Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time
Speaker 1: to go into the vault for an older episode of
Speaker 1: the show. This time we are airing the first part
Speaker 1: of our series on finger nails. This originally came out
Speaker 1: September one. Yeah, let's dive right in. Welcome to stot
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're
Speaker 1: going to be embarking on part one of an exploration
Speaker 1: of nails, not nails like you hit with the hammer,
Speaker 1: though I guess you could hit him with the hammer,
Speaker 1: though that would be really bad. Talking about the kind
Speaker 1: of nails on the human body. And I was thinking
Speaker 1: just the other day about how nails are sort of
Speaker 1: the mascot for or idleness, for human idleness, because when
Speaker 1: humans are idle, what part of the body is going
Speaker 1: to get the most attention. I think it's almost always
Speaker 1: going to be the nail. Right, You're either some people
Speaker 1: bite their nails. If you're not biting your nails, you're
Speaker 1: often like looking at your nails, kind of observing like oh,
Speaker 1: they're too long, or like, oh, there's some kind of
Speaker 1: weird thing here. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic psychology of mind,
Speaker 1: but but I think this is pretty common, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean even if you're not even looking at them,
Speaker 1: sometimes you just sort of feel them, like you're just
Speaker 1: sort of feeling the edges of your nails and you know, see,
Speaker 1: making sure everything's lined up there. For my own part,
Speaker 1: I tend to find that I noticed them the most
Speaker 1: when I am more in the more in the past. Really,
Speaker 1: but if I was driving into work and I'd be
Speaker 1: stuck in a light or something, and then I would
Speaker 1: notice my nails and I would be and that's when
Speaker 1: I would notice that I need to trim my nails,
Speaker 1: and I would of course be in a position where
Speaker 1: I really shouldn't be trimming my nails. Um, And then
Speaker 1: you know, the rest of the time, I'm not really
Speaker 1: noticing them. That's why the Good Lord made teeth. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get into that. Uh, that's not particularly my style,
Speaker 1: but I know a lot of people do it. My
Speaker 1: cat is a big, big fan herself. I'm also not
Speaker 1: a nail biter, but I there are people very close
Speaker 1: to me who are and I have observed the behavior
Speaker 1: for many years up close and with a lot of
Speaker 1: thoughts about it. Yeah, so so much like our two
Speaker 1: episodes on Tomatoes last week, this is gonna be a
Speaker 1: pair of episodes that that are going to get into
Speaker 1: some real weirdness. It's and and so I urge you
Speaker 1: to stick with us, even if you think, oh, fingernails,
Speaker 1: I have those, I don't want to hear two episodes
Speaker 1: about it, But really, I think I think you do.
Speaker 1: And I think a great place to start would be
Speaker 1: just to just touch on sort of the the obvious
Speaker 1: weird aspects of our fingernails. I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: today because they're they're obviously living. They are, you know,
Speaker 1: they're part of our body, and yet they're not living
Speaker 1: in a way right there, like these things these like
Speaker 1: little uh you know, almost like like stones that come
Speaker 1: out of our our fingers, right Yeah, Well, I mean
Speaker 1: we think of ourselves as non clawed animals. I think
Speaker 1: this is a pretty common intuitive grouping of animals that
Speaker 1: people make. Is like the kind with teeth and claws
Speaker 1: and the kind without, and a lot of them have
Speaker 1: teeth and claws because you got to it's a hard
Speaker 1: world out there. But humans, you know, we've got tools,
Speaker 1: and we've got social relationships, and we've got language and
Speaker 1: all that, so we don't really need claws, but we
Speaker 1: kind of do because we kind of do have claws,
Speaker 1: and nails are not super formidable in a claw sense,
Speaker 1: but they're kind of claw like. Yeah, yeah, I was
Speaker 1: thinking about how they're Our nails are definitely functional, and
Speaker 1: we'll get into a lot of those functions as we
Speaker 1: progress here. They do play a very real role in
Speaker 1: our lives and yet on the same time, at the
Speaker 1: same time, they're very ornamental, so that their condition and
Speaker 1: their upkeep inevitably communicate something about ourselves to the world.
Speaker 1: You know, Um, we we can't help but think about
Speaker 1: our own nails at times when we're encountering other people,
Speaker 1: and like it or not, you're gonna notice other people's nails.
Speaker 1: Are they Are they all done up? Are they bright
Speaker 1: and colorful? Are they are they really making a statement?
Speaker 1: Are they Are they kind of grimy? Are they you know?
Speaker 1: They're they spotted with paint? Did they show where? And tear? Like?
Speaker 1: These are these are some of the things that are
Speaker 1: nails communicate and and it's it's it's like if you're
Speaker 1: having a bad hair day or your hair is weird
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, you know, you can put on a
Speaker 1: cap and that's in many circumstances, and you know you
Speaker 1: kind of get by. But a bad nail day or
Speaker 1: bad bad nail days or months or what have you,
Speaker 1: that's often kind of difficult to ignore. But on both sides, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can wear gloves everywhere, but that's gonna
Speaker 1: communicate something else entirely. You're gonna look like you're ready
Speaker 1: to do some strangling or your bond villain or something, right,
Speaker 1: or you know, there actually is another type of nail
Speaker 1: that you didn't get to that has always stood out
Speaker 1: in my mind ever since I saw this movie when
Speaker 1: I was a little kid, Which are the cyborg nails
Speaker 1: in Paul vere Joven's Total Recall. Remember the lady who
Speaker 1: has nails that she's like touching with the stylus from
Speaker 1: her computer and the changing Yeah, very cool. When will
Speaker 1: they invent that? Yeah? And for the time being, we're
Speaker 1: just left with with paints, right, um, And we'll get
Speaker 1: into the use of paints and other ornamental techniques on
Speaker 1: our nails as well. In these episodes because ultimately, yeah,
Speaker 1: these these nails that we have um are kind of
Speaker 1: at this intersection of so many different aspects of the
Speaker 1: human condition. And if you look close enough, especially if
Speaker 1: you go far back into prehistory or or look around
Speaker 1: the world at different cultural treatments of nails, Uh, there's
Speaker 1: far more strangeness and magic and religious significance than than
Speaker 1: people might expect, especially if you're just an American who
Speaker 1: just kind of clips them into the trash can. But
Speaker 1: maybe we should start with a quick look at the
Speaker 1: anatomy of a nail. And now we're not going to
Speaker 1: go super deep on this, but the simple version is
Speaker 1: that you've got the hard part of the nail. This
Speaker 1: plays to fingernails. In tone nails, the hard part of
Speaker 1: the nail is known as the nail plate, and the
Speaker 1: nail plate is made out of these compressed layers of
Speaker 1: former epidermal skin cells that have been caratonized. Caratonized as
Speaker 1: kind of it's your body doing two skin cells. What
Speaker 1: Medusa does to people who invade her garden of rocks. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's filling the cells with keratin, which
Speaker 1: is this tough, fibrous protective protein that makes up not
Speaker 1: only the nails but also the hair and UH and
Speaker 1: keratin is found in living skin cells as well, and
Speaker 1: then the caratonized cells in the nail plate make it
Speaker 1: not only tough, but relatively flexible and translucent. And the
Speaker 1: translucent quality of the nails is I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting things about them. If you look close,
Speaker 1: you can kind of see through it to the flesh underneath,
Speaker 1: and then to the capillary blood flow under that. If
Speaker 1: you look at it long enough, it might start to
Speaker 1: get a little creepy, yeah, because because there's a sense
Speaker 1: that the nail is strong. We know the nail is
Speaker 1: is strong, and yet the flesh that we see through
Speaker 1: that nail window looks very you know, soft and delicate
Speaker 1: and and and we all often know from experience that
Speaker 1: it is very sensitive under there. Absolutely, it's sort of
Speaker 1: like a window through your skin, but like a frosted
Speaker 1: glass window, you know, not exactly transparent, but translucent. But so,
Speaker 1: where does the nail plate come from. Well, it comes
Speaker 1: from the nail matrix, which is found at the base
Speaker 1: of the nail, and this is sort of the cellular factory.
