Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey are welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie
Speaker 1: Kai E Douglas. Oh yeah, that's your your new nickname now,
Speaker 1: I just want to try it out. Kawai kai. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think that people usually call
Speaker 1: me cute that, which is what kawaii essentially means in Japanese.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, what is it? What is cute? What does
Speaker 1: it mean to be cute as a person is a thing? Like?
Speaker 1: What does that label mean within our culture? Well, I
Speaker 1: think the United States it's more of an outward appearance,
Speaker 1: whereas in Japanese culture it is sort of this whole
Speaker 1: industrial complex of absolute cuteness. Yes, yes, definitely in Japan,
Speaker 1: kauai is big business and has been for for decades now. Um,
Speaker 1: but certainly cute holds a lot of power here in
Speaker 1: the States as well throughout most of the rest of
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, even just looking around in this room,
Speaker 1: we can see some little bits of cute peking their way,
Speaker 1: and there's a there's a wooden monkey over there on
Speaker 1: Noel's desk. There's Pablo Picasso in his underwear. Picture of
Speaker 1: Pablo Picasso is underway. Yes, I don't know how cute
Speaker 1: that is, but but the monkey's cute to eliminate extent,
Speaker 1: the dinosaur is cute. And if you go around our death,
Speaker 1: like any workplace, you're gonna find various totems of cute,
Speaker 1: various little, uh little icons of cuteness that just some
Speaker 1: degree empower the individual who has it. That's right. So
Speaker 1: we are going to explore this concept of kauai e
Speaker 1: and we're gonna do it through a couple of different
Speaker 1: vectors here, one of which is, of course, uh, one
Speaker 1: of the big exports of the Internet, and I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about porn, but the other thing cats cats. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So it should come as no surprise anyone that, of
Speaker 1: course the Internet is full of cat videos, cat photos,
Speaker 1: cat memes, images, gifts, you name it. I mean, in
Speaker 1: any given day, you're probably bombarded with at least two
Speaker 1: or three of these things, right, and if you act
Speaker 1: actively seeking them out, if you're actively consuming them, then
Speaker 1: there's no end in sight. You could get on a
Speaker 1: kick one day and just keep going that you starve
Speaker 1: to death. You could you would just fall down that
Speaker 1: cat wormhole and and you're right, you can fill your
Speaker 1: head with with all these sorts of images. And actually,
Speaker 1: there is an artificial neural network that Google's ex Laboratory
Speaker 1: and Stanford University have been working on. And again, this
Speaker 1: is a large scale neural network. It's distributed across sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand process of course, and researchers trained models with more
Speaker 1: than one billion connections. And they found that this network,
Speaker 1: when it sort of ran off on its own, it
Speaker 1: learned how to identify a cat after a week of
Speaker 1: watching YouTube videos. That is how prevalent this subject is
Speaker 1: on the internet. Yeah, they fit at random thumbnails of images,
Speaker 1: each one extracted from ten million YouTube big eos. And
Speaker 1: it ends up having to basically invent the concept of
Speaker 1: the cat in processing all of this data, figuring out right,
Speaker 1: what's at the heart of this? What is this about?
Speaker 1: What is what? What? What is all this data telling me?
Speaker 1: It is telling me this is a cat, this is
Speaker 1: the form of the cat, and uh and and then
Speaker 1: and then everything else stems from that. And so you
Speaker 1: have someone like philosopher Dan Dennett, who who's talking about
Speaker 1: these sort of super normal stimuli, and he's talking about
Speaker 1: super normal stimuli like chocolate cake. He's saying that there
Speaker 1: are certain things in our environment that we see that
Speaker 1: really get us ramped up, and that cats, babies, these
Speaker 1: all maybe the sort of super stimuli that works UM
Speaker 1: on this sort of evolution and instinctual preference. So if
Speaker 1: you look at a chocolate cake, for instance, Um, that
Speaker 1: is a high energy food, right, You like the chocolate
Speaker 1: cake not because it's chocolate cake, but because you know
Speaker 1: that it's going to be a huge shot of glucose,
Speaker 1: and that you know, from an evolutionary perspective, that would
Speaker 1: be helpful for us to have stores with that, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: because in the ancient past, of course, a big chocolate
Speaker 1: cake was hard to come by, or certainly that much sugar,
Speaker 1: that much energy in one place was hard to come by.
