Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Speaker 1: Jerry's out there. Oh I'm sorry, and Dave's here in
Speaker 1: spirit too, So short Stuff you should know the short
Speaker 1: Stuff edition. Dave Bruce, No, Dave Kustan are the editor
Speaker 1: of Short Stuff, the producer. Okay, he's our, he's our
Speaker 1: Jerry for Short Stuff. No, I know, I don't. We
Speaker 1: haven't given David a lot of love on the show.
Speaker 1: I know we need to, man, he's great. Yeah, short
Speaker 1: Stuff came along and Jerry was like, yeah, don't bother
Speaker 1: me with that. Yeah, I'm time for the crew. Do
Speaker 1: I make extra money then forget it? Yeah. Man, you
Speaker 1: guys don't know Jerry like we know Jerry. What's great
Speaker 1: is she'll never hear this. You know, that's right, because yeah,
Speaker 1: Kustan will never pass this along. He's too terrified ever,
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh. So we're talking about scratching our heads
Speaker 1: when you think, which is something that I don't do.
Speaker 1: I don't even when I read this. Though there are
Speaker 1: a couple of thinking ticks that I have that could
Speaker 1: be explained, that's just not one of them, for sure.
Speaker 1: And this was one of those things where I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: is this going to be like the origin of you know,
Speaker 1: a grain of salt just gonna send me into like
Speaker 1: some sort of blind rage. I thought so at first,
Speaker 1: and then no, it turns out when you start to
Speaker 1: really look into this, because if you think about it,
Speaker 1: that's a really weird thing to do to scratch your
Speaker 1: head when you're sitting there thinking, and you might not
Speaker 1: do it. I don't do it, but we might not
Speaker 1: even know anybody who does that reliably. The thing is
Speaker 1: is it's like an idiom, that being a head scratcher.
Speaker 1: It's like a cultural thing, at least in the West,
Speaker 1: where if somebody's scratching their heads and you know they're
Speaker 1: standing in front of the chalkboard, you know that they're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out some sort of problem and they're
Speaker 1: having trouble with it, like that's just what that has
Speaker 1: to do with and they're the explanations are multitudinous, and
Speaker 1: again it seems like something you'd be that's ridiculous, and
Speaker 1: then if you stop and thinking about you're like, that
Speaker 1: actually could be right in this case. Yeah, Like if
Speaker 1: you were to take a beginning acting class and you
Speaker 1: were in there with a bunch of dumb beginning actors
Speaker 1: like I did in college. Uh and the and the
Speaker 1: professor said, the acting teacher said, all right, you're you're
Speaker 1: here's the scene. You're trying to figure out a very
Speaker 1: difficult problem. The first thing one of those dopes would
Speaker 1: do is scratch their head, because that is just a
Speaker 1: popular trope to indicate, or maybe scratch their chin something
Speaker 1: like that, which counts as part of the head, I guess,
Speaker 1: but it's it's universally a sign that you're thinking about something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't really make any sense. Is where we
Speaker 1: have said that you would do that, um and there's
Speaker 1: no definitive explanation for why, which which has really left
Speaker 1: the door open for a lot of people that to
Speaker 1: put some ideas up. One of the big ones is
Speaker 1: that it's a relic of evolution and that really what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're not like you're not, you know,
Speaker 1: helping along your thoughts. You're actually showing a form of distress,
Speaker 1: whether it's angst anger anxiety. Those are kind of the
Speaker 1: different interpretations and explanations. But the first one is that
Speaker 1: we're showing a remnant of what we used to do
Speaker 1: back in the UM. The I guess the Tuck Tuck
Speaker 1: days where somebody something made us angry, we would maybe
Speaker 1: throw our arm up and strike them or whatever. And
Speaker 1: the first explanation of this is that we we are
Speaker 1: starting to do that, like we're raising our arm out
Speaker 1: of anger, and then we stop because we are civilized now,
Speaker 1: and that ends up being like, uh, we almost kind
Speaker 1: of play it off by scratching our head. Yeah it's
Speaker 1: a little thin, but but here's the thing. This is
Speaker 1: when I was really like, oh, maybe there's a little
Speaker 1: more to this. When you see somebody who's really mad
Speaker 1: and they're trying to keep from hurting somebody, you will
Speaker 1: free quickly see that person like rubbing their forehead or
Speaker 1: rubbing the back of their neck or something like that.
Speaker 1: And what they're saying is this is some sort of
Speaker 1: like derivation of that. Yeah, yeah, I totally have seen that,
Speaker 1: and that is a real thing. Uh. There's another possible explanation.
Speaker 1: This was in a two thousand nine article for Psychology
Speaker 1: Today when a former FBI counter intelligence agent named Joe
Speaker 1: Navarro talked about being under stress, and he said our
Speaker 1: brain requires a certain amount of hand to body touching,
Speaker 1: like either handwringing or rubbing your temples or touching your
Speaker 1: lips or something. And what he's saying is is that
Speaker 1: it's a soother U. Instead of maybe a signal to
Speaker 1: an enemy, it's just you self soothing yourself through some
Speaker 1: sort of stressful or fearful situation. And there's actually some
Speaker 1: research to back that up, which I think choke. We
Speaker 1: should take a little break, collect our thoughts, and then
Speaker 1: come back and and talk more about this whole hoad scratcher.