Speaker 1: It turns out new nail plate through cell division over time,
Speaker 1: and as new cells form at the base of the nail,
Speaker 1: it pushes the old nail out from the root, which
Speaker 1: is why nails grow. Now, it's interesting to note that
Speaker 1: there are nails are actually composed of three layers of
Speaker 1: that fibrous composite keratin. And and this is of course
Speaker 1: a fibrous protein. Like we said, it's found in hair
Speaker 1: and feathers and hoofs, claws and horns. Uh. But I
Speaker 1: was looking a little deeper into just the the structural
Speaker 1: integrity of the nail. I read an article from back
Speaker 1: in two thousand four that was published an Experimental biology
Speaker 1: by Firing at All, in which the researchers quote examine
Speaker 1: the structure and fracture properties of human fingernails to determine
Speaker 1: how they resist bending forces while preventing fractors running longitudinally
Speaker 1: in the nail bed. So we we've all cracked a
Speaker 1: nail before. I imagine it's not a fingernail than a
Speaker 1: toe nail. That's a quick thing for me. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: And it's a you know, but you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: a wonderful thing that we tend to see far more
Speaker 1: latitudinal cracks than the opposite in other words, cracks tend
Speaker 1: to be more or less parallel to the edge of
Speaker 1: the nail, as opposed to straight up the middle, which
Speaker 1: would obviously be far more traumatic. Not to say it
Speaker 1: doesn't occur, but um, but generally you're gonna have one
Speaker 1: that's going across the nail. So that means that our
Speaker 1: nails are an isotropic, meaning the material has a different
Speaker 1: value when measured in different directions. And this is much
Speaker 1: like wood, you know, which is stronger along the grain,
Speaker 1: or like meat, you know, the direction in which you
Speaker 1: slice a piece of meat makes a difference in how
Speaker 1: tender it is. Uh. The same thing would probably be
Speaker 1: true of your nails, right, Uh. And that's exactly what
Speaker 1: they ended up doing in this experiment, like tested like
Speaker 1: cutting on nails, uh, not living nails, I believe they were.
Speaker 1: They were trimming so that they used in the experiment.
Speaker 1: But basically, there are long, narrow cells in the thick
Speaker 1: intermediate layer, while tile like cells in the thinner dorsal
Speaker 1: and ventral layers increase bending strength and prevents cracking from forming.
Speaker 1: Well that's very nice, and really all this lines up
Speaker 1: with just the way that we tend to use our nails, uh, scraping, prying, tweezing.
Speaker 1: If you've ever tried to use your fingernails as a screwdriver,
Speaker 1: you've hit up on some of the design limitations, but
Speaker 1: also some of the flexibility of the nail. You'll find that, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're just pressing on something, if you're trying to
Speaker 1: like dig something out of your own skin, and you
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't do that, but if you are, you'll find
Speaker 1: that you have a fair amount of you know, of
Speaker 1: pressure you can exert on that nail. Right, But if
Speaker 1: you start trying to go side to side with a
Speaker 1: with with the head of a screw, you're gonna find, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not really rigid enough to turn the screw. But fortunately,
Speaker 1: at the same time, um, it's not so brittle that
Speaker 1: I just ripped my nail to pieces when I'm trying
Speaker 1: and failing to do that. Oh. I've never thought to
Speaker 1: put it into words like that, but you're absolutely right,
Speaker 1: Like twisting pressure on the nail does not feel as
Speaker 1: as comfortable and easy as regular like tweezing or pressing
Speaker 1: pressure is. Yeah, I mean not to say you can't
Speaker 1: turn a nail, I mean turn a screw a little
Speaker 1: bit with your nail. But I think you'll find that
Speaker 1: if when it gets to the nitty gritty of trying
Speaker 1: to actually put some force into the rotation of the screw,
Speaker 1: you're going to realize that you should probably stop what
Speaker 1: you're doing and get an actual screwdriver. Now, there's a
Speaker 1: very interesting contradiction, a sort of psychological contradiction that comes
Speaker 1: with the nails which is that they're the parts of
Speaker 1: our body that would be the toughest, you know, the
Speaker 1: ones we would put out front as as defensive parts,
Speaker 1: the teeth, the nails. There there are defense mechanism. But
Speaker 1: one thing you've noticed if you if you ever tried
Speaker 1: to trim a dog's toenails, is that they generally do
Speaker 1: not like this at all. They do not want their
Speaker 1: toenails to be messed with, even though it's the hardest
Speaker 1: part of their body, and you can mess around with
Speaker 1: the soft parts of their body. They're usually fine with it.
Speaker 1: But you start going in for the nails and they
Speaker 1: get all squirmy and say, I want to clatter around
Speaker 1: on the floor forever. Uh, And you will not get
Speaker 1: a chance to do this. And there's actually a similar
Speaker 1: kind of contradiction. I think that goes on in human
Speaker 1: psychology because think about all of the horrifying images that
Speaker 1: people you know, they occur in movies, of course, unfortunately
Speaker 1: sometimes they're practiced in reality, and they all probably just
Speaker 1: occur to us naturally when you imagine something bad happening
Speaker 1: to your nails or your teeth, it's like a particular
Speaker 1: kind of vulnerability obsession. Yeah, and and I should add,
Speaker 1: if you don't want to hear about any of this,
Speaker 1: you know, feel free to skip, like maybe you know,
Speaker 1: ten fifty seconds. But we're not gonna dwell on this
Speaker 1: long or in great detail. But but yeah, it should
Speaker 1: be noted that fingernail based torture goes back quite a
Speaker 1: ways given the delicacy. And certainly there are a lot
Speaker 1: of nerves in our fingers, and the nail actually makes
Speaker 1: our finger more sensitive, which is something that that I
Speaker 1: hadn't really thought about before. But this was pointed out
Speaker 1: by Evan Writer, assistant professor in the Ronald O. Pearlman
Speaker 1: Department of Dermatology, n y U langon health, quoted in
Speaker 1: a Mental Floss article by Jordan Rosenfeld from two thousand eighteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the way I've read it put is that by providing
Speaker 1: a counter pressure to your fingertip. It gives you special
Speaker 1: sensitivity in the skin cells in your fingertip that wouldn't
Speaker 1: be there otherwise. Yeah, which is something to keep in
Speaker 1: mind the next time you have some sort of issue
Speaker 1: with your nails where you find yourself asking that question,
Speaker 1: why do I have these What is what good are
Speaker 1: these nails doing me when they're causing me so much
Speaker 1: discomfort right now? UM? I know, for for my own part,
Speaker 1: I in the past had ingrown tonenails on both of
Speaker 1: my my big toes and uh, and had to have
Speaker 1: the thing where the the podiatrist goes in and like
Speaker 1: removes a section of the toenail and kills the nail
Speaker 1: bed underneath it. Um to to prevent that kind of
Speaker 1: thing from happening. And I kind of get the impression
Speaker 1: that this is not all that uncommon because I have
Speaker 1: other friends who we've compared toes and we're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you had the same thing done. Well, I'm sorry you
Speaker 1: had to endure that, Robert. But I also do find
Speaker 1: it quite amusing that you have you have toe parties
Speaker 1: with your friends. Well, you know, I have to say
Speaker 1: that the procedure is far preferable to an ingrown toenail.
