Pod Insights The Rest Is Science The Biology and Psychology of Crying About this episode Are humans the only creatures that shed emotional tears? If we are, what purpose do these tears really serve? If crying is so natural, why do we so often try to hide it?
A single sob sends Hannah and Michael into an unexpected journey through the science and mystery of emotional crying, from the first tearful moments of infancy to the complex social signals behind adult weeping.
Why do babies cry before they can speak? How do tears strengthen - or strain - our relationships? And what is the hormonal cocktail that makes “a good cry” feel so strangely comforting?
Join Professor Hannah Fry and YouTube educator Michael Stevens as they uncover the strange, revealing story of the human tear: why we cry, what our tears communicate, and how this uniquely human response shapes the way we connect.
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Transcript 8,402 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Hannah Fry? This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
0:02 Michael Stevens? Imagine this: inside all of us, billions of cells follow millions of instructions written in microscopic code. And when a new cell grows, it copies those instructions, but the smallest error can lead cancer to develop.
0:17 Hannah Fry? Right, and this is the reason why there isn't a single cure for cancer, because, you know, there are more than 200 different types, each of them have got different distinct characteristics, you know, different challenges, different mysteries. And that means that trying to cure cancer isn't like following a single path, it's like trying to map out an entire forest.
0:34 Michael Stevens? That's right. And Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. I mean, their work spans more than 20 countries, with over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses pushing knowledge forward to save and improve lives worldwide.
0:50 Hannah Fry? You know, over the last 50 years, the work that this charity has done has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. And you have to think about, that is more parents at the dinner table, right? That is more friends at their birthday parties, that is more people who are living longer, better lives.
1:08 Michael Stevens? For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/rastescience.
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2:16 Speaker 04 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
2:47 Hannah Fry? Welcome to The Rest of Science with me, Hannah Fry.
2:50 Michael Stevens? And me, Michael Stevens.
2:51 Hannah Fry? And we thought we would talk about crying today. Specifically, why do humans cry? Why do you cry, Michael?
2:58 Michael Stevens? I don't want to get into it right now, but I want to know why. Because there's only one animal on this planet that cries emotional tears.
3:09 Hannah Fry? Are you sure?
3:10 Michael Stevens? I know that there's some debate. There's some stories that camels have cried in emotional moments, like when they're reunited with their babies. One camel, by the way, not camels.
3:22 Hannah Fry? A single camel.
3:23 Michael Stevens? But what is your feeling here? Do you think it's uniquely human to cry emotional tears? Because as we all know, anything with wet eyeballs is going to have tears.
3:32 Hannah Fry? Yeah, of course.
3:33 Michael Stevens? But we produce a bunch when we're emotional. And we have not seen that in other mammals or birds.
3:39 Hannah Fry? Because I mean, wet eyes, there's three reasons why you have wet eyes. There's like the sort of lubricating tears that just stop your eyeballs from
3:47 Michael Stevens? Drying out.
3:48 Hannah Fry? Turning into, you know, raisins. There's the reflex, if you get something in your eye and need to sort of water and flush it out. And then the third one is the emotional tears, which supposedly has all kinds of hormones inside of it, which make it chemically distinct from the previous two. And that's the one that we're saying is
4:08 Michael Stevens? That, yeah, we just don't see it in other animals. And maybe we haven't looked closely enough, but you don't have to look very close at humans to see emotional tears.
4:16 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
4:17 Michael Stevens? Weeping and sobbing. So why? Who was the first person to weep? At some point in evolution, we went from being hominids that didn't cry tears to suddenly, there was a first person who was like overwhelmed. Maybe it was a baby and tears came out. And they were like, probably freaking out. Their parents were like, the baby's leaking.
4:43 Hannah Fry? What is this?
4:44 Michael Stevens? And now the tears are just a thing.
4:46 Hannah Fry? Maybe actually, the distinction between not crying and crying is slightly fuzzier than you're describing. Because you could still have tears running down your cheek, but it's like, the cause of it, the kind of the thing that caused you to cry or caused the tears to leak from your face. That's the thing that's slowly changed over time.
5:05 Michael Stevens? Yeah. Okay, so let's start there. What was the last thing that caused you to cry?
5:10 Hannah Fry? Um, so my, my, well, mine's, mine's gonna be a bit of a downer, but my dad died this year, so I cried very much at his funeral. I was really good at the mourning.
5:20 Michael Stevens? Yeah, there's a lot you just said there. You were really good at the mourning. What do you mean by good? Like, a sight to behold?
5:27 Hannah Fry? I was the picture of mourning.
5:30 Michael Stevens? And that's just it. I, I think, and I think we'll get here through the talk, that I think it's about the picture. It's about signaling something.
5:38 Hannah Fry? Okay, that's so interesting.
5:39 Michael Stevens? Not by choice, though.
5:40 Hannah Fry? Well, that's one thing that I think is interesting, because I was giving the eulogy. And there was a moment in the eulogy where I caught myself. And I knew that I was, had the instinct to cry. I was desperately trying to repress it. My voice went high, I had the lump in my throat, like all of the kind of physiological responses that you have to trying to suppress this cry. And that, I think, does tell you that these things aren't necessarily, you, you don't necessarily have agency when it comes to crying.
