Vintage Antivaxxers, Horror Flick Psychology, Robin-Eating Bats

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Kiley Watson. I'm Colton Scrivener. Colton, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you. Thank you. Happy to be here. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about your research and your new book? Yeah. So I study morbid curiosity and why people are interested in things that sometimes scare them or disgust them or repulse them. So why are we sometimes drawn to that when we don't want to be? Why are we sometimes drawn to that and we choose to be? And what does it mean for our psychology, our mental health, and just our general well-being if we are drawn? to these kinds of things. And I cover all of that and more in my new book, Morbidly Curious, A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Awesome. Yeah, very relevant to listeners of this show. Certainly not every episode is morbid using that broad definition, but we have plenty where listeners are like, ah, I can't believe I just listened to that and also enjoyed it. So really excited to have you on. so on the weirdest thing i learned this week we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading writing reporting etc decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was sarah kiley what's your tease okay so i have a very morbid actually and kind of sad Batman and Robin natural history story. Great. We've had a lot of, we've been talking a lot about bats and other so-called vermin recently on Weirdest Thing. So it's just, I tis the season. We're recording this and actually on Halloween. So happy belated to everyone listening. To all who celebrate. Yeah. My tease is that I'm going to talk about the original anti-vax movement, which at least had really interesting propaganda art. They had that going for them. Colton, what's your tease? I think I could share with you guys some fun findings about horror fans and empathy. Ooh! I love that. Can't wait. Incredible. Sarah Kiley, why don't you kick us off with Batman and Robin and horror? Yeah, this one, this is a wild ride. Yeah. So to start with, yeah, bats are one of the creatures we often associate with spookier seasons. And now it's starting to get dark at 430 in the Netherlands. So I'm like, I'm definitely in a spookier mood. And bats are really, really fascinating. I think they make up like 20% of like species or at least of mammals on Earth or something. There's a lot more bats than we think about. And before we get into like my bat fact, I have a couple like mini facts to warm everybody up because there's just so much great stuff to talk about bats. So the first one is that the Mexican free-tailed bat can fly up to 100 miles per hour, which makes it the fastest mammal on earth. Like very cool. Yeah, that's pretty fast. It's pretty fast. Did you say 100 miles per hour? Yeah. So they're like out there zooming. And also in general, bats are the only mammals that fly like other flying things like flying squirrels and lemurs they're like gliding they're not really sure but lying so bats are really special for that anyway and then this other one which is like a like a steal it for whoever's listening that may join this podcast i didn't have time to make this my weirdest thing but it was the weirdest thing that i found in the finding of this weirdest thing but apparently bat poop is like this amazing fertilizer that's really full of nitrogen and phosphorus in fact there's a story i i always find these weird stories from like local magazines from like 2006 but it's this like texas magazine and apparently in the 1800s chemists were like discovering that the same concentrated nitrates and guano which is bat poop could be used to manufacture gunpowder so this doubled its value and bat caves were rated for like the bat poop during the civil war and apparently like this bat scientist in this story from 20 years ago says that guano was the biggest mineral export in texas before oil was discovered. So that one, if someone doesn't steal that, I might be back to review that one later. I also feel like there's real opportunity there for like a Civil War era, like vampire or zombie movie where it starts with somebody trying to raid a bat cave to make water gunpowder. Maybe we're farming the vampires, keeping them as bats. Historical fantasy people, you have heard it here. Please go write your 12 part series. but yeah so we love bats bats are awesome and while we're talking about flying bats also are interesting because they're this like group of animals that eat a whole bunch of different things most bats are insectivores which means they like eat beetles and moths and mosquitoes apparently some bats can have like hundreds or even like a thousand mosquitoes an hour which like where are they when i need them where are they when i'm getting eaten alive i don't know and then there's the sweet tooth bats who like they like fruits and seeds and pollen and they'll steal like a sip of sugar water from the hummingbird feeder so i think that's just very cute and then we have spooky bats the vampire bats who there's only three species of those but they're all in south america and they like they don't bite people they bite cows and the sheep and stuff and they they they're tiny little amounts most of the time like two teaspoons a day of blood yeah they're very demure. Yeah, it's like just a little kiss. Like I don't vampire seems a little harsh for for what they're doing here. Honestly, like I, I think I'd rather a bat bite me for a little bit than a mosquito. You know what, I'm just pro bat at this. Just make sure you go get your shots. Exactly. Which go get their shots. Another moral of my story so far. Lots of information. But yeah, but then there's other bats that like eat whatever, like birds, fish, frogs, lizards, unlucky other bats you name it so yeah so this flying weird little mammal can depending on who they are eat whatever so they're very diverse in all sorts of things and today we're talking about the greater noctule bat which is this tree dwelling creature it's got a wingspan of 16 to 18 inches it lives all across europe but it's like mostly in the iberian peninsula to like the bosporus region of turkey and its highest concentration is in the southwest of spain and they're the biggest bats in Europe. They're