One Flew Over

the cellular level. I did a little digging because I was curious, why does the word cuckoo mean insanity? What does the title One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest have to do with insane silence? So cuckoo is on a monopeia of the call male cuckoo birds make, But why is it synonymous with being crazy? The idea that cuckoo birds are quote insane comes from the observation that they make that one repetitive, silly call of cuckoo, but also that the cuckoos lay their own eggs in the nests

of other birds. So cuckoo became synonymous with foolish than with crazy. But cuckoos aren't crazy, as we've discussed on the podcast before, they're actually really clever brewed parasites, meaning they intentionally lay their eggs in the nests of unsuspecting host families so that their own chicks will be carefully fed and raised by a stranger, leaving the cuckoo free to mate and lay more eggs elsewhere. So the title

one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is factually incorrect. Cuckoos don't have nests at all, So cuckoos being cuckoo has been debunked. But is there actual mental illness amongst animals? We can't sit them down on a couch and talk to them like we're in a New Yorker cartoon, So how do we understand what's going on inside their heads? And do animals experience human emotional ailments such as depression and midlife crisis? On today's episode will look at mental illness, captivity,

and midlife crisis in animals and humans. You may have heard of o c D obsessive compulsive disorder. As we'll discuss it's a lot more complicated than how the popular media presents it is just being tidy or obsessively clean. People with o c D must complete certain rituals, whether it's handwashing, turning lights on and off, saying a mantra, or checking of doors are locked and it's not their fault.

The brain literally starts skipping like a record. A recent University of Michigan study found that O c D brains get stuck in a quote loop of wrongness. Technically speaking, there's a malfunction in this singular opercular network that is a central part of the brain linked by nerve connections. This is, generally speaking, the quality control area of the brain. It checks for errors happening during a task and is

responsible for adjusting or stopping a behavior. What happens in the brains of people with o c D is that this coldly control area over detects errors and has a less functional stop action neural network. So you're stuck in a loop. You're stuck in a loop. You're stuck in a sorry, You're stuck in a loop where you think you may have made an error and you can't stop trying to correct it. And as we'll see, humans aren't the only ones trapped in the O c D carousel.

With me today is Hannah Michael's comedian writer, anthropology major and koala over welcome Hannah, Hey, what's up? Coal is are gross? And I like that, So why are the gross? All our supials are gross? All our supials are disgusting. They are an evolutionary pit stop. Then we should not have evidence of but we do because Australia, and they're real, real nasty, all of them. They have weird junk and they do weird stuff with it and it offends, it's

offensive to everyone. And they let you they let you hold koalas in Australia because really, yeah, they're they don't have rules or laws in Australia. You can do what you can murder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to the zoo where they let you hold it and they were like, no, you have to cradle its but you have to cradle its button. So there's like just a photo of me lest in a koala. And then I found out they all have chlamydia. It's a oh yeah, yeah, yeah they do.

Actually there is um chlamydia outbreaks amongst koalas. And it's interesting this book I read about, it's called Zubiquity. She's talking about like how maybe we can learn about the spread of STDs and humans by studying koalas because they're just a bunch of disease riddled Yeah they're gross, like up, yeah, yeah, they're they're They also poop a lot in their sleep, Like they sleep a lot because the eucalyptus leave that

doesn't provide much. Yeah, it's toxic, really fibrous, not a lot of nutrition, so it takes a lot of energy and time to actually digest. So they're like sleeping and pooping almost the whole day, so like up to twenty two hours a day. Yeah. Yeah, so we're exactly like you're living the dream. They kind of are. We also feed our young out of a kloacas ah chloacas. So I'm glad we're starting on this note. Chloaca is always

a strong opener. So I want to talk about O c D, which is the acronym for obsessive compulsive disorder. It's kind of been a part of the public discourse in a way that's like not too accurate, not too good. I'm sure you've heard people say off hand like I'm a neat freak, I'm so O c D. Yeah, or like like I like to organize my socks. I'm o c D. Um My best friend has O c D and his apartment is disgusting. It's just a poster of

female trouble, single chair, no soap. Yeah, well so I have O c D. I actually had it as a kid mostly, and like I mean, if you've ever seen my college dorm, which thank god nobody has, but it was disgusting. They all are. It's true, but it's not. It's like there's not an exception. You're not like, oh, I'm O c D. And therefore there is an underwear hanging from the ceiling fan like there is there always is. Um. So, there are a lot of misconceptions about a c D.

First is that it's either like a minor quirk. Some people think it's just like this sort of minor thing, and then other like there's also sort of the monk perception of it, where it's all consuming part of your personality, and it's like the truth is sort of like on a spectrum. So for some people it's not that big of a deal. For others it can be really like a huge nuisance because they can't really function that well.

It's so it's so strong. It's also I think there's this misperception that people that have it are like delusional, Like I know that when I turn off the stove and then I check like five minutes later, I know it's not like magically turned back on by like stove gremlins. I'm just like it's it's almost like it's kind of rewriting your memory where it's like, well, I think I

turned it off, but like did I? And you know, because like when you do a kind of repetitive action, I think most people have had that where you're like, oh, well, did I kind of lock the door and you sort of forget You're not sure. It's like that, except like it happens like ten times and you're like, I'm pretty pretty sure the fifth time around that got locked. So it's really interesting because it's caused by a dysfunction of

neural networks, as we're going to discuss uh soon. Um, And it's it's not like this just like a little thing that you can kind of ignore because compulsion is really powerful. It's um, it's like a short circuiting of the brain where it's like a record skipping on a turntable, like you don't mean to play the first ten seconds of Babo O'Riley over and over, but like the hardware is malfunctioning, like there's dust on the record or the

needles messed up. I don't really actually know because I've never owned a record player because I'm a terrible millennial that's killing the records industry. So I want to take you on an imagination journey to to think land. So it's my favorite kind of journey because I'm scared to drive it. I was like when I talked about like, oh, I'm kind of scared to find someone's like, oh, well driving is way more dangerous, and I'm just like cool, now I'm scared to drive. Yeah. Yeah. I love people

