So Cute I Could Eat You Up

as a baby. They're gonna eat me up and we'll just go fasting cheeks. Yeah, I know, I do have 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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. 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 can let us know by sending us an email to

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