Speaker 1: Uh So if if you uh, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: having issues like that, and you should definitely try and
Speaker 1: get some some help with it. That is not yourself
Speaker 1: toying around and trying to perform some sort of amateur
Speaker 1: surgery on yourself in the bathroom, because that's only going
Speaker 1: to result in more pain. Um. Speaking of which, I
Speaker 1: have to admit that I did not have the stomach
Speaker 1: to really dive into this topic of of nail torture
Speaker 1: in depth. I know there's a book, famous book by
Speaker 1: George Riley Scott, The History of Torture throughout the Ages,
Speaker 1: and I skimmed that a little bit and quickly realized
Speaker 1: that my eyes were a little bigger than my stomach
Speaker 1: on that one. Um. But basically you have a lot
Speaker 1: of accounts of de nailing in there, either by just
Speaker 1: pulling the nails out or by first using the insertion
Speaker 1: of a red hot nail beneath the fingernail as a
Speaker 1: precursor to de nailing. George Riley Scott, by the way,
Speaker 1: also wrote a history of prostitution in the early twentieth
Speaker 1: century that I understand was one of one of, if
Speaker 1: not the first histories of prostitution. That was not like, uh,
Speaker 1: it was not coming from a super judgmental standpoint, like
Speaker 1: a moralizing standpoint. H Well, that's interesting. So we're done
Speaker 1: with the nail torture that others inflict on us, I
Speaker 1: think at this point. But let's come back to that
Speaker 1: other form of sort of nail punishment that we sometimes
Speaker 1: do it ourselves, nail biting. Oh yeah, So, as I
Speaker 1: said before, I am not a habitual nail biter, but
Speaker 1: I have observed a bunch of it up close over
Speaker 1: the years, and so I don't know, I've I've sort
Speaker 1: of like mused on it for a long time. So
Speaker 1: habitual nail biting is known clinically as on ecophagia, and
Speaker 1: studies have found somewhere between maybe twenty to thirty percent
Speaker 1: of people in total do it, though it varies a
Speaker 1: lot by age um. So the twenty to thirty percent
Speaker 1: figure comes from a study published in twenty seventeen and
Speaker 1: the Journal of Dermatological Treatment by Pierre Halte at All.
Speaker 1: But according to some sources, nail biting peaks in early years,
Speaker 1: especially in teenage years, with some estimates as high as
Speaker 1: forty five percent. Of teenagers doing it regularly, which sounds
Speaker 1: very high. But then again, I guess I don't know
Speaker 1: what teenagers do. I do have to come back to
Speaker 1: um the name of the habitual nail bite though, because
Speaker 1: the uh, the actual meaning of that is is the
Speaker 1: eating of of fingernails, right, I mean it, which is
Speaker 1: not actually what's going on, right at least not in
Speaker 1: most cases. I don't know. Maybe who knows what some
Speaker 1: people swallow, But yeah, phagia, that's you know, that's used
Speaker 1: in the terms for the eating of all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: Into my phegia is the eating of insects and so forth, copperphagia.
Speaker 1: We don't need to get into hogegias, the eating of hogs,
Speaker 1: of great sandwiches. But even if you're not swallowing the nails,
Speaker 1: nicophagia can have a lot of negative consequences. For one thing,
Speaker 1: that your nails are very dirty. They are sort of
Speaker 1: a hot spot for bacteria on your body and uh,
Speaker 1: and so I was reading several articles about this. One
Speaker 1: thing I was reading was an article in The Verge
Speaker 1: by Alessandra Potenza, and the author here pointed out that
Speaker 1: nail biding can also have dental consequences, So she pointed
Speaker 1: to some dental health blogs that I was looking at.
Speaker 1: Several of these had dentist citing an estimate from the
Speaker 1: Academy of General Dentistry that quote, nail biting can result
Speaker 1: in up to four thousand dollars in additional dental bills
Speaker 1: over one lifetime. Because there are a number of reasons.
Speaker 1: But apparently it's not good for your teeth to be
Speaker 1: chewing too much in any case, and it's especially not
Speaker 1: good to be always putting chewing pressure down with your
Speaker 1: front teeth. I mean, you think about it, that's not
Speaker 1: normally how you chew. Normally, you chew kind of like
Speaker 1: with the pressing of your back teeth, But when you're
Speaker 1: biting with your nails, you're kind of aligning your jaw
Speaker 1: in a strange way to bring your front teeth together
Speaker 1: and turn them into clippers. But beyond that, there's also
Speaker 1: just the the exchange of bacteria from one place to
Speaker 1: the other and it and it actually does go both ways.
Speaker 1: So you're getting bacteria from under your fingernails and your
Speaker 1: fingertips into your mouth, but you're also getting bacteria from
Speaker 1: your mouth under your fingernails, which can cause infections there
Speaker 1: and apparently it can be bad both ways. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's really no upside to doing it. Um, obviously just
Speaker 1: stopping is easier said than done. But but but yeah,
Speaker 1: from from a purely health standpoint, um, it's best to
Speaker 1: stay away from it. But that leads to the interesting
Speaker 1: question of why we bite our nails in the first place,
Speaker 1: and why some people, especially in engage in o nicophagia
Speaker 1: like the habitual, repetitive biting of the nails. I was
Speaker 1: reading an interesting article about this in Fox by the
Speaker 1: science writer Joseph Stromberg, and so he cites that there
Speaker 1: were several early theories on nail biting, of course, before
Speaker 1: we had modern psychology. One of course, was Freud, and
Speaker 1: Freud grouped nail biting as one of the obsessions that
Speaker 1: fell under the oral receptive personality. And in Freudian theory,
Speaker 1: the idea was that if a if a child nursed
Speaker 1: too much during infancy, they would grow up to have
Speaker 1: this oral fixation, the oral receptive fixation, and which caused
Speaker 1: them to always like chew on their nails and like
Speaker 1: put objects in their mouth. You know the kind of
Speaker 1: people who are always like putting a stick in their
Speaker 1: mouth or something. But again, you know, this is Freudian
Speaker 1: is um. There's no real evidence for this, and as
Speaker 1: far as I could tell, there's never been any evidence
Speaker 1: that's turned up that there's any connection whatsoever between nursing
Speaker 1: in early childhood and and so called oral fixations. It
Speaker 1: just seems to be another one of those things that
Speaker 1: you know, Freud kind of said it, but there's no
Speaker 1: reason to believe it's true unless you're one of those
Speaker 1: people that has one of those bumper stickers that says
Speaker 1: Freud said it, I believe it. That settled it. Now.
