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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Mel Gibson did it, Tom Cruise nearly busted Oprah’s couch doing it, and Kanye pretty much
00:05
has owned it for years now.
00:06
I’m talking about expressing too much emotion, usually in public and in weird and often insensitive
00:13
ways.
00:14
Such regrettable outbursts are not unique to celebrities, of course, and they can be
00:17
enough to make us think of our emotions as irrational.
00:20
But they’re not… well, not usually.
00:23
When they’re not getting the better of us, they have work to do.
00:26
Part of their job is to provide the energy and motivation that lets us meet our goals
00:30
and our needs, and despite the occasional public fail, they often improve our performance
00:36
in a given situation.
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So emotions play an important role in how we think and behave.
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Of course, when they blow up and someone screams at a flight attendant or punches a paparazzo
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or jumps on stage and grabs the mic away from a teenager in the middle of her acceptance
00:48
speech to say that someone else deserve the honor more – all hail Beyoncé – you’re kind
00:52
of off the rails of normal emotional function.
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Okay, definition time, general idea.
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Emotion is a mind and body’s integrated response to a stimulus of some kind.
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Emotions involve physiological arousal, expressive behaviors and conscious experience.
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These can be short flashes or long, lingering responses, and they can be very clear or very
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confusing.
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Say, you’re walking home at night and you hear footsteps behind you.
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Physiological arousal occurs in the form of your heart pounding, your expressive behaviors
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could be like quickening your pace or moving toward a streetlight, and your conscious experience
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may include thinking “Oh I’m…
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I’m… gonna get mugged now?
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Is this like a werewolf behind me?”
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Feeling, you know, fear and panic.
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We know those three pieces are there, but psychologists are still puzzling out exactly
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how they fit together.
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How do thinking and feeling interact?
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Which one comes first?
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And do these bodily reactions – the pounding heart, the need to pee, the sweaty palms – come
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as a result of the thought “I”m scared”, or did my tweaking out body trigger the thought
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in my brain?
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These are just some of the questions that we’ll be looking at in this messy, exhilarating,
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and terrifying world of emotions – no one gets out unscathed.
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[Intro]
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Our emotions represent and construct a big part of who we are.
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Think of how boring we would be – how boring the world would be without joy, embarrassment,
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heartache, or fear.
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What would motivate us to make decisions, be cautious, or bold, or strive to understand
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each other?
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What would keep our humanity intact?
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Where would punk rock come from?
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No doubt, we need our emotions, but how do they work?
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Well, like, apparently everything in psychology, there are a few different theories.
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In the late 1800s, pioneering American psychologist William James suggested that our feelings
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follow our bodily reactions to external situations; that, for example, you feel sad because you
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are crying, or you’re scared because you’re shaking like a leaf.
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This idea was also proposed by Danish psychologist Carl Lange, and so, this concept that physiological
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arousal precedes emotion is called the James-Lange theory.
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But American physiologist Walter Cannon wasn’t feeling it.
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He thought that too many of the body’s reactions were too similar: a racing heart, fluttering
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stomach, and sweaty hands could be attributed to passion, fear, excitement, or anger.
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So how could they cause such different emotions?
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His colleague, Philip Bard, agreed, concluding that bodily responses and emotions occur separately,
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but simultaneously – and this idea is the base of the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion.
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In other words, a racing heart doesn’t cause fear, nor does the feeling of fear result
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in a racing heart, rather, both things just happen together.
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Today, most psychologists agree that our emotions are also tangled up with our cognition: whether
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or not we’re afraid of a dog on the sidewalk depends a lot on whether we’re interpreting
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the animal’s behavior as threatening or friendly, probably also, what our personal history with
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dogs is.
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In the 1960s, American psychologist Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer interpreted this
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idea that cognition can define emotion, into what they called their “two-factor theory”.
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They believed that to experience emotion, you must both fear physiological arousal,
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and cognitively label that arousal.
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And again, please remember that in psychology, arousal is different from how you’re used
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to using it.
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Here, arousal can be thought of as activation or stress, or even energy – an increase in
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reactivity or wakefulness that primes us for some kind of action.
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So sometimes, arousal can spill over from one event to the next: say you just watched
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a heated soccer match, and you’re all revved up, and someone looks at you funny.
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Suddenly, you might label that lingering arousal as anger, and the next thing you know, the
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whole stadium is one big rioting aggro chain reaction.
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Schachter and Singer examine this so-called “spillover effect” with an experiment that
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involved an usual combination of college guys and drugs.
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First, they injected a bunch of college guys with the hormone epinephrine.
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This is basically adrenaline, and as you yourself have probably experienced, it induces a level
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of physiological activation that can go any number of ways emotionally.
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But then they threw a curve ball – some of the subjects were told to expect symptoms
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of feeling all revved up, while others were told the injection wouldn’t produce any effects
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at all.
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Then, after being injected, each subject was left in a waiting room, and with them in the
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room was an actor, pretending to wait as well, and acting either all jerky and irritated,
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or super happy and euphoric.
