ASM120 Questions, Question, and Even More Questions (Part 2)

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questions questions and even more questions all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Applause] [Music] science faith hey everybody this week's episode is the second part in the series of patrons questions that we started last week to become a patron you can go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the patreon link to become a partner of the show asksciencemike.com is also where you can submit your questions and learn more about seeing mike live when he's in your area but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started gordon hall asks hi mike just wondering if there's any correlation between spiral dynamics and politics [Laughter] yes absolutely uh spiral dynamics one of the things that's most effective at is describing interactions between political groups it's very easy to imagine that the democrats have a orange green center of gravity and that the republicans have a red blue center of gravity in the parties and that's why they have so much trouble talking to each other they have fundamentally different ways of viewing the world josh and becca say i have been in deconstruction for about five years but i often feel drawn back towards my conservative christian upbringing years ago i might have explained this as being convicted by the holy spirit to turn back to the truth now i see it as an unhealthy fear of eternal conscious torment put into me from an early age along with far too much certainty that the church has already figured everything out and i just needed to follow along still there is a part of me that just can't let go of the fear that i used to be right and now i've gone astray i feel in a position where i can't really go forward towards a new healthy spirituality nor back to my old form of belief that i see is seriously flawed in so many aspects i just drift in the middle of deconstruction distracting myself from the cognitive dissonance what might help how you let go of the past and the fear attached to it you realize that you could be wrong now but you could have been wrong then this is the trouble with theologies that make exclusive claims about spiritual destinations how do they justify that their position is superior to other positions how do they know their holy book is the holy book and how do they know that their interpretation of that holy book is superior to all the other competing interpretations so what might help revel in the fact that you'll never know anything for sure especially anything about theology or god or what happens when we die and so what's left to do your best to build an ethic to build a a world view that best allows you to help others why because you'd like to be helped that's why i'm a christian boiled down to its essence this is a faith about loving god and loving and serving others it's beautiful it's beautiful and jesus says to fail to do so is to wander through a burning trash dump where the worm never dies there's weeping and gnashing of teeth i'd rather love god and serve others jordan mckay do you prefer coke or pepsi uh i'm from the southeast i prefer coke although i rarely drink it i have started drinking again lately because i was stressed out from the move and i've gained a lot of weight so i'm going to stop doing that appleton says you've mentioned your learning disabilities and that as a kid you had to develop coping strategies specifically a poor short-term memory leading you to learn to commit things immediately to long-term memory as a kid i struggled with an auditory processing problem but i believe that the coping strategies i developed helped me later excel as a musician and a music teacher i found in other areas the best teachers usually aren't those with natural talent but people who had to consciously struggle and learn how to learn the given subject or skill though they were undiagnosed at the time how would you now diagnose your learning disabilities as a kid can you describe the specific strategies you developed to cope how would you teach these techniques to others to help them for example remember more of the things they read and research boy your point is excellent and uh gosh i don't know that i'm a good example these strategies are so early in my development it's like saying so how do you breathe uh i don't know i don't know uh one tip i um closed not [Music] either available ticker tape or literally closed captions popping up to help me use parts of my memory that are better in terms of reading how i remember so much i avoid distraction i get very focused i have almost no notifications on my phone but the few that i do i use do not disturb or airplane mode and when i'm reading and researching i don't do anything else emails closed i don't let myself get distracted it's probably as good as i can do today marie why do we get wandering itches and what causes them in case you call them something different a wandering edge is when you have an itch scratch it and immediately somewhere else starts to itch i did itching on a really recent episode of ask science mike like the last five or six episodes i think if you google science mike itch you'll get it first shot ryan straight says once had a christian leader tell me that no animals besides humans have pain during childbirth and that is proof of the fall haven't found any evidence to back this up what do you think mike thanks yeah that's not true now humans do have an especially painful childbirth because we