Oh my god, you're such a nerd.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, how does anger affect your physical health?
If you ask people, would you like to feel anger or would you like to not feel anger?
We would expect the vast majority of people would say, I don't like to not feel anger.
Thank you very much.
Angie, I read something recently on Quora, which I like to read.
What is Quora?
What is Quora?
I mean, I have been on Quora, but like, what is it?
Quora was honestly the original inspiration for this show because Quora is a question
asking and answering website with a community of people who ask a lot of questions, many
of them good, many of them crazy.
And then people who answer them and they range from experts to amateurs to goofballs.
But, you know, I love questions, which is one reason I love doing this show.
Sometimes just reading the questions without the answers is illuminating.
You're exposed to a lot of ideas that you just wouldn't have otherwise.
And here's one.
This actually isn't a question.
I guess it was the preamble to a question.
And it seemed totally nuts.
But the more I thought about it, I thought maybe there's at least a kernel of truth and
maybe a lot of truth.
It's about anger.
So somebody had written one minute of anger weakens the immune system for four to five
hours.
One minute of laughter boosts the immune system for 24 hours.
And like I said, I read it and I thought there's no way that's true.
But boy, I would love that to be true, especially if one can curtail anger and boost the laughter.
So what I'm bringing to you is really a simple question.
Is anger really bad for you physiologically?
I think in the long term, it can be bad.
But this question was about what happens when you get really mad in the immediate term,
the four or five hours after you lose your mind with anger.
So there are approach emotions and avoidance emotions.
And approach emotions are ones that get you to do things.
And avoidance emotions are emotions that get you to withdraw and refrain from acting.
So anxiety, worry, to some extent, sadness.
But anger, I would have the exact opposite intuition from this Quora contributor, which
is that anger might heighten the immune response in the short term.
Because it's driving you towards some kind of action or approach, as you put it?
Well, in a sense, right?
It's good to ask why we have emotions.
Why do we have emotions, Angela, since it's good to ask?
Well, one could argue that we have everything we have, you know, four-chambered heart,
two eyes, et cetera, because of survival, because of the forces of evolution
that have favored adaptations.
So you could argue that about all emotions.
And the negative emotions, including anger, the evolutionary story is kind of straightforward.
If you didn't defend yourself when somebody was taking advantage of you,
you would not survive very long.
If you didn't worry when bad things were on the horizon, you wouldn't do things that
worried people do that eventually make their survival more likely.
And there's even an evolutionary explanation for positive emotions, like laughter.
Is laughter an emotion?
Laughter is actually a behavior.
But like being in a state of elation, I don't even know what the emotion is called when you laugh.
I think it's called chuckledom.
Wait, really?
Is there like a word?
What is the emotion I'm feeling when I laugh?
I think it's gruntlement.
You know how people always say someone's disgruntled.
Right, maybe they're gruntled.
But these positive emotions also have an evolutionary purpose, or we think they do.
It's all theory.
Which or what?
Well, the prevailing theory here is called broaden and build.
And it comes from a friend and a great psychologist named Barbara Fredrickson.
She has posited that the evolutionary adaptive value of positive emotions
is kind of the complement to why we have negative emotions in times of threat and stress and attack.
What emotions do we need to promote our long-term survival when things are good?
And these positive emotions broaden our repertoire.
They encourage us to try new things, and they build resources.
They build cognitive resources like knowledge, but also they build social resources like friendships.
So basically, you can think of fight or flight and broaden and build as two sides of the emotional
coin, one for bad times, one for good times, but all of these emotions promote our survival.
So getting back to this Quora question, the reason why I'm thinking in a different way than anger
suppressing our immune system is that when we have negative emotions that are all about us being
asked to do something right away in order to survive.
I think the word here is allostasis, that the body has an adaptive response to change,
you know, heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline, cortisol, attention, and so forth.
And anger is the emotion that we experience when we feel like our rights are being violated
and we're under attack. And I would imagine that the immune response there, the allostatic response,
would be like rev up and increase immune function. Just a guess.
So I can follow that daisy chain, but I could also imagine really that same daisy chain may have
some negative physiological effects. I know there's been research on the connection between
anger and heart attacks. There's been academic research on anger and lung function. Now,
when I see these findings, I think, well, how do we know that's causal? In other words,
how do we know that the kind of person who's in a position to be having a really severe,
let's say, heart attack has not had a lot of other things going on.
