Listener Questions #23

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about fingerprints, particle beam accidents, tickles and yawns! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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• 1:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are fingerprints actually all unique? Are we sure they never change? I'm not contemplating committing a crime, I just find it strange.

• 1:22Daniel Whiteson?

  A Russian man was once bitten by a particle beam. If you injected a parasite into CERN, would it turn into steam?

• 1:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I read about someone yawning. Now I have to do it too. I promise I'm not bored. It has nothing to do with you.

• 1:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Being tickled is something I absolutely hate, so then why do I laugh when it makes me so irate?

• 1:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 1:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now I'm gonna spend the whole time yawning.

• 2:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I really don't like being tickled.

• 2:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weider-Smith. I study parasites and space and I don't mind being tickled. It's okay, I guess.

• 2:19Daniel Whiteson?

  But I do love giving a good tickling, which makes me a terrible hypocrite, I know.

• 2:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, one of, one of the great joys in my life is that my son loves being tickled and he has the greatest smile and the best laugh. And I know that I'm biased, but, uh, but like, he wakes up in the morning and the very first thing he says is, "Tickle." Like, just while, while he's getting his, like, brain together and clearing the cobwebs, he knows he wants tickles already. And so he always wakes up asking for tickles and, uh, and I love that.

• 2:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I don't like being tickled, but I love the idea of tickling, you know, that it shows you this deep, like, mind-body connection. Somebody just has to, like, wiggle their fingers at somebody who's ticklish and they erupt in laughter. It's crazy, right? It shows you that, like, our minds and our bodies are deeply, deeply connected.

• 3:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. And, and we can even just say words to our son that imply we're about to tickle him and he'll start, like, squirming and giggling because he knows it's coming. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's fun.

• 3:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And what tickles me the most are the puzzles of the universe, how everything works, what it's all made of and how it all comes together. And I love being tickled by our listeners' curiosity, everything that you all wonder about the universe.

• 3:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're so good at that, Daniel. All right. And so let's, let's jump right to our first question. And our first question is a question that we got from our amazing Discord community. We have the best moderators on that community. And if you want to join us, you can find an invitation to our Discord group at danielandkelly.org. And we would love to see you there. So let's go ahead and hear our first question from AlberioBX.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. This is AlberioBX, but you guys can just call me Drew if it's easy for yous. I was thinking about the human body. And how much it changes over the course of its lifetime. I even heard a statistic that every seven years or so, the human body, you have a completely new set of cells. I don't know if that's true or not, but I hear that statistic quite often. However, from womb to tomb, our fingerprints remain the same. I was wondering why that is. Why is it that our fingerprints never change? Is that something that's encoded in our DNA? If I get a paper cut in my finger, does the DNA tell the cells how to regrow into that fingerprint? I was also wondering,

• 4:44Speaker 04

  does everyone truly have a unique set of fingerprints? Is it possible to be born where you have a matching right index finger with a completely random person? What are the chances that you might actually have the same fingerprint to someone else? Very curious about that. Thank you very much in advance. I'm looking forward to hearing your answer. I love the podcast and shout out to the Discord community.

• 5:12Daniel Whiteson?

  This is awesome because I have the same question. I've always wondered this. And now we have an excuse for Kelly to go do a bunch of research and answer it.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Yay.

• 5:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  What I love is that I hadn't actually ever wondered what, why, what forms my fingerprints? Why do they form? But then we get so many questions from our listeners where I'm like, oh yeah, why does that happen? So like props to y'all for being way more curious than I am and for helping me get the answers to these sorts of questions.

• 5:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So let's start with the basics, like why fingerprints? Why do I even have them? Why aren't our fingers smooth?

• 5:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we think that we have fingerprints because the extra surface area that they create helps us grip things better.

• 5:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Really?

• 5:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  So like those extra ridges help make it easier for us to hang on to things. Or maybe those extra ridges give us like more surface area that can connect with things. And so we have a higher sensitivity because we're essentially touching things with more skin. I don't think we actually have this answer like locked in. I wouldn't bet my life on that answer. But our great ape ancestors also have fingerprints. So this is like an ancient thing that came about a while ago.

• 6:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I'm not deeply impressed by these ideas. I mean, they sound to me like reasonable first hypotheses as you're investigating it. But, you know, haven't people done experiments like, does it actually give you better grip? Does it actually make you more sensitive? Do we know any of that?

• 6:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I didn't read about that part for very long. I mostly read about why we, how we got our fingerprints. That's a great question, though. And if you aren't unconvinced by these answers, wait until you get to yawning and tickling later on in the show.

• 6:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  The answers only become less convincing as we go today.

• 6:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, this just shows you how deep a puzzle all of biology really is. There are so many amazing mysteries to solve and mysteries along the way. All right, so then if we don't really know why we have them, do we understand how they form?

• 7:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes-ish. So, okay, all right, so here we go.

• 7:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so while we are fetuses and we're starting to develop, this is very early in like the first, first couple of months, like first trimester, maybe start of the second.

• 7:30Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I'm a fetus, I'm floating around.

• 7:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, floating around in an amniotic sac. And your fingers on the tips, you get these things called Vohler pads. And when I saw a picture, they remind me of like the sticky suction cuppy bottoms on Gecko feet.

• 7:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool.

• 7:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so you get these, like, you've got these pads. And these pads are going to eventually sort of become part of the rest of your finger. And so they will like sort of get integrated into your skin. And so the shape and location of these pads on your fingers are what's ultimately going to determine whether you get whorls, loops, or arches, the three main shapes of fingerprints.

• 8:15Daniel Whiteson?

  But how big are the pads relative to like the tip of your finger? I was originally imagining like one big pad, but it sounds like it's a lot of little pads?

• 8:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, so each finger has one big pad.

• 8:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So then how did the location of the pads or the orientation or something determine whether you're getting loops or whorls?

• 8:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I'm gonna get there, my friend.

• 8:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 8:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Give me a second.