have giant noggins which have huge heads because we have these big brains so you know we probably have more pain than average significantly more pain but there's some pretty gnarly methods of of birth and reproduction in the animal kingdom so no i haven't found any evidence to back that up either so ask the person site evidence how do you know that let's see joel says do you think time travel will ever be possible yes and do you think that the fact that we haven't seen evidence of it yet i.e someone from the future traveling back to our present makes it less likely time travel is possible we do it all the time we're doing it right now we are traveling forward on the arrow of time you can change the rate with which you travel through time by getting into a very deep gravitational field or moving faster and then you're traveling through time now traveling backward in time no i don't know if that's possible probably not there's a couple of plausible ideas in physics brian green explores one in his book the fabric of the cosmos but they have a small problem you can't go back in time to before the time machine was invented so i think time machine time is doing that's a big stretch time travel's tough lots of energy required jason and ashley say hello what is your favorite science about connecting with other people specifically why do some people need to feel more connected than others to feel deeper meaning thanks ashley we're social mammals we're all gratified by connecting with other people some of us have been conditioned to experience that less some of us have um different predispositions from our gen x that lead to different brain structure development where we find too much social interaction with too many people overwhelming to our sensory processing facilities um so i think a lot of that comes down to the extraversion introversion spectrum and then our life experiences especially how we form attachment relationships are we secure attach or we avoid attach you know all that matters joe since you are a christian and raising your children as christians how would you feel if they grew up and decided to marry someone of a different faith what if your daughter had to convert to islam for example would that worry you or would you accept that if she was at peace with her decision i would totally accept wherever my kids go spiritually as long as it is not to an extremist fundamentalism uh because i think that tends to be bad for people especially women but no if my daughter converted to islam and got married to a muslim i'd celebrate at the wedding dave simmons says the roman catholic church has different levels of worship latria which is adoration of god and dulia which is the veneration of the saints mary gets her own bonus level called hyperdulia do you think our brains can differentiate between prayer oriented toward a triune god and venerating or asking for the intercession of a saint dave i don't know i haven't seen any and i mean any studies on that i would assume the benefits to your brain are very similar though uh tai i've been reading astrophysics for people in a hurry by neil degrasse tyson which has led me to do a little extracurricular research on him i've watched several interviews in which tyson is asked about the existence of an all-powerful completely good god his response is always that if god exists he is either not all-powerful or not all good tyson cites terrible things that happen in the world every day his point being that an all-powerful all-good god would not allow these things to happen how do you respond to this i have my own opinions but i am curious about yours uh how do i respond to that maybe we're anthropomorphizing god too much yeah we're putting we're making a sky god i don't spend a lot of time debating scott manning the sky gods it's not particularly interesting or compelling to me god is the ground of being god is the source of all and god i suppose is all powerful but not like if we were a magician that could do whatever we wanted god is from which all emanates god is is creative by nature god creates a universe that continues to create so i just think that's an old-fashioned argument i think we shouldn't based our theology on 400 year old physics which is what neil degrasse tyson is doing there he's which is f is totally understandable right that's the that's the dominant normative view of god in western civilization is is based on really old physics uh so i understand what's happening there but i think if we process our theology through our physics uh we end up somewhere more like john shelby spong or spinoza or something like that and then those questions become non-sequiturs they don't make sense mallory says if human bird mutants existed how large would their wings have to be to allow flight assuming they had feathered wings like an eagle can't answer that off the top of my head malory i can tell you that one reason birds are able to fly is they have a fundamentally different physiology than humans they have much lighter bones for example and i'm not sure how well that scales up to a human-sized animal there were some relatively large flying animals in the time of the dinosaurs but they did you know i don't know that their wings were feathered i think i've heard arguments both ways from paleontologists the wings would have to be very very large there'd have to be significant muscle mass and we would probably better gliders than flyers but truly massive i'm guessing and this is guessing this is not a mathematical answer you know a wingspan of 