January 20, 2015 • 25 mins
What do tears of joy and the desire to pinch a baby's cheek have to do with one another? Quite a lot. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, find out about dimorphous expressions, as well as the siren call of baby scents that lure the joyful aunt to its cheek in the first place.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
do you have any old memories, childhood memories, even infant
memories lost in the in the in the haze of
(00:25):
forgetfulness emerging in which you you're looking out out of
a bassinet and there's a grandma or an aunt coming
at you teeth ready. They're kind They're gonna bite you. Yeah,
they're gonna eat you up. Yeah there, I'm so cute
as a baby. They're gonna eat me up and we'll
just go fasting cheeks. Yeah, I know, I do have
(00:48):
this one of my earliest memories. And I have now
come to know these people as the cheek pinching Mafia.
Yeah yeah, so well. I mean, you have a daughter yourself.
Have you observed family members or even strangers going in
for a pinch, going in for a nibble, telling you
about legs, like the fat on the baby legs. I
(01:09):
remember when my daughter there was a certain period of
times she got super chunky, and people just like I
don't want to eat, and it was just concerning I'm
not gonna lie, so you yourself have never felt the
temptation to go after a little thy meat. No, And
we should explain these people don't actually want to eat
(01:29):
the baby or do harm to it. They're just they're
experiencing an unparalleled level of joy and they can't help themselves.
And that's what we're talking about today. Yeah, it's important
to note. Yeah, first, first off, let's just say that
this has nothing to do with any kind of malicious biting.
That's an entirely different, different area of study. Um, and
(01:51):
it's also something that not everyone is going to relate to.
We ran into this a bet when we we did
a video on this topic, more specially about a recent
study that came out out this that we'll get into
in a bit. And uh, and I think we we
went with the we went with the title to talked
about eating baby feed or biting baby feed, or eating babies, etcetera.
And uh, a number of people we're up in all
(02:12):
they were just like, oh, that's the that's disgusting. You
people are monsters. How why would anyone want to buy
a baby's foot? Babies are precious, or why would anyone
want to get a baby near their mouth. Babies are disgusting,
like they were all of these like a number of
people got it and we're like, oh yeah, I just
want to eat this kid's you know, feed up. But
a number of people were just like could not connect
with it on any level. And having to do a
(02:34):
blog post where I was like trying to lay it
out a little more and be like, look, nobody's saying
eat babies, I know, And then like once again someone
was like, you guys are satan us. You know, we
really aren't really, but as a group, those guys are
very interesting. As a slide note stans Yeah, I mean
m Anton LaVey, very fascinating individual. Um, yeah, I'd love
(02:57):
to do something on Satanist sometime. Yeah. That means said
we were, We don't self identify a satanis. Now. What
we're talking about is this kind of joy that is
so intense that it's overwhelming. And I wanted to bring
up Zad Smith's essay on joy. Jadie Smith as a
writer and she's she's an essays and a fiction writer,
and in her essay on joy, she says it might
(03:19):
be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy, But maybe
everybody does this very easily all the time, and only
I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel
that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure
arrived at by the same road. You simply have to
go a little further down the track. That has not
been my experience. And if you asked me if I
(03:39):
wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be
at all sure I did exactly because it proves such
a difficult emotion to manage. And she goes on to
say that food gives her pleasure on a daily basis,
but she's really only known pure joy about six or
seven times in her life, and some of those times
involved for romantic love. And so it's very interesting essay
(04:03):
about this um and I want to just read a
couple of other little bits here. She says, we certainly
don't need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes,
especially if they are fraught with danger, do something ecstatic
to our brains. Though, like the pills that share the
same name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind ecstasy.
(04:25):
Right when my wild crush came, we wandered around a
museum for so long it closed without us noticing. Stuck
in the grounds, we climbed a high wall, and, finding
it higher on its other side, considered our options, broken
ankles or a long night sleeping on our stone. Lion
and the end of passersby helped us down, and things
turned prosaic, And after a few months it fizzled out.
(04:47):
What looked like love had just been tamed spirit. But
what a wonderful thing to sit on the high wall,
dizzy with joy and think nothing of breaking your ankles.
And I love this because this is her example of
something is joy woyful, it's it's a hard experience. Um,
it's not pleasure. And she goes on to say that
(05:07):
occasionally her child is a pleasure, though mostly her child
is a joy, And she says that means that, in fact,
she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather
that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight that I've
come to recognize as joy and now must find some
(05:27):
way to live with daily. Now that this is great,
because this is exactly what is happening when we are
talking about babies, in this desire, this this voiced expression
of wanting to eat them because they're so cute. Yeah,
I think you you may have brought this, uh that
that second quote up to me before. I can't remember
(05:47):
was on the podcast or just outside the podcast after
after I became apparent, because I certainly when you have
a child in your life like this, it uh, it's
a storm of different emotions, and certainly it's certainly not
something you can just say, oh, it's a pleasurable experience.
You can say it's a joyous experience. But under that
(06:08):
umbrella of joy, there are times when it's you know,
tremendously pleasurable and times when it's tremendously miserable, depending on
the circumstances. Yeah, So it kind of makes sense that,
especially through that lens, that people would have that sort
of reactions to children. And it's not just children too,
it can be puppies, I mean really, anything that requires
(06:28):
care anything, Yeah, childlike or or locked in into that
childlike zone that's uh in the case of a cat
especially or a dog that's hijacking our our child awareness. Yeah. Now,
there's actually a name for this. It's called a dimorphous expression.
