Ouch! That Feels Great

We generally think of pain as something to be avoided. But psychologist Paul Bloom says that as much as we're wired to avoid suffering, we also seek it out. This week, we begin a two-part mini series about the curious pleasure we take in certain forms of pain.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Hey there, Shankar here. I'm crisscrossing the country for a series of live shows this summer. I'll be sharing seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain. These ideas have made my life better. I think they'll do the same for you. Stops on what I'm calling the perceptions tour include Clearwater and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, Portland and Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago, Austin and Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Phoenix, and more. To see if I'm coming to a city near you, please visit hiddenbrain.org/tour. If you've heard my voice for years, it's going to be fun to come see me in person.

• 0:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Again, that's hiddenbrain.org/tour. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some years ago, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard put people in an empty room. They gave the volunteers a simple task: sit quietly for a few minutes without distractions. No phone, no books, nothing to do but think. Before the session, the study participants were also given a device. It could deliver a mild electric shock. Using it was not necessary, it was completely optional. The results were, well, shocking.

• 1:24Shankar Vedantam?

  The majority of men and a quarter of the women chose to shock themselves rather than sit in silence. This held true even after they rated the shock as painful. We are led to believe in everything we hear and read that suffering is unpleasant, something to be avoided. Every ounce of common sense tells us we should avoid something as unpleasant as an electric shock. So what would compel people to voluntarily hurt themselves? Today, we begin a two-part mini-series about the upside of discomfort and the curious pleasure human beings take in seeking out some forms of suffering.

• 2:09Shankar Vedantam?

  When pain becomes pleasure, this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:33Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:59Shankar Vedantam?

  The year was 1974. Chinatown and Blazing Saddles were in movie theaters around the country. Queen and David Bowie on the radio. James was a high school senior in Toledo, Ohio. He requested that we not use his full name.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  I was one of those 18-year-old, impulsive, adrenaline-filled guys who just loved being social, ran track, but also was on the high school newspaper and lots of good, close friends, but just kind of one of these bouncing-off-the-wall kind of guys.

• 4:36Shankar Vedantam?

  There was an unusual fad making its way across the United States at the time. Streaking.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Streaking was basically people would run without any clothes through populated areas with just tennis shoes on typically. And it was sporting events. There was even a song called "They Call Me The Streak." It was a country song and it was like a number one song.

• 5:06Shankar Vedantam?

  The song was catchy. James couldn't get it out of his head. Inspired by the growing trend, the 18-year-old gathered up a few friends. Together, they came up with a plan.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  I think a couple of the guys at my church, I think we talked to them initially. And then I think we had another guy from another another high school, actually, I remember. And then a third guy was from my school. So I think we started just talking about it. And, you know, the small group gathered and we said, "Let's do this." And so we're going to go to this local mall, very large mall in Toledo, and just run through the center part of the mall, which is a very big area. So the center part of the mall, we were going to enter at one specific entrance and exit at another exit. So we knew where the getaway car needed to be, where he needed to drop us off and where he needed to pick us up.

• 5:55Shankar Vedantam?

  James and his friends planned the whole thing like a bank robbery. But as their excitement grew, they let their plan slip out. Very quickly, word got around. On the big day, James and his friends bundled into the car with a getaway driver.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  And we arrived at the mall. And we all went in with fully clothed just to case the joint. When we came into the mall, it was extremely busy, crowded. We actually recognized some people from our school, from our church. And we noticed a lot of security guards.

• 6:32Shankar Vedantam?

  So when you walk through the mall initially and you see people whom you know and you see people from your church and you see people who are security guards, did a thought cross your mind that perhaps this was not the best idea?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  You'd think. You would think that would happen. But no, it did not. I think it was more of a challenge. Okay, let's do this. We've got an audience here. You know, let's hit this.

• 7:06Shankar Vedantam?

  James and his four fellow streakers had what they felt was a foolproof plan to protect their anonymity. They would wear masks.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  We definitely wanted to cover our faces. So we come out of the mall, get into the car. We get into our sneakers and our masks. That was it. And we go in and the entrance was kind of like a, like a fire exit, I believe. So we got in that way. I don't, can't remember how we actually got into that door. And we were going down this long hallway. And I remember thinking, this hallway is really long. We really want to just get this done.

• 7:40Shankar Vedantam?

  At this point, you are all completely naked.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. You get sneakers and the masks. And we got up to the double doors. I still remember this, the double doors that has the push bar on it. And we all kind of looked at each other and said, okay, one, two, three. And we just burst out, just burst out those doors into the crowd, running pell mell into the crowd.

• 8:04Shankar Vedantam?

  The next moments were sheer adrenaline and pandemonium.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Total panic. Just wanting to get out of there as fast as I can. And I know, I knew which direction that we had to run because we, we had walked through it earlier. And so we're running very fast and security guards are trying to get through the crowd. So having a large crowd actually helped us keep the security guards away. But there was one point where I was running and a security guard was coming toward me and I had to use a couple of innocent bystanders as kind of a basketball pick. So they kind of caught the security guard and I was able to run around and, and keep going. And I have no idea of those poor people. I just don't know what happened. But that, that actually saved me. And I was able to keep going and get out of there as fast as we could.