Speaker 1: More recently, nail biting has been listed in the d
Speaker 1: s M is a form of o c D of
Speaker 1: obsessive compulsive disorder, but not all experts agreed that this
Speaker 1: is the best categorization for it, as not all forms
Speaker 1: of nail biting or universally considered really obsessive UM. And
Speaker 1: so another theory has emerged that nail biting is sort
Speaker 1: of a form of emotion regulation. Just one example of
Speaker 1: this is a study from published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry by Sarah Roberts at All
Speaker 1: called the Impact of Emotions on Body Focused repetitive behaviors
Speaker 1: evidence from a non treatment seeking sample. And this is
Speaker 1: a whole class of of behaviors, body focused repetitive behaviors
Speaker 1: that can involve nail biting, hair pulling, you know, various
Speaker 1: things that were sort of often grooming related, skin picking,
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. And so in this study they
Speaker 1: tested people in several different kinds of scenarios that were
Speaker 1: trying to elicit certain emotional reactions. One was a frustration situation,
Speaker 1: in which subjects would be given a difficult job to
Speaker 1: do that that could not possibly be done in the
Speaker 1: time they were given to do it. Um. Another one
Speaker 1: was a boredom scenario where people were left in a
Speaker 1: room with nothing to do. Another one was an anxiety
Speaker 1: scenario where they were asked to watch an extremely terrifying
Speaker 1: movie scene. I think it was a plane crash scene
Speaker 1: from the movie Alive. I've never seen it. Is that
Speaker 1: the one where the soccer players resort to cannibalism? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one based on true occurrences, But but certainly
Speaker 1: is notable for having just a very terrifying and at
Speaker 1: least at the time, very convincing airplane crash scene. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how it holds up today, but I imagine
Speaker 1: it holds up pretty well. And then finally there was
Speaker 1: a relaxation condition where they're watching a video. They're sitting
Speaker 1: in a nice comfy chair and they're watching video of
Speaker 1: a pleasant beach scene. That's nice too, I like that
Speaker 1: movie a lot. What makes you wonder I kind of
Speaker 1: want to see the video, Like how exactly relaxing is
Speaker 1: the speech? What if you're looking at the speech and
Speaker 1: thinking like, ooh, I don't know, sharks, Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: you could, um it certainly remind there are these wonderful
Speaker 1: videos called moving Art that you can find on I
Speaker 1: think they're a Netflix, and they're basically that kind of vibe,
Speaker 1: like really soothing ambient music. Um, and then these just
Speaker 1: beautiful scenes of things like beaches or mountains and sometimes
Speaker 1: wildlife depending on what the theme of the episode is.
Speaker 1: But it's some great nap time fair Oh nice. Uh
Speaker 1: well so anyway, so the results of the study were
Speaker 1: basically that observed behaviors in reported desire to bite the
Speaker 1: nails and engage in these repetitive body focused behaviors. It
Speaker 1: singled out two situations especially, which were stress and boredom
Speaker 1: and uh In Stromberg's article, he quotes Fred Penzel, who's
Speaker 1: a psychologist who helps patients who who deal with nail biting,
Speaker 1: and Penzel says of people in these conditions, quote, when
Speaker 1: they're under stimulated, the behavior provides stimulation, and when they're
Speaker 1: over stimulated, it actually helps them calm down. And he
Speaker 1: compares it to nicotine actually with the idea that the
Speaker 1: nicotine and cigarettes can sort of be a stimulant when
Speaker 1: you are under stimulated, and it can be a relaxant
Speaker 1: when you are over stimulated. Uh So, another question is
Speaker 1: how do you quit if you if you're a nail
Speaker 1: biter and you want to stop. I've read several ideas.
Speaker 1: One of course, is just trying to replace nail biting
Speaker 1: with an incompatible alternative activity. So in situations where you
Speaker 1: might find yourself biting your nails, have something that you're
Speaker 1: doing with your hands that you know you can't bite
Speaker 1: your nails at the same time, or alternately, I've read
Speaker 1: people say, hey, just wear gloves or put tape over
Speaker 1: the ends of your fingers. There's even there are even
Speaker 1: companies that make especially tailored, nasty tasting clear nail polished
Speaker 1: so that if you put your fingers in your mouth.
Speaker 1: That is disgusting. All Right, on that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Thank Alright, we're back. So we're talking about nails. And
Speaker 1: one question that I find myself thinking about when when
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm bored or idle and I start staring at
Speaker 1: my own nails, is how fast exactly to these suckers grow? Well,
Speaker 1: there is an answer to this, and it varies from
Speaker 1: not not only from person to person but throughout a
Speaker 1: person's lifetime. But an average figure that's often cited is
Speaker 1: that fingernails tend to grow about zero point one millimeters
Speaker 1: per day one tenth of a millimeter per day. So
Speaker 1: at this rate, if you wanted to grow nails as
Speaker 1: long as a six meter saltwater crocodile, it would take
Speaker 1: about sixty thousand days or about a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: four years. But unfortunately, even if you could live that long,
Speaker 1: your nails would probably not keep growing at such a
Speaker 1: dependable rate indefinitely. And one of the great studies in
Speaker 1: the history of fingernail research is actually uh something that
Speaker 1: contributes to our understanding of this fact, and it's something
Speaker 1: that's also in the spirit of Albert Hofman with lsd
Speaker 1: or Barry Marshall, the guy who put a Helicobacter pylori
Speaker 1: in his in his stomach to prove that it was
Speaker 1: the cause of ulcers rather than say stress or acidic
Speaker 1: foods uh it. It is a bold act of self experimentation,
Speaker 1: and I will say an astoni wishing feat of commitment
Speaker 1: over time. And this is the story of a doctor
Speaker 1: named William Bean. All right, So, Dr William B. Bean
Speaker 1: was a physician in a medical historian who lived from
Speaker 1: nineteen o nine to nineteen eighty nine, and he taught
Speaker 1: medicine at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and
Speaker 1: the University of Texas in Galveston. In addition to his
Speaker 1: medical practice and his teaching and his research, William Bean
Speaker 1: was a prolific writer. And I think it's worth saying
Speaker 1: that he was also an unusually good writer. An example
Speaker 1: that I saw pointed out in a paper on Bean's
Speaker 1: life was a passage that I'm about to read, which
Speaker 1: which he wrote simply praising the virtues of books for
Speaker 1: the dedication of a library. And I just thought this
Speaker 1: was so lovely. So, Robert, do you mind if I
Speaker 1: read this here, Bean wrote. Books remind us of friendship.
Speaker 1: They lead us to equanimity and peace, at least peace
Speaker 1: of mind. They help us maintain our individuality without the
Speaker 1: dear and crushing loneliness of those who love only themselves.
Speaker 1: The wisdom we gain from books leads us to act
Speaker 1: as though we were building our ideas for eternity, mindful
Speaker 1: that the nature of life and death are so ordered
Speaker 1: that we and our works are fleeting and falling grains
Speaker 1: of sand in the hour glass of time. If we
Speaker 1: can avoid the apathy of those who claim to know
Speaker 1: that nothing matters, and the sheer folly of those who
Speaker 1: know that they personally matter immensely, we shall have been
Speaker 1: worthy successors to that silent company of physicians, our medical forebears,
Speaker 1: whose spirits watch over us here. Through the careful and
Speaker 1: scholarly making and the wise use of books and libraries,
Speaker 1: they build our great tradition. By following them, we must
Speaker 1: add to it, as physicians, wise and humble in the care,
Speaker 1: the comfort, and sometimes in the cure of our fellows
Speaker 1: in their sickness and in their sorrow. Oh, that is beautiful.
Speaker 1: And he actually brings some of this uh, some of
Speaker 1: this thoughtful writing spirit to his scientific papers. So this
Speaker 1: really remarkable self experiment that William being carried out is
Speaker 1: revealed by the title of a paper that he published
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty and the Archives of Internal Medicine called
Speaker 1: Nail Growth thirty five years of observation. That is dedication.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so so that is correct. You are understanding
Speaker 1: the title correctly. There William being meticulously tracked the rate
Speaker 1: of his own nail growth for thirty five years, beginning
Speaker 1: sometime in the early nineteen forties, I think even as
Speaker 1: the earliest nineteen forty one, and he published his findings
Speaker 1: in a series of scientific articles, the first of which
Speaker 1: appeared in nineteen fifty three and all the way up
Speaker 1: until nineteen eighty. I think the one in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: was the last one. So thinking about this problem, I
Speaker 1: immediately would have a question, which is how exactly do
Speaker 1: you track how much your nails grow? Right? Like, you
Speaker 1: can look at your nail and I don't know it
Speaker 1: looks this long to a but uh, like, if if
Speaker 1: you clip them eventually or if something comes off of them,
Speaker 1: how do you know how much it has grown? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I know when? When? When you brought up this study. Like.
