Looming
Why can a deadline weeks away cast a shadow over today, while a threat such as climate change can feel distant? Fraser, Nick and Peter explore how we detect approaching danger and how that response drives anxiety, fear and procrastination.
The conversation begins with locusts watching Star Wars, then moves from collision avoidance to the way humans judge threats. Along the way, the team discusses why diaries can make future obligations feel closer, the time-as-distance metaphor, whether making a deadline feel urgent actually helps and how an endlessly rising sound can create a sense that something is about to happen.
Rind and Simmons describe what happens when locusts watch Star Wars: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1479436/
Sharp Edge Eye Syndrome: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9675685/
Threat imminence and the periaqueductal grey: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17717184/
Threatening students seem closer than repulsive students: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23160204/
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer.
I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights.
On this podcast we look at a wide range of topics from an analytical viewpoint.
And today we're discussing looming.
Nick, three words.
Winter is coming.
Speaker B:Yeah, good point.
So that's.
That is.
That is exactly what we're talking about.
But first, let's talk about what happens if you make locusts.
Watch Star Wars.
Speaker A:Ah.
Speaker B:In one of the best experiments I think I've ever read, read about the psychologist called.
ologist called Claire Rind in:Watch Star Wars.
I don't know what she was hoping to discover.
Well, I do actually know what she was hoping to discover.
She was measuring a thing in their brain, the descending contralateral movement detector, and, and its connection to another thing called the lobular giant movement connector.
And these are single neurons in the locust brain.
So they have these big neurons and their job is effectively to manage their ability to jump away from threats.
And so it turns out that the thing they got really excited about, these neurons was not Luke Skywalker's character arc or anything like that.
It was when there was a TIE fighter moving towards the screen.
Oh.
Apparently that was their favorite bit, the locusts.
Speaker A:Was it visual or audio or both?
Speaker B:We don't know entirely visual.
Okay, so the, the theory here is that.
Well, it turns out if.
If a visual object is growing sufficiently quickly, it's recognized or detected as a threat by locusts, by this single neuron, and that then fires them up to jump out of the way.
And so, I mean, I think the logic of choosing locusts is they turn out to be really, really good at avoiding collisions because if they fly in these enormous swarms of millions of locusts and they don't all crash into each other all the time, and they're also obviously very good at getting out of the way when a bird is trying to eat them and stuff.
So anyway, the reason I thought that we should talk about this is because I am haunted by looming things Anyway.
I'm always feeling if there's some sort of deadline, something I've got to do in a couple of weeks time, there's this sense of a shadow growing, you know, this kind of idea of sort of a long shadow being cast by a thing that's getting closer.
And that kind of stops me from relaxing.
And I thought, well, you know, this, I think this Metaphor is very deep.
And you know, what is it then that makes us feel like a thing is becoming a growing threat?
Can we, is it good?
Are we getting it right or other things that we're getting wrong about it?
And how can we, how can we fix any issues to do with that?
So that's it really.
Looming, looming on the locus.
Speaker C:It's worth pointing out that those neurons are present in both the larvae and the adults.
So it's genetically transferred.
It's not a sort of thing that emerges from their environment, which is pretty.
Speaker A:Awful for the larvae because I don't think there's anything they can do about it.
Right.
And so they are.
Speaker B:I don't know how mobile larvae can.
Speaker A:They wiggle around and they can do something.
Speaker B:Yeah.
I mean anything is better than getting eaten by a bird.
Speaker C:It's also worth pointing out that robotics engineers mimic that system for collision avoidance.
Inspired by the biology so effective.
Speaker B:I mean what is it?
Do you mean they kind of the visual sort of self driving cars and stuff?
Speaker C:Yeah.
The architecture of the neural nets has specific bits of it dedicated to movement detection and collision avoidance.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean human.
So in humans we don't have a single neuron like our locust brethren.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:But we do have, there's a very old bit of brain architecture called the superior collicus which is present in almost all vertebrates, even non mammals.
And we mammals have built other stuff on top.
But essentially it's that it kind of automatically triggers when a thing looms and does all this other stuff like triggers our motor systems.
Defensive response to the fight, flight freeze kind of response.
Babies do it.
Babies also can detect approaching objects and respond in inverted commas defensively.
For a baby I think that means.
Speaker C:They were as little as two weeks old.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:And what's a baby's defensive response, Peter?
Speaker C:I don't know.
Look cuter.
