Science Vs - ASMR: How Whispering Hijacks the Brain

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

ASMR is huge. People say these videos of someone whispering or making soft sounds can make them feel all tingly inside, and even help them feel calm and less anxious. So, what’s going on here? We talk to scientists who have looked into what’s happening in our bodies and brains when we experience an “autonomous sensory meridian response.” You’ll hear from Dr. Giulia Poerio, Dr. Bryson Lochte and Professor Craig Richard — as well as ASMR artist Mike Bryant - aka The Velvet Whisperer.  Craig Richard has a podcast called "Sleep Whispers" if you want to check it out: https://www.silkpodcasts.com/  Transcript: https://bit.ly/3yy5Gt5 This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from Courtney Gilbert, Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music Written by So Wylie, Bumi Hidaka, Bobby Lord and Peter Leonard. Thanks to the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Damiaan Denys, Dr. Phil Gander and Matt Frank. And thanks to Nolwazi Nene, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, okay. How about this? Hey, hey, how's it going? Get a little closer to the microphone. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Do, do, do, do, do. This is the show that pits facts against feeling tingly. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Is that right? Am I doing it right yes absolutely yes on today's show asmr if you don't know what it is it's this massive trend where you watch videos

of people whispering or making soft sounds and you're supposed to get this lovely bodily reaction. And the person coaching me here is Mike Bryant. He's a vocal instructor who makes ASMR videos and goes by Velvet Whisperer. His friend suggested the name. I had no idea what I should use. And so he's like, well, based off the tone of your voice, it kind of has a velvet quality to it. What did you think when your friend was like, you have a based off the tone of your voice, it kind of has a velvet quality to it. What did you think when your friend was like, you have a velvety tone to your voice? You know, I take that as a compliment.

The first time that Mike heard about this weird ASMR world was back in 2015. At the time, Mike was really stressed out about work and having a lot of trouble getting to sleep. So one day, a friend texted him a link to a video that he thought would help. You know, when he said, watch this video tonight, I automatically just assumed, okay, maybe it's something like nature sounds or ocean sounds.

You know, something that people typically do to relax. When I pulled up the video and a woman popped up on the screen and she was whispering. Good evening. This video is going to be dedicated to you. At first I was like, what is this? This is not what I was expecting. But ironically, even in the moment of me kind of questioning, like, what is this, in like the first 10 minutes or so, I started to feel so relaxed. But then I had this other element of these tingles.

The closest thing I can think of is like goosebumps, but it's not goosebumps, though. It's something different. Like a high almost. Like literally feels like it's at the top of my head and then it just starts to kind of immerse throughout my body. Almost like raindrops that are just like coming down. It felt new, but it also kind of felt familiar. I feel really content right now. And if I was stressed before, not in this moment. But the video was like an hour long and I didn't make it all the way through.

I fell asleep. It was the best sleep I had in so long. And I woke up with my headphones kind of like twisted or whatever, like much later. So then I was hooked. Like I was watching ASMR every night. It kind of blew his mind. And this tingles thing was so amazing that he just had to get more of it. And when he looked through the comments of that video, he realized that lots of people were feeling this way. Writing stuff like, oh wow, so many ASMR tingles. Amazing. And here's another one. I can't express how much you help me relax. Infinite tingles. Some people go even further, saying that these videos help them when they're feeling sad or anxious.

A few months later, Mike decided to start making these ASMR videos himself. He'd found this thing with this magical effect, and he wanted to pay it forward. He likes doing role play in his videos, like he'll pretend to be a dermatologist and will sit down in front of the camera and talk to you. So glad that you could make it here today. How was your commute over? Was it all right? And so Mike became part of this big trend. Fast forward to today and ASMR is huge.