definitely not like the biggest bats ever. They're pretty, they're about, they're a little bit smaller than like a vampire bat. We'll get more into it in a minute, but they're really cute. Their faces just look like a bunch of mushrooms. Like their ears are just like very mushroomy and like they have these pointy teeth, but I was looking at all these pictures of them today and they're kind of like, they're like kind of like dorky. Like they look like when my dog's teeth get stuck on her lips. That is like the energy that these bats give. They have these little snouts that are like a little like pug or a little sharpay i think they're really cute but i also like i i love little freaky animals so take it with a grain of salt you might not think they're that cute but anyway it was believed that these bats like a lot of other bats were mostly munching on insects and all of this they're like little beetle guys but scientists uncovered some feathers and bird dna in their poops because bat poop is so important we should all apparently be scooping that up. But yeah, so they're like, okay, what is going on here? These little bats are eating birds. And even though these bats are, yeah, big for Europe, they're smaller than vampire bats that we mentioned earlier. And then when you think of like giant bats, like the giant golden crown flying fox in the Philippines, like those guys, and they eat fruit, they're little like fruit eaters. They're four times the size of these European bats. So in terms of bats, big for Europe, not that impressive if you're in the Philippines. But scientists have wondered for a while how these birds, or not birds, how these bats have managed to eat birds, considering they weigh 50 grams, and these birds that they're supposedly eating are half of their body weight. Lucky for us and for bat scientists, there's one particular bat that told us exactly how it's done, and they published their findings earlier this month in Science. So back a couple years ago, the spring of 2023 researchers in spain put these little like sensor backpacks on a handful of back bats in the doniana national park in andalusia so the european bat is like the perfect size for a backpack because a lot of bats are too little for us to really track them and see what's going on but these guys are they can they can manage and basically one of the authors mentioned in scientific american that these sensors like it it's so great because it feels like you're almost flying alongside the bat. So it's not visual, but it is sound and you can see how high up and where they go. So it's pretty magical because we have bats are a little bit mysterious. And so one day these researchers are researching and they get a little alert that one of their bats, a little, it's a lady bat. So Batman, it's probably a little bit of a, a little bit of a stretch, but you'll see. But yeah, one of them had returned home after a very exciting meal. And so the sensor's audio picked up enough sound that the researchers were really able to get like a vivid story of what happened. And so it starts like this. We have little miss bat who's flying along as bats do. And she spots a robin 4,000 feet up in the air. So that's like where birds fly to avoid being eaten by falcons and like other stuff. So like they're up there. And it's just a little robin a little songbird and the bird was as surprised as the rest of us when the bat climbed to these heights and descended rapidly to capture it mid-flight which another one of the authors described it as like a dog fight like it was rough and we have the sound we have the sound recording to listen to so i'll share that so that people who go to the website can see or listen to this but it's if you have the stomach for it it's fascinating it's like this like creepy silence as the bat like sneaks up and this is happening in like the dead of night the bat is echolocating like it's it's this isn't if you're just a bird you are out of luck but yeah the bat kind of creeps up and then there's like this initial like chomp basically where it's like the attack begins and the bird starts just chirping like crazy and then it briefly you have a second really where the bird is like I'm getting away and then for the next 3,000 feet of just like straight descending and plummeting to the earth there's this like battle to the death marked by like more and more frantic chirping and then at the end there's just bat noises so now we're like a thousand feet off the ground and it's like oh and so rest in peace to the robin but yeah so the story for the bat like doesn't end there neither does the recording because for 23 solid minutes this bat just keeps like flying around echolocating all over the sky while eating the bird that's again half of its body weight so it's kind of carrying the bird with him oh i have details you'll see just wait there's more to come but i mean for for a visual that's like if i was like jogging up a mountain and grabbed a mountain goat and just started eating it while i'm running like i'm not a big person, but that's like half of your body weight. Yeah. And we know, we know it took that long because you can hear the chewing noises for those 23 minutes on the recording. Yeah. And yeah, that's, that's super fun. And yeah, it's not an easy feat. And so there's another like little creepy tidbit or fascinating tidbit, creepy and fascinating. But prior to this, the researchers had been gathering up severed songbird wings because they suspected, hey, like maybe this is part of the puzzle and they stuck them in the freezer and then they do what scientists do which is analyze them using x-rays and they do the dna analysis and they discover that the bats are like biting the wings off and then just throwing them into the abyss like while they're doing this eat and fly extravaganza and so like after after the wing removal which like i don't know the wings are kind of like as a chicken wing person i'm like you guys are missing out on an opportunity but anyway, they stretch the membrane behind their hind legs and make this little pouch to have some like in-flight snacking support. So again, like we don't, we didn't get to see this. This was just a sound. So please, whatever you're envisioning is about as much as any of us know. But yeah, I would see I can see how that would make