Short Stuff: That's A Head Scratcher

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!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's out there. Oh I'm sorry, and Dave's here in
spirit too, So short Stuff you should know the short
Stuff edition. Dave Bruce, No, Dave Kustan are the editor
of Short Stuff, the producer. Okay, he's our, he's our

(00:24):
Jerry for Short Stuff. No, I know, I don't. We
haven't given David 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'm time for the crew. Do
I make extra money then forget it? Yeah. Man, you
guys don't know Jerry like we know Jerry. What's great

(00:45):
is she'll never hear this. You know, that's right, because yeah,
Kustan will never pass this along. He's too terrified ever,
That's right. Uh. So we're talking about scratching our heads
when you think, which is something that I don't do.
I don't even when I read this. Though there are
a couple of thinking ticks that I have that could

(01:06):
be explained, that's just not one of them, for sure.
And this was one of those things where I'm like, oh,
is this going to be like the origin of you know,
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

(01:26):
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
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 you know they're
standing in front of the chalkboard, you know that they're

(01:46):
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 they're the explanations are multitudinous, and
again it seems like something you'd be that's ridiculous, and
then if you stop and thinking about you're like, that
actually could be right in this case. Yeah, Like if
you were to take a beginning acting class and you

(02:07):
were in there with a bunch of dumb beginning actors
like I did in college. Uh and the and the
professor said, the acting teacher said, all right, you're you're
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, because that is just a
popular trope to indicate, or maybe scratch their chin something

(02:31):
like that, which counts as part of the head, I guess,
but it's 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, um and there's
no definitive explanation for why, which which has really left
the door open for a lot of people that to

(02:52):
put some ideas up. One of the big ones is
that it's a relic of evolution and that really what
you're doing is you're not like you're not, you know,
helping along your thoughts. You're actually showing a form of distress,
whether it's angst anger anxiety. Those are kind of the
different interpretations and explanations. But the first one is that

(03:14):
we're showing a remnant of what we used to do
back in the UM. The I guess the Tuck Tuck
days where somebody 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 we are

(03:35):
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, uh, we almost kind
of play it off by scratching our head. Yeah it's
a little thin, but 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

(03:56):
and they're trying to keep from hurting somebody, you will
free quickly see that person like rubbing their forehead or
rubbing the back of their neck or something like that.
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. Uh. There's another possible explanation.

(04:17):
This was in a two thousand nine article for Psychology
Today when a former FBI counter intelligence 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 handwringing or rubbing your temples or touching your
lips or something. And what he's saying is is that

(04:37):
it's a soother U. 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 choke. We
should take a little break, collect our thoughts, and then
come back and and talk more about this whole hoad scratcher.

(04:58):
Great shot, all right, so you said that, um. The

(05:25):
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 can help. And supposedly because our um
head is the source of this issue, our brain is,

(05:46):
that's why we would touch our head rather than say,
like our knees or something. The thing is, there is
some research to back this up. Um. There was a
study in two thousand and seventeen and Scientific Reports, which
is a journal, and it's it watched Resus macaques um
which who are sorry not sorry, and they found that

(06:08):
the kind of the the higher on the totem pole
level macaques, when they were stressed out, they might start
to itch or scratch or just do something. Um and
that this was taken by other maccaques who were saying
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

(06:30):
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,
and people be like, you know, everyone would pass by
his office and he's a versus macaque. These um, these

(06:53):
researchers were saying that 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 you lay off me. Or I'm
super stressed that I can't possibly defend myself. There's no
point in attacking me to show your dominance. I'm already
already submitting here, so don't waste your energy either way.

(07:15):
The Reese's macaques that displayed some sort of um 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. Uh.
This one that you dug up displacement activity. So you've
got an animal that has a couple of different options

(07:38):
and let's say a stressful situation, uh, and it doesn't
want to do either one of them, or maybe can't
decide which one to perform, so it does uh what's
called the displacement activity. So you've got a bird, let's say,
uh that another bird comes to attack, It's like, well,
should I attack back or should I just fly out
of here? Uh? I'm just gonna pick up the ground instead.

(08:02):
And um, 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

(08:24):
Athens who crashed his bike that day. He had two
choices was get up really quick and get my books
and right out of there, and 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. So there's one one last
explanation that I found, and that is that people who

(08:46):
scratch their head or you know, rub their eyes or
something like that while they're thinking UM are engaged in
a certain kind of UM learning mode is what it's
called a dominant learning mode, and that is where we
our senses are involved in the way that we think about,
or recall or take in information. And so people who

(09:08):
are tactile with their learning modes would might touch themselves,
touch their their heads or something like that. UM. People
who are visual learners might kind of look up in
the sky or something like that. That's where you're like,
you're kind of exaggerating the point of the sense, even
though that sense is not giving you any information and
helping along. It's almost like we just kind of revert

(09:31):
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 one thousand percent of
visual learner. Uh. If somebody's trying to explain something like
how something operates, they can talk to me untill they're
blue in the face. But if I actually see it,

(09:52):
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 sky and they're saying that that's what I'm doing. Basically,
you know, it makes sense. Somebody needs to teach you
about percentages visually because there ain't no such thing as
a thousand percent. Shut up. I have to say, Chuck,

(10:12):
you can't see me right now, but I have never
scratched my head more than I heard during this this recording.
This has been brutal. Alright, well, hopefully you didn't lose
too many. Um So that's it for short stuff. Everybody,
me and Chuck say Audios. Stuff you should know is
a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts.

(10:35):
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