who think that they can logic you out of anxiety. No, you can't. You can't because like all of the potential solutions to the to the worry that you have, we've already thought of, and then you can make a new worry out of right. Right, we're problem wizards, right, Like, oh, you're more likely to be struck by lightning and you're like,

oh my god, lightning. Um. So, as we approach a future where gene therapy seems more plausible, there's kind of some like upsetting possibilities, So like you could have a doctor turn behaviors on or off depending on their desirability. Like so like for certain mental illness, that would be great because it's like there's a lot of suffering. Um. But then it gets it's like gets into this uncomfortable territory of like, well, do we want to get rid

of everything that's not just like totally neurotypical? Does art die if we do that? Maybe? I don't know. Have you seen Gattica? So the premise of that is like your ability to do a job, your applicability to like be an astronaut or something, is they look at your genes and they're like, oh, you have the strong genes of an astronaut, or you have like so I haven't seen Getica, but I've seen a thousand parodies of Gaetica

basically yeah yeah, um. And and in the movie, it's like the guy's like, oh, you know, I'm not genetically fit to be an astronaut, but I really want to do it. So he's got to like have fake skin cells that he collects from this other guy and like, um, you know, like get a bunch of yearine. I guess for tests. It's been a long time since I remember

what bodily fluids he uses to check the system. But I think, you know this concept of like we are hitting upon this thing where it's like, as we start to get to the point where we can turn things on and off, like how far can that go? To the point where it's like, oh, we're actually taking all of the diversity out of the human brain. And but then so typically we think about it like, oh, you know, we'll get rid of all of the sort of quirks

or mental abnormalities. But what if you could actually give someone something, Say you could give someone O c D so that they'd be a really good copy editor, or like quality control, so it'd be like gatica and reverse. But yeah, I wish you could do that later in life too, because I feel like a lot of adults growing up with problems was very helpful informative, and now it's destroying their lives, just hypothetically a lot of adults.

So it's kind of interesting because I can't decide whether it'd be worse if you would like give someone against their will O c D or take it away against their will. But unfortunately we do this to mice because we always do stuff to mice. Oh yeah, we do. So scientists knocked out gene and mice which caused them to engage in O c D behaviors. It's actually got a really catchy name. It's called sap app three um.

It's a protein that helps brain cells communicate, so it's like really good for There's this part of the brain called the cortex stri item that it's like this bundle of brain cells that help regulate reward motivation, stimulus response, and motor function. So when you don't have that protein, it's like trying to run a car that isn't properly oiled. So given how O c D functions, it's this like

inability to correctly process information and give a response. So there's a bunch of things that you can have where it's these like repetitive loop compulsions that are a result of that reward system malfunctioning. So like you have handwashing, checking intrusive thoughts. There's even like fear of authority, like where you're like, oh, I have to pray to God like ten times otherwise you know he'll smite me with lightning.

So for mice, like what what do you think that would look like like they're not praying to mouse God or washing their hands. I don't know, I guess maybe checking their feet or even there's they know there's no food or Yeah, I feel like these mice have very limited habitats. I don't know, Sniffing their babies, eating their babies they do, like they do that anyway. Yeah, they

just like to eat their babies. I think that's just a normal mouse thing, Like like they're watching their little mice TV and just have a bowl of babies that they eat, maybe like eating a tail that they know is their tail, but they keep biting it. Yeah, so that's actually pretty close to what they do. They groom their face um and like like they do this fur grooming over and over again. Um, so they like start

to get these open sores. It's really it's actually really kind of creepy looking because they like, I know, it's really sad. They have like these big bald patches on their face and on their bodies where they keep grooming. So when these scientists altered that gene that regulates the function of the cortex stri item, they started developing all of these sores, all of these bald patches. Uh, they

showed more anxiety and unfamiliar environments. And when I was a kid, actually had a hamster that had this big bald spot on its head. He looked like one of his friends siskan monks, like you know how they like shaved. Why did they? I don't know why they did that. Okay, my guests solidarity with one bald monk like at that isn't fucking years ago. He's like the head monk and they're all like, oh, well, we've got to be like

Jerry or he's gonna feel sad. Yeah, yeah, no, that has to be it because that is not a handsome hairstyle and sorry, it's not a good look. So I had no idea that my hamster maybe had a CD or something. And dermatillomania is a kid that's basically what that is. Oh really yeah, yeah, that that is very closely linked actually, So like when you have that that reward system where it's like you do an action that fulfills some kind of needs, So like scratching something, because

we all like do some amount of skin picking. It's it's a dermotil mania is skin picking, like where it's like you scratch. Yeah, I still bite the hell out of my fingers when I'm nervous and gross, which a lot of people do. People did that, I just as a kid. It was at the point where it was yeah, but yeah, that's because like that is sort of like what the mice are doing. They're like scratching sort of uncontrollably,

like I'm itchy. They can't they can't stop because that reward system is going like no, no, you need to keep like like turning yourself into a Franciscan monk. So

I have mixed feelings on gene therapy. I mean, obviously like bestowing mice with o c DS bad or giving it to people, But you know, it's like at the same time, it's like if you get rid of every deviation from the norm, you won't get like you know, Pabo pacasas and like um van go or sorry van GoF um, who's like, you know, he had depression and obviously him suffering isn't worth all of the beautiful art. Well maybe I know. I don't know, but you know,

from a humanist perspective, it's not. But then again, like you would, it seems like there's a lot of like artistic nous to like having a non near typical brain. Uh, but like, primarily, can we just stop giving my society? I feel like if TV shows are right, they're going to become like these super intelligent detectives and then like the next thing, you know, they're gonna put all humans in jail for their crimes against mice, and they're gonna be all like quirky and be like, I don't have

time for interpersonal relationships. I'm the mouse detective. Even though I wouldn't necessarily want to get rid of my o c D, for many people it is a huge burden or even debilitating. So what are the options. There's cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, of course, but for people with

