiful. A flower, a waterfall I'm curious if there's any evidence for this approach. And if you have recommendations on other sort of daily habits or mindsets those of us who struggle can use, So discuss affects us less. And our reactions don't hurt the people around us. What do you think of Katherine's strategy and do you have any suggestions, David I think it's a wonderful strategy and it's quite inspiring actually to hear Catherine describe it that way. And I believe that Th those kinds of strategies are available to us all. She asked for some specifics There is a strategy of what's called attentional deployment. So just simply shifting your attention from one thing to another Um so that you're not paying attention to the thing that you find disgusting. I think more More effective is reappraisal. so appraising something as different, not thinking about it as the disgusting thing, but rather maybe as having beauty in it, focusing on that You know, the low level form of this is When you're a kid and you're watching a gross movie, convince yourself that it's ketchup and not blood. You're sort of reappraising at a low level so that you don't feel disgusted. That's a bit harder when you know the reality of the situation. In fact, interestingly, it's harder for odors than it is for vision. It's hard. But we have a lot of these kinds of strategies