EP130: How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds: Insights from Dr. Dennis Proffit

In this episode of SEE HEAR FEEL, Dr. Dennis Proffitt, Commonwealth Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at University of Virginia, shares insights from his expansive research on perception and interoception. Dr. Proffitt discusses how social, emotional, and physical factors influence how people perceive space, including practical examples from his research on the steepness of hills and the impact of physical fitness and companionship. He also delves into the significance of social relationships on perception and explores the emerging field of interoception, explaining how our internal and external perceptions shape our emotions and responses. The episode highlights how both perception and interoception are intertwined with our experiences and actions.

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Dennis Proffitt

00:49 Personal Anecdote: NASA and Perception of Hills

02:32 Research Findings: Perception and Physical Fitness

05:04 Social Relationships and Perception

08:40 Understanding Interoception

12:45 Final Thoughts on Perception and Experience

Transcript

Christine Ko: [00:00:00] Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I am happy to be speaking with Dr. Dennis Profitt. Dr. Dennis Profitt, PhD is the Commonwealth Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at University of Virginia. He also held various positions at that institution, including being the founding director of the Undergraduate Degree Program in Cognitive Science, the Chair of the Psychology Department, and a recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award for Scholarship. Dr. Profitt is the author of the book, Perception: How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds. Much of his research focuses on how people perceive and think about space. His research has shown that social and emotional factors, as well as previous experience or expertise, interact with both perception and cognition.

Welcome to Denny. 

Dennis Proffitt: Thank you. 

Christine Ko: Thank you so much for being here. Can we start off with your sharing a personal anecdote?

Dennis Proffitt: I'd be happy to. It actually has two parts. So the first part is, in 1989, I [00:01:00] was part of a workshop at NASA Ames Research Center in Moppett View, California, Mountain View, California. We were studying how pilots fly helicopters. Basically what we were looking at is how can we help pilots more accurately perceive the environment around them, given the very difficult task of flying helicopters. Now, in this context, so Mountain View, California is not far from San Francisco. I was going to San Francisco frequently, and what is most striking about San Francisco is the steepness of the hills of the streets in San Francisco. Now as steep as they appear, they're not really that steep. So the steepest street in San Francisco is 18 degrees. If you ask people how steep it is, they'll tell you, oh my god, it's maybe 50 degrees. Many of the steepest streets in San Francisco have steps on them, and they appear very steep. And so I would tell my colleagues, there's a mismatch between what we're trying to [00:02:00] do in getting the pilot to perceive the world accurately, when I'm not seeing the world accurately when I go to San Francisco. So I took this problem back to Virginia, to my university, and I encouraged a graduate student to look into this. So what we found was, for example, behind our building, there is a hill, the hill is about five degrees. People estimate that it's about 20 degrees, and that's a big difference. Five degrees is not very steep. 20 degrees is what it appears to be. And So we were doing this research when one day, a number of women overestimated the hill, but not by very much, not by as much as everybody else. And it turns out that they were all members of the University of Virginia varsity soccer team. And so we wondered, what does that mean? And then it occurred to us, maybe, because they are extremely fit athletes, hills don't look as steep to them. And so we did a number of studies over a number of years, [00:03:00] and the answer to that question was, yes, that's true. You perceive the world in terms of your ability to act on it. And for an athlete, hills do not look as steep. We did studies with backpacks. Put a backpack on people, hills look steeper. We did studies with fatigue. You make people go on a long run, hills look steeper. Another researcher in England, Frank Eves, has done studies on people dieting, and as they lose weight, the steepness of hills goes down. So what we've found in this research, by accident, was that we see the world in terms of our body's ability to act on it.

Christine Ko: Yeah. That's cool. So this is probably a little bit different because I'm one person. Because at first when you were when i'd read about that as well, your work on the steepness of hills, and I was thinking about me when i'm on a chairlift for skiing that [00:04:00] the slope doesn't look that steep, but then I know when I'm later when, as soon as I get off the chairlift and I try to go down that slope, it is much steeper than it seems to me on the chairlift.

So that's probably just more like an optical illusion or something, or just, in 

Dennis Proffitt: So we have a study on this sort of thing. And what we do is we had people stand at the top of a hill and judge how steep it was in two conditions. In one condition, they were standing on a block, and the other condition, they were standing on a skateboard. The hill looks a lot steeper when you're standing on the skateboard. The other thing you probably noticed as a skier is that the bunny slope looked really steep when you were learning to ski. And now when you go by it, it looks practically flat. 

Christine Ko: Absolutely.

Dennis Proffitt: It's your ability to act. 

Christine Ko: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So then probably when I'm on the chairlift, and I don't have to act, I'm underestimating how steep it is. And then when I'm at the top of it and [00:05:00] about to come down, I overestimate how steep it is. That's fascinating. Okay. Wow. Moving on to another question. I read that in research for your book, Perception. One of the things that surprised you the most is how important social relationships are. Can you talk about that discovery of yours and how that relates to perception? 