Maybe the arrows even going in the other direction, maybe their limited function
physically is leading them to be angry. So do you know anything about whether these negative
emotions are actually connected with whether by correlation alone or cause with physiological
negative outcomes? Well, absolutely important to say that this Quora question was about immune
response and heart attacks are very different. But let's take the classic like when you
blow your temper, are you more likely to have a heart attack? I mean, there's data. It's not
experimental data for obvious reasons that in the few hours that follow a very angry outburst,
you are more likely to have a heart attack or a stroke. And that's just I assume people
come into the ER, you're interviewing the family and you're like, Oh, what happened? So that is not
data that would convince you, I think, Steven, that it's causal, because who knows, maybe there's
a third variable that both accounts for the angry outburst and for the cardiovascular event. But it
seems that when you are feeling anger, there's a pretty easy causal story to tell, which is that
when you are angry, your blood pressure goes up, you become very activated, your heart rate goes up,
these are things that would precipitate a cardiovascular event if you have other
underlying vulnerabilities. So I don't have any random assignment experimental evidence that I
can even imagine anybody has amassed. But because anger does all those things, one can imagine that,
yes, it has some causal effect, not on immune function, but on cardiovascular function.
So let's keep broadening it out beyond the immune response that this Quora person wrote about,
and just the general effects, upsides and downsides. I was watching not long ago,
one of my favorite golfers, a young Spanish golfer named John Rahm, who's very, very,
good, talking about his anger on the course. He's still pretty young, probably in the 25 to 28 range,
but when he was a little bit younger, he was, I would say, notorious for getting really angry
on the course when he would hit a bad shot. He really exhibited his anger, so he would
hit a bad shot and he might slam a club or curse. It wasn't directed at others,
which is probably a point worth making. It was directed at himself.
This is like the John McEnroe of golf or something?
There you go. Yeah, I would say so. He was pretty vocal.
Fiery was the word they used, I think, because that's a cliched description that
goes along with being Spanish. Anyway, he's phenomenally successful. He also seems to be
a good, decent, sensible person. People seem to like him a great deal. But the narrative was that
his anger was getting in the way of his being a great, great golfer and that he needed to address
that. And so the other day I heard him talking about this. I thought his description of his
reckoning of his anger was so humane and sophisticated because he said,
listen, I still get angry. I'm always going to get angry if I hit a bad shot.
All I changed was my response to my anger. And all I really wanted to do was feel the anger,
express the anger, acknowledge the anger, and then put the anger behind me immediately because
guess what? Now I have to go hit another shop. And if I'm hitting that next shop in a state of
anger, the odds are that the outcome will not be so good. Then he was asked, well, wouldn't you
rather just not get angry? And he said, no, are you kidding me? He said, this is a natural human
emotion and you can't control your emotions. And what he said next was my favorite part. He said,
if we could control our emotions, wouldn't all of us be happy all the time? Now, who's to say
whether he should try to experience a little bit less anger? But I thought his way of processing
it and dealing with it was wonderful, honestly. So do you agree or would it be better to try to
limit the amount of anger you're actually experiencing in the first place?
So much to say a lot of admiration like you have for this very like metacognitively sophisticated
response. Like I'm experiencing emotions, I see different routes for how to deal with it. So
kudos. I think that is actually what scientists who study emotions would call emotion regulation.
When you say to yourself, I'm going to experience the anger, and then I'm going to notice that I've
experienced anger, but I'm also going to try to shorten the amount of time I experienced that.
That is almost the definition of emotion regulation. So I don't want to call that like,
nobody can control their emotions. I think what he means is that you can't not experience the
anger in the first place. You cannot avoid the generation of the emotion, but you can
change your reaction to the emotion. And that I think is exactly right. But there's one little
thing I want to say to John, which is that I do think that under certain circumstances,
you can actually change the base rate for the generation of the emotions in the first place.
You're saying if he were slightly better golfer, he would get angry less than that.
He should try to become a slightly better golfer. Is that what you're saying?
Okay. Well, here's the thing. There are things you could do is sometimes called
situation selection or situation modification. Like if you really didn't want to have
the kind of anger that necessarily follows from missing a shot, he could just not play golf.