YouTube told us that last year ASMR related videos were viewed more than 65 billion times. It's one of the most searched terms on YouTube, which is now crawling with ASMR artists, whispering, squishing slime, and tapping microphones with long fingernails. It's now so mainstream that companies are using it. Like here's an ad from KFC. Enjoy the gentle sound of deep frying chicken. Pretty relaxing, huh? Even the Texas Department of Health made a pandemic PSA using ASMR. Vaccinated or not, wear a mask, keep six feet apart, and avoid crowds.

And behind all of this hype is a very puzzling scientific question. How can listening to a rando on YouTube whispering give someone like Mike all of these emotional and physical feelings, like goosebumps and tingling on his head? What exactly is happening? Like, if I pull a piece of hair off, the piece of hair has been detached from my skin, and I felt a prickle. That seems to be so logical to me.

But just to be hearing an ASMR video and that's saying I know raindrop sensations and now I'm content and I don't know. Like what is happening? And then on the flip side, there's people who can't stand this stuff. Having someone go, this podcast is dedicated to you, is less gentle raindrops and more acid rain. So what's going on there? Today on the show, we have some of the very first studies into this weird phenomenon and some clues as to what is actually happening in your body and your brain as you get these tingles.

And by the way, you should stick around even if you've never felt this. Because we're going to give you lots of opportunities to try. When it comes to ASMR, there's a lot of... What is happening? But then there's science. Science vs. ASMR is coming up just after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there.

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Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why,

and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Welcome back. starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we're diving into this thing called ASMR. And the first thing you need to know about this phenomenon is that the name ASMR is meaningless.

So it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. That's Julia Puerro at the University of Essex in the UK, chatting to our producer Meryl Horn. And Julia says that even though this term, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, sounds fancy, it was actually just made up by someone who was one of the first people to talk about this tingly feeling online and i think her intention was to make it sound more scientific um because people were calling it brain tingles or braingasms and and things like that so she she wanted to kind of legitimize it i think by you know giving it a scientific sounding name but it doesn't really have any basis in science um because it doesn't make name, but it doesn't really have any basis in science.

Because it doesn't make any sense. Because it doesn't make any sense. Like take meridian. In science, it means a lot of things. The prime meridian is a longitudinal line that connects the North and South Poles. It's also a thing in Chinese medicine. But the person who picked that word

just wanted a word that was less sexual than braingasm. And meridian also means prosperity and splendor. But just because the name ASMR is a bit silly, it doesn't mean that the feeling is. In fact, Julia, who studies this phenomenon, has felt it ever since she was a kid. Somebody once described it, and I thought this was a really good description, as somebody opening like a can of Coke

and like pouring it on your scalp, that kind of fizzy, tingling stuff. And when Julia was growing up, there was no hype around ASMR. No YouTube at all, in fact. And she actually had no idea what she was feeling. But every now and then, out in the wild, she'd get those tingles. A really distinct memory for me was when I was about, I don't know,

about 17 or 18 or something like that. But I basically, I signed up for a credit card by accident in a bank because the person there was so relaxing. She was very soft-spoken. So I ended up just wanting to continue the conversation because I was so relaxed by her. So I basically signed up for this credit card, which I didn't need or want. It was like you were in a trance?

Yeah, pretty much. Julia didn't know that this happened to anyone else, and she didn't really talk about it either. That was until something happened, something that would make Julia want to study this. So one day she was at a conference, and that feeling, it happened again. One of the speakers had this particular soft spoken voice and it gave Julia the tingles. But this time she mentioned it to a colleague who said, oh yeah, I just heard a story about this on the radio about people watching videos of someone folding towels and then having these lovely reactions. And I think I had that kind of light bulb moment of,

that is the thing. And so that night I went home, I travelled home, and I was searching for it. So I was just typing like tingling and stuff like that into Google and news articles. And then I found the term ASMR. And then what I did was I typed it into YouTube. And then I spent about three or four hours watching ASMR videos on YouTube.

