Why Everything Is Such A Hoot Right Now.

🤣🤣🤣😐😐😐🙃🙃🙃💩.

The voicover for this edition is read by me, the author - and I think it will work better on you than the transcript, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.

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TRANSCRIPT:

The other day, I did something that millions of people have been doing daily for the last 25 years, and it horrified me.

Here’s what happened. I learned from author Tom Cox of the following ridiculous but apparently true story, covered by The Independent in 1997:

“For more than a year, Neil Simmons went out into his garden every evening and mimicked the calls of the owls, but they never replied.Until one evening last year, they began to hoot back at him.

Mr Simmons, 41, [why does his age matter? Do all British men start hooting at owls in their 40s? Anyway….] was delighted and logged each occasion when his imitations met with a hooted response. But unbeknown to him [you see, this is how you know it’s a funny story, no journalist will ever use the word “unbeknown” in a serious story], Fred Cornes, 58, his neighbour in the village of Stokeinteignhead in Devon, was also hooting at the owls and was equally delighted to be receiving a response.

The exchange continued for almost a year before they realised what was happening.”

Yes, that’s wonderful. But - stop a second here.

I would like to ask you what your face just did.

If you’re listening to this essay, there’s probably a medium to high chance that if you found that story appropriately absurd, your face creased into a smile or maybe you even laughed. But if you’re reading, there’s less of a chance of that, and if you’re reading it on your phone, there’s maybe not much of a chance at all.

My reaction? I found this story really funny, so I used my phone to forward it to a few friends, accompanied by the crying with laughter face tipped to one side emoji (🤣).

In fact, I used about 10 of them in a row (🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣), just to really hammer home how much it tickled me.

But then I had an in-body moment - that’s the opposite of an out of body moment, and it’s where you back out of the virtual world of the internet, and to your surprise you find yourself to be a warm bag of chemicals and electricity, a person, sitting on a metal bench by the seaside, in the place you were when you looked at your phone and the internet completely consumed your sense of self.

To be clear, this isn’t new human behaviour - we’ve had the ability to become completely lost in books or daydreams or worries for centuries. Maybe the Romans did it too. Maybe the tribes of Mesolithic peoples wandering the fertile lowlands of ancient Doggerland, now under the North Sea, maybe they did it too - perhaps when they noticed signs that the sea had been creeping inland over the last few decades, ey up, Trevor, that doesn’t look good.

Maybe this is just what it is to have a human mind - you naturally create these vast virtual spaces for your imagination to romp around in, playing with ideas and roleplaying what-ifs with complete creative freedom, and nobody should try to convince you that’s a bad thing.

But when you disappear into yourself like that - what happens to the body you leave behind?

In one sense, this is a daft statement. All this is still happening within your body, in the same way the internet couldn’t exist without the massive server farms and undersea cables that form its real-world body.

But when I came back to myself on my metal bench by the sea, after forwarding that funny story to friends accompanied by a blizzard of emojis, I realised - I wasn’t laughing.

I wasn’t even smiling. Just a very slight curl of the lips and a crinkling at the corner of my eyes. Almost indistinguishable from a wince.

Isn’t it weird that every day millions of people, not just younger people who grew up in the great new weirdness of the internet and therefore are weirder by default, but also people my age who existed before it, we all emote at each other without using our bodies - other than the tiny muscle movements required for typing symbols onto a screen? We sent these little pictures that convey an emotion that on some level we may be feeling some trace of, but more often than not, it hardly breaks the surface on our actual faces?

We have to do this, of course. Anything else would be unforgiveably rude. Just imagine if we were honest about our physical reactions - “that’s really funny, Tom, I almost smiled. 😐”

Well, that reads like withering sarcasm. If I did that I’d end up with no friends and double my enemies. Which is too many.

But it is so strange that we’ve got used to such an exaggerated form of expression that sometimes is little more than a flat-out lie.

Unlike disappearing into our own heads, this is actually a new thing. Emojis came about as an extension of emoticons, which we also still use today - those ;-) winky faces or smiles we can type with a combination of punctuation, numbers and letters.

The first batch of 90 emojis were released by carrier Softbank in 1997, and in the late 2000s, both Apple and Google petitioned to have emojis introduced into Unicode, the standardised text of the modern internet. By 2011, Apple had added an official emoji keyboard to their latest release of iOS - and then there was no stopping them.

Every year, new emojis are introduced, perhaps to convey new emotions required for a whole new year of this increasingly complicated world.

One of this year’s crop is a large, swollen-looking face, as if seen through a fish-eye lens, with enormous bulging eyes, meant to convey shock, amazement and distress mixed with deep anxiety:

(So, you know, there’s a statement about how many people are feeling about 2026.)

And on it goes. The language of emojis continues to evolve and to become embedded deeper and deeper in how we communicate with each other - a new language, treacherous with continually renegotiated meanings.

But why do we need a new language? I guess you could say - because it’s hard to put emotion into text. But haven’t the best writers been doing that pretty successfully for centuries? Isn’t this a reading problem and about not treating the meaning of language as something you should be beaten over the head with? I would love to ask a professional linguist what they think of all this.

But in a way it doesn’t matter, because emojis are here to stay, and I feel sure that something even more obvious will replace them at some point.

Yet it’s already making us insincere, I guess - a somewhat fabricated performance of what we think we should be feeling when we’re talking to someone that would be a hell of a lot harder to pull off if they were actually in front of us.

