Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions #23

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

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

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Is illegal everywhere So if you're high, just don't drive. Make a plan to get a sober ride. Because if you feel different, you drive different. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Are fingerprints actually all unique? Are we sure they never change? I'm not contemplating committing a crime.

I just find it strange. A Russian man was once bitten by a particle beam. If you injected a parasite into CERN, would it turn into steam? 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. Being tickled is something I absolutely hate.

So then why do I laugh when it makes me so irate? Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right. Now I'm going to spend the whole time yawning. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I really don't like being tickled. Hello, I'm Kelly Weider-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I don't mind being tickled. It's okay, I guess.

But I do love giving a good tickling, which makes me. me a terrible hypocrite. I know. 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, 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 I love that. 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 mind and our bodies are deeply, deeply connected. Yes. Yeah. 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, yeah, it's fun. 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. You're so good at that, Daniel. All right. And so 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 daniel nkelly.org and we would love to see you there so let's go ahead and hear our first question

from alberio bx hello daniel and kelly this is alberio bx but you guys can just call me true if it's easy a fuse 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 question 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, 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. 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 Yay. What I love is that I hadn't actually ever wondered what forms my fingerprints. Why do they form? But then we get so many questions from our listeners where I'm like, oh, yeah, what 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. So let's start with the basics like, why fingerprints? Why do I even have them? Why aren't our fingers smooth? So we think that we have fingerprints because the extra surface area that they create helps us grip things better. Really? 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 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. 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, having people done experiments, like, does it actually give you better grip? Does it actually make you more sensitive?

Do we know any of that? I didn't read about that part for very long. I mostly read about how we got our fingerprints. That's a great question, then. And if you're unconvinced by these answers, wait until you get to yawning and tickling later on in the show. The answers only become less convincing as we go today. 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? Yes-ish. So, okay, all right, so here we go. Yes-ish. All right, so while we are fetuses, and we're starting to develop, this is very early in like the first couple months, like first trimester, maybe start of the second. All right. I'm a fetus. I'm floating around. Yep, floating around in an amniotic sack. And your fingers on the tips, you get these things called voler pads. And when I saw a picture, they remind me of like the sticky suction cup bottoms on gecko feet. Cool. And so when you get this.

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 whirls, loops, or arches, the three main shapes of fingerprints. But how big are the pads relative to like the tip of your finger. I was originally imagining like one big pad, but sounds like it's a lot of little pads. No, so each finger has one big pad. Yeah. So then how did the location of the pads or the orientation or something determine whether you're getting loops or warals? Well, I'm going to get there, my friend. Okay. Give me a second. All right. The background with

these pads, though, is that where you have these pads in 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 main shapes for their fingerprints. I didn't know that either until I started researching this, but they will still have unique fingerprints. Okay. Okay. So you could like deduce familial relationships just from fingerprints? 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. Well, I was wondering if anybody had ever used them for like paternity tests. Like that can't be my baby. It's got whirls and I've got loops or something.

No, I think it's not quite that informative. All right. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's more like a needo fact that your family is like a whirl family instead of an arch family or something like that. I don't even know. I've got to go find out in a minute. Okay, well, there you go. And this got had me spending a lot of time looking at my fingers. Exactly. I was just staring at my own fingers. All right. So tell us how they form. 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. The middle one is called the basal layer. All right.

Yes. But middle from here on out. Okay, I'm going to hold my fire here on criticizing biological names. That would be fair. I mean, it's basal to the epidermis. But, all right, anyway. 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. Yes. Right. Okay. So the bottom layer, the dermis, starts replicating much quicker than the top layer. Oh. 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.

Mm-hmm. And the location of the voler pad 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 whorls and stuff like that. So the bottom layer is growing faster, and the top layer isn't, so the top layer like cracks, and so essentially the topic of your skin is sort of, like, incomplete, and you can sort of see down into the other layers. Is that right? Kind of. 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. And why are the buckles often in lines? Why aren't they like more in patches or blobs? So a couple 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 line start, the middle, the top, and the bottom. And the top is moving towards the bottom and the bottom's moving towards the top. And it sounds like there's some sort of stochasticity here, like the same fetus. If you ran the experience, in 10 times might end up with slightly different fingerprints. 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 detail. 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 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. Probably a lot more, right? 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 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.