6:09 Michael Stevens? That's right. This matters to me because I'm, I think, probably, I shouldn't be, but I'm obsessed with figuring out what it is that describes humanity as simply as possible. And so, looking at the things that differentiate us from other animals on this planet. Is a place to begin and emotional crying is one of them. Oh, Michael, when did you last cry? Hannah, I'm glad you asked because, did you like my Hannah impression?
6:35 Hannah Fry? That was really good. It was good. I think I'm a bit more Cockney than that, but sure.
6:39 Michael Stevens? I go, wouldn't you? I don't really know English accents.
6:45 Hannah Fry? When did you last cry?
6:46 Michael Stevens? The last time I cried was very different than yours because I was completely alone. I was watching About Schmidt.
6:52 Hannah Fry? Right.
6:53 Michael Stevens? And I guess this is a spoiler, but I'm going to say it anyway because you can go and find your own sad movie. But at the end, this child that he has been, that he adopted, the main character Schmidt, he gets a drawing from the child and it's a drawing of him and the child holding hands. And I just got so wet in my eyes. I didn't like sob. It was a quiet cry, but I was just so overwhelmed at the sort of patheticness of how small this event was and yet how powerful and how much meaning it had.
7:28 Hannah Fry? Was it that you were overwhelmed by the emotion of the scene in the film? Or was it that it was tapping into something that you felt about your own family, your own, you know, your own child, your own experience?
7:41 Michael Stevens? I don't know. I didn't even have a child at this point.
7:44 Hannah Fry? Oh, wait, hang on. How, your child's like many years old.
7:49 Michael Stevens? Look.
7:49 Hannah Fry? Is that a lot? Have you cried this decade?
7:53 Michael Stevens? All right, you got me. I cried more recently. I'll just, I don't, I don't want this to become a political discussion, but I cried after watching a politician speak. And the politician said something that was just so humble.
8:07 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
8:07 Michael Stevens? I also, when I need a good cry, I do, late at night, turn on military funerals.
8:15 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
8:15 Michael Stevens? The circumstance and pomp of these ceremonies with the other soldiers there doing the 21-gun salute, who may have not even known the deceased, the flyover in, with the empty man formation. It's just so big, the funeral procession going down the freeway and just people have come out onto the street just so their kids can see, to see what? It's so.
8:42 Michael Stevens? Human, it's so weak and humble, but yet so significant at the same time.
8:48 Hannah Fry? It's like the bigness and the smallness of the entire world is one thing. The specific moment that triggered me when I was speaking in my dad's eulogy. I'd written this eulogy and I'd talked about the funny things that we'd done together, these amazing things. And I'd written that I remembered the feeling of holding his hand when I was a young girl. And that was the thing that got me. It was that connection of knowing that I'd held his hand that morning when he was in the casket and then that, that very visceral sensation of being a child and looking down at your dad's hands when they're covered in dirt from work. And I think that's it. It's like, it's, it's, it's the bigness and smallness simultaneously of those moments that can be overwhelming.
9:28 Michael Stevens? Isn't it? Yeah. I saw my father's body as well. They had a room that his body was in and they said, yeah, well, you guys can go and, and, you know, say last things to him. And it didn't really hit me until that moment when they asked me to go first, that I was like his son. It was like, really? Yeah. See, and this is starting to make me feel.
9:49 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
9:50 Michael Stevens? Like my eyes have a little bit more fluid in them.
9:52 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
9:53 Michael Stevens? But it's not because you're here or these people are here because I've cried mainly alone. I'm always alone and I've been alone in those circumstances and yet I still did this. Still got watery eyed.
10:05 Hannah Fry? It is strange, isn't it? It is strange, the things that trigger you.
10:09 Michael Stevens? But it's also not strange. Like, these stories all make complete sense, right? No one's going to go, you cried when you watched a funeral? But to put it in the context of no other animal has been definitively observed crying emotional tears. That's when I think we need to say, what are humans up to? I'm still feeling very emotional. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna now just shift to something that I think will make you cry for a very different reason.
10:38 Hannah Fry? Go on.
10:39 Michael Stevens? As I was looking into theories of emotional tears, I found a equation.
10:44 Hannah Fry? Right.
10:45 Michael Stevens? Out of some research from Alabama and I think, oh, you're gonna love this. All right. You ready?
10:51 Michael Stevens? Here's the equation. Crying equals.
10:54 Hannah Fry? Oh, God.
10:55 Michael Stevens? Meaning plus vulnerability divided by sensory threshold.
11:02 Hannah Fry? Okay. This is one of the fake equations that exist in the world.
11:06 Michael Stevens? I knew you'd call it that.
11:07 Hannah Fry? And I've got to be honest with you. I have a severe allergic reaction to them.
11:10 Michael Stevens? Tell me why.
11:11 Hannah Fry? They make me actively angry. There's a multitude of reasons. For one thing, how are you measuring vulnerability? What's the, what's the unit of vulnerability?
11:20 Michael Stevens? It's the metric unit. One pathetic. I don't know. But I see, yeah, I see. I agree with you.
11:27 Hannah Fry? Okay. Also, what was it? Sensory threshold, did you say? Okay. So what happens when your sensory threshold is zero? That means you're infinitely crying?
11:34 Michael Stevens? Ooh, yeah. The space time continuum is destroyed by your crying.
11:38 Hannah Fry? Oh, what about if you've got a very high threshold crying? I mean, what about if you've got a negative sensory threshold? Do you go to negative crying?