Speaker 1: You had to jump on it. And uh, it's the
Speaker 1: chocolate cake example is great too because if anyone remembers
Speaker 1: back to our episodes on decision fatigue UM and in
Speaker 1: neural load and how that how we carry that through
Speaker 1: the day. The experiments that studied it, Uh, most of
Speaker 1: the time they seem to incorporate chocolate cake in one
Speaker 1: form another, using that as the temptation as to your
Speaker 1: to your willpower to your your problem solving ability. Let's
Speaker 1: see what happens when we throw a chocolate cake in
Speaker 1: your direction. Not literally, uh though that would be awesome
Speaker 1: as well, but but we'll put it in your vicinity
Speaker 1: and see how it affects your brain power and low behold,
Speaker 1: it just really tinkered with people's ability to think rationally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because suddenly I have to at least resist it. And
Speaker 1: in a way, it's like I have to fight that
Speaker 1: chocolate cake. It's like it's like you're going through a
Speaker 1: dungeon and you're trying to get to the treasure. Then
Speaker 1: you have to fight a troll along the way. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing, except the battles taking place inside your
Speaker 1: mind as you try to resist the irresistible glucose temptation
Speaker 1: of the cake. So Dannatt would say that a super
Speaker 1: normal stimuli for cuteness, of course, would be babies. He says,
Speaker 1: it's important that we love babies that will not be
Speaker 1: put off by saying messy diapers. He says, so babies
Speaker 1: have to attract our affection in our nurturing, and they do.
Speaker 1: And so that's when you begin to really look at
Speaker 1: not just babies, but cats and puppies and really anything
Speaker 1: that embodies this idea of innocence and vulnerability and and
Speaker 1: this sort of parental instinct that we'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about. But this is this idea that cats
Speaker 1: perhaps have arrested our attention because of this instinct because
Speaker 1: they look like babies essentially, and then play it up
Speaker 1: to as we've discussed before, crying in a way that
Speaker 1: mimics the cries of a baby, et cetera. Yes, now
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention this because we are going to
Speaker 1: go dive into this kawaii or going to dive more
Speaker 1: into cats and the culture of cats on the internet.
Speaker 1: But there's something called cute aggression, and I think, I
Speaker 1: don't know, part of me is sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: one eyebrow raised about this study and it just sounds
Speaker 1: like a tumbler page. It's actually a study actually theory. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Rebecca Dyer, she's a grad student psychology at Yale University,
Speaker 1: took one nine people and she had them look at
Speaker 1: pictures of animals. The categories were cute, funny, and neutral
Speaker 1: photos actually specifically of puppies, and then the participants rated
Speaker 1: how they felt about the pictures agreeing or disagreeing with
Speaker 1: statements like I just can't handle it, meaning the cuteness um,
Speaker 1: or whether whether or not it made them want to
Speaker 1: squeeze something, or if they were seized with the impulse
Speaker 1: to vocalize after seeing one of these pictures like so cute.
Speaker 1: So researchers found that the cute or the animal, the
Speaker 1: more aggressive the response. Okay, okay, So now they follow
Speaker 1: up with a non verbal study and participants. Participants are
Speaker 1: given bubble wrap and they're told to just go to
Speaker 1: town with it, okay, and they watch a slide show
Speaker 1: of cute and then funny and then neutral pictures of animals,
Speaker 1: and then lo and behold. Which you find is that
Speaker 1: more bubbles were popped during the cute slide shows as
Speaker 1: opposed to the funny pictures of animals or the neutral
Speaker 1: pictures of animals. Now, the data is not that crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're talking about hundred and twenty pops for
Speaker 1: the cuteness um, eight pops for the funny, and only
Speaker 1: one hundred or excuse me, and one hundred for the neutral.