• 8:54Shankar Vedantam?

  But in any group of antelopes being chased by lions, there is always the slow one who gets caught. The guards captured one of the naked runners.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  I still remember the one gentleman who got tackled and caught was yelling at us. And I remember he kept saying, "Come back here, come back and help me." And we were like, "Uh, sorry, sorry, our friend, we're out of here." He was marched back through the crowd to the security office, which was up some stairs. So he was kind of the quintessential walk of shame. Totally naked, I mean, just sneakers, his mask. I think he actually had his mask, they took his mask off by then, too. So everyone knew who he was.

• 9:44Shankar Vedantam?

  What was your feeling as you were running through the mall, James? Was it a sense of just panic, embarrassment? What was going through your head?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  I think just more panic and just focused on the goal of getting out of there. You know, just wanting to not get caught. I mean, that was it, don't get caught, get out of there. Try to find your way as best you can. That was really it. I wasn't thinking about any repercussions or consequences, of course. Just, just pure adrenaline, you know, go, go, go, don't get caught, don't get tackled, etc.

• 10:20Shankar Vedantam?

  And so the three of you now who are remaining sort of burst through the mall doors on the other side, was the getaway car waiting for you?

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Yes, exact, thank goodness. There he was, and we just, we literally dove into the backseat and just told him to hit it. And what I, what I remember is he then ended up taking us back to our own homes while we were getting dressed in the car. So our clothes were still in the car. So we're getting our clothes on in the car and just, you know.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  You know, yakking, you know, high adrenaline, just, you know, very verbal with each other. Can't believe we did this. Oh, my gosh, I can't, you know, did you see how many people were in there? And so and so, he got tackled and all, you know, and just go and just, you know, that kind of vibe in the car.

• 11:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Were there any consequences that came from this?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I guess we could say that. So, um, when I got home, you know, I was pretty, adrenaline was up and just kind of thinking, wow, what have I done? But that was crazy, is interesting. And went to bed. And the next day, um, I was in the kitchen, you know, I was getting ready for school and my mother came into the room and she was very angry. Um, because I thought I'd kind of gotten away with this, that my parents wouldn't know about it. Well, she had gotten a call from one of her, from the women that she went to church with, who had actually had been there the night before and witnessed this, uh, witnessed everyone running through, including me. So she, yeah, she saw, saw me, all of me.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  And my mom just could not believe it.

• 11:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Let me take you back for a second. You said you were wearing a mask. So how did anyone spot you?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  I think several of the other guys had gotten the word out a little bit. So that's why I think we had a lot of people there who knew us, including this woman. Because I think her daughter went to one of the high schools and I think the daughter heard it. So she passed it on to this woman from the church. And somehow identified me. I think she, it's a good question. How she identified me. She probably knew how tall I was. Let's put it that way. We'll leave it at that.

• 12:36Shankar Vedantam?

  And did you try and deny it when your mom brought it up at the, at the table?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  No, she obviously had a, a witness, an impeccable witness. And, you know, so, yeah, I just, I had to, I had to admit it. And I said, I apologized profusely and I don't remember any consequences necessarily. I don't know if I was grounded or anything like that, but, um, yeah.

• 12:58Shankar Vedantam?

  What happened when you got to school? Because, of course, if word of this had gotten out and lots of people actually had gone to the mall, essentially not to go to the mall, but to basically see this, see the spectacle, they must have known that it was you who was running through the mall. What did your friends think?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there was some buzz in high school, if I do remember it afterwards. And, you know, I got a couple of high fives and maybe a couple of "you're an idiot." You know, it was a mix of that kind of thing. So, yeah, the word had gotten out a little bit in the school.

• 13:27Shankar Vedantam?

  When you look back on the incident now, James, do you look back at it fondly? Do you look back at it with regret? Do you look back at it with embarrassment?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Maybe a little bit of both, all of those. I think it was, again, the mindset of the 18-year-old at the time who wanted just to take a chance. Maybe it's just the allure of, "I gotta try this. It's way out of my comfort zone. It's unknowable, actually." Until it's a testing, you know, of oneself to see if this really could get away with it. If, you know, how would that feel?

• 14:07Speaker 03

  You know, all those kinds of things went into this as well. And probably, I don't know, I won't speak for everybody, but probably not thinking less of consequences and more of, "What's this experience going to be like? What could this possibly be like?"

• 14:26Shankar Vedantam?

  What compels us to do embarrassing things, like run naked through a crowded mall of people we know? And what does streaking have in common with horror movies, spicy food, and mild electric shocks? The answer's when we come back.

