What is Cool?

Hey, Vsauce Michael here, and a couple of weeks ago, Vice's new channel Noisey blind folded me, the Gregory Brothers, about 200 other people, and then bused us to a hidden Skrillex show. It was cool, but what is cool? I mean, what does it mean to be cool? Cool is a judgement of taste. People who are cool are with it. They exhibit a style people want to emulate; they're fashionable. But being cool isn't just about confidence or being above the situation. In fact, what is considered cool changes all the time.

Here's a fantastic illustration charting by time and location what was generally considered cool. To truly get the origin of what we today mean by cool, we're going to have to go back to West Africa in the 15th Century. The Yoruba language has a great word, itutu. It means physical beauty, but also being calm and detached from your circumstances, almost unnaturally so in a superhuman kind of way. And a similar, more specific term comes from the Italian concept of sprezzatura. This was a way of behaving favored by the wealthy upper class in 15th Century Italy. To exhibit this behavior, you wanted to act nonchalant, even if doing so would take a lot of work. You would hide your desires and emotions behind ironic detachment.

But where can you see sprezzatura? Well, how about here—the Mona Lisa. She doesn't laugh. She's exercising restraint. It almost feels like she's looking down on you, smugly. Now, to make this more clear, let's take a look at a recent discovery, a painting that used to be thought of as a copy of the Mona Lisa made years and years later. Except, recent restoration has shown that the very same mistakes and corrections that DaVinci made on the original were also done on this painting, leading restorers to believe that this painting was made side by side with the actual Mona Lisa. Look at her expression. It's even more clear that she's looking at you like "Huh, really?" "You think you're cool. Okay."

Related is the Italian concept of omertà. This is keeping your cool and not telling the authorities anything about anybody. It's the type of attitude you see in movies like Goodfellas or The Godfather. But our modern definition of cool may most directly come from slaves and prisoners. People in those positions are subjected to authority in a very direct way, and any kind of rebellion against authority or fighting against it is most certainly going to be answered with nothing but punishment and very little chance of success. And so instead, an attitude of ironic detachment is taken on, which allows you to distance yourself from that authority, to be away from it, against it without actively confronting it and getting in trouble.

Now, later on in the 1940s, the actual word cool began to stick to this attitude. It came out of the smoke-filled nightclubs where jazz, beatnik, and bohemian culture thrived. The only way to freshen up that smoke-filled air was to open windows and let the cool night air in. Saxophonist Lester Young is credited with making this connection and popularizing the use of the word cool. Even cooler is the fact that Lester also popularized the use of the word bread to mean money. Well, look at that, the sun has come out. That's cool.

It also means that it's a good time to talk about the brain. Laurence Steinberg points out that there are systems in the brain that mature as we get older. The first is the socioemotional network, and this deals with social and emotional inputs. Second is the cognitive control network. This deals with regulating behavior and making ultimate decisions. But these two networks do not mature at the same rate. In fact, there's an awkward period in puberty and adolescence where the social emotional network in our brain is more active, and so, whether or not people think you are cool matters more to you than is reasonable.

So in a way, you could say that the less worried you are with being cool, the more developed your brain is. Instead, focus on vocabulary. The only thing that doesn't change, the only coolness that doesn't fade is cool—the word. Over the years, we have used all kinds of other words to mean cool, but the one that has never changed, the one that has always been cool to use is cool. And that's cool. Go check out that Skrillex concert footage. Noisey is the channel that uploaded that new MIA video as well as MIA's responses to YouTube comments. And according to this guy, fat people shouldn't be making music. All I know is, as always, thanks for watching.