intractable o c D there are more drastic methods. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a method of targeting areas of the brain suspected to be associated with o CP and stimulating the neurons with repetitive magnetic puluss Another alternative treatment that is very slowly being researched is ketamine, you know, special K vitamin K K ways blind squid ketamine. It's been shown to have a pretty striking effect in a case study a person with severe debilitating O c D that

was resistant to other treatments was given ketamine. Almost immediately, his O c D symptoms vanished, and this lasted for two weeks after a controlled dose of the drug. Researchers aren't even exactly sure why it works, so obviously they've started giving ketamine a mice to try and get to the bottom of it. These my studies suggest that a chemical byproduct of breaking down kettamine in the body might be responsible. Is called Oh boy, here we go, hydro

oxyen or ketamine. Nicely nailed it, and alone it has none of the addictive properties that edamine has. A Bunch of people with O c D right now are like, oh, yes, great, give me the drug that won't get me high. Thanks a lot, scientists, Hey, get out of that khole. We'll be right back after a few quick messages. When someone tells the story of an alien abduction, we may think they're just cuckoo, but researchers at Harvard aren't so sure.

There's a study that compared the physiological reactions of people calling alien abductions to those who are calling real traumatic events such as car accidents or combat experiences. What they found was surprising people claiming to have been abducted by aliens are the same sorts of physiological reactions when we're calling their abductions as those who are called real life traumas. So are aliens real or are these real memories implanted

not by aliens but by our our own brains. As we've discussed on a previous episode of the podcast, sleep paralysis can make you believe you are being abducted by aliens because you see sleep paralysis interrupts the normal sleep cycle, causing hallucinations while half awake. So these waking nightmares actually implant themselves as real memories that haunt the abductees for years. Later, turns out, deep inside, we were the aliens all along. So why are we so scared of alien abductions? I

understand why we're scared of aliens. Their gross and they have tinnacles and brains on the outside and whatever, But shouldn't we been more afraid of them just straight up murdering us. The idea of getting beamed up into a flying saucer, living amongst creatures that you can't communicate with or understand is kind of uniquely scary, And I have a theory for why we're so preoccupied with it. But before we do that, we're going to have to take a trip to the mat genation station and board the

brain train to do so. Imagine you're going about your daily life when you feel a pain in your butt. You turn around and try to see who your assailant is, but your vision starts to swim and you fall unconscious. You wake up in what looks like a comfortable living room. You have a headache. Okay, that's where my being able to relate to this has stopped. So you try to

lie down on the couch. It's really stiff and uncomfortable, and you kind of try to adjust from the pillows, but it's like attached to the rest of the couch and it's like plastic. You've got to open the door to escape, but it's locked, and you try to open a window to get some fresh air. And you noticed that the scene outside is very sunny and still and calm, and the clouds aren't moving, and like there's a bird

just like midair midflight, just totally stationary. So you run over to the phone to try to call nine one one, but the receiver won't budge. It's just like a big lump of plastic and like all the numbers just spell out like phone. The TV is has a picture painted on into your horror. It's the fixed image of Jay Leno. And so in a panick, you go to the bedroom, which is surrounded in ceiling to floor windows, and outside you see the faint, shifting shapes of unknown creatures eagerly

watching your every move. So I think there's a reason that human zoos are a trope in science fiction. The idea of being condemned to the rest of your life to live in a small exhibit alone and trapped amongst like alien creatures that can never relate to you or know your needs for like food and sleep, is really terrifying. Like they don't know your social needs. They have like maybe like a person shaped like pillow. That's like, I am Steve Spawns. You see the television last night. But

it's just you know, their aliens. They don't know what you need. But here's the mind fuck. We've been the aliens the whole time. What, Yeah, because we remember zoos and how we put animals in them and to the animals worthy aliens uck. Yeah, yeah, it's have you ever been to the san Diego Zoo. Uh when I was a kid. Yeah, it's it's huge. Um, that's not the one where the elephants keep dying. Maybe I'm not sure. Actually, I mean, like elephants are there, and I would assume

that they die at some point. I haven't heard of their being like immortal elephants like we we we'd probably know, we'd probably know. I mean, I don't think that there's been a rash of elephants dying there, but maybe I don't know. An elephant died at Sydney's Taranga Zoo died from herpes. What Okay, Australian animals are just plagued with STDs. There, there's Australian animals like must be just having unprotected well, I guess all animals have unprotected sex. Huh, I'm smart.

I don't know. But Nobo's sword fight with their dicks, I feel like that's but I don't know what you can get from that after tech the attack and he also dick. That's yeah, I mean, like I read this thing. It's is the elephant at Sydney's Taranga Zoo had a sudden and acute battle with herpes, which is not how I thought herpies worked. I think it's how it works

in babies, so it's possibly and elephants. I guess some the adult human immune system can handle herpes, right, yeah, because it says it was a young agean elephant, um, so maybe was too young. Oh man, this was It started out really funny about like sex or elephant STDs. Now it's like elephant babies dying. You know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for starting you guys on this elephant death search. No,

that's okay that we need to know. But but at this point I am a certain I have made up that there is one zoo around the southern California area with a bunch of elephant deaths. It's far too late. They're gonna sue you that there's already like a herd of lawyers writing like giraffes and rhino is just like

stampeding towards going like Hannah. So I actually really like the San Diego through They do make a lot of efforts to do animal Enrichmond, and they, like you said, they're really big, so they are able to make pretty good environments for their animals. But I mean even at zoos like that out where it's like they really care about conservation, they really care about their animals, there can

still be issues of the animals mental welfare. Even if like their health is perfectly fine, they have enough exercise, they can still have these issues. So, like going back to the human zoo example, you know, even if you're like taken care of and you're given healthy meals every day and your captors seem to love you, you're gonna

get really bored of your fake house. Uh, You're gonna like, I don't know, just like seeing to yourself, bounce walls, pretend to read all the fake books, like pacing around, which is what animals do in zoos, exactly what they do in zoos, and sometimes the researchers have to go mining in a big pile of stinky polar bear poop to check on their mental state. So in zoos like these repetitive behaviors it wouldn't be called O c D. They call them stereotypees, which is defined as like a repetitive,