• 14:44Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:06Speaker 04

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• 16:39Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We generally think of pain and suffering as something to be avoided. See a sharp thorn on a bush? Don't touch it. Scary movie on TV? Change the channel. A menu item with five peppers in front of it? No, thank you.

• 16:59Shankar Vedantam?

  At the University of Toronto, psychologist Paul Bloom says that as much as we are wired to avoid these experiences, we may also be wired to seek them out. Paul Bloom, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  It's great to be here, Shangar. Looking forward to talking.

• 17:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Paul, we just heard from a man named James, who against all better judgment, decided to run naked through a mall with his buddies when he was in high school. Now, I'm assuming you've never gone streaking yourself, but you have engaged sometimes in doing things that were unpleasant. Like what, Paul?

• 17:31Speaker 06

  I have, and I bet you have too. I eat spicy food. I eat food so hot, it makes me sweat and makes me uncomfortable. I go on social media. I think, this is going to make me upset. I read it. It makes me upset, but I do it. And then I do it over and over again. I watch movies that frighten me. I look at things that repel me. Even in little examples. Like a lot of people, I don't like the feeling of velvet. It just makes me, it's a scrunch up. If people could see me, they'd see me. I'm a little scrunch. And yet, when I see velvet furniture, I can't resist running my hand over it. I go, oh, man. Well, my wife looks at me and laughs. And so I find this fascinating.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  You know, the very simple story of human nature is that we seek out pleasure and avoid pain. And I'm interested in counterexamples, where we sometimes avoid pleasure and seek out pain.

• 18:33Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, some time ago, one of my friends was growing some peppers in their backyard. And it turned out these were called ghost peppers. These are one of the spiciest peppers that have ever been grown on the planet. And I just couldn't resist, you know, cooking something with it and trying it out. And in fact, just cooking it was so difficult and so unpleasant because I was in these intense coughing spasms. You know, I could barely breathe. It was so spicy. And yet, there was a part of me that said, I have to try this.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  We're drawn to that sort of thing. So there are limits. Some people won't go near spicy foods. Even somebody like you who will try ghost peppers, you probably have a limit into what you'll try. So we like some degree of control. And I think the control is really important to keep in mind when we talk about these things. We like to know what we're doing. But with this control in place, we then seek out experiences that push us to the limits. They they they push our our our tolerance for pain, as in the the Ghost Fever. They they push our tolerance for embarrassment and shame, as in your streaker. And in some cases, they they they push us in moral directions to to doing doing things that that that trouble us morally. They push us with regard to sort of psychological pain.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  You you you listen to a song, like I listen to Adele, Love Adele, uh, but but it makes me sad. And, you know, if I'm if I'm sad anyway, you get to tear up a little bit. So so it's such a neat puzzle, why we do these things.

• 20:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So when you start to look, you see versions of this phenomenon everywhere. You know, traffic slows down when there's a car crash because people want to rubberneck and get a glimpse of something awful. Here's a clip of the mixed martial arts fighter Carrie Steller interviewing another MMA fighter, Josh Rosenblatt.

• 20:17Speaker 07

  It definitely takes a special kind of human being to punch people in the face and to enjoy being punched in the face. Because at the end of the day, not that you like love it, but I mean, there has to be some kind of enjoyment factor out of it to be able to get there, get in there. I mean, if you take a beating, you take a beating.

• 20:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, you got to kind of like it. You have to kind of like getting punched in the face.

• 20:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you think he's exaggerating when he says you have to kind of like getting punched in the face, Paul?

• 20:41Speaker 06

  I don't. I I think I think it's complicated. So he'd be a very, very bad MMA fighter if he liked if he liked it too much. He presumably, he really should get in the habit of liking punching other people in the face. But um, but but there's something to it. I I I read a passage which he in another interview where he talks about, you know, when you start off, getting punched in the face is the worst thing.

• 21:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Yes.

• 21:05Speaker 06

  And then you sort of start to feed off of it. And um, and here's one thing which which is really important, which which, you know, this interview you just played really illustrates, which is for a lot of these things, I think for just about all of the suffering that I'm interested, we're going to talk about, it has to be voluntary.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  I don't doubt that when he's in the ring and gets hit in the face, he says, "This is the real thing. This is what I'm here for." And it fuels him. But if he's standing in line at the movies and somebody runs up to him and pops him in the face, there's nothing like that at all. You know, if you're cooking the ghost peppers and you're eating, you're tearing up, you're sweating and everything, but you put that in there, that's one thing. And that's a source of pleasure and challenge and anticipation. On the other hand, if you, you know, wanted to sit down for your morning oatmeal and somebody stuck some ghost peppers in there as a joke, you're not going to be very happy. I've written about this and I've talked about this. And some people say, and people get angry and they say, "Look, I live a life of chronic pain or this terrible thing happened.

• 22:09Speaker 06

  Who are you to tell me this is fantastic?" And my answer is, I'm not telling you it's fantastic. If you don't choose it, suffering that's unchosen is typically terrible. We're interested now in the chosen stuff.