And you've probably heard this before, like tears of joy. Yeah,
(06:48):
I'm so happy, I cried. They just so overjoy that
you're just weeping as if somebody had died. Yeah, I
mean basically two different expressions that have the same origin.
So that's where our cheek pinching ants and uncles come in.
And um, when people highly charge positive emotional situations respond
with tears of joys or threats of eating a baby
(07:11):
foot or something. Um, they're just really modulating their emotions. Yeah.
You can imagine somebody up there in the old brain
machine manning the switches like its power plant and uh,
you know there's too much steam in the machine. You
need to hit the release foul and let some of
it out. In a similar way, Uh, the little guy's
man in the switches and says, all right, aunt uh
(07:31):
aunt Filma here is really about to blow up with
with positive emotion over this baby. What can we do?
Throw in a few images into her brain of her
nibbling the toes off the baby, or nipple nipple and
a little thigh meat, and that'll bring things down to
a manageable level. Uh, not that you're rationally thinking any
of that, but the idea is that this is this
is all going on under the surface indeed. All right,
(07:55):
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about the actual studies on them.
All right, we're back, and you know, I do want
to say that I can relate to the wanting to
bite the baby. Yeah, well, not not a baby biter
(08:18):
per se, But there have been times when I've been
hanging out with with my son and he's particularly well
behaved and adorable, I have thought I could just nibble
his ear. Like there was one time where I was like,
I can nibble as ear. And then I was like,
whoa is that dangerous that I just thought that was
I like actually close to nibbling his ear. And then
of course they ran across this research and everything was fine.
(08:38):
But then also like some of the things the various
games you may play with the toddler where you you
go in for a little next sugar where you're not
actually biting the childer thing, but you know you're just
kind of like, um, you know, making a raspberry noise
against their fat little necks, or you're you're just tickling them.
Even like there's a certain amount of of of threat
and attack with with cute embrace swear it just all
(09:00):
gets meshed up, and you don't know which side is
up and which side is down anymore. You know. I
think about the tickling thing a lot, because there is
actually there's nothing more joyful to me than to see
my daughter just shriek, you know, a tear of like
laughing and also kind of like you know, the sort
of crying laughing face is the cutest thing in the world.
Oh yeah, my son would go, we would tickle him,
and he'll go, He'll go, no tackle me, no tackle me.
(09:23):
And then he has a chance to catch his breath
and he goes more. Yeah, there's a there's a sort
of symbiotic thing going on there. Um. Now, psychological scientists
and lead researcher Orienta Aragon of Yale University decided to
check out this so called cute aggression after seeing the
actress Leslie Bib on Conan and um coming in, did
(09:47):
I just do that Conan Conan? Yeah, I kind of
remember the scene in Conan the Barbarian where there was
a baby. There may have been. I've been coming up
with all sorts of alternates pronunciations today anyway, on and
in Bib but not only expressed her desire to punch
up baby because it was so cute, and kick a dog.
But then she admitted that when she met a fellow actress,
(10:10):
Angelica Houston, that she told her quote, You're just so beautiful.
I want to cut your face. And so this researcher,
Orion Oriano Aragon was like, I gotta check this out
a little bit further because in this interview bib was
obviously like very excited and expressive about her emotions. It's
(10:32):
like you can really see it overpowering her. And then
they have to go to the release valve, except maybe
an even more extreme version in her case, like she's
the face is too beautiful, make her imagine her slicing
it off. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little frightening, alright. So
so so Aragon, who you know, devotes a lot of
her work to human emotional connections. This is just her
(10:54):
only things, just a corner of her research. Two thousand
fourteen study, she and her team presented participants with images
of babies, some more infantile than others, um you know,
some cuter than others. Then they charted their emotional responses
to each image, as well as due to the duration
of the emotional charge, that they felt. They found that
(11:16):
test subjects who showed more bity pinchy aggression when looking
at a cute baby also showed a larger drop off
in positive emotion five minutes later. Yeah, and this is
important because this is really showing that they're they're modulating
their emotions. In other words, if they hadn't had some
(11:36):
sort of cute aggression to temper their overwhelming feeling of joy,
I mean, what would happen. I don't know. Would your
aunt or uncle like strip off their clothes and run
naked through this shrieking? You know, this is important. You
have to think about that the next time someone is
cute aggressive toward a dog or a baby like this
person needs to bring it down. Yeah. I mean, you're
(11:58):
you're really dealing with cute over Look, you're risking qute
overload at this point, and luckily there is a response
system in place. Um so yeah. Aragon suggests that that
this is all a matter of dimorphous expression, rebalancing the
scales normalizing after an intense dose of the cute and
that five minute drop and that does observed in the
experiment seems to demonstrate how the negative emotions allow us
(12:22):
to moderate those intense positive emotions and restore the balance.