12 to 18 feet would be required with incredibly massive muscles and a completely different bone structure which would make us somewhat brittle on the ground pja says could quantum entanglement ever be used as a mean to communicate instantaneously across the universe it seems like people are very fast to make this hugely but i don't see any suggestion as how it could ever be possible thanks mike no quantum entanglement does not allow information to travel faster than light as that violite violates the laws of relativity that's not what quantum entanglement does that represents the fundamental misunderstanding of entanglement for example when two particles are are are entangled if you start close together you take them further apart two observers in different places can observe the particle and they'll see the same observation but then they can only verify that via a traditional light speed communication light speed or less so no it doesn't it doesn't transmit information it's not how entanglement works conrad says i heard an anecdote where the senior executives of a major corporation sorry can't remember which all had only boys for children you have two girls and i have one daughter where i'm at right now being in such a position would not be compatible with my goals in life then i think not yours either does or can the gender of your children influence your life career choices thanks mike great question uh i don't have a good answer for you i haven't seen any research on that this that's the theme for this week's show great question i haven't seen any research on that andy says hi mike can't wait to see you at the gathering in la love your work and i watched the overview video by the planetary collective last weekend and was really moved by the views of earth from space will you talk briefly about what's happening in my brain when i see these beautiful images and feel a deeper connection to the world as a whole thanks mike andy um oh you're experiencing aw gosh awe in the brain uh it's gonna be some ventral stratum activation it'll cause some limbic activation what's the neuroanatomy of all i don't remember gosh i read a book on this uh andrew newberg who wrote how god changes your brain did a book called how enlightenment changes your brain and when he talks about enlightenment there's a big e enlightenment and a little e enlightenment so a big e is like an incredible you know almost mystical experience level experience uh and then literally aw is like our everyday experiences of awe and wonder and so he goes into great detail about uh how that happens and i can't remember any of it but i love the book so check out how enlightenment changes your brain by andrew newberg uh and sorry for that this is what happens when i shoot from the hip okay brandon says best response for learning about story and your method of communicating large ideas with narrative any quick tips okay don miller's story brand framework is one of the best overviews i've ever seen on how to communicate with story and narrative you can check out the story brand podcast on which i was a guest where we go into that a lot to do that okay aaron says describe the perfect pizza the one that is hot and in front of me james martin says hi mike i've recently heard several people on other podcasts take examples from neuroscience to make the claim that we don't have free will split brain examples cases of epilepsy etc and subsequently raised out about whether persons who have undergone certain neurological procedures should be held responsible for their actions do you think it's a bit extreme to ditch the concept of personal responsibility because some fringe cases in neuroscience wouldn't it make a lot more sense to refine the concept of free will to allow a more nuanced conception of personal agency i.e compatibilism philosophers and psychologists have cast doubts on classical conceptions of free will for a very long time but that does not mean that the only acceptable position left is some kind of hardcore determinism where people can't be held accountable for their actions thanks for making such a consistently great podcast can't wait to see you in in edinburgh by the way the church where you will be speaking is the first stop on the harry potter tour of edinburgh and jk rowling wrote the first harry potter books in a cafe just up the road james wow what a strong clothes i can't wait to check that out um yeah i think i think free will is overrated i think we have agency i think it's limited i'm not interested in holding people accountable for their actions which is a concept i would call retributive justice or punitive justice where justice or punishment is the goal excuse me or punishment or retribution is the goal of a justice system i am all about rehabilitative justice so how can we help people make better decisions and choices how can we protect people from the actions of others so if you have someone who for whatever reason whether free will exists or not they you know they violently attack people all the time we have to take safeguards to prevent that from happening and that may look a lot like incarceration for that person but i think yeah i think in general when i think of crime and punishment i assume there's not free will and that we need to do a better job of helping people shape their agency into healthier choices for themselves and for society and i think we see cultures and societies that do that well especially in northern europe and we see cultures that do that extremely poorly like the united states