Yeah. But I mean, the guy's a professional golfer who's been heading in this direction
for his entire life. Exactly. But I'm just saying it's not impossible to change
the base rate of your emotions. It is possible. It's just that very often that's not what you
would choose to do. So when one has a negative emotion, you could imagine there are a number
of ways you could regulate that emotion. And many of them might be healthy, but I could imagine
that some are unhealthy. So you want a little emotion regulation 101, maybe 102. Here's what
I think is really important to know about emotions. The next time we feel something,
we might do well just to remind ourselves like, well, they're my emotions again, my inherited
evolutionary machinery, and they have this kind of signaling feature. And I think then the question
is, what are they signaling? And anger in particular, I think signals my rights are
being violated. And then I think when you notice that you're feeling angry, pause to say, Oh,
I must somehow perceive that my rights are being violated. And then you could ask in what way,
understanding all that equips us with a broader range of responses than what we might otherwise
have. And before you do what is instinctive or immediate or reactive is to have this pause.
I think it might be attributed to Victor Frankel or Abraham Maslow, one of these
humanist psychologists that between stimulus and response lies, free will lies our humanity. So,
you know, somebody cuts in front of you in traffic, or says something that you think is
incredibly insensitive, and triggers you. And between that stimulus, and your response is your
freedom in your humanity. I do think that's what maturity is, is recognizing that space.
It's also interesting to me to consider what are the direct proximate causes of people's anger.
So I'm looking here at a survey done by IBM and NPR.
IBM and NPR?
Specifically by Watson Health. Watson Health is the IBM directive that's trying to use
predictive analytics to look at health outcomes. And NPR cares about health, I guess, and stuff
like that. They did a survey, this was a couple years ago, they found that 84% of respondents said
they felt Americans are angrier than they were a generation ago. But that's not why I wanted to
bring this up. What I wanted to bring up is one of the primary sources of people's anger today.
Before I tell you, would you like to guess what one of the most dominant sources of anger is?
Is it politics?
Indirectly, reading the news and reading social media. 29% of respondents say they get angry
often, and 42% said they get angry sometimes when they check the news. 31% of respondents
said they get angry sometimes, 12% said they get angry often when they check social media.
So it does make me wonder about all the opt-ins that we engage in that make us angry.
And I've wondered about this for years, which is, why do people read and watch and follow things
that they know will make them angry? You know, I don't know, because you would say to yourself,
that's a negative emotion. And if you ask people in a multiple choice, would you like to feel anger
or would you like to not feel anger? We would expect the vast majority of people would say,
I would like to not feel anger, thank you very much. You would think. But then we must have
observed that, like, the other side of the political spectrum really makes you mad. Why
don't you just ignore it? Well, interestingly, ignoring things that make us upset is an emotion
regulation strategy. It's called attention deployment. So in the arsenal of emotion
regulation tactics that we hopefully develop over the course of life, attention deployment,
not thinking about stuff that makes us feel angry is one of those tactics. But the obvious downside
of that is denial. If you just ignore this thing that's being done to you, you're gonna, in the
long run, suffer in the short run, you might feel better because you're not thinking about this
thing that's making you mad. But in the long run, it's bad. So that may be an explanation
about why people go to social media or other media sites. Because if you don't do that,
it's even worse. Angie, when we started this show and even before we started the show and
we were just becoming friends and chatting about family and work and so on, I would say a common
feature of many of our conversations was your expressing how angry you'd gotten at something,
often within your family, me and Amanda, me and Jason. But, you know, I have to say,
now that we're talking about anger today, I can't think of the last time that you've brought up
something like that. So either you got sick of talking about it, you thought I got sick of
hearing about it, or you're feeling it a little bit less. Also, I should say both your kids are
away at college. That may be the solution. It does help. Research shows. What makes you angry
these days? And do you feel that you are less angry now than you were in previous eras of
Duckworth time? I can tell you that I still am fully capable of the emotion of anger,
but I do think I am more emotionally regulated than I was five years ago and then 10 years ago,
even more emotionally regulated than that. And the reason I say that is not because of my
own introspection as much as the data that are done on longitudinal studies of human beings.
And emotional stability gets better. We're at our probably least emotionally stable during
adolescence. And then after that, we become much more even keel, but progressively so over
almost all of adulthood. And then when you get to very old age, other things start happening
to emotion regulation. So I would just say that if I am like most people, then I am more even keel
and less hot tempered. In addition to those general trends, I will say that I spend maybe
more time collaborating with James Gross at Stanford University than with almost anyone else.