Speaker 1: The first thing that comes to mind is some is
Speaker 1: like a bearded uh professor type who has one hand
Speaker 1: that has those big, long spiral fingernails up. No, he
Speaker 1: didn't do that, uh No, but he did find an
Speaker 1: interesting way. Being actually explains in this paper that there
Speaker 1: are a number of ways to track the growth of
Speaker 1: your nails. Uh And this is his method. Quote. I
Speaker 1: make an indentation with the little file commonly employed to
Speaker 1: open small glass vials. On the first day of each month,
Speaker 1: I file a transverse groove just at the edge of
Speaker 1: the free margin of the cuticle, being careful not to
Speaker 1: push it back or interfere with it. Within a week
Speaker 1: or two after marking the nail, the end is recorded
Speaker 1: when the mark has just reached the free margin of
Speaker 1: the nail exactly one point four or five centimeters from
Speaker 1: the start. Early in my observations, I measured nail clippings
Speaker 1: by linear growth than by weight. With careful calculations, I
Speaker 1: found that anywhere from to more than fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the nail had been used up by unnoticed attrition. Not
Speaker 1: only does the length of the nail wear away, but
Speaker 1: the dorsal surface also wears down. If a fingernail is
Speaker 1: trimmed with scissors and not filed, sharp angles can be
Speaker 1: felt since scissors simply takes away bites without filing, These
Speaker 1: sharp points disappear in a day or two from unnoticed
Speaker 1: wear and tear. Uh. And I found this very interesting. So,
Speaker 1: even apart from clipping, being observes that somewhere between a
Speaker 1: quarter and a half of the mass of the nail
Speaker 1: just vanishes over time through regular wear and tear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's we we easily take these these tools that
Speaker 1: are our fingernails for granted, because we use them all
Speaker 1: the time to varying degrees to interact with the world
Speaker 1: around us. But they are self replenishing, you know, unlike
Speaker 1: the various real tools we use on the on the
Speaker 1: on natural materials. Uh, those we inevitably have to replace
Speaker 1: as they wear out. Yeah, it absolutely makes logical sense,
Speaker 1: but it's it's just hard to square that with my
Speaker 1: experience because I feel like I never notice my my
Speaker 1: fingernails just being worn away. But obviously it happens a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, like you say, if nothing else, you'll
Speaker 1: notice that that the sharp edge will go away, um,
Speaker 1: you know, pretty quickly on its own. Even if you
Speaker 1: don't file them. Isn't that interesting? Yeah? Uh? And I
Speaker 1: also want to note Bean's dedication to accuracy and control,
Speaker 1: since he notes that at one point, to make sure
Speaker 1: that the cuticle itself was not advancing or receding unnoticed
Speaker 1: of course, because you know, if the cuticle was moving,
Speaker 1: that would change how his measurements were happening with the
Speaker 1: with the file in the nail plate. Uh, just to
Speaker 1: make sure the cuticle wasn't moving, Being made a tattoo
Speaker 1: in his thumbnail to use as a bench mark. What
Speaker 1: a little more on his on his method. This is
Speaker 1: a quote from an earlier paper by Being, which was
Speaker 1: reproduced in a Discover magazine article on him. I was reading,
Speaker 1: uh so being wrights quote. When I first began to
Speaker 1: measure the rate of nail growth, I scored marks on
Speaker 1: all my nails. Within a few months, I found that
Speaker 1: each nail had its own pace. This was clearly distinguishable,
Speaker 1: even by the rather crude method that I used. Some
Speaker 1: nails grew rapidly, some in an intermediate phase, less rapidly,
Speaker 1: and some slowly. The differences were small, but regular. There
Speaker 1: was consistency in the variation. So if I applied a
Speaker 1: ratio I could tell by measuring one nail what the
Speaker 1: others were doing. And this I did on several occasions.
Speaker 1: In simple terms, toenails grew more slowly than nails of
Speaker 1: the hand, and the nail of the middle finger grows
Speaker 1: more rapidly than the nails of either the thumb or
Speaker 1: the little finger or the other two middle fingers interact.
Speaker 1: So the middle finger is the one that he found
Speaker 1: to uh to grow the fastest. Yes, and this is
Speaker 1: a finding that has been reproduced in other studies that
Speaker 1: I'll mention in a minute. Just surprisingly interesting. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would have guessed the index finger just thinking about like
Speaker 1: the way that I interact with things with my finger. Now,
Speaker 1: I would think, well, that's the one you're most likely,
Speaker 1: you know, you see some sort of strange film on
Speaker 1: a window or something, you need to scratch at it,
Speaker 1: and you're going to use your index surely. Uh So
Speaker 1: that's that's that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, it is um And
Speaker 1: we'll get to possible explanations for this difference in in
Speaker 1: just a bit here, But I want to read being
Speaker 1: summary of his paper from from nineteen eighty. He says,
Speaker 1: quote a thirty five year observation of the growth of
Speaker 1: my nails indicates the slowing of growth with increasing age.
Speaker 1: The average daily growth of the left thumbnail, for instance,
Speaker 1: has varied from zero point one twenty three millimeters a
Speaker 1: day during the first part of the study when I
Speaker 1: was thirty two years of age to zero points zero
Speaker 1: nine five millimeters a day at the age of sixty seven.
Speaker 1: And uh, and pursuing that line of thought a little further,
Speaker 1: he actually does get strangely thoughtful and melancholy about it,
Speaker 1: or maybe not melancholy, at least there there's a kind
Speaker 1: of haunting and beautiful passage, or at least unusually so
Speaker 1: for a medical journal paper. And so this is my
Speaker 1: last quote from being He writes. The kind of pleasure
Speaker 1: and understanding that I get from studying natural history has
Speaker 1: long vanished from most contemporary teaching institutions that have become
Speaker 1: part of intensive care units, which are supposed to save
Speaker 1: the residual intellectual machinery of medical students. The teeming mass
Speaker 1: of hope and pain, technical virtuosity, and de personalization called
Speaker 1: a health center delivers packets of what is termed medical care.
Speaker 1: The capacity to look remains, but the capacity to see
Speaker 1: has all but vanished teachers and students forget that the
Speaker 1: ability to palpate is not the same as the ability
Speaker 1: to feel. As a gentle countercurrent, I set forth here
Speaker 1: this most recent five year installment of the observations of
Speaker 1: the growth of my left thumbnail. It is a very
Speaker 1: long record of the growth of human deciduous tissue. It's
Speaker 1: duration has little precedent in clinical medicine or human natural history. Still,
Speaker 1: the nail provides a slowly moving keratin chimograph that measures
Speaker 1: age on the inexorable absissa of time. So there's something
Speaker 1: actually strangely profound going on here, which is by meticulously
Speaker 1: measuring the slowing of the growth of his fingernails over time,
Speaker 1: he's actually watching his body become less cellularly productive every
Speaker 1: single year as the circulation slows down. As that's one probable,
Speaker 1: at least partial explanation for it. As the body grows older,
Speaker 1: it becomes less efficient at producing new cells. Uh, the
Speaker 1: fingernail grows with just slows and slows, and he's measuring
Speaker 1: it in such minute detail that he can see it
Speaker 1: happened month by month as the body says, all right,
Speaker 1: we are we're going to slow down on nail production,
Speaker 1: but we're all in on ear hair. My god, I
Speaker 1: would love to read a William Bean study on his
Speaker 1: ear hair. I think it would be so lovely. All Right,
Speaker 1: So that was But we're gonna take a quick break.