Dennis Proffitt: I'm trained as a cognitive psychologist. Academic psychologists get trained in a particular area. So there's perception, which is my area. There's social psychology. That's another area. Personality. That's another area. Emotions. That's another area. We act as if our area is unaffected by all of the other ones. And that way we can just focus on our area. So those of us in perception assume that perception has nothing to do with personality and emotions and social psychology and so forth. I now believe that's false, and it's a real problem in our field. So with regards to social. The first thing that [00:06:00] startled me was a finding by Julianne Holt-Lunstad in which she looked at hundreds of thousands of individual data on mortality. And what she found was that being lonely, Has a more detrimental effect on mortality, the likelihood that you're going to die than smoking cigarettes, excessive drinking, lack of exercise, obesity, air pollution; all of those things that we know are going be harmful to health. There's nothing worse than being alone, and it kills you. As somebody outside of the area of social, I was dumbfounded by this finding. And then in our social area, there was a postdoc named Simone Schnall. She's now a Professor at Cambridge University in England. And when she was a postdoc, she became interested in our studies on hills. She came into my office and said, I've got an idea for a study. [00:07:00] What if people are standing at a hill, either with or without a friend? Will the hill, Will that change how steep the hill appears? And I said, you've got to be kidding me. Of course not. And she said, I think it will. And I said, I don't. And I have a lot more experience studying hill perception than you do. I don't think this is a great idea. And she said, I'm going to do it anyway. I said, okay. And she did. And it worked. If you're looking at a steep hill, and you're with a friend, it looks less steep than if you're not with a friend. And then what she did is she did another study and she said to people who were looking at the hill alone, simply imagine and think about a good friend, or somebody you don't know, or somebody that you detest. And hills look steeper in the latter two conditions and less steep if you're thinking about a friend. Moreover, the quality of the social relationship influenced how steep the hill appears. Wow. So [00:08:00] what this shows is that your ability to act is influenced by whether or not you are with or thinking about your friends. Because the resources that you have available to you when you're accompanied by others is much greater than when you're by yourself. It's not that your friend is going to push you up the hill. But in terms of the resources available to do the basic things in life and the decisions that you have to make and all of the other kinds of things that are going on, being with a friend makes everything easier. 

Christine Ko: That's cool. A lot of your research is on perception. Can you also talk about interoception? 

Dennis Proffitt: Okay. So interoception is the flip side of perception. So perception is our sensing and awareness of the external environment. Interoception is our sensing and awareness of the internal [00:09:00] environment. There's a lot more research on perception. The work on interoception is fairly recent. What we need, I think, to understand perhaps better than we often do, is that the nervous system, including the brain, is trying to create a maximal state of affairs in the internal environment by coordinating its actions in the external environment. So it has to deal with two environments, okay? The brain is not just about seeing the external world and reasoning about it. It has to take care of the internal environment, all of the metabolism, the breathing, the digestion, all of that stuff. And the brain is informed about what's going on in the internal environment through sensors, sensory receptors in the tissues of our body that send it information about the internal environment. And that's interoception. It's perceiving what's going [00:10:00] on inside of you.

Christine Ko: Can different wearables, a wearable ring or a wearable bracelet, be helpful to the wearer in terms of knowing when we feel good or bad or things like that?

Dennis Proffitt: Now. The wearables. What is important to realize is that there is, there are, there is no physiological measure, nor suite of physiological measures that can predict the affect that somebody is experiencing. Okay, it used to be that we thought, okay, then it, the brain or the the nervous system or the heart rate or, what have you, will be in a particular state when you're happy and some other state when you're sad or a particular state when you're afraid and another state when you're anxious. And that's just not the case. Okay. So affect and emotions are interpretations of what's going [00:11:00] on the inside and what's going on the outside. Emotions are stories we tell ourselves about how we feel and why we feel the way we feel. They're not isolated atoms of experience that occur because our internal state and our interoception is of a particular sort. So you could have all of the monitors in the world, and it wouldn't mean anything because it can't predict the story that you're going to tell yourself about how you're feeling right now, given your interoception and perception, and as those change over time together in the history of your life.

Christine Ko: So that, I think then, you're touching on how it's moved that. the field has moved toward that week. we create our emotions. 

Dennis Proffitt: Yes, you do. 

Christine Ko: Okay. It's interesting because I was actually at a wedding yesterday and I spoke to someone and she was talking about her second child is now in college. But so she was [00:12:00] talking about a long time ago when she first had her first child. She suddenly felt this overwhelming need to care for this baby, but that's what she felt. She felt this need to nurture and care for and take care of the baby, but she wouldn't, she didn't think that was love. Like she wouldn't have called that love, but she said that later she explained those feelings by calling that love. I thought it was interesting the way she phrased it. It's almost exactly, I think that's 

Dennis Proffitt: It's a great example. 

Christine Ko: Yeah. 

Dennis Proffitt: And no sensor would ever come to that conclusion.

Christine Ko: Yeah, cause that's the story she's telling, right? But it sort of resonated with me because I wasn't sure, like right away when my first child was born, that I was overwhelmed by love. I think I felt a lot of fear and anxiety, actually, about how to take care of this kind of helpless little baby. Do you have any final thoughts? 

Dennis Proffitt: We assume that we see the world the same from one time to another. And in some sense we do and in some sense we don't. It's the same world. The world doesn't change, but we do. We change because we get older. [00:13:00] We change because, on a short time basis, we may be fatigued. We may not have eaten in a while. I mentioned before that what the nervous system is trying to do is coordinate things between two worlds, the inner world and the outer world. We make a distinction between what is outside and what is inside. The nervous system doesn't make that distinction. You have to interpret your experience and whether it's how steep is that hill, or how do I feel, am I happy or sad? These are your creations and they are putting together what is outside and what is inside into a sense of yourself in the world. And so the distinction between inside and outside is an artificial one in our experience.

Christine Ko: I like it. I really appreciate that you're willing to talk to me and educate me and share. 

Dennis Proffitt: It was a pleasure. I very much enjoyed the conversation. 

Christine Ko: Thank you.