Speaker 1: Great shot, all right, so you said that, um. The
Speaker 1: FBI agent Joe Navarro said that this is kind of
Speaker 1: like a soothing thing, like we're self soothing, Like the
Speaker 1: sense of touch can have a soothing effect on us.
Speaker 1: And if we're experiencing stress or anxiety or something, just
Speaker 1: touching yourself can can help. And supposedly because our um
Speaker 1: head is the source of this issue, our brain is,
Speaker 1: that's why we would touch our head rather than say,
Speaker 1: like our knees or something. The thing is, there is
Speaker 1: some research to back this up. Um. There was a
Speaker 1: study in two thousand and seventeen and Scientific Reports, which
Speaker 1: is a journal, and it's it watched Resus macaques um
Speaker 1: which who are sorry not sorry, and they found that
Speaker 1: the kind of the the higher on the totem pole
Speaker 1: level macaques, when they were stressed out, they might start
Speaker 1: to itch or scratch or just do something. Um and
Speaker 1: that this was taken by other maccaques who were saying
Speaker 1: maybe more aggressive as a sign of like, I'm really
Speaker 1: stressed out, so just kind of leave me alone, and
Speaker 1: they actually were left alone. Yeah, it made me think
Speaker 1: of the Seinfeld where George said, if you want people
Speaker 1: to leave you alone, look stressed out and annoyed. And
Speaker 1: there were all the times that they would walk by
Speaker 1: his office in Yankee Stadium and he was doing that.
Speaker 1: He would have his hands on his head, rubbing his temples,
Speaker 1: and people be like, you know, everyone would pass by
Speaker 1: his office and he's a versus macaque. These um, these
Speaker 1: researchers were saying that the way they interpreted that is
Speaker 1: that it tells this potential attacker, you know, one, I'm
Speaker 1: not fully stable here, so you don't know what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do, so maybe you lay off me. Or I'm
Speaker 1: super stressed that I can't possibly defend myself. There's no
Speaker 1: point in attacking me to show your dominance. I'm already
Speaker 1: already submitting here, so don't waste your energy either way.
Speaker 1: The Reese's macaques that displayed some sort of um itching
Speaker 1: or scratching behavior, sorry, scratching behavior while they were stressed
Speaker 1: out signaling they were stressed, were attacked less than those
Speaker 1: that didn't. So I like this last one a lot too. Uh.
Speaker 1: This one that you dug up displacement activity. So you've
Speaker 1: got an animal that has a couple of different options
Speaker 1: and let's say a stressful situation, uh, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: want to do either one of them, or maybe can't
Speaker 1: decide which one to perform, so it does uh what's
Speaker 1: called the displacement activity. So you've got a bird, let's say,
Speaker 1: uh that another bird comes to attack, It's like, well,
Speaker 1: should I attack back or should I just fly out
Speaker 1: of here? Uh? I'm just gonna pick up the ground instead.
Speaker 1: And um, preening might be another activity, or grooming oneself.
Speaker 1: And the theory is that these may have emerged. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a soothing physical contact, or maybe it's just a
Speaker 1: routine behavior to calm yourself down, or maybe sort of
Speaker 1: linking with that other one to throw off the person,
Speaker 1: which kind of made me think of that guy in
Speaker 1: Athens who crashed his bike that day. He had two
Speaker 1: choices was get up really quick and get my books
Speaker 1: and right out of there, and or act in a
Speaker 1: lot of pain. And he said, I'll do the third thing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna act like I'm reading a book. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he engaged in displacement activity. So there's one one last
Speaker 1: explanation that I found, and that is that people who
Speaker 1: scratch their head or you know, rub their eyes or
Speaker 1: something like that while they're thinking UM are engaged in
Speaker 1: a certain kind of UM learning mode is what it's
Speaker 1: called a dominant learning mode, and that is where we
Speaker 1: our senses are involved in the way that we think about,
Speaker 1: or recall or take in information. And so people who
Speaker 1: are tactile with their learning modes would might touch themselves,
Speaker 1: touch their their heads or something like that. UM. People
Speaker 1: who are visual learners might kind of look up in
Speaker 1: the sky or something like that. That's where you're like,
Speaker 1: you're kind of exaggerating the point of the sense, even
Speaker 1: though that sense is not giving you any information and
Speaker 1: helping along. It's almost like we just kind of revert
Speaker 1: to the sense that we're most comfortable with maybe taking
Speaker 1: information in with I'm not sure, but that's the last
Speaker 1: explanation I saw. Yeah, that's the one that really hit
Speaker 1: home for me because I am one thousand percent of
Speaker 1: visual learner. Uh. If somebody's trying to explain something like
Speaker 1: how something operates, they can talk to me untill they're
Speaker 1: blue in the face. But if I actually see it,
Speaker 1: I will understand it. And if I'm thinking of something
Speaker 1: or if I'm deep in thought, I will often like
Speaker 1: tip back in my chair and kind of look up
Speaker 1: in sky and they're saying that that's what I'm doing. Basically,
Speaker 1: you know, it makes sense. Somebody needs to teach you
Speaker 1: about percentages visually because there ain't no such thing as
Speaker 1: a thousand percent. Shut up. I have to say, Chuck,
Speaker 1: you can't see me right now, but I have never
Speaker 1: scratched my head more than I heard during this this recording.
Speaker 1: This has been brutal. Alright, well, hopefully you didn't lose
Speaker 1: too many. Um So that's it for short stuff. Everybody,
Speaker 1: me and Chuck say Audios. Stuff you should know is
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