And I was like, this is the best thing ever. And then after that, I thought, oh, gosh, well, if it's got a name, then presumably people are researching this. Julia was thinking that someone had to be studying this. So she goes searching the literature and finds basically nothing. I thought that there would be research on it. And there wasn't. So that's why I kind of did something,

because I felt like something needed to be done. So Julia did something. She decided to set up one of the first experiments out there into ASMR. And she wanted to look at what was happening in the body of someone who was experiencing these tingles. So she brought a bunch of people into the lab, both those who experience ASMR, and from here on in, we're going to call them the tinglers, and those who don't experience it. So everybody was in a cubicle that had no windows, and it just had a computer screen, the physiology equipment, and things like that. And she showed them all some regular videos and some tingly videos, like this one of a

woman folding towels. Today I'm going to show you different techniques of how to fold washcloths, hand towels. Julia put some sensors on them to measure things like their heart rate, and then it was game time, which meant leaving the person alone to watch the videos. It's mainly if you want the boring details waiting around. And it's very slow, so it took us a really long time to test all these people.

Julia ran over 100 people through this ASMR assembly line. And here's what she saw. First off, when the tinglers watched their videos, their heart rates went down. And that was compared to the non-tinglers. So we found an average decrease of 3.41 beats per minute. About three beats per minute. That's the same response that we see from stuff like listening to relaxing music. Julia also put little sensors on people's fingertips, which measured something called skin conductance, which is a way that scientists can tell how

excited you're getting. And it does this by measuring sweat. It's very subtle, so it can pick up kind of very small changes. So you don't need to be sort of dripping with sweat. In fact, that would probably be not very good because the sensors might fall off in that case. But it is an indicator that something physiologically, emotionally is going on. Now, Julia thought that because ASMR is this uber relaxing sensation, that their skin measurements would show that people were getting less excited. But that's not what happened. People actually got a little bit sweatier.

Which is odd. Because remember, she also found that their heart rates went down. And usually, you don't think about those two things going together, like increased sweating and decreased heart rate. If you go for a run or you have to give a presentation at work, in those cases, generally, they're both going up. Your heart rate ramps up and you sweat more. But in Julia's study with ASMR, that'll seem jumbled.

What we think might be happening is that tingling sensation itself is a bit activating, but overall ASMR is very relaxing. Now, this is just one study and Julia is testing this more. But if she's right, ASMR isn't just about feeling purely relaxed or euphoric. It's this complicated dance between different emotions that's changing over time. In 2018, Julia published the first study looking at what's happening in the bodies of tinglers. And in it, she wrote that for the first time, they'd found physiological evidence for the ASMR experience. Soon after, another paper came out showing that tinglers' pupils dilate while they're getting this ASMR response.

And that also seems to happen when you get the chills from listening to really great music. Okay, so as a recap, here's Julia's study. As we interpreted it through ASMR, you know, with the heartbeat and the sweating and the tingles. Today I'm going to show you different techniques of how to fold washcloths, hand towels, and big bath towels, too. I'm also going to show you the two ways of how to incorporate all three of them into and make them look into, make them into sets. And while Julia was measuring sweat and heartbeats, other pioneering ASMR researchers were focusing on a different organ altogether, the brain.

And now we have our first ever picture of what is happening inside our head as we get the tingles. And it's... Oh, pure magic. Just pure magic. That is coming up just after the break. Welcome back. We just learned that when people experience ASMR, it looks like there's this anomalous mix of relaxation

and excitement going through their body. But what is happening inside their brains? This is something that Bryson Lochte, who's now a psychiatry resident at UCLA, was jonesing to find out. Several years ago, back when he was still a student, he wanted to chuck some tinglers into an MRI machine while they were all tingly to see what the devil was going on in there. And at first, he was worried that people wouldn't be able to get the tingles while they were in an MRI. He chatted about it with Meryl. You're in this tube, kind of like a big plastic

tube with a really powerful magnet surrounding you. It's like a really noisy machine. It's kind of like the sound of being in a big dumpster and someone's like hitting it with like a chain or something, you know? Like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Yeah, it's like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Yeah, it sounds like that. Bryson just had to hope that this ASMR feeling was stronger than all that banging going on. So he and his colleagues slid their first tingler into the tube

and there was a screen where a video played, a video that was actually quite similar to the one in Julia's study. Literally, again, someone was folding a towel. Hi, guys. I'm going to be folding some towels. What is it with these people and folding towels? They watched other videos too, where ASM artists stare straight into the camera and sometimes it feels like they almost reach out to the listeners.