• 8:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. The background with these pads, though, is that where you have these pads and their shape is sort of genetically determined. So this is why, and we'll get to why in just a second, but this is why families sometimes have similar mane shapes for their fingerprints. I didn't know that either till I started researching this, but they will still have unique fingerprints.

• 8:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 9:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 9:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So you could like deduce familial relationships just from fingerprints?

• 9:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't, it is the case that you can look at the fingerprints of family members and they will be similar, but I don't know that that is a reliable enough indicator that you could say, oh, Daniel's brother committed the crime because we've been able to see Daniel's fingerprint and this fingerprint looks really similar.

• 9:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I was wondering if anybody had ever used them for like paternity tests, like, that can't be my baby. It's got whorls and I've got loops or something.

• 9:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I think it's not quite that informative.

• 9:31Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Interesting.

• 9:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. It's more like a neato fact that your family is like a whirl family instead of an arch family or something like that.

• 9:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't even know. I gotta go find out in a minute.

• 9:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, there you go. And this got, had me spending a lot of time looking at my fingers, but uh.

• 9:46Daniel Whiteson?

  I was just staring at my own fingers. All right. So tell us how they form.

• 9:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So your voler pads, they're on the tips of your fingers and they are becoming part of your skin. So your skin, let's talk about three layers. You've got the epidermis, which I'm just going to call the outer layer. You've got an inner layer called the dermis and I'm going to call that the bottom layer. And in between the epidermis and the dermis, you have this middle layer, transition layer that we call the basal layer, but I'm just going to call it middle.

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  The middle one is called the basal layer. All right.

• 10:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, but middle from here on out.

• 10:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. I'm going to hold my fire here on criticizing biological names.

• 10:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  That would be fair. I mean, it's basal to the epidermis, but all right, anyways.

• 10:32Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we have like a skin sandwich. Let's just review. We got the dermis in the bottom, the middle layer, and then the epidermis on the outside.

• 10:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Right.

• 10:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 10:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the bottom layer, the dermis, starts replicating much quicker than the top layer. And as it's replicating more and more quickly, that middle layer starts to buckle. And when that middle layer buckles, that's what's going to form the ridges that you see on the outside of your finger. And the location of the voler pad.

• 11:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Impacts where those buckles happen because it's sort of like, you know, bending around that voler pad. And so like where your voler pad is located, any like differences in its shape between individuals will impact if you get the whirls and stuff like that.

• 11:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So the bottom layer is growing faster and the top layer isn't. So the top layer like cracks and so essentially the top of your skin is sort of like incomplete. And you can sort of see down into the other layers. Is that right?

• 11:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Kind of. So, so the bottom layer is replicating like crazy. And then the middle layer is the one that's buckling. And that's going to stay buckled essentially, the way it's forming right while you're a fetus for the rest of your life. And then from that buckled layer, your epidermis emerges and it reflects the buckles that are happening in that middle layer.

• 11:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And why are the buckles often in lines? Why aren't they like more in patches or blobs?

• 11:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So a couple of things. First, I think that has to do with the way that they grow around the voler pad. But then also the lines sort of show up in a pattern. So first they start, so they start growing in the center of your finger. And then some of the lines start emerging on the tip of your finger and then heading towards the middle. And then where the top of your finger bends for your first joint, there's lines starting there too, and more moving towards the center. So there's three spots the lines start, the middle, the top and the bottom. And the top is moving towards the bottom and the bottom's moving towards the top.

• 12:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And it sounds like there's some sort of stochasticity here, like the same fetus, if you ran the experiment 10 times, might end up with slightly different fingerprints.

• 12:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, so this reminded me of when you were talking about how snowflakes are formed. And you were talking about how as you move through a cloud, the little micro features of the climate, so like it's a little bit colder here, a little bit wetter here, like that creates a unique fingerprint. So your fingerprint apparently can be impacted by things like how thick the amniotic fluid is while your fingerprints are forming. And so there's a bunch of randomness at this stage that impacts the details of your fingerprint. And the way these details play out are things like when lines come together and they form, do they join? Or do they kind of form a branching pattern? So you've got like short ridges that are just kind of like a little bit of a line

• 13:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  that doesn't really go anywhere, or an island, which is just like a little spot where there was a buckle and it also doesn't really form a line like you would expect. And there are many, many, many of these unique features on our fingers. And so, looking at places where your finger forks, or where you have an island, and then looking at the relative location of those features relative to one another, creates so many possible combinations that there's more combinations than there are humans on this planet.

• 13:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Probably a lot more, right?

• 13:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, a lot more, a lot more. And so, that's why every fingerprint is unique. I suppose it's not impossible that two people could have nearly the same finger. It's just really vanishingly small probability that even within your family, when you've got the same like, patterns of loops and whirls, that all of this would come together in the exact same way is statistically improbable.

• 14:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like rolling a die with a zillion sides twice and getting the same number.

• 14:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, exactly.

• 14:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 14:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 14:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, so your fingerprints really are a unique identifier.

• 14:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yeah, they're really unique identifiers. And then the listener wanted to know, why don't our fingerprints ever change? And the reason they never change is because, you know, that pattern is emerging from these buckles and those buckles in this middle layer will always stay the same as you get older. And so, if you cut your finger, it will grow back and reflect those buckles that happened while you were a fetus. So, I mean, if you like, cut your finger open and it, you know, grows back in between, like, maybe you'll have a cut in the middle of your fingerprint or something like that, if you have a scar there. But in general, any minor cuts that you have, your skin should grow back with the same pattern, reflecting what's happening in the like, buckled layer below.

• 15:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So, for anybody out there who's pregnant, how far into the pregnancy are the fingerprints determined? And does it happen like, over a day? Or a moment? Or like, a week? Or does it depend on what they're eating for dinner?

• 15:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think it happens between 10 and 16-ish weeks post-conception. So, it takes a little while. It's not like you can have a spicy burrito if you really want whirls, and a bag full of carrots if you'd like a child with arches. You don't, you don't have that kind of control.