So yeah, and Arragon did a couple of different online
surveys here, so it wasn't just one study. Um. I
think she started with the baseline of a hundred forty
three participants asking if people cried when they saw loved
ones reunited, or you know, if they are watching certain movies,
(12:42):
just to sort of test out whether or not these
people were perhaps I don't want to say uh, over
expressing their emotions, but we're maybe a little bit more
sensitive to these sorts of situations. Um. And then yeah,
she had a couple of other uh surveys. One online
study had six d seventy nine participants who confirmed again
these sort of findings over and over again. Of yeah,
(13:05):
if the person would respond much more aggressively when they
were looking at pictures of babies or you know, cute
things like puppies. Now the question is is it universal. Well,
we don't know if it's wholesale universal, but Aragon consulted
language professors in different cultures and yes, indeed, cute aggression
(13:28):
popped up elsewhere in the world. And Tagalog and which
is an Austronesian language with about fifty seven million speakers
in the Philippines and Manila. In some other places, giggle
refers to gritting of teeth and the urge to pinch
or squeeze, and then in Farsi, it's not uncommon to
hear an adult to tell a cute baby, I want
(13:51):
to eat your livery just play very hannibal, right, it's
the giggle. Is is interesting too because we actually one
of the viewers of the video amid the people who
are saying that we were monsters in satanists, one person said, oh, yeah,
we totally have a word for that uh in my
native tongue. So yeah, just just because just because you
don't have a word for it in English and cannot
(14:12):
directly relate to it, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. See,
we're not crazy, you know. That was another thing that
came up in uh in some of the responses to
the video we did. And by the way, I'll link
to this video on the landing page for for this
episode at stuff to bow your Mind dot com in
case you want to go check that out and actually
explore a YouTube comment threat um. It can be a
(14:32):
life changing experience. But there were people who were saying, oh, well, babies,
Babies are gross baby stink. Why would you want that
anywhere near your mouth? And it's true babies do poop
themselves and urinate on themselves and then bomb it on
themselves profusely. But uh, if they're cleaned and maintained, they
have a nice film. Well I kind of think it's
(14:53):
not the fault of the ants and uncle sometimes because
they are emitting certain pheromones that make them mell lovely.
And um, I had read about this before. I believe
it's that the idea behind it is that it's sort
of a bonding thing. Well, yeah, I mean there's a
lot going on in the biological level between parent and child. Uh,
(15:14):
and their loads of studies on this. We've discussed some
of them in the past here where it's it's about
the you've got to form that bond that the child
has to have a bond to survive. And then in
some cases there is a resistance to the bond on
the part of the parents because they may need to
survive without the child. There's, like I say, tons of
fascinating Uh. Like I said that, there are tons of
(15:35):
fascinating studies on this. Yeah, And I mean we we're
talking about is communication through scent, and that's not so odd.
We've talked about that a lot before. There's a study
titled Mother's Recognition of their Newborn by Olfactory ques and
in that study, it was found that women could identify
their newborn by smell alone after just an hour with
their newborn. So again that I think that speaks to
(15:58):
how important smell is. Um, how is that not a
parlor game? That would be great? You know, pass the
baby around, pass the baby blindfolded and you have to
smell which one is yours? That would be great? Would
it would be great? I think that's going to be
a new sort of postpartum game. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Now,
in September two thousand and thirteen, in the issue of
(16:20):
Frontiers and Psychology, researchers looked a little bit more into
smell and its effect on people. They used brand brain
scanners to scan the brains of fifteen women, half of
whom had just recently given birth something like six weeks earlier,
and half of them had never given birth. And while
they scanned their brains, they had them sniff the pajamas
(16:42):
of two day old infants, and these smells were shown
It to uh, to activate the the subjects reward circuits
in their brain. Yeah, and now all of the women
had activation in their reward circuits. But it turned out
that the women who had just recently given birth to
their own babies were experiencing it perhaps a little bit
(17:05):
more intensely. And when we say intense, we're talking about
like the feeling one gets after having obtained food, like
the baby, just the smell of the baby, and by extension,
the presence of the baby is is a meal in
and of itself. Yeah, that's what I thought was interesting too.
You're right. It's it's the kind of stuff that that
(17:25):
makes our brains like just say, hey, you got to
seek this out again and again. That food insects and
the baby would would elicit the same sort of responses.
I think shows how important this is. Making the caring
for the baby is on par with obtaining food. So
organism and continue to eat food. These are all good
(17:48):
things in a part of your genetic mission. Go to it. Yeah,
so it makes sense that this sense of joy that
you feel when you look at this cute baby could
be so overwhelming for some people and they would have
to bring out this modulating expressions of cute aggression because
it's really I mean, this is it's umpire, as you say,
(18:11):
with life or death. And when you look at it
that way, you're like, Okay, I can understand that. The
grandmother's response, my response, or you know, or uncle's response
to this being yeah, it's tied into some of our
most primal, important wiring. So it makes sense to me. Alright.
I wanted to go ahead and close this out with
a little bit more of Z. D. Smith, And she
(18:32):
says in her essay Joy, the writer Julian Barnes, considering morning,
once said it hurts just as much as it's worth.
In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote
the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told
it to my husband, who told it to me. For
months afterward. These words stuck with both of us, so
(18:52):
clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as
it's worth. What an arrangement? Why would anyone accept such
a crazy deal? Surely, if we were sane and reasonable,
we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy,
as animals themselves sensibly do, the end of a pleasure
(19:13):
brings no great harm to anyone, after all, And can
always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.