And so the tinglers were listening to all these whispers through headphones and meanwhile they held a little device with some buttons on it. There was one to press if they just felt relaxed and a different button to press if they felt the tingles. So the idea was that they would play the video and then the person in the machine would let the researchers know with the click of a button, hey, I'm feeling relaxed, or ooh, I'm getting the tingles.

Bryson would watch on a monitor as all of this happened and he could see that people were pushing the tingles. Bryson would watch on a monitor as all of this happened, and he could see that people were pushing the tingles button. Despite this weird setting, the tingles were coming through. It was a big relief, to be honest. It worked. Yeah. I was very excited by it. This is Craig Richard, a professor of physiology over at Shenandoah University, and he ultimately teamed up with Bryson and remembered seeing all these brain scans capturing the elusive tingles. Seeing the data was just so exciting because it helped explain the potential mechanism behind ASMR.

So yeah, I was super giddy. What did you think was going on in the brain, you know, when people had tingles? Oh, pure magic. Just pure magic. But through these brain scans, he could see that what was happening wasn't just magic. Because even though this was a small study, just 10 tinglers, he could see that there were these very particular areas of the brain lighting up when people got that special sensation. And it helped explain what was going on here. Like the nucleus accumbens, which is a little nugget in the center of your brain.

And it's kind of like the happiness detector. It gets activated when... You're riding your bike and you're enjoying it. You're eating your favorite food. Someone gives you $5. And these are all lovely little moments. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's likely that your nucleus accumbens is going to light up during moments just like those. Another thing that caught Craig's eye

was how ASMR seemed to activate a big slice of brain that's shaped like a rainbow. It's called the somatosensory cortex. And generally speaking, it lights up when someone touches you. Like if someone strokes your cheek, there's a little chunk of your somatosensory cortex that's dedicated to cheek touching. And when watching these videos, that part of the brain lit up, as well as some other areas, like the forehead part of your cervatus sensory cortex. And this was actually a bit weird,

because no-one was touching the tingler's cheeks or their forehead or any part of them at all. They're just watching a video. But to Craig, it made sense. Because in a lot of the videos... The artists in the videos were pretending to touch the viewer. It's simply that if hands are coming at you, whether it's on a video screen or it's in real life, your brain responds as if you're getting touched. People perceived fake touch as somewhat slightly as real touch. So the brain is somewhat easy to trick. For those of us who don't experience this ASMR thing,

Craig says, think about it like when you watch a scary movie. You might jump out of your seat. There's no threat to you when you're watching a horror movie, but you feel scared and you might cover your eyes and you might jump out of your seat. Another study came out last year using EEGs to look at people experiencing ASMR. And it also showed activation in that same area of the brain. So Craig says, feeling like we're being touched, that might be part of the tingly feeling. But there was another clue in the data to help explain what was going on.

These ASM artists. They're looking at you gently. They're moving slowly. They're speaking in a caring way and they're looking at you in a caring way. And that all triggers your brain to respond like, oh, this is a caring person. I think I'll be relaxed. And you might even feel so relaxed that you fall asleep. Zooming out a little, Craig thinks that this ASMR feeling is tapping into a super important brain response that has nothing to do with towels and tapping. It kicks in when you're around someone you love and someone who cares for you. Researchers call it affiliative behavior, and it's associated with certain brain areas lighting up. Like, these particular parts of the brain seem to go berserk

when you put parents in a brain scanner and show them pictures of their little squirts. And, yeah, Craig saw those areas of the brain lighting up as people were getting the tingles. Two surveys of tinglets have found that personal attention is one of the most common triggers to getting tingles. And Craig says that doesn't always mean that someone is staring at the camera and folding towels for you. So there are a lot of ASMR videos that you don't see the person's face.