It's like rolling a dye with a zillion sides twice and getting the same number. Yes, exactly. Right. Wow. So your fingerprints really are a unique identifier. Yes. Yeah. They're really unique identifiers.

And then the listener wanted to know, why don't our fingerprint? prints 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, you're saying, you're skin should grow back with the same pattern, reflecting what's happening in the like buckled layer

below. 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 depending on what they're eating for dinner? 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 have that kind of control. 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? Pretty small. Yeah, 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, it's delicious. I remember when our firstborn son was a lentil. And Kachina was like, Oh, our little lentil. 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. Funny how some of those things are cute and affectionate, but nobody wants to get, like, called an avocado. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. You banana. My little grapefruit. That's right. 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 of that answer. Let's send it back to Al Biro and see if we have answered their question. 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 and the type of fingerprints 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. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast. Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, The Trey to My Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby. Why would I bring her a cardboard baby? I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all. When he found out Trey's shortcomings

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Listen to sacred lessons as part of the Maikultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If one of us wins, we all win. I'm Ashley Reifeld, and I'm the host of the women's skateboarding podcast. Good luck with that. Good luck with that is a skateboarding podcast that is part cultural record, part news brief, mostly group therapy, and a place to talk about the past, present,

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because we want to share our experience of existing in an industry that wasn't always built for everyone. So listen to good luck with that on iHeart Radio Act, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel. If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast?

When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast. some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 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. I love that this question managed to sort of shoehorn parasites in. It maybe wasn't a natural melding of topics. But any time, Parasites can be worked into a conversation of game. So thank you, Ryan. 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 Protvino. U70 was called because it was able to accelerate protons up to about 70 giga electron volts, which at the time was really impressive. These days, our accelerators are much more powerful. So one giga electron volt is about the energy in the mass of a proton. So 70 giga electron volts means you've given it kinetic energy 70 times its mass, which is a lot. But the Tevotron, where I got my Ph.D., in 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. 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. Exactly. And so what happened was Anatoly was working on the collider, and people often imagine that he 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-proton collisions, not proton air collisions at some random place. And so that also was happening at the U70 synchrotron. but sometimes you take the beam and you bend part of it off to slam it into some other 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 U70s synchrotron 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. Oh, no. Yeah, bad news. Did he immediately know that that had happened?

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. So protons are the particle of choice for treating cancer. And it totally 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. His face was half paralyzed. He lost hearing on that one side. Amazing. Interestingly, the paralyzed side of his face didn't age. What? 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.

What? 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. 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?

Well, it's actually really fascinating because proton beams we used to treat cancer typically are much lower energy, like much less than a GEV, 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. Okay. Right. So he didn't get the, like, major deposition.

In that sense, a higher energy beam might be safer because these 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. Yikes. He's so lucky that he's not lucky at all. He's very unlucky. 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.

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 yeah, it's incredible. 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

the beam and they diverted off somewhere else and they should have 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. It would be very, very bad. It's definitely not recommended. I mean at CERN we have more than 200 times as much energy per proton as in the Bergorsky accident. Wow. So much higher energy per proton.

Also, the thing we've done at the Large Ageon Collider is we've made the beans 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. Yikes. 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. So really be extra careful. Really be extra careful. Now, if you really are not a fan of parasites and you really wanted to fry a parasite, or you

want to, like, make a parasitologist you know uncomfortable. You could take 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. 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. 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. But then I guess you have to worry about it. Like if the mosquito is in front of your face, is it going to, is the laser going to hurt you if it hits you too?

