Short Stuff: That's A Head Scratcher

me with that. Yeah, I'm time for the crew. Do I make extra money then forget it? Yeah. Man, you guys don't know Jerry like we know Jerry. What's great is she'll never hear this. You know, that's right, because yeah, Kustan will never pass this along. He's too terrified ever, That's right. Uh. So we're talking about scratching our heads when you think, which is something that I don't do.

I don't even when I read this. Though there are a couple of thinking ticks that I have that could be explained, that's just not one of them, for sure. And this was one of those things where I'm like, oh, is this going to be like the origin of you know, a grain of salt just gonna send me into like

some sort of blind rage. I thought so at first, and then no, it turns out when you start to really look into this, because if you think about it, that's a really weird thing to do to scratch your head when you're sitting there thinking, and you might not do it. I don't do it, but we might not even know anybody who does that reliably. The thing is is it's like an idiom, that being a head scratcher.

It's like a cultural thing, at least in the West, where if somebody's scratching their heads and you know they're standing in front of the chalkboard, you know that they're trying to figure out some sort of problem and they're having trouble with it, like that's just what that has to do with and they're the explanations are multitudinous, and again it seems like something you'd be that's ridiculous, and then if you stop and thinking about you're like, that

actually could be right in this case. Yeah, Like if you were to take a beginning acting class and you were in there with a bunch of dumb beginning actors like I did in college. Uh and the and the professor said, the acting teacher said, all right, you're you're here's the scene. You're trying to figure out a very

difficult problem. The first thing one of those dopes would do is scratch their head, because that is just a popular trope to indicate, or maybe scratch their chin something like that, which counts as part of the head, I guess, but it's it's universally a sign that you're thinking about something. Yeah,

so it doesn't really make any sense. Is where we have said that you would do that, um and there's no definitive explanation for why, which which has really left the door open for a lot of people that to put some ideas up. One of the big ones is that it's a relic of evolution and that really what you're doing is you're not like you're not, you know, helping along your thoughts. You're actually showing a form of distress, whether it's angst anger anxiety. Those are kind of the

different interpretations and explanations. But the first one is that we're showing a remnant of what we used to do back in the UM. The I guess the Tuck Tuck days where somebody something made us angry, we would maybe throw our arm up and strike them or whatever. And the first explanation of this is that we we are starting to do that, like we're raising our arm out of anger, and then we stop because we are civilized now, and that ends up being like, uh, we almost kind

of play it off by scratching our head. Yeah it's a little thin, but but here's the thing. This is when I was really like, oh, maybe there's a little more to this. When you see somebody who's really mad and they're trying to keep from hurting somebody, you will free quickly see that person like rubbing their forehead or rubbing the back of their neck or something like that. And what they're saying is this is some sort of like derivation of that. Yeah, yeah, I totally have seen that,

and that is a real thing. Uh. There's another possible explanation. This was in a two thousand nine article for Psychology Today when a former FBI counter intelligence agent named Joe Navarro talked about being under stress, and he said our brain requires a certain amount of hand to body touching, like either handwringing or rubbing your temples or touching your

lips or something. And what he's saying is is that it's a soother U. Instead of maybe a signal to an enemy, it's just you self soothing yourself through some sort of stressful or fearful situation. And there's actually some research to back that up, which I think choke. We should take a little break, collect our thoughts, and then come back and and talk more about this whole hoad scratcher.

Great shot, all right, so you said that, um. The FBI agent Joe Navarro said that this is kind of like a soothing thing, like we're self soothing, Like the sense of touch can have a soothing effect on us. And if we're experiencing stress or anxiety or something, just touching yourself can can help. And supposedly because our um head is the source of this issue, our brain is, that's why we would touch our head rather than say, like our knees or something. The thing is, there is

some research to back this up. Um. There was a study in two thousand and seventeen and Scientific Reports, which is a journal, and it's it watched Resus macaques um which who are sorry not sorry, and they found that the kind of the the higher on the totem pole level macaques, when they were stressed out, they might start

to itch or scratch or just do something. Um and that this was taken by other maccaques who were saying maybe more aggressive as a sign of like, I'm really stressed out, so just kind of leave me alone, and they actually were left alone. Yeah, it made me think of the Seinfeld where George said, if you want people to leave you alone, look stressed out and annoyed. And there were all the times that they would walk by his office in Yankee Stadium and he was doing that.

He would have his hands on his head, rubbing his temples, and people be like, you know, everyone would pass by his office and he's a versus macaque. These um, these researchers were saying that the way they interpreted that is that it tells this potential attacker, you know, one, I'm not fully stable here, so you don't know what I'm gonna do, so maybe you lay off me. Or I'm super stressed that I can't possibly defend myself. There's no

point in attacking me to show your dominance. I'm already already submitting here, so don't waste your energy either way. The Reese's macaques that displayed some sort of um itching or scratching behavior, sorry, scratching behavior while they were stressed out signaling they were stressed, were attacked less than those that didn't. So I like this last one a lot too. Uh.

This one that you dug up displacement activity. So you've got an animal that has a couple of different options and let's say a stressful situation, uh, and it doesn't want to do either one of them, or maybe can't decide which one to perform, so it does uh what's called the displacement activity. So you've got a bird, let's say, uh that another bird comes to attack, It's like, well, should I attack back or should I just fly out of here? Uh? I'm just gonna pick up the ground instead.

And um, preening might be another activity, or grooming oneself. And the theory is that these may have emerged. Maybe it's a soothing physical contact, or maybe it's just a routine behavior to calm yourself down, or maybe sort of linking with that other one to throw off the person, which kind of made me think of that guy in Athens who crashed his bike that day. He had two choices was get up really quick and get my books and right out of there, and or act in a

lot of pain. And he said, I'll do the third thing. I'm gonna act like I'm reading a book. Yeah, so he engaged in displacement activity. So there's one one last explanation that I found, and that is that people who scratch their head or you know, rub their eyes or something like that while they're thinking UM are engaged in a certain kind of UM learning mode is what it's called a dominant learning mode, and that is where we our senses are involved in the way that we think about,

or recall or take in information. And so people who are tactile with their learning modes would might touch themselves, touch their their heads or something like that. UM. People who are visual learners might kind of look up in the sky or something like that. That's where you're like, you're kind of exaggerating the point of the sense, even though that sense is not giving you any information and

helping along. It's almost like we just kind of revert to the sense that we're most comfortable with maybe taking information in with I'm not sure, but that's the last explanation I saw. Yeah, that's the one that really hit home for me because I am one thousand percent of visual learner. Uh. If somebody's trying to explain something like how something operates, they can talk to me untill they're blue in the face. But if I actually see it,

I will understand it. And if I'm thinking of something or if I'm deep in thought, I will often like tip back in my chair and kind of look up in sky and they're saying that that's what I'm doing. Basically, you know, it makes sense. Somebody needs to teach you about percentages visually because there ain't no such thing as a thousand percent. Shut up. I have to say, Chuck, you can't see me right now, but I have never scratched my head more than I heard during this this recording.

This has been brutal. Alright, well, hopefully you didn't lose too many. Um So that's it for short stuff. Everybody, me and Chuck say Audios. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts. My Heart Radio is that the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.