unvarying and apparently functionless behavior pattern. So polar bears in captivity will engage in repetitive pacing behaviors. They can also do like facial ticks over and over which I feel like if I was looking at a polar bear who's like pacing and like eye twitching, like that would be really scary because they're already huge and my entire face could like fit in their jaw easily, and if they're just pacing and like twitching, going like, oh geez, day

number one thousand, uh man. But some brave researchers wanted to get to the bottom of this, literally because it's bear poop, so they looked at levels of fecal glutico cortoid metabolites. Okay, so basically it means there's stressed use in or poop. So they found that the polar bears who spent more time pacing also showed higher levels of

stressed juice in their poop. So the researchers concluded that quote variables associated with reduced pacing at zoos were enrichment numbers of bears in the group and bears having a view out of their exhibit, with a strong suggestion that the existence of positive reinforcement training program may also be important. So like basically having a view outside social interactions like everything you don't have at a cubicle job, right, So aside from these lifestyle changes, Like, what can you do

for the polar bears that have the stereotypies? You know, it's too bad. We can't just give them some prozac, or can we? We can? It's like a facetious question because the science we're looking into medications that they could give polar bears, and so tranquilizers are not really great for calming them down because it just makes them sleepy, but no less dressed out. They're just like, I'm tired and on board. This is the worst. And so like

when they tried prozac, it actually showed some promise. So like, there's this case study of female polar bear where she had pacing behaviors, facial ticks, huffing and coughing, all of the these stereotypes that the polar bears can exhibit. It was because she had been separated from her parents, and then the zookeepers, because most zoop keepers aren't monsters like,

they wanted to help her. They reunited her with her parents to try to calm the behavior, and it stopped for a while, and then it re emerged a couple of months later, which it's kind of like the diathesis stress model and psychology where it's like you have physiological predisposition towards like O c D or in the polar bears case, the stereotypes, and then you have UM the trigger,

which would be being separated. So even once they corrected the separation anxiety, she still developed the disorder because it

already kind of triggered that that progression. So she suffered from that for twenty two years, and then researchers started treating her with prozac and eighty four days after starting medication, the pacing behaviors stopped, which, yeah, it's it's crazy because it's like even in the field of clinical psychology, that would be an incredible that's a really good UM outcome. So it was very surprising that this would be like the outcome for polar bears that we don't know nearly

as much about in terms of their brain physiology. UM. And remember those poor mice who were given O c D and looked like scarface. They are also treated with prozac and they stopped showing symptoms. So that's good. I mean, like the scientists gave them those CD in the first place. I feel like they don't deserve any like out of boys, But you know, But then the question is like, oh,

was there o c D cured? It's kind of hard to say because like the behavior stopped, but we don't necessarily know, like if their emotional state went back to normal. What's neat about the poop thing is that that's a sort of more objective measure of like stress levels, because

it's like, we'll see how stressed out your poop is. Yeah, and if you have terrified if my toilet told me I was your toilets like, yeah, you've been looking intense lately, you know, I know, toilet, get your job, take my pop. Just want just shut up and take my poop, willya? So we're left with moral questions from this this poop study, like our zoo is bad for large animals mental health, and does that justify keeping them there even for conservation?

I mean, I feel like if you're willing to dig into a big steaming pile of polar bear poop, like you're probably doing things right. I think. So I wouldn't if Yeah, it's it's a hero's work. It's an unsung hero's work of just like just scooping that up, And I mean I would hope they would have some like safety things, but like what if you're just in there with the bear like sorting through their poop, and then the bears like go on, like what are you doing? Bro?

It's like, it's fine, it's private. You don't need to know about it. Bear. I remember when I first got my dog, and I started like, you know, you take them on the walk and you clean up their poop. Like the first time she saw me do that, she gave me such a look, where are you putting that? Why are you collecting it? Like she's is like, I mean she wanted to eat it, is the thing, like she would eat her own poop when she was I was gonna say, what a snob your dog is? Usually

they just eat that. Oh no, they eat it. But but she was like she looked offended, like like you're taking my poops and just throwing them away. That's a perfectly good turn. I've been having a lot of really weird thoughts because some that ship happened to me, And now I think weird is the best literally my therapist diagnosis looking for someone new hi um. And it goes back to this so much because I just I start thinking about like scary sex scenarios and I started thinking, literally,

if aliens come to Earth, what do I do? The first thing I do show them the pandas, ask isn't it weird that we forced these pandas to fuck? And if they say no, that's not weird, you run, Oh, yeah, that's a really good litmus test, like because you know, if we do that to pandas and aliens see that, they might get ideas. Yeah, I'm sorry, that is weird because like we are so obsessive about panda's sex lives. It's like it's really grossive us. Yeah, it's like, oh,

you're not having enough sex pandas. It's like, could you just like not do that? Like could you leave them alone? Is it any of your business how sex the pandas are having, Like maybe they don't feel like it, you know, maybe they have a headache every night. It's just none

of your business. So I was interested in confinement since it affects polar bears and presumably a lot of other animals mental health so much whether it affects the mental health of people, and intuitively, it just makes that being in prison is going to affect your mental health. That's right. But there's actually a study published in the American Journal of Public Health that looked at the rates of self harm amongst incarcerated people, and they found that it was

significantly linked to solitary confinement. And the numbers were pretty like pretty crazy because it's like, so only seven percent of the prison population were held in solitary and over fifty percent of the these incidents of like self harm or behaviors sort of like the polar bears would go through or or the mice where it's like kind of right, we're all linked to people who had been in solitary, which is it's really upsetting to me that like also just like that we seem to care more about like

zoo animals than like people in solitary confinement, which is a really uncomfortable thing. But it's like, you know, I feel like if we're willing to like sift through polar bear poop, like we're gold miners, like like old forty niners panning for gold, Like maybe we could put a little more effort into looking into like prison reform, you know, maybe I mean, considering that they can talk to us instead of to us probably, yeah, I mean, they're human

people who can use their words, and they don't. We don't need to communicate to them through poop, like like polar bears can we That's true, It's like you know, I mean these people are bored. Yeah, for some reason that made me think of like a poop Luigi board, just using one of those see through things. It's like, oh, now it's going towards like the rat poop. So that's not how I pictured Quiji board. Yours is better. Did you just picture like AUGI board made out of poop?

