 When I first saw the name, I thought it did say that the very next speaker was Dr. Dre. And I got excited in a special way that a hip-hop skeptic was here today. But on closer inspection, there was vowel detection like Old MacDonald, I was E-I-O. And the name changed from Dre to Deidre, so, Dr. Barrett, it's your show. Help, Deidre Barrett. Stimulism. Stimulism. I'm so white. I'm so white. I know, it's awful. It's awful. Supernizzle Stimulizl, which is like a ten-year-old reference and I'm sorry, but what are you going to do? I'm saying Deidre Barrett. Talk about dreams, yo. I'm talking Deidre Barrett. Please welcome to the stage Deidre Barrett. This distinctive call issues from our cuckoo clocks may seem more goofy than sinister most of the time. However, this creature is the leading example of a brood parasite. A female cuckoo will sneak into other bird's nests and lay an egg shoving one of the rightful ones out so that the count is correct. She flies away to repeat this enumerous nest, leaving the care of her progeny to the unsuspecting adoptive parents. The cuckoo's egg resembles the egg of the host, but it's a little bit larger and it's a little bit brighter. As soon as the baby cuckoo's hatches, its mouth is a little wider and a little redder than the actual chicks of that species. If there are any other chicks, when the baby hatches, it also tries to shove all of the other eggs out of the nest and it depends on how deep a nest it is as to whether it succeeds or not. The mother cuckoo has already dumped one egg, so sometimes the cuckoo is the only one left in the nest as it's being raised, but if not, the cuckoo re-enacts the Cinderella story in reverse. The ugly stepsisters go wanting while the adoptive parent caters to Cinderella in this case. Tragic comic dramas like this play out in all kinds of arenas of animal life. Male barn swallows that have light brown chests are selected by females for a deeper color of the chest, which indicates hardiness, but scientists with a 599 felt tip marker can deepen the color on the chest of a previously scorned male and females will line up to mate with it preferentially after its chest is brightened. And these animal behaviors look funny to us or sad, the reflexive instincts of dumb animals, but then with a jolt of recognition you can think how different are these from our endless wars, our modern health woes, all of our romantic and sexual posturing. Human instincts were designed for the savannas 10,000 years ago and they would guide us toward healthy behaviors if we were still on the savannas hunting and gathering and in that sparse of population. But the increase in population density, in technological invention, in pollution, in all kinds of things that have changed with modern society mean that evolution has not kept pace in what our instincts are guiding us toward. And animal mythology discovered a concept which is crucial to understanding this disconnect between our instincts and our environment, that of the supernormal stimulus. Nobel laureate Niko Tenberg, and coined this term after his animal research discovered that it was very easy to design objects that would pull an instinct more than whatever natural object they had evolved for. He studied birds that lay small pale blue eggs with a bit of gray dappling and found that they preferred to sit on a bright blue, you know, day glow blue egg with black polka dots instead of gray speckles that was so large that in some cases the birds would continually slide off and have to hop back on but they'd ignore their real pale blue little eggs while doing this. And so it was really obvious that the bird was not coded for the gestalt of a healthy egg. It was coded for blueness and spottedness and sort of egg shape and in other species it was coded for the egg color being brown, in other species it was not coded for spottedness but it was just coded for a few key things that meant this is the healthiest egg if you lay too many, choose this one to sit on, not the gestalt. And so the essence of the supernormal stimulus is that an exaggerated imitation can easily pull the instinct more strongly than the real thing. Now, Tenbergen was a fascinating person. He was Richard Dawkins' dissertation advisor. He was a strident atheist in his time which was more interesting yet in that day and age. Four years before he won a Nobel Prize, his four years older brother won a Nobel Prize. They're the only pair of siblings. So he's a fascinating man but in my book I've got a whole chapter on his biography and his family but in this talk I want to focus on this one concept that I think is really his very most important for humans which is that of the supernormal stimulus. He found that you could create supernormal stimuli for all basic instincts. Brown nesting birds would not only sit on eggs but if the eggs are dislodged from the nests they roll them back in. This pic image is actually sort of halfway between the sitting and the rolling behaviors that they have in the photographs. But the ground nesting birds will roll an egg back into the nest if it's dislodged and so you can make them do the same thing if it's bigger, if it's brighter. And the grey-legged goose would ignore its own egg to roll a volleyball back into its nest or at least try to very, very heroically. And once the chick hatched parents preferred feeding a fake baby bird beak on a stick if it was simply wider and redder than the real chicks. I mean think of that cuckoo mouth in the earlier picture. And then likewise hatchlings will beg food from their very rough estimate of what is an adult beak. For some species the spot on the tip, as in this picture of the herring gull, a red spot on the tip of the beak seems to be the cue. If you make it larger they prefer it to the real parent's beak and you can distort it to where it looks nothing like a beak and give it more spots and they like that better yet. The graph is of pecking behavior. He found that the territorial male stickleback fish which has a reddish underside would ignore a real male to fight a dummy fish if the fish's underside was brighter red. It would not fight this dummy up top that looks completely realistic but doesn't have red on the underside, but