• 15:41Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's really amazing to hear that your fingerprints are essentially determined when you're pretty small. I mean, 10 to 16 weeks, you're like, what, the size of a walnut or an orange or something?

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pretty small. Yeah, I don't, I don't know exactly. I definitely, when I was pregnant, had that app that every week would like pop up a new fruit to be like, "Your daughter is a mango now." I was like, "Oh, delicious."

• 16:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I remember when our firstborn son was a lentil and Katrina was like, "Oh, our little lentil."

• 16:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's so cute. I think Peanut popped up once and we've called our daughter Peanut ever since. And I don't think that's her favorite thing.

• 16:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Funny how some of those things are cute and affectionate, but nobody wants to get like called an avocado.

• 16:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You banana.

• 16:30Daniel Whiteson?

  My little grapefruit.

• 16:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 16:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it just doesn't work. Just doesn't work. Some fruits are more emotional than others. All right. Fascinating. Well, thank you very much for that answer. Let's send it back to Al Bureau and see if we have answered their question.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Wow. Thank you so much, Kelly, for the insightful answer. And thank you, Daniel, for asking such insightful questions. It's mind blowing to me that genetics does play a role slightly in determining what type of fingerprint you have. But what's even more mind blowing to me is that the condition of the womb plays a role in the type of fingerprint you have. To me, that makes it obvious that everyone's going to have a unique fingerprint because statistically, what are the chances of replicating everything perfectly? It's not going to happen, not naturally at least. So that answers that question perfectly. Thank you guys so much for the insightful answers. I really, really appreciate it and I am looking forward to the rest of the episode.

• 17:37Speaker 01

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• 19:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners today. Here's a question from a listener who's curious about particles and parasites.

• 19:31Speaker 08

  Hey, Daniel and Kelly. I love the show and I love that biology has been getting some coverage lately. In the episode about leeches, Daniel mentioned that he's never been bitten by a particle, but I heard about an incident where a Russian physicist sort of was attacked by particles when he got part of his head accidentally in the proton beam of his particle accelerator. And he lived to tell about it. So to me, this brings up so many unanswered questions, such as, are these beams just in open air so that you can go up and touch them? What do they look like? And does CERN have a proton beam

• 20:11Speaker 08

  that's similar to this? And what color would it be? And if you went and opened up the hatch at CERN that I assume you have, and you just like reached in there and grabbed the beam, what would happen? Or if you tried to intercept it with different materials, like you put glass in front of it, or tried to reflect it with a mirror, or stuck some of Kelly's parasites in there with a long pair of tweezers, what would happen in those cases? Thanks for considering my question. And please don't let this physics question stop you from talking about parasites. Thanks.

• 20:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that this question managed to sort of shoehorn parasites in. It maybe wasn't a natural melding of topics, but anytime parasites can be worked into a conversation, I'm game. So thank you, Ryan.

• 20:59Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is a great opportunity to tell a really fascinating story in the history of particle physics, and also a tragedy, of course. This is not an apocryphal story. There really was a Russian physicist who was zapped by a particle beam. 1978, Anatoly Burgoski was working at the U70 accelerator in Protivino. U70 was called because it was able to accelerate protons up to about 70 gig electron volts, which at the time was really impressive. These days, our accelerators are much more powerful. So 1 gig electron volt is about the energy in the mass of a proton. So 70 gig electron volts means

• 21:40Daniel Whiteson?

  you've given it kinetic energy 70 times its mass, which is a lot. But the Tevatron, where I got my PhD, and which for a while was the highest energy collider in the world, is almost 2,000 GEV. So much more powerful and the Large Hadron Collider is almost 14,000 GeV. So these days, colliders are much more powerful than back in the 70s, but this still was a lot of energy for a person to absorb.

• 22:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so whatever we're about to hear happened to Anatoly, we could imagine it would be way worse if it happened to someone today.

• 22:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And so what happened was Anatoly was working on the collider and people often imagine that he like stuck his head into the beam. And I think that's part of Ryan's question is like, how do you even get into the beam? How does that even happen? Like, isn't there a pipe there? And it's a good question because that's not really possible. Usually these beams are in vacuum because you want the beams to go fast and to not collide with air particles. And so usually make a beam pipe and pump it down to near vacuum. For example, at CERN, the beam pipe is like 10 to the minus 11 atmosphere. And that's because we want just proton-proton collisions, not proton-air collisions at some random place. And so that also was happening at the U-70 singatron. But sometimes you take the beam and you bend part of it off to slam it into some other

• 22:58Daniel Whiteson?

  kind of target. Maybe you want to smash it into some crystals or you want to hit it into some high-density target and look for other kinds of interactions. And so they also had this feature at the U-70 singatron is like a beam extraction channel where the beam is like bent off and directed at a target. And so the beam was supposed to be off and he was like working on the target and he was leaning over some equipment and the safety mechanism, which prevents the beam from coming on when people are working on it, failed. And so the beam cranked back up and some of it shot out this beam extraction channel. And instead of hitting the target, it went right through his head.

• 23:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 23:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, bad news.

• 23:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did he immediately know that that had happened?

• 23:41Daniel Whiteson?

  He immediately knew. He described it as seeing a flash brighter than a thousand suns, but weirdly felt no pain, right? He didn't like immediately feel burned, though he did actually get burns on his face, right? What happens when particles impact flesh is they deposit a lot of energy. Basically, it's cooking you, right? We talked about this in our episode about how particle beams can cure. Cancer, if you deposit energy just into the tumor, for example, you're cooking the tumor. And proton beams are really good for this because they tend to deposit their energy at only a certain depth. Depending on their energy, they either dump it one centimeter in or two centimeters in or four centimeters in. So you don't have to like irradiate a whole tube of flesh. You can actually just irradiate a little deep blob.

• 24:24Daniel Whiteson?

  So protons are the particle of choice for treating cancer. Anatoly didn't have cancer, but he did get this proton beam through his face. And everyone expected him to die, basically. They took him to the hospital to say like, okay, let's watch what happens to see when somebody dies from protons. But he didn't. He recovered.