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So the dude’s just sitting there, jacked up on this hormone, and his heart is racing,
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and his cheeks are all flushed, and in the case where the subject was told not to expect
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the effects, the study found that the guy would actually adopt the emotion of the actor
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in the room, becoming happy or testy, depending on how the person was acting.
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His body was having a physiological response to the hormone, but he ended up effectively
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deciding which emotion he was feeling.
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But, if the subject had been told that the injection would make him feel all pumped up,
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he’d actually report very little emotion, just because he was blaming that racing heart
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and flushed face on the drug, not a particular state of mind.
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So in terms of the two-factor theory, the cause of physiological arousal had to be identified
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before a person could feel and label the response as a particular emotion.
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To Schachter, Singer, and their disciples, this meant that arousal spurs emotion, but
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cognition directs it.
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And yet, some researchers like Polish-born American psychologist Robert Zajonc, contend
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that all emotions are the result of just putting a name to our arousal – he suggests that many
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of our emotional reactions occur separately, or even before our cognition kicks in.
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If you hear a sudden crash outside your window, you’ll automatically react with a jolt before
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your brain has the chance to think, “Gee, what was that crazy noise?
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Should I feel startled?”
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This is, in part, because when it comes to emotions, it’s thought that our brains process
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sensory input by two different kinds of roots – top-down, or bottom-up approaches, and neuroscientists
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can actually chart these two pathways in action.
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Some bigger, more complex feelings, like love and hatred take what we call the “high-road.”
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Say, you read a love letter from your sweetie.
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You can pin that mushy feeling in your heart to the sensory stimulus of reading traveling
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from your eyes all the way through your thalamus to your brain’s cortex.
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There, it can be analyzed by means of your cognitive process, perhaps, consciously, perhaps
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implicitly – and labelled with, like, “Aw, so sweet,” at which point, it heads to your
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limbic system, the central brain region that drives emotion, motivation.
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At that point, you respond with all the warm-fuzzies.
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Other emotions, like simple likes, aversions, and fears, don’t have to involve actual thinking,
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and take a sort of “low-road” neural path.
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Like, that crash outside, or a baseball flying at your head.
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Such “jump-out-of-your-chair” stimuli bypass the cortex and zip right from the ear or the
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eye to the amygdala in the limbic system.
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It’s a knee-jerk reaction that allows us to react quickly, often in the face of potential
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danger.
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In other words, that slower, high-road cortex route allows thinking about feeling, while
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the quick low-road shortcut allows instant emotional reaction.
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The stomach flip that happens when you see your ex, or the ten thousand pee breaks you
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gotta take before you give a speech, or your heart racing after a really good kiss – it’s
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hard to argue with the fact that we often feel emotions with our bodies as much as with
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our brains.
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And you can thank your autonomic nervous system the next time you’re freaking out or trying
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to calm yourself down.
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Perhaps, you recall when we talked about the roles of the sympathetic and parasympathetic
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branches of our autonomic nervous system.
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The sympathetic division is what arouses you in a crisis – it makes you hyper aware, makes
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your heart rate and breathing increase, spikes your blood sugar for extra energy – all that
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fun stuff.
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It’s like a pit crew readying you for action, and once it’s done its job and the danger
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has passed, the parasympathetic division steps in and talks you back down from the edge,
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slowing down your heart and breathing rates, and shutting off those stress hormones.
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Generally, rubbing your back and being all, “Everything’s gonna be okay, baby.”
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What you need is the right degree of arousal for the situation: for example, if you’re
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navigating through fast moving traffic in an unfamiliar city, you wanna hit the sweet
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spot of optimal arousal that allows you to focus your attention without either freaking
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out or getting all mellow and sleepy.
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Like we said before, there’s a lot of overlap in the symptoms of different emotions.
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If you monitor the heart rate, breathing, and perspiration of a group of people who
09:00
are watching three different movies, you probably couldn’t tell who was watching the grisly
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horror movie, an angry fight, or a hot sex scene.
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Fear, anger, and sexual arousal often deliver some of the same biological signals.
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But those emotions certainly feel different to the people experiencing them, just as they
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usually look different to others observing their expressions.
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And though differences in emotion can appear subtle, or even undetectable on brain scans,
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many of them do show distinctive patterns.
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For most people, positive feelings tend to show more activity in the left frontal lobe,
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while negative ones show up more in the right frontal lobe.
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And someone who’s very afraid will show increased activity in the amygdala, our more primal
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emotional center.
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Emotions are fascinating things that drive us to do all sorts of brilliant and weird
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stuff.
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Understanding them and being able to read them both in yourself and others is vital
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if you wanna make it through even an average day.
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But misreading your emotions or someone else’s can be confusing – even dangerous – and it’s
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just one of the things that we’ll be looking at next week.
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Today, you learned about what emotions are, how they work, and why we need them.
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We talked about the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter & Singer, and Zajonc theories, and
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we also looked at the relationship between cognition and emotion, and how the autonomic
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nervous system mobilizes emotion.
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Thanks for watching, especially to all of our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course
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possible – to find out how you can become a supporter, just go to Subbable.com.
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This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
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is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.
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Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who
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is also the sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Café.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.