the bird more portable Not doesn take off that much weight but makes it a little more condensed Then it more of a chicken nugget situation versus a full But I mean you would have to ask the bat But yeah, so this story got like a ton of news coverage, which is I always love when that happens because then the study authors are like saying a bunch of stuff to everybody. And if you just go digging around enough, you'll find like really great quotes because they just start saying stuff. And one of my favorite quotes is from Laura Stidschultz, who is one of the authors. And she told the Guardian, from a human perspective, I didn't feel very good about it. But on the other hand, the bat is a rare, a very rare species. And it isn't doing very well in Southern Europe due to droughts and wildfires. So we want the species to have a good meal, which is about how I feel about like nature in general is this definitely doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. But like, it is what it is. and it is true like the this particular bat is a threatened species and it's one of the rarest in europe as well and it's got this fragmented distribution like a lot of species and it's like a it's already a small part of the world like we say oh it's all across europe but europe's little and in that small area of the world where they roost the deforestation and the tree disease and climate change it's making it life harder for these guys and like no matter how like murderous their bird catching habits are like that sucks like to have your habitat be just divvied up and yeah they really the these these bats really like to roost in like these tree holes that are in old growth forests which are again like pretty much in trouble everywhere like the old trees are really struggling out here and while lots of people are fascinated by bats we don't know a ton about them especially in terms of conservation. I found this big review of basically all the climate change bat information from 2022. Apparently like less than half of these studies published concrete evidence for bat responses to climate change. And like over a third of the studied bat species, the evidence is only like a predictive species distribution model. So this is where the bats are probably going. And only a tiny proportion of, I think it's like 400 bat species. And I think there's more than a thousand bat species out there, but they basically like only a tiny amount were studied using long-term or experimental approaches. And on top of all of that, it's the bats that are looked at are typically in Europe, North America, and Australia. And of course, that's not, bats are pretty much everywhere. So it's a little bit of a bummer, but all in all, as in many stories that I tell on this podcast, there's a bad guy and it's human-induced climate change. But yeah, why this bat devised this like metal way of catching and eating prey in the air? We don't really know if it's a climate change thing or if they've been doing this forever, because this is the first time that anybody's captured any of this going on. And who knows, we may never get to capture it again. I mean, if I get to hear this again, that's fine. I will listen to it again. But yeah, it just shows again, like animals, animals will go pretty far to survive, including 4,000 feet in the air. That is my sad story about Batwoman and Robin. Wow. I remember when the study came out and I didn't read any of the articles about it. I guess it was just during a busy week, but I definitely assumed it was like a big, big bat just swooping in. So this was way more interesting than I expected. A tough little scary bat. A little Spanish bat. Very fun. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about something scary in a very different way, which is the very first anti-vax movement. I should start by saying that I first learned about this from a 2021 article in Public Domain Review by Erica X Eisen. I love Public Domain Review. It's one of my favorite sort of like starting points for weirdest thing facts. But I think it's a website not a lot of people are aware of if you're not the kind of person who reads historical academic papers. Yeah, they also have fun stuff. They know how to have fun over at Public Domain Review. Go check it out. So I talked on a previous episode, probably back during peak lockdown about the general history of vaccination, which started with inoculation for smallpox. But just to give a really quick overview, smallpox is the only human disease we've fully eradicated. It is the vaccine origin story and success story. And it used to be one of the deadliest human diseases. It killed one in three people it infected. And it left most survivors with some combination of permanent disabilities, health conditions, and disfigurement. And Egyptian mummies show us that it existed at least as early as 1350 BCE, if not before. So before we had vaccination as we know it, we had variolation, which was the transfer of a little bit of material from a smallpox sore into a healthy human in one way or another to offer them some amount of protection from the disease. And that may have taken place as early as 200 BC. It's a little flaky exactly when it started. And it did work in that if you get exposed to a little bit of smallpox and you don't get super sick and you don't die, you'll then have protection from getting smallpox later. But as you might imagine, with a method of primitive inoculation, where you're literally just taking stuff from a sick person and exposing another person to it, you very often just caught smallpox. That's called getting sick, I think. Yeah, exactly. It really, I think, varied a lot depending on your baseline health, the method of exposure. It was really a crapshoot. For example, written accounts in the mid-1500s describe variolation that was used in China that they called insufflation. And with that, they would dry up smallpox scabs, grind them up, and blow them up your nose. No. Which obviously does not sound great, but was probably, I think was probably one of the more successful forms of this because it wasn't just literally taking like fresh smallpox ooze and giving you a cut and putting it in. It's all bad. Scarier than the bat story. Yeah, I guess I should have said this is actually a very scary story. And yeah, by the 18th