• 24:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 24:42Daniel Whiteson?

  His face was half paralyzed. He lost hearing on that one side. Amazingly, the paralyzed side of his face didn't age.

• 24:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 24:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So like one side of his face is like still smooth and the other one is getting wrinkles. I guess maybe because he like can't move it. So like the skin isn't getting wrinkled. The dude is still alive. He's like still around.

• 25:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 25:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. This happened in 1978. He was born in 42. So, you know, he's getting up there, but he's living a long life.

• 25:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  If the protons are depositing all of their energy in a very particular spot, do we know like, was it in his occipital lobe or the hippocampus? Or like, do we know what region it deposited all of its energy in?

• 25:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's actually really fascinating because proton beams we use to treat cancer typically are much lower energy, like much less than a G E V, so that they do this thing where they stop and they deposit all of their energy. So in this case, because they're so high energy, probably most of them just went through him.

• 25:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 25:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? So he didn't get the like major deposition. In that sense, a higher energy beam might be safer because his protons don't end up dumping all of their energy. But they also have a lot of energy. So even if they lose a little fraction, you're getting fried. So yeah, it probably damaged a whole tube of Russian physicist through his brain.

• 25:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yikes. He's so lucky that he's not lucky at all. He's very unlucky. But, but the fact that, I mean, based on the explanation so far, it doesn't sound like, you know, he's forgotten his loved ones or he can't move his right foot anymore. Like, it sounds like he got off pretty easy, given what he went through. I would have expected this to have been much worse.

• 26:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, apparently he still has like occasional seizures, so there are lingering brain effects, but you know, he's still being a physicist, he's got his brain mostly there, so.

• 26:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 26:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 26:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And in principle, this is something that could happen at CERN, again, not with the main beam, because there's no way to access the beam when it's running. They can't run the collider until they close the beam pipe and they pump it down to vacuum, and then they turn the collider on. But there are also fixed target experiments at CERN where they take part of the beam and they divert it off somewhere else, and they shoot it at like a dense block of material to create neutrinos or muons or something else. There's of course, a lot of safety equipment involved, but there are places where the beam is not in that beam pipe. And so in principle, one could. Now Ryan wanted to know what would happen if you stuck your eye in the beam at CERN? Okay, it would be very, very bad. It's definitely not recommended.

• 27:10Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, at CERN, we have more than 200 times as much energy per proton as in the Burgorsky accident.

• 27:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 27:17Daniel Whiteson?

  So much higher energy per proton. Also, the thing we've done at the Large Hängung Collider is we've made the beams more intense, which means a lot more protons. The beams are not like continuous, which is like proton, proton, proton, proton, proton. They come in these bunches of like 10 to the 10 protons, and you pass the bunches through each other. And the goal there is to get as many interactions as possible. So you make the bunches really tight and dense, and you pass them through each other after you focus them. So we have much higher intensity beams, like more protons per second, not just more energy per proton.

• 27:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yikes.

• 27:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And we overlap these bunches every 25 nanoseconds. So yeah, these beams are very intense and much more dangerous than what they had back in the 70s.

• 27:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So really be extra careful.

• 28:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Really be extra careful. Now, if you really are not a fan of parasites.

• 28:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, stop.

• 28:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And you really wanted to fry a parasite, or you wanted to like make a parasitologist you know uncomfortable, you could took a parasite, put it on a stick, and stick it in the beam, and yeah, there would be a lot of energy deposited into that parasite. Very quickly, you would have a roasted or toasted or something parasite.

• 28:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, there are some parasites that ought to be roasted or toasted, so I can accept, I can accept this, although it seems like an inefficient way to take out a population of parasites.

• 28:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I wouldn't mind some mosquitoes getting fried by those beams. And I wouldn't mind having like some sort of beam I could shoot at mosquitoes. I recently saw this AI which has a camera and it spots mosquitoes. And it shoots a laser at the mosquitoes, but just to identify them. So you can then go zap it. And I was like, soup that thing up, man. Fry those mosquitoes like Star Wars space based weapons to fry mosquitoes from space. I'm all into that.

• 29:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But, but then I guess you have to worry about it. Like if the mosquito is in front of your face, is it gonna, is the laser gonna hurt you if it hits you too?

• 29:07Daniel Whiteson?

  I'd rather the mosquito get fried and I get a little bit of splashback than get bitten.

• 29:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 29:13Daniel Whiteson?

  But we're gonna do a whole episode about mosquitoes pretty soon, aren't we?

• 29:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  We sure are.

• 29:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And I'm imagining that Jewish space lasers are not a part of the solution to mosquitoes.

• 29:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That wasn't on my research list. No, no, it wasn't.

• 29:27Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So let's send our answer back to Ryan and see if we have answered his question.

• 29:32Speaker 08

  Daniel, thanks for that info. I didn't know the beam could be diverted outside its normal chamber. I didn't necessarily mean that you stick your eye in the beam. More like what it would look like from the side view. I kind of imagined it looks like a laser, but I have no idea.

• 29:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, Ryan, great follow up question. And your intuition is exactly right here. The beam would look a lot like a laser, which is invisible unless you see scattered dust particles. The beam is going through a vacuum and so almost nothing gets scattered. And so it's essentially invisible.

• 30:04Speaker 08

  Thanks for the info and thanks for such a good podcast.

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• 32:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, next up, we have two questions that were sort of along a similar line. I think they were both inspired by our episode on why do we itch? And they got folks thinking about other questions. Why do we yawn? Why are we ticklish? And so let's go ahead and listen to the questions from Jude and Dylan.

• 32:22Speaker 12

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I love your show. Your recent response to the question about itching got me thinking. What causes tickling? Why do we involuntarily laugh when tickled? Is it learned behavior that becomes conditioned?