11:44 Michael Stevens? Negative crying. You suck moisture into your eyeballs.
11:47 Hannah Fry? Absorbing water from your eyes.
11:49 Michael Stevens? You need to stop negatively crying. I'm drying up over here.
11:52 Hannah Fry? Also, meaning, sorry, what is the meaning of meaning?
11:55 Michael Stevens? Mm hmm.
11:56 Hannah Fry? I mean, I think, I'm not saying that there's, you know, there's some, some ideas behind that, right? It's like the value of an idea to you, how vulnerable you're feeling, you know, your own personal threshold. But this is like, I mean, putting it into an equation gives it this false sense of precision.
12:11 Michael Stevens? A false sense of precision and correctness.
12:13 Hannah Fry? Yes.
12:14 Michael Stevens? I think what's being said here is that there's something called meaning. And there's something called our vulnerability to it. But then it's all mediated by just how, where our threshold is for crying. The lower it is, the bigger that ratio gets and the more crying there is. But yeah, you're right. These are such soft terms.
12:34 Hannah Fry? I'm okay with that idea. What you've just described is, I think that's, I think that's good. I mean, every, the two situations that we've described about us crying definitely fit into that category, right? But also there's this idea of the, the threshold that you as an individual have, that some people are more sensitive to crying than others. I think I'm okay with that broadly as a rough idea. I think that's, that's, that's good. It's just, don't make up equations.
12:55 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
12:55 Hannah Fry? Not in my presence.
12:56 Michael Stevens? Uh, so then let's, let's look at the, the data. Let's look at how crying begins in, in the life stages of a human.
13:03 Hannah Fry? In a baby.
13:04 Michael Stevens? In a baby.
13:05 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
13:05 Michael Stevens? Okay. They're famous criers.
13:07 Hannah Fry? They're, yes, they are mega criers. I mean, the thing is, is that crying in babies, there's, there's, there's different versions of this, right? Cause there's that crying. As a sound for different reasons. So whether they're hungry, whether they're uncomfortable, whether they've got gas, whatever it might be. But that, there's a really clear evolutionary purpose for that, which is in order to signal for attention to the carer to sort of fix a situation.
13:34 Michael Stevens? Right, to get nurturing, to get attention. It's a distress call. And you're right, we see this in all kinds of animals.
13:40 Hannah Fry? Absolutely. There is some work, I don't know whether you've come across this, this is by a nurse called Priscilla Dunston. And she has a theory, right, that there's actually, the different reasons why babies cry changes the sound that they make purely because there is some reflex that starts the sound. So for instance, when a baby is hungry, like, and we're talking really, really young here, right, like first, first three months of life, when they would be suckling, they, the tongue in the mouth goes into a certain position that makes a like nyet sound. Or there's a few others, there's like a, if they're really uncomfortable from trapped wind, it makes more of a like eh eh sound.
14:23 Hannah Fry? Or there's like a, you know, one's beginning with a more of a huh sound, that kind of thing. Now, I should tell you that there have been like some small scale studies on this. And it's really difficult to definitively pin down that this is what babies are doing. But there are lots of parents who say that this is actually a really useful rule of thumb, rather than a hard and fast scientific rule.
14:44 Michael Stevens? You can kind of figure out what the baby is trying to say more specifically than just, look at me, give me attention.
14:49 Hannah Fry? Exactly, exactly right.
14:51 Michael Stevens? Okay, that's making me think, I don't know if you know the answer to this, but when a child is extremely young, still breastfeeding, the sound of its tears can cause the milk to, does that depend on how the cry sounds?
15:04 Hannah Fry? Oh my gosh. It's, it actually makes, makes your boobs hurt.
15:07 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
15:07 Hannah Fry? Like, it's unbelievable.
15:09 Michael Stevens? Any cry? Or is there, does the hunger cry cause it more?
15:13 Hannah Fry? Well, it's specifically your baby as well.
15:16 Michael Stevens? Only your baby?
15:17 Hannah Fry? So the thing is that the, the hormone that, that creates letdown, that essentially allows the milk to, to, to run. There are a few different ways that it can be signaled. And one of them is an auditory cue. And within 48 hours of your baby being born, your body essentially learns your baby's cry, and it triggers the production and letdown of milk. When it hears that that signal. And I think it is, I'm talking personal experience now rather than, rather than
15:45 Michael Stevens? Sure, understood.
15:46 Hannah Fry? Than scientific stuff. But I think, I think it is specifically cry, because there's a different cry when your baby is hurt.
15:52 Michael Stevens? Right.
15:53 Hannah Fry? And that doesn't signal the milk.
15:55 Michael Stevens? And these all sound like really deep evolutionary mechanisms. But what these two day old babies don't do is cry with emotional tears.
16:06 Hannah Fry? They're not watching military funerals.
16:08 Michael Stevens? They aren't. They're crying by creating a vocalization, but they're dry on the face.
16:14 Hannah Fry? Hmm, they are.
16:15 Michael Stevens? Now, I've, I've read that it's around four to eight weeks of age that they might, you might start to see tears.
16:21 Hannah Fry? Physical tears. But are they emotional tears at that stage? You know, Darwin.
16:26 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
16:26 Hannah Fry? I don't know if you've heard.
16:27 Michael Stevens? Met him a few times.
16:28 Hannah Fry? He's, he's kind of a big deal.