century, this kind of stuff was happening all over the world. And the way people wrote about it suggested it dated back at least hundreds of years, if not more. And then in 1798, Edward Jenner, who I think was actually from an area with a lot of cows, but he definitely he had heard rumors about humans catching cowpox, which is related to smallpox, but it's in cows. And then crucially, not getting smallpox later when everybody else was getting smallpox. So he was like, that's interesting. and he used material from a milkmaid's cowpox sore to inoculate a young boy. The boy got a little bit sick for a few days, quickly got better, did not get smallpox, and then later was very clearly immune to smallpox. And so that was a huge success. And cowpox is like, it doesn't look nice, but it's very different from smallpox. It's similar lesions, but they would tend to stay isolated to the hands of the milkmaid, which were obviously exposed when they were actually milking the udders. And they wouldn't really get sick. They would just have, it was basically like a dermatological condition that looked nasty. And then they were fine. So this was in contrast to that early sort of form of pseudo immunization was like very clearly there was a huge benefit at a pretty low risk. And in fact, Jenner named this therapy vaccination for the Latin word for cow, vaca. So it all goes back to cows. It always does. Yeah. But keep in mind that Pester wouldn't even propose germ theory for more than half a century. And research on antibodies wouldn't start until the 1900s. So even though there was very clear, like, visible common sense evidence that this was working, it wasn't like we had anything close to a clear mechanism for how it worked. Did they have, like, speculation at that time? I haven't. That's not something I've done a bunch of research into. But what I have seen, it was just like common sense. Look at what is going on with the milkmaids. And you can kind of wrap your head around like a very vague hand wavy common sense version of it where it's cowpox is clearly not as bad as smallpox, but it does look a little bit like smallpox. So maybe there's like some kind of, but the theory of disease was still mostly my asthma, which is like bad air. Yeah, I think if I was if I was living at that time, I would be a little skeptical if somebody was like, yes, let me inject you with some of this cowpox. Exactly. Yes. Yeah, I understand that. Yeah, exactly. And so unsurprisingly, there was a lot of room for skepticism and members of parliament, members of the clergy and even some doctors became really vocal, became really vocally against vaccination. though members of all of those groups also existed in the very pro-vaccine camp. But anyway, it basically boiled down to why would you inject a human with something that came from a sick, filthy animal? That's gross and maybe dot, dot, dot, satanic. And as is the case with modern health misinformation, there's very clearly a combination of people who have earnest, really heartfelt concerns and people who have an agenda, which I'll get into a little bit later. against big cow. Yeah. The thing is, there was kind of an agenda against big cow in a way, but I'll get to that later. I mentioned in my first tease, I think that they had, they did have some fascinating propaganda art. There were a lot of, you know, this era, the late 1700s into the 1800s, really peak political cartoon era, in my opinion. Just some great etchings that you can go back and look at. People were absolutely vicious. There's one that's in the Wellcome collection that's from 1800. It shows a diseased woman turning into a mermaid. What? Being pulled in a cart by a physician riding a cow and an apothecary dude holding a syringe up. And this grotesque procession is scaring children. And that was supposed to be like, look, vaccines. There's another etching where Jenner himself is seen with a giant check in his back pocket because he did get an award from the government for figuring out how to keep people from getting smallpox. They had checks back then? That was a thing? Maybe it was like some kind of money note, but it was described in the museum description as a check. I don't know. It looked like a piece of paper to me. He had a sign of money in his pocket, and he also had horns and a tail. And in the searching, he's dumping baskets full of human babies into a cow's mouth. The cow is then pooping out little human cow hybrids that are being shoveled into a wagon. Is this still the time where people hadn't figured out how to draw babies yet and they look like little miniature adults? No, these were proportional babies, I would say. They weren't scary medieval adult babies. It was around that time that we just discovered how to make babies in art. That's why I don't like medieval art. It's a real problem. There's so many just men who are baby-sized. Yeah, just tiny men. And then, yeah, there are anti-vaccine crusaders approaching to fight them in the distance. You'll also see in a lot of these cartoons a lot of comparisons to the golden calf, which is the idol that Moses' followers made to worship while he was up on Mount Sinai getting the Ten Commandments. And they were like, what now? We're in the desert. We might as well. Let's make a god. And then many references to, like, it's a literal mark of the beast. you're getting stuff from a beast and it marks your arm they had pretty good pr yeah these are actually pretty you know what like the anti-vaxxers today could probably use a little creative oomph from these guys meanwhile i did see one provax cartoon that featured like a milkmaid in the back saying surely the disorder of the cow is preferable to that of the ass which that's a little cheeky Yeah. Okay, girl. So William Rowley was a major figure in this anti-vax movement, and he put out anti-vax pamphlets spreading a lot of disinformation. I say disinfo and not misinfo because he was definitely one of those people who did have an agenda He and some other prominent anti physicians had previously been making a lot of their money traveling around doing traditional variolations And those were of course much more dangerous, much less effective, but took a lot of work from a doctor walking around, stabbing people with smallpox needles. And so he and a few other people had a vested