All right. Well, on that note, let's call over the
robot and do a couple of listener mail. All right,
This one comes to us from Hannah, and Hannah writes
(19:33):
in from Northern California, says Hi, Julian Robert. I'm sure
you've got emails last year when the slug Love podcast
originally aired, but I wanted to toss in my two cents.
My sister is a U SEE Santa Cruz graduate, and
as a lifelong resident of Northern California myself, I know
a thing or two about banana slugs. Hell head into
(19:54):
the Santa Cruz Mountains, you'll quickly find yourself knee deep
in these slimy yellow guys hash gals, because of course
they're amaphrodites. Uh. First off, UCSC does have competitive sports. Tennis, soccer, basketball, swimming, diving, golf,
cross country, and volleyball are all represented intercollegiically by the
Banana Slugs. The mascot is named Sammy. Second, the banana
(20:17):
slug was chosen as the at the insistence of the
students in the nineteen eighties, when they apparently found the
sea lion proposed by the chancellor to improperly represent the
forest located campus. Sea lions rarely get very far inland,
but banana slugs are freaking everywhere. Finally, there is a
tradition in Santa Cruz, especially among university students who have
not all grown up around the gastropods, to kiss the
(20:39):
first banana slug you see in a year. This will
cause your lips to tingle due to one of the
defensive chemicals present in the slug slime, and it will
give you a little bit of street cred on campus.
Go banana slugs, Hannah and norcaw go banana slugs. And
I like that this college is uh traditions and writes
(20:59):
the passages involve actual intimate contact with gastropods. I think
that's that's lovely with its mascot. Yeah, talking that though,
if you're like mascot is alligator, calligator or a wizard?
Where you're gonna get a wizard? Oh, you can get
wizards all right. Here's a bit of listener mail comes
(21:23):
to us from Cameron Camera writes in on the subject
of genetic memory. Hi, Julian Robert, I've been catching up
on your podcast episodes and listen to the tripophobia episode.
You were discussing the study of mice trained to fear
the smell of cherry blossom and how that fear was
passed on to the following generations when I was reminded
of a similar study, if I remember correctly, I was
watching a science news program called Daily Planet a few
(21:44):
years back, and they were representing and they were presenting
a study that was done to figure out why we
hate or cringe at certain sounds, such as fingernails screeching
on chalkboards. The researchers concluded that it was a defensive
mechanism going back to prehistoric man. These sounds we hate
resemble the sounds made by some prehistoric predators, and that
defensive trigger has been passed down genetically, just like this
(22:07):
cherry blossom smell did on the mice. Sorry, I haven't
had the time to find the actual study for you yet,
but I thought you'd find it interesting as it goes
along quite well with your phobia episode. Thanks for the show,
enjoyable and informative. PS. Is there such a thing as
fear of podcast? And what would it be called? Ha? Ha?
And that was such a great email from Cam, because
(22:28):
not only did it help to spin off a video
about nails on chalkboard, but at the same time we
were researching The Grinch and there was a bunch of
information some people positing that the grinches um disdain for
the Who's was falling within that same range of nails
on a chalkboard. I mean, this is just a lovely
(22:49):
email that was intersecting with everything that we were doing
at the time. So thank you Cam for that. And uh,
I think a fair podcast. Maybe podcast fun of phobia?
Maybe so maybe So I wonder if it would be
related to the fear of podcasts itself, or the sensation
of listening to podcasts, or that that feeling you get
when you look into your podcast folder or on your
(23:09):
device or in iTunes or however you listen and realize
that you have so many episodes to catch up. There
would be the anxiety of like there's not enough time. Yeah,
I used to get that when I was really listening
to a lot of music podcast I've I've really tried
to limit myself since I have a little less time
for him these days. But I would occasionally I go
on vacation and I come back and they'd all have
(23:31):
stacked up, and it's like, oh, that's like it's twelve hours,
twenty four hours of podcasts right there. What am I
gonna do? I get that feeling when I look at
our list of topics and we have this running list
of topics we want to cover, and I get there's
just sort of like excitement but also like anxiety of
when are we going to get to that? How are
we going to get to that? Indeed, I mean there
are yeah, there's some topics that we have had on
(23:53):
the list really since the beginning, like some for various reasons,
we just haven't gotten around to. Yeah. Some of it
just has to do with aerendipity though, like you know
it's the right time, or you know, we've had some
other things across our desk, like yes, take it out,
it's time to release the crack and yeah, all right,
and you know, sometimes it has to do new studies
that have come out that that tell us, yes, now
(24:13):
is definitely the time to do this because here's some
actual science we can discuss or just whatever is you
know thrilling us at the time. Yes, so we're not
all willing nilly all the time, just you guys now
we're somewhat intentional. All right. Well, there you have it,
just a little bit of listener mail to get you
through the night, or the day, or the day whenever
you choose to listen. In the meantime, be sure to
(24:35):
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where you'll find all the podcast episodes going way back
to the very beginning. You will find all of our videos,
all of our blog posts, pictures of what we look like,
links out to our social media accounts, all that good stuff. Indeed,
And if you have some thoughts that you'd like to
share with us, especially with the baby stuff, like do
you have cute aggression? Have you ever expressed it? You
(24:57):
can let us know by sending us an email to
blow the mind at how staff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
do you have any old memories, childhood memories, even infant
memories lost in the in the in the haze of
(00:25):
forgetfulness emerging in which you you're looking out out of
a bassinet and there's a grandma or an aunt coming
at you teeth ready. They're kind They're gonna bite you. Yeah,
they're gonna eat you up. Yeah there, I'm so cute
as a baby. They're gonna eat me up and we'll
just go fasting cheeks. Yeah, I know, I do have
(00:48):
this one of my earliest memories. And I have now
come to know these people as the cheek pinching Mafia.