I'd rather the mosquito get fried, and I get a little bit of splashback than get bitten. All right. But we're going to do a whole episode about mosquitoes pretty soon, aren't we? We sure are. And I'm imagining that Jewish space lasers are not a part of the solution to mosquitoes. That wasn't on my research list. No. No, it wasn't.

All right. So let's send our answer back to Ryan and see if we have answered his question. 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. 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. Thanks for the info, and thanks for such a good podcast. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The most anticipated guest from season three is here, the tray to my Charlotte. Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments. He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby. Why would I bring her a cardboard baby? I was literally, I was like,

this doesn't track for me at all. When he found out Trey's shortcomings... I'm kind of excited at talking about, you know, I think he's a guy spends time in Central Park, you know, he's probably, you know, he'll be some surgery stuff, you know, and I was like, all this kind of stuff going on, and they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine.

And they said, but he's impotent. And I was like, he's impotent. And why he chose not to return to him just like that. They came and presented an idea, and I was like, I get, I see it. It's so kind of a one joke. idea you don't want to miss this listen to are you a charlotte on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for 25 years i've explored what it means to heal not just for

myself but alongside others i'm mike delarocha this is sacred lessons a space for reflection growth and collective healing what do you tell men that are hurting right now everything's going to be okay on the other side, you know, just push through it. And, you know, ironically, the root of the word spirit is breath. Wow. Which is why one of the most revolutionary acts that we can do as peoples just breathe. Next to the wound is their gifts. You can't even find your gifts unless you go through the wound.

That's the hard thing. You think, well, I'm going to get my guess. I don't want to go through all that. You've got to go through the wounds you're laughing. Listening to other people's near-death experiences, and it's all they say. In conclusion, love is the answer. Listen to Sacred Lessons as part of the My Goutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. Lines and Times with Spencer Graves on the IHart Radio app is a podcast designed for hunters and fishermen to enjoy success. I like the idea of like, hey, put me on a big deer. You know, hey, there's a big deer out here. He's doing this. Be looking for this deer. But I also love doing it.

on my own. I love going out there and saying, running my cameras. I love patterning the deer. I like showing up at the right time, checking the wind, knowing what stand I need to be in. And then whenever it all comes together and it happens, that's the most satisfying thing ever. So when you do it on your own, it's like, I then can hang my hat. But if I had somebody say, hey, pull up on these dots and catch them right here and you're going to win. And then when I go win, it's like, yeah, that's cool. I won the tournament. The ultimate goal, it's done, but it's like, dude, when you find them and you make

them bike, that's the puzzle. I love it. Listen to Lines and Tines with Spencer Graves on the IHard Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If one of us, wins, we all win. I'm Ashley Reifeld, and I'm the host of the women's skateboarding podcast. Good luck with that.

Good luck with that is a skateboarding podcast that is part cultural record, part news brief, mostly group therapy, and a place to talk about the past, present, future of women and gender expansive skateboarding. This week, me and my co-host, Nora Vasconcelos and Alex White, we have Fabiana Delfino on the show, a professional skateboarder from Florida, whose grit was forged in a family of athletes. Tune in to hear how she broke into the boys club, what it takes to be pro, and why just being grateful you're here shouldn't be the price

of entry. Maybe the industry thinks that we just started skating five years ago, because that's when they maybe started paying attention. It's a no-fluff conversation about putting in the years, stacking clips and receipts and still having to prove your worth while the industry catches up. You break down the door, sick now like hold the door for everyone. We created good luck with that because we want to share our experience of existing an industry that wasn't always built for everyone. So listen to good luck with that on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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.

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 a behavior that becomes conditioned? 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. Well, Daniel, the answer to both of these is, we don't really know. And so I thought I would sort of smooosh them together and tell you what we do know. And then, you know, highlights our lack of knowledge here. Is this going to be a very short answer? No, I tried to dig pretty deep to see what we did know. So hopefully you learn something. All right.

Well, let's start with tickling because otherwise we'll all be yawning. That's right. Yeah. We'll end the episode on the yawner so that everybody thinks. go take a nap afterwards. So did you know, Daniel, that there are two kinds of tickles? Only two? Well.