16:30 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
16:30 Hannah Fry? Um, he wrote this book. It's, uh, you know, as well as the origin of the species and um, descent of man and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it's important books. He also wrote this book, which was called The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. And this is, it's a stonking read, Michael. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone.
16:50 Michael Stevens? All right.
16:50 Hannah Fry? He's got an entire chapter on blushing. He's got an entire chapter on weeping. Um, he goes around just observing all kinds of animals and all kinds of humans in all kinds of situations. He's got a sweaty hippo who's very cross in labor, been there. Um, he's got an impatient horse. He's got an orangutan who desperately wants some apple. It's like there's, it's, it's honestly, it's absolutely delightful. But he also, this is, I think the first book to have ever included printed photographs inside of it. And he has within it a study of upset babies.
17:23 Michael Stevens? Oh, my goodness.
17:24 Hannah Fry? Isn't that amazing? So what you have here is a page of six images of very upset children.
17:32 Michael Stevens? Yes. And they look like they're like Victorian age children with. They're black and white photos. The kids look like they're in distress.
17:41 Hannah Fry? Yeah. I mean, I think that they're, well, one's in a sort of high chair. They're all wearing like really cute Victorian clothes. They're all very chubby. They're all just absolutely gorgeous little kids, but they're all crying.
17:53 Michael Stevens? And they've got faces that are immediately recognizable as crying. The eyes are closed quite shut and the grimaces on the face. They're very sad.
18:03 Hannah Fry? They're very cute and as normal children are when they're upset. But Darwin made a study, I mean, both of which muscles were being contracted in their faces as they were crying. But he also made a study of his own infants. And he noted that one of his children, one of his babies, at 77 days old, he accidentally brushed the cuff of his coat across their open eye.
18:27 Michael Stevens? Ooh.
18:27 Hannah Fry? Accidentally, he says, and that caused tears to stream down their face.
18:32 Michael Stevens? Okay, at 77 days.
18:34 Hannah Fry? 77 days, but he was pretty sure that they weren't crying emotional tears. It was reflex.
18:38 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
18:38 Hannah Fry? It wasn't until 139 days that he felt that they were weeping emotional tears.
18:44 Michael Stevens? Okay, so it took 139 days for Darwin's child to finally start shedding emotional tears. What is that? 4.56986 months.
18:54 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
18:54 Michael Stevens? Wow.
18:55 Hannah Fry? Yeah, I mean, 20160 minutes, if you like.
18:58 Michael Stevens? If you're rounding, yeah.
18:59 Hannah Fry? If you want that.
19:00 Michael Stevens? Now, a theory I've heard about that transition, which to me feels like a kind of metamorphosis.
19:08 Hannah Fry? From not crying to crying.
19:10 Michael Stevens? Yeah, is that at first, this distress call, just like you'll find in birds and other mammals, gets the attention that you need for all kinds of reasons. Just to get it to stop because it's annoying, to get it to stop because it could alert predators of your position, but also maybe just a reflex, like the milk let down, going, oh, my body, my DNA tells me what to do here. But also, that danger, the danger of alerting predators to where you are and aggravating the parents eventually needs to disappear. But the helplessness and the need for care never does in our species, because we have such extended adolescence, pretty much our whole lives, I think, was always childlike in ways that no other animal is.
19:55 Hannah Fry? In the sense that we play, for example.
19:56 Michael Stevens? In the sense that we play, in the sense that we're always like learning new things and always can learn new things. So instead of making a racket, a vocal racket, when we want to signal this, we can do it with the way our face looks and with tears coming out of our eyes.
20:14 Hannah Fry? A physical signal rather than an auditory one.
20:16 Michael Stevens? That's right.
20:17 Hannah Fry? So, okay, interesting idea. But then, I don't know if you've ever met a two-year-old, they are very noisy.
20:25 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
20:25 Hannah Fry? And they cry very loudly.
20:27 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
20:28 Hannah Fry? So what's that about?
20:31 Michael Stevens? Well, okay, yeah, right. How, I guess they're not done with the metamorphosis yet. They're still in their cocoon, gelling into a tear crier and not so much of a loud, sober wailer.
20:44 Hannah Fry? Sure. But then also, I mean, there's sort of like loud sobbing wailing that you get from a young child, which is genuinely, I'm hurt, I'm in pain, or I'm hungry, I'm tired, I need something, and I can't quite articulate what it might be. That is different from watching military funerals.
21:06 Michael Stevens? Yeah, it is. It's certainly different that a child will cry when they physically hurt themselves, when they fall over. But I don't. I will cry when I hear a speech. But if I broke my arm, I probably wouldn't cry.
21:19 Hannah Fry? Oh, I would.
21:19 Michael Stevens? I would not feel good.
21:21 Hannah Fry? Oh, I would.
21:22 Michael Stevens? My lip would be so stiff.
21:25 Michael Stevens? You guys would be like.
21:26 Hannah Fry? Excuse me, I'm the British one here. Thank you very much.
21:28 Michael Stevens? I know, but I'm just saying, you've got competition. No, but you see where I'm getting with this. Like, as we age, the things that make us cry are very different than the things that made us cry when we were even more helpless, and helpless in a different way. When you're hungry, you don't always cry the way you did when you were two or one or less.
21:49 Hannah Fry? Agree, agree.
21:49 Michael Stevens? And yeah, I don't think anyone's saying that babies are going to watch a funeral and be able to understand and feel overwhelmed. They might be overwhelmed just because. The sensations.