it would fight any of the lower ones in preference to a real stickleback. It seemed to have to have the eye and be roughly the approximate shape, but other than that those are some very fish-like things that it perceives as a more dangerous intruder. So again you can just look at what the instinct is coded for. Fight things that are bright red on the underside, not a gestalt of the male stickleback that might be invading its territory. So many evolutionary concepts have been applied to human behavior either formally in evolutionary psychology or have just crossed over into popular conversation. However, the importance of supernormal stimuli doesn't seem to have been fully appreciated in either of those arenas. So that's the main mission of my talk today to describe how relevant I think that this concept is. I'm appropriating it to describe a broad array of human folly because animals encounter supernormal stimuli very rarely. The cuckoo clearly is one, but they're pretty rare in nature. So animals are going to encounter them mostly when some human builds a giant blue plaster egg. If they were really already lying all over the place, the animal clearly would have evolved some other way of detecting what to sit on. But we humans can produce our own and we are. Instincts arose to call our attention to rare necessities, but we've completely reversed this process and now we manufacture things to cater to the instincts. And supernormal stimuli applies to concepts of sex, health, international relations, and media, and beliefs. So today I want to summarize some of the general relevance of supernormal stimuli but with an emphasis on its relationship to the word supernatural and how it may pull us toward certain behaviors because I think partly it's explanatory of why some people believe some very irrational things, probably not anyone in this room, but then maybe more importantly to us why we so often behave irrationally even when we're not buying into some odd belief about things that we can act like some of the people that do at times. I think that's the part of the message that's more relevant for us personally. And it's not all bad news. Once you realize how supernormal stimuli can operate, you can craft new approaches to thinking about things because humans have one huge advantage over all these other species that Tim Bergen was studying which is we have this massive brain system which is there exactly for overriding simple instincts when they're leading us astray and for logically reasoning out other things that actually go against the more initial instinct. So I first want to focus on... Oh, I skipped one. That's a slightly relevant cartoon that I like but I want to focus on sexuality. This is not a cartoon. This is a real photograph. But what do you think this wasp is doing? This is one of the other few examples of a natural supernormal stimuli. There are a few orchids which instead of doing what almost all other flowers do of giving an insect something to eat as the way that you get the insect to get there, get pollen on it and go to another plant. In this case, the flower, that dark part that the wasp is sitting on looks, is shaped like the body of a female wasp only just a slightly sexier and more exaggerated shape of a female wasp. So male wasps come down and basically hump the flower and ejaculate on it but they also, in the process of doing that they get some of the pollen from the flower on them and they fly off and then fairly soon they see something else that looks like this just super wonderful female wasp to them and they go down and repeat the process and they're pollinating the second flower. So it's a sexual supernormal stimulus for male wasps. And it's very obvious when we're looking at animals doing that but it's really, humans aren't coded much differently than that at all. In my book, Supernormal Stimuli, I quote from a Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut passage in Mrs. Rosewater where this sort of shlumpy, timid little guy is trying to impress this more macho male that he looks up to and he takes this centerfold picture of a naked woman and sort of nudges the guy and says, hey, how do you like this girl? And the older man kind of looks at him a bit pittingly and says, that's no girl, that's a piece of paper. Which kind of underlines, you know, it's as odd as the orchid when you think about it. I mean most people think that people using blow-up dolls for sexual purposes seems kind of funny to most people but just simple straight usual pornography we just don't really stop and question. It's just a piece of paper or it's just images flickering on a video screen. And then of course in Las Vegas we have real bodies with supernormal proportions and I love what the New Yorker cartoonists did with the idea of intelligent design, random mutation or intelligent design, you decide. As if it is basically strippers and porn stars that are intelligently designed. They indeed have a reasoning hand in their body proportions. But it's not just body proportions, what is found facially pretty is basically the indicators of health and then for sexual attractiveness indicators that would make it really clear this is a female that go with having more estrogen, less testosterone in the body. And what this image is, is the picture on the right is a computer composite from the faces of multiple women judged attractive. And on the left that face has been computer altered half and half with the image of the composite pretty woman and a baby's face. And it's more top area of the head, less lower jaw yet than an adult female has. But basically proportions that you'd have if a woman was never exposed to any testosterone which all of us have certain amounts of in our body. It's a hyper-female, no sign of maleness in this face that seems to be judged the very prettiest, again, over the real proportions. And if you've never watched Dove's little sort of semi-advertising video called Evolution, it's quite interesting, it's on their site and it's all over YouTube. And basically they take a model with no makeup on and all these first steps you see here are putting makeup on her to achieve some of these changes in facial contour and then