Speaker 1: But when we come back, we're going to consider what
Speaker 1: more recent researchers had to say about nails, and then
Speaker 1: we'll get into some other nail related topics before we
Speaker 1: close out this first episode on on on the subject. Thanks,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you. Alright, we're back al right. So
Speaker 1: in the last section we talked about the research of
Speaker 1: a doctor named William Bean who very carefully studied the
Speaker 1: rate of his own nail growth for thirty five years,
Speaker 1: and he published that study in nineteen eighty. But I
Speaker 1: was looking for more recent stuff about the rate of
Speaker 1: nail growth and there was a New York Times Q
Speaker 1: and A from that addresses this by c Claiborne Ray
Speaker 1: and uh. The The author here interviews Jeffrey S. Dover,
Speaker 1: an Associate clinical professor of dermatology at the Yale School
Speaker 1: of Medicine, who reports the following. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: we still don't know all of the factors that influence
Speaker 1: the rate of nail growth. But it's generally accepted that
Speaker 1: fingernails grow about three times as fast as toe nails. Robert,
Speaker 1: does this square with your experience? I don't know if
Speaker 1: it squares with mine. I mean, I don't doubt their findings.
Speaker 1: But prior to it either, But but but if you
Speaker 1: but but but prior to this, hey, have you had
Speaker 1: quiz me on this, I would have guessed that the
Speaker 1: rate was more or less the same. I feel like
Speaker 1: you know, just from when it is by observing my
Speaker 1: nail growth. When it is time to trim my fingernails,
Speaker 1: it's probably time to trim my toe nails. Though now
Speaker 1: now that I think about it, maybe fingernails do seem
Speaker 1: to require trimming a little more frequent only. But I
Speaker 1: would don't know. I would have guessed at this particular
Speaker 1: rate that it would be three times as fast as toneenails. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have naturally come to this
Speaker 1: conclusion either, But this seems to be a pretty consistent finding.
Speaker 1: Fingernails grow a lot faster, and three times the rate
Speaker 1: does seem to be the average of the findings. Um.
Speaker 1: They also, of course, they confirm what william being discovered,
Speaker 1: which is that nails tend to grow more slowly as
Speaker 1: you get older, and uh, let's see uh. And then,
Speaker 1: speaking to Bruce Robinson, a clinical instructor of dermatology at
Speaker 1: Lennox Hill and Mount Sinai Hospitals in Manhattan, fingernail growth
Speaker 1: apparently peaks in your teens and your twenties and then
Speaker 1: declines afterwards. And then there's another very strange fact. Handedness,
Speaker 1: as in left handed or right handed, appears to affect
Speaker 1: the rate of fingernail growth. So if you're left handed,
Speaker 1: the nails on your left hand will tend to grow
Speaker 1: a bit faster, and vice versa. And the rate also
Speaker 1: tends to increase in summer and decrease in winter. And
Speaker 1: it tends to be a little bit faster in men
Speaker 1: than in women, and tends to be a little bit
Speaker 1: faster in women during pregnancy. Well, I mean, on the
Speaker 1: handedness side of that, Uh, it would certainly be meeting
Speaker 1: the demand because you'd be more likely to to use
Speaker 1: that hand for you know, scratching at things, manipulating things
Speaker 1: with your fingernails and therefore wearing them down. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean it makes you wonder, like, what's the mechanism
Speaker 1: there is there some genetic kind of coding for handedness
Speaker 1: that says, okay, I know you know. Do your genes
Speaker 1: say okay, I know that you're left handed, So let's
Speaker 1: make the nails on the left hand grow faster. Or
Speaker 1: is there something else at work? Is it more kind
Speaker 1: of an adaptation to use of the hand and so
Speaker 1: as an illustration of the explanation of this question, uh,
Speaker 1: there there was a study that I came across because
Speaker 1: I saw a reference to it in the Wired article
Speaker 1: by Nick Stockton. But the study was by this British
Speaker 1: dermatologist named Rodney Dauber who worked at Church Chill Hospital
Speaker 1: in Oxford, and I think he sometimes lectured in dermatology
Speaker 1: at Oxford University as well. I couldn't actually find if
Speaker 1: Dauber is still alive, so I'm not sure, but I
Speaker 1: hope he is. But so around the year nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: or eighty one, Dauber suffered what he described as quote
Speaker 1: a mallet finger deformity of the left ring finger whilst
Speaker 1: playing rugby and so basically this means his finger got jammed.
Speaker 1: This usually happens when something strikes you hard on the
Speaker 1: fingertip and it bends the finger by force, and in
Speaker 1: doing so damages the tendon that you normally used to
Speaker 1: straighten your finger. I've read that this can also be
Speaker 1: called baseball finger, but that that I don't know that
Speaker 1: sounds like that should mean something else, like the tip
Speaker 1: of your finger is swelling to baseball size. But with
Speaker 1: this injury, Dauber saw an opportunity to test a theory
Speaker 1: about why the fingernails grow at different rates, and he's
Speaker 1: so so in the spirit of William Bean. Also he
Speaker 1: performed this experiment on himself and he published there was
Speaker 1: else in Clinical and Experimental Dermatology in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: Study was called the Effect of Immobilization on Fingernail Growth.
Speaker 1: So Dauber notes that there had been some other theories
Speaker 1: to explain the observed difference in nail growth, and some
Speaker 1: of these differences were, for example, the nails on our
Speaker 1: longest fingers tend to grow the fastest. So remember we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier beans finding that the middle finger has the
Speaker 1: fastest growing nail, and so maybe this is an evolutionary
Speaker 1: adaptation since the middle finger is usually a person's longest
Speaker 1: finger and likely to be the first one to come
Speaker 1: into contact with an object. If you just sort of
Speaker 1: extend your whole hand. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition
Speaker 1: to have a fast growing middle finger nail, and so
Speaker 1: maybe the differential growth is programmed in the genetic level.