All you're seeing them do is they might be, you just see their hands doing something. They might be solving a Rubik's cube. They might be raking a little Zen garden very carefully. And so that doesn't appear like it's this positive personal interaction, except for your brain knows those hands are attached to a person. And whoever this person is, is taking time out from their day to show you something that is important to them. So it makes sense for our brains to feel like, wow, this person really cares for me. Or they're just making money off you. But no matter, that's probably not what you're thinking about in the moment while you're watching these videos.

Craig Records, there's just something about watching someone very carefully make fun sounds just for you that hijacks this affiliative brain network. But it's not like this explains everything here. Because I don't know about you, but I don't feel all tingly in real life when someone's taking care of me. Like it's nice, but these tingles? Still though, this story rang true for Mike, our velvet whisperer who you heard from at the start of the show. Mike had that big question about tingles, wondering what's happening there and why do we get them. And so we told him about this idea

that it could be our brains getting a bit tricked and we see these videos and feel like someone is touching us and taking care of us. And as we told him all this, he had a bit of a Ratatouille moment. That did just kind of unlock a memory. I remember when I was like eight or nine, it was during the summertime when I wasn't in school. So my mom would have my grandmother watch me while she went off to work. And so when she would drive up, park the car, and I was asleep, she would wrap me in a blanket. Was I eight years old? Maybe I was

younger. I'm not sure. But anyway, she would wrap me in a blanket, pick me up and carry me into my grandmother's house. And I remember feeling so, I don't, like comforted. There was something about this euphoric or like pleasant sensation of her doing that. And so once I caught onto it, I would fake sleep every time to make sure that she did it. When she was carrying me, hearing her feet like hit the cement, you know, because those are like sounds that are around me. The tapping. Right, exactly. The tapping, exactly. Yeah. Wow. So that was like your first ASMR experience, maybe. Yeah, that has to be it. So, okay, wow. Okay, yeah. So mystery solved for me in a sense. Yeah, I love that.

I love that. So here's where we're at. That tingly sensation, it is real. Scientists can see it in brain and body scans. But Scooby, there's one final mystery we need to solve. I asked Craig about it. Do you think that everyone can experience it? It does not appear.

Well, I could be more confident than that. No. Right. There you go. Nailed that question. No, I don't think everyone can experience it because we do hear so frequently of people that will watch ASMR videos, they've tried a bunch, and they don't experience it. And they really want to.

Surveys have tried to get at how many people feel this. The largest we could find wasn't an academic study, but it was done by a French online streaming service. 12,000 people responded from six countries. And about a quarter said that they felt something like goosebumps or tingles. Another quarter felt calm and relaxed. Another quarter felt nothing. And then there was something we haven't talked about yet. There were those that hated it. Yeah. When listening to ASMR triggers, about one in five felt annoyed or irritated. Sorry if that's you. Also, I'm amazed you're still listening to this podcast. It's so curious. Why do the same or, for the most part, many similar stimuli? And some people are like, oh, cool me to sleep with your sweet mouth sounds.

And other people want to rip your face off if you make those sweet mouth sounds. There's been a few studies that have tried to get at this question. Some look at personality differences between tinglers and non-tinglers, and they have found some differences. Like tinglers might be more open to experiences or more artistic on average. They also might be less likely to be conscientious, that is, not so concerned with deadlines or attention to detail. So Hermione is less likely to be a tingler than Ron. But even the nerds who do these studies say it's early days and not to read too much into this. Funnily enough, the best explanation that we could find

suggests that tinglers are just more generally sensitive to their environment. Like, they're more sensitive to bright lights or loud noises. So it's sort of a double-edged sword. In fact, research finds that tinglers are also more likely to experience the flip side of ASMR, called misophonia, hating sound. Like, perhaps they'll love hearing certain kinds of noises,