Yeah yeah, so well. I mean, you have a daughter yourself.
Have you observed family members or even strangers going in
for a pinch, going in for a nibble, telling you
about legs, like the fat on the baby legs. I
(01:09):
remember when my daughter there was a certain period of
times she got super chunky, and people just like I
don't want to eat, and it was just concerning I'm
not gonna lie, so you yourself have never felt the
temptation to go after a little thy meat. No, And
we should explain these people don't actually want to eat
(01:29):
the baby or do harm to it. They're just they're
experiencing an unparalleled level of joy and they can't help themselves.
And that's what we're talking about today. Yeah, it's important
to note. Yeah, first, first off, let's just say that
this has nothing to do with any kind of malicious biting.
That's an entirely different, different area of study. Um, and
(01:51):
it's also something that not everyone is going to relate to.
We ran into this a bet when we we did
a video on this topic, more specially about a recent
study that came out out this that we'll get into
in a bit. And uh, and I think we we
went with the we went with the title to talked
about eating baby feed or biting baby feed, or eating babies, etcetera.
And uh, a number of people we're up in all
(02:12):
they were just like, oh, that's the that's disgusting. You
people are monsters. How why would anyone want to buy
a baby's foot? Babies are precious, or why would anyone
want to get a baby near their mouth. Babies are disgusting,
like they were all of these like a number of
people got it and we're like, oh yeah, I just
want to eat this kid's you know, feed up. But
a number of people were just like could not connect
with it on any level. And having to do a
(02:34):
blog post where I was like trying to lay it
out a little more and be like, look, nobody's saying
eat babies, I know, And then like once again someone
was like, you guys are satan us. You know, we
really aren't really, but as a group, those guys are
very interesting. As a slide note stans Yeah, I mean
m Anton LaVey, very fascinating individual. Um, yeah, I'd love
(02:57):
to do something on Satanist sometime. Yeah. That means said
we were, We don't self identify a satanis. Now. What
we're talking about is this kind of joy that is
so intense that it's overwhelming. And I wanted to bring
up Zad Smith's essay on joy. Jadie Smith as a
writer and she's she's an essays and a fiction writer,
and in her essay on joy, she says it might
(03:19):
be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy, But maybe
everybody does this very easily all the time, and only
I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel
that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure
arrived at by the same road. You simply have to
go a little further down the track. That has not
been my experience. And if you asked me if I
(03:39):
wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be
at all sure I did exactly because it proves such
a difficult emotion to manage. And she goes on to
say that food gives her pleasure on a daily basis,
but she's really only known pure joy about six or
seven times in her life, and some of those times
involved for romantic love. And so it's very interesting essay
(04:03):
about this um and I want to just read a
couple of other little bits here. She says, we certainly
don't need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes,
especially if they are fraught with danger, do something ecstatic
to our brains. Though, like the pills that share the
same name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind ecstasy.
(04:25):
Right when my wild crush came, we wandered around a
museum for so long it closed without us noticing. Stuck
in the grounds, we climbed a high wall, and, finding
it higher on its other side, considered our options, broken
ankles or a long night sleeping on our stone. Lion
and the end of passersby helped us down, and things
turned prosaic, And after a few months it fizzled out.
(04:47):
What looked like love had just been tamed spirit. But
what a wonderful thing to sit on the high wall,
dizzy with joy and think nothing of breaking your ankles.
And I love this because this is her example of
something is joy woyful, it's it's a hard experience. Um,
it's not pleasure. And she goes on to say that
(05:07):
occasionally her child is a pleasure, though mostly her child
is a joy, And she says that means that, in fact,
she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather
that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight that I've
come to recognize as joy and now must find some
(05:27):
way to live with daily. Now that this is great,
because this is exactly what is happening when we are
talking about babies, in this desire, this this voiced expression
of wanting to eat them because they're so cute. Yeah,
I think you you may have brought this, uh that
that second quote up to me before. I can't remember
(05:47):
was on the podcast or just outside the podcast after
after I became apparent, because I certainly when you have
a child in your life like this, it uh, it's
a storm of different emotions, and certainly it's certainly not
something you can just say, oh, it's a pleasurable experience.
You can say it's a joyous experience. But under that
(06:08):
umbrella of joy, there are times when it's you know,
tremendously pleasurable and times when it's tremendously miserable, depending on
the circumstances. Yeah, So it kind of makes sense that,
especially through that lens, that people would have that sort
of reactions to children. And it's not just children too,
it can be puppies, I mean really, anything that requires
(06:28):
care anything, Yeah, childlike or or locked in into that
childlike zone that's uh in the case of a cat
especially or a dog that's hijacking our our child awareness. Yeah. Now,
there's actually a name for this. It's called a dimorphous expression.