Speaker 1: So you know, the data Here's not like putting this
Speaker 1: this strong information out there to say like people are
Speaker 1: just bursting with cute aggression. And you know, but they
Speaker 1: are saying, Rebecca Dye or at least is saying it
Speaker 1: could be the sort of pent up frustration at not
Speaker 1: being able to reach through those photos and cuddle that
Speaker 1: baby or that puppy because you just want to touch it,
Speaker 1: you don't want to bite it. Well, and that's what
Speaker 1: we've talked about the before. How how sometimes there are
Speaker 1: these there are people who will say that baby is
Speaker 1: so cute, I just want to eat it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: on some level, you you actually do. On some level,
Speaker 1: you're being fooled into into equating the baby's cuteness and
Speaker 1: the face of the baby, the shape of the baby,
Speaker 1: the baby nous of the creature. Equating it with something
Speaker 1: you would actually gorge on is found in the barest,
Speaker 1: which is kind of awful. Yeah. Alright, well, on that note,
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a break here and when we
Speaker 1: get back we'll get more into this idea of quite
Speaker 1: all right, we're back. You know, another thing about that study,
Speaker 1: I had never heard of a study using the bubble
Speaker 1: wrap uh method before. I really hope that become standardized
Speaker 1: to the point where we see movies about serial killers
Speaker 1: where like a potential serial killer is being forced to
Speaker 1: look at, you know, accident photos gets a rise out
Speaker 1: of him. And so it's like, you know, and Anthony
Speaker 1: Hopkins Hannibal like characters sitting there with the grim face,
Speaker 1: watching grim footage and then popping bubble rap, and it
Speaker 1: just becomes really so much a part of how we
Speaker 1: determine unconscious thoughts that even the CIA begins to use it, right,
Speaker 1: just just orders with like vast reams of the stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then people are probably more willing participants because who
Speaker 1: doesn't love to pop bubble wrap? Everyone? Everyone loves it,
Speaker 1: even dogs love it. Sure it's not as fine, all right. Kawaii.
Speaker 1: Um we we touched on it at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the episode, but I kind of see it. This is
Speaker 1: very reductionist because it really we could do an entire
Speaker 1: podcast on Japanese culture in kawaii, but um, it's sort
Speaker 1: of this Hello Kitty ization is certainly the the easiest
Speaker 1: example and certainly the most widespread example of of Japanese
Speaker 1: culture Kawaii cute culture because it's it's everywhere now, and
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the big eyes, it's the cute creature
Speaker 1: and it and it also has this sort of Japanese
Speaker 1: school girl quality to it. And then that's, according to
Speaker 1: some cultural historians, that's kind of the the origin of
Speaker 1: the Kauaii movement in Japan anyway, that it you go
Speaker 1: back to the nineteen seventies, you find this kitten writing,
Speaker 1: this cute handwriting they call it among schools, right because
Speaker 1: it wasn't really all that readaful. I mean, it got,
Speaker 1: you know, to the point where it's just big round
Speaker 1: characters and faces and stars and uh and the and
Speaker 1: the teacher who was saying, no, this is not actual writing.
Speaker 1: But then it blows up. It starts showing up in
Speaker 1: comic I mean not in common boost been magazines, but
Speaker 1: then ultimately in Magna and other forms, and eventually becomes
Speaker 1: this huge industry with stuff like Hello Kitty, which is
Speaker 1: just all over the world and and and attached to
Speaker 1: so many different products. Yeah, and if you look really
Speaker 1: deeply into kauai, you will begin to see that it's
Speaker 1: not just the products the clothing, um even food items,
Speaker 1: or even some of the logos that are on airplanes
Speaker 1: in some um government entities, but it's also behavior and
Speaker 1: mannerism among both genders. And it really is this preoccupation
Speaker 1: with um not just cuteness, but youth and innocence. So
Speaker 1: it's this, uh, sort of an arrested development. I look
Speaker 1: at it that way, not the TV show, but in
Speaker 1: terms of, you know, trying to stave off aging and
Speaker 1: all of the sort of responsibility and perhaps the less
Speaker 1: fun aspects of life as you get older. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then probably encapsulates a lot of nostalgia as well, because
Speaker 1: you grow older, you end up still catching attaching these
Speaker 1: cute icons in this qualification of just about every aspect
Speaker 1: of life, and therefore you keep it kind of tethered
Speaker 1: to youth and tethered to youth culture. You know what's
Speaker 1: interesting about that too, is that if you seize onto
Speaker 1: this idea of kai and you see them to this
Speaker 1: idea of embodying these aspects of cuteness and big eidness
Speaker 1: and innocence, then perhaps in a way you're thinking to
Speaker 1: yourself on a subconscious level, at least you know, I
Speaker 1: will be more protected out there in society, which then
Speaker 1: brings up this whole idea of you know, how do
Speaker 1: we really how much of this parental response is responsible
Speaker 1: for our behavior in the way that we interact with
Speaker 1: things that are cute. Now, another bit of Japanese cuteness
Speaker 1: that instantly comes to mind is the the lucky cat.
