Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: That's A Head Scratcher

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

It’s actually really strange that scratching your head is a widely understood sign that you’re puzzling over something. No one’s exactly sure why we do that, so interesting theories abound! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's out there. Oh, I'm sorry, Dave's here in spirit too.

So this is short stuff, you should know, the short stuff edition. Dave Bruce? No, Dave Kustan, the editor of short stuff, the producer. Okay. He's our Jerry for short stuff. No, I know, we haven't given Dave

a lot of love on the show. I know, we need to, man, he's great. Yeah, short stuff came along, and Jerry was like, yeah, don't bother me with that. Yeah, I don't have time for this crap. Do I make extra money? Then forget it. Yeah, man, you guys don't know Jerry like we know Jerry.

What's great is she'll never hear this, you know? That's right, Dave will. Yeah, Kustan will never pass this along, he's too terrified of her. That's right. So we're talking about scratching our heads when you think, which is something that I don't do. I don't either.

When I read this though, there are a couple of thinking ticks that I have that could be explained. That's just not one of them. For sure, and this was one of those things where I'm like, how is this gonna be like the origin of a grain of salt just gonna send me into like some sort of blind rage?

I thought so at first, and then no, it turns out when you start to really look into this, because if you think about it, that's a really weird thing to do, to scratch your head when you're sitting there thinking. And you might not do it, I don't do it, but we might not even know anybody who does that reliably. The thing is it's like an idiom, that being a head scratcher.

It's like a cultural thing, at least in the West, where if somebody's scratching their heads and they're standing in front of a chalkboard, you know that they're trying to figure out some sort of problem and they're having trouble with it. Like that's just what that has to do with. And the explanations are multitudinous. And again, it seems like something you'd be like,

that's ridiculous. And then if you stop and think about it, you're like, that actually could be right in this case. Yeah, like if you were to take a beginning acting class and you were in there with a bunch of dumb beginning actors like I did in college. Right. And the professor said, the acting teacher said,

all right, here's the scene. You're trying to figure out a very difficult problem. The first thing one of those dopes would do is scratch their head. Right. Because that is just a popular trope to indicate. Or maybe scratch their chin, something like that. Which counts as part of the head, I guess.

Yeah. But it's universally a sign that you're thinking about something. Yeah, so it doesn't really make any sense is where we have said that you would do that. And there's no definitive explanation for why, which has really left the door open for a lot of people to put some ideas up.

One of the big ones is that it's a relic of evolution. Yeah. And that really what you're doing is you're not, like you're not helping along your thoughts. You're actually showing a form of distress. Yeah. Whether it's angst, anger, anxiety, those are kind of the different interpretations

and explanations. But the first one is that we're showing a remnant of what we used to do back in the, I guess, the tuk-tuk days. Yeah. Where if something made us angry, we would maybe throw our arm up and strike them or whatever.

And the first explanation of this is that we are starting to do that. Like we're raising our arm out of anger and then we stop because we are civilized now. And that ends up being like, we almost kind of play it off by scratching our head. Yeah. It's a little thin, but here's the thing.

This is when I was really like, oh, maybe there's a little more to this. When you see somebody who's really mad and they're trying to keep from hurting somebody, you will frequently see that person like rubbing their forehead or rubbing the back of their neck or something like that. Absolutely.

And what they're saying is this is some sort of like derivation of that. Yeah, yeah, I totally have seen that and that is a real thing. There's another possible explanation. This was in a 2009 article for Psychology Today when a former FBI counterintelligence agent named Joe Navarro talked about being under stress.