Speaker 1: Another explanation was possibly people whose fingers are immobilized due
Speaker 1: to hemi parisis or neuropathy tend to show decreased fingernail
Speaker 1: growth as well, and so perhaps the lack of nerve
Speaker 1: supply slows the growth of the fingernail. But finally, there
Speaker 1: was another theory which is known as terminal trauma, which
Speaker 1: I should have checked to see if they ever made
Speaker 1: that into like a Michael Doodakov movie or something. But
Speaker 1: but the the terminal trauma theory is that the nails
Speaker 1: on some fingers grow faster because those fingertips are used
Speaker 1: more often. And under this idea, the more fingertip encounters
Speaker 1: pressure or damage, the faster it's nail grows. And this
Speaker 1: theory would be consistent with with observations by a Legro
Speaker 1: Clark and Buckston in the nineteen thirties that both nail
Speaker 1: biters and manual workers have more rapid nail growth. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a finding. If you bite your nails or if
Speaker 1: you tend to do you know, hard work with your hands,
Speaker 1: your nails grow faster than in people who don't do
Speaker 1: these things. Interesting, so just supply meeting demand exactly. So
Speaker 1: Daubert decided to test this by comparing the growth of
Speaker 1: the nails on both of his ring fingers, both while
Speaker 1: his finger was splinted to help it heal from the
Speaker 1: rugby jam, and while it was unsplinted and in normal use,
Speaker 1: and his results supported the terminal trauma theory. In general,
Speaker 1: the nails on his left hand grew slower than on
Speaker 1: his right hand, but the left ring finger, which was
Speaker 1: in the splint that nail grew even more slowly while
Speaker 1: it was splinted and thus immobilized, and once he could
Speaker 1: use his finger again, the nail grew faster. An also
Speaker 1: interesting note in general the so if you're if you're
Speaker 1: right handed, the left hand nails tend to grow more
Speaker 1: slowly than than your right hand. But no matter how
Speaker 1: your handedness breaks down, toe nails tend to grow at
Speaker 1: the same speed on the left and right. So this
Speaker 1: might be a result of handedness being more important for
Speaker 1: you know, what you do with your limbs than footedness. Now,
Speaker 1: something that comes to mind on that point and this
Speaker 1: would this would have to be something, This would actually
Speaker 1: be a kind of topic that I would I would
Speaker 1: love to look at it in the future. Is what
Speaker 1: what effect does shoes have on this? Because because of
Speaker 1: course we so many of us wear shoes, of great
Speaker 1: number of us, and certainly I think individuals more likely
Speaker 1: to be heading up or participating in a study of
Speaker 1: this sort. And we know from that the shoes change
Speaker 1: like the shape of our foot. You know that these
Speaker 1: are these are not natural um sheaths that we're putting
Speaker 1: our our feet into. And I wonder if if our
Speaker 1: shoes would be serving to apply more of a constant
Speaker 1: and sustained pressure on the nails. Um. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of an open question for me. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder I wondered about exactly that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So why did the toenails grow slower than the fingernails?
Speaker 1: I wonder if that is natural among all people, no
Speaker 1: matter what you do with your feet, or if that
Speaker 1: is more an artifact of shoe wearing. Like I wonder
Speaker 1: if if you run around barefoot a lot or often
Speaker 1: like kicking at things with your toes, would your toenails
Speaker 1: grow faster? Right? Oh? Yeah, that's another good point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like because like I guess, I think of like the
Speaker 1: beach person who is going out barefoot at a lot, Like,
Speaker 1: on one hand, you're not going to have the end
Speaker 1: of your shoe um, pushing against your toe nails or
Speaker 1: restraining your feet, but perhaps you're you're more likely to
Speaker 1: you know, to scratch around it things, to use your
Speaker 1: toenails in a way that is more in keeping with uh,
Speaker 1: their their evolved purpose. I guess yeah. I I didn't
Speaker 1: find any evidence of whether anybody has studied this question,
Speaker 1: but if you are a toenail fingernail researcher out there,
Speaker 1: maybe look into this. Does being a barefoot person make
Speaker 1: the difference? Yeah, but anyway to summarize it, so, I
Speaker 1: think it looks like there's pretty good evidence that when
Speaker 1: fingertips are put to more work by touching things doing
Speaker 1: you know, just generally manipulating objects, putting pressure on the
Speaker 1: fingertip wear and tear, the nails grow faster. And this
Speaker 1: could explain part of the difference in growth made by
Speaker 1: handedness and the differences that are observed based on what
Speaker 1: we do with our hands, such as if you're a
Speaker 1: manual worker. But that brings us to I guess the
Speaker 1: last thing I wanted to talk about before we have
Speaker 1: to wrap up this first episode, um, which is coming
Speaker 1: back to the idea of humans as a non clawed animal.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know, so we we think about animals
Speaker 1: like big cats that have powerful teeth and claws, hard
Speaker 1: parts anchored in the bodies for tearing the flesh, the
Speaker 1: flesh of other animals. And in contrast, humans don't have claws,
Speaker 1: so we have tools. We have a claw like hard
Speaker 1: tool power at our fingertips. But in a way, nails
Speaker 1: are still sort of like claws, even if in diminished form.
Speaker 1: And what seems to be definitely true is that nails
Speaker 1: evolved from organs that were very claw like. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: certainly when we looked at to other primates, uh, we
Speaker 1: see uh, we we see true Claus and things more
Speaker 1: like like true Claus versus our own fingernails, which are
Speaker 1: still useful. Again. Uh, these are very useful to scratch,
Speaker 1: to scrape, and and and I think a lot of
Speaker 1: us find this to be the case. To manipulate very
Speaker 1: small objects, uh, which you know, which of course is
Speaker 1: is very much the domain of of of of human ingenuity.
Speaker 1: You know, Uh. Even even those of us who will
Speaker 1: have we're fortunate enough or or just through the luck
Speaker 1: of our lives, are not doing a lot of like
Speaker 1: like like intensive labor. You're still gonna have to pick
Speaker 1: up a pin off of the floor at some point, right,
Speaker 1: You're still gonna have to occasionally engage in that kind
Speaker 1: of uh, you know, a fine manipulation of small things.
Speaker 1: And for that our nails are are are perfect. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say probably the characteristic motor activities
Speaker 1: of human beings compared to other animals. One is what
Speaker 1: you do with your with your like throat and your
Speaker 1: mouth is language, of course, and the other is fine
Speaker 1: motor movements at the fingertips. Right. But of course we
Speaker 1: do have tools that that stand in for a lot
Speaker 1: of these other uses. So we don't need a great
Speaker 1: big old uh you know, velociraptor type talent or anything,
Speaker 1: because we have other tools that can stand in for that,
Speaker 1: that sort of claw and uh. And so this is
Speaker 1: the thought by many data to to play a role
Speaker 1: in the changing shape of our fingers over a human evolution. Um.
Speaker 1: So basically, our our primate ancestors had something more like
Speaker 1: true clause and it's and we have the stunted, flattened
Speaker 1: versions of clause. And the reason here maybe because some
Speaker 1: two point five million years ago, you know or or more,
Speaker 1: we started using tools, and two things impacted the shape
Speaker 1: of our fingers and nails. First of all, curved nails
Speaker 1: would have increasingly gotten in the way of tool manipulation.
Speaker 1: And then secondly, broader fingertips allowed us to better grip
Speaker 1: uh stone tools. Oh I see, Okay, So if you
Speaker 1: have more of a claw at your fingertip, it makes
Speaker 1: more sense for your finger to narrow more taper towards
Speaker 1: the end, Whereas if you don't have a claw at
Speaker 1: the end, it makes more sense to have a flatter,
Speaker 1: broader fingertip that can probably more easily close around an
Speaker 1: object and keep it steady. Yeah, I mean, think of
Speaker 1: some of our claude humanoid icons. Think of Edwards s
Speaker 1: assor hands or Freddy Krueger or you know, various sort
Speaker 1: of humanoid monsters that have long, tapering fingernails. You might
Speaker 1: sometimes wonder, well, all right, well, those claws are great
Speaker 1: if your trim and hedges there are are you know,
Speaker 1: harassing teenagers in their dreams. But what do you do
Speaker 1: when you need to manipulate another tool. Uh, you're gonna
Speaker 1: kind of be um you know, um up the creek
Speaker 1: in that regard, Pumpkinhead can't play tennis. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: here's another interesting thing to think about. Um, what about
Speaker 1: what what about? Yeah? Okay, obviously, Edwards says, their hands,
Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger. You know they have those impressive nails that
Speaker 1: they get in the fight. But could they throw a punch?