• 22:26Shankar Vedantam?

  So on the surface, these different things might seem like they have nothing in common with each other, you know, streaking or touching a velvet sofa, doom scrolling, rubber necking, getting punched in the face. But you say they all illustrate the idea of benign masochism. We've talked about this on the show before when we featured the great psychologist Paul Rosin. But can you explain what benign masochism is, Paul?

• 22:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this term comes from Paul, and he was a brilliant psychologist. And benign masochism is when we seek out pain and suffering in limited controlled extents. So Rosin is not talking about people who seriously damaged their body or set themselves on fire. He's talking about everyday stuff. So he gives examples of spicy foods, really hot baths, so hot you're just kind of cringing as you get in. You know, saunas, cold baths, various things like that, exertion, running until you could barely run anymore. Your heart's pounding out of your chest, you're breathing in gasps. That's benign masochism. Seeking low levels of pain

• 23:32Speaker 06

  in ways that don't damage your body permanently, but ways that shake you up. And Rosin is interested, and so am I, in why we do this and what it tells us about human motivation.

• 23:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So I want to understand how our brains are wired to seek out things like this. And to answer that question, you say we might first have to look at why we might be wired to seek out unpleasant experiences. You once knew a grad student who told you about an unusual game that people play in Mexico City. It's called tokes. What is tokes for?

• 24:03Speaker 06

  So tokes, he wrote to me and told me about, is people go out and they're partying, they're with their friends, they're with their family, and these are these tubes. And you put your hands in the tubes and you get an electric shock. And I gather you could turn a dial to determine what kind of electric shocks you get. And people compete into how much they could take it. And this, to me, is a super interesting case of benign masochism. It has some features that not all benign masochism has. It's public, it's social, it's fun. And I think in this case, not all cases, but in this case, we see the social effects of benign masochism in different ways. So one way is it's a way to show off.

• 24:45Speaker 06

  You know, my son, I talk about my son Zachary when he was a teenager, and he would have, he'd get together with his friends and they'd be arguing, he'd be trying to stick wasabi up their nose and see who can get the most wasabi there. They'd have slapping competitions. They would, as a way to sort of, in a friendly, social way, see who's the toughest, who can take the most. But another thing which is super interesting is that sometimes when you and I experience a painful event together, we're both in a sauna together, we both dive into the ice cold water, we both zap ourselves, it brings us together. And there's actually a lot of studies suggesting, doing this in a laboratory, looking at it

• 25:27Speaker 06

  out in the world, that shared pain, more than shared pleasure, shared pain brings people together.

• 25:40Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm thinking about a time when a friend and I went, you know, swimming in the ocean in New England and it was still winter and the water was very, very, very cold. I could barely stand there and it was so painful. But yet I remember that so vividly now as you're talking, Paul, because the memory of standing there with my friend was, in fact, a bonding moment.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  I tell the story in my book of this friend of mine who was hiking in England with a friend and they got lost. And they got lost and it was getting dark and they were cold and they didn't have any food. They didn't have any water. They were getting really worried. And then they ended up popping right in the middle of a small town, of a pub. And like an hour later, sitting outside in a pub, they're drinking beer, eating fish and chips, they're laughing. And this is an experience. She told me this. This happened like 20 years ago. She told me this. Man, that was a great experience. Well, if they just had a normal afternoon, had a lot of fun, saw some sights, and then went to the pub, it wouldn't have this force. Shared suffering just really connects us.

• 26:40Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if this might also be connected to the story that James told us about streaking through the mall. Not only was he doing it for, you know, the edification, I suppose, of the people in the mall, but he was doing this with four other buddies. They were running through the mall together. This was a bonding experience for them.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  I think streaking alone is probably no fun at all. You want to streak with your buddies. And this sort of thing shows up in other ways. It shows up in religious rituals. So my friend, Dimitri Igoladis, talks about, studies rituals that involve pain. He talks about this Hindu festival they have in Mauritius where people walk over hot coals and they have skewers plunged through their cheek and their tongues. They have hooks dug into their body and then the hooks are attached to chariots. And the men will spend hours in the afternoon dragging these chariots up to the top of a hill. And this all sounds, it sounds, you know, barely, somebody like me could barely listen to it. But it has

• 27:41Speaker 06

  all of these effects. It brings people together. For the young men who do it, it increases their standing in the community. It increases how attractive they are to the women. And he has done research finding that if you watch this with a community, you see people suffer for your religion, for your community. You become more willing to give money to the community. You care more about it. It brings people together.

• 28:08Shankar Vedantam?