and the next question was what are numbers but james you already got a question so i'm not doing i'm not doing doubles for anybody but it's a funny question lewis says at age 43 i finally stopped denying the impact that childhood sexual abuse had on me and started working on some kind of framework to make sense of it all i'll share one detail relevant to my question i'm male and my abuser is female i've read several blogs and realized that i needed to sort out the betrayal angle i've also found the opinion it seems to be supported by the data that abused girls are more likely to be promiscuous as teenagers why would that be what data do you have to extrapolate the likelihood of boys are in this regard i don't have any data on that i have seen studies that link abuse to promiscuity and abuse to cycles of abuse and perpetuation of abuse that's because sex is a powerful conditioning tool there's very few states of neurological arousal so intense and so the things that happen to us and that we do during sex tend to strongly influence our behavior because so many of the brain's reward systems are activated even in situations of abuse so i'm sorry that happened to you and i'm glad that you're finding a framework to make sense of it and to heal and to grow toward health but th this is a huge part of why sexual abuse occurs is it it can be a self-reinforcing phenomenon it's also a reason victims suffer so much is uh sexual abuse can create behaviors that aren't healthy for the individual over time even if they're not perpetuating a cycle of abuse allowing themselves to be used or victimized or engaging a lot of sexual activity but not deriving pleasure satisfaction from it all those things are traps that victims get caught in as a result of sexual abuse the female abuser of a male abuse e is a not unheard of that's not something the media talks about a lot especially because of our kind of patriarchal approach to sexuality um if a girl is sexually abused we tend to view that as a crime if a young boy is sexually abused by an older woman we tend to view that as a high five right but that's not a healthy or beneficial look at sexuality andrew says hi mike you've said many times that meditation has radically changed your spiritual practice could you share a little bit of how and why i know a little bit about the science of meditation but i'm interested in how it helps you feel closer to god with the help of you and michael i've developed a pretty solid meditative practice that i think is valuable but there are some times when i do it and i don't feel connected at all i'd love your thoughts on this thanks so much for all you do okay andrew um meditation is different every time you don't have to feel connected to god every time the point is to be still to be quiet to be intentional and to be aware and then what happens in that space happens uh meditation is the thing that works over time it's called a practice for a reason not a session the science completely reinforces that so keep developing your practice and whatever your intention is that thing that you tell yourself you're doing this because over time will get closer so if that is to feel close to god if that's the intent the seed you plant before your practice just give it time it'll bloom um why does you know you said could you share a little bit and why how and why because as my practices deepened i sit in centering prayer and in time i find myself in the presence of god and you say what does that mean i can't tell you it's just a thing that happens i just sit calmly quietly in the presence of god and god does the same with me it's beautiful and uh it's a brain thing will asks would love your train of thought when asked does all information exist irrespective of human ego what atmospheric conditions were like on jupiter 21 712 years ago say from the moment you read this the like your makeup of vapor from your most recent yawn the cause of the second strongest gravitational wave event etc does all information within the universe exist even if given modicum is perpetually outside the reach of human consciousness man the patrons are not messing around with with these questions [Applause] i just hope this is palatable to the entire science mic audience at least in part yes i think all information exists in the universe i think it becomes knowledge as we're aware of it but it is already information in physics yeah absolutely okay quincy says as a space nerd and peacemaker what are your personal thoughts on the entanglement between space exploration slash technology and military technology do you think there is a way we can continue to advance the space exploration aspect without advancing militarism does this problem exist in other countries and space programs i heard neil degrasse tyson is working in a book on this topic that is supposed to come out in the next year so it will be interesting to hear his thoughts i'm actually more interested quincy in his thoughts than in mine there is an incredible link between militarism and space exploration today in every country i'm aware of the technology that gets you to a space station or the moon is the same that delivers a warhead to another continent there's no way around that some in some ways the peaceful exploration of space is saber-rattling it's posturing it's look what we can do we could do it with a bomb too right militarism is such a cultural value along with natural nationalism i'm not sure how to decouple those at scale short of an over an intentional reboot of the educational systems