• 32:36Speaker 13

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. It's Dylan from California, and my question is about yawns. When I was younger, I heard that when you see somebody yawn and it makes you yawn, it's due to a sympathetic response somewhere in your brain. And I guess that kind of makes sense, but it doesn't really account for the fact that when I talk about, hear about, or think about yawns, it often makes me yawn. So I hope to hear what you guys have on the subject.

• 33:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, Daniel, the answer to both of these is, uh, we don't really know. So I thought I would sort of smoosh them together and tell you what we do know. And then, you know, highlights our lack of knowledge here.

• 33:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Is this going to be a very short answer?

• 33:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I try. I tried to dig pretty deep to see what we did know. So hopefully, hopefully you learned something.

• 33:23Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's start with tickling.

• 33:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 33:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Because otherwise we'll all be yawning.

• 33:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah, well, we'll end the episode on the yawn-er so that everybody can go take a nap afterwards. So did you know, Daniel, that there are two kinds of tickles?

• 33:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Only two?

• 33:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well.

• 33:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I have in my power several kinds of tickles.

• 33:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, oh, interesting. Wow. Well, scientifically, maybe you should get into this field. Scientifically, there's two. There's a knismesis. I'm sure I got that wrong, but did you want to try it? You can see it written down.

• 33:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I was gonna say knismesis, but.

• 33:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Knismesis, maybe. Sure. It's the Greek word for itching. And essentially, this is like a sort of light, feathery sensation. It actually sounds quite a bit like itching, which is to say you just sort of gently run like your fingers along the surface of somebody's skin. And it doesn't necessarily make them laugh. Maybe it feels kind of nice. It feels like maybe there's a spider walking on your skin. And so I think we suspect that the function of this kind of tickle is because it helps you identify if something is walking on your skin. It draws your attention and then you like press the spider or, you know, you brush the spider or the tick away.

• 34:36Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's different from the feeling of an itch.

• 34:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think there's a lot of overlap here. Itching is often self-initiated. So for example, we were talking about how different aspects of our immune response can make you itch. So that's something inside of your body that is resulting in an itch. This is specifically in response to external stimuli. And I think that's part of the difference, but it did seem to me while I was researching it that there's probably a lot of overlap there.

• 35:05Daniel Whiteson?

  So like a spider is crawling along the hairs in the back of your arm. That's going to make you feel a little ticklish and your finger is going to go over there and be like, yeah.

• 35:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, yep. And I'm going to spend the rest of the episode now scratching and thinking that certainly there's something crawling on me. After I get a tick on me. For the next couple of weeks, I spend the whole time being like, there's another one. And there's not another one.

• 35:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So if we're recording an episode and I see a spider crawling on your shoulder, what do you want me to do hypothetically speaking?

• 35:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, if I felt like you could identify it, if it were a black widow or a brown recluse, I'd want you to say something. Otherwise, let it go. It's probably fine. Yeah.

• 35:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I have a friendly relationship with spiders because we both hate mosquitoes. Right? So I'm like, you want that corner of my bedroom? You can have it as long as you eat any mosquito that comes near you. That's the deal.

• 35:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I in general like the spiders on my property. I think they they do a nice ecological service. I'm just a little nervous of the ones where if I get in their way, they could hurt me. But otherwise, I love having them around. And actually, our property has tons of rabid wolf spiders.

• 36:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 36:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which sounds really bad.

• 36:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  But they're not. And they're they're fine. And they they walk around on the grass. And if you go outside with a headlamp, which I do sometimes in the middle of the night, there are literally thousands of little green lights that are like reflections in the eyes of the spiders coming back at us.

• 36:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 36:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm like, oh, there's a lot of you guys out here. I'm not going to think too hard about that.

• 36:32Daniel Whiteson?

  This is the script of a horror movie.

• 36:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but you know, I like them. They they control the other kinds of insects. We're good. The rabid wolf spiders and I are good. But, okay.

• 36:41Daniel Whiteson?

  You go outside and there's thousands of little friendly spiders going, don't worry, Kelly, we're on it. We're patrolling for insects.

• 36:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I say, thanks, buddies.

• 36:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 36:52Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So tell us about the other kind of tickling.

• 36:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. The other kind of tickling. So we all know at this point to never expect that I'm going to pronounce anything correctly. So don't repeat this to anybody you want to look good in front of. I think it's gargalosis. And this is the more intense kind of tickling. This is probably the kind of tickling that Daniel is telling us he's really good at, where you're pressing down kind of hard. It's like a rhythmic motion and it makes people laugh.

• 37:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but you gotta be moving fast also, right?

• 37:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you gotta be moving pretty fast. And so we're, to be honest, not 100% sure why quickly pressing down on somebody's body results in this feeling of ticklishness and why it makes you laugh. We think pressure receptors are involved, but we don't necessarily know why when you hit pressure receptors in some part of the body, it makes you go hee hee hee. And in other parts of the body, it just kind of hurts.

• 37:48Daniel Whiteson?

  When you say, why are you saying we don't understand like the mechanism? Like, we can't explain how the signals propagate and do the thing? Or are you saying why in the sense of why does it make sense to do this? Like, evolutionarily, is this an advantage for some reason? Or the byproduct of some other system? Or is it both kinds of why?

• 38:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Both. But but but there's a couple hypotheses for why from an evolutionary perspective. So let's go ahead and chat about some of those. So one of the ideas, and I gotta say, I don't find this one super convincing, is but but it was in a lot of the papers that I read. So one of the ideas is that tickling teaches you to protect vulnerable areas. So like when your parents tickle you, they're teaching you to like tuck your arms into your side because if someone, I don't know, if someone like stuck a sword in your armpit, they could like, they could hurt you. But but I feel like there's other parts of your body that you wouldn't want to get slashed open that aren't super ticklish.

• 38:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I guess I'm just not convinced that someone tickling me would prepare me for like a lion coming and attacking. And now I'd suddenly like I'd cover my stomach so it wouldn't disembowel me because my mom gave me tickles.

• 39:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And that would definitely save you from the lion. But maybe there is something there because it does feel like you're more ticklish in like your neck area and your belly and behind your knees, like places that you're, I guess, are a little bit more vulnerable. That might be like the genesis of this idea. But yeah, I agree. It sounds like a post facto explanation.