It's just like a Weiji board. But like I just pictured the pointy wand is poop like like you just have. You wouldn't really change the function of the Wegi like you're so you're all seven of your girlfriends that you're sleepovers are like touching them one poop and likes seeing where the poop goes. This is a haunted a haunted turd. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, you know, Hasbro look into that. I feel like we need a story of gory revenge to make up for all the sad polar

bear science. Binkie was a polar bear who lived at the Alaska Zoo and Anchorage. Pinkie maybe the name you've given undersized balding chihuahua, but he was over one thousand pounds of concentrated muscular spite. When a tourist scaled two safety fences in order to get the perfect photo of Binkie, he grabbed her leg, snapped through her bone, and kept her shoe as a souvenir for three days. There are

photos of Binkie holding his shoe trophy. Humans, when learning about a bad decision another human has made, will often attempt to replicate that bad decision. So teens decided to go pool hopping in Binkie's private pond. Binkie did not appreciate this and mauled one kid, who was lucky to end up alive. The zoo was kind of cagy about whether Binkie was the one who attacked the kid, but he reportedly had blood around his muzzle and what I can only assume was a smug ass bear grin following

the incident. He also a bit off a zookeeper's finger. Despite all this, the zoos still loved him. They said, Binkie is quote independent and quote likes to play games and is a very smart bear. No doubt, be Key achieved celebrity dumb for his maulings. Binky merchandise was produced with photos of him holding the tourist shoe and saying, quote, send another tourist. This one got away. I'm not kidding.

This is a real shirt. People sent in letters supporting Binkie's decision to chew on intruders, and unfortunately Binkie passed away. In people left him flowers, but I don't really understand why they didn't leave a wreath of shoes instead. So hopefully Binkie is frolicking in heaven, ripping angels to shreds. Hey, spit that show out. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back after these messages. So is it just confinement that can cause mental anguish or is

it loneliness as well? Could fomo fear of missing out one day be a medical diagnosis? Loneliness and isolation feel terrible. There's this pain in your stomach when you yearn for other people, that lump in your wrote when you feel rejected, the tight sensation in your chest when you're left on read. It's all in your head, right, Well, it's possible that your body can actually be damaged by social seclusion. So

parents are very intelligent social animals. You can tell this because once I was at the fair and I asked this guy if I could pet his parrot, and he said yes, and then I pet it in it like nearly bit my finger off. They have very powerful beaks for like crushing nuts, and this one like just bit a big chunk out of my finger, like I was like pulling my hand away and painted. It's kind of like doing this like laughing noise. Parrots worse than thinky,

like it's like get me a shoe. So other than that sociopathic bird, most parents require social stimulation to remain emotionally healthy. Um. So there's this really creepy study where these searchress looked at socially isolated African gray parrots, which they're one of the most intelligent social species of birds. Like parrots are really intelligent, and then of parrots, African grays are like super smart. They're like the Stephen Hawkings.

It's hot because you know hawks well, Stephen Hawking is a physicist. His name also it is shared with Anyway, the loneliness deeply affected these parrots right down to their DNA. So I'm gonna have to explain some stuff about DNA.

It's gonna be really really exciting. Tell him, yours are the caps at the end of our chromosomes, so you know, like how yeah, like your your little like noodles that are DNA, and like on the end of him like you have like an X or Y or both or um, I'm got understand, I got my noodles, You've got you

got your gene noodles. And then at the end of these is like a chunk of DNA that's kind of effectively junk, like it isn't actually used to build anything in your body, but it's essential because when the chromosome is being duplicated, there are these enzymes that do the duplication. They can't travel all the way down to the ends of the DNA because like think of sort of like a jacket zipper, like you can't zip it all the way down or like comes off and like flies into

the void and then your jackets broken. So the telomere is kind of like you know that little thing at the end of your jacket that like stops the zipper. It's like that where it's like this buffer that protects all of the important parts of your chromosome. So the enzyme that's duplicating. It doesn't cut it off right up create hand part um. So uh, but every time it goes through the duplication process, it's shortened because it does

cut off a little bit of that telomere. So that's why it's like associated with aging because like once you start cutting down that tell mere enough, then like you start to cut out the essentials like make more blood. Um. As you can tell, I'm very good at understanding genetics. Um. So, this study of these these isolated African gray parents showed

that the telomeres are shortened by stress and loneliness. Um So, the test subjects that were kept alone instead of in pairs had shorter telomeres than the ones that had someone to be with. So don't get mad at the researchers because like they didn't like evily like be like we're gonna put this parrot alone. They just took um data from these aternarians that like, I guess when the vets were looking at African gray parents, are like, oh is it alone or in pairs? And then when they would

do routine checkups, they had blood samples. And so this study took place in Austria and it's illegal in Austria to house African gray parents alone, which I totally agree with the sentiment of the law, but it's so crazy that there's such a specific law. They're like there's an a parent lobby there that's like looking after parents, feeling like, no, you have to buy two, you can't have one parent. But obviously it's very poorly enforced because they were able

to do the study. So the researchers just took like the existing blood work from the Vets Office and found that loneliness can actually shorten the parent's lifespan. So I feel like we should start a parent tinder and do a good for the nature. So it's not just parrots though, because there's a study of people over the age of fifty in the UK and they found that a combination of feeling lonely and not having much contact with family or friends can actually predict that they would have a

shorter lifespan. So maybe we should start a parrot tinder. But for humans, So, can you actually die of a broken heart? This is a hypothetical question because because I'm about to say yes, you can, um so broken heart syndrome is a real thing. It's this really rare event when like you have a sudden stress like learning a loved one has died, actually causes this cardiac muscle malfunction that can be fatal. Um. It also goes by another name.