And James Gross is the leading expert in adult emotion regulation. And so I quite literally
think that writing all these papers, they've taught me tactics that I've put into practice.
So for example, when we talked about John and golfing, immediately I thought of James Gross's
research and I thought, well, some of these tactics he really practically speaking can't do.
So situation selection, situation modification, like removing yourself from or changing the
dynamics of golf. Can't do that because he wants to play golf. Attention deployment. Can he not pay
attention to the fact that he missed that last shot? My guess is that is exactly what he does.
He focuses on the ball in front of him and what he needs to do. And then finally, if you ask for
a complete description of all the things that are in the armory of somebody who's emotion regulating,
there's reappraisal, there's ways of thinking about your emotion in a different way.
And so for example, what John seems to be doing is saying, you know what,
emotions are part of life. They are natural. They're normal. That's a kind of reappraisal
strategy. And then finally, there's response inhibition, which is basically just try to
suppress it directly. And that tends to be the least effective. But let me just say, Steven,
I don't know if this accounts for my not mentioning angry outbursts over the last year or so,
but I have learned a lot from James Groves. Just knowing that there are these categories,
situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, reappraisal, response
inhibition, and understanding their pros and cons, I think has made me more emotionally regulated.
So we know that at least two people in the universe, Angela Duckworth and John Rahm,
are having more success in managing their anger. Although everyone else is just getting
angrier and angrier while reading social media. Still to come on No Stupid Questions,
Steven and Angela discuss how laughter affects our physical and mental health.
Oh, oh, stop what you're doing. Read this cartoon.
Before we return to Steven and Angela's conversation about anger,
let's hear some of your thoughts on the subject. We asked listeners to tell us whether they think
anger is a healthy or an unhealthy emotion and what tools they use to cool down when
they're feeling a little hot under the collar. Here's what you said.
Hi, this is Brooke from Florida. And although I don't think you can label any emotion good or bad,
I do think anger is sort of a wasted one. Anger usually just ends up hurting me more than the
person that I'm angry at. So why would I want to do that to myself? One technique that I have found
really useful for myself is exercise. In particular, I like to do pushups when I'm upset. It allows me
to release some of that aggressive energy in a constructive way. Exercise also releases positive
endorphins that balance out my brain chemistry. I like pushups in particular because I can do them
just about anywhere. Although I have gotten some confused looks at work when I dropped to the floor
for 20 reps next to my workspace. I find as an educator techniques that I implore with children
who attend school in my building and with my 10-year-old son, we got to pause. I call it peanut
butter. Pause and breathe, baby. Pause and breathe so we can ride those emotions like a wave in the
ocean. That was, respectively, Brooke DeCarolis, Tyler Thorstrom, and Jennifer Chapman. Thanks to
them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts. Now back to Steven and Angela's conversation about
the connection between emotions and health. What about laughter? Because let's not forget,
the Quora statement was about how anger will deplete or hurt your immune system. But the second part
was one minute of laughter boosts the immune system for 24 hours. So that sounds, to me,
lovely and perhaps made up. It's really kind of clickbait. But what I notice is that in your
description of these emotion regulation steps, you didn't talk about laughing or smiling. I know
you've brought up this study in the past where subjects are asked to put a pencil in their mouth
and bite down on it, which replicates the muscular reality of a smile. And that's supposed to have
some kind of beneficial effect. Can you tell us anything about smiling and laughter driving the
immune system, mood, physical health, anything? So we did mention broaden and build and laughter
and positive emotions like joy. This all fits into that category of broaden and build. I want
to start with a story. I remember being at some dinner, and this is so many years ago, there are
these two researchers at my university, University of Pennsylvania, they are the gers. So the last
name is Ger. And I can't tell you what their first names are, but it's the husband and wife couple.
And they study schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses. I remember at this dinner
that somebody said, and I believe it was one or both of the gers, that when somebody who is
really suffering from a profound mental illness laughs, when there is the natural and appropriate
expression of humor and laughter, that's when you know the patient is getting better. I do think
there have been correlational studies that correlate sense of humor to positive health outcomes.