21:59 Hannah Fry? I mean, about Schmidt is 12 plus, they're not even allowed.
22:02 Michael Stevens? They're not even allowed, they should not be watching it.
22:05 Hannah Fry? Okay, so there's definitely lots of evidence of other animals crying for pain or crying for hunger, all of that kind of thing. I think that there is evidence of other animals making auditory and like behavioral cues in an emotional way. So elephants is the classic example here. Lots of people have reported that they've seen elephants engaging in mourning behavior. There's, there's one particular incredible story about an experiment that went wrong. So I don't know if you know this, but elephants have names that they give each other.
22:38 Michael Stevens? How do they, how do they?
22:40 Hannah Fry? They rumble, they like, it's, it's an auditory thing. They use their trunks to kind of call out names. It looks like elephants actually have a vocabulary of lots of different words. They have a word for bees. They have a word for human, they have a word for bad human. It's like actually quite a lot of complexity to animal language. Anyway, what you can do is you can turn up with a truck and a loudspeaker and play out a recording of an elephant calling another elephant's name. And if that elephant is within that herd, just that one elephant will turn around. You'll be like, Billy. And the elephant will be like, yes, which is amazing.
23:14 Michael Stevens? That is really amazing.
23:16 Hannah Fry? You have to be really, really careful when you do this experiment. It's called a playback experiment. And the reason why is that a group of researchers went out into the savannah, played a sound of an elephant shouting another elephant's name. But what they hadn't realized was that the elephant they'd recorded had since died.
23:32 Michael Stevens? Oh no.
23:33 Hannah Fry? And so the herd, who she used to belong to, suddenly got extremely distressed at hearing this voice effectively from the past.
23:42 Michael Stevens? From a ghost.
23:43 Hannah Fry? From a ghost. And her daughter, the deceased elephant's daughter in particular, was going through the bush like for days and days and days, looking for her lost mother. So, so this kind of idea of like mourning behavior that you see in animals, we know that it exists, not just in an observational way, but in those kind of slightly unfortunate situations where it's actually been an outside intervention, a human intervention that has created this, this mourning behavior. You get this with whales too, right? Like whales will. Will will carry the carcass of their dead children, often for for days. They'll form a hub around a whale that's dying.
24:23 Hannah Fry? Um, you know, there's, there's lots of like extremely complex mourning behavior that you see in animals. And over the years, we've had lots and lots of reports of people who've worked closely with elephants, people, fishermen who've worked closely alongside whales, who claim that they have seen emotional tears in these situations.
24:43 Michael Stevens? Really?
24:44 Hannah Fry? But it's just really difficult to prove, right? It's really difficult to prove. How do you know that it's not dust that's got in the eye? How do you know? I mean, it's a whale, for goodness sake, it's in the water. But also, if you decided to do an observational study of a human, right? You could follow you around since 2020 and have very little evidence of you crying at all.
25:03 Michael Stevens? Me crying, yeah, that's true.
25:05 Hannah Fry? It's a really rare event.
25:06 Michael Stevens? That's true. So I, I, I'm willing to admit that we don't know conclusively that only humans cry emotional tears.
25:14 Hannah Fry? But we don't have any hard evidence that, that any other animals do.
25:18 Michael Stevens? We don't have hard evidence. And like personally, I think that these other animals, who knows what they're feeling? But I'd like to believe, and I think we almost have an obligation to believe, that they're feeling things quite deeply. They're expressing it differently, though. They're not contorting up their facial muscles in a way that creates this redness, this puffiness, this wetness that is almost hard to hide.
25:43 Hannah Fry? Hmm.
25:44 Michael Stevens? Maybe they're doing something that we can't quite pick up on, but their other con specifics immediately go, they're crying. And that, I think, gets us to what a crying person causes us to think about them, which maybe we should do after a break.
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28:47 Michael Stevens? All right, welcome back. We are talking about crying and I want to move on to whether or not crying is a choice. How much voluntary control do we have over our emotional tears?
29:01 Hannah Fry? I mean, sometimes none at all, right? I mean, I don't know. Have you, given that you've only cried once a century?
29:08 Michael Stevens? No, come on. I cry. I cry just the right amount.
29:12 Hannah Fry? That's the right amount.
29:13 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
29:14 Hannah Fry? But definitely I've had this experience numerous times where you get that, that feeling in your throat, the lump in your throat. And, and what that is, is there's a competition in your throat, right? For what the muscle should be doing. Part of you, your reflex is to help you breathe. And the other part of you is your reflex is to try and suppress the, the cry.
29:33 Michael Stevens? Right.
29:33 Hannah Fry? And so what you end up with is this tension in your muscle that feels like a lump in your throat. But also what happens is when you've got this tension, you lose the fine motor control that your throat normally has, which is why your voice starts to go really squeaky.
29:47 Michael Stevens? Wow.
29:48 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
29:48 Michael Stevens? That's fascinating.
29:49 Hannah Fry? Isn't it?
29:50 Michael Stevens? The fact that we even are concerned about, should I allow this to happen or try to resist it? Says so much about the cultural and psychological importance of crying and what it means to us. The thing is, we suppress a lot of emotions. We'll suppress laughter because it's inappropriate to laugh right now. We will be really tired, but try to look really alive.