• 39:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And how would you even test where you're more vulnerable? Like, what what does that? Like, what does that even mean? Is it like the density of blood vessels in that area? The like proximity to organs? Uh, I don't know. Anyway, that's, that's an idea. These things are hard to test. Another idea is that like rough and tumble play in general is an important thing for our species and for other great apes. And making it enjoyable is a way to ensure that we like, kind of keep doing it. And also having that enjoyable interaction produces social reinforcement that helps improve our bonds. But I feel like that gets a little confusing because some people hate being tickled. And, and so why do we laugh when we hate it?

• 40:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is that really improving our bonds? But, but I, you know, I can imagine wanting to make rough and tumble play fun so that you learn how to do it could be important.

• 40:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that makes me think of lots of other creatures that play. You know, wolves, for example, and dogs and cats play. Are they also ticklish? Do you have to be ticklish in order to enjoy play?

• 40:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know if you have to be ticklish to enjoy play, but scientists think that they've seen something that looks like tickling and looks like enjoyment of the tickles at least in great apes, cats, rats.

• 40:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Rats?

• 40:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, rats. And so this was, so I went to Bowling Green State University for my bachelor's and my masters. And one of the things that this university is known for is that in the psychology department, there was a guy who discovered that rats like to be tickled and they laugh in the like ultrasonic range. And so this was our big claim to fame, uh, Yakpanxep, I think. And yeah, and so he would like, he'd, you know, kind of tickle them and he'd have this, this thing that would pick up their sounds and then turn it into a sound that he could hear. And it sounded like they were laughing and they would come back for more. And so it seems like it was a thing that they enjoyed and they would sometimes also make this noise with each other. Like they were enjoying it when they were like, kind of wrestling and playing.

• 41:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So it wasn't just that he knew how to tickle the rats? They were also tickling each other?

• 41:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 41:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Incredible. The rat tickler.

• 41:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And one of the papers that I read, uh, pointed out that there's a fair bit of debate in the field about whether or not this is really tickling or just like. Some pleasurable, a noise that indicates pleasure and it's just like sort of enjoyment in the interaction. But great apes definitely do do tickling and babies, just like human kids, will like, you know, they'll get tickled by their mom and to ask for tickles, they'll like put their arms up in the air and expose their armpits. And as the moms get close, they'll like kind of pull them back down in anticipation. So it's very clear that like, they enjoy it, they're asking for it, and it's like a social thing.

• 42:08Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a display of affection for sure. Well, how early can people get tickled? Like, can you tickle a newborn baby?

• 42:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we don't respond to being tickled until we're about six months old.

• 42:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 42:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so there's a question now, if you don't do it right when you're born, is laughing in response to tickling innate? So like something you would do even if you didn't encounter any humans at all for a year or something?

• 42:33Daniel Whiteson?

  If you were raised by wolves, could you be tickled?

• 42:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, that's right. Unless wolves tickle and then, you know, but uh.

• 42:39Daniel Whiteson?

  If you were raised by rats, you could be tickled, it sounds like.

• 42:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah, absolutely. I, but I wouldn't recommend that.

• 42:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobody's getting an IRB for that study.

• 42:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I don't think so. And so the question, yeah, so are you born with the ability to be ticklish? Or is it something that you learn? And so one of the ideas is like, parents, when they've got babies, they'll like tickle their baby and they're laughing and smiling because they're enjoying the interaction. And so do babies learn, oh, this is when I'm supposed to be laughing and smiling. And then in the 1940s, there was an experiment that I feel like is maybe a little ethically dubious where the dad and the mom both agreed that when they tickled the baby, they were going to put a mask on their face so that the baby couldn't see their expression and they were going to not laugh. And they would laugh during other interactions with the baby, but when they tickled the baby, they

• 43:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  would not be laughing. And they were trying to see, will the baby laugh on its own?

• 43:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Who is doing these experiments on their children? Oh, my gosh.

• 43:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, right? And the 19, you know, 1940s was a different time, I guess.

• 43:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not volunteering my children for weird studies. Like, what if I'm never nice to my children? Will they still love me?

• 43:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, but your, your kid's poop has been involved in all kinds of experiments. So I don't, and you've got poop in the freezer. I don't know how high a horse you can sit on there, Daniel, but. But, but I see that in terms of like, uh, things you'd talk about with your psychiatrist, probably, you know, your dad and your mom not laughing with you when you get tickled is, is higher up there.

• 44:07Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So what did we learn by ruining this baby's life?

• 44:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  The baby did spontaneously laugh on its own at six or seven months. So it looks like laughing is innate. It's just something that we do, whether we are responding to laughing that our parents are doing or not.

• 44:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I see.

• 44:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe you could even think of it as like a reflex. When someone does this to you, you do it back. But as far as like, why we do it, we don't really know. And it's hard to study.

• 44:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I was wondering if the great ape connection was going to help us loop all the questions together, because maybe there's a connection between fingerprints and tickling. Maybe you need fingerprints for better tickling.

• 44:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. So you can get like a better grip on the belly of your baby.

• 44:51Daniel Whiteson?

  See, I'm a biologist. I can just come up with these ridiculous hypotheses.

• 44:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, then you gotta test them, Daniel. That's the next stage. It turns out that most of the research we've done has been on the first kind of tickling. We talked about the light kind that sort of, it sounds a lot like itching. But there's not a lot of research on this second kind. And part of that is because like, you know, one, some of the ways you might study this would be like, you'd put someone in an FMRI machine and then look at like what their brain is doing or something. But when you tickle someone like this, they move all around and now it's hard to get data on them.

• 45:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Y'all are missing Kelly's little dance that she does when she talks about that.

• 45:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty expressive. Should have been Italian, but, uh,

• 45:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  and then the other thing is like, you know, when you're doing an experiment, you want to make sure you're standardizing what's experienced by the people in the experiment. And so how do you standardize tickling?