And you've probably heard this before, like tears of joy. Yeah,
(06:48):
I'm so happy, I cried. They just so overjoy that
you're just weeping as if somebody had died. Yeah, I
mean basically two different expressions that have the same origin.
So that's where our cheek pinching ants and uncles come in.
And um, when people highly charge positive emotional situations respond
with tears of joys or threats of eating a baby
(07:11):
foot or something. Um, they're just really modulating their emotions. Yeah.
You can imagine somebody up there in the old brain
machine manning the switches like its power plant and uh,
you know there's too much steam in the machine. You
need to hit the release foul and let some of
it out. In a similar way, Uh, the little guy's
man in the switches and says, all right, aunt uh
(07:31):
aunt Filma here is really about to blow up with
with positive emotion over this baby. What can we do?
Throw in a few images into her brain of her
nibbling the toes off the baby, or nipple nipple and
a little thigh meat, and that'll bring things down to
a manageable level. Uh, not that you're rationally thinking any
of that, but the idea is that this is this
is all going on under the surface indeed. All right,
(07:55):
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about the actual studies on them.
All right, we're back, and you know, I do want
to say that I can relate to the wanting to
bite the baby. Yeah, well, not not a baby biter
(08:18):
per se, But there have been times when I've been
hanging out with with my son and he's particularly well
behaved and adorable, I have thought I could just nibble
his ear. Like there was one time where I was like,
I can nibble as ear. And then I was like,
whoa is that dangerous that I just thought that was
I like actually close to nibbling his ear. And then
of course they ran across this research and everything was fine.
(08:38):
But then also like some of the things the various
games you may play with the toddler where you you
go in for a little next sugar where you're not
actually biting the childer thing, but you know you're just
kind of like, um, you know, making a raspberry noise
against their fat little necks, or you're you're just tickling them.
Even like there's a certain amount of of of threat
and attack with with cute embrace swear it just all
(09:00):
gets meshed up, and you don't know which side is
up and which side is down anymore. You know. I
think about the tickling thing a lot, because there is
actually there's nothing more joyful to me than to see
my daughter just shriek, you know, a tear of like
laughing and also kind of like you know, the sort
of crying laughing face is the cutest thing in the world.
Oh yeah, my son would go, we would tickle him,
and he'll go, He'll go, no tackle me, no tackle me.
(09:23):
And then he has a chance to catch his breath
and he goes more. Yeah, there's a there's a sort
of symbiotic thing going on there. Um. Now, psychological scientists
and lead researcher Orienta Aragon of Yale University decided to
check out this so called cute aggression after seeing the
actress Leslie Bib on Conan and um coming in, did
(09:47):
I just do that Conan Conan? Yeah, I kind of
remember the scene in Conan the Barbarian where there was
a baby. There may have been. I've been coming up
with all sorts of alternates pronunciations today anyway, on and
in Bib but not only expressed her desire to punch
up baby because it was so cute, and kick a dog.
But then she admitted that when she met a fellow actress,
(10:10):
Angelica Houston, that she told her quote, You're just so beautiful.
I want to cut your face. And so this researcher,
Orion Oriano Aragon was like, I gotta check this out
a little bit further because in this interview bib was
obviously like very excited and expressive about her emotions. It's
(10:32):
like you can really see it overpowering her. And then
they have to go to the release valve, except maybe
an even more extreme version in her case, like she's
the face is too beautiful, make her imagine her slicing
it off. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little frightening, alright. So
so so Aragon, who you know, devotes a lot of
her work to human emotional connections. This is just her
(10:54):
only things, just a corner of her research. Two thousand
fourteen study, she and her team presented participants with images
of babies, some more infantile than others, um you know,
some cuter than others. Then they charted their emotional responses
to each image, as well as due to the duration
of the emotional charge, that they felt. They found that
(11:16):
test subjects who showed more bity pinchy aggression when looking
at a cute baby also showed a larger drop off
in positive emotion five minutes later. Yeah, and this is
important because this is really showing that they're they're modulating
their emotions. In other words, if they hadn't had some
(11:36):
sort of cute aggression to temper their overwhelming feeling of joy,
I mean, what would happen. I don't know. Would your
aunt or uncle like strip off their clothes and run
naked through this shrieking? You know, this is important. You
have to think about that the next time someone is
cute aggressive toward a dog or a baby like this
person needs to bring it down. Yeah. I mean, you're
(11:58):
you're really dealing with cute over Look, you're risking qute
overload at this point, and luckily there is a response
system in place. Um so yeah. Aragon suggests that that
this is all a matter of dimorphous expression, rebalancing the
scales normalizing after an intense dose of the cute and
that five minute drop and that does observed in the
experiment seems to demonstrate how the negative emotions allow us
(12:22):
to moderate those intense positive emotions and restore the balance.