Speaker 1: If you find all you find it all over Asia,
Speaker 1: and you you find it increasingly everywhere in the United
Speaker 1: States as well. Of course, the little generally like a
Speaker 1: gold plastic cat, big eyes and it's it's waving its
Speaker 1: little paw in the air. Uh. These are officially called
Speaker 1: maneki nicko or beckoning cats. And I was looking up
Speaker 1: some stuff back because I'm well, how does that tie
Speaker 1: into cute culture? Because as I suspected, that's older in
Speaker 1: its roots than the Hello Kitty. It dates back to
Speaker 1: the the Edo period, which was between a sixteen o
Speaker 1: three and eighteen sixties seven. Uh, And you know, it's
Speaker 1: just sort of picked up steam over time. So even
Speaker 1: though we look at the kitten writing in the seventies
Speaker 1: and and the rise of Hello Kitty is sort of
Speaker 1: the real um pivotal aspects of Hawaii, I feel like
Speaker 1: that the roots were already there, if if nowhere else
Speaker 1: in the presence of cats. I think you're right now.
Speaker 1: I have this idea of you know, the thousands of
Speaker 1: years from now, well people look back at you know,
Speaker 1: sort of a saying, oh, the Ming dynasty thing, you know,
Speaker 1: the rise of the Hello Kiddy dynasty, Because that really
Speaker 1: is how pervasive kauai is. And I think in the
Speaker 1: United States here were we have flavors of it um
Speaker 1: and you know, just look around, as you say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we look around our office and we can
Speaker 1: see that it's it's um interwoven into the way that
Speaker 1: we decorate or we perceive certain aspects we have our life.
Speaker 1: At least two adult members of the staff who are
Speaker 1: Disney fanatics, and there's a lot of kauai tied up there.
Speaker 1: And again, just about every other death has some sort
Speaker 1: of token, some sort of little bit of kauai. I
Speaker 1: feel like if you look closely enough, if you root
Speaker 1: through their stuff, I mean really get in there and
Speaker 1: in their privacy, you'll find some bit of cute that
Speaker 1: is keeping them going. And that sounds kind of specific.
Speaker 1: What have you found? Oh, all sorts of stuff. I'll
Speaker 1: show you later. I have a box. Okay, So you're
Speaker 1: probably wondering to yourself, are there any studies that can
Speaker 1: support this cuteness, that can kind of give us a
Speaker 1: better idea of why we react to this stuff the
Speaker 1: way we do. Of course there is because you know
Speaker 1: what we're talking about cute. We're talking about the way
Speaker 1: that of kitten's face is cute to us because it
Speaker 1: is reminiscent of the baby's face. And then what happens
Speaker 1: when we look at the baby, right, that's the question. Well,
Speaker 1: there have been studies that have looked at that. We
Speaker 1: have the technology, of course to look inside the brain
Speaker 1: to see how what kind of neural activity is going
Speaker 1: on when we do different things. And there was there's
Speaker 1: one particular study that we're looking at here, uh and
Speaker 1: this was this involved the use of a meg scanner
Speaker 1: and they were looking at parental responses to both puppy
Speaker 1: faces and baby faces and then unfamiliar adult faces. Right, yes, Okay.
Speaker 1: The really startling thing about this study is that when
Speaker 1: participants looking at all of these pictures within one seventh
Speaker 1: of a second, just a split second, literally, the medial
Speaker 1: orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses, lit
Speaker 1: up like a pinball machine when people look at infant
Speaker 1: and puppy faces, but was pretty, you know, relatively silent
Speaker 1: when adult faces showed up. So kringele Bach Morton Kringelbach,
Speaker 1: who ran the study calls this the parental instinct, and
Speaker 1: he says these responses are almost certainly too fast to
Speaker 1: be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive. That's his
Speaker 1: idea about it. Yeah, because we're talking about middleseconds here.
Speaker 1: We're talking about just an instant of seeing that baby face,
Speaker 1: that puppy face, and you are suddenly pacified. You suddenly
Speaker 1: you're maybe put out of an aggressive spirit or irritated spirit,
Speaker 1: and you have to somehow help the poor larval human
Speaker 1: or dog. Yeah. And the thing is that it even
Speaker 1: goes beyond visual processing, because people who are blowing from
Speaker 1: birth have the same areas activated in their brains when
Speaker 1: they hear the name of animals. So the concept of
Speaker 1: animals or how we've painted them and language just goes
Speaker 1: far beyond just pictures. Here. The idea is really standing
Speaker 1: in for um, the experience. So that study makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. I mean again, it just ties in
Speaker 1: directly to the way we look at look at an infant,
Speaker 1: at a kitten, at a puppy and uh and and
Speaker 1: how we instantly want to care for it on some level.