Speaker B:Yeah, look cuter or grab onto things.
Speaker C:I think cry.
Speaker B:I think it's probably their response to everything.
Speaker A:So it's clear what the evolutionary benefits are are for this.
Right.
For any kind of animal.
How do we move beyond that and say well that's a really good thing.
What we're going to delve into is what.
Where it goes wrong and how it permeates, I don't know, popular culture or.
Speaker B:Well, where do we want to go with this?
So.
Well there's actually, as you'd expect, a lot of studies about how we judge the imminence of threats.
Right.
So.
And I think there's, there's probably.
It's probably worth thinking about two things which you need to do, one of which is detect the threat, which I think is what this superior collocus does.
It's like it just says this thing is scary, and then there's threat appraisal, which is like, well, what is it?
Is it a threat or is it someone coming to give me a big cuddle?
But, you know, the whole thing of, like, when you make someone flinch by.
By flicking your.
I mean, you clearly this happens subconsciously and autonomously, like you don't have any control over it.
You know, it's not a threat, but you can't avoid flinching.
driving all this mobs, et al,:I love this experiment because it sounds horrendous.
They put volunteers in a maze with a virtual predator that could chase and capture them and would give them an electric shock if they got captured.
So I think it's basically a computer game where they're being chased by this sort of red triangle or something.
And if they.
If it caught them, then they.
Then they.
Speaker A:This is the stuff of nightmares.
Speaker B:I know, I was like, well, they should do that, but they should make them play alien isolation instead.
But then they'd probably.
Probably die of terror.
But anyway, so as the thing was sort of chasing them, the prefrontal cortex was mainly active, which is kind of the more conscious bit of your brain.
And as it got close enough that they were starting to anticipate potentially being caught and suffering pain, it shifted to the periaqueductal gray, which is a brilliant name for part of your brain.
It's the bit of your brain that does all the more autonomous things like pain control and fight and flight.
And so basically, when a thing is close enough, it starts to transition into.
From more kind of threat perception to actual fear.
Speaker A:Well, I think what's interesting is this transition, right, because we're all familiar with this thing of like, being burned, right.
And what happens is, if I understand it correctly, your body reacts before your brain reacts.
Right.
You feel the pain after you've moved.
Yeah.
And that's all very clear and something has happened.
Whereas this is that kind of.
That sort of transition bit.
And what's happening this.
That feels like that's the heart of things when we talk about looming, which is that sort of transition period into that where it becomes automatic now.
Speaker B:It's scary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So exactly.
And I think.
I think that that rings a bell with me.
We haven't really got onto the metaphor side of it yet, but certainly, you know, that's panic mode when there's a deadline and it stops being this slightly abstract thing and, and starts being something that does then motivate you on a, on a physiological level.
Vagion et al.
2012.
Apparently what the thing is affects our perception of how scary it is.
So snakes and spiders coming towards you, we underestimate how quick the collision time will be.
So we think they're closer than they are, which Balcitis and Dunning sort of replicated that threatening stimuli seem closer than repulsive stimuli.
And they simulated this by getting.
I didn't have time to read the whole paper, but they got a threatening student and a repulsive student and, and, and made the move towards the test subjects to see what happened in the direction in which someone is looking.
So talking of threats as people, that makes a massive difference.
So if someone looks angry but they're not looking at you, it's perceived as much less of a threat than if someone looks angry and they're looking at you.
Feels like, yeah, makes perfect sense.
But it's interesting.
I mean that is again like handled, handled on a non cognitive level.
You know, that's something which we, which we experience viscerally.
So yeah, I think that's, it's all fairly intuitive.
I mean if you're a human, all of this makes perfect sense.
So yeah, there we are.
That's, that's what we know about.
So scary things seem closer.
We perceive them as being more up in our face than they are.
And there is some transition point between something being a threat and being processed cognitively to being actually triggering our sort of fear responses.
Okay, so yeah, looming.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Where do we want to go with this though?
So we've established what it is and you know, why it might be the case and the drivers behind it.
Right.
What's the question that we want to address then regarding it?
Speaker B:I think, I think it's looming.
What's that all about?
Speaker A:Okay, so what's it all about then?
Speaker B:Deep dive.
Deep dive into looming.
Speaker A:Deep dive into looming.
Great.
Okay, nicely laid the foundations there, Peter.
What have you got?
Speaker C:Well, moving slightly to a sort of the metaphorical domain, looming has been proposed as a model for how anxiety works.
ehavior Research and Therapy,:This is an active model.