interest in being like, no, what Jenner is doing is stupid, we should go back to what we did before. And the first edition of his pamphlet showed children literally taking on bovine facial characteristics, like giant eyes and swollen faces. There's this boy with big reddish spots that kind of look like cow print. He also had children covered in sores, which of course, kind of similar to some of the stuff we see with anti-vax misinformation now, a kid covered in sores is what happens when they get smallpox, That's not what happens when they get vaccinated for smallpox. He warned of, quote, beastly and evil diseases. Then he put out a second edition of his pamphlet featuring an elderly woman named Ann Davis. We don't know if she actually existed, but he claimed she died soon after being inoculated, perhaps because she was an elderly woman. But first she sprouted horns, he said. Oh. And there was a lot of this, a lot of the rumors around this were like, it will turn you into a cow. You will be a cow. And people were like, sounds bad. I don't think we shouldn't do that. Benjamin Mosley, who was another big smallpox vaccine hater, he invoked the image of bestiality with this zinger. He was like, who knows also, but that the human character may undergo strange mutations from quadripedal sympathy. And that some modern pacifae may rival the fables of old. pacifae for folks who don't remember is the woman from the greek myth the queen of crete who gave birth to the minotaur after poseidon made her really horny for a bull and what is up with us and cows like oh my lord and like the conversation did evolve because this anti-smallpox vaccine contingent persisted as the decades went on. This guy, W. Halkett, who was the associate of the Medical Reform Society, in 1870, he wrote a pamphlet called, this is all the title, Compulsory Vaccination! A Crime Against Nature! An Outrage Upon Society! A libel upon the wisdom and goodness of the creator, a medical delusion, a legislative blunder, and a dark blot upon our civilization. Okay, Shakespeare. Wow. He didn't keep up with the whole turning into a demon cow thing, probably because germ theory was on the come up, and he was like, maybe we will figure out a reason why this works. But he did say it made kids weird. It reminds us of some modern arguments. He was like, we talk about mental horns and cloven hooves, but they're a metaphor for the insurmountable stupidity that has been observed in some children from the time they were vaccinated, no symptom of which appeared prior to that time. There was also this meme of a kid who literally started acting like a cow. So people shifted away from it will literally give you horns to like it'll make you cowish. But all of the skepticism really started expanding in the mid-1800s, which might surprise you, given that we were like figuring out more science. But it was because in England, Parliament started passing laws to make vaccination compulsory and to provide it for free to the poor. So the compulsory nature, you can understand why people did not take that well. And there were some really complicated socioeconomic dynamics happening there. There were fines that you could get hit with if you didn't let your kids get vaccinated. And so that really riled people up, understandably, because there was a huge wealth gap. And if you were rich, you could just ignore these mandates. And if you weren't rich, they could ruin you. There were instances of people having their belongings auctioned off because they couldn't pay the fines. So again, I can totally get why people did not love that. And the other thing is that the vaccination that was free got very conflated with something called the new poor law of 1834, which is like when you when you look at Edwardian and Victorian and Georgian media about England and people talk about the poor houses and the workhouses. This is where that came from, because basically there was this big push to be like, if you can't pay your bills, your only choice is to go to the workhouse will keep you from dying but it means you have to go live in a workhouse and basically be slave labor so not great social welfare systems and people understandably did not like that and did not like the threat of the poor house and they and what happened is that a lot of the team sort of like agents who were responsible for enforcing that law were the people going around running the free vaccination programs. Great. Rumors started spreading too. First of all, they were like, we hate those guys. We don't want them. But then rumors started spreading that if you accepted free vaccination, that that counted as receiving poor relief, which meant you would be classed as a pauper. So you would lose your right to vote, get sent to a poor house, which was not true. But it makes sense that people were nervous about that. The other thing about this time that I think is really interesting and does have a potential lesson for us today is that, yes, smallpox vaccinations, even as they existed in the 1800s, were incredibly vital. Like smallpox was still killing loads of people at that time and burning through cities. And the vaccinations really did work. But they also weren't being implemented entirely safely, especially when it came to the free vaccination programs for the poor. Apparently there were a lot of initially a lot of like untrained people doing these procedures and they would just be out in the open in like filthy cities where there was tons of disease. And the way vaccination worked for a long time is that you would do a like chain of transmission. Somebody would who had been inoculated with cowpox would then be used as the source for the next person who got vaccinated. I talked about the horrible history of children being basically used as smallpox vaccine fridges for long voyages on a previous episode. But that meant that, like, the way this worked is that you would kind of like take your baby to just like the town square and they'd be like, well, we have a knife and a baby and we're going to poke that baby and then poke your baby. Yay! So just the unsanitary public untrained nature of it meant that it wasn't uncommon for an infant to get some kind of other illness that the other baby happened to have or a bacterial infection. And then of course, yeah. And given the times that