  We had Dimitris on Hidden Brains some months ago. And I remember him telling me toward the end of our conversation that at one point, I don't think this was in the Mauritius. I think it was in another location. But he had spent a lot of time in this place and gotten to know the people. And they also had a fire walking ritual. And on the big night, you know, someone turned to him and basically said, okay, it's now your turn. And he had to actually walk across these skulls. And of course, there was a voice inside him that said, you know, this is not a smart thing for, you know, an anthropologist to be doing. But there was also all of this social pressure around them. And he says that once he did it, it transformed the way he felt and his connections with the people around him.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the difference between an anthropologist and a psychologist. I'll sit in my office and I'll read about it. And I think I'm very brave for reading this heavy duty stuff. Dimitri goes and he does it.

• 29:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So one reason to do painful or embarrassing things is they make us look tough or they connect us to others. Another reason might have to do with the idea of contrast. Tell me about your experience shoveling snow as a child in Quebec.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  Oh, this is a, it's this fond childhood memory. And it's actually very simple. I bet everybody listening has done something like this. But I'd go out and we would get snow. I'll tell you the stories, really. And I'd shovel the walk and I'd shovel the driveway. And I'd get nice and cold. And then I'd come in and my mom would make me some hot cocoa. And she'd make me a bath and sit in the bath. And I would be so happy. And there's a logic to this, which is that sometimes we suffer. And this might sound really strange, but sometimes we suffer because the end of suffering, the contrast where we get out of the cold and into the bath, it feels so good.

• 29:56Speaker 06

  It's this dumb joke my father, dumb joke he tells about the guy who's banging his head against the lamppost. And when asked why he does it, he says, it feels so good when I stop. And I'm glad, I'm glad you like it, or you're being nice and pretending to like it. You shouldn't humor my father of these dumb jokes, but, but, um, but in some way, I think we often seek out unpleasantness because the release from unpleasantness feels so good. There's nothing like a hot bath after you, a hot shower after you've been hiking or, or, or camping for three days. There, there's nothing like jumping into the cool Finnish lake after you've been roasting in a hot sauna. And so some of it is contrast.

• 30:34Speaker 06

  And there's laboratory studies finding that, um, that you could feel a neutral experience, something which normally be neutral, feels good if it was preceded by a painful experience. That, that our, our minds work on contrast. Everything we experience is sort of relative. Whether or not a bath, water feels hot or cold depends on how it felt before. And so too for pain and pleasure.

• 31:02Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I've sometimes heard people who go to a chiropractor or a massage therapist who subjects them to really intense pain. Uh, but when you talk to them afterwards, they'll tell you that the experience may have been painful, but afterwards they felt bliss. I mean, that's the same contrast theory here.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right. And, and a lot of, now, you have to be willing to go through the pain and you have to in some way do the math. And I think we do this unconsciously, figure is the pain worth the relief at the end?

• 31:31Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, my daughter recently started, uh, her freshman year at college and right before, uh, the term started, they went on this, uh, hiking trip, uh, which was really in, in fairly, you know, primitive circumstances. There were, there were very few showers. They were sleeping outdoors. It was uncomfortable. And they spent three days and of course they went through this period of suffering. They bonded with each other tremendously, but then they show up back on campus now as soon as the semester starts and they're moving into their dorms, which are really, you know, not that great. But compared to what they had just dealt with the previous three days, the dorms felt like the four seasons. And so they all move in and they say, my God, these dorms are the best things ever. And I thought this was kind of genius on the part of the school to basically put the kids

• 32:13Shankar Vedantam?

  through a period of suffering before introducing them to, you know, campus housing.

• 32:18Speaker 06

  It is, it is fairly clever. It is fairly, you, you probably, the cafeteria food tastes better too, if you were, were living off the food you had to kill in the woods or something.

• 32:30Shankar Vedantam?

  There's a study related to this idea that looked at how people spend their time over the course of a month, often trying to balance out their feelings, depending on whether they're feeling good or feeling bad. Can you talk about this work that's been done?

• 32:43Speaker 06

  It's very interesting research. They did it with tens of thousands of people and use a smartphone app to record people's activities and how happy they were when they were doing these things. And what they found was that people tended to work on a principle of hedonic balance, which is that, once they did something that was fun, they would then do something that was less fun. They would then choose, well, now's the time to, you know, clean the bathroom or, you know, work on my taxes. And when they did something unpleasant, they would then, that would be the time to go, you know, to go for a nice walk or, you know, have a whiskey, watch a fun TV show or something like that. They would hold their life in balance. And I think this sort of hedonic contrast is really interesting.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  It says, it says that we often seek out these contrasting experiences. It might be that after, that after a difficult experience, you know, a pleasurable experience is all the more pleasurable. And that might push them in that direction.

• 33:42Shankar Vedantam?

  But isn't it interesting, Paul, that it's not just that we do something difficult and then we, you know, seek a reward or we seek a treat? But sometimes, if we've had a lot of treats and a lot of rewards, we actually might be interested in saying, okay, let me try my hand at doing something difficult. So the scales balance in both directions.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  I think so. And I think there's a few different things going on here. One is what psychologists call hedonic treadmill, which is after a while, having a good time, you get bored of it. You, you know, you habituate is the term we use. And so you need to switch off and do something else. Now, one thing you could do is find a different pleasurable activity that scratches a different itch. But it might be time then to recognize, I'm getting diminishing returns from my pleasurable experiences. There are taxes to be done. Now's the time to do them.