Here we go, I can do this tackets subo cardio myopathy. UM, damn you, thank you, thank you, thank you everybody. Um, here's where it gets really interesting. So Barbara and Nadderson Herowitz, who is a cardiologist here at U c l A. I don't know why I said here. We're not at U c l A right now, but it is, you know over there, Yeah, it's in LA. So she made the connection between broken heart syndrome and humans and something

called capture myopathy and animals. Uh So when a small prey animal is captured, it can just like die of cardiac or s. So like these researchers who are trying to capture these birds wants to like put the little bands and then like a lot of them would just die, I know, And they're like, you know, they're not trying to kill them. They're just like trying to give them a little bracelets. But the birds just like gave up.

I guess they're just like no, we're done. So Naderson Horowitz found that there's this clinical similarity between animal capture myopathy and human broken heart syndrome. She was saying that we could learn a lot about human medicine from animals and vice versa. But like, personally, I'm just waiting for them to be able to like implant a lion heart. Uh it means so like because like they're not scared of anything, so they'll never die of a heart attack, right, scientists? Sure, Yeah,

I'm pretty sure I'm going with lobster heart here. Oh really, why I think some species don't die unless they're like named. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, so they do actually have a really long lifespan. Yeah, no, you're totally correct. You take that lobster heart with confidence that that's a very good, good choice. But then, like, I mean, would you start like having the qualities of the animal, like just like

pinching people all the time. I did that already. It's like you can like get a rubber band on your fingers and like, oh no, I don't know what to do already done, Oh this is an audio podcast. I do have a rubber beating. Remind me to do something I don't know what it is right, and she's she's left like her hands are functionally useless now because she's like, I can't figure out these rubber bands. No, it's I tried biting them and that's the end of the list.

You've tried waving your hands around very slowly and nothing works. So in Denver was being plagued by a wig wearing menace. The quote midlife crisis banded has been responsible for three bank robberies. He's called the midlife crisis banded because he appears to be in his forties to fifties. His weapon of choice and open umbrella, which makes me suspect you might be the penguin or Mary Poppins's delinquent son. As far as I know, he's still at large, although maybe

he's outgrown his midlife crisis banditry. Where the police right to label this man is going through a midlife crisis? Does such a thing even exist? Well, as we'll discuss, we might find the answers lie with a ringutans who seemed to experience a midlife crisis at their own. Now, I'm not suggesting that Denver deputized in a orangutan to get inside the mind of a bandit dealing with a

midlife crisis. But wait, no, no, I'm totally suggesting that get a grizzled, hard drinking orangutan detective to begrudgingly come out of retirement so he can catch a bandit can maybe make a few friends along the way. So, Hannah, would you believe that the concept of a midlife crisis

is very contentious amongst psychologists, sociologists, and economists. Uh? Sure, I thought it was in sink because like I went to um, uh the seminar by uh this economist Andrew Oswald, and he was talking about like like all of the drama behind like his research into midlife crisis, and it was it was really fine to me. How it's like there's just a lot of like frustration and drama and

anger into the research into midlife crisis. Like, well, I guess you know, that's a pretty lively topic for economists, so their attempts being made to quantify the phenomenon it kind of may seem silly, like they're gonna research are you kidding? They quantified the hotness of servers, like they'll do anything like the hotness of computer servers or no, like like human wait waiters and waitresses. Oh, like when they're hot, the economy is bad? What again, could be

makeing this up? No? No, no, no, no, you're not. This sounds I'm this sounds correct. I feel like how they're doing this. I don't know. I want to know who proposed this and got funding? I mean, what fucking creep? I don't know. I mean like like I feel like it's like like the the motivation behind the studies, Like I'm just gonna go to a bunch of restaurants and check out hot waitresses. Um, that's incredible, man, Yeah, like just like funded by the boob Inspectors Society or something,

is it? I wonder which way the causality is going, Hannah, Like if it's that hot servers cause the economy to crash, or when the economy is crashing, only hot servers get hired. I'm gonna say hot servers are gods. Okay, So like so like they can actually control knew it. I knew hot people were behind the economy always. So how do you quantify midlife crisis? Are you like, oh, the amount of like penis enhancement drugs that you take or like

cool impractical cars? Um? So actual midlife crisis. Clinically speaking, you would measure it through like higher rates of anxiety depression, and but the main measure would be overall life satisfaction. Um funk, I'm gonna die at sixty. So Andrew all Oswald again, because I mean, it's of course an economist would do this, like when are people the most sad? Uh So he studied surveys of mental well being and across many different countries, and he found this consistent dip

during midlife. And to be fair, this is a little bit of a contentious finding. It's an effect that's only found in moralists fluent countries, and there's been yet to be a study that like definitively isolates what variables are affecting the levels of mental wellness, and so it's kind of a it's a study in progress. So I'm interested if we can look to our animal cousins for answers. And so during this talk about humans being sad, he also brought up animals being sad and that really that

was really a seems like a fun guy. Yeah, he he was very fun. I actually I talked to him after the thing and like he's like, so, so, what do you do. And I was like, oh, I'm a comedian, and he like gave me this blank look and then just turned away to talk to someone. To be fair, that is better than tell me a joke. But right, right, no, it's but I don't think he was being intentionally rude.