of every culture that's space faring man these questions are really hard jonathan scott hey mike i've heard that we are supposed to closely pass bernard's star in about 5 million years what kind of impact will a close solar pass have on our solar system at the least could we expect some type of gravitational impact to our orbit or the orbits of other bodies in our system thanks uh space is huge so a close pass of a star is close in astronomical terms but still not close at all on the scale of a given solar system it's very very very very very rare that stars pass close enough to disturb the orbits of their planets it's not unheard of there's so many stars it does happen that's how by the way we get planets that are um just wandering through space not in a solar system some star flung them loose but to my knowledge bernard star will not get anywhere near close enough to our solar system to disturb the orbits of the planets around our sun but i could be wrong i didn't research that answer okay joe says i've been saving up several okay but i'll do one so i'll do the first one is there a scientific reason why some people feel they were predestined for something a career a ministry salvation etc absolutely our brains are meaning making machines your consciousness is less the boss of your brain and more than narrator so there's all sorts of things that happen in your life experience and in your actions that didn't originate in the parts of the brain responsible for your consciousness but your brain your conscience still takes credit for them in your process of meaning making that's why we are wired to accept explanations for phenomena that include a purpose including our own lives really really good question says i feel like i've heard a lot of your life-changing story which i'm happy about and appreciate through the liturgists and this podcast is there more to find out in finding god in the waves oh man andy i have been asked that so many times honestly i think the podcast really hurt the book more than it helped it um because people think they've already heard everything about my story and the fact is in the first half of the book i go into deeper detail about my story my deconstruction my experience than i have anywhere else and in the second half of the book i talk about rebuilding my faith in more specific detail and in wide swaths than i have anywhere else finding god in the waves is not just a collection of material from the podcast there's a mo there's a huge part of the book that has never been mentioned on the air the themes are different uh it's a book length work so absolutely there's more to find out in finding god in the waves which the paperback edition comes out october 3rd in the united states so if you want to get it really inexpensively that will be an opportunity let's see almost done here folks beth says are there any positions of authority you think are automatically deserving of respect i often hear for example people say that the office of the president inherently deserves to be respected regardless of who's serving in that role other examples commonly referenced in the church are pastors church leaders parents and other figureheads should we automatically respect certain authority figures in life or is it valid for our respect levels to vary depending on the behavior and character of people in those roles the second one i automatically respect everyone not because of their position but because they're a human being but if people are abusive dismissive negligent authoritarian controlling then i will lose respect for them no i don't think i don't think any office inherently gets respect i think all people deserve respect until they show you that they don't megan says if you can train your brain to have mystical experiences does that need negate the idea of god directly revealing himself to you no no it doesn't here's why oh maybe it does maybe i was about this where i was going was to learn more about space we've had to launch satellites into orbit right and the stars are already always there but we couldn't see them until we did the work to get the position to see what they had to say but the stars don't reveal themselves to us the stars simply are and we see them or not and sometimes it takes more work to see them so in like that view of god where god is sort of a a ground of being then um god is always there and we either discover god's work or not but in like a more personal way in a relational way relationships take work relationships take effort if i'm across a continent from my life and i don't call her and i never come home she's no way to communicate with me short of flying across the country and finding me so no i don't i don't think in either paradigm either a personal god or a ground of being god that the idea that you can do things to make yourself more aware of god and god's revelation i don't think that negates god no back to my original answer zack says sometimes life throws you a situation that gives you the perfect science mike question a few days ago i opened the freezer and realized the grocery receipt had been accidentally placed on top of a frozen pizza when i grabbed the paper it barely felt cold certainly less than i expected and less than the food i took out i continued to leave the receipt in the freezer to see what would happen nothing did is this due to a lack of moisture in the receipt yes or how thin the paper is yes why won't my receipt freeze because it is already frozen [Laughter] frozen matter is what in a solid state and all of