I have, in my power, several kinds of tickles I use. Oh, oh, interesting. Wow. Well, scientifically, maybe you should get into this field. Scientifically, there's two. There's a chnismessus. I'm sure I got that wrong. But did you want to try it?

You could see it written down? I was going to say chnismis, but. Kynismesis, but. 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. But it's different from the feeling of an itch. 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. 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's going to go over there and be like, yeah. 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 weeks, I spend the whole time being like, there's another one and there's not another one. 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? 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. 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. Yeah. No, I mean, I in general like the spiders on my property. I think 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, which sounds really bad. But they're not. And they're fine. And 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. And I'm like, oh, there's a lot of you guys out here. I'm not going to think too hard about that. This is the script of a horror movie. Yeah, but you know, I like them. They control the other kinds of insects. We're good.

The rabid wolf spiders and I are good. But okay. 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. And I say, thanks, buddies. Okay. All right. So tell us about the other kind of tickling.

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 gargalesis. And this is the more intense kind of tickling. This is probably the kind of tickling that Daniel is telling us who's really good at, where you're pressing down kind of hard. It's like a rhythmic motion and it makes people laugh. Yeah. But you've got to be moving fast also, right? Yeah, you got to 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 he-h-h-h-h-h-and in other parts of the body it just kind of hurts. 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? Both. 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 is. And I got to say, I don't find this one super convincing. 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 I feel like there's other parts of your body that you wouldn't want to get slashed open that aren't super. super ticklish. 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 disembow me because my mom gave me tickles. 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. Yeah, and how would you even test where you're more vulnerable? Like, 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? I don't know. Anyway, 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 enjoy. 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 so why do we laugh when we hate it? 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. 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? 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, sharks. Yeah, rats. And so this was, so I went to Bowling Green State University for my bachelor's and my master's, 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, Yacht Pank's step, I think. And yeah, and so he would like, he'd, you know, kind of

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

Wow. Incredible. The rat tickler. And one of the papers that I read 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. It's a display of affection for sure. Well, how early can people get tickled? Like, can you tickle a newborn baby?

So we don't respond to being tickled until we're about six months old. 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. If you were raised by wolves, could you be tickled? Yes, that's right. Unless wolves tickle and then, you know. If you were raised by rats, you could be tickled, it sounds like. That's right.

Yeah, absolutely. But I wouldn't recommend that. Nobody's getting an IRB for that study. 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 would not be laughing. And they were trying to see, will the baby laugh on its own? Who is doing these experiments on their children? Oh, my gosh. I know, right? And in the 1940s was a different time, I guess. I'm not volunteering my children for weird studies. Like, what if I'm never nice to my children?

Will they still love me? Yeah, well, but 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 I see that in terms of like 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 higher up there. All right. So what did we learn by ruining this baby's life?

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. I see. 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.

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. Oh, yeah. So you can get like a better grip on the belly of your baby. See, I'm a biologist. I can just come up with these ridiculous hypotheses. Well, then you've got to test them, Daniel.

That's the next stage. I see. 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 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, 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. Y'all are missing Kelly's little dance that she does when she talks about that.

Yeah. I'm pretty expressive. Should have been Italian. But. And then the other thing is, like, you know, when you're doing an experience. 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? Because everybody responds in different ways to tickling. Some people like it harder. Some people like it lighter. Some people

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, he-he and some will guffaw. And like, what's scale? do you put those things on for, like, how much someone's enjoying this? 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. Yeah, right.