Speaker 1: And I feel like we all buy into that really easily.
Speaker 1: But here's another idea that two twelve Japanese study looked at,
Speaker 1: and this one was published in the Plos One. They
Speaker 1: were asking, well, if I look at something cute, how
Speaker 1: does it affect my attentiveness? Which which that question makes
Speaker 1: me think of all these things that we were We
Speaker 1: surround ourselves with these icons of cute, Like the cute
Speaker 1: little lamp that I have on my desk. It's like
Speaker 1: a little face um that I got an I kea
Speaker 1: years ago. What happens when I look at that? Is
Speaker 1: it making me more relax? Is it making me more atentive?
Speaker 1: Is it a just a distraction? Is all this cutest
Speaker 1: a distraction? Well, in this study they looked into this.
Speaker 1: They took participants and they viewed animal images and then
Speaker 1: they tested them to see how they performed on various tasks,
Speaker 1: and they found that participants who viewed infant animal images,
Speaker 1: ones that were rated particularly cute, they were able to
Speaker 1: perform pass better than those who viewed images of boring
Speaker 1: adult animals. So it's interesting, right, because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: is it really possible that if I look at a
Speaker 1: cute object or a cute picture that I'll be able
Speaker 1: to better? You know, concentrate on the task before me.
Speaker 1: But I would indeed hang in there as the cute
Speaker 1: cat hanging from the branch. I would want to to
Speaker 1: to convey to you. I like, how you get that?
Speaker 1: That was nice stuff? Um. But the thing is is
Speaker 1: that each group of participants consisted of less than fifty
Speaker 1: university students, and I think they did three different versions
Speaker 1: of these attention tests. And then all of these fifty
Speaker 1: university students were between the ages of eighteen and twenty two.
Speaker 1: And so this is also taking play in Japanese culture,
Speaker 1: where you know that the kawaii effect is much more pronounced,
Speaker 1: which leads some people to say, perhaps there's not really
Speaker 1: that much evidence here that cuteness could bolster your attentiveness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if this held true, you would just want to
Speaker 1: cuteify everything. You'd want a little cute faces and animals
Speaker 1: just crawling all over just everything in your work life,
Speaker 1: everything at home, just until you're just there's just an
Speaker 1: overdose of cute all the time, just to keep you attentive.
Speaker 1: And I have to say that might be distracting at
Speaker 1: that point. Yeah, alright, so what about cuteness and a robot?
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about you, Arnie. Sorry, but I'm
Speaker 1: talking about Kismut the robot. And we've actually met Kismut
Speaker 1: before here on, at least in the episodes that we've described.
Speaker 1: Kismutt is robot that has been used at M I
Speaker 1: T and it is used to figure out sort of
Speaker 1: the psychological ramifications of interactions between humans and robots, specifically children.
Speaker 1: It kind of looks like a skinless robot Magua or Furby. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Ferby definitely. It's got the furry ears, it's got huge eyes,
Speaker 1: and it can make a lot of distinctive um faces
Speaker 1: that that interact with the person. Yeah, and it works. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think it works really well because it's not it's
Speaker 1: not an attempted to human face, so you don't actually
Speaker 1: get into that possibility of uncanny Valley. It's instead this
Speaker 1: this non human but but it that it has human
Speaker 1: qualities to it, and then it is successfully making all
Speaker 1: these various faces and conveying emotion. At the bottom of this,
Speaker 1: there's just cuteness. That's what reigns supreme about this robot
Speaker 1: um other than its ability to interact with humans. So
Speaker 1: what do you do? You take this robot and you
Speaker 1: insert it into a study, which is headed up by
Speaker 1: Terry Burnham at Harvard University along with Brian Hair. They
Speaker 1: pitted nine volunteers against each other anonymously in games where