It's not been sort of thrown aside.
This is a way of Understanding it and a way of distinguishing from things, things like depression is anxiety is a sense of looming threat, whereas depression is a sense of loss of something.
The core idea is that threat perception is about a dynamic growth and a rapid gain of danger.
So the sense that your anxiety is caused by a sense that things are becoming more threatening or things are getting worse all the time, or you're worrying about things going wrong.
So it's like this building of unpleasantness causes anxiety and it's a measurable effect.
The publication has got a looming cognitive style questionnaire, which will.
Speaker B:Is it called the looming cognitive style?
Speaker C:Yeah, the looming cognitive style is a trait, a measurable trait in people.
Some people have it and some people don't, to lesser or greater extent.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:It provides a clean distinction between depression and anxiety, which is often lacking in other paradigms of it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Are we in a territory of.
We've, you know, there we are 60,000 years ago, wandering around on the African plain.
We got all these things are super useful, but then it messes up in.
In the world in which we live in.
So thinking about, you know, calories, you know, I like, I want me some of that sweet stuff, and we end up bloated.
Messes, mess.
Speaker C:You're on the right track, I think.
Speaker A:Right.
And whereas this is like super useful to be able to avoid, you know, the lion charging at you.
Speaker C:Yeah, but I mean, we grew up in a physical world where the lions were the big threats and things like that to us.
So our threat detection systems are tuned to things that occur in kind of milliseconds to seconds.
A boulder falling off a mountain, you need to react to it within seconds.
A lion, you need to react to it within seconds.
Whereas we deal with more cognitive looming problems like climate change, which are, you know, take decades to really have a noticeable effect.
So that's kind of why I think that big threats don't loom, as they often should, as you'd like them to.
So slow looming isn't looming.
So.
Yeah, so you have.
So some threats, you have to.
You have to engage on them on a cognitive level for them to actually become a threat, become a perceivable threat.
And this has important ramifications for things like policy.
So policy change.
If you're trying to encourage people to recycle more and use less petrol, then you have to make climate change seem like more of an imminent threat.
Speaker A:Well, it needs to switch to that bit where it's cognitive.
Well, I guess it's still cognitive, but conscious sort of thinking and worry about Something in that, you know, get through that looming transition, bit into the, oh my God, my hand's on fire.
But yeah, so where it becomes visceral.
Right, exactly.
Otherwise we don't do anything about it.
Like climate change, for example.
Speaker C:And you experience this yourself, that summer thunderstorm which is looming on the horizon, which was likely to cause a downpour within minutes, feels much more threatening than climate change, which is potentially species ending.
Speaker A:Yeah, Quiet.
Okay, that makes sense.
So do we have other examples or other areas we want to delve into this either Peter or Nick?
Speaker C:Well, I mean, I just want to, I mean, so one thing we have got, the technology, which is the diary, which is, causes a lot of looming based anxiety.
It's a looming machine.
What it does is it means that you can codify things that are going to occur in the future and gives you this sort of thing to refer to.
So you've always got this sense of a threat.
Whereas if you did, we didn't have diaries and we kind of like.
Speaker B:Well, things just happened.
Speaker C:Things just happened.
We had to sort of remember things.
But you've got this physical reminder that there are things looming ahead.
Yeah, so it's not a, it's not.
Because what the diary does, it means that your recollection of events doesn't have to be time based, which is much harder.
Humans aren't very good with time, particularly in future or past events.
What it does, it provides you a cue based memory system.
So your diary reminder will ping up and say, oh, there's a meeting now.
And then your brain can reload all the information about what that meeting was about.
So you move from a time based memory to cube based memory.
Speaker B:Well, I think more fundamentally, the way that we measure time, the way that we think about time, is basically turning time into distance.
You know, whether it's the hands of a clock moving or a number going up, you know, it's basically turning into a, into a, into a very effective metaphor of distance.
And that's, that is exactly how it feels.
That's something that's going to happen in three weeks, feels further away.
All of our metaphors about time are distance related.
And so just no surprise to me at all that we have the same kind of physiological response to those kinds of things.
And we've designed these tools to provoke those kinds of responses.
And when we delay something, we say we're going to put it back, you know, that we, it kind of feels like we're putting things further away, putting them into the distance and you know, when they're Canceled altogether.
And suddenly the horizon is, is freed.
This fantastic feeling of a, of a thing being removed.