And he said, our brain requires a certain amount of hand to body touching, like either hand wringing or rubbing your temples or touching your lips or something. And what he's saying is that it's a soother instead of maybe a signal to an enemy, it's just you self soothing yourself

through some sort of stressful or fearful situation. And there's actually some research to back that up, which I think, Chuck, we should take a little break, collect our thoughts and then come back and talk more about this whole head scratcher. Great. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show,

Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you said that the FBI agent, Joe Navarro,

said that this is kind of like a soothing thing. Like we're self-soothing. Like the sense of touch can have a soothing effect on us. And if we're experiencing stress or anxiety or something, just touching yourself can help. And supposedly, because our head is the source of this issue, our brain is, that's why we would touch our head rather than say like our knees or something.

Right. The thing is, is there is some research to back this up. There was a study in 2017 in Scientific Reports, which is a journal. And it watched 45 Reese's macaques, who are sorry, not sorry. Yeah. And they found that the kind of the higher on the totem pole level macaques,

when they were stressed out, they might start to itch or scratch or just do something. And that this was taken by other macaques who were, say, maybe more aggressive as a sign of like, I'm really stressed out, so just kind of leave me alone. And they actually were left alone. Yeah, it made me think of the Seinfeld, where George said, if you want people to leave you alone,

look stressed out and annoyed. And there were all the times that they would walk by his office in Yankee Stadium. And he was doing that. He would have his hands on his head, rubbing his temples, going, ah. And people would be like, you know, everyone would pass by his office and not bother him.

He's a Reese's macaque. These researchers were saying, the way they interpreted that is that it tells this potential attacker, you know, one, I'm not fully stable here, so you don't know what I'm gonna do. So maybe lay off of me. Or I'm super stressed out. I can't possibly defend myself.

There's no point in attacking me to show your dominance. I'm already submitting here. So don't waste your energy. Either way, the Reese's macaques that displayed some sort of itching or scratching behavior, sorry, scratching behavior, while they were stressed out, signaling they were stressed, were attacked less than those that didn't.

So I like this last one a lot too. This one that you dug up, displacement activity. So you've got an animal that has a couple of different options in, let's say, a stressful situation. And it doesn't wanna do either one of them or maybe can't decide which one to perform. So it does what's called the displacement activity. So you've got a bird, let's say,

that another bird comes to attack it. He's like, well, should I attack back or should I just fly out of here? I'm just gonna pick at the ground instead. And preening might be another activity or grooming oneself. And the theory is that these may have emerged. Maybe it's a soothing physical contact. Or maybe it's just a routine behavior to calm yourself down

or maybe sort of linking with that other one to throw off the person, which kind of made me think of that guy in Athens who crashed his bike that day. He had two choices, was get up really quick and get my books and ride out of there. And say I meant to do that. Or act in a lot of pain. And he said, I'll do the third thing,

I'm gonna act like I'm reading a book. Yeah, so he engaged in displacement activity. 100%. So there's one last explanation that I found and that is that people who scratch their head or rub their eyes or something like that, while they're thinking are engaged in a certain kind of learning mode is what it's called.

A dominant learning mode. And that is where our senses are involved in the way that we think about or recall or take in information. And so people who are tactile with their learning modes would might touch themselves, touch their heads or something like that. People who are visual learners might kind of look up

in the sky or something like that. That's what I do. Where you're kind of exaggerating the point of the sense, even though that sense is not giving you any information or helping along, it's almost like we just kind of revert to the sense that we're most comfortable with maybe taking information in with. I'm not sure, but that's the last explanation I saw.

Yeah, that's the one that really hit home for me because I am 1000% a visual learner. If somebody's trying to explain something, like how something operates, they can talk to me till they're blue in the face. But if I actually see it, I will understand it. And if I'm thinking of something or if I'm deep in thought, I will often like tip back in my chair

and kind of look up in the sky. And they're saying that that's what I'm doing basically. And you know, it makes sense. Somebody needs to teach you about percentages visually because there ain't no such thing as 1000%. Shut up. I have to say, Chuck, you can't see me right now, but I have never scratched my head more

than I have during this recording. This has been brutal. All right, well, hopefully you didn't lose too many. So that's it for short stuff, everybody. Me and Chuck say adios. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.