suddenly you see the photoshopping and one eye gets enlarged, another eye gets enlarged, you see the chin gets smaller and the neck is stretched to this proportion that wouldn't exist on an adult female. And again, the image at the bottom is super normal. It's not anything you'd actually see on a real woman in terms of especially the neck and eyes. But lest you think that I'm completely picking on men, this was a recent joke book titled Corn for Women. It consists of attractive men fully clothed with thought bubbles or dialogue bubbles over them saying things like I just vacuumed the whole house, I hope you like chicken sauteed with tarragon and butter, or let me get up with the baby. But more seriously, genres that have been suggested to be the equivalent of porn for women include romance novels, soap opera, and the sort of standard chick flick. It's probably most heavy handed in the romance novels that the point of view character is always female. The plot concerns her finding and capturing the heart of the one right man. Heroes are most commonly six foot two inches if it's specified or over six feet tall if it's not. Adjectives that describe Mr. Wright's appearance in descending order frequency are muscular, handsome, strong, large, tanned, masculine, and energetic. Personality descriptions were bold, calm, confident, intelligent. The readership of romance novels is as overwhelmingly skewed toward the female as standard pornographies are toward the male. And it's almost as big a market almost 2000 English language romance novels are published every year generating 1.2 billion in sales. So what is the harm in this, if any? I mean one thing to think about is just if you think about all of these synonyms for masturbation, jerking off, wanking, almost all of them tend to also mean wasting time. So romantic daydreams probably waste at least the same amount of time. But other super normal stimuli probably take even more of our time. I've been talking about just the specifically sexual but really many super normal stimuli and entertainment cater to broader sort of social things. I mean the television shows being named things like friends is certainly not accidental. The content consists of you're sitting around, you're sitting in your living room, you're seeing their living room. There are all these smiling faces and people sort of making cute jokes and smiling and laughing. And it's basically the kinds of social stimuli that we're conditioned to seek out smiling, friendly faces, people being nice to us, laughter, social relationships. Only it's coming from a box of wires. And yet we respond to it very much like if the people were in the room with us and we were establishing social relationships with them. And again this isn't terribly harmful in small doses. It pulls huge amounts of our time in modern civilization. And for television it's not just the content that is the pull, but there's something that Pavlov called the orienting reflex. And the orienting reflex is when you see something novel, your reflexive response is to turn your head toward it, focus on it, still the rest of your body and just pay attention for a split second to see if it's something that you need to evaluate more. And if it isn't you relax and you go back to whatever you were doing and you move again. But television throws up new stimuli, whether it's a new face on screen or a loud noise or in action shows it's obviously other kinds of car chase stimuli. But they come with about the frequency that the orienting reflex would be relaxing. So it just constantly stimulates the orienting reflex and keeps us just, oh, something new, something new, something new, staring at the screen continuously. So it's co-opting this attention getting thing just in the medium, kind of aside from whether it's also a super normal stimulus for social relationships or action adventure or for scary things as we'll talk about more. Now, the next area I want to talk about, oh, I keep skipping some of the general cartoon ones. But the next area I want to talk about is cuteness. We don't usually try to parse what is cute, but it does have identifiable traits. Think of something you think of as cute, whether it's puppies or kittens or cartoon characters or your own children. Just think about one or two things that are cute. And because cuteness is the type of attractiveness associated with youth, your cute objects almost for sure have many youthful traits. This is Conrad Lorenza's drawing. He shared the Nobel Prize with Tim Bergen. This is his drawing of the change between the young and the mature in a number of species. And you see these very similar infants of most species have a smaller body with a disproportionately large head than once you're looking at the face, disproportionately large eyes relative to the head, again, as compared to adults. Small nose, chubby limbs, and clumsy coordination. Then, behaviorally, youthful behavior includes more playfulness, more affection, helplessness, and any sort of sign of a need to be nurtured. And cuteness is simply the mechanism by which infants trigger nurturing in adults. And it's a crucial adaptation for survival. So, scientific studies find that the definitions of cuteness are very similar across cultures, and they're very similar across species. The Romulus and Remus seems to have been completely a myth, but some of the stories of animals nurturing humans when they were abandoned or lost do actually check out as true. Definitely, zoos find it quite easy to get a wet nurse of another species when a mother has abandon as not caring for her young. The young of other species look cute to us, and they look cute to, at least within mammals, most other species. Anyone disheartened by research demonstrating that attractive adults get better-paid jobs and are better liked than average will be really dismayed at the studies on infant cuteness. There is good agreement on which infants are cutest. The two on the left are simply the average when they took 100 pictures of babies of the same age. The 10 rated cutest, the top is the males, the 10 cutest females are on the left on the bottom, and the 10 least cute, but these were all healthy children, so you still, most