Brain Junk

When Henry the Eighth died, he left behind an estate totalling millions. And not entirely what you’d expect. Is it possible for a king to be bougie? Maybe yes.

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Trace Kerr, and I’m Amy Barton, and this is a Brain Storm about King Henry VIII.

AB: First of all, I always enjoy having some sort of context for a historical figure. And when I was looking at this subject, it gave stats for how big King Henry VIII was. And so 23 year old King Henry VIII was 6’1″, 32 inch waist, 39 inch chest. So you can imagine with me, 23 year old King Henry VIII: Keanu Reeves roughly.

TK:Okay.

AB: So he probably was kind of dreamy at that age. In an English king sort of way. By the time of his death. Imagine John Goodman.

TK: Oh, John Goodman. Not In the good times.

AB: Original Roseanne John Goodman.

TK: Oh, okay. So he was a very big cause. There’s paintings of him and he looks like he was probably a very big man. And the the painter was just being polite. Right? That’s, you know, he’s like, no, you totally look like this.

AB: Yes. Yeah. Six months after he died in 1547 a full inventory of all of his possessions was commissioned. So that was thousands and thousands of individual items included all of his properties and anything he owned. And so some of the funky things, MentalFloss put together an article of interesting things that they found like purple velvet bagpipes.

TK: Oh

AB: So great.

AB: He was apparently quite a musician, which if you watch the history channel you probably already know he had lots of instruments but that was the most swagalicious.

TK: That’s very flamboyant.

AB: Yes. Yeah. That was from his Elton John Era. I don’t know. He had a codpiece large enough to conceal a weapon. Uh, and that was in the era. But I’m sorry. Let’s face it. There are times when I wish you guys can see us.
TK: There were so many things I wanted to say that I just let go. Okay. So codpiece yes,

AB: large enough to fit a weapon inside. Wow. That would have been we’ll move on to the mace pistol.

TK: Sure. Let’s do that.

AB: I had to Google what a maze pistol would look like. Cause the mace is like half an uncheck chain and the ball with the spikes on it right normally. But a mace pistol looked like from the pics pictures maybe 18 inches long. And mostly what we would imagine a pistol looking like but on the barrel, huge spikes around the barrel. So like if you failed to hit your shot, you could bludgeon them. That was kind of amazing. He was apparently also very into weapons. Basically what I got from this is like we all think when I win my million or my 10 million, I’m gonna put a fire pole in and I’m going to put a slide. And it seems like he lived that life cause he’s all are a very, like he had a huge collections of these things. He had a suit of armor with a 51 inch waist, which is in his end of life phase when he was older.

TK: Wow. That’s like me. When I was pregnant.

AB: He could have had some babies there. He owned dozens of dogs in his lifetime and after his death, more than 60 leashes were found in his wardrobe, which makes him very likable to me. And he had a pet Marma set. It was even painted with him decades later. And the best thing is that he had cat armor. And it’s also the saddest thing because he actually did not have any cat armor. That was what originated this whole thing. I’m like, OH MY Gosh Henry the eighth had cat armor. That is so great. He did not you guys. It was probably some high school project to make a thing. And it’s attributed and I saw it on Facebook and I was so excited for a minute.

TK: But this is what’s important because then it’s about, you know, double checking your sources.

AB: That’s right.

TK:And I’m very disappointed that they didn’t have cat armor. But imagine him with his 60 dogs over his l...

Big word for a genetic mutation where an animal is split with one side being entirely female and the other male. This can happen in some species of birds, crustaceans, snakes, and insects.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I'm Amy Barton and I'm Trace Kerr, and I want to share with you a Brain Storm about a gynandromorphy.

AB: I'm not sure how to feel about this topic at all.

TK: It's a huge word, isn't it? Don't be scared. It'll be okay. So I stumbled across this on Instagram with a picture of a cardinal. That's those all-red birds with a little black faces.

AB: This is a good direction. No forceps involved.

TK: Nope, no good direction. But the picture was strange in that half of the cardinal was bright red and the other half was light beige and...

AB: For real in real life?

TK For real for real. And I'm going to tell you why.

AB: Okay.

TK: So gynandromorphy is individual animals with both genetically male and female characteristics. So, and it can be bilateral, so cut straight and half or mosaic where like your arm is male and your face is female and this kind of thing. But it doesn't happen in mammals. It only occurs in insects, spiders, crustaceans, and very rarely birds.