would be really serious and the kid could even die. And it still it seems like on the whole, it saved a ton of lives that they were doing this because smallpox was so deadly. But it was like not fake that your kid could end up worse for wear because some random dude was poking them with a dirty knife. And there were laws passed during the 1800s to try to address this. It's not the public health experts didn't see that this was a problem. They started enforcing training and supervision and regulation to make sure that things were being done in a more clean, sane way. Though, of course, that was all still by 19th century standards. It still probably wasn't amazing. And yeah, I was reading one paper that I'll link to on popside.com slash weird. that was like, that's an important thing for us to remember in talking about how we discuss and study actual vaccine risks, because there are side effects to some vaccines, generally very rare, especially the ones that have any chance of being serious. But we're really not going to talk about them because vaccines are so important to keeping the world's population healthy, healthy, that there is definitely this aversion to talking about the very rare cases where a vaccine can harm you. And I've been thinking about this a lot because there was recently the very biased new vaccine panel associated with the CDC had a presentation by a CDC researcher about febrile seizures tied to, I think, the MMR vaccine, but maybe one of the other childhood vaccines. Chickenpox? Chickenpox. Anyway, febrile seizures, they're scary for parents. It's when a child has a seizure and a fever. I had one as a kid. They are almost never a serious medical problem. And they can also just happen because they're sick and they have a fever and they tend to happen around the same age that you get vaccinated for chickenpox. So it's, first of all, hard to actually prove that every time this happens, it's from the vaccine. But what's interesting is that the takeaway of this expert's presentation was like, yes, there's a connection and let me show you how the numbers show. It's not dangerous. And that connection is nothing compared to how many children it protects. But the takeaway from this panel, because it's not really about the information being presented, the takeaway from this panel was like, look, there's a scientist saying that it causes seizures. I don't have the answer for how we get better at discussing these things, but we very clearly do need to get better at discussing them. And I think the parallel is really interesting. These were these very poor people in England who had valid concerns with the free public health programs being offered to them and the potential risks to their children. And today, just in case anyone listening is not aware, nobody is sticking your kid with the dirty needle in the middle of a tenement house in in london in the 1800s that is not the situation be like it's understandable that the idea of accepting risk is on some level a personal choice this paper i'm starting talking about the researcher starts off by listing a bunch of scary side effects and they're like is this a vaccine no this is ibuprofen which many people choose to take very often but vaccines are this really specific case where it's like yeah you can choose what to put into your body except vaccines are kind of the only thing that if you choose not to put into your body you're putting lots of other people at risk so we're just we really haven't figured out how to talk about this even though hundreds of years have gone by but important takeaway smallpox was eradicated in 1980 and that's huge it's the only thing we've ever done that for and there there are two repositories of smallpox one in the u.s and one in russia there are periodically intense debates about why we still have them and whether we should just destroy them on the one side people are like every once in a while we catch somebody making a little bit of smallpox somewhere and what if somebody makes a bioweapon or something gets out or a similar disease breaks out and having this little bit of smallpox for research will be really important. And on the other hand, people are like, unforced error. What if the smallpox gets out? Get rid of it. So that's a story for another day. But the point is, despite all of the fear mongering about turning children into cows, Jenner's research really did change the world. And that's cool. And I highly recommend checking out the political cartoons about the risks of becoming bovine adjacent. Nice. This episode brought to you by Big Cow. Yeah. Big Cow. All right. We're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Colton, tell me more about horror movies and empathy, two things that I love. Yeah, two things that I think most people should love to some extent. So you might think if somebody enjoys watching a movie where there a lot of suffering and blood and gore and scary things that maybe they lacking a little bit in empathy or maybe there something maybe a little wrong if they enjoy that I think that an intuitive thing to think, right? And I can sympathize with that. But it turns out if you actually look into the literature of do people who like scary things, do they have, for example, low levels of empathy or compassion? Are they just adrenaline junkies who are looking to get a rush The answer is kind of surprising. So if we start back in like the 1980s, right? So this is when Psych was just starting to look at horror movies and empathy, right? This is around the time that a lot of movies started being put on VHS. They were coming inside the homes. People were a little concerned. What happens if my kid catches Friday the 13th on TV or something? And there were a couple studies in the 1980s that were done on empathy and horror films and enjoying horror films. and these were synthesized, I think in 2000, I want to say 2005, it's around that time, in a meta-analysis. So this meta-analysis just gathered all the studies they could find on horror fans or horror enjoyment and empathy. And it's a big long paper because it includes a lot of other things. But if you look at their results for the meta-analysis, you would come away thinking, okay, horror fans do have low empathy because that's how it's mentioned in the abstract. So if you actually dig into that