On her book That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion
Cover Interview of February 20, 2012
In a nutshell
That’s Disgusting is about the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of being human told through the lens of the emotion of disgust, our repulsions and our attractions, and the very fine line that separates them.
The book begins with an immediately intuitive and familiar experience of disgust—food. Then it moves to a basic primer of the various forms of disgust and its neurobiological underpinnings, providing illuminating and strange facts. For example, the earliest symptom of Huntington’s Chorea, before any physical problems manifest, is the inability to recognize the facial expression of disgust; feral “wild” children never acquire disgust; psychopaths are notoriously undisgustable.
I then tackle fundamental questions regarding what the main purpose of the emotion of disgust is—to protect us from death, most predominantly death by disease—and how this mutates, can backfire in our social interactions with others, and incite the worst of human behavior.
That’s Disgusting then explores how and why we are enticed by disgust, such as with horror movies, and our fascination with death, our animality, and our sexuality. The last chapters move on to more abstract and complex levels of disgust, in particular morality, and the book concludes by examining what we can learn from disgust and how disgust can be harnessed for the greater good.
Some of the original theoretical arguments and conclusions the book makes are that: 1) disgust evolved uniquely in humans from the emotion of fear to protect us from death by a slow as opposed to a fast process (e.g., disease v. tiger); 2) disgust is an inherently “selfish” emotion and actually a twisted form of empathy; 3) to be disgusted is a luxury of abundance. In other words, we have to have options for survival in order to shun a pockmarked mate or moldy food.
In sum, That’s Disgusting explores how society, culture, neurobiology and evolution weave together to shape both our personally unique experience of the emotion of disgust and more generally who and what we are as human beings. I think a reader will be most happy with, and appreciative of, this book if she approaches it with a mixture of intellectual curiosity and whimsy.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
That’s Disgusting is about the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of being human told through the lens of the emotion of disgust, our repulsions and our attractions, and the very fine line that separates them.
The book begins with an immediately intuitive and familiar experience of disgust—food. Then it moves to a basic primer of the various forms of disgust and its neurobiological underpinnings, providing illuminating and strange facts. For example, the earliest symptom of Huntington’s Chorea, before any physical problems manifest, is the inability to recognize the facial expression of disgust; feral “wild” children never acquire disgust; psychopaths are notoriously undisgustable.
I then tackle fundamental questions regarding what the main purpose of the emotion of disgust is—to protect us from death, most predominantly death by disease—and how this mutates, can backfire in our social interactions with others, and incite the worst of human behavior.
That’s Disgusting then explores how and why we are enticed by disgust, such as with horror movies, and our fascination with death, our animality, and our sexuality. The last chapters move on to more abstract and complex levels of disgust, in particular morality, and the book concludes by examining what we can learn from disgust and how disgust can be harnessed for the greater good.
Some of the original theoretical arguments and conclusions the book makes are that: 1) disgust evolved uniquely in humans from the emotion of fear to protect us from death by a slow as opposed to a fast process (e.g., disease v. tiger); 2) disgust is an inherently “selfish” emotion and actually a twisted form of empathy; 3) to be disgusted is a luxury of abundance. In other words, we have to have options for survival in order to shun a pockmarked mate or moldy food.
In sum, That’s Disgusting explores how society, culture, neurobiology and evolution weave together to shape both our personally unique experience of the emotion of disgust and more generally who and what we are as human beings. I think a reader will be most happy with, and appreciative of, this book if she approaches it with a mixture of intellectual curiosity and whimsy.