AB: Can you imagine being the first guy that really documented that? They're like, no, we don't believe you buddy. I'm like, no, come and look! For real! 
TK: Well, here's how it happens. So this is according Natural History Magazine in insects and birds. So, in humans, a woman's egg is, you know is one, it's the x, okay? And the sperm has x or y. So they get together and you have an x, x, which is female or x, y, which is male. Well, in birds, the egg can have a z male or a w female, and the male is only donating a z cell. So here's what's weird. If the egg has both a z and a w, and if the male for some reason has a zz sperm, that egg is going to get fertilized and you will have both female and male cells growing in one egg. Ooh. So knowing how often it happens is tough to know because we really only notice when the animal had happens in has sexual dimorphism, which is the male and female look different. So if you have a cardinal, the male is bright red, the female is light beige.

AB: So this would be like one baby, little tiny man fish, really big lady fish.

TK: Yup. And uh, like in lobsters there's this great picture where one side of this lobster, it's like somebody drew a line right down the middle of one side is bright orange and one side is dark black.

AB: Huh? Weird.

TK: Yeah. And then in the cardinals there was a story about one on the BBC and it's sang like a male, but was being courted by another male. And depending on how its insides are all set up, this bird could actually reproduce.

AB: Wow.

TK: Yeah. Depending on which, where all the anatomy broke down, if it was, if it was more mosaic, he inside and it has, you know, the capability to have eggs then yeah, it could possibly breed.
AB: Wow.

TK: Yeah. I also found a rose gypsy moth where the wings on the female side are half the size and brown and gray and the male side is pink on the wings and abdomen.

AB: Was it able to fly? Was at disproportionate enough that it could,

TK: It probably couldn't fly because you know, these female wings were super tiny and the male were super big.

AB: Always going in circles.

TK: Yes. It just kind of flutters around.

AB: Now, this is not a thing that happens in mammals you said. So like you see the picture of the dog with black fur and a blue eye and then uh...

TK: Now that is a Chimera and that's not male and female. What's happened there is you have two cells, two different developing embryos that stuck together and...

AB: So you're your own twin?

TK: Yes, you have two different people. So like this is going completely off topic, but it's fascin...

Medical science on the fly. Turns out you only need to pull a few G's to loosen that stubborn kidney stone.

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Trace Kerr, and I'm Amy Barton, and this is a brainstorm. 

AB: Are you a roller coaster fan Trace? 

TK: Nope. 

AB: Oh, me either. So this is never going to help us. 

TK: I like roller coasters from the ground at a distance where I can hear the people scream and that's about it. 

AB: Yeah, I am the backpack holder on that voyage. Yep. It's my favorite thing to do at a theme park is to stand there with the backpacks cause it's peaceful and nobody bothers me. They're like look at that nice mom. She's holding all the backpacks. Well, scientists have been awarded an Ig Nobel prize for their research regarding rollercoasters and the effectiveness of removing kidney stones. 

TK: Oh No. I have a friend who had a horrible kidney stone go to the hospital thing this year. So, okay. I've gone to the theme park. Right. And she likes roller coasters. All right, well this is good. Okay. Fill me in. 

AB: The way they figured this out was the doctor had Dr. Mark Mitchell and David Wharton, of Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine, had a patient come in and he had been on a rollercoaster and passed a kidney stone and he's like, that was either a big coincidence or maybe it worked. And so he rode again, and it happened again. And so the patient came back and he told his doctor. And you know, like we all tell our doctor, ‘I found this thing on web MD and it totally works’. So, but the doctor, you know, they talked about it and 

TK : They love that. 

AB: Yes. So professor Whartinger, he built a silicone model of his patient's renal system and I totally wish I was at the theme park when this happened. He brought the renal system on the rollercoaster, including artificial kidney stones and took it with him and he rode the roller coaster and he watched to see what would happen. And the artificial renal system pass to kidney stones. Big Thunder Mountain at Disney world in particular has an effective level of that vibration and the ups. And the downs and ups it rattles on loose. 

TK: So this would be like if your kidney stone was stuck somewhere between your bladder pain, the exit, right. Hop on the roller coaster and it's going to move it closer to the end. 

AB: Yeah. 

TK: Wow.

AB: Amazing. Huh. 