30:14 Hannah Fry? That's what I'm doing right now, Mary.
30:16 Michael Stevens? Right. Boy, I could tell you some stories about how I feel right now. But I choose not to because it's all about the image. It's all about the look, right?
30:26 Hannah Fry? Absolutely.
30:27 Michael Stevens? And so what do sad people look like? I'll tell you. According to some research I was reading, people look at criers as being more sincere and honest, warmer, friendlier.
30:42 Hannah Fry? Friendlier?
30:43 Michael Stevens? But also probably more emotionally unstable, possibly incompetent.
30:48 Hannah Fry? Right.
30:49 Michael Stevens? And also possibly manipulative.
30:51 Hannah Fry? Wow.
30:52 Michael Stevens? Okay. Some of these are opposites here. You're more sincere and honest if I see you crying. Or maybe you're just really manipulative, right? It says a lot of both good and bad things, positive and negative. It's a big indicator of stuff. And whether you think someone's tears make them seem more honest or less honest, depends a lot on the context, who the person is, whether you know them or not. It's a major signal that can mean a lot. It can be arousing, it can be soothing to the crier and to others watching.
31:27 Hannah Fry? That point about whether or not you're choosing to cry. I don't know, I've definitely had the experience numerous times in my life where I really haven't been able to control the fact that I was feeling like super emotional. There was once I was in a meeting, I'd just been appointed to faculty at university.
31:43 Michael Stevens? Congratulations.
31:44 Hannah Fry? I was in a very important meeting and I'd been very, very stressed. I was very tired. I think I was possibly also pregnant or at the very least had a very young baby. And the meeting progressed, something happened in the meeting and I just immediately burst into tears. And it was International Women's Day as well. Can you imagine? And I knew that my colleagues were losing respect for me in that moment, but I just couldn't do anything about it. Couldn't do anything about it. But the thing is, is that I do think that the, that there's lots of evidence that the hormones that you have in your body change how likely you are to cry. So I have a very good friend who has testicular cancer. He's taking some hormones to, as part of his treatment that, that suppress the androgens in his body. Androgens is a, is a, I mean, people call them male and female hormones.
32:28 Hannah Fry? It's rubbish way to think of it because everybody has both.
32:31 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
32:32 Hannah Fry? But what happens as you suppress the androgen in your body, your, the presence of prolactin can increase. Now prolactin is the hormone that your body creates when it comes to breastfeeding.
32:45 Michael Stevens? Pro-lactin.
32:46 Hannah Fry? Prolactin, exactly. Anyway, so he said that like during his treatment, everything's broadly been fine. He's taking these hormones. He kind of feels normal, except that he's really emotional and he cries all the time now.
32:56 Michael Stevens? Yep.
32:56 Hannah Fry? Like he'll watch, you know, like a puppy commercial or something and there'll be a puppy on the screen and he'll just start crying. And, and I do think that the threshold, you don't necessarily have control over where that threshold is.
33:08 Michael Stevens? That's right. So hormones affect that threshold. And in your story too, being tired affects it a lot. And that brings up a thing I've, I've noticed before, like it sounds true to me, which is that people are more likely to cry watching movies on airplanes.
33:23 Hannah Fry? Oh, right.
33:24 Michael Stevens? Which I think it's one. Maybe you're more tired, but also you're captive.
33:30 Hannah Fry? Mm hmm.
33:30 Michael Stevens? Okay, you can't shift your attention to other things because you've just got that seat front in front of you. I don't know, you're just kind of like more alone.
33:39 Hannah Fry? There's like more social anonymity as well there, right? Like, you know, if you're, especially if you're tucked into tucked into a window seat.
33:46 Michael Stevens? Right.
33:47 Hannah Fry? Like, I think you can sort of get away with crying and no one seeing you.
33:50 Michael Stevens? You can get away with it. Yeah, there's less of a feeling of, oh, hold on, this is an inappropriate time to do it. It's an appropriate time. You don't have any meetings. You're not in a meeting. You're just waiting. And so the tears flow.
34:03 Hannah Fry? I also wonder whether there's something to do with the amount of oxygen that you have. Because I mean, when you're in the air, it's basically like mild hypoxia.
34:10 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
34:10 Hannah Fry? Like mild oxygen starvation, which I think completely changes your ability to handle stress, you know, lowers your mood, makes you more vulnerable to about Schmidt.
34:20 Michael Stevens? Yeah, I watched I watched this alone in my apartment in New York. That's all it took for me.
34:24 Hannah Fry? Is it a very high apartment now?
34:26 Michael Stevens? It was on the top floor, actually. And I felt better afterwards, which like is a very famous, well-known thing about crying, just having a good cry.
34:36 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
34:37 Michael Stevens? And I'm, I think there's a lot going on there, but we have found oxytocin being released, endorphins being released because of crying. So there's a reward for crying.
34:47 Hannah Fry? Some evidence that you physically feel better afterwards.
34:50 Michael Stevens? Correct.
34:51 Hannah Fry? You know, in Japan, this sort of trend started where hotels would have crying rooms.
34:56 Michael Stevens? Oh, really?
34:57 Hannah Fry? Where you could go and watch a sad movie and just enjoy a good old cry.
34:59 Michael Stevens? Also, it was full of things that would make you cry if you needed to just have that release.
35:04 Hannah Fry? Exactly.
35:04 Michael Stevens? And that gets to what I'm saying about how people can be soothed by their own crying.