like the gentle folding of a towel. But they'll hate other noises. And Craig, who is a tingler, says that if you hit him with the wrong ASMR video, it'll drive him up the wall. It seems like there's a fine line between cringing and tingling. And we were curious where that line was. So we decided to try something that we know some of you hate. Meryl brought out some crackers. All right, I'm going to start. Ew, I didn't like that one. Oh yeah, follow it up with a slurp and a gulp. Exactly. And I agree with Wendy. The worst moment

there for me, it was the big lip smack at the end. That is where you turned me. You turned me right there. So there's ASMR style eating, which is what you started doing. Yeah, right. I felt like I didn't feel the tingles, but I was like, oh, that's actually quite nice. Like crunch, crunch, crunch. Yeah. But once you start smacking and chewing loudly, that turns into mukbang style.

So mukbang are those videos where people have piles of food and they just sit there and they eat the food from the video and they tend to chew with their mouth open, making loud smacking noises. There are people who love that and may experience ASMR to those exaggerated mouth sounds. It's just like food. I may not like this apple pie, but oh, I like this apple pie made by someone else. So scientists are just starting to unfold what's happening with this tingly feeling. And it looks like if you're watching these videos, it might get you excited by tingling the part of your brain that makes you feel like you're being cared for. Or it might make you want to throw your laptop out the window. And we're not

exactly sure why that is. In fact, there's lots of questions that we still have about ASMR. Like, researchers are wondering if it could help some people who have anxiety or depression. We don't have much science there. Also, lots of tinklers say that they start to get desensitized to this after a while. It gets harder and harder to feel the magic. Why is that? We don't know. But if you are just starting out on your ASMR adventure,

how do you find out if you're a tingler or not? Go to YouTube, put in ASMR, and treat it like a buffet. And this was me and Meryl. Before we started making this episode, we actually didn't know if we could experience ASMR. So we decided to hit the buffet. I gave it a go, starting with the old classic. The first thing is relaxing towel folding tutorial. Hello. Welcome to another towel.

Okay, no, this is too ridiculous. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, towel. I can't. Okay, next one. What I'll be doing in this video is a hand motion video. Oh, God, no. I really don't like this one. Hello, my beautiful humans. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, But Meryl hit the jackpot. I think I just experienced ASMR for the first time. I'm looking at this video, and there's this woman who has, I think it's just cardboard. It's like she has long fingernails, and she's tapping it on this little circle circle of cardboard and it's like I just got weirdly happy like I'm smiling I do feel some tingles I feel really good Okay, I found one. There's someone tapping their nails on a phone or something and, like, sweeping their hands, like, and I'm really sleepy now.

Okay, I'm actually going to go to sleep. Good night. I'm actually going to go to sleep. Good night. And now I'm listening. Oh, back to later. That's Science Verses. Hello. Hey, Meryl Horne, producer at Science Verses. Hi, wendy how many citations in this week's episode there's 73 citations 73 yep and if people want to find these citations where should they go

they can go to our show notes and then follow the links to the transcript and then you can also head to our instagram where you can see uh wendy's Wendy's debut as an ASMR artist and an amazing little sand sculpture that our producer Michelle Dang made. Yeah, yeah. It's fun and embarrassing. The sand sculpture is fun. The ASMR is embarrassing. Yes. And if you have any questions for me, you can shoot me a tweet at Wendy Zook.

Z-U-K. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you say bye-bye? Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

Bye. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne with help from Courtney Gilbert, me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Akedi Foster-Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka, Bobby Lord and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode,

including Dr Damien Dennis, Dr Phil Gander and Matt Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Damien Dennis, Dr. Phil Gander, and Matt Frank. A special thanks to Nolazi Nene, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph LaBelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Faction. All right, I'm going to stop doing that. Faction next time. though.