TK: That is pretty amazing. It's excellent. But we were talking the other day about this and there's also a lot of hazards to ride the roller coaster too. There's some bad medical stuff we're not going to talk about that we're just going to talk about. I'm trying to imagine this fellow has this bag thing and it's got the renal stuff and it's probably got water and everything, all loaded..

AB: Trying to get the rollercoaster guy into letting him take it..

TK:  that they actually let him take it on there! 

AB: It seems irresponsible. ‘trust me. I'll hold on tight. I'll buckle it in just like this.’ 

TK: Yeah. You know... 

AB: And the 17 year old is like, ‘well, he said he was a doc...

In this longer, old school Brain Junk episode, we go around the world from Thailand to Germany and a few countries in between. We explore a huge variety of cool traditions used to celebrate a couple’s love.

Dug out of the Siberian permafrost completely by chance, two female round worms appear to revive after 41,000 years.

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to Brain Junk! I’m Trace Kerr, and I’m Amy Barton, and this is a Brain Storm about round worms.

AB: Because we talked about flat worms recently, now we’re going to talk about round worms. Trace is excited-I can tell already. These are Siberian round worms-does that make you more excited about it? 

TK: They sound exotic. I’m imagining them drinking vodka and wearing fuzzy hats.

AB: I am sorry to report that that is not their life. Their life is that they have been buried in Yakutia, Siberia, for someehere in the neighborhood of 40,000 years down in the perma-frost. For those that need a little bit of a refresher that haven’t been watching a lot of nature shows, certain areas, it never thaws beyond, in this particular area, they have about a 3 foot, it’ll thaw in the summertime about 3 feet down. So if you’r making a garden, or burying a body, it’s gonna have to be in the three foot zone, otherwise you’re going to need a concrete buster. So these guys were farther down than that. A team of Russian scientists, working in collaboration with Princeton University found viable specimens whil they were looking at 300 soil samples in the Arctic perma-frost. So they’re taking samples, there looking to see what’s in there. They’re looking for other things. One was a squirrel burrow, located in Duvenny Yar, I don’t know, I’m probably pronouncing that in the French way. It was an outcropping that dated about 32,000 years ago, and they also found a sample that was about 41,000 years old. So very old, very deep and they found nematodes, round worms, and they think they were female round worms. So they had the samples out, they were in a 68 degree environment, and they’re just hanging out, and scientists noticed that they began to move again. And not just like, cause after a day or so, when something thaws it changes shape a little. But it wasn’t that. It was after days and days they began moving and eating. 

TK: Holy cow!

AB: Yeah! 41,000 year old round worm.

TK: That’s stunning, and kind of disturbing, because what else is out there that’s gonna thaw out eventually that we’re not ready for. 

In 1804 Dr. Troxler discovered he could make pastel dots disappear if he stared at them. Blink, and they would reappear. Trace puts Amy to the test…will she experience the Troxler Effect?

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Amy Barton, and I’m Trace Kerr, and it’s time for a Brain Storm. 

TK: Alright, so in order to do this, here’s what I need you to do. I need you to look at the little black dot in the middle of the screen and kind of unfocus your eyes. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to describe what’s there. On the screen Amy’s looking at it’s kind of blurry pastels. And just keep looking and try to not have your eyes move. You just want to look right at that middle dot and let me know if you notice anything happening. 

AB: They disappear. All of the spots. Now my eyes just got tired,

TK: And then you blink, right? 

AB: But they were almost completely gone. 

TK: K-you going to do it again? 

AB: I’m going to try.

TK: What you’re experiencing is something called the Troxler Effect. If your eyes arent’ moving back and forth the colors fade away and it looks like you’re looking at a blank sheet.

AB: Yellow goes away first. Blue goes away last, that’s weird! 

TK: Then it’s just a blank sheet, right? 

AB: Yes! I don’t hold still well enough, and my distance, and bifocals, and old people.

TK: The first time I did it I couldn’t believe it. My mouth just fell wide open. 

AB: Buyt then the second time I tried it I could do it faster. It’s almost like you have a skill now. You’ve got a little magic like those old, what re those old pixelated art?

TK: Oh! Yes. 

AB: It’s a similar kiund of thing where you see the picture if you relax your eyes.

TK: I could never get those to work.

AB: Me either.

TK: Cause I can’t get my eyes to relax. And Chas’s problem is that his eyes keep bouncing around. So let’s explain the optical illusion called the Troxler Effect. It’s named after a Swiss physician Ignats Paul Vital Troxler. 