35:09 Hannah Fry? Absolutely.
35:09 Michael Stevens? But crying can also be arousing. It can, it can make your, your heart rate go up, but it could also make it go down.
35:16 Hannah Fry? Definitely.
35:17 Michael Stevens? In my experience, I've only ever felt better after crying. I've only ever felt better while crying. I'm glad to be doing it.
35:25 Hannah Fry? A good cry, there is something.
35:27 Michael Stevens? I'm sure you can feel aroused while crying. Not that kind of aroused.
35:34 Hannah Fry? Michael, whatever you enjoy is absolutely fine by me.
35:38 Michael Stevens? Thank you.
35:38 Hannah Fry? That's you do you. Well, one of the reasons why people think that crying makes you feel better is because of the hormones that are contained within your tear.
35:47 Michael Stevens? Within the tear, so they're leaving your body.
35:50 Hannah Fry? Yeah, so andrinocorticotropic hormones.
35:53 Michael Stevens? I've heard that before. It's like a really easy answer to like, oh, tears are great because they get rid of these hormones, leaving you feeling better. And I guess I believe that, but I think hormones are not in the tears. Psychologically, something still happens when you've had that release. A lot of crying comes from, I believe, like, evolutionarily, the deep cry for help. In fact, we've seen like, children will cry if they get hurt and no one's around. And as soon as someone arrives, they already start to feel better. This happens to adults as well. You're no longer in the mode of, help me, help me. You're being helped. The distress call can go away.
36:36 Hannah Fry? Well, Darwin was thinking a lot about the evolution of this. And Darwin's conclusion, you know, looking at different animals and their sort of emotions, but also in humans and children weeping and so on. His conclusion really was that he thought this was something that humans practiced and could suppress, right? So different cultures had different attitudes towards crying. But he also thought that this was just like some kind of adaptation that doesn't really do anything, you know, like sneezing when you look at a bright light. His idea was that it's like, okay, it's just sort of something, just a kind of something. Actually, there are some people who say this is actually maladaptive, right? Because your eyes are filling with tears, you're crunching up your face, you can't see as well as you were able to before.
37:20 Michael Stevens? Right. So crying as a sign of vulnerability is literal. When you're crying, you are more vulnerable. Your vision is compromised. You really do need other people's help.
37:33 Hannah Fry? Definitely when you're around somebody else who's crying, I think that seeing their vulnerability.
37:41 Hannah Fry? Sort of makes you want to appease them more. It's quite a good conflict de-escalator, crying.
37:46 Michael Stevens? It certainly communicates because it's possible for people to be revolted by a crying person. If they don't know the person, if it would be really awkward, they'll avoid the person. Either way, whether a crier's tears make people come to them or flee them, it's a huge social signal.
38:05 Hannah Fry? It is a huge social signal.
38:07 Michael Stevens? And it may have. Maybe Darwin was right in terms of its very early emergence because we can also produce excess tears just when we yawn. Like, the stretching of the muscles around the eyes can cause the tear glands to put out more fluid.
38:25 Hannah Fry? I think a lot about how, I mean, humans, in terms of our niche, right, we're these like, very intelligent, very social creatures.
38:35 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
38:36 Hannah Fry? And I think, once it comes down to it, maybe the sort of the beginning of crying, maybe the first human who cried was, it was just, it didn't really mean anything. But I think what it's come to mean is something that's, that's both of those things, both very social and intellectual, no?
38:51 Michael Stevens? Yeah, I think so. I think that, that cognitive social niche is where we belong. And so it's just so human to do a podcast about crying. Let's, let's have a good talk about crying, but let's also overthink it. Let's do some cognition and let's do some emoting and some socializing, which in other animals, isn't the key to their survival. It's not the niche that they've worked out. Ours is very much about communing with others. We're not quite like honeybees or ants. They're almost like a super organism in ways that, that human societies aren't. But yet, yeah, we, we do a lot of other things, which I
39:33 Michael Stevens? don't know if animals do this, but when, you know, you're at a restaurant and the server brings you your food and says, enjoy your meal, and you go, oh, you too. I mean, thanks. Right?
39:44 Hannah Fry? Have a good flight. Thank you.
39:46 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
39:46 Hannah Fry? You don't, damn it.
39:47 Michael Stevens? The way we'll automatically respond to things like, oh, hey, how you doing? Fine. How are you? You know, and we don't answer the question literally. That's all, there's a name for that. It's called phatic communion.
39:59 Hannah Fry? Love it.
40:01 Michael Stevens? Where phatic means language, communion means coming together. And these, these ways that we unconsciously respond to each other, just kind of signal that like, hey, I'm a human too. I get it. There are social rules. I'm here. I'm available, whatever. And I think that crying probably falls into that category a little bit, that it's a way of showing we do need each other. But in a way, humans don't need each other. Like an ant on its own cannot survive. Cause it, it only has one role, but it needs all the different roles in its, in its community.
40:33 Hannah Fry? Can humans survive on their own? I mean, like really, really on their own. You'd have to be very, very off grid in order to not have any reliance on other humans.
40:41 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
40:42 Hannah Fry? I'm thinking about the food chain here. I'm thinking about like, I don't know, everything you buy, like you sort of need other humans at some.
40:49 Michael Stevens? Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. I've looked a lot into like hermits. And it's almost always not totally independent. They would raid cabins nearby for supplies and stuff.