the molecules in a piece of paper are frozen at room temperature and in fact in their current configuration can't actually melt they can only be combusted if you heat or receipt enough what will it do it will burn it won't melt it'll never melt so that's what's happening uh there's no moisture so you're not gonna get ice crystals and it's very thin and it's an insulator so it it doesn't conduct thermal energy especially well it's so thin you pick it up your fingers warm it very very quickly yeah the receipt is is never going to feel really i guess if you dipped it like liquid nitrogen then it would be quite cold your fingers aren't thermometers by the way what your fingers measure is not temperature but change in temperature rate of thermal transmission and the receipt is just not doing it for you in absolute terms it's the same temperature as the frozen pizza it just doesn't feel as cold because you pick up the receipt it doesn't transfer a lot of thermal energy away from your fingers so that's the main thing it's it's a the receipt's already frozen and b your fingers aren't thermometers katie owen says i'm a queer christian and my theology is affirming of queer identities i am extremely confident in the truth of my stance on my identity even so sometimes in conversations with people of a more fundamentalist perspective i find myself doubting what if they're right what if i am really just reading what i want to read what is happening in my brain when these doubts creep in how can i participate in productive discussions about the church and lgbtq persons without getting triggered and working through identity crisis all the time katie you you might not have to why don't you just take the time to get secure in your identity with people who love you for a while and just just skip the advocacy to fundamentalists not forever if you feel called to those conversations have them but first get solidified in god's love for you get solidified in people of faith who accept you that's what's going on your brain derives beliefs from social identity your social identity comes from people who you spend time with so just spend a lot of time with affirming folks for a while get secure and then go back and have those conversations i don't want to oversimplify it but i think it's that simple i think it's that simple you've wrestled through this i assume you come from a faith background where you once were not affirming and so you've got a lot to work through there and then as as this is still kind of fresh and new for your consciousness and your emotional systems you're having conversations with people who speak to a place where you once felt social belonging and identity and that's a powerful force in human belief and behavior yeah spend time with affirming people and you know what honestly this is a powerful job for people like me i'm straight for me to talk about gender identity to talk about sexual orientation is an academic pursuit so i don't i don't i don't carry the same uh felt risk of social rejection ostracization of theological torment in these conversations so it is much easier for me to have a conversation with a non-affirming christian because i don't have the same amount of skin in the game so let us allies do some of this work right it's not it's not uh it's not queer christians who are persecuting queer people it's not so don't worry that the work won't get done take care of yourself if you don't take care of yourself you can't help you can't help if you don't take care of yourself john says i'm curious as someone who's a lot more connected to the rural south and i am what you thought of the s town podcast if you listen to it i thought it was masterful storytelling and incredibly compelling but something about it doesn't sit quite right with me now that i've had some distance from it but i can't fully articulate why it felt a bit cavalier to me i suppose john unfortunately i have not heard the s town podcast though many have told me it's excellent dev says should be really quick when to answer you mentioned before that you have a scientific method to fall asleep really quickly i'd like to know how that works okay i talked about that on a previous episode of science mike i don't remember which one i think i talked about it once with don miller as well it is not a quick answer it is not a quick method it basically comes down to good sleep hygiene and a consistent meditative practice those are the two components making good decisions about what you do in the hours before you go to bed going to bed at a really consistent time keeping the space that you sleep in dark quiet not using your bed for anything other than sleep or sex no media consumption no phone no tv none of that should happen because you're conditioning yourself to be active instead of you're basically training yourself sleep training uh and then um i do a breath meditation i listen to myself breathe and i i really i go to sleep in 25 seconds if i go to sleep slowly i go to sleep in 25 seconds and but this is not something that you can figure out in two weeks or two months maybe two years good habits over and over and over amanda says what are your thoughts on prophecy in the bible for example isaiah 53 talks of a suffering servant whom many refer to as a prophecy of christ i have some family members who base their faith on old testament prophecies being fulfilled in the new testament arguing that because these prophecies were fulfilled in the bible it must be true do you think old testament writers were actually being