Norman Swan

speaker

307 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 11 Aug

Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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What's That Rash? · Why do we cry? · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

Not so animals do cry, but it looks as and there's been these stories about gorillas and other animal species, but when you talk to veterinarians and zookeepers and others who deal with animals all the time, they don't report crying with tears, although they do report crying.

Or what they interpret to be crying.

So humans

do seem to be peculiar in that they cry and produce tears as well.

So it's

Crocodiles Crocodile.

Exactly.

And to answer one of Ian's questions about what you know, what's the biological basis?

It looks as though the biological basis of crying changes according to your age.

I mean some people call it an acoustic umb umbilical chord, so that when you uh the vocalization of crying becomes less as you get older and the tearful part becomes more prominent.

And it's what induces that's right.

So it's it's what induces that crying.

So it's part of attachment, it's a part of wanting comfort.

Emotion is involved and probably becomes more and more involved as we get older.

And that exactly fits with the evidence.

Later on it's about something that psychologists call the theory of mind.

And the theory of mind is, you can be really complicated about it, really simple.

I'll be really simple, and I'll probably we'll probably get lots of emails from psychologists saying how wrong I've got it.

But it's about understanding self and other, what's me and what's you, and being able to read the emotional state that another person is in.

Um it overlaps with other aspects of social cognition, but this theory.

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