So, yeah, I think, I think the, the, the metaphor with time, which seems very obvious to us, I think, is worth, is worth pointing out.
You know, actually we have.
The reason that a deadline has the same sort of response to us as an approaching car is because that metaphor, the mapping onto distance, is completely natural for us.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
And it can be.
Actually, it can be just thinking it through right now.
That means the vocabulary around both space and time, it's, you know, remarkably similar, if not the same.
And I'm sure there are examples where there are some differences in the vocabulary, but a lot of it is, you know, identical, so.
Absolutely.
Speaker B:So, I mean, thinking about what procrastination is, which I think is a, you know, the curse of the modern age is something which is essentially not responding quickly enough to, in the way that you should, to an approaching threat, not getting out of the way, as it were, you know, or kind of dealing with things as you should until they are close enough to trigger a kind of panic response.
Right.
So, so the owner, I mean, that is the equivalent of dawdling in the middle of the road and only kind of jumping out of the way of the car when it really is about to hit you.
The question is, can work.
What techniques can we use to try and make that thing seem closer than it is?
To try and make, to try and make an approaching deadline feel more like a giant spider which is coming towards us.
How do we trick ourselves into responding more aggressively in a way that we would prefer?
Like is it would be better to not have to panic, be better to just, you know, walk out of the way of the car instead of having to jump out of the way when it's right on top of you.
Speaker A:Well, I was going to say that sounds.
Although theoretically that sounds like a great idea.
The flip side of that just makes me feel like I'd be living in a.
Okay, I'd get rid of some of the anxiety around procrastination, but I'd be in a constant state of alert with adrenaline sort of flowing all the time.
But we are, of course, humans and I forget who it is.
There's a stand up comic who's talking about this.
I think if you're an antelope, okay, there you are sort of breezing around on the savannah, et cetera, and all going well.
Then suddenly a lion's chasing at you from out of nowhere.
You've managed to get away, and then five minutes later, there you are just happily breezing around, just eating, munching away.
Whereas one of us, if one of us sort of had someone sort of trying to eat us with big fangs and we survived, we'd dine out on that for the rest of our lives.
And it would take us a long time and months of therapy, et cetera, to get over that.
Speaker C:Life is too safe these days.
Speaker A:Well, no, what I'm saying is that the way we've developed is to.
Not the way we've evolved.
There's a reason why species that are prey, they can't.
That constant state of anxiety that we would have and they.
I don't know how their sort of neurology works, but they just shrug it off straight away.
It's not a big deal.
Speaker B:We need life for them.
Speaker A:Yeah, we just need.
We need to be more like antelope.
Speaker B:Well, yeah, that's interesting.
I mean, the fact that we can do things about it, the fact that we can do things about threats, sophisticated things, it imposes a bit of a burden on us as well.
It's not just a thing, you know, like imagine an asteroid, you know, if it was like a day away, you know, what's the.
What's the point?
Just go and do all the things you wanted to do, you know.
But if it's 10 years away, well, now we've got to spend time thinking about it, dealing with it and putting lots of effort into it.
So there is, you know, and that's obviously still better.
You'd still rather have that.
But it does feel a bit like, well, the further out we look, if we do constantly have to be worrying about everything, you know, then if we just getting.
We'll be loomed at all the time, everything will be looming at us.
And it's like at some point you've got to go, well, some of these things, let's just chill out.
And there is a study which, which looked at the difference between certain and uncertain threats that, you know, if you.
If you know where something is and when it's going to happen, you get a spike of anxiety, stroke, fear.
But it's very close.
But if you don't know when it's going to happen, there's a constant sustained sense of anxiety.
I was wondering if, when Peter was talking about the way that, you know, we've evolved these things to deal with imminent threats that don't last very long.
Whether the modern world is so full and the information environment, because we have so we get.
So we're so informed about everything, whether it just means that we are living in this perpetual state of physiological anxiety because of our awareness of so many things that could happen and whether it would be better just not to know.
And I know there's, there's, you know, there's been studies, I don't know how confirmed these are, but looking at the fact that, you know, right wing people tend to be more motivated by a sense of threat, for example, so threat tends to drive people towards authoritarianism.
And you know, you could look at the sort of political, the kinds of, you know, when is conservatism popular versus when liberalism is popular?
And it tends to correlate a little bit with, you know, if there's a war on, people tend to be more conservative and if it's the 60s, people tend to be more liberal.
You know, so that, you know, that obviously has real effects.
