That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites - Cute Animals

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Across social media and in day-to-day life, we spend a lot of time obsessing over cute animals. But what makes us enjoy them so much? Today's Neuroscience Bite discusses the neuroscience behind our love for cute animals. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. So this one's based on an interview I did with CBC Canada a while back. And the question that the reporter asked me was, why are people so into cute animals? You know, people send around emails with pictures of cute puppies. We look at videos and, you know, YouTube and TikTok of cute little animals. And what, why do we like them so much? Like what gets us going? Well, there's two reasons for that. I feel like I should rename the podcast, the amygdala podcast, because yep, we're back to

our old film, the amygdala. When you see a picture of a small, cute, fuzzy animal, for most of us, you've got a warm, fuzzy response and that's your brain literally going, well, hey, this thing's pretty cute. So you get a warm fuzzy from doing it. The amygdala rewards you, if you will, for the image. And the other reason ties to something else that we've talked about. If you remember when I talked about learning in the brain, we talked about prediction errors and dopamine and the reward system. Well, generally, you're not expecting to get these things. It pops up in your email or you're flipping through and you see one, and all of a sudden things are better than expected. It's like a little reward because it's a small, cute animal. And that drives you to, guess what, want to see more of them.

Now, with that being said, you can get overloaded with small, cute, fuzzy animals. Some of you might not think that's possible, but if you started looking at them all day, every day, the amygdala probably wouldn't respond as much and you wouldn't have as big a prediction error, which means less dopamine to be released. So that's the neuroscience of cute animals and why we're addicted to all those pictures and videos of them that's a quick little neuroscience bite my name is oliv krigolson and i'm that neuroscience guy remember you can follow me on twitter at that neuroscience guy subscribe to the podcast and of course if you can support us check out our website

that neuroscience guy.com thanks so much for listening and i I'll see you on Sunday for another full episode of the podcast.