AB: That’s a good name.

TK: Right? So in 1804 Troxler discovered that certain colors, pastel colors in particular, have a sneaky habit of disappearing when he looked them for a long period of time. I can just imagine the first time this happened. He tought he was probably going blind.

AB: Yeah-you shake you head and then ahhh!

TK: And then it’s there, but then it’s gone. So what’s happening is that when we stare at something for long enough your brian is like ‘K, it’s just too much material, I can’t keep looking at this’ and it kind of fades it. But if you shift your view for even a second..

AB: It’s back.

TK: Here’s something freaky. If our eyes didn’t naturally bounce around all the time, this would happen whenever we looked at anything. 

AB: You’d be standing waiting for the light to turn green forever.

TK: Yeah, because it would just kind of fade out. But our eyes do naturally bounce and jiggle around because we are taking in all our surroundings. But when you are focused on that pictrure, I find that if I do it too many times, you know my eyes start to water and I have to blink weird, because I have to think about it. You know it’s like when you try to think about breathing.

AB: YES! 

TK:And you start getting kind of dizzy…

AB: You’re messing with autonomic processes!

TK: I don’t know what to do! I have on the website, or you can just put in “Troxler Effect” and you will find tons of these pictures. You should absolutely go look it up and give it a shot.

AB: I’m going to try and go make other stuff in my world, like I’m going to go find a focal point and see what I can make disappear. 

TK: It helps if it’s pastel.

AB: Wow! That’s excellent.

TK: Why thank you!

AB: Love those brain things.

AB: we’re on Facebook and Instagram as BrainJu...

Need to string some wire through your house or clean a particle accelerator? You might need a science ferret.

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to Brain Junk! I’m Trace Kerr, and I’m Amy Barton, and this is a Brain Storm.

AB:Today I would like to talk about the very special subject of Science Ferrets. In 1999, the BBC UK published an article about a concert in London. There was a big to-do, and they were gonna have also sorts of bands, big venue. But not a normal venue, so they’re stringing wires, because you can’t just have people tripping over wires, and the event planners were discovering ‘we can’t get a long enough pole to get these wires strung through.’ And I don’t know who the person who thought of this was, but somebodie’s like ‘What if put a harnes son a ferret, and we put a wire’ they didn’t use this accent, they had a different accent probably. They attached the wiring to the ferret harness and they put the ferret in the tunnel. And if the ferret didn’t just naturally go out the other end they’d put a little something that smelled good at the other end to lure the little gyus through, and they did all the work.

TK: Ohhh, I like Science Ferrets!

AB: Mhmmm. Those are like Roadie Ferrets. So Roadie and Science Ferrets. We’re going to get to Science Ferrets now actually, because I was excited about this, so much so, that I was willing to show my hand and tell Trace ‘Oh my gosh! Have you heard about these ferrets?!’ And she texts back, she’s like ‘yeah, I know.’

TK: Ooohhh, that’s not…

AB: You totally did. She sent me a link and she’s like ‘I will see your Roadie Ferrets and bring you Science Ferrets.’ So Trace is actually Science Ferrets, and I’m Roadie Ferrets. 

TK: You know, I like Roadie Ferrets, because I like the idea of them hanging out by the speakers, and the girls are like ‘Hey, can we get backstage passes?’

AB: And they’ve all got a rat tail…

TK: Yeah, pretty much. So tell me about the Nerd Ferrets.

AB: Yes. They bring great joy to me, because the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had the same problem as the concert venue. It has long, long, long tunnles of pipes and you can’t just get a guy with a pole to shove ’em through. So they did the same thing. Harnesses, ferrets, wires, send ’em through, a little something at the other end and that is how much of the wiring has been done at the Large Hadron Collider. So here’s what I wonder though. They’re gonna be getting results, and then five years down the road a guy is going to be like ‘I know you’re excited about this, but it appears to be a ferret hair. This is not actually scientific results, it’s ferret hair. Sorry bros.’ There IS an instance, if you google CERN and ferrets, you will not find the Science Ferrets first, you will find the poor ferret that chewed through a wire and got electrocuted at the Large Hadron Collider.

TK: Aaahhhhh.

AB: Yeah, But the rest of the Science Ferrets, little harnesses, loving life, going to get snacks at the other end. For science.

TK: I love it. 

AB: It makes me really happy. 