This, this sort of general sense of where the threats are and where are they coming.
Speaker A:I'll bring in Peter before I do what you were saying.
That makes me think of two things.
First of all, you know, I'd probably actually, on balance, rather be a human than an antelope.
Maybe an antelope feels like that as well.
Sorry, so you think an antelope would.
Speaker B:Rather be a human?
Speaker A:No, that's what I'm saying, that perhaps it would be rather, rather be an antelope than a human, but actually doesn't have the capacity to sort of think in that manner.
Right.
And I would argue that, you know, we've got a greater awareness and knowledge, etc.
And what's the word I'm looking for?
Not, not sentience, but this awareness.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Which antelopes don't have.
And so no wonder we have all these sort of neuroses.
Okay.
Because we've got a lot more to worry about.
Although antelope's got to worry about getting eaten all the time.
But anyway.
Speaker B:But you're, you're claiming they don't.
Yeah, antelopes don't have ptsd, they don't have generalized anxiety disorder.
Speaker A:They just get on and they don't worry about asteroids.
Okay, but the other thing, and I don't know, sort of, you know, where, what more to say about that.
But the second thing, what you were talking about was more right wing leaning people.
There's research done into people who are more on the right end of the spectrum have a greater repulsion towards dirty stuff.
Okay.
There's been studies done into this and cleanliness and they're much more, they don't like stuff being dirty.
Whereas if you're liberal, bit of dirt's fine.
Speaker B:I mean, if you meet, if you ever go to, you know, meet.
Meet the kind of people you.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:I'm gonna stop there.
Speaker A:Go to Peter's house.
Oh my God, it's clean.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker A:Yeah, and so that sort of feeds into what you were saying.
Speaker B:I mean, it's interesting that.
I mean, obviously Peter's relating this to the evolutionary environment and the two big killers are going to be accidents and disease, you know, so that's, they're the two things that we, you know, and they obviously serve as massive metaphors for us.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, what is this thing dirty and is it going to contaminate me and is this thing going to squash me and eat me?
You know?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And if you, yeah, and if you, the more, the more of those, you, the more of those types of threats that you see around you, the more you're going to have an inclination to want to conform with your tribe.
You're going to depend on your allies more.
You're, you know, if there's more threats, you're going to need to band together and work harder together.
And so there's this tendency perhaps to be a bit more authoritarian and less concerned about freedom.
It all makes sense.
It's a just so story.
We don't have any evidence for any of this, but it's a plausible hypothesis.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
So look, we're, we're a fair way through now and I think one of the things I'm interested in, but I don't know if we'll get in.
Into it, is the sort of, where you talked about there just so stories and we've talked about metaphor.
I think it's interesting how, you know, this, all these sort of feelings and phenomena, how they, you know, permeate our culture.
Right.
And stuff we like to consume.
Okay.
I'm thinking about films, TV, literature, etc.
We may or may not go down that avenue.
But before we do, Peter, round this off for us.
Speaker C:Yeah.
So just returning briefly to how we can help people have a better sense of looming threats like big things like climate change.
So construe level theory gives us some answers as to kind of why it might happen on a cognitive level.
So things that are distant in time, distant in place, or not closely related to you as a person are more abstract and more sort of more inert.
They're more, you know, they're less of a threat.
So policy for climate change is all about proxima.
Proxima sizing.
Making things feel closer to you can help.
So it's it's not completely constructive theory, but what it does is if you can make it feel more relevant.
So continually point out how there's more flooding and the rate, you know, there's storms get worse and people remember those and feel those then and relate those to climate change is how it's done.
In my research, I came across there's a form of a synesthesia, which I really want to have.
Speaker A:Oh, right.
Okay.
Speaker C:So some people have a kind of time space synesthesia where they can visualize in their own.
Actually in their visual field, their own calendar.
So it doesn't appear like a calendar on a wall, but they have a sort of.
Some people.
For some people, it's kind of.
It's a circle which represents a year and then it spirals into future years.
And they can analyze any individual given day or hour within that all have different colors and shapes, and they can use that as a framework to pin events on.
So they don't need a.
They don't need a diary because they've got this sort of diary in their heads, which I think is a incredibly.
That's a superpower.
Speaker A:Well, once again, as with many of our podcasts, obviously the answer to all this is neural implants.
That's where we need to get with this stuff.
Right?
Speaker C:Yeah.
