Most of us want our life to be about something.
We want to have an impact.
We want to do something and once we die, of course, we can't have a whole lot of
impact after our death unless we've really had a lot impact in our life.
Somehow we've done something while we're alive that carries over after our death.
But our ability to do anything of relevance obviously stops at the point
of our death.
And so that's I think is something we both don't like the transition but
we also don't like the idea of not existing anymore.
And it's sort of disappearing into the lost sands of time so to speak.
That's not very hospitable.
But even over and
above all of that is just that hardwired reaction to fight against death.
That sympathetic nervous system reaction and that's in there and that kicks up and
that can always make us feel emotional.
That's what it kind of does.
Alright, let's take death a step further here now.
And let's talk about things we do to kind of play with this a little bit.
So let's talk about horror movies.
Why are horror movies so prevalent?
Why do so many people like to go to horror movies?
Well, it's a safe form of playing with your sympathetic nervous system.
So that sympathetic nervous system, when it kicks in, it gives rise to emotions.
Now, in the case of if you were in a horror film and
something happened, you would feel nothing but fear.
You know, if there was really a psychopath running around trying to kill everyone and
you were in that situation, you would almost always feel fear.
But, in a movie situation it's kind of subtlely different.
In a movie situation they scare you, first of all.
Let me come back to that in a moment.
But, and you feel scared, you feel fear for
a moment, but that quickly resolves into something else.
It usually resolves into a kind of humor.
A kind of like, they got me there, and so
there's almost immediately a relief, followed by the fear.
You anticipate the fear and then they do it to you at some point.
You're [SOUND], there it is, but then you instantly safe.
And that safe comes with, it's like escaping a very dangerous situation.
Situation, you're free of it.
It's like when you wake up from a horrible dream and
you feel that amazing release from it.
So horror movies are a way to kind of very safely play with fear and
then immediately have that fear resolved.
Usually immediately.
Different filmmakers do things differently.
Alfred Hitchcock was the king of suspense.
You always felt there was more.
You always felt there was something coming.
Let's talk about that for a moment, suspense.
Goes back to the hippocampus.
I remember the most scary movie I ran into was Jaws.
Wasn't technically a horror movie [LAUGH] but it kind of was.
The Jaws movie they had that famous
[MUSIC],
And early in the movie,
they would play that little song just as something was about to happen.
So you would hear that, you'd hear it, you'd hear it, and
then something would scare the crap out of you, okay, so what happens then.
Of course your amigdula fires.
It fires up the hippocampus and
your hippocampus codes that part before the fear.
So now, later in the movie, they can play that in.
[MUSIC]
And now you're in that anticipation of danger mode that we call suspense.
And that sort of prolongs the fear reaction,
because now you're anticipating danger, anticipating danger, anticipating danger.
And sometimes in movies they intentionally then don't give you the danger, or
they just have something funny happen, which again,
resolves that danger in an interesting way.
They're again playing with all this, but notice that's the hippocampus.
In fact, it's become so common in scary movies to have certain sounds and
certain themes, that we've now learned these across the movies.
And just about any movie now, they can, just by the way they play the music,
they heighten it up a little bit.
They do whatever, we will start to feel suspense.
And again, that's our hippocampus' learned from our movie viewing,
that this is the stuff that happens before the scary part in the movie.
Now of course, every now and then movies will give you no suspense at all.
They'll just have you, do do do do, everything's fine and then boom.
They try to scare you.
Again, playing with that, trying to catch you unready for the fear.
Sometimes they can make you fearful and then it never pays off.
Sometimes not etc., but they're kind of
playing with your sympathetic nervous system but always in the safe environment.
Another example that fits with that really well
are things like haunted houses that we might go to at Halloween and
Halloween they set up haunted barns here or there, or whatever.
I'm using in part, kind of situations.
And again, we can go into those.
We know we're going to be scared.
They're using scary sounds.
They're using all these same suspenseful kinds of stimuli to get us scared.
And they may even do things like reach out and
grab us if they have live actors in their haunted house.
But again, we always know it's safe.
So even if someone grabs us, what do we do?
Scream, and go running over to the other side, and laugh with our friends.
Right we chuckle like whoa man that guy got me, but
immediately the fear is followed by a sort of release from the fear.