• 34:34Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how we sometimes seek out unpleasant things in order to punish ourselves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 34:59Speaker 04

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• 37:02Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 37:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Psychologist Paul Bloom is the author of The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He says there are many reasons we seek out perverse pleasures. We seek attention. We wish to experience the contrast between pain and pleasure. And sometimes, we just like the challenge of it.

• 37:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Paul, you told me about your son Zachary when he was a teenager, but when he was four years old, he was watching a cartoon one day, and it had a violent chase scene in it. How did he respond to this?

• 37:36Speaker 06

  So he began, and I should tell you, I have his consent to use these stories. He's in his 20s now, and he's still-- he rolls his eyes a bit, but I could tell these stories. There was different cartoon characters chasing each other, the sort of thing you and I would watch and be fine. But he was a kid. And he got scared. He started to cry a little bit, shake a little bit, getting really upset. And I said, "Hey Zach, don't worry, man. I'll turn it off." So I reached to shut it off. And he yells at me, saying, "Don't turn it off. Leave it on." And then he stares at me. He's kind of crying and being upset. And I think there's something very human in that, where, you know, if you and I were watching a horror movie together, or a thriller, and we're just like, "Oh, this is extremely-- heart pounding, very stressful." And then someone said, "Oh, don't worry, guys. I'm gonna shut it off."

• 38:21Shankar Vedantam?

  What are you doing?

• 38:24Speaker 06

  "Why are you doing that? What are you doing? We're enjoying this. And maybe we paid to see it." And that's a sort of paradox. Why are experiences that are normally negative, like being afraid, become pleasurable in the context of fiction? You know, if you're sitting in your house alone, and it's the middle of the night, and you think you're alone, and all of a sudden, you hear footsteps, that'd be the worst thing you could imagine. Your heart would be pounding out of your chest. And that would not be fun. But you'll watch a movie where that happens to another character, and maybe your heart's pounding a bit anyway. But this is fantastic. This is great. What's gonna happen next? And I think fiction is an extremely clever invention.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  There's a lot of reasons why we like stories. But one of the reasons, which is what we're zooming in now, it connects to our theme, is that it offers us tension and fear, but it's entirely safe.

• 39:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if there's also an element of predictability about it. There are some forms of fiction and some, you know, movies that have sequels to them that in fact are very predictable. If you watch the Die Hard movie sequence, for example, what happens in Die Hard and Die Hard 2 and Die Hard 3, fundamentally, the plot is not changing. What does that do for us as we are watching things that are very dramatic and perhaps even stressful or thrilling? But we kind of know where it's all going to end up.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  That's right. And, you know, you've had kids. You know, one of the agonies of having kids is, you know, reading Go Dog Go for the 10,000th time. Because at first, kids are, you know, sensitive creatures. And at first, they hear a story and it's often going to be too tense for them to sort of cope with. So they say, read it again, read it again, read it again. Tell me the part again. And there's a tremendous safety. They know what's gonna happen. And the bad parts of the excitement fade away and the good parts are intact.

• 40:26Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, it's almost, as you're describing this, it's almost like a form of, you know, exposure therapy. I mean, kids are not quite psychiatrists, but that's kind of what they're doing, right? When they're basically saying, expose me to this scary thing over and over and over again. And after some time, it starts to just become a thing I can enjoy rather than something that terrifies me.

• 40:47Speaker 06

  You know, I never thought of it that way, but I think that's a, that's a deep point. I've, I've always been interested in the idea that, for adults at least, our, our love of fiction is motivated by a desire to experience worst-case scenarios. Which is why we don't just appreciate happy fiction, we, we appreciate fiction where everything goes to hell. Zombie movies and war movies and movies of relationships that, that end up, you know, in, in pieces. And you wonder why, why don't we just watch happy things? And one answer is, because we wanna prepare ourselves for bad things. And one way to do so is to, is to go over it in our head as a sort of simulation. Just like you might use a flight simulator to simulate what's gonna happen if you're flying

• 41:30Speaker 06

  and, and you know, one of your engines fails. The idea of that exposure could be part of this process is a good one. Maybe there are things in your life which you're gonna experience sooner or later, and fiction toughens you up. It gives you a little taste of what it is, so that when it really happens, you're in a better position to deal with it.

• 41:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you think the same thing is at work when it comes to the fantasies we have? Many of us, of course, have pleasurable and pleasant fantasies, but lots of us also report having, you know, unpleasant fantasies. Now, when it comes to a fantasy, you know, we're the scriptwriter, we're the director, it's a movie that we're making in our own heads. Why do you think we come up with fantasies that are unpleasant or scary?