I think it was just like he was not expecting bad answer because these were all like like economists, thing like like maybe he thought I was like making fun of him. It's like, no, no, no, no, it's it's I. I take it very seriously. So he was saying that the midlife crisis isn't just a human phenomenon. That there are studies of chimpanzees and ringatans that the animal caretakers report there being a dip in their perceived happiness around

the chimp's middle age. So there are a bunch of really great personality measures that were used in the study that the caretakers would report they're all really interesting, but I'm just going to point out a few of my favorites. Um, there's stingy, lazy, depressed, defiant, predictable, jealous, sensitive, stable, manipulative, and clumsy. So it's like the worst version of the seven form just all terrible. And I also really liked the idea of like a caretaker being like this champ

is stingy. It's like it's uh so, it's a little bit subjective as you can't imagine. Um. Oh. Another good one though, is that the caretakers were being asked if they felt like the animals are, we're reaching their goals, and that makes me wonder, like what would be like a chimpanzee or an orangutan's goal. I feel like instinctively, it seems like they live pretty day to day like scratch, but get nice insects and eat them. I mean there's

a hierarchy. Yeah, I guess. Just get to the top of that and get a lot of food right for later, become the cool rang a tan that everyone looks up to. Yeah, get get others to to pick the bugs off your button right right, like you do a skateboard flip, and then every next thing, you know, everyone's picking bugs out of your ass. Crack. Yeah. When I was in Costa Rica, you could actually tell the Capuchin's, You could tell what their social ranking was by hony stars. They had all

their faces. Yeah. It started out cool, yeah, yeah, and then it got real dark. Real quickly, so like I would imagine that the ones that are less high up on the hark you have a lot of scars because they're like bullied. Ye. It's sort of like in like

monkeys can be such dicks. The snow monkeys, you know, the really cute ones with the red faces and like the big poofy for codes in the Japanese hot springs, y uh, And they're adorable because they go into the hot springs and they just like chill out, but they're also really clicky and mean. They like yeah, yeah exactly.

Like they're just like Karen at your local spa, who's like giving you judge looks, so like if you're not a socially accepted um snow monkey, they're like no, no, you don't get to be in the hot springs, which really sucks because it's very cold there. And like there's I remember watching one of the probably in Attenborough one where it's like a video of like this like snow

monkey and her child like shivering in the cold. Well all these like posh monkeys were like like laughing it up in the hot springs society, Man, are we in mirrors too? The monkeys are the monkeys mirrors of us, you know. Yeah, m hm, I'm sorry. I don't provide free pot with the podcast, Like you don't just get to get weed, so it's a little unfair for me to spring those questions on you. Now, that's okay. These

questions are the weed. They are the weed, that's true. Yeah, just getting a little high on some some questions about monkey society. Um, so why do we see this dip in the happiness of rayantans and chimpanzees, So sort of like with the human midlife crisis, there's not really a scientific answer yet. But I asked my friend who she's actually worked with orangutans, and I wanted to see, like

what she thought about this study. And she thinks that, um, because it's focused on primates and captivity, it could be an effect that isn't found in the wild, So like there's something about the captivity that affects their happiness around midlife. So this is just like wild speculation, but it's my podcast, damnit,

and I can speculate as much as I want. I wonder if there's like this sense of boredom or like a realization of like a routine, like because I feel like this may be the case for human midlife, Like you've settled down, you have a job that you kind of at this point where you're like, oh, maybe I can't really switch jobs and I can't switch families, and so you're just sort of like you get this sense of like, oh, like this is the routine, and I'm going to be doing this like X amount of years

until I get really old. So you feel like this absence of choice, which I think can be a really like kind of a downer when you feel like, oh, man, I you know, I've been an accountant for ten years. This is just this is my life now. My resume is all freelance comedy. Yeah. I feel like for most people when they think about being stuck in in jobs, they don't think like freelance comedy, well, they should be dying.

It's like it's like that Gary Larson cartoon where the P. T. Barnum, the kids of P. T. Barnum like escaped the circuits to go become accountants. Yeah. Yeah, it's this is an audio podcast, and that's a very visual gag, but I want want you to imagine it like these two little rascally kids exiting the circus tant it's Ry Larson. There probably cows. Oh yeah, there, I mean everyone's cows. That's

Gary Larson's brand. So there's actually like and this sort of gets into I'm gonna try to end the podcast on a much happier note, which is how do you be happy? And how do orangutans be happy? So for humans, there's some interesting ideas about how to become happier, and one of them is the psychologist named Robert Holden who hosts laughing workshops, which is just like a circle of people laughing. So like it's literally like I've seen videos of it, like people like sitting on the floor in

a circle or lying down. I've seen these you know you have in me hope and now I just want to hunt down this guy. So like he just says like now laugh and they all laugh like a bunch of terrifying you're telling me it there is a way to be happy, and then you're telling me the thing that we all used to measure our jobs is worthless. Well no, So what's interesting is the I mean, the clinic is a little more complicated than just like laugh

my robot um. They're also like told to remind themselves of happy things in their lives and like this is not so this to be clear, this is not like for people with clinical depression. This is not like a substitute for something like that. It's just people who are maybe like dissatisfied in life but not depressed, and so like they do cognitive things like you don't have to earn,

deserve or work for happiness. But researchers recorded brain activity and participants before and after to the clinic, and they found that after the participants actually did have activity in the left prefrontal lobe, which more closely resembled that of generally happy people. So people who wrote on a survey like yeah, I'm fine, which it's crazy to me that you can like like simulate it by pretending to laugh, which again is maybe a dangerous thing to say as

a commedian, like we could automate the comedy. I mean, they tried it, um and again, I'm making all these things up. Why are you pausing to listen to me? I don't know. I think they tried it in Edinburgh and they tried to make a computer tell jokes and it was just really racist and sexist. Oh no, see you say you're making this up, but you're not. I yeah, there have been multiple attempts at like these AI algorithms

that always just turned in a Nazis. Like there was a there was a yeah, the Twitter gu Yeah, there was the Twitter bot the girl who what was her name this talk about that was trying to impersonate a teenage girl and then she just turned into full like like saying Nazi slogans and really racist stuff. Smarter child never became a Nazi. Smarter Child out stayed pure. Yeah. I mean a lot of robots turn evil, but it's death to all humans, not like humans based on your race.

But if like the idea of like forcing laughter at like in a group like your occultists doesn't appeal to you, there are other ideas on how to be happy. So Dan Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist who says we're really bad that predicting, like what's going to make us happy?