So yeah, and Arragon did a couple of different online
surveys here, so it wasn't just one study. Um. I
think she started with the baseline of a hundred forty
three participants asking if people cried when they saw loved
ones reunited, or you know, if they are watching certain movies,
(12:42):
just to sort of test out whether or not these
people were perhaps I don't want to say uh, over
expressing their emotions, but we're maybe a little bit more
sensitive to these sorts of situations. Um. And then yeah,
she had a couple of other uh surveys. One online
study had six d seventy nine participants who confirmed again
these sort of findings over and over again. Of yeah,
(13:05):
if the person would respond much more aggressively when they
were looking at pictures of babies or you know, cute
things like puppies. Now the question is is it universal. Well,
we don't know if it's wholesale universal, but Aragon consulted
language professors in different cultures and yes, indeed, cute aggression
(13:28):
popped up elsewhere in the world. And Tagalog and which
is an Austronesian language with about fifty seven million speakers
in the Philippines and Manila. In some other places, giggle
refers to gritting of teeth and the urge to pinch
or squeeze, and then in Farsi, it's not uncommon to
hear an adult to tell a cute baby, I want
(13:51):
to eat your livery just play very hannibal, right, it's
the giggle. Is is interesting too because we actually one
of the viewers of the video amid the people who
are saying that we were monsters in satanists, one person said, oh, yeah,
we totally have a word for that uh in my
native tongue. So yeah, just just because just because you
don't have a word for it in English and cannot
(14:12):
directly relate to it, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. See,
we're not crazy, you know. That was another thing that
came up in uh in some of the responses to
the video we did. And by the way, I'll link
to this video on the landing page for for this
episode at stuff to bow your Mind dot com in
case you want to go check that out and actually
explore a YouTube comment threat um. It can be a
(14:32):
life changing experience. But there were people who were saying, oh, well, babies,
Babies are gross baby stink. Why would you want that
anywhere near your mouth? And it's true babies do poop
themselves and urinate on themselves and then bomb it on
themselves profusely. But uh, if they're cleaned and maintained, they
have a nice film. Well I kind of think it's
(14:53):
not the fault of the ants and uncle sometimes because
they are emitting certain pheromones that make them mell lovely.
And um, I had read about this before. I believe
it's that the idea behind it is that it's sort
of a bonding thing. Well, yeah, I mean there's a
lot going on in the biological level between parent and child. Uh,
(15:14):
and their loads of studies on this. We've discussed some
of them in the past here where it's it's about
the you've got to form that bond that the child
has to have a bond to survive. And then in
some cases there is a resistance to the bond on
the part of the parents because they may need to
survive without the child. There's, like I say, tons of
fascinating Uh. Like I said that, there are tons of
(15:35):
fascinating studies on this. Yeah, And I mean we we're
talking about is communication through scent, and that's not so odd.
We've talked about that a lot before. There's a study
titled Mother's Recognition of their Newborn by Olfactory ques and
in that study, it was found that women could identify
their newborn by smell alone after just an hour with
their newborn. So again that I think that speaks to
(15:58):
how important smell is. Um, how is that not a
parlor game? That would be great? You know, pass the
baby around, pass the baby blindfolded and you have to
smell which one is yours? That would be great? Would
it would be great? I think that's going to be
a new sort of postpartum game. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Now,
in September two thousand and thirteen, in the issue of
(16:20):
Frontiers and Psychology, researchers looked a little bit more into
smell and its effect on people. They used brand brain
scanners to scan the brains of fifteen women, half of
whom had just recently given birth something like six weeks earlier,
and half of them had never given birth. And while
they scanned their brains, they had them sniff the pajamas
(16:42):
of two day old infants, and these smells were shown
It to uh, to activate the the subjects reward circuits
in their brain. Yeah, and now all of the women
had activation in their reward circuits. But it turned out
that the women who had just recently given birth to
their own babies were experiencing it perhaps a little bit
(17:05):
more intensely. And when we say intense, we're talking about
like the feeling one gets after having obtained food, like
the baby, just the smell of the baby, and by extension,
the presence of the baby is is a meal in
and of itself. Yeah, that's what I thought was interesting too.
You're right. It's it's the kind of stuff that that
(17:25):
makes our brains like just say, hey, you got to
seek this out again and again. That food insects and
the baby would would elicit the same sort of responses.
I think shows how important this is. Making the caring
for the baby is on par with obtaining food. So
organism and continue to eat food. These are all good
(17:48):
things in a part of your genetic mission. Go to it. Yeah,
so it makes sense that this sense of joy that
you feel when you look at this cute baby could
be so overwhelming for some people and they would have
to bring out this modulating expressions of cute aggression because
it's really I mean, this is it's umpire, as you say,
(18:11):
with life or death. And when you look at it
that way, you're like, Okay, I can understand that. The
grandmother's response, my response, or you know, or uncle's response
to this being yeah, it's tied into some of our
most primal, important wiring. So it makes sense to me. Alright.
I wanted to go ahead and close this out with
a little bit more of Z. D. Smith, And she
(18:32):
says in her essay Joy, the writer Julian Barnes, considering morning,
once said it hurts just as much as it's worth.
In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote
the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told
it to my husband, who told it to me. For
months afterward. These words stuck with both of us, so
(18:52):
clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as
it's worth. What an arrangement? Why would anyone accept such
a crazy deal? Surely, if we were sane and reasonable,
we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy,
as animals themselves sensibly do, the end of a pleasure
(19:13):
brings no great harm to anyone, after all, And can
always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.