• 42:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's exactly, is exactly the same sort of process. So you might be going for a walk, and instead of filling your head with happy thoughts or fantasies about awards and great riches and true love, you say, yeah, what if my wife left me? What if I got fired? What if something happened to my kids? There are studies where it sample what people think about day to day. So you're walking around and, and a beeper goes off on your phone. You write down what you're thinking about. And to a surprising extent, over half the time, when you're free to think about anything you want in the world, people's minds go negative. And we think about bad things. And I think that this in some way makes our life less pleasurable, but it makes adaptive sense.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  There's no, there's no value in you imagining what you're gonna do if you win a great prize. Because, you know, you stand to stand up and accept a great prize. That's not, good things typically are really easy to deal with. But what happens if, if your relationship is destroyed? If, if, you know, your, your, your government falls apart? If people attack you? That's the sort of thing where it really pays to think about, even if it makes our life quite a bit less pleasant.

• 43:29Shankar Vedantam?

  The psychotherapist and podcaster Esther Perel talks about the idea that sometimes the fantasies we have, including the sexual fantasies we have, are often at odds with our own values and proclivity. So in other words, we have fantasies about things that in fact are at odds with what we actually want to happen to us in real life. And I'm wondering if that's actually a manifestation of what you just talked about, which is when you're going for the walk and you imagine your child being kidnapped, you're not actually asking for your child to be kidnapped. You're just exploring what that would be like and trying to figure out what you would do in that circumstance.

• 44:02Speaker 06

  I think that's exactly right. There, there are studies on what people seek out in pornography and what they do with the fantasies that they have. And to a surprising extent, people, and more often women, have fantasies about, about violence and bad treatment. But what's really important to keep in mind is, in some sense, they're fantasies and that you're thinking about them, but it's not what they want. In fact, they're, they're, they're having these things run through their head exactly because it's what they don't want. But they have to worry about more than men have to worry about. So our mind will often reenact things that are our own worst case scenarios.

• 44:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk about the idea that some of our interest in playing with unpleasant experiences has to do with play? That when kids, for example, use their imaginations to come up with games, they often involve horrific scenarios, being chased by a monster, being eaten by a lion. They also include the possibility of injury. For example, kids play fight, for example. Talk about how games can sometimes be unpleasant and painful, Paul.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  It gets at the theory we've been talking about from a different direction. So evolutionary biologists have long asked the question, why do animals, including humans, play? It seems like you spend your time learning about the world and establishing social relationships and accumulating resources, but instead, we chase each other with toy guns, or we go watch football. So what's the purpose of play? And I think there's an answer. I think there's actually a really good answer, which is play is a form of safe practice. The reason why young animals, including young humans, play fight is because fighting is a useful skill.

• 45:46Speaker 06

  And one way to get good at a useful skill is to practice at it. And play is a very clever trick, where you go through the practice of what you're trying to do, but in a safe way. And so it's not just we're talking about people, but like dogs. Dogs play fight. They have a sort of signal, what they call a play bow, where they communicate to each other, we're going to fight, but it's going to be for fun. We're not going to really hurt each other. And then they proceed with fighting. What makes humans unique, then, isn't play. A lot of animals play. It's that we play in our heads. And I think everything from video games, to horror movies, to rumination, is a form of safe play.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  We reenact these things that we want to get good at, like combat, or planning, or fighting, that sort of thing.

• 46:41Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to play you a clip from the TV show Fear Factor.

• 46:45Speaker 11

  You guys are each gonna have to stick your head inside this box with these 50 tarantulas for three minutes. And if you don't think that you can remain absolutely motionless for three minutes, I want you guys to back out now. Because besides their eight legs, each one of these tarantulas has two huge fangs and all of their venom.

• 47:05Shankar Vedantam?

  So this task involves covering yourself in tarantulas. Now, the participants are trying to win a prize, Paul, but as viewers, we are not trying to win anything. So what's the appeal? You know, Fear Factor had millions of viewers.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  There must be some of the satisfaction to think, "Thank God it's not me, it's other people." But I think we are, we have a vicarious interest in seeing people push themselves to the limits, just like we sometimes do it ourselves, both in the real world and in, and in the imagination. There's a fascination in watching other people do it. There's a fascination watching other people compete in sports, compete in games, and, and also put themselves at risk in interesting ways. And, and maybe it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction that I'm not them, look what they're doing, or maybe even a sense of superiority.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  But I think the most important cause is just this fascination in seeing worst-case scenarios, what happens when people are put to the limits.

• 48:11Shankar Vedantam?

  So, in a more serious context, some people take the idea of, of pain and unpleasant experiences to an extreme and actively subject themselves to self-harm. Some people cut themselves, others subject themselves to intense pain. Some of these things can be extremely dangerous, even life-threatening, and they become medical problems, they become disorders. Can you talk about how this kind of self-harm might also be related to feelings of powerlessness, but also feelings of control, Paul?