• 45:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like, cause everybody responds in different ways to tickling. Some people like it harder. Some people like it lighter. Some people, it's, you know, most ticklish on their neck. Some people on their knees or something. And we really don't understand why that variability exists. And we don't really understand how to measure tickling, because some people will be like, hee hee, and some will guffaw. And like, what scale do you put those things on for like, how much someone's enjoying this?

• 46:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's not just a physical response, right? Like, you don't have to touch somebody, as you were saying. Like people's anticipation of tickling can trigger the reaction.

• 46:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. And there was actually, there was a discussion about, well, could we standardize this by having a machine that tickles people?

• 46:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  So they thought that, that maybe people-

• 46:33Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just imagining some sad person out there who has no friends and nobody's ever tickled them, like ordering a tickling machine on Amazon instead.

• 46:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so that, okay, so that might work because this, they did an experiment where they had somebody underneath a table, or something like that. And there was a person on top and the thing that they were told is that something like 50% of the time, you're going to get tickled by a robot and 50% of the time, you're going to get tickled by a person and you're not going to know which one's the person and which one's the robot. And people responded similarly to both. So even if you think you're not getting tickled by a person, you think it's a robot, you respond the same way. But, you know, it wasn't actually a person tickling them the whole time. And anyway, uh, yeah. And then, you know, like responses also depend on whether or not you know, someone, because if you don't know someone, then it's kind of creepy and you feel different about it. So it's complicated.

• 47:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I don't think I want to be tickled by a robot. No, thank you.

• 47:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, I don't, I don't feel like I'd be able to get over it. But I also wouldn't want to be in an experiment and get tickled by a stranger. There was at least one paper I read where an experiment was done where people in a tickling lab were tickling each other, which seems like a problem to me because they like probably have some expectation of for the outcomes of the experiment.

• 47:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which might impact the way they respond to the tickling. Uh, so the point is, this is hard to study.

• 48:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, what about zooming into the biology? Is it really impossible to study like on the microscopic scale? Like what's happening inside your skin and what signals are being sent?

• 48:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think it's impossible. Uh, but the papers that I read suggested that we really don't know much. So let me, let me sort of, there's a 2025 paper, uh, written by Kiltenny in Science Advances. And here's what they say. Gargalisis or tickle is one of the most trivial, yet enigmatic human behaviors. We do not know how a touch becomes ticklish.

• 48:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or why we respond to other people's tickles, but not our own.

• 48:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 48:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  No theory satisfactorily explains why touch on some body areas feels more ticklish than on others, or why some people are highly sensitive while others remain unresponsive. Gargalisis is likely the earliest trigger for laughter in life, but it's unclear whether we laugh because we enjoy it. Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Darwin theorized about tickling, but after two millennia of intense philosophical interest, experimentation remains scarce.

• 49:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 49:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that was a review written this year.

• 49:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you think experimentation is scarce because funding is thin, because it seems frivolous and unimportant, like it's not a major medical issue, it's not going to solve any problems? It's just sort of like a curiosity?

• 49:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I suspect that's part of it.

• 49:21Daniel Whiteson?

  No.

• 49:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, if I had a million dollars to give to cancer or understanding tickling,

• 49:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  I might, I think basic research is critical.

• 49:30Daniel Whiteson?

  What if tickling cures cancer?

• 49:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? Maybe.

• 49:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I mean, I think it's an important question. I hope we get more funding, but at the moment, we don't know much about it.

• 49:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, all right. All right, well, then let's turn our attention to the other mystery of human reactions, which is the yawn.

• 49:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, all right, so Daniel, out of vertebrates, how common do you think yawning is?

• 49:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Out of vertebrates? Well, I've definitely seen cats and dogs yawn. I remember my rats yawning. So we're getting pretty small. I'm guessing maybe, well, I don't know about fish. Can fish yawn? They're vertebrates. I would guess all land vertebrates yawn. How am I doing?

• 50:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're doing well, but I studied fish for my masters in my PhD, and they definitely yawned.

• 50:17Daniel Whiteson?

  They yawn?

• 50:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  They yawn, yeah. And so yawning is a stereotypical three-phase behavior where first you like open your jaw really wide, and then you kind of like contract the muscles, you close your eyes. Yep, exactly, just like. Just like that. And, and, and then your jaw sort of like passively closes. And we see this behavior throughout the vertebrates.

• 50:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 50:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's ubiquitous. And so there's, there's two kinds of yawns. There's spontaneous yawn, which is what we're going to talk about first. And then there's contagious yawning. And Dylan wanted to know a lot about contagious yawning, but let's talk about first about why we yawn at all.

• 51:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like when I started researching this, I thought I knew what the answer was going to be.

• 51:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 51:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it wasn't what I thought. So were you also, when you were a kid, told why we yawn? And if so, do you remember what you were told?

• 51:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I, I remember some not very credible explanation about getting more oxygened or something, open your mouth wider to breathe more deeply or some nonsense.

• 51:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, that's what I was told to. And there's apparently no evidence for that. People have, have looked and checked and it doesn't really work. Fetuses yawn too, which doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have to do with oxygen. But anyway, not a lot of support for that. There are some things that to me seem more like identification of correlations than explanations. And so we tend to yawn when we wake up or when we're about to go to bed. And so there's this idea that yawning has a rhythm and that yawning is part of, quote, facilitating state change and is associated with arousal. And so something about yawning helps you and not like arousal in a mommy,

• 52:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  daddy sexy way. But in a, why did I say it that way? I don't know.

• 52:10Daniel Whiteson?

  The least sexy way to say that.

• 52:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Not in a romantic sort of way, but in a, what kind of arousal are you talking about now? Like a wake yourself up kind of a way?

• 52:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. I wish I had done that differently, but you know, it was funny. So I was, I was trying, I was thinking, what is a kid friendly way to say it?

• 52:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I totally whiffed.

• 52:35Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Message received. The message received. But yawning is part of waking up because it feels to me more like people yawn when they're sleepy.