kids are cute, but the less cute composite is on the right in both cases. And you'll notice, especially for the male, the less cute composite looks older, although these infants were all exactly the same age, but that eye's not quite as big relative to the face, already beginning to elongate the face a bit, but looks to our eye, you know, we judge a bit older, even though that's not the case. But the studies, such as the infant's physical attractiveness, its effects on bonding and attachment, document that stereotypically cute babies get the most attention from strangers, they get the most attention from their parents, they go on to get better treatment from teachers, they run less risk of abuse and neglect, but fortunately, most babies are cute enough to attract sufficient nurturing from parents in the world around them. And the decline in cuteness usually corresponds to the child's increased ability to take care of itself, this New Yorker cartoon telling David, you're not as cute as you used to be and we're losing, and you're losing our attention. It's funny, but it's actually exactly the way things are supposed to function as the kid gets older, they don't need to be monitored as much and the attention moves on to their younger siblings. However, there's the consumer version of... I'm saying computer because I'm not getting... Okay, now it's up. The consumer version of this also works on us rather powerfully. In the 1990s, the Journal of Animal Behavior published a series of articles on the evolution of the teddy bear, tracing their origins to 1900 when Theodore Roosevelt posed next to a bear he had shot. So the original teddy bears were shaped like a male bear and that's an early teddy bear on the left side of the first picture. And over the years, the teddy evolved to become the cute teddy on the right with the sharder snout and the more infantile features. With tongue-in-cheek but metaphor-firmly in mind, the animal behaviors continued to publish on the evolution of the teddy pointing out that the changes may be likened to mutation but that they're actually being produced by intelligent design. See, it crops up all over the place. Teddy strippers are really intelligently designed diverting human resources to enable teddies to reproduce at this phenomenal rate. So since the teddy is often a child's first toy, one of their hypotheses that got tested in one of these articles was that it may be that infants prefer the newer cuter teddy bear. Could we have the slide back? Care to guess which teddy the infants prefer? I heard the right answer from several of you even without the slide up there. The one on the left is the adult bear. Yes, infants are the one group that don't care about cute and up to about age four they preferred that bear on the left that looks more like maybe it's going to nurture you than the one on the right. But between four and six there wasn't much preference and then from six up they prefer the cuter teddy. And it's of course older children and adults who buy the teddy bears for the infants but they're becoming a phenomenon on college campuses. I mean around Harvard you go in the Harvard coop they're all these teddy bears dressed up in their little Harvard t-shirts and they're not just all being sold for babies. They're in the dorm rooms. And slide up one more time please. On the right side you see an old picture of an old-fashioned Santa delivering an old-fashioned teddy and notice how Santa got at least as much cuter as the teddy bear did. And this just works in every arena. Decades ago Stephen Jay Gould wrote about how Mickey Mouse had gotten cuter over the years. He started off looking somewhat more like a caricature of an adult mouse with the longer snout and the head smaller relative to the body and the head got larger and the snout got shorter and the eyes got bigger and Mickey just got cuter and cuter and cuter and more baby like. And you'd think that once we know this that maybe cartoonists would just start off drawing the cutest thing but actually you see exactly the same thing happening more recently with the Simpsons and they're one of the few human characters where the word snout might really apply. And they started off with long snouts and they have short snouts as well as the little button noses that for them are separate. Larger eyes, larger heads relative to the body. Just very gradually whether it was conscious with the people drawing or not the cartoons are liked better and better if they're cuter and cuter. Now food is another arena. I wrote a whole book Wasteland which I won't go into here but obviously we pay attention to this for animals. Don't feed them bread, eat the bread yourself. I'll skip that and whoops. Same thing goes for exercise. I mean we're better to our pets. You know you wouldn't not walk your dog but we're raising free range chickens to feed to couch potato people. They're just innumerable things. Our horror films are our super normal stimuli for what we ought to be afraid of and paying attention to for that reason. And even our real wars get generated on somewhat that scary. Michael Shermer said something yesterday that I agree with to a certain extent that evil happens in secret but I think that it's actually even more striking that the secret is more for the people at the top but I think at the bottom level why the soldiers are there it's evil happens in the name of self-defense. We don't have departments of aggression every country has a department of self-defense so the leaders ramp up this super normal expectation about the role of the threat of the enemy. They're aggressing against us and both sides feel like they're defending themselves. But in conclusion why it's so important to pay attention to super normal stimuli is not that at all times we want to avoid them we have some resources and time to waste at times so we may sometimes realize we're sitting on that giant blue egg or we're feeding the baby cuckoo and just rationally make the decision that there's no harm it feels good we're gonna do it but at other times we may want to redirect our resources and thinking about super normal stimuli just helps us to become aware and I think makes us more able to make rational decisions.