Speaker 1: they had to donate money or withhold. It's sort of
Speaker 1: the classic scenario we've seen over and over again. They
Speaker 1: can donate it into a communal pot and that would
Speaker 1: yield the most money, but only if other people donated
Speaker 1: to So the researchers split the group into two. Half
Speaker 1: made their choices undisturbed at computer screens, while the other
Speaker 1: half were faced with the photo of this absolute adorable kisman. Now,
Speaker 1: the players who gazed at Kismut gave thirty more to
Speaker 1: the pot than others, and Vernam and Hare believed that
Speaker 1: at some subconscious level they were aware of being watched,
Speaker 1: or they sort of took that as being watched just
Speaker 1: looking at this photo. Um, but it may have something
Speaker 1: also to do with our brain kind of carrying out
Speaker 1: this decision making with this cute, this representation of cuteness
Speaker 1: in front of us. Yeah, because how hard and selfish
Speaker 1: can you be in the presence of like a really
Speaker 1: cute kitten or an adorable baby. Not so much in
Speaker 1: even in the processing of it of thinking thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: this is cute, and you know that melts my heart
Speaker 1: a little bit. But in that those micro sect that
Speaker 1: we talked about, of seeing this cute image and that,
Speaker 1: you know, against every fiber in your your your body,
Speaker 1: any defense you may have you may have up against
Speaker 1: that cuteness and against the idea of giving your money
Speaker 1: away or or or or letting your your temper go
Speaker 1: down a bit, it kind of creeps in past all
Speaker 1: those defenses and deactivates you. Well, what I love too,
Speaker 1: is this idea that you could manipulate altruistic behavior with
Speaker 1: a pair of fake eyeballs, right just staring at you,
Speaker 1: adorable fake eyeballs. All right, Well, we're gonna take one
Speaker 1: more break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about Kauai and a little bit
Speaker 1: more about cats. All right, we're back. Okay. So there
Speaker 1: is a wonderful article from Wired magazine called In Search
Speaker 1: of the Living, purring, singing Heart of the Online Cat
Speaker 1: Industrial Complex. Uh. The author, Gideon Lewis Krause, cites a
Speaker 1: couple of different studies to try to explain why cats
Speaker 1: rule the Internet. And it's very interesting. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a very long discussion of the power of cats, the
Speaker 1: power of feelines, but it is I would say it's
Speaker 1: must read for anyone who is a self aware cat
Speaker 1: person because she really gets into how we interact with
Speaker 1: the feelines, how the feelines to limited extent and interact
Speaker 1: with us, and how this becomes a metaphor for the
Speaker 1: way we approach life itself. Yeah, and if you're very
Speaker 1: interested in Japanese culture, this is also a great way
Speaker 1: to sort of plunge in and see how that's played out.
Speaker 1: The first study that was mentioned in this article is
Speaker 1: a study of internet habits of two hundred and six
Speaker 1: teams or a University of Science and Technology students. Now
Speaker 1: of these students were deemed depressed after they were being
Speaker 1: after they were surveyed, so there's this sort of you know,
Speaker 1: pat standard survey to assess levels of depression that was
Speaker 1: administered to them. So they figured out that, you know,
Speaker 1: within the sample size of these people are depressed. So
Speaker 1: they found two things in this Internet usage UM. By
Speaker 1: the way, they also had access to the amount of
Speaker 1: UM activity they had online, not specifically what sights they
Speaker 1: went to, but the kind of activity like for instance,
Speaker 1: file sharing, checking their email, surfing, the way of looking
Speaker 1: at images, looking at videos. Yeah, and so to findings
Speaker 1: in general, the more participant score on the survey indicated depression,
Speaker 1: the more his or her Internet usage included, uh, those
Speaker 1: features as you say. So there was a lot of
Speaker 1: file sharing, high levels of that, especially with music and movies.