• 52:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And so I think that the point they're trying to get at is that it's a state change. So you're going from one state, like asleep, to another state, awake, or you can do it in reverse. But it's some way in which your body prepares for transitioning between these two different phases of our lives, asleep or awake. But again, to me, that seems more like there's a correlation.

• 53:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like where this happens more when you wake up or when you're about to go to sleep. But that doesn't help me understand why.

• 53:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 53:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're doing it. And I couldn't find satisfactory answers for why that facilitates the state change, especially if it's not like getting more oxygen to different parts of your body.

• 53:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's lots of studies about sleep and changes in the brain as you wake up and fall asleep. Surely somebody must have identified like neurological mechanism or basis for yawning.

• 53:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Uh, I don't know that they have. And again, so I found another review from this year, and it's not as long as the last one, I promise. And it says, existing literature has demonstrated that yawning can be attributed to various factors. However, there's currently no consensus on the primary cause of yawning. So we don't know. But.

• 53:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Look at big science protecting their central dogma, huh?

• 53:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Actually, like, this is another great example of like, scientists are happy to admit when we don't know something. And lack of consensus also means like, some people think it's A, some people think it's B, we don't really know yet. So let's keep arguing about it.

• 54:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, just want to point that out.

• 54:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Nope. Totally agree. But so there's another class that says that, uh, class of scientists that say yawning is about doing things that help you cool your brain down. And so I think this is about like the, you know, your vessels around your head get a little bit bigger when you do this and that like carries cool air or cool blood to your brain. I'm not quite sure I understand the mechanism through which this happens. But there have been some studies in animals where they have like cooled the brain region and there's been less yawning, or they've heated up the brain a little bit and there's been more yawning. So there does seem to be some correlation between the temperature

• 54:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  of the brain and how often you yawn. So maybe that is part of the answer. But then that doesn't explain why. There's a morning and an evening pattern to it. Like, is your brain like really hot right before you go to bed? And like, why would that be? I don't, I don't know.

• 55:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 55:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing.

• 55:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Incredible that we've been doing these things for thousands of years, wondering about them for thousands of years, and still, nobody knows the answer.

• 55:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know.

• 55:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Young scientists out there, there are still so many questions for you to crack.

• 55:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Totally crazy. Okay, and so then Dylan's, the second part of Dylan's question is about contagious yawns.

• 55:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 55:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we are equally clueless here. So, so there's some hypotheses that like, okay, if you look around and you see that somebody in your troop is yawning, for example, maybe, or like you're in a wolf pack and one of the wolves is yawning. That could be information to you that they're not as alert as they could be. And now you become more alert. But that doesn't really explain why you would yawn also.

• 55:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that would suggest the opposite.

• 55:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Daniel Whiteson?

  That you would not yawn when they're yawning.

• 55:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, or so, so maybe it's a coordinating behavior thing, like, oh, it's time for all of us to go to bed, so I'm going to yawn so that you know that I'm about ready to go to bed and that'll coordinate our behavior. But that also doesn't seem necessary because like, just lay down and shut your eyes. Everyone's going to be like, oh, Kelly's asleep. I guess we're going to bed. So I don't necessarily feel like you need it for synchronizing group activity or that it needs to be associated with group vigilance, but those are some hypotheses. But what's interesting is that yawning can be contagious across species too.

• 56:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 56:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So like, if you see a gorilla at the zoo yawn, you might be more likely to yawn too. And if you just hear about someone yawning, you might start yawning.

• 56:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Or if you listen to a 20 minute podcast discussion of yawning, you're going to be yawning.

• 56:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have yawned a couple of times during this conversation. So I looked at a study where they had humans watch videos of non-human animals yawning.

• 56:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 56:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, cute, I want to be in that kind of study.

• 56:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  But it did look like humans were yawning in response to like cats yawning, which makes it hard to understand like why that benefits anyone.

• 57:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so there's a lot we don't understand about yawning also.

• 57:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it's awesome that biologists try to think of these explanations, but I wonder if sometimes the answer is just like, well, your brain works in this way for some completely separate reason, and this is a byproduct of it. And it's not harmful, and it just went along for the ride evolutionarily. And it maybe is a way to figure out some other thing that's happening in your brain, but there's not necessarily some independent reason for it to exist. Do you think that's possible?

• 57:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point that applies both to yawning and to tickling. It could be a byproduct of something else. It doesn't really help us, but there's, you know, it also doesn't cost us much. So there's no reason for evolution to like, cut it out.

• 57:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Of our, you know, behavioral repertoire. And so, yeah, at the moment, both of these behaviors are just like big question marks.

• 57:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating. Wonderful. I love these question marks in science.

• 58:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and I guess I had assumed that we knew more about tickling and yawning. So thank you very much to Dylan and Jude for teaching me more about what we don't know.

• 58:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's hear if these answers tickled them or made them yawn.

• 58:15Speaker 12

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thank you for the great response. I think it was fascinating, and also I don't think it's at all frivolous. It's bothered and tantalized minds for literally millennia. They need more funding for all kinds of scientific research, including tickling. Thanks for all you do, and thanks for all the research.

• 58:34Speaker 13

  Thank you for tackling this question. It definitely tickled my curiosities to hear that even fish yawn. And I like the idea that these are simply behaviors that evolution had no reason to get rid of, so it didn't. As always, I look forward to hearing what more you have to say about this extraordinary universe.

• 58:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, thank you so much. We love getting listener questions. Please send us your questions through the Discord channel. You can send them to us by email at [email protected]. You can also send them to us through social media, though I'm slightly less likely to see them if they come through Instagram or something because I'm... Technologically deficient, but if you send it to us as an email or through Discord, we will see it.

• 59:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And even if you don't write to us with your questions, keep asking them, keep being curious about the universe.

• 59:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, all questions get an answer. Some questions end up on the show.

• 59:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks very much, everyone.

• 59:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks.

• 59:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 59:41Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 59:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 59:53Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:00:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:00:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy, write to us.

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