Coltan Scrivner

Yeah, yeah.

The point of contact itself rather than... Our faces.

And so it kind of draws... That was my first inkling that there's something about danger and violence that really just draws our attention, in this case, our visual attention.

Yeah, it makes us kind of myopic.

That's exactly right.

And a lot of people, when they experience violence sort of secondhand, like when they see it, for example, they talk about it being frightening.

And I started thinking, well, it is kind of weird that humans also expose themselves to things that scare them.

Willingly.

Horror movies.

or true crime or whatever it might be, haunted houses, haunted hotels.

And I thought, well, I wonder if that's related.

And so I started looking into the literature and no psychologists were researching this.

Nobody that studied human behavior empirically was doing this work.

And that seemed insane to me because it's something that is so common, again, not just in our culture, but in every culture that we have documented.

I found one guy who was interested in this and he was a literature scholar and he studied horror literature and he lived in Denmark.

That feels right that he lived in Denmark.

Yeah, they're dark.

Scandinavians, yeah.

So I reached out to him and I said, hey, you are the only person in the world I can find who is interested in this topic and I'm interested in this.

We should do something together.