So, yeah, I think if you ever needed like a personal assistant, you need to find somebody with this because they'd be totally on it all the time.
Speaker A:Brilliant.
Okay, Nick.
Sharp edge.
Sharp edge.
Something.
What's.
Yeah, what's that all about?
You've got something for us?
Speaker B:Well, so, yeah, so I discovered self diagnosed with this new syndrome, which I found out about when I was doing the research for this.
Speaker A:Well, you have self diagnosed.
Speaker B:Yeah, I discovered this is something that I thought was some weird problem with me.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Turns out it's a weird problem with lots of people.
Speaker A:Okay.
It's still a weird problem, though.
Speaker B: ted in scientific journals in:Basically where someone feels kind of discomfort just by thinking about sharp edges and pointed objects coming towards them.
And where this affects me, actually is when I'm in bed.
If I'm in bed in a bed that isn't mine, if there's a table with a corner eye level by the side of the bed, I have to turn away and sleep with my back to that table with the corner.
And in general, like, thinking about things or if there's even like a thing Pointy thing kind of pointing at me.
I get this sort of urge to cover my eyes.
It's a few times it's been actually debilitated, like worrying about not being able to drive or something, you know, not what.
Not wanting to drive.
Because I'm worried about feeling this thing.
But that's very, very rare, Right.
I mean, it's hardly ever happened to me.
Speaker A:When would you feel this in a tweet?
Speaker B:If you start thinking.
Speaker A:Just starting thinking about it.
Okay.
Speaker B:Thing coming towards you through the windscreen.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So anyway, turns out that's.
So this is obviously like a.
An overactive looming detector in your brain, you know, making you want to get away from something which isn't even really there and which can't move towards you.
So.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I don't know, maybe some of our listeners have got this and now self diagnose.
Speaker C:If you were going into a room that had a low ceiling with things hanging off the ceiling, would that you off?
Speaker B:No, that's like things pointing downwards, not an issue.
It's like specifically things that are sort of pointed towards me, towards my face.
Okay, yeah, that kind of thing.
Speaker A:Well, look, thank goodness for that because here you are, reach the ripe old age of, you know, 27, as you are.
Obviously that is a key part of it is you've managed to.
You succeed in avoiding these things as have a long line of hairs.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:All these other.
Speaker B:I mean all these other people constantly getting stabbed in the face with stuff, but not me.
Speaker A:Not you.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'm skirting around these pointy things.
Speaker A:Nice.
Look, we're sort of drawing to the end of this.
Have we got anything we can wrap this up with, Peter?
Speaker C:Yeah, I've got something.
So something listeners could look up as an example of kind of auditory looming.
Because the looming is not limited.
The looming detector is not limited to your visual cortex.
It's auditory as well.
So it's set off by changes in pitch, changes in volume, and again, you have the same biases that Nick described built into you.
So you overestimate the rate at which things are coming at you, which makes sense.
Speaker B:Like a growling lion.
Growling lion's getting closer than.
Speaker C:So somewhere listeners might have come across this.
If you're walking around in town and suddenly the police car starts to accelerate and puts their light, puts their sirens on immediately behind you, it feels like a very imminent threat and you sort of want to get out of the way and out the road.
But actually it turns out that it's not because the police are quite Good at driving.
It turns out they're not going to hit you, but you get that fear response.
But anyway, I came across this thing that's often used.
Sound designers for film and theater, as well as composers for film, use this approach.
Use these approaches to.
To give you a bit of an anxiety, a fear response in certain things.
So lots and lots of sound scores.
Hans Zimmeric, for example, and Jaws and the Bolero is a classic example.
They have this sort of common.
This continuing rising without resolution, which just builds on anxiety.
And a very pure example, an engineered example, is this thing called the shepherd tone.
Oh, I recommend you look at it.
You look it up on YouTube.
It's a set of stacked octaves that endlessly increase in pitch, and it creates this sort of auditory illusion of this thing that never actually arrives.
It sounds like it's forever going up and up and up, but it's not.
It's just more and more tones are coming in at the bass and going and rising up.
That's a really good looming example.
Speaker A:Yeah.
And what's it called?
A shepherd's tone.
Speaker C:The shepherd tone, yeah.
Speaker A:Wonder why it's called a shepherd tone.
Speaker B:It was made by.
Described by someone called Shepherd.
Speaker A:Ah, there we go.
That's a. Yeah, that sounds like about.
Okay.
All right.
Lovely.
No, that was nice.
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