• 48:40Speaker 06

  So I know less about this. I know less about the sort of pathologies of not the benign masochism anymore, but the heavy-duty masochism where people will seriously harm themselves. Sometimes it's a byproduct of some form of mental illness like schizophrenia and falls very much outside the normal phenomena we're talking about. But there is a connection between these forms of self-harm and the sort of more benign forms of self-harm. One of the connections is they both may be forms of signaling. In some way, an adolescent, say, cutting herself or harming herself in some other way could be a signal to people, "I need help. I need help and my need is so serious, you're not listening to my words."

• 49:25Speaker 06

  And I get that. The words could be fake, the words could be dishonest, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna damage my body to persuade you that this is serious business. And so, one, one explanation for cutting and other things like that is that it's a cry for help. Another explanation is that there is almost paradoxically a sort of anesthesia effect for certain sorts of self-harm. That it takes you out of your body, that the infliction of pain under the right circumstances makes other pains go away.

• 50:00Shankar Vedantam?

  We should note that there are resources and support available for people struggling with cutting and other forms of self-harm. To access those resources, you can call or text 988 in the United States at any time of the day or night.

• 50:17Shankar Vedantam?

  So Paul, researchers have examined people's propensity to punish themselves after they've done something that violated their own values. Can you describe these studies and what they found?

• 50:27Speaker 06

  So, it's an old observation that sometimes people hurt themselves because they believe they did something wrong and want to punish themselves. There's a story about Galen, the 20th, the second-century physician. He had a friend of his who beat up severely a slave and he felt horrible about it. So he went to Galen, went to his house, stripped himself naked, handed him a whip and said, "You have to flog me for my crime." And Galen tried to laugh it off and said, "No, you won't have to do this. No, you have to flog me." And it might seem like a strange example, but I think we see this impulse in ourselves where when we do something wrong... We're moralizing creatures. This is what I'm very interested in. I study this in children. I study this in adults. Our desire to punish wrongdoers.

• 51:12Speaker 06

  And the most obvious cases are when the wrongdoers hurt other people. But sometimes the wrongdoers are ourselves. So there's now several studies of the form where since you give people some opportunity to hurt themselves in a mild way. Give themselves painful shocks, stick their hand in freezing water, which is very unpleasant after a while. And what these studies find over and over again is that if you tell people ahead of time, I want you to think about something you did that was wrong. I want you to think of a time when you hurt somebody. People will then inflict more pain on themselves. So the role of morality, the role of a desire to punish wrongness is, I think, one force that could explain something that goes on in masochistic pleasures.

• 51:57Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, Paul, if the same thing might happen on the sports field as well. We've all seen, you know, athletes who mess up or someone who plays a bad shot in tennis, and they get so angry with themselves, they want to punch themselves or actively hit themselves. You know, again, you're inflicting pain on yourself, but it's the same kind of thing. How could you have made this mistake? I'm punishing you for making this terrible mistake.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  It's exactly the same, the same process. I've seen it many times. And once or twice, you know, I've kind of smacked myself and I say, dummy, how did you do that? And I think it's almost a mystery why it doesn't happen more often. I mean, think about how we want to punish people who mess up or are cruel or indifferent in real life. Doesn't it make sense that when we see that we ourselves are lazy or cruel or indifferent, we want to punish ourselves? We want to sort of treat ourselves badly the way we think we should be treated. Now, as I'm saying this, it doesn't sound like the most healthy thing in the world. I think in small doses, I think it's fine. I don't think much badly about a tennis player who hits himself on the head with a racket

• 53:04Speaker 06

  after missing an easy shot. I think if it gets taken too far and you start thinking that you're worthless and you want to sort of destroy your own life, that could be awful. But in small, like a lot of things we're talking about, in small doses, I think it's part of a full life.

• 53:24Shankar Vedantam?

  In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we examine how pain and pleasure can intertwine during sex, and how, at the extremes, pain and pleasure can start to resemble one another.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  People who are in intense pleasure, intense happiness, are hard to tell apart from people whose faces are in intense pain.

• 53:46Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're already a subscriber, that episode should be available in this podcast feed right now. It's titled "The Zen of Pain." If you're not yet a subscriber, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org to sign up. If you're using an Apple device, you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Your subscription gives you access to exclusive episodes. It also helps us build a show. Again, those links are support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain. Paul Bloom is a psychologist at the University of Toronto. He's the author of "The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning." Paul, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  Thank you. This was terrific.

• 54:36Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have follow-up questions for Paul Bloom and you'd be willing to share those questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "PAIN." That email address again is [email protected].

• 55:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week, in our two-part mini-series about the pain-pleasure continuum, why we fantasize about living a life of leisure, and why this might be an error.

• 55:29Speaker 12

  So definitely, people, you know, when they think about a future that's desirable, that's fun, enjoyable, it's about relaxation. It's about being lazy. It's about being at the beach and just kind of sitting. So we see this all the time.

• 55:44Shankar Vedantam?

  That's next week on the show. I hope you'll join us.

• 55:50Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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