And if I could have my career to live over again, ski jumper, no, definitely not ski jumper,
Steven, I'm a little fearful of heights. But I was thinking if there's something else I would
study other than like psychology of effort and excellence, which are my specialties,
I really think that studying the causal effect of happiness, that's kind of what positive
psychology is. I have this longitudinal data that I'm analyzing right now, where we have
measures of happiness, a variety of self-report questionnaires about positive motion. And I have
measures of grit. And what I find is that there's a stronger effect of happiness predicting grit
than there is of grit predicting happiness. It just collectively argues for the idea that laughter
and smiling and feeling happy, that they have a causal effect on what happens to us next.
And I'll just say that it is still a mystery why we have laughter. The world's leading researcher
on this or one of was a Yap Pangsep. And he has all these videos of him tickling rats because he
studied the laughter response in non humans. And just the fact that you can tickle a rat and that
laugh is kind of interesting because we think of it as a higher order emotion, but turns out you
can make a rat laugh. But then the question was like, how and why is it that these less sophisticated
organisms have this emotion of laughter? Even Yap Pangsep would admit it's still a mystery.
But the speculation is that maybe one reason is that laughter is often a shared experience.
There's a social component. Often people are laughing at the same joke. Also, it's a signal
of fitness. So I think one could argue that when you see somebody who is self deprecating, who knows
how to laugh themselves can laugh at other things. It is a sign of emotional health. It's often
considered to be a sign of self awareness and maturity. Do you ever laugh out loud when you're
alone? I'm sure I laugh out loud less when I'm on my own, but not not at all. I do think laughter
is a kind of conversation or a social emotion. There is something almost fundamentally social
right about laughter. You're telling someone you appreciate them. And you know, there are a
variety of ways to do that. But laughter seems very genuine in part maybe because it is nonverbal
because words can be distorted. People can say, oh, you look great today. But if someone says
something witty and you laugh, it sounds organic usually. Look, I find 90 percent of the New Yorker
cartoons actually legit funny. I don't know if I laugh out loud, but I'm always at least amused.
And I so often have this kind of like, oh, Jason, stop what you're doing. Read this cartoon.
I have noticed that when I spend time with people who don't laugh or who aren't funny or charming or
witty in any way, I get angry. So put Steven in the room with a grim person and you get an angry
Steven. My rights to enjoy myself are being violated. You know, I was talking to my daughter
about anger as I was preparing to ask you this question, and she raised a kind of chicken egg or
forest tree argument, which is if no one can sense your anger, would you still get angry in the same
way? I guess she's thinking the anger is a way to communicate to someone often that something was
done wrong or that you're not OK with something. So is there a big difference typically in how we
experience anger in public and privately? I do think anger is an approach emotion. It gets us
to do stuff. And so when there are other people around, I do think that anger gets us to interact
with them, either the person who's the object of your anger or other people and you're recruiting
them. What happens when you feel anger when you're alone? I do think that many of us, when we feel
angry, go and find somebody, either the target of our anger or just somebody else that we can
complain to. It's a negative emotion, but it gets you to do something. It can be better than
alternative emotions like depression or withdrawal. If I had the choice, for example, when I get
rejected and I know you're thinking socially, but I'm an academic. No, I was thinking a journal.
You were. Oh, my God, you're such a nerd. I love that. OK, well, when I get rejected from a journal,
like I send a paper into a journal, it gets rejected. I have noticed that some of my colleagues,
by the way, very often meant like their first response is to be pissed. Like, what a bleeping
idiot. And then my first reaction is often not anger, but just wounded and feeling bad. It's like,
oh, you know, it wasn't good enough. So that's a withdrawing. Do you ever find yourself wishing
that your more natural response was anger? Oh, absolutely. I was like, oh, anger, that's the way
to go. Given the choice between two negative emotions, one being more approach oriented,
the other one being more avoidance, one being more like do something, the other one being withdrawal,
one being outward, the other one being inward, that maybe if we had to choose under many
circumstances, the outward ones better. OK, under many circumstances, but one can imagine other
circumstances where we certainly wouldn't want people to make manifest the approach emotion,
right? Correct. So when you get rejected by a journal, maybe I as your friend am saying,
yeah, I'd much rather you feel a little bit of anger and do something about it than to just
feel wounded. But let's say we put you in a different circumstance. Let's say you're driving
down a street in Philadelphia with a gun in your glove compartment and someone cuts you off.