We overestimate things that will make us happier, like elections, although hang on, I have a small problem with that because I think, like maybe for more minor elections where you're like I kind of want this guy in, Like maybe that's true, but I think ones where it's like it really is important. It does have I mean, I know that has an impact life. Yeah, I mean because like I feel like the study may have been done

in those wonderful pastimes when uh, when elections seemed more normal. Um, but other things are like romances, promotions, moving to your destination of choice, or even like winning the lottery, which again small point. There's actually this interesting curve of like how money improves quality of life, and it's sort of it shoots up obviously because like money is important to

be able to live and be comfortable. But then after you know your first cool million, it kind of plateaus because like, you know, there's not a lot of difference between your first mega yacht and your second mega Like I don't think a rich person is like you know, I wasn't really feeling it, but like once I got like my third Lamborghini, I really just was satisfied. It's

really happy. But a few things that I can actually predict, like how happy you're going to be is one, like, um, your last memory of an event will kind of color your whole emotional response to it. So like if you have a great vacation, but on the last day, like you pooped your pants, Like you're gonna think, Oh, that vacation sucked. I pooped my pants. That was the vacation to Hawaii where I pooped my pants, not the one

where it's like because I've been reading my words. So like, even if you have like like of your vacation was fine, you snorkeled, you like you served, you know, all these fun things, but like that one percent was you pooping

your pants, Like that's gonna taint your whole experience. And so some of the best predictors of overall human happiness is, uh, the amount of time spent with family and friends, which sounds really sappy, but it's also kind of corresponse to the studies we talked about earlier with like the African Gray parents and study of people in the UK, where it's like, you know, it doesn't it doesn't even have to be like a spouse, like being married or even

having kids don't necessarily predict your happiness, but just like generally spending time with friends, people you care about, like or maybe plants. There's this study that shows that so seniors living in a nursing home we're given a plant to water, and those that weren't given the plant had like much higher rates of mortality than those that just were given like this plant to take care of in water.

And it's an interesting thing because like the the ideas that maybe like having that control over your environment actually sort of improves your quality of life, and like an improvement in your quality of life will make you live a little bit longer because you're like, you know, maybe have more motivation to get up and walk around. And but I don't think you can just like give an orangutan a plant, because like they're typically surrounded by plants, even in zoos, So how do you make them happy?

I mean it is actually pretty similar to human happiness, like you need like enrichment, socializing control over their environment. And I talked to my friend again who like worked with orientans, and she said, there's five categories of enrichment. There's social, cognitive, physical, and sensory, and then my favorite one food. Uh so, like food is different from sensory.

It is, well yeah, so like physic Yeah, so like sensory would be like you know how like kittycats like to scratch things, so that would be like they're getting this sensory feedback from scratching your couch up and then like the physical is actually like the physical habitat that they live in, so like the space, so like having having a place to like go and eat in private, you can do things like give them puzzles with food rewards, as actually at the San Diego Zoo kind of recently

and I saw the girl has had these little like envelopes filled with I guess pumpkin seeds or some kind of food reward, and they're just like it's really kind of funny because like this huge really just like bussing with this little tiny owned block really long periods of time. They were just like so interested and they were getting

tiny tiny pieces of food out of it. Like it just doesn't seem like it would be that like motivating, but I guess it was interesting enough, and like there's like a little hole they had to like figure out. It wasn't the most complicated puzzle, but we gave them jobs. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're a Maleman now, and it's like, yes, I am a Maleman. So also, this is really cute.

She was saying that like really social animals need to have a good relationship with their caretakers, so like with dolphins, and sea lions if you're if you're training them. Before they get trained, they're shown photos of different trainers and then the dolphins like boop their noses to the photo of the person they want to work with, and then

that's that's who they'll work with. Um. And then imagine being an ugly trainer, like you're the last one picked by the dolphin and I don't know what dolphin standards are, and then like that dolphin that gets stuck with you just kind of looks at you guys like, um, I feel like, you know, maybe looking at these kind of like enrichment things that we do for animals might help people, like you know, maybe we should put our sandwiches inside of a puzzle or like uh, but you know, more realistically,

like the kind of like socialization stuff where it's like with a lot of things, like you know, you just kind of eat food regularly, but like I feel like, and you're you're the anthropology person, but like food seems like a very social thing. So so it's like we're sort of more in the fast food era of like you shove a thing in your mouth while you're driving

to your six jobs. But like I think it's interesting because I think maybe like part of like human enrichment would like actually being making food and then having it be like a social experience. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean we do that. We do that a lot. We have ceremonies around that, we have Oh wait, you were saying Thanksgiving. Okay, Oh it's I don't know if that would be pro social though. Thanksgiving more of a combat arena. I mean, but that's what most of our like meal

gatherings are combat arenas. There are a lot of both, and that it's kind of enriching in no way, and actually it's infuriating. Yeah, it's fucking I swear to God if Grandpa says anything about Israel. But that causes me to research to state solution issues. And yeah, it's a form of enrichment, except like, like the puzzle is like how do I get out of this conversation with my uncle without like how do I get him to not use the word Palestinian. Yes, it's not just human contact

that helps make us happier. Animals have been scientifically proven to improve moon and stress levels. A cute stress was reduced when study participants pet a soft, fuzzy rabbit versus when they pet a soft puzzy toy. Grooming and caring for horses can help with reducing the negative impacts of PTSD, and it's not just the fuzzy, cute animals that can help us. A study found that when elderly people were given pet crickets, they reported feeling less depressed than a

cricketless control group. I guess the key to happiness is lots and lots of crickets. So how do you got anything to plug? I probably have shows, Okay, I will tweet it if I have a show, probably unless it's a bad show, in which case I won't do that. But please book me anyway. It's at Hannah Michael. So it's h A N A M I C h E L S. I know, I don't know, but it's it's a long story, awesome. And you don't have to apologize

for your name named name. Gotta gotta use your lobster heart and just like put your name out there when I slam this claw on the table, you accept that name. So you can follow me on Twitter at Katie Golden or I mean, I would also suggest very strongly following at pro bird writes my bird Twitter, where I'm definitely a human doing a bird and not a bird controlling a human puppet. Um, And you can follow us at

Creature feet Pod. That's not beat pot like, like, it's not about beat so it's like the shortened feature anyway, just just you can. You can probably find us on Twitter, Instagram, m on Facebook, and of course join us next Wednesday for a more creature feature m hm