This season of Everything Is Amazing is looking at the effect of what we like to call the outdoors upon our lives…

Season 7 Is Done! What's Next? [Part Two]

…and unless you live somewhere enormously distant from any kind of urban centre, one thing that going outside virtually guarantees is that you’re going to meet other people.

I talked a while back about how deceptively challenging it can feel to say hello to a stranger, because we tend to think we’re being a bother, whereas other people are much more likely to be delighted that we said hi:

The Science Of Oh Hello There

But then you have an actual conversation, in which you’re both assessing each other based on your tone of voice, body language, micro-expressions, all of it - and at some point, you form a kind of pre-opinion about this person: oh, they look shifty, I don’t trust them, or oh, they have a kind face, look at those laughter lines around the eyes, or oh yikes, they’ve clearly had too much coffee, I bet they write a science newsletter or something, time to get out of here.

What you’re doing is something you couldn’t do online, and certainly not with an emoji. You’re using your body, and you’re assessing the way they use their body, to create a gut feeling about their character.

It’s an interesting term, gut feeling, because it doesn’t just mean “a feeling you have in your gut” - it means a form of intuitive thinking. You’re engaged in a form og analysis where you’re allowing your emotions to have a say - you know, those things that up-tight rationalists would say are utterly irrelevant for thinking, because of their fickle nature and implied meaninglessness.

This is often the model for creative work that’s taught to us from a young age: ignore what your body is telling you and just push through. But - we know gut feelings aren’t entirely trivial. They might be unreliable and chaotic and throw up all sorts of false messages, but that doesn’t mean they’re all illusory.

Someone who has looked into this in detail is science writer Annie Murphy Paul, whose most recent book, The Extended Mind, is a terrific introduction to the body’s role in thinking. She looked at successful day traders, whose finely attuned instincts - gut feelings! - could make the difference between big wins and crippling losses.

She quoted John M. Coates, a former trader turned neuroscientist and applied physiologist working on the biology of risk taking, formerly working at the University of Cambridge.

Coates said that on a Wall Street trading floor:

“...you will find high-IQ Ivy League-educated stars who cannot make any money at all, for all their convincing analysis, while across the aisle sits a trader with an undistinguished degree from an unknown university, who cannot keep up with the latest analytics, but who consistently prints money, to the bafflement and irritation of his seemingly more gifted colleagues.”

The key, believes Coates, is the trader’s interoceptive ability - their awareness of what their own body is telling them and an understanding of what it means.

Annie Murphy Paul mentions a quick test of your interoceptive skills that you can try on yourself right now. Without putting a finger to the pulse in your wrist or neck, can you feel your own heartbeat?

(I can only do this when I’m walking briskly and my blood is pumping hard enough to feel in my jaw and inner ear.)

Another test is how good you are at a ‘body scan’ when you’re meditating, where you’re focusing your attention on different parts of your body, one by one - this also may also be a great way to train your interoception over time.

I’m hardly the person to teach you about the power of interoception - my friend Jonny is a better person to consult, because he’s partly built a business around it - but it’s worth bearing in mind two key ideas: that the state of your body is, a lot of the time, heavily involved in creating your emotions as well as reflecting them, and that your wider body is sometimes aware of things that your conscious mind isn’t.

We could see this “deeper mind” at work in the case of Henry Molaison, the man who lost his ability to form new memories when his hippocampus was destroyed, whom I wrote about a few years ago:

"Now...Where Was I?"

In Henry’s case, while his conscious or working memory was completely disconnected, his embodied memory kept working, and allowed him to learn through repetition how to draw a five-pointed star while looking at a reflection of his drawing hand in a mirror. When he finally did it correctly, he was astounded:

“That’s strange. I thought it would be difficult, but it looks as though I’ve done it rather well.”

He had no conscious memory of practicing it, again and again. But his body did, and it learned from these reps, presumably with the help of billions of neurons that exist in our bodies outside of our brains.

Interoception can also act as a kind of social bridge to access other people’s emotions. We can read other people’s physical state, we can emotionally identify with it, that creates a response in our own bodies, and hey presto - you experience empathy as a real bodily sensation.

For example, I find it almost impossible to watch someone on a stage making themselves look like idiots in front of a live\ audience, even if I fully consciously know that it’s fictitious because it’s a scene in a film or TV show and they’re all actors - it doesn’t matter, my stomach churns, I start sweating, full-body cringe, it’s just too much. I’m sure you have something like this too - at least I hope so, or else I’m going to feel very uncomfortable about having confessed this.

But what happens when you take that body completely away? What happens when you shut that deeper mind off when you’re interacting with strangers, because neither of you is actually physically present?

Well, according to theories around embodied thinking, it seems what happens is - you think less. Maybe this explains a lot of the utter foolishness on social media, all the cruelty and shaming and dunking and the rest of it. I love using social media to meet new people, but I can absolutely accept that I’m only showing up with a relatively small part of my mind, simply because my body isn’t present.

Maybe that’s one of the best arguments for getting outdoors. It’s where you can meet other people in full, and have conversations using your entire mind, to say something no emoji will ever be able to convey - instead of just continuing to hoot at each other in a language we don’t quite understand.

Thanks for listening.

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Images: Giles Lambert; Jeremy Hynes.

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Further reading on embodied memory:

Why It Might Not Sink In Until You've Written It Down