I would probably rather you not chase them down and shoot them. I don't want you to act
on your anger in that way. So obviously there's a spectrum here, not just a spectrum, but there
are many, many ways to respond. Remember, I said between stimulus and response lies our humanity,
lies our free will. Just recently in Philadelphia, there was a shooting on South Street, which is
this very popular street that people go to. It's like restaurants and shops. And the context of it
was there was some kind of disagreement. They get into this altercation. Bullets are flying
everywhere because people are taking out their guns and several bystanders, at least two, I think,
were shot and killed. And then many others were just shot. So that would definitely be an example
where an inward emotion would have been much better for everyone. You know, we're going to
experience anger. We're going to get into fights with people and anger gets us to protect ourselves
and to do really stupid things sometimes. And well, I wish we didn't have guns available as one
of the ways to express ourselves. That's Angela's op-ed. Let me ask you one last question. Can you
think of anything that used to typically make you angry that no longer does? Okay, well,
going back to my marriage to Jason, I think it used to make me angry if I felt like he was neglecting
me. And let me just be really specific, like if he would come home late for dinner, I would just
seize. He would come in like 30 minutes late and be like, now it's cold. And by the way,
I also have a job. Thank you very much. And I think now my slightly more evolved mature response
would be like, well, first of all, if it's bothering me, I should say that it's bothering me. So I
should just call him at the moment that I begin to get bothered and say like, it is bothering me
that you're not here. Why are you not here? As opposed to letting the pot just spoil, as it were,
emotionally. And second of all, I think I now have the perspective to just say like, hey, nobody
doesn't come up on time on purpose. And probably there are other reasons. And as my therapist
reminds me, you have to take care of yourself. So what could I do in these 30 minutes that would
make me feel better instead of just sitting and thinking about how my husband's not home, I could
like, get 30 minutes of work done. And then it comes in, I'll be like, Oh, you're home.
I'm very proud of your progress, Angela. You sound like you're rapidly maturing. And by the
time we're all 100, we're going to be perfect. Can I just say?
Yes. Well, let's not get too angry and interim. It'll probably shorten our lifespan.
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of today's
conversation. In the first half of the show, Steven and Angela wonder if there's a specific
emotion associated with laughter. While laughter is linked to many emotions, joy, embarrassment,
happiness, relief, the word that's probably closest to what they're looking for is mirth.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, mirth is defined as
gaiety or lightness of mood or mind, especially as manifested in laughter.
Later, Angela compares the behavior of Spanish golfer John Rahm to that of former professional
tennis player, John McEnroe. While both athletes are famous for their tempers, Rahm is known for
directing his anger at himself, while McEnroe raged not only at himself, but also the umpire,
spectators, and the universe in general. Also, Angela tries to remember the origin of a quote
about how our humanity lies between stimulus and response. The phrase is often attributed
to psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankel, but the passage wasn't actually written
by Frankel. The words were popularized by motivational author Steven R. Covey, who wrote
in his 1994 book First Things First, quote, years ago, I was wandering between the stacks of books
at a university library. I chanced to open a book in which I encountered one of the most powerful,
significant ideas I've ever come across. The essence of it was this, between stimulus and response,
there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies
our growth and our freedom. Covey could not remember who wrote the passage, and he didn't
attribute it to Frankel, but he did use it in discussing Frankel's life and work. The fact
checking website, quote, Investigator, believes that Covey was referencing a piece by existential
psychologist Rallo May, who in a 1963 article wrote, freedom is the individual's capacity to
know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response, and thus to throw
his weight. Finally, Angela cannot remember the full names of the University of Pennsylvania
professors known as the Gurs. Raquel Gur and Reuben Gur are professors of psychiatry, neurology,
and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, Pearlman School of Medicine. In addition to their
award-winning research on schizophrenia and other brain disorders, Raquel Gur is famous for
testifying as an expert witness in the trial of James Holmes, the man responsible for killing
12 people and injuring 70 others in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in 2012. That's it for
the fact check. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what's the purpose of embarrassment?
I have my little plastic tray and it's a huge cafeteria. I just dropped it. Clattering, silverware,
water, everywhere, the whole cafeteria then applauded, not in a nice way.
That's next week on No Stupid Questions. For that episode, we want to hear about your most
embarrassing moments. Tell us the story of what happened and what made it feel so particularly
humiliating. To share your experiences, send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com with
the subject line, embarrassment. Make sure to record in a quiet indoor space with your mouth
close to the phone and please keep your thoughts to under a minute. No Stupid Questions is part of
the Freakonomics Radio network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire,
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