paper, there's a couple of interesting things that you'll find. So one of them is that there were only six studies that looked at empathy and horror fandom. Not nothing, but small, if you're going to make a wide sweeping claim about somebody's mental state. And what's more interesting is that only two of those studies actually had significant results. And so if you look at those two studies and say, okay, in the cases where they actually found that enjoying horror was related to low empathy. What did they test? What was the method? What did they use? It turns out that those two studies might have been slightly biased in how they tested that claim. Yeah. So, you know, meta-analysis are great. That's like our gold standard in science for what is the current truth, but they're only as good as the studies they summarize. So if they're summarizing studies that have some methodological flaws, then you're just summarizing poor information. And I don't think they did this intentionally. I think it's just the fact that there weren't a lot of studies on this and what they had was maybe a little bit flawed so these two studies uh one of them for its like measure like the way it operationalized being a horror fan was they showed people a short clip of a brutal murder with no resolution right so like a kill scene or like a 20 or 30 second kill scene in a horror movie the other one showed a terrible scene of torture from a film again with no resolution so these short clips and uh The authors, to their credit of this meta-analysis, noted that these were unusual ways to measure horror fandom. Yeah, yeah. You know, maybe it does not represent... Did you enjoy a Serbian film? Yeah, yeah. Did you, not only that. Go figure. Did you enjoy, like, a specific scene of a Serbian film? Because, you know, horror movies, they give you this mixed emotional range of things when you're watching it. Sometimes you feel joy, sometimes you feel fear, sometimes you feel suspense. There's a lot of things going on. So if you chop it into little bits and you show someone one scene and you say, how much did you enjoy that scene? It may not tell you much about people who enjoy the movie as a whole or the story as a whole. So for example, if you show someone a scene of torture or brutal murder with no resolution, and you say, how much did you enjoy that? You might be tapping into something like sadism and maybe not horror fandom. The analogy that came to mind for me would be like, if I show you a scene from a rom-com and it's the breakup scene, and I say, how much did you like that scene? And the people who say yes probably aren't necessarily rom-com fans. They maybe just are a little bit sadistic. They're going through a breakup. They're having a hard time. Yeah, but that's an important part of the story, but it's maybe not the part that you would ask, do you enjoy that? And then expand that. I thought that was kind of interesting. And then I have some studies on empathy that show the opposite of what this meta-analysis has shown. It turns out if you recruit hundreds of people and you give them standardized measures of of cognitive empathy. So like your ability to take the perspective of another person. If Rachel says, oh man, I've had this, I've had a tough day. All these things have gone wrong. We can take her perspective. We can understand that, right? That's cognitive empathy. Now, affective empathy is similar, but it's more about feeling what another person feels. So if your mom is crying, it may not matter why your mom is crying. You're probably going to feel a little sad because your mom is crying, right? That would be affective empathy. And then there's a third trait that seems like it would be important, which is compassion. So this is caring about another person's well-being, right? So you have taking their perspective, feeling what they feel, and caring about how they're doing. And those things are all related. They make us good, cooperative, pro-social creatures, but they are distinct and you can measure them distinctly in even an fMRI. You can measure them distinctly in psychological instruments. And so if you just recruit hundreds of people and you give them those three psychological instruments to see how they score. And then you ask them, what kind of movies do you like? Do you like romance movies, drama movies, horror movies, thriller movies, action movies? What you find is that people who really like horror movies score just like people who really dislike horror movies in affective empathy. So they feel emotions just like anyone else. What's really interesting is that when you get to cognitive empathy and compassion, they actually score a bit higher. So they're actually a little bit better at taking the perspective of another person. And they're a little bit more carefree. about another person's well-being. And you can take that further and you can say, okay, that's just people reporting. I like horror movies or I like action movies or whatever. But what about actual engagement? What if you watch a lot of horror movies? Does that actually affect it? And so if you give people, in this case, it was 50 horror films, like the 50 greatest horror films. And you just say, of these 50 films, just put a check mark next to the ones that you've seen, right? A nice measure of horror engagement. And then you give them those same empathy questionnaires, cognitive empathy and affective empathy and compassion, you find the same thing. So affective empathy looks just the same, even if you've seen all 50, or if you've only seen one, cognitive empathy and compassion, in some cases, a bit higher. And this was even broken down by subgenre. So it didn't matter if it was a ghost movie that you enjoy the most, or maybe psychological thrillers, or even like gory slasher films. You were really good at taking the perspective of another person. And I thought that was interesting because it's a little counterintuitive, but if you think about what a horror movie is, it maybe it starts to make sense, right? So at its core, a movie or a story about someone who's very vulnerable and who's being pursued, attacked, chased by someone or something that is much more powerful than them. It's kind of this power imbalance in horror that doesn't really exist in other genres. And so in order to actually enjoy a horror