Speaker 1: And second, they found patterns of Internet usage that were
Speaker 1: statistically high among people with depressive symptoms compared with those
Speaker 1: without the symptoms. So, for example, people with depressive symptoms
Speaker 1: tend to engage in a lot of email usage, so
Speaker 1: they were sending emails right and left and um. This
Speaker 1: correlated with some research that was done by psychologist Janet
Speaker 1: Moorehan Martin, and Phyllis Schumacher. They found that frequent checking
Speaker 1: of email rate may relate to high levels of anxiety,
Speaker 1: and then of course that correlates to depressive symptoms. Well,
Speaker 1: I can definitely see where checking your email all the
Speaker 1: time would be depressing, because that's where we get our
Speaker 1: bills these days. That's where bad news is just as
Speaker 1: likely to come in via email as it is to
Speaker 1: come in over the phone. Yeah, and I think it's
Speaker 1: you know, just the the act doing that over and
Speaker 1: over again, sort of bullies. This underlying anxiety, Yes, that
Speaker 1: is at the root of all of this, and so, um,
Speaker 1: the study is really interesting. I won't go into all
Speaker 1: the different points that correlated with depressive symptoms, but those
Speaker 1: are just a couple of the highlights. Um. Lewis Crofts,
Speaker 1: the the author of this article I'm Wired, then looked
Speaker 1: at this other study because he felt like these two
Speaker 1: kind of dovetailed together really nicely. Because first you have
Speaker 1: the study of just you know, if you're if you're depressive,
Speaker 1: then perhaps you're a higher user of the Internet, or
Speaker 1: you you're watching more videos and possibly suggested in this article,
Speaker 1: you're seeking out more cat videos. You're seeing now more
Speaker 1: cute videos. Are You're going to cute overload to get
Speaker 1: that dose of cute fluffiness into your life. So he says,
Speaker 1: you know that they did not know what exactly the
Speaker 1: content was, but you know, it stands to reason that
Speaker 1: cats would be part of some of that, all right.
Speaker 1: So the second study, which is called Factors Influencing the
Speaker 1: Temporal Patterns of dietic behaviors and Interactions between domestic cats
Speaker 1: and their owners. The conclusion quote that the higher the
Speaker 1: proportion of all successful intents to interact with the cat
Speaker 1: that were due to the cat. The longer was the
Speaker 1: duration of the interactions. So he says that, in other words,
Speaker 1: your cat will like you best if you pretend that
Speaker 1: you don't desperately want to play with it. I love
Speaker 1: this study even has not one a prize with the
Speaker 1: ignobles it should. I mean, it's a very interesting study
Speaker 1: and a revealing study, but it reveals something that scientifically
Speaker 1: that cat owners pretty much already know that. You bring
Speaker 1: somebody into the house who's allergic to the cat, who
Speaker 1: who who does not like the cat, That's who the
Speaker 1: cat is going to insist on walking on and climbing
Speaker 1: up on and rubbing against and everything else under the sun.
Speaker 1: You bring in a toddler who wants nothing more than
Speaker 1: to pet the cat for hours and hours on end,
Speaker 1: the cat is going to avoid that child like the plague.
Speaker 1: That's right, and it's great that there's finally a study
Speaker 1: that says this is this is what's happening here, because
Speaker 1: all of us have suspected it. Um. The other part
Speaker 1: of the study was that the more neurotic cat owner,
Speaker 1: the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and nesley security and
Speaker 1: unconditional affection, which is essentially what we were just talking about.
Speaker 1: And then of course the brief of the interactions. So
Speaker 1: I think it's just important to state that as the
Speaker 1: owner and and and the cat that dynamic because Lewis
Speaker 1: Kraft says, hey, what do we do on the interner
Speaker 1: that all day long we like things and then we
Speaker 1: sit around and we wait for things that we do
Speaker 1: to be liked, And he says that we check all
Speaker 1: the analytics and all the retreats, and this is where
Speaker 1: those cats come in, because cats essentially are us trying
Speaker 1: to gain approval. Yes, so there is huge symbol of
Speaker 1: these interactions that we have between us. Yeah, when the
Speaker 1: cat shows you attention, you have you sort of won
Speaker 1: that attention. You have to you have to continually rewin
Speaker 1: that cat's attention because otherwise, because at any given point
Speaker 1: a day, okay will be like, hey, I really want
Speaker 1: to leave the house and never see you again. Is
Speaker 1: that cool? Uh? And then I will happen if you
Speaker 1: allow it to. And then if the cat remains in
Speaker 1: your house, you have to you have to sort of
Speaker 1: play it cool or you sometimes you have to coax
Speaker 1: the cat and to get the reward of the cute face,
Speaker 1: of the warmth against your body, the furry feeling of
Speaker 1: holding the cat, and of course the health ben offense.
Speaker 1: They've been numerous studies that have looked at the health
Speaker 1: ben if it's of cat ownership. But then again, the
Speaker 1: more you chase after it, the more you try and
Speaker 1: make it your own, the more likely that have penis
Speaker 1: is going to crawl under the bed and hide from you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's sort of like if if you seek out
Speaker 1: these pictures and these videos of cats, then on some
Speaker 1: level you're you're courting approval from them. And it says,
Speaker 1: you know, if you see a picture of a cat
Speaker 1: and says, oh hi, it's not you know, it's the
Speaker 1: cat's not saying oh, hello, hello, look at me, the
Speaker 1: cat saying oh I didn't see standing there. It's that
Speaker 1: sort of attitude. And so I love how he weaves
Speaker 1: all of this together, this internet usage. So in that sense,
Speaker 1: be the Lucky Cat is really a cat video that
Speaker 1: takes back to the Edo period because it's a beckoning cat.