And there was actually, there was a discussion about, well, could we standardize this by having a machine that tickles people? And so they thought that maybe people. 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. Well, so that, okay, so that might work because 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 was actually a person tickling them the whole time. And I don't know. Anyway, 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. Yeah, I don't think I want to be tickled by a robot. No, thank you. Yeah, no, 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

probably have some expectation for the outcomes of the experiment, which might impact the way they respond to the tickling. So the point is, this is hard to study. 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? I don't think it's impossible, but the papers that I read suggested that we really don't know much. So let me sort of, there's a 20, 25 paper written by Kiltenny in science advances. And here's what they say, gargolessus or tickle is one of the most trivial yet enigmatic human behaviors. We do not know how a touch becomes ticklish or why we respond to.

to other people's tickles, but not our own. Right. 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. Gargolises 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. Wow. So that was a review written this year. 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.

I suspect that's part of it. No. Yeah. I mean, if I had a million dollars to give to cancer or understanding tickling, I might. I think basic research is critical. What if tickling cures cancer? What? Maybe.

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

So, Daniel, out of vertebrates, how common do you think yawning is? 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 what I fish. And fish yawn, they're vertebrates. I would guess all land vertebrates yawn.

How am I doing? You're doing well, but I studied fish for my master's in my Ph.D., and they definitely yawned. They yawn? They ya. 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 then your jaw sort of like passively closes.

And we see this behavior throughout the vertebrates. Wow. It's ubiquitous. And so 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.

Yeah. I feel like when I started researching this, I thought I knew what the answer was going to be. 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? I remember some not very credible explanation about getting more oxygen or something, open your mouth wider to breathe more deeply or some nonsense. Yep, that's what I was told to. And there's apparently no evidence for that.

People 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. 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 daddy sexy way but in a why did I say it that way? I don't know. That was the least sexy way to say that.

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? Yeah, that's right. That's right. I wish I had done that differently. But, you know, it was funny.

So I was trying, I was thinking, what is a kid-friendly way to say it? And I think I totally whiffed. 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. Yeah. 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, 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 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. 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. 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... Look at big science protecting their central dogma, huh? Yeah. 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. Yeah. Anyway, just want to point that out. Yep, nope, totally agree.

But so there's another class that says that 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 animal. 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 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, I don't know. Amazing. Amazing. Incredible that we've been doing these things for thousands of years. It's wondering about them for thousands of years.

And still, nobody knows the answer. I know. Young scientists out there, there are still so many questions for you to crack. Totally crazy. Okay. And so then Dylan's, the second part of Dylan's question is about contagious yawns. Right. And we are equally clueless here.

So there's some hypotheses that like, okay, if you look around and use, see that somebody in your troop is yawning, for example, 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. Yeah, that would suggest the opposite. Yeah. You would not yawn when they're yawning. Right. Or 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. Oh. 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. Or if you listen to a 20-minute podcast discussion of yawning, you're going to be yawning. I have yawned a couple times during this conversation. So I looked at a study where they had humans watch videos of non-human animals yawning. Aw. Yeah, cute. I want to be in that kind of study. But it did look like humans were yawning in response to, like, cats yawning.

Wow. which makes it hard to understand, like, why that benefits anyone. And so there's a lot we don't understand about yawning also. 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? 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 it also doesn't cost us much, so there's no reason for evolution to cut it out of our behavioral repertoire. And so, yeah, at the moment, both of these behaviors are just, like, big question marks.

Fascinating. Wonderful. I love these question marks in science. 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. Let's hear if these answers tickled them or made them yawn. 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. Thank you for tackling this question. It definitely tickled my curiosities to hear that even fish yon, 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. 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 Questions at Danielandkelly.org. 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. And even if you don't write to us with your questions, keep asking them. Keep being curious about the universe. Yes, all questions get an answer.

some questions end up on the show. Thanks very much, everyone. Thanks. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows.

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the grand slam in turkey hunting. Four, 53 hits, we're legal sheet and light. And he gives us this one last. and he pitches off. And when he pitches off, he flies right into the gun barrel. I said to the cameraman, do you have it? He said, shoot him. I said, Justin, shoot.

You can download this episode and others from Lines and Tines with Spencer Graves on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every year. single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop? What?

Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Clepper, listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound.

It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council

have resources available for you at loveyourmind today.org. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.