movie in order to feel scared by it, which is what most people want to get out of a horror movie. If you go to the theater and you watch a scary movie and it doesn't scare you at all, you're probably thinking you didn't get your money's worth. But if it scares you a little bit, right, that's what you're looking for is that little bit of fright. In order for it to be scary, you have to actually empathize with the vulnerable person in the story, right? So if you're a psychopath and you're going in there and you have no empathy for the vulnerable person for the protagonist, the victim, it's not going to be scary to you, right? It's not going to be interesting to you. And you're probably not going to like it. You're probably not going to be a horror fan. That kind of leads into this interesting question of then are horror fans really these like hardened, adrenaline junkie, sensation-sinking people that we, that again, intuitively, it would make sense, right? Yeah, somebody who likes a good thrill, maybe that's who wants to go watch a horror movie, wants to go to a haunted house on Halloween or something like that. But it turns out that a lot of horror fans are actually a little bit higher in anxiety than the average population. So they're actually a little bit more of scaredy cats, which raises an interesting question. Why would you go watch this thing that you know scares you? And it turns out that many people who seek out these sort of scary play experiences, again, whether it's a horror novel, whether it's going to a haunted house on Halloween or watching horror movies. it turns out that many of them get what they get from a horror movie or a horror book or something like that is a feeling of overcoming their fear. So it's not the fear itself that they're actually chasing. They do want to experience fear, but not for that feeling necessarily. It's for the ability to experience that safely and practice overcoming it. And it feels good to overcome a challenge, to be presented with something that you can overcome. And horror movies do that really well with emotions that we tend to avoid in real life, like anxiety and fear. So yeah, I think there are a lot of things in psychology where it's intuitive to believe, oh, horror fans probably are low in empathy, or maybe they're adrenaline junkies. But it's important, I think, to test those intuitions, because many times they come back, not only not being true, but maybe even being the inverse of what we originally believed. Yeah, totally. Something I've been thinking about a lot recently, with like horror discourse is that I see like a contingent of horror fans who are like everything's about trauma now like why can't we just have good old fashion and I'm like no I think if you look at the history of horror as a genre it was actually more of a blip that we had the like hostile yeah which like I don't have a problem which is its own form of trauma it's all trauma But there's like, where's the straightforward blood and guts? Why does everything have to be about childhood trauma? And I'm like, what do you think gothic horror was about? Everything was just the movie. I mean, that's in horror's DNA. That's always been a part of it. Yeah, I think that's part of the draw to it, right? That's part of the, again, part of the intrigue is that it's really the only genre that deals with these really difficult existential sort of narratives, right? Yeah. death and loss and grief and in ways that other other genres just don't deal in quite as much yeah it's the only way for us to safely explore scenarios of what would happen if this took place totally yeah i recently wasn't feeling well and i was like i want to watch something familiar and comforting like event horizon it did make me feel better it was great like a movie where what is like a portal to hell opens up on a spaceship that's lost in outer space somebody you survive yeah yeah yeah that's me with midsummer if i'm having a bad day i'm like okay old people need to jump off a clip sorry spoilers um if you've gone the last eight years sorry guys yeah big big plot twist there big uh or maybe not i don't know watch it guys you'll enjoy it if you have empathy you'll still you will still be surprised there's more in store for you in Midsommar. This is also not related to the topic itself, but I'm realizing I've never plugged my good friend's horror movie that's available on Tubi, First Time Caller. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know if I like horror because I don't want to be jump scared. It's purely psychological. It's like a sort of a one act. It's a dude in a room doing a Joe Rogan type radio show as a very unlikely apocalypse starts to unfold. It's really good. Mike Flanagan loved it. He left a great review for it on Letterboxd. And it's free on Tubi, so you should check it out. First time caller. When did it come out? Like three years ago, I think. Two or three years ago. Okay, so fairly recent. Yeah, yeah. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, starring and directed by my good friend Abe Goldfarb. Anyway, love horror. Love talking to you about your research. Always, Colton. Would you remind our listeners what your book is called so they can go find it? Yes, yeah. So, morbidly curious, a scientist explains why we can't look away and it should be available at your local bookstore or Barnes and Noble or Amazon or wherever you buy books. And it just goes through the reasons why we're morbidly curious, why we're drawn to things like horror movies and true crime, or even cases where we don't want to actually see it, like maybe a car wreck on the side of the road. Why do we, what do we do that? And then the kind of the second half of the book is, what does that say about us? I have a chapter on empathy and a chapter on anxiety and a chapter on kids? Like, should you let your kids engage in scary play? And is it good for them or bad for them? And yeah, I think I think it'll put a lot of people at ease, both the people who are morbidly curious and the people who aren't but have maybe a friend or family member who is and they've always wondered why they love Halloween so much or why they are always on Tubi streaming horror movies. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Beloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.