Speaker 1: The cat is waving, the cat is saying hi, hello,
Speaker 1: and and actually acknowledging you, even though it's just a
Speaker 1: mechanical cat or or just even an unmoving uh image
Speaker 1: of a cat. It's waving to you, it's beckoning to you,
Speaker 1: and therefore it's approving of you. Messengers like the unrequited love.
Speaker 1: And finally you have this cat saying yes, come here,
Speaker 1: I will fold you into my arms. And then you
Speaker 1: have somebody that got frustrated and said, forget it. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to try and len these cats approval anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make myself one out of stone, or I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make one that actually mechanically waves at me, and
Speaker 1: that will do it. It would be my cat gollumn, yes,
Speaker 1: cat go yeah. Um. Clay Sharkey has an interesting TED
Speaker 1: talk and he talks about something called cognitive surplus, and
Speaker 1: then he weaves that into l O L cats and
Speaker 1: he says that cognitive surplus is the ability of the
Speaker 1: world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large,
Speaker 1: sometimes global projects. So he uses l O L cuts
Speaker 1: as an example. Right, a lot of people from all
Speaker 1: over the world contributing to this one effort essentially just
Speaker 1: to make all of this laugh, which is a great thing.
Speaker 1: And he says that um, it is made up of
Speaker 1: two things this cognitive surplus. He says that it's the
Speaker 1: world's free time and talents. And he says, the world
Speaker 1: has over a trillion hours a year of free time
Speaker 1: to commit these shared projects. I kind of I don't
Speaker 1: know where he came up with that, staff, but that's
Speaker 1: a lot. And then he says that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: we as a collective power of world changing behavior, if
Speaker 1: we can do the ll L cats that we could
Speaker 1: potentially with that those trillions of hours actually committed to
Speaker 1: something that is meaningful, I mean beyond making all of
Speaker 1: us laugh, because that is meaningful. So he's saying, hey,
Speaker 1: if you've got time to ll okay, you've got time
Speaker 1: to cure cancer. I think he's saying, we can all
Speaker 1: maybe not cure cancer, but you know, we could all
Speaker 1: freak at least love each other a little more. We
Speaker 1: could love each other a little bit more. We could
Speaker 1: pool our efforts to try to tackle certain problems that
Speaker 1: would rely upon individual efforts, um to to give their
Speaker 1: talents to this one thing. It's an interesting concept. It's
Speaker 1: very ted. It is it's very ted. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: does make me think again of cuteness as a as
Speaker 1: an icon, cuteness as as an object of worship, a
Speaker 1: little adorable cat made out of plastic that you put
Speaker 1: on your desk and in a sense, you pray to
Speaker 1: every time you look at it. You're you maybe not,
Speaker 1: you're actually not Actually you're not actually saying any kind
Speaker 1: of a prayer, but you are looking to it and
Speaker 1: investing some level of cognitive energy into it and expecting
Speaker 1: to gain from it. There you go. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is as good as it gets when it comes to
Speaker 1: trying to explain the love of cats, the obsession with
Speaker 1: cats on the internet, and then touching on this idea
Speaker 1: of kauai and uh, the ways in which it colors
Speaker 1: our perception. All right, So there you have it, kauaite cute. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm sure everyone has some little bit of insight on
Speaker 1: this to share, and we would love to hear about it.
Speaker 1: We'd love to know what is the little icon of
Speaker 1: cute that empowers you throughout the day, or what is
Speaker 1: the what is a little bit of cuteness that you
Speaker 1: absolutely detest and uh and would I would actually interfere
Speaker 1: with your productivity during the course of the day. Let
Speaker 1: us know about that as well. You can find us
Speaker 1: in all the usual places. Stuff to about your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com as the mothership, but we're all so on Tumbler,
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Blower Mind, Stuff Show
Speaker 1: and Julie. If they want to send us a good
Speaker 1: old fashioned email, where can they do that? Well, it's
Speaker 1: really quite easy. All you have to do is send
Speaker 1: us an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com,
Speaker 1: YEA for moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it?
Speaker 1: How stuff works dot com