All right. Well, on that note, let's call over the
robot and do a couple of listener mail. All right,
This one comes to us from Hannah, and Hannah writes
(19:33):
in from Northern California, says Hi, Julian Robert. I'm sure
you've got emails last year when the slug Love podcast
originally aired, but I wanted to toss in my two cents.
My sister is a U SEE Santa Cruz graduate, and
as a lifelong resident of Northern California myself, I know
a thing or two about banana slugs. Hell head into
(19:54):
the Santa Cruz Mountains, you'll quickly find yourself knee deep
in these slimy yellow guys hash gals, because of course
they're amaphrodites. Uh. First off, UCSC does have competitive sports. Tennis, soccer, basketball, swimming, diving, golf,
cross country, and volleyball are all represented intercollegiically by the
Banana Slugs. The mascot is named Sammy. Second, the banana
(20:17):
slug was chosen as the at the insistence of the
students in the nineteen eighties, when they apparently found the
sea lion proposed by the chancellor to improperly represent the
forest located campus. Sea lions rarely get very far inland,
but banana slugs are freaking everywhere. Finally, there is a
tradition in Santa Cruz, especially among university students who have
not all grown up around the gastropods, to kiss the
(20:39):
first banana slug you see in a year. This will
cause your lips to tingle due to one of the
defensive chemicals present in the slug slime, and it will
give you a little bit of street cred on campus.
Go banana slugs, Hannah and norcaw go banana slugs. And
I like that this college is uh traditions and writes
(20:59):
the passages involve actual intimate contact with gastropods. I think
that's that's lovely with its mascot. Yeah, talking that though,
if you're like mascot is alligator, calligator or a wizard?
Where you're gonna get a wizard? Oh, you can get
wizards all right. Here's a bit of listener mail comes
(21:23):
to us from Cameron Camera writes in on the subject
of genetic memory. Hi, Julian Robert, I've been catching up
on your podcast episodes and listen to the tripophobia episode.
You were discussing the study of mice trained to fear
the smell of cherry blossom and how that fear was
passed on to the following generations when I was reminded
of a similar study, if I remember correctly, I was
watching a science news program called Daily Planet a few
(21:44):
years back, and they were representing and they were presenting
a study that was done to figure out why we
hate or cringe at certain sounds, such as fingernails screeching
on chalkboards. The researchers concluded that it was a defensive
mechanism going back to prehistoric man. These sounds we hate
resemble the sounds made by some prehistoric predators, and that
defensive trigger has been passed down genetically, just like this
(22:07):
cherry blossom smell did on the mice. Sorry, I haven't
had the time to find the actual study for you yet,
but I thought you'd find it interesting as it goes
along quite well with your phobia episode. Thanks for the show,
enjoyable and informative. PS. Is there such a thing as
fear of podcast? And what would it be called? Ha? Ha?
And that was such a great email from Cam, because
(22:28):
not only did it help to spin off a video
about nails on chalkboard, but at the same time we
were researching The Grinch and there was a bunch of
information some people positing that the grinches um disdain for
the Who's was falling within that same range of nails
on a chalkboard. I mean, this is just a lovely
(22:49):
email that was intersecting with everything that we were doing
at the time. So thank you Cam for that. And uh,
I think a fair podcast. Maybe podcast fun of phobia?
Maybe so maybe So I wonder if it would be
related to the fear of podcasts itself, or the sensation
of listening to podcasts, or that that feeling you get
when you look into your podcast folder or on your
(23:09):
device or in iTunes or however you listen and realize
that you have so many episodes to catch up. There
would be the anxiety of like there's not enough time. Yeah,
I used to get that when I was really listening
to a lot of music podcast I've I've really tried
to limit myself since I have a little less time
for him these days. But I would occasionally I go
on vacation and I come back and they'd all have
(23:31):
stacked up, and it's like, oh, that's like it's twelve hours,
twenty four hours of podcasts right there. What am I
gonna do? I get that feeling when I look at
our list of topics and we have this running list
of topics we want to cover, and I get there's
just sort of like excitement but also like anxiety of
when are we going to get to that? How are
we going to get to that? Indeed, I mean there
are yeah, there's some topics that we have had on
(23:53):
the list really since the beginning, like some for various reasons,
we just haven't gotten around to. Yeah. Some of it
just has to do with aerendipity though, like you know
it's the right time, or you know, we've had some
other things across our desk, like yes, take it out,
it's time to release the crack and yeah, all right,
and you know, sometimes it has to do new studies
that have come out that that tell us, yes, now
(24:13):
is definitely the time to do this because here's some
actual science we can discuss or just whatever is you
know thrilling us at the time. Yes, so we're not
all willing nilly all the time, just you guys now
we're somewhat intentional. All right. Well, there you have it,
just a little bit of listener mail to get you
through the night, or the day, or the day whenever
you choose to listen. In the meantime, be sure to
(24:35):
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where you'll find all the podcast episodes going way back
to the very beginning. You will find all of our videos,
all of our blog posts, pictures of what we look like,
links out to our social media accounts, all that good stuff. Indeed,
And if you have some thoughts that you'd like to
share with us, especially with the baby stuff, like do
you have cute aggression? Have you ever expressed it? You
(24:57):
can let us know by sending us an email to
blow the mind at how staff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
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