41:01 Hannah Fry? Cheating, not hermit.
41:01 Michael Stevens? So, I mean, I think the best example is Juana Maria, which wasn't even her real name. She was christened that after death. But she was a, a native on one of the Channel Islands. I mean, the ones off the coast of Alto California.
41:14 Hannah Fry? I thought this was too exotic for, for the English Channel.
41:17 Michael Stevens? Specifically, she, uh, lived on San Nichols Island. Her people were called the Nicoleno people, and she was the last speaker of their language. I don't know the full history of the island, but there was like a Russian American company that came in and they like massacred the indigenous people off of some rumors that there had been some violence against themselves and whatever. And then eventually I think some of the missionaries said, let's get them all off this island for one reason or another. But they neglected to bring Juana Maria. And there's all kinds of apocryphal stories about, did she, uh, get left behind because bad weather meant the ship just said, leave her? Or did she jump off the ship and swim back to the island?
42:00 Hannah Fry? Wow.
42:01 Michael Stevens? Well, all we know is that she remained there from 1835 to 1853, all by herself.
42:09 Michael Stevens? So for most of her late twenties and thirties, she was on this island all alone. She fashioned her clothes out of feathers.
42:17 Hannah Fry? I mean, you wouldn't bother really, would you?
42:18 Michael Stevens? She did bother, though. Isn't that interesting?
42:21 Hannah Fry? Yeah.
42:21 Michael Stevens? Yeah. There's a rumor that her feather skirt was sent to the Vatican, but then lost. Um, after she was found, of course, because people knew she was still there. So I guess there might be some truth to the story that she was left behind or escaped.
42:35 Hannah Fry? Right.
42:35 Michael Stevens? They knew she was there all alone and she just lived on her own. She caught seals. She made herself a tent and may have also lived in a cave nearby. When she was picked up, uh, she was really excited to be back around people. There were like three or four people in Santa Barbara in a mission there who still spoke her language that she was able to speak to. Some of her songs were recorded on wax cylinders.
42:56 Hannah Fry? No.
42:57 Michael Stevens? And we still have them. None of it's been translated. There are all these words that she said, we don't know what they mean.
43:04 Hannah Fry? Oh, that's so cool.
43:05 Michael Stevens? Now, she was, I, I kind of believe this part of it. I think she was really excited to be back around humans. And she was apparently really excited to be eating fruits and corn and all the stuff she didn't have on the island. But she got dysentery just a few weeks after being rescued and died.
43:21 Hannah Fry? Oh, no way.
43:22 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
43:23 Hannah Fry? And she wouldn't, well, she wasn't that old, right? Like.
43:25 Michael Stevens? No, she was, she was in her, she, by then she was probably like forty.
43:30 Hannah Fry? Right.
43:30 Michael Stevens? Forty-one, forty-two. Yeah. But she survived for a very long time on her own. So, you know, the old like, oh, you could only live a few months without food, a few days without water, but not a second without hope.
43:44 Michael Stevens? Maybe.
43:45 Hannah Fry? I've never heard that before, but I'm putting on a T-shirt immediately.
43:48 Michael Stevens? Please do. I guess she doesn't have much to tell us about that because she may have retained hope. But she certainly lived without other people.
43:57 Hannah Fry? I wonder whether she cried in that time.
44:00 Michael Stevens? I know.
44:01 Hannah Fry? Cause on the one hand, you know, she's got total social anonymity.
44:06 Michael Stevens? Right.
44:06 Hannah Fry? Also. Quite a lot to cry about.
44:10 Michael Stevens? Yeah, right?
44:11 Hannah Fry? But on the other hand, no one to socially cue.
44:14 Michael Stevens? I mean, because we know so little about her, maybe she like cried tears of joy. Maybe she jumped off that ship and said, finally, the island all to myself, all that blubber.
44:25 Michael Stevens? But probably not. I think, I think that, yeah, we are a social species. So her story makes me wonder about the social niche of humans. Because no one ever seems content to say, well, we're the thinking ape or whatever. I guess we are literally called Homo sapiens, the wise ape. But the social aspect of it, I think, is, is, is kind of explained through tears. What is its social role? Now that we've talked so much about it, how are you feeling about it?
44:56 Hannah Fry? I think it is. I think you're right. I mean, look, this is definitely one of those questions, which is about what's the reason for this evolutionary trait? Right? And it's like, actually, sometimes, sometimes there isn't an answer. And often the answer is we don't know for sure. So this is definitely in that category, right? We cannot be absolutely sure. But I think that there's something in the idea of when you need to communicate vulnerability, or when your body chooses to communicate vulnerability on your behalf. And this idea of like, uh, just bringing down the kind of de-escalating conflict, wanting to appease each other, I think it's ultimately about connection.
45:35 Michael Stevens? Yeah.
45:36 Hannah Fry? And we're connected to you, dear listener. How was that for an ending? Do you like that?
45:41 Michael Stevens? Uh, it's gonna make me cry.
45:44 Hannah Fry? Well, before the tears come flooding, please do like and subscribe on YouTube or rate and review us on your favorite podcast app.
45:53 Michael Stevens? And if you'd like to send us your thoughts, your feelings, the rest is science at goalhanger.com. If you want to send us some tears, some prolactin, I don't know what our physical address is, but stay tuned. No, please, send them to me.
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