prophetic or do you think this is something we look back on now and see christ in it i'd love to hear your thoughts on this thanks for all you do i think there's no question amanda that many old testament writers were referring to prophecies about the messiah i don't think they were thinking of jesus in particular i think the thing with prophecies is very easily to protect someone into prophecy if i made some prophecy about sea levels rising and i was ambiguous enough about the time frame or i say a child would come from a land where the seas were rising what does that mean at what age the day they were born the first five years of life why'd the seas rise was it permanent was it storm surge from a hurricane see what i mean the lack of specificity in prophecy is what makes them so compelling because the meaning making machinery of human brains finds the parts of a narrative that fits a prophecy and uh it becomes authoritative so yeah i'm not a big prophecy guy you might get that from my answer if that's important to their faith though like this is not a worthwhile debate having it's just not a worthwhile debate to have in my opinion kevin says i'd love to hear the best argument you know of for the actual existence of the soul and maybe hear whether you believe in one or not what is a good reason to actually believe we go on after death what do you currently believe about this i know your beliefs have shifted many times but what do you currently believe is it just lights out when we die or do we go on uh kevin thanks for asking that it's a question i get asked quite frequently but i don't think we've done on the show in a while i have no idea what happens when we die and i am not particularly concerned about it i have enough on my mind going through this life the actions i take are not for eternal reward later but because i believe it's the right way to live now i don't know anyone who has died and can tell me about it um now someone said what about jesus jesus was dead for three days okay that's great [Music] my jesus experiences are decidedly mystical in nature and probably not a great place for me to make a fact claim about a universal human experience so maybe there's a heaven that we uh consciously go to and are in the presence of a conscious being like god i think that'd be amazing maybe the the ending is more mystical or you know involves a union i have no idea which means i also don't know what i think about an immaterial soul i have no idea i've seen absolutely no science which speaks to an immaterial soul at least not convincingly uh so in general i'm just not an afterlife faith kind of a person my belief in christ is about this life and the here and now not the next life and some you know cosmic reward last question comes from christine i hope an after dark question can make it onto the podcast what the heck is the deal with crying after sex i don't normally do this though i have once or twice in the past during times of stress in my life recently i experienced a personal loss and the amount of crying after sex has dramatically increased is this some time of flight or fight response hormones my poor husband would appreciate knowing it is not him it's me thanks mike christine okay off the top of my head if i remember correctly like half of women have experienced uh crying after sex it can come a couple of ways there's no single answer one during orgasm and during sexual contact uh you get a lot of oxytocin that can cause tears of joy it does not sound like what's happening to you sounds like you're having a little bit more of a sadness or feeling down after sex and uh it's not flight or fight there's a release that happens during orgausman during sexual contact and [Music] there are feelings that you maybe have not fully processed and the intensity of a sexual experience brings them to the surface there's nothing wrong with it if you find it especially unpleasant um talking to a therapist could help a lot um but i think how we contextualize and react to our experiences defines a lot of the suffering so maybe that's a good time for some cuddling and some closeness and some reassurance and um that that doesn't it doesn't have to be like an indictment on the sexual experience it's not a judgment on anyone uh it's just a time for some intimacy and uh there's nothing wrong with it at all it's not unhealthy it's not uncommon it is more common in women than men but it's not unheard of in men either it troubles me i think in our culture in our comedy we make a lot of jokes about crying after sex and uh on on the one hand level i get it that's processing uh it gives us some distance that's fine but on the other hand it can alienate people are having the experience so it's not unhealthy there's nothing wrong with you doesn't mean you have a bad relationship with your husband it simply means that your brain has gone through a very intense experience through sex and that is bringing to the surface other feelings and emotions as a result and it's totally normal and totally healthy and there's nothing wrong with you christine or with your husband next week we'll do hopefully an upload of the sermon i do it good sam if it's any good and then i might i might go quiet here for a couple of weeks while we unpack boxes in california thanks for listening everybody thanks andrew for your pre-production work on our science mic thank greg nordine for producing and sound designing especially on really long episodes like this one and jeb thanks for the theme song buddy everybody i'll talk to you soon