Speaker 1: Could Freddy Krueger throw a punch? How about these various
Speaker 1: like a lizard man creatures that show up in all
Speaker 1: the manner of sci fi and fantasy. Uh, they just
Speaker 1: always have to slash and bite, right, I mean they
Speaker 1: couldn't because when you have a clause you're not you're
Speaker 1: gonna probably gonna have a difficulty forming a fist. So
Speaker 1: we know that the tool use seems to have played
Speaker 1: a role in the evolution and form of our hand.
Speaker 1: And there have also been some interesting studies that look
Speaker 1: at how the ability to to to form a fist
Speaker 1: uh and essentially throw a punch may have played a
Speaker 1: role in the form of our hand as well. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting hypothesis though, I mean I wonder um
Speaker 1: Iven wonder about the idea of of punching as an
Speaker 1: adaptation just because it's so often results in the injury
Speaker 1: of one's own hand when you do it right. Well,
Speaker 1: that is, that is something that these studies have looked into,
Speaker 1: and we have some path They may be many years
Speaker 1: old at this point, but I remember that was one
Speaker 1: of the factors that wasn centered like that sweet point
Speaker 1: um in the in the formation of the hand where
Speaker 1: it can both potentially form a fist and land a
Speaker 1: punch while also maintaining its integrity without damaging the thing
Speaker 1: that you need for tool manipulation. So it's gonna kind
Speaker 1: of a delicate balance there. But but this led to
Speaker 1: an interesting question that I've often had, uh and and
Speaker 1: that is, are sharpened nails useful in a in say
Speaker 1: a stand up fight? Would they be an advantage uh
Speaker 1: in in a fight? And um, this is one of
Speaker 1: these things. It's kind of been like an idle speculation
Speaker 1: before I remember. I remember seeing like a music video
Speaker 1: or a poster or Glenn Danzig, uh, the rock musician
Speaker 1: has um like sharpened fingernails, and and trying to figure
Speaker 1: out like what the limitations and or advantages of that
Speaker 1: would be well, you know, I gotta say, if I
Speaker 1: were to imagine going into a fight with with long,
Speaker 1: sharpened finger your nails, I think I would honestly be
Speaker 1: more worried about about trauma to my fingernails in the
Speaker 1: fight then I would be excited about my ability to
Speaker 1: use them as a weapon. Um And this comes back
Speaker 1: to the duality we talked about earlier, like our hard
Speaker 1: parts like teeth and nails. For some reason, uh, even
Speaker 1: though they are the hard parts, we have kind of
Speaker 1: like special fears of trauma toward them. And if you
Speaker 1: had long nails and a real scuffle, that just seems
Speaker 1: like a real liability. Yeah, and that that seems to
Speaker 1: be part of the consensus. I was looking around it
Speaker 1: is I couldn't find any real studies on this, but
Speaker 1: I was I found a lot of discussion about this
Speaker 1: on martial arts boards. Um. So, on one level, people
Speaker 1: would say, Okay, in a stand up fight, if you
Speaker 1: were someone who's after you at being able to scratch
Speaker 1: someone with your nails is not a bad deterrent because
Speaker 1: you can irritate tissue. You can you know, you can
Speaker 1: go for the eyes. And then also something worth keeping
Speaker 1: in mind is that your nails as they scrape tissue,
Speaker 1: they collect tissue which provides a genetic sample of an
Speaker 1: attacker potentially. But others also point out, okay, well, this
Speaker 1: idea of sharpening your nails or having long nails for
Speaker 1: you know, to benefit you want to fight, Ultimately, these
Speaker 1: are the these can end up bending backwards rather than
Speaker 1: gouge in a you know, a high pressure situation, and
Speaker 1: that also it might make forming a fist that much
Speaker 1: harder to do. So Ultimately, it doesn't look like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence for the idea that that our
Speaker 1: nails are are really a um, you know, that much
Speaker 1: of a defensive benefit. Though obviously they can be used
Speaker 1: to scratch and claw if neat be so they're not
Speaker 1: They're not completely useless in that regard, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like there are a lot of ways to really
Speaker 1: encourage them back towards a more defensive claw purpose that
Speaker 1: we would find in other animals. Interesting. Uh so, so
Speaker 1: has Danzig never commented on why he's got long finger nails?
Speaker 1: He doesn't say anything about it. I do not know
Speaker 1: it's possible that he did. Uh and I'm just I'm
Speaker 1: just not aware of it. I can't say that. I've
Speaker 1: read a lot of interviews with the man over the years. Uh,
Speaker 1: but I imagine that the case there was that he
Speaker 1: did it because it looked cool and creepy, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like, uh, something out of a nos Ferato movie. Right.
Speaker 1: Do you see so many and so many different types
Speaker 1: of vampires and ghouls and creeps that have have long nails,
Speaker 1: long tapering nails, and it, you know, it looks creepy
Speaker 1: and cool. I would say the ultimate example of that
Speaker 1: for me is the way klaus Kinski looks in Werner
Speaker 1: Hurtzog's knows Ferrato, where he's got long creepy nails. Oh
Speaker 1: it's it's it's spine tingling. Oh yeah, those are some
Speaker 1: Those are some wonderfully nasty fingernails. I had to reacquaint
Speaker 1: myself look up a picture that has been a while
Speaker 1: since I've I've seen it, though, I guess the original
Speaker 1: Nosferato also had some pretty creepy nails, and the Willem
Speaker 1: Dafoe version also pretty gastly. Oh Shadow of a Vampire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great movie. Be Actually, I feel like that
Speaker 1: that is a sort of forgotten Jim. I need to
Speaker 1: revisit it or shadow Did I say Shadow of of Vampire?
Speaker 1: Shadow of the Vampire? I can't remember what the article is,
Speaker 1: but it's the one with Willem Dafoe as Max Shrek
Speaker 1: and it's it's fantastic. Yeah, I want to say it's
Speaker 1: the same director who had done that really weird art
Speaker 1: film Begotten prior to that, which which I don't think
Speaker 1: there's really any comparison to be made between the short
Speaker 1: film and in the vampire film, but I don't interesting
Speaker 1: bit of film trivia. Nonetheless, I never saw that one. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry we're here on vampires, and I know we're
Speaker 1: out of time, so we gotta wrap up part one.
Speaker 1: But Vampires is the perfect lead in to next time,
Speaker 1: where we're gonna be talking about corpses and mythology and
Speaker 1: magic and religion, all surrounding beliefs about nails. That's right,
Speaker 1: so be sure to uh tune back in. I guess
Speaker 1: this will be Thursday. We will continue our discussion of
Speaker 1: fingernails in the mean time, if you would like to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us, so we'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. Obviously, you all have fingernails, or at least
Speaker 1: you've had them. At some point. Uh. The same goes
Speaker 1: for your toe nails. You have a useful information about
Speaker 1: this topic, you have experiences, you have you have injuries, uh,
Speaker 1: you have fighting experience, etcetera. All these things that you
Speaker 1: might wish to share whether us and we would like
Speaker 1: to hear from you. Uh. Likewise, just another reminder that
Speaker 1: if you use the Facebook, there is a Facebook group
Speaker 1: for our show. It is the Stuff to Bow your
Speaker 1: Mind discussion module, which you can uh you know, it
Speaker 1: has to be invited to however it works. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that basically we're not active on any real social
Speaker 1: media account out there, but there is a fair amount
Speaker 1: of activity in that one little place, so I encourage
Speaker 1: you to check it out if you wish. In the
Speaker 1: meantime you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Bowl your Mind, check out some of these past
Speaker 1: topics of discussion. You can find us wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcast and wherever that happens to be. We just
Speaker 1: asked that you rate, review and subscribe you thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback from this episode or any other to suggest shopic
Speaker 1: for the future, just to say hello. You can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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