TK: we’re on Facebook and Instagram as BrainJunkPodcast, and you can find us on Twitter as @MyBrainJunk. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee, you won’t be bored.  

Show Notes: 

Roadie Ferrets

Bad Day for Wire Chewing Ferret 

Science Ferrets

It’s our one year podcast-aversary! We thank you for your love with an episode on accidental swallowings and some…not so accidental. Trace also remembers the time when she had an ice cube stuck in her throat.

You Swallowed What? Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Amy Barton, and I’m Trace Kerr, and it’s time for a Brain Storm.

TK: I’m going to tell you about a man in China. He swallowed a spoon on a dare in 2017 and it got stuck in his throat.

AB: Really. For real?

TK: Yup. Got stuck in his throat. And not only that, but he left the spoon. For. Months. Because apparently it wasn’t bothering him that much. Until he was punched in the chest by one of his firends. I’m imagining this was a college aged guy, and one of his buddies was like “Hey!” you know, right in the chest. And then he was having chest pains and all sorts of stuff, so he finally went in. and the doctors took two hours to remove the eight inch long spoon from his esophagus.

AB: Oh my word! Handle up or handle down?

TK: Handle down. And there’s an x-ray where you can see the spoon right at the, you know the base of the throat where your necklace would be, and it just hung straight down.

AB: You guys didn’t see me “are you kidding me” mom eye roll. You don’t call your kid an idiot, but you know, it’s that face you reserve for extremely foolish choices.

TK: Yeah. Well when I saw the x-ray of the spoon-I don’t have it on here-Amy was like “What?! Is there a picture?”, it kind of got me thinking about people swallowing stuff on accident or on purpose.

AB: There are some terrific hospital billboards in our area, regarding that very thing.

TK: Yes! Well, it happens so often there’s even a name.It’s called ‘foreign body ingestion’.

AB: There’s an insurance code then. Awesome!

TK: I’m sure there is! And emergency rooms see a lot of these kind of things. So fun fact, 80-90% of these objects that are swallowed pass through-just fine. Mostly because most of them are swallowed by kids under the age of three. Common objects swallowed: Coins, buttons, pins, magnets, batteries, small toys, pieces of toys, and toothpicks.

AB: I believe all of that and I’m worried about toothpicks.

TK: Yeah, toothpicks. And I saw a horrible x-ray of a kid who had swallowed those big safety pins.

AB: >gasps in a mom-like fashion< YES! Were they open?!

TK: Yes, some of them were open. I know. Zo went screaming from the room when I was looking at the picture. The kid is fine-the kid is fine!

AB: Good!

TK: IN adults, most accidental swallowing, what do you think the top three are?
AB: Accidental swallowing as an adult. What do I put in my mouth? Maybe a pen cap, ummm, I don’t know. I’m not a chewer. I can’t even begin to imagine.

TK: Well, the most are bones-chicken and fish bones. And then the third one is dentures.

AB: Oh no. Oh no!

TK: I know. I once as a child swallowed an ice cube and got it stuck. But it was one of those round onces with a hole in t...

Can Flatworms remember how to find food after re-growing their heads? Science rolled up its sleeves and found out.

Flatworms Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Trace Kerr, and I’m Amy Barton, and this is a Brain Storm.

AB: This is a Brain Storm about the beheading of flatworms. I’m just going to lead with that and tell you right away where this is going.

TK: Oh no!

AB: I know. The good news is flatworms are among the types of worms, I’m not sure if it’s all worms that can grow their heads back, or if there’s categories where it’s curtains if you lose your head. Flatworms, good news, flatworm fans! Flatworms grow their heads back. Joseph Stromburge of Smithsonian Magazine has brought us new and exciting information about how the memory works with flatworms, and it’s something that scientists have kind of hypothesized about since the 1950’s. Scientists from Tufts University, Tal Shomrat and Michael Levin, have new experiments that show that beheaded flatworms can actually retain trained behaviors  after their brains have regenerated. So worm loses it’s head, it regrows after about a couple weeks, and they show evidence that they know stuff they used to know that they shouldn’t. And this is something that’s been around since the 50’s. Scientists were doing experiments and were like ‘You guys!’ regarding memory RNA and then the scientific community looked at it and were like, we feel like there’s some bias, we don’t think memory RNA is a thing, and so it was shelved, clearly, for like 60 years.

TK: I have so many questions. So, there’s only one brain? It’s not like there’s multiple little brains, like down some nervous system, and so the head is gone, and then like how do they eat...?

AB: One brain. And presumably they’re sort of hibernating and healing.

TK: How are we, how, huh?

AB My scientific research is EXTREMELY shallow, and includes only the parts I’m interested in.

TK: What do they do? That’s what I want to know.

AB:   So right now, I’m going to tell you about how the experimentation works. There’s petri dishes with food, there’s some worms that live in a completely flat bottomed dish that have food, and some that live in a rough surfaced petri dish. And so they train the flatworms. The flat surface for the ones is where the food is, the rough surface, for the others, is where the food lives for the other worms. So they kind of know, ‘if I go to this rough surface there’s probably going to be food there’. And then the flat ones know.

TK: Ah.

AB: And so then they create an environment where it’s kind of hostile because they don’t like light, so they illuminate one section and they put the food in the illuminated area. So it’s aversive to the flatworm to go there, but they also know there’s food. So they trained them. Rough surface means food so even if there was a light, which they didn’t like, they’d go there. Then they chopped their heads off.

TK: Oh!

AB: Two weeks though, everybody, it’s just two weeks and they’re back. And so then, they put them in that same circumstance again and the ones that associated rough surface would go right back to that illuminated surface again, without that period of training them first-rough surface needs food-and then they’d bypass that whole learning process.

TK: That’s stunning! How, so what...

Why do we want to crush-hug cute things like babies and young animals? It may have something to do with adorableness overload and how our brains compensate to get things done.

Cuteness Aggression Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Amy Barton, and I’m Trace Kerr, and this is a Brain Storm.

TK: Amy, have you ever been around a cute puppy, or a baby and you find yourself wanting to chew on their feet or pinch their cheeks really hard?

AB: You really squeeze them! Hug them so tight!

TK: You really squeeze them so tight! Yeah that feeling of being overwhelmed by adorableness which is giving you the desire to squeeze or bite cute things without causing harm – that’s cuteness aggression.

AB: It is? It has a name. OK, that girl from Despicable Me with the unicorn.

TK: Yes. It’s so fluffly! And she’s squeezing it. Well, there’s this really great paper, it’s called “It’s so cute I could crush it. Understanding neural mechanisms in cuteness aggression” by Katherine K.N. Stephropolis and Laura  A. Alba. They were studying 54 test subjects. They show them, and I love this, “cute” and “less cute” babies and animals. So they had pictures of babies and they would make their eyes bigger and this kind of thing, so the’re cute and less cute. It’s like ‘you’re baby isn’t ugly enough for this study’. And then animals, they used elephants, ducks, pigs, cats monkeys, dogs and rabbits and they had like baby animals, and then grown up jaded animals out behind the gym.

AB: The two packs a day animals.

TK: Yup, yup. And they found that the cuter babies and animals elicited more brain response. And for about half of all adults, they often have reactions like ‘I want to pinch those cheeks’ or ‘I want to squeeze it’ or they say ‘I want to eat you up’ or ‘I don’t want to hurt it, I just want to eat it’. I myself have, ok so I have three cats, and one of them is really laid back and, you know cats have their ears that are really soft and fluffy, and if he curls up right in my face, I have, on occasion, found myself using my lips to go nib, nib, nib on his ears. It’s really weird. I’ll even do it and think ‘this is kind of strange’, but that’s that sort of cuteness aggression. And what they wanted to know was why do we do that? Why is that the more cute we seem to think a thing is, the more activity there is in the brain’s reward system?

AB: Why is the response ‘I want to squeeze you so hard’? Because that’s not a protection response?

TK: It’s not. Results indicate that feelings of cuteness aggression relate to feeling overwhelmed by emotion and the feeling of caretaking. The researchers think that possibly we evolve this way. So you have to take care of a baby, and the baby is super cute. You don’t have time to be gooey about it. You’ve got work to do, diapers to change, food to make, that sort of thing. Cute aggression helps blunt the gooey feeling so we can get our work done.

1. Wow! It shoots you right past-I’ve had arguments with the kids where I’m like ‘this is going to be a three hour argument. Unless I cut right to the definitive statement that’s going to shoot them right over the top. I think that’s sort of your body doing the same thing. We’re going to stop this three hour cuddle fest, I’m going to shoot right over the top so we can get on with the day.

TK